mexico

A Mexican court ruled last November that Yahoo and Yahoo Mexico had to shell out a whopping $2.75 billion in a lawsuit over a yellow pages listing service's lost profits. On Thursday, Mexico's Superior Court of Justice reduced that number to a mere $172,500 in damages.

This is likely welcome news to the tech company. Damages of $2.75 billion is a huge portion of the company's revenue -- in Yahoo's most recently reported quarter, it only generated $1.07 billion in revenue.

The lawsuit was originally filed by the Worldwide Directories and Ideas … Read more

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.--There are a lot of reasons film scouts for sci-fi movies visit the abandoned Santa Fe Railway locomotive repair shops here and go crazy over the crumbling industrial cathedral. The buildings are massive and lined with tiles of white and green windows. Old machinery rusts overhead and in corners. The shops just scream "movie set."

I'm visiting this ode to railroading history with a tour guide from The New Mexico Steam Locomotive and Railroad Historical Society. These are the same people who are rebuilding an entire steam engine on the other end of town. The guide lets our tour group through the locked gate and we step back in time about 80 years.… Read more

Anonymous has set its sights on Mexico's Department of Defense.

The group's Mexican legion has claimed responsibility for waging a distributed-denial-of-service attack on the government site, rendering it inoperable for several hours yesterday, according to the Associated Press.

During the attack, the group posted a statement on the media section of the government's Web site. The statement claimed that a "bad government" was running the country.

"Our struggle is for life, and our bad government offers death as the future," the statement read, according to Spanish language tech news site Web Adictos. "… Read more

After winning a $2.7 billion preliminary judgment against Yahoo, a plaintiff in a Mexico City civil court case said the matter can be settled for less than the court's judgment.

The judgment handed down Friday by the 49th Civil Court of the Federal District of Mexico City involved allegations that Yahoo was in breach of contract related to a yellow-pages listing service. The lawsuit was brought by Worldwide Directories and by Ideas Interactivas.

However, a man who is a partner in both firms tells Reuters that he and his partners would be willing to consider a settlement offer … Read more

That crazy-looking flute in the above picture? Chances are it was a weapon in Mexico's drug war.

Or parts of it were, at least. Now those pieces make up one of 50 working musical instruments engineered from confiscated Mexican revolvers, shotguns, and machine guns that were once scheduled for public destruction.

Mexico City-based artist Pedro Reyes conceived of the project, titled "Imagine," as a statement on widespread gun violence in the country. … Read more

A very odd flock of birds landed in Albuquerque, N.M., this past week. There wasn't a feather in sight as four winged creatures sat on bare branches, flashing their eyes and lifting their wings. These art objects are fashioned entirely from recycled phone parts.

Escape, an installation piece by U.K. artists Neil Mendoza and Anthony Goh, turns unremarkable phone scrap into curious and engaging little birds. Each bird contains an Arduino controller.

When hooked up to the cell network in Europe, the birds can take and make phone calls. Here in New Mexico, they are reprogrammed to react to the proximity of people approaching them. … Read more

SAN YSIDRO, Calif.--They were hidden in the gas tank -- 17 tightly-wrapped packages of marijuana weighing in at 38.44 pounds.

The car was nondescript, a green 1999 Mazda 626. The driver was a male 50-year-old Mexican national, a resident of Tijuana who had presumably been hoping to make it into California without being stopped.

Instead, the man got caught with the massive haul of pot, snared by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers here at the world's busiest border crossing using several tools in their arsenal -- some high-tech, some very low-tech -- to find … Read more

TUCSON, Ariz.--It's summer in the Southwest, and there may not be a hotter border anywhere in the United States. For one thing, the mercury is easily over a hundred every day. And then there's the steady flow of organized smugglers trying to sneak themselves and their substantial cargo -- of migrants and/or drugs -- across Mexico's long desert frontier with Arizona.

There are nine U.S. Border Patrol sectors stretching across America's southwestern frontier. And back in 2000, the agency was snagging more than 2,000 people a day for crossing illegally into its … Read more

What would you do for free Wi-Fi? Mexican Internet provider Terra has teamed up with ad agency DDB to offer free Wi-Fi in public parks to dog owners who clean up after their pets.

As seen in the absurd promo vid below, owners who deposit poop in the special bins in 10 parks in Mexico City will be rewarded with free Wi-Fi, broadcast through routers shaped like doggy bones.

The more you add, the more minutes you and everyone else gets. The bins seem to have a simple scale to weigh the poop, so they would likely still work if people put rocks or trash in them instead. … Read more