Column of the Wolf

A daily mix of news covering technology, science, human rights, wolf news, stupid human tricks and many other topics.

15.12.2009

The short gloves are off. Earlier today, both Google and Facebook got into the URL shortening game with goo.gl and fb.me. Google's move in particular is a direct challenge to bit.ly, the rising independent standard among link shortening services. Bit.ly's response is in effect to ask publishers and consumers who they trust with all their data: Google or the rest of the Web? To that effect, it is rolling out a new service called bit.ly Pro, which allows Web publishers to bit.ly to send out short links with their own branded (short) domain names such as nyti.ms, 4sq.com, mee.bo, or tcrn.ch. Publishers in the beta include AOL, Bing, foursquare, Hot Potato, the Huffington Post, Meebo, MSN, the New York Times, the Onion, TechCrunch and the Wall Street Journal. Pro accounts is where all the money is, although bit.ly is not yet charging

It's still not called the Google Phone, but the Nexus One — to be made by HTC — is as close as I think we're going to get. The WSJ cites sources familiar with Google's plans and says that Google has designed this handset and plans to sell it directly to consumers, unlocked

The Delhi High Court has fined Microsoft for harassing alleged software pirates by taking them to court in the national capitol, instead of the cities where the crimes had supposedly occurred. According to the ruling, using money as a power tool is not condoned without repercussions

Seagate Technology today announced what it's calling the world's thinnest laptop and netbook hard drive, the Momentus Thin drive, which at 7mm, is just over a quarter of an inch thick and is 25% slimmer than a traditional 9.5mm, 2.5-in. hard drive. The 5,400 rpm Momentus Thin comes in 250GB and 160GB capacities, features 8MB cache, and uses the SATA 2.0 3Gbit/sec interface. The drive is scheduled to ship to Seagate's resellers next month

14.12.2009

First of its kind research conducted by Ynet in collaboration with surfers, bloggers suggests two of Israel's largest internet service providers perform manipulation on file sharing traffic

Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto's business practices reveal how the world's biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found. With Monsanto's patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts

Following an official press release recently that the Pirate Party of Australia is now accepting members, a scathing editorial was written in the Sydney Morning Herald. Such a response was expected, but this tone usually changes when they receive support from thousands of followers

As millions of people wait for the arrival of Christmas in just a couple of weeks time, the festivities have come early for BitTorrent fans. A few hours ago the mighty Demonoid fully returned and the good news is that there appears to be little data loss. Users are feverishly uploading fresh torrents right now

13.12.2009

Audio DRM has all but dissapeared from MP3s. Apple said earlier this year that there would be no more DRM on music available via the ITunes music store. However, as prolific writer and blogger Cory Doctorow has found out, they still require DRM on their Audiobooks

IT security firm Sophos has announced its latest probe into how easy it is to steal identities via Facebook and found that user negligence is worst in 2009. We assumed things would be better in 2009 but the situation is worse. This really is a wake-up call, said Paul Ducklin, head of technology, Sophos Asia-Pacific (Sydney)

On 8 December, Canadian sci-fi author Peter Watts, author of the Rifters trilogy and Blindsight, was crossing the US/Canadian border at Port Huron, Michigan when he was involved in an altercation with US Border Patrol agents. According to Watts, he was beaten, left half-naked in a cold cell, and finally dumped on the Canadian side of the border with no coat. A legal consultant from the Electronic Frontier Foundation was successful in helping a civil rights lawyer in Michigan free Watts. Watts faces US charges of assaulting a federal officer. Based on the accounts, one can assume Watts did so by hitting the officer's hand with his face. If convicted, Watts faces two years in a US Federal prison — via Slashdot

12.12.2009

A broad swath of American enterprise ranging from major software makers to motion picture and music companies are joining forces to oppose a new international treaty that would make books more accessible to the blind

They're the scourge of the Internet right now and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation says they've also raked in more than US$150 million for scammers. Security experts call them rogue antivirus programs. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Centre issued a warning over this fake antivirus software Friday, saying that Web surfers should be wary of sudden pop-up windows that report security problems on their computers

A Californian company is aiming to capture sunlight in space to generate a regular supply of electricity on Earth. There are significant obstacles to overcome, like the high cost of launching things into space, but California's largest utility has already agreed to buy the power. The chief executive officer of Solaren Corporation, Gary Spirnak, says satellites which carry TV signals are already generating small amounts of electricity

Waste plastic from throwaway carrier bags can be readily converted into carbon nanotubes. The chemist who developed the technique has even used the nanotubes to make lithium-ion batteries. This is called upcycling — converting a waste product into something more valuable. Finding ways to upcycle waste could encourage more recycling: for instance, bacteria can convert plastic drinks bottles into a more expensive plastic. The carrier-bag-to-nanotube technique was developed by Vilas Ganpat Pol at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and converts high or low-density polyethylene (HDPE and LDPE) into valuable multiwalled carbon nanotubes

11.12.2009

A worldwide coalition of Non-Governmental Organisations, consumers unions and online service providers associations publish an open letter to the European institutions regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) currently under negotiation. They call on the European Parliament and the EU negotiators to oppose any provision into the multilateral agreement that would undermine the fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens in Europe and across the world

A consortium including Google and KDDI has signed a deal to build and operate an international undersea cable system, estimated to cost $US400 million ($436m). Globe Telecom, part owned by Singapore Telecommunications, and units of Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications are also part of the consortium. he cable system, named Southeast Asia Japan Cable, has a design capacity of 17 terabits per second upgradeable to 23 Tbps, the highest capacity system ever built so far, the companies said in a joint statement. It is targeted to be operational by the second quarter of 2012

Germany has unveiled the world's most powerful weather supercomputer that scientists hope will provide critical data on global warming for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Weighing in at 35 tonnes and using 50 kilometres of cables, the supercomputer named Blizzard is capable of 158 teraflops, or 158 trillion calculations, per second

Aspiritech, a Chicago based non-profit company, has launched a program to train high-functioning autistic people as testers for software development companies. The company says autistics have a talent for spotting imperfections, and thrive on predictable, monotonous work. Aspiritech is not the first company to explore the idea of treating this handicap as a resource. Specialisterne, a Danish company founded in 2004, also trains autistics. They hire their workforce out as hourly consultants to do data entry, assembly line jobs and work that many would find tedious and repetitive — via Slashdot

10.12.2009

As promised, Facebook has begun rolling out new privacy options to its 350 million users. Watch out for the Everyone setting. On Wednesday morning, users began seeing a message offering a new, simplified privacy settings page and the ability to set specific options for every post made to Facebook. The changes, first announced this summer, again promised last week, and available today, give users much tighter control of who sees what, down to the individual reader, if desired

Facebook has agreed to shut down a program that sparked a lawsuit alleging privacy violations, and set up a $9.5 million fund for a nonprofit foundation that will support online privacy, safety and security. The lawsuit centers around Facebook's Beacon program, which let third-party web sites distribute stories about users to Facebook. Beacon was launched in November 2007 and less than a year later plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit alleging that Facebook and its affiliates did not give users adequate notice and choice about Beacon and the collection and use of users' personal information. In addition to Facebook, the lawsuit's defendants include Blockbuster, Fandango, Hotwire, STA Travel, Overstock.Com, Zappos.com and Gamefly

One of the country's leading architectural photographers was apprehended by City of London police under terrorism laws today while photographing the 300-year old spire of Sir Christopher Wren's Christ Church for a personal project. Grant Smith, who has 25 years experience documenting buildings by Richard Rogers and Norman Foster, was stopped by a squad of seven officers who pulled up in three cars and a riot van and searched his belongings under section 44 of the Terrorism Act, which allows police to stop and search anyone without need for suspicion in a designated area

An Arizona State University research team has developed a process that removes a key obstacle to producing lower-cost, renewable biofuels. The team has programmed a photosynthetic microbe to self-destruct, making the recovery of high-energy fats — and their biofuel byproducts — easier and potentially less costly

09.12.2009

Today Mozilla released Thunderbird 3. Many new features are available, including Tabs and enhanced search features, a message archive for emails you don't want to delete but still want to keep, Firefox 3's improved Add-ons Manager, Personas support, and many other improvements — via Slashdot

Google has introduced a new approach to presenting news online by topic, developed with The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that if the experiment succeeded, it would be made available to all publishers. The announcement of the living stories project shows Google collaborating with newspapers at a time when some major publishers have characterized the company as a threat. Google has also taken steps recently to project an image of itself as a friend to the industry

Seagate's new Pulsar solid-state drive for enterprise servers incorporates technology to protect data in transit in the event of a power failure. The Pulsar is the first offering in a product line Seagate expects to expand and comes in 50GB and 200GB capacities. SSD vendors like Seagate are expecting exceptionally strong growth in 2010 and 2011

The amount squandered by Victoria Police's troubled IT department was more than $120 million, three times the sum detected by the Ombudsman, a former senior police manager says. Richard Kennedy, the force's former manager of strategy and business relationships, said the IT department was systematically milked by IBM for years before any action was taken. Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost, and the Ombudsman, Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon and the auditor- general were repeatedly warned, Mr Kennedy said. The whole thing is just an unbelievable disaster

08.12.2009

Google and several other Internet giants are lobbying the UK government to drop a proposal that would allow the secretary of state to introduce new changes to copyright law. The proposal is part of Britain's Digital Economy bill, a comprehensive package of legislation that contains other controversial measures, including a requirement for ISPs to track illegal file sharing and possibly suspend the accounts of repeat offenders. Last week, Google along with Yahoo, Facebook and eBay sent a letter to Peter Mandelson, first secretary of state and head of the UK's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), asking the government to drop the 17th clause of the bill

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