June 2001 Archive

30 June 2001

Kuwait is to launch an inquiry into how its Defence Ministry managed to pay $290 for a single pastry knife and $4,000 for a meat tenderiser.

Watch what you say around the dead in North Carolina, and don't go hauling them around in a ute either.

29 June 2001

Earlier this week, a delegation from Papua New Guinea visited Canberra, begging for help in its fight to stop the environmental devastation caused by BHP's giant Ok Tedi goldmine. The Australian Government refused, despite past financial involvement in the mine.

Onerous clauses lurk in many software user license and terms of service agreements — and a new law could set those terms in stone. 'By opening this shrink wrap, you have agreed to transfer ownership of your soul to Bill Gates.'

At a time when Internet literacy seems in inverse proportion to age, a new generation of students is faced with an old temptation made easier than ever: taking the work of others and passing it off as one's own, welcome to the world of internet plagiarism.

28 June 2001

By exploiting the quantum properties of light, it should be possible to broadcast uncrackable messages via satellite.

A 22-year-old British woman, calling herself 'The Pimptress', published photographs of her boyfriend wearing skimpy panties and a bra on the Internet to avenge his cheating ways. The page was picked up by major news sources, which was quite a nice deal for UBoot, the company hosting the site — especially considering the whole thing was a hoax to generate interest in its service.

A Shetland pony on a UK farm has surprised its owners by giving birth to a half-zebra foal. The owners of the pony, called Tilly, had no idea she was pregnant when they bought her from a wildlife park, where she had been kept in a field with a male zebra.

27 June 2001

Students in Papua New Guinea were peacefully protesting against World Bank plans when the police started riots, resulting in three deaths.

IBM has built the world's fastest silicon-based transistor, a development that promises to make telecommunications chips run faster on less power.

The US Supreme Court ruled that publishers violated freelance authors' copyrights by putting their articles in electronic databases, extending the reach of copyright protections in an online age.

Australia's remote Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean is set to be turned into a space launch centre with Australia announcing it would fund US$52 million toward the satellite spaceport.

In a significant win for open-source desktop productivity suites, Sun Microsystems today announced that the US Defence Information Systems Agency would implement up to 25,000 units of its StarOffice 5.2 software.

A guard at a Turkish state bank robbed his own cashiers and distributed $25,000 to passers-by in what police said was a response to the planned closure of the bank.

26 June 2001

A Japanese fighter jet conducting training on the northern island of Hokkaido mistakenly strafed a car park, smashing the rear window of a passenger car and penetrating the roof of a garage.

The National Australia Bank has confirmed that online vandals broke into and defaced one of the company's Web servers last week.

Draconian workplace practices in the US allow businesses to set the standards for what their employees should wear, which means no tattoos, no facial piercings and no unusual hairstyles or colours or you don't have a job — I can see that Starbucks certainly wouldn't be employing me any time soon. In Australia a conservative appearance is only expected in the corporate sector.

Iran's state telecoms monopoly has ordered tough new restrictions on Internet use, requiring service providers to block some sites and barring access to the Web for under-18s.

Sony isn't the only studio in hot water over being caught generating their own rave reviews to sell their films.

25 June 2001

One man, Bob Kolody, owns the copyright to the design of a Coca-Cola can, and rather than acknowledging this, Coke will go to any lengths to discredit the man and his attorneys — including the corruption of Federal Justices. The very secret battle of Bob Kolody vs Coca-Cola is mind-blowing in its implications.

24 June 2001

Population is a pivotal issue for India. But India and Andhra Pradesh, its fifth largest state, have taken profoundly divergent paths to control it.

A series of fires set in Phoenix which were thought to be the work of a radical environmental group turned out to be set by an individual, a deeply religious nut job, who fabricated the story to throw suspicion off himself.

23 June 2001

Following the false advertising fiascos that have engulfed Sony in controversy, rival studio Fox Searchlight Pictures has now acknowledged that, yes, it too turned out fake commercials.

A NSW Government web site has been sabotaged by a rock and roll fan, bombarding unsuspecting visitors with classics by BB King, Ray Charles and Cold Chisel.

The blueprint for a global code on cybercrime was agreed on, paving the way for international rules governing online copyright infringement, online fraud, child pornography and hacking.

Internet users may soon have to contend with a new form of spam that turns their private e-mail correspondence into a billboard for online advertisers.

22 June 2001

The globalisation battleground is poised to move into cyberspace as the World Bank prepares to hold a major conference online to avoid another round of violent demonstrations — which just goes to prove how out of touch the World Bank is A very verbose account of the recent denial of service attacks against Gibson Research Corporation committed by an illiterate and ill-informed 13-year brat Nests of rare venomous spiders have been found near Windsor Castle and could be living underneath the royal estate itself. A leading entomologist believes they may be a new species or a type of spider previously thought to have been extinct for thousands of years C may be for cookie, but A is for assault, one man learned after allegedly assaulting the Cookie Monster at the Sesame Place theme park — assaulting Elmo I can understand, but the Cookie Monster? A class of British 11-year-olds said the retarded monkey boy should go back to school after he sent them a letter describing them as young Americans

21 June 2001

The new design has now been installed throughout all of 'Opinions of the Wolf', with the added bonus of new selectable dodgy colour themes.

You too can be a William Gibson cyberpunk with a tiny device called Nomad beaming holograms direct into your retina. A small wearable computer directs a laser beam into your eye so only you see the information.

Scientists are puzzled by a CD-eating fungi discovered in Central America. The fungus burrows into the edge of the CD and thrives on the thin aluminium substrate and the data-storing polycarbonate resin. So far the metal-eating fungus is restricted to Belize.

Have you ever thought it'd be cool if you could have an environmentally-friendly computer? How about a hand-powered web server?

Sometimes the wetness of liquids is inconvenient. The transport of liquid drops across a solid surface is impeded by contact forces, and some of the liquid invariably gets left behind on the surface. Now they have found a way to make water less wet. These 'liquid marbles' behave more like soft solid spheres than like liquid drops: they roll down inclined planes, instead of sliding, and leave no liquid film behind them.

Most of the US public is 'dangerously' ill-informed about the rest of the world and lacks an even basic knowledge of Asia, according to a new report published Wednesday. The damning survey by the National Commission for Asia in the Schools says that young Americans particularly are trapped by an educational isolationism which leaves them desperately under-prepared for the demands of the global economy.

20 June 2001

The fate of the free Net may rest in the hands of a university student in Sweden making less money than a coffee slinger at Starbucks. While the first generation of file-trading technologies fights over Napster's leavings, more radical Net programmers are still committed to building a wholly anonymous, virtually untraceable way of communicating and trading files online. Chief among these is Freenet, an open-source project viewed by many as the ultimate inheritor to Napster's original promise of free online file swapping.

Solving a 30-year-old scientific mystery, physicists have found the most convincing evidence yet that neutrinos — elusive subatomic particles that were thought to have no mass whatsoever — have a tiny wisp of heft after all.

A 10-year-old Chilean boy who had been abandoned by his parents survived for two years in a cave with a pack of stray dogs who scavenged for food with him and may even have suckled him.

19 June 2001

Telstra said a core router linking Sydney and Los Angeles was causing degraded performance to Internet traffic between Australia and the United States. While their broadband service has had a 13-hour outage preventing BigPond Cable and ADSL customers accessing the most basic of Internet services — e-mail.

Hacker group 2600 Australia today warned soft drink maker Coca-Cola Amatil to increase the security of online competitions after today publishing part of the process it says the company uses to verify competition entries.

Villains have all the fun. Even when it comes to kid's stuff. As Mitchel Resnick of the MIT Media Lab pointed out, the movie Toy Story says a lot about what our culture lauds and what it disapproves of in children. The story's hero, Andy, has a bedroom full of well-kept toys — frequently played with but never adapted or modified. The arch-nemesis Sid, on the other hand, turns everything he can into ghastly hybrids like a spider with a baby doll's head and Erector Set legs.

18 June 2001

President of the World Federation of Neurology, Dr James Toole, proposes that world leaders aged over 60 should be required to pass regular mental competence tests to prove they can still do their jobs.

Octavio Soares takes Timorese children from refugee camps to orphanages in Java. His aim is to indoctrinate them as pro-Indonesia activists.

Apple Computer, which gained fame with its iconoclastic marketing, has told the Church of Satan it does not want to be associated with it.

17 June 2001

Look at it this way: the retarded monkey boy hasn't barfed on anyone yet, and he's only mispronounced one world leader's name so far. The bad news is it was the only guy over there who likes the US, and he has only two syllables in his name Still reeling from revelations that its advertising department had concocted a phoney film critic and used him to promote four Columbia Pictures releases, Sony Pictures Entertainment has now admitted that two of its own employees posed as ordinary moviegoers in on-the-street interviews to promote another Columbia release last summer

16 June 2001

Shell is to invest $1 billion into alternative energy R&D over the next 5 years. It's looking at big offshore wind farms in the North Sea, solar power, and research into geothermal energy and biomass.

One scientist has stuck out his neck and stated that global warming has little to do with human activity, is a natural cyclical phenomenon to do with carbon dioxide-water exchange, and things could start cooling down in a few years.

Despite two major outages, Telstra says BigPond customers will not be compensated for service disruptions which have left them high and dry for close to 24 hours.

15 June 2001

Japanese scientists have developed tiny spinning screws, 8mm long and under 1mm diameter, that can swim along veins or burrow through flesh taking drugs to infected tissues. The swimming micro-machines are based on cylindrical magnets, and can screw through 2cm of beef steak in 20 seconds. It could also be used as a New Age silent assassination weapon.

Philips and E-Ink have demonstrated the first high-resolution electronic ink displays for use in handheld devices. They aim to have them on the market within two years.

Researchers are using spider genes to get potatoes and tobacco plants to produce large quantities of silk protein, which they hope to be able to weave into fibres and fabrics.

A travelling digital film festival run by a punk rocker continues to tour America, harkening to a time when freaks ruled the Internet and major media corporations refused to contemplate a future online.

Bigger is better in America — apparently even when it comes to god. Mega-churches, giant houses of worship that draw congregations of up to 20,000 to weekend services, are thriving, and super-sized houses of worship have become fixtures of America's religious landscape, in spite of criticism from some traditionalists that they are a sort of religion lite.

Velda González may be 68 years old, the vice president of the Senate in Puerto Rico and a grandmother several times over. But none of that mattered to US Navy officials who treated her like trash, which is the same way they've treated so many others who have been arrested for protesting the Navy's bombing exercises on the island of Vieques.

14 June 2001

A new invention could help the blind to 'see' again — with their tongues.

Declassified Australian government documents suggest a nuclear bomb may have been detonated in a pristine tropical rainforest in northern Queensland at the height of the Cold War.

Microsoft bashers were out in full force last week, chastising the company for a new technology in the forthcoming version of its Windows operating system they say infringes on free speech, intellectual property and the copyrights of Web content creators.

13 June 2001

Dr Who, the hero of the world's longest-running science fiction series has visited many worlds, but next month he will visit the unexplored terrain of cyberspace with the BBC's first ever Internet-only broadcast.

A tongue-in-cheek warning says AOL's removal will free up disk space and save money.

The US Supreme Court has allowed a religious use of public schools that will pose a serious threat to principles of religious neutrality and church-state separation — I have a fix for this little problem. A chip needs to be implanted in everyone's head. The moment somebody says; 'My god is the true god and I will force my ignorant narrow minded beliefs upon you', the chip is activated and their head explodes. This would leave the remaining population free to worship their own gods safe from the obnoxious god botherers — should end the odd religious war at the same time.

12 June 2001

Indonesian immigration officials yesterday freed 29 foreigners, including 18 Australians, who were detained at an international conference in Jakarta, as criticisms grew of police-sanctioned brutality against the organisers.

A virtual bomb was lobbed on the sleepy town of Texas on the NSW and Queensland border. It sat undiscovered until Mr John Beale, owner of the Lilyvale Estate winery, logged on to update his Web site on Friday.

Two oil companies on Friday announced another big discovery in the Gulf of Mexico — but this time it was a sunken World War II German submarine rather than oil or natural gas. The wreckage of the U-boat was found 5,000 feet below the surface, and it may may rewrite a bit of wartime history.

11 June 2001

A useful game for long car trips is 'If Only He Had Lived to See'. If only Gregor Mendel had lived to see the first cloned pig. If only Icarus had hung on long enough to fly the Concorde. If only Zapruder had used a better-resolution camera, with more frames per second, on the grassy knoll. And if only Alfred Hitchcock had a mobile phone.

Intel Corporation researchers have demonstrated that there are no fundamental barriers to extending Moore's Law for another decade by building the world's fastest silicon transistors. These transistors — featuring structures just 20 nanometers in size — will allow Intel to build microprocessors containing a billion transistors, running at speeds approaching 20 gigahertz and operating at less than one volt in approximately 2007.

Woman on Waves, a privately financed Dutch ship equipped to perform abortions near countries where the practice is banned, will sail to Ireland on its maiden voyage.

10 June 2001

After almost two months at the negotiating table, the workers who play characters such as Mickey Mouse and Cinderella at Walt Disney World have won an important concession: clean undergarments.

Now they've come up with computer memories in which information is recorded, read and erased by molecular switches. That means super-tiny machines with powerful capabilities.

09 June 2001

By studying genetic data and fossil records of a common California snail, biologists from Louisiana State University and the University of California, San Diego have found that a change in a species' territory can bring on rapid morphological, or structural, evolutionary changes — evolution is faster than you think A program created to automatically overload Microsoft's Web and e-mail servers has been discovered on several corporate networks and may have spread further on the Internet, antivirus researchers said Friday. First reported this week, the worm — dubbed DoS.Storm — spreads on Web servers running Microsoft software and is designed to use the infected servers to level an Internet attack against the company

08 June 2001

Vying for prime position in outer space, Australian scientists hope to secure one of the largest radio telescope projects to observe the universe. As part of a consortium of countries, which include the United States, Europe and China, Australia is grappling for the opportunity to be the host of the AU$1 billion Square Kilometre Array telescope project.

Remote-controlled car locks replace not only the traditional key but also the coat hanger and the rock through the window.

In spite of stereotypes, women who consider themselves hackers have been part of the computer world for decades.

A privately financed group that works for abortion rights overseas sued the Bush administration yesterday to challenge its rule denying federal funds to foreign family planning or health organisations that perform or advocate abortions.

07 June 2001

A consortium led by the CSIRO is designing a super-speed Internet for Australia to service high-end users in medicine and the film industry. It has received AU$14 million from the Australian Government to establish a Centre for Networking Technologies for the Information Economy.

Telstra, the large Australian telco, has just imposed a 3GB download limit on all cable and ADSL broadband users on its Freedom Plan, claiming 5% of users hog 35% of total bandwidth at any one time.

Web site Jump The Shark tries to pinpoint that defining moment when hit TV shows overreach, when a new character, guest star or plot device signals a loss of innocence — for me it was the incredibly lame Scrappy Doo.

Telstra has won another domain name dispute, wresting control of the telsra.com domain from a Melbourne typosquatter.

The EMI music group today signed with Roxio to add copy protection to its CD-authoring software, thus stopping people from copying illegal MP3 files onto blank CDs. There must be a lot of it going around — 5 billion blank discs will be sold in the US this year.

It used to be the stuff of locker rooms, bathroom walls and little black books, but sexual gossip among teenagers has been showing up lately in what some educators and others call a disturbingly powerful forum: Internet sites.

06 June 2001

Fans of the X-Men may not realise that the character Kitty Pryde was named after a real person that was a fellow student with John Byrne at art school in Calgary. And it gave the real Kitty Pryde, an artist, some difficulty in being taken seriously.

Researchers in Australia and England are working on developing materials from plants like hemp and elephant grass to replace plastic and metal-based car components. Scientists say the materials are biodegradable and can increase fuel efficiency since they weigh about 30 percent less than currently used materials.

Half the Earth's people now live in cities, and the existing administration structures can't cope, the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements warned today during the launch of its first report on The State of the World's Cities. The report was released two days before a special session of the UN General Assembly to appraise progress in building sustainable settlements anproviding adequate shelter for all.

05 June 2001

Tristan Kading, a 15-year-old vegetarian and seasoned protester, saw the necessity to speak his conscience when McDonald's showed up at his school recently looking for summer employees for its restaurants. Administrators at Stonington High School instead saw a disrespectful and disruptive student unwilling to co-operate in a special assembly on job interview skills that the McDonald's Corporation had agreed to host — they forced him to read an apology to the entire school.

Many Californians are enduring pricey electric bills and rolling power outages during the current energy crunch. But some residents have avoided such headaches by getting themselves off the electrical grid and on alternative energy.

The air pollution from cutting grass for an hour with a gasoline-powered lawn mower is about the same as that from a 100-mile automobile ride, according to a new study from Sweden, which recommends using catalytic converters on mowers. The report is the first to compare lawn mower pollution with auto mileage, according to the researchers.

Seems David Manning, the reviewer from the Ridgefield Press, is not another Ebert after all, but a character created to pump up Sony movies by the studio's marketing machine. Sony studio executives are shocked after learning that Manning is a fake.

Microsoft and America Online are negotiating a range of licensing and legal issues so contentious that the two sides disagreed over the weekend whether they were even still talking.

04 June 2001

The next time a serious press seminar is held on just why so many readers are so sceptical, so disbelieving and so hostile about who we in the press are and what we write, I have an answer: the Nationally Circulated Hoax in the mainstream press that Clinton staffers had vandalised the White House and Air Force One.

A black bear with a sweet tooth has three times smashed down the doors of a small bakery in rural Ontario to satisfy his craving for cakes and doughnuts.

A Swedish scientist investigating the most environmentally friendly form of burial has found a way of quickly recycling corpses into soil enricher.

03 June 2001

Gay and lesbian Catholics were denied Holy Communion at St Patrick's Cathedral in Melbourne in their annual action for church recognition on Pentecost Sunday.

Nepal's new regent has tried to pass off the slaying of almost the entire royal family as a bizarre 'accident', as public discontent grows over sanitised official versions of the tragedy.

A simulation that helped lead an independent inquiry to conclude that FBI agents did not fire their guns in their siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco eight years ago never tested the type of assault rifle that the agents had there, an official who helped run the test says.

02 June 2001

Glacial deposits in the tropics 600 million years ago are proof that the Earth at one stage was a giant snowball, with the oceans entirely covered by ice.The cause: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was reduced by weathering of silicate rocks The G8 Group of the world's leading industrial nations are making progress — albeit slowly — on plans to combat cybercrime. At a meeting in Tokyo, the G8 Government/Private Sector High Level Meeting on High-tech Crime workshsopped five themes — data retention, data preservation, threat assessment and prevention, protection of e-commerce, and user authentication If the retarded monkey boy's first budget is any indication, the business of America today is big business. Small companies, it seems, are somebody else's business

01 June 2001

The rare red wolf population is on the rise in Florida. Seven rare wolf pups have recently been born at the Brevard Zoo. There are no viable red wolf colonies in the wild, but zookeepers are hoping to change that. The two latest pups are among only 250 red wolves alive today, most of them in zoos Nothing will change until corporations realise that they don't have a communications problem. They have a reality problem The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers needs to move quickly to broaden public participation in its decision-making process, according to a report released today by public-interest groups. If it doesn't, its legitimacy is at stake Thousands of faithful Web fans were duped into believing the tragic tale of Kaycee Nicole, a young, beautiful Kansas teen dying of leukaemia. Until the truth emerged: Kaycee Nicole was a fabrication, a figment of Debbie Swenson's imagination, and the star player in an intricate, detailed, and extended hoax Against the background of the recent 'deaths' of Nowheremom and Kaycee, beloved but fictional members of online communities Anandtech and MetaFilter, respectively, FEED itself got to play a walk-on role in a case of a fictional identity with global reach

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