July 2001 Archive

31 July 2001

A break in the Southern Cross cable, Australia's fastest overseas data network, off the coast of Sydney will take up to 12 days to repair and leave thousands of users in the lurch.

Esso Australia's record $2 million fine over the fatal Longford gas explosion has been likened to a corporate speeding ticket by unions.

Last week, Dmitry Sklyarov, a PhD computer science student from Russia, came to the United States to share knowledge and information regarding serious security flaws in Adobe software with fellow developers. He was promptly arrested.

Media complacency is helping to normalise the violent assaults carried out by Italian police on the G8 demonstrators in Genoa.

Several scientists have found compelling evidence that Viking Mars landers did indeed discover life on the red planet in 1976. A re-examination of findings relayed to Earth by the probes some 25 years ago, claim the experts, show the tell-tale signs of microbes lurking within the Martian soil.

30 July 2001

Three Boy Scouts dug out chunks of a 190 million-year-old set of dinosaur tracks and threw the rocks into a reservoir, irreparably damaging the prehistoric find.

Search engine portal Google has removed links to pages that could allow crackers to automatically explore the Web for a specific vulnerability in e-commerce software.

A hungry bush rat cut communications to the bustling north Queensland mining town of Mt Isa when it chewed through a fibre optic cable.

29 July 2001

If we finally prove we're not alone in the cosmos, will it happen because we've discovered flashing lights in the sky? A growing number of SETI researchers think this is possible.

A new global map of Mars has revealed a host of valleys carved from otherwise smooth areas that might be signs of the Red Planet's most recent ice age. The features also bolster the case for a vast reservoir of water ice just below the surface.

28 July 2001

AOL Time Warner's $100 million investment in e-tailer Amazon.com this week highlights an emerging, high-stakes battle between the media giant and Microsoft. Long-time foes in areas such as instant messaging and online access, AOL and Microsoft are facing off in the e-commerce arena — specifically over technology that makes it easier to navigate the Web and make purchases online. So-called e-wallets — which store commonly requested information such as a login name, shipping address and credit card number — are shaping up as a key leverage point for controlling how consumers and businesses use the Internet.

27 July 2001

Australian tourism authorities may change laws 'to protect people too stupid to protect themselves' after sightseers clambered on a floating dead whale and patted great white sharks eating the carcass.

Meat from transgenic pigs destined for destruction was turned into sausage and eaten by at least nine people in Florida. It may be the first time people in the US have eaten genetically modified meat.

26 July 2001

Phoolan Devi, the woman known as the 'Bandit Queen' before she entered Parliament, was shot dead by masked men right outside her home in the heart of the city on Wednesday afternoon — if you're unfamiliar with Phoolan Devi, the 1994 film Bandit Queen is well worth a look to gain an insight into the early life of an extraordinary woman.

It is the dark underbelly of globalisation, a trade in human misery and despair that has gone largely unnoticed.

Microsoft is working on Farsite, a fail-safe computer file storage technology which saves your files on hundreds or thousands of networked PCs — call me sceptical, but I just can see myself trusting storage technology developed by the dodgy brothers at Microsoft.

Scientists have developed a new type of clock that is accurate to one second in 100 million years, far more accurate than existing atomic clocks. It is based on the optical frequency of a single cooled mercury ion linked to a laser oscillator.

25 July 2001

Australia's old, flat and salty landscape needs a revolution in land use, says Dr John Williams of CSIRO Land and Water. Dr Williams told the Queensland State Landcare and Catchment Management Conference that our current farming system, based on annual crops and pastures, is simply not right for our ancient flat dry continent A form of matter called Bose-Einstein condensate, which first was created in a laboratory in 1995, has been tinkered with until it caused miniature explosions that resemble exploding stars called supernovae, according to a new study The Washington Post has a go at explaining the widespread belief in New Age rubbish and other examples of science's mything links

24 July 2001

The United Steelworkers of America and an international rights group sued Coca-Cola Friday, alleging trade unionists at plants that bottle the company's soft drinks in Colombia are systematically intimidated, kidnapped and killed.

Earlier this month, Bruce Blair, president of the Centre for Defence Information, a non-profit military research organisation based in Washington, DC, wrote that Russian nuclear scientists last year found a bug in Microsoft's SQL Server database software that threatened the security not only of Russian nuclear weapons materials, but also of US nuclear materials.

Telstra BigPond broadband usernames and passwords have been breached, following a Trojan attack that affected at least sixty nine users over the weekend.

23 July 2001

An interesting look at the misinformation that can be spread by someone with blatant industry connections and access to the media.

Michael King, the Newtown solicitor who plans to mount a class action against Telstra over the failure of its high speed ADSL Internet service, is getting calls from up to 50 interested parties a day.

Better than sliced bread? Coming soon: Individually wrapped slices of peanut butter.

22 July 2001

Interactive voice-response systems are torture. Why do businesses insist on using a technology that alienate their customers so much?

Indian engineers have developed a handheld computer to help the poor and illiterate join the Internet. The Simputer reads web pages aloud in native languages, making it possible to reach the 50% of Indians who cannot read. Not that they can afford the $300 cost alone — the Simputer is designed to be used by a number of people, each one with a smart card that stores information and customises e-mail and browsing software.

21 July 2001

A fire sparked by a train derailment in a tunnel in downtown Baltimore raged for a second day Thursday, and its impact rippled onto the Internet. The fire, which has caused power outages in the area, has also brought segments of WorldCom's UUNet Internet network to a grinding halt, affecting customers along the Eastern corridor — which finally explains why so many sites were down last week.

The armed Russian who posted the following ad on the Net advertising his services was deadly serious: 'Will help retire from life, possibly without patient's consent'. Unfortunately for the would-be assassin, the only people interested in his offer were the police.

20 July 2001

The White House has dodged a denial-of-service attack launched by the 'Code Red' computer virus by shifting to a different numerical web address, according to security experts.

ICANN, the Internet's controlling body, is trying to assert its dominance by warning of the dangers of alternative domains. A policy document says the advantages of a single source, or root, for domain names well outweighs demands to change it. If opened up, it would mean some addresses on the Net could not be found by others.

19 July 2001

For decades, we've been living in a fast-food world. Suddenly, everywhere you look, there's McTrouble. Could it be that we're finally overcoming our addiction to saturated fat and cardboard chips, to Happy Meals and nursery décor? Could the burger era really be coming to an end at last?

Commercial Alert, a consumer group founded by the legendary Ralph Nader, has complained to the US Federal Trade Commission that many search engines are engaged in deceptive advertising. The group alleges the engines instead of using objective search formulas are selling top spots in their search results to the highest bidder without telling users. Engines named in the complaint are MSN, Netscape, Directhit, HotBot, Lycos, Altavista, LookSmart and iWon.

18 July 2001

An Australian organisation which donates computers to disadvantaged kids has criticised Microsoft Australia for its alleged lack of charity.

An Australian scientist has won the concrete world's most prestigious award for his work in turning industrial waste into a useful component of concrete for building and construction.

17 July 2001

Hoping to prevent an outbreak of violent protest at the G8 meeting in Genoa, Italy, Friends of the Earth Europe are laying down some ground rules.

Human rights activists put out a call to hackers here to help get the word out about their cause — not by having them deface sites, but by creating applications that can help the organisations manage data. Greg Walton, a freelance human rights researcher, spoke to hackers at the Def Con conference in support of the Hacktivismo project, an attempt to create an anonymous, private way of getting human rights information across the Internet while protecting the identities of those who report the abuses.

16 July 2001

Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement has banned the use of the Internet in the war-torn country to stop access to vulgar, immoral and anti-Islamic material.

A revealing study by psychologist James Bruning of Ohio University suggests that, with a handle like Bruno, you would have a lot better chance applying for a job as a truck driver than a hair dresser. That's because the old human passion for stereotyping seems to be very much alive and well in this age of political correctness.

15 July 2001

A California judge on Friday threw the book at a man convicted of tossing a lap dog to its death in heavy traffic, sentencing him to a maximum of three years in prison after finding no real remorse for a crime which sparked an international outcry.

When a family of ducklings fell down a Vancouver sewer grate their mother did what any parent would do. She got help from a passing police officer.

14 July 2001

Web standards advocates are declaring victory in their battle over browsers, but as they turn up the heat on their next adversary it's clear that their longstanding crusade on behalf of elegant design principles is far from over.

13 July 2001

While Exxon shrugs off protests, the sheer size of the public backlash and the long-term effects on branding could be more of a problem than the company has anticipated.

In an unusual action against a 'deadbeat dad', the Wisconsin Supreme Court has upheld a probation order that bars a man convicted of failure to pay child support from having more children unless he shows that he can support all his offspring.

The wreckage of Amelia Earhart's ditched-at-sea aircraft may have been found. High-resolution satellite imagery of Nikumaroro Island in the south-west Pacific has detected what may be remains of the plane resting in water within a coral atoll.

More than 70 garden gnomes were found on the steps of a cathedral in north-eastern France after an undercover operation by the shadowy Garden Gnome Liberation Front.

12 July 2001

Hobbies gone wrong... Helpful hint on how to make a PHKL — that's short for 'Pink Hello Kitty Laptop'.

Bacteria impregnated into every single fibre of a fabric, could live, breed and eat up the dirt, creating self-cleaning clothes.

Possums — New Zealand's public enemy number one — have gone to the dogs. The furry marsupial, introduced from Australia in 1837, has been turned into coats, hats, golf gloves, bikinis, nipple warmers and has even been hanging tail on menus of some restaurants in New Zealand and Asia. But now the noxious pest is being turned into dog food — I'll have to have my uncle bring some over for the dogs for xmas.

11 July 2001

A Canadian legal secretary who penned poetic tribute to Pomeranian dogs running rampant through the streets of Liechtenstein has clinched this year's Bulwer-Lytton prize for wretched writing.

According to an internal Salvation Army document, the Bush administration is working with the nation's largest charity, the Salvation Army, to make it easier for government-funded religious groups to practice hiring discrimination against gay people.

Comets and asteroids have been blamed for a lot of things before. Shaping Earth. Jumpstarting life. Wiping out dinosaurs. Even possibly altering human evolution.

The appropriately named Andrew Luster, heir to the Max Factor fortune, is not just an arsehole, he's an astoundingly dumb arsehole. He's set to appear before a California court on charges of raping three women after allegedly drugging them and filming the incidents.

10 July 2001

The St Bernard dog, that symbol of hope for lost snow-goers in Europe, is becoming popular in China... though not for carrying brandy to a victim of frostbite.

Australia is second only to Norway as the most desirable country in the world in which to live, says a United Nations survey to be released today.

Australian Internet users have been unable to access popular instant messaging services for almost a week as computer giant Microsoft suffers one of its worst Internet outages on record.

09 July 2001

Robert Redford has called the retarded monkey boy ignorant on the environment and urged other nations to keep pressure on the United States at a global climate conference next week Hollywood studio Warner Bros has had a spell cast on it for showing apprentice wizard Harry Potter riding his broomstick with the brush part at the back

08 July 2001

Lene Vestergaard Hau, the scientist who managed to slow light right down to a stop in a cloud of super-cooled atoms, explains how she did it and its implications for new optical communications technology, tabletop black holes and quantum computers.

07 July 2001

Finding such equal-opportunity critiques on the Net comes as a blessed relief. Too many women-centric sites — often decked out in feisty grrly graphics — are quagmires of enforced bonding for those who either think Sex in the City is the epitome of liberation or, conversely, celebrate excess body hair as an unassailable emblem of emancipation.

06 July 2001

The two red wolf pups transplanted from Brevard Zoo to Beardsley Zoo are doing fine with their new little brother. And their wild cousins in North Carolina can breathe a little easier thanks to the Supreme Court's refusal to overturn a lower court ruling protecting red wolves that wander onto private property. Not so lucky are the newly classified Red Wolves in Algonquin who, thanks to the short-sightedness of the Canadian Government's refusal of a year round ban on wolf-killing, may well disappear forever.

Microsoft is launching an offensive against what it sees as its chief competition on the Internet: open-source code. A stance that IBM see as futile and counterproductive.

Falun Gong proponents continue to elude China's security forces by using mobile phones and obscure Internet services to keep followers connected.

05 July 2001

Sandline is the one of the world's leading private military corporations — corporate mercenaries. In that capacity they will do just just about anything for a client government or 'genuine, internationally recognised and supported liberation movement'. Helicopter gunships, special forces units, marines, bodyguards, intelligence training — presumably including torture techniques and interrogation — the whole works. If you've seen it in a science fiction novel, Sandline will probably do it for you.

The European Union has blocked General Electric's planned $41 billion purchase of Honeywell International. This is the first time a merger between two US companies has been blocked solely by European regulators, so I would expect some retaliation the next time a European company tries a foray into the US. The Europeans feared the deal would create an unfair dominant position in markets for jetliner engines and aircraft electronics.

The Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, home of the America's Cup, has bought back its website address after a Canadian poached it for pornography. Squadron commodore Peter Taylor would not say how much was paid to retrieve the address which slipped into the wrong hands when the squadron accidentally failed to keep up payments.

A team of Australian and Indonesian scientists may have witnessed the birth of a gold deposit on the flanks of a submerged volcano bubbling away in waters off northeastern Sulawesi.

04 July 2001

A down-and-out businessman established one of history's fastest frauds, conning tens of thousands of small investors.

Pluto has suffered another demotion with scientists discovering a very bright, icy body possibly even larger than the tiny ice-planet's moon Charon and orbiting the Sun in the same celestial neighbourhood.

Microsoft has abandoned the controversial Smart Tags feature it was packaging in its new Windows XP operating system following criticism that the function was a cloaked attempt by the software maker to forcibly lure new subscribers to its Web-based services.

03 July 2001

Security Service MI5 once planned to recruit a team of specially-trained gerbils as a secret weapon to sniff out spies, it has been revealed. The animals were to help interrogate suspects because they could use their acute sense of smell to detect a rise in adrenaline — the chemical released in sweat when people feel under stress A Melbourne man has patented the wheel. Freelance patent lawyer John Keogh was issued with an Innovation Patent for a 'circular transportation facilitation device' within days of the new patent system being invoked in May A Microsoft executive's recent quip about the purportedly un-American characteristics of non-proprietary software did more than send open-source fans into a tizzy. It also sent companies supporting the Linux operating system a clear signal: You've become important enough for Microsoft to attack directly A retired British woman has decided to sail round the world permanently on the QE2 because it costs no more than staying in an old people's home

02 July 2001

Your password can reveal a lot about yourself, according to research for CentralNic. It's found four different categories — Family (47%) who use names of partners, kids or pets for their login, Fans (32%) who pick names of sports stars or movie stars, Fantasists (11%) described as self-obsessed who love passwords like 'sexy' and 'superstud' and the Cryptists (9%) who create intricate 'cryptic' passwords.

You may not be aware of it, but the government is monitoring your e-mail, looking for information about potential terrorist attacks. Besides the obvious free speech issue, the problem with this strategy is that real terrorists hide their messages within other messages.

Graduates of a prestigious New York City high school were presented with diplomas this month that contained an embarrassing typographical error. Diplomas for the 700 members of the Stuyvesant High School class of 2001 boasted that the school specialises 'in science and mathemetics'.

01 July 2001

Italy plans to invite the leaders of developing countries and others of high moral standing to the G8 summit in Genoa next month in an attempt to head off violent anti-capitalist protests.

It took Ron Wild about 10 years of visiting genealogical libraries around the country, perusing microfilm and searching through dusty archives, to trace the family line of his wife, Eva Mary, six generations to her great-great-grandfather, Joel Calvin Taylor, a farmer, born in Constable, NY, in 1824. It took Mr Wild just a few hours recently to uncover the 44 previous generations.

Liverpool is to honour one of its greatest sons by renaming the city's airport after the musician John Lennon. It will be called Liverpool John Lennon Airport when a new terminal opens in the spring.

Search


Archives