August 2001 Archive

31 August 2001

Governments around the world have found a new rallying cry — 'Software libre!' — and Microsoft is working overtime to quell it. A recent global wave of legislation is compelling government agencies, and in some cases government-owned companies, to use open-source or free software unless proprietary software is the only feasible option.

According to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings — disguised as mice — are using us to compute The Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, And Everything. Now earthling scientists have roped unsuspecting web servers into a similar — albeit slightly less ambitious — exercise in parasitic computing.

Regional Altavista search sites have not added any new listings for more than four months.

Civil liberties group Electronic Frontiers Australia has spoken out against recommendations that could see Internet service providers forced to put their customers under constant surveillance.

The United States government agencies that once tried to breach the Iron Curtain with radio broadcasts are taking the information war to the Internet, hoping to finance an American-based computer network designed to thwart attempts by the Chinese government to censor the web for users in China.

30 August 2001

Graeme 'Shirley' Strachan, the rock singer and television personality, was killed yesterday when the helicopter he was flying solo crashed into a cliff face in the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast.

The Federal Government announced yesterday it was considering an overhaul of media ownership laws but Labor immediately branded the move a 'desperate bid to impress a few media proprietors' in the months before the election.

Just as every Elvis fan longs to visit Graceland, Spam fans world-wide now have their own pilgrimage to make. On 15 September, Spam will have its very own museum, dedicated to the quirky joys and unprecedented excitement inspired by Spam.

The Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany has electronically linked snail neurons onto transistor chips and got them to communicate with each other — and with the chips. It's primitive, but it's the first time a neural network has directly interfaced with a silicon chip. They're now working on a 15,000 neuron-transistor experiment.

Microsoft has quietly disclosed that the latest versions of its Internet Explorer browser will not support Netscape-style plug-ins — the software bridges that extend the capabilities of a browser. The move means many Web sites that use popular programs like Apple's QuickTime won't work right with Windows unless developers change the code to meet Microsoft's requirements.

29 August 2001

A polar bear, an apparent health freak, stole toothpaste and vitamin pills after breaking into a tourist camp in the Norwegian Arctic, but bizarrely left food untouched.

A flaw in at least one BigPond e-mail server allows spammers to hijack the infrastructure to send bulk e-mails, resulting in the Telstra server being blacklisted and innocent outgoing e-mails bouncing back to users.

28 August 2001

Brian West uncovered a security error on the Poteau Daily News web site — caused by the extremely dodgy FrontPage — that meant anyone could edit the site without having to provide a password. He notified the editor and later met with undercover FBI agents asking him to reproduce the vulnerability — now he's up on Felony charges for wire fraud.

A plastic filling that helps teeth repair themselves could soon cut visits to the dentist. The composite material releases calcium and phosphate that rebuild tooth enamel and can heal small cavities.

IBM scientists have built a computer circuit out of a single strand of carbon, taking a step toward post-silicon computers.

27 August 2001

Microsoft's antitrust battle against the US government has drawn out of the woodwork a number of supporters for a quick resolution — unfortunately, not all of them are alive.

Forget your traditional Hawaiian skirts. A Belgian agri-design team has headed to greener pastures with clothing made of living grass.

Italian fashion designers have come up with the most trouble-free shirt known to man. Not only does it not need ironing, but it will even roll up its own sleeves.

26 August 2001

In a scathing attack on the political culture of his own country, Sean Penn praised the anti-globalisation protesters' commitment to change while dismissing the 'saccharine' lifestyle of Hollywood and dismissing many of his contemporaries as talentless.

After 18 years on death row in Idaho, Charles Fain was freed, thanks to a DNA test, and the murder of a 9-year-old girl is once more an open case — now, perhaps, they could start testing the other people on death row.

25 August 2001

A newly discovered asteroid whose orbit around the Sun had only been tentatively investigated was rumoured last weekend to be on a collision course with Earth.

You don't have to be the Man of Steel to put X-ray vision to good use. Drivers on Japan's heavily congested roads soon may see through tall trucks and buses — thanks to an in-car computer prototype designed to rid roads of safety black spots.

24 August 2001

An international set of specifications for writing non-verbal human communications in computer code is being drawn up by a US web standards group. Computer scientists backing the project believe that the language could improve cross-cultural communications and might eventually lend itself to virtual reality and artificial intelligence applications.

Mick Jagger was said to be fuming after a picture of the ageing Rolling Stone was used for the front cover of a British seniors' magazine, Saga.

Military and private satellite snapshots of Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey reveal an anomaly that researchers say might be the remains of Noah's Ark.

23 August 2001

If you've read even one article about Microsoft you probably already know that everything the company does is in the interest of consumer convenience — well, that's the spin, anyway.

Foxes, cats, blackberries and bitou bush have not just been disasters for the Australian environment. They are also ethically unacceptable.

22 August 2001

One-sided coverage of Genoa and the May Day protests has led many to ask if mainstream news broadcasters are really telling us the whole truth. For the real story you've got to tune in to the video activists.

For the first time, CSIRO and US scientists are using the moon to check and calibrate sensors on board weather satellites. The moon tuned sensors are expected to provide a wealth of improved information about climate change and air pollution.

A giant Mr Potato Head statue given by Pawtucket in Rhode Island to its twin town, Belper, in central England had to be removed because local people said they didn't like it.

Telstra has hung up its latest mobile phone promotion, which essentially forces users to foot the bill for spam messages, following an uproar from the Australian Consumer's Association and pressure from the government.

21 August 2001

Notorious logging company, Boise Cascade, signs up World Wide Fund for Nature for help with their image-management.

The European Space Agency has built its first ground station in Australia, after lifting the largest satellite dish in Western Australia into place in New Norcia, 134 km north of Perth.

Environmental authorities have found more than 80 frozen corpses of animals, including rare species, which had apparently died of starvation in a zoo near Rio de Janeiro.

As he awaits execution in Ohio, John W Byrd Jr is insisting on the electric chair rather than lethal injection as the more graphic way to demonstrate the cruelty of capital punishment in the face of his self-proclaimed innocence.

20 August 2001

Environmentalists and the Queensland government have been angered by the latest moves by the federal government in the approvals process for oil drilling on the Great Barrier Reef.

A Canadian group is offering Australians a mail order suicide kit, which includes a customised plastic bag for suffocation, to skirt Australia's anti-euthanasia laws.

Britain is considering a controversial change to citizenship rules to require immigrants to learn English as a condition of gaining nationality.

19 August 2001

Prosecutors say thousands of children in South Florida's poorest neighbourhoods have been administered unnecessary dental care in a scheme to defraud Medicaid.

18 August 2001

New York City's Metropolitan Transit Authority has 1300 ageing subway cars it wants to get rid of by sinking them in the ocean to crate a huge artificial reef.

Astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found the star 47 Ursae Majoris in the Big Dipper has at least two planets orbiting it. The latest is a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting at the same distance Jupiter orbits our own Sun. The other is a planet about 2.5 times the size of Jupiter.

17 August 2001

The last of the so-called free Internet Service Providers in Australia — FreeOnline — has called it quits, announcing today that its service will no longer be in operation from 1 September onwards.

A trendy henna tattoo could cause you months of pain and discomfort, and even a lifelong allergy to a common chemical found in dyes. But the problem is not the henna dye itself, an extract of the plant Lawsonia intermis, but the chemical para-phenylene diamine.

A company called BreakAway Foods of Columbus, Ohio, has frozen and packaged macaroni cheese in a cardboard cylinder so it's ready to eat after a minute in the microwave. Better still, insert a stick into the heated package, and you can push it up to eat like an ice block as you wander about — just plain weird...

16 August 2001

US District Court Judge Ronald Lew ruled on Monday that the free speech rights of Utah artist Tom Forsythe — who was sued by Mattel two years ago after he parodied Barbie dolls in a series of photographs meant as a stinging social comment — outweigh the company's trademarks and intellectual property rights as they relate to the 42-year-old doll.

The speed of light and other constants that scientists have relied on to explain the universe and its formation may not be so constant, according to a new study conducted by an international team of researchers.

15 August 2001

What comes out of the human body and goes into a toilet is often thought of as an end product. But for future residents of Mars, human waste will need to take on a more vital role.

Massachusetts attorney general prevents bankrupt dot-com, Essential.com, from cashing in on users' personal information.

Despite recent attempts by the Chinese Government to restrict Internet access and curtail the burgeoning growth of Internet cafes, the Chinese continue to flock to the Internet in their millions.

14 August 2001

The Federal Opposition has forced Telstra into disclosing an embarrassing cover up, revealing a backlog of 20,000 faults on its telephone network Australia-wide.

Two six tonne 'flower pots' at Wagga Wagga are being used by CSIRO researchers working towards a solution for the problem of dryland salinity. The huge pots, or lysimeters, are used to measure the consumption of water by crops.

The $6.2 million Pentagon program designed to let Americans living overseas vote online received only 84 ballots last year. An estimated six million Americans are currently living overseas. That means the experiment — which the Pentagon describes as a success — spent $74,000 per voter.

13 August 2001

Two of Norway's largest forest owner associations, have initiated a campaign to make the wolf disappear from Norway. Viken and Norskog sell their products mainly to Norske Skog ASA, in which both Viken and Norskog are shareholders. The company is one of the world's largest manufacturers of paper for print (magazines, newspaper et.) and the majority of its exports go to UK and Germany. The whole chain, from forest to consumers, is eco-labelled under PEFC as coming from sustainable operated forest... Maybe it should be labelled: coming from wolf-free forests? On the 6th of October, the Commonwealth Heads of Government — CHOGM — will be meeting in Brisbane at the Convention Centre. Fifty-four heads of state from Commonwealth countries, including HRH Queen Elizabeth II, Tony Blair and John Howard, will be meeting in private to discuss world economic policy. Stop CHOGM has been set up by the Stop Chogm Alliance to help build the biggest possible blockade of the CHOGM meeting

12 August 2001

In a legal wrangle over branding, a London High Court has declared that WWF is to be used for animals, not wrestlers.

A senior Tibetan official says the Chinese government will decide on a successor for the Dalai Lama. But such an appointment flies in the face of the spiritual leader's prediction that his reincarnation will be found outside China.

The high-speed Southern Cross Cable connecting Australia to the United States is to be reconfigured in light of service disruptions due to damage from a ship's anchor late last month. The Southern Cross Cable Network is taking steps to 'enhance the self-restoring ability of the network'.

A world-renowned Roman Catholic scholar says he has found evidence that the Catholic church sanctioned and blessed same-sex relationships from the Middle Ages to the 19th century.

11 August 2001

The real motive for raw socket support is for Microsoft to use Windows XP to exploit a bad situation, to deliberately make things worse. Microsoft wants to replace TCP/IP with a proprietary protocol that it will tout as being more secure.

A growing number of online companies are ambushing competitors through software that puts ads where marketers want them most — in front of customers visiting rival web sites.

Early reports had a band of armed hostage-takers storming the Colombian consulate, but all the machine-guns, automatic rifles and shotguns seen were in the hands of Sydney police.

10 August 2001

It's kind of a drag to track a turtle for months and find out someone ate it.

An ambitious three-year mission to catch a piece of the sun and safely return that sample to Earth was successfully hurled on its way into deep space Wednesday atop a Delta 2 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral.

Man has always had trouble understanding exactly what his best friend is trying to say. But a new gadget released in Japan is trying to reduce the lingual divide between dog and its owner.

Animal rights groups are threatening to launch a boycott of next year's soccer World Cup unless the South Korean government clamps down on the sale of dog meat.

09 August 2001

Rob Rosenberger is determined to shine the bright light of sarcasm into every dark corner of the computer security industry. He carefully reviews the press coverage of every virus alert and rips into reporters who mindlessly repeat whatever 'facts' they may have been fed by their sources A Queensland grazier has developed a high-tech computer tracking system to help graziers crack down on cattle rustlers Australian e-commerce security company eSec has partnered with US-based security-software developer and trainer Foundstone to bring Foundstone's Ultimate Hacking: Hands On course down under The National Crime Authority has called for a medically supervised heroin trial to help combat the drug trafficking and money laundering cycle which was fuelling the pervasive spread of organised crime, but Australia's spineless Prime Minister, John Howard, has rejected the suggestion Four inmates made a spectacular escape from a Swiss prison overnight by tying a rope from their cell to a tree beyond the jail's perimeter fence, aided by a computer mouse

08 August 2001

A US federal appeals court has ruled that firing a person because of their sexual orientation is legal.

Telstra's troubles have accelerated, with service difficulties on its ADSL broadband network spreading nation-wide.

Software piracy could cost Logicworld as much as AU$250,000 — the largest penalty to be slapped on an Australian company to date.

A Princeton professor, Professor Edward Felten, is suing the Secure Digital Music Initiative group for blocking his publication of research on cracking the security of digital music.

07 August 2001

Researchers are putting the finishing touches to a $1.25 million supersonic rocket which will be launched at Woomera on 23 October.

Australia's fastest submarine data link to the United States, Southern Cross Cable, was hit by another outage last night.

Australian taxpayers now fund 84 percent of all the drugs prescribed by doctors. It's a massive tonic for the drug industry, and companies spend a lot of those taxpayer dollars trying to get doctors to choose their drugs rather than someone else's. They win favour with lavish meals at top restaurants, harbour cruises, dancing girls and expensive holidays... marketing methods that many experts believe are causing doctors to prescribe excessively and inappropriately.

06 August 2001

French Greens have symbolically renamed Paris' riverside motorway — named after the late President Georges Pompidou — in a fresh strike in the war between the city's cyclists and the motor car.

The weak will never inherit the Earth, but they just might blow it up on the way out. As hundreds of thousands of Americans find themselves downsized, right-sized, laid off and plain old fired during this latest economic meltdown, some of them are getting even.

Seven descendants of the dog that killed Diane Whipple are being offered for sale by a Southern California woman who is asking $1,200 each — a prime example of greed over good sense.

05 August 2001

A system of gigantic ancient valleys — some as much as 200 km wide — has been spotted partly buried under aeons of volcanic lava, ash and wind-blown dust on Mars.

Cable & Wireless Optus is providing the technology for an ACT Department of Urban Services trial aimed at preventing crime, particularly car theft.

In Europe, mobile phone operators hope users will pay to have targeted SMS messages delivered directly — so you have to pay to receive advertising, what drugs are these people on?

04 August 2001

Dell Computer has quietly stopped offering the Linux operating system as an option on its desktop and notebook PCs, saying that low demand forced the company to pull the software from its online stores.

It's not likely that users will soon see modems that exceed 56 kilobits per second on store shelves, but it is not impossible. Internet service providers are slow to adopt V.92, the International Telecommunications Union's latest modem standard, but technically, modems can go faster.

03 August 2001

The latest encryption designed to stop CDs from being copied has already been broken.

Researchers at the University of Zurich using sophisticated 3D modelling have recreated Neanderthal faces — and they are remarkably human and handsome. Despite this, they suggest Neanderthals were a separate 'sister' species from modern humans.

Storm experts in the US have made a cloud vanish from the sky for the first time. They achieved the feat by sprinkling a water-absorbing powder over the cloud, making it disappear from sight and weather station radar screens. They hope the powder will one day dry up deadly hurricanes and tropical storms.

Doctors in the Indian city of Varanasi have finally discovered the reason for a surge in the popularity of the free condoms they have been dishing out for family planning. Weavers in the holy Hindu city, also known for its silk industry, have been using government-distributed condoms to help in producing hand-woven silk saris.

02 August 2001

A pair of money-grubbing yuppies have put up Internet bids for the privilege of naming their unborn son — I wonder what sort of rights a corporation could hold over the child.

Hamburger chain McDonald's has gained a strong foothold in New South Wales schools by offering cheap cheeseburgers, school deliveries and a cut of profits to parents and citizens' associations that send diners to its outlets.

People who dress up as hobbits have become the latest victims of a police crackdown on unconventional lifestyles in the Central Asian state of Kazakhstan.

01 August 2001

The co-ordinator of Dona Ana County's drunken-driving prevention program has been arrested on a charge of driving while intoxicated at a DUI awareness picnic.

At least one intruder, apparently armed with a spear, went fishing in the Key West Aquarium, killing several exotic specimens and making off with a load of lobsters, snappers and trout.

A New Zealand inventor has put a home-made pulse jet engine on a go kart — a man in search of an embarrassing headline.

The pyramidiots are a group of enthusiasts who think the ancient Egyptians may have used huge kites to lift the giant stones to build the Pyramids. Recently they lifted a 3,000 kilogram obelisk using a kite in 20mph winds in just 25 seconds.

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