October 2001 Archive

31 October 2001

A patent held by a little-known programmer from New Jersey may complicate — at least temporarily — the grand visions of Web services touted by titans such as IBM, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. Charlie Northrup, the chief executive of software developer Global Technologies, holds one of the earliest patents that describe how diverse computer systems can talk to servers connected to the Web and run software on multiple platforms. Sound familiar? That's just the kind of service Microsoft is pushing with its .Net strategy, a wide-ranging plan for moving business computing applications such as calendars, word processors and e-mail onto the Web.

When trouble walked inside a Capitol Hill bank Friday, John Spates didn't think. He acted. He chased down a robbery suspect and, with dozens of people watching, held onto the woman until police officers arrived.

Telstra's search engine GOeureka is falling behind the times with search information last modified in July this year.

A new Backyard Bugs Guide will familiarise young Australians with the insects in their backyard.

30 October 2001

BitArts Labs, a British company, has claimed that crackers have already circumvented Microsoft's registration process for Windows XP.

Australian scientists, led by Dr Allan Paull from the University of Queensland's centre for hypersonics, will attempt to fire a rocket at hypersonic speeds this week. If successful their scramjet will be the fastest air breathing engine ever built, capable of pushing aircraft along at more than 10 times the speed of sound.

Peter Fromherz and Gunther Zeck, from the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich, have succeeded in melding together living nerve cells and silicon to create the world's first neuronal chip.

29 October 2001

Red and green lights dance in the sky above the North and South poles. The two lights — the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis — appear to be a mirror image of each other. This picture was taken by a spacecraft during a recent space weather storm. It is the first time Northern and Southern Lights brightening at the same time at opposite ends of the Earth have been captured on film.

Scientists have released new details of a giant super-crocodile which lived around 110 million years ago and grew to the length of a bus. Sarchosuchus imperator specimens were first discovered in the Ténéré Desert in Niger in 1964, but new finds in the Sahara have made it possible to form a clearer picture of the giants.

Two Ohio men who threw beer bottles at a woman in a car paid the price on Friday — they had to parade through the centre of their hometown dressed as women.

28 October 2001

Telstra broadband and online services executive director Greg Willis said the $1 billion plus of broadband development would be over a number of technologies including satellite, ADSL and its hybrid fibre coaxial cable.

ICANN has fiddled its own rules to protect existing members. It claims unjustified delays in processing an application by New.net meant the bid was rejected, causing a ruckus.

Some people want to introduce elephants, camels and other large African beasts into the US — and not in zoos, but roaming free in vast parks. Why? To replace the megafauna supposedly killed off by the first humans to enter the New World. The popular overkill theory took a hefty knock today with evidence it wasn't humans but climate change which caused the extinctions.

Check out the University of Virginia's Plagiarism Resource Centre — a complete one-stop shop to stop plagiarism, a growing problem since students discovered the net.

State, Territory and Commonwealth Government consumer authorities have launched a combined Web site designed to protect consumers from online scams.

Researchers in Seattle are getting closer to growing living heart muscle outside the body, a technique that could one day make heart transplants and artificial hearts obsolete.

27 October 2001

A Pennsylvania man who wanted to promote co-operation between Iraq and the United States in the wake of the 11 September attacks apparently has a new pen pal in Saddam Hussein.

Treva Throneberry quit her Panhandle high school in 1985, halfway through her junior year, leaving classmates wondering where she went. Police in Vancouver, Washington, believe they have the answer. They say she has been hitchhiking around the country for much her adult life, masquerading as a homeless, abused teenager.

26 October 2001

Students at Indiana University are leading a campaign to get state agencies to reject doing business with Boise Cascade, a company accused of environmental abuses.

Software developer Multelink yesterday announced it would spend $10 million trailing a wireless phone and e-mail device in Ballarat over six months.

SafeSurf was one of the earliest advocates of Internet filtering. Their Online Co-operative Publishing Act is probably the only time that an Internet filtering company proposed that web site operators could be sued by parents for not rating their web site — regardless of what type of content was on it. But now the SafeSurf web site is being blocked by TeleGlobe, a company with their own take on filtering.

Tests of a controversial weapon that is designed to heat people's skin with a microwave beam have shown that it can disperse crowds. But critics are not convinced the system is safe. Last week, the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico finished testing the system on human volunteers. The Air Force now wants to use this Active Denial Technology, which it says is non-lethal, for peacekeeping or riot control at relatively long range — possibly from low-flying aircraft.

25 October 2001

An international day of protest designed to jam the US-led communications spy system Echelon was a rousing success according to its organisers, who claim that the cyber-demonstration helped to raise public awareness about the surveillance system.

McDonald's employees found a dead deer under a sink in the men's bathroom, and police were trying to figure out how it got there. 'I am taking this matter very seriously,' owner Larry Smith said Tuesday. 'The safety of my restaurant, employees and customers are among my highest priorities and will never be compromised.'

A homeless woman is suing Santa Fe Southern Railway over a 1998 accident in which a train in Santa Fe severed her feet as she was lying on the tracks at a crossing.

Hundreds of people called 911 after seeing six parachutists who were trailing plumes of red smoke land at Austin High School. 'People thought we were being invaded,' said Ed Harris Jr, director of emergency communications for the Austin Police Department.

24 October 2001

Home Secretary David Blunkett has announced he wants the UK's laws covering cannabis to be eased so possession will no longer be an arrestable offence. The drug would remain illegal under Mr Blunkett's proposals but be re-classified from a class B to a class C drug.

Drinks maker Coca-Cola has come under fire from Harry Potter fans for using images of the popular character in its latest advertising campaign.

23 October 2001

A piece of software being distributed anonymously online has successfully cracked part of Microsoft's anti-piracy technology, the centrepiece of much of the giant's recent forays into the audio and video world.

A future where you can remotely switch on your garden sprinkler, receive a call from your mobile telling you you're home has been broken into or where vending machines phone for a refill aren't too far off, with a group of Australian scientists developing Web-based infrastructure to pull off multiple stunts of this kind.

Australians will continue to increase their appreciation of the goods and services that they get from the natural world, says Dr Steve Morton, Chief, CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems.

Scientists have puzzled for years how insects manage to fly. The bumble bee, for instance, has the aerodynamics of a tiny brick and it has been theoretically proved several times it's impossible for it to fly. Now we've found out the secret of insect flight — it's all to do with complex tiny air vortices produced from their wings.

22 October 2001

Me and all of my work mates, have found ourselves back on the streets thanks to the underhanded dealings of the New Zealand-based Advantage Group. About a year ago Whitewolf was purchased by Advantage Group, now we find that out new parent company has asset-stripped our office and retrenched all of us — although they have put a very warm and fuzzy spin on the process in the news release of the decision. So if you have buyers sniffing around your company, it's well worth checking out their intentions thoroughly before signing a deal. And if you're looking to get your hands on some of the best HTML developers, Java developers and designers in Sydney, drop me a line.

Australia's top Internet domain name regulator auDA has terminated a year-old hosting relationship with NetRegistry on the advice of lawyers, following a security breach.

A brief history of Ulughbek, a 15th-century Afghan astronomer-prince whose quest for knowledge led to his overthrow by religious extremists.

Rob Rosenberger, editor of the V-Myths web site and a critic of fire engine-chasing anti-virus companies, claims he was treated to an early morning visit by the FBI last weekend. He says he was forced to pull a column he was planning to run that would have caused embarrassment to one of the anti-virus vendors.

Software-maker Macromedia is claiming it owns the patent to Adobe Systems' popular Photoshop program, according to a suit filed in a US federal court.

21 October 2001

Scientists believe it may be possible to halt and even reverse the progress of multiple sclerosis by targeting key chemicals of the immune system The left-wing bastion of Berkeley, California, narrowly voted Tuesday night to condemn US military action in Afghanistan and not before the addition of an amendment denouncing the terrorist mass murder of thousands of Americans on 11 September SRI International, a research firm in Menlo Park, California, is working with the Defence Department to create a shoe that will convert the mechanical energy of walking into electric power to charge up gadgets, batteries and other devices

20 October 2001

An online artificial conversation program named ALICE wins a top prize in the Loebner artificial intelligence contest, in which computers try to convince judges that they're human.

An Italian man has killed his 72-year-old wife after she made him a bad cup of coffee.

Silicon Valley entrepreneur Steve Kirsch is currently advocating the creation of a voluntary federal database of brain fingerprints, a record of a person's brain wave activity when shown images with which a terrorist would have a strong personal connection, and correlating these to iris scans.

19 October 2001

Look out, music pirates: The recording industry wants the right to hack into your computer and delete your stolen MP3s.

There is no banking system in Afghanistan, but there is a network of money-changers with a system that has withstood 20 years of war and corrupt governments and may come close to a theoretically pure marketplace.

Charles Darwin could not have known he might one day improve mobile phone communications and help win wars. But a new computer-based genetic algorithm based on Darwin's ideas about how the fit survive may do just that.

A Japanese company has launched the latest in cyber-pets — a robot cat that purrs when stroked.

18 October 2001

Top British scientist Stephen Hawking has warned that the human race is likely to be wiped out by a doomsday virus before this millennium is out unless it starts to colonise space.

Telstra has refused to respond to rumours within the broadband community that its three-gigabyte data download restriction may be lifted, claiming it hasn't decided what its future plan will be.

At this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, industry publishers realise that readers aren't quite ready to toss that paperback, and look to add new technologies.

17 October 2001

Police have been called in after a hidden camera was found in a womens' toilet at Cambridge University. The miniature web-cam device was discovered at the department of experimental psychology.

Telecommunications cable network operator Southern Cross Cable Network said there has been a downturn in demand for cable capacity in the wake of September 11 events but that it is well placed versus competitors.

Centuries ago it was commonly believed that comets carried disease in their tails. Nowadays we know the only 'disease' you can get from a comet is a cold — if you stay out too long at night watching it! But these old beliefs were not completely wrong: comet tails do contain an extremely poisonous chemical compound — hydrogen cyanide. Now a team of Dutch and German astronomers using the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope on Hawaii have discovered that this poison can help them to understand the birth of massive stars. Its presence is a sign that a massive baby star has begun to warm up.

16 October 2001

David Dunn of Cleveland has become such a powerful warrior in the Internet fantasy game DragonRealms that others would pay thousands of dollars to assume his character, Bloodwrath. But shortly after the 11 September terrorist attacks, a real-world impostor tried to kill him off and steal his online identity.

The hijackers who carried out the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon expressed confusion and surprise Monday to find themselves in the lowest plane of Na'ar, Islam's Hell.

2001 has been a bad year for ISP customers in Australia, who have faced seemingly continuous outages and other service problems. A recent survey reveals the full extent of this situation, as the ISP industry watchdog prepares to bite back.

Australian Internet Service Providers are split over the decision to disconnect virus-spreading users that have taken insufficient precautions against malicious attacks.

15 October 2001

Marriages between first cousins in some migrant groups in Sydney are resulting in high rates of infant deaths and an incidence of serious birth defects nearly three times that in the wider community.

Trained to kill, the dolphin Diana has found a new vocation — helping autistic children to break out of their shell. Born 28 years ago, Diana was raised by her Soviet masters to serve as a weapon in the Cold War. Families from Russia, Poland and Turkey have brought their troubled children to this southern Ukrainian port to benefit from the strange psychic qualities displayed by Diana and a dozen or so of her fellow aquatic mammals.

14 October 2001

The Australian Department of Defence confirmed its internal and external data network had been struck down by the nimda worm.

When cartoon detective Dick Tracy first appeared 70 years ago, his wristwatch communicator was pure fantasy. This week IBM and Citizen announced they would recruit dozens of Dick Tracys on Japanese and US university campuses to trial a wristwatch computer early next year.

Polaroid, which made cameras that developed photos on the spot, has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. The US firm has been struggling under a debt mountain for some months, and the announcement had been widely rumoured.

13 October 2001

They're neighbours on the periodic table of elements, but carbon and silicon are pretty much strangers in the worlds of physics and technology. Carbon is the main building block of life, while silicon is the foundation for semiconductors. But several promising research efforts are under way to combine the two realms, using organic polymers as material for the production of microelectronics, including transistors and displays.

12 October 2001

Inflatable loudspeakers light enough for anyone to shift could mean rock stars' roadies have had their day. Loudspeakers come in heavy, cumbersome boxes that provide an air enclosure to absorb unwanted vibration and give a fuller sound. But now two companies, SoundTube Entertainment of Park City, Utah, and Ellula Sounds of Loughborough in Leicestershire, UK, reckon an inflatable box will do the job.

A woman has stunned the medical world by conceiving triplets while already 10 weeks pregnant. She is due to give birth to the boy later this month and deliver the other three babies early in the New Year.

Telstra BigPond customers were unable to send large attachments since all day Wednesday following another system glitch.

Administrators of the troubled Australian etailer E-Store have revealed the company's debt to a pool of 80-odd creditors amounts to about AU$2 million — the bastards still owe me a copy of Metal Gear Solid.

StarOffice has the interface familiarity and file format compatibility that will enable it to peacefully coexist with Microsoft Office. And its cross-platform support and ingenious use of XML will pay dividends in future, more wide-scale deployments.

The German city of Cologne has set up drive-in brothels in a bid to move the red light district away from near its landmark cathedral.

11 October 2001

Evil Bert, meet Evil Osama. Right now, the two appear to be inseparable — at least on ubiquitous posters carried by pro-Taliban demonstrators.

The priestesses of the Delphic Oracle in ancient Greece may have been intoxicated on natural gases when they issued prophecies that helped shape the foundation of Western civilisation.

Biometric-enabled ATMs could be doling out cash to Australian bank customers within a year following the launch of technology that promises to reduce the expense of converting existing ATM security infrastructure.

Imagine getting shot by your best friend. But the triggerman in one case was a dog. Authorities in Douglas County, Washington, said that goose hunter Michael Boyle was shot in the leg when a dog stepped on the trigger of a 12-gauge shotgun.

While military forces are engaged in a war of weapons in Afghanistan, frustrated civilians on both sides of the conflict are waging a war of words online. Discussion boards and chat rooms across the Internet have become a battleground for pro- and anti-American Web surfers locked in well-reasoned debates as well as vicious clashes in which vitriol-fueled tirades are the weapons of choice.

Thirty years ago, a simple message launched a revolution in the history of human communications. That dispatch is now considered the first e-mail, or electronic message, to have been sent from one computer to another through a network. Devised by BBN Technologies scientist Ray Tomlinson, the system for sending e-mail was initially a demonstration of what ARPAnet — the Internet's precursor — could do.

10 October 2001

Australia's love affair with mobile phones looks set to pay environmental dividends following the launch of a mobile handset recycling scheme. Established by Planet Ark in conjunction with major mobile phone retail outlets, the scheme aims to recycle 500,000 handsets in the next 12 months.

iPrimus, is scrapping its unlimited DSL plan and has given users a month's notice to find an alternative service.

Disgruntled Dingo Blue customers are threatening to swap providers unless service levels are returned to what they were before last week's redeployment of dial ports caused major congestion.

An Albuquerque policeman and his pilot face disciplinary measures after using a police helicopter this week to swoop in for a midnight snack of doughnuts.

09 October 2001

SETI@home, the peer-to-peer computing project that ties together millions of computers to examine radio waves coming from space, has 3 million users — and thousands of new people sign up to crunch data each day — making the entire SETI@home network more powerful than the biggest of supercomputers. So powerful, indeed, that there is the possibility of running out of data to process. To solve this problem, SETI@home is installing a Linux-based, super-fast digital data recorder that was donated by Hewlett-Packard. According to the company, the new machine can record data 10 times faster than the previous recorder.

Toshiba is bringing its low-temperature polysilicon display technology to notebooks in hopes of eventually lowering their price. Such technology is already used in smaller devices, including some handheld computers and mobile phones, and offers higher quality images using fewer components — 40 percent less, according to Toshiba — than its counterpart called amorphous silicon.

The pending liquidation of Excite@Home has AT&T offering to pick up some assets — to creditors' dismay — but a buyer for the Excite portal could be harder to come by.

08 October 2001

The rotting remains from a sunken cargo ship carrying 3300 tonnes of frozen fish just off Norway's western coast have been shipped to Denmark where the cargo is being used as biofuel.

An investigation by Calgary cops is underway into alleged death threats made from the mobile phone belonging to the mother of leading mayoral candidate Dave Bronconnier.

07 October 2001

The Dallas city council overwhelmingly voted down a proposed site for a new inner city McDonald's restaurant. This followed months of intense community organising and coalition building among diverse groups including Vegetarian Society of Dallas, Krishna religious community, Mt Auburn neighbourhood association, UPROAR — United People Resisting Oppression And Racism — Hindu organisations and others.

A Melbourne man who patented the wheel has been awarded an 'Ig Nobel Prize' by Harvard University. Freelance patent attorney, John Keogh, patented the 'circular transportation facilitation device' last June to highlight problems with Australia's new Innovation Patent system. He shares the prize with the Australian patent office, IP Australia, which granted him innovation patent #2001100012.

06 October 2001

South Africa is carrying out the greatest transfer of wildlife the world has seen in 50 years to create the world's greatest game park. It is transferring 1000 elephants from the famed Kruger National Park into neighbouring Mozambique under a project to create a 35000 sq km trans-frontier wildlife park.

How to build your own supercomputer: Take a few off-the-shelf, stripped-down PCs, add some network switches, a maze of Ethernet cabling and some home-grown Linux software, and you'll be well on your way. Hewlett-Packard, together with a national laboratory in France, tried this recipe out. To the great surprise of many scientists, it worked. What they ended up with is the I-Cluster, a Mandrake Linux-powered cluster of 225 simplified PCs from HP that has benchmarked its way into the list of the top 500 most powerful computers in the world.

05 October 2001

A clever gadget no bigger than a personal stereo can rapidly predict food poisoning. While the gadget, called ImmunoFlow, will at first be used by food-processing companies, it is so small and light that its inventors ultimately envisage health inspectors delivering on-the-spot justice to restaurateurs trading in spoilt chicken or buggy burgers.

An underwater fuel cell that runs on seawater and subsea sediment can generate small amounts of power indefinitely. Plankton release energy by using oxygen to break down organic matter in seawater or sediment. Deeper down in the sediment there is no oxygen, so the plankton rely on different chemicals. These two reactions set up a potential difference between the seawater and the sediment a few centimetres beneath.

04 October 2001

Optus has admitted that it has lost some e-mails belonging to several thousand of its dial-up Internet subscribers following a system glitch over the long weekend and for the second time in seven days, Telstra BigPond Mail customers with user names beginning with the letters P and F are being affected by a technical glitch which is leading to delays in receiving e-mail.

Internet filters designed to keep pornography away from children were banned at San Francisco city libraries despite a federal law mandating them.

AdKey's software allows web sites to lock out users who use apps that block banners and pop-up ads.

Motorola researchers have successfully demonstrated a methane gas-powered fuel cell, which can provide enough juice between chargings for a month of mobile phone calls.

British engineering group Mayflower Corporation unveiled a new engine which could increase fuel efficiency by at least 40 percent and decrease emissions by 50 percent.

Harnessing nuclear fusion — the energy that makes the stars shine — may be possible soon because of a new approach.

A mother bear appears to have cared for a missing 16-month-old Iranian toddler who was found safe and sound three days later in the animal's den.

03 October 2001

A new and controversial proposal under consideration by the World Wide Web Consortium could open the way for companies to claim patent rights — and demand royalties — on standards authorised by that body.

A US court shut down thousands of web sites after it determined that they diverted web surfers and held them captive while bombarding them with ads for pornography and gambling.

A man mistook his younger brother for an elk and shot him dead at the start of the elk hunting season in Finland.

02 October 2001

An audit of ten Australian Federal Government web sites has found most contained serious security holes and were at risk from hackers. While Bug hunter, Rain Forest Puppy, crafts a full disclosure policy to nudge vendors to acknowledge and fix security holes in software products, or be exposed.

The Australian government has been criticised for using the fear generated by the 11 September terrorist attacks on the US to push through the controversial Cybercrime Bill Thursday night. The bill allows police to intercept Australians' telephone, Internet and e-mail communication encourages 'lazy policing' and corruption.

Scientists investigating brain function build a microscope which sees inside a rat's head as it moves around.

The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a massive technological change, converting to mass-producing chips with copper, rather than aluminium, wires. The weird part: Almost no one seems to be having major problems. Copper, which conducts electricity better than aluminium, gives designers an avenue to break through looming physical barriers that could prevent further boosts in chip performance.

01 October 2001

Muslim sisters are burning, dying, imprisoned without a voice — all in the name of one of the greatest religions in the world. An enlightening account of the truth about Islam and women by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.

Looking somewhat like a huge, upturned golf tee, it would be the highest man-made structure on earth. It would also provide electricity to as many as 200,000 homes. If built, a proposed 200-megawatt solar chimney for rural Australia would become the most daring application yet of a quirky form of generating alternative, renewable electricity.

Sandor Ligetfalvy's never-sent, but wonderfully worded letter of resignation from McDonald's offers a glimpse behind the shiny façade into the appalling way that employees are treated.

Optus dial-up internet users could lose access to some overseas web sites and e-mail after network administrators voted to blacklist Optus for refusing to crack down on an alleged spam gang. Optus has made the SPEWS.org list, described by insiders as the 'nuclear weapon' of the anti-spam lobby, for allegedly housing a known spammer on its dial-up network.

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