March 2002 Archive

31 March 2002

Microsoft is using its dominant market power to target Palm organisers and other handheld digital devices powered by Palm software because they threaten the Windows monopoly. And, while they're at it, Unisys and Microsoft plan to launch a marketing campaign that seeks to undermine Unix, the operating system at the heart of powerful server lines from rivals Sun Microsystems, IBM and Hewlett-Packard — oddly enough, the web site is itself powered by Unix software.

NeuHausPlatz Computer Systems assembled a pile of computer parts, hooked them up without a case and covered the lot with quick-dry spray foam, resulting in an extremely light weight, if ugly, computer.

Nominet has warned Scottish businesses against accepting offers to register their names with the supposedly Scottish .sc domain. This top-level domain country code is actually for the Seychelles.

Some insurance companies recognise certain breeds of dogs as threatening, which causes homeowners problems in buying policies.

30 March 2002

An Intel-funded report accuses AMD of confusing consumers with its 'beyond megahertz' campaign to downplay clock speed as a marketing tool.

Long-suffering spam recipients have acquired a new ally in their ongoing struggle to stem the ever-rising tide of unsolicited e-mail: the Federal Trade Commission. While the California Supreme Court is to review an appeals court decision that likened sending mass-mailing e-mails to trespassing.

Wherify Wireless has created a US$400 Personal Locator that is a watch with a built-in pager, GPS unit and wireless data connectivity. It's targeted at families with kids.

29 March 2002

Back from a triumphant Embedded Systems Conference in San Francisco where he publicised Amiga Anywhere, Amiga CEO Bill McEwen has posted an update on progress with Amiga hardware and AmigaOS 4 and 5.

The Nigerian government is tired of being known as the spam/scam capital of the world and setup a web site to combat the common e-mail scam.

It may look like an overgrown ornamental bamboo, but elephant grass is seen by Britain's government and agricultural bodies as a key to helping embattled farmers and generating green power.

In any rogues' gallery of astronomical evildoers, black holes would have to be the number 1 nightmare. But are the nightmares real? A few doubters are beginning to emerge. If they're right, then black holes may be just the latest grand illusion of cosmology.

28 March 2002

Ericsson is bringing to Australia a bundle of products and services that may provide carriers and would-be carriers with an economical way of delivering broadband services including telephony, video and high-speed Internet into the home via optical fibre.

Internet-filtering software will block only about 80 per cent of pornographic images — much less than parents had hoped — highlighting the need to supervise young surfers, according to a CSIRO report.

At the game developers conference, Sun is releasing a white paper on their new 'Java Games Profile'. Their ultimate goal is to have one CD you could pop into an XBox, a PS2, a Windows machine or a Linux machine, and play the same game on them all.

Laws are made to be broken. Or so the National Aeronautics and Space Administration seems to think. After an almost two-year wait, the agency's Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, is poised to take delivery of a machine that proponents hope will counteract the laws of gravity.

27 March 2002

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has stepped in and used new powers to set standard Internet access charges for ISPs.

Telstra have concluded that a manual solution is the best way to fix the problems faced by more than 1,300 broadband users.

Thousands of pages of historically valuable documents that served as the basis for published research concerning intelligence in the early Cold War years have been withdrawn from public access over the past several years, to the dismay of intelligence historians and scholars who found them missing from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

A recent study suggests that the domestication of dogs mutually led to profound changes in the biological and behavioural evolution of both species.

26 March 2002

The New Zealand government now wants network operators and ISPs to ensure they can spy on customers using their services on behalf of police and secret service groups.

Verisign is sending out deceptive domain registration bills in an attempt to poach business — at a highly inflated price, of course.

Florida, a state run by another corrupt shrub, has implemented restrictions on gay parenting. This doesn't just mean that if you're gay you can't adopt, it also means that children in happy, stable homes can be legally removed by the state because of their parents sexuality. Welcome to the land of the free.

25 March 2002

It's no surprise to anyone that this year's best actor and actress Oscars were rebadged prettiest, black American. Denzel Washington is a great actor, but his performance is barely worth a nomination, let alone an award, when compared to his peers competing against him in the category. As for adorable Halle Berry, her acting is best done with her mouth firmly shut, handing her an acting award is as ludicrous as handing an one to Meg Ryan. This is supposed to be an award for outstanding talent, it is neither a politically correct campaign tool or the you're-nearly-dead-have-an-Oscar award that Henry Fonda received for On Golden Pond. Unfortunately, the Oscars have been a laughable award for so many years that no one will raise an eyebrow. Just seems a shame that Wil Smith was apparently deemed not poster boy cute enough to have beaten Washington to an award that he had out-acted him for.

Use of hand-held technologies, such as mobile phones, GameBoys and computers, has caused a physical mutation in the under-25s, according to new research. The study, carried out in nine cities around the world, shows that the thumbs of the younger generation have overtaken their fingers as the hand's most muscled and dextrous digit.

A single glass of wine will impair your driving more than smoking a joint. And under certain test conditions, the complex way alcohol and cannabis combine to affect driving behaviour suggests that someone who has taken both may drive less recklessly than a person who is simply drunk.

Scientists warn the melting Arctic ice cap could lead to polar bears becoming extinct. Studies show the decline in the thickness and extent of the ice cap is causing hundreds of bears to die each year. Many of the estimated 25,000 bears spend long periods trapped on land rather than ice, where they find it hard to feed.

24 March 2002

AOL is the world's most successful ISP — except, apparently, in its own house. Among the problems cited: The e-mail software frequently crashed, staffers weren't able to send messages with large attachments, they were often kicked offline without warning, and if they tried to send messages to large groups of users they were labelled as spammers and locked out of the system. Sometimes, e-mails were just plain lost in the AOL etherworld and never found. And if there was an out-of-office reply function, most people couldn't find it.

If you think the crashing telecommunications industry is in chaos now, just wait until it all flips around and the world is choking on Web traffic and too many phone calls squeezing through too few fibre-optic lines. It will happen sooner than conventional wisdom dictates.

When Channel Islands National Park officials needed an estimated about 300 rats exterminated on the east side of environmentally sensitive Anacapa Island, Aspen Ag Helicopters got the call. The kill was necessary because the rodents, descendants of rats that reached the island by way of a shipwreck a century or more ago, were decimating the populations of two rare seabirds. And GPS helped the helicopter company do the job.

23 March 2002

Surgeons have carried out a ground-breaking operation on Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics, so that his nervous system can be wired up to a computer.

Sydney's bats can't take a hint — you'd think the smell of python excrement would send them packing, but no. Smearing branches with chilli and shrimp paste didn't work either.

Two ageing pranksters are facing fines and jail for repeatedly letting off 'fart spray' in a New Jersey supermarket.

22 March 2002

Telstra's failure to comply with a Competition Notice demanding it play a fairer game in the wholesale arena will see the Notice come into effect today — leaving the telco heavyweight possibly facing legal action from disgruntled customers and the competition watchdog, which could chase penalties exceeding AU$10 million Operation Clambake, a project that exposes Scientology as a scam, has received a DMCA notification letter from Google that was issued at the request of the Religious Technology Centre and Bridge Publications — the Church of Scientology. A long list of URLs were listed as infringing, and Google has complied with the DMCA request by removing them Can space aliens zap Web pages? Does Mr T have a grudge against Web surfers? And has the Internet's missing link finally been found? Welcome to the far-out and far-flung world of 404Error File Not Found messages An American scientist says he can improve people's sight by stitching artificial muscle to the eyeball and squeezing it. The smart eye band could be turned on when needed by a switch hidden on a tiny power source behind the ear. It works as a cinema screen would if it was moved back and forth until the projector image came into focus

21 March 2002

A campaign by the shadow minister for information technology, Senator Kate Lundy, to expose Telstra's use of line-splitting technology that degrades residential Internet speeds has left the telco facing a barrage of complaints from customers.

Science minister Peter McGauran — another of Howard's morons-in-residence — dismissed a plea by scientists that Australia spend money searching for potentially threatening asteroids that could only be spotted from the Southern Hemisphere, calling it a 'fruitless, unnecessary, self-indulgent exercise'.

A high security jail which aims to turn dangerous dogs into well-behaved pets has opened in Berlin. The Berlin Interment Home takes in stray fighting dogs and domestic pets courts have deemed a danger to the public. It even has a canine death row.

While talking computers have long featured US and UK voices, the Aussie-accent was launched today by speech technology company Appen at the Australian Technology Park in Sydney.

The 213 things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the US Army.

20 March 2002

A full-size virtual keyboard projected by light on to any surface has been invented. Beams of light, which detect the user's movements, make up the keyboard.

Fledgling telco COMindico has been restructured under a new chief and has launched direct broadband services to compete with the troubled Telstra, which has admitted that it is unable to determine a restoration date for a software problem that has left 1,300 customers unable to log on to their broadband service.

Less than a week after Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer told visitors at the massive CeBit exhibition in Hannover, Germany, that he wanted to see a warmer, friendlier Microsoft, his company has become embroiled in a row with Sony over gaming consoles. Microsoft complained to the show organisers, Hannover Messe AG, that Sony was breaching show rules by letting people play on Sony PlayStation 2 consoles. Technically, Microsoft was right, and the Messe was forced to act on the complaint.

Our solar system may have had a fifth terrestrial planet, one that was swallowed up by the Sun. But before it was destroyed, the now missing-in-action world made a mess of things.

According to a BBC report, it is possible that a secret CIA project to investigate methods of sending anthrax through the mail might have been responsible for the anthrax attacks in the United States last year.

19 March 2002

Flexstorm has developed a new type of CD called flexCD. It is about 140 microns thick — 1/10th that of a normal CD — and is, as the name suggests, flexible.

The Internet Industry Association's is asking its members to commit to a revised version of the industry's online content regulation code that will remove their discretion to set prices for content filtering software.

European Union leaders have approved a controversial multi-billion-dollar satellite network that is designed to end reliance on United States technology and space-bound military systems.

The giant Mr Potato Head statue given to the town of Belper in Derbyshire by its American sister city has been scratched and dismembered. He was sent to a fibreglass specialist for repairs and now stands outside the Safeway supermarket in the town.

18 March 2002

As part of the Lindows lawsuit, the judge has preliminarily ruled that there are serious questions regarding whether 'Windows' is a non-generic name and thus eligible for the protections of federal trademark law.

Acclaim Entertainment, a computer games firm, has been accused of pushing back the frontiers of bad taste after it announced that it was seeking to advertise its latest title on gravestones.

A pre-trial decision by a judge in a dispute over a multimillion-dollar home in Marion could end up making real estate deals outlined in e-mail as binding as those put on paper.

It's the stuff of science fantasy, but Dr Joe Rosen, from the acclaimed Dartmouth Medical Centre, says that, within five years, he will be able to graft wings and tails on to human beings.

17 March 2002

California-based spammer eTracks is being sued by the law firm, Morrison and Foerster. They are seeking damages of $50 for each e-mail delivered in violation of California's anti-spam law, up to $25,000 per day.

Geodesic Systems, a maker of memory management and debugging software, has a live demo of their Linux product running on the Mozilla nightly builds. It detects memory leaks and can show where in the code the leaked memory was allocated and actually recover the leaked memory.

In a perfect world, a list of the the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business would not exist. In a perfect world, businesses would be run with the utmost integrity and competence. But ours is, alas, an imperfect world, and if we must live in one where Enron, Geraldo Rivera, and Cottonelle Fresh Rollwipes exist, the least we can do is catalogue the absurdities.

16 March 2002

Across Australia, people will soon receive phone calls from Telstra explaining why they cannot access their e-mail on their BigPond broadband connections With customer complaints repeatedly unanswered and lack of co-operation with telecommunications regulatory watchdogs, two local ISPs — Australis Internet Pty Ltd and Internet TV Australia — have been given 14 days to explain their lack of action It may be more famous for making typewriters, but Olympia has just revealed what some observers are calling one of the sexiest gadgets of this year's CeBIT — the Soundbug is a small device that can turn pretty much any flat surface into a soundboard John Ivers got tired of waiting in line to ride a roller coaster so he decided to build his own — the Blue Flash — in his backyard The Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to create anime-based military uniforms that can block out biological weapons and even heal their wearers as part of a five-year contract to develop nanotechnology applications for soldiers

15 March 2002

Speed kills. But it is not only the speed at which people drive that is the problem: the speed of the music they are listening to also has a hand in their fate. An Israeli researcher says drivers who listen to fast music in their cars may have more than twice as many accidents as those listening to slower tracks.

Rick Boucher, an influential US lawmaker stepped up his criticism Wednesday of record labels' moves to protect CDs against copying. He approached the record industry's trade association in January with concerns that blocking consumers from copying their own CDs might violate US copyright law. The response from the Recording Industry Association of America didn't satisfy him.

Former NASA engineer Homer Hickam — one of the legendary Rocket Boys — advocates that the US revive its nuclear rocket program of the 50s and 60s, arguing that nuclear-powered rockets are the only realistic way of opening up the rest of the solar system — particularly Mars — to human exploration.

The Rubber Band Machine Gun is a fully functional gatling gun with twelve rotating barrels and a live action trigger. It loads twelve bands per barrel for a whopping 144 rubber bands that shoot off as fast as you can turn the handle — fun for all the family.

14 March 2002

Her eyes have captivated the world since she appeared on the cover of National Geographic in 1985. Now, after 17 years, the mystery of who the Afghan girl is has been solved.

Software company Compuware is charging IBM with using its intellectual property and engaging in illegal tying of its technologies and anti-competitive practices.

A day after the US Federal Trade Commission announced that it shut down an operation that used deceptive e-mails to sell bogus domain names, a representative for the agency said Tuesday that while the FTC will not disclose specific plans, it intends to 'vigorously and aggressively' go after deceptive spam.

Chip announcements galore from the CeBIT trade show in Hanover, Germany. Intel has produced prototypes of high-density memory chips — that support nearly eight times as many transistors as today's Pentium 4 — using an advanced manufacturing process, and will use the technology in faster microprocessors scheduled for introduction in the second half of next year. Advanced Micro Devices is ready to start shipping Athlon processors, code-named Thoroughbred, made using a 0.13-micron process to customers later this month.

A Catholic primary school in Melbourne has banned the use of bandaids to treat students, apparently because it is afraid of being sued.

13 March 2002

Telstra White Pages Online temporarily became the gateway to one of cyberspace's red light districts yesterday. It appears that pranksters conspired to redirect the site's traffic to a pornography portal.

A flaw in a software-compression library used in all versions of Linux could leave the lion's share of systems based on the open-source operating system open to attack, sources in the security community have said.

Is NSW heading for a brave new world of Internet censorship where, by protecting some, we effectively block access to all?

Sources inside AOL and Red Hat say AOL is making a major internal switch to Linux, and the long-rumoured AOL default browser switch from Microsoft's Internet Explorer to Mozilla — or at least Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine — is well under way, but AOL will probably not offer an AOL client for Linux in the foreseeable future.

12 March 2002

A big thanks to Kevin at The Comic Box for his fast and efficient service in shipping back issue comics halfway around the planet.

Floundering conservation group Earth Sanctuaries said last week it may have found a saviour for its collection of threatened animals, such as quolls and woylies, with 12 groups putting forward final rescue bids.

Three key players in the children-overboard affair have been gagged by the Howard Government and will be prevented from appearing before a Senate inquiry.

Kenneth Feinberg, the head of the 11 September Victim Compensation Fund — a fund created by Congress and run by the Department of Justice — said that gay partners of the heroes of 11 September will not necessarily be eligible for the same compensation as heterosexual family members who lost their loved ones.

11 March 2002

ComAURegister, a company that misled small businesses into believing it dealt with Internet domain name registrations, will be forced to cough up customer refunds, retract false information and contribute to legal fees, following action in Federal Court, Brisbane.

After receiving 35,000 phone calls following 11 September, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has pushed forward plans to implement an online project aimed at tracking Australians living overseas.

The staid folks at the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention have been caught in a political flap after they linked to a — gasp! — site that advocates a 'positive attitude towards sexuality'.

10 March 2002

About 25,000 OzEmail customers were unable to receive e-mail for nearly 13 hours this week because of a software fault. Customers of Australia's second largest internet service provider complained e-mail was blacked out for most of Tuesday.

The US government has approved the creation of a .kids.us domain, containing only material safe for children to view.

Microsoft's plans to launch Xbox in Australia are unchanged despite sales being suspending in two large Japanese electronics retailers.

09 March 2002

Amazon.com said Wednesday that it has settled its long-running patent-infringement suit against Barnes&Noble.com over its 1-Click checkout system. The details of the settlement were not disclosed.

Network computer maker Sun Microsystems is suing software giant Microsoft for anti-competitive behaviour. The company said on Friday that it is seeking more than $1bn in damages from Microsoft for making its Windows XP operating system incompatible with Sun's Java programming language.

Empty cans of Pringles crisps could be helping malicious hackers spot wireless networks that are open to attack. Security company i-sec has demonstrated that a directional antenna made with a Pringles can significantly improves the chances of finding the wireless computer networks being used in London's financial district.

08 March 2002

Australia's top-secret satellite spy agency, the Defence Signals Directorate, has been given sweeping new powers to report on Australians to the Federal Government.

A new tabletop device said to generate a long-sought laboratory version of nuclear fusion has been called into question even before it was formally announced.

A new luxury fibre industry could soon open up in Australia using fibres not from sheep but from rabbits. CSIRO's Livestock Industries is investigating the establishment of a potential new angora rabbit industry in Australia.

The drive to improve the lives of laboratory animals is having an unforeseen effect. Enriching the living conditions of rats, mice and other animals changes both their behaviour and their physiology, new studies show. This will have an increasingly important effect on the outcome of scientific experiments, including drugs trials.

07 March 2002

Britain's hemp producers feel that after years of battling bureaucracy they may finally be on the brink of a boom — and can count Queen Elizabeth II among their customers.

A former Optus employee and alleged hacker, bailed to appear before a Sydney court today, has told ZDNet Australia that he will not be making an appearance. He claims the idea that he hacked into an Optus database is a beat-up story aimed at scaring him away from an earlier claim of unfair dismissal against the carrier — the outcome of which is still pending.

Delegates to China's parliament are reproaching Western Internet administrators for blocking e-mails from China in a growing fight over the cross-Pacific flow of junk e-mail. Academics among the 2,987 provincial deputies attending the annual meeting of the National People's Congress also called for laws punishing the distribution of junk e-mail, or spam.

Disease-causing microbes can effectively be eliminated from recycled water by storing it underground, new research by CSIRO scientists has found.

Science fiction fans know that many seemingly impossible technologies materialise years later — mobile phones, personal computers and of course, human spaceflight, being three examples. However this may not to be the case for warp drive, the idea of travelling through space faster than the speed of light.

06 March 2002

UK Government plans to archive all internet traffic and e-mail has been singled out for a controversial award at this year's Big Brother Award ceremony.

The Federal Minister for Communications and Information Technology, troglodyte Richard Alston, used his key note address at the opening of ATUG's 2002 conference to describe those concerned that Australia is falling behind in broadband take up as 'baying dogs'.

Microsoft, whose Xbox game machine debuted in Japan 10 days ago, has said that several Xbox users had reported that the console was scratching game discs, but there was no need to recall the hardware or software.

Both Windows XP and Windows 2000 will be rendered inoperable, and Microsoft will be unable to develop future new operating systems, if it is forced to separate IE from the operating system, according to court filings the company made on Friday. The US States still fighting Microsoft argue, on the contrary, that separation of this and other matters now 'integrated' into the OS is both feasible and necessary.

Australia's 1.5 million pay TV subscribers will have access to more channels under a landmark agreement struck yesterday between rivals Foxtel and Optus to share their content.

05 March 2002

The Nokia 8210 mobile phone has become a source of embarrassment for the Finnish manufacturer at WCIT 2002. When Nokia's chief technical officer, Yjro Neuvo, was confronted with allegations that some of Nokia's handsets carry inherent design faults during a press conference at the event this morning, he repeatedly said that he was unaware of the of the controversy surrounding phones.

Joining Internode in the troubled residential broadband market, Pacific Internet's big selling point, flexibility, is based on users' ability to customise their own plan, and the option of not having a contract.

Lawyers who squared off in a trademark dispute between the operators of a tourism portal and Barcelona, Spain, disagree on whether a US District Court judge made the right call this month when he awarded the Internet address Barcelona.com to the city. But they agree that the judge broke new ground in US anti-cybersquatting law.

An electronic version of the Domesday Book compiled in 1986 is now unreadable. The computers needed to read the discs of the £2.5 million BBC Domesday Project are now obsolete. While the original Domesday Book compiled in 1086 is in fine condition in the Public Record Office, Kew.

The United States will this week choose a private contractor to develop the technology that will replace soldiers with robots on the battlefields of the future. The new battle network, known as Future Combat Systems, will enable sophisticated weapons to be deployed close to enemy lines with a minimum risk of casualties.

04 March 2002

Microsoft's software monopoly is running out of time, says open-source guru Eric Raymond, and he's got a precise figure for when the company's position will no longer be sustainable: $350.

Operating system maker Be has filed a federal lawsuit against Microsoft, alleging the software giant's anti-competitive practices stunted the growth of the Be operating system.

From the fun-things-to-do-with-magnets department comes the Home-made Gauss Rifle. It requires a wooden ruler with a groove down the middle to serve as the rail, steel balls that can roll down the groove to use as projectiles, and magnets to store and redirect energy.

AOL's sales tactics have landed it in federal court, where it stands accused of billing customers for unordered merchandise hawked in aggressive pop-up advertisements on its Internet service.

03 March 2002

Dennis Vieren, has designed and built the most beautiful aluminium case ever, called project 'Frozen'. He designed his case from the ground up using CAD software, and built it from plates of 3mm aluminium and 3mm acrylic glass. Now I know what I want for my birthday.

Harvey Taylor, a wanted Florida sex offender and deeply stupid man, who fled into the Maine woods and got lost said he had to have several toes amputated due to frostbite because authorities were slow in apprehending him. Taylor spent at least three nights in the snowy woods in Mattawamkeag after running from a Penobscot County Sheriff's detective a few weeks ago, he now threatens to sue the detective.

According to web server information firm Netcraft, about 1 million Web sites are vulnerable to attack through recently discovered flaws in the popular PHP scripting language.

02 March 2002

The World Wrestling Federation failed this week in its latest bid to be allowed to share the trademark WWF initials with the World Wide Fund for Nature.

Privacy advocates vow that they would have serious concerns if Australia followed US moves to allow organisations to track people's location via their mobile phones.

Describing broadband as the communications infrastructure of the future, Telstra CEO Ziggy Switkowski announced a AU$50 million dollar stimulus package targeted at applications developers working on broadband related packages. Meanwhile, Apertura and Optus have teamed up to offer cheaper satellite broadband services to regional and rural communities in Australia.

DNA molecules are prime candidates for helping humans make microscopic machines because they have a long history of assembling things on the molecular scale. Researchers at New York University have taken a significant step forward in being able to instruct artificial DNA molecules to move in specific ways with a method that allows certain portions of DNA to bind to each other, and then release. This reversible binding method allows for control of the shape of a DNA molecule, or machine.

01 March 2002

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and four major law school legal clinics announced the launch of a project and web site — Chilling Effects — to empower Internet with detailed information about their legal rights in to cease-and-desist letters designed to restrict online activities Telstra's poll rigger has come forward, alleging that members of the telco's senior management found the entire situation incredibly funny and threatened him with legal action if he told his story Since 11 September last year, up to 2000 people in the United States have been detained without trial, or charge, or even legal rights. The fate of most is unknown. And while the retarded monkey boy is pimping an axis of evil, the international view believes that the United States is a part of it Chumbinho, a Brazilian dog with a strong instinct to retrieve brought his master an unwelcome gift Wednesday — a smoking grenade

Search


Archives