May 2002 Archive

31 May 2002

Esphion's anti-denial of service attack tool performed well for the armed forces of five nations. The Auckland company was the only private sector organisation invited to last week's Joint Warrior Interoperability Demonstration that attended. The Echelon boys will be well pleased by the result.

Former tennis star Steffi Graf won a court case against Microsoft Germany on Tuesday over fake nude photos of her that were posted on a Web site run by the company.

The CSIRO's Dr John Rankin and Dr Terry Norgate told the Green Processing 2002 Conference in Cairns that metals can help in achieving globally sustainable development.

If you had a smallpox vaccination as a child and think you are still protected, think again — almost everyone vaccinated before smallpox was eradicated in the mid-1970s has now lost their immunity.

30 May 2002

The Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association has officially launched a campaign to stem mobile phone theft, which could lead to changes in both the Telecommunications Act and the Crimes Act.

OzEmail has announced plans to launch its OzEdsl service, following a small-scale trial of its new broadband service which has been running since 20 May.

The religious zealots who photograph women entering abortion clinics and posts their photos on web sites have privacy advocates interested in their moronic tactics. Apparently, the group is run by some of the people involved in the Nuremberg Files.

Australian scientists announced a breakthrough in efforts to clone the extinct Tasmanian Tiger, saying they had replicated some of the animal's genes using DNA extracted from preserved male and female pups.

29 May 2002

A mobile phone made of paper, which is sent as a 'letter', has won a competition sponsored by Sony.

I found an odd little French search engine called KartOO, which presents its results in Flash, allowing you to refine your query interactively.

International environmental criminals are outpacing slow-moving enforcement agencies as they line their pockets by plundering the planet.

The Pentagon plans to use genetically modified bugs that 'eat' the enemy's fuel and ammunition supplies without harming humans. Should be loads of fun when that escapes into the surrounding environment.

28 May 2002

A British man has been threatened by a gang of spammers after reporting its activity to his ISP.

Users of the TiVo digital video recorder have reacted angrily to a new sponsorship feature that automatically records certain programmes, adverts and other promotional material.

Former Labor MP Andrew Theophanous was a self-styled champion of multiculturalism and immigration. This week, the one-time ALP high-flyer was found guilty of taking bribes, the first federal MP ever to be convicted of corruption.

The US spacecraft Mars Odyssey has reportedly discovered vast quantities of frozen water just below the planet's surface — a finding being hailed as one of the most important ever made about the red planet.

27 May 2002

National Party Senate leader Ron Boswell has said, a legislated right of country people to the latest technology must be a part of any further sale of Telstra.

Japanese computer giant NEC will close its plants in Britain and Malaysia as part of a plan to move production to China.

Telstra expects to have to pay up on its decision to offer rebates to ADSL customers for loss of service.

Mummified, rotting moths are being used as a slow-release pesticide. Roundworms grown inside the moths' bodies contain a bacteria which emerge to kill other soil bugs. If the moths are coated in clay and starch they can be easily scattered among crops.

26 May 2002

John Zuccarini, a scam artist, who trapped surfers mistyping their URLs, including those for children's web sites, and barraged them with popup ads for porn and gambling has been fined almost US$2 million. The FTC has a sense of humour: the case name is 'Cupcake Party'.

Internet addresses packing the famous labels of Ralph Lauren and Polo fashions and an alleged cybersquatter who didn't even bother to respond to the accusation would normally add up to a slam-dunk decision for a trademark holder under a fast-track system to resolve disputes over domain names.

Touted as the first Internet-enabled, completely autonomous consumer robot, it is the first product from Evolution Robotics of Pasadena, California. With the company's US$499 build-it-yourself kit, you essentially construct a mobile robot around your own notebook PC. Included software permits novice robotics hobbyists to program complex behaviours with relative ease.

Scientists at the University of Florida say a new form of solid nitrogen salt could power smaller and lighter spacecraft.

25 May 2002

Microsoft has warned Windows NT and 2000 users of a new flaw in its debugger tools that could let attackers give themselves complete control of a system once they've gained basic access to that system.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the First Amendment Project asked the California Supreme Court to uphold a lower court's decision to permit publication of the source code for DeCSS technology, which circumvents digital copy protection systems.

Echelon has been surrounded by controversy since rumours of it first popped up on the net. The US Government has never admitted to it, although various other governments have. Now Bruce McIndoe, a lead architect for Echelon and its 'big brother', Echelon II, has been discovered and interviewed.

Lord Bingham, the senior UK law lord, called for abolition of the laws against cannabis.

24 May 2002

Netscape 7.0 is the latest browser version developed around a technology called Gecko, which was created by an open-source browser movement known as Mozilla and funded by AOL.

Microsoft is aggressively lobbying the Pentagon to squelch its growing use of freely distributed computer software and switch to proprietary systems such as those sold by the software giant.

An international team set a new record for Internet performance by transferring the equivalent of an entire compact disc's contents across more than 12,272 km of network in 13 seconds. The rate of 401 megabits per second achieved in transferring 625 megabytes of data from Fairbanks, Alaska to Amsterdam in the Netherlands is over 8000 times greater than the fastest dial-up modem.

Take a tour of campus an shoot some monsters. The Wearable Computer Lab at the University of South Australia has developed a prototype wearable Quake suit.

23 May 2002

NSW Police Minister Michael Costa is seeking to shut down the web site www.snifferdogalert.com, operated by the state's Council for Civil Liberties and Redfern Legal Centre, which alerts the public via SMS to where drug sniffer dogs are being patrolled.

South African police have made a breakthrough against organised criminals who spam Internet users in an attempt to defraud them of thousands of pounds. Six people were arrested in South Africa last weekend on suspicion of being involved in the infamous Nigerian e-mail and letter fraud.

New Jersey will begin examining the possibility of placing limits on roller coaster G-forces. Pointing out that the G-forces on coasters are considerably greater than even those experienced by astronauts and race car drivers, legislators on both the state and national levels want to start reining in coaster G-forces which have been blamed for a number of injuries and deaths over the past few years.

A group of children who adorned their bodies with industrial-strength magnets narrowly avoided permanent disfigurement.

22 May 2002

It's a well-known mark of Google's success that its name has become a verb. The company is launching the future tense of that verb in the form of two sites for experimental search and browsing technologies. The first experiment page, Google Labs, lets Google users try out technologies fresh from Google's research and development team.

According to a United Nations study on the state of the global environment, almost a quarter of the world's mammals face extinction within 30 years.

The Eldred vs Ashcroft case concerns the constitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) which, following intense lobbying by media conglomerates such as Disney and Time Warner, was enacted by Congress in 1998 and extended the term of all existing and future copyrights by twenty years. Eric Eldred, who maintains a web site that gives readers free access to materials whose copyrights have expired, challenged the CTEA with the assistance of the Openlaw project of the Berkman Centre. Although Eldred has lost in both the district and appellate courts, the case has been accepted for review by the Supreme Court.

The Chinese government plans to put a human on the moon by 2010, with a long-term goal to 'set up a base on the moon and mine its riches for the benefit of humanity'. Yeah, right.

21 May 2002

While the events of 11 September have focussed the attention of CIOs on catastrophic outside threats to operations, they should keep their attention closer to home. Australian CIOs and IT managers are being put on alert after a survey found that computer crime here has been higher than in the US.

The World Intellectual Property Organisation has upheld Spanish entrepreneur Christian Castresana's right to use InternetNews.info, rejecting a challenge from media giant INT Media Group.

IBM researchers have created transistors out of carbon nanotubes that can outperform similar silicon transistors, a development that helps build the case that carbon may one day become a building block of computing.

Honda is investing more cash into hydrogen powered cars. It is helping to develop home-based generators which produce the fuel so drivers don't have to fill up at stations.

20 May 2002

The biggest enemy of free software may be Senator Ernest F Hollings. Legislation introduced in March 2002, by the South Carolina Democrat to require that copyright-protection software be embedded in PCs, handheld computers, CD players — and anything else that can play, record, or manipulate data — could make open-source software such as the Linux operating system illegal.

Tom Lonsdale, an Australian vet, claims that pet food diets of processed meat and cereal are making animals ill and shortening their lives.

What do a 17th-century Swedish warship, an opulent Chicago theatre and a Kansas City hotel 'skyway' have in common? All met catastrophic ends — and they have important lessons to teach today's innovators.

Three cast-iron Scottish cannons believed to date back to the late 1700s have been found by workers at Sydney's Taronga Zoo.

19 May 2002

Lindows has announced that a Seattle Judge has denied Microsoft's appeal to shut them down, citing that Microsoft's own use of evidence helped determined 'Windows' is a generic word.

Hackers posing as Ford employees have managed to steal some 13,000 credit reports which include, not only credit card numbers, but also such useful information as address, SSN, bank account details and credit ratings.

In an effort to preserve and expose scholars around the world to rapidly plundered historical texts, a joint project between the University of California and the Max Planck Institute have photographed and digitised around 60,000 tablets. Ironically enough, the digitised versions will probably not go anywhere near to outlasting the original clay tablets.

NORAD is considering deploying zeppelins along the west coast and Canadian border to keep an eye out for terrorists. Larger than jumbo jets, easier to repair and upgrade than satellites, this may be an idea whose time has come. Again.

18 May 2002

Mireille Breitwieser, the mother of an art thief, was imprisoned after admitting she shredded up to 60 masterpieces by leading artists, such as Bruegel and Watteau, stolen in broad daylight from museums in five countries. French police also dragged the Rhône-Rhine canal in eastern France looking for priceless objects, such as weapons, vases and musical instruments, dumped there last November.

Hotmail, the free e-mail service which was purchased by Microsoft some years back and is now part of the MSN Internet Service, has changed its users' 'personal profile' settings by adding and pre-checking a new set of option boxes.

The creep towards paid-for online content continues with news that access to the NYTimes.com's archives is now available at a price on Yahoo. The archives date back to 1 January 2000 and individual stories can be bought for $2.50 each — the same price as charged by the NYTimes.com's own archive service.

Researchers at the University of Missouri-Rolla hope to wash away the problem of land mines with technology that harnesses — and focuses — the power of water, as a child's plastic water pistol does.

17 May 2002

Two of the recent litter of six red wolf puppies born at the North Carolina Zoological Park have been placed with a female already raising her own pups in the wild at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. This is the first time that captive-born red wolves have been placed with a wild mother.

Music CD copyright protection schemes such a Cactus Data Shield 100/200 and KeyAudio can be circumvented using tools as basic as marker pens and electrical tape.

With all the excitement over fingerprint scanners, it comes as no surprise that they can be easily fooled with the use of gelatine.

Greenpeace is accusing Japan of buying votes from new members of the International Whaling Commission in a bid to lift a global ban on commercial whaling.

16 May 2002

A new change has appeared in Sun's strategy. Instead of dismissing Linux as inferior, it is now trying to integrate elements of Linux into Solaris for easier porting of applications. This looks like a step in the right direction for Linux acceptance in the professional server market.

In contrast to general public perception, women are generally in the vanguard when it comes to fighting sexual censorship. The civil rights lawyers, activists, sex workers, media pundits, and professors who fight for your right to have dirty pictures are by and large female. Many call themselves feminists. And the people fighting to stamp out pornography today are most decidedly male.

Australian scientists have given the green light to using waste glass in concrete construction. This means local council, recyclers, municipal engineers, and private contractors can look at using glass concrete for a range of construction applications including bike paths, footpaths, kerbs, gutters and similar work.

An Arlington couple has sued the District, saying an archaic rule requiring babies to have their married father's surname discriminates against women.

15 May 2002

As Telstra's market dominance continues to be scrutinised by the government, regulators and competitors, momentum is building in an ambitious project to construct a viable alternate national broadband infrastructure. A groundswell of interest has emerged from a powerful group of Australia's electricity utilities, which are uniting in a bid to seize the potential synergies and opportunities in using their combined existing infrastructure as a platform for a residential and business broadband network.

For more than 15 years, Pamela Samuelson, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has been fighting what she sees as overzealous and innovation-stifling expansion of copyright laws in the high-tech arena. She has written influential scholarly articles for academic publications, filed friend-of-the-court briefs in landmark cases and organised academic conferences where ideas can be refined and disseminated.

The full report, from Business2WWW and Interactive Bureau/Porter Research, isn't due out until later this year. But some pre-released material warns that companies are spending large amounts of money on web sites that don't work and are difficult to use.

Both Bob Kolody's Coca-Karma case and Uzi Nissan's fight with Nissan Motors have recent updates to report.

14 May 2002

Engineers at Advanced Micro Devices say they have developed a process to make wireless devices more powerful without increasing their cost. The breakthrough is called MirrorBit technology and involves flash memory chips. Flash memory stores data such as phone numbers and programming code in mobiles and handheld computers when the devices are turned off.

Speculation is rife that WorldCom, the Telecommunications giant that owns OzEmail, could soon declare bankruptcy.

Booksellers in the UK hope to use Radio Frequency ID chips to report on the entire life cycle of a book, including ownership and second-hand sales.

Fred Jerome of the Gene Media Forum has recently written a book called 'The Einstein File: J Edgar Hoover's Secret War Against the World's Most Famous Scientist'. The book talks about how the FBI spied on Einstein and identifies some of the people who said he was a spy. Jerome sued the government to obtain access to the 1,427 page file.

13 May 2002

A possible challenge to the ban on Baise-Moi is being planned by the manager of Melbourne's Lumiere cinema, which is now the only cinema showing the controversial French film in Australia.

The company RealNames, which tried to make a buck off of the domain name gold rush by adding their own layer on top of the ICANN system, is going out of business. To review, the RealNames system is a browser plugin which redirects a user who types 'cookies' in the IE address bar to Nabisco.com. The reason for the closure appears to be the decision by Microsoft to not renew their agreement with RealNames which expires in June.

NASA needs parts no one makes any more. So to keep the shuttles flying, the space agency has begun trolling the Internet — including Yahoo and eBay — to find replacement parts for electronic gear that would strike a home computer user as primitive. Officials say the agency recently bought a load of outdated medical equipment so it could scavenge Intel 8086 chips — a variant of those chips powered IBM's first personal computer, in 1981.

Friends of the Earth is calling for better testing of chemicals in products used by consumers, without using animals. It says the chemical industry promotes the use of unnecessary tests on laboratory animals, while attacking new standards for chemical products. The environmental group refers to the industry's criticism of new safety suggestions in the interests of animal welfare as 'hypocritical'.

12 May 2002

Guinness has recognised a NASA invention as the world's lightest solid. The material is nicknamed 'solid smoke' because of its cloudy appearance and super-light weight. It weighs only three milligrams per cubic centimetre and is 99.8% air.

European functionaries recently commissioned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas to create a new logo for the EU. To capture the diversity and unity of Europe in a single image, Koolhaas put all the colours of the national flags of the EU's constituent states on a single flag of many vertical stripes. While perhaps laudable in theory, however, the resulting 'bar code' design invites parody.

Lawrence Wollersheim, a former Scientologist, who received US$8.7 million from the church this week 22 years after first suing it for mental abuse hailed the settlement on Saturday as a victory that could unleash a flurry of similar lawsuits.

Mash-ups are songs created by digitally synchronising instrumental tracks with vocal tracks from two or more existing songs. Often the source songs are wildly disparate, and the result is frequently better sounding than you might first expect.

11 May 2002

Microsoft could have to make radical changes to meet European regulatory concerns, changes that go well beyond what is being demanded of it in the US.

The ACCC has called for a review of the Trade Practices Act to consider jail terms for executives found guilty of collusion.

The British Board of Film Classification has demanded a cut in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones for a head-butt. The one second cut means the difference between a '12' and a 'PG' certificate.

A Los Angeles radio station is planning to auction off a Russian Buran space shuttle and the minimum asking price is $6 million.

10 May 2002

Microsoft was convicted of software piracy by a French court last year. The company was fined three million francs in damages and interest for violation of intellectual property because of the illegal inclusion of another company's proprietary source code in SoftImage 3D, an animation package.

Sci-fi readers often deplore book best-seller lists — because review editors actively ignore many sci-fi sales, since they don't consider that stuff 'popular', even though sci-fi titles often sell in far greater numbers than 'serious' highbrow literature. But this all might change soon, with the launch of Bookscan; new technology that tracks actual sales at the cash register with greater precision than ever before.

The traditional method for trying out new consumer technologies is to get people to live with them for a while, and then ask them how they fared. Dutch electronics company Philips, however, prefers to take a family, lock them up in a 'home of the future' for two months and subject them to 24-hour video scrutiny.

Bugs that eat roads and buildings. Biocatalysts that break down fuel and plastics. Devices that stealthily corrode aluminium and other metals. These are just a few of the non-lethal weapons that the US has tried to develop, or is trying to develop. But quite how close such weapons are to reality we may never know. The US National Academy of Sciences is refusing to release dozens of reports proposing or describing their development, even though the documents are supposed to be public records.

09 May 2002

Rick Boucher, said last July that he wanted to amend the DMCA to permit certain 'fair uses' of digital content, such as backing up an audio CD by bypassing copy protection technology. In an interview on Thursday, Boucher said he now has sufficient support — from the tech industry, librarians, and Internet activists — to feel comfortable introducing his bill 'in the next month'.

Microsoft has come up with another novel way to make its software compulsory — an annual subscription licensing system for schools where you have to pay for all of the computers you're using, even if you don't want them to run the Microsoft software you're licensing. This includes Macs and PCs running Linux.

A security hole affecting old copies of some Microsoft Office applications may have left a legacy of data leaks with the potential to reveal sensitive information and weaken security on government and commercial Web sites around the world.

World Wrestling Federation Entertainment, Inc dropped its name on Monday and put down the famous logo. The new name will be World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE. The company said that the change was due in part to a losing battle with the World Wildlife Fund over the use of the initials and it more firmly entrenches the entertainment as violent theatre versus actual sport.

08 May 2002

Compaq Australia may be facing a class action lawsuit from irate customers who feel duped by the hardware manufacturer's accidental web site promotion of Presario laptop computers costing just one cent.

Microsoft planned in 1999 to bundle its media player and operating system in a bid to attack rival RealNetworks, according to a Microsoft e-mail, even as a federal court was about to punish the company for similar efforts in the web browser market.

Paul M Herbert Law Centre at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge is giving Douglas Dorhauer, one of its students, an unusually comprehensive legal education. In addition to offering him the standard classes and exams, it is suing him.

Some penguins avoid the bends by using a technique almost the same as human divers. The condition, also known as decompression sickness, happens when nitrogen enters the bloodstream. But Adélie and King penguins slow down and surface at an angle which helps with decompression.

07 May 2002

Sony has begun developing a games console to succeed its popular PlayStation 2 after 2005, according to company sources.

Industry sources have named Seiko Epson as the manufacturer that supplied Nokia with faulty components that led to a high screen failure rate amongst its handsets.

A new experimental microscopic tungsten lattice can increase the efficiency of an incandescent electric bulb from 5% to greater than 60%. This is done by converting waste heat into visible light.

Police in La Crosse, Wisconsin say a naked man drying his clothes in a launderette stormed off when two women laughed at him.

06 May 2002

Nanotechnology is getting closer with genetically engineered viruses grabbing zinc sulphide and arranging themselves into highly organised structures.

Corporations can be found liable for deceptive advertising if they make misleading public statements about their operations and conduct. In its 4-3 decision, the California Supreme Court said Nike and other corporations are not protected by the First Amendment when they present as fact statements about their labour policies or company operations in advertisements, press releases, letters to the editor or public statements.

Archaeologists have stumbled on a 4,500-year-old pyramid in Egypt containing the tomb of a queen whose identity remains a mystery. The latest discovery was made by a Swiss team excavating the tomb of the 4th dynasty pharaoh Redjedef, son and successor of Cheops who was also known as Khufu.

Wherify's global positioning personal locator is a bracelet that can be locked on to a child's wrist. It plots the wearer's precise location and transmits the data to a central database via a mobile phone connection.

05 May 2002

Software maker Adobe won its lawsuit Thursday claiming that rival Macromedia infringed on the company's patents. Adobe filed the suit in August 2000, alleging that the user interface of Macromedia's Flash Web animation tool infringed on Adobe's patent for 'tabbed palettes', a feature that allows users of design software to rearrange the work space on the PC screen.

Hundreds of millions of songs may illegally trade hands online every month, but file swapping may actually be causing people to spend more money on music. A study by Jupiter Research reports that about 34% of veteran file swappers say they are spending more on music than they did before they started downloading files. About 14% of heavy file traders say they now spend less on music.

Two Virginia congressmen, Jim Moran and Tom Davis, have proposed a $315 million program that would require biometric markers on all states' driver's licenses within five years, according to federal legislation the pair filed Wednesday.

Woradech Kaimart, a Thai inventor, has come up with throwable fire extinguisher balls. You just toss them into the fire, or place them in high risk areas, and they explode from the heat and spew various fire-retardants all over the place. According to the article, they will soon be on sale in Thailand's 7-Eleven stores and are being considered by US-based fire and safety supply company Tyco.

04 May 2002

Australia's broadband community is celebrating the Federal Government's recent decision to separate the accounting practices of Telstra's wholesale and retail arms, anticipating increased competition.

A free version of Sun's StarOffice business productivity suite is now available for download from OpenOffice.org, an open-source developer community sponsored by Sun. OpenOffice.org 1.0 provides a selection of software nearly identical to Microsoft Office's. Both suites feature word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation programs. OpenOffice.org 1.0 is a less expensive alternative, however, and supports more operating systems.

When asked why personal video recorders are bad for the industry, Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner says; 'Because of the ad skips... It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming.'

Nokia won't match compensation given to Australian owners of faulty 8210 handsets for neighbouring consumers in Asia.

03 May 2002

Telstra has signed up as a service partner for Iridium Satellite LLC, which owns and operates a global wireless communications system via satellite that covers all oceans, air space and landmasses, even the north and south poles.

It's claimed hundreds of Taliban prisoners could be buried in a mass grave in northern Afghanistan and that the US is reluctant to investigate it. A US human rights group says the mass grave they believe is near Mazar-e-Sharif could contain men killed by the Northern Alliance.

Dirk Broer's Dutch team has developed spray-on liquid crystal 'paint' which changes colour at the touch of a button. The new design could be used to make giant TV screens, digital billboards and walls which change colour.

Waste from sewage plants could be transformed into clean hydrogen fuel with high efficiency using new processing technology devised in Europe.

02 May 2002

Tom Murphy, author of embed, a tool that alters the embedding level of TrueType fonts, has been getting some nasty cease and desist letters from the lawyers of Agfa Monotype. Fortunately Tom is not one to rollover to the illegal demands of a large corporation.

And on more cease and desist lunacy; Avi Adelman, proprietor of BarkingDogs.org, a 'proactive' news web site that unearths political malfeasance in and around Dallas, Texas, is locked in a battle against the Belo media corporation, owner of The Dallas Morning News, which sent him a legalistic letter this week demanding that BarkingDogs.org remove all 'deep links' to the DallasNews.com site.

According to the National Science Foundation's biennial report on the state of science understanding in the US, sixty percent of those surveyed believe in ESP, psychic power, and alien abduction. Americans... scientifically proven to be dumber than the average bear.

And if you don't show an interest in science and technology, you miss out on learning about RatBots. By implanting electrodes in rats' brains, scientists have created remote-controlled rodents they can command to turn left or right, climb trees and navigate piles of rubble — and maybe someday, with the rats outfitted with tiny video cameras, use to search for disaster survivors.

01 May 2002

While the war between heavyweight Web browsers like Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer continues to fester, the final version of Mozilla, an open-source program that users say could trump both big-brand browsers, is set to make its debut. But while the upstart browser has unique features and devoted fans, it still has relatively few users.

Bad software-buying decisions are costing Australian businesses millions of dollars a year. The losses are greater when the deployment of software fails to deliver the expected benefits.

NASA scientists have developed a computer model that can detect where rain or snow originates. By tracing where water evaporates from and where it falls, the model demonstrates how water vapour moves through the atmosphere.

Paul McCartney has won a court order preventing auction house Christie's from selling his hand-written lyrics to 'Hey Jude'.

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