June 2002 Archive

30 June 2002

A group of web publishers filed suit in federal court this week against the Internet ad network Gator, charging that Gator sells ads on their Web sites without authorisation and pockets the proceeds.

Fancy an Athlon-based, dual head laptop, then Xentex Technologies have the toy for you.

Providing more proof that the record industry is indeed a oligopoly, two major record companies, Vivendi Universal and Warner Communications, have been convicted of price fixing by the FTC over a recording from 1998 of the Three Tenors.

Boeing engineers have designed a super-efficient aircraft that would look like a giant bat and slash the cost of air transport. The Blended Wing Body concept, outlined more than ten years ago but now said to be almost perfected, would have no fuselage or tail. Rather, it would basically be a wing with a belly that would accommodate the passengers and freight.

29 June 2002

A team of Japanese engineers has come up with a way of blocking mobile phone signals using wood panels containing magnetic material. The panels would be useful in cinemas, theatres, or anywhere where ringing mobile phones cause exasperation.

Researchers at Philips have integrated a space-saving optical mouse into a mobile phone for the first time.

The guys at cluelessmailers.org have made a map of spam. It shows the relationships among spammers and other entities — legitimate or not — including organisations that track spam, advertises with, shares addresses, e-mails through, and all sorts of other data.

Tschibsi, an Austrian farmer's faithful dog, saved his life by running for help after a hay-making machine sliced up the 62-year-old's left foot.

28 June 2002

The Who bassist John Entwistle, whose impassive onstage demeanour stood in counterpoint to the manic antics of fellow band members Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, died Wednesday night in Las Vegas.

Microsoft is warning people that a series of flaws in its Windows Media Player could allow a malicious hacker to hijack people's computer systems and perform a variety of actions.

Australian scientists have launched a new project to galvanise Australia's property, building and construction industry to embrace sustainability. Evergen is an idea with a tangible outcome — commercial buildings, which are built faster, perform better, sell for more, and which ultimately, are recyclable and have a zero net cost to the environment.

Members of the Toledo police computer crimes task force and FBI agents served search warrants at 13 residences, including an apartment, a condominium, and single-family houses. Investigators believe cable modems that connect Buckeye Express customers to the Internet were altered, allowing computer users unauthorised access to excessive amounts of bandwidth.

27 June 2002

A new technique being developed by GE and IBM to further decrease the size needed to magnetically store data. This new technique could produce 150 gigabits per square centimetre — that's a terabyte on a laptop size hard drive.

An e-mail gateway start-up, IronPort Systems, is pushing marketers to back a plan that would let spam recipients charge companies for unwanted messages.

David Kirsch, a University of Maryland professor, needs the disastrous business plans, pointless PowerPoints and tales of failure to create a digital archive of Internet failures.

AMSAT-OSCAR 7 was launched in 1974 for radio hobbyists to use. In 1981 the onboard batteries died and the satellite went silent. Then on 21 June 2002, 20 years later, a hobbyist testing some new equipment made an amazing discovery — AMSAT-OSCAR 7 is live once more, both broadcasting and accepting signals.

26 June 2002

According to a recent survey, information technology professionals think a major attack on US government computer systems is coming and that the government is not adequately prepared for it.

Australia plans to endorse CD-copying kiosks in a controversial world-first plan that legalises music piracy. The Australian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society will allow an Adelaide-based business to operate CD-pirating kiosks nation-wide for a modest royalty payment.

NSW Central Coast fleet supplier, Cellular One, has identified a malfunction that occurs when Nokia's 6310 is used with a hands-free accessory supplied by Beyond Holdings.

An Alaskan chicken-hypnotist who cycles around the world with a travelling circus has ground to a halt after a charity clothes shop in Scotland sold her bicycle by mistake while she was in the fitting-room.

25 June 2002

Companies planning on moving old programs to the Microsoft's .Net software plan may get a dose of sticker shock: Making the conversion could cost roughly half of the original development cost.

Moves are afoot to block Australian ISPs from charging customers who complain about service provider conduct to the industry watchdog.

ISPs are pressing Telstra to provide another weapon in the war against spam by activating caller line identification for all dial-up internet connections.

Space Data says its plan to create America's first floating wireless network — by putting disposable transmitters on government weather balloons — has already undergone successful testing and is economically viable.

24 June 2002

Hundreds of housing estate residents in Melbourne will be given a free computer and cheap internet access as part of an initiative to help low-income families into the IT age.

The Canadian government has given the military and RCMP permission to jam radio signals during the G8 summit and the Pope's visit in July.

DaisyMan at ArsWare has come up with a software based Dead Man's Switch that will, if you don't 'check in' every so often, post a message — presumably about your demise, but whatever you wish — to various message boards, send e-mail — maybe that incriminating evidence? — to your friends, and encrypt specified files on your computer so that 'they' can't have them.

From Doomsday Devices to Robotic Tigers and Randroids, VillainSupply.com have got it all. Don't forget the convenient, accessible self-destruct device.

23 June 2002

The Internet's potential for promoting expression and empowering citizens is under threat from corporate and government policies that clash with the medium's long-standing culture of openness, some leading Internet thinkers warned.

The Civilian Space Xploration Team, a collection of rocket jocks, engineers and space enthusiasts around the country, are set to launch their rocket, dubbed Primera Spaceshot 2002, by the end of June from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.

Circuit City, America's second-largest electronics retailer, is phasing out sales of videotape movies as the chain makes way for the inevitability of DVD.

A 28-year-old Panamanian accused of killing a judge was eaten by a crocodile as he swam across a river after escaping from prison.

22 June 2002

Telstra is in hot water again over revelations it has been double-billing some mobile phone customers, resulting in refunds reportedly totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Philips is demonstrating a prototype miniature disc drive that uses a coin-size disc capable of storing nearly twice as much data as a standard-sized CD.

Scientists running a pioneering experiment with 'living robots' which think for themselves said they were amazed to find one escaping from the centre where it lives.

Greenpeace has said it would name smog-filled days in Toronto after local members of the federal Liberal government in order to draw attention to Canada's failure to ratify the Kyoto accord, a world-wide effort to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

21 June 2002

A Boy Scout who went a little too far in trying to achieve a merit badge in Atomic Energy. From smoke alarms, lantern components, the paint from radio clocks, and a little help from the Nuclear Regulator Commission, David Hahn attempted to build a nuclear reactor in his mother's shed.

Minerals explorer Michelago and ANZ plan to pursue Australian and international wind power projects through a trust which could list within two years.

A seal saved an elderly dog from a watery grave after it was swept away by fierce currents in a fast-flowing river in northern England.

The sweet scent of roses or almonds could take some of the pain out of your stay in hospital. But only if you're a woman.

20 June 2002

In a new suit that echoes earlier charges from Netscape, Sun Microsystems and others, Microsoft is accused of bullying companies out of using Burst.com products and stealing the streaming company's technology.

The 'tooth phone' consists of a tiny vibrator and a radio wave receiver implanted into a tooth during routine dental surgery. The phone was designed by Royal College of Art graduates James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau.

Being a Star Wars fan has made Jeff Parks a millionaire, he makes customised light sabres.

Canadian doctors implanted an artificial eye into a blind man — it performs well enough for him to be able to drive — admittedly in an empty parking lot.

19 June 2002

A consortium of industry heavyweights will offer wireless broadband in Australia next year, a move which will allow broadband access anywhere and offer a viable alternative to DSL technology.

Industry groups have welcomed the recommendations in a recent report that legislation dealing with Internet censorship be repealed, which would return Internet law enforcement to the Crimes Act of 1900.

In an about-face, Microsoft said that it will reinstate the ability to run Java programs in Windows XP. Microsoft said it would include its own Java software in the Service Pack 1 update to Windows XP due late this summer. In the long term, though, the company plans to remove Java from Windows altogether.

Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, the maverick former professional wrestler whose election stunned the political establishment, announced on Tuesday that he would not seek a second term.

18 June 2002

There is intense competition surrounding control of the .org domain, which Verisign coughed up in order to keep .com and .net from going to the highest bidder. Open-source and Internet pioneers Paul Vixie and Carl Malamud have entered the fray; central to their bid is their announced intent to place all the software necessary to manage a TLD in the public domain.

In a continuing effort to maintain their image as evil incarnate, record companies are considering charging used CD retailers a royalty for every CD they resell — effectively receiving multiple royalties for the one item.

A reporter for The Guardian is being prosecuted in Zimbabwe for a report that appeared on the newspaper's web site. If the case is successful, it would allow Zimbabwe's courts to apply the country's draconian media laws to any online publisher, putting reporters and editors at risk of arrest if they go to Zimbabwe, or any country with extradition treaties with Zimbabwe.

Technonerds go to movies strictly for entertainment, and of course, the most entertaining part comes after the movie when they can dissect, criticise, and argue the merits of every detail.

17 June 2002

Australian organisations have had input in a range of new Web standards from the World Wide Web Consortium, designed to increased interoperability of the Internet.

Microsoft accidentally sent the virulent Nimda worm to South Korean developers when it distributed Korean-language versions of Visual Studio .Net that carried the virus, the software company has acknowledged.

The World Trade Organisation next week is likely to permit the European Union to levy tariffs of at least US$956 million on US exports because of illegal tax breaks given to US exporters such as Microsoft and Boeing.

Teleportation is usually found in science fiction programs like Star Trek, but a team of researchers from the Australian National University has carried out a successful teleportation experiment in a gravitational wave lab.

16 June 2002

In an end-run around the South African government's plans to seize control of the .za domain, administrator Mike Lawrie took pre-emptive action and moved the primary .za zone file offshore Of the $130 million Unwired Australia raised from the likes of Credit Suisse First Boston, Bruckman Rosser Sherrill and The Invus Group, $110 million was spent on licensing space on the 3.4Ghz spectrum. It recently launched its first trial of the technology at no cost to the people of Paddington Warner Home Video has chosen not to copy-protect the home versions of its blockbuster movie Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in major markets, including the US and UK. This means people can go out and buy a DVD or VHS, connect the analogue output of their player to a recorder — either analogue or digital — and make free copies for friends The Australian Consumers Association says the insurance industry has hoodwinked governments and the community into thinking there has been a blow-out in public liability claims

15 June 2002

With the recent ruling in the Blacksnow/Mythic case, it seems the EULA — End User Licence Agreement, that thing that you never read — might affect the rest of the software industry, not just with game companies. From now on, you might just want to read the EULA before you click 'accept'.

Antivirus companies have warned of a new virus that communicates through digital images, but security experts aren't sure how much of a threat this latest evolutionary branch of malicious code poses.

Both PADI and NAUI, the two largest scuba diving certification agencies in the world, have turned over student information from the past 3 years to the FBI. If you're a diver, you likely now have a little file at the FBI.

Australian scientists have developed a permanent contact lens to improve poor vision. The synthetic lens can be surgically implanted to provide permanent, but reversible, correction of refractive error.

14 June 2002

British intelligence service MI5 may be well-known for leaving top-secret laptops on trains, in taxis and at other public locations, but Britons have also found a variety of innovative ways to destroy their portable computers — from running them over to dropping them off bridges.

The jury in the Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney federal civil rights lawsuit against four FBI agents and three Oakland Police officers awarded plaintiffs $4.4 million for violation of the activists' constitutional rights and returned a verdict largely in favour of Earth First! activists Cherney and the late Judi Bari.

British ethical investment funds have largely steered clear of the developing world, where working conditions are often poor and economic growth needed most. Fund managers say that although they would like to invest in poor nations and force change for the better, companies are too opaque to even allow them to get started.

Just when you thought it wasn't possible for McDonald's to get any worse... the 78 McDonald's restaurants in Hawaii are adding a new menu item — spam.

13 June 2002

Researchers at IBM's laboratories in Zurich report that they have achieved a storage density of one trillion bits of data per square inch, about 25 times as great as current hard disks.

Freeplay is about to launch a handheld, windup mobile phone power supply, the Freecharge. Although larger and heavier than several spare batteries, it has two distinct advantages over the former, you don't have to turn the phone off to connect it and it will never go flat a long as your arms work!

Raymond Chiao, of the University of California at Berkeley, believes that superconductors can convert electromagnetic radiation into gravitational radiation.

Bird lovers have a new use for their mobile phones — tracking the marathon journey of migrating geese. Anyone sponsoring one of six geese that carry satellite tags will be sent a weekly text message.

12 June 2002

UMAX US is continuing its full-frontal assault on the intelligence of its American customers. Claiming that its older parallel port scanners don't work under Windows 2000 or XP.

The controversial Sniffer Dog Alert web site is in the process of upgrading to a larger server following high traffic loads which have frequently knocked its services off air.

Amazon.com accepted a cease-and-desist order from the SEC, ordering it not to help anyone else violate securities laws by faking results.

In just a few years, the Internet has transformed the world into a huge marketplace for used books, utterly transforming a business that had gone pretty much unobserved for centuries.

11 June 2002

The WIPO panel considering Jerry Falwell's attempt to strip Gary Cohn of his parody web site has ruled that Cohn is entitled to keep his domain names.

A fibre optic cable in the Dandenong area has been cut, interrupting BigPond Broadband access to a large section of Melbourne.

The once-liberal dishing out of Internet Protocol addresses is coming back to haunt some Australian punters and is pushing a local controversial spamming suit into cloudier waters.

David Bowie is confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing.

10 June 2002

Big-O Software's AIM+ add-on program to AOL's instant messenger service includes a component that sends back customer information to the main server.

Etherlinx uses an inexpensive wireless standard to transmit Internet data. Their ambitious plan threatens to shake the near-monopoly that the cable and phone companies hold on high-speed access.

Unless web designers provide a text equivalent, material can often be inaccessible to those relying on Internet screen readers.

The truth about Ruby Bryant, the woman who received secret payments from TE Lawrence, prompting suggestions that the pair had enjoyed a clandestine love affair, can now be revealed. Far from being the First World War hero's lover, she was instead a timid orphan who was saved from destitution by his simple act of philanthropy.

09 June 2002

Day after day since 1984, teams of programmers, linguists, theologians, mathematicians and philosophers have plugged away at a $60 million project they hope will transform human existence: teaching a computer common sense The South African government wants to seize control of the .za domain. However, ICANN owns the domains and under the ICANN rules, they will not relinquish control Beijing's most popular newspaper, the Beijing Evening News, has unwittingly republished a bogus story about US Congress threats to skip town for Memphis or Charlotte unless Washington builds them a new Capitol building with a retractable dome. The source? America's celebrated spoof tabloid, The Onion The UK Government has admitted that it failed to investigate the hardcore pornographic web sites run by Richard Desmond, the adult magazine publisher, when it decided that he was a fit and proper person to acquire the Daily Express and Sunday Express

08 June 2002

Dee Dee Ramone, a founding member of the pioneer punk band the Ramones, was found dead of a possible drug overdose in his Hollywood home. He was 50.

The rural Ruby Ranch community fought the phone company for use of their unused lines and installed their own DSL service.

The Federal Communications Commission is quietly handing over control of the broadband Internet to a handful of massive corporations.

SafeType make a strange vertical keyboard, they also have a study claiming that this is more ergonomic than your usual board.

07 June 2002

A Washington think tank calling itself the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution is preparing to release a 'study' warning that the widespread use of open-source software will allow international terrorists to have their way with us. Funny how they're funded by Microsoft With the death of the only person who knew the password to an archive held at a museum in Norway, suddenly the data became inaccessible. The result? A nation-wide radio appeal asking for hackers to volunteer to help solve the problem Wind power is set to become a significant feature of the Australian electricity market with more than 1,600 megawatts to be introduced by 2005. This is in sharp contrast to a decision by John Howard, who has bowed to coal exporters demands by refusing to ratify the Kyoto climate change treaty aimed at cutting greenhouse gas emissions Senior figures at the Department of Transport sent a secret e-mail to uncover information on the Paddington rail crash survivor Pam Warren in what has been seen as an attempt to discredit her

06 June 2002

More than four years after the launch of the Mozilla.org open-source project, Mozilla 1.0 is ready to browse.

VeriSign will soon be offering its wire tapping services for a monthly fee. NetDiscovery will allow telcos to comply with court ordered wire taps. Meanwhile, the NSA are hard at work trying to wiretap fibre optic cables.

The NSW Council for Civil Liberties has hit back at the Federal Government's counter-terrorism package, despite claims agencies won't allow agencies to read e-mails or SMS at whim.

The Securities and Exchange Commission have said that Microsoft violated federal securities law by using improper bookkeeping to understate its earnings by as much as $900 million over a four-year period.

05 June 2002

US forensic expert Andrew Rosen, the computer scientist who extracted crucial deleted data for the Enron investigation, has donated his company's Linux-based forensic software, the Storage Media Archival and Recovery Tool — SMART — to NSW Police.

The Source, an Australian government web site, has been spamming people multiple times, despite the site's privacy policy stating it won't use e-mail addresses without the owner's consent.

E-Store has admitted it has a backlog of unfulfilled orders following a rolling succession of lost telecommunications services during its recent move of premises.

Jeanne Heifetz thought she had merely tripped over one of those quirks that occasionally worm their way into standardised tests. Words were missing from a book excerpt she was familiar with on a Regents English exam. But when she discovered a second extensively altered excerpt, she began to wonder, if there was something sinister afoot?

04 June 2002

In the wake of OzEmail's entry into the broadband market, and Telstra's broadband advertising campaign, iPrimus has dropped the pricing on its Jetstream ADSL offerings by as much as 28 percent, for the second time this year.

Newsletter and Internet publisher Paul Trummel, whose February jailing prompted a flood of protests by journalists and others around the US, has now been dispatched to solitary confinement at King County Jail.

The Bivings Group, a PR company contracted to Monsanto, invented fake citizens to post messages on internet listservers. These phantoms had launched a campaign to force Nature magazine to retract a paper it had published, alleging that native corn in Mexico had been contaminated with GM pollen.

Project Eden had to visually provide a spectacular theatre high enough to house the towering trees of the rainforests, wide enough for the sun-baked escarpments of the Mediterranean and, oh yes, become the eighth wonder of the world.

03 June 2002

A hacking contest that promised US$100,000 as first prize appears to have been weighted so heavily against competitors that some decided to hack the competition rather than the target server.

When Jakob Nielsen, a well-known online usability expert, conducted a study on how children up to the age of 12 use the Internet, he came across a surprising finding: namely that the vast majority of them couldn't tell the difference between content and advertising online.

Yet another step closer to the universal translator: NEC has announced trials of software for your PDA that listens to spoken English and Japanese phrases, translates them, and re-speaks them in the other language.

Police in the west of England said on Friday they had recovered a cache of stolen property having been led to the hoard — by a squirrel.

02 June 2002

The European Parliament has voted to ban spam by adopting the opt-in system for unsolicited commercial e-mail, finally freeing the way for the entry into force of a European Parliament and Council directive concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector/q> As the US Congress continues its investigation of the Enron affair, human rights advocates are calling for a probe of the Bush administration's possible role in another energy and influence-peddling scandal. The retarded monkey boy and US oil interests have ties to some of the key figures in the arms-for-oil scandal which has devastated Angola French direct-broadcast satellite company Canal Plus alleges that NDS, a company owned by News Corp — which also owns BSkyB — Canal Plus's biggest competitor in Europe — hacked the smart cards used by Canal Plus and published the hacks on the Internet Rob McEwen owned an underperforming gold mine in north-western Ontario, and he needed new ideas about where to dig. So he broke new ground — and made data on the mine available online to anyone who wanted to help. Eureka! The Internet gold rush was on

01 June 2002

Perth-based spammer, T3 Direct, is suing Joseph McNichol, an anti-spam advocate, after being blacklisted by a spam prevention web site spews.org, in what is believed to be a first of its kind case world-wide and one that could end up 'bigger than Ben Hur' DARPA are working on Project Babylon, an attempt to create a portable, two-way, real-time, multi-lingual audible speech translator proposed to be run on everything from PDAs to wearable military hardware to workstations The Philadelphia court has officially overturned the Children's Internet Protection Act, the law that required blocking software to be installed in all libraries that receive federal funds An FBI anti-terrorism investigation possibly involving Osama bin Laden was hampered by technical flaws in the Bureau's controversial Carnivore Internet surveillance system. The incident, which occurred in March 2000, is described in newly-released FBI documents obtained under court order by the Electronic Privacy Information Centre. A written report describes the incident as part of a 'pattern' indicating 'an inability on the part of the FBI to manage' its foreign intelligence surveillance activities

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