August 2002 Archive

31 August 2002

A humble t-shirt dye may be used to revolutionise high-speed telecoms networks. Four researchers at Virginia Institute of Technology are using the washable, light-fast dye, Procion Red, to make polymer films that manage laser light.

Rape crisis centres and women's refuges have joined merchants in expressing concern regarding recent moves to limit calls made to 1800 numbers to 60 seconds.

Airbags could one day save the planet. At least, that is the view of one mathematician, who is suggesting that they could be used to nudge asteroids or comets that are on a collision course with the Earth gently out of harm's way.

Young children who share their home with two dogs or cats in the first year of life are half as likely to become allergic to those animals than kids who grew up with only one dog or cat, or no pets.

30 August 2002

A Melbourne company, MediaWeb, is offering 5GB a month broadband access for less than AU$50, while pundits from across the IT industry in Australia have defended the more legitimate uses of the broadband in the wake of porn comments made by the deranged Senator Richard Alston. And as Yahoo in the US gears up for the introduction of a high-speed Internet service with telco giant SBC Communications, the portal's Australian arm is keeping its eyes open for similar revenue diversification opportunities.

Hopes that world leaders would agree to boost renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, were dealt a devastating blow when European Union negotiators abandoned attempts to press for it.

Conservative Iranian newspaper, Afarinesh, recently reported that two government agencies, which were not identified, had proposed legalising brothels, under the name of 'chastity houses', as a way of bringing prostitution under control.

Hackers have attacked the Recording Industry Association of America's web site for the second time in a month, dramatically altering several pages of content in a humorous protest against the industry group's position on file sharing.

29 August 2002

A charred guitar, once owned by Jimi Hendrix and now owned by Dweezil Zappa could become the most expensive guitar ever sold when it goes under the hammer in London next month.

Scottish Hydro-Electric have started a trial of broadband internet access via power lines. Just plug the modem into any power point in your house, with no need for additional lines into the house, and reasonably priced too.

Tiny little hairs and not any kind of chemical glue help a gecko race up and down vertical surfaces as smooth as glass.

Britain's Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, has caused outrage in Israel and angered sections of the British Jewish community by making veiled criticism of the Sharon government's policies towards the Palestinians.

28 August 2002

Defence lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union are up in arms over a police file of potential criminals in Delaware. The database contains a list of people who police believe are likely to break the law. It features names, addresses and photographs of potential suspects — many of whom have clean slates. Since the system was introduced in Wilmington in June, most of the 200 people included in the file have been minorities from poor, high-crime neighbourhoods.

The Canadian government is considering a proposal that would force ISPs to rewire their networks for easy surveillance by police and spy agencies. A discussion draft released Sunday also contemplates creating a national database of every Canadian with an Internet account, a plan that could sharply curtail the right to be anonymous online.

Time's 26 August cover feature on 'The Green Century' promises to explain 'How to Save the Earth'. The answer, according to a prominent article inside: blame environmentalists for a lack of environmental progress.

Australia's chances of securing a multibillion-dollar microprocessor manufacturing plant have strengthened, with Intel chief Craig Barrett preparing to meet the Federal Government. This has since been rejected due to Australia being too 'economically mature'.

27 August 2002

A new Internet Peering service has been launched in Brisbane, a system that could allow ISPs to offer cheap broadband access. Routing local traffic directly between ISPs instead of communicating over the Internet could cost Telstra more than $100K per month in lost revenue.

A coalition of green groups distributed dubious honours in their version of an Oscars ceremony to companies they say are guilty of 'greenwash' — using an environmental veneer to disguise continued poor practice.

Environmentalists denounced a proposal to bridge a North-South rift on the eve of the Earth Summit in Johannesburg on the weekend as a sell-out to rich nations seeking freer trade and corporate globalisation. While South African police guarding the Earth Summit on the weekend accused demonstrators of involving children in a banned street protest that stole attention from talks on the future of the planet.

Haxjere Sahiti was married on a Sunday, murdered on a Monday, and buried in the woods the same afternoon. Married life lasted less than 12 hours for her. It ended with the 20-year-old Kosovar Albanian woman lying dead on her family's living room carpet, with seven pistol bullets fired into her torso.

26 August 2002

Hundreds of girls as young as 12 are being raped or forcibly kept as concubines in rural Zimbabwe by President Robert Mugabe's youth militia as part of a campaign that human-rights lawyers have branded 'systematic political cleansing' of the population.

Scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have found a tiny, mysterious particle in the spinal marrow fluid which may be a new form of life and which could help explain the cause of schizophrenia.

Lost your cat or dog? No need to whistle or call on a fruitless search — just track your pet with your mobile phone.

The United States is a nation of laws. The police arrest suspects they reasonably believe to have broken the law, not citizens who happen to disagree with the government's politics. Cops don't go after people pre-emptively because they might commit a crime someday. In America, people are considered innocent until they're proven guilty in a court of law.

25 August 2002

The secretive federal court that approves spying on terror suspects in the United States has refused to give the Justice Department broad new powers, saying the government had misused the law and misled the court dozens of times, according to an extraordinary legal ruling.

BT has lost its controversial bid to sue Prodigy Communications over a patent that it claimed covered the use of hyperlinks. US District Judge Colleen McMahon awarded Prodigy its motion for summary judgement to have the case dismissed, saying that no jury could find that Prodigy infringes BT's patent.

An escaped emu caused confusion in Hamburg after a woman called police to report what she thought was a bare-chested man with two big white dots on his forehead staring into her window.

It's easy when you have drunk 12 pints to forget that lions are carnivores and do not like ice cream. And it probably seemed a good idea after a night on the beer to break into a zoo, find a cage and stuff Cornettos through the mesh.

24 August 2002

Telstra will explore using the open source Linux OS as part of a new standard operating platform being scoped by the telecommunications giant as it looks to reduce its $1.5 billion annual IT budget. Such a move could see Microsoft further sidelined at its biggest Australian customer, following a recent deal with Sun Microsystems that will see Java 2 used as Telstra's web services platform, as well as revelations that Telstra is considering Sun's StarOffice desktop application suite as a possible replacement for Microsoft Office on some or all of its 45,000 desktops.

In contrast to a declaration by Telstra, the nation's biggest broadband provider, just weeks ago that it was comfortable with current pricing for fast internet services, a forum held by the Government's Broadband Advisory Group saw a consensus that price was the key determinant, according to a report from the National Office for the Information Economy.

The UK's take on the 'European DMCA' — the European Copyright Directive — will make criminals out of ordinary computer users, according to a new critique by the UK Campaign for Digital Rights. And it will also fail to protect researchers, says Julian Midgley who penned the report.

The mayor of the French Mediterranean town of Le Lavandou, faced with a cemetery 'full to bursting', has banned local residents from dying until he can find somewhere else to bury them.

23 August 2002

The Federal Government has released a report about its online content co-regulatory scheme. But some industry commentators, including the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, have asked whether it's the Government's place to control what we look at.

The low Internet penetration rate in impoverished Ethiopia hasn't stopped local entrepreneurs from getting into e-commerce. EthioGift sells everything from flowers to sheep.

In American and Russian laboratories, millions of years of immense pressure and heat are being telescoped into just a few minutes to produce synthetic diamonds that even expert dealers can't distinguish from the real thing. The only difference is the price... man-made diamonds could sell for less than $100 a gem. And that is disastrous news for De Beers, whose $9 billion a year monopoly on the diamond trade keeps prices sky high.

If you've always suspected that the male of the species can be competitive to the point of stupidity, Rosanne Roy from McGill University in Montreal and her colleagues have evidence that you're right...

22 August 2002

MGM has begun shutting down James Bond fan sites after a fan got a hold of the script for the forthcoming 'Die Another Day' and posted parts of it in the users' forum.

Staff members with the US Securities and Exchange Commission are considering launching civil proceedings against RSA Security — owner of the dodgy Verisign — and some of its officers, according to a company filing with the regulator.

In what may become a new legal front in its war against online copying, the Recording Industry Association of America has asked a federal court for help in tracing an alleged peer-to-peer pirate. And in recent weeks, scads of so-called 'spoof' files — repetitive loops or snippets filled with crackle and hiss — have been anonymously posted to the hugely popular sites where music fans illegally trade songs online, a tactic fully endorsed by the RIAA.

Australian Agriculture Minister Warren Truss welcomed a commitment by oil major BP to produce a sugar-ethanol/petrol blend in Brisbane.

21 August 2002

A new report shows that Australia is a laggard and renegade state when it comes to protecting the environment and is going backwards on every indicator of environmental health, from pollution to land clearing. The report, commissioned by a plethora of green groups, contradicted recent assertions by the conservative government of John Howard that it had made great strides in controlling pollution and promoting sustainable land use The Chinese effort to build a home-grown Win98 is called Yangfan Linux, which means raise the sail in Chinese, the open source operating system is being pieced together by the Beijing Software Industry Productivity Centre, a group established by the government to organise Linux development in China Microsoft's hold on corporate Australia appears to be weakening, with a rise in the number of big companies opting to use Linux software for critical applications The NSW Government has advanced with plans to make use of state-owned electricity infrastructure for broadband connectivity, with the New England area to be the first testing ground

20 August 2002

'Come out of the closet' about marijuana use was the theme of this year's Seattle Hempfest, the fragrant annual waterfront event. And at least several of the tens of thousands of festival-goers did come out of the closet. And went into jail.

Scientists are hard at work looking for ways people with diabetes can measure their blood sugar without the painful and scarring jabs now necessary for blood collection.

The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles became the city's first religious edifice to generate solar power. The massive church's solar panels will return enough juice to the city's power grid to light up 66 homes.

A bald eagle that was left for dead after its beak was shot off is alive and tearing its prey to shreds again thanks to Dr Brian Andrews, a Canadian dentist, who fashioned an artificial bill out of acrylic denture material.

19 August 2002

One of Australia's most controversial domain name sellers, Internet Name Group, has shut down its web site and disconnected its phones. On Monday the company was placed under the administration of Melbourne-based chartered accountants Brooke Bird The sabre-rattling by the United States over Iraq — and the Howard Government's eagerness to join in — takes war mongering to a new level. This would be neither a territorial nor religious war, nor even part of the retarded monkey boy's war against terrorism. Some US officials are euphemistically describing the proposed war on Iraq as pre-emptive self-defence, designed to bring about regime change The Bulldogs, already in strife for breaching the salary cap for rugby league players, now face scrutiny over a $900 million stadium and unit project with the corrupt Liverpool Council Benefon has eschewed the MMS battle currently being fought by other companies and has instead released a range of mobiles with GPS capabilities

18 August 2002

Oracle, which supplies Yahoo! with database software, may lose some of that business to a little-known competing product — the free MySQL database.

Tens of thousands of US military and government computers containing sensitive information are easily accessible over the Internet, ForensicTec Solutions, a computer security firm that cracked the networks has claimed. The FBI has since raided the offices of the company.

Microsoft withdrew its free TrueType Web fonts on the eve of LinuxWorld, leaving some Linux advocates upset about the decision. Microsoft, however, whinged the fonts were being 'abused'.

'Steady' Ed Headrick, the California inventor who figured out a way to make the Frisbee fly fast and straight, has died at the age of 78. His family said his ashes will be made into Frisbees.

17 August 2002

Alcatel has prevailed in a suit against former employee Evan Brown, who claimed that he — rather than the company — owned rights to a software idea that he asserts had long existed in his head. Maybe they should team up with NASA, who have told Northwest Airlines security specialists that they are developing brain-monitoring devices in co-operation with an unnamed commercial firm.

The world's largest record companies have filed a lawsuit against major ISPs for not blocking access to Listen4Ever.com, music site located in China. The defendants in the suit include AT&T Broadband, Cable & Wireless USA, Sprint, Advanced Network Services and UUNET Technologies. The RIAA has since dropped the contentious lawsuit.

Scattered around the planet are hundreds of creatures that have been to the Moon and back again. None of them are human. They outnumber active astronauts 3:1. And most are missing. They're trees. 'Moon trees'.

Egyptian police have arrested a man who performed brain surgery on a number of people even though he had only a primary school education.

16 August 2002

In Australia, pharmaceutical companies are barred from advertising drugs directly to the public. But they don't need to. The media does the job for them. The recipe is simple. All the companies have to do is use phrases such as 'independent study' and 'medical breakthrough', and journalists queue up to be manipulated. Then take an expert to talk up the product, add a victim who needs it, stir in some research findings commissioned by the drug company, and you have an advertisement dressed up as a legitimate news story.

Security researchers say they have found a serious flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser that could expose credit card and other sensitive information of Internet surfers.

Wireless mice have been around for a while, but how about deskless ones? Gyration makes a mouse that doesn't need a surface of any kind and can even be used in the air.

An intrepid bunch of rabbits have emulated Indiana Jones, turning into archaeologists to unearth a rare and ancient glass window in central England.

15 August 2002

Toho — current owner of all things Godzilla — has launched a cease and desist notice on Davezilla.

Australia is set to become home to the world's first Solar Tower, a one kilometre high structure with the potential to generate enough electricity to supply a city of more than 200,000 people.

The FBI accidentally pulled the plug on its own web sites. A misconfiguration in the bureau's domain name set up meant that many visitors to FBI.gov could not get through.

Seattle-based HighLift Systems is hosting a conference this week to meet with investors and other parties potentially interested in a device that could open the final frontier to the masses within 15 years because of the space elevator's relatively low costs and extremely high traffic volume.

14 August 2002

Ever since their computerised ID system switched on a few days ago, Japanese citizens have dropped out in droves from what many resent as a 'big brother' monitoring of the people.

Human Rights Watch have announced that Yahoo is 'complicit' in rights abuses by the Chinese government after agreeing to a Beijing-backed self-censorship pledge for web pages.

Cybercrime investigators for NASA are trying to figure out how 43MB of sensitive design data about planned space vehicles got into the hands of a hacker — and then into the hands of a reporter.

Despite continual problems with its BigPond service, Telstra continues to play down the extent of disruptions experienced by its internet customers.

13 August 2002

Microsoft's new 'Software Choice' campaign is all for your right to choose... as long as you choose Microsoft. It's too bad that Intel and the US Government couldn't see through the rhetoric.

Computer scientists in India have cracked an age-old mathematical problem by designing a method for computers to quickly prove whether a figure is a prime number — a vital step in cryptography.

On Wednesday, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will begin awarding contracts for the design and implementation of a Total Information Awareness (TIA) system. The TIA program, with its ability to provide persistent storage of everything from credit card, to employment, to medical, to ISP records, is a recipe for civil liberties disaster unless there are provisions for citizens to find out who is looking at their records and to see and correct those records.

A new drug being developed for commercial use in Australia and the United States called Melanotan — more alluringly dubbed the 'Barbie' drug — seems to be an answer to prayers of millions of people who desire to sport the perfect tan. As a bonus it also promises reawakening of sexual desire.

12 August 2002

Ever wanted to keep stray dogs or neighbours from trampling your backyard, but just couldn't find the system to really deter them? Why not build a bi-polar Tesla Coil system.

BBC has investigated allegations that Downing Street illegally hacked into its computer system in order to influence critical news items before they were broadcast.

US lawmakers have asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to go after Internet users who download unauthorised songs and other copyrighted material, raising the possibility of jail time for digital-music fans.

It hovers! It spins! It spies! The Draganflyer III gyro-stabilised helicopter with optional Eyecam video system is the highest tech flying toy in the world.

11 August 2002

Kramut Kennels — the breeders of one of my beasties, the adorable, if slightly mad, Tonka — currently have Siberian Husky pups on the ground. They will be available to be taken home mid October.

Mac users are having trouble applying for an Australian Business Number online, forcing them to use snail-mail to register their business.

The remarkable toolmaking talent of a New Caledonian crow called Betty has challenged the chimpanzee's reputation as the most proficient toolmaker in the animal world. The bird, one of two kept at Oxford University's zoology field station, fashioned a hook from an ordinary piece of wire — something even a chimp cannot manage.

After more than a decade of trying, Australian researchers have created a highly infectious virus that could wipe out the country's rabbit pests by making them sterile.

10 August 2002

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have put the theoretical to the test by using single silicon atoms to represent the 1s and 0s of computing. This is equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs in one square inch of material.

Hewlett-Packard is using the spraying technology developed for inkjet printers to cool chips. They have made a robot that'll wander around data centres, detecting hot chips and hosing them down.

The FCC issued a record fine of nearly US$5.4 million against a company for sending junk faxes to businesses and consumers.

More than 200 years after they went out of fashion in Britain, professional hermits are back in the job market. A newspaper advertisement seeking a resident hermit for the stately Shugborough Home in Staffordshire, central England, has prompted a flood of replies from men eager to ditch stressed-out modern life for a spot of peaceful cave-dwelling.

09 August 2002

Cell, a radical new processor designed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba and dubbed a 'supercomputer on a chip', could enter production in 2004. The chip could end up inside the PlayStation 3, and elements of its design will be seen in future server chips from IBM.

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating the marketing practices of VeriSign. In recent months, the company has been hit with a spate of lawsuits accusing it of deceptive marketing practices related to its efforts to persuade rivals' customers to shift suppliers of domain names.

Japanese electronics giant Sharp will start making solar batteries in the United States from next April to help expand the small but growing part of its business.

Human understanding of the laws of physics may be about to be turned upside down with the proposition that the speed of light is not a constant, as has been believed.

08 August 2002

Jakob Nielson is proposing that tactile, physical interfaces will be the next evolution in how we interact with machines.

American movie, recording and software executives could be arrested if they travel to Australia, could be prohibited from entering Australia, or could be extradited to face criminal charges if Californian Democrat congressman Howard Berman's copyright protection bill, which allows cracking of computers, passes into law.

Real estate agents say location is everything, but these tenants don't care about the neighbourhood — the worse, the better. Carnegie Mellon University is looking for property — two or more sites of 300 acres apiece — on which to test robots developed by its National Robotics Engineering Consortium. And when it comes to running robots through their paces, a house in the suburbs just won't do.

Fortnum & Mason in London's Piccadilly — one of London's most prestigious addresses — is looking for a chocolate buyer to travel the world, taste as much chocolate as possible and select only the best for its discerning customers.

07 August 2002

A bug in widely-used communications software could let attackers gain control of computers and authentication systems. Security researchers have warned of a flaw in communications software that could allow attackers to take over computers running Windows, Unix-based operating systems and Mac OS X, as well as Kerberos authentication systems.

New York has abruptly yanked an official web site after discovering that personal data from nearly 2,000 online job applicants — including home addresses and Social Security numbers — could be viewed by anyone.

Senator Mike DeWine is crusading to hand the FBI new powers to eavesdrop on immigrants and other non-citizens living in America.

Hundreds of sightings of enormous arrowhead-shaped aircraft that have been logged since the 80s just might have been solved. According to a new report by the National Institute for Discovery Science, the craft — referred to as Big Black Deltas, or BBDs — are massive black airships on the order of 600 feet long, 300 feet wide, and 40 feet tall, weighing on the order of 100 tons and capable of carrying huge loads over long distances.

06 August 2002

The World Wide Web Consortium has published the Public Working Draft for XHTML 2.0. The second edition of the W3C recommendation for XHTML 1.0 is also available.

Striking back against a computer that is attacking you may be illegal under US law, but security researcher Timothy Mullen, chief information officer of AnchorIS Inc, says people should be allowed to neutralise one that is unwittingly spreading destructive Internet worms like Nimda.

A broad group of hackers and security experts have banded together to create a new service that assembles information on vulnerabilities, security tools and bug-related discussions.

80% of the e-mail that makes its way into Hotmail's user inboxes is spam. And that does not include the garbage caught by Hotmail's filters.

05 August 2002

One of the great questions of contemporary American political economy is, 'who shall control the commons?' 'The commons' refers to that vast range of resources that the American people collectively own, but which are rapidly being enclosed: privatised, traded in the market, and abused. The process of converting the American commons into market resources can accurately be described as enclosure because, like the movement to enclose common lands in eighteenth-century England, it involves the private appropriation of collectively owned resources.

From BuyClamsOnline.com to billromanowskisucks.com, a stroll through the graveyard of defunct domain names offers a melancholy vision of monumentally stupid hopes that were cruelly dashed.

In a scene somewhat reminiscent of the DVD format's tumultuous adoption by content providers in the mid-90s, top executives at the major studios met quietly last week in Los Angeles to discuss the opportunities and challenges for a high-definition version of DVD.

In the latest study of a 4.5 billion-year-old Martian meteorite, researchers have presented new evidence confirming that 25% of the magnetic material in the meteorite was produced by ancient bacteria on Mars.

04 August 2002

Some users who signed a 12 month unlimited download contract with Optus@Home just before the July cut-off have found themselves on the capped plan instead. Not surprising news considering Optus' home phone section managed to screw up my payments last week and cut me off without a word of warning.

Greenpeace are running a contest to come up with a new parody logo for Esso aka Exxon-Mobil.

Civil liberties groups in the United States are celebrating a court ruling which orders the United States Justice Department release all the names of those it has detained since the 11 September attacks.

General Motors plans to begin installing new sensors and communications systems into vehicles next year in a move that could save lives but that also raises privacy concerns.

03 August 2002

A large number of lawsuits have been filed against companies that have not complied with the anti-spam statute in Utah. And the governor of Ohio has signed into law a bill that allows internet subscribers to sue for up to US$50,000 and ISPs for up to US$500,000. It allows you to sue for $100 per email plus court and lawyer fees incurred. Looks like the cost of spamming is going up.

Nevada voters could make their state the first to legalise marijuana and derive taxes from a regulated sales system this year.

Something strange has been going on under our feet for the past four years. Earth's gravity field suddenly shifted gears and began getting flatter, reversing a course of centuries during which the planet and its gravity field grew rounder each year.

Thanks to GPS, it seems quite a few people are discovering they don't live where they thought. Prior to GPS, state, county and city borders were part law, part measurement, and part guesswork. Now, they're able to go back and discover where actual borders should be, and it's making many people unhappy.

02 August 2002

Crime statistics are political dynamite, and the media is trying constantly to light the fuse of public alarm. As law and order becomes a permanent political campaign issue, each new statistic is a bullet in a war of words.

Floppy drives were once an indispensable part of personal computing. But not any more: 21 years after the introduction of the 3 ½ inch floppy disk, the floppy drive looks to be on the brink of extinction. But in spite of the floppy's creep toward obsolescence, PC makers aren't ready to give up on them — yet.

A team of researchers, doctors and medical institutions in Seattle may have a simple gift for people with diabetes — freedom. Freedom from worries over maintaining the proper level of sugar in the blood. And freedom from the fear that the disease will destroy their eyes, heart or kidneys. The freedom comes in clusters of cells plucked from a donated pancreas. The cells, known as 'islets', produce insulin, which the body needs to use sugar. Type 1 diabetes destroys those cells, making the body insulin-deficient.

Plustech, a subsidiary of tractor maker John Deere, has built a six-legged walking logging machine that looks suspiciously like a prototype for an AT-AT walker.

01 August 2002

When web operator Jon Messner gained control of one of al-Qaeda's prime Internet communication sites, he offered it to the FBI to use it for disinformation and collecting data about sympathisers. But by the time FBI agents found someone with enough technical know-how to set up the sting, the opportunity was lost as militant Islamic web users figured out the site was a decoy.

Bloggers are busting chops, big time, and their weblogs are what's keeping the media honest. The latest evidence: some big media organisations are now quoting their criticism of other big media organisations.

Robert Young, an animal behaviour expert at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, and his colleague Rebecca West of De Montfort University in Lincoln, UK are convinced that dogs can count and researchers at the University of California Davis say they try to convey different messages through the pitch and pace of their barks.

The R2-D2 Interactive Astromech Droid is coming soon to a store near you. Equipped with innovative speech recognition technology, infrared scanning technology and working sonar navigation, this R2-D2 recognises 40 spoken phrases, plays six exciting games, and sings three tunes. It even has a retractable arm that lets it hold a beer can.

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