November 2002 Archive

30 November 2002

The .au Domain Administration has issued a warning concerning an e-mail by a domain services company, Open Your Mind, run by the same man who was in charge of disgraced domain name reseller Internet Name Group.

Scientists say the steak knife is destined for the scrap heap thanks to a new DNA test able to identify cattle carrying a tenderness gene.

A study by researchers at the University of North Carolina will concern environmentalists who say planted GM crops have cross-pollinated with normal plants to create 'superweeds' that are resistant to insect attack and could spread rapidly.

Defence Minister Robert Hill said the prototype Rapid Route and Area Mine Neutralisation System would significantly improve the army's ability to clear anti-vehicle land mines from unsealed roads and airstrips.

29 November 2002

Access to plain facts is on the auction block as a result of recent decisions in Australia and overseas that seek to tie up databases under international copyright laws.

Students are devising increasingly sophisticated countermeasures to protect their free supply of copyrighted entertainment.

Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon and two legislators announced a plan to make spam illegal in the same way that the state already has put a stop to millions of unwanted telephone calls: through a No-Call Law.

A team of dermatologists think they've found a way of attaching skin grafts without the scarring and swelling that existing methods can cause. A new laser-activated glue that as well as treating skin burns, could one day be used to seamlessly join other tissues or seal blood vessels.

28 November 2002

Citing security flaws that lead to ads and spies on Microsoft infested computers the BBC recommends avoiding Internet Explorer.

fathertom wanted a nice neat new PC, so he built one in a lunch box.

If you've ever been pigeonholed by TiVo and Amazon's automatic customer profiling, spare a thought for the guy the machine labeled as a 'pregnant gay man'.

The Miskovic family in the town of Danilovgrad, Montenegro thought a World War II artillery shell was the ideal replacement for a broken table leg — until it exploded, injuring eight people as they were about to eat a meal.

27 November 2002

Australian broadband community group Whirlpool is claiming victory over Telstra after the Telco sent a letter to its ISDN Home customers admitting it may have been overcharging them since the beginning of the year.

Almost half of all Australian households cannot get access to ADSL, and Australia continues to lag behind the rest of the Western world in broadband connections.

Australian-developed software for managing university research administration is making inroads, with the University of Sydney the latest to sign up for the program.

In a unique crackdown on illegal file-sharing, a Danish anti-piracy group mailed invoices to alleged pirates demanding compensation for downloading copyrighted materials off the Internet.

26 November 2002

Online identity theft is nothing new, but recently there's been a growing number of scams aimed at commandeering eBay accounts.

AOL is testing a standalone e-mail client that could set the stage for a features battle with Microsoft in the market for Internet-based communications software.

Melbourne-based Keypoint has joined the ranks of Australia's largest ISPs after finalising its acquisition of 20 smaller regional service providers.

Enzo Boschi, head of Italy's Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology, has said that a volcanic island submerged off the coast of Sicily for the last 170 years could reappear in the coming weeks if furious seismic rumblings continue.

25 November 2002

Dot-com poster child Razorfish has ended its days as an independent company. The web site design firm, which cultivated a techno-hip image that helped define the Internet boom, was acquired on Friday by the privately held consulting group SBI and Company.

Connecticut-based TopCoder awarded US$50,000 to John Dethridge, a University of Melbourne PhD candidate, for winning the Division 1 programming tournament.

The US Government has moved to relax emissions restrictions on older, mainly coal-fired power plants, drawing praise from the power industry but criticism from environmentalists.

Passers-by alerted fire-fighters after hearing noises emanating from a locked dumpster. Within minutes of arriving at the scene, the occupant was rescued but fire-fighters say the puppy turned out to be a very large and apparently well-fed rat.

24 November 2002

The microphone-shaped Karaoke TV Star, from IVL Technologies, answers the impossible dream of enthusiastic shower singers everywhere: Being able to belt out a song without scaring the pets or small children.

Tom Martin, a professor at Virginia Tech's electrical and computer engineering department, is working to prevent new types of denial-of-service attacks aimed at battery-powered mobile devices.

It's official: using browsing the web while blocking pop-up ads and other such exciting web site enhancements is theft. Anti-leech.com are offering to protect your site from browsers blocking pop-ups — or 'theft tools' as they call them — just try stealing from them with your favourite pop-up free browser.

A New York meat processing company is recalling hundreds of thousands of pounds of ground beef that may be contaminated with potentially deadly E coli bacteria. A ridiculous situation as the beef would have been consumed long before the recall was issued.

23 November 2002

Despite the daily bombardment of news from the Middle East, Central Asia, and other world trouble spots, roughly 85% of young Americans could not find Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel on a map. And of the internal geographic questions, 70% couldn't find New Jersey and 11% couldn't find the US.

Physicist Stephen Wolfram took the stage Wednesday at the Comdex Fall 2002 trade show, evangelising a computing-centric view of the universe that might sit better with the technology industry than it has with some other audiences. Wolfram believes the universe is composed not of particles and waves, but of simple tiny programs. He believes these myriad programs, or algorithms, give rise to physical phenomena as fundamental as space and as complicated as human beings.

The Australian travel industry is set for a shake-up next year with the entry of global online travel leader Expedia into the local market, tapping Sydney as its Asia Pacific headquarters.

The increasing use of the internet by political activists could provide valuable lessons for the UK Government.

22 November 2002

Millions of people world-wide may have worse eyesight and even be more likely to go blind because of a long-held but misguided idea about how to correct short-sightedness. A study intended to confirm the theory has instead been stopped because the children's eyesight was getting worse.

After many years, support has finally been added to MAME for the Bradley Trainer. The Bradley Trainer is a conversion of Atari's Battlezone arcade game that Atari created for the US Army as a training simulator for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Only two of these units were supposedly created, and only one of them is known to exist today. The Bradley Trainer is more of a simulator than arcade game, and the cabinet has many additional controls and buttons over its arcade counterpart.

The Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, has opted to switch to Linux from Microsoft for its Gyandooth programme.

Up until now, there's been fixed wing, or there's been rotating wing, and that's it. But now thanks to Patrick Peebles, there's an entirely new principle of flight called the FanWing.

21 November 2002

A software bug in a common component of Microsoft Web servers and Internet Explorer could leave millions of servers and home PCs open to attack.

Australian Universities are coming under heavy fire from the hacking community, with a serious breach overseas last weekend providing a timely reminder of the consequences of a successful attack.

According to the Australian Consumers' Association, selling music CDs that cannot be copied digitally is a bad move by an industry that seems to be intent on self-destruction.

Like magnetic keycards, which have been in the news because of fraudulent 'skimming' attacks, smart cards are also vulnerable.

20 November 2002

Oscar-winning actor James Coburn, famed for his action roles and poignant characterisations in a career spanning more than 40 years, died of a heart attack on Monday.

Watchmaker Fossil has licensed the Palm OS for a Wrist PDA that features a touch screen, a stylus integrated into the band, 2MB of memory, an infrared port, and standard Palm applications including address book, date book, and memo pad.

Asia-Pacific will host more domain name root servers following a deal between a current root server host and a regional organisation that handles Internet registration and resource allocation.

Bob Lanier, an expert at the annual convention of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, said a rise in asthma cases may be linked, in part, to cleanliness and abundance.

19 November 2002

When Kathleen and Joseph Bannon, unrepentant spammers, struck the Film Threat e-mail list last week they picked the wrong man to piss off. Chris Gore does not take spam lying down.

A new class of PC displays, called Smart Displays, that will use Wi-Fi to effectively decouple themselves from the PC will be unveiled next week at Comdex.

Eye specialists are closer than ever to developing a bionic eye to restore sight for those blinded by retinal disease.

According to Telstra, Mobile phone theft had dropped in the three months since the company began blocking stolen or lost phones from its network.

18 November 2002

Lucas discovered a bug in his wife's iBook after she left it to charge overnight — well more that one. It had become the new home for a colony of ants.

The Japanese government is considering abandoning Windows in a plan to boost computer security within the government. The government is very interested in alternatives, especially Linux.

A new study, co-authored Professor Garth Nicholson, has found motor neurone disease is triggered by a sudden loss of nerve cells.

Siletz tribal elder Donna Kessinger had never touched a computer. Now, she's an old hat at e-mail and instant messaging — courtesy of a tribal council plan to help far-flung members stay in better touch.

17 November 2002

Technology that renders optical media useless after a short lifespan will soon find its way into stores in the form of perishable DVDs.

The Federal Trade Commission said that it had sued six junk e-mailers who bombarded Internet users with illegal pyramid schemes, fraudulent loans and e-mail filters that actually attracted more 'spam'.

The BBC have announced they will be showing a new version of a Dr Who episode originally written by Douglas Adams and that was never shown after industrial action halted the original production in 1979. 'Shada' will star Paul McGann as the Doctor.

When Nike tried to rebut charges that its foreign subcontractors used sweatshop labour, it landed before the Supreme Court. The issue: Whether corporations be given full free-speech rights to defend themselves and their business practices without fear of being sued.

16 November 2002

Cray announced a new supercomputer that will leave its fastest counterparts in the dust. The maker of supercomputers, based in Seattle, says its X1 will offer up to 52.4 teraflops, or trillion mathematical calculations per second. Reaching that level requires 4,098 custom-designed 800MHz Cray processors.

Still trying to decide whether your enterprise development architecture should be based around Sun's Java or Microsoft's .NET? Perhaps you should be more worried about whether either of them is going to work at all.

A medieval fresco featuring a rodent with an uncanny resemblance to Mickey Mouse has been uncovered in an Austrian church. Disney has refused to comment.

In a bout of self importance, Star Wars producer Rick McCallum told a Melbourne audience that the fight against P2P swapping of films was as important as the war on terrorism.

15 November 2002

An eccentric Frenchman who goes by the name of Crazy Eric has entered the record books for the unusual feat of carrying permanently about his body more than 1,000 useful objects. Dubbed the human Swiss Army Knife, Eric is a 30-year-old electrician from the central-eastern city of Lyon who has a psychological obsession with neatness and an ingenious line in clothes design.

As former chief investigator for the King County Medical Examiner's Office, Jerry Webster has seen lots of unusual things. So he didn't blink when a family called to ask if they could set their deceased loved one afire on a Viking-style raft and push his floating funeral pyre into Puget Sound.

It may work for Santa Claus and the singing chimney sweep in 'Mary Poppins', but one Texas man found out that going down the chimney was no way to enter a home after he became wedged in the smoke stack.

Laura Betterly of Data Resource Consulting, a self-described 'spam queen', talks about not just the millions of e-mails she spews, but what it costs per mailing, what the response rates are and what she actually makes.

14 November 2002

In addition to the much trumpeted $100 million Bill Gates has donated to India's fight against HIV, he's funding the Microsoft jihad against Linux to the far more impressive tune of $421 million.

The .au domain name administrator has confirmed plans to initiate second level domain names for states and territories, a move touted as allowing state or local groups to promote their interests online.

Lawrence Livermore National Lab is putting together a supercomputer that will boast nearly the same performance as the ASCI White system from IBM that the lab now uses but it promises to be 10 times cheaper. Called Evolocity, the system will be the fastest clustered supercomputer in the world. But it will be far easier on the wallet, thanks to the use of off-the-shelf components and the open-source Linux operating system.

Louis Dethy, a reclusive pensioner who booby trapped his home in Charlerois, Belgium with the intention of killing his estranged family, died himself when he inadvertently triggered one of his own devices.

13 November 2002

The drought gripping large parts of the country is starting to take its toll on the wildlife of outback Australia. The drought has become so bad in the far west of New South Wales that birds are dropping out of the trees.

Dublin's Trinity College Library administrator, Robin Adams, would like to discuss an uncanny resemblance between the 18th-century Long Room Library at Trinity, and the 'Jedi Archives' in the latest episode of the 'Star Wars' epic.

Best practices and step-by-step guidance on how to build a working Linux system on older hardware or on modern hardware with limited memory and storage.

The Australian competition watchdog, the ACCC, has launched an action against retail chain Harvey Norman and two of its most senior IT executives over alleged breaches of the Trade Practices Act.

12 November 2002

Altavista has recently changed their search engine to allow more competition with Google.com. It offers a whole set of new features, like searching through PDF documents, and more importantly got rid of their commercial portal interface.

The ACCC has filed proceedings against the New York based operator of a web site it alleges posed as the official site for the Sydney Opera House.

Australia's telecommunications complaints authority has welcomed federal government moves to cut off a practice whereby consumers are unknowingly lured into copping excessive telephone bills for Internet usage, but industry groups are less than happy with the proposed legislative changes.

Pixar has been sued by artist Stanley Mouse. Mouse created a movie treatment titled 'Excuse My Dust', which was set in 'Monster City', where the animated monster characters worked for the 'Monster Corporation of America'. One of the characters was a green, wisecracking, ambulatory eyeball. Furthermore, the lawsuit claims that a story artist from Pixar visited Mouse in 2000, and discussed Mouse's work.

11 November 2002

Kaspersky Labs, a Russian anti-virus company, has apologised for an e-mailed virus alert that was infected with the very worm the message was supposedly designed to warn against.

Mobile phones, electronic organisers and portable DVD players would be so much less cumbersome if they were surgically implanted under your skin. Science fiction? Not any more.

German prosecutors were investigating a complaint on Saturday that the brain of urban guerrilla Ulrike Meinhof was removed after her death in 1976 and examined to find a reason for her violent behaviour.

Telstra is offering sweetheart deals to municipal councils in an attempt to cripple competition for telecommunications services in regional Australia.

10 November 2002

The Federal Privacy Commissioner is expected to get tough with business over privacy breaches in response to a record quadrupling of formal complaints in the past year.

If John Le Carré were in Belgrade, he would have enough material to write at least three spy novels. Belgrade has been the main spy centre in Europe for a decade, and with an estimated 4,000 foreign spies in Belgrade now — most of them hiding behind various humanitarian, economic and non-government organisations — that doesn't look likely to change.

While you're working your way up to that case mod of your dreams, why not start small and modify your optical mouse by changing that red LED to a nice blue one.

Homosexuals are to be offered legally-registered civil partnerships under UK Government plans to give them the same rights as married couples.

09 November 2002

After a wait of almost ten years and passing through a series of owners' hands, new Amiga hardware is on sale. G4 processors at up to 800 MHz. Development of AmigaOS 4.0 has been continuing at a steady pace by Hyperion and will be ready for release early 2003.

A new set of fonts being developed by six publishers of scientific, technical and medical journals promises to contain every character — more than 7,000 in all — that might be needed in a technical article published in any scientific discipline. When complete, sometime next fall, the STIX fonts will be shared freely with publishers, software manufacturers and scholars, under the condition that they not be altered.

Six thousand police are camped in the Tuscan city of Florence in readiness for possible violence when up to 200,000 anti-globalisation protesters pour into the city tomorrow for a huge demonstration.

A rogue squirrel is spreading terror in a Cheshire town where it keeps attacking people. Children have been attacked, grown men chased and residents of Knutsford, central England, are fearful of letting their kids out to play.

08 November 2002

Clare Milne, whose grandfather AA Milne gave the world Winnie the Pooh, is seeking to claw back US commercial control of the honey-loving bear who has enchanted children across the globe for three-quarters of a century.

John Halderman, a computer scientist from Princeton University in New Jersey, plans to show delegates at a digital copyright conference in Washington DC next week that the idea of CD copy-prevention is 'fundamentally misguided'.

Two of the internet's 13 root name servers have been separated to improve the stability and security of the web's address system, following a major attack two weeks ago.

Top Microsoft executives, including co-founder Bill Gates and chief executive Steve Ballmer, have long derided open-source software as being everything from a 'cancer' to 'Pac-Man-like'. But those messages have failed to diminish the popularity of open-source programs such as Linux among developers and customers, according to a Microsoft memo distributed at a strategy meeting in Berlin in September.

07 November 2002

Connect Internet Solutions has launched a new broadband service targeting medium to large businesses with the claim its portfolio of offerings can reduce customer bills by 25%.

The Federal Government has given its blessing to Commonwealth departments and agencies to investigate and adopt open-source software.

The American Open Technology Consortium, a non-profit organisation of technologists who have joined together to educate lawmakers and regulators about technology — especially in regards to the Internet has compiled a list of the lawmakers responsible for eight bad internet laws. These bad coders and their backers have done more damage to computing, the Internet and freedom than all the virus authors, spammers and crackers combined.

One local small town chocolate company, DeBrand's, is planning to fight back against San Diego based PanIP's claim that they hold the patent over any automated commerce done by text and graphics on a video monitor. The owner of DeBrand's has even set up a web site to organise the different e-merchants, www.youmaybenext.com.

06 November 2002

A bizarre case mod that recreates the computer terminals from Terry Gilliam's Brazil, using an old Mac and a 1923 Underwood typewriter.

A start-up company, MagiQ Technologies, plans to introduce a cryptography system that uses 'quantum key distribution' to thwart eavesdropping on fibre optic communication channels.

A bacterium that thrives by feeding on a common pollutant may provide a means to help clean up contaminated soil and ground water.

An Indiana judge refused to dismiss a federal lawsuit against Vectren that accuses the utility of failing to install costly anti-pollution equipment at its ageing coal-fired plants.

05 November 2002

Blueprint for a Living Continent, a submission on the sustainable use of water resources, claims that Australia cannot be drought-proofed. It suggests managing drought better with an immediate end to broadscale land clearing, paying farmers to maintain environmental services like clean water and healthy soils, and extra costs on food and water to pay farmers to farm sustainably.

Open-source software gave Microsoft a one-two punch this week, with the European Union and an African non-profit educational organisation showing preference for Linux systems.

Procter & Gamble, one of the world's leading cosmetic companies, planned to side-step an EU animal-testing ban by conducting the experiments outside Europe.

At least 60,000 Telstra customers have been hit by a billing bungle, with subscribers to high-speed internet facing higher charges after the company misread their use of the service.

04 November 2002

The EU has fined Nintendo for price discrimination in different countries. The next logical question is whether DVD region coding also runs afoul of the same law.

The Federal Government has asked the telecommunications watchdog to investigate claims that Telstra provided misleading information to a Senate inquiry and the Victorian Supreme Court. The allegation has been made by a group of small business owners who have been involved in a long-running dispute with Telstra over telephone faults.

Joe Wagner, a Stanford doctoral student and founder of Hypertouch, sues a bulk e-mailer, seeking $50 per unwanted message — which he plans to donate to charity if he wins.

Nancy Carter, a Toronto-based freelance TV producer, has been battling US-based Inter.net Group for the past 16 months over a billing dispute she says may have cost her a lucrative job opportunity. Now she wants $110,000 in damages over a policy that led Inter.net's Canadian subsidiary to keep her ISP account open for incoming e-mail even while denying her access to the account.

03 November 2002

Enmax and Vision Quest Windelectric plan to build Canada's biggest wind farm in breezy southern Alberta, a CA$100 million project aimed at spinning out enough renewable power to supply more than 32,500 homes.

Ken Adelman, founder of TGV and Network Alchemy, is using a digital camera, helicopter, and a Power Book to take a high resolution photograph every 500 feet down the California coast with the aim of busting people putting up illegal sea walls. Also of note: the web site has 44GB of photos so far, runs on solar power, and is Microsoft Free. Pocketmail plans to shut down its Australian technical support operation in the next two months, but says staff cuts will be minimal.

In ten years with the Boy Scouts, Darrell Lambert has held almost every leadership position in his Port Orchard troop. He's earned 37 merit badges and the coveted Eagle award. He exemplifies the Scouts' standards in every way but one: He doesn't believe in a god.

02 November 2002

SuSE Linux is developing a desktop Linux distribution that will allow Windows users to continue using (some of) their Windows applications, including Microsoft Office.

Miles has performed some interesting case mods including one that involved the sacrifice of his kid's furby.

Satellite broadband ISP Access 1 suddenly closed down last Friday, leaving its customers less than eight hours to find alternative Internet access.

European scientists have carried out the first experiments on antimatter. Researchers in Geneva, Switzerland, have been able to trap and control anti-hydrogen atoms in a chamber at a sufficiently low temperature to begin studying their physics in detail.

01 November 2002

MasterCard International is expecting to make available to Australian banks in the first or second quarter of 2003 new technology designed to minimise credit card skimming.

The next wave of weblogs, or blogs as the sites are known, may very well be for knowledge management, or k-logs.

Japanese animators Masamune Shiro (Ghost in the Shell) and Hajime Katoki (Gundam) have decided to apply their creative design skills to a new line of limited edition optical mice.

A federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled that the government cannot revoke doctors' prescription licenses for recommending marijuana to sick patients.

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