December 2002 Archive

31 December 2002

Does abortion lead to breast cancer? Does condom use lead to increased sexual activity? According to the government, the answer is now inconclusive, as they blindly alter low-level scientific conclusions to satisfy conservatives.

Each year, governments chip away at citizens' civil liberties. It's a tactic the United States condemned during the Cold War but now uses in the war on terror.

On the internet, you can learn about virtually anything. You can seek comfort from others similarly afflicted by a rare disease or explore such sensitive topics as birth control. Just as long as you're not connecting from work, a school or a public library.

Hole after hole, breach after breach, flaw after flaw is found — and most of the time, it's in a Windows system. Yet hackers generally don't exploit them. Why is that?

30 December 2002

Renewable Energy Generators Australia said that a report recommending the end to a mandated target for increased green energy use was flawed and would put at risk billions of dollars in investment.

After seeing wolves in the zoo and on television, the Utah trapper who accidentally caught a wolf near Morgan last month was sure he would recognise a wolf if he ever saw one in the wild. An event that has caused somewhat of an uproar in Utah.

Ukrainian police at Rovno, southern Ukraine, have seized a batch of radioactive xmas trees that businessmen were selling at local markets for the upcoming Orthodox festive season.

A British woman, told by her construction worker husband to expect an 'expensive vehicle' for Christmas, naturally expected a sports car, but she was wrong. Denise Guy, 54, opened her front door on Christmas day to find her 40-year-old husband dressed as Santa Claus, behind the wheel of a seven-tonne excavator.

29 December 2002

After 19 years as a state Fish and Wildlife officer, Bob Lantiegne says he is being harassed because he's gay — and that a number of investigative agencies say they can do nothing about it Joseph Turow has begun a crusade to de-capitalise the word Internet and, by extension, to acknowledge a deep shift in the way that we think about the online world Mexico's equivalent of the RIAA used federal police to raid Grupo Mekong, responsible for half of the 400 million virgin CDs imported each year, accusing them of being in league with the Piracy business in Mexico. The rationale being that record companies buy only 20% of Mekong merchandise, so the other 80% must be going to pirates, disregarding computer users, independent labels or other legal uses The frenzied bidding for a tumbledown Northern California town closed at nearly US$1.8 million yesterday on eBay. If the deal goes through, 82 acres of Bridgeville will go to the unidentified buyer who put in a bid for US$1,777,877 just seconds before the Internet auction closed

28 December 2002

While the Pentagon has spent the past year planning for a war against Iraq, the peace movement has been gearing up to disrupt domestic military activity, tie up commerce and get out the anti-war message.

Since the dawn of the information age, computer security commandos have battled the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: child pornographers, drug lords, mafiosi, and terrorists. A noble struggle, to be sure, but mostly vapourware. The Feds have a massive, multi-agency plan to protect the national information infrastructure. Get ready for IT police and network smart bombs. Because of the inroads the Internet and other digital network technologies have made into everyday life over the last decade, it is increasingly possible to amass Big Brother-like surveillance powers through Little Brother means. The basic components include everyday digital technologies like e-mail, online shopping and travel booking, ATM systems, mobile phone networks, electronic toll-collection systems and credit-card payment terminals.

The Japanese Government is funding the development of diamond-based semiconductors to replace silicon chips. The main advantages of diamond include heat resistance and higher electrical resistance.

The Chinese Government has ordered the closure of more than 3,300 Internet cafés for safety reasons after a fire destroyed an underground cafe in Beijing in June this year.

27 December 2002

In an attempt to out do Clark Griswold, Alek installed 22,000 Xmas lights on the outside of his house alone. A webcam that allows you to turn the lights on and off and see the results of your handiwork. It only works between 6pm and 10pm MST and I can't imagine the neighbours are happy.

A Japanese manufacturer has come up with a spherical PC, it comes in silver or an attractive shade of lime. PCs are enough trouble without having to worry about them accidentally rolling off your desk.

A consortium of three universities and four Japanese companies is investing $25M into a project, that is supposed to deliver a 1.5TB DVD by 2010. Multiple layers being used for storage and, more importantly, they claim it will be backwards compatible to existing DVD technology.

New Jersey has just enacted legislation that would require all handguns to be able to recognise their owners and only fire when their owners grip them. Gun manufacturers will be required to implement this within three years of the New Jersey Attorney General's approval of an acceptable, commercially available model.

26 December 2002

Google has quietly launched an Australian site, google.com.au. Most Australian internet users typing in the google.com address will be re-directed to the local site, which allows them to restrict searches to Australian web sites.

Industry sources say that Microsoft have Macromedia in their sights. Whilst it could just be holiday gossip, if they do pull it off it could have a significant impact on the cross-browser compatibility of Flash applications.

The University of Alberta's undergraduate computing science student group modded the office shredder — with duct tape, 110v case fans and an Athlon fan — to increase the speed of the paper shredder from 12 to 37 pages shredded before overheating.

The US Copyright Office asked for public comment on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and it got it. Critics worry about everything from losing great art to restricting blind people's access to information.

25 December 2002

Thirty-five-year-old Herve Bernaudon, a sheep farmer from the Hautes-Alpes region, has become the first person in France to be placed under formal investigation for killing a wolf.

Psychologists at the University of Sussex found that people who get involved in campaigns, strikes and political demonstrations experience an improvement in psychological well-being that can help them overcome stress, pain, anxiety and depression.

Data recorders in aeroplanes, the so-called black boxes, describe what went wrong after a disaster. Now, medical devices are emerging to act like a black box in the human body, except they're being used to prevent disaster.

A bizarre rumour that Malawi's government is colluding with vampires to collect human blood for international aid agencies in exchange for food has led to a rash of vigilante violence.

24 December 2002

Joe Strummer, former singer, guitarist and songwriter for legendary punk rockers The Clash, died Sunday at his home in Somerset, England of an apparent heart attack; he was fifty.

A mutual fund firm with ties to the Getty family oil fortune said it plans to offer a pair of ecology-friendly funds with the Sierra Club name that will not invest in oil stocks.

Yahoo is planning to acquire search engine specialist Inktomi in a deal worth $235 million as it aims to strengthen its search services.

British mobile phone maker Sendo filed a suit in a US federal court against its former partner Microsoft, accusing it of stealing its technology and customers.

23 December 2002

A new Amnesty International report reveals that China's Internet police force is brutally efficient — and becoming more so every day.

The Denver police have gathered information on unsuspecting local activists since the 1950s, secretly storing what they learned on simple index cards in a huge cabinet at police headquarters. Among those the police spied on were nuns, advocates for American Indians and church organisations.

While the volume of e-mail has kept growing, the tools most people use for mail have barely evolved in the past two years.

Chinese and French scientists say they have developed a new approach to treating the equivalent of HIV in monkeys.

22 December 2002

Forbes just put out a list of 85 breakthroughs since 1917 (sneakers) that have revolutionised the way we live. This is interesting on a number of levels, a reminder of the past (modem: 1962), and a frightening realisation that not much of interest has come out of the last 10 years (only 4 of the 85 ideas).

The South Australian control team in charge of a new satellite hopes experiments to be conducted on the FedSat will pave the way for new mobile phone technology.

A poll of BBC World Service listeners attracted 150,000 votes from 153 countries and revealed the diversity of the world's musical tastes, after 'A Nation Once Again', an Irish republican rallying cry, was named the world's favourite song. Australians and New Zealanders voted for both Crowded House's 'Don't Dream it's Over' and 'Highway to Hell' by AC/DC. Disturbingly enough, the United States went for 'Girl from Ipanema'.

Germany is being flooded by cheap beer, selling for as little as five cents a can, as shops rush to clear stocks ahead of new charges from January to discourage throw-away containers.

21 December 2002

Slaughter, and then worse, came to Butare, a sleepy, sun-bleached Rwandan town, in the spring of 1994. Hutu death squads armed with machetes and nail-studded clubs had deployed throughout the countryside, killing, looting and burning.

Barry Shein is president of The World, a small ISP in Boston. Founded in 1989, The World was the first dial-up Internet service provider in the world. It has survived competition from the telecoms and weathered the dot-com meltdown, but Shein is worried that it won't survive spam. The multinational creation, KaZaA, has become the most popular online file-swapping system in the world that a coalition of entertainment companies has filed suit to shut it down.

Sharp is bringing out a 3D monitor next year that requires no special glasses. It took them one day to convert Quake to work with the monitor. They are already selling mobile phones in Japan for the NTT DoCoMo network with scaled-down versions of the screen.

20 December 2002

A handful of US municipalities are refusing to let their employees collaborate with federal officials seeking to spy on residents under the Patriot Act. Meanwhile, librarians are launching their own protests.

Determined to repel an invasion of the English language, a local authority has proposed a ban on home building by non-Irish speakers in a 60-mile stretch of Connemara coastline from Barna to Carna, near the booming city of Galway.

Canadian thieves calling themselves Grinch Enterprises kidnapped a Santa Claus figure off an Ontario family's front lawn and are holding the jolly icon for a ransom of canned goods for a food bank.

Ahsan Azamtullah, a Pakistani man, has been sentenced to life in prison under the country's blasphemy laws for being a follower of Sardar Ahmed, a self-proclaimed prophet.

19 December 2002

Julian Haight appears to be blocking Spamex, a competitor to SpamCop that provides disposable e-mail addresses as a spam-proofing technique. He has also periodically blocked Despammed.com, another free-service competitor.

Rich Clark claims he was involved in a car chase and received threatening phone calls after taking photos of the house belonging to mega-wealthy bulk e-mailer, Alan Ralsky.

It took an airport metal detector to give a Canadian woman a clue to why she was suffering from persistent stomach aches four months after having abdominal surgery.

A pub with no beer is one thing but Goondiwindi, in southern Queensland, has a new water park with no water.

18 December 2002

A jury acquitted Russian software company, ElcomSoft, of criminal copyright charges related to selling a program that can crack anti-piracy protections on electronic books.

AOL Time Warner has released Netscape 7.01 that allows users to suppress pop-up ads, one of the most hated ad formats.

Linux is making inroads into the nation's universities, pushing Windows, Unix and Apple operating systems off the desktops of first-year IT students.

Music and film producers have been slammed as rip-off merchants in a scathing industry review by Forrester Research chairman and chief executive George Colony. And according to Gartner analyst Daniel McHugh, attempts to block copying of music CDs will spark an arms race between record labels and hackers.

17 December 2002

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan was shocked at the public humiliation of a woman councilor beaten and paraded naked through a village on the orders of a powerful landlord.

According to a new United Nations report, despite global treaties, children are being recruited as soldiers by governments in the Congo, Burundi and Liberia and are prevalent among rebel groups in Colombia, the Philippines, Uganda and Sri Lanka.

A US court has granted AOL almost US$7 million in damages from CN Productions that sent its users nearly 1 billion spam messages touting adult web sites.

Thousands of Gentoo and Magellanic penguins have been found on washed up on beaches partially paralysed and dying in the Falklands.

16 December 2002

The so-called Group Five set of customers, including the ACCC and top government departments, is considering opting out of a servicing contract with Telstra.

United States Government officials have confirmed the CIA has a hit list of terrorist leaders it is authorised to kill.

The world's biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don't be evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business.

ICANN plans to approve a host of new address suffixes to join the likes of .com and .org over the coming year.

15 December 2002

The sequel to legendary anime movie Ghost In The Shell, Innocence: Ghost In The Shell, has been announced. Due out in spring of 2004 in Japan, with Mamoru Oshii onboard writing the screenplay and directing.

The grey wolf that was captured in Utah and sent back to Wyoming is heading back to his home ground. While federal agents are probing the death of a grey wolf that they believe died of a gunshot wound in South Dakota.

Search engine company Google is testing an online shopping price comparison service, Froogle, and has introduced beta versions of two other search tools, Google Webquotes and Google Viewer.

If a US-led war with Iraq smears blood on his hands as an American citizen, Sean Penn wants to know why — and he has come to Baghdad to find out.

14 December 2002

A future high school history teacher, Jason Eric Smith, sold an 867MHz PowerBook G4 on eBay right before finals. He found out the hard way that people are out there to rip you off, and he went to great lengths to catch this guy with the help of Mac heads everywhere.

Lurking in the heart of the Melbourne Museum is the 50 year old CSIRAC computer, and it's still functional. Sporting a whopping 2K of RAM and screaming along at a blistering 300kHz it proves the adage that they really don't make 'em like they used to.

DSL roll-outs are galloping ahead around the world, with more than 30 million subscribers now using the technology, but Australia continues to lag behind its Asia-Pacific neighbours.

Federal authorities are pursuing fugitive crime boss James 'Whitey' Bulger in cyber space under a first-of-its kind agreement announced Wednesday between the FBI and Web portal Terra-Lycos. With a presence in 42 countries and in 19 languages, Terra Lycos is known for the world-wide scope of its Web presence.

13 December 2002

A group of techie activists equips tree-sitters in Northern California's Headwaters Forest with laptops and wireless gear in hopes that protestors' in-tree blogs will draw attention to old-growth logging.

Wildlife campaigners are backing calls for the New Zealand government to support an industry that turns the alien brush-tailed possum species into coats and socks.

A banner hanging in United Record Pressing's shipping room gives a peek at what the Nashville company hopes for its future: 'Vinyl Rules! Pure analogue, anti-digital revolution'.

Frank Polifka has a patent on his tornado in a can device — officially known as Windhexe — that creates a tornado force wind. Besides pulverising concrete, it can pulverise small objects including jelly fish, and chicken feet without destroying the organic compounds. The chickens don't like it.

12 December 2002

A group of professional Internet engineers and technicians from New Zealand are following the published procedure to obtain the delegation of geek.nz from the NZ Domain Name Commissioner. If successful, geek.nz would be New Zealand's twelfth second-level domain.

An innovative solution to curb both spam e-mail and telemarketing. In short, the potential recipient of a message/call advertises the potential cost of contacting him uninvited. If the sender agrees to pay that cost, it acquires a token that it includes in the message/call and the message/call is accepted. The recipient decides to collect the fee or not, while recipients in a white list are not required to carry a token. The author, Scott Fahlman, also provides for a more detailed description.

Software meant to protect young people from the seamier side of the Internet may also be blocking important health information.

Apple's latest promotion is a gimmick with Madonna, Tony Hawk or Beck's signature, or a No Doubt logo on an iPod. It seems Apple's really pushing the iPod as a too-cool fashion accessory as much as a too-cooler MP3 player.

11 December 2002

The fires raging around the island continent's biggest city, Sydney, this week are as natural to the bush as are kangaroos and emus, or sun and rain. But urban sprawl has blurred the divide between the outback and the cities, and while fires the size of England rage almost unnoticed in the remote centre of Australia, in populated areas the flames can bring death and destruction.

The NSW Government has backed off repealing controversial internet censorship laws, putting the legislation in the deep freeze while it waits for a federal review.

Customs is targeting terrorists with technology that allows officers to track passenger data and travel patterns.

French is such a rich language that it now has, by state decree, two words for '@' — the 'at' sign that has become a world-wide symbol for the Internet — but only one official way to pronounce it.

10 December 2002

Take a tour of London Underground stations that have been abandoned during the more than a century history of the commuter system. It's all very Neverwhere CNN owned the story of the first Gulf War — blogs and the Internet may carry the day if there is a sequel British vagrants will be wearing a variety of styles in fur this winter as an animal rights group hands out unwanted coats in its 'Fur Giveaway' campaign Three environmental groups — the International Centre for Technology Assessment, Sierra Club and Greenpeace — sued the Environmental Protection Agency in a bid to force it to combat global warming by limiting air pollution from US automobiles

09 December 2002

Brian Thomas, a PhD candidate in ecology at Stanford University, has done an ecological analysis of humans and vampires in Sunnydale, the home of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He took some initial assumptions on rates of population growth, vampire feeding, etc and plugged them into a differential equations model. What he got was an equilibrium human population of 36,346, and an vampire population of around 18, and furthermore the equilibrium is stable. His conclusion was that even though the show's designers are not ecologists, they managed to come up with ideas that actually made ecological sense Consumer Reports magazine's vintage photo gallery is a fun site in which you can see photos from when the magazine reviewed electric toasters in 1956, in-car record players in 1961, radio sunglasses in 1966, and other good stuff. Don't forget about the flaming Nerf ball A totally new and highly controversial theory on the origin of life on earth, is set to cause a storm in the science world and has implications for the existence of life on other planets Jules Verne anticipated man's first trip to the moon in his 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon. Arthur C Clarke foresaw space stations and sentient computers in his classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Ray Bradbury wrote about extraterrestrial civilisation in The Martian Chronicles decades before NASA's Mars Rover surveyed the planet. These accounts, written before space travel was possible, have inspired generations of space scientists and explorers. Now, the European Space Agency hopes to recognise young writers and inspire future astrophysicists and astronauts by sponsoring the Clarke-Bradbury International Science Fiction Competition

08 December 2002

West Bloomfield spammer Alan Ralsky, who just may be the world's biggest sender of Internet spam, is getting a taste of his own medicine. Ever since an article was written on him a couple of weeks ago, he says he's been inundated with ads, catalogues and brochures delivered by the US Postal Service to his brand-new US$740,000 home.

Relatives of Ray Wallace, the man behind the legend of Bigfoot, which became the US equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster, have finally confirmed it was a hoax after his death at the age of 84.

Phil Lelyveld, a Vice President for Disney, has written to the FCC to tell them to ignore Digital Consumer's comments on the Broadcast Flag issue. The Broadcast Flag is an inter-industry conspiracy to turn over the keys to general-purpose computing to Hollywood studio execs — under this proposal, no one will be able to ship digital television technology (like DVD recorders and FireWire) without Hollywood's permission. Lelyveld wrote to the FCC — who are taking comments on the proposal — without mentioning his day-job, to tell them that Digital Consumer, a civil liberties groups with more than 40,000 members, is nothing more than a 'two dot.com millionaires' working to create a world 'where we are all artist/waiters'.

The Japanese consumers in the Kyoto and Hyogo prefectures of Japan have filed a lawsuit against Walt Disney Japan over the red tint on the Japanese DVD release of Spirited Away. Japanese consumers who purchased the Spirited Away DVD were very disappointed when they discovered a red tint to the film. A hundred thousand consumers complained, but Buena Vista Home Entertainment Japan, a subsidiary of Walt Disney, pretended nothing was wrong with the disc.

07 December 2002

The release of the Internet Industry Association's cybercrime code has been delayed because of concerns raised by the Privacy Commissioner.

Gay men, lesbians and bisexuals are to be offered the same rights as married couples under revolutionary UK Government plans to create legally-recognised civil partnerships.

NASA is threatening to mothball the International Space Station unless Russia coughs up its share of the money for maintenance and support missions.

The PlayStation 2 continues to dominate hardware sales in the UK, with over 90,000 units of the console sold in the last week of November — three times the sales of Xbox and GameCube combined.

06 December 2002

Power surges and sags caused by bush fires in the Sydney basin have done untold damage to computing infrastructure, and highlighted the need for business continuity protection.

According to recommendations of an Internet task force, the standards body for Internet domain names should ratchet up efforts to ensure the accuracy of domain-name owner data and eliminate bulk marketing that uses domain-name information.

An Edinburgh University team has received a grant to research Wind-Powered rainmaking machines. As a cautionary note, there is the instance of a 1952 cloud-seeding experiment gone terribly wrong.

If you're tired of your television set looking like a lump of black plastic, then Predicta have the telly for you. Or maybe a Hellraiser puzzle box PC is more to your liking.

05 December 2002

Antivirus companies are warning of a damaging new e-mail worm, which, when activated, deletes all files on drives labeled D, E, F and G.

Praemium Portfolio Services, a Melbourne-based online investment company, has savaged what it claims to be a lax response from the Australian Federal Police to a series of denial-of-service attacks on the company's site.

Solar power is set for a boost with the help of a material that can soak up energy from almost all of the Sun's spectrum. It should allow solar cells to jump in efficiency from today's best of 30 per cent to 50 per cent or higher.

Richard Gere has won the unwelcome accolade of being declared the year's worst celebrity waffler by Britain's Plain English Campaign. And British author Wendy Perriam won the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Prize with her description of a patient fantasising about her foot surgeon in the darkly comic novel 'Tread Softly'.

04 December 2002

321 Studios has released DVD X Copy, a US$99 program that is the first to let users create a mirror image of an entire DVD on a second blank DVD. The copy even includes menus, special features and enhanced audio.

Advocates of royalty-free policies in standards are slowly but surely turning the tide against intellectual property owners. But the battle isn't over. While the World Wide Web Consortium will no longer allow its process to be manipulated in a way that turns royalty-encumbered technology patents into standards and patent holders into jackpot winners, other standards bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force are not following the W3C's lead just yet.

The Digital Domesday project which had become unusable has now been revived thanks to the successful emulation of a 1980's era Acorn computer. Folks at Leeds University and University of Michigan did the emulation work. This is just one early indication of how difficult it will be to maintain our digital heritage. Note that the printed Domesday Book, on which the digital project was modeled, is still quite accessible after almost 1000 years.

A British woman may have discovered the ultimate in car security when she started her vehicle with a hi-tech electronic key — lodged inside the belly of her one-year-old son.

03 December 2002

Niki Passath, an Austrian electrician, has invented the world's first tattooing robot — a tattoo gun powered by Palm OS.

Brazilian company, Tec Toy, is releasing a new version of the venerable Sega Master System, dubbed the Sega Master System III, it will include 74 games built-in.

Three small ISPs have been snapped up by Primus Telecom's subsidiary HotKey.

Growing numbers of lawyers are pushing the murky edges of the law, hoping to strengthen — or at least clarify — the rights of animals, beyond traditional bans on cruelty.

02 December 2002

If you've ever wondered how the noxious John Edward runs his seedy little show, it has more to do with spewing lots of vague questions than with his alleged 'psychic gift'.

It's scary to think that sophisticated 3G mobile systems may depend for their survival on Hello Kitty, that cutesy Japanese pink cat with whiskers but no mouth. But that's what it might come down to.

According to energy regulator Callum McCarthy, Britain's push to build new wind farms could exacerbate current problems of overcapacity in the electricity industry — or nuclear power generators could be going out of business.

Rumours are leaking out over the next version of Windows, code-named 'Longhorn', due out in test form next year and in final form in 2004. It will have a new look and feel, very different from Windows XP. Its guts will also be radically different from Windows XP, because they're based on XML, the emerging lingua franca of the Internet. And it will be the first version that won't function fully without new hardware.

01 December 2002

The Department of Family and Community Services has breached the Privacy Act by spamming web site competition entrants on behalf of a university Telstra chief information officer Jeff Smith has revealed plans to shift the telco's back-office systems to the Linux operating system 'wherever possible', to take advantage of the platform's commodity pricing Australian researchers searching for extraterrestrial life are cheering at their recent elevation to associate membership of NASA and a $250,000 in-kind donation by Sun Microsystems To help protect the endangered Asian snow leopard, Thomas McCarthy and Priscilla Allen are trying to help people in a tiny Kyrgystan village sell hats, bags, slippers and other handicrafts

Search


Archives