March 2003 Archive

31 March 2003

Federal Privacy Commissioner Malcolm Crompton believes spammers may breach Australia's National Privacy Principles and hopes to join the fight against spam by launching a test case.

A serious security vulnerability has been found in the ubiquitous Sendmail software, which processes 60-70% of the world's e-mail messages.

Two incidents of friendly fire in the ongoing war against Iraq have raised concerns about potentially serious glitches in the targeting software of the US Patriot missile.

30 March 2003

Clay Shirky has a good essay on wireless networking, contrasting two approaches to building out a network, roughly akin to the cathedral and bazaar methods of building software.

The quest for perpetual motion has been going on since at least the 11th century according to the Museum of Unworkable Devices, and scientists have been getting it wrong ever since. Take a gander at some of the most valiant efforts (and ultimately the biggest failures) in trying to beat the laws of physics through the last 1000 years, along with other impossible inventions and devices.

A leading diabetes researcher, Baker Institute's Danielle Alberti Memorial Centre director, Mark Cooper, will today outline a possible new treatment which could save the lives of juvenile diabetes sufferers.

29 March 2003

Instead of the traditional soldering iron, Kenneth Maxon has successfully used a toaster oven to solder surface mount parts.

The Maryland General Assembly has voted to reduce penalties for cancer patients and others who smoke marijuana to relieve suffering.

A California anti-spam bill passed the Senate on Wednesday, a first step toward the passage of a law that would give people the right to sue spammers.

28 March 2003

Minotaur is a redesign of the Mozilla mail component. Its goal is to produce a cross platform stand alone mail application using the XUL user interface language.

Westpac's web site has been replicated across the Pacific, but the bank claims that all customer details are safe.

Domain names in languages other than English should be available within the next few weeks or months.

The Bush administration has a launched a global PR network to not only disseminate, but also to dominate news of the conflict around the world.

27 March 2003

A big thanks to Billy at Skin Deep for my new labret and nose piercings. You can never have too much shiny titanium in your face.

The Web sites of Arab news agency Al-Jazeera have been taken offline, with a denial of service attack one possible cause.

Computer games and business software could become cheaper under new parallel importation legislation expected to be passed by federal parliament.

An enzyme-catalysed battery has been created that could one day run mobile phones and laptop computers on shots of vodka.

26 March 2003

A mysterious Iraqi who calls himself Salam Pax, writing a blog from the heart of Baghdad, has developed a large internet following with his wry accounts of daily life in a city under US bombardment.

Red Hat is breaking tradition and skipping 8.1 and 8.2 and jumping directly to 9.0. RHN subscribers get it a week ahead on 31 March. Available to the rest the world a week later.

Authorities in China are using computers to spam mobile phones of law-breakers until they turn themselves in.

Swiss banking giant UBS said it will hand over to the US government some Iraqi assets that had been frozen since 1990. Now if only the Catholic Bank would hand over stolen Nazi assets from WWII.

25 March 2003

War profiteering has already begun and their targets are ordinary Australians, who they aim to dupe with simple yet cunning plans.

After getting a standing ovation as he walked on stage, Michael Moore was later visibly shaken at the loud boos and jeers that followed his anti-Bush comments at the Oscars.

CNN has effectively halted correspondent Kevin Sites' blog at kevinsites.net.

Microsoft's Hotmail has tightened restrictions on daily outbound messages sent by subscribers, a tactic it says will help curb spam.

24 March 2003

Optimus Prime is heading out to the Middle East with his guard unit to provide fire protection for airfields under combat.

The Los Angeles Police Department plans to install 27 wireless local area networks at police stations throughout the city in the next three months.

John Dvorak predicts that Apple will switch to Intel processors within the next 12 to 18 months.

The conflict in Iraq has spurred a wave of Web attacks from hackers expressing views about the war.

23 March 2003

Caltech computer scientists announced the protocol, capable of delivering 8,609 Mbps over the Internet, using 10 simultaneous flows of data.

Microsoft was forced to yank a magazine ad by the Advertising Standards Authority. In the ad they claim that their security is so tough they'll make the hacker extinct.

French oil giant TotalFinaElf has closed its oil production facilities in Nigeria's western delta and evacuated workers, due to spiraling violence that has left dozens of people dead.

22 March 2003

The 'Not In Our Name' register will act as an historical record of those Australians who do not support an attack on IRAQ by Australia without UN approval.

Galvanised by the Anglo-American attack on Iraq, thousands of anti-war activists around the world have taken to the streets, with more than 1,000 people arrested while demonstrating in San Francisco.

If you're tired of having to manually deliver documents or other items within your office building, and if your building has high ceilings, good lighting, and minimal air currents, then you will inevitably reach the same conclusion Joshua Tyler of HP Labs has: An automatic helium blimp delivery service.

Singapore's Internet registry has withdrawn its trademark application for the Internet domain name of .sg, following a hostile public reaction to the unprecedented move.

21 March 2003

A new federal rule — classifying grey wolves in most of the US as merely threatened rather than endangered — has just been announced by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. It's the first step by Interior Secretary Norton toward putting wolves under the control of states where politicians want to eradicate these magnificent animals Microsoft warned today about a serious flaw in almost every version of its Windows software that could allow hackers to seize control of a person's computer when victims read e-mails or visit web sites The retarded monkey boy and his allies are unlikely to face trial for war crimes although many nations and legal experts say a strike on Iraq without an explicit UN mandate breaches international law US citizens have turned on French fries and toast to vent their frustration at France's anti-war stance on Iraq. Now the French have joined in the food war by urging people to send pretzels to the retarded monkey boy

20 March 2003

What do you get if you give a delicate thread of spider's silk a glassy coating — and then remove the silk by baking? The answer is ultra-thin, hollow optical fibres, which are narrow enough to carry light beams around the fastest nanoscale optical circuits.

Al Gore has been chosen to be on Apple's board of directors. The inventor of the internet should be a valuable asset to Apple.

Melbourne IT is in the news again. Customers who have registered domains with the company are receiving fake e-mails asking them to renew domains which still have a long time to go before renewal.

19 March 2003

Peace activists girding for a possible US-led war against Iraq are increasingly turning to the Web to voice their opposition and organise meetings and demonstrations against military action.

Critics charge that it is the De Beers of the Internet: an organisation that, like the diamond cartel, has created an artificial scarcity to protect a few established players. This faceless power centre is ICANN. And its actions may jeopardise the future of the Internet.

Kiwi Richard Mander was one of the few who liked Clippy the Windows office assistant, and he wants to abolish the Web browser back button. If you're an enemy of the first and a fan of the second, you should be worried: Mander advises vendors on interface design.

18 March 2003

Donald Scott offers an insight into the horrors and perils of providing tech support for your family.

The American Academy of Diplomacy web site has been hit by attackers who posted a page stating 'no war', as the crisis over Iraq heads toward military confrontation.

Ipsos-Reid has released its latest research on file trading. Bottom line, the great majority of users do not believe they are breaking the law. Only 9% feel there is anything wrong with their actions. With 40 million Americans identified as active file traders this is indeed stirring information, though not surprising. Another stat, 73% of US downloaders report that their motivation for trading was to sample music for later purchase.

17 March 2003

An American peace activist has been run over and killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza.

Researchers from Stanford University have claimed to have extracted a private key from a SSL based Web-server by using timing based attack techniques.

Increasing numbers of small to medium ISPs are challenging the widespread Australian regime of limited data downloads with new and innovative approaches to pricing.

Estari is making dual head laptops. Orient it like a book, you have two portrait-oriented touch sensitive monitors. Orient it like a laptop and one of the monitors becomes a soft keyboard. Not they don't come cheap, with a starting price of US$4,000.

16 March 2003

The FBI says it may look into the case of forged documents the Bush administration recently presented as evidence of Iraq's nuclear ambitions.

Build your own 1:5 scale Sherman tank, it comes complete with working suspension, meticulously built wooden tank treads and X-Arcade controls.

Toshiba has come up with a cartridge full of methanol which could be used as an alternative to battery power.

15 March 2003

It is the oldest department of forensic science in the world and the seat of learning that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes. For the past 200 years, generations of pathologists at Edinburgh University's faculty of medicine have assisted the police in some of the most gruesome criminal cases in Scottish history, including the Lockerbie disaster and the World's End murders. Yesterday, that long and productive association came to an ignominious end after it emerged the university had refused to bid for the Crown Office contract to provide their forensic experts to the police.

Despite daily reports about the 'showdown' with Iraq, Americans hear very little from mainstream media about the most basic fact of war: People will be killed and civilian infrastructure will be destroyed, with devastating consequences for public health long after the fighting stops.

US Government agencies opened a package mailed between two Associated Press reporters last September and seized a copy of an eight-year-old unclassified FBI lab report without obtaining a warrant or notifying the news agency.

14 March 2003

Mozilla 1.3 is out and about. New to this version are features like image auto sizing, bayesian junk-mail filtering, dynamic profile switching, about:config for a pretty view into all of Mozilla's 'secret' settings, an initial version of Midas for rich text editing, and a lot of other fixes for performance, standards compliance and site compatibility.

A Texas start-up has developed a system for immediately backing up and restoring e-mail and other communication services in case of an outage — any outage. Just as important: MessageOne's service costs 90% to 95% less than conventional backup systems.

Eric Hunting suffers from Environmental Illness which perpetually confines him to his home, which even as carefully furnished as it is, is still slowly killing him. His web site, Shelter, is both a plea for help and a guide documenting one man's quest for non-toxic housing.

13 March 2003

The world's first brain prosthesis is about to be tested in California. The brain region to be replaced is the hippocampus, which 'encodes' experiences for storage as memories. Unlike devices like cochlear implants, which merely stimulate brain activity, the new silicon chip implant will take over the tasks of the damaged part of the brain.

The recording industry condemns the launch of two systems that will allow people to copy up to 100 hours of music onto a single disk.

European Commission experts have concluded that Microsoft violated EU antitrust rules, and the experts have proposed two major requirements: making Microsoft share more proprietary information with its rivals and uncoupling its Media Player audio-visual software from the Windows operating system.

The cost of oil dependence has never been so clear. What had long been largely an environmental issue has suddenly become a deadly serious strategic concern. Oil is an indulgence we can no longer afford, not just because it will run out or turn the planet into a sauna, but because it inexorably leads to global conflict. Enough. What we need is a massive, Apollo-scale effort to unlock the potential of hydrogen, a virtually unlimited source of power.

12 March 2003

The Citizen's Commission on Human Rights, one of the Scientology cult's more obnoxious front organisations that is basically a hate group targeting mental health professions, engages in domain hijacking. They grabbed wfmh.net in an attempt to poach surfers looking for the World Federation for Mental Health.

Telstra broadband cable users will receive a 25 percent rebate for February due to downtime, the second rebate to be paid to customers in as many months.

An employee at the top-secret Government Communications Headquarters has been arrested following revelations in The Observer last weekend about an American 'dirty tricks' surveillance operation to win votes at the United Nations in favour of a tough new resolution on Iraq.

Weblogs have been around for years but have gained rampant popularity only recently. This immense interest now is carrying over to the corporate world, where a few companies already are deploying corporate Weblogs for both internal and external communications.

11 March 2003

The father of Bali bomb victim Josh Deegan has stated that linking war against Iraq with the Bali tragedy was cynical and the prime minister should immediately withdraw his remarks. While the PM also copped an earful from New Zealand as their resolve strengthened against following Howard into war against Iraq.

In an era of high-tech war and space-age cyberweapons, Sony's PlayStation 3 is promising the most radical advance in computer technology and design since the introduction of the personal computer 25 years ago.

Telstra has moved to terminate several BigPond user accounts and signaled a more aggressive anti-spam policy to avert the threat of being excluded from global newsgroup communities due to large volumes of spam being sent via BigPond news servers.

Mitchell Baker discusses why browser innovation matters — especially Gecko, and why it will survive things like Safari.

10 March 2003

Australia's approach to broadband infrastructure is pitiful and we need to stop 'fiddling around' with technologies such as DSL and 'get serious'.

Afghanistan has entered the Internet era with the launch of its own .af domain, and two web sites.

Walter Kolbow, junior minister in the German Defence Ministry, was quoted as saying that the United States was behaving like a dictator over the Iraq crisis.

09 March 2003

In the same vein as the Internet Movie Database, the fledgling Internet Book List needs people to vote on books they've read, and even more it needs dedicated people to submit books and author information.

Robert Park is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland at College Park and the director of public information for the American Physical Society, wrote a list of warning signs to help federal judges detect scientific nonsense.

Visitors to MIT will soon have more to see than lab equipment and students snoozing through afternoon lectures. They'll also be able to gawk at — and even manipulate — fish as they swim alongside the pedestrians in MIT's famous one-sixth-mile-long Infinite Corridor.

Animals entering the UK under its pet passport scheme have been bringing in potentially serious exotic illnesses.

08 March 2003

A physics grad student in the UK has come up with the mathematical formula for how to flip a pancake and have it land correctly back in the pan.

After Yugoslavia's formal name change to Serbia and Montenegro, it is still not clear what will happen with the country's top-level domain.

A five-year-old Indian boy dutifully showed up in court after receiving a summons, only to find out the case was against his father.

07 March 2003

A 150-year-old invention combined with the latest silicon technology gives Sandia Labs an 'unbeatable' digital security device About 100 anti-war demonstrators marched through a mall Wednesday to protest the arrest of a shopper who wore a t-shirt that read Peace on Earth and Give Peace a Chance John Howard got a thumbs-down as a possible foreign minister from the then head of the Foreign Affairs Department, Richard Woolcott AOL announced that its spam filters hit the 1 billion reject mark for a 24 hour period. This is an average of 28 rejects per day per member. In addition, AOL spam engineers say they receive 5.5 million spam submissions each day from AOL users

06 March 2003

East Timor has bowed to intense political pressure from Australia and will today rush through the signing of an agreement to clear the way for joint development of the vast oil and gas reserves of the Timor Sea.

Fifty years to the day from the discovery of the structure of DNA, James Watson causes a furore by suggesting that stupidity is a genetic disease should be cured.

These guys have implanted the world's smallest webserver-on-a-chip into a dead fly. From the site: 'Fly, grants us the ability to virtually possess the body of a dead, preserved fly via web-based technology.' There is a webcam monitoring the fly, so you can watch as you blink the LEDs. And don't worry if something goes wrong with it — Several pre-programmed and wired flies will be on hand in case of technical malfunction.

05 March 2003

Internet Infidels Discussion Forums offers a humorous look at the US government's latest attempt at scare mongering — if you have set yourself on fire, do not run...

An early test version of the next major release of Microsoft Windows has been leaked onto the Net. Code-named Longhorn, it hints of major changes under the Windows hood, as Microsoft radically improves file management and searching features in Windows and in Yukon, the code-name for the next version of SQL Server, due out later this year.

One day we may have a Government that understands the IT industry and its problems, but that day will never come under Richard Alston.

The Advertising Standards Agency in the UK has outlined new rules which govern text advertisements including SMS spam, e-mail spam, and web pop-ups. All unsolicited advertising must now clearly identify itself as advertising. This is as a direct result of the number of complaints about junk texts, e-mail and web pop-ups.

04 March 2003

NSA personnel have been instructed to step up operations to bug the phones and e-mails of the UN Security Council. And, not surprisingly, the US news monopolies have been ignoring the story.

Dozens of young Iranians have been detained for 'unlawful actions' after using a web site to arrange dates.

Net Nanny 4.0, the internet filter provided by the three largest service providers, Telstra, Optus and OzEmail, is so ineffective it is about to be ditched by the Australian Broadcasting Authority due to its high failure.

03 March 2003

Egypt's legendary library of Alexandria boasted that it had a copy of every known manuscript in the world. The directors of the new Alexandria Library have joined with an American artist and software engineers in an ambitious effort to make virtually all of the world's books available online.

Education experts warned yesterday of the potentially damaging effect on literacy of mobile phone text messaging after a pupil handed in an essay written in text shorthand.

Wireless G, the new Ferrari of wireless networking, has just hit the market, driving techies mad with the promise of more speed than even they can handle.

02 March 2003

A journalist attends the World Economic Forum and writes her friends an e-mail about the experience. Two weeks later, that e-mail is on the Web, people she's never met are correcting her spelling, and the journalist is vowing to go back to longhand.

Filmmaker Michael Moore says journalists should look into a possible deal between the Bush administration and Russia to carve up Iraq's oil fields after ousting Saddam Hussein.

Visitors to Daypop, an index of Weblogs, were treated on Wednesday to a new feature called 'word bursts', an automated attempt to identify the hottest words at the moment.

01 March 2003

France's high-rise ghettos are fuelling machismo driven males to murder while leaving the young women of the area living in constant fear.

Microsoft is pushing for a change in at least Washington's anti-spam law. Some analysts claim that the changes contain holes that will allow Microsoft to be exempt from the law. Odd that Microsoft is simultaneously trying to stop spam sent to Hotmail users, and to make sure that it can send unsolicited commercial e-mail without penalties.

A German university was accused by the BSA of pirating MS Office, because they mirrored OpenOffice.org. The scripts from the BSA only check for 'Office' in the filename and then automatically send out notices to the ftp administrators.

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