April 2003 Archive

30 April 2003

British authorities arrested a man Tuesday believed to head a group of hackers known as 'Fluffi Bunni', which used a stuffed pink rabbit to mark attacks that humiliated some of the world's premier computer security organisations.

Wood mice make signposts out of leaves and twigs so that they do not get lost in fields.

In the toughest move to date against unsolicited commercial e-mail, Virginia enacted a law imposing harsh new felony penalties, including prison time.

29 April 2003

Amnesty International has criticised Australia's tough deterrent policy against asylum seekers as a regional conference co-sponsored by Canberra begins on Bali.

Conservation experts say overproduction of cheap robusta coffee beans — commonly used in instant coffee — may be contributing to the loss of tigers, elephants, orangutans and rhinos in Sumatra.

28 April 2003

California authorities who raided Jon Weinhart's Tiger Rescue last week discovered nearly 90 dead tigers and leopards at his home — including 58 dead cubs stuffed into three freezers — and piles of big cat pelts stacked in a storage barn.

Three paintings by Van Gogh, Picasso and Gauguin worth an estimated £4 million have been 'stolen to order' from the Masters collection at the Whitworth Art Gallery. They were found the next day crammed into a tube behind a public toilet.

In a huge setback to the big record and movie companies, a federal judge in Los Angeles ruled in favour of two file-swapping services; Grokster and StreamCast Networks.

27 April 2003

Computer book publisher O'Reilly & Associates is taking a dramatic stand against automatic extensions of US copyrights by voluntarily limiting its own copyright protection on hundreds of technical titles — and promising they'll enter the public domain after that.

Bob Carr's performance on forests is appalling, despite all the new National Parks. Many suffer pre-emptive logging.

Emarketersamerica.org has filed suit against spam opponents, seeking a jury trial and damages of $75,000. The complaint alleges antispam groups have interfered with contracts between marketers and their Internet service providers by petitioning the ISPs to remove the marketers from their networks.

Protesters in the Netherlands and London heckled Shell management at the oil giant's annual meetings this week over executive pay rises and environmental policies.

26 April 2003

A federal judge has ordered Harry Potter books back onto an Arkansas school district's library shelves, rejecting a school board's claim that tales of wizards and spells could harm school children.

In a move the company claims is designed to comply with federal regulations, Monster.com will delete most references to Syria, Iran, Sudan, Myanmar and five other countries from job postings and resumés.

The Cypherpunks have finally caught on to the blog phenomenon: enter Invisiblog. This blog system allows users to register accounts and update their weblogs using Len Sassaman's Mixmaster anonymous remailer program. Now you can post all those tales of late-night dumpster diving, without fear of being branded a terrorist.

Human rights groups have condemned the detention of three children as terrorism suspects in the notorious Camp X-Ray prison. The United States military admitted for the first time that three teenagers, aged 16 years and under, were among detainees.

25 April 2003

Investigators searching for a link between the bodies of a woman and an infant boy that washed ashore separately on the Richmond waterfront may find clues in an unusual medical phenomenon called 'coffin birth'.

Seattle retailers can continue to sell food products that contain hemp — at least for the time being — after a US appeals court said it would review a federal ruling making such products illegal.

Uninvited guests could soon be in for a shock. Security experts are discussing plans to roll out a non-lethal land mine that zaps intruders with 50,000 volts. The Taser Area Denial Device is based on the Taser electric shock weapon, widely used by police forces around the world. Like the Taser gun, the land mine fires darts at its victims. It satisfies the convention that bans explosive land mines, but some experts question its safety.

A civil liberties group is again trying to gain access to a secret list to determine if Pennsylvania's attempt to block access to child-pornography Web sites is affecting innocuous sites.

24 April 2003

Telstra has attracted political and media controversy over revelations that it uses Indian outsourcers for some of its software development after it was reported that almost 100 Indian programmers and analysts were working on Telstra projects for as little as $12,000 a year, undercutting Australian IT specialists who can earn about $60,000 for doing the same job.

Researchers from the University of New England at Armidale say urgent human intervention is vital if the pure bred dingo is to have a future. The Northern Territory's Parks and Wildlife Service says the dingo is not under threat in the Northern Territory. Meanwhile wildlife rangers are excited about the possible sighting of the spotted tail quoll, not been seen in the region for the past 50 to 60 years, in the Mount Dalrymple area of north Queensland.

Another chapter in the high times of the internet stockmarket bubble closed yesterday when the Chaos Group, a one-time high-flyer, announced plans to sell its internet music business back to its founder.

A bitter conflict is unfolding in northern Iraq between two minority communities, with the Americans accused of turning a blind eye to killings and ethnic cleansing.

23 April 2003

Peter Lloyd, author of Taking The Red Pill: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in The Matrix, believes that many of the plot developments in 'The Matrix' that seem to contradict the laws of physics, biology, etc, can actually be explained with a closer look at the science.

Rare 13th-century wall paintings have been uncovered after months of painstaking conservation work at a parish church in London's East End.

A grey seal trapped in waters teeming with salmon south of Loch Lomond was yesterday awarded an official £150 fishing permit by the angling club that threatened to shoot him less than a week ago.

The Australian Direct Marketing Association has been branded as delusional following its criticism of the National Office for the Information Economy's anti-spam report, which called for legislation banning junk e-mail.

22 April 2003

The US sugar industry is threatening to bring the World Health Organisation to its knees by demanding that Congress end its funding unless the WHO scraps proposed guidelines on healthy eating.

Web firms, such as Spoonfull.net, face investigations of 'cramming' — charging via telcos for unordered services.

From the beginning, the heads of the American Central Intelligence Agency followed a plan to use the work of agents posing as 'human shields'. The CIA chiefs used peace activists in America carefully and systematically.

Not one charge has been laid in Sydney since the post-Bali raids on six Indonesian families, but 255 Indonesians have been locked up since and the community feels under siege. Now some have even lost trust in each other.

21 April 2003

The Bush administration's doctrine of pre-emptive first strike represents a radical departure from previous US national security doctrine and national values. Non-aggression had been the guiding beacon in the United States' relations with the rest of the world.

Food from Kuwait finally arrives for the malnourished lions, tigers and other animals at Baghdad's dilapidated zoo.

A new security device, Observation Camera, allows householders to keep an eye on their properties using cameras that transmit images of intruders to their mobile phones.

20 April 2003

AntiCap UK, a not-for-profit pressure group, has been launched in the UK to campaign for unlimited broadband access after ntl's decision to limit the amount of downloads customers can make to one gigabyte per day.

British designer, Michael Gill, has made what he says is the world's first inflatable church — a grey plastic building with a blow-up organ, pulpit, altar, Gothic arches and fake stained-glass windows.

The US Army's chief of chaplains is investigating reports that a chaplain in Iraq was offering soldiers who haven't bathed in weeks a dip in a 2000-litre tank as long as they agreed to be baptised.

Some public library systems around the state won't provide the federal government with records of their patrons' reading habits, but they will still comply with that controversial requirement in the USA Patriot Act.

19 April 2003

Stephen Avery, of Briar Court, Oxford Road, Smethwick, whose dog was nearly half its natural weight, has been banned from keeping an animal for five years and ordered to do two years of community service.

Italian scientists from the San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Milan say they have cured mice suffering from a form of multiple sclerosis. They used a novel stem cell therapy that could offer new hope for patients with the auto-immune disease.

As fighting in Iraq enters the final chapter, the winners of the information war seem certain — online news services were boosted to new heights by those seeking a broader view.

18 April 2003

It's going wrong, faster than anyone could have imagined. The army of 'liberation' has already turned into the army of occupation.

Organised gangs of international art traffickers were behind the looting of the most important exhibits at Baghdad's national museum.

Even the animals have gone. Baghdad's frenzied looting spree has left nothing untouched, and the city zoo is no exception.

An exotic flesh eating fly, the parasitic Old World Screwworm fly, which has been found on pet dogs overseas could find its way to Australia.

17 April 2003

The National Office for the Information Economy has recommended the introduction of anti-spamming laws, with spammers possibly facing prison sentences, whilst simultaneously playing down their potential benefits.

Executives of companies found guilty of price-fixing could face jail terms under a federal government overhaul of competition law.

Richard Alston's Framework for the Future report came under fire before it was even released today, boding ill for the governments attempts to demonstrate it is acting decisively to improve Australia's ICT industry.

A simple flaw in Internet Explorer 6.0 causes the browser to crash when it views pages containing malicious HTML code.

16 April 2003

AOL has launched an intensified legal assault on junk e-mail by filing five lawsuits against more than a dozen individuals and companies accused of being major purveyors of spam.

Legislation aimed at blocking freedom of information applications on the government's internet censorship regime appears to be heading for defeat in the Senate, as the Democrats are unlikely to support it.

Telstra will not support laws banning the use of hands-free and handheld mobiles in vehicles, ignoring concerns by safety advocates who point to research that both are unsafe for driving.

Sony will put an upgraded version of its PlayStation 2 video game, featuring improved DVD playback and a better remote control, on sale in Japan in mid May.

15 April 2003

The US says it will recover and repair priceless antiquities looted from Baghdad's national museum. Which is laughable when they just sit back and watch as library books, letters and priceless documents are torched. It should prove interesting watching them try to pry artefacts out of the claws of wealthy American collectors.

Welcome aboard the Iraqi gravy train. There will be no role for the UN in setting up an interim government in Iraq. The US-run regime will last at least six months, probably longer. And by the time the Iraqi people have a say in choosing a government, the key economic decisions about their country's future will have been made by their occupiers.

Telstra claims it is disabling an increasing number of BigPond Internet accounts involved in spamming as the nation's largest ISP adopts a 'get-tough' policy on the annoying and expensive practice.

The Department of Energy has chosen to completely disregard the key finding of the National Academy of Sciences that polygraph screening is completely invalid.

14 April 2003

In the summer of 2002, CDT embarked on a project to attempt to determine the source of spam. To do so, we set up hundreds of different e-mail addresses, used them for a single purpose, and then waited six months to see what kind of mail those addresses were receiving. The results offer Internet users insights about what online behaviour results in the most spam. The results also debunk some of the myths about spam.

Starship Dimensions places images of various starships from science fiction settings such as Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, ID4, Macross/Robotech, Lexx, Freespace and Battlestar Galactica side-by-side, in scale. The author has also conveniently included football fields, humans, King Kong, and buildings for comparison. You can even drag them around the page and stage your own interstellar battle royale.

13 April 2003

In Canada, when engineers finish their undergraduate degree, they attend a ceremony referred to as Kipling. Alongside the formal ceremony are the kipling pranks. This year, the Software Engineers at McMaster University designed a life sized Pac-Man board, thus answering the question of whether or not software engineering is in fact engineering.

Sony has taken an extraordinary step to cash in on the war in Iraq by patenting the term 'Shock and Awe' for a computer game. It is among a swarm of companies scrambling to commercially exploit the war in Iraq, which has killed more than 5,000 soldiers and civilians in the space of three weeks.

The family of a British peace protester, shot by an Israeli sniper as he shielded three young children, claimed yesterday that he appeared to have been deliberately targeted for assassination.

12 April 2003

Another spam e-mail fraudulently claiming to represent an Australian bank is doing the rounds, this time claiming to be from ANZ.

WorldCom is planning to announce that it will abandon its scandal-tainted corporate moniker and take on the name of its better-known long-distance subsidiary, MCI, according to sources familiar with the company's intentions. And for much the same reasons the dodgy Advantage Group has rebadged itself as Provenco, no doubt hoping that customers have the attention span of a goldfish.

An extreme case mod of a Nissan Sentra, where a car is turned into a go-kart.

The House approved nearly $19 billion in tax breaks Friday for energy companies and power producers and set up a showdown with the Senate over energy policy, particularly oil drilling in an Alaska wildlife refuge.

11 April 2003

The Pentagon has held up its practice of 'embedding' journalists with military units as proof of a new media-friendly policy. On 8 April, however, US military forces launched what appeared to be deliberate attacks on independent journalists covering the war, killing three and injuring four others.

Children using Google's SafeSearch feature, designed to filter out links to Web sites with adult content, may be shielded from far more than their parents ever intended.

Congressional Republicans, working with the Bush administration, are manoeuvring to make permanent the sweeping anti-terrorism powers granted to federal law enforcement agents after the attacks of 11 September 2001.

The matriarch of a herd of elephants in South Africa opened a gate with her trunk to free antelopes being held at a camp in the east of the country.

10 April 2003

The 70th anniversary wasn't noticed in the United States, and was barely reported in the corporate media. But the Germans remembered well that fateful day seventy years ago — 27 February 1933. They commemorated the anniversary by joining in demonstrations for peace that mobilised citizens all across the world.

Standard PC file-compression programs can already be used to detect the language in which a piece of text is written. Now researchers have shown they can distinguish between classical music, jazz and rock — all without playing a single note. And audio fingerprinting can name a tune as it plays, promptly displaying the title and artist on an internet radio or mobile phone.

Privacy International announced the results of its competition to find the worlds most pointless, intrusive and egregious security measures.

Is your Internet service provider appropriating your intellectual property? The question was bought home to NZ IT columnist Bruce Simpson when he found the ISP he was using claimed rights over his intellectual property in its terms and conditions.

09 April 2003

Researchers are developing a computer that helps people cope with the daily deluge of e-mail messages.

A Los Angeles police officer, Kelly Chrisman, used department computers to access confidential law enforcement records of celebrities and sold the information to tabloids.

Legislators unanimously passed a bill that would let Washington residents sue illegal spammers in local courts, even if the e-mail is sent from other states.

08 April 2003

Martin Cooper, the inventor of the mobile phone, says that mobile carriers are making big mistakes in releasing Wi-Fi and other advanced data services.

Some anti-spam vigilantes are giving spammers a taste of their own medicine, bombarding them with e-mail, signing them up for catalogues and products they did not order and flooding them with phone calls.

07 April 2003

Radio stations that are 100% digital can't play certain copy-protected CDs because the copy-protection doesn't allow them to rip the tracks on to their station's system. Copy-protection is therefore directly responsible for the lack of airtime in this market by the artists who choose to copy-protect their CDs.

06 April 2003

Microsoft gave out copies of .NET Visual Studio Pro to attendees of the Microsoft .NET Student Tour. Despite the discs saying 'unlicenced software — illegal without separate license from Microsoft', the freebie didn't contain any license document, and one guy decided to ask the MS conference rep about it.

Habeas is suing two internet marketers, saying that they've included Habeas' haiku in their mail, thereby lowering their SpamAssassin score by 6 points, but allegedly violating the trademark.

05 April 2003

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry lashed out at top congressional Republicans after they assailed him for saying the United States, like Iraq, needs a regime change.

An Oregon anti-terrorism bill would jail street-blocking protesters for at least 25 years in a thinly veiled effort to discourage anti-war demonstrations.

The embattled music industry fired another strong counterattack, suing four college students at three universities who run file-sharing sites.

04 April 2003

Did you know that Taco Bell bought the Liberty Bell? Or that Spaghetti grows on trees? The Museum of Hoaxes compiles 100 of the best April Fool's Day hoaxes perpetrated through the ages.

Google and Amazon have tied the knot in a deal designed to expand Google's advertising presence and give Amazon users greater access to products not listed on the e-tailer's site.

Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, England's most senior family judge, said that homosexual partnerships should be recognised by law and transsexuals should have the right to marry in an assumed gender.

The Federal Government will create new offences for those who use the Internet to incite or promote suicide.

03 April 2003

After years of providing the Netscape-branded browser with its Unix operating system, Hewlett-Packard is sidestepping that product for its open-source original, Mozilla.

The phrase 'self-healing server' has an almost spiritual ring to it. Few IT marketing promises sound as appealing as this one, and IBM is spending a lot of money to make sure it sticks in the head of IT administrators.

A colossal squid has been caught in Antarctic waters, the first example of Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni retrieved virtually intact from the surface of the ocean.

02 April 2003

Federal investigators have arrested Andrew Carlssin, an enigmatic Wall Street wiz, on insider-trading charges. Carlssin claims his uncanny success in the stock market is due to his being a time traveller from the year 2256.

The Australian Defence Force's $1.23 billion Jindalee over-the-horizon radar network has made its official debut after 40 years of development.

The notion that as a Marine he would be expected to kill people somehow escaped Stephen Funk when he enlisted. Yesterday, 47 days after he refused to report for active duty in Iraq, Funk declared himself a conscientious objector.

01 April 2003

Sources close to Microsoft's legal department claim that the company has purchased the rights to an obscure patent that effectively gives it control of the entire open-source movement.

American troops shot and killed seven Iraqi women and children yesterday when the van in which they were travelling failed to obey orders to halt at a checkpoint near the city of Najaf in southern Iraq.

NXT has developed an LCD screen that can produce sound as well. They claim that the sound quality is quite good, and compare it to average multimedia computer speakers.

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