June 2003 Archive

30 June 2003

A Brazilian consumer has sued EMI and Sony because of the copy protection technology in a best selling album caused it to be unplayable in his car — he won.

In much the same way as bar codes entered our lives, RFID will soon be following our every purchase. But it has the potential to be misused to not only keep tabs on your purchases, but also on your movements and associations.

29 June 2003

Danny Wallace accidentally founded a group whose sole purpose is to perform unsolicited acts of kindness to unsuspecting strangers. Finally, a cult really worth joining.

Google's Toolbar 2.0 Beta has a feature that Microsoft forgot to include — it automatically block popups for IE5.5 and higher browsers.

28 June 2003

There are some cool hacks coming out of Amazon's open API and XML feed policy. Some nifty stuff — 27,000 developers have apparently signed up to build hacks on Amazon data.

CSIRO has just released a guide for the growing band of enthusiasts who are building homes of straw bales construction.

With a sizeable chunk of the spam now clogging the Internet's arteries emanating from Microsoft's own servers, the software giant's recent antispam campaign — splashy press events, high-profile lawsuits, e-mails from Chairman Bill — comes off as little more than grandstanding. The company should spend less time in court and more time working with other antispam communities on viable technology solutions. Fixing its own spam-spewing MSN service would be a good place to start.

27 June 2003

On the centenary of George Orwell's birth, author William Gibson says that 1984 is not about the future. It's not about the present. It's about 1948. Technology delivers us away from Oceania towards a state of absolute informational transparency where invasion of privacy is democratised. Here, even the powerful find it difficult to keep secrets.

All Australian schools would stick to the same curriculum, children would start school at the same age and sit the same leaving exam under a federal government plan unveiled Thursday.

A future generation of anti-aircraft missiles could be made far harder to dodge by a guidance system inspired by the flight of dragonflies and hoverflies. The missiles will mimic a strategy called motion camouflage, which predatory insects use to trick prey into thinking they are stationary.

Australia could be the first country to outlaw spamming and spammers could face jail sentences by the end of the year.

26 June 2003

TechTV, a United States-based cable television channel, is in talks with Foxtel about bringing its geeky content to Australia. Foxtel will need about 50 new channels for the network after it converts to digital transmission next year.

Microsoft's path to expand the Windows empire with a new search program called MSNBot is leading directly to search king Google.

Australia's domestic intelligence agency, ASIO, will have aggressive new powers from today to detain for an unlimited period citizens suspected of having information about terrorist offences, which raises the spectre of agency abuse.

25 June 2003

Vint Cerf, in his foreword to the latest Reporters Without Borders report on the state of Internet censorship, The Internet Under Surveillance — Obstacles to the Free Flow of Information Online, decried Internet censorship by governments, and put the onus on citizens of the world to not only keep that censorship in check, but ensure the information that is on the Internet is truthful.

Web users will soon be surfing video and audio content as easily as text and images thanks to some innovative Web tools — Continuous Media Web — being developed by CSIRO.

Allegations that Telstra sells email addresses of BigPond customers have been denied by the telco.

Noam Chomsky discusses the recent US policies in Iraq and the real goal behind the war.

24 June 2003

The protest against music discs with copy-control technology has now reached the corridors of political power, with a resident of Manly writing to the Federal Member for the area, Workplace Relations Minister Tony Abbott.

Because of the debate about ever-more centralised mass media and changing FCC regulations in the United States, the question of whether the Web is also becoming centralised has become a hot potato. However, the Web is not a mass medium. It's not broadcast. The Web is on-demand, driven by each customer's specialised need in each moment.

The dispute over genetically modified crops will intensify with news of the evolution of superweeds, which are resistant to the powerful weedkillers that GM crops were engineered to tolerate. While French small farmers' leader and anti-globalisation campaigner, José Bové, was starting a 10-month jail sentence last night for destroying genetically modified crops, his third spell in prison in four years, after his highly melodramatic arrest.

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos wants the Internet retailer to offer its customers 'anything, with a capital A'. Add to that list the technology for building a mini-Amazon.com of one's own.

23 June 2003

Serial spammers Queensland Computer Company have been disconnected from the iPrimus, as the retailer continues to frustrate ISPs by spamming — a practice that has not yet been outlawed.

Western Power, a West Australian power company, said its infrastructure had provided a viable option for piping commercial fibre-optic broadband to customer premises.

GeoVector has come up with a system that lets you point out a location. They say it could be used to get info on buildings and objects, such as pointing your mobile device at a movie theatre could tell you what's on. They've also developed a 'real world' version of Doom. So don't be surprised if you're in Japan early next year and see people running holding their mobile phone or PDA like a gun.

22 June 2003

Esso could face legal action from hundreds of companies after the Victorian Supreme Court ordered it to pay more than $1 million in damages over the Longford gas explosion.

Lunatic fringe Senator Orrin Hatch has suggested that people who download copyright materials from the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed. But Hatch himself is using unlicensed software on his official web site, which presumably would qualify his computer to be smoked by the system he proposes.

21 June 2003

The Family Court has mounted a major challenge to the detention of children under Australian immigration laws and claimed the right to order their release. Detaining children under such laws is probably illegal, the court ruled in a decision that could affect 108 children now in custody.

Researchers at the Solid State Electronics Laboratory at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed the world's smallest pinball game. And researchers at the University of Birmingham have developed a micro-engine that will allow people to charge mobile phones using lighter fluid.

NASA is putting money into Momentum-eXchange/Electrodynamic Reboost tether technology — MXER for short — an innovative concept that if implemented would station miles and miles of cart-wheeling cable in orbit around the Earth.

Less than two years after berating its rivals for over-charging customers, mobile phone company Vodafone has added a 25c connection charge - known as a flagfall — to its so-called No Plans service.

20 June 2003

Online reseller City Software has bought the remains of failed competitor E-Store, broadening its own customer lists and product range in the SMB space. E-Store is the second online retail brand to be acquired by City Software, which acquired International Software Warehouse in March 2001.

When computers become too small to be operated by buttons, how will we control them? The only option will be to gently bend them, according to engineers at Sony's Interaction Lab in Tokyo. They are developing ultra-small information gadgets such as map browsers for tourists, controlled not by a mouse or keypad but by a bit of deft deformation.

Shattered bones could soon be replaced by segments of artificial bone that can be 'printed' within hours. The artificial bone is strong enough to bear weight, and would slowly be replaced by new bone.

During a discussion of methods to frustrate computer users who illegally exchange music and movie files over the Internet, Senator Orrin Hatch asked technology executives about ways to damage computers involved in such file trading. Like that law would ever be used legitimately.

19 June 2003

Theodore Gray, creator of the Periodic Table Table, has an article on how to whip up a batch of ice cream in 30 seconds or so by using liquid nitrogen.

Phillip Knightley, an ex-pat journalist was who worked for Frank Packer's Consolidated Press and Keith Murdoch's Herald, asks; is the media, particularly TV, in the business of the mass-production of ignorance?

George Monbiot launches the Chartist movement of the 21st Century: a manifesto for a world in which every individual would have an equal say.

Microsoft has filed 15 lawsuits accusing the defendants of collectively flooding its systems and customers with more than 2 billion spam messages. While Telstra has terminated a BigPond account after a two-day spam campaign by the Queensland Computer Company — who was previously booted from iExec for the same offence.

18 June 2003

A hydrodemolition robot is going to restore seven bridges in Georgia. It's a robot that destroys everything in its path with a crushing stream of water 15 times more powerful than a jackhammer and it looks like a street cleaner machine on steroids.

Australia has slipped behind Estonia in world-wide broadband league tables, falling to 23rd behind the likes of Taiwan, Belgium and Austria, due to a lack of competition and ridiculous download limits.

'The Orica Report', suppressed for over a year, has finally been released due to an FOI application from the Greens, and pressure from the EPA. The report reveals a problem of lead pollution in Homebush Bay, and a reluctance on the part of the developer to admit the fact and responsibility for a cleanup.

Linux father Linus Torvalds is leaving microprocessor company Transmeta to work exclusively on Linux kernel development.

17 June 2003

Scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a smart brick which can monitor a building's health and report its conditions wirelessly.

An emerging type of chip architecture from QuickSilver Technology, known as adaptive, or reconfigurable, computing, could transform technology.

Chip designer ARM introduced a new instruction set for its ARM architecture, saying it will give consumers longer battery life, better performance, and lower memory costs from their mobile devices.

South Australia has caused eyebrows at the Initiative for Software Choice to be raised in concern, with the organisation writing to Premier Mike Rann to demand that a proposed open-source software bill be dropped.

16 June 2003

New Zealand porn king, Steve Crow, is threatening to sue the country's stock exchange for stealing the name of his sex magazine. He launched his adult magazine NZX in November 2001, and he wanted compensation from the New Zealand Stock Exchange, which has only just rebranded itself with the same name.

According to Dr Suelette Dreyfus, an expert in online sabotage, hackers are electronic graffiti artists, not terrorists, and even though some make political attacks on the net, they still should not be confused with terrorists.

Under a thick cover of fog, cattle duffers have stolen more than $600,000 worth of rare livestock in what has been described as one of the biggest cattle thefts in Victorian history.

15 June 2003

A pair of unusual political allies, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, a left-wing Democrat and a conservative religious group, teamed up on in Washington's latest bid to rid the Internet of spam to announce support for a new bill that would create a national 'Do Not Spam' registry of e-mail addresses and, unlike other federal proposals to date, give individuals the right to sue spammers for $1,000 per unlawful message.

Los Angeles officially becomes the world's first city to have its own Internet domain. An interesting attempt to cash in on the unwary by reselling the .la TLD that belongs to Laos.

Scotland may be the most popular UFO destination on the planet, but Roswell, New Mexico is the old favourite for government conspiracy buffs who believe the US government has been hiding proof of an alien spacecraft crash in 1947. Popular Mechanics has recently gained access to de-classified documents from the Roswell military base, and they contain no entries of unusual events or activity. I wonder if the release of these documents will deter the conspiracy theorists?

14 June 2003

A consortium of the world's top consumer electronics firms, mobile networks and broadcasters are funding the development of mobile phones that will spend money on your behalf. The consortium, called Mobile VCE, includes Nokia, Sony, Vodafone and the BBC.

IEEE has officially ratified the much-anticipated 802.11g high-speed wireless standard.

Privacy advocates say a shift by Microsoft could effectively marginalise a particularly intrusive use of Web bugs, the tracking and profiling devices used by online marketers and spammers. Last month Microsoft retooled its Hotmail service, adding a feature that allows users to block Web bugs placed inside e-mail messages.

Phone companies which allow SMS spam messages to be sent across their networks face fines of up to $10 million under a new industry code, which requires carriers and service providers to only send bulk SMS messages to users who have 'opted in', and to allow them to 'opt out' of receiving the messages. Don't get too excited, the ADMA have already challenged the proposal.

13 June 2003

Oscar-winning actor Gregory Peck, who just recently topped the American Film Institute's list of all-time cinematic heroes for his portrayal of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, died overnight of undisclosed causes at his home in Los Angeles; he was 87.

The long-awaited $500 million Optus/Department of Defence C1 satellite was launched from French Guiana in South America, opening the skies for the $600 million deployment of digital pay-TV in Australia.

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman has warned broadband users on the dangers of P2P programs, after a jump in complaints about hefty bills resulting from excess download charges.

When Stuart Payne set up a web site, Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down, devoted to the gourmet pleasures of tea and biscuits, he should not have been surprised that it attracted 250,000 visitors in two years.

12 June 2003

Spammers are hijacking IP addresses in the search for new ways to send mail, and Australia's ISPs are being told to beware of customers who bring their own addresses.

British Egyptologist Joann Fletcher has announced her team may have identified the mummy of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, the wife and co-ruler with pharaoh Akhenaten and stepmother to legendary boy King Tutankhamun.

A global search by the Tate gallery has unearthed 500 lost works by JMW Turner. Some have never been seen in public; others have not been displayed since the death of possibly Britain's most important painter.

A new report which finds photo-messaging seems to be the next 'breakout capability' of new-generation mobile phones is adding fuel to the fiery debate over the privacy implications of multimedia devices.

11 June 2003

Seduced by the siren song of wireless access throughout the home, many a user has experienced the discrepancy between the manufacturer's advertised claims (150 feet indoors, 300 outside) and real-world implementation (the living room and upstairs bedroom may as well be on different continents). In steely-eyed determination to exercise his inalienable right to network access anywhere on his property, Paul Boutin hired a WiFi engineer to help him bathe his property in 802.11 waves, using only mass-market consumer hardware.

Handwriting experts fear that the wild popularity of e-mail and IM, particularly among kids, could erase cursive within a few decades. I personally hate writing in cursive, I print faster and neater and have my own personal shorthand that negates any cursive benefits. I refused to continue cursive writing when I hit high school and got in quite a bit of trouble due to my stubbornness.

Scientists from the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory have created a working plasma force field.

While the number of those who have fallen victim to fraud when using online auctions remains low, the number is growing.

10 June 2003

A patent underlying the popular GIF format is set to expire soon. That could make PNG, created as a royalty-free alternative, obsolete — unless other issues come into play Mobile phone users should be able to keep their phone numbers if they switch to other wireless carriers, a federal court ruled yesterday, rejecting an appeal from big US mobile phone providers Harry Evans, the Senate's most senior official, warns that John Howard's proposed changes to the parliamentary voting system would deliver absolute power to the Prime Minister The .zip compression format has known remarkable stability and compatibility for many years, but that may soon change. PKWare and WinZip, makers of competing compression and encryption products, are fighting over the .zip standard — which means that .zip archive files created by one program may not be accessible by the other

09 June 2003

In the past four years, ever lighter electronics and a growing grid of satellites, along with a network of programmers, tinkerers and trekkers, have brought real-time connectedness to the world's most remote places.

UK boffins have demonstrated unbreakable quantum cryptography over fibre links longer than 100km for the first time. Researchers at Cambridge-based Toshiba Research Europe say their work paves the way for commercial quantum cryptography systems within three years.

So what does a Canadian cabinet maker who's a closet techie do during those long winter months? You modify a 17" monitor case to house your computer and call it the iMike.

08 June 2003

George Ziemann's last installments of his series on 'Thomas Edison, Intellectual Property and the Recording Industry' show that the controllers of the media bullied folk back then as they do now — and it didn't work; The Industry Evolves, Copyright and the Grand Illusion and Bringing the Past Into the Present.

07 June 2003

Bruce Sterling refers to the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness plan as 'Poindexter's nutty scheme': 'You have more privacy if everyone's illiterate, but you wouldn't really call that privacy. That's ignorance.'

Telstra may pay a rebate to ADSL customers affected by a major outage on Wednesday evening, and will soon introduce a service level guarantee for cable customers following unstable network performance this year.

Applying modern technology to the task of corralling chickens for the slaughterhouse results in a chicken-catching machine that surprisingly is not as gruesome as it appears. Scientists are already researching ways for the chickens to fight back.

A shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark was filmed in Biloxi, Mississippi between 1982 and 1988 by Eric Zala, Jayson Lamb and Chris Strompolis. What's particularly amazing is that the trio began filming the project when they were twelve and finished six years later when they were eighteen. The complete film isn't available online, but a trailer that gives a bit of the feel of the finished project is available.

06 June 2003

Adelaide University has unveiled a new super computer capable of one trillion calculations per second. The $1.7 million Hydra is also 250 times faster than the best desktop computer and is among the three fastest computers in Australia and the 80 fastest in the world.

A small group of volunteers will participate in the first human trial of a new-generation vaccine against the AIDS virus developed by an Australian consortium.

Palm plans to buy Handspring to strengthen its grip on the market for handheld devices. It also has finalised plans to spin off its PalmSource software unit.

Some cities and counties are banning or considering banning geocaching in their parks.

05 June 2003

Sydney-based web developer Paul Knapp has unveiled a web-based storage system, with some differences. Membox offers a personal information repository, managed through an internet-connected web interface. Each individual record in a Membox is known as a Mem. There is a search and categorisation functionality to manage them.

Police Chief Gregg Jarvies put three officers on administrative leave with pay pending the outcome of an investigation into Erin Carter's, a Chapel Hill High School student, allegations that two of the investigators misrepresented themselves as members of an FBI Cyber Crime Task Force.

Fears that the UK government may not have a finger on the pulse of modern technology were exposed in the House of Lords, as some Lords debated unsolicited spam email, while others discussed the tinned meat of the same name. Lord Renton asked: 'Will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food can become an unsolicited email, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an email?'

Telstra has been accused of offering better services for ADSL customers who buy directly from the market leader, rather than through another internet service provider — bit of a problem when almost half of Australia's ADSL users now connect via non-Telstra ISPs, according to figures released by the telco.

04 June 2003

Invasions of privacy on the Internet are less likely to happen in Europe because laws are generally stricter than in the United States about what can be published about individuals. When balancing freedom of speech against personal privacy rights, the default in Europe is more toward privacy rights. And that default is not just legal but deeply cultural.

Finishing a beer in the sun before it gets warm is usually not a problem, but what about those really hot days? Having some hardware lying around there is only one solution to keep the beer cool, that's to make a PeltierBeer.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have been able to mimic the adhesive ability of Gecko feet with a synthetic material that could find applications in new types of vehicle tires or allowing robots to climb walls.

An Australian online legal information service is expanding to span the globe. The new World Legal Information Institute, WorldLII, is operating from its Sydney base with the aim to provide free access to crucial legal documents internationally.

03 June 2003

Microsoft is phasing out standalone versions of its Internet Explorer Web browser, according to statements attributed to IE program manager Brian Countryman in an interview posted on the software giant's web site.

The junk email plaguing Europe has something decidedly in common with the American variety. Nearly all the spam messages are in English, originate in the United States and don't even bother to price their wares in euros.

Unable to sue file-sharing networks into submission, the music industry is stepping up its campaign to instill fear and frustration among the people who use them to copy songs free.

The Council of Europe has called on countries to refrain from censoring information transmitted via the internet, promote ease of access for all their citizens to the internet, and to ensure that service providers were not systematically held responsible for material transmitted over their servers without their knowledge.

02 June 2003

Australia, the world's largest coal exporter, reaffirmed its opposition to ratifying the Kyoto treaty on combating climate change, saying it was not in the national interest. As usual our dodgy and corrupt PM is happy to oblige whoever offers him the biggest bribes, namely the coal industry in this instance, and the ignores the future of the rest of us who have to live with the consequences of his personal greed.

The world's most powerful leaders converged on the tightly-guarded French resort of Evian yesterday, aiming to heal rifts over Iraq as thousands of anti-capitalist activists tried to disrupt the meeting.

Crimson Sky has made a very cool case mod inspired by HG Giger's biomechanical Alien design. The site gives specifics about the computer but doesn't give instructions on how to build it.

George Ziemann has two excellent articles that explore the early days of the recording and music industry and how their attempts to monopolise their respective mediums in the past failed. The Dawn of Recorded Music and the First Pirates focuses on early collusion in the phonograph industry and Music, Movies and Monopoly on Thomas Edison's failed attempts to restrain fair trade in the two new media he gave commercial rise to.

01 June 2003

Washington is joining 13 other states and the federal government in suing Alyon Technologies who they say fraudulently billed residents for pop-up ads, typically from pornography sites.

Trainspotting is the much-maligned pastime revolving around the writing down of the serial numbers of locomotives. As if having everybody snickering at them wasn't bad enough, reports suggest that spotters are now facing a security crackdown.

For the man who has everything; the last surviving Aircraft Carrier built in England for WWII and commissioned as the HMS Vengeance in late 1944 is currently for sale.

Digital rights management sounds unobjectionable on paper: Consumers purchase certain rights to use creative works and are prevented from violating those rights. In reality, our legal system usually leaves us wiggle room. What's fair in one case won't be in another — and only human judgement can discern the difference.

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