July 2003 Archive

31 July 2003

Give Franz Josef Och, a researcher at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, enough parallel data and you can have a translation system for any two languages in a matter of hours. His approach relies on two concepts, gathering huge amounts of data, and applying statistical models to this data — it completely ignores grammar rules and dictionaries — the computer-encoded equivalents of the famous Rosetta Stone inscriptions

For many IT managers a weeklong failure of the corporate e-mail system under their control would be more traumatic than a divorce

As much of the world nears an Internet address crunch, North America stands as an island apart, threatening to fragment plans for the biggest overhaul of the Web in decades

The FBI is so scared that Internet telephone calls are fast becoming a national security threat that must be countered with new police wiretap rules. Yet another intrusion into your privacy

30 July 2003

Waste product from a Coca-Cola plant in India which the company provides as fertiliser for local farmers contains toxic chemicals. Dangerous levels of the known carcinogen cadmium have been found in the sludge produced from the plant in the southern state of Kerala. Coca-Cola denies the reports and say they will continue to supply the sludge to farmers

MIT student, James Patten, has created a Corporate Fallout Detector. It acts and looks like a Geiger counter, but it's a barcode scanner with an internal, updateable database of corporate misdeeds, with both Pollution and Corporate Ethics modes

Paul Darrow, who played the ruthless anti-hero Avon, is in a consortium that has acquired the rights to Blake's 7 in a deal to bring the show back to screens more than 20 years after it ended

While much of Europe seeks to fortify its borders against unwanted foreigners, dozens of Spanish villages have invited immigrants to move in

29 July 2003

Medical researchers have warned that wearing a tie could be bad for your eyes. A report in the British Journal of Ophthalmology has shown that a tight necktie raises blood pressure in the eye, increasing the chances of developing glaucoma

Australia's internet service providers who are excluded from the notorious 'gang of four' peering arrangement are steadily forming a more inclusive gang of their own, with help from PIPE Networks, a new national internet exchange operator

Napster may be long dead, but the name and the kitty logo of the pioneer online music-swapping program could return to cyberspace before the year is out. Roxio, which owns the rights to the Napster name, plans to shelve its current online music service, pressplay, and roll out Napster 2.0 by Christmas

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission plans to have an automated robot trawl the web for suspicious sites and discussion board postings could be operational by October

28 July 2003

An unusual suspect is being used in Western Queensland to deter feral dogs from having a woolly snack. Tambo Grazier Andrew Marin has employed alpacas to protect sheep flocks from predators and he says so far it seems to be working. Alpacas are highly protective of their herds and more than capable of killing a dog if threatened

Monty, a Shih-Tzu, in Greater Manchester has been offered a gold credit card from the Royal Bank of Scotland with a spending limit of £10,000

27 July 2003

A bamboo bicycle is a strong step towards making bicycling more sustainable, especially in contrast to aluminium, one of the most resource demanding materials that exist

Stress is one of the top causes of heart attacks — and working with stupid people on a daily basis is one of the deadliest forms of stress. Despite the dodgy source and unverifiable contacts, I have to wonder if this article would be proven true if authentic research was performed

Malaysian Muslim men can divorce their wives through text messages on mobile telephones. Anyone who is gutless enough to initiate a divorce using SMS is someone you should be glad to be shot of

26 July 2003

Spammers last week got on the wrong side of the wrong man, and quickly found themselves with a taste of their own medicine. The man? Deputy Communications Minister Andrei Korotkov. Tired of the endless spate of unsolicited messages that clog e-mail systems everywhere, an audio message was volleyed non-stop to the telephone numbers listed in the spam

Safecom has released the photographs from the Children Overboard scandal that the public were not allowed to see, in keeping with the brief issued by Operation Relex' Canberra Command Centre — at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet's office — which stipulated explicitly to 'not humanise the asylum seekers'

A non-invasive neural network that is designed to read minds could give freedom of movement to everyone, thanks to a system that lets them steer a wheelchair using only their thoughts

Barry Brook from the Northern Territory University fears small mammals in the Top End may become extinct if land clearing continues

25 July 2003

Anti-spam activists have upped the ante in their fight against junk email by publishing the details — including credit card information — of people who've ordered spamming services online

Computer manufacturers have been press-ganged into the hunt for customers in the broadband internet market, with industry heavyweights Telstra and Optus planning to offer services bundled with PCs in time for Christmas

23-year-old polar bear Pelusa was sprayed with an antiseptic spray that turned her normally white fur a dark shade of violet. The unusual colour — a temporary side effect of the treatment for dermatitis — has turned the ageing bear into a minor celebrity in Argentina and prompted thousands of schoolchildren and tourists to make their way to the Jardin Zoologico de Mendoza

Officials are determined to secure a replacement for the city's police dog that died last week of heat exhaustion. Sandor, a Belgian Malinois, died when a patrol car's air conditioning failed on a 38°C day

24 July 2003

The federal government intends to introduce legislation later this year that will ban unsolicited commercial e-mail. But a member of the advisory group charged with helping develop the new anti-spam legislation does not feel the final document goes far enough in punishing people found guilty of spamming

Though Google has become synonymous with searching, it does have a few pitfalls, including a tendency to skew results toward shopping, a lack of diversity for searches containing synonyms and its impact on research

According to Gartner, seven million US adults, were victims of identity theft in the 12 months ending June 2003. The analyst group is calling on banks to make it tougher for crooks to obtain credit in false names

A new type of tungsten filament — the world's most widely used light source — may emit enough energy to power electric cars, generators, and consumer electronics

23 July 2003

Welcome to a police state. The FBI has started harassing people for reading politically incorrect articles in public. That guy who reads over your shoulder on public transport may be a police informant rather than just an annoying prat

Google unveiled refinements to technology for searching daily news, its latest effort to become the Web's go-to hub for headlines. The new service, called Advanced News Search, allows visitors to scour headlines by date, location, exact phrases or publication

The case of 174 feral Chihuahuas on death row in a Los Angeles animal shelter has pitted animal rescue groups against each other in a debate over whether the purse-sized dogs are too vicious to adopt

Dog-E-Data is Australia's largest independent provider of free pet information — including Pet Talk Radio which is both broadcast via local community stations and streamed online — as well as being home of the unique Dog-E-Data ID service for dogs

22 July 2003

Amazon are aiming become the Google of books with their plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of non-fiction. Users would only be able to read a certain portion of the text from any one book, but it sounds promising nonetheless

Evgenij Vasiljev, a Russian software developer, has developed the Pskov 1100 — a home-made Gauss pistol

The Berkman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is the new keeper of the specification for a popular weblog tool. The Berkman Centre took over ownership of the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) 2.0 specification this week after UserLand, a company owned by RSS 2.0 author David Winer, transferred the copyright to the centre

A Sri Lankan who sent a dog to New Zealand has been asked to pay ten times the cost of the original air freight in order to return the pet, after it was refused entry

21 July 2003

Intel is pushing development of the 802.16 wireless networking standard. Designed to operate over a number of bands from 2GHz to 66GHz, 802.16 can work over 30 miles and pump data at speeds of up to 70Mbps. 802.16 is to 802.11 what the M25 motorway is to the Basingstoke one way system

If you've ever had the overwhelming desire to add a rocket pack to your bicycle or build a 2 million volt tesla coil, United Nuclear scientific supply offers a dangerous products category where you can purchase the parts and plans that will have you well on your way to becoming an embarrassing headline in your local paper in no time

New technology that can recover information from shredded documents. Not only can companies scan strip-shredded paper and recover the information, they can do the same with cross-shredded paper. The shreds are glued onto a piece of paper and then scanned. Software then looks for matches and suggests possible combinations to the operator that can be accepted or rejected. It comes at a price though — one company charges US$8-10,000 to reconstruct the information in a cubic foot of cross-shredded material

Thick-skinned mice with a remarkable ability to heal wounds are created by genetic engineering

20 July 2003

Harold Newman, had pursued a hobby — an elaborate genealogy project — trying to link all characters from Greek mythology in a single family tree. Jon Newman wanted to finish it. Now, the Newmans' combined work has been published by the University of North Carolina Press as A Genealogical Chart of Greek Mythology: Comprising 3673 Named Figures of Greek Mythology, All Related to Each Other Within a Single Family of 20 Generations

Landover Baptist Church offers yet another amusing and enlightening article from the Pastor Deacon Fred on ridding your community of the scourge of athetists

Useability guru Jakob Nielsen lambasts PDF files as a form of online presentation: PDF is great for one thing and one thing only: printing documents. Paper is superior to computer screens in many ways, and users often prefer to print documents that are too long to easily read online. For online reading, however, PDF is the monster from the Black Lagoon. It puts its clammy hands all over people with a cruel grip that doesn't let go

19 July 2003

Guide Dogs Queensland has begun trials of a laser-guided walking cane, and plans to soon test a prototype Batcane that uses sonar technology to warn the blind of obstacles

Up to one-fifth of Telstra's $250 million in broadband revenue comes from a small percentage of its customer base who exceed their download limits

Giving a whole new meaning to the phrase 'death by chocolate', scientists have invented a baitless mousetrap that attracts rodents with the irresistible aroma of chocolate

Neville Kan, a London dentist, drilled away almost half of a healthy tooth to punish a patient who owed him money

18 July 2003

The European Commission mapped out the world's toughest ban on spam in an attempt to stop the blizzard of junk email clogging up the internet. Under the new rules, it will be illegal to send unsolicited emails anywhere in the European Union after October. Advertisers will have to secure the 'opt-in' consent of consumers before they can invade email privacy. Internet service companies will be obliged to filter out much of the obvious spam

Microsoft has acknowledged a critical vulnerability in nearly all versions of its flagship Windows operating system, including its recently launched Windows Server 2003 software

Telstra will sign up to a series of strict performance hurdles when it inks a long-awaited wholesale DSL deal with Optus, now in the final stages of negotiation. Optus has indicated it will seek to extend its popular bundling strategy when it begins offering the wider-reaching DSL broadband service

Takara, Japan's number two toy maker, is set to launch a device in November that translates cats' meows into human speech, following the smash-hit dog-language electronic interpreter Bowlingual

17 July 2003

AOL has laid off 50 employees involved in Web browser development at its Netscape subsidiary amid a reorganisation of its Mozilla open-source browser team. Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organisation, will continue mozilla.org's work of co-ordinating the development of the Mozilla codebase

Researchers at MIT are developing a search engine for people using the web on slower net connections. The software will e-mail queries to a central server and receive the most relevant web pages from the search results by e-mail in a compressed form

Quentin Tarantino has persuaded his producers to release his latest movie, Kill Bill, in two instalments after finding it impossible to cut it down to less than three hours

16 July 2003

Allegations are flying around the world as consumer groups battle printer makers over claims that some inkjets tell porkies about how much ink is really left in a cartridge

DSL Reports are currently pursuing a spammer from the West Palm Beach, Florida area and have been quite successful. More interesting is that the spammer appears to be posting in the thread

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America is going for several notorious anti-abortionists necks and a famous cybersquatter in a case it has brought over nine domains it claims infringe its trademarks

Scientists hoping to clone prehistoric mammoths are preparing their first frozen DNA samples in a bid to revive the species

15 July 2003

For the first time in three years something has happened in browser land. In fact, major events have started happening at a breathtaking pace

A young, female red wolf that scientists had hoped would pair with an older male on Bull Island was struck and killed by a car on in rural Awendaw earlier this week. The female, a 2-year-old named Echo, had been rejected by her intended mate, an 8-year-old male who has lived in the wild the past three years

Harvard has revoked its admission of Blair Hornstine, the prospective member of the Class of 2007 who made national headlines when she sued her school system to ensure she would be her high school's sole valedictorian, following a widely-publicised report that Hornstine had plagiarised material in articles she wrote for her local paper

14 July 2003

Russia's only sniffer cat, hailed for its successes in the campaign against the bloody and lucrative world of caviar smuggling, has been run over and killed in a suspected contract killing

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Western Australia have created a robot that uses the neural impulses of rat brain cells to draw pictures

13 July 2003

Daring Fireball is running an interesting article linking men's wigs and web design, the problem being that the client can't understand the concept of less is more

Who would ever, in this time of the greatest interconnectivity in human history, go back to shipping bytes around via snail mail as a preferred means of data transfer? Jim Gray would do it, that's who. And not just Zip disks, this guy ships entire hard drives, or even complete computer systems, packed full of disks

A flotilla of rubber ducks about to beach on the shores of Nova Scotia after travelling the world for more than a decade is being hailed as more than just flotsam and jetsam by oceanographers

12 July 2003

The last production line for the original Volkswagen Beetle is to close in Puebla, Mexico

If you thought mobiles couldn't get more annoying, think again. Ringback tones personalise the 'ring, ring' sound that traditionally has covered the silence between the time that people enter digits and when the call is answered. I have to wonder at the thought that's gone into this idea, because people have come to associate music with being put on hold and are likely to hang up on you

After having its funding cut off by Congress a decade ago, the SETI program has just received a NASA five-year grant to participate as a lead team in the NASA Astrobiology Institute, which investigates the origin and future of life in the universe

11 July 2003

Interesting article on Declan McCullagh's PoliTech mailing list, a member of an ad hoc group of urban infiltration enthusiasts has offered his opinion that civil infrastructure of most major cities is ridiculously easy to disrupt. He argues that terrorists aren't serious about destroying said infrastructure, but neither are the governments interested when it comes to the mammoth task of safeguarding cities

Derek Wyatt MP, Chair of the All Party Internet Group, has set up a Web site to encourage consumers to fight back against spam email. EndSpam, includes advice about how consumers can complain to their ISP about unsolicited commercial email or complain to their MP about the issue of spam in general

The Wi-Fi Alliance has announced the first round of Wi-Fi Certified interoperable 802.11g products

Santana Kennels owner Ian McIver arrived at work in time to see the building ablaze, and immediately set out to free 51 dogs and 11 cats, the Winnipeg man is recovering from second degree burns. No animals died but one Pomeranian was singed. Foster homes are needed for the rescued animals

10 July 2003

Reacting to the new federal surveillance systems which have been set up in the US, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have set up a web site that will let US citizens create dossiers on government officials

While the English version of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix has hit the shelves around the world, non-English-speaking fans of the series have been left high and dry — and some of them are getting desperate

PETA has filed a lawsuit against KFC, accusing the company of making misleading statements on its Web site regarding how the chickens it sells are treated

The Family Court dismissed an application by Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock to keep five children in a detention centre after a ruling they should be set free

09 July 2003

George Gobel, 1996 winner of the Ig Nobel prize for chemistry for lighting a barbecue with liquid oxygen, has had his extended home page pulled by Purdue University. The site has even been removed from Google's cache. Fortunately, the Wayback Machine still has a copy in its archives

Telstra's latest Web hosting offering has come under fire from a competitor for its claims to target small to medium enterprises with low-cost Web hosting

A feature of the new web site of the Australian High Tech Crime Centre is an email crime reporting service that allows you to report an electronic crime such as hacking without ever having to take your eyes off the computer screen

A series of legal skirmishes over who owns the real estate on a computer user's screen is turning into a war. With companies like Gator happy to facilitate serving ads on rival sites

08 July 2003

The British Library is hoping that its range of downloadable natural ringtones — featuring such aural delights as the song of a cuckoo or squawk of a penguin — will replace current favourites such as the Mission Impossible theme and Tubular Bells

Where an enlightened post-Soviet era government believes the Internet is essential for life in the 21st century and backs that up with legislation declaring Internet access is a human right. Estonia is a country where hot, running water was a luxury a decade ago. It's now a place where farmers have broadband Internet, 80% of the people use online banking, Internet usage and broadband penetration rates are comparable to Western Europe, and the government conducts most business virtually through a system of networked computers. Not bad for a country that only ten years ago was a crumbling, bankrupt mess with a network infrastructure to match

Microsoft has killed off Windows NT, maybe it should now release its source code to the open-source community in order to fight off the challenge from Linux. If nothing else the open-source community will be laughing so hard they won't be able to fight back

British transsexuals will have the legal right to marry and have their gender changed on their birth certificate under new laws. A move that should also enable intersex children to live a normal life

07 July 2003

Adobe Systems has begun testing online activation of its Photoshop 7.0 application in Australia as a way of stemming the illegal use of its software

Speaking days after the case against a multiple sclerosis sufferer accused of supplying cannabis was abandoned, Lord Prosser, a former High Court judge in Scotland, said the current laws on the Class B drug were unenforceable and should be scrapped. He has called for cannabis to be legalised and the drug supplied in the same way as alcohol and tobacco

Serious doubts about whether Iraq was developing nuclear weapons were communicated to Australia months before John Howard repeated the claims in parliament, according to Greg Theilmann, a former senior United States official with the State Department

06 July 2003

For centuries, researchers have been confounded by the fact that the Incas apparently ruled a mighty empire without any written records. Now Gary Urton, a professor at Harvard University, believes he has uncovered a language of binary code recorded in knotted strings — a writing system unlike virtually any other

Christopher Blommel has a vision for a better world — one where every man would carry in his wallet a small cellophane packet containing a product that can come in handy in an emergency — pocket duct tape

Gerbils, hamsters and guinea pigs will be able to go on holiday almost anywhere in Europe after the EU extended pet passports to most domestic animals

05 July 2003

Nerve cells derived from human embryonic stem cells and transplanted into paralysed rats have enabled the animals to walk again. The findings add to a growing number of studies that suggest embryonic stem cells could have a valuable role to play in treating spinal injuries

All new Victorian homes will have to have solar hot water or rainwater tanks under building regulation changes. The changes are part of the State Government's mandatory five-star energy standards to come into full force in July 2005

Australian federal politicians will soon debate proposed legislation that will make open-source software the first choice for Commonwealth departments and agencies. Australian Democrats senator Brian Greig has announced his intention to introduce a private members' bill into the Senate that may see federal agencies forced to justify their expenditure on proprietary software

Sydney police have arrested a man who allegedly used home PCs to create hundreds of forged documents using stolen identities. They must be on a roll, having discovered what they believe to be another counterfeiting ring which had been producing imitation drivers licences, birth certificates, group certificates and tax returns

04 July 2003

Invisible 'soft walls' in the skies around city centres and other likely terrorist targets could make it impossible for hijacked planes to fly anywhere near them. The new avionics system comprises an on-board GPS database containing the coordinates of no-fly zones. If pilots try to enter these areas, they are physically countered by the onboard computer and gently steered from the area

If big business hopes to regain the dwindling trust of consumers, demanding a right to lie is hardly the way to do it. So perhaps the US Supreme Court helped save corporate America from itself — at least temporarily — by declining to rule on the Nike Corporation's claim of a constitutional right to lie

The California Supreme Court has ruled that a former employee of Intel was free to send e-mail messages to current company employees, overturning a lower court's injunction. The court rejected Intel's argument that the messages represented illegal trespassing into its computer systems

Steven Low, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and his colleagues have been developed that drastically improves download performance from the net. Running at 3,500 times faster than traditional broadband this software achieves download speeds of up to 7 gigabytes per minute

03 July 2003

Anyone hoping to make lots of money charging consumers directly for WiFi internet access is in for very empty pockets. But making your money back on your shiny new WiFi hotspot by selling coffee or offering a room for the night is a more realistic approach

Sarah Matteson, a Medical College of Georgia student, and Michelle Goree, a veterinary medicine student at Auburn University, have received a federal innovation award for having dogs and their owners undergo health screenings at the same time

FireWire isn't just for connecting iPods and DVD burners any more. A software package from Apple lets you use plain old — and fancy new — FireWire cables to connect Macs in a network. Apple's IP-over-FireWire software turns a FireWire bus into something akin to an Ethernet port

If eyewitness memories are missing, the brain makes them up, and scanning technology has a hard time telling real from fake. And yet, dodgy repressed memory experts are still seen as credible

02 July 2003

Mozilla 1.4 is now available. It offers several enhancements over Mozilla 1.3.1; bookmarks improvements, smooth scrolling, junk mail improvements and proxy auto-config failover. It is the basis of today's Netscape 7.1 release. In future milestone cycles, changes will be made to both the Mozilla technology and the project's organisation, including a move towards the standalone Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird applications as the main focus of development

University of Perugia researchers have found that artisans throwing pots in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Umbria were practising an early form of nanotechnology. Coloured glazes in pottery samples from the Umbrian town of Deruta exploit the reflective properties of minute metal grains to give them a rich lustre

Your next personal computer may well come with its own digital chaperone. As PC makers prepare a new generation of desktop computers with built-in hardware controls to protect data and digital entertainment from illegal copying, the industry is also promising to keep information safe from tampering and help users avoid troublemakers in cyberspace

BBC World last week showed a documentary on Israel's nuclear arsenal and its alleged biological warfare program, contrasting the international treatment of Israel with that of other states seeking weapons of mass destruction. Of course, Israel cries anti-Semitism, you can't have it both ways

01 July 2003

An investigation has begun after sightings of a legendary ape-like beast in the forests of central China

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is now advocating that third-world countries be given funds to implement WiFi technology and leapfrog into the future

The Guardian clears the confusion around a culturally critical and chronically misused word — ironic

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