August 2003 Archive

31 August 2003

The difficult part about making your own liquid motion lamp is, of course, the motion

US companies with the highest rates of pay for chief executives also have the greatest number of staff redundancies, according to the 'Executive Excess 2003' report conducted by United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies. Is anyone really surprised?

Computer glitches by the US Air Force allowed some foreign countries to get classified or sensitive military parts they weren't supposed to have

30 August 2003

RSA Security is developing a 'blocker' tag that disrupts RFID tag transmissions, protecting a person's privacy from those who would abuse RFID technology

EarthLink filed a lawsuit against the 'Alabama Spammers', an unidentified group it alleges used its access service to send massive amounts of junk e-mail

Penelope Corcoran, a Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter, had a chance to try out a Bow-Lingual on Crema, her part-Chihuahua part-Dachshund beastie. The unit didn't score too well, looking more like an expensive, battery hungry, canine version of a Magic 8-Ball than a true translation device

Scientists studying an unspoiled jungle river wilderness in Venezuela have announced the discovery of 10 new fish species, including a red-tailed tiddler, a 'punk' catfish with a spiky head and a piranha that eats fruit as well as flesh

29 August 2003

Human rights groups have condemned Vietnam for upholding espionage charges against Pham Hong Son, an imprisoned cyber-dissident and pro-democracy activist, calling for his immediate release

The Fuelcell Propulsion Institute plans to convert a 120-ton diesel locomotive into a fuel cell-driven train, a project that could one day make fuel cells a reality for subways allowing trains to run independent of the electricity grid

An alliance of online music broadcasters sued the recording industry in federal court, alleging major record labels have unlawfully inflated webcasting royalty rates to keep independent operators out of the market

Mexico claims multinational chain Zara is abusing trade agreement by importing cheap clothes from Asia

28 August 2003

Yahoo! News is now offering the feeds in the RSS format. The feeds are free of charge to use for individuals and non-profit organisations for non-commercial use

Osirusoft, one of the largest anti-spam black-lists, has been shut down by its operator following a barrage of massive Distributed Denial of Service attacks that have crippled the service

Amazon has filed 11 lawsuits against marketers that used its name when sending bogus e-mail, charges that echo a widening problem for companies operating online

Software giant Symantec is adding product activation technology to all of its upcoming consumer products, starting with Norton Antivirus 2004. Customers who fail to activate the software by contacting Symantec within 15 days of installing it will be left with a non-functioning application. Despite such good intentions, product activation remains a tricky business, and that Symantec runs the risk of alienating loyal, legitimate customers by imposing the technology

27 August 2003

AOL has added weblogging tools to its internet offerings and Yahoo is trialing its blog tool in Korea. While Jason Kottke tries to educate the press on the correct usage of weblog

Three Boston companies think it's about time to change the light bulb, saying that LEDs are the future of illumination

In a case that pitted trade secret rights against free speech, the Supreme Court in California has ruled that courts can block internet users from posting codes that can be used to illegally copy DVD movies

Over the weekend, a denial-of-service attack took down the web site of The SCO Group, which is caught in an increasingly acrimonious row with the open-source community over the company's legal campaign against Linux

26 August 2003

Telstra's 100,000 cable broadband customers were unable to log onto to the carrier's service for four and a half hours this morning, thanks to a faulty router

A test done by the Dutch PC-Active magazine showed that among 30 different CD-R brands tested, a lot of them were already unreadable after twenty months

Australian companies have long prided themselves on their highly inventive nature and global reputation as early adopters of new technology. But Australia's track record in commercialising technical know-how on the global stage is lamentable. Australia is yet to produce a globally significant technology company, and risks falling behind rivals in Europe and Asia as a centre of technical development

A black woman in Britain has won the right to be given an artificial foot which matches her skin colour, after first being told to make do with a white one

25 August 2003

The BBC has gone public with its intention to find a way to put the entire content of its radio and TV archives online

When police find a skull and want to know what its owner looked like, they generally use artists who reconstruct the face by building up layers of clay over the skull. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Germany have advanced efforts to computerise the process. The method could speed forensic work and could also be used to reconstruct long-extinct animal species

Experts say administrators can't control the information transferred between these devices and a corporate network, unlike e-mail and other network traffic

24 August 2003

Scientists from Bell Laboratories have identified an ocean sponge, living in the darkness of the deep sea, that grows thin glass fibres capable of transmitting light better than industrial fibre optic cables used for telecommunication. You can tie a knot in these natural biological fibres and they will not break

Qantas has effectively ruled out the installation of anti-missile technology on-board its aircraft due to doubts over cost and effectiveness

23 August 2003

In an action scene during the filming of a low-budget movie, The Scorpion's Vengeance, Flavio Peniche was apparently handed a gun with real bullets rather than blanks, causing him to shoot and kill another actor, Antonio Velasco. The film's producer, Eduardo Martinez Sanchez, and the props manager have scarpered for parts unknown

A power outage struck a Qwest Communications facility that hosts many of eBay's servers, rendering its services inaccessible for far longer than the reported three hours

Nokia has manoeuvred to the cutting edge of the video-game industry by agreeing to acquire Japanese gamemaker Sega's online gaming subsidiary, Sega.com. Nokia plans to integrate Sega's technology, enabling groups of gamers to compete against one another, into its N-Gage gaming phone

22 August 2003

US Trade officials have backed off from a tough line on music, movie and software piracy, admitting that shoehorning Australia into a copyright regime based on criminal law may be a bridge too far

The Xenoturbella, an enigmatic worm that resides in the mud at the bottom of a Swedish fjord, is identified as mankind's long-lost relative, after being written off for years as an obscure mollusc

Railway officials in Wakayama, a largely rural prefecture in western Japan, racked their brains for months for a way to keep wild deer from running onto train tracks and getting killed. Finally, inspiration struck: scare them off by spreading lion dung along the tracks

21 August 2003

The Federal Government plans to outlaw using the internet for 'offensive and menacing purposes', proposing new laws that could mean two years in prison for activities like organising or advocating violent protests through the internet. However, the opposition aren't amused, saying it could be used to crack down on legitimate protest

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is proposing a massive system of tracking for homeless people and others who are served by shelters and care centres. The system will track people by their social security number, and will collect general and mental health information. Secret Service and national security agents can gain access to the database by just asking for it

The movie industry is blaming poor sales of such movies as Gigli, The Hulk and Charlie's Angels not on the fact that they were poor quality, but because people text message their mates telling them that the movie sucks

Cambodia's Ministry of Tourism is drawing up grandiose plans to upgrade the final stronghold of the Khmer Rouge into a million-dollar theme park

20 August 2003

Shane Atkinson, a New Zealander who sent millions of junk emails out every day has shut his business after his personal details were posted on the web

Mike Todd, the Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, has claimed that some police officers are so inept at interviewing suspects that viewers of television dramas such as Inspector Morse and The Bill would have a better chance of solving crimes

The Australian Computer Society believes the trend toward offshore outsourcing in the high value IT services market could cost Australia 40,000 computer jobs and billions of dollars in lost economic benefit by 2015

Spray-on computers the size of a grain of sand are set to transform information technology. Scientists are already working with Edinburgh hospitals to spray nanocomputers on coronary patients to monitor their hearts unobtrusively and wirelessly. The technology should be ready within four years and these spray-on nanocomputers should be at work in hospitals, schools and shops in less than ten years

19 August 2003

A growing amount of research supports the idea that DNA could be the basis of a staggeringly powerful new generation of computers. An initial foray into the field has produced the first game-playing DNA computer — an enzyme-powered tic-tac-toe machine that cannot be beaten. While the lads in the Physics department at Cambridge University believe that erasable electrostatic lithography could be used to make a quantum computer based on arrays of quantum dots

Debate on the retransmission of free-to-air TV channels on the new digital Foxtel system has escalated, with Foxtel applying to the competition regulator for clearance under its third-line forcing provisions

18 August 2003

Coke and Pepsi, recently accused of having dangerous quantities of pesticides in their Indian products, are challenging a ban on their drinks in government buildings. Lawsuits must be a cheaper option than pulling their finger out and removing the pesticides

A Saudi Arabian telecommunications company has accused Lucent Technologies and Switzerland-based ACEC of paying more than $15 million in bribes to the minister in charge of the country's telephone agency

17 August 2003

General Motors, DaimlerChrysler and Isuzu Motors have agreed to drop the lawsuit that has delayed California's clean-air program

Foxtel has turned up the heat on networks Seven, Ten and the ABC to ink a digital retransmission deal after SBS yesterday its place on Foxtel's digital service

16 August 2003

No refrigeration, no subways, no smooth traffic flow, no air conditioning — well, at least the Internet worked

Need combine your love of fish with your love of computers? The aquarium case mod may be the thing for you. But if you have a history of killing your goldfish, maybe Thinkgeek's plastic fishie kit may be more appropriate. Or you could go for an ant farm

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto have come up with a novel, inexpensive, stereoscopic technique for generating 3D displays from cellophane and a laptop computer screen

15 August 2003

Armed with inexpensive, mass-produced gems, two startups are launching an assault on the De Beers cartel and are stepping into the realm of the computer as diamonds show amazing potential as a superior semiconductor

HBOS, one of the largest UK banks is to introduce random lie detector analysis of insurance claims according to this article from the Edinburgh Evening News. The three month trial will see calls from its 1.5 million policy holders randomly subjected to voice stress analysis. Those flagged up will then receive a set of questions designed to expose potential fraudsters

14 August 2003

Julian Dibbell has quit his day job to sell items from Ultima Online in the real world, hopefully making a living on which to support his wife and daughter

The Federal Trade Commission has filed suit against GoInternet.net, charging that it hawks Web presence over the phone and then assesses its targets on their phone bill without their authorisation

13 August 2003

Every once in a while a set of fraternal twin eggs merge into one embryo and the resulting person has two sets of DNA. It is possible for a Chimera to have different sets of DNA in different body parts, which can cause complication for body identification, DNA typing for organ transplants, crime investigation, etc. Researchers have no idea how common this is, but suppose that it is a reasonable percentage of all fraternal twin pregnancies, which would mean millions world-wide

Incompatible new versions of the popular file-compression format could put the squeeze on users and as a result unravel support for Zip

New national e-crime guidelines have been launched by Standards Australia to help organisations deal with incidents following widespread concerns about the forensic status of computer-generated evidence

Covered in oil after resetting a sensor in the aircraft's nosewheel, the pilot stood on a chair in the terminal building and pleaded with the exhausted tourists to join him

12 August 2003

Michael Berry's name, reputation and credit line were easy pickings for some very scary people. Yours are, too

Thirty years after a bunch of hippies brought flower power to bear on a plan for a military camp in southern France, 100,000 ecologists and campaigners against global trade rules returned to the site yesterday for a festival aimed at putting the world to rights. The militant farmers' leader José Bové was at Larzac then, and he is there now

Merrill Lynch is set to ban access to outside e-mail services from sites such as AOL, Yahoo and MSN, in response to regulatory requirements and to protect its network from viruses

US District Judge Joseph Tauro has rejected an attempt by the recording industry to uncover the names students suspected of online music piracy

11 August 2003

In a statement worthy of Bill Hicks, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has declared that weapons sales by rich countries were responsible for the proliferation of wars. The outspoken veteran leader said wars were being waged as an excuse to try out new weapons

The craze for flash mobs — where jokers gather en masse at a moment's notice, perform an inane activity and then disperse quickly — is spreading across Europe

Astronomers have found the first direct evidence of a giant spiral galaxy far away that is ripping apart a much smaller one and gobbling up millions of its stars — an event that demonstrates the power of that mysterious cosmic stuff called dark matter

A Royal Bengal tiger escaped from a Bangladesh zoo after its keeper left its cage open, but snuck back an hour later after apparently being frightened by the crowds — or possibly knowing when it's onto a good thing

10 August 2003

Ismo Rakkolainen and Karri Palovuori, from Tampere University of Technology, Finland, have come up with the Walk-thru Fog Screen. The fog screen, consisting of 'fog' that is blown down from top, and the protective laminar airflow creates a thin and crisp surface, pretty undisturbed by the air in the rest of the room, making it ideal for projector usage. People can walk right through this screen of fog. Their next idea is to use the fog as a touch-screen, making it even more accessible

Every night, as darkness descends, countless street lamps and lights turn on to keep the darkness at bay, bathing countless square feet of the planet in light that sometimes rivals day time. But has anyone stopped to consider what effect all this light may have on people and animals that have evolved to fit an environment where a significant part of the 24 hour day is spent in lightless conditions? Some scientists have, and they are claiming that all this light is causing numerous problems

Once again Telstra have disconnected ADSL with no warning. Their faults page mentions a miscellaneous 40 minute disruption of service in the early hours of the yesterday morning, but is typically silent over the seven hour downtime inflicted on many users in the Sydney area today

09 August 2003

Google News Alerts are sent by email when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify

Victoria Police will raid trading markets in search of pirated video games next weekend as the industry gears up for a crackdown on mod chipping

08 August 2003

The morale boosting purchase of a talking Bob the Builder toy inspired a team of geeks to perform some exploratory surgery and endow Bob with some enhanced equipment... meet Evil Bob

Electronic Frontiers Australia has dismissed a proposal to restrict access to Internet accounts to those that can satisfy a 100 point identity check as ludicrous

When 15 students from the University of Newcastle were caught plagiarising other people's work, they not only passed — some even got credits and distinctions

Replacing the contents of the eye's lens with a soft polymer gel could allow millions of people to throw away their reading glasses

07 August 2003

The mouse's feature animation unit, along with two other studios, are using Photoshop in Linux. They use the Wine emulator to run the software and the three studios, not known as team players, all agreed that a project that would benefit the entire open-source community while delivering a technology they needed was worth their co-operation

It may seem Orwellian to some, but the first major commercial service that traces people's locations using their mobile phones — mapAmobile — is designed more to ease the minds of worried parents and suspicious bosses than to enable unauthorised spying. While any new mobile purchased over the past 18 months in the US or is probably E911 capable, enabling law enforcement to home in on your phone in case of an emergency — like that isn't going to be abused

06 August 2003

The Indian units of rival soft drink giants Coca-Cola and Pepsi jointly denied yesterday an environmental group's report that their beverages contained high levels of pesticides. The private Centre for Science and Environment said soft drinks sold by the firms in India contained high levels of pesticides such as DDT and malathion

After a period of neglect, the intellectual legacy of Seymour Cray, the father of the modern supercomputer, is being revived

Mobile phone users world-wide will soon be able to dial-a-dolphin if a scheme to record their underwater conversations proves a success

05 August 2003

A power struggle erupts over a technology widely used to distribute weblogs, pitting blog pioneer Dave Winer against opponents at IBM, Google and others clamouring for a different format

A strange two-wheeled creature makes an appearance at the DefCon show in Las Vegas — a robot that's designed to patrol around and sniff out security flaws in wireless networks

04 August 2003

The new MiMail worm is technically of the garden variety, or no-frills, type it's still managing to sucker in a lot of users through its use of social engineering

A man has been cleared of child porn charges, after investigators found that an Internet attacker was responsible for the presence of illicit images on his PC

03 August 2003

The pioneering e-mail protocol is under intense scrutiny by its critics, one of its originators and standards bodies trying to rescue the Internet from overdosing on spam

Maria Viaznikova and her team, of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute in Canada, have developed a new way of gathering DNA evidence for analysis using fingerprints. The new test can extract DNA in 15 minutes — even from a print stored for many years and in varying conditions. The patented extraction technique consistently produces ~10 nanograms of DNA. Analysis generally requires 5-10 nanograms, although it is possible with as little as 0.1 nanogram

02 August 2003

If you need a short term junk mail address or a very temporary e-mail address, Mailinator is right up your alley. When you're suspicious of something, make up an address on the spot. The address will be instantly active at Mailinator for about 24 hours during which you can check for replies to see if your suspicions were grounded

By proceeding carefully, documenting everything, being persistent and keeping his cool, Steve Oualline was awarded a $199 refund for his unused copy of Microsoft Windows XP

In a delightful scam that should be a warning to editors everywhere, one Michael Burdick of Las Vegas created a web site, Hunting for Bambi, offering rich jerks the chance to hunt down naked women with paintball guns in the Nevada desert outside Las Vegas, at four grand a time. The service did not, of course, exist. The only point of the exercise was to sit back and watch as the US media wallowed in an opportunity to present themselves as outraged crusaders for women's rights, without bothering to check their facts

Xerox has made a chance discovery lets printers superimpose glossy images on regular printouts, creating the possibility for document authentication along the lines of holograms on credit cards

01 August 2003

The retarded monkey boy is seeking funds for a controversial project to drive gas pipelines from pristine rainforests in the Peruvian Amazon to the coast. The plan will enrich some of Bush's closest corporate campaign contributors while risking the destruction of rainforest, threatening its indigenous peoples and endangering rare species on the coast

Japanese lawmakers and bureaucrats support alternative energy as a home-grown business that can help cut energy costs

Web Access has been ordered to reverse the transfer of more than 500 Australian domain names it made during the past two months

Israel's Parliament has passed a law preventing Palestinians who marry Israelis from living in Israel. The move was denounced by human rights organisations as racist, undemocratic and discriminatory. And the homophobic the retarded monkey boy said he remained firmly opposed to gay marriages and that administration lawyers were working to ensure that the term marriage would cover only unions between men and women. A stance that has created a backlash against the Vatican

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