September 2003 Archive

30 September 2003

Australia will soon have a new federal Communications and IT Minister, with Attorney-General Darryl Williams set to over the job as Senator Richard Alston prepares to retire amidst a major Cabinet reshuffle. Former Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock will take over the Attorney-General's department

The Commonwealth Bank has introduced Australia's first lite Eftpos terminal. The PayLite terminal is designed for smaller businesses that process less than $100,000 in card transactions per year, and do not require the extra functionality found on traditional Eftpos terminals

29 September 2003

In an attempt to show that primitive communications can still function in modern networks, a student at Algoma University took up a challenge from Professor George Townsend to replace the lowest layer of the OSI networking model with a set of bongo drums

A county fair in the US state of West Virginia has an unusual tourist draw card — a cooking competition featuring road kill. The idea was brainstormed by the Pocahontas County Visitors Bureau to spice up their Autumn Harvest Festival

28 September 2003

US spies have found weapons of mass destruction at last — on a remote Scottish island. Managers at the Bruichladdich Distillery on the Hebridian island of Islay, famous for producing Scotland's best malt whisky, were puzzled when they received an e-mail from 'Ursula', asking them to repair their webcam that broadcasts scenes from the Victorian distillery to whisky lovers around the world. After inquiring, they found that Ursula was a spy with the US Defence Threat Reduction Agency

The five major US library associations are planning to file a legal brief siding with Streamcast Networks and Grokster in the California suit, brought by the major record labels and Hollywood studios. The development could complicate the RIAA's efforts to portray file-swapping services as rife with spam and illegal pornography

Cyberspace users in India are up in arms against the government. For the first time since the Information Technology Act, 2000, was introduced, the government has banned a site, Yahoo Groups, for publishing anti-government material. Many netizens believe the government is trying to gag the Internet, a medium for free flow of information

Daniel Geer, one of the primary authors of a report Reliance On MS A Danger To National Security, was fired from @stake Thursday morning. @stake said that; The values and opinions of the report are not in line with @stake's views and that Geer's participation was not sanctioned. Microsoft, who has worked closely with @stake in the past, denied that it was involved in @stake's decision to fire Dan

27 September 2003

Dr Bob has a handy how-to on combining 6 200GB IDE drives into a small tower and hacking together some firewire controllers to give you one giant 1.2TB firewire drive

A panel of leading security experts blasted Microsoft for vulnerabilities in its software, and warned that reliance on the developer's software is a danger to both enterprises and national security. Having just spent a week getting everything reinstalled after a Win2K crash so bad that it required a complete reformat, I'm not at all surprised

The Australian Communications Authority has convened a working group to study the privacy and security implications of mapping telephone numbers to Internet Protocol numbers ahead of a trial next year

A controversial Pentagon big brother program, Total 'Terrorism' Information Awareness, that called for monitoring databases containing data on millions of Americans for signs of terrorist activity is set to be killed off by a stop on funding

26 September 2003

After aeons drifting hopelessly lost in the space/time continuum, Doctor Who is finally coming back to Earth. In a move that heralds the most eagerly anticipated comeback in television history, BBC1 said that it is developing a new series of the sci-fi classic

Sanyo has announced that the world's first environment-friendly optical discs made from corn will hit the market from December this year

A group of Israeli reserve air force pilots drew condemnation for refusing to carry out air strikes in Palestinian areas, but their unprecedented protest set off an emotional debate on the ethics of the targeted killings of militants

25 September 2003

Interline Wireless Technology, a Polish company has reportedly set a world record in stretching the range of a Wi-Fi network for an amazing 110km at 2.4GHz. They achieved this using an antenna developed by them and an Intel Pro/Wireless 2011 Access Point

The recording industry has withdrawn a lawsuit against a Newbury woman because it falsely accused her of illegally sharing music — possibly the first case of mistaken identity in the battle against Internet file-traders

Townsville scientists in north Queensland have found a way to prevent ships bringing foreign marine creatures into Australian ports when they exchange their ballast water. Researchers at CRC Reef and James Cook University have launched a pilot plant to trial the sterilisation of ballast water, a process that may lead to sterilisation systems being installed aboard international ships

24 September 2003

HotAIR, the web site of the Annals of Improbable Research, is publishing a fascinating series on the Origin of Murphy's Law. It turns out there really was a Murphy, and the story of his law involves rocket sleds, Chuck Yeager, and Edwards Air Force Base. The article covers all these topics and more, and includes interviews with Yeager, the son of Murphy (really), and several surviving members of the project that inspired the law

California is trying a deceptively simple approach to the problem of junk e-mail: It is about to ban spam. While spammers in Australia who repeatedly send unsolicited bulk e-mail could be fined up to $1 million a day under new anti-spam laws shortly to be introduced into Federal Parliament. But the Government, political parties, charities and religious organisations, which are understood to be exempt, would still be able to send as much spam as they like

Mirroring a move by rival Overture Services, Google experiments with search results tailored to a person's geographic location

23 September 2003

Compaq has finally provided a FAQ to the world to ask that long standing question where is the any key? I can only hope that this was added as a joke, and not in response to legitimate need

Microsoft Windows Update is offering a download for their 1.0 version of the Microsoft Windows Rights Management client, if you care to download it. Although it's not required or a critical update, this just paves the road for all of Microsoft's software to require DRM technology on your computer

Iraq was in effect put up for sale when the American-appointed administration announced it was opening up all sectors of the economy to foreign investors in a desperate attempt to deliver much-needed reconstruction against a daily backdrop of kidnappings, looting and violent death

22 September 2003

A highway in Saskatchewan has won the dubious honour of worst highway in Canada, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. The bloke who entered the highway in the competition won a free wheel alignment

The first time around, Indian Motorcycle lasted more than 50 years. This time, it lasted five. On Friday, Indian closed the factory in Gilroy where it made heavyweight cruisers and other motorcycles, telling its 380 employees that a deal with a new investor had fallen through

The founders of AC Propulsion seem to think that lithium-ion batteries have led them to the holy grail of electric motoring

21 September 2003

The full magnitude of the world's largest ever rodent has been revealed — the now-extinct monster was the size of a cow. The creature weighed in at 700 kilograms and lived eight million years ago, roaming the lush banks of the ancient Orinoco delta in north-western Venezuela. But the 3m long, 1.3m tall behemoth was an evolutionary cousin of today's humble guinea pig

The UK has introduced legislation banning British firms from spamming personal e-mail and mobile phone accounts from the end of this year, although business addresses will remain unprotected

BBCi and Vodafone have new projects that reflect a broad mission to build digital interactivity into public spaces

20 September 2003

Scientists have discovered that when it comes to detecting if you've been swindled out of a fair deal, monkeys can be just as sharp as humans

A widespread belief among physicists nowadays is that modern science requires squadrons of scientists and wildly expensive equipment. Craig Wallace, fresh out of Spanish Fork High School, had almost the entire physics faculty of Utah State University hovering (and arguing) over an apparatus he had cobbled together from parts salvaged from junk yards and charity drops. The apparatus is nothing less than the sine qua non of modern science: a nuclear fusion reactor, based on the plans of Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television

A permanent ban on taxes unique to the Internet has taken another step toward reality, with House approval of legislation that next goes to the Senate

19 September 2003

Criticism is growing over VeriSign's surprise decision to take control of all unassigned .com and .net domain names, a move that's wreaking havoc on some filtering tools

Lindows promises free goods for California residents who qualify for benefits from a settlement in Microsoft's antitrust case

Unmarried and homosexual partners of Armed Forces personnel are to be given the same rights of compensation and pensions as widows

18 September 2003

Telstra BigPond, which is Australia's leading ISP with 1.43 million dial-up and broadband customers, has launched a new user-pays anti-virus and spam protection service for customers. If they're making you pay for this, they are condoning, if not actively encouraging, spam

With Hurricane Isabel churning in the west Atlantic on Sunday, a 70-year-old woman hurled a knife at her husband because he chose to watch football instead of preparing for the storm

A desperate American recording industry is waging a fierce fight against digital copyright infringement seemingly oblivious to the fact that, for practical purposes, it lost the digital music sharing fight over five years ago... in Canada

A large number of people who walk into libraries don't borrow a thing; they come in to use the space and read the newspapers or sit there. So what would a library of the future look like to cater for all of the people in the community? Julie Rae, Chief Executive of the Central Highlands Regional Library, thinks that parts of it would look like your lounge room, parts of it would look like the Qantas club... and that would include a bar as well, parts of it would look like a library with shelves of books and parts of it would look like a café... there might be virtual reality rooms

17 September 2003

People wearing headphones could easily hunt down a virtual insect, using only the echolocation sounds, in what is apparently a very intuitive process. Dean Waters, a bat expert at the University of Leeds, hopes that a similar system in the cockpit of fighter planes could allow pilots to track some controls using their hearing, freeing up their eyes for other tasks

In a move aimed squarely at rival Microsoft, Sun Microsystems has unveiled a suite of desktop software aimed at businesses that want to dump — or just can't afford — the Windows operating system on their companies' personal computers. The Sun Java Desktop system, which was previously code-named Mad Hatter, runs on the open-source Linux operating system and includes a variety of programs that replace Microsoft's internet browser, productivity suite, and other parts of the Windows package

16 September 2003

Those windows that allow glare onto your computer screen can be useful, soon they will provide power to your computer, air conditioning and other useful necessities

Ever wanted a ball of Silly Putty as big as your head? Now you can make it at home. The University of Minnesota's Chemistry Department has instructions on how to make it, as well as other fun things like Slime

Lost or stolen mobile phones will be useless to anyone who tries to make calls on them, as a result of new federal regulations. They will be blocked on all mobile phone networks, rendering them virtually worthless because they can no longer be used

Westpac customers had millions of dollars removed from their accounts during the weekend because of a computer glitch

15 September 2003

Scientists' efforts to realise the space elevator, as first described by Arthur C Clarke in his 1979 novel The Fountains of Paradise. Advances in materials science mean that a cable reaching up as far as 100,000km from the surface of the Earth is no longer an impossibility and 70 scientists and engineers are discussing the idea at a conference in Santa Fe

A WTO draft trade text issued at the organisation's meeting in Cancun calls for an end to export subsidies on farm products of special interest to developing countries and their gradual elimination on other farm goods. Unfortunately, talks have fallen through, with developing nations angrily accused richer countries of pushing their own interests

14 September 2003

With the popularity of case modding, Wired have a round-up of some more extreme mods; from a V8 engine to a shiny Aluminium box

Cameron Jones, a DJ and scientist in Melbourne whose research is in the area of communication through biological cells, serendipitously created an 'optical biocomputer' when he spilled beer on his CDs and left them over night. The resulting fungus that formed distorted the sound of the CDs in interesting and meaningful ways

13 September 2003

Google-owned weblog creation site Blogger is eliminating its paid version, Blogger Pro, and folding premium functions into its free service, bucking a trend toward making people pay for web site extras

A senior police officer has argued that every single person in the UK should be compelled to have their DNA on the national database in an effort to prevent crime

After taking its anti-piracy campaign to court, the music industry is finding itself on the receiving end of a lawsuit that challenges its purported amnesty program as a fraudulent business practice

12 September 2003

Sweden was in a state of shock after its Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh, died after being stabbed while shopping at an exclusive department store. It didn't take long for the morons to crawl out of the woodwork and declare her assassin a patriot

Intelligent software that brings rough sketches to life in a virtual world is promising to revolutionise the way children learn and to help engineers visualise their designs

A report from Stanford University suggests that genetically-modified vaginal bacteria may be able to serve as a 'living condom', secreting proteins that protect women against HIV

11 September 2003

12-year-old New York girl, Brianna Lahara, was among the first to be sued by the record industry for sharing music over the internet is off the hook after her mother agreed to pay US$2,000 to settle the lawsuit. P2P United, a trade group representing six of the biggest file sharing web sites, offered to pay the fine her behalf

A company called BigChampagne sells regional P2P download statistics to most of the major record labels. When the labels know what people are downloading, they know what to put on the radio, and sales in the area increase. The record industry's lawsuits against file sharing companies hang on their assertion that the programs have no use other than to help infringe copyrights. If the labels acknowledge a legitimate use for P2P programs, it would undercut their case as well as their zero-tolerance stance

10 September 2003

After hours of travelling, Charles McKinley, 25, of New York City, pried open the crate with a crowbar Saturday morning. He popped up outside his parents' doorstep in the south Dallas suburb of DeSoto, shook the hand of a shocked deliveryman and walked away

China, a haven for spammers, wakes up to the problem and blocks 127 servers identified as the sources of high volumes of unsolicited e-mail

Anti-spam legislation is being fast-forwarded by the Federal Government. The Bill is expected before parliament within weeks and will likely be in place before xmas

Disney is going to start offering DVDs that deteriorate within 48 hours after removing them from an oxygen-resistant envelope

09 September 2003

The Court of Appeal in The Hague rejected all of Scientology's claims in appeal in Scientology's action against XS4ALL, Karin Spaink and ten other internet providers. As a result, Karin Spaink's web site, which Scientology sought to remove from the Internet based on copyright claims, is entirely legal in the Netherlands. The court also overturned two lower court rulings, one of which said that linking to material that infringed a copyright was itself actionable. The other ruling said that ISPs that failed to act on credible notification of a copyright violation could be held liable for that. The Appeals Court felt that this was too vague a standard, and thus posed a threat to free speech

People searching for art that was stolen by the Nazis have a new tool: a web site that allows US museum collections to be checked for long-lost pieces

Oracle has lifted the covers off long awaited plans to offer a utility-style grid computing architecture, unveiling its 10g database flagship and putting the Linux open source operating system squarely at the centre of its corporate future

08 September 2003

There's a new test aircraft that can travel at supersonic speeds without triggering a sonic boom. The technology works by modifying the shape of the plane

There are plans in India to use GPS technology to alert train drivers of obstructions on the tracks, automatically stopping the train if the driver fails to take action. This sounds like a good use of cheaply-available technology to provide a safer train network

Intel Labs is prototyping a potentially revolutionary new personal server. The tiny device comprises a hard disk, BlueTooth, a Web-DAV enabled HTTP daemon, and other technologies enabling the user to access and modify their files from any enabled PC within their 'Personal Area Network'. In theory, this would allow the worker to access their own data — essentially to have their own PC — at any suitable workstation as long as the personal server were nearby

07 September 2003

At thousands of Bookcrossing zones, people have discreetly left free books in hopes that a stranger will pick them up, enjoy them, register them on the Internet, then pass them on

Users of the Lycos web portal have been unable to access their e-mail this week following a glitch during an upgrade

06 September 2003

An ISP in Tennessee, whose main facility was completely levelled by a tornado, recovered in 72 hours. The story is a great recounting of how they executed their disaster recovery plan, what they found they had left out of that plan, data recovery from destroyed hard drives, and perhaps the best argument ever for offsite backups

Aquada have just tested a fully amphibious car on the Thames. It can travel at up to 100 miles an hour on land, and its wheels fold up to allow it to speed across water at 30mph, propelled by a jet

05 September 2003

Don Park puts the semantic back into the semantic web — mark things up willy-nilly and make sense of them afterwards

A new line of corn-based plastics, called polylactides or PLA, has begun to land on US supermarket shelves. Its strongest selling points are that it fully degrades in 47 days, doesn't emit toxic fumes when incinerated, and requires 20 to 50 percent less fossil fuel to manufacture than regular plastics

A French court has ruled that music compact discs which include functions to prevent copying amount to faulty goods and that buyers must be reimbursed

Toshiba and NEC will incorporate fuel cells into the laptops by 2004. Sony, Hitachi and Casio are expected to follow the suit. The tests show a fuel cell lasting 10 hours. With the form-factor of a Bic lighter, it allows the laptop user to carry a few extra cells in the laptop bag all the time. Battery prices are expected to run at about US$200

04 September 2003

The wide spread of unsolicited e-mails is leading publishers and site owners towards subscription-based RSS. People just do not subscribe to free e-mail newsletters any more, making a broad assumption that anyone offering them would be a spammer

Poachers who have hunted some rhino species to the verge of extinction could soon be tracked down by genetic tests being developed in Britain and Taiwan

Soon, the way you use your mouse could help prove who you are. Scientists have found a way for people to sign their name online using a mouse instead of a pen. The technology, based on the research from Queen Mary College, University of London by Peter McOwan, uses a neural network to pick out the unique features of the way that someone uses a mouse

Lawyers for a New York woman accused of illegally sharing music over the internet suggested the US recording industry acted illegally when it investigated her online activities and that a search of music files on her computer may have been unconstitutional

03 September 2003

A genuine, flexible, flapping-capable winged aircraft, or ornithopter, has been produced by the University of Toronto's Institute for Aerospace Studies and non-profit research institute, SRI International

Picture-messaging phones may be about to get a whole lot more intrusive. Thanks to a novel way to make a thin sheet of a piezoelectric ceramic material work like an ultra-cheap micromotor, mobile phone cameras should soon be able to zoom and focus with the same precision as the autofocusing lenses used in expensive stills cameras

The popular Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera officially launched its English Web site, five months after hackers brought down a temporary site at the height of the Iraq war

02 September 2003

The Dutch are the first to permit cannabis to be legally dispensed to those with a doctor's prescription, and other countries — including Britain, parts of the US, Australia and Canada, where plans for a similar system are at an advanced stage — will be watching the Dutch experience closely

Japan, China and South Korea plan to develop an original operating system in a bid to challenge the domination of Microsoft Windows. Microsoft has declared the strategy unfair

Microsoft has told the W3C that it's considering making changes to Internet Explorer in light of a recent ruling against the company in a patent infringement lawsuit

American doctor Geoffrey Chernoff has told a Queensland medical conference that small skin biopsies are taken from patients and stored until the patient uses it for reconstructive or cosmetic procedures

01 September 2003

A Tufts team has figured out how spiders and silkworms spin such strong silk, which could have far-reaching implications for everything from hospital dressings to body armour.

A few weeks ago, MIT graduate student Shan Sinha cancelled his broadband Internet service. Now his Net connection comes through the chimney. From a computer in the living room of his Cambridge apartment, a few blocks from the MIT campus, a cable goes into the fireplace up to the roof, where it is attached to an antenna. From there, data packets hop to another roof-mounted antenna at a nearby student's apartment. That way, from roof to roof in multiple hops, Sinha's data packets finally reach a gateway — a computer connected to the fixed Internet — at MIT's computer science building

The WTO has agreed to give poor countries greater access to inexpensive lifesaving medicine by altering international trade rules

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