October 2003 Archive

31 October 2003

Bruce Hubbard, an Auckland peace activist, sent an email to the US Embassy objecting to the war on Iraq and got charged with misuse of a telephone for his troubles

The Australian National Office for the Information Economy said it wouldn't endorse use of Microsoft's controversial document security technology, Information Rights Management in Commonwealth agencies

The US Library of Congress has created four exemptions under which it is legal to crack digital copyright protections — lists of sites blocked by commercial Internet filtering software, but not spam-fighting lists; computer programs protected by hardware dongles that are broken or obsolete; computer programs or video games that use obsolete formats or hardware; e-books that prevent read-aloud or other handicapped access formats from functioning

US scientists have deliberately genetically engineered an extremely deadly form of mousepox. The new virus kills 100% of mice, even if they have been vaccinated and are treated with antiviral drugs

30 October 2003

Individuals have been warned about the threat of identity theft for years. Now it's the turn of businesses. A warning that coincided nicely with the arrival of four new dodgy ANZ spoofs in the e-mail

The torrent of spam that is flowing into electronic mailboxes comes not only from outlaws and hucksters but also from the office towers of the biggest and best-known corporations

Individuals and small-business owners should be able to buy domain names without being required to divulge their mailing address, phone number and e-mail address, an international coalition planned to say in a letter

29 October 2003

The kerfuffle over Bob Brown's heckling of the President is by no means over. The speaker Neil Andrew wants to find someone to punish for the sin of letting the world see what actually happened in the Australian Parliament

Symantec has been unable to resolve a glitch that is stopping some users activating its latest antivirus software, and says it doesn't know when a fix will be available

28 October 2003

Some moron from the US propaganda machine has ripped off the very well written, girl on the street blog, Baghdad Burning

The White House web site's use of its robots.txt file to disable search engines from crawling certain material is an exercise in historical revisionism. Many excluded items in the robots.txt file involve mentions of Iraq, possibly to prevent people from finding changes to past statements and information when archived elsewhere

The Anti-Spam Research Group of the Internet Research Task Force early this month formed a subcommittee to hammer out differences between a number of competing protocols that all aim to do the same thing: verify that e-mail senders are who they say they are

A company accused of sending unsolicited bulk email was fined US$2 million, the first such ruling under California's anti-spam law. PW Marketing LLC and its owners, Paul Willis and Claudia Griffin, were also banned from owning, managing, or holding an economic interest in any company that advertises over the internet without first notifying the attorney general. The injunction will remain in place for 10 years

27 October 2003

The Gemini, described by inventor Robert Leeds as the world's first underwater sports car, is a personal submersible that will set you back US$825,000. However, the submarine only goes about five knots, so speed is not its primary focus. It can handle three people for three days at depths of up to 50 metres

The latest offering of Mandrake's distribution, 9.2, has been found to not only be incompatible with some LG CD-ROM drives, but to destroy them during the installation process. Mandrake have posted information on their errata page. Along with over 350MB of updates within a week of release, it's not been a good start for this latest release

26 October 2003

The Motion Picture Association and APRA have commissioned a report from Allen Consulting into the effects of extending Australian copyright from life plus 50 years to life plus 70 years. This forms the MPA and APRA's contribution to US-Australian free trade negotiations, currently underway. The report recommends that copyright terms should be extended. An extension of copyright would not be in Australia's interest. Some would argue that it is not in anyone's interest. Projects such as Project Gutenberg of Australia would be adversely affected by such an extension. Perhaps now is to time to write to your Member of Parliament, asking them to oppose any extension of copyright or patents, and shore up whatever resistance there is to an extension of IP in Australia

Howard does jingoistic nationalism well. He clutches sports people to his breast. He honours our war dead and the Bali victims by affirming our core values, yet he casually throws them away, even in our own Parliament, to please disrespectful foreign guests

More than seven years after British Rail was abolished, the Government took a large step towards the renationalisation of the network last night by allowing the state-backed Network Rail to take all track maintenance back in-house. The news came on the day that one of the main rail contractors was accused of falsifying records. It is the most significant sign yet that the privatisation drawn up by the Conservative government and refined by Labour has been a failure

Search engine Google, owner of one of the most powerful brands on the internet, is now close to floating its shares for the first time

25 October 2003

With the rise of Mini-ITX motherboards and their usefulness for modding small household objects into PCs has resulted in hobbyists across Europe, the United States and the Far East stuffing the works of personal computers into toasters, humidors, biscuit tins, lampshades, even a plush ET doll

Researchers estimate that nano-velcro would be about 30 times stronger than conventional epoxy adhesives. It would bond most solids together so powerfully that the materials themselves would break before the pads of hooks came apart. It would also be about 3,000 times stronger than a microscopic version of Velcro made by carving tiny hooks into silicon wafers

Robots rarely seem cuddly, partly because of their hard metal exteriors. But designing supple skin for them has to fulfil two apparently opposing needs: being elastic enough to have the dexterity of a human, while carrying enough wiring to allow it to accurately sense its environment. Now electrical engineers at Princeton University have developed a hyper-stretchy metal film that might do the job

Taking a new twist on an old antispam method, Microsoft previews a system for singling out mail from approved addresses. It plans to use the system in its free Hotmail e-mail service

24 October 2003

A home-brew supercomputer, assembled by technicians and students at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University from 1,100 off-the-shelf Apple Macintosh computers in just one month at a cost of slightly more than US$5 million, is about to be ranked as one of the fastest machines in the world

The BBC has launched the beta of iCan, its service for enabling Britons to act collectively to participate in their governments

Reporters Without Borders has just published its second world press freedom rankings. Forget Laos, Burma and North Korea — they don't want to know. Cuba is also cited for locking journalists up. Finland, Iceland, Norway and the Netherlands are the freest places for journalists to operate, tying for the number one spot. Australia is a shameful number 50

Bill Gates has slammed moves by political parties in Australia and elsewhere to legislate the adoption of open-source software, claiming the open-source system was 'inferior' and said it represented a false economy in relation to lost opportunities to improve productivity. Bob Cringley explains why exactly why Microsoft doesn't understand open-source

23 October 2003

The much-maligned wolf, one of the fiercest predators on the planet, has become an important provider of food for other animals in the few years since it was returned to Yellowstone National Park

In an effort to improve its corporate reputation, adware company Gator has launched a legal offensive to divorce its name from the hated term 'spyware' — and so far its strategy is paying off. In response to a libel lawsuit, an antispyware company has settled with Gator and pulled Web pages critical of the company, its practices and its software. And other spyware foes are getting the message

22 October 2003

Most computer hardware web sites tell you how to get your computer hardware up and running properly. Hardware Analysis takes a different approach and tells us exactly how not to install computer hardware. They document many of the pitfalls that'll sound familiar to many enthusiasts and have some great pictures of what could go horribly wrong during an upgrade

A civil liberties watchdog group is expressing concern over the San Francisco Public Library's plans to track books by inserting computer chips into each tome

A judge sentenced an Arizona woman to 60 days home detention for intercepting her husband's ex-wife's e-mail, saying the penalty is a warning to others who might be tempted to do the same

21 October 2003

Researchers at NEC have taken wireless connectivity to new levels by successfully demonstrating handovers between access points while traveling past them at bullet-train speed

A growing number of angry Telstra BigPond customers have registered interest in launching a class action against the telco over delays in its email service during the past three weeks

Miracle fuel additives that promise more kilometres per litre, cleaner engines and less pollution are as old as fuel itself. Such claims are often vague and rarely proven. But Oxonica says it has developed an additive, called Envirox, that makes diesel burn more efficiently, producing fuel savings of 10%

20 October 2003

Reducing journalism to a branch of corporate and government public relations is the hidden agenda of the media deregulators, in Britain and America

The spirit of the retarded monkey boy has been trapped in a clay pot and tossed into a river in northern Thailand after being cursed by hundreds of farmers protesting US agriculture policy

Workers at the Streets ice cream plant at Minto, in Sydney's south-west, were unaware that the manufacture of its major Australian ice-creams might be transferred to China

19 October 2003

Two of three types of GM crops tested in farm scale trials are worse for wildlife than conventional crops, according to the long-awaited results of government trials

There's a significant shift afoot in storage fundamentals, and it's not storage area networks or network attached storage — although both will have critical roles in these new fundamentals. The shift involves the facilitating role that metadata will play in abstracting the specifics about data and where it's stored from the applications, end users, and operating systems requiring access to it

A man so angry with his laptop that he shot it has topped an annual league table of the oddest computer mishaps. Data recovery experts say although machine failure is blamed for the majority of lost files, humans are getting more careless too. The list of the strangest ways data was lost was compiled by recovery experts Kroll Ontrack

18 October 2003

A group of men out hunting moose in the eastern Norwegian valley called Oesterdalen had a close encounter with a pack of wolves last Saturday. They snapped digital photos and experts now say the wolves constitute a new family

A new species of frog — named nasikabatrachidae, which is Sanskrit for frog with a nose — has been discovered in the mountains of southern India. The purple, small-headed creature with tiny eyes, protruding snout and a bloated appearance belongs to a new family of frogs that scientists thought had either never existed or had disappeared without trace millions of years ago

Australia has signed an agreement with the United Kingdom and New Zealand in its continued bid to clamp down on international Internet fraud

Indian protesters choked the streets and highways of La Paz with a powerful anti globalisation demonstration

17 October 2003

A new study looks the effect of speed cameras and doubling of speeding violation fines in both Australia and the UK. It finds that these measures, which are catching on in the US, have failed to produce positive results

The latest innovations developed by computer crackers on behalf of the junk e-mail profession are techniques that enable spammers — or scam artists for that matter — to create web sites that are essentially untraceable. One group in Poland is currently advertising invisible bulletproof hosting in online forums for spammers

Mozilla 1.5 has been released, this is supposed to be the last version of the old Mozilla suite. Mozilla Firebird 0.7, the stand-alone browser by mozilla.org and Thunderbird 0.3, the stand-alone version of the Mozilla mail-program also have shiny new versions. The new browser release included a bug fix for a long standing <hr> bug that promptly rendered all of the workaround <hr> code in the site invisible. The CSS has been fixed to reflect the changes

16 October 2003

A new partnership between Victorian optical communications company CEOS and Hitachi will see Passive Optical Network technology which can deliver information up to 200 times faster than existing broadband available to households in Australia and New Zealand early next year

The Victorian government has moved to curb the hours telemarketers can harass people, they will be banned from calling people at home after 8:00 pm on weeknights and after 5:00 pm on weekends

A Chinese martial arts expert, known as 'the doctor' for his practice of acupuncture and traditional Chinese medicine, turned the tables on four burglars armed with knives, killing two of them and seriously wounding a third

15 October 2003

HP and Sun are likely to feel Telstra's wrath because BigPond users' email has been slowed over the past two weeks. BigPond mail servers began to stall early this month and the slowdown continued for 10 days, which the ISP blamed on a bug-ridden software upgrade

The US Supreme Court has agreed to step into a fight over how the country's government can protect children from online porn without resorting to unconstitutional censorship

The Victorian Government is working to close a loophole which has allowed some parents use their children to claim the $7,000 first home buyers grant

14 October 2003

US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops

SETI@home is preparing to make a major change to their client and backend. The new system 'boinc' will be a general purpose client and accept work units from other projects (selected by the user). This will open-up SETI@Home's millions strong user base to academic projects that cannot afford supercomputers. As boinc is an open source framework other distributed projects will also be able to use it giving boinc a larger installed base than SETI@Home

Honda has brought the mass production of zero-emission hydrogen vehicles a step closer to reality by developing a cheaper-to-make, high-performance fuel cell stack needed to power the cars

13 October 2003

Thirteen activists were arrested as Greenpeace took action to prevent the distribution of Inghams poultry feed, revealing that Inghams is the largest single user of genetically modified crops in Australia

Our federal representatives are doing their best to rid Australian inboxes of junk email — for their own benefit as much as anyone elses

An audit of e-commerce Web sites by the Victorian government has found less than 1% met all the requirements for the Commonwealth 'Best Practice' model

The lives of Roman Catholics in some of the countries worst hit by HIV/AIDS are being put at even greater risk by advice from their churches that the use of condoms does not prevent transmission of the disease

12 October 2003

Long-time C|Net reporter and Politech operator Declan McCullagh has been contacted by the FBI, requesting that he retain all records regarding his talks with Adrian Lamo. The problem? The FBI's letter was sent under the auspices of a law which applies only to internet service providers

A Swedish couple hunting on a remote mountain in Sweden's far northern region of Jaemtland this week found 70 pairs of shoes, all filled with butter. It's not going to be pretty when the butter starts to rot and the authorities have to wait for the snow so they can get up there with a snowmobile

11 October 2003

The Bass Station is an old-school boom-box case modded to include a built in a WiFi access-point, along with: a 120GB hard drive, and an MP3 decoder, and that is controlled using a web browser. Besides being able to play MP3s, it can also stream audio to other devices in its local area network, double as a file-server for file-sharing

Three Britons are appearing in court on drug smuggling charges after a large quantity of cocaine was found concealed inside two live Labradors. The drugs had been surgically concealed inside the dogs and were surgically removed. One of the dogs died and the other was recovering

The P2P networking approach that threatens to make the recording industry obsolete could also bring about a more reliable Internet

Web developers want to light a fire under Microsoft to get better standards support in the company's Internet Explorer browser, but they can't seem to spark a flame

10 October 2003

The Straight Dope explains all the weird keys that come with standard PC keyboards

Sony has crammed a raft of new features into its next generation PlayStation games machine, but Australian players will have to wait until at least the second half of next year to buy one

New UK regulations that will implement a European directive on copyright could mean up to two years in jail for file-swappers

Telstra admitted that up to 720,000 Australian telephone services, or 10% of the lines it monitors, fail every year

09 October 2003

Cooligy is applying an idea from Victorian engineering to solving a key stumbling block in the development of high-performance chips — how to cool them down

A new battery — lauded as the smallest implantable battery in the world — may soon be powering tiny bionic neurons, devices that emit electrical micropulses to stimulate damaged nerves and muscles

A Dutch consumer watchdog demanded Nokia conduct an in-depth investigation after two Nokia mobile phones exploded, injuring their owners, in the Netherlands within a few months

08 October 2003

A Princeton University student has published instructions for disabling the new anticopying measures being tested on CDs by BMG — and they're as simple as holding down a computer's Shift key

LookSmart, one of the dodgier search engines, has been hit hard by news its biggest customer, Microsoft's MSN, would not renew an agreement which accounts for most of LookSmart's revenue

Coles Myer has followed Telstra's lead and begun flirting with open-source software, such as Linux, as the retailer rationalises its IT operations. Even Microsoft is toying with a licensing scheme similar to an open-source arrangement for one of its code libraries

07 October 2003

Tom Baker, the fourth Dr Who, told BBC Radio Five Live that comedian Eddie Izzard had landed the part. But BBC says no final decision has been made on who will star in the TV show when it returns in 2005. I'd like Richard Grant for the role, but am quite taken by the suggestion of Jonathan Pryce

A disused industrial site at Green Square will become Sydney's first legal squat, where students will live for a token sum pending redevelopment of the site. Six art students and four architecture students are due to move into the dilapidated Waverley-Woollahra incinerator within the next three weeks pending approval from South Sydney Council. The project already has tentative support from the property's owners, Waverley Council and Woollahra Council

Researchers at Loughborough University in central England say they may have worked out why the cookie crumbles and that the problem may be due to cooking techniques and humidity

06 October 2003

Philips has found a way to burn a dual layered DVD+R. Unlike other dual layered disks that have been developed, this one is also designed to be backwards compatible with current DVD players. The DVDs will hold 8.5GB of data — 4 hours of video — and are set to be released as soon as next year

Google's new AdSense terms of service, not only allow them to terminate you without notice, cause or recourse (withholding any sums owed to you at the time), but also bind you to a number of restrictive confidentiality terms, including one that prohibits you from criticising the service. This is definitely on the wrong side of the 'Don't Be Evil' line

05 October 2003

The Ig Nobel awards for 2003 were presented at Harvard University. Engineering: the inventors of Murphy's Law Physics: authors of 'An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces' report Medicine: the scientists, who discovered that London taxi drivers are smarter than average London residents Psychology: authors of the 'Politicians' Uniquely Simple Personalities' report Chemistry: a Japanese scientist who studied a bronze statue strangely ignored by pigeon population Literature: the author of more than 80 scientific reports on amusing statistical information Economics: the man, who viewed the entire country of Liechtenstein as a large convention centre Interdisciplinary: authors of 'Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans' study Peace: a man who gained a triple accomplishment: for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and for creating the Association of Dead People Biology: first documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck species

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has formally taken court action against Domain Names Australia and its director for alleged breaches of the Trade Practices Act related to mailouts to domain name holders

Adelaide-based telco Agile Communications has circumvented the limits of Telstra's ADSL network by building its own broadband infrastructure in a small South Australian town

Seventeen conservation and wildlife protection groups filed suit this week to challenge the federal decision to lower the status of the gray wolf from endangered to threatened in the lower-48 states. The decision would also ultimately hand over species management to state governments, at least one of which has called for extermination of the species

04 October 2003

Australia may be facing a permanent drought because of an accelerating vortex of winds whipping around the Antarctic that threatens to disrupt rainfall

Intel's Vanderpool is a computer chip designed to run more than one operating system at a time could break Microsoft's stranglehold on PC software

A flaw critics have warned of in the RIAA's series of lawsuits against consumers — the possibility that 'innocent' file-sharers could appear 'guilty' — is the subject of a newly released anonymous paper; Entrapment: Incriminating Peer to Peer Network Users

Conceding that its strategy of patching Windows holes as they emerge has not worked, Microsoft plans next week to outline a new security effort focused on what the company calls 'securing the perimeter', which is likely to be little more than the same dodgy tactic with a shiny new name

03 October 2003

Every time a software program locks up and you want to start over, every time you need to change your password or log on or off your computer, you can thank David Bradley. The same David Bradley who saved Bill Gates' derriere before the Windows operating system became the monster it is today. Bradley is the man who gave the world control-alt-delete

One of Moby's fans is being sued by the RIAA, and Moby is far from impressed

A truck, a sat dish and a sunburnt country. When you absolutely positively need to connect to the Internet, why not carry your own broadband connection with you? Onno Benschop and his wife are doing just that — packed up the lot and have gone on the road, so far roughly 3000km

One of the more artistic case mods, the Spider Case, it's pretty lights make up for its hefty footprint

02 October 2003

Andy Markley's domain and professional reputation were effectively hijacked by a spammer. After facing complete indifference to his plight from his own ISP, he was forced to track the bastard down himself

Some technologies are so blatantly obnoxious that the human race would rejoice if they were summarily executed. Bruce Sterling offers some candidates for destruction including; land mines, prisons and DVDs

Super Slurper, a starch-based polymer with a powerful thirst, has been employed in nappies and filters, but researchers want to turn the page and develop a different application: drying waterlogged books. It is being re-designed to aid librarians and archivists in their battle against flood damage

IBM has wowed the semiconductor industry with a new chip design under development. Compared to silicon-germanium bipolar chip technology, now considered state of the art, the new semiconductor design could vastly improve performance of wireless devices

01 October 2003

The array of plans and options facing new broadband users will become more transparent with the launch of a free online tool for comparing fast internet services. Both Whirlpool and its sister site, Broadband Choice, have been relaunched with a set of tools to allow users to dynamically compare the broadband plans and prices of the large number of providers that have sprung up over the past two years

The Federal Government has been urged to investigate allegations that failed asylum seekers have been encouraged by Government officials to use fake passports. It is claimed immigration officers supported the use of false documents in order to bypass passport controls in other countries

The Queensland Government's plan to issue smartcard driving licences to the state's 2.5 million motorists could seriously compromise privacy rights

Storage specialist Optima Technology has filed a lawsuit against Network Solutions, alleging that the registrar gave away its domain name without its permission and so caused damage to its business. Verisign have a long history of this practice, usually against people who can't afford to fight back

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