November 2003 Archive

30 November 2003

Human Pacman is a project of the Mixed Reality Lab of the National University of Singapore. Players don back pack computers, VR gloves, and 'mixed reality' goggles which overlay virtual cookies — shown as floating spheres — on a first person view of the real world. Aided by a helper who can view the entire game board, players realise their pacman fantasies as they physically move around in a wide-area setting, eating cookies and avoiding monsters

If you're heading into a case modding project, the object is usually to improve on the original. In this case, a serious xBox nerd unintentionally turned his gaming machine into Orac

The controversial plan is set for the next session of Parliament, introducing the possibility of mandatory identity cards containing biometric information and tied to a central database

Hibernating bears have a unique ability to stop their bones from degenerating during long periods of inactivity, a finding that is stimulating the search for new treatments for osteoporosis

29 November 2003

Francisco and Sheila were ideal parents. They raised 25 babies, taught them good survival skills, and sent many of them off to live on their own. Francisco and Sheila were Mexican grey wolves, or lobos, pioneers in a US federal programme to restore the endangered Mexican grey wolf, the rarest and most genetically distinct subspecies of grey wolf in North America. Although captive themselves, Francisco and Sheila taught their pups such good wolf traits that many are thriving in the wild

Opte.org announced that they have successfully mapped the entire internet. They are currently compiling a LGL map for all to see. Currently they have a LGL map that has over 5 million edges and has an estimated 50 million hop count. And it only took them 252.68 hours to complete

Replacing a pipe organ is no small undertaking. These majestic instruments are costly and difficult to build, and demand months of tuning and tweaking to deliver a perfect sound. In Europe, birthplace of the organ and long the dominant producer of them, they are also intensely political. When Lausanne decided in 1999 to replace the cathedral's aging Swiss organ with a new one from an organ maker in Gloucester, Massachusetts, it was viewed by many Swiss as an act of heresy. Never before had a European cathedral entrusted such a sacred task to an American firm

28 November 2003

Federal intervention has failed to stop the ACT passing landmark legislation creating the new offence of industrial manslaughter. Negligent employers face penalties of up to 25 years jail. The offence is designed to target negligent and reckless behaviour which results in the death of an employee. Individuals found guilty face lengthy prison terms, while corporations can be fined up to $5 million

Just half a litre of blood and a few hours could be all it takes to create a personalised body repair kit, if controversial claims prove true. TriStem, the small London-based company, says it can revert white blood cells into a stem-cell like state. This would make them capable of regenerating many body tissues and treating illnesses from heart disease to Parkinson's. The company has now published some evidence, but many experts remain very sceptical

Just half a teaspoon of cinnamon a day significantly reduces blood sugar levels in diabetics, a new study has found. The effect, which can be produced even by soaking a cinnamon stick your tea, could also benefit millions of non-diabetics who have blood sugar problem but are unaware of it

An 80-year-old woman used a ceremonial sword to successfully fight off two six-foot raiders who burst into her home. Angina sufferer Jean Freke grabbed the sword from the wall in her drawing-room after she was pushed to the ground. The widow wrestled with one of the burglars and brandished the weapon at the other — via Die Puny Humans

27 November 2003

Applied Digital Solutions are marketing the VeriChip as the world's only implantable ID technology, claiming they could one day replace credit cards. They are also receiving condemnation from some fundamentalist Christians who believe that this is the fabled 'mark of the beast' of biblical lore

Darren Barefoot points out a consumer-sized wind turbine from Windsave. A very nice device that allows you to generate wind power at very low wind speeds

Dell is moving its call centre operations for the Latitude and Optiplex computers back to the US from Bangalore, India after an onslaught of complaints from dissatisfied customers who couldn't cope with the differing accents and scripted responses. Is this the beginning of a trend where companies recognise that the quality offered by relocation to cheaper centres around the world doesn't result in customer appreciation and better quality?

In an interesting twist on political correctness, LA County has banned the use of the terms Master/Slave

26 November 2003

Paramilitaries, embedded journalists and illegal protests. Think this is Iraq? It's Miami, with uber-Nazi Timoney leading a armed military assault on the democratic right to peaceful protest

Jon Lech Johansen, the Norwegian who drew the ire of the Hollywood movie industry by breaking the encryption code for DVDs at age 15, has now cracked the codes for iTunes

In an unusual combination, the British Library has formed an alliance with Amazon.co.uk to sell to the public catalogue listings of over 2.5 million literary works from its collection

25 November 2003

New York's highest court has heard arguments in the case of a man who has refused to cut his dog's tail for national competitions. John Hammer contends that the 'docked-tail' standard violates state law against intentionally injuring an animal and constitutes illegal discrimination

A young entrepreneur has gotten into the business of recycling junked TV commercials for clients with low budgets. TV ads cost anywhere between $50,000 and $1 million and small businesses usually cannot afford an original production. The company, Thought Equity, wipes off all references to the earlier company and makes the junked commercial ready for reselling with a price tag less than $10,000

New laws allowing Singapore to launch pre-emptive strikes against computer hackers have raised fears that internet controls are being tightened and privacy compromised in the name of fighting terrorism

24 November 2003

Daniel Frommelt and his posse have recoded a prototype of Slashdot that uses valid, semantic HTML and stylesheets. Frommelt projects four-figure bandwidth savings in the candidate redesign, were it adopted, not to mention better appearance in a wide range of browsers and improved accessibility. Next he needs volunteers to retool the Slashdot engine. And yes, he did it all with CmdrTaco's blessing

A Toronto man is the first to be charged with theft of communications for downloading child pornography using someone else's residential wireless network. The War Driver was caught naked from the waist down driving the wrong way down a one-way street, with a laptop in hand

A new device called a dog on a chip may combine the benefits of technology and nature by not only detecting dangerous or illicit substances but by providing the electronic equivalent of a dog barking

23 November 2003

For decades scientists and farming bodies have been trying to find alternatives to shearing for removing the wool from the sheep's back. All sorts of weird inventions have come and gone but one, it seems could now be here to stay. Bioclip involves the use of an injection to break the wool. The product is now used commercially on tens of thousands of young sheep and within weeks Bioclip will announce that an international company will distribute the product throughout Australia

Internet portal Yahoo may want to think about changing its advertising slogan from 'Do You Yahoo?' to 'You Do Yahoo'. In e-mail messages that began going out last week, Yahoo advised its users that their account preferences had been changed, by Yahoo, to indicate that they wanted to receive advertising solicitations through spam, snail mail and telephone

22 November 2003

E-mail security hardware maker IronPort Systems will announce next week it is buying anti-spam firm SpamCop for an undisclosed sum, and plans to invest more than $1 million into the company to keep it running. An interesting business proposal, considering that IronPort makes a specialised computer with the reputation as the fastest way to send millions of junk e-mail messages

A masked man who robbed a Modesto bank Monday forgot to cut eye holes into his disguise, occasionally lifting up a corner of the flannel cloth to see his feet as he fumbled his way through the heist, and crashing into the Oak Valley Community Bank's steel door frame on the way out. And yet despite his stupidity, he still managed to get away

A cheque sent by Israel's ambassador to compensate the family of a student shot in the head by the country's defence force has bounced

21 November 2003

A new species of baleen whale has been discovered. The stunning find, made after researchers studied the body shape and genetics of a few leviathan skeletons gathering dust for the last 25 years in a Japanese museum, brings the total number of known species in the main genus of baleen whale to eight

A growing movement aims to stop or regulate software that surreptitiously monitors computer use

A US civil rights group fears legal threats from Diebold, an electronic voting company, are having a chilling effect among ISPs, students and voting rights advocates

Cunningham MP Michael Organ has claimed that the Howard government's mealy-mouthed subservience to the United States has been exposed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair's persistence. 'While our government washes its hands of Australians David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, Mr Blair has apparently won agreement from US President George Bush that nine British nationals detained in Camp X-Ray at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay can be returned to the UK for trial'

20 November 2003

Home Secretary David Blunkett has refused to grant diplomatic immunity to armed American special agents and snipers travelling to Britain as part of President Bush's entourage this week. In the case of the accidental shooting of a protester, the Americans in Bush's protection squad will face justice in a British court as would any other visitor, the Home Office has confirmed

If you've hung around the Internet long enough, chances are you've encountered the Goatse guy — google it if you're curious, but don't say you weren't warned. Slashdot has added whole volumes of code just to keep users from tricking each other into opening this photo. That said, someone is fond enough of the image to create a Goatse case mod. In a far more tasteful display of case modding style, Joe LeBlanc turned a junked Mac into a G4 Cube Aquarium

marry, and it gave the state legislature 180 days to make same-sex marriages possible. The Pagan Prattle has an amusing counter to the fundie mantra of biblical marriage

China has announced a government-funded project to promote an alternative to DVDs and attack the market share of the global video format. The rollout of the long-planned project, known as EVD, or enhanced versatile disc, was timed to coincide with the beginning of what China calls the golden sales period — known elsewhere as the Christmas shopping season

19 November 2003

Federal Democrat spokesperson for IT, Senator Brian Greig, has accused the federal government of using its proposed anti-spam legislation to favour groups with conservative agendas, allowing religious and political organisations to flood e-mail in-boxes with spam and deny other groups the right to respond

Microsoft experiments with an international news search service in competition with Google's, upping the ante in the hotly contested Web search market

18 November 2003

Research done by Jennifer Richeson, Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, shows that political correctness in American society takes it's toll on cognitive ability. It appears that white Americans, when placed in a situation where they are interacting with blacks, spend so much of their cognitive capacity ensuring that they show no racial bias that it impedes their ability to do other cognitive tasks

Caterpillar faced protests this week against its sales of bulldozers to Israel. A dozen protestors marched outside its head office in Iowa, USA. They included Cheryl Brodersen, the aunt of Rachel Corrie, the 24-year old peace protestor who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in March 2003

While record companies prepare for the sentencing of three Sydney men convicted of music piracy by the Federal Court, a new survey shows most musicians and other music professionals believe copyright laws are too harsh. It found that 81% of the 200 respondents felt that the Copyright Act should be changed to allow the copying of a user's own legally purchased CDs, but not borrowed or downloaded music. Less than half of respondents felt that downloading free music constituted theft from artists and composers, while only 25% felt it was theft from record labels. 27% of respondents did not feel downloading music was theft

17 November 2003

Noticing some commonalities in the spam flooding their e-mail in-boxes, a small group of hackers set out to track down who was responsible. Along the way they uncovered a trail that led them to an organised gang of criminals halfway around the world, and right back to some of the largest financial institutions in the US, and their customers, that became the gang's prey

FilmForce has substantiated rumours of Farscape returning as a standalone project with no new episode commitment attached, independent of Sci-Fi Channel

16 November 2003

Greens Senator Bob Brown says the Immigration Minister Senator Amanda Vanstone should appear before a Senate inquiry into last week's arrival of suspected asylum seekers on a remote northern Australian island. The Greens also claim the Federal Government plans to excise more islands from Australia's migration zone

In the Robert Redford Building, toilets flush themselves with rainwater — except for the urinals, which use no water at all — the floors are made of bamboo and the carpets from hemp

15 November 2003

Two days ago a boat load of Turkish Kurds arrived in Northern Australia by leaky boat. Both the foreign minister and the immigration minister stated unequivocally that 'The passengers of the Minasa Bone did not claim asylum in Australia'. This is in spite of the fact that we can be reasonably certain that at least one of them was begging a Turkish interpreter, in Turkish, to be allowed to stay. But even if they were granted a Temporary Protection Visa, they would be forced into prison camps in inhospitable parts of Australia for years before being shipped back to their homeland to be killed

The US$10.99 Dakota reusable digital camera announced in July was usefully hacked on 6 November. First attempts to extract picture data took 10 hours to read out 16MB, but new code for Windows, Linux and Mac lets you get pictures quickly over USB and view or print them without Ritz's help

In a rare sign of trouble for the booming search marketing business, Google is fending off complaints from angry customers who say recent changes to the company's advertising program are costing them sales

An independent PC developer has created a program called MyTunes that lets users of iTunes share MP3 files almost as easily as they could using programs such as Kazaa

14 November 2003

For dedicated fans of the legendary science fiction hero Doctor Who, the long wait is over. A new animated version based on the ninth incarnation of the doctor, played by Richard Grant, has been placed on the BBC's Internet arm BBCi and can be downloaded for viewing. The 85-minute series called The Scream of the Shalka also coincides with the show's 40th anniversary

Surround sound can make home movie viewing more fun, but requires peppering your room with speakers and cables. No more. Nirotek's DVD player, the NIRO 1.1 PRO, delivers the surround effect using just a single unit. It works by packing five small speakers into one case. Each speaker signal is then manipulated by computer algorithms to mimic the effects used by the brain to identify the direction a sound is coming from

Daniel Schacter and Scott Slotnick, at Harvard University, have revealed characteristic activity in the brain that predicts whether a memory is accurate or false. The difference occurs at the time of recall, suggesting that a test for false memory might one day be possible

13 November 2003

Microsoft plans to add pop-up blocking features to Internet Explorer next year as part of its Service Pack 2 update for Windows XP, a move that would go far toward stamping out the Web advertisements

Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble conducted a secret RFID trial involving Oklahoma consumers earlier this year. Customers who purchased P&G's Lipfinity brand lipstick at the Broken Arrow Wal-Mart store between late March and mid-July unknowingly left the store with live RFID tracking devices embedded in the packaging. Wal-Mart had previously denied any consumer-level RFID testing in the United States

Identity fraud cost the Australian community AU$1.1 billion in 2001/02, according to a report released by the Minister for Justice and Customs, Senator Chris Ellison, who also acknowledged the rapid subsequent growth of the problem

The government has finally gotten a clue about the reality of IT jobs in Australia, with information and communication technology skilled jobs cut from the federal government's list of high-demand jobs for potential migrants

12 November 2003

Small countries in the United Nations have been arguing to put the Internet under the control of the UN so that countries can more easily control Internet content. It's on hold for now, but this could become a very real censorship problem, very soon. Some nations have gone so far as to suggest 'monitoring boards' for internet content

While OzEmail subscribers fume over undelivered email, the supplier of the ISPs e-mail platform says it has not asked for technical assistance. According to OzEmail, only its MyMail webmail users have been affected by an outage that has been going on for more than two weeks. However, many customers have described a wide range of problems beyond the webmail product

Optus has announced it will soon begin offering ADSL to residential customers, after finalising negotiations to use Telstra's infrastructure. Which means that it will be prone to the same faults and breakdowns that plague the Telstra product

11 November 2003

Before you complain about your job, take a look at some of the most noxious jobs in science. Some of the career gems include; fart-sniffer, barnyard masturbator, and prison-rape researcher. Then there's the outright terrifying; the pre-med student who ate, drank, and breathed the blood, urine and vomit of yellow-fever victims

A free, experimental IPv6 migration broker has been announced, which will allow Australians on IPv4 internet connections to test out applications for the newer internet protocol

The disposable mobile seems like a nice alternative to being locked into a lengthy contract, or for people who only need a mobile for a short period of time. Plus the company offer a $5 rebate for yot to bring it back and swap for the next one

10 November 2003

Cyberkinetics is about to ask federal regulators for permission to start testing a device that would enable paralyzed people to control computers directly with their brains or possibly help them move their limbs. Initially, the device, implanted into the brains of paralyzed people, will help them control a cursor on a screen or play video games. Researchers believe the technology could one day enable paralyzed people to type, control lights and heating controls, manoeuvre wheelchairs, or even manipulate robotic arms

Researchers at Harvard University have demonstrated for the first time that they can easily apply a film of tiny, high-performance silicon nanowires to glass and plastic, a development that could pave the way for the next generation of cheaper, lighter and more powerful consumer electronics. The development could lead to such futuristic products as disposable computers and optical displays that can be worn in your clothes or contact lenses

Sun is planning on creating Opteron-based servers. These are expected to include 2-processor and 4-processor models running either Solaris or Linux. This move isn't surprising, given the performance and cost gaps between the Opteron and UltraSPARC processors. A move to Opteron would allow them to be more competitive in cost and focus more on what they're good at, designing systems, not processors

09 November 2003

Gertrude Jones didn't want flowers or cards when she died. She wanted to get rid of the retarded monkey boy. The 81-year-old woman's obituary asked that memorial donations be given to any organisation that seeks the removal of President Bush from office. And people across the country are following her wishes

McDonald's misunderstands the nature of dictionaries: that is, to observe the language as it is spoken and to document it. McDonald's is up in arms over Merriam-Webster's inclusion of 'McJob' — a low-paying job that requires little skill and provides little opportunity for advancement — in its current edition and has, naturally, trumped up a completely groundless trademark claim to back this up. Trademarks don't let you control how people speak — they only allow you to stop other commercial outfits from confusing your customers; certainly, they don't give you the power to stop the reporting of the fact that English speakers use 'McJob' to describe a crappy job. Interesting to note that Merriam-Webster later caved in to the bully boys and pulled 'McJobs' from the list of examples of new words added to the dictionary

Weeks after a groundbreaking scientific study said naval sonar appears to be killing marine mammals, the Bush administration yesterday won House approval to use sonar wherever Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sees fit. Passage next week by the Senate is virtually assured

08 November 2003

When Varg the police dog was sent into a Norwegian confectionery factory to track down two intruders, his sense of taste got the better of his sense of duty. The German Shepherd nearly ate himself sick

Microsoft forgot to renew their hotmail.co.uk domain. A Good Samaritan renewed it for them, but was unable to get a response from anyone at Microsoft. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it

Internet search engine Google has unveiled free software that lets people search the web quickly — without launching a web browser

The FTC has shut down D Squared, a company that's been spamming via the Windows Messenger Pop-Up Service. In some cases, ads would pop-up every 10 minutes, and only advertised a $30 product that disabled similar pop-up ads. The FTC is slamming the extortion gauntlet on them. Interestingly, the FTC only caught onto all this because one of their own commissioners was among those getting spammed

07 November 2003

Experts at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth have worked out for the first time the true extent of the damage Guy Fawkes would have caused if his daring deed had not been foiled on 5 November 1605. They found that within a radius of about 40m, everything would have been razed to the ground. Within 110m, buildings would have been at least partially destroyed. And some windows would have been blown out even as far as 900m away

Law enforcement officers currently search for prints by dusting a crime scene with fluorescent powder. This sticks to the oily residue left by the fingertip, showing up the whorls and ridges. But sometimes the prints are not clear enough to finger a suspect. A new dust being developed at the University of Sunderland is made of sticky nanoparticles could help. The nanoparticles are tiny glass spheres between 200 and 600nm in diameter. As well as being speckled with a fluorescent dye, they are coated with hydrophobic molecules, which are repelled by water and attracted to oil. So they fix tightly to the fingerprint

06 November 2003

Telia, one of Sweden's largest ISPs, has started blocking computers that send spam. The computers that Telia will block are primarily those that have been infected with 'trojans' which are being used, without the customer's knowledge, to send enormous amounts of spam

Troubled software maker Novell has announced plans to acquire Germany's SuSE Linux for US$210 million in cash, and entered talks with IBM to extend agreements between IBM and SuSE

OzEmail is giving away little information about an 'upgrade' which has prevented customers from accessing their e-mail via the web

05 November 2003

Three dozen protesters howled and prowled the sidewalk outside the Alaska Board of Game meeting in Spenard on Monday, hoping to raise enough ruckus to stop the board's planned resumption of aerial wolf kills. Nevertheless, the Game Board today is expected to authorise the first aerial predator control program in Alaska in more than 15 years, using a new state law that allows private pilots to participate

Modern-day medicinal use of leeches is limited to the treatment of blood clotting problems after surgery. Dr Gustav Dobos, from Kliniken Essen-Mitte, and colleagues maintain that leech saliva contains anti-inflammatory substances and other chemicals, which could relieve symptoms of arthritis

The ABC is under pressure to join a national internet peering network to relieve internet service providers of the cost of delivering the public broadcaster's content to subscribers

04 November 2003

British chocolate manufacturer Cadbury Schweppes said it hopes to chip away at the world's litter mountain with candy packages that dissolve in water. Biodegradable trays that look like plastic but are made of water-soluble cornstarch polymer, developed by Plantic Technologies Limited, will be used for Cadbury's Milk Tray chocolates sold in Australia

Citizen has unveiled a miniature PDA concept considerably smaller than existing PDAs. The 60 x 90 x 9.3mm 16-colour grayscale PDA is just a bit bigger then a credit card. It runs ITRON4 as an OS, and battery life is rated at 30 hours

The telecommunications watchdog is investigating abuse of a huge national database containing personal information on every Australian with a phone connection. They are concerned that companies may be misusing information stored in the database, which is meant to supply data for emergency services, law enforcement and directory services

Consumers and small businesses self-installing ADSL internet services could be interfering with their security systems. The Australian Communications Authority warned that self-installed ADSL could disable to back to base calling functions of some security services, which automatically dial the security company in the event of an alarm

03 November 2003

Helen Carr picked the wrong person when she spammed an FBI computer crime agent. Her scam targeted AOL users with messages saying their credit cards were refused during the last billing cycle, and linked to a false billing centre page which demanded private information

One of the oddest phenomena in the natural world — the sudden mass death of lemmings — has been resolved, according to a trio of European biologists. Unexplained population crashes of this rodent of the high northern latitudes have bred the myth that, whenever they become too numerous for the available food, the creatures band together and fling themselves off cliffs in a crazed suicidal rush. However researchers now say the truth is even more complex. Lemming populations, they say, surge spectacularly and fall just as quickly, thanks to the combined feasting of four predators: the stoat, arctic fox, snowy owl and a seabird called the long-tailed skua

02 November 2003

Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel threatened to sue the makers of the Simpsons over a spoof news ticker. The show's creator Matt Groening said Fox News raised the unlikely prospect of suing a show broadcast by its sister channel, Fox Entertainment, because it wanted to stop the Simpsons parodying its famously anti-Democratic party agenda

Tom Coates has been discussing technical tricks for coping with message-board trolls on his Everything in Moderation blog, and, surpisingly, an avowed Slashdot troll has shown up to explain why he undertakes extreme technical measures to disrupt Slashdot's message boards

The British Library is a government-owned library that legally has to hold a copy of every book, pamphlet, map, journal, newspaper and piece of sheet music published in the UK. That law has changed and now the Library will be able to collect non-paper resources, such as web sites, electronic journals, CD-ROMs and microfilms. Obviously, the library won't be archiving everything in these categories, but will be keeping resources of national, historical or academic interest

01 November 2003

Microsoft — desperate to capture a slice of the popular and ad-generating search business — approached Google within the last two months to discuss options, including the possibility of a takeover. Nothing much came out of that overture, but Microsoft may consider it again in the future. Dan Gillmor suspects Google stopped this talk for the obvious reason: a Google that was part of Microsoft would forfeit the search and advertising company's most vital asset — the relatively high level of trust it's earned with the Internet community

A super-fast computing processor that uses light, not electrons, to perform calculations has gone on sale for the first time. The device is called Enlight and can perform 8000 billion arithmetic operations per second, about 1000 times faster than a standard processor. Lenslet, the Israeli company that developed the processor, say its light speed calculations deliver the power of a supercomputer in a single device

A federal judge in Houston has thrown out the 20-year-old arms smuggling conviction of a former CIA agent, outlining in scathing terms how federal officials knowingly used a false affidavit at his trial and concealed the act through years of appeals

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