December 2003 Archive

31 December 2003

Franck Le Calvez, a French children's author, has sued Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios, claiming the cartoon fish they catapulted to fame in the worldwide blockbuster Finding Nemo was plagiarised from his 1995 creation Pierrot Le Poisson Clown

Australia has proposed that all national communications regulators develop a multi-lateral memorandum of understanding (MoU) on spam to boost the fight against unwanted bulk email. MoUs are already used to underpin several international internet structures, such as IP address space

30 December 2003

Disney has revised its online privacy policy to allow the sharing of user information to third parties, the company confirmed on Tuesday. New registrants who accept Disney's privacy policy during registration also accept all marketing options by default. They have to manually turn them off later if they want to opt out. A Disney representative said the changes were made to help customer service operate more effectively between its offline and online businesses

David Byrne, Talking Heads frontman, has turned PowerPoint into a visual art medium in a satiric DVD/Book combo titled Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information. Byrne claims that, The genius of it is that it was designed for any idiot to use

The children of a cancer patient who donated his body for research are suing after their father's embalmed head was found in a tool shed. It had been there for nearly eleven years. The head was among 150 pounds of human cadaver parts allegedly removed from the University of California-Davis medical centre by a former autopsy assistant

The night before the funeral, the family gathered at the undertakers for a final private farewell, when they heard the sound of his mobile ringing from within the sealed coffin. Several distressed members of the family had to leave the funeral home whilst staff rushed to remove the phone

29 December 2003

A Dutch invention is promising to make vehicles at least 50% more efficient and also bring down the soot and carbon dioxide emissions. This is made possible by replacing the conventional wheels by in-wheel electric engines which are normal electric engines turned inside out. No transmission is necessary as the in-wheel engines are powered by battery-packs installed on the vehicle. A diesel-powered generator which replaces the original engine on the vehicle charges the battery-pack continuously. The Dutch company E-Traction has built a bus using this technology that will undergo testing for the next six months

Microsoft's Research group are working on a technique to combat spam. Dubbed the Penny Black project, it involves making e-mail senders perform a computation taking around 10 seconds, which their recipients can then check for. This delay would limit bulk e-mailing speeds to around 8000 a day, meaning that to spam all of those fresh, guaranteed 25 million addresses would take approximately 8.5 years

28 December 2003

Software companies in India are embracing the trend where source code for the software being bought or sold is kept safe with an escrow agent with carefully drafted agreements. This allows the buyer to get hold of the source code in cases where software was licensed from a start-up which has now folded or a breach of contract regarding the maintenance services that were agreed upon can be proven. The source code is automatically released upon the occurrence of any of the events mentioned in the escrow agreement and the buyer will be able to study the source code and continue to provide support services for the software bought without relying on the employees of the software supplier

27 December 2003

Lawrence has spent over six years collecting video and other hacks for game consoles. He has recently put together the fourth revision of his video signal primer, expanded to six pages now, including subjects like chroma subsampling, horizontal colour resolution and the interesting revelation that your eyes suck at blue

Vancouver is facing the worst outbreak of syphilis per capita in the developed world, with city health officials fearful of a looming epidemic of the sexually transmitted disease once thought almost wiped out in North America

26 December 2003

Having learned nothing from the UK beef industry's battle with BSE, the US agribusiness mouthpiece has announced that not only was the suspected animal still slaughtered for human consumption, but its remains went back into the food chain as animal feed. Nice head in the sand tactics, guys

Meghan Stapleton, a Santa hat-clad reporter for the NBC television station KTUU in Anchorage found her way into the national spotlight while taping a scene with a young reindeer named Blitzen at the Santa Claus House in North Pole. Seems the reindeer took a dislike to tacky feel good stories and tackled the silly bint on camera

25 December 2003

It has been in place for only a few weeks, but 'Don't Miss a Sec', a contemporary art installation that is in essence a one-way mirrored loo on a construction site near the Thames, has been raising heated, even violent emotions. While it may provide a fine opportunity to indulge in voyeurism and exhibitionism at the same time — like going to the toilet in the bushes, if the bushes were in the middle of the street — in reality the experience is proving prohibitively unnerving to some

In this case Toys 'R' Us advertises using a giraffe mascot named Geoffrey. But Toys 'R' Us does not own the rights to that mascot, instead Geoffrey, Inc — a Toys 'R' Us subsidiary — owns them. So the toy store 'licenses' the trademark from Geoffrey, Inc, at a hefty rate, then calls that a business expense and deducts from its pre-tax income. Since Geoffrey, Inc isn't a Louisiana company, Toys 'R' Us argued that it doesn't need to pay Louisiana taxes on it's income. The judge disagreed

Maids in Hong Kong can draw a higher salary if they're computer-literate enough to defrag hard-drives, reinstall operating systems, and do other sysadminly chores. But some have rebelled against the shift to computer-literate cleaners

24 December 2003

An appeals court upheld a verdict to clear Jon Johansen, a 20-year-old Norwegian, of DVD piracy charges on Monday, dismaying Hollywood studios who cluelessly claimed that the decision would encourage hackers

As Wal-Mart stores continue to spread across the US, community opposition is also mounting from critics who say its 'always low prices' mean always low wages for nonunion workers and that its famous 'rollbacks' on goods roll over local businesses and economies

New Communications Minister Daryl Williams is tipped to close the Government's National Office of the Information Economy in early 2004 and extend a moratorium on new free-to-air TV licences later in the year

23 December 2003

A spammer's claim to his clients that he had an agreement with anti-spam technology vendor Brightmail to not block his traffic was contradicted by Brightmail officials. Notorious spammer, Scott Richter, is currently being prosecuted for fraud and his claims against Brightmail are part of his defence

Spam is robbing Australian businesses of at least $2 billion annually, according to one estimate — and there's little governments can do about it

Optus is planning to double its revenues to about $11 billion annually in the next seven to 10 years and is considering using offshore call centres as early as next year as part of its growth push — you have to wonder if this plan is less about the money and more about solving the problem of their current dodgy locally outsourced call centre generating more complaints against the company than all other services combined

22 December 2003

In the midst of a film industry crackdown on digital movie piracy, filmmaker Robert Greenwald is urging rampant, unauthorised copying of his documentary criticising the Bush administration's reasons for invading Iraq The 56-minute film, Uncovered: The Whole Truth about the Iraq War, concludes that President Bush and his team distorted intelligence data and misled the American public ahead of the March invasion that toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein

The recording industry can't force Internet providers to identify music downloaders, a federal appeals court said Friday in a major decision shielding online privacy while undercutting the industry's anti-piracy campaign

The Ekip, a pita-bread-shaped, stubby-winged, wheel-less, unmanned ship that weighs in at 500 pounds. For more than two decades, engineers at a former Soviet aerospace plant have been toiling on a drone aircraft that looks a whole lot like a prop from Plan 9 From Outer Space

21 December 2003

Lawyer Marisa Kakoulas has written an interesting article on copyright and tattoos

How fast is fast enough? That is the question buyers of Wi-Fi wireless local area network equipment are asking themselves in the wake of new standards and claims by vendors that they can deliver data at eye-popping rates. In reality, the systems for small business and home networks rarely approach those rates

The Heliodisplay is an interactive technology that projects into the air above the machine still or moving images that can be manipulated with a fingertip. The images are two-dimensional, and they are not holograms. The Heliodisplay's inventor, Chad Dyner, says the technology could one day replace conventional cathode-ray tubes, liquid-crystal displays and plasma screens

20 December 2003

The Supreme Court of the Netherlands reaffirmed that it is lawful to make the filesharing software KaZaA publicly available. This court is the first Supreme Court or other national high court ruling on the legality of peer-to-peer technologies such as KaZaA. The outcome of the case, brought in a counter-suit by music rights society Buma/Stemra, has been closely watched by the entertainment industry, technology businesses and consumer advocates. This victory sets the precedent about the legality of peer-to-peer technology across the European Union, and around the world

Australian researchers have worked with their US counterparts to develop a way of making public key authentication ubiquitous and more accessible by encoding it as a sound

Sun Microsystems is to fund the next version of SETI@home, the distributed computing project that is looking for intelligent alien life

A new study will investigate results suggesting African rats could test saliva samples far faster than human technicians, allowing early treatment of tuberculosis

19 December 2003

The luddites at the PM's Press office have just sent out a 10MB PowerPoint presentation to everyone on the PM's media list. It consists solely of pictures of the PM's staff having a high old time on a single page. Printing down to PDF it's a mere 250+KB. They have therefore unnecessarily clogged up mailboxes up and down the country — those that even allow PowerPoint documents through the firewall. They need a cluebat from Edward Tufte

US federal regulators are expected to set aside a swath of spectrum for a new wireless technology that would let motorists use small display screens to get traffic updates, buy fast food or find a nearby hotel

Swiftel engineers are close to finding the cause of a lengthy outage that left its Victorian ADSL customers without service Monday

18 December 2003

XML syndication and peer-to-peer meet to extend the power and efficiency of Web-based information distribution

A world first wireless webcasting system has been launched in Melbourne. SquizBiz is a hardware and software package that converts a standard video camera into a wireless webcasting system. It is currently being used by farmers and vets for virtual consultations to overcome the tyranny of distance faced by people living in remote areas

Konfabulator, a web site that offers desktop widgets for the Macintosh desktop, is gearing up to provide similar gadgets for Windows

17 December 2003

The Canadian Copyright Board has ruled that Canadians can legally download peer-to-peer music files, although uploading them is still illegal. So long as music is being recorded purely for personal use, and not being sold, rented, or otherwise disseminated to other people, its use is legal. It does not matter whether the source of the recording is a pre-owned track, a borrowed CD, or a track downloaded from the Internet, the board said. The combination of the latter two rules means that recording a CD for a friend is illegal, but handing the CD to the same friend and letting them make a copy for their own use is legal

The US Navy has proposed the development of 28,000 acres within the endangered Red Wolf recovery area as the site for the new Super Hornet Outlying Landing Field and supporting buildings

An Adelaide rocket scientist who called police to report thieves were trying to break into his home and steal his cannabis plants wound up getting arrested himself

16 December 2003

Number three ADSL internet service provider TPG has jumped on the download bandwagon, offering a true unlimited service after Telstra and Optus both changed their download allowances

Australians will be offered an array of new pay-TV services next year after Foxtel reached an historic agreement with the competition regulator, securing the green light for its $550 million digital upgrade

Sanyo is launching a TS41 mobile phone in Japan that you can use just by pressing it to your face. Tiny vibrations from the phone travel through bones in the face to the ear. NTT DoCoMo, has an experimental model called Finger Whisper that is merely a wristband with a microphone and earphone in it. Users talk into the wristband while sticking a finger in their ears, sending it vibrations that the ear and the brain convert to sound

15 December 2003

Pigeons are being used to transfer large amounts of data in a short amount of time. The pigeons have proven to be faster and more reliable than electronic means. However, while there is still the occasional packet loss, this is definitely a case of high bandwidth wireless networking

Aiirnet will next month begin installing the largest single Wi-Fi deployment in the nation in the city of Cerritos in Southern California. Ultimately, anyone with a laptop or wireless device will be able to surf the Web from virtually anywhere in the city's 22km² area

Don Baggs, an amateur historian from Monmouth, south Wales, intends leading 5,000 archers to a second battle of Agincourt in an attempt to defeat plans for a wind farm at the historic site in France — via Southerly Buster

14 December 2003

Li Zhi, a former government worker in southwest China, was jailed for eight years for posting essays and comments online criticising official corruption

The UK has taken matters into its own hands and is making it a criminal offence to send e-mails or text messages unless the recipient has agreed in advance to accept them, the law is in effect now. Unfortunately much spam originates from the US so the UK had previously asked the US to co-operate

Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore announced that his office had made its first felony indictment under the state's antispam law. The charges were filed against North Carolina resident Jeremy Jaynes, also known under the pseudonym Gaven Stubberfield, for allegedly using fraudulent means to transmit unsolicited bulk e-mail

If you're based in Denmark you can call TeleDanmark directory service on 118 and get them to do google queries for you. So now you can avoid harassing your friends in front of computers and pay your monopolistic telco $2 instead

13 December 2003

By 2020, we might actually have wireless Internet interfaces that ordinary people will feel comfortable having implanted in their heads, just as ordinary people are today comfortable with having laser eye surgery. All the signs — early experimental successes, societal demand for improved healthcare, and military research — point in that direction

The Kyoto protocol is dying a death of a thousand cuts. Last week, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, the US, reiterated that it wants nothing to do with the only international agreement designed to save the world from runaway global warming. The European Union, Kyoto's main promoter, revealed that most of its members will miss their emissions targets. And Russia once again seemed to be on the point of wrecking the protocol completely. But there is a plan B, called contraction and convergence, which has been gaining ever more influential converts

Animals with neophobia die younger, suggesting that a lifetime of fearful stress can take an accumulated toll on health

Gary Price points out that in their quest to become the command line of the Internet, Google has added several new features: you can now enter UPS and FedEx, patent, aircraft registration, and FCC equipment ID/tracking numbers

12 December 2003

Sydney is regularly voted one of the world's best cities to live in, but a new environment report has warned its affluent lifestyle is ecologically unsustainable. The 2003 environment report on New South Wales says Sydney residents are wasting millions of gallons of water, demanding ever more electricity and remain car obsessed, increasing greenhouse gas emissions. One of the best ways to help with sustainability is to sack all of the profiteering arsehole developers who, if not actually council members, have them well in their pockets

Wireless guru Rob Flickenger details the known records for Wi-Fi link distances, included is a new distance record for an un-amplified Wi-Fi link, set by the students of Utah's Weber State University. 82 miles was accomplished with 802.11b

A research group at the Australian National University is getting symmetrical 250Kbps at 20km, using empty 7MHz-wide broadcast TV allocations in the 45MHz band. Story here, project homepage here. Aim is to put some bandwidth out beyond the reach of the wires, where users are few and far between

Almost half the Australian public agree with Mark Latham that the retarded monkey boy is incompetent and dangerous — via Southerly Buster

11 December 2003

Cab Elvis lives! And so do any other Seattle cabdrivers who want to trade their black slacks and crisp shirts for costumes. The Seattle City Council approved an ordinance allowing cabdrivers to hit the road dressed like Santa Claus, Superman or whatever strikes their fancy, as long the costume is approved by their cab companies

New Zealanders use the internet more than their neighbours across the Tasman as well as 30 other countries covered by a new international survey

Shalom Gelbman is in trouble with the local cops after making a few small errors in judgment — he was impersonating a police officer; pulling someone over for a traffic offence; the someone happened to be an off-duty state trooper

The Argonne National Laboratory have designed nanoparticles which identify, and then latch onto, target molecules. The nanoparticles are injected into the bloodstream, where they circulate through the body, picking up their target toxins as they go. Once they have made their rounds, all that's needed to remove the particles from the body are a magnet housed in a handheld unit and a small, dual-channel shunt inserted into an arm or leg artery

10 December 2003

This year, Google started a widely used news service. Last week, it seemed to some users of the Google search engine that the site had started to editorialise. Anyone searching on Google for the phrase miserable failure was sent to the official White House biography of the retarded monkey boy. George Johnston, is the man who started this particular Google bomb

Bruce Simpson, the New Zealand man who built a cruise missile in his garage using parts bought off the internet to show how easily it could be done, claims the New Zealand government forced him to shut down his project after coming under pressure from the United States — via Die Puny Humans

A naked, samurai sword-wielding martial arts expert screaming, 'I'm god! I'm immortal', hacked his wife to death in a blood-soaked Bronx rampage. When the madman lunged at police, one cop fired 14 shots — bringing down the suspect but also hitting her partner twice. The cop's vest stopped one bullet from hitting his chest, though another slug penetrated his knee — via Die Puny Humans

When officer Jason Zier pulled over a 1992 Mazda 626 on Thursday afternoon, the vehicle's registration had expired. By the time he'd finished writing up Sean Leach for the infraction, the car was legal again. That's because the 36-year-old Jersey City man had a mobile, a friend with a computer who he could reach and the foresight to use the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission's online registration service. Leach's ingenuity did not save him from getting a ticket, but it did keep him from having his car towed and getting socked with the towing bill

09 December 2003

Seduced by the siren song of wireless access throughout the home, many a user has experienced the discrepancy between the manufacturer's advertised claims (150 feet indoors, 300 outside) and real-world implementation (the living room and upstairs bedroom may as well be on different continents). In steely-eyed determination to exercise his inalienable right to network access anywhere on his property, Paul Boutin hired a Wi-Fi engineer to help him bathe his property in 802.11 waves, using only mass-market consumer hardware

The European Union has asked nine member nations that have failed to adopt a privacy law intended to help the fight against unwanted email to describe how they intend to comply with the law

Should the Internet come under control of the United Nations? That will be one of the most contentious issues at the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva this week. Paul Twomey, the president of ICANN, found out what it feels like to be voiceless after being escorted from the meeting room

ATM frauds are a clever combination of social engineering and hardware hacking. The most sophisticated thefts involve the purchase and setup of real ATMs that actually do dispense cash to avoid suspicion, but are altered to save both the card's magnetic signature and the customers PIN, which are later added to false cards and used to empty bank accounts at real ATMS

08 December 2003

This is a story of weapons of mass destruction. Chemical weapons. Domestic Terrorism. Forged Identifications. And media double standards. In the Texan town of Tyler law enforcement officials found what hundreds of investigators in Iraq have been looking for months. A Tyler man named William Krar with ties to white supremacists had built a sodium cyanide bomb. In the words of the Justice Department, the man had developed his own chemical weapons — via Die Puny Humans

The ALP and Government combined in the last hours of parliamentary sitting for the year to ram through legislation to put ASIO above the public interest by giving it secret police powers. The legislation will make it an offence to discuss ASIO's questioning of people, whether they are innocent or not, for two years after the interrogation occurs

Yahoo, owner of one of the largest e-mail systems in the world, is said to be developing a cryptographic product that will be offered freely to mail servers. Domain Keys, would require the message sender to authenticate in order for message to come across a trusted e-mail network

07 December 2003

Following two release candidates, the 0.4 release of Mozilla Thunderbird is now available. Thunderbird 0.4 features an updated look to Thunderbird's default theme, including a variety of new icons; better OS integration, cut and paste of images on Windows, and a number of bug fixes and other new features

David Pogue takes up arms against 'miscellaneous' charges on phone and banking bills, and against 'innocent' mistakes where customers are repeatedly, routinely overcharged

Are mini black holes raining down through the Earth's atmosphere? Theodore Tomaras, a physicist at the University of Crete in Heraklion, Greece, and his Russian colleagues Andrei Mironov and Alexei Morozov think this could explain mysterious observations from mountain-top experiments over the past 30 years

An encyclopedia with water soluble pages holds all 60,000 known active mouse genes, making posting genomes much easier

06 December 2003

Broken-down Fisher and Paykel washing machines are being converted by Taranaki engineer Michael Lawley into smart new wind turbines for the renewable energy market — via The Green Man

A novel plastic made by compressing a powdered mixture of two polymers has been produced at room temperature for the first time. The breakthrough holds the promise of plastics that are much more recyclable and more energy efficient to produce

A French hunter was shot by his dog after he left a loaded shotgun in the trunk of his car with two dogs and one of the animals accidentally stepped on the trigger

Two robbers left a German taxi driver glued to his steering wheel before running off with €300

05 December 2003

Dell has issued a memo to its tech-support staff, telling them not to help Dell customers remove spyware from their systems. Dell has decided that its duty to its users is superceded by its duty to upholding contracts that you sign when you click on the I agree button after downloading software, contracts in which you promise to allow spyware to be installed on your machine, and promise not to try to remove it

Over 38,000 Optus pay TV and Internet subscribers have been double-billed in what has been described by the company as a manual processing error

A high-speed Japanese train set a new record of 581 km/h, breaking its own previous record. The Superconducting Maglev had real passengers on board this time. They proved that the distance between Osaka and Tokyo can be covered in one hour's time

04 December 2003

A comment last year by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was awarded the Foot in Mouth prize by Britain's Plain English Campaign; 'Reports that say something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know.' Aniruddha Bahal, an Indian investigative journalist, won Britain's little-coveted Bad Sex in Fiction Award for a turbo-charged account of a lovers' tryst that likens their amours to a speeding Bugatti sports car

Rumours have it that Sony is planning to let players interact with games using hand gestures, eye movements and emotion sensors in PlayStation 3. There's a conceptual image of the PS3 doing the rounds that is very pretty, unfortunately its source in unconfirmed making it highly likely that it's a fake

Toshiba and NEC have won a round in the fight for standardising the format for DVDs as their technology has been embraced by an industry forum, but the real battle is won by convincing consumers and Hollywood

03 December 2003

Escape from Woomera is a first-person video strategy game, based on Half-Life, in which you play a refugee in the notorious Australian detention centre. The idea is to call attention to the deplorable state of Woomera and the inherent cruelty of the detention process

Nicholas Kristof offered the prize of an Iraqi 250-dinar note with Saddam's picture for the best name for the Iraq conflict. Many imaginative suggestions rolled in, including; 'I Waged Two Wars Against Saddam and All I Got Was His Headache', 'Visit Scenic Saddam and Gomorrah', 'Operation Gee Whiz, This Liberation Thing Seemed a Lot Easier When We Were Drawing It Up Back at the Think Tank', 'Mission Implausible: A Job Well Spun', 'The War That Cried Wolfowitz', 'War of Mass Deception', 'Dubya Dubya III', 'Mess in Potamia' and 'Blood, Baath and Beyond' — via The Green Man

The record rate of woodchip exports is also a record rate of destruction in Tasmania's forests. While Gunns got $419 million from sales to Asia, Tasmanians got just $25 million or so for royalties, plus the decimation of a natural resource

The Fairfax run MyCareer site ran an amusing ad yesterday looking for an Opposition Leader: 'The successful applicant for this excellent short-term executive position must be thick skinned, opinionated and willing to be stabbed in the back. Prior experience in this type of role, including head-kicking and some leadership skills an advantage, though not mandatory. This bright and energetic role model will receive a generous package that includes travel at taxpayer's expense with the unlikely possibility of promotion in the near future. For immediate start, prefer debater with knack for circular arguments. Previous applicants will be considered.' Mark Latham won and has immediately followed the tried and true Labor approach of toadying up to Howard

02 December 2003

The retarded monkey boy has brought the international treaty aimed at repairing the Earth's vital ozone layer close to breakdown, risking millions of cancers, to benefit strawberry and tomato growers in the electorally critical state of Florida — via Southerly Buster

Outrage is growing over a factory processing dead bodies in northeast China for a German company that puts them on display in major European cities. The plant, near Dalian city, is used by Body Worlds which was founded by Günther von Hagens, the German anatomist who has created a stir with his exhibitions of flayed human corpses in a variety of poses

Newly discovered security flaws in Microsoft's Internet Explorer could let attackers invade a user's personal computer, but a fix is not yet available

01 December 2003

Movies like 101 Dalmatians, Snow Dogs and Finding Nemo unwittingly persuade movie goers to buy pets based on their movie experience. For malamute rescuers, the trend is tragic. By the time an abandoned malamute reaches an animal shelter, it is more likely doomed to euthanasia because only half are retrainable

He's a little greyer than he used to be, but other than that, Bear, who disappeared six years ago, is the same old dog Frank and Jeanie Flores knew and loved. The Flores family has no idea where the dog, a brindle-coloured lab and chow mix, has been or what he's been up to the past six years

A label that changes colour as fruit ripens is allowing shoppers to see whether pears are ready to eat without have to squeeze them. The system, developed at the Horticulture and Food Research Institute of New Zealand, uses a punnet that traps the volatile compounds fruit emit. As the fruit ripen, the colour of the label changes in response to changing concentrations of these compounds

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