June 2004 Archive

30 June 2004

The President's handlers foolishly granted a Presidential interview (Indymedia have an MP3 available or you can read the transcript) to a non-White House Press Corps journalist, Carole Coleman, the Washington correspondent for RTE, the Irish national television network. When she asked him pointed, pertinent questions, he became upset when his stock answers failed to satisfy her. An aide to the President later complained that Coleman had overstepped the bounds of politeness — via BoingBoing

John Howard, showing his usual love of money over environment, has offered a $5 million bribe to the notorious eco-vandal Gunns for a proposed $1 billion pulp mill. The Greens are far from impressed

mozilla.org today released upgrades to both Firefox 0.9 (0.9.1) and Thunderbird 0.7 (0.7.1) to fix some minor bugs present in both releases. Both releases correct some flaws in the extension system that some users may have been experiencing, as well as a new icon set for the navigation toolbar on Windows and Linux in Firefox 0.9.1

A US motorist found a slithery surprise not covered in his rental car agreement when a ball python stuck its head out from between his legs. He was completely in shock, said Madison, Wisconsin, police officer Laura Walker. I mean, he said he was lucky he didn't crash the car

29 June 2004

Folk cures abound for curing a hangover, yet only time — to let the body clear out the toxins — seems to really do the trick. But help may be on the way. Researchers from Tulane University and the University of California, San Francisco report that an extract from Opuntia ficus indica, a type of prickly pear extract, eases the symptoms of a hangover when taken before drinking begins — via Rogue Sun

The Iranian daily newspaper Etemaad has reported the controversial story of a woman who claims to have given birth to a frog. While it is unclear how this could have happened, the paper carries quotes from medical experts who say there are human characteristics to the animal. It has been speculated that the woman, who has not been named, unknowingly picked up the larva while she was swimming in a dirty pool — via Die Puny Humans

28 June 2004

It may soon be possible to carry around an AK-47 assault rifle and an iPod with you down the street — and be arrested for carrying the iPod. That's according to critics of a Senate amendment to the copyright code proposed by Senator Orrin Hatch this week called the Induce Act. He wants to make the intentional inducement of copyright infringement an offence, and this will extend liability to any manufacturer of a device which plays infringed material, or a shop that sells such a device, they say — via BoingBoing

Sheddrick Deon Bentley, a less than intelligent member of society, walked into a Wal-Mart covered in blood and bought clothes, bandages and garbage bags with a bloodstained $100 note. The employees found this a bit suss and called the cops. The rocket scientist was charged with murder after authorities found a stabbed body in a bin — via Keith Lynch

27 June 2004

Users are being told to avoid using Internet Explorer until Microsoft patches a serious security hole in it. The loophole is being exploited to open a backdoor on a PC that could let criminals take control of a machine. The threat of infection is so high because the code created to exploit the loophole has somehow been placed on many popular web sites. Experts say the list of compromised sites involves banks, auction and price comparison firms and is growing fast

26 June 2004

An interesting article about the absentee rate of PCs in various UK workplaces. While the average employee was out sick seven days a year, the average PC was inoperable due to a virus nine days a year. There's also mention of junk e-mail's impact on productivity, with one business reporting that 99.84% of all incoming mail is spam

Hewlett-Packard has discovered a memory flaw that could be in as many as 900,000 of its notebook computers and is offering customers free memory modules as a remedy

An Oklahoma state judge, Donald Thompson, frequently masturbated and used a device for enhancing erections while his court was in session, charges a petition by the state's Attorney General Drew Edmondson seeking his removal

25 June 2004

Somewhere in Germany is a baby Superman, born in Berlin with bulging arm and leg muscles. Not yet five, he can hold seven-pound weights with arms extended, something many adults cannot do. He has muscles twice the size of other kids his age and half their body fat. DNA testing showed why: The boy has a genetic mutation that boosts muscle growth — via Die Puny Humans

Microsoft has announced a massive expansion in storage capacity of 250MB for users of its free Hotmail service, but just when the extra megabytes will become available to local users isn't clear

The NSW Government has made official its push into open source, launching a $1.5 million deployment of what may be the state's largest-ever rollout of open source software on the desktop

24 June 2004

The freedom of individuals around the world to surf the net is under threat from the policies of democracies as well as authoritarian regimes and dictatorships, according to the Internet Under Surveillance report by media watchdog Reporters Without Borders. The authors distinguished between dictatorships like China that gag the internet, and democracies, which they said threatened freedom of expression in the name of fighting pornography, racism or global terrorism — via GeneWeb.info

Police are re-examining more than 100 murders in England and Wales they suspect could be so-called honour killings. Many of the female victims were from South Asian communities. Detectives are not reopening the cases but hope to learn more about the scale and nature of the phenomenon. As well as South Asian communities, some of the victims came from Arabic or eastern European backgrounds. Motives for the murders often included relationships which the families felt brought them dishonour. Police say some of the murders were carried out by contract killers hired by the families. They also believe that so-called bounty hunters were involved — people, including women, who make a business out of tracking down victims — via Die Puny Humans

Francisco Javier Ortiz Franco, a top editor and founder of the Zeta weekly newspaper, was slain by unidentified gunmen as he drove through Tijuana's Marron district with his children. The newspaper, in a statement posted on its Web site, said it would not speculate about motives for the attack but Zeta's campaigns against corrupt politicians have in the past made its editors targets of gangland-style attacks

23 June 2004

Telstra is finalising a plan for its IP network, and will take the first step in its biggest overhaul in five years this week when it issues a $300 million contract to upgrade its core system by replacing its ageing copper network with fibre-optic lines

MySQL AB, the company behind the popular open source database MySQL, is looking to ramp up its presence in the Australian market

Inghams has told McDonalds in New Zealand that the next shipments of soy to feed their chickens will not be GE, whereas Australian consumers still have no choice but to eat Inghams chickens fed GE soy

A US federal judge yesterday approved class-action status for a sex-discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart that has become the largest private civil rights case in US history. It could represent as many as 1.6 million current and former female employees of the retailer

22 June 2004

A Japanese teenager was forced by his teacher to write an apology in blood after dozing in the classroom. The 40-year-old male teacher handed the boy a box-cutter and paper and told him to write an apology in blood. The teacher left the student, who then cut his finger and began to write an apology using his own blood

68-year-old grandmother, Louise Jones, pulled up to her house and saw a police car. She honked, and an officer got out of the vehicle. Jones said the officer went to a call at another home, then returned to her house to give her a ticket for honking. Police said Jones wouldn't cooperate and hit the officer. That's when the officer pulled his Taser gun and shocked her — via Die Puny Humans

21 June 2004

There's a new application for RF-absorbing materials: wallpaper that blocks Wi-Fi. BAE, the British defence contractor, has announced that the same material used to foil radar by stealth bombers can be used to selectively block certain frequencies and prevent wireless networking signals from entering or exiting a building. Pass me my tin foil beanie

20 June 2004

Nokia has funded a mobile phone browser project at the Mozilla Foundation, breathing new life into the open-source effort once written off as Microsoft roadkill. The resulting project, called Minimo, has produced a workable prototype, or pre-alpha milestone

19 June 2004

German police are hunting three bandits who held up a self-service strawberry farm with a pistol and a knife — for a five-pound basket of strawberries

18 June 2004

Amnesty International charges of Iraqi prisoners being subject to cruel and inhumane treatment were notified to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet in June and July of 2003, Australian Defence Forces chief General Cosgrove told a Senate estimates committee

The development of a new breed of electric stun gun that can incapacitate whole crowds of people at a stroke has appalled human rights groups. Today, the commercial stun guns used by the police or the military can target only one person at a time and work only at very close quarters. But the new weapons are being designed to sweep a lightning-like beam of electricity across a swathe of people from distances of 100 metres or more. Amnesty International is calling for exhaustive safety tests of all electroshock weapons

Ever wondered where on earth late-night radio jocks like Stan Zemanek, below, find their motley crew of eccentric, opinionated callers? Some are created by insomnia and too much alcohol, no doubt, but on Zemanek's show several characters are the creation of the voiceover specialist Bryan Wiseman

A blind man drove a golf cart for two miles through the winding streets of Peachtree City, accompanied by his guide dog — and an inebriated friend giving instructions — before running into a parked car

17 June 2004

G-Gnome has finished his amazing Orac case mod, which looks absolutely stunning. For those that don't know, Blakes 7 was a late 70s/early 80s British science fiction series and Orac was this intellectually snobbish, difficult and incredibly brilliant computer, hand built by an eccentric scientist

Mozilla Firefox 0.9 and Mozilla Thunderbird 0.7 have been officially released

The University of Tokyo has developed the illusion of invisibility, under the name of Optical Camouflage. The system is remarkably simple — you have a mix of light-sensitive and light-emitting devices attached to an adapted reflective surface. The devices are hooked to a computer, which simply projects on each side whatever is on the opposite side. The result is more of a translucent look, than real invisibility, but the potential is there. The inventor's next objective is to make walls that are invisible, using the same technology. Project a real outside image onto an interior wall without windows. This almost sounds more frightening than the cloak, since there's no reason why the sensors would have to be placed outside. Imagine a world where PHBs can turn their office wall into a window onto any cube. Zero privacy. The technology is great, but the potential for abuse is definitely there

16 June 2004

Music business analyst Phil Tripp is pushing for a change to the Copyright Act that would give consumers the legal chance to copy music for their personal use

ISP iiNet has announced plans to roll out its own DSL broadband infrastructure covering approximately 11,000 ports across Australia. After a three month customer pilot and feasibility study, 32 exchanges will be covered for the initial rollout around the country, replacing part of the capacity currently acquired from iiNet's wholesale provider

Yahoo began offering 100MB of storage to people who use its free e-mail service. As part of an overall redesign of its mail service, Yahoo also upgraded Mail Plus paid users to 2GB of storage and lowered its subscription rate from $29.99 a year to $19.99. Other a la carte services, such as POP e-mail forwarding, are consolidated under this plan and will no longer be sold on a standalone basis

15 June 2004

Makers of the revived Zeppelin airship delivered their first helium-filled craft to a commercial user Saturday, a Japanese company that plans to use the 12-seat craft for sightseeing trips and advertising. The granddaughter of the original airship's inventor, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, was on hand as Japan's Nippon Airship Corporation took delivery of the 247-foot ship, destined for sightseeing and advertising flights in Japan and a starring role at the 2005 world's fair in the city of Aichi

A grapefruit-sized meteorite smashed through the roof of a New Zealand house, hitting a couch and bouncing off the ceiling before coming to rest under a computer. The 1.3kg chunk of space debris dropped out of the sky and plummeted through the tiled roof of the Auckland home on Saturday

Muggers in South Africa handed back an Alcatel mobile phone while robbing two terrified women — because they refused to thieve cheap stuff

14 June 2004

The best way to get a great deal with Microsoft may be to say you're seriously considering Linux — which is why Microsoft spent Thursday dispelling the myth of open source. More companies are using the threat of Linux when negotiating deals with Microsoft. While Microsoft is adamant that open-source software isn't a serious competitor on the desktop today, it may well be forcing Microsoft's prices down

Hewlett-Packard has signed an agreement to sell Sendmail's e-mail software, the latest move by the longtime Microsoft ally to also woo open-source players

NTT DoCoMo says it has achieved a connection of 300Mbps with its experimental fourth-generation network

13 June 2004

Approximately a million news stories from the 19th century are going online. The project will cost roughly £$2 million and include 100 years of news and images from publications that are no longer copyright protected, and currently only available at the Newspaper Library in Colindale, North London. 52,000 newspapers and magazines will be included and the project should take 18 months to complete

An angry buzzard is terrorising a quiet English country road by dive-bombing passing cyclists. Paul Taylor, 71, says the bird of prey used its beak and claws to rip a three-inch gash in his head as he cycled along the stretch of road near Holsworthy in Devon, western England

12 June 2004

The decomposed body of a man dressed in pyjamas was discovered in an abandoned Tokyo apartment building 20 years after he is believed to have died. A Tokyo Metropolitan Police official said construction workers were preparing to tear down the building earlier this month when they found the man's skeletal remains laying face-up on a mattress on the tatami reed mat floor of a second-floor room — via Rogue Sun

A former night-shift cook at a Denny's Restaurant in Illinois is in hot water after allegedly getting creative in the kitchen. Anthony Lindhorst, of Waterloo, is charged with five counts of aggravated battery for allegedly lacing brownies with marijuana and mixing his semen into the restaurant's sauce. Lindhorst is accused of serving the brownies to co-workers and the tainted sauce to two customers

11 June 2004

Michael Costa has always been a man with a reverse Midas touch, everything he touches turns to shit. Public transport in NSW is no exception. His ingenious method for solving the problem of trains running late is the use of creative accounting. The definition of a late train will change from more than four minutes to more than ten minutes. Usually this sort of dodgy scheme is done far from the public eye. But rocket scientist Costa, always keen to get his ugly mug on camera, announced his cunning plan to the press

Virtual, moving fences controlled from a laptop could one day herd cattle to fresh fields for grazing. A farmer would control multiple herds from a single server at home as if they were playing a video game. Although static virtual fences already keep dogs inside yards in affluent US neighbourhoods, no-one has attempted a moving virtual fence before, nor attempted to apply the idea to large herds of animals. Basically we download the fences to the cows, says Zack Butler, of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. We say: 'Today stay here, tomorrow go somewhere else

Peter FitzSimons has a good write up on how Peter Garrett's independent views highlight Alexander Downer's kow-towing — via GeneWeb.info

10 June 2004

The US Fish and Wildlife Service recently reported that a record 55 red wolf pups [BugMeNot] have been born in 11 litters in North Carolina this spring. More than 100 red wolves now roam 1.5 million acres in the northeastern part of the state. This year's promising wolf census comes on the heels of a judge's decision that temporarily halted the building of a landing field by the US Navy that Defenders and others charged would be harmful to wolves and migratory birds in the area

Google is considering renewing support for RSS, the latest twist in a standards war that could change how people read the news

An adware purveyor has apparently used two previously unknown security flaws in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to install a toolbar on victims' computers that triggers pop-up ads

Armed police staking out a former nuclear bunker in Fife said they are now talking to a man hiding inside. Firearms officers and negotiators were called to Scotland's Secret Bunker near Anstruther, which is now a Cold War museum. The man is understood to be Ronald MacDonald, a 39-year-old who had been living rough in the area — via Charlie Stross

09 June 2004

The chief of the defence force General Cosgrove has been caught misleading the people [BugMeNot] yet again. He told Senate Estimates this week that Australia had an agreement with the Americans that they would detain POWs in Iraq on our behalf so we could avoid our responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions to ensure they were not tortured

Just when you thought Optus customer service couldn't get any worse, the cheap bastards have joined the ranks of Australian telecommunications companies using cheap labour in India for some of their call centre operations

A British robber who stole £115,000 in cash from a bank broke back in a week later to give most of it back. The thief got into the Barclays Bank in east London, smashed a window and helped himself to the cash in the ATM machine. A week later baffled staff called detectives to say the robber had returned £104,000

08 June 2004

Australia's overseas aid spending is up, but not all the money goes to worthy projects to alleviate poverty. (Australia's Official Development Assistance outlay for 2004-05 is an estimated $2133 million.) Increasingly, money is being allocated to beefing up regional security and promoting good governance. Much of what should be pure aid money has gone to managing refugees in Nauru and on the recent Solomons mission. Overseas aid is being redefined to include things such as counter-terrorism measures. The Parliamentary Library has a two-page Research Note that lays it all out — via journoz

The United States is close to deciding whether to spend tens of millions of dollars establishing permanent joint training facilities in northern Australia for its military forces

07 June 2004

Maria Isabel had been raped, beaten, stabbed in the chest and tied up with barbed wire before a blow to the back of her head finally killed her. Such murders have become common in Guatemala, where there are now daily reports of killings but rarely news of any arrests. Such unchecked misogyny, with no clear motive, is reminiscent of the situation in Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican city just over the border from Texas where around 100 serial-type sexual murders over the last decade have become an international cause célèbre

Microsoft says it will ask a European court this week to suspend parts of the European Commission's landmark decision that ordered it to stop business practices that violate antitrust law

06 June 2004

NetGear's WG602 access point has a hidden password that provides remote and local administrative control. Unlike Linksys', where turning the firewall on (which is on by default, but a researcher found new units in which it was off when taken out of the box), the NetGear hole cannot be disabled. The backdoor seems to have been created by the vendor that packaged the device for NetGear

Marvin Heemeyer, a muffler shop owner who plowed a makeshift armoured bulldozer into several buildings after a dispute with city officials, was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound after a SWAT team cut their way into the machine with a blowtorch early Saturday

05 June 2004

Yahoo's new browser toolbar is advertised to clean out adware and spyware from the user's PC. They forgot to mention that Yahoo excludes by default two popular adware/spyware applications — Claria (ex-Gator) and WhenU.com — Claria has commercial bonding with Yahoo

An open source Solaris is in the works, Sun spokesperson Russ Castronovo has confirmed. However, he declines to reveal any significant details about the project, including what software license Sun will use, whether all of the components of the operating system will be open-sourced, and when, exactly, Sun intends to release an open source Solaris

04 June 2004

It has been announced that the latest version of Shareaza, a popular P2P application for Windows, was released under the GPL. Currently the source code is hosted by the Shareaza servers, but the announcement makes mention of the code becoming a project on Sourceforge. The binaries are still available for Windows only, but I imagine it is only a matter of time before a Linux port emerges

A smart bullet that can be fired at a target and then wirelessly transmit back useful information has been developed by US researchers. The projectile, created at the University of Florida in Gainesville, US, is 1.7 centimetres in diameter can be fired at from an ordinary paint-ball gun. The front is coated in an adhesive polymer that sticks it to the target. Inside, the elongated projectile holds a sensor, a tiny wireless transmitter and a battery. This enables it to report back its findings to a laptop or handheld computer up to 70 metres away. It can also reusable, because compressed gas within the gun provides the propulsion — via Die Puny Humans

Nokia's new 3220 camera air phone is an effort on the part of the company to gain market share that has been slipping away to manufacturers of mobiles considered trendier than Nokia's older standby models. A motion sensor in the 3220 makes the lights blink in a sequence that spells out letters when the handset is waved. Joi Ito ponders the joys of an airtexting enabled BlackBerry and its potential as a hecklebot

The German inventor who pioneered the technology behind the Sony Walkman has won a multimillion-pound payout nearly 30 years after dreaming up his invention. Andreas Pavel's original 1970s concept of the stereobelt revolutionised portable listening and Sony's version — the Walkman — became a global hit. Now the 57-year-old stereo enthusiast, who works in Milan, is threatening to use his payout to sue Apple Computer, whose iPod portable music player is the digital successor to the Walkman. He is believed to be considering cases in Italy and Canada, where his patents were filed later and may still be valid

03 June 2004

In celebration of D-Day, Colossus, one of the earliest electronic code-breaking machines, has been rebuilt after ten years of effort by computer conservationists. Colossus was used to break the Lorenz cipher. Remarkably, the use of parallel processing (five tape channels) and short gate delay time (1.2µs) allows the Colossus to match the speed of a modern PC

The recording industry is testing technology that would prevent consumers from making copies of CD burns, a piracy defence that could put some significant new restrictions on legally purchased music

An 11-year-old girl led a fellow sixth-grader, Satomi Mitarai, to an empty classroom during their school lunch hour Tuesday, slit her throat and slashed arms with a box-cutter and left her to bleed to death — via Die Puny Humans

02 June 2004

Tim Robinson has built a computer capable of solving polynomial equations — using Meccano. His difference engine uses a similar approach to Babbage's design. He's also created a differential analyser complete with a GUI. Both could be scaled up indefinitely to handle larger problems

Some critics say the endless stream of hugely popular reality television shows are as dull as watching paint dry. Well, now they can test the theory with a live, eight-week round-the-clock Webcast of just that. Billed as the ultimate reality TV show, British pay-channel UKTV Style promises a wall, some brushes and different types of paint in its program Watching Paint Dry

01 June 2004

Queensland Internet service provider OnTheNet claims it is the first non-Telstra ISP in the state to install broadband ADSL infrastructure into telephone exchanges

A 15-year-old grammar school boy yesterday became the first person in Britain to be convicted of inciting someone to murder him. The boy, who can be identified only by the pseudonym John, invented a cast of characters in an internet chatroom as part of an elaborate plan to commission his own murder

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