February 2005 Archive

28 February 2005

Europe is about to become an internet fixture with the launch of its own extension — the .eu domain — and businesses are girding for the battle to bear the precious two letters

More than 10 million households across Australia will soon be able to send text messages from their home telephones. It does, of course, mean that you're up for a new phone if you want to access the service

A team of South Korean scientists say they have found a way to produce the human body's own cancer-killing cells through gene therapy, offering new hope to cancer sufferers

The legend that rice porridge was used in mortar to make robust ramparts has been verified by archaeological research in the north-western province of Shaanxi. During recent maintenance work on the city wall of the provincial capital Xi'an, workers found that plaster remnants on ancient bricks were quite hard to remove. A chemical test showed that the mortar reacted the same as glutinous rice to a reagent

27 February 2005

The Babylon 5 feature film has been cancelled

The US Fish and Wildlife Service is suspending a red wolf breeding programme on Bull Island designed to help spare the species from extinction. The service says the program is no longer as important to wolf recovery as it was in 1987 when the government first brought breeding pairs to Bull Island, near Charleston. Pups born there would grow and learn to survive in the wild before being moved to North Carolina's Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on a vast, undeveloped barrier island

26 February 2005

Firefox 1.0.1 has been officially released by the Mozilla Foundation, with some important security fixes. An announcement and release notes are available

Stock markets have jumped at the news that famed US digital video recorder maker TiVO may be the subject of an takeover bid by Apple

AOL is expected to launch an Internet phone service in the United States next month, leapfrogging rivals in a fast-growing market as it seeks to evolve from an also-ran provider of dial-up Internet access to a broadband services powerhouse

25 February 2005

A rigorous study in Italy has confirmed claims that professional soccer players have a higher than normal risk of developing a type of motor neuron disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The reason remains a mystery. ALS involves the death of motor neurons, the nerve cells responsible for voluntary movement, and eventually leads to paralysis and death

Hydroelectric power is environmentally friendly — everyone knows that. Except they are wrong — it can seriously damage the climate. Hydroelectric dams can produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane, and in some cases produce more of these greenhouse gases than power plants running on fossil fuels. Claiming that hydro projects are net producers of greenhouse gases is not new, but the issue is now climbing up the political agenda

An elderly Thai monk who mistook a tube of superglue for eye drops can see again after doctors unglued one eye. Phra Kru Prapatworakhun, 81, had been unable to see for nearly a week after applying the superglue, which he found in his temple's medicine cabinet — via Ben Templesmith

24 February 2005

John Howard has caved in to his bestest buddy in the whole, wide world and has agreed to send more Australian troops off to be slaughtered in the retarded monkey boy's illegal occupation of Iraq. This from a men who swore he'd never, ever increase troop numbers. Liar

Marchex just paid $164 million to buy Name Development, an obscure company that displays pay-per-click keyword ads on 100,000 domains. It's not a stock swap either, as $155 million of that was in cash. The seller reportedly built the portfolio by scarfing up expiring domains (including hardware-update.com, previously owned by Microsoft and linked from within the Windows 2000 OS) and replacing the content with pay-per-click ads

Apple today unveiled the second generation of its iPod mini digital music players. A new 4GB model is priced at AU$299, while its 6GB bigger brother will retail at AU$359. Both models are available worldwide immediately in a choice of silver, pink, blue and green

ISPs and content hosts will be required to report online child porn to the Australian Federal Police from 1 March under amendments to the Criminal Code Act 1995

23 February 2005

Just a few weeks after a major power outage took out LiveJournal, almost all of Wikimedia Foundation's services are offline due to a tripped circuit breaker at a different colocation. Among other services, Wikimedia runs the well-known Wikipedia open encyclopedia. Coincidentally, the foundation is in the middle of a fundraising drive to pay for new servers. They have established an off-site backup of the fundraising page until power returns"

A woman has sued Hewlett Packard, claiming the ink cartridges for their printers are secretly programmed to expire on a certain date, in some cases rendering them useless before they are even installed in a printer. For anyone who's run into this problem, there is a workaround

The American Bar Association has claimed that thousands of suspects unable to afford lawyers are wrongly convicted each year because they are pressured to accept guilty pleas or have incompetent attorneys

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is coordinating an international operation to trace the source of spam e-mails that aim to defraud Internet users

22 February 2005

Lexmark is dead in the water with their hopes to use the DMCA to force their customers to buy their over-priced toner. Their request for another hearing has been denied

A breakaway faction of the W3C called WHAT-WG, or the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group — which includes Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera — is threatening to revolt over electronic forms standards. WHAT-WG has announced its intention to submit the draft to the W3C, posing the potentially awkward possibility of the consortium advocating two conflicting avenues for Web forms. The fate of a standard could also determine whether the order form could be accessed in any standards-compliant Web browser, or if it would be available only to users of a particular operating system — an outcome that has browser makers and others worried about the role of Microsoft — via Slashdot

An 800-kilometre-wide sea, surviving as broken plates, appears to lie just beneath the surface in observations from the Mars Express spacecraft. The sea is just 5° north of the Martian equator and would be the first discovery of a large body of water outside the planet's polar ice caps

21 February 2005

Hunter S Thompson, the American counterculture writer, has been found dead at his home in Colorado. His body was found by his son, Juan, after he had shot himself. He was 67. He pioneered gonzo journalism, a factual style in which the writer was an essential part of the story. Worthwhile checking out The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders

Telstra has resolved its long-running broadband pricing dispute with competition regulators, avoiding potentially massive fines with the promise of a rebate to its competitors

According to NSW Justice Minister John Hatzistergos, the Commonwealth need to conduct a trial of mobile phone jamming equipment in prison under the usual dodgy excuse of combat terrorists

20 February 2005

American soldiers traumatised by fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be offered the drug ecstasy to help free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares — via BoingBoing

19 February 2005

The University of Southampton has launched a new semantic web interface, called mSpace, that it says will make searching for information online, and learning about a subject, much easier. mSpace is a framework that gathers information sources and presents them to the user in a single window. It can potentially be applied to any subject, provided the basic information is available. The researchers say this means users will no longer have to wade through lists of undifferentiated data when researching a subject

Social networking is out and straight invitations are in at Google's free e-mail service, but the official line is that the shift does not signal an end to Gmail's beta status

Telstra is blaming network congestion for ongoing problems with its BigPond e-mail service. Network congestion had seen some users getting messages that the service was unavailable. BigPond spokesman Craig Middleton said he was unaware of any specific cause of the network congestion

Sony hopes to dethrone Apple's iPod as the hottest portable music player with a new product to be released by the end of the year

18 February 2005

An online forum with eBay's Australian trust and safety director has highlighted the frustration many local users of the auction site feel at the speed of response to problems with fraud and account spoofing

Secrecy surrounds the harvest of a hemp crop destined to be turned into two houses on the New South Wales north coast. Around 2.5 million plants will be used to build what is believed to be the first hemp houses in Australia

Plans to privatise the £48 billion clean-up of UK nuclear sites could put public safety at risk. Government advisers fear that financial pressures will encourage the companies to cut corners and will increase the risk of accidents

Hard to scratch, chemically stable, inexpensive, environmentally friendly and readily available, so-called transparent transistors are an entirely new class of materials

17 February 2005

ABC television will have a younger sibling from 7 March in the form of ABC2, the broadcaster's new free-to-air digital channel

After gobbling up OzEmail to create the third-largest ISP in Australia, iiNet managing director Michael Malone is considering further acquisitions here and in New Zealand

At his keynote address to the RSA Security Conference, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates announced that a beta version of the next generation of Internet Explorer will be released this northern summer

A bizarre attack in 2002 left Dr OC Smith, a medical examiner in Shelby County, Tennessee, handcuffed to a window guard, wrapped in barbed wire and with a motion-sensitive bomb strapped to his chest. In an even stranger development, detectives concluded that the highly respected doctor faked his attack. He was arrested on charges of lying to federal authorities and illegally possessing a bomb — via Paul Mellen

16 February 2005

It has been called everything from a crying shame to environmental vandalism as the debate over climate change management heats up in Australia. The Australian Medical Association, state governments and environmentalists protested Little Johhny Coward's refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol when the treaty, known officially as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, came into effect Wednesday

Two campaigners who were found to have distributed a leaflet in the mid-1980s libelling the McDonald's fast food chain were denied their rights to free speech and a fair hearing, the European Court of Human Rights ruled yesterday

iiNet will take over the residential business of home grown Internet access group OzEmail after completing an AU$110 million acquisition agreement with its owner

Workshare Technology offers a free safety net from the potential embarrassment of a public display of hidden and forgotten Microsoft Office comments and changes, called Workshare Trace

15 February 2005

Scientists have successfully modified the AIDS-causing HIV in such a way that it can attack metasticised melanoma (cancer cells). The impact of genetic research on cancer research is in and of itself amazing. To mix this with the strategy of using one strong enemy against another is brilliance. Research will continue, obviously, but they are already reporting success on living creatures

Pig embryos could provide sources of new organ and tissue transplants for people, and they may pose fewer risks than using material from adult animals

Australia's communications watchdog is investigating the Liberal Party over Prime Minister John Howard's pre-recorded phone messages used to bombard households during the federal election campaign

14 February 2005

Scientists at The Digital Evolution Lab at Michigan State University have created virus-like computer programs that replicate, mutate randomly, and compete with each other... in other words, they evolve. Among such feats as learning to add and compare numbers, these digital life forms also once avoided scientists attempts at killing them, by playing dead. You can download the project from SourceForge

Telstra will not build its planned multi-billion-dollar residential fibre-optic network — designed to replace copper lines over the next two decades — without iron-clad guarantees from the competition regulator, but will consider partnering with rivals for the project

13 February 2005

Slate's Paul Boutin reports on the sordid history of the oldest scam on the Internet. For almost as long as the Web has existed, there's been a thriving economy of sites, services, and software vying to grab you as soon as you mistype an URL. Studies estimate that 10-20% of all hand-entered URLs are mistyped, adding up to at least 20 million wrong numbers per day, helping to enrich the likes of porn purveyors, ISPs, Paxfire, Microsoft and VeriSign

12 February 2005

A survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility has found hundreds of US Fish and Wildlife Service scientists have been instructed to change findings to favour business interests

Wiki Media Foundation, the group behind the Wikipedia online encyclopedia project, said Friday that search giant Google has volunteered to host some of its content on company servers

11 February 2005

A newly found security flaw in popular browsers, including Firefox and Opera, could be exploited by hackers to carry out phishing scams, security experts have warned

If you think you're safe from identity theft, take your eye off your PC and make sure you know where your wallet is. That's because a new survey has found that you may have more to worry about from careless paper management than from evil online forces

Scientists from around the world launched a project on thursday to genetically identify species using bar codes. By taking a snippet of DNA from all the known species on Earth and linking them to photographs, descriptions and scientific information, the researchers plan to build the largest database of its kind

A cordon-bleu chef has modified an ink-jet printer and loaded printer's cartridges with coloured fruit and vegetable concoctions instead of ink, and the paper tray contains edible sheets of soybean and potato starch. Flavours range from birthday cake to sushi

10 February 2005

Newcastle-based telecoms and media player SP Telemedia has announced plans for a DSL broadband network focused on regional areas in the eastern states

Mark Jen, a blogger whose candid comments about life on the job at Google sparked controversy last month, has left the company. It is not clear if he resigned or was fired but references a post at Google Blogoscoped where it was suggested that he may have been fired over his blog Ninetyninezeros. Given Google's push into the blogging space with their recent acquisition of Blogger it might be interesting to see how this shakes out

A rare oarfish washed up on a beach in Perth, Australia on Monday. It's oddly the sixth oarfish to be found on a Western Australia beach in recent months

09 February 2005

Ophthalmologists have implanted Artificial Silicon Retina microchips in the eyes of five patients to treat vision loss caused by retinitis pigmentosa. The implant is a 2mm chip that contains about 5,000 microscopic solar cells that convert light into electrical impulses. Already some patients have experienced improvements such as not bumping into objects around the house, and being able to read the time on a clock

A Perth couple has attempted to sell the naming, advertising and promotional rights to their unborn daughter for at least $1 million via an internet auction site. eBay pulled the auction

Why is this not a surprise? The cleaning done, now About.com is for sale, according to NYT. The asking price is $350 million to $500 million. Five companies are bidding for it and the bids close today: bidders are Google, Yahoo, The New York Times Company, AOL and AskJeeves — via paidContent.org

A Welsh rugby fan cut off his own testicles to celebrate Wales beating England at rugby. Geoff Huish, 26, was so convinced England would win Saturday's match he told fellow drinkers at a social club, If Wales win I'll cut my balls off. Friends at the club in Caerphilly, south Wales, thought he was joking. But after the game Huish went home, severed his testicles with a knife, and walked 200 yards back to the bar with the testicles to show the shocked drinkers what he had done — via Warren Ellis

08 February 2005

A microchip so powerful that it could turn mobile phones into pocket-sized desktop computers has been unveiled by Sony, Toshiba and IBM. Ten times faster than its rivals, the new Cell microprocessor is being billed as the world's first super computer on a chip, it will be used in the new Sony Playstation 3 due out next year

Gmail, the Web mail service operated by search engine Google, could be gearing up for its official launch after users of the service found that the number of invitations they could send out increased from four to fifty

07 February 2005

A recent independent report did a hatchet job on municipal wireless networks, damning them as an expensive failure. Glenn Fleishman took the report to pieces in a series of long blog-posts, exposing its shoddy methodology and dubious provenance. Now he reports that the organisation that produced it, the New Millennium Research Council, is a front for the telecoms lobby — via BoingBoing

Eureka Aerospace in Pasadena is developing a High Power Electromagnetic System that can fry a vehicle's microchips and slow cars to a halt — it leaves the suspect in control of the car; he can steer, he can brake, he just can't accelerate. The antenna array could be mounted on police pursuit vehicles or helicopters. It's slated to be ready for testing by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department by late summer — via BoingBoing

Toronto police have found a new application for computerized photo editing. The police released edited photos on 3 February from a series of child pornography pics in an attempt to locate where the photos may have been taken. Two days later, they have identified the Port Orleans hotel in Disney World as being the location. This seems to be the first time photo editing has been used in law enforcement this way and strikes an interesting line between protecting the victims and being able to get public tips. It looks like it may be used quite heavily in the future given this success. The girl from the photographs has been found and is safe. Her abusive adoptive father is already in jail for other child porn charges, and may face more time for the Disney World photos

06 February 2005

Fuji Photo and CMC Magnentics are two of six companies, who have formed a consortium to promote HVD technology, which they say can be used to put 1TB of data onto just one disc. The consortium say that a HVD disc could hold about 200 standard DVD's, and transfer data at speeds 40 times that of DVD, about 1GB per second. HVD is being seen as a possible successor to Blu-ray and HD-DVD technologies

Sunbird, Mozilla's standalone cross-platform calendar project, has reached its first official relase: version 0.2, for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. This is good news for all of us waiting for decent free calendaring software

05 February 2005

A federal judge has struck down a Bush administration rule that lowered Endangered Species Act protection for wolves that are migrating out of strongholds in the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes into neighbouring states. In a ruling released yesterday, US District Judge Robert Jones in Portland rescinded the April 2003 decision by the US Fish and Wildlife Service which had divided wolf range into three areas and had reclassified the Eastern and Western populations as threatened instead of endangered. The agency had left wolves in the Southwest in the endangered category

South Australian Premier Mike Rann wants an immediate investigation into why an Australian woman was held in the Baxter detention centre for four months. Cornelia Rau, 39, who went missing from the Manly psychiatric hospital in Sydney in March 2004, spent four of 10 months' detention in Baxter after being found in far north Queensland without identification. She spent the other six months in the Women's Correctional Centre in Brisbane, after Queensland police believed she was an illegal immigrant. She was turned over by police to immigration officials, who could not confirm her identity

Some Optus customers are facing a $179 charge for a new modem following the storms that lashed the Victoria and NSW this week. Australian IT understands that the carrier has been called on to replace a large number of modems used for its HRC cable broadband service since the storms hit on Wednesday. Customers whose equipment is out of warranty will be charged $179 to replace their modems, which are only available from Optus

04 February 2005

Two key witnesses appearing before a Senate inquiry in Canberra have backed bribery claims made by federal independent MP Tony Windsor. Mr Windsor says he was offered an overseas posting to quit politics, a claim he has repeated under oath at the inquiry. He says that businessman Greg McGuire made the offer on behalf of Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson and Nationals Senator Sandy Macdonald. John Howard's cronies are still trying to weasel out of the charge

The Canadian government is moving to counter worries surrounding Canadian citizens' privacy being compromised by the United States' Patriot act. Apparently the FBI currently has the right, through Patriot, to search documents which may contain Canadian information sent to US firms carrying out work under contract. Thankfully, privacy still means something up there

Russian President Vladimir Putin has sent a statement to the State Duma, or lower house of parliament, attacking part of an anti-terror bill that would restrict media coverage of terrorist attacks and calling it unconstitutional. You've got to laugh when it's Russia who are more progressive than the so-called free west

Former MP3.com chief and Lindows CEO Michael Robertson will reenter the music world next week with MP3tunes, a service that promises music without DRM restrictions. MP3tunes hopes to attract users who are fed up with restrictions on copying music from sites that use digital-rights-management techniques, such as iTunes

03 February 2005

Six Romanians have been jailed for digging up the corpse of a cancer victim, ripping his heart out and eating it because they thought he was a vampire — via Warren Ellis

When told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three American high school students said it goes too far in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories — via Warren Ellis

The research team at Johns Hopkins University have found a way to crack the code used in millions of car keys, a development that could allow thieves to bypass the security systems on newer car models. This shouldn't affect Australia, as our codes are apparently tougher to crack for the time being

02 February 2005

Employees could receive a bill each month for the cost of stolen bandwidth and wasted time if Australia-based Exinda Networks' URL Bandwidth monitoring system takes off

Controversial Australian political and business web site Crikey announced its AU$1 million sale to Private Media Partners

Google is now an ICANN-approved domain name registrar, an intriguing move that could be tied to its blog hosting service, Blogger. Yahoo recently dropped its domain prices to US$4.98, as hosting companies use domains as a cheap way to lure customers. Registrar status could allow Google to compete aggressively on price. Bloggers seem to resist paying for hosting, so cheap domains might help Google's plans for world domination

01 February 2005

iiNet has revealed plans to launch voice over IP across its network by mid-2005 as it launched a spirited challenge to tier-one carriers with new voice and broadband bundles

Optus has reached 100,000 resale DSL broadband customers since entering the market less than 12 months ago. The move comes amid indications the number two telco plans shortly to announce details of an investment of up to AU$100 million in its own DSL network

Under the new US Order, the saving and planting of seeds will be illegal and market will only offer plant material produced by transactional agribusiness corporations

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