April 2005 Archive

30 April 2005

Last month's Cornell Copyright Debate of the Century (with EFF's senior IP attorney, a copyfighting media scholar, and the legal heads of the MPAA, RIAA, Universal and Napster 2) is finally available online as a series of torrents in MP3 and Quicktime format, thanks to Allison Muri at the University of Saskatchewan — via BoingBoing

The US forced out a top human rights investigator at the United Nations, Egyptian-born law professor Cherif Bassiouni, just days he released a report criticising the US for committing human rights abuses. Cherif Bassiouni says, The US has done an enormous disservice to the cause of human rights in Afghanistan simply because they wanted somebody who was going to look the other way on what their practices were

New York State has gone on the attack against spyware and adware by filing a lawsuit [PDF] against a Los Angeles-based marketing company that allegedly installed invasive software onto consumers' computers without proper notice as part of free software downloads. In an announcement today, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said he had filed the lawsuit against Intermix Media, a 6-year-old Internet marketing company

29 April 2005

Scientists have built a small nuclear fusion device triggered by changes in temperature. In a surprising feat of miniaturisation, scientists are reporting today that they have produced nuclear fusion — the same process that powers the sun — in a footlong cylinder just five inches in diameter. And they say they will soon be able to make the device even smaller. While the technique is unlikely to lead to power generation, such a device could act as a portable source of neutrons for analysing materials and medical imaging, and perhaps even spacecraft propulsion — via Bruce Sterling

After more than sixty-years, a rare bird believed to have been extinct has been spotted in the Big Woods of Arkansas. A kayaker first reported seeing the ivory-billed woodpecker last year. Scientists have since spotted the bird several times and even caught it briefly on video — via BoingBoing

The retarded monkey boy has signed into law the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. A lawbreaker can land in jail for up to three years for distributing a single copy of a prerelease movie on the Internet. The MPAA's president Dan Glickman applauded the move, stating he wanted to thank the congressional sponsors of this legislation for their strong advocacy for intellectual property rights

It seems that I missed a perfectly good, zombie virus story from the BBC. There is no justice in the world. It should be noted that, nearly a month on, people still haven't noted the date it was published — via The Path of Now and Forever

28 April 2005

This is the story of bitchchecker (the hacker), a user who lost it because he thought he had been kicked of an IRC channel by Elch. The hacker comes back on the channel threatening to hack and ruin Elch's machine, and dares Elch to give his IP address. The address given was 127.0.0.1 [english]

Security researchers have discovered an attack aimed at would-be visitors to Google.com, one that attempts to download malicious programs onto the computers of people who simply mistype the search giant's Web address. According to security specialist F-Secure, unsuspecting Web surfers may be bombarded with various types of Trojan horse threats, spyware and backdoors when they go to Googkle.com. The scheme is meant to take advantage of sloppy or hurried typists, given that on most keyboards the letter k key sits next to the l needed to type Google

Telstra mobile phones were blacked out today following a power failure at a Sydney exchange and a cut cable near Newcastle

Tony Blair was told by the government's most senior law officer in a confidential minute less than two weeks before the war that British participation in the American-led invasion of Iraq could be declared illegal. Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, spelt out to Mr Blair the dangers of Britain going to war without a second resolution. It is understood that he then went on to warn that British soldiers could be hauled before the International Criminal Court

27 April 2005

Senator Eric Abetz has launched a free open source CMS for use by government departments and not-for-profit organisations. However, a leading IT lawyer and several software developers have claimed it isn't really open source

A Jordanian man shot dead his divorced sister after seeing her photo on his friend's camera-equipped mobile in the latest honour killing in the kingdom. The unidentified man shot the 31-year-old mother twice in the head Sunday night and then turned himself in to police saying he committed the murder to cleanse his family's honour. The incident is the fifth example of a so-called honour killing in Jordan this year. Those found guilty usually face sentences of a maximum of one year in jail under Jordanian law — via BoingBoing

Thousands of the amphibians have died in recent days in a pond in Hamburg's Altona district, with their bodies swelling to bursting point. The toads' entrails are propelled for up to a metre, in scenes that have been likened to science fiction — via meta-roj blog

26 April 2005

The French courts have banned DRM copy-protection on DVDs [english], because it is a consumer right to make a backup or to change formats — via BoingBoing

Under pressure from competing internet providers, Telstra will deliver its next generation ADSL2+ broadband service to the market at least eight months earlier than expected, according to sources close to the carrier

UK music lovers are getting frustrated with restrictions placed on digital music tracks once they buy them from online stores. The magazine reported that people are also being turned off net music stores because of pricing and disappointing sound quality compared with CDs — via BoingBoing

What someone sees can be detected by remotely measuring their brain activity — even extracting information that people are not aware they possessed. The newly-demonstrated technique may lead to breakthroughs in measuring consciousness, helping doctors assess coma patients

25 April 2005

Hong Kong is planning to launch a 1Gbps broadband home service. Although the idea of using shared infrastructure is nothing new for TV/phone/data this appears to be the first to do this over IP at such high speed. The cost is high — US$215 a month. Per megabit, however, this is a very cheap service. This kind of solution only really works in town blocks where cat5 cabling is a realistic option

24 April 2005

Looks like the Internet Explorer team is trying to catch up to some of the major OS browsers. They claim to have finally added proper PNG support and have fixed numerous CSS bugs

A recent study at King's College indicates that the average IQ loss of e-mail users was ten points or six points more than cannabis users. And in another story, it seems that computers make kids dumb and an apparent problem-solving deficit disorder observed in children who use computers

23 April 2005

The trend of using inbox as a personal database has become more pronounced as the services have dramatically increased their storage capacity in response to Gmail offering a free service with 1,000Mb of storage. For all but the very organised, old e-mails will contain phone numbers that haven't been entered into a diary, names and addresses of contacts, meeting or customer information, useful statistics or competitor information and photos of products and people

Spain presented the papacy of Benedict XVI with its first big challenge yesterday when the Vatican and the Socialist government of the Roman Catholic country traded blows in a heated row over its plan to legalise homosexual marriage. The dispute erupted after the government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero drove a bill through the Cortes on Thursday that will allow homosexuals to marry and adopt children. The Vatican hit back yesterday by advising Spanish Catholic civil servants to refuse to officiate at homosexual wedding ceremonies, even if it meant risking losing their jobs

Suspended animation is poised to move from science fiction to reality: scientists from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle have successfully used hydrogen sulphide gas to induce a state of reversible hibernation in mammals for the first time, using methods that could eventually be applied to human beings. The breakthrough promises to allow doctors to slow human metabolism almost to a standstill, protecting critically ill patients from damage to the brain and other organs that would normally be inflicted by oxygen deprivation

22 April 2005

Google has added a My Search History feature to its online search engine that allows users to view past searches. The technology also lets them search inside the results to quickly retrieve a page they visited in the past. The feature will provide visitors with a relevant history, such as the number of searches performed and the last time they visited a Web page, as well as an overview of similar searches

Victoria may become the first Australian state to use electronic voting, with the Victorian Electoral Commission looking into using electronic systems for the 2006 state election. An Electoral Commission spokesman said that the current project was about making voting easier and more private for people with disabilities, rather than a test of e-voting technology for wider use. This is not about introducing wide-scale electronic voting at the next state election, spokesman Doug Beecroft said

21 April 2005

Sony and Toshiba, which support the Blu-ray Disc and HD-DVD formats respectively, are actively discussing the possibility of a single format. Should they manage to agree on a single format, and gain the acceptance of other companies backing the respective formats, it would benefit both consumers and the electronics and entertainment industries

Google Maps UK and Google Local UK have been launched, confirming speculations that the search engine giant would continue to expand its regional services to an international audience

20 April 2005

Elwood (Woody) Norris has invented a working flying machine, AirScooter. He asked one of his test pilots to demonstrate it for 60 Minutes on a hilltop outside San Diego, California. It can fly for two hours at 90 km/h, and go up to 3,000 metres above sea level. This week, he will receive America's top prize for invention. It's called the Lemelson-MIT award — a half-million dollar cash prize to honor his life's work, which includes a brand new personal flying machine. Woody Norris' and others' inventions are for NASA's The Highway in the Sky. It is a computer system designed to let millions of people fly whenever they please, and take off and land from wherever they please, in their very own vehicles — via Slashdot

Many of the world's largest organisations are turning their backs on outsourcing and one in four are actively bringing services back in-house. A survey from Deloitte Consulting reveals that 70% of respondents have had significant negative experiences with outsourced projects

19 April 2005

Adobe is to buy Macromedia in a stock transaction valued at US$3.4 billion that will see the formation of a content-creation behemoth. The deal, announced early on Monday morning in the US, is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2005, subject to shareholder approval. Bruce Chizen will continue as Adobe's chief executive and Shantanu Narayen will remain president and chief operating officer. Macromedia chief executive Stephen Elop will join Adobe as president of worldwide field operations

Lesli Reed-Brennan, a 19-year-old Los Angeles woman, has sued AOL saying that a former monitor of its kids only chat room seduced her online when she was a lonely teenager, persuading her to send him nude photos of herself and to engage in phone sex. It appears that AOL is being sued for Lesli's own stupidity

Nickolas Buckalew, a 17-year-old Morrisville youth, is being held on $100,000 bail after police said he raided a tomb in a cemetery and removed a head from a corpse. Court documents said the suspect allegedly talked of using the man's head as a bong or a pipe for smoking marijuana — via Warren Ellis

18 April 2005

LED lamps were unthinkable until the technology cleared a major hurdle just a dozen years ago. Since then, LEDs have evolved quickly and are being adapted for many uses, including pool illumination and reading lights, as evidenced at the Lightfair trade show here this week. More widespread use could lead to big energy savings and a minor revolution in the way we think about lighting

Doctor Who fan site Output Gallifrey is reporting that David Tennant has been cast as the tenth incarnation of the Time Lord. Tennant, who has recently appeared in BBC dramas Blackpool and Casanova, has been linked with the role of the Doctor since the announcement of Christopher Eccleston's departure

17 April 2005

Picture a flower that opens when facing the sunlight. In work that mimics that sensitivity to light, MIT Engineer Robert Langer and his German colleagues have created the first plastics that can be deformed and temporarily fixed into shape by light. This material could one day lead to medical devices that build themselves inside a patient's body, or door latches that can be opened with a flashlight — via Science Blog

A grandmother stopped an intruder from entering her home by lobbing a heavy garden gnome at him. Jean Collop was woken early on Tuesday morning by the sound of an intruder on the roof of her home in Wadebridge, southwest England. I grabbed the first thing that came to hand — one of my garden gnomes — and hurled it at him, and hit him, she recalled. He lay there and I began to scream. I went back into the kitchen and found a rolling pin in case he came down. I didn't want to break another gnome — via BoingBoing

16 April 2005

Scientists at Harvard University have shown how ultra-cold atoms can be used to freeze and control light to form the core — or central processing unit — of an optical computer. Optical computers would transport information ten times faster than traditional electronic devices, smashing the intrinsic speed limit of silicon technology. This new research could be a major breakthrough in the quest to create super-fast computers that use light instead of electrons to process information. Professor Lene Hau is one of the world's foremost authorities on slow light. Her research group became famous for slowing down light, which normally travels at 186,000 miles per second, to less than the speed of a bicycle

Cyber criminals are starting to use fake blogs to snare new victims. The bogus web journals are being used as traps that infect visitor's machines with keylogging software or viruses — via Geek News Central

Indian police have charged 80 people for burying children alive in an ancient Hindu ceremony known as the festival of pits. The ceremony, in which children — some less than a year old — are buried alive briefly and then dug up, happened on Monday in southern Tamil Nadu state

15 April 2005

BBC, Channel 4, British Film Institute and OU (Open University) issue call to action for Creative Archive Licence. Media and arts organisations, universities and libraries have today been urged to join an innovative new scheme designed to give the public access to footage and sound from some of the largest film, television and radio archives in the UK, as well as specially commissioned material

Downhill Battle have a new open source video platform — a publishing tool based off of BattleTorrent and a video player written in Python. They've started a whole new organization to sponsor the project. They say TV channels will be made out of RSS feeds and anybody can subscribe to another user's content channel. The system is being designed for the express purpose of putting broadcasting in the hands of individuals. I like this idea of using recent advances in filesharing and syndication to allow aggregated content to be delivered to your desktop

John Pinnock, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, says he needs the power to investigate customer complaints over content issues as well as carriage services. Pinnock said the fact he was prohibited from investigating complaints about content was one of the key limitations of his office

14 April 2005

Sony's rolling out their new line of flash-based music players to the market these days. More stylish than ever, they surely look like a serious attempt to regain territory lost to the iPod, and perhaps even to create the Walkman of the 21st century. And it looks like Sony has finally given in to consumer pressure: these new MP3 players can finally play MP3 natively, not just Sony's proprietary ATRAC format. But wait — you cannot just put your MP3s onto the device, you have to run them through Sony's obfuscation software first. The obfuscated files, when installed properly on the device, can be played. But you can't just move them around, share them with your friends, whatever. Well, of course the obfuscation scheme has already been broken by a brave hacker — via Slashdot

13 April 2005

With new features in the latest version of MySQL, like subqueries and a new binary format, the company has become a stronger competitor against much larger companies, and seems poised to bite into their revenues. Even more importantly MySQL might actually spark some fundamental changes in the market

Australia's peak communications industry body has cleared the way for the launch of broadband services several times quicker than existing ADSL offerings

Telstra BigPond is temporarily disconnecting compromised computers from its network to stem a tide of malware swamping its servers and delaying e-mail and Web site requests

12 April 2005

One of the fathers of the internet has warned that a surge in demand for new online addresses from devices such as mobile phones could stress the capacity of the world's computer communications system. Vint Cerf, chairman of ICANN, said the current version of the internet had space for more than 4 billion addresses, enough to last until 2020

Australians are driven to pirated music because just 65% of the country's top music tracks are available from the three legitimate online music sites, according to a study on the digital downloads industry

Online retail giant Amazon has acquired US-based print-on-demand company BookSurge. The privately owned inventory-free book printing and fulfilment company based in South Carolina already provides a print-on-demand service for out-of-print or hard-to-find books, available for sale on Amazon.com or as a service to other publishers and authors. And other retailers, wholesalers and distributors use its wholesale platform, called BookSurge Direct. But Amazon hopes the deal will primarily allow it to offer a wider range of more rare titles, including foreign language translations, to its readers

11 April 2005

Notoriously crap ISP, BigPond, has taken exception to a recent Whirlpool survey in which most respondents rated Bigpond's customer service as awful or average. Perhaps, instead of unleasing its PR flunkies, it should be fixing its appalling service

ICANN, the internet's authority for web addresses, has officially designated .jobs and .travel to be used the internet, with discussions continuing on other extensions including .asia

10 April 2005

Mike Bolesta — Baltimore County resident, innocent citizen, owner of Capital City Student Tours — recently found himself under arrest, himself transported to the Baltimore County lockup in Cockeysville, where he's handcuffed to a pole for three hours while the US Secret Service is called into the case. His crime? He shopped at Best Buy, where it seems the staff are so moronicly stupid that they are unable to recognise US$2 bills as the legal tender they are

The Wikimedia Foundation hopes to sell an English version of Wikipedia on CD-ROM and DVD before the end of the year. A boxed set of the German language version of Wikipedia has been available since last year

A 21-year-old man, Charles Stergios, was sentenced in US District Court in Maine to more than six years in prison for perpetrating an extensive Internet fraud scheme. He was ordered to pay nearly $118,000 in restitution to his victims. It seems that the federal prosecutor had tried to score Stergio a shorter amount of jail time, but Judge George Singal, who was not bound by the plea bargain agreement, decided on a harsher sentence on the grounds that he did not think that the defendant had sufficiently accepted responsibility

09 April 2005

Primus Telecom will enter the local phone market using exchange equipment being installed for DSL broadband. Primus said it was upgrading 200 exchanges around Australia, with 100 more due to have equipment installed over the next year

Foxtel has given rival Optus the unprecedented ability to compete for its entire customer base after inking a deal that ensures Optus upgrades its pay-TV service to digital signals. After months of fighting over the issue, Foxtel's board yesterday unanimously agreed to changes to the companies' content-sharing deal, which are expected to boost Foxtel's pay-TV customer numbers

The United States remains the largest source of spam, but other countries are catching up, with Australia also named in security firm Sophos' dirty dozen

PC World's Andrew Brandt went to work tracking down a comment spammer, following a link from a single piece of comment spam blocked from their Movable Type-powered blog, and discovering a wanted criminal — Six Apart :: ProNet

08 April 2005

Gary Stern is president and owner of Stern Pinball, which is the last remaining pinball manufacturer in the world. Yearly, his company produces 10,000 hand-built machines and designs about 3-4 different models via Shacknews

For the first time ever, those who have been blind since birth will have a chance to see the world. It's still in the early stages, but this is a giant leap forward in medical science. The bionic eye comprises a computer chip that sits in the back of the individual's eye, linked up to a mini video camera built into glasses that they wear. Images captured by the camera are beamed to the chip, which translates them into impulses that the brain can interpret

The Photo Card Bill that has passed through the NSW's lower house represented the most fundamental attack on our personal freedoms since the failed Australia Card proposal of the 1980s, Australian Privacy Foundation chair Anna Johnston said

07 April 2005

Johannesburg seems to have something of a problem with building hijackers. They hold up an empty building's rent-a-cops, then take over and fill the building with innocent tenants, collecting rent until the real cops show up to evict them — via BoingBoing

Professor Jaak Panksepp says that animals other than humans exhibit play sounds that resemble human laughs. These include the panting sounds made by chimps and dogs when they play and chirping sounds observed in rats. This suggests that the capacity for laughter may be a very ancient emotional response that predates the evolution of humankind. Research suggests the capacity for human laughter preceded the capacity for speech — via BoingBoing

Impatient TV viewers have discovered BitTorrent in Australia mainly because the local networks are so slow to broadcast content. Programs are at times behind by months and, in some cases, years. According to an independent study, it takes an average of four months to watch the latest episodes of top-rated shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives. There are now calls for TV networks to consider offering episodes for download at a small cost

A battle in the war against RFID beacons in US passports has been won. The State Department now admits that their previous RFID proposal would put Americans at risk and is now considering other options. That's the good news. The bad news is that the State Department continues to blindly cling to the false promise of planting RFID chips in passports — via BoingBoing

06 April 2005

Firefox already contains a pop-up blocker by default, but this does not handle pop-ups launched by plug-ins such as Flash and Java. Mozilla developers are responding to the increasing number of advertisers that are using plug-ins to launch pop-up ads. While you're adding things, you may want to check out how to put Firefox into overdrive

An alcoholic cousin of an aide to Ahmed Chalabi has emerged as the key source in the US rationale for going to war in Iraq. According to a US presidential commission looking into pre-war intelligence failures, the basis for pivotal intelligence on Iraq's alleged biological weapons programmes and fleet of mobile labs was a spy described as crazy by his intelligence handlers and a congenital liar by his friends. I have to wonder how this guy missed a career in politics — via Warren Ellis

The grand finale of a wedding taking place near Felsted, Essex, UK was the release of dozens of Thai lanterns into the night sky. Shortly after, concerned citizens called the Stansted Airport and the police to warn authorities that aliens may be invading — via The Pagan Prattle

A report from the University of Pennsylvania claims that psychological therapy and counselling can be just as effective as drugs in the early stages of treating moderate to severe depression. The findings run counter to current practice in the United States

05 April 2005

Google's indexing service dropped all Web sites with a .com.au extension for a few hours on Friday afternoon, effectively leaving millions of sites unattainable from the Net's most popular search engine

Photo hosting services that allow users to publish their digital pictures online are being threatened by a vulnerability in the PHP scripting language that could be exploited by a malicious image file

BeOS, the operating system that could have been the foundation for Mac OS X, but almost died, instead has returned as Zeta OS — which is supposed to be fast, stable, media centric and boot within 15 seconds. Zeta is being released by yellowTAB of Germany and has applications such as an office suite and the Firefox browser bundled with it. Most BeOS applications will also run as-is. Screenshots are available — via Slashdot

US delegates to the US Commission on Human Rights say that body's country membership must be reformed to prevent those who abuse human rights from using their positions on the committee to prevent criticism of their records

04 April 2005

Microsoft escalated its efforts to crack down on Internet fraud, announcing that it filed 117 civil lawsuits against unnamed individuals in federal district court in Seattle, hoping to learn the identities of those behind a rash of e-mail phishing scams identified over the past six months that specifically targeted customers of Microsoft's MSN Internet and Hotmail e-mail services

John Gillatt of Bolton, Manchester, managed to get lost in the Malaysian rain forest for five days without a map or compass, or any other basic survival material. To cap it all he said that he did not realise there were leopards in the jungle, poisonous snakes and tarantulas. Not bad for someone describes as an English biologist — via Improbable Research

Police in Malaysia are hunting for members of a violent gang who chopped off a car owner's finger to get round the Mercedes S-class' fingerprint recognition system

Belgian trainers helping police to understand body language have caused a controversy by likening the retarded monkey boy's facial expressions to a chimpanzee's. I'm guessing the chimps complained

03 April 2005

Wordpress, an incredibly popular Open Source Blogging system was found to be spamming Google by inserting hidden links to junk content on high paying Adsense keywords such as mesothelioma and debt consolidation. Following Threadwatch picking up the story an anonymous Google rep appeared in the original thread admonishing bloggers not to use sneaky tactics to rank highly for duplicate content such as the 100,000 hidden articles on the Wordpress site. The articles have now dissapeared from Google and it remains to be seen whether Google will ban Wordpress outright as they tend to do when SEO's and web dev's pull these kinds of stunts — via Slashdot

The day after the BBC confirmed there will be a second Doctor Who series next year, as well as a Christmas special, new Dr Who actor Christopher Eccleston has revealed he will not continue in the role, for fears of being typecast. Billie Piper, who plays his assistant Rose, will probably continue in her role

Google has enabled results prefetching for Mozilla based browsers, which means that the top results of queries are being loaded in the background and pages will load faster. It can be turned off

One of the many complaints about the GIMP is that of its user interface and how it should be more like Photoshop. If you feel that this is true then Scott Moschella has hacked together GimpShop which turns GIMP's user interface into something more akin to Photoshop for OSX. However, if you're not running that operating system, fret not, because there is are ports for Linux and Windows too — via Slashdot

02 April 2005

While Jon Johansen ported PyMusique to C#, now called SharpMusique, a head of IFPI Norway says they don't care about PyMusique and that all the blame is on Apple and its proprietary DRM — via CoCo

Bob Cringley takes an interesting look at one possible future for television, and he's looking to the past to do it

A year after unveiling a free e-mail service with a full gigabyte of storage, Google is doubling the capacity of each account and plans to keep bumping up the limit in the future

01 April 2005

A red-faced BBC has apologised for requesting an interview with Bob Marley, the Jamaican reggae legend who died 24 years ago. BBC Three, one of the public broadcaster's digital TV channels, sent an e-mail to the Bob Marley Foundation saying it wanted to do a documentary about his hit song No Woman No Cry. It said the project would involve Marley — who died of cancer in May 1981 at the age of 36 — spending one or two days with us, and that it would only work with some participation from Bob Marley himself. A BBC press officer, contacted by AFP in London on Friday, confirmed that the gaffe was not an April Fool's joke — via BoingBoing

An Australian mosquito-borne virus has become the basis of a possible vaccine for cancer and HIV. The Queensland Institute of Medical Research, the University of Queensland and the Department of Health have launched a company that hopes to one day market the vaccines. QIMR laboratory head Andreas Suhrbier says the Kunjin virus, which is found in northern Australia, has been modified to cure cancerous cells in mice. The Scots are also working on a vaccine

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