June 2005 Archive

30 June 2005

For the second time within the past year, an Indymedia server has been seized in the United Kingdom. This time it is the Bristol Indymedia server (currently redirected to the United Kollectives IMC site); this follows on from the Ahimsa seizure last October. The current seizure was carried out using a search warrant by the UK police at approximately 16:30GMT on 27 June 2005. This was despite being warned by lawyers that this server was considered an item of journalistic equipment and so subject to special provision under the law (press release). Bristol Indymedia is currently being supported by the National Union of Journalists, Liberty and Privacy International. Other media organisations have declared their support — via Slashdot

Jon Lech Johansen (known for his work on decrypting DVD security codes) has created a patch for the Google Video Viewer — less than 24 hours after the search giant shipped the video playback plug-in, a tool based on the open-source VideoLAN media player. The patch, released on Johansen's 'So Sue Me' blog, effectively disables a modification Google made to the VideoLAN code to prevent users from playing videos that are not hosted on Google's servers — via BoingBoing

A power supply problem on an undersea cable has severed all outside Internet connectivity to Pakistan. Many businesses have been seriously impacted. Repairs will involve some disruption to access from other countries, and are tentatively scheduled for overnight

Australia will not introduce a national identification card because of the fear of identity theft by criminals

29 June 2005

The Liberals' controversial same-sex marriage legislation has passed final reading in the House of Commons, sailing through with a vote of 158 for and 133 against. Supported by most members of the Liberals, the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP, the legislation passed easily, making Canada only the third country in the world, after the Netherlands and Belgium, to officially recognise same-sex unions — via Moonbeam

Advanced Micro Devices has fired off a federal antitrust lawsuit against Intel, claiming that its rival has a monopolistic grip on the PC industry. The suit, filed Monday in the US District Court in Delaware, details alleged scare tactics and coercion that AMD claims Intel imposed on 38 companies, including large-scale computer makers, small system builders, wholesale distributors and retailers

Brazil's Ministry of Health has demanded that Abbott Laboratories cut the price of its AIDS drug Kaletra by 42%, threatening to break the company's patent and produce generic versions of the drug if it does not comply. The Abbott Park, Illinois-based company has 10 days from the time it received Friday's ruling to agree to reduce Kaletra's price to $0.68 per pill from $1.17. If Brazil follows through on its threat, the move would mark the first time the country has adopted compulsory licensing — via BoingBoing

A young mother found at the scene of a car crash near Tokyo in which her husband and infant son were killed had been dead for at least a day before the accident happened, police were quoted as saying on Sunday. The bizarre discovery was made after emergency crews who rushed to the scene found the body of Rie Ishikawa, 28, in a state of rigor mortis — via Warren Ellis

28 June 2005

US scientists have managed to revive dead dogs to life, by using a technique similar to cryogenation, in which the dogs' blood was drained and replaced by a cold, saline liquid. A couple of hours, their blood was replaced, and an electric shock brought them back to life with no brain damage. The technology will be tested on humans within the next year. Bear in mind this comes via one of Murdoch's tabloids and they're never known for fact checking or truthful reporting

The first voice-operated computer assistant is installed in space — its operators hope it is more reliable than the treacherous HAL from the movie 2001

Internet song-swapping web sites like Grokster can be held liable for copyright infringement, the US Supreme Court has ruled, siding with the entertainment industry in its effort to curb online piracy

27 June 2005

Google has hugely expanded the areas of the world that it covers with satellite imagery. Egypt, Iraq, mainland Europe and the UK have all now got satellite coverage to a lesser or greater degree. You can now go see sights like Buckingham Palace or the Arc de Triomphe. Sydney is also available and you can zoom in quite nicely, provided you don't want to go further North than Central Station, as the entire North Shore is missing

A hippo separated from his family has adopted a 120-year-old male tortoise as his mother. Owen the hippo sought refuge behind the tortoise just after Christmas, and weeks later they are inseparable. The details of Owen's adventure are not entirely clear, but it seems to have begun when a group of hippos was swept into the open sea from the river where they lived — via Rogue Sun

26 June 2005

Last year the Kurtztown Area High School approved a program which gave every student an iBook. Now thirteen students face felony charges for violating the district's usage policy. The secret password, 50Trexler, was widely-known among the student body and distributed early in the school year. It allowed between 80 and 100 students to reconfigure their laptops. The more computer-savvy students began to disable the administrations' ability to spy on the students' computer use. For others, it became a game, trying to outsmart the administration and compete with fellow students who held the secret

An Italian judge has ordered the arrest of 13 CIA personnel on charges that they seized an Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, on a Milan street two years ago and flew him to Egypt for questioning

25 June 2005

A Nepali radio station that has been banned under the new, post-coup regime has gone back on the air. Every night, a commentator stands on the roof of his now-useless radio-station and reads the news over a megaphone to an audience of hundreds — via BoingBoing

An ethnic Ogoni group from Nigeria's oil-producing Niger Delta accused Shell on Thursday of undermining a new government initiative to reconcile Ogoni communities with the oil multinational

24 June 2005

It's a technology that could one day aid buildings to survive earthquakes or hurricanes. It could be used to remotely control the viscosity of liquid shock absorbers in cars, or the lubricants in robotic joints. Japanese researchers have devised a way to turn a range of oily liquid solutions to jelly using a burst of sound waves. The jelly can then be shocked back into becoming a liquid. Until now, there had been no method to achieve instant, remote and reversible control between stable liquid and gel phases at ambient temperatures

According to security company Secunia, a new browser flaw could allow attackers to trick users into relinquishing sensitive information such as passwords. The flaw is unusual in that it affects every mainstream browser and can be exploited on the Mac OS X operating system as easily as on Windows

Microsoft is throwing the full weight of Hotmail behind its Sender ID e-mail authentication technology by sidelining incoming mail when it fails to pass a Sender ID check. The software maker has begun warning Hotmail users with an on-screen alert when the sender of an incoming e-mail cannot be verified using its Sender ID Framework. Mail that fails to pass the test will be placed in a junk mail folder or could even be deleted

23 June 2005

Google has confirmed that it is developing an online payment system, although it says it has no plans to take on eBay's PayPal service

An Indian researcher has cracked the much-touted impenetrable Windows Genuine Advantage of Microsoft. According to Microsoft this service would soon require all Windows users to verify their licence before downloading updates

Three lions reportedly rescued a 12-year-old girl from her kidnappers in Bita Genet, Ethiopia. The girl had been held captive for seven days by men who intended to force her into a marriage. Police say the lions scared off the kidnappers and stayed to protect her — via BoingBoing

22 June 2005

Phishers and malware writers have started sending e-mails that refer to the high profile data security breach at MasterCard — when information on more than 40 million credit cards was stolen — with an offer to help worried card holders into recovering their stolen information

Dvorak has an interesting editorial up, where he links the recent stories of alleged security problems and spyware problems bittorent has been having with the recent Microsoft announcement of research into a file sharing application called Avalanche. concluding it's all part of an orchestrated Microsoft disinformation campaign against BitTorrent

French actress turned animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has urged the European Union to take legal action against France for authorising the killing of six wolves

Japan has failed in its bid to resume commercial whaling during a vote at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Uslan, South Korea. Twenty-nine countries voted against, with 23 supporting the plan

21 June 2005

Real Simple provides a useful guide to expiration dates and how long dozens of products last — via BoingBoing

A prankster in Sunnyvale, California has been toying with traffic lights across the city for three months. Police say he or she has turned them to face the wrong way, altered the timing, and made them flash red in all directions. There is evidence that whoever is doing it knows what they're doing, (city spokesman John) Pilger said. The evidence suggests they're an electrician or have that background. This isn't a high school prank — via BoingBoing

An underground society has emerged among Tokyo's homeless living beneath the shadows of the capital's skyscrapers and in its parks. Just recently, there's been a rapid increase in the number of former yakuza gangsters who've become homeless. And they're really aggressive, flashing their tattoos, scaring passers-by and lording over other homeless as they do whatever they like. For many Japanese who associate the yakuza with wealth, even if it is the result of ill-gotten gains, the idea of a gangster living on the streets is close to unthinkable. But the number of homeless yakuza inhabiting parks and living under bridges is apparently skyrocketing, especially in central Tokyo — via Warren Ellis

20 June 2005

New Zealand's telecommunications have been crippled by two separate incidents that have closed the country's stock exchange and affected internet, mobile and landline phone calls around the country. You'd think Telstra were running the show

A technique that confuses clothes moths about their sexuality has made a dramatic difference to the storage of ballet and opera costumes at Covent Garden

19 June 2005

Apparently a sudden interest in technology is catching. My mother is in good company with her recent acquisition of an iPod, Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is also a devotee of Apple's iPod. If the thought of the Queen trolling through Apple's online jukebox, iTunes looking for hits is a little too much for the frontal lobes, the Sun assures its readers that, like most things, she probably has a footman to do it for her

18 June 2005

Little Johnny Coward had been forced to review his barbaric immigration detention policy that has seen families locked up for years without hope of release. These minor changes have only come about since the government got outed for illegally incarcerating and deporting Australia citizens. The changes don't go far enough, the entire system needs to be dismantled and the facilities turned over to a more suitable use; like locking up useless, rascist, xenophobic, hate-mongering politicians

A Georgia lawyer is taking a case to appeals court to prove that the mere act of viewing a web site does not constitute possession of the materials that were automatically cached on your hard drive

17 June 2005

An alleged armed robber has just had the beating of a lifetime, at the hands of nearly 30 women inside a Shreveport beauty school. They all beat him with sticks, table legs and curling irons. Officer Eric Swartout describes what happened, Basically, they're hitting him with everything that wasn't nailed down — via BoingBoing

As the Downing Street memo confirms, they had so little evidence of real threats that they knew from the start that they were going to have manufacture excuses to go to war. What's more damning still is that they effectively began this war even before the congressional vote

The inherent weirdness of quantum physics may act to prevent the paradoxes which seem possible with the conventional view of time travel

16 June 2005

Activity surrounding Kryptos, the cryptographic puzzle at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, continues to surge. Elonka Dunin who runs a comprehensive Kryptos site, told The Guardian that she used to see 500 visitors a day but recently got 30,000 visits in 24 hours. Of course, interest in cracking Kryptos skyrocketed once it was revealed that The Da Vinci Code dustjacket references the puzzle and that it's part of the plot of Dan Brown's next bestseller, The Solomon Key — via BoingBoing

Two men were married in the chapel at Nova Scotia's Greenwood airbase in May, in what's being called the Canadian military's first gay wedding. How can you not love Canada? — via HogBlog

Denial of service attackes mounted through zombie PCs are more likely to come from users of AOL than any other source

15 June 2005

The G8 plan to save Africa comes with conditions that make it little more than an extortion racket. Twenty-five countries have so far ratified the UN convention against corruption, but none is a member of the G8. Why? Because our own corporations do very nicely out of it

An executive tried to liven up a dull day at the office by stripping naked to interview a 25-year-old woman. Saeed Akbar, 35, said at first that it was part of his tough interviewing technique but later admitted that he was bored and wanted a cheap thrill

On 5 May 2005, the Colorado Wildlife Commission agreed to accept the Colorado Wolf Management Working Group's (CWMWG) policy allowing migrating wolves from Yellowstone National Park and the Arizona-New Mexico borders to roam freely in Colorado. This decision came after a public comment period earlier this year and with a unanimous vote by all 14 members of the CWMWG

14 June 2005

UK schools are to be transformed into learning and community centres serving the needs of hard working families said Ruth Kelly, the UK Education Secretary, as she announced the biggest overhaul of the school timetable for decades. Teaching the curriculum and preparing children for exams will be only part of the wide-ranging services every school will be expected to offer from 2010. They will open their doors early for breakfast and provide after school clubs and child care until six in the evening. The premises will no longer be used for 39 weeks a year but will stay open to provide child care in school holidays

13 June 2005

What has been claimed as Europe's oldest civilisation has been discovered by archaeologists across the continent. The report says more than 150 large temples, constructed between 4800 BC and 4600 BC, have been unearthed in fields and cities in Germany, Austria and Slovakia, predating the pyramids in Egypt by some 2,000 years. The network of temples, made of earth and wood, were constructed by a religious people whose economy appears to have been based on livestock farming

Researchers in Israel say they have succeeded in growing a date palm from a seed that is 2,000 years old. The seed was unearthed during an excavation of the ancient mountain fortress of Masada 30 years ago and is thought to be the oldest seed ever germinated

12 June 2005

A Russian site, IframeDollars, is paying web developers 6 cents for each machine they infect with spyware or adware. One security expert estimates that iframeDollars could collect as much as $75,000 annually from the adware it placed on the infected machines during the third week of May, which cost approximately $12,000 in payments to place

Same-sex couples are to be allowed to adopt children under a radical overhaul of adoption laws in Scotland. In the first major change to the laws governing adoption for 25 years, unmarried couples, including gay couples, will be able to adopt jointly. At present, only married or single people can adopt and although homosexual or unmarried couples can currently raise children, only one can be recognised as the legal parent

11 June 2005

Ken Kutaragi, president of Sony Computer Entertainment, has disclosed in an interview that PlayStation 3 will natively run Linux. In fact, it will come bundled with it, if you purchase the HDD peripheral

iPods may soon shrink slightly in size, with news that Toshiba has managed to make 46mm drives a little smaller. The move reflects industry-watchers doubts that new generation music players can be marketed solely on higher-capacities — portability and weight are emerging as equal considerations for future generations of such devices

British explorer, Colonel John Blashford-Snell, has found an early submarine that he believes was the inspiration for Nautilus, Captain Nemo's vessel in Jules Verne's novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. She was built in 1864 by a visionary craftsman, Julius Kroehl, for the Union forces during the American Civil War. But the boat, called Explorer, was never used in the conflict and was subsequently taken to Panama where she was used to harvest pearls. She was ideal for this purpose because of a unique lock-out system, identical to the one in the Nautilus from Verne's book, published in 1870

10 June 2005

Scientists at Sandia National Labs have created a magnetic pulse gun (rail gun) that can accelerate small aluminum plates at 34 kilometres per second, faster than the Earth travels through space. The accelerated plates strike a target after traveling only five millimeters, or less than a quarter-inch. The impact generates a shock wave — in some cases, reaching 15 million times atmospheric pressure — that passes through the target material turning matter into various states almost instantly (solids into liquids, liquids into gas, and even gas into plasma)

Kidnappers who stole a Dalek from a Somerset tourist attraction have sent its owners a ransom note and the robot's amputated plunger. The 5ft model, believed to be an original from the cult BBC Dr Who series, was taken from Wookey Hole Caves near Wells on Monday. On Thursday, staff found the plunger arm and a ransom note on a doorstep. The note read: We are holding the Dalek captive. We demand further instructions from the Doctor. The group, signing themselves Guardians of the Planet Earth, added: For the safety of the human race we have disarmed and removed its destructive mechanism

09 June 2005

The spy was definitely not called Bond, for that name is not among the military officers selected 40 years ago to conduct reconnaissance missions for the US from an orbital laboratory in space. But secret agent Bond shares a number — 007 — with one of the US spies-in-training. Space historians are trying to find out who the mystery man is after his spacesuit turned up, along with an identical outfit bearing number 008, in an abandoned space agency (Nasa) blockhouse last used to launch Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom into space in 1961 — via Warren Ellis

Pieces of a man's body fell from the wheel well of a South African Airways passenger plane bound for John F Kennedy International Airport Tuesday and landed in the yard of a suburban home. A South African Airways spokeswoman said it appeared to have been a stowaway attempt. She said the plane had stopped in Dakar, Senegal, on its way to New York. The body parts, which included the right leg, part of the spine and a hip, struck a garage roof of the home in South Floral Park, New York, before landing in the backyard — via Warren Ellis

The future for pianolas in Australia looks grim, with the country's only manufacturer of pianola music set to close down. A collapse in demand for the music is sending the unique business to the wall. For 45 years, Barclay Wright has operated the Master Touch Piano Roll Company in Sydney. It is one of only two companies in the world that makes the rolls that guide the keys on pianolas. He has now been forced to put his building on the market

08 June 2005

The UK is considering doubling the copyright term for popular music to 100 years. That means the Beatles' Love Me Do and Please Please Me, scheduled to to go into the public domain in 2013, would earn royalties for record companies until 2063

CVS has began selling a disposable digital camcorder. The US$29.99 pocket-sized camcorder was developed by Pure Digital Technologies, a San Francisco-based start-up company. The camcorder weighs under 140 grams and holds 20 minutes of digital video and sound. It features a 35mm colour playback screen and an ability to delete video and it saves video on a memory chip instead of tapes. Within 18 hours of getting his hands on the camera, the king of the one-time digital camera hacks/analysis had slurped the flash memory and has the unencrypted, XVID codec, 320x240, 30fps movies stored in the camera on his computer

Taiwanese technology group BenQ has agreed to take over Siemens' ailing mobile-phones unit, drawing a line under hundreds of millions of euros of losses for the German engineering giant

07 June 2005

An Israeli inventor has developed a way for divers to breathe underwater without cumbersome oxygen tanks. His apparatus makes use of the air that is dissolved in water like the gills of a fish

The US Supreme Court has refused to sanction the use of marijuana for medical purposes, dashing the hopes of thousands of patients using the drug for pain relief. By a vote of six to three, the court refused to allow residents in 10 states to use the drug with a doctor's permission and under highly regulated conditions. The ruling means federal authorities in 10 states may arrest terminally ill patients who use the drug as well as those who provide it to them. But some states remain defiant, saying medical certificates authorising marijuana will still be dispensed

A scuba diver was swallowed almost whole by a great white shark yesterday in a Jaws-style attack just offshore from Cape Town

06 June 2005

Australia's domain name regulator has seized more than 1,000 domains from Ansearch, saying the search engine company's intended use did not comply with its policies. However, in a twist, more than 100 of those names — which only came back onto the market last week — have already been scooped up by a Perth-based web hosting and online search company, Empius Interactive

05 June 2005

According to its creator, Dr Adrian Bowyer of the University of Bath, RepRap is a revolutionary machine that can copy itself and manufacture everyday objects quickly and cheaply could transform industry in the developing world. To encourage that development, Bowyer plans to make the design of the RepRap available online and free to use, in the same way as open source software such as the Linux operating system or Mozilla's Firefox browser

Japanese scientists are attempting to explore the centre of the Earth. Using a giant drill ship launched next month, the researchers aim to be the first to punch a hole through the rocky crust that covers our planet and to reach the mantle below. The team wants to retrieve samples from the mantle, six miles down, to learn more about what triggers undersea earthquakes, such as the one off Sumatra that caused the Boxing Day tsunami

Penn Jillette's latest stunt did not involve his usual sidekick, Teller: He became the father of a baby girl. Jillette, 50, and his wife Emily, 39, welcomed Moxie CrimeFighter Jillette on Friday. We chose her middle name because when she's pulled over for speeding she can say, 'But officer, we're on the same side', Jillette explained. 'My middle name is CrimeFighter' — va BoingBoing

04 June 2005

Apple will announce its plans Monday, that it is scrapping its partnership with IBM and switching its computers to Intel's microprocessors, in a move that raises questions about the Mac maker's future computer strategy

Google has launched Google Sitemaps. It seems to be a service that allows webmasters to define how often their sites' content is going to change, to give Google a better idea of what to index. It uses some basic XML as the method of submitting a sitemap

Chris Claremont is returning Excalibur to its British roots and bringing back Pete Wisdom. To which Warren Ellis commented: He's not my character, I don't own him, and if Chris can wring some more mileage out of a character who is basically Jack Regan out of 'The Sweeney' stuck in a superhero comic and made to play James Bond (seriously. That was pretty much the entire thought process), then good luck to him. I can just see that a Pete Wisdom not running about at the behest of Warren's twisted imagination is going to suck horribly

Two men have been arrested after shots were fired during a meeting in which it is believed they were trying to sell stolen copies of the next instalment of the adventures of Harry Potter

03 June 2005

Bob Geldof is aiming to galvanise the world to aid Africa with his Live 8 concerts next month and thousands of people will demonstrate in Scotland as leaders of the world's richest nations gather for a summit there

New Jersey is using an anti-terrorism law for the first time to try six animal rights activists charged with harassing and vandalising Huntingdon Life Sciences, a company that made use of animals to test its drugs

Developers of the Mozilla Thunderbird open source e-mail client have recently added a podcasting feature to its arsenal and improved its defence against phishing attacks

02 June 2005

Microsoft announced that the next version of Office will use Internet-friendly XML technology as the default file format for documents created in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. While it may use XML, it will use it badly

An experimental supercomputer made from Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) that can reconfigure itself to tackle different software problems is being built by researchers in Scotland. The Edinburgh system will be up to 100 times more energy efficient than a conventional supercomputer of equivalent computing power. The 64-node FPGA machine will also need only as much space as four conventional PCs, while a normal 1 teraflop supercomputer would fill a room. At this point in time, the software needed to run it, which is the key to the project, is vapourware

01 June 2005

The Washington Post today confirmed that W Mark Felt, a former number-two official at the FBI, was Deep Throat, the secretive source who provided information that helped unravel the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s and contributed to the resignation of president Richard Nixon. The confirmation came from Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story, and their former top editor, Benjamin C Bradlee

Major companies that sell open source software have been accused by a top EU official of treating open source developers as mere subcontractors

The effort to ban municipal networks in Texas has failed. Texas House Bill 789 originally had provisions to ban muni wireless networks. The Senate passed a significantly rewritten version, without a ban. A conference committee failed to reach agreement, so the bill died when the Texas legislature adjourned this weekend

A Carnegie Mellon engineer is in the early stages of adding legs to a camera-in-a-pill that doctors currently use to see inside the intestine. Metin Sitti, director of the NanoRobotics Lab, is putting a three-footed system through its paces in pig intestines — via BoingBoing

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