January 2006 Archive

31 January 2006

The Russian justice ministry has asked a court to shut down the Russian Human Rights Research Centre, one of the country's oldest human rights group — via Boingboing

James Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the top climate scientist at NASA, says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming — via digg

30 January 2006

US Representative Marty Meehan's staff has been heavily editing his Wikipedia bio, among other things removing criticisms. In total, more than one thousand Wikipedia edits in various articles have been traced back to congressional staffers at the US House of Representatives in the past six months

Canada's biggest record label, publisher and management company is helping out a family sued by the RIAA for copyright infringement. The privately-owned Nettwerk Music Group is intervening because the current actions of the RIAA are not in their artists' best interests

According to a new UK survey done for the BBC, only 48 percent of Britons accept evolution. Forty-percent of the 2,000 participants think that creationism or intelligent design should be taught in schools — via Boingboing

29 January 2006

Google's new China search engine not only censors many web sites that question the Chinese government, but it goes further than similar services from Microsoft and Yahoo by targeting teen pregnancy, homosexuality, dating, beer and jokes. In addition, contrary to Google founder Sergey Brin's promise to inform users when their search results are censored, the company frequently filters out sites without revealing it

A court has ruled that Google's caching and displaying of millions of web-pages is legal. Google Cache is the service that offers to show you stored versions of the web-pages that turn up in the results for your Google searches. Until recently, no court had ruled on the legality of this, and it was unclear whether this would qualify as a fair use. If not, Google and a number of other caching services, particularly the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, would have been in deep trouble — via Boingboing

Joshua Philip Martin was in his fourth day on the job as a rescue-squad worker in Russell County when, in a playful mood, he decided to reach into the front seat of the ambulance and zap one of his co-workers with the defibrillator paddles. Earlier in the week, a judge convicted Martin, 25, of involuntary manslaughter — via Warren Ellis

28 January 2006

The ACLU has received complaints from six organisations and nearly two dozen people who fear they have been spied upon, photographed, videotaped or had their events infiltrated by government agents. They say none of them did anything that would justify surveillance but rather are critics of the Bush administration — via digg

The collision was inevitable. Google has vowed to provide unbiased, accurate, and free access to information to people around the world, while touting a corporate motto of don't be evil. And China, which controls information with an iron grip, has blossomed into the world's second-biggest and fastest-growing Internet market. For those wondering what would happen when the irresistible force of Google and its altruistic motives finally met up with the immovable object of China, with its lure of higher profit, the answer came when Google unveiled its first search service inside China. Its concession: Google will play by government rules and censor results of sensitive queries, such as Falun Gong or multiparty elections. There's already a workaround

A rodent-eating snake and a hamster have developed an unusual bond at a zoo in the Japanese capital, Tokyo. Their relationship began in October last year, when zookeepers presented the hamster to the snake as a meal. The rat snake, however, refused to eat the rodent. The two now share a cage, and the hamster sometimes falls asleep sitting on top of his natural foe. As a joke, the zookeeper said they named the hamster Gohan — the Japanese word for meal — via Rogue Sun

27 January 2006

A 20-year-old Californian, Jeanson James Ancheta, accused of using hundreds of thousands of hijacked computers to damage systems and send waves of spam across the internet, has pleaded guilty to US federal charges

Bioengineers at Columbia University Medical Centre in New York City are starting to engineer living heart tissues to fix these damaged hearts. Their patches for broken hearts are made of heart tissue grown in the lab. Right now, animal trials are just starting and it will take at least a decade before human trials begin

Researchers at Ohio State University may have identified a new and unusual tumour suppression gene that could effect cancers of the lung, head, and neck. The gene, known as TCF21, is silenced in tumour cells through a chemical change known as DNA methylation, a process that is potentially reversible

26 January 2006

Russia's federal security service, the successor to the KGB, has launched a cold-war style attack on non-governmental organisations and human rights groups, linking them with alleged espionage by British diplomats in Moscow

A group called the Metamorphosis Foundation reports that 126 nongovernmental organisations in Macedonia have signed an open letter to that country's president and parliament demanding prompt adoption of the Law on Free Access to Information — via Boingboing

The complete title of the Beastie Boys' forthcoming concert movie is in fact, Awesome! I Fuckin' Shot That!. They lent hand-held video cameras to 50 fans, told them to shoot at will and then presented the end result in in all its primitive, kaleidoscopic glory — via Boingboing

25 January 2006

Spiders, centipedes and scorpion-like critters are among the 27 new animal species that biologists have discovered in the dark, damp caves of two Central California national parks — via digg

Fridge magnets may one day be able to fix bad grammar and change the words to something they think is more appropriate. The idea is that each magnet is aware of the other magnets on the fridge and they transmit information between each other, Australian digital artist Pierre Proske said. Mr Proske is working with researchers at the Future Applications Lab of the Viktoria Institute in Sweden to develop the intelligent fridge magnets

24 January 2006

Premier Iemma has been embarrassed into cancelling government plans to put a new toll on the M4 following the public release of secret government documents obtained by the Greens. The government had planned to continue the M4 toll past the 2010 date when it was due to become free for public use

eBay has scrapped all sellers' transaction fees in China in an effort to compete with local outfits offering free services. The online auctioneer announced the changes on its China web site, saying transaction fees would be waived, but small fees would continue to be charged for listing products on the site's webspace and for feature products

23 January 2006

Brian Krebs of the Washington Post has written about the recent spate of hijackings at LiveJournal. Hundreds of journals have now been taken over by a notorious group called Bantown using a series of complicated cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities. It is unclear whether LiveJournal has managed to close the security holes that the hackers claim to have used. The company says it has, but the hackers insist there are still at least 16 other similar Javascript flaws on the LiveJournal site that could be used conduct the same attack. Bantown group members said they plan to turn their attention to looking for similar flaws at another large social-networking site — via Slashdot

In a recent literacy study it was found that more than half of students at four-year colleges — and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges — lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers. The literacy study took a look at three different type of literacy: analysing news stories and other prose, understanding documents, and having basic math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips

The European Space Agency, citing the fact that we don't glue ourselves together when we cut ourselves, has funded a study toward creating a spacecraft that could fix itself. By replacing a few of the fibres in the resinous material that make up a spacecraft's skin with hollow fibres containing adhesive, the material has a chance to fix itself when it encounters minor damage, much the way our skin does when blood wells up and clots. While admittedly years away, such material makes longer duration missions a possibility

22 January 2006

The IEEE Task Group N voted to confirm the proposal for the 802.11n Wi-Fi standard. Submitted by the Joint Proposal team, this specification was developed by the Enhanced Wireless Consortium (EWC) and included several elements developed within the Joint Proposal team

After a burglar broke into caricaturist Bill Weg Green's Heathmont home, it took the 82-year-old just seconds to draw his attacker. Fifteen minutes later, patrolling police caught a suspect — and Mr Green's drawing proved they had the right man

A 5m northern bottle-nosed whale that became stranded in the River Thames has died after a massive rescue attempt to save its life

A huge beached whale has been dumped outside the Japanese embassy in Berlin in a Greenpeace anti-whaling protest. The environmental activists hauled the fin whale to Berlin from the Baltic coast after finding it beached on a sandbank. The dead whale measured 17m long and weighed 20 tonnes. Activists are trying to demonstrate that there is no need to kill the mammals for research — as Japan does — because cadavers can be found — via Darren Barefoot

21 January 2006

Google has been subpoenaed by the US Justice Department to turn over a database of search terms as part of a government probe of online pornography. Google is resisting the demand

William Shatner sold a kidney stone for $25,000 to GoldenPalace.com. Shatner's donating the dough to Habitat For Humanity. GoldenPalace.com originally offered $15,000 for the stone but Shatner turned it down, noting that his Star Trek tunics have commanded more than $100,000 — via Boingboing

The first magnetic levitation elevators could hit the market as soon as 2008. The Toshiba Elevator and Building Systems Corporation has stated that the same technology used to develop high speed trains will soon be available in their elevators

20 January 2006

The Mozilla Team has quietly enabled a new feature in Firefox that parses ping attributes to anchor tags in HTML. Now links can have a ping attribute that contains a list of servers to notify when you click on a link. Although link tracking has been done using redirects and Javascript, this new feature allows notification of an unlimited and uncontrollable number of servers for every click, and it is not noticeable without examining the source code for a link before clicking it

eBay plans to offer an instant-purchase service to supplement its bid-and-wait online auctions, pitting the company directly against conventional e-commerce retailers

19 January 2006

Just days after Microsoft announced its online advertising entry, Google has announced their entry into the radio industry. Google has signed a deal to purchase dMarc Broadcasting for US$102 million. The deal will allow Google to enhance its presence in the advertising industry over to the radio industry. Google says it plans to integrate its highly successful AdSense programme with those from dMarc

A group of Papuans who arrived on Queensland's Cape York yesterday have accused the Indonesian Government of genocide. The group of 30 Papuan men, six women and seven children displayed a banner on their 25-metre canoe, asking for help to save West Papua

18 January 2006

Optus has begun shifting its 200,000+ DSL customers across to its new copper wire based broadband network in a move that could help wipe more than $1 billion a year from Telstra's revenues

British Prime Minister Tony Blair's plan to introduce national identity cards has suffered a setback, with the House of Lords voting to force the government to provide more details on the cost of the controversial scheme

17 January 2006

Sony BMG has finally jumped on the iTunes bandwagon, with the music giant today confirming it had added its roster of artists to Apple's Australian on-line music store

Security experts and privacy advocates unanimously agree that ID cards will not protect Australia from terrorist attacks, despite Attorney-General Philip Ruddock saying the key reason for an Australian ID card would be national security

16 January 2006

Police may charge a BASE jumper who was rescued from a cliff face in national park in south-east Queensland. The man's parachute failed seconds after he jumped, sending him crashing into the cliff at Christmas Creek near Beaudesert. His parachute tangled on a rock ledge about 50 metres from the top of the cliff and an SES volunteer was lowered to the man, before five men waiting at the top pulled them to safety

It seems likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft — via Warren Ellis

15 January 2006

A Swedish farmer sentenced to gaol for shooting a wolf preying on his sheep petitioned the government on Thursday for a pardon as a dispute grew between the wildlife lobby and farmers alarmed at growing wolf numbers. Depleted by centuries of hunting, Sweden's wolf population has benefited from preservation programmes and legislation to now number about 150. Wolves have even been seen near Stockholm. Animal rights groups say the population is still critically low, making it vulnerable to inbreeding and disease, but the farming and hunting lobby says wildlife laws introduced in 2001 leave their livestock and dogs unprotected from attack

Idaho Department of Fish and Game intends to kill up to 75% of the wolves in the Lolo elk zone to bolster struggling elk herds there, pending approval from the Idaho Fish and Game commission and the US Fish and Wildlife Service — via TidePool

14 January 2006

Several researchers from Sandia National Laboratories, led by principal investigator Susan Rempe, are part of a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary team developing a nano-size battery that one day could be implanted in the eye to power an artificial retina — via Warren Ellis

The future of humanity could lie within a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole. The facility is designed to hold around 2 million types of seed, representing all known varieties of the world's crops. The Norwegian government is planning to create the seed bank next year to safeguard the world's food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels and earthquakes

Symantec has fessed up to using a rootkit-type feature in Norton SystemWorks that could provide the perfect hiding place for attackers to place malicious files on computers. The anti-virus vendor acknowledged that it was deliberately hiding a directory from Windows APIs as a feature to stop customers from accidentally deleting files but, prompted by warnings from security experts, the company shipped a SystemWorks update to eliminate the risk — via digg

13 January 2006

Stan Howard faces prosecution for felling endangered trees as his brother, brother of Australian Prime Minister John Howard, prepared to host a major six-nation conference on climate change

This hyperdrive motor would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds. It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There's just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics — via Warren Ellis

If you are scuba diving, be sure not to swim anywhere near any ship or installation that has been protected by the Raytheon Corporation's new swimmer denial system. Otherwise you will very quickly feel extremely sick and probably drown. Raytheon's underwater sensors detect any unwelcome presence and trigger an underwater sound system that emits extremely powerful pulses of low frequency audio. The pulse rate and audio frequency are chosen to make human organs resonate like organ pipes, causing swimmers to vomit into their masks or suffer internal ruptures — via Warren Ellis

12 January 2006

Mozilla has released the first major update to Thunderbird. Version 1.5 includes an automated update system, in-line spell checking, an a bunch of other additions and improvements

A press release from Nikon UK has announced plans by Nikon in Japan to reduce its production of film cameras and related products to just a handful of items — via digg

Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group is getting out of the domestic mobile phone market after selling its stake in Virgin Mobile Australia to joint venture partner Optus for AU$30 million. But the Virgin brand will go on after the company granted Optus, Australia's second biggest telco behind Telstra, a 15-year licence to use the name

11 January 2006

Steve Jobs has introduced a new notebook and an iMac computer that use Intel's latest Core Duo processor. The iMac announcement is six months ahead of the schedule outlined by Apple last year

Angry members of MySpace, the personal file-sharing website for young adults, are accusing Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation of censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites. The 38 million subscribers to MySpace discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens. The protests gathered pace, and when 600 MySpace customers complained and a campaign began to boycott the site and relocate to rival sites News Corp relented and restored the links

The 8000-tonne japanese whaling factory ship Nisshin Maru broke away from a supply ship it had loaded with whale meat and steered a deliberate collision course towards the 949-tonne Arctic Sunrise, the smaller of two Greenpeace ships chasing the whaling fleet. The Japanese are claiming they were rammed, but this wouldn't be the first time they've lied about ramming Greenpeace vessels

ApNano has tested armour said to be five times stronger than steel and twice as strong as any impact-resistant material used in protective gear. Last year, a sample of the ApNano material was subjected to tests in which a steel projectile traveling at a speed of up to 1.5 kilometers per second slammed into the material. Executives said the impact was the equivalent to dropping four diesel locomotives onto an area the size of a human fingernail. They said the nano-based armour, which stemmed from a new carbon form called Inorganic Fullerenes, withstood the impact — via Warren Ellis

10 January 2006

Unhappy when his Canadian bank, Vancouver-based Citizens Bank, began out-sourcing some of its credit card processing to the United States, Don Rogers lodged his protest via the bank's online payment system, jamming its computers by making dozens of tiny payments a day — via Feòrag

Luciano Mares, 81, of Fort Sumner, New Mexico, discovered the meaning of karma when he threw a mouse he had found in his home onto a pile of burning leaves — only to see it run away and burn his house down — via Feòrag

A secret Pentagon study has found that as many as 80% of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to their upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armour. Such armour has been available since 2003, but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection

09 January 2006

Google announced the release of Google Pack, a free collection of essential software. Along with Google's own programmes, such as Google Toolbar and Google Earth, Google Pack contains Firefox, Adobe Reader, Ad-Aware and a six month subscription to Norton Antivirus. I would expect most geeks already have most of this installed already. I'm baffled by the inclusion of a resource hog like Norton, but at least you can choose to exclude it from the pack

A cow that escaped a slaughterhouse dodged vehicles, ran in front of a train, braved the icy Missouri River and took three tranquiliser darts before being recaptured six hours later. News of the heifer's adventures prompted a number of people to offer to buy the animal — via Boingboing

From the beginning to the end of his career, Ariel Sharon was a man of ruthless and often gratuitous violence. The waypoints of his career are all drenched in blood, from the massacre he directed at the village of Qibya in 1953

08 January 2006

Microsoft has admitted to removing the blog of a Chinese journalist from MSN Spaces. The censored site has been re-hosted elsewhere after a short down-time, but is no longer accessible to the folks in China

Lego is now allowing you to design a model online, and then order a kit that contains the parts necesary to build it — via digg

US mobile records are for sale online to the general public. The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their mobile phone records are available to anyone — for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of mobile phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts. No court order needed, no credentials required. If they want your records and have the money, they get them

07 January 2006

An ISP who successfully sued spammers in the past has now been awarded an $11.2 billion judgment against James McCalla of Florida for sending millions of unsolicited e-mails advertising mortgage and debt consolidation services — via digg

A boy in Canton, Ohio puts up a web page telling his friends to go to their school web site and hit refresh. Now the local prosecutor wants to charge him with a felony and threatens him with jail time, although prosecutors say community service is more likely and disciplinary action from the school — via Boingboing

Last month Grant Goodman, an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, received a letter from his friend in the Philippines that had been opened and resealed with a strip of dark green tape bearing the words by Border Protection and carrying the official seal of the Department of Homeland Security — via digg

06 January 2006

Futurama May Get New Lease on Life Talks have begun at 20th Century Fox TV to revive Futurama, which takes place in the next millennium, much in the same way Family Guy found new life after cancellation. The final original episode of Futurama aired on Fox in August 2003. But since then, the show has found new life via DVD releases and repeatedly high-rated airings on the Cartoon Network — via digg

The Viktoria Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden, is working on a concept they call Push Music, which is software that enables peer-to-peer connections between music players, enabling people to browse the music collections of others and take a copy of whatever they like — via The Raw Feed

Greenpeace has laughed off claims by a Japanese whaling organisation that the US Navy is spying on its protest ships in the Southern Ocean. The Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research, the group conducting the whaling and the real pirates, claims the information is being gathered for the US Civil Marine Analysis Department's worldwide report on piracy

05 January 2006

More than 500 General Electric employees have sued Monsanto along with two related companies, claiming they were exposed to toxic chemicals manufactured for decades by Monsanto

The UK government has been accused of compiling a national DNA database by stealth as police reported a rapid increase in genetic profiling

Australia had its hottest year on record in 2005, with meteorologists saying the rising temperatures were due to global warming. Australia's Bureau of Meteorology said temperatures were on average 1.09°C higher than normal in 2005, making it the hottest year since records were first kept in 1910. Meteorologist Mike Coughlan said previous record hot years in 1988, 1998 and 2002 were caused by El Nino events, where warmer waters in the South West Pacific lead to lower rainfall and hotter weather in Australia. But there was no El Nino in 2005

04 January 2006

Every year The Edge asks over 100 top scientists and thinkers a question, and the responses are fascinating and widely quoted. This year, psychologist Steven Pinker suggested they ask What is your most dangerous idea? The 117 respondents include Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Daniel Dennett, Jared Diamond — and that's just the D's! As you might expect, the submissions are brilliant and very controversial

The inventors of MP3 are taking portable music listening one step further with the introduction of two surround sound enhancements. Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits and France's Thomson SA have added two new elements to MP3 Surround demonstration software: MP3 SX (MP3 Stereo eXtended), which enhances MP3 stereo files for multichannel playback; and Ensonido, which provides portable MP3 Surround sound using stereo headphones

03 January 2006

eMagin has developed a wearable headset system, dubbed the EyeBud 800, that plugs into the iPod and displays video from it in front of one eye, using optical technology designed to give the picture a higher resolution and make it appear larger than on the iPod's screen. Scheduled to debut in the first half of this year, the EyeBud is expected to retail for as much as US$599 — US$200 more than the cost of a 60-gigabyte iPod

02 January 2006

Recent research conducted by Yahoo! and Ipsos reveals that while 12% of surveyed Yahoo users know what RSS is, only 4% of surveyed Internet users use it [PDF] and know they use it. Podcasting is also reviewed, with the conclusion that 2% of surveyed people use it. The increasing number of blogs should go with an increasing number of syndicated readers, as they are now an important part of the web

An unidentified man swore at crew and passengers after being refused a bottle of wine on the four-hour flight from Manchester to Tenerife. He became so abusive the fed-up pilot diverted the Monarch Airlines Airbus to Porto Santo island off West Africa. After the plane touched down, the man was marched off by police and had his luggage dumped on the tarmac. The plane and its remaining passengers then took off again for Tenerife, where it landed almost four hours late after the unscheduled stop — via Boingboing

01 January 2006

GM crops under test in the UK have cross pollinated to weeds, giving them the same resistance to herbicide as the GM crops. This has been reported as occurring in Canada, which like the US is well past the test stage and allows widespread use of GM crops. What's worse, in Canada crop rotation has conferred multi-herbicide resistance to some of the weeds

A hoax press-release claiming Narnia had walked out of the World Trade Organisation talks in Hong Kong because it was fed up with being bullied by the US and Europe was picked up and run as news by many outlets including Forbes — via Boingboing

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