April 2006 Archive

30 April 2006

The US government has asked a federal judge to dismiss the EFF's civil liberties lawsuit against the AT&T Corporation because of a possibility that military and state secrets would otherwise be disclosed. The statement concludes by saying: Finally, because the United States intends to assert the state secrets privilege and file a dispositive motion to dismiss this action, the United States requests that discovery proceedings be deferred until the government's submission has been considered and heard. You can view the full text of the government's statement of interest (PDF) on the EFF's web site

Grand Master Masaaki Hatsumi is the last living apprentice of the last fighting ninja, Toshitsugu Takamatsu. At 76, he continues to train would-be ninjas, and the AP's Hans Greimel spent a day at his studio, collecting ninja wisdom like Always be able to kill your students — via Boingboing

29 April 2006

The California Public Utilities Commission has approved a plan allowing providers of high-speed internet services to test electricity lines to deliver internet access

An artificial insect eye that could be used in ultra-thin cameras has been developed by scientists in the US.The dimpled eye, contains over 8,500 hexagonal lenses packed into an area the size of a pinhead. The dome-shaped structure, described in the journal Science, is similar to a bee's eye. The researchers, from the University of California, Berkeley, say the work may also shed light on how insects developed such complex, visual systems. Darpa is also funding this project with applications expected for digital cameras and high speed motion detectors

Intelligence agencies and police will be given access to a vast database of biometric photographs of Australians to be created for the new health and welfare smart card to fight terrorism and more general crime

28 April 2006

Some of Canada's best known musicians, including Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlin, Sum 41 and Barenaked Ladies, have formed a new copyright coalition. The artists say in a press release that they oppose file sharing lawsuits, the use of DRM, and DMCA-style legislation and that they want record labels to stop claiming that they represent their views

The introduction of a national smart card with photo ID has upset Coalition MPs and privacy experts who believe it could develop into a national identity card by stealth

Telstra shares could gain in value by almost a quarter if it successfully fought new internet phone technology, otherwise it risked further declines in revenue

27 April 2006

Seagate is shipping its 750-gigabyte Barracuda 7200.10 drive. This drive represents an increase in capacity of 50 percent over the previous industry maximum of 500GB and is the first 3.5-inch internal drive in the industry to achieve 750GB using perpendicular magnetic recording technology

Microsoft is entering the social networking market currently led by MySpace.com and Friendster with its own entry, Wallop

India reaped new fortunes in its recent rise as an outsourcing powerhouse. But now India hears footsteps: China, Hungary, and several other countries are luring offshore outsourcing jobs

26 April 2006

DARPA is funding a startup the supposedly has a unique approach to detect rootkits. The startup, Komoku, is ready to emerge from stealth mode with hardware and software-based technologies to fight the rapid spread of malicious rootkits. They have a PCI card that doesn't necessarily determine that a rootkit is installed, only that the OS has changed dramatically enough to warrant investigation. Microsoft, however, demonstrated a rootkit running in a virtual machine outside of the user's OS workspace that made detection impossible — via Slashdot

The BBC has posted an online interface into a catalogue of 946,614 BBC radio & TV programmes, dating back 75 years — searchable by category, cast and crew

A Cape Breton man who killed two sex offenders in Maine visited the homes of another four sex offenders but no one answered the door. Maine state police say Stephen Marshall had a global satellite positioning programme on his laptop computer, which allowed investigators to trace his movements — via digg

25 April 2006

A startling Internet video that shows someone spraying graffiti on President Bush's jet looked so authentic that the Air Force wasn't immediately certain whether the plane had been targeted. It was not so much a hoax, as a ridiculously expensive attempt at viral marketing by Marc Ecko Enterprises

Optus' bid to wean itself off Telstra ADSL resale and bring more margin back to its broadband business has hit a snag, as technical glitches play havoc with the company's $150 million Bigfoot project to deploy its own ADSL infrastructure

The latest low-tech billboards along the highways of the Netherlands are startling enough to prompt motorists to indulge in U-turns. Or make that ewe-turns. These ads are walking, woolly flocks of bleating sheep

24 April 2006

For the last few years, a coalition of technology companies, academics and computer programmers has been trying to persuade Congress to scale back the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now Congress is preparing to do precisely the opposite. A proposed copyright law would expand the DMCA's restrictions on software that can bypass copy protections and grant federal police more wiretapping and enforcement powers. The new law would send you to prison for attempting to infringe copyright. It would make it even more illegal to own tools that could be used to remove copy-restrictions, like DVD-ripping software — it could even bust Symantec for making software that removed the Sony rootkit malicious software that the company distributed with its CDs last year

International carrier Southern Cross Cables said it had fixed a problem with its Internet link between Australia and the United States on Saturday that several local ISPs had warned could cause slow international speeds

It's not a Can't beat 'em? Join 'em scenario but it's pretty close. In a move that will most likely anger DVD buyers in western markets, Warner Home Video is trying to compete with film pirates in China as they launch a trial program. A new release movie, sans all the normal packaging, is available for the equivalent of US$1.50

23 April 2006

South Carolina's Legislature is considering outlawing sex toys. The South Carolina bill, proposed by Republican Rep. Ralph Davenport, would make it a felony to sell devices used primarily for sexual stimulation and allow law enforcement to seize sex toys from raided businesses — via Boingboing

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have discovered a material that gives a whole new complexion to the term fridge magnet. When this alloy is placed in a magnetic field, it gets colder. Karl Sandeman and his co-workers think that their material — a blend of cobalt, manganese, silicon and germanium — could help to usher in a new type of refrigerator that is up to 40 percent more energy-efficient than conventional models

22 April 2006

Bob Cringely offers an intriguing reason behind Apple's recent strategy of Boot Camp. I believe that Apple will offer Windows Vista as an option for those big customers who demand it, but I also believe that Apple will offer in OSX 10.5 the ability to run native Windows XP applications with no copy of XP installed on the machine at all. This will be accomplished not by using compatibility middleware like Wine, but rather by Apple implementing the Windows API directly in OSX 10.5

A group of telecoms companies — Optus, Macquarie Telecom, PowerTel, Primus, Internode, Soul and TransACT — has joined together to form a plan for upgrading broadband around the nation. Telstra's nose has been put out of joint by the move and responded with a childish rant that the plan is a scam

LiveJournal recently introduced ads on some pages for free users. More interestingly, they also added a new restriction to their TOS (XVI 17 b.) banning users from using or providing ad-blocking software. The new TOS also permits them to immediately terminate the account of anyone they catch doing this

21 April 2006

Holographic data storage pioneer InPhase Technologies, has announced that it has demonstrated the highest data density of any commercial technology by recording 515 gigabits of data per square inch. The first generation drive will have a capacity of 300 gigabytes on a single disk with a 20 megabyte per second transfer rate — via digg

Higher education, technology companies, and a consumer group are the latest to band together in an attempt to fight the growing problem of viruses and spyware plaguing the Internet

iiNet's broadband customers have for several weeks been experiencing slow speeds to some international Internet sites as the telco wrangles with a congested connection in the United States

Rupert Murdoch has made another foray into e-commerce, with an investment in the world's largest job search engine. Simply Hired received a total AU$18.11 million from New Corp's Fox Interactive Media and venture capital firm Foundation Capital

20 April 2006

A rat nerve cell attached to a semiconductor chip has exchanged a signal with the chip, an achievement that could lead to organic computers that process information like a brain — via Aine MacDermot

America's estimated 30,000 Elvis impressionists fear that they are about to be put out of business. Robert Sillerman, a New York businessman, has bought the rights to Elvis' name and likeness and has threatened to ban unauthorised Elvis clones — via evano

Five girls decorated their Ohio hometown with life-size Super Mario Brothers power-up bricks. The Man responded with full-on terrornoia, dispatching video-game illiterate bomb-squads to defuse the bricks, and now the girls face potential criminal charges — via Boingboing

19 April 2006

In 1993, Jack Rogers grudgingly agreed to serve on a task force studying whether his local Presbyterian church in Southern California should ordain gays. Quite frankly, he wasn't interested in giving the topic serious thought. I opposed homosexuality reflexively — that was just what I thought Christians were supposed to do, he recalls. But once he did embark on a scholarly journey, the Presbyterian minister found that his views changed 180 degrees: He's become a vocal advocate of ordaining gays and marrying gay couples in the church — via Aine MacDermot

18 April 2006

A legal spat over a Web site criticising Jerry Falwell for his antigay views won't ascend to the US Supreme Court. The justices on Monday declined without comment to take up the evangelical preacher's appeal, which challenged the operator of Fallwell.com, a site that aims to explain why Rev. Falwell is completely wrong about people who are gay or lesbian. The televangelist had claimed the domain name's spelling was too close to that of his official Web presence and asked the courts to shut it down

Shoppers in the British city of Nottingham are being kept in line by a team of former Ghurkas hired to patrol Ikea. Since the team took over three weeks ago, not a single crime has been reported — via I Spy

The world's strongest glue is made by bacteria. The adhesive can withstand an enormous amount of stress, equal to the force felt by a quarter with more than three cars piled on top of it

17 April 2006

Vespa has unveiled two prototype hybrid scooters that deliver 25% more power and use 20% less petrol. You plug them into a standard European 220V socket for three hours to charge them or run them on normal gas-engine mode. They can run battery-only at low speeds, which is useful in indoor/zero-emissions environments. The helmet-space under the seat has been replaced with a stack of 12V/26Ah batteries — via Boingboing

Agents from the US bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm agents detained a suspicious individual on a Georgia college campus — a guy dressed up in a ninja costume, on his way to a party on campus — via Boingboing

16 April 2006

Scientists studying organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs) have made a critical leap from single-colour displays to a highly efficient and long-lived natural light source. If the device can be mass-manufactured cheaply interior lighting could look vastly different in the future. Almost any surface in a home, whether flat or curved, could become a light source: walls, curtains, ceilings, cabinets or tables — via Warren Ellis

Users thinking of pirating the next version of Windows may have a surprise in store: no Aero for you. The upcoming Microsoft OS will run a check to ensure the copy was legally purchased. If it comes up short, the shiniest part of the OS will not be available. The Aero display also won't be available to those who buy Windows Vista Basic, the low-end consumer version of the operating system. Let's see how long that security feature takes to crack

US forces in Afghanistan are checking reports that stolen computer hardware containing military secrets is being sold at a market beside a big US base. Shopkeepers at a market next to Bagram base, outside Kabul, have been selling memory drives stolen from the facility

15 April 2006

Google has launched a Web-based calendar service that allows users not only to input and track events, but also to coordinate schedules with others and create automatic event alerts

Internet shoppers accustomed to tax-free purchases from Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store soon may be in for an unpleasant surprise. State legislatures and tax officials, eager to find new ways to boost government spending and curb budget shortfalls, are eyeing the burgeoning market for digital downloads as a potentially lucrative source of revenue

Ministers may now hesitate before using anti-terrorist powers against suspected extremists after a court ruling against control orders. Lord Carlile, the government's independent assessor of terrorism laws, gave his view after a High Court judge in London ruled that ministers' powers to put accused terrorists under house arrest contravene human rights laws

70 year old Yasumasa Matsuzaki was evicted from a convenience store because of his habit of reading magazines without ever buying anything. He returned five minutes later with a chainsaw and threatened the staff before returning to the magazine rack. The incident last week is part of a wave of so-called grey crime in Japan. The percentage of over-65s in prison has trebled in the past decade and exceeds 10 per cent of the total prison population - four times the UK figure. Japan has the highest rate of incarceration for pensioners in the industrialised world

14 April 2006

An RAF doctor who refused to serve in Iraq because he believed the war to be illegal was jailed for eight months. The conviction and imprisonment of Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, the first member of the armed forces to be charged with disobeying orders to deploy in Iraq, has provoked widespread condemnation. Anti-war groups declared that a man who had shown great moral courage and acted according to his conscience was being pilloried for his beliefs

Sitting in a culture dish, a layer of chicken heart cells beats in synchrony. But this muscle layer was not sliced from an intact heart, nor even grown laboriously in the lab. Instead, it was printed, using a technology that could be the future of tissue engineering. Droplets of bio-ink — clumps of living cells a few hundred micrometres in diameter — flow together and fuse when squirted close to each other. They can be made to form layers, rings and tubes — which could serve as blood vessels — depending on how they are deposited. Bioprinting could develop into a fast and cheap way to engineer a variety of tissue types

MIT scientists have harnessed the construction talents of tiny viruses to build ultra-small nanowire structures for use in very thin lithium-ion batteries

A Tasmanian company has obtained the first state or territory licence to use hemp in a pet food product. Hemp is banned in food for human consumption in Australia, unlike most other western countries. Industrial hemp contains very low levels of psychotropic chemicals and is used in products like paper and clothing. Business owner Ian Rochfort says he has been fighting bureaucracy for years for the right to harvest hemp, which will be used in the company's dog biscuits — Hemp Hound Hors d'oeuvres

13 April 2006

This Anzac Day descendants of Turkish soldiers will for the first time be officially allowed to join in the march of veterans. Turkish-Australians whose fathers and grandfathers fought at Gallipoli have been defying RSL policy by marching in the Melbourne parade since 1996. But now they've been given official sanction from Victoria's RSL

Microsoft has developed Oklahoma's Computer Spyware protection Act. The law will supposedly protect people from unwarranted hackers or virus attacks and can fine individuals up to $1M who are found guilty of breaking into a computer without the owners knowledge. At the same time, it also allows some of the better known capable companies to look into your computer for possible virus/spyware and fix the problem without informing you. And, while these friends are doing their job, they can also take the moment to do other things — via Slashdot

An ultralight autonomous aircraft that mimics the navigational abilities of a fly could one day become a real fly on the wall. The 10gm microflyer, being developed by a team of researchers lead by Dario Floreano at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, has a 36cm wingspan. But it could one day be shrunk to insect size and used for search and rescue

12 April 2006

Google has snapped up the rights to an advanced text search algorithm invented by a University of NSW student. The algorithm, or search engine tool, is called Orion and was developed by UNSW PhD student Ori Allon at the university's School of Computer Science

ABC will make a number of its most popular programmes available online at no cost. Beginning 30 April, a redesigned ABC.com web site will allow web surfers to watch full episodes of programs such as Lost, Desperate Housewives and others starting the morning after they air on ABC. In addition, programming from other Disney-owned networks will be made available online over the next couple of months. All programs will be shown in their entirety, including commercials which cannot be avoided. Aside from being unable to avoid commercials, watching the programs will be similar to watching timeshifted content in that viewers will be able to pause, fast forward, and rewind

Popular social-networking site MySpace is responding to concerns about teen safety by bringing a security officer on board and hiring more employees to handle inappropriate content

11 April 2006

Neurosurgeon Kenneth Smith has performed a revolutionary operation on St Louis resident Cheri Robertson, connecting a camera directly to her optic nerve. The rig is in principle similar to Geordi La Forge's visor, albeit in very rudimentary form. At present, the image consists of a number of white dots, as on an LED display. There are also governmental restrictions on this research, forcing Kenneth and his team to fly to Portugal to carry out the operation. If this technology takes off, the future will be bright for the sight-impaired — via Slashdot

What happens when your satellite navigation system in your car gives you bad advice on which road you should take? In Britain, these systems have been directing drivers down a road near the (aptly named) town of Crackpot that is strewn with boulders and has an unprotected 100ft dropoff on one side. The locals are worried someone's going to go off the edge

10 April 2006

China's environment ministry has ordered cleanups at 20 chemical and petrochemical enterprises, including CNPC and units of Sinopec, after they were found to pose serious safety threats

A brightly plumaged parrot and a long-tailed forest mouse unique to the Philippines have been discovered in the vanishing rainforest of a tiny tropical island

09 April 2006

The construction of 402 homes might finally signal the end of the 28-year red wolf breeding programme at the Graham site. Local zoo officials want to move the wolves to protected land at Northwest Trek near Eatonville, but that hinges on a $550,000 federal appropriation at a time when money is tight

The competition watchdog has rejected Telstra's proposed charges for connecting and disconnecting broadband ISPs' access to its basic copper wire

Open Source Development Labs is previewing work that attempts to make life easier for software companies by bridging GNOME and KDE, the two competing graphical interfaces most widely used with Linux

08 April 2006

New Greenpeace research shows that McDonald's are partners in forest crime that is creating a trail of destruction right into the heart of the Amazon rainforest — via Warren Ellis

Scientists have made one of the most important fossil finds in history: a missing link between fish and land animals, showing how creatures first walked out of the water and on to dry land more than 375m years ago. Palaeontologists have said that the find, a crocodile-like animal called the Tiktaalik roseae and described today in the journal Nature, could become an icon of evolution in action — like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds

Police in China are investigating whether the discovery of more than 120 human skulls may be part of a growing trade in macabre handicrafts — via Warren Ellis

A Republican controlled committee has defeated a bill that would have guaranteed fair access and stopped companies like AT&T and Verizon from charging high-bandwidth sites for allowing their customers to have priority access to them

07 April 2006

Anti-terrorism detectives escorted a man from a plane after a taxi driver had earlier become suspicious when he started singing along to a track by punk band The Clash. Detectives halted the London-bound flight at Durham Tees Valley Airport and Harraj Mann, 24, was taken off. The taxi driver had become worried on the way to the airport because Mann had been singing along to The Clash's 1979 anthem London Calling, which features the lyrics Now war is declared — and battle come down while other lines warn of a meltdown expected — via Boingboing

The Australian Consumers Association has savaged the federal Government's plans for the full roll-out of digital television services as part of its media reforms

06 April 2006

Lou Slaughter, the chief executive of GigaBeam, a technology company in Herndon, Virginia, has come up with millimetre-wave technology, which transmits data over wireless connections at one gigabit per second - 1,000 times as fast as a DSL connection

In Sweden, a new political party — the Pirate Party — is pushing a platform that would abolish patents and free creative works from copyright protections after five years, instead of the 50 to 100 years typically associated with a creator's exclusive rights

Apple Computer said on Wednesday that it has released a public beta version of Boot Camp, software that enables Microsoft Windows XP to run natively on Intel-based Macs

05 April 2006

Australia's screen culture — from Alvin Purple to home video of Queen Elizabeth's 1954 royal tour — will be available online from next year. In a collaboration aimed at increasing the Australian public's knowledge of their audiovisual heritage, more than 1000 clips from film and television programs and radio broadcasts will be available on a web site. Associated scripts, interviews and oral histories will also be available as education material

The movie download firms Movielink and CinemaNow have made a deal with the big five studios to ensure that downloads will coincide with DVD releases at Blockbuster and WalMart. Unlike previous deals, these will be full purchase downloads, and not merely for a rental period. The move is aimed at stemming the rising tide of pirate downloads, and DRM will be in force to prevent copying the movies to DVD. The first batch of downloadable movies will include Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and King Kong. The drawback is that they'll be DRMmed, Windows-only and twice the price of DVDs

04 April 2006

Telemarketers will have to abide by a national Do Not Call register in 2007, after the federal government announced it would soon introduce legislation to protect consumers

A red-faced Australian nudist who tried to set fire to what he thought was a deadly funnel web spider's nest ended up with badly burnt buttocks — via Rogue Sun

Bladders engineered in the laboratory from patients' own cells and then implanted into the body have succeeded in their first clinical trial. It is the first time a discrete, complex organ has been grown and transplanted into people — the researchers are now working on hearts and pancreases

03 April 2006

Click on an eBay auction listing, and you could get an unwanted result: a fake eBay login page, created by scammers looking to pilfer your username and password

Twentieth Century Fox confirms The Simpsons are going to the movies and should hit theatres in 2007. A 25-second trailer for the film has been shown to US audiences at screenings of Ice Age: The Meltdown, promising to introduce the greatest hero in American history. It then cut to Homer Simpson, wearing only his underwear, who admitted: I forgot what I was supposed to say

02 April 2006

German nuclear power station officials, responsible for high-level security within the plant, avoided owning up to having lost keys to vital areas around the reactors for as long as possible — via Aine MacDermot

01 April 2006

Believe it or not, Emilio Gonzalez, a Spaniard amateur began his crater search at home after reading an article about the discovery of Kebira, the biggest one found in the Sahara. After a couple of minutes he located two craters. After checking the records, he realised these were completely new, and now two geologists confirm his findings. And there is more, these craters may be part of a chain studied by NASA geologist Adriana Ocampo, so if it's confirmed that these new ones are part of the same episode, it could mean the definitive evidence for her theory of an asteroid broken into pieces fallen in that area — via Slashdot

The keeper of the biggest collection of indigenous Australian art and cultural history is digitising its catalogue in a project designed to help preserve its ageing archives

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