June 2006 Archive

30 June 2006

Microsoft has removed the controversial phone home notifications component from its WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) anti-piracy tool, but may be turning off copies of Windows without WGA installed

Three computer experts have been arrested over an alleged international plot to spread viruses via e-mail. Police say the viruses run without the knowledge of the computer owner and allow criminals to access any stored private and commercial information. The three men are alleged to have targeted UK businesses since at least 2005, and infected computers worldwide — via Spam Huntress

Two Florida girls aged 14 and 15 created a bogus profile on MySpace, grabbed a pair of pistols, then robbed an adult man who arranged to meet the lovely but fictitious 18-year-old Natalia in person — via Boingboing

29 June 2006

Microsoft has decided to initially use technology from its WinFS project in the SQL Server database, rather than directly in its Windows operating system

Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo on Saturday signs into law a bill to abolish the death penalty in the country — via Meta-Roj Blog

Life expectancy is increasing in the developed world. But Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey believes it will soon extend dramatically to 1,000

The Dell laptop seen bursting into flames in photographs on the internet is being examined as part of the company's probe of the incident

28 June 2006

In a rare case of music retailer-turned-Internet pirate, the Virgin store chain in France said Tuesday that it had been found guilty of downloading and reselling a Madonna hit without permission. The store's online portal, virginmega.fr, was ordered by the Paris Tribunal de Commerce to pay €600,000, or US$754,000, in damages for downloading the Madonna song Hung Up from a France Télécom Web site that had exclusive rights to distribute the song for one week

A publishing firm fell foul of the law by using unlicensed typefaces worth £80,000, according to licensing lobby group the Business Software Alliance (BSA). The publishing firm had claimed to be using just one font but in fact was found using 11,000. The publisher was the subject of a BSA enquiry after an ex-employee tip-off, said the BSA, which is funded by software companies

Victoria will speed up the development of a AU$31.2 million high-speed fibre optic network for academics by piggybacking on an existing network used for railway services

27 June 2006

Many individuals currently without permanent housing still manage to stay connected via a mobile phone, laptop or some other gadget. Many homeless have email addresses and find that it offers them a way to get their foot back in the door of normal society via Slashdot

A security start-up is borrowing a technique from the research labs to try to give Internet Explorer PCs relief from Web-based attacks. GreenBorder Technologies, a venture-backed start-up, plans to release on Tuesday a security tool that puts Microsoft's IE in a virtual sandbox. Called GreenBorder Pro, the product uses virtualisation technology similar to what researchers at antivirus companies have been using for years. In a virtual environment, malicious software is allowed to execute, but it can't touch the underlying operating system

Mediaware, a tiny Canberra tech firm, has won a multimillion-dollar deal to supply digital video systems to next-generation US spy planes, staking its claim as one of Australia's best performing software exporters

26 June 2006

France has given the thumbs-up to the defanged version of a controversial law that would have forced Apple Computer to open up its iTunes digital rights management to players other than its iPod

The banking details of thousands of Australians have been revealed and an international police investigation jeopardised in a bungle by Australia's peak internet crime-fighting agency. The details of 3500 customers from 18 banks, including names and account numbers, were lost when a classified computer dossier on Russian mafia phishing scams was misplaced by the Australian High Tech Crime Centre in April last year

Number two telco Optus has already signed supply agreements with at least one party as it moves closer to giving ISPs wholesale access to its extensive new high-speed broadband network

25 June 2006

LiveJournal recently introduced an ad-supported level. Over the last few days an advertiser used an ad to install the ErrorSafe malware that tried to trick people into believing they had a fault on the computer that needs them to purchase a fix. The ad used a server-side setting and targetted only those outside the US, to prevent LiveJournal's own checks from noticing it. LiveJournal has apologised for the ad and slow response — via Slashdot

University of Helsinki chemist Anatoli Bogdan reports that cells, tissues, and perhaps the body, could be cryopreserved without suffering damage from ice crystals — via BoingBoing

24 June 2006

Researchers led by the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology in Italy are developing robots that evolve their own language, bypassing the limits of imposing human rule-based communication. The technology, dubbed Embedded and Communicating Agents, has allowed researchers at Sony's Computer Science Laboratory in France to add a new level of intelligence to the AIBO dog. The robot dog has learnt to see a ball and tell another one where the ball is, if it's moving and what colour it is, and the other is capable of recognising it

TorrentSpy named the hacker who it claims broke into its computer systems on behalf of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), as part of a legal request that would force the MPAA to turn over documents stolen from the Internet file-searching company

23 June 2006

Family First senator Steve Fielding made a string of nuisance calls to journalists yesterday to expose politicians' power to bombard the public after they were exempted from new do-not-call laws

Fourteen staff at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in Wales have been sacked and 101 disciplined after they swapped so many pornographic e-mails that it affected the organisation's mainframe computer

22 June 2006

Hasbrouck Heights Library Director Michele Reutty is under fire for refusing to give police library circulation records without a subpoena. Her lawyer explained; Reutty did the right thing... At no time did Michele Reutty say to any police officer or anybody else that she would not give the information if it was properly requested. However, borough labor lawyer, the exceedingly dim and clueless Ellen Horn, who also represented the library trustees, said Reutty was more interested in protecting her library than helping the police

MacBook Pro batteries are apparently swelling, then failing. MacFixIt has pictures of their own swollen MacBook Pro battery, which looks like it has suffered an internal explosion. Apple is replacing batteries on a case-by-case basis, but hasn't yet admitted any wide-scale issues

Giant superheated bubbles of gas are drifting towards Earth and popping as they encounter our planet's magnetic field, new findings reveal. Researchers suspect the bubbles may actually feed the bow shock that is created where the solar wind rams into our planet's magnetic field

21 June 2006

Scientists have used embryonic stem cells and a soup of nerve-friendly chemicals to not just bridge a damaged spinal cord but actually regrow the circuitry needed to move a muscle, helping partially paralysed rats walk

Monash University researchers are $100,000 richer after their technology, which enables speedier internet downloads, was named as an outstanding commercialisation opportunity

A 46-year-old man on a motorcycle was struck by lightning and killed Wednesday evening while riding in rush hour traffic on the Boulder Turnpike. Witnesses said they saw a flash of light just before the yellow motorcycle crashed into the center concrete divider. It is unknown if the man was killed by the lightning strike or by the crash that followed

20 June 2006

Police are using a network of amateur investigators as bounty hunters to deal with online fraud

A new mobile phone scam is sending missed call messages to unsuspecting users, urging them to dial premium rate phone lines, an industry watchdog has warned

A Pentagon document classifies homosexuality as a mental disorder, decades after mental health experts abandoned that position. The document outlines retirement or other discharge policies for service members with physical disabilities, and in a section on defects lists homosexuality alongside mental retardation and personality disorders — via BoingBoing

19 June 2006

The US Government is set to transition to IPv6 in June 2008. The CIO Council's Architecture and Infrastructure Committee has provided a list of best practices and transition elements that agencies should use as they work to meet the deadline. The latest additions, released in May, are a compilation of existing recommendations and best practices gathered from the Defense Department, which has been testing and preparing for the transition for years, the private sector, and the Internet research and development community

A Florida-based company called Oragenics may have found a way to rid our mouths of a bacteria that thrives on sugars in the mouth, which it consumes while excreting lactic acid. On the surface it seems like an elegant solution, but clearly there is the potential to upset delicate systems in nature, resulting in possible larger-scale side effects — via digg

18 June 2006

A major drug company, Genentech, is blocking access to a medicine that is cheaply and effectively saving thousands of people from going blind because it wants to launch a more expensive variant of the same product on the market

A form of solid carbon dioxide, named amorphous carbonia, that could be used to make ultra-hard glass or coatings for microelectronic devices has been discovered by scientists from the University of Florence in Italy. It was made by squeezing dry ice, a form of carbon dioxide used to create smoke in stage shows, at huge pressure

17 June 2006

The 25 European Commission member states and nine accession countries have all signed up for a plan that could make e-accessibility mandatory — via digg

Google is now taking on that part of the Internet that has been notoriously difficult to navigate: US Government sites

On top of the tales of the appalling finish on the black Macbooks and discolouration of the white Macbooks that have been doing the rounds, here's a remarkable thing that the Macworld team has turned up in its lab tests. The black Macbooks, when compared to the top-end white versions (the latter, you'll recall, are AU$300 cheaper but have no other noticeable configuration differences), are actually slower at a number of tasks than the mid-config white ones. That is, if you leave the disk on the white model at 60GB, rather than upgrading to 80GB — via Irma

16 June 2006

Bill Gates, the man who started Microsoft and has been its public face throughout its three decades of existence, plans to step away from daily work at the company. Gates announced on Thursday that he will gradually relinquish his current role, ceding the title of chief software architect immediately, while remaining a full-time employee for the next two years. In July 2008, he will become a part-time employee and chairman

Mac users can check off another box in the plus column for owning Intel-based Apple hardware. A start-up company that goes by the name of Parallels has just introduced software that lets Macs run Windows and Mac OS X simultaneously

Two butterfly species have been bred in the lab to make a third distinct species. In a species, individuals need to be capable of interbreeding to produce fertile offspring. The study demonstrates that two animal species can evolve to form one, instead of the more common scenario where one species diverges to form two. There is growing circumstantial evidence for hybrid speciation in Ragoletis fruit flies, swordtail fish and African cichlid fish. Some also suspect the American red wolf could be the product of hybridisation between coyotes and wolves

AOL is breathing new life into Netscape.com with a revamped design — still in beta — that takes a page from the strategy playbook of user-driven sites such as digg.com and del.icio.us

15 June 2006

Several Australian newspapers are gearing up to follow the lead of British counterparts in putting exclusive breaking news online before it appears in print and devoting more newsroom resources to the internet http://email.news.com.au/ct/click?q=44-9npfIZU5YwNkh7gEd8oaX9RR

Amazon.com has started selling groceries, a cautious step into a business that was one of the biggest casualties of the dot-com collapse

Google added a new online photo sharing feature to Picasa, the free software that lets users organise digital photos on their computers. The test Picasa Web Albums offering is available by invitation only and appears similar to popular photo sharing Web site Flickr

The Aymara, an indigenous group in the Andes highlands, have a concept of time that's opposite our own spatial metaphor. A new study by cognitive scientists explains how the Aymara consider the past to be ahead and the future behind them — via BoingBoing

14 June 2006

Millions of Windows users may unwittingly be test subjects for an unfinished Microsoft antipiracy tool. The software maker has been delivering a prerelease version of Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications software to PCs as a high priority item in the built-in update feature in Windows. The tool, also known as WGA Notifications, is used to validate the authenticity of Windows software installed on a PC

Apple's iPods are made by mainly female workers who earn as little as £27 per month, according to a report in the Mail on Sunday. The report claims Longhua's workers live in dormitories that house 100 people, and that visitors from the outside world are not permitted. Workers toil for 15-hours a day to make the iconic music player and the iPod nano is made in a five-storey factory (E3) that is secured by police officers. Apple is currently investigating the sweatshop allegations. [Update: Apple has published their findings]

Small wireless broadband carriers in the bush are being forced to partner or perish as a bizarre consequence of a billion-dollar program aimed at improving regional phone services

Google has unveiled an enhanced version of its popular online mapping program

13 June 2006

The proposed services access card is essentially identical to the Australia Card proposal for a national identity card overwhelmingly rejected 20 years ago, according to a privacy study to be released today

Windows Vista will be better equipped to protect itself from malicious rootkits than its predecessor, Windows XP, but because so many legitimate applications use rootkit techniques, Microsoft has decided to implement two crucial anti-rootkit technologies only in 64-bit versions of its new operating system

A black bear picked the wrong New Jersey yard for a jaunt earlier this week, running into Jack, a territorial tabby, who ran the bear up a tree — twice — via RogueSun

12 June 2006

John Perry Barlow — Grateful Dead lyricist, copyfighter, and co-founder of EFF — conducted an electronic debate with ex-congressman Dan Glickman, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America on the BBC's web site. The exchange is fascinating in that it shows Glickman lives in an information vacuum and doesn't have a clue about electronic media — via BoingBoing

UK music fans no longer face the threat of prosecution for copying their own CDs on to PCs or MP3 players, as long as the songs are only for personal use. Peter Jamieson, chairman of the British Phonographic Industry, said consumers would only be penalised if they made duplicates of songs for other people. Mr Jamieson also called for Apple - which makes the popular iPod portable music player — to open up its iTunes software so it is compatible with the technology of other manufacturers

It's hundreds of times thinner than a human hair but as sensitive as a human finger. Researchers have devised a nanosheet that can be wrapped around any surface — such as that of a surgical instrument or a robotic hand — to mimic the sensitivity of touch

11 June 2006

A Taiwanese company called A-Zone International has given the iPod a retro spin with the iPod Dock Valve Station, a docking station that features an elegant 1940s-style valve amplifier

Toshiba announced a 2.5-inch hard drive with a 200GB capacity, effectively raising the bar for mobile storage. The drive uses a new technology called perpendicular recording

10 June 2006

What happens when you combine 200 litres of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints? It's amazing and completely insane. The first part of this video demonstrates a simple geyser, and the second part shows just how extreme it can get. Over one hundred jets of soda fly into the air in less than three minutes. It's an hysterical and spectacular mint-powered version of the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas

Google has just released the Google Browser Sync extension for Firefox. This extension allows you to save your bookmarks, history and passwords on Google servers, effectively giving you a roaming profile, which you can sync on any computer running Firefox (and the extension, of course)

The NSA is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in Internet technology — specifically the forthcoming semantic web championed by the Web standards organisation W3C — to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals — via Slashdot

09 June 2006

A recent vote in the US House of Representatives has led to a rejection of the principle of Net Neutrality from the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (Cope Act), in spite of massive lobbying from prominent businesses

Microsoft is staking its claim in the high-performance computing territory with the launch of an OS specifically designed for computer clusters used by engineers and scientists

German police have arrested a man on suspicion of murdering a woman with a sausage. Authorities said the man had given a patchy account of events, acknowledging that he may have administered a bockwurst

08 June 2006

iTunes facing fresh legal attacks in several European countries. Government consumer protection agencies in Norway, Denmark and Sweden want Apple to lift restrictions that prevent customers from playing music they bought through iTunes on devices made by Apple's rivals.

Microsoft acknowledged that it needs to better inform users that its tool for determining whether a computer is running a pirated copy of Windows also quietly checks in daily with the software maker. The company said the undisclosed daily check is a safety measure designed to allow the tool, called Windows Genuine Advantage, to quickly shut down in case of a malfunction. The EULA is suppose to disclose this daily call-in feature. Lauren Weinstein, who is co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, was one of the first people to notice the daily communications to Microsoft

This week's launch by Google of an online spreadsheet, which is currently being tested by a limited set of users, has stirred up a lot of controversy around the Internet. There are privacy concerns about users storing financial data on Google's servers. Just how secure are these servers, and how long will Google guarantee to maintain users' data?

07 June 2006

A man shouting that god would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in Kiev zoo after he crept into the animal's enclosure — via The Pagan Prattle Online

The military wants to turn odour recognition into a science to help fight terror. The Unique Signature Detection Project, is designed to help identify terrorists based on scents they secrete in their sweat, tears, urine and other bodily fluids — via digg

A team of scientists and surgeons at the Bernard O'Brien Institute of Microsurgery at Melbourne's St Vincent's Hospital have developed a method of growing new organs within a patient's body. The cells have been grown in a plastic chamber under the patients' skin

Queensland Police are to be given power to force suspects to hand over passwords and encryption codes

06 June 2006

Those looking forward to built-in Adobe PDF support in the forthcoming Office 2007 productivity suite and Windows Vista operating system might have to go without. Microsoft announced that it will remove support for the electronic document technology after negotiations with Adobe broke down

Chemical abortion will be available in far north Queensland from next month following the importation of Australia's first consignment of the RU486 abortion pill

A group of four Connecticut librarians recently announced that the US government had requested to view private patron records and also threatened imprisonment if the librarians spoke up about it — via digg

05 June 2006

American trade negotiators have threatened to scuttle Russia's entry into the World Trade Organisation unless the country shuts down the AllOfMP3.com website, which sells music under Russian copyright law, despite the ire of the RIAA and its international puppet organisation, IFPI — via Boingboing

Ricoh is pioneering the use of plant-based plastics at its global headquarters in Japan

A flood of legislation released by the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act threatens to drown whole classes of consumer electronics

04 June 2006

Recent research, shows that at the lowest temperature point at which the change of state occurs — called the Quantum Critical Point — the Han purple pigment actually loses a dimension: it goes from 3D to 2D — via digg

A farmer somewhere south of Rotherham and east of Sheffield proves to have even iffier field-based hand-writing than Eddie with his poorly rendered arse (KMZ)

03 June 2006

A meteor which crashed into Antarctica probably caused the biggest mass extinction in the Earth's history and likely spawned the Australian continent, scientists say

Folks who value creative content rescued from obscurity may be concerned about major fee increases proposed by the US Copyright Office. At the end of this month, they plan to double the fee for copyright records searching from $75 to $150 per hour (it was $20/hr as recently as 1999), and add a new $100 fee just to give frugal searchers an estimate of how much a real search is likely to cost — va Boingboing

02 June 2006

Computer games in the hands of the elderly are shaping up as the latest weapons in the war against Alzheimer's

Henry and Roma Gerbus received a phone call from a man named Ed claiming he had purchased their old hard drive at a flea market. They had previously taken their computer to Best Buy to have the hard drive replaced and were told that the store would destroy it. Now it has turned up at a flea market, still containing their personal information, such as bank account numbers and Social Security numbers. The Gerbus' are a little perplexed and are very worried about identity theft

The competition regulator yesterday gave its strongest indication yet that Telstra could scrap its proposed AU$2 billion next generation broadband network by the end of this month

01 June 2006

ThePirateBay.org, a longtime fixture of the BitTorrent community, is currently under investigation. Their servers have been seized by the Swedish police

A takeover battle looms for iiNet after fellow Perth telco Amcom snapped up a 19.9 per cent stake for $18 million, taking advantage of a plunge in the market value of the struggling No3 internet provider

The technology that helped make black-light posters and concert T-shirts a cultural mainstay is now being used to make fuel cells, chip packages and PC components

In yet another blow against free speech rights, the Supreme Court decided that government employees who report wrongdoing do not enjoy 1st Amendment rights while on the job

Search


Archives