August 2006 Archive

31 August 2006

Remember Hymn? You should, back in the day (like, um, 2004) it allowed you to strip the FairPlay DRM right off iTunes Music Store bought files just like that; well, it's been a long time in coming, but a new app called QTFairUse6 looks like it can now be used (with some amount of difficulty) to dump iTunes version 6.0.4 - 6.0.5 files of their chastely protection

The 41-year-old Lockheed Martin engineer had complained to his bosses. He had told his story to government investigators. He had called congressmen. But when no one seemed to be stepping up to correct what he saw as critical security flaws in a fleet of refurbished Coast Guard patrol boats, De Kort did just about the only thing left he could think of to get action: He made a video and posted it on YouTube.com — via Slashdot

A century after they were wiped out by hunters and a burgeoning population, wolves have returned to parts of eastern Germany as factories close down, businesses fail and people move out

30 August 2006

You can now geotag your photos on Flickr through a reasonably simple to use drag and drop interface. Nifty!

Japanese authorites reported yesterday the first case in Japan of an Apple laptop catching fire and ordered the US company to investigate the trouble involving the faulty Sony batteries and report back within a week

StopBadware.org is accusing AOL of bundling malicious software into its latest free Web browser upgrade, version 9.0, citing a lack of proper disclosure and the inability for users to opt out

29 August 2006

LibriVox is the largest of several emerging collectives that offer free or inexpensive audiobooks of works whose copyrights have expired, from Plato to The Wind in the Willows

Google Books has just started offering downloads of their public domain books as PDF files. You can search for free view books to find other ones

In a deal between Internet giants that are competitors in some markets, Google and eBay announced that Google would begin selling advertising for eBay outside the United States and help eBay shoppers worldwide place calls quickly to online merchants to do business

Engineers moved the giant statute of Pharaoh Ramses II from a congested square in downtown Cairo to its new home near the more peaceful Great Pyramids. Contractors moved the more than 3,200-year-old statue from Ramses Square in an effort to save it from exhaust fumes and other environmental hazards that were causing the 83-ton structure to deteriorate

28 August 2006

Two whistleblowers — one in Italy, one in Greece — uncovered a secret bugging system installed in mobile phones around the world. Both met with untimely ends. The resultant scandals have received little press in the United States, despite the profound implications for American critics of the Bush administration — via digg

Known geek and comedy singer/songwriter Weird Al Yankovic has released the first song from his new album Straight Outta Lynwood for free on his MySpace page. The track is entitled Don't Download This Song and tells of the dangers of illegally downloading music from filesharing sites — via Slashdot

Analyst group Gartner believes that virtualisation will allow Microsoft to create a more flexible operating system platform in the future based around modularity

27 August 2006

A Turkish hacker seeding usenet groups with trojan horses has made it a habit to hunt down pedophiles trolling the groups. The cases go back to 2000, with the mysterious good samaritan responsible for several arrests. The man now has tacit approval from the FBI for his actions

The Eighth Circuit Appeals Court recently ruled that police may seize cash from motorists, citing that possession of a large sum of cash is 'strong evidence' of a connection to drug activity. Gonzales was never charged with any crime, but his cash was stolen by police anyway — via digg

An 89-year-old man has been left both heartbroken and betrayed after his North York bungalow was stolen from him in the rising wave of title fraud. Paul Reviczky, who fled Hungary in 1957 is one of the latest homeowners to discover that Ontario law favors banks, mortgage companies and purchasers over victims of fraud — via digg

26 August 2006

Millions of textbooks and wall-charts across the world will have to be revised, after astronomers yesterday declared that Pluto could no longer be considered a planet. Under historic new guidelines, the solar system has shrunk from nine planets to eight. Scientists decided that tiny Pluto was too puny for its own gravity to pull its orbit into a nearly spherical shape — the orbit is erratic — and so could not be considered a classical planet. Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of dwarf planets. This leaves eight classical planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune

Senior Program Manager Steve Riley announced today at Tech.Ed Australia that full HD content shall only be played at the full resolution where only signed drivers are used — only in the 64-bit version of Vista

Microsoft released the latest test version of its Web browser, Release Candidate 1 (RC1), as it prepares to officially launch Internet Explorer 7 later this year

25 August 2006

Mozilla has accepted Microsoft's offer of help toward ensuring interoperability between Firefox and the upcoming Vista operating system

Because of a risk of fire, Apple is recalling 1.8 million batteries that use Sony's battery cell technology, which also was at the root of Dell's historic recall last week

Apple will pay $US100 million to license Creative Technology's patents for its iPod music player and settle all legal dispute between the two companies

A new security column at Engadget details the new old threat of bumping locks. An 11-year-old girl bypassed a standard 5-pin lock at a recent DefCon Hacker Convention. The girl had no prior experience and didn't even understand the theory she was applying — via Slashdot

24 August 2006

It's a big day for astrophysics. After much speculation, scientists now have conclusive proof of dark matter. This result doesn't rule out alternate gravity theories like MOND, but it does mean those theories will have to account for exotic forms of dark matter

Some geologists are ticked off at the International Astronomical Union for using the word pluton to describe a round object orbiting the sun with a period more than 200 years. A pluton, it seems, is a common type of rock formation that exists in most Geology 101 curricula. IAU head Owen Gingerich is quoted as saying that he was only peripherally aware of the definition, and because it didn't show up on MS Word's spell check, he didn't think it was that important — via Slashdot

Red Hat and Novell, the two top Linux sellers, have only just begun building Xen virtualisation software into their products. But they're already planning to add a higher-level option

Microsoft on Tuesday launched a new offensive against cybersquatters who allegedly gain illegal profits from thousands of Web sites, such as WindowsLiveTutorial.com and HaloChamp.com, that include the company's trademarked names

23 August 2006

People close to the production of Stargate SG-1 said Sci Fi Channel cancelled the series on the eve of its 200th episode, which aired last Friday night, making the show the first cable scripted series to reach such a milestone

Microsoft has issued an open invitation to the Mozilla to bring both its Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail application into the Windows fold

Scientists have found tasmanian devils in the state's far north-west coast area remain cancer free, despite the spread of the disease across the rest of the state. In a recent survey, more than 100 devils were caught in the area over 10 days. Government wildlife biologist Clare Hawkins says not one was found to have the facial tumour disease, which has already wiped out about 40 per cent of the state's devil population. Dr Hawkins believes the survey results, combined with a trial now under way, may provide avenues for keeping the north-west disease-free

Just a fortnight after Telstra dumped plans for a national fibre-to-the-node rollout, the Tasmanian Government is pitching its own state-wide fibre network as an alternative to the telco giant

22 August 2006

YouTube, the popular California Web site that offers video clips, announced a plan to post every music video ever made for free download. The plan threatens iTunes, which charges for videos

Flash memory company SanDisk fired its latest salvo at Apple, taking the wraps off of its Sansa e280, a $250 flash-based MP3 player with 8GB of storage, or enough memory to hold some 2,000 songs

Fourteen-year-old Ben Underwood of Sacramento, California, is one of the few people known to use echolocation as a primary means of navigating the world on land. There's not even a hint of light reaching his brain. His eyes are artificial, but his brain has adapted to allow him to appraise his environment. He makes a clicking sound to communicate with objects and people around him — via Warren Ellis

21 August 2006

Google has launched their beta version of Writely.com. Writely is their word processor and answer to Microsoft Word. In addition to the usual editing features it includes many collaboration features, as well as the ability to save documents as PDFs and RSS feeds

The FDA has recently claimed that there are no medical benefits to marijuana use. Yet at the same time, the FDA has approved synthetic versions of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main active ingredient in marijuana, for use in high-priced prescription drugs. Surprisingly, the FDA also lists marijuana to be as dangerous as heroin and PCP — via digg

The first phase of clinical trials indicates China's first AIDS vaccine is safe and possibly effective, government officials announced at the press conference after a two-month-odd assessment

20 August 2006

A simple tweak to the way common silicon transistors are made could allow faster, cheaper mobile phones and digital cameras. Devices with the modification have already set a new world record for the fastest transistor of its type. To achieve the speed gain, researchers at the University of Southampton added fluorine to the silicon devices

Television screens and computer displays capable of producing a wider range of visible colours could someday be built incorporating tiny sections of electrically-activated polymer. This polymer contracts and relaxes, like a muscle, in response to a current

The US Federal Communications Commission has begun an investigation of the use of video news releases, sometimes called fake news, at US television stations. Video news releases are packaged stories paid for by businesses or interest groups. They use actors to portray reporters and use the same format as television news stories

A mix of bacteria-killing viruses can be safely sprayed on cold cuts, hot dogs and sausages to combat common microbes that kill hundreds of people a year, federal health officials said Friday in granting the first-ever approval of viruses as a food additive. The combination of six viruses is designed to be sprayed on ready-to-eat meat and poultry products, including sliced ham and turkey, said John Vazzana, president and chief executive officer of manufacturer Intralytix Inc

19 August 2006

Ryanair today threatened to sue the government for compensation unless airport security measures are returned to normal within seven days. Michael O'Leary, the outspoken chief executive of Ryanair, described the new restrictions as farcical Keystone Cops security measures that don't add anything except to block up airports, as he issued the ultimatum

Entrepreneurs are creating companies that exploit the creative opportunities in other people's junk, sparing the environment in the process

Users of unreleased Windows update urged to fix critical security flaws. Microsoft has released two patches for its Vista operating system, saying that it too is affected by flaws that were disclosed during the company's 8 August security updates

18 August 2006

The warrantless Internet and telephone surveillance program authorised by the Bush administration violates the US Constitution and must cease immediately. The landmark decision makes US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency's once-secret program. The American Civil Liberties Union had filed suit against the government, claiming the program ran roughshod over the constitutional rights of millions of Americans and ran afoul of federal wiretapping law

Macrovision's best-known form of copy protection inserts noise into analogue video signals to make it difficult to get a good copy of the DVD or VHS recording. A company named Sima has products that eliminate this noise when digitising such video, as any good digitiser would do. Macrovision argues that this is a violation of the DMCA, and a court sided with them in June. Now the injunction is being reviewed, and several organisations are siding with Sima and Fair Use, including the American Library Association, the Consumer Electronics Association, the Home Recording Rights Coalition, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If it isn't overturned, this decision could make it illegal to develop products for making copies of commercial analogue recordings

A federal judge ordered tobacco companies Thursday to admit they lied about the harmful effects of smoking cigarettes and to warn consumers in advertisements and packaging that tobacco is addictive. US District Judge Gladys Kessler ruled that the industry conspired for decades to deceive the public about the dangers of smoking and now must pay to help smokers kick the habit

In recent years, software companies have hammered out rules with researchers on disclosure, which cover how and when vulnerabilities are made public. Now flaw finders want something in return: more information from software providers on what they are doing to tackle the holes the researchers have reported

17 August 2006

There will be at least 12 planets in our solar system, and probably many more, if a new definition of the word planet is adopted. Next week the International Astronomical Union will vote on a draft definition of what distinguishes a planet from lesser space rocks. The new scheme would retain Pluto — previously threatened with ejection from the club — but it would also admit several new members, including the former asteroid Ceres, and even Charon, which until now has been classed as Pluto's moon. Writers John Scalzi and Scott Westerfield have been having something of an on-going barney over whether or not Pluto is a planet and the whole thing resulted in Cthulhu adjudicating

Google is about to give its hometown a wonderful gift: a municipal wireless network covering the entire city of Mountain View, with free Internet access for both residents and visitors. Google's grand gesture is incomplete in one crucial way — the company will not provide live human tech support, which is often crucial for first-time users

The state of Washington has sued the owners of the Movieland.com, alleging that the company used spyware to strong-arm users into signing up for its paid movie download service

This past weekend, the OSU Linux Users Group descended on a field in Oregon to create a 45,000+ square foot crop circle of Firefox. The photos and write-up are worth checking out — via Slashdot

16 August 2006

The Swedish Pirate Party has launched a commercial, high-capacity darknet, on an unprecedented scale and bandwidth. This service lets anybody send and receive files anonymously without being tracked or traced. There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet, says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check

AMD announced its new Rev F generation of Opteron server processors on Tuesday in the US, the next volley in a competition with Intel's newly competitive Xeon models. The Rev F Opterons, all dual-core models, add new virtualisation abilities and faster memory, run at the same 2.6GHz top speed as preceding mainstream models, and plug into AMD's new Socket F. Although that new socket disrupts server designers' easy upgrade path from one Opteron to the next, it also lays the foundation for quad-core chips in 2007 and for server designs through the end of the decade

RealNetworks will release open-source software this year that will let Linux computers play Windows Media files

Live Writer, a new Microsoft programme for bloggers moves the company further into a growing online market, while competing with some of the smaller players that make similar software for Windows

15 August 2006

The Australian Greens leader Bob Brown has rejected claims he has not tried to contact members of the Exclusive Brethren religious group

Descendants of extinct mammals such as the giant woolly mammoth might one day walk the Earth again. It isn't exactly Jurassic Park, but Japanese researchers are looking at the possibility of using sperm from frozen animals to inseminate living relatives.

After the recent release of AOL search logs, Paul Boutin used the site splunkd.com to analyse the logs. His analysis groups searchers into seven categories: The Pornhound, the Manhunter, the Shopper, the Obsessive, the Omnivore, the Newbie, and the Basketcase. My favorite example search is in the Basketcase category: i hurt when i think too much i love roadtrips i hate my weight i fear being alone for the rest of my life — via Slashdot

14 August 2006

E-mail in-boxes are under a new kind of spam attack. This new spam has confused many people due to its lack of advertising, viruses, or request for personal information. One popular theory is that these innocuous blocks of text, often drawn from popular literature, are being used to un-train spam filters to allow more malicious spam through in the future

Nuclear bombs can kill people even if they're not used. In the US alone, the Department of Energy estimates that more than 2,500 billion litres of groundwater are contaminated with uranium as a consequence of nuclear weapons production. In Uranium 'pearls' before slime, scientists from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory say they discovered that some common bacteria could convert deadly heavy metal into less threatening nano-spheres. In fact, these bacteria can convert soluble radioactive uranium into a non-toxic solid form called uraninite. Still, more research needs to be done before using these bacteria on a large scale, but it's a step in the good direction. Read more for additional references and photos showing how Shewanella oneidensis can help us to decontaminate groundwater at nuclear waste sites — via Slashdot

Dell is recalling 4.1 million notebook computer batteries because they could erupt in flames, the company said Monday. It will be the largest safety recall in the history of the consumer electronics industry

13 August 2006

Google has announced a deal to make the books from the University of California library available online. The agreement bolstered the Google Book Search project, a controversial campaign by the online search juggernaut to digitise all the written works in the world and put them on the internet. The state university system has more than 100 libraries on its 10 campuses and bills the aggregate collection as the largest research and academic library in the world

Since the early 1960s, the man who owns and lives inside the £1m Victorian property has been digging. No one knows how far the the network of burrows underneath 75-year-old William Lyttle's house stretch. But according to the council, which used ultrasound scanners to ascertain the extent of the problem, almost half a century of nibbling dirt with a shovel and homemade pulley has hollowed out a web of tunnels and caverns, some 8m deep, spreading up to 20m in every direction from his house. Their surveyors estimate that the resident known locally as the Mole Man has scooped 100 cubic metres of earth from beneath the roads and houses that surround his 20-room property

The RIAA brought a file-sharing lawsuit against a guy who died; they offered the departed's family a 60-day grieving period before they began to depose his children for the suit against his estate — via Boingboing

12 August 2006

Air travellers leaving the United Kingdom on Thursday faced the strictest security measures in years: iPods, mobile phones, laptops, and even books and magazines were no longer permitted as carry-on items

Sources at PC and notebook component makers indicated that Apple will launch its MacBook laptops using Intel's new 64-bit Merom CPU in September, with associated OEM makers, such as Asustek (MacBook) and Quanta Computer (MacBook Pro), expected to benefit from that

Scientists in England have gathered definitive evidence that a kind of cancer in dogs, known as Sticker's sarcoma, is contagious. It is spread by tumour cells getting passed from dog to dog through sex or from animals biting or licking each other. Robin Weiss and his colleagues did genetic studies on the tumour cells from 40 dogs with Sticker's sarcoma, collected from five continents, which showed that all the tumour cells are clones of each other. The parent cell probably arose in a domesticated dog of Asian origin — perhaps a husky — hundreds of years ago, and perhaps more than 1,000 years ago. A similarly transmissible cancer has recently been discovered spreading through populations of Tasmanian devils

11 August 2006

Sony's new Blu-Ray drives won't be able to play Blu-Ray DVD movies, because they couldn't meet all the requirements set out by the cartel that controls Blu-Ray DRM — via Boingboing

Attack code exploiting a recently-patched vulnerability in Windows operating system has been posted to the Internet, prompting concerns of a widespread attack. The software was added to the widely used Metasploit project — a favorite of both security researchers and malicious hackers — at around 1.00am Thursday morning Pacific Time, according to HD Moore, the Metasploit project leader. It works very reliably against Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems that do not have SP2 [Service Pack 2] installed, he said in an e-mail

Security features in the kernel of Microsoft's forthcoming operating system, Windows Vista, obstruct innovations by antivirus and other security applications, security vendor Symantec has claimed

10 August 2006

US scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory say detecting biowarfare agents will become a lot easier thanks to a new barcode system based on biosensing nanowires

Detective Senior Constable Mark Thomas, an officer involved in the prosecution of 13 accused terrorists, has told a court he gleaned much of his knowledge of terrorism from the internet and admits he's no expert on the subject

The Indian high court has ordered Coke and Pepsi to produce the formulas for their soft-drinks, on the back of a report that says that Pepsi contains 30 times the amount of pesticide reported in 2003, while Coke's level has gone up 25-fold — via Boingboing

09 August 2006

Google has signed a $900m deal with Fox to provide search capabilities for Fox sites, the most noteworthy of which is MySpace. This deal does not include FoxSports.com, which already has a deal with MSN. Google claims that MySpace was an important site to be involved with given its rapid popularity growth. Google also signed a deal with MTV earlier in the week

Researchers at the University of Washington have discovered a possible nonvolatile magnetic semiconductor and are investigating its use for spintronics, an emerging technology that is concerned with manipulating and controlling the charge, flow and magnetism of electrons. The possibilities for the material cobalt green, a paint developed by American Revolution era artists, as a spintronics material is exciting. Should the magnetic properties of the paint at room-temperature prove able to reliably control the wild spinning of excited electrons in a processor, not only could the size of processors reduce substantially, but the constant limiting factor, how to keep things cool, could disappear

Chancellor Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister in waiting, has bought the idea that all electronic transactions in the UK should be linked to a central government/police database. Every cash withdrawal, every credit card purchase, ever loyalty card use... And that data should flow back from the police database to the loyalty card provider. So, for example, not only would the government know what books you were buying, but the bookstore would also know if you had an outstanding speeding ticket

08 August 2006

AOL has released the search logs of over 650,000 users for research purposes. This looks like it may become a public relations disaster for AOL, as well as a privacy nightmare for the users involved as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch notes: AOL has released very private data about its users without their permission. While the AOL username has been changed to a random ID number, the ability to analyze all searches by a single user will often lead people to easily determine who the user is, and what they are up to. The data includes personal names, addresses, social security numbers and everything else someone might type into a search box — via Slashdot

The nation of Cameroon, which controls the .cm top level domain, has typo-squatted all of the .com domain space. They have placed a wildcard DNS record to redirect all traffic to an ad-based search page. Unlike the earlier case of Verisign putting a wildcard in the real .com domain, ICANN has very little direct control over what a nation can do with their own TLD — via Slashdot

07 August 2006

Reading blogs via popular RSS or Atom feeds may expose computer users to hacker attacks, a security expert warns. Attackers could insert malicious JavaScript in content that is transferred to subscribers of data feeds that use the popular RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom formats, Bob Auger, a security engineer with Web security company SPI Dynamics, said last Thursday in a presentation at the Black Hat security event in Las Vegas

Google has started warning people when search results could potentially lead them to malicious code. The search giant is using data from the Stop Badware Coalition to flag sites that are potentially host to malicious software. Google, along with Sun Microsystems and Chinese PC maker Lenovo, announced support for the group in January. People who attempt to go to a Web site that has been identified as risky by the coalition are taken to a warning page. Warning — the site you are about to visit may harm your computer! the page states in bold type, then suggesting users can learn more about malware and how to protect yourself at StopBadware.org

06 August 2006

How much greater data density? In the Hitachi Maxell device, a single disc about 1 cm larger in diameter than a CD will buy you 300GB. By way of contrast, HD-DVD currently offers a maximum of 30GB on a 2-layer disc, and Blu-ray tops out at 50GB. Although upgrades are in the works that promise to increase the capacity of both of those formats, even the most pie-in-the-sky predictions fall short of what is planned for merely the first commercial generation of holographic storage. Future plans for that medium include boosting the capacity to 800GB in two years, and 1.6TB per disc by 2010

The Domesday Book has gone online. As one of the earliest public records goes online, anyone with an internet connection will be able to access this important document. Amongst other interesting facts, the BBC is reporting that the Book can still be used today in court for property disputes. In an interesting development, the National Archives are making online searches free, but downloads of data will cost £3.50. Similar launches of historical web sites in the past have struggled to keep up with server loads in their first days and weeks, so it remains to be seen whether the Domesday Book online will be more or less fragile than the parchment originals — via Slashdot

Brazil has published a list of more than 5,000 generic terms from the Portuguese language related to Brazilian plant biological diversity to raise awareness and prevent further misuse of trademarks that hinder Brazilian exports. The Brazilian government has been, and is, involved in a number of trademark disputes with companies that, for example, take a name of a fruit in Brazilian Portuguese and trademark it to get exclusive rights to commercialise it under that name in a certain country or region. This hinders Brazilian exports, especially when it happens in larger markets, Cristiano Franco Berbert of the Permanent Mission of Brazil in Geneva told Intellectual Property Watch

05 August 2006

French scientists demonstrated that seaweed, when burned to a crisp, is a great material for making supercapacitors that could provide more power than traditional batteries — via Boingboing

A shape-shifting lens has been developed that alters its focal length when squeezed by an artificial muscle, rather like the lens in a human eye. The muscle, a ring of polymer gel, expands and contracts in response to environmental changes, eliminating the need for electronics to power or control the devices

om3ga has performed an experiment as to the best method to fix scratched CDs. He set himself the criteria that it can't take longer that 5 minutes and it has to be something in his house. The result isn't what you'd think... Hair Gel — via Slashdot

04 August 2006

Green Wi-Fi is a non-profit that seeks to provide last mile internet access with nothing more than a single broadband internet connection, rooftops and the sun. Their wi-fi access nodes, which consist of a small solar panel, a heavy-duty battery, and a router, can be linked together to extend one internet connection into a larger network

Last week the BBC demanded video host YouTube remove many copies of its Top Gear TV service from its web site. That was because, this week, the BBC made Top Gear available in its entirety on-line at BBC2 — via digg

YouTube removed all parody/fanfilm/spoof Star Wars content two days ago due to copyright violation. This morning, in an incredibly awesome PR move, Lucasfilm contacted YouTube, and told them to put it all back online — every last one — via digg

Telstra's hopes of building a $3.4 billion fibre broadband network are near collapse, with negotiations between telco and competition regulator set to be abandoned as early as today

03 August 2006

Time Warner says its plan for AOL to offer free email and web services will generate higher profits starting next year, rejecting Wall Street concerns that the move could destroy the internet division's main source of revenue

Computer researchers are developing a prototype architecture for halting distributed denial-of-service attacks, where a barrage of traffic is directed at a server to shut it down

Looks like a theoretical physicist at St Andrews University in Scotland believes that invisibility may be possible. And its not going to be a potion or a cloak, but will come in the form of a device

02 August 2006

German scientists may have found a way to significantly reduce the radioactive decay time of nuclear waste. This could render the waste harmless in just tens of years and make disposal much less difficult as opposed to current standards — via Slashdot

Armor Holdings plans to start selling their liquid armour next year. The new armour, originally envisioned to be spread on like peanut butter, is instead sprayed onto Kevlar in ultrathin coats. It's a mix of polyethylene glycol, a polymer found in laxatives and other consumer products, and nanobits of silica, or purified sand. Together they produce a sheer-thickening liquid that stiffens instantly into a shield when hit hard by an object. It reverts to its liquid state just as fast when the energy from the projectile dissipates — via Slashdot

01 August 2006

Boston is toying with a somewhat unique approach to their version of the city-wide low-cost wireless network. Rather than put the network in the hands of a private organisation under contract the city may allow a non-profit group to run the show — via Slashdot

The federal government may tap the vast pool of social resources behind blogs and websites such as Flickr and Wikipedia to boost its online information services

Call centre and technology jobs have been the main target of offshoring to low-cost operations in places such as India and the Philippines, but journalism is in the sights of one of India's largest offshorers

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