October 2006 Archive

31 October 2006

MySpace has licensed new technology to stop users from posting unauthorised copyrighted music. The move comes amid pressure from major studios and record labels against popular online sites like MySpace and YouTube, which they accuse of infringing the copyrights of their artists' music and videos. MySpace, one of the most popular sites on the internet, has licensed technology from privately-held Gracenote allowing it to review music recordings uploaded by community members to their profiles

A Perth-based company has been fined $5.5 million for sending millions of unsolicited emails, with a judge labelling the spam annoying, costly to combat, and a threat to the internet

30 October 2006

The FBI has raided the home of Christopher Soghoian, the grad student who created the NWA boarding pass site. Details can be found on his blog including a scanned copy of the warrant. The bad news is that he really did break the law. The good news is that Senator Charles Schumer did it first, 19 months ago, on an official government website no less. The outcome of this trial should be at least academically interesting. At best, it could result in nullifying some portion of the law(s) that the TSA operates under — via Slashdot

What happens when a film studio and a fanbase get into bed? Fans of Joss Whedon's Firefly, and the movie by Universal Studios — Serenity — are not amused. After being encouraged to viral market Serenity, the studio has started legal action against fans (demanding $9000 in retroactive licensing fees in one case and demanding fan promotion stop), and going after Cafepress. The fans response? Retroactively invoice Universal for their services — via Slashdot

New studies on rogue elephants have determined that they rape and kill rhinoceroses; attack villages with intelligent measures like blocking escape routes and pinning down humans before goring them to death; and display psychological traits previously only observed in people — via Rogue Jeff

29 October 2006

A Texas judge has refused to allow the RIAA untrammelled access to the defendant's hard drive in Sony v Arellanes. The court ruled that only a mutually agreeable, neutral computer forensics expert may examine the hard drive, at the RIAA's expense, and that the parties must agree on mutually acceptable provisions for confidentiality — via Slashdot

Either Lieutenant Colonel John Pine-Coffin has the strangest military career in history or the obituary writers at the Telegraph have been indulging in long lunches. In 1963 he was in Nassau when he was ordered to investigate a party of Cuban exiles that had infiltrated Andros Island, part of the Bahamas. His seaplane landed in thick mud and Pine-Coffin decided that his only chance of reaching dry land was to strip off. On coming ashore, plastered in mud and wearing only a red beret and a pair of flippers, he was confronted by a party of armed Cubans. Mustering as much authority as he could in the circumstances, he informed the group that they were trespassing on British sovereign territory and were surrounded. The following morning, when the Royal Marines arrived to rescue him they were astonished to find him and his radio operator in a clearing standing guard over the Cubans and a pile of surrendered weapons. He was appointed OBE — via Charlie Stross

In a stealth manoeuvre, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy, will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law. It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President's ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act, helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions

28 October 2006

The dye in your blue jeans could soon be used to kill cancer cells, say scientists. UK researchers are employing tiny gold nanoparticles, 1/5000th the thickness of a human hair, to deliver the chemical compound directly into cancer cells, tearing them apart instantly. The common dye found in blue jeans and ballpoint pens is called phthalocyanine and is a light-activated, or photosensitive, agent with cell-destroying properties

EO-1 is a new breed of satellite that can think for itself. EO-1 can re-organise its own priorities to study volcanic eruptions, flash-floods, forest fires, disintegrating sea-ice--in short, anything unexpected

23 year old Grant Stanley has been sentenced to five months in prison, followed by five months of home detention and a $3000 fine for the work he put in the private BitTorrent tracker Elitetorrents

27 October 2006

The music, movie and software cartels claim piracy is a number one problem not only for themselves, but for the world as a whole and so successful are their continuing dis- and misinformation propaganda campaigns that they've been able to dragoon entire governments and police forces into acting as industry enforcers. But far from being at the top of the pile, movie and music piracy rank 16th and 20th, respectively, on a global index of illicit markets. Software piracy ranks 7th. And even those positions are subject to considerable doubt

A Tower of Babel device that gives the illusion of being bilingual is being developed by US scientists. Users simply have to silently mouth a word in their own language for it to be translated and read out in another. The researchers said the effect was like watching a television programme that had been dubbed

SpamThru, a horribly ingenious new piece of malware, downloads and installs its own anti-virus software, which it then uses to detect and remove competing malicious software installed by other hackers on the same system — via Boingboing

26 October 2006

Vodafone Australia is poised to turn its back on its 12-year mobile-only strategy, and planning to open a tender for a landline broadband partner, with the aim of earning $200 million in revenue from fixed-line services within three years

Microsoft has made its Sender ID Framework available to developers who want to create services or products that use the authentication technology for cutting back on spam

China is moving to require people to use their real names when blogging. The proposed solution, arrived at by the Internet Society of China (affiliated with the ministry of information) would allow bloggers to use a pseudonym when blogging as long as they used their real name when registering — via Slashdot

25 October 2006

US customs officials have the authority to scrutinise the contents of travelers' laptops and even confiscate laptops for a period of time, without giving a reason

Firefox 2.0 has officially been released on Mozilla.com. Here are the builds for all languages and Win/Linux/Mac and the release notes

Google has unveiled a free programme called Google Custom Search Engine that lets users tailor a search index to their content specifications. You can select keywords for the index, as well as which web sites will be included or excluded in the search. You also may customise the look and feel of the engine. The trade-off? When you implement the index on your web site or blog, it will be populated with Google text ads via Google's lucrative AdSense Program. On the plus side, you do get paid for click-throughs — via Slashdot

24 October 2006

Sun intends to begin open-sourcing Java by the end of this year and complete the process in 2007, according to the company's executive vice president of software, Rich Green

Google has launched a new customisable search function for third parties that allows them to filter search results to suit their own purposes. Known as the Google Custom Search Engine, the search function will be provided free by Google for use on other web sites, with results displayed on the host's web site, rather than on a Google page

Telecom New Zealand is making a further attempt to offload its struggling Australian business AAPT, opening talks with a number of junior telcos less than six months after failing to find a buyer for around $450 million. TNZ is now believed to be in talks with NSW-based Soul — which is controlled by WH Soul Pattison — about selling its retail fixed-line business, the fourth biggest in the country. AAPT is also in separate talks with infrastructure player Powertel — which holds a 19 per cent stake in Perth-based broadband company iiNet — to build a credible third force in broadband internet services

Chilli Internet is the latest iBurst wireless reseller to reveal it will block customers trying to use peer-to-peer file sharing

23 October 2006

The US has banned Vegemite, even to the point of searching Australians for jars of the spread when they enter the country. The bizarre crackdown was prompted because Vegemite has been deemed illegal under US food laws. The great Aussie icon — faithfully carried around the world by travellers from downunder — contains folate, which under a technicality, America allows to be added only to breads and cereals

Boy Scouts in the Los Angeles area will now be able to earn a merit patch for learning about the evils of downloading pirated movies and music. Nothing like getting early brainwashing from corporate America

22 October 2006

Bill Crozier, one of Oklahoma's nominees for state superintendent of education has proposed a unique, if incredibly moronic idea for protecting students from outbreaks of violence. If elected, he said he would put thick used textbooks under every desk for students to use, not for the purposes of education, but as body armour — Pharyngula

The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online has officially launched, bringing 50,000 pages of searchable text and 40,000 images to the public for free. Presented by the University of Cambridge and other collaborators, the site currently contains only half of what will be available by 2009 — via Boingboing

A key oversight agency has approved a .asia domain for Internet addresses, supplementing suffixes available for individual countries, such as .cn for China and .jp for Japan. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers earlier approved .eu for the European Union. Made up of groups that run domain names for China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and other countries, the DotAsia Organisation plans to explore permitting domain names in Asian languages under .asia

21 October 2006

Union Products, the original manufacturer of the plastic pink flamingo, will close its doors by 1 Novemebr, according to the company's president. Production of the flamingos stopped in June, along with the company's other product lines, and the company is now in the process of liquidation, according to its president, Dennis Plante — via Improbable Research

Undersound is a new project to distribute music around the London Underground trains. Users can upload songs from their collections to centralised distribution points, and download tracks left by other users. The system keeps tack of which tracks came from what station — via Boingboing

First, they threatened to sue over a song. Then they shut down his web site. In its losing battle with a maverick comic, the government of Kazakhstan even took out full-page newspaper adverts to confront what it saw as damaging slurs. Yesterday, however, Kazakhstan made an abrupt change of tack in its attempts to stifle Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedian who has made the oil-rich Central Asian country an international laughing stock. The deputy foreign minister, Rakhat Aliyev, invited Cohen to visit the country he has lampooned across the globe

20 October 2006

Less than 24 hours after the launch of Internet Explorer 7, security researchers are poking holes in the new browser. Danish security company Secunia reported today that IE7 contains an information disclosure vulnerability, the same one it reported in IE6 in April. The vulnerability affects the final version of IE7 running on Windows XP with Service Pack 2

Microsoft has released the long-awaited version of the Internet Explorer 7 browser for the Windows XP operating system. It is the first major new version of Internet Explorer since 2001. IE 7 for Windows XP is available as a free download, and it also will be offered as a high-priority update via Microsoft's Automatic Updates service starting in November.

An invisibility cloak that works in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum has been unveiled in the US. While not quite as effective as Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, the device is the first practical version of a theoretical set-up first suggested by physicists earlier this year. About the size of a movie reel canister, the cloak works by steering microwave light around an object, making it appear to an observer as if it were not there at all

19 October 2006

ICANN has reviewed the Spamhaus-e360 case, according to a statement from the domain-name agency, and noted that it has no knowledge as to the merits of e360's claim against Spamhaus and why Spamhaus did not appear in court to defend itself. However, ICANN did say that it would be unable to comply with a court order to suspend the spamhaus.org domain, if one is handed down

News Corporation has bought a 7.5 per cent stake in the John Fairfax newspaper group, as Rupert Murdoch's media empire moves to take advantage of changes to Australia's ownership laws. The company launched a share raid on Fairfax last night, snapping up 7.5 per cent of the group for $364 million. News Corp bought the shares at $5.20, in a big premium on yesterday's closing price of $4.74. The move is the latest in a rapid series of media manoeuvres that have followed the passage of the new ownership laws through Federal Parliament

Aladdin has come up with a new way of restricting the data stored on optical discs. It's XCD format has a chip built directly into the disc and which fits into a USB port. So, a user needs to plug the disc into their computer to access a cryptophic key before being able to use the data stored on the disc (presumably in some sort of proprietary player) — via Slashdot

Google plans a solar-powered electricity system at its Silicon Valley headquarters that will rank as the largest US solar-powered corporate office complex. The Web search leader said it is set to begin building a rooftop solar-powered generation system at its Mountain View, California headquarters capable of generating 1.6 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power 1,000 California homes

18 October 2006

Some video iPods made after 12 September have the RavMonE virus loaded onto it. In Apple's announcement they take a swipe at Windows security and encourage Windows users to install anti virus applications

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, an international version of the MPAA, is breathing down the necks of 8,000 users of file-sharing software. The new cases cover file sharers in 17 different countries who have been allegedly using sites including BitTorrent, eDonkey, SoulSeek and WinMX. For the first time legal action is being taken in Brazil, Mexico and Poland. The IFPI said the actions affect a wide-variety of people: a laboratory assistant has been charged in Finland, while a parson has been served with action in Germany

Creative Labs has updated two of its MP3 players in order to break their FM radio recorder features. If you bought your Creative device because it said, Record FM radio! on the box, you're shit outta luck now -- Creative just stole that value out from under your nose. Guess that means I'm not going to be buying anymore Creative devices — via Boingboing

17 October 2006

Wired News editor and former hacker Kevin Poulsen wrote a 1,000-line Perl script that checked MySpace for registered sex offenders. Sifting through the results, he manually confirmed over 700 offenders, including a serial child molester in New York actively trying to hook up with underage boys on the site, and who has now been arrested as a result. MySpace told Congress last June that it didn't have this capability. Wired News says they will publish Poulsen's code under an open-source license later this week — via Slashdot

Just days after patching four bugs in PowerPoint, Microsoft is warning of a new attack targeting its presentation software. Microsoft is not aware of any attacks that take advantage of the bug, but with code now in circulation on public Web sites like Securitydot.net, the attack is easily available to attackers

Microsoft is making several key changes to its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system in an attempt to soothe European antitrust worries, while keeping its worldwide distribution plans on schedule

16 October 2006

The details of a day in the lives of hundreds of thousands of Britons will reportedly be recorded and compiled into a digital time capsule that will be stored permanently at the British Library. The One Day in History project, described as a blog for the national record, will feature British celebrities such as actors Stephen Fry and Derek Jacobi, and the writer Bill Bryson contributing to the compilation, along with any Briton with access to the internet who wants to participate

15 October 2006

The Australian ISP Exetel has decided to cut bandwidth for P2P traffic in half from noon to midnight. This move will save Exetel about $45,000 per month, while it only takes $75,000 to implement the bandwidth throttling mechanisms

A Hungarian airport has been bilked into trying an insane scheme to RFID-track every passenger. This panopticon was invented by snake-oil salesmen from University College London. It will track every passenger to within one meter, and it will contain countermeasures to prevent passengers from removing or trading their snitch-tags. The idea is that safety is something abstract that can be enhanced by treating air travelers like rapists on day-release — as opposed to each traveller's personal security of being free, and un-spied-upon. Imagine the things a terrorist could do with perfect knowledge of the location of every passenger in the airport: I think we'll put the bomb there — via Boingboing

14 October 2006

In conflict zones, children are often killed by the live leftovers of war — unexploded bombs or landmines can be mistaken as toys. In Singapore, activist and designer Rapp Collins created frisbees that look like landmines, and volunteers are scattering them throughout the city — via Boingboing

Eudora is going open source — it'll be based on Thunderbird, the email client from the Mozilla foundation, the folks who run the Firefox project — via Boingboing

China has partially unblocked Wikipedia. Wikipedia refused to censor itself to appease totalitarian Beijing, but China unblocked it anyway. China needs Wikipedia and Chinese net-users would access it using circumvention tools — the block on Wikipedia made Chinese Wikipedia users into automatic dissidents. Readers in China report having problems getting to the Chinese language version, and English-language articles on certain subjects, such as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 — via Boingboing

13 October 2006

The US Department of Homeland Security plans to develop software that analyses and summarises opinions expressed in articles, providing a possible tool for better monitoring what is written about the United States in the global press

Social networking web giant MySpace.com has moved to protect its Australian operation and users from music copyright infringements

12 October 2006

Google has finally integrated Writely and spreadsheets into Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Writely.com now redirects to this new location. The design has also changed to match the look of other Google services

Microsoft appears to be more deeply involved in SCO's legal battles against Linux than previously reported

IceWeasel is a version of Firefox created for use in free operating systems like Debian (and its derivatives, such as Ubuntu), which eschew any element that can't be freely reused by anyone, for any reason. Iceweasel was developed because Firefox and the Firefox logo are trademarked, and because some of the default Firefox plugins can't be freely redistributed. Iceweasel will be synchronized with the current Firefox release, but without the non-free artwork and plugins — via Boingboing

11 October 2006

An international team of scientists has discovered a substance to heal bleeding wounds within seconds. They're using a solution of protein molecules that self-organises into a biodegradable gel. Until now they've only tested it on animals, but the tests were highly successful — via Slashdot

Mexico's Teotihuacan, once the center of a sprawling pre-Hispanic empire, is set to become the launch pad for an attempt to communicate with extraterrestrial life. Starting Tuesday, enthusiasts from around the world have a chance to submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature to be included in the message. Those contributions — part of media company Yahoo's Time Capsule project — will be digitalised and beamed with a laser into space 25 October from the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, now an archeological site near Mexico City

CNet looks at what happens to the loved ones of people who take their passwords to the grave — Microsoft and Yahoo will provide you with your departed's mail (but Yahoo requires a court order!), while data that is locked up locally may not be retrievable at all — via Boingboing

10 October 2006

iiNet has sold its New Zealand operations, ihug, to mobile phone giant Vodafone for $NZ41 million (AU$36.4 million). ihug, New Zealand's third biggest internet service provider, was put up for sale in July after iiNet said it had received a large number of approaches to buy the company

Google Buys YouTube Google has agreed to purchase online video phenomenon YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. YouTube will operate independently, and the companies will work together on building new features for independent users as well as for aspiring directors, they said in a press release. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2006

09 October 2006

Apple has admitted problems getting hold of enough replacement parts to repair faulty MacBooks that have been randomly shutting down. Many owners of Apple's MacBook, which was launched in May, subsequently complained about the computer randomly shutting down after a couple of months use. The issue was caused by faulty logic boards (motherboards), problematic heat-sinks or a combination of both

A UK firm is hoping a mobile phone security system it has developed which sets off a high pitch scream, permanently locks the handset and wipes all data if stolen, will halt the spiraling rise in phone theft. The sound will only stop if the battery runs out or is removed, but it will begin again as soon as the battery is replaced or charged. Even replacing the SIM card will not help

President Bush, again defying Congress via a signing statement, says he has the power to edit the Homeland Security Department's reports about whether it obeys privacy rules while handling background checks, ID cards and watchlists

08 October 2006

Anna Politkovskaya, a prominent Russian journalist known as a fierce critic of the Kremlin's actions in Chechnya, has been found dead in Moscow. The 48-year-old mother of two was found shot dead in a lift at her apartment block in the capital. A pistol and four bullets were found near her body and a murder investigation has been launched — via Warren Ellis

Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's Good Omens is closer to being made into a film by director Terry Gilliam... if the director can track down a coin that hasn't been minted since the 1780s called a groat — via Boingboing

Mark Thomas, the stand-up comedian, has done more to expose illegal arms deals than the Ministry of Defence, the Export Control Organisation and HM Revenue and Customs put together, simply by searching the internet and the trade press and attending the arms fairs the British government hosts — via Defense Tech

07 October 2006

Google has launched Google Code Search, which the company says will let programmers search billions of lines of code for tips on how to write their own software. The service, conceived by the Google Labs early technology group, will crawl publicly available code, most of which is made available through open-source projects. The search and indexing covers code on Web pages and code that resides in compressed files. Google expects that the search engine will be used primarily as a learning tool to help students and serious programmers, rather than a way to find and copy another person's code. Hackers immediately found new and interesting uses for it

An undercover TV investigation claims to have infiltrated criminal gangs selling thousands of UK credit card and passport details for as little as US$9.50 each from offshore call centres. The Dispatches documentary, shown on UK's Channel 4, follows a 12-month investigation. It included footage of middlemen offering an undercover reporter the credit card details gleaned from Indian call centres of 100,000 UK bank customers

Telstra has launched a AU$1 billion NEXT G mobile broadband network, offering high-speed wireless mobile and Internet access to 98 percent of Australians. NEXT G, which boasts 12 channels of Foxtel television, sport and movie downloads, is more than 100 times bigger geographically and up to five times faster than any other 3GSM network in Australia

06 October 2006

The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize in mathematics was awarded to Dr Piers Barnes and Ms Nic Svenson of CSIRO for figuring out how many photographs to take of a group of people to be confident of getting at least one where no-one's blinking

Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have teleported matter. The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter but believe it can be extended further — via Boingboing

Whether you're looking to exact revenge on a cheating spouse or to simply quiet that noisy neighbor once and for all, InstantHitman.com can help. Let our team of experienced contract killers make a bold statement on your behalf! If you're reading this fine print, you're either a search engine, a lawyer, or just really bored. In any event, this site is obviously a joke. Please, don't kill anyone, and don't hire anyone to kill anyone. Got it?

05 October 2006

Amazon's A9 search engine has dropped some of its most widely touted features, including the ability to remember everything a user has ever searched for and a service that showed detailed, street-level images of major cities

In evolutionary circles, giant rats and miniature elephants have long been accepted as the products of accelerated evolution in isolated environments such as islands, but McGill paleontologist Virginie Millien has been the first to establish just how quickly these odd-shaped animals got that way. In fact, island mammals evolve about three times faster than their mainland counterparts, says Dr. Millien, who based her findings on an analysis of the documented evolutionary rates of 88 island mammal species, about half of which were rodents — via Warren Ellis

Can a surveillance drone be made virtually invisible? VeraTech, a US company thinks so, and their patent application explains how. Persistence of vision turns the fast-moving rotors of any helicopter into a near-transparent blur, while the slow-moving body looks solid. So why not make the entire aircraft spin as it flies, turning it into a single faint blur in the sky?

04 October 2006

The US government is loosening its grip on the domain name system and is edging closer to giving ICANN a greater measure of autonomy in making decisions about the future of the Internet

A hoop of superconducting magnets several kilometres wide and similar to a particle accelerator could hurl satellites into space — or perhaps weapons around the world — at a fraction of current launch costs, suggest the findings of a report funded by the US air force. Their interest stems from the ring's potential to launch small, 10-kilogram satellites into orbit, though researchers were not told what kind of satellites the military had in mind. Any payload lofted with such a ring would need to withstand a staggering 2000 times the force of gravity as it accelerates to over 23 times the speed of sound — before hitting a ramp into the heavens

Jon Lech Johansen, known as DVD Jon after he cracked CSS encryption at the age of 15, has now reverse-engineered Apple's FairPlay DRM — but not to crack it. Instead Johansen's company, DoubleTwist Ventures, wants to license the tech to media companies shut out by Apple from playing their content on the iPod. And, soon, on the iTV. Johansen could end up selling a lot of hardware for Apple

A 29-year old Swede, who was the first to be convicted under last year's new file-sharing laws, has been cleared on appeal. The court of appeal did not consider the screen dumps provided by the Antipiracy Bureau enough evidence to be able to convict the man. Since the crime does not carry a high enough punishment under Swedish law to allow for a search of the defendant's house, this means it will be virtually impossible to prove file-sharing crimes in the future

03 October 2006

International security expert Bruce Schneier claimed processing power has increased to such a degree that data has become a pollutant

Alton Verm, an unbelievably stupid man from Texas, is fired up because the Conroe Independent School District uses the book Fahrenheit 451 as classroom reading material. He wants to ban a book about book burning because It's just all kinds of filth. Not that he'd know, because he hasn't even read it — via killfile.newsvine.com

Academics may be given limited access to books banned under terrorism laws, Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock says. His comments came after the University of Melbourne removed three books from its library, fearful it may be breaking laws which prevent the distribution of literature which praises terrorism or terrorists — via Gideon Polya

Yahoo is set to allow third-party developers to use its consumer e-mail programme create new web services

02 October 2006

A flexible material that automatically repairs damage and also pinpoints where it has been wounded has been developed by US researchers. They say it could eventually prove useful for airplane maintenance

Dell has started a US recycling program that features free home pickup of any Dell computer or peripheral. Dell already offers similar programs in Europe and Canada. After enduring tough criticism over the years from environmental groups, tech companies have started offering more ways for consumers to properly dispose of computer gadgets and to conserve electricity while using computer gear. Among tech companies, environmental advocacy group Greenpeace has singled out Dell and mobile-phone maker Nokia for their ecologically conscientious policies

01 October 2006

A woman in Surrey, England couldn't figure out why her car wouldn't start. An Automobile Association patrolman arrived on the scene and the two realised that the woman's dog had swallowed the car's immobiliser chip fob. The immobiliser contains an RFID chip that must be within a certain proximity of the steering column for the key to work. The patrolman put the dog in the front seat, turned the key and the car started right up — via Boingboing

The format war on next generation DVD may be over before it has begun, thanks to a breakthrough by a British media technology company. New Medium Enterprises claims to have solved a technical production problem that makes it possible to produce a cheap, multiple-layer DVD disk containing one film in different, competing formats

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