November 2006 Archive

30 November 2006

An official document (PDF), dated 19 November, summarises an agreement between the US and Russia in which Russia has agreed to close down AllofMP3.com, and any sites that permit illegal distribution of music and other copyright works. The agreement is posted to the web site for the Office of the US Trade Representative. It summarises the joint efforts of the two countries to fight content piracy, an issue in which Russia and Eastern Europe figure prominently

Using cheap acoustic sensors the surface of any 3D object can be instantly made into a touch-sensitive interface capable of tracking two objects at once. Its creators are planning to make hospitals more hygienic — keyboards and mice will be replaced by desks wired to perform as keyboards and touchpads

29 November 2006

The NSW state government will in early 2007 go shopping for suppliers to establish universal coverage of free Wi-Fi in Sydney's central business district (including North Sydney), in addition to the suburbs of Parramatta, Penrith and Liverpool and outlying cities Newcastle, Wollongong and Gosford

IE and Firefox might vie for dominion in desktop browsing, but Opera, makers of a browser that comes in desktop, smartphone, and mobile phone versions, wants to control the mobile space

Starting next year, French deputies will use desktops and servers running Linux, Mozilla's Firefox Web browser, and OpenOffice.org, an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office

28 November 2006

Sir Cliff Richard appears set to lose a battle to extend the number of years that musicians can receive royalties for their records. He wants copyright to last 95 years, rather than the present 50 years. But an independent review is to recommend the terms are not extended, a well-placed government source has said

A homeowners association in southwestern Colorado has threatened to fine a resident $25 a day until she removes a Christmas wreath with a peace sign that some say is an anti-Iraq war protest or a symbol of Satan — via Pagan Prattle

Here's yet another way to dodge the irksome requirement of presenting a valid e-mail address to register for a Web site: 10 Minute Mail, a Seam-based Web application that fills the bill just long enough to get you onto the site... and then disappears. No fuss, no muss, and best of all, no spam

27 November 2006

Bob Averill, a student at the Art Institute of Portland, claims he was expelled for being an atheist after he challenged a young woman's belief in the ludicrous. I jokingly asked her if she believed in leprechauns. It turns out, she does. They live on another energy layer, Averill told the Portland Mercury. In the interest of bringing my own view to the discussion, I began to ask her how she knew these things. Again I know all too well that people can be sensitive about their spiritual beliefs, so I was pretty much walking on glass as I did so. The other student complained to the teacher, and Averill was eventually expelled — via killfile

YouTube is coming to mobile phones — or, to be more precise, a small slice of YouTube is coming to some Verizon Wireless phones. While its explosively popular Web site is free, YouTube's phone-based version will require a $15-a-month subscription to a Verizon Wireless service called VCast. And instead of choosing what to watch from a vast library of clips, VCast users will be limited to an unspecified number of videos selected and approved by the companies

26 November 2006

24-year-old Sainul Abideen thinks he's come up with an alternative to CDs and other data storage options that'll allow for greater storage capacities and be cheaper and biodegradable to boot, using a fancy printing technique he's devised to cram loads of data onto a plain old sheet of paper. The system appears to be somewhat similar to QR Codes and other newfangled bar code-type technologies currently in use in parts of the world other than here, but Abideen's Rainbow Versitile Disc can apparently store far more amounts of data than those — between 90 and 450GB — via Kyle B

A new telescope has been unveiled in Mexico by President Vicente Fox. The Large Millimeter Telescope will be used to pick up electromagnetic radiation known as millimetre waves emitted 13 billion years ago, when the first stars burst into existence, astrophysicists say. The $128M telescope is a joint project between Mexico and the US. With an antenna diameter of 164 feet, the LMT dwarfs existing millimetre-wave telescopes and should be able to pick up signals from the faintest objects in outer space

Researchers at the University of Rochester have found a way to change the properties of almost any metal by using a femtosecond laser pulse. This ultra-intense laser blast creates true black metal from copper, gold or zinc by forming nanostructures at the surface of the metal. As these nanostructures capture radiation, the metals turn black. And as the process needs surprisingly low power, it could soon be used for a variety of applications, such as stealth planes, black jewels or car paintings

25 November 2006

Mozilla's Firefox 2.0 has long been considered a safer Web browser than Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but a new flaw in the Firefox Password Manager could let hackers steal login data

It's been more than 100 years since the discovery of the 2,000-year-old Antikythera Mechanism, but researchers are only now figuring out how it works. Since its discovery in 1902, the Antikythera Mechanism — with its intricate and baffling system of about 30 geared wheels — has been an enigma... During the last 50 years, researchers have identified various astronomical and calendar functions, including gears that mimic the movement of the sun and moon. But it has taken some of the most advanced technology of the 21st century to decipher during the past year the most advanced technology of the 1st century BC

From 8 December, it will be once more legal to own and operate an MP3 Transmitter in the UK, primarily used to convey music between an MP3 player such as Apple's iPod to your home or car stereo. The device was originally banned because their transmissions can override and interfere with legal radio stations, which is prohibited by the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949. Strong consumer demand for the devices and pressure from Liberal Democrats were among the primary motivators for the amendment

24 November 2006

Mobile phone owners will be allowed to break software locks on their handsets in order to use them with competing carriers under new copyright rules. Other copyright exemptions approved by the Library of Congress will let film professors copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books. All told, Librarian of Congress James H Billington approved six exemptions, the most his Copyright Office has ever granted. For the first time, the office exempted groups of users. The new rules will take effect Monday and expire in three years. In granting the exemption for mobile phone users, the Copyright Office determined that consumers aren't able to enjoy full legal use of their handsets because of software locks that wireless providers have been placing to control access to phones' underlying programs

Toshiba plans to release another marvel next year, an SD card that can hold a whopping 8GB of data. That's 2,000 songs or 2,500 pictures from a 6-megapixel digital camera

Rubber tyres, the kind that lie at the bottom of rivers and at the back of junkyards the world over, could be ideal water filters says an environmental engineer at Penn State university in the US. Yuefeng Xie says his crumb rubber suffers none of the problems of traditional water filtration systems and as a result can filter wastewater up to four times faster

23 November 2006

Scientists have taught dolphins to combine both rhythm and vocalisations to produce music, resulting in an extremely high-pitched, short version of the Batman theme song. The findings, outlined in two studies, are the first time that nonhuman mammals have demonstrated they can recognise rhythms and reproduce them vocally

Thiago Olson, a 17 year old Michigan teen, was able to create a small fusion device in his parents' basement. The machine uses a 40,000 volt charge and deuterium gas to create the small reaction, which he says looks like a small intense ball of energy. The teen's fusion device is obviously not a self-sustaining reactor, but it still shows how fusion technology is becoming more accessible. Hopefully this points to a future where large scale fusion reactors are both economical and widely used

22 November 2006

It's a huge challenge: how to store digital files so future generations can access them, from engineering plans to family photos. The documents of our time are being recorded as bits and bytes with no guarantee of readability down the line. And as technologies change, we may find our files frozen in forgotten formats. Popular Mechanics asks: Will an entire era of human history be lost?

After three years of delays, a massive database containing personal information on every Australian with a phone number could soon be protected. A Bill before federal Parliament includes fines up to $66,000 or two years imprisonment for anyone misusing personal information in the Telstra-managed phone directory. It is three years since the Australian Communications and Media Authority raised concerns about misuse of data in the Integrated Public Number Database, a complete and always up-to-date electronic directory of all listed and unlisted phone numbers and contact details. It is used by emergency services, telcos and producers of public number databases, but only emergency services are authorised to access silent lines

Tipped off by three plastic pipes mysteriously skimming the ocean's surface, authorities seized a homemade submarine packed with three tons of cocaine off Costa Rica's Pacific coast. Four men traveled inside the 50-foot wood and fiberglass craft, breathing through the pipes. The craft sailed along at about 7 mph, just 6 feet beneath the surface

21 November 2006

A law is being rushed through the Australian legislature that will criminalise great swaths of the citizenry. The Internet Industry Association of Australia is posting warning scenarios spelling out how far-reaching this law would be

Local broadband TV provider ReelTime Media is negotiating with at least two US studios to enable Australian consumers to download episodes of US TV series 24 hours after transmission there. If negotiations are successful, it will shake up free-to-air TV, which holds back broadcasting many US TV program seasons for the Australian ratings season between February and November. Any deal would allow consumers to download episodes for 72 hours only. Any such partnership will be keenly contested by the Australian commercial networks

Universal Music Group has filed a lawsuit against MySpace for infringing copyrights of thousands of its artists' works. Universal, owned by French media giant Vivendi, filed the suit at the US District Court Central District of California, Western Division. The lawsuit accuses MySpace of allowing users to upload videos illegally and taking part in the infringement by re-formatting the videos to be played back or sent to others

20 November 2006

Unlike salamanders and lizards, most animals have lost the ability to replace missing limbs. But a research team in San Diego has been able to regenerate a wing in a chicken embryo — a species not known to be able to regrow limbs — suggesting the potential for such regeneration exists innately in all vertebrates, including humans

Lauren Weinstein raises an alarm about a new Google service, Click-to-Call. The service seems ripe for abuse of several kinds. One red flag is that Google falsifies the caller-ID of calls it originates for the service. Up to now, the typical available avenue for manipulating caller-ID has been pay services that tended to limit the potential for large-scale abuse since users are charged for access. Google, by providing a free service that will place calls and manipulate caller-ID, vastly increases the scope of the problem. Scale matters

Nobel Prize winning scientist Paul Crutzen has suggested deliberately spreading a layer of particulate matter in the upper atmosphere to help reflect some of the sun's energy in an effort to combat global warming. He reminds us that the eruption of the volcano Pinatubo in 1991 cooled the planet by as much as 0.9 degrees; he believes his computer simulations show a similar effect from deliberate injection of sulfur into the atmosphere by humans. Whatever the feasibility of the idea, as the president of the National Environmental Trust has said, We are already engaged in an uncontrolled experiment by injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere

19 November 2006

Researchers at Dresden University believe that sabres from Damascus dating back to 900 AD were formed with help from carbon nanotubes. Sabres from Damascus are made from a type of steel called wootz. But the secret of the swords' manufacture was lost in the eighteenth century. At high temperatures, impurities in the metal could have catalysed the growth of nanotubes from carbon in the burning wood and leaves used to make the wootz, Paufler suggests. These tubes could then have filled with cementite to produce the wires in the patterned blades, he says

The MPAA has launched yet another defensive attack, this time on a small business that is pre-loading movie DVDs onto iPods and reselling them. The original DVDs of the movies that are loaded are also given to the customer. The MPAA is claiming that the service Load 'N Go Video offers is completely illegal because ripping a DVD is against the DMCA. The MPAA is also suing the company for copyright violation — via Slashdot

Steve Bracks has seized on a secret deal the Liberal Party has struck with fundamentalist hate preacher Danny Nalliah not to decriminalise abortion. The Premier said the Liberal action was odd and that party leader Ted Baillieu should not have his policy constructed behind the back door by other groups

18 November 2006

Three million Britons have been issued with the new hi-tech passport, designed to frustrate terrorists and fraudsters. So why did Steve Boggan and a friendly computer expert find it so easy to break the security codes? — via Bruce Sterling

Wikipedia has become accessible in China after being blocked for more than a year, attracting applause from free media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders

Mirrors in orbit around Mars could create Earth-like conditions on a small patch of the planet's surface, according to a NASA-funded study. The extra sunlight would provide warmth and solar power for human explorers, but some experts say the mirrors may be hard to deploy — via Warren Ellis

17 November 2006

Broadband internet access is becoming so vital for businesses that it can be seen as a new utility comparable to water and electricity, a new United Nations report has revealed

Deep in the most remote jungles of South America, Amazon Indians are using Google Earth, GPS and other technologies to protect their fast-dwindling home. Tribes in Suriname, Brazil and Colombia are combining their traditional knowledge of the rainforest with Western technology to conserve forests and maintain ties to their history and cultural traditions. Indians use Google Earth to remotely monitor their lands by checking for signs of miners and GPS to map their lands. Google Earth is used primarily for vigilance, says Vasco van Roosmalen, program director of a nonprofit involved in the project

A group of Saitama used car salesmen whose idea of punishing a co-worker allegedly involved using him as a target for air rifle practice and as an ashtray are now being targeted themselves, but by crime fighters. At first, all three allegedly told the cops they tortured the man as a joke. But there wasn't much funny about the fact that their co-worker had to be rescued by public health authorities and shunted away in a mental hospital for a couple of weeks — via Warren Ellis

16 November 2006

The tangle of cables and plugs needed to recharge today's electronic gadgets could soon be a thing of the past. Researchers at MIT have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power wirelessly to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players. In a nutshell, their solution entails installing special non-radiative antennae with identical resonant frequencies on both the power transmitter and the receiving device. Any energy not diverted into a gadget or appliance is simply reabsorbed. The system currently under development is designed to operate at distances of 3 to 5 metres, but the researchers claim that it could be adapted to factory-scale applications, or miniaturized for use in the microscopic world

Junichiro Mine, 27, an unemployed man of Toyota, Aichi Prefecture, was arrested Wednesday for strangling a woman he had got acquainted with through a suicide web site — via Warren Ellis

15 November 2006

CSIRO has had an important win in a court case in the US in its battle to be paid royalties for its Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology. CSIRO was granted a US patent for this technology in 1996. Yesterday, in the US Federal Court of the Eastern District of Texas, Judge Davis granted summary judgment in favour of CSIRO in regard to the patent's validity. He also granted summary judgment that the defendant, Buffalo Technology, had infringed CSIRO's patent

Sun is considering releasing its Solaris operating system under the General Public License, raising the possibility of cross-pollination with Linux. The server and software company previously made Solaris an open-source project called OpenSolaris in 2005, releasing source code under the Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL). However, Sun this week chose the GPL for its open-source Java effort

Scientists have found a new pain killer based on human saliva. Apparently 1 gram of the new drug provides as much pain blocking as 3 grams of morphine. The drug blocks the breakdown of the body's natural pain killing mechanism. Scientists say the molecule is simple and synthesis is expected to be simple — via Slashdot

14 November 2006

Google is adding a customised start page to its Google Apps for Your Domain program, a set of online tools that companies can privately brand for their users, free of charge

Sun Microsystems is releasing the code for the Java programming language, marking one of the biggest contributions to the open-source community under the GNU General Public License

13 November 2006

Telco Internode will deploy some AU$3.5 million of broadband infrastructure through rural South Australia in a new project responding to the needs of a regional group of local councils

12 November 2006

Well, so much for closing piracy loopholes! With Windows Vista and Office 2007 only just going Gold, and not even available to Microsoft beta testers, developers or volume licence subscribers, the first cracked versions have already hit the pirate boards

Randy Wooten, mayoral candidate for Waldenburg Arkansas (a town of eighty people), discovered that the electronic voting system hadn't registered the one vote he knew had been cast for him... because he cast it himself. The machine gave him zero votes. That would be an error rate of 3%, counting the actual votes cast — 18 and 18 for a total of 36 — via Slashdot

11 November 2006

A dead man has been blamed for hundreds of speeding offences in Australia in what police believe is a major fraud designed to help motorists avoid traffic fines. Police in Sydney said 240 people were under investigation over the speeding scam, where hundreds of motorists blamed either the same dead man, or a person living in another state, for driving their cars at the time of the speeding offences

Last year for the first time, proceeds from cyber crime were greater than proceeds from the sale of illegal drugs, according to comments by Valerie McNiven, an adviser to the Treasury Department. The profile of the typical cyber criminal is changing fast, too. If you think that's a lone hacker sitting in a college dorm or a basement recreation room, think again. Cyber crime is rapidly evolving from the domain of misguided pranksters, to elaborate, profit-driven schemes involving organized-crime syndicates that may be based around the block, or halfway around the world. It's estimated that 85% of malware today is created with profit in mind. The sobering corollary to that statistic: only 5% of cyber criminals are caught and prosecuted

10 November 2006

Telstra finally launched uncapped ADSL1 and ADSL2+ broadband services, more than 18 months after some competitors started offering the higher speed services. However, the telco will only sell ADSL2+ services in locations where competitors are already offering the higher speeds. It will offer the uncapped ADSL1 service nation-wide as a wholesale offering to competitors

A new Australian study has recommended doctors use Google to help diagnose difficult cases, despite indications it's only 60 per cent accurate. Specialists at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane studied how effective the world's largest and most popular search engine is for helping diagnose rare diseases. The work, published online today by the British Medical Journal, recommends specialists use Google because it is now a source of three billion journal articles, more than any specialist search engine

09 November 2006

Google accidentally sent out e-mail containing a mass mailing worm to about 50,000 members of an e-mail discussion list focused on its Google Video Blog

Google wants to make the information it stores for its users easily portable so they can export it to a competing service if they are dissatisfied. Making it simple for users to walk away from a Google service with which they are unhappy keeps the company honest and on its toes, and Google competitors should embrace this data portability principle

The Chinese GPS system, Beidou, is apparently to be opened up for free access within China, worrying European investors on the €2.5 billion competing project, Galileo. Initially, China had declared that access to their system would be restricted to the military, and Europe had planned to recoup some of the cost of their system by selling licenses to China. Michael Shaw, from the US government's National Space-based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Coordination Office in Washington DC, said, Frankly, China's behavior towards Europe is not so different to how Europe behaved with us when GPS was the only game in town a decade ago — via Slashdot

08 November 2006

Adobe will contribute source code to the Mozilla Foundation as the two organisations aim to establish a standard scripting language that developers can use to create interactive applications for Adobe's Flash Player and Mozilla's Firefox browser

The dentist's drill is the epitome of pain and discomfort in the modern world, but that could soon change. Bio-medical research and the advent of cold plasma needles could eliminate the need for drilling teeth

Neanderthals may have given the modern humans who replaced them a priceless gift — a gene that helped them develop superior brains. And the only way they could have provided that gift would have been by interbreeding. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides indirect evidence that modern Homo sapiens and so-called Neanderthals interbred at some point when they lived side by side in Europe

07 November 2006

A spam-sending Trojan dubbed SpamThru is responsible for a vast amount of the recent botnet activity which has significantly increased spam levels to almost three out of every four emails. The developers of SpamThru employed numerous tactics to thwart detection and enhance outreach, such as releasing new strains of the Trojan at regular intervals in order to confuse traditional anti-virus signatures detection

Piracy statistics are labelled self-serving hyperbole in a draft government report. A confidential briefing for the Attorney-General's Department, prepared by the Australian Institute of Criminology, lashes the music and software sectors

Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have announced that they have engineered a strain of the AIDS virus that fights AIDS. This strain of AIDS works like a vaccine and improved the immune system of the test subjects. After three years on this new therapy, no side effects have been observed

06 November 2006

Peter Jenner, former manager of bands like Pink Floyd, T Rex and The Clash, states in an interview with the Register that music label executives have lost faith in DRM and dollar-per-track online music selling isn't working too well as a model. He predicts that in two to three years time, many countries will have moved to a blanket licensing regime — via Slashdot

An internet advertising firm called Zango has agreed to pay $US3 million (AU$4 million) to the US government to settle allegations that its pop-up ad software was secretly installed on millions of personal computers

05 November 2006

A new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research, a UK think tank, has some concrete suggestions on how to reform the UK's dated intellectual property laws. The starting point for its deliberations is the notion that knowledge is both a commodity and a public good, and it recommends that the UK move from a model where knowledge is 'an asset first and a public resource second' to one where knowledge is primarily a public resource and secondarily an asset. Is that an anti-business attitude? The report's authors don't think so — via Slashdot

Malware writers have used a Wikipedia article and special storage features to attempt to plant malicious code on unsuspecting users' systems, the online encyclopedia's organisers have confirmed — via digg

04 November 2006

The founder of the world wide web has voiced concern over increasing abuse of the internet, with truth the first victim as technology develops at ever more dizzying speeds. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the web while working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in the late 1980s, said the global online network was at growing risk of being misused by undemocratic forces

Microsoft has backed off their Vista license, now allowing transfers and even legal sales between third parties — via digg

03 November 2006

Google aims to close the gap between the classic way people get e-mail — sitting at a computer — and the slow-as-molasses reality of receiving e-mail on mobiles. They're introducing a custom version of Gmail that can run on any phone with Java software, or close to 300 different mobile phone devices

Everyone must have noticed a surge in spam recently, particularly for stock pump 'n' dump scams. Anti-spam companies have seen a 30% increase in the last two months and, more worryingly, more of this spam is getting through to mailboxes due to the spammers' change in tactics. Rather than use unsecured mail relays spammers are using bot nets, making spam harder to identify and eliminate. Bounced spam is also on the up, and some experts reckon it's past time to start worrying

02 November 2006

A second security flaw that could cause the new Firefox 2 browser to crash has been publicly disclosed. The vulnerability lies in the way the open-source browser handles JavaScript code

Forgent Networks has settled its lawsuit concerning the so-called JPEG patents for US$8 million, a fraction of what the company initially sought

Providing some information is better than giving none at all, search giants are saying, but human rights groups warned that filtering of web content is increasing in developing countries

01 November 2006

Even as it does damage control on the random shutdown problem, Apple is trying to address other MacBook flaws, ranging from discolouration and cracks in some of its computer cases to strange sounds that come from inside them

The use of carbon nanotubes in ultrafast computers and other electronic devices has been stymied because batches of the material contain nanotubes with varying electronic properties. One nanotube is semiconducting, while the next is conducting. Now Northwestern University researchers have developed a reliable and potentially practical way to sort through this mess, segregating nanotubes into precisely the types needed for high-performance electronics. The advance could speed progress toward nanotube computers and has many nearer-term applications, including high-definition displays, devices for nanotoxicity testing, and solar cells

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