December 2006 Archive

31 December 2006

The first deliveries of Clocky, which runs away from drowsy owners who don't get up in time, were made just in time for Christmas, and one early user says the clock, which was an Internet sensation when it was first announced, is appropriately aggravating

This New Year's Eve, at midnight on the dot, hundreds of millions of pages of US government secrets will be revealed. Or at least they'll no longer be official secrets — it may actually take months or more for the National Archives and Records Administration to make those pages available for public consumption

30 December 2006

The AACS DRM used in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray has been cracked. The program allows one to decrypt and dump the video for play on a users hard drive, or it can be burned to a blank HD-DVD and played on a stand-alone player

Two-hour flights to the other side of the world may seem like a scene from a science fiction movie; but the technology is in place, and a plane that can do just that is currently in development. While it looks like a scene from a flight simulator, the Astrox space plane is the real deal, and the Astrox Corporation says it could revolutionise the transportation industry. Traveling as fast as Mach 25 with at least 30 minutes of space shuttle-like views while in orbit is the highlight of this plane, and the Astrox Corporation, along with their partners, are claiming to have finally overcome their largest problem, mixing fuel

29 December 2006

Samsung, the world's third-largest maker of mobile phones and a force in the notebook and display markets as well, has engineered a fuel cell that can power a notebook computer for up to a month

25 years ago, TV series Blake's 7 — and most of its characters — were killed off. But now the cult programme is coming back from the dead in a series of newly penned hour-long audio episodes, which will initially be podcast in five-minute segments. It is hoped that they will be followed by a mini-series, Blake's 7: Legacy, to be set 30 years after the bloodbath on the planet of Gauda Prime, which ended the original 52-episode run

Microsoft has managed to rankle its critics again, this time over a set of patent applications that cover one of blogging's key technologies — a technology that Microsoft did not invent. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, lets bloggers, owners of news sites and other content providers notify their readers when new content is published

28 December 2006

Former US President Gerald Ford, who was swept into office after the Watergate scandal and later pardoned Richard Nixon, died at age 93

The world's top spy chiefs — including the heads of the CIA and British, Australian and Canadian agencies — have been meeting in secret in New Zealand — via Djehuty

Ironically, web sites that feature the TRUSTe security certificate are twice as likely to contain badware as web sites without a security certificate, alleges spyware researcher Ben Edelman in a new report

Microsoft sent some holiday cheer in the direction of security vendors this week by releasing new APIs for developers working to create software that can interact with Windows Vista

27 December 2006

Shoe Money has an interesting post about how his server got hacked via an old file in an unused subdirectory. After a bit of digging, he discovered how the hacker found the vulnerable code via Google's Code Search, thanks to site maps and a poorly secured server. I pretty much fell into the same trap with some old unsecure directories leftover from a previous buggy software update and that was without the horror of site maps thrown in

26 December 2006

Optical microchips that can store light for short periods of time before sending it on its way have been constructed for the first time by researchers at IBM in the US. The work is an important breakthrough for chip designers who hope one day to use optical buffers in superfast processors that rely on photons instead of electrons for their processing power

For the first time the rising ocean levels have washed away an inhabited island. Lohachara island was at one point home to some 10,000 people. It, along with several other spits of land near the Indian mainland, is now permanently underwater. As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities. Eight years ago the first uninhabited islands — in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati — vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented

25 December 2006

Singer James Brown, known as the Godfather of Soul, has died at the age of 73. He was admitted to hospital in Atlanta after being diagnosed with severe pneumonia but died at 0145 local time (0645 GMT). The star was famous for hits including I Got You (I Feel Good), Papa's Got a Brand New Bag and Living in America

If you don't believe that Santa Claus can deliver presents to millions of homes in a single night, Larry Silverberg, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University, explains that Santa's society of elves has an understanding of physics and engineering that exceeds our own. In fact, Santa Claus and his crew really can deliver presents in one night because of their advanced knowledge of electromagnetic waves, the space/time continuum, nanotechnology, genetic engineering and computer science. For example, he doesn't carry presents. He uses a nano-toymaker to fabricate toys grown atom by atom inside the children's homes

24 December 2006

The Department of Defence has taken the step of blocking HTML-based email. They are also banning the use of Outlook Web Access email clients. The DoD is making this move because HTML messages can easily be infected with spyware and executable lines of code that enable hackers to access DoD networks

Northwestern University researchers report that by combining organic and inorganic materials they have produced transparent, high-performance transistors that can be assembled inexpensively on both glass and plastics. Researchers have long worked on developing new types of displays powered by electronics without visible wires. But, until now, no one was able to develop materials for transistors that could be invisible while still maintaining a high level of performance

Millions of rockhopper penguins are disappearing in a sinister and astonishing phenomenon that is baffling biologists. In just six years their numbers have fallen from 600,000 to 420,000 in the Falkland Islands — one of its few remaining strongholds — according to the latest survey by Falklands Conservation. The decline equates to a drop of about 30 per cent, although the Falklands population is thought to have dipped by about 85 per cent since 1932, when there were more than 1.5 million birds

23 December 2006

A new extension to USB that will enable sharing of various USB peripherals between computers will be available early in 2007. The new MultiSwitch hub technology, developed by SMSC, allows the sharing of information and content from devices such as DVD players, cameras, printers, and scanners, and between laptops and desktops using a simple USB cable. Future hubs may also allow wireless sharing of peripherals

Siemens engineers have reached 107 Gbps data transmission record over a fibre optic cable and expect the technology to be on the market within a few years. The test, 2.5 times faster than a previous maximum transmission performance per channel, was done in cooperation with Germany's Micram Microelectronic, the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications and Eindhoven Technical University of the Netherlands

22 December 2006

It is nothing new to see technology from military and governmental endeavors change daily life profoundly. One only has to look at the fruits of the space programme; from computers to microwave ovens to Tang. New military gear is on the horizon that promises to do the same, including biosensors, bandages that clot blood using soundwaves, and the ubiquitous Swiss Army Pen

As VHS tapes and VCRs head the way of Betamax and phonographs, commentator Bill Hammack warns that the right to fair use is in danger of disappearing right along with them

Around the time that the great pyramids were built in Egypt and Stonehenge was erected in England, a young woman living in what is now Iran lost an eye and was fitted with a prosthetic device. The find supports speculation that such prosthetics were available to a fortunate few in the ancient world. The newly found eye looked like the real thing

21 December 2006

Azureus, the BitTorrent client software developer, has announced its first content distribution partnership. BBC television shows and original productions will be distributed to users of Azureus' new Zudeo file-sharing service in the United States. Azureus mentions these BBC titles in its press release: Red Dwarf, Strange, Invasion Earth, Little Britain, Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, Coupling, Keeping Up Appearances, League of Gentlemen and Ideal. No word on the full line-up just yet

A study by a team of neuroscientists and engineers has demonstrated that humans can follow a scent trail — an ability that most had assumed only animals possessed. Furthermore, the study demonstrated for the first time that humans make use of differential information from the two nostrils. The researchers blindfolded college students who crawled through grass to sniff out a chocolate-scented trail

20 December 2006

The DMCA-like amendments to the New Zealand Copyright Act passed their first hurdle in parliament, with an overwhelming 113 to 6 vote to pass the Bill to the Commerce Select Committee for further discussion. The detail-oriented can read the full debate (or rather lack of debate), and one enterprising New Zealand legal blogger has an excellent series of posts on the Bill, its background, and its implications. New Zealanders interested in fighting this legislation have until the 16th of February 2007 to make submissions to the Select Committee, before the committee makes its recommendations and sends the Bill back for a second reading — via Slashdot

Following the lead of Mozilla and Microsoft, Opera Software has incorporated a new phishing filter into its Opera Web browser to block sites bent on stealing financial information

In a new pact with NASA, Google will help to develop new search capabilities, imaging systems, and other technologies to help make space exploration more appealing to Internet users

19 December 2006

The UK government has just given the go ahead to two large offshore wind-farm projects. Between them the schemes would produce enough renewable electricity to power about one million households. The larger London Array project covers 232km² between Margate in Kent and Clacton, Essex and will be the world's biggest when it is completed. The £1.5bn scheme will have 341 turbines rising from the sea about 20km off the Kent and Essex coasts, as well as five offshore substations and four meteorological masts

Organic — or carbon-based — transistors are not new and can be used to design flexible computer displays, RFID tags and sensors. However, these organic single crystals could not be mass-produced because they needed to be individually handpicked. But now, researchers at Stanford University and the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a new method for building flexible organic transistor arrays. Even if the researchers have reached a density of 13 million crystals per square inch (or 2 million per square centimetre), there are still several issues to solve before this method can be used for commercial applications of these fast transistors

Panasonic said it has developed a lithium-ion battery that won't overheat even if a short circuit occurs. The new battery includes a heat-resistive insulator inside the battery cell, next to an existing separator that insulates the anode and cathode. If that separator is punctured a short circuit occurs that typically causes the battery to overheat and in some circumstances catch fire. Panasonic said its insulation layer ensures that the battery won't overheat even in the event of a short circuit

18 December 2006

The Tasmanian government hopes it can drive down the cost of broadband in the state after a strong response to calls for companies to help manage fibre optic cables

CSIRO has won another small battle in its long fight against the globe's technology giants over wireless LAN royalty payments. The court cases brought against CSIRO over its 1996 patent have been moved from California to Texas, where the science agency recently won a case on the same issue

Microsoft has quietly released an update for Internet Explorer that fixes a problem with the browser's phishing shield. The feature that protects against fraudulent Web sites, new in IE7, in some cases could bog down computers running Windows, according to an article on Microsoft's support site published last week. This could happen when a Web page contains many frames or when a user browses many frames in a short time

17 December 2006

An article at the Radar lists the ten most dangerous toys of all time, those treasured playthings that drew blood, chewed digits, took out eyes, and, in one case, actually irradiated. To keep things interesting, the editors excluded BB guns, slingshots, throwing stars and anything else actually intended to inflict harm

Researchers at a Toronto hospital have stumbled upon a dramatic treatment for mouse diabetes, with large implications for the treatment of diabetes in humans. The islet inflammation cleared up and the diabetes was gone. Some have remained in that state for as long as four months, with just one injection. They also discovered that their treatments curbed the insulin resistance that is the hallmark of Type 2 diabetes, and that insulin resistance is a major factor in Type 1 diabetes, suggesting the two illnesses are quite similar

16 December 2006

A third Stargate series is in the concept phase and is being actively worked on by the Vancouver creatives behind Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. No concept for the show has yet been revealed. Despite the cancellation of SG-1, the series is likely for a 2007 debut

Google has launched a service designed to help inventors search patents. The site is currently indexing the seven million patents granted by the USPTO, and will soon add other sources

The United States Mint, concerned that rising metal prices could lead to widespread recycling of pennies and nickels, has banned melting or exporting them. The Mint is also testing dozens of cheaper alternative metal compositions in the expectation that Congress will mandate a change when it meets in the new year. According to calculations by the Mint, the metal value of pennies, which are made of copper-coated zinc, is now more than one cent. The metal value of 5-cent coins, made from a copper-nickel blend, is up to 7 cents. Adding in the costs of manufacturing means the Mint now spends 1.73 cents for every penny and 8.74 cents for every nickel it makes

15 December 2006

Australia's $3.5 billion free-to-air commercial television industry is being threatened by the internet more quickly than expected, with a new online study showing 53 per cent of respondents regularly download TV shows from the internet, most of them illegally

Nanotechnology, the use of subatomic materials as microscopic building blocks for thousands of consumer products, has turned into a big business so quickly that few are monitoring its effects on health and the environment. So the government of Berkeley, California, is intending for the city to be the first to step into the breach and try to regulate this industry

The New York Times unveiled a new service that allows readers to quickly post stories that they find on the newspaper's Web site to Digg, Facebook and Newsvine. It marks the first time that the country's third-largest newspaper has added a news-sharing tool to its Web site, allowing readers to develop conversations and post comments about specific stories. Readers will be able to add headlines and a small portion of text to the social media sites by clicking on the logos of Digg, Facebook and Newsvine

14 December 2006

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said his company, Wikia, is ready to give away all the software, computing, storage and network access that web site builders need to create community collaboration sites. Wikia, a commercial counterpart to the non-profit Wikipedia, will go even further to provide customers — bloggers or other operators who meet its criteria for popular web sites — 100 per cent of any advertising revenue from the sites they build

At least half of Google's Checkout service has been opened up to countries other than the United States. Now, regardless of where you live, you can purchase items with Google Checkout

13 December 2006

Emerging internet file-sharing services have begun to derail attempts by some wireless internet providers to weed-out bandwidth hogs on their services. Managing director of Sydney-based wireless ISP BigAir Jason Ashton said there was nothing the company could do to stop the traffic and pointed to Rapid Share, a web-based file-sharing system, as an example of one of the new breed causing headaches for the company's technical staff

Llamas are not just for transportation anymore. It turns out that the animals' blood could be useful for detecting all sorts of maladies in the surrounding environment — from deadly pathogens to industrial emissions. A research effort has done just that, manipulating a rare type of antibody found in llamas to make an inexpensive and diverse biosensor

12 December 2006

Flash memory and hard-disk drives could face a challenge from a new chip technology, dubbed phase-change memory, being developed by a group of companies led by IBM. The companies claim the technology does a better job of storing songs, pictures and other data on iPods and digital cameras than current flash memory, and could someday replace disk drives. The companies have built a prototype device that runs 500 times faster than today's flash memory while using half as much power to write data to a memory cell

Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Mark Sheppard, Jonathan Woodward, Christina Hendricks and Adam Baldwin all turned up and partied with fans at the hotel bar into the night at the cancelled convention Flanvention

It is considered polite to light a match after passing gas. Not while on a plane. An American Airlines flight was forced to make an emergency landing Monday morning after a passenger lit a match to disguise the scent of flatulence — via Roguesun

11 December 2006

US Department of Energy (DOE) Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alexander Karsner today announced that with DOE funding, a concentrator solar cell produced by Boeing-Spectrolab has recently achieved a world-record conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent, establishing a new milestone in sunlight-to-electricity performance. This breakthrough may lead to systems with an installation cost of only $3 per watt, producing electricity at a cost of 8-10 cents per kilowatt/hour, making solar electricity a more cost-competitive and integral part of our nation's energy mix

After years of selling online music digitally wrapped with copy and playback restrictions designed to hinder piracy, major music labels are beginning to make some songs available in the unrestricted MP3 file format

The molecules that make octopus skin so successful as a dynamic camouflage could provide materials scientists with a new way to make super-reflective materials. What's even more odd is just how reflective these proteins are — they reflect all wavelengths of light that hit at any angle

10 December 2006

Manchester is planning the largest Wi-Fi zone in Europe to enable more citizens and local businesses to access the Internet. The proposed wireless area would cover 400 square miles of the city, allowing its business and residents to access the Internet for free

Hackers are distributing a file that they say lets users of the corporate version of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system get around the software's anti-piracy mechanisms. Windows Vista must be activated, or authorised by Microsoft, before it will work on a particular machine. To simplify the task of activating many copies of Vista, Microsoft offers corporate users special tools, among them Key Management Service (KMS), which allows a company to run a Microsoft-supplied authorisation server on its own network and activate Vista without contacting Microsoft for each copy. The software Microsoft.Windows.Vista.Local.Activation.Server-MelindaGates lets users spoof that KMS process, allowing them to activate copies of the enterprise editions of Vista, its creators say. The hacked download is available online on sites including The Pirate Bay and other file sharing sites

Apple may be cool and hip with consumers, but it's anything but a trendsetter when it comes to good environmental policies, according to activist group Greenpeace

09 December 2006

The CSIRO demonstrated the world's fastest wireless radio link by transmitting sixteen full quality DVD streams over a 250m link and only using a quarter of the available bandwidth. The CSIRO ICT Centre announced that it has achieved over six gigabits per second over a point to point wireless connection with the highest efficiency (2.4bits/s/Hz) ever achieved for such a system

Palm is buying — or rather, buying back — what it used to own. This week, Palm announced that it purchased a perpetual license to the Palm Garnet operating system from Access Systems

When Iranian journalist Mojtaba Saminejad was sentenced to prison for insulting his leader, it was not for a newspaper article. His story was posted on his personal Web blog. Nearly one-third of journalists now serving time in prisons around the world published their work on the Internet, the second-largest category behind print journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists said in an analysis released Thursday

08 December 2006

In an age of multimillion-dollar high-tech weapons systems, sometimes it's the simplest ideas that can save lives. Which is why a New Jersey mother is organizing a drive to send cans of Silly String to Iraq. American troops use the stuff to detect trip wires around bombs, as Marcelle Shriver learned from her son, a soldier in Iraq

German Minister of the Interior, Gunther Beckstein, is seeking jail time for violent game developers, publishers, and players. The draft law, a reaction to a school shooting that shook German public opinion last month, will come before the upper house of parliament next year. But it is already sending shockwaves through the 2m-strong German online gaming community

Most internet users already know it: spam is on the rise again as senders of unwanted email find new ways to circumvent filtering systems. A study released last month by the security firm Postini found that unwanted messages now account for 91 per cent of all email, and over the past 12 months the daily volume of spam rose by 120 per cent. A separate report by California-based IronPort Systems concluded that worldwide spam volumes increased from 31 billion messages daily in October 2005 to 61 billion messages per day in October 2006

07 December 2006

The massacre of elephants in the Mouadje rainforest in the Democratic Republic of Congo is a lamentably common occurrence. But now, seismic sensors developed for the battlefield are being adapted by conservationists in Africa to fight back against illegal poachers, and loggers. The detectors are buried along forest footpaths to pick up the footfalls of hunters, and eavesdropping sensors are being hidden in trees to listen out for elephant calls — and gunshots. Data is also being borrowed from environmental monitoring satellites to reveal any illegal logging that can devastate the animals' habitat

Over the past few years, the Internet has seen new domain names such as .eu for Europe and .travel for the travel industry. Now, the key oversight agency is looking to get rid of some

Social networking web site MySpace says it will release tools to identify and ban US sex offenders from its service. The company said the new service will be the first national database that brings together about 46 US state sex offender registers. This is on the heels of proposed legislation that would require sex offenders to keep their email on file. The addresses would presumably be used to restrict former criminals from accessing online community sites, but in an the era of easily obtainable email addresses it's hard to see how this would be effective

06 December 2006

Thousands of Australians who use iPods and other digital music players will no longer be acting illegally after a major overhaul of copyright laws passed parliament today

Liquid water has flowed on the surface of Mars within the past five years, suggest images by the now lost Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). The results appear to boost the chances that Mars could harbour life

Virtual reality can apparently prompt the development of false memories. Ann Schlosser at the University of Washington tested students' ability to learn how to use a real digital camera by operating a virtual one. Although those students who used the virtual camera found it easier to remember how the camera worked, they also experienced more false memories

Providers like Skype, Yahoo, Net2phone, Dialpad, etc, will not be able to offer VOIP in India under the proposed government clampdown. BPOs and other call centres will face the axe if they use any of the VOIP services provided by the above companies. It is not clear if this clampdown will affect regular home users

05 December 2006

Games console makers such as Sony Computer Entertainment and Microsoft may need to re-engineer anti-piracy technology in consoles made for the Australian market to stop consumers using illegal game titles. Amendments to Australia's copyright laws expected to be passed this week will make it legal for consumers to use modified chips (mod-chips) that circumvent anti-piracy technology built into game consoles if they also overcome measures that restrict the use of DVDs and games titles purchased legally in other regions

Mayid's call shortly after 4.00am sent four Polk County, Florida, deputies racing to the 2,150-acre lake just outside Lakeland, where they jumped into the water and wrenched Apgar's arm from the gator's mouth. The 45-year-old victim, who told authorities he'd passed out nude on the shore after smoking crack cocaine, was rushed to a hospital in critical condition #8212; via Pharyngula

04 December 2006

An outspoken opponent of US government efforts to reestablish the gray wolf in western states has pleaded guilty to trying to poison the federally protected species. Tim Sundles, 48, planted meatballs laced with a poisonous pesticide in Idaho's remote Salmon-Challis National Forest in 2004 with the aim of killing wolves. The meatballs instead poisoned a coyote, fox, magpies and three pet dogs. Sundles could face as much as six months behind bars and five years probation

French and American researchers have discovered that the stones on the higher levels of the great pyramids of Egypt were built with concrete. Until recently it was hard for geologists to distinguish between natural limestone and the kind that would have been made by reconstituting liquefied lime. They found traces of a rapid chemical reaction which did not allow natural crystallisation. The reaction would be inexplicable if the stones were quarried, but perfectly comprehensible if one accepts that they were cast like concrete

What do remote-control garage door openers have to do with national security? A secretive Air Force facility in Colorado Springs tested a radio frequency this past week that it would use to communicate with first responders in the event of a homeland security threat. But the frequency also controls an estimated 50 million garage door openers, and hundreds of residents in the area found that theirs had suddenly stopped working

03 December 2006

The Western Australia state government will pool the next 10 years of its annual AU$100 million telecommunications spend into a billion dollar contract to build a state-wide broadband network

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations. The technique is called a roving bug, and was approved by top US Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organised crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him

Those who expected the initial Vista release to generate a wave of hype will be sorely disappointed. While Vista is now available for companies, they do not really appear to care. The situation is the same with Office 2007. Why? Several reasons, not the least of which is expected difficulty in adaptation to the new features

02 December 2006

Australians can take their video mobile phones into concerts without fear of criminal sanctions, the federal Government has announced. Under amendments to federal copyright laws announced today, it will no longer be a criminal offence to take a devices capable of audio-visual recording to a live entertainment venue and record the performance without permission. The announcement outlined the federal Government's response to a Senate committee report which had recommended changes to the Copyright Amendment Bill, 2006

A Sydney man has been charged over an alleged $1.2 million internet banking scam. The 42-year-old was arrested yesterday by detectives attached to Strike Force Ackeron, established in 2003 to investigate the scam

01 December 2006

Microsoft's Vista may be vulnerable to at least three pieces of widespread malware, two of which date back to 2004, according to security vendor Sophos. At least three well-known Internet worms — labelled Stratio-Zip, Netsky-D and MyDoom-O by Sophos — are able to execute on the OS. These worms comprise 39.7 percent of all malware currently in circulation, according to the security vendor. The MyDoom and Netsky variants were first detected back in 2004

The Queensland government has started seeking expressions of interest for the construction of a high-speed, open access broadband network across Brisbane. In a statement, the state's Premier Peter Beattie said his government had already received responses from a number of parties interested in the proposed network, dubbed Project Vista, which was first flagged in October

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