January 2007 Archive

31 January 2007

Along with today's iPod Shuffle line additions, Apple has released the promised 802.11n Enabler for compatible Macs. The software is available via a software download from the Apple Store for $2.99 (US$1.99) unless you buy the Airport Extreme base station which includes the software at no additional cost

One of the main challenges in developing microscale robots lies in miniaturising their power and propulsion. Now, researchers in the US may have found a solution to this problem, by exploiting the natural movement of bacteria to propel micro-objects through water

Adobe Systems intends to submit its ubiquitous PDF format to ISO as part of its ongoing format war with Microsoft and Vista. The announcement comes the day before Microsoft's competing format XPS (XML Paper Specification) ships with the new Windows Vista operating system and Office 2007 software suite. Formally known as Metro, XPS has been described as a PDF killer intended to break PDF's decade-long role as the de facto standard for printable documents

30 January 2007

Because the new 45-nanometer transistors from IBM and Intel are smaller, they can switch on and off more quickly, roughly 300 billion times per second in Intel's case. Intel has code-named its new 45-nanometer chips Penryn and plans to produce next-gen Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, and Xeon chips this year, all with Penryn designs

Security researcher Alex Ionescu claims to have successfully bypassed the much discussed DRM protection in Windows Vista, called Protected Media Path, which is designed to seriously degrade the playback quality of any video and audio running on systems with hardware components not explicitly approved by Microsoft. The bypass of the DRM protection was in turn performed by breaking the Driver Signing / PatchGuard protection in the new operating system. Alex is now quite nervous about what an army of lawyers backed by draconian copyright laws could do to him if he released the details, but he claims to be currently looking into the details of safely releasing his details about this at the moment though

Wolves in the northern Rockies will be removed from the endangered species list within the next year a move that would open the population up to trophy hunting. Federal officials are expected to announce the plan Monday. The agency also will finalise removal from the list of a separate population of wolves in the Great Lakes region

29 January 2007

Alex Ionescu has found a way of fooling Vista into believing DRM is working when it's not. It allows premium content such as HD-DVDs to be played on an uncertified computer. This is quite different from the method used by muslix64 to circumvent DRM by locating the DRM key in the binary image of a DVD player program such as WinDVD

More than 300 cases of the highly infectious disease, which is spread by airborne droplets and kills 98% of those infected within about two weeks, have been identified in South Africa — via Bruce Sterling

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department restyles their recruitment page in the mode of Frank Miller's Sin City — via Warren Ellis

28 January 2007

Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, said that the wildly successful site will start sharing revenue with its millions of users

A data cable made from stretched nerve cells could someday help connect computers to the human nervous system. The modified cells should form better connections with human tissue than the metal electrodes currently used for purposes such as remotely controlling prosthetics — via Warren Ellis

Microsoft acknowledged offering to pay a blogger to correct what it said were errors in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia

27 January 2007

Scientists have built a tiny memory chip that uses new technology to pack a relatively large amount of information into a square about one-2,000th of an inch on a side. Although the chip is modest in capacity — with 160,000 bits of information — the bits are crammed together so tightly that it is the densest chip ever made. The achievement points to a possible path toward continuing the exponential growth of computing power even after current silicon chip-making technology hits fundamental limits in 10 to 20 years

Maine overwhelmingly rejected federal requirements for national identification cards, marking the first formal state opposition to controversial legislation scheduled to go in effect for Americans next year. Both chambers of the Maine legislature approved a resolution saying the state flatly refuses to force its citizens to use driver's licenses that comply with digital ID standards, which were established under the 2005 Real ID Act. It asks the US Congress to repeal the law

Bird flu hasn't gone away. The discovery, announced last week, that the H5N1 bird flu virus is widespread in cats in locations across Indonesia has refocused attention on the danger that the deadly virus could be mutating into a form that can infect humans far more easily

26 January 2007

Computer experts have traced a $1 million online bank heist in Sweden to a Russian hacker known only by his colourful sobriquet — the Corpse — in one of the more brazen Internet banking crimes of recent memory

A New Jersey state appellate court yesterday affirmed that any personal information given to ISPs must remain private. Yes, this indicates that New Jersey, like a lot of states, is ahead of the curve on Internet privacy, said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital rights group

Synthetic spider silk, like lycra in many ways, has a number of unique properties. The MIT lab that created it is being monitored by military elements, keenly interested in applications of this material to front-line technologies. The secret of spider silk's combined strength and flexibility, according to scientists, has to do with the arrangement of the nano-crystalline reinforcement of the silk as it is being produced — in other words, the way these tiny crystals are oriented towards and adhere to the stretchy protein. Emulating this process in a synthetic polymer, the MIT team focused on reinforcing solutions of commercial rubbery substance known as polyurethane elastomer with nano-sized clay platelets instead of simply heating and mixing the molten plastics with reinforcing agents

25 January 2007

Google's German web site was waylaid for two hours because its address was mistakenly reassigned. The temporary takeover of the site just after midnight was not the result of a hacker attack. Rather, it appears that the German organisation that assigns domain names, the DeNIC, made an error and registered www.google.de as available and immediately gave it away

Europe is upping the pressure on Apple to open up its restrictive DRM that ties iTunes to the iPod. Norway ruled last year that the iPod-iTunes tie-in was unreasonable and gave Apple a deadline to make a change to its policies, but was unsatisfied with the response they got. Now France and Germany have joined forces with Norway, making it a lot harder for Apple to just walk away from those markets

A North Dakota man aims to be the first hemp farmer in the United States. That is, the first one since the practice was made illegal in 1938 and only allowed again temporarily as part of the WWII war effort. After 10 years of recent effort by North Dakota lawmaker David Monson, he is now poised to receive a license to grow the crop beloved by sustainability advocates — as long as he gets fingerprinted first

The British Broadcasting Corporation said Monday that it was in discussions with the search engine company Google about putting some of the BBC's programming on the online video site YouTube

24 January 2007

The plaintext exploit used to partially crack HD-DVD a couple of weeks ago was brought to bear on Blu-Ray by the same gents this weekend--and it worked a treat

Australians are likely to miss out on the option of upgrading to Microsoft's new Windows Vista and Office 2007 software through a new Internet download service

Record companies are considering ditching DRM for their MP3 albums. For the first time, flagging sales of online music tracks are beginning to make the big recording companies consider the wisdom of selling music without rights management technologies attached. Most independent record labels already sell tracks digitally compressed in MP3 format, which can be downloaded, e-mailed or copied to computers, mobiles, portable music players and compact discs without limit. Partially, the independents see providing songs in MP3 as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales. Should one of the big four take that route, however, it would be a capitulation to the power of the Internet, which has destroyed their monopoly over the worldwide distribution of music in the past decade and allowed file-sharing to take its place —l via Slashdot

23 January 2007

As Microsoft prepares to release Windows Vista to the masses, disparate Linux camps are banding together to prepare a counterattack. The Open Source Development Labs is merging with the Free Standards Group to form The Linux Foundation. The goal of the new group is to streamline efforts and help the open-source operating system compete more effectively against proprietary platforms. Community groups, universities, and industry players — including HP, Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, Novell, NEC, and Oracle — are coming together under the new flag

The Center for Consumer Freedom placed ads in the NYT attacking PETA, a radical pro-animal group. A little digging reveals that the Center for Consumer Freedom is an astroturf organisation (fake grassroots) funded by the fast-food companies that PETA opposes — via Boing Boing

MySpace.com has filed a lawsuit against the self-proclaimed Spam King for allegedly blasting the portal with spam through the use of compromised user accounts. MySpace also seeks a permanent injunction to bar Scott Richter, who has fought with Microsoft and the state of New York over spam, and his affiliates from using the popular social networking site, according to a MySpace announcement

22 January 2007

Researchers have been able to encode an image into a photon and to later retrieve it intact. It's analogous to the difference between snapping a picture with a single pixel and doing it with a camera — this is like a 6-megapixel camera... You can have a tremendous amount of information in a pulse of light, but normally if you try to buffer it, you can lose much of that information... We're showing it's possible to pull out an enormous amount of information with an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio even with very low light levels

Sony and Universal Music apparently denying Zune owners the ability to squirt songs by certain artists to other Zune users. That's right, if you've actually purchased songs from the Zune marketplace and happen to run into another Zune owner, you're prohibited from sharing certain songs

Banks and credit card companies are rushing to notify their customers to keep an eye out for fraudulent activity on their accounts after several retailers discovered thefts of customer data from their computer systems. TJX, the parent company of Marshalls, TJ Maxx, and several other national chains, said hackers breached a system that handles credit card, debit card, and check transactions in the United States and Puerto Rico. The company also said there is a possibility the breach is as far-reaching as the United Kingdom and Ireland

21 January 2007

Apple plans to open up protected music and movies content bought from the iTunes Store. The iPod maker is expected to make two announcements this week — the first will be to allow streaming of protected AAC content via USB; the second will be to licence its Fairplay DRM to the company's Made For iPod licencees

The invisible RFID ink process developed by Somark involves a geometric array of micro-needles and an ink capsule, which is used to tattoo an animal. The ink can be detected from 4 feet away — via Warren Ellis

A 13-year-old girl's father and stepmother were arrested after the teen told police she had been locked in a room for nearly two years, allowed out only for meals, chores and one-minute timed bathroom breaks. Clint Engstrom, 32, and Lynn Engstrom, 35, were charged Tuesday with one count each of causing mental harm to a child, a felony

20 January 2007

There's a new twist in the ongoing battle between the next-generation, high-definition DVD standards: Hackers have cracked the antipiracy software on several movies published in the HD DVD format. Perhaps ironically, hackers chose to break the copy-protection system in Universal's Serenity, a 2005 science fiction film about a renegade crew of space outlaws. The hackers are distributing copies of the films using BitTorrent, a once-controversial file-sharing tool that is working to clean up its reputation by forging partnerships with TV and movie companies. Hmm... as this crack is on a movie-by-movie basis, I'm seeing this as a workaround rather than a global format crack

Seagate claims the 2.5-inch Savvio 15K, which comes in 36GB and 73GB models, needs 30 percent less power than any other 15K drive. That's good news to data centres coping with the high cost of cooling bills, as ultradense architectures, including blade servers that pack high-powered machines into racks like sardines, prove harder and harder to cool

19 January 2007

Researchers at the University of Alberta Department of Medicine have shown that an existing small, relatively non-toxic molecule, dichloroacetate, causes regression in several different cancers. But there's a catch: the drug isn't patented, and pharmaceutical companies may not be interested in funding further research if the treatment won't make them a profit. In findings that astounded the researchers, the molecule known as DCA was shown to shrink lung, breast and brain tumours in both animal and human tissue experiments

MGM has announced the extension of the hit Stargate SG-1 franchise with two movies based on the popular series. Stargate: The Ark of Truth will bring a conclusion to the primary storyline of the past two seasons of SG-1 and Stargate: Continuum is the usual time paradox tale

A Detroit man with a record of breaking store windows to satisfy a fetish for female mannequins faces up to life in prison if convicted on the latest charge against him

18 January 2007

Governor CL Butch Otter said he will support public hunts to kill all but 100 grey wolves in the state once the federal government removes the animal from Endangered Species Act protections, and that he hopes to shoot a wolf himself

Hewlett-Packard researchers have developed a novel way to create flexible electronic circuits that could make it routine by the end of the decade to modify and upgrade the circuitry in computer-based consumer products even after they have been sold. The technology grows out of an advance in nanocomputing, which involves creating circuitry on a molecular scale and making it interact with today's silicon wires and transistors

By genetically removing a particular protein, scientists have developed cattle that seem to be resistant to mad cow disease. Dr Juergen Richt with the United States Department of Agriculture in Ames, Iowa and colleagues generated cattle lacking the prion protein and monitored them for growth and general health status from birth to 20 months of age

17 January 2007

If you have a Core 2 Duo Macintosh, the built-in WLAN card is capable of networking using (draft 2) 802.11n. This capability can be unlocked via an update Apple distributes with the new AirPort Extreme Base Station. Or, they will sell it to you for $4.99. Why don't they give it away for free, say with Software Update? Because of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (which was passed in the wake of the Enron scandal). iLounge quotes an Apple representative: It's about accounting. Because of the Act, the company believes that if it sells a product, then later adds a feature to that product, it can be held liable for improper accounting if it recognises revenue from the product at the time of sale, given that it hasn't finished delivering the product at that point — via Slashdot

A samurai sword wielding vigilante has come to the rescue of two Police officers when they were attacked by an armed gang in South Shields, England. A group of men had forced their way into a house and were ransacking the place when passing plain-clothes officers were alerted by a woman inside screaming. The criminals outnumbered them and were armed with a hammer, knives and chains and attacked the Police officers. As one of them stabbed at a Policeman with his knife, a mysterious do-gooder appeared from nowhere and attacked him with a samurai sword. One of the burglars began running away but was stopped by the stranger who struck him on the arm with the sword. Two of the criminals were arrested, but in true hero style the samurai disappeared before police could speak to him — via Boing Boing

The husband of Second Life land baroness Anshe Chung said he should not have filed a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint against YouTube in his attempts to have the site delete a video of her avatar being attacked by a barrage of digital flying penises. And as a result, he said, he has revoked the DMCA claim. I didn't realise that some people would misunderstand this as a censorship attempt, which it definitely was not, Guntram Graef said. So, what was it if not an attempt to scupper the story?

16 January 2007

Dell is the target of a class action suit on behalf of Canadian consumers who purchased several models of Inspiron notebooks. The suit claims the computer maker knowingly sold faulty machines

While Toshiba has publicly announced its achievement of developing a triple-layer HD DVD-ROM (read only) disc with a capacity of 51 gigabytes, Ritek is disclosing behind closed doors at CES its own achievements in multi-layer HD optical media. Ritek claims to not only have been able to produce a three-layer and four-layer HD optical discs, but to have successfully designed HD media with a full 10 layers. The company says that its multi-layer process can be applied to both HD DVD and Blu-ray formats

15 January 2007

Trading movies and other large data files online through the popular BitTorrent delivery platform may soon happen on simple consumer devices, thanks to a pair of companies that are creating specifically designed processors that can handle what PCs can do today

Camero, a company out of Israel that has developed a camera that can see things through solid walls, has raised $14 million, bringing the total is has raised to $20 million

14 January 2007

Firefox 3 and IE8 are both in the works. It's obvious that IE will continue to hook into the advanced functionality that Vista offers, while Firefox will become more of a vehicle for independent web services (particularly those from Google). So with IE8 and FF3 we will likely see the two biggest browsers head off into different directions

Northern Territory schools will become the first in Australia to test a revolutionary new laptop computer that costs just $US100 ($128). The One Laptop Per Child project — which is shipping hand-cranked laptops to Brazil, Argentina, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand — has sparked the interest of the NT Education Department, which will begin testing the machines when schools recommence later this month

Gas-guzzling sports cars, four-wheel-drives and people carriers could be priced off the road within five years after a crackdown on carbon emissions to be announced by the European Commission this month. The average new car in 2012 will have to emit no more than 120 grams of carbon per kilometre under proposals to be announced by the European Environment Commissioner, Stavros Dimas

13 January 2007

Will Apple release a version of its Safari browser for Windows? The Mozilla Foundation seems to believe such a move is a distinct possibility. The outlook is buried in the wiki information the Mozilla Foundation posted this week about its future plans for Firefox

Scientists in the US have created a tiny cable — much thinner than a human hair — through which they can transmit visible light. This potentially paves the way for improvements in solar energy, computing and medicine

The terror alert e-mail service being offered by the British secret service is not secure, according to a Spy Blog, a libertarian organisation that monitors security and surveillance developments. MI5 launched an e-mail alert service on Tuesday which informs subscribers of any changes to the national security threat levels. However, a Spy Blog investigation claims to have found that subscriber details will be sent out of the country, unencrypted, to a server based in the US

12 January 2007

A cheap self-assembly device capable of fabricating 3D objects has been developed by US researchers. They hope the machine could kick start a revolution in home fabrication — or rapid prototyping — just as early computer kits sparked an explosion in home computing. Rapid prototyping machines typically cost from $20,000 to $1.5 million. The standard version of the Freeform fabricator — or fabber — is about the size of a microwave oven and can be assembled for around $2400. It can generate 3D objects from plastic and various other materials. Full documentation on how to build and operate the machine, along with all the software required, are available on the Fab@Home website, and all designs, documents and software have been released for free

Over the next few months, eBay will be offering its PayPal users a new tool in the fight against phishers: a $5 security key. The security key is actually a small electronic device, designed to clip on to a keychain, that calculates a new numeric password every 30 seconds. PayPal users who sign up to use the device will need to enter their regular passwords as well as the number displayed on the key whenever they log in to the online payment service

Following a splashy keynote delivered by Steve Jobs to introduce a new smartphone, Cisco has filed suit against Apple in a wrangle over the trademarked name iPhone

11 January 2007

Google has quickly fixed a flaw that reportedly exposed the contact lists of Gmail users to spammers, giving them, at least in theory, a new source of e-mail addresses for hawking their wares. When users access Gmail, Google's Web-based e-mail service, their contact lists are stored in a JavaScript file on their hard drives. Before the flaw was patched, a malicious Web site could have read that file, extracting the list of contacts, then sending that data to spammers

On Tuesday, Microsoft released its monthly round of patches to fix vulnerabilities in Windows and Office, but conspicuously absent were fixes for two known flaws in the widely used Microsoft Word application. The vulnerabilities were first reported in December, and were ranked critical by security firms because they could be used by malicious hackers to gain complete control over a system

Top electronics retailers are lining up behind a new universal DVD format created by Warner Bros to bridge the gap between the competing HD DVD and Blu-ray camps. The new DVD media, dubbed Total HD, is the latest solution in the problem over dueling next-gen DVD standards: Sony's Blu-ray and Toshiba's HD DVD

News emerged this week that top cryptologists at the US National Security Agency had a hand in some of the security features in Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista. The NSA, best known for its code-breaking capabilities and covert-spying operations, loaned a team of cryptologists to the software giant for reviewing some of the security features in Vista, which is expected to be used, eventually, by hundreds of millions of computer users around the world. Microsoft has confirmed the agency played an active role in the software's development

10 January 2007

The past few years have seen a clear trend toward ridding desktop PCs of wires. But the VGA cable connecting your system to your monitor has been a stubborn holdout. Now a company called Quartics is looking to sever that tie, using technology that will allow monitors to link via wired or wireless USB connections

Office for Mac users who've been wondering about a new version — and Office 2007 compatibility — got some answers today as Microsoft said it will ship Office for Mac 2008 by year's end. At MacWorld in San Francisco, officials of Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit also announced plans for spring delivery of beta versions of converters that will allow the current version of the popular suite, Office for Mac 2004, to open, edit, and save files in Office 2007's new default XML formats for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The final converters will appear six to eight weeks after Office for Mac 2008 ships

09 January 2007

Sony has been convicted of misleading the French public and told to pay damages to a consumer watchdog for selling downloadable songs that only run on its own music players

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University may have found a way to kill cancer cells without radiation or toxic chemicals. The group is taking the step of patenting the idea, as this new approach using sugars may hold real potential for the fight against cancer

08 January 2007

An international team of researchers has discovered a new generation of optical molecules which interact 50% more strongly with light than any molecules ever tested. These organic molecules, known as chromophores, have been theorised by physicists at Washington State University, synthesised by chemists in China and tested for their actual optical properties by chemists in Belgium. But if they're excellent candidates for being used in optical technologies such as optical switches and Internet connections, these new materials should not be used before several years — if ever

A blogger named Spocko had his blog shut down by ABC/Disney lawyers because he had posted clips from an ABC Radio-affiliated program and commented on their content, as well as informed show advertisers of what exactly they were paying for. Spocko merely pointed out the content that station KSFO was broadcasting, and as a result Visa pulled their advertising from the station. More companies were reportedly considering pulling their ads

Google has struck a partnership with a Chinese peer-to-peer file downloading service, Xunlei Networking Technologies. The partnership will give users of the Xunlei service easier access to Google search services and multimedia content via a search link on Xunlei's home page, the companies said Friday. The deal also involves marketing development and product co-operation

07 January 2007

Hitachi Introduces 1-Terabyte Hard Drive Hitachi is first to the mat with an announcement of a 1-terabyte hard disk drive. Industry analysts widely expected a 1TB drive to ship sometime in 2007; Hitachi grabbed a head start on the competition by announcing its drive just before the largest US consumer electronics show. According to Hitachi, the drive ships in the first quarter of 2007, and will cost $399 — less than the price of two individual 500GB hard drives today

We can expect 3.5-inch 300-terabit hard drives within a matter of years. Currently Seagate is using perpendicular recording but in the next decade we can expect heat-assisted magnetic recording (HARM), which will boost storage densities to as much as 50 terabits per square inch. The technology allows a smaller number of grains to be used for each bit of data, taking advantage of high-stability magnetic compounds such as iron platinum

Movie studios have approved Sonic Solutions' technology Qflix, which allows people to download movies and burn them to DVDs that include CSS, the method of encryption that protects all pre-recorded DVDs sold today. Apparently the DVDs will also be subject to DRM restrictions placed by download services such as limiting the times a movie can be played back and how many times the movie can be burned

06 January 2007

Google has announced its partnership with the University of Washington, the University of Arizona and others to create the world's largest database — a moving picture of the universe

Samsung's new dual-sided LCD, which is 2.22 inches wide and offers QVGA resolution at 240 x 320 pixels, might help reduce the thickness of cell phones that sport clamshell designs. Or it could give those handsets more room to add features that consumers want. Today's clamshell designs use two screens — one on the outside, one on the inside — that take of up much-needed real estate in a tiny handset

Senator Leahy introduced a bill, simply called The War Profiteering Prevention Act of 2007, targeting fraud by gov't contractors supporting the occupation of Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina. Such profiteering would be a felony under Leahy's legislation, punishable by up to 20 years in prison and fines of $1 million — via digg

05 January 2007

Five leading hardware makers have come together to push for a new storage component that incorporates NAND flash memory onto a computer's hard drive to allow for faster start-up speeds. The hybrid technology is designed to work hand-in-hand with advances in Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista, which will become available to consumers later this month. The technology helps to shorten a Vista-based machine's startup time by booting the system straight from the flash memory chip instead of waiting for the system to turn on and start spinning the platters on the hard drive

Smaller. Safer. Faster. That's how SanDisk describes its new hard drive for notebook computers, a drive that does not use the spinning plates of standard hard drives but the same Flash technology found in MP3 players and digital cameras. Consumers can't buy the drive yet, and SanDisk has not announced a price. But in a written statement, the firm's CEO and founder, Eli Harari, said the drive will add a hefty $600 to the price of any notebook using it

Adobe has become the latest software giant to see its applications exposed to hack attacks, but experts suggest the problem might not be grave, even though its potential reach is vast. Because Acrobat is a nearly universal application in both corporate and consumer worlds, Symantec security researcher Hon Lau called the Acrobat hack breathtaking. The Acrobat flaw does not occur in Acrobat or the Acrobat reader directly, but in the Web browser plug-in that lets PDF documents be read directly over the Internet in programs such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox

04 January 2007

A typing mistake on an online booking form left a German tourist 13,000km off-course on a journey to meet his girlfriend. Tobi Gutt left Germany in high hopes on Saturday, dressed in T-shirt and shorts for the Australian summer, but instead of heading towards Sydney, Australia the 21 year-old ended up en-route to Sidney, Montana. Initially Gutt reasoned that it was possible to fly to Australia via the United States and it was only as he boarded a commuter flight to Sidney, an oil town that's home to around 5,000 people, that the terrible truth dawned on him. Up to that point he'd flown to Portland, Oregon and on to Billings, Montana with mounting concern

Warner Brothers, which helped popularise the DVD more than a decade ago, plans to announce next week a single videodisc that can play films and television programs in both Blu-ray and HD-DVD

03 January 2007

Google has quickly fixed a flaw that reportedly exposed the contact lists of Gmail users to spammers, giving them, at least in theory, a new source of e-mail addresses for hawking their wares

While some islands are sinking, last August another rose from the ocean, formed by volcanic activity and caught in the act by a passing yacht. What looked like a brown stain on the South Pacific turned out to be a spectacular drift of floating pumice stones stretching more than 16 km — and an indication an island was being born nearby

02 January 2007

British travelers using a credit card to purchase their ticket may now have their credit card and email accounts inspected by US authorities. This has been true since October, when the US and the EU agreed about what information the US could demand from airlines and how this information would be handled. But details of the agreement only recently came to light following a Freedom of Information request. The US says it will encourage US carriers to reciprocate to any requests by European governments

Wikipedia has inadvertently blocked Qatar from editing pages thanks to the technical workings of an automated censor imposed by the sole national high speed ISP. The temporary 12 hour autoban was due to spam-abuse coming from the IP address in question, but the fact that this belongs to the country's sole high-speed internet provider had the unintended consequence of stopping Qataris from editing the wiki. Wikipedia has since narrowed the ban down to anonymous users from the affected IP, meaning existing accounts from Qatar should now be back online. This raises a number of issues about internet connectivity in small countries and any company allowed to run ISPs in a monopoly situation — via Slashdot

Ah, Pravda... it does bring the wacky: Russian scientists from the city of Novosibirsk, Siberia, made a sensational report at the international conference devoted to new methods of treatment and rehabilitation in narcology. The report was called Methods of painful impact to treat addictive behavior. Siberian scientists believe that addiction to alcohol and narcotics, as well as depression, suicidal thoughts and psychosomatic diseases occur when an individual loses his or her interest in life. The absence of the will to live is caused with decreasing production of endorphins — the substance, which is known as the hormone of happiness. If a depressed individual receives a physical punishment, whipping that is, it will stir up endorphin receptors, activate the production of happiness and eventually remove depressive feelings — via Improbable Research

01 January 2007

It has long been known that the Toxoplasma gondii parasite alters its host's behaviour, but now it seems the way it alters it depends on the sex of the host. A common parasite can increase a women's attractiveness to the opposite sex but also make men more stupid. Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women. On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls

Over at The Frosty Mug Revolution, PJ Doland makes a compelling case for a new HTML attribute in the spirit of the highly-regarded nofollow attribute promoted by Google — the NSFW attribute (rel=nsfw). His original idea has been refined and expanded by positive comments from readers, resulting in a semantic solution to the issue he raises in the original post. Content creators can apply the attribute to paragraph tags, div tags, or any other block-level element. Doing so will indicate that the enclosed content is not safe for work. Visitors will be able to configure their browsers to block display of just the content enclosed by the flagged block-level element. This isn't about censorship. It is about making us all less likely to accidentally click on a goatse.cx link when our boss is standing behind us. It is also about making us feel more comfortable posting possibly objectionable content by giving visitors a means of easily filtering that content — via Slashdot

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