September 2007 Archive

30 September 2007

It may seem like an unlikely source of inspiration for a new computer memory technology, but Detective Conan (otherwise known as Case Closed) — a popular anime and manga series about a young detective who uses high-tech gadgets to help him solve cases — could have provided the creative spark that led to the development of a protein-based ultrathin memory. Using ferritin, a protein commonly found in both eukaryotes and prokaryotes that facilitates iron storage, scientists from Japan's Nara Institute of Science and Technology came up with a way to build memory on thinner substrates, thus avoiding the need for energy-intensive, high-temperature processing (often in excess of 1,000°C)

Google is considering a Canadian launch of its Street View map feature, which offers street-level close-ups of city centers. But the company said it would probably blur people's faces and vehicle license plates to respect tougher Canadian privacy laws

An unlikely Internet frontier is Paris, Texas, population 26,490, where a defamation lawsuit filed by the local hospital against a critical anonymous blogger is testing the bounds of Internet privacy, First Amendment freedom of speech and whistle-blower rights

29 September 2007

Large PC manufacturers were slated to have to stop selling XP after 31 January. However, they have successfully lobbied Microsoft to allow them to continue selling PCs with all flavours of Windows XP preloaded until 30 June, a further five months. Microsoft also plans to keep XP on retail shelves longer and will allow computer makers in emerging markets to build machines with Windows XP Starter Edition until June 2010

Algae are a promising source of biofuels: besides being easy to grow and handle, some varieties are rich in oil similar to that produced by soybeans. Algae also produce another fuel: hydrogen. They make a small amount of hydrogen naturally during photosynthesis, but Anastasios Melis, a plant- and microbial-biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, believes that genetically engineered versions of the tiny green organisms have a good shot at being a viable source for hydrogen

A cross-site scripting vulnerability may mean bad news for Gmail users. The ethical hacking group GNUCitizen has developed a proof-of-concept program that deftly steals contact information and emails from the popular web-based mail service. At the moment there are no wild exploits for this vulnerability — via Slashdot

28 September 2007

New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clarke announced New Zealand's intention to commit to 90% renewable electricity by 2025. The country already uses 70% renewable electricity, primarily hydro and geothermal power and will continue to increase its use of renewables over the next 20 years

Shannon Larratt of BME and ModBlog has made what looks like an emergency post [since deleted] about a hostile takeover attempt of BME — via Warren Ellis

Copyright lawyers from Harvard's Berkman Center have written an article in the Harvard Crimson excoriating the Harvard Coop bookstore for claiming that its prices are intellectual property — via Boingboing

27 September 2007

New Zealand police have launched a wiki open at anyone wanting to edit and make suggestions to the Police Act as part of a wider revamp. New Zealand's current Police Act is nearly 50 years old. In March 2006 a review undertaken. Following this a new website wiki.policeact.govt.nz has been launched to allow people to suggest wording for the new Policing Act. The wiki version of the Policing Act will be viewed by New Zealand parliamentarians, before an official bill is introduced into Parliament — via Boingboing

Burma's bloggers are using the internet to beat censorship, and tell the world what is happening under the military junta's veil of secrecy

Got US$1.5 million lying around? You can buy a Titan Missile Silo [eBay listing] and wait out the apocalypse. Not sure where the silo is, but the real estate agent (who wants a US$10,000 earnest money escrow before he'll show it to you) has an Orange County 949 area code — via Boingboing

26 September 2007

Scientists in India have just made a breakthrough, a so-called Holy Grail in the illumination industry in producing an LED that emits pure white light, suitable for interior lighting of homes, offices, etc. The challenge has been developing a combination of materials that will produce this light, which they believe they have

Amazon has launched the public beta of its new digital music portal called Amazon MP3, which will feature two million songs from 180,000 artists and 20,000 labels, all without DRM. Separate songs will sell for $.89 or $.99 and albums will range in cost from $5.99 to $9.99, with the best selling albums coming in at $8.99. It looks like it's locked down to US customers only

The Sex Pistols returned to the studio recently to re-record Anarchy in the UK for Neversoft's upcoming Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. Activision announced the Sex Pistol's re-recording, as the publisher claims it was unable to locate the original multi-tracks

25 September 2007

Starting 12 November, The One Laptop Per Child Project will sell its affordable XO laptop to Americans for a brief period of time, but there's a slight catch: US buyers must purchase two computers — one for their own child and one for a child in the developing world — for a total cost of US$399 — via Slashdot

It seems that Microsoft support will allow anybody with a copy of Vista Ultimate or Business to call and request a downgrade disc themselves, just like it says in the licence terms. So there you have it, anyone can pick up a Vista downgrade disc as long as they have a nice enough version of Vista — via Gizmodo Australia

24 September 2007

Random House and eMusic have begun to sell DRM-free audiobooks on their site. This is pretty big news, since iTunes has an exclusive deal with Audible for ebooks, and Audible won't sell non-DRM ebooks (though they have other non-DRM products), even when the author doesn't want any DRM

A method developed at Colorado State University for crafting solar panels has been developed to the point where they are nearly ready for mass production. Produced at less than $1 per watt, the panels will dramatically reduce the cost of generating solar electricity and could power homes and businesses around the globe with clean energy for roughly the same cost as traditionally generated electricity — via Slashdot

23 September 2007

The Pirate Bay has been digging through the enormous chunk of leaked email from MediaDefender, the sleazy enforcers used by the entertainment industry to fight P2P, and they've discovered evidence of illegal sabotage. So they're suing all the big movie and record comapnies in Sweden — via BoingBoing

While Microsoft is still pushing Vista hard, the company is quietly allowing PC makers to offer a downgrade option to buyers that get machines with the new operating system but want to switch to Windows XP. The program applies only to Windows Vista Business and Ultimate versions, and it is up to PC makers to decide how, if at all, they want to make XP available. Fujitsu has been among the most aggressive, starting last month to include an XP disc in the box with its laptops and tablets

22 September 2007

Google is planning to span the Pacific Ocean with its own undersea fibre optics cable

The Open Mobile Terminal Platform — a forum dominated by operators but including manufacturers such as Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and LG — announced that its members had agreed on micro-USB as the future common connector

London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost £200 million but an analysis of the publicly funded spy network has cast serious doubt on its ability to help solve crime. In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average. The study found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any — via Slashdot

21 September 2007

Former defence minister Kim Beazley has told how Australia cracked top-secret American combat aircraft codes in the 1980s to enable the shooting down of enemy aircraft. The radar on Australia's US-made Hornets could not identify most potentially hostile aircraft in the region — they were set up for European threats — but despite many requests, the codes were not provided, so In the end we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves. The Americans knew what the Australians were doing and were intrigued by the progress they made — via Slashdot

Google has quietly introduced a new app of sorts called Shared Stuff, a social bookmarking service offering a strange balance of Google Bookmarks, del.icio.us, and Google Reader shared feeds with a heavy dose of Gmail integration

20 September 2007

Mozilla has announced a new initiative to overhaul email and internet communications in general. The new company, MailCo, will be given $3 million in startup capital from Mozilla to start with the Thunderbird code and work from there. MailCo will be led by David Ascher of ActiveState fame and, according to him, will be a for-profit venture without the emphasis on profit — via Slashdot

Intel and others plan to release a new version of the ubiquitous Universal Serial Bus technology in the first half of 2008, a revamp the chipmaker said will make data transfer rates more than ten times as fast by adding fibre-optic links alongside the traditional copper wires

Google adds a PowerPoint clone called Presentation to its stable of online Word and Excel clones. Whether an online-only, browser-based presentation suite will be nearly as powerful as a native application is yet to be seen — via Gizmodo Australia

IBM's Lotus-branded proprietary programs already compete with Microsoft products for e-mail, messaging and work group collaboration. But the Symphony software is a free alternative to Microsoft's mainstay Office programs -- Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The Office business is huge and lucrative for Microsoft, second only to its Windows operating system as a profit maker

19 September 2007

Punk legends The Sex Pistols have announced a concert to mark the 30th anniversary of the release of their seminal album Never Mind the Bollocks. Original members John Lydon, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock will play at the Brixton Academy in London on 8 November. The group, who split in 1978, first reformed for a world tour in 1996 and last performed together in 2003

The New York Times said it will end its paid TimesSelect Web service and make most of its Web site available for free in the hopes of attracting more readers and higher advertising revenue

Apparently, SCO's lawyers were working overtime last Sunday, because they wrote a quick plea to the bankruptcy court for permission to hire accounting temps. Why? Approximately half of SCO's finance department has resigned or been fired. Two who resigned had over ten years of experience each. One can only assume that they know what's about to happen to SCO — via Slashdot

A US federal court ordered the Chiquita banana company to pay $US25 million ($30 million) in fines for paying more than $US1 million in protection money to Colombian paramilitary groups between 1997 and 2004

18 September 2007

The Federal Government recently began an unsavoury campaign to win votes by abusing parents' concern for their children. It is trying to whip up fear about the largely non-existent threat of online sexual predators

Warner, who currently support both HD DVD and Blu-ray high definition disc formats, had also been working on a hybrid disc format — Total HD — which was originally due to debut this year, was delayed, and is now on hold indefinitely

Yahoo is buying e-mail service Zimbra for $350 million in an all-cash deal that may open a new revenue channel for the slumping Internet icon. The acquisition announced Monday represents Yahoo's second significant expenditure this month as co-founder Jerry Yang spearheads an effort to breathe new life into the company

In one of the bolder experiments to date, SpiralFrog.com, a service scheduled to open today, will let Web surfers download songs by U2, Timbaland, Amy Winehouse and other Universal Music Group artists free. The catch: Consumers have to wait 90 seconds for each track to download, and they must answer questions each month about their buying habits. In addition, the songs can't be played on iPods or burned onto CDs as they can with 99-cent downloads from the dominant online music store, Apple's iTunes

17 September 2007

A German operator of a Tor server used to anonymously route traffic over the net said he was arrested in a midnight raid on his residence that stemmed from an investigation into bomb threats said to have passed through an internet protocol address under his control

Google added 54 new countries to Google Maps ranging from Afghanistan to Yemen and has plans to add even more countries in the coming months. Along with the Google Maps addition, DigitalGlobe, provider of Google's satellite images, is launching a new satellite on Tuesday

The $100 laptop — which was already up to a hefty $175, has gotten yet another price bump to $188. A spokesman says they're committed to keeping the price from rising above $190, and probably below $200 if at all possible. It's very strange that the price keeps rising, seeing as it's been, what, two years since the project was announced, plus they've gotten more orders from companies so they can ramp up bulk production. Shouldn't hardware prices have dropped instead of risen? — via Gizmodo Australia

16 September 2007

The X PRIZE Foundation and Google has announced the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon to win a $30 million prize purse

Two students at Central Kings Rural High School fought back against bullying recently, unleashing a sea of pink after a new student was harassed and threatened when he showed up wearing a pink shirt. The Grade 9 student arrived for the first day of school last Wednesday and was set upon by a group of six to 10 older students who mocked him, called him a homosexual for wearing pink and threatened to beat him up. The next day, Grade 12 students David Shepherd and Travis Price decided something had to be done about bullying. They used the Internet to encourage people to wear pink and bought 75 pink tank tops for male students to wear. They also brought a pink basketball to school as well as pink material for headbands and arm bands. David and Travis figure about half the school's 830 students wore pink

Using lasers to drive spaceships has been a subject of interest for many years, but making a photonic engine powerful enough for practical use has been elusive. Dr Young Bae, a California physicist, has built a demonstration photonic laser thruster that produces enough thrust to micro-maneuver a satellite. This would be useful in high-precision formation flying, such as using a fleet of satellites to form a space telescope with a large virtual aperture. Scaled up, a similar engine could speed a spacecraft to Mars in less than a week — via Slashdot

15 September 2007

The Rational Response Squad have lost their YouTube account, which is the account that we've been posting videos with ever since RichardDawkins.net lost theirs. Apparently Creation Science Evangelism Ministries had been submitting false DMCA copyright requests and after RRS came to their defence, they were banned

The company MediaDefender works with the RIAA and MPAA against piracy, setting up fake torrents and trackers and disrupting p2p traffic. Previously, the TorrentFreak site accused them of setting up a fake internet video download site designed to catch and bust users. MediaDefender denied the entrapment charges. Now 700MB of MediaDefender's internal emails from the last six months have been leaked onto BitTorrent trackers. The emails detail their entire plan, including how they intended to distance themselves from the fake company they set up and future strategies. Other pieces of company information were included in the emails such as logins and passwords, wage negotiations, and numerous other aspect of their internal business — via Slashdot

Technology that translates spoken or written words into British Sign Language (BSL) has been developed by researchers at IBM. The system, called SiSi (Say It Sign It) was created by a group of students in the UK. SiSi will enable deaf people to have simultaneous sign language interpretations of meetings and presentations

14 September 2007

The Computer and Communications Industry Association — a trade group representing Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, among others — has issued a report [PDF] that finds fair use exceptions add more than $4.5 trillion in revenue to the US economy and add more value to the US economy than copyright industries contribute. Recent studies indicate that the value added to the US economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion, said CCIA President and CEO Ed Black. The value added to the US economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion — via Slashdot

Google is calling on businesses and regulators throughout the world to set international standards for protecting consumer privacy online and offline

First drug companies were caught deleting side effects about drugs on Wikipedia, now the big law firms working for the drug companies are getting caught deleting what they don't want people to know about them

13 September 2007

Fark.com has sued a man it accuses of attempting to hack into the e-mail and computers of its staff members. The lawsuit says an unknown computer hacker sent e-mails 8 imploring Fark staff members to visit a particular Web site. For the next four days, Fark staff received forged e-mails that appeared to come from other staff members, containing links to three Web sites. The links contained Trojan horse programs, malicious software that allows secret unauthorised remote access to computers

Microsoft has been granted a patent for stealthy audio watermarking, which is just a slick way of saying inaudible digital watermarks directly embedded in the audio of a file, allowing the owner to be traced. Apparently, in their version of the tech, the watermark's scattered throughout the file so it's more difficult to pull out or tweak and it's able to be compressed while remaining intact — via Gizmodo Australia

The National Science Foundation has announced a new University of Arizona project, which they call the Dark Web, intended to monitor all terrorist activity on the Internet. The project relies on advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis [to] find, catalog and analyse extremist activities online. The coolest part of the project is a tool called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating 'anonymous' content with an accuracy of 95%, according to the release — via Slashdot

12 September 2007

In a recent announcement on the Whirlpool front page, it appears that accounting software maker 2clix is suing the founder of the forums as the founder allowed statements relating to the Plaintiff and its software product that are both false and malicious to be published on the Whirlpool forums — via Slashdot

For obvious reasons, scientists long have thought that salt water couldn't be burned. So when an Erie man announced he'd ignited salt water with the radio-frequency generator he'd invented, some thought it a was a hoax. John Kanzius, a Washington County native, tried to desalinate seawater with a generator he developed to treat cancer, and it caused a flash in the test tube. Within days, he had the salt water in the test tube burning like a candle, as long as it was exposed to radio frequencies. His discovery has spawned scientific interest in using the world's most abundant substance as clean fuel, among other uses

Virginia's law banning the massive distribution of junk e-mail is an unconstitutional barrier to free speech, a lawyer for a former spammer told the state's highest court

A Las Vegas man faces about 20 years in prison after pleading guilty in a case where he impersonated intellectual property lawyers and tried to bully owners out of their domain names. According to the FBI, David Scali is charged with registering an e-mail account under an alias and then sending e-mails in which he claimed to be the intellectual property lawyer. In the e-mails, which were sent in late June and early July of 2006, Scali threatened to file $100,000 trademark infringement lawsuits against the owners of various Internet website names unless they gave up their domain name registrations within two days

11 September 2007

Google claims to rank search results by relevance, but the search engine engages in deceptive conduct by selling off the top positions to commercial partners, a Sydney court has heard. The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) is taking world-first legal action in the Federal Court against Google Inc over allegedly deceptive conduct related to sponsored links on its websites. The ACCC has brought a two-pronged case against Trading Post and Google — including subsidiaries Google Australia and Google Ireland — for potentially misleading consumers. The consumer watchdog alleges Google does not do enough to differentiate organic search results — those ranked by relevance — from sponsored links which appear at the top of the results page — via Slashdot

Hewlett-Packard is licensing a medical patch it has developed to Ireland's Crospon that potentially can replace hypodermic needles or pills for delivering vaccines or other types of medication to patients. The patch contains up to 90,000 microneedles per square inch, microprocessors and a thermal unit. Medications contained in the patch are heated and then injected through the needles. Processors can monitor drug delivery, deliver doses over extended periods of time or deliver drugs in response to a patient's vital signs (eg, blood pressure or heart rate), depending on how it is programmed

A solar-powered, unmanned craft has flown for 54 hours — a record for both unmanned aerial vehicles and solar craft. None before has managed to store enough solar energy to fly through more than one night — via Slashdot

10 September 2007

The Mozilla Foundation last week released the first beta version, 8.0.0b1, of the revised Eudora e-mail application since Qualcomm stopped developing it commercially and turned it over to the open-source community in 2006. Mozilla already has an open-source e-mail program, Thunderbird, and the new Eudora will be a branded offshoot, with some new features, according to the release site. In addition, a related extension called Penelope will provide some extra features to both Eudora and Thunderbird

Indian journalist Amit Varma reports that Mumbai's police are requiring the city's 500 Internet cafes to install keystroke loggers, which will capture every keystroke by users and turn that information over to the government — nearly in realtime by the sound of it. Buy things online, and the underpaid Indian police will have your credit card number. Will these end up getting sold in a black market somewhere? Not unlikely — via Slashdot

09 September 2007

It looks like the efforts of the anti-scammers at sites like 419eater, Scamwarners, Artists Against 419 and possibly others have become the target of the Storm botnet. Spamnation has a post about it, and as of this writing none of the above listed sites are responding. Spamnation reports that CastleCops and other anti-spam forums are being DDoSed as well. Sounds like a massive, concerted effort against the folks who are fighting the good fight. If the scammers have gone to these lengths, perhaps the efforts of the anti-scam groups are working — via Slashdot

Microchip implants have induced cancer in laboratory animals and dogs. A series of research articles spanning more than a decade found that mice and rats injected with glass-encapsulated RFID transponders developed malignant, fast-growing, lethal cancers in up to 1% to 10% of cases. The tumours originated in the tissue surrounding the microchips and often grew to completely surround the devices. To date, about 2,000 RFID devices have been implanted in humans worldwide, according to VeriChip — via Slashdot

08 September 2007

A police operation to covertly follow a Central Otago man came to an abrupt halt this week when the man found tracking devices planted in his car, ripped them out and listed them for sale on Trade Me. Police have neither confirmed nor denied they placed the devices, yet they demanded Trade Me yank the auctions

Organisers of a duathlon in Scotland have taken out a one million pound (nearly AU$2.5 million) insurance policy against attack by or sighting of the fabled Loch Ness monster. First Monster Duathlon race director Malcolm Sutherland said they were planning for all eventualities. Transport operator FirstGroup said in a statement its policy with insurers Royal and Sun Alliance would pay out should Nessie emerge from the murky depths of the vast watercourse and/or attack one of the competitors — via Ben Templesmith

07 September 2007

US District Judge Victor Marrero ruled in favor of the ACLU and struck down a portion of the revised USA PATRIOT Act this morning, forcing investigators to go through the courts to obtain approval before ordering ISPs to give up information on customers, instead of just sending them a National Security Letter. In the words of Judge Marrero, this use of National Security Letters offends the fundamental constitutional principles of checks and balances and separation of powers — via Slashdot

The UK government has responded to an electronic petition that called on it to ensure the BBC's iPlayer works on non-Windows PCs. More than 16,000 people have signed the petition since it was created. In its response, the government said the BBC Trust had made it a condition of launching the iPlayer that it worked with other operating systems. The iPlayer on-demand TV service lets people catch up with BBC programmes by downloading them via the net

Physicists at the University of Michigan have demonstrated how two separate atoms can communicate with a sort of quantum intuition which Albert Einstein referred to as spooky. In doing so, the researchers have made an advance towards super-fast quantum computing and even a quantum internet

06 September 2007

Members of The Chaser were arrested today after attempting to breach security at the APEC Leaders Conference in Sydney. Chas Licciardello and Julian Morrow were arrested, along with nine crew members (all are now free on bail), just a short distance away from the InterContinental Hotel where President Bush is staying. They had already cleared at least two police checkpoints disguised as a Canadian motorcade. No particular reason we chose Canada, said Taylor. We just thought they'd be a country who the cops wouldn't scrutinise too closely, and who feasibly would only have three cars in their motorcade — as opposed to the 20 or so gas guzzlers that Bush has brought with him — via Slashdot

Computers inside pharmaceutical giant Pfizer's network are spamming the internet with e-mails touting the company's flagship erectile-enhancement drug Viagra, along with ads for knockoff Rolexes and shady junk stocks. But the e-mails are not part of Pfizer's official marketing efforts. Pfizer's computers appear to have been infected with malware that has transformed them into zombie computers sending spam at the behest of a hacker. Oddly enough, they are spamming the public's inboxes with ads for the company's own product

A Toronto-led team of researchers has found a way to use stem cells derived from skin to treat spinal cord injuries in rats. The finding lends promise to the idea that stem cells could one day be used to heal spinal cord injuries in humans, helping thousands of Canadians to walk again. Injured rats injected with skin-derived stem cells regained mobility and had better walking co-ordination, according to the study published yesterday in the Journal of Neuroscience. The skin-derived stem cells, injected directly into the injured rats' spinal cords, were able to survive in their new location and set off a flurry of activity, helping to heal the cavity in the cord

05 September 2007

This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct, becoming the most cost-efficient supercomputer anywhere that Adams knows of. It's small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk, said Brom. Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own — via Slashdot

Scientists at UC Davis have discovered that some eels have an extra set of jaws deep in their throats that launch forward into their mouths to help pull prey in. It looks like a funny pair of forceps with curved sharp teeth, said evolutionary biologist Rita Mehta, lead author of the research. Before the discovery, scientists thought that all aquatic predators swallowed their prey using suction. By dropping the lower jaw and creating a flow of water into their mouths, they draw in the prey. The two species of moray eels studied by Mehta and functional morphologist Peter Wainwright are the first examples of an alternative feeding method

04 September 2007

Security firm SunBelt, which discovered the Bank of India's hacked Web site was serving dangerous malware, says the infamous Russian Business Network (RBN) — an ISP linked to child pornography and phishing — is behind the attack. The service provider in question has developed a notorious reputation, with Verisign classifying it as the baddest of the bad in the ISP world in June 2006. According to Verisign threat intelligence analyst Kimberly Zenz, RBN is different to other service providers because unlike many ISPs that host predominately legitimate items, RBN is entirely illegal

The Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network in June in the most successful cyber attack on the US defence department, say American officials. The Pentagon acknowledged shutting down part of a computer system serving the office of Robert Gates, defence secretary, but declined to say who it believed was behind the attack. Current and former officials have told the Financial Times an internal investigation has revealed that the incursion came from the People's Liberation Army

Swedish ISPs may soon be required by law to take greater responsibility for unlawful file-sharing. Although rejecting the ludicrous idea of an overarching broadband fee which would be shared out among copyright holders, a government report published on Monday called for internet providers to be bound to contribute to bringing all copyright infringement to an end. Under the proposal, copyright holders whose material is being shared illegally would be entitled to compensation from ISPs which did not ban users. Needless to say, the country's ISPs are not happy — via Slashdot

03 September 2007

Quietly over the weekend, Network TEN has joined the Foxtel EPG. It's been a long running negotation, but finally Foxtel users, and iQ users in particular, gain the benefit of actually seeing the stations programming in the schedule. So it's now just Channel Seven still holding out on Foxtel

A group of anonymous programmers are planning to sell iPhone unlocking software on the Internet. They demonstrated the software hack for CNN and had a T-Mobile sim card working moments after removing the AT&T sim card. This is bound to stir up a lot of controversy: in the US iPhones are supposed to work only on the AT&T network in the first two years according to their agreement with Apple — via Slashdot

According to a report released Monday by antivirus company Sophos, China — including Hong Kong — hosted 44.8 percent of the world's infected sites in August 2007. The United States ranked a distant second, hosting 20.8 percent of Web sites that contain malicious code. The number of infected Web pages has also grown. Sophos said that it detected an average of 5,000 new infected pages each day in the month of August

02 September 2007

Since 30 August, there are massive problems with PayPal subscriptions. The automatic renewal of subscriptions stopped that day, causing headaches for lots of web site owners that rely on this kind of revenue. The problem is global, as this thread in the PayPal Developer Community shows. PayPal is aware of the problem but hasn't indicated any progress yet; some posters are wondering whether they have stopped working on it over the long (US) holiday weekend — via Slashdot

Zango sued Kaspersky Lab to force the Company to reclassify Zango's programs as nonthreatening and to prevent Kaspersky Lab's security software from blocking Zango's potentially undesirable programs. In the important ruling for the anti-malware industry, Judge Coughenour of the Western District of Washington threw out Zango's lawsuit on the grounds that Kaspersky was immune from liability under the Communications Decency Act — via Slashdot

The Tidbinbilla space tracking station, outside Canberra, Australia is still communicating with the two Voyager spacecraft 30 years after they were launched and 18 years after Voyager 2 passed close by Neptune. The bank of computers that would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who cannot be junked. The 1970s hardware is now our world's only means of chatting with two robot pioneers exploring the solar system's outer limits. Today Voyager 1 is humanity's most remote object, 15.5 billion kilometers from the sun. Voyager 2 is 12.5 billion kilometers from it. Both continue beaming home reports, but now they are space-age antiques. The Voyager technology is so outmoded, said Tidbinbilla's spokesman, Glen Nagle, We have had to maintain heritage equipment to talk to them — via Slashdot

01 September 2007

The latest version of Google Earth contains a hidden feature: a full-fledged flight simulator. Press Command+Option+A in OS X or Ctrl+Alt+A on a PC or Linux box and you'll be greeted with a hidden dialogue box that lets you choose an aircraft (F16 or SR22) and an airport. Once you've made you selection, you'll be placed inside the aircraft. You can then fly around the globe in a free flight simulator, viewing the scenery that is pulled from Google Earth's map files

Google on Friday began hosting material produced by The Associated Press and three other news services on its own Web site instead of only sending readers to other destinations. The change affects hundreds of stories and photographs distributed each day by the AP, Agence France-Presse, The Press Association in the United Kingdom and The Canadian Press. It could diminish Internet traffic to newspaper and broadcast companies' Web sites where those stories and photos are also found — a development that could reduce those companies' revenue from online advertising

Amazon will probably launch its DRM-free music store in the next few weeks, joining Wal-Mart and others in posing the first real threat to the iTunes Music hegemony. Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos adopted an MP3-only strategy so that the music Amazon sells can play on iPods any device. Trouble is, it may be a half-assed music store, with Sony and Warner still mum on the subject of stripped DRM

After recent setbacks in the RIAA's lawsuits, the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) has decided to try a different approach in Australia — they want ISPs to do their dirty work for them. Australian ISPs, though, have soundly rejected calls from AFACT to slow down or terminate user accounts that AFACT has determined are being used to distribute copyrighted works. Telstra had this to say: We do not believe it is up to the ISPs to be judge, jury and executioner in relation to the issue when the content owners have any number of legal avenues to pursue infringements — via Slashdot

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