November 2007 Archive

30 November 2007

The desire for greater control over how search engines index Web sites is driving an effort by publishers to revise a 13-year-old technology for restricting access

A massive SEO poisoning attack was directed at Google in particular and resulted in tens of thousands of Web pages hosting exploits showing up on the first page of Google searches for thousands of common terms [PDF]. Sunbelt Software blogged about the attack on Monday after investigating it for months. By Wednesday Google had removed tens of thousands of malware-hosting pages from its index — via Slashdot

The ability to create flexible, transparent electronics could lead to a host of novel applications, such as e-paper and electronic car windshields. Now, scientists have constructed a transistor made of a network of nanotubes that may serve as an essential component in a trans-flex device. Such devices require two main components: light displays and current-controlling transistors. While scientists have found that OLEDs and LCDs work well as light displays, finding a truly transparent and flexible transistor material is still an open area. Usually, these transistors consist of metallic nanowires

HP and Crospon have developed a skin patch employing microneedles that barely penetrate the skin. The microneedles can replace conventional injections and deliver drugs through the skin without causing any pain. The skin patch technology also enables delivery of several drugs by one patch and the control of dosage and of administration time for each drug. It has the potential to be safer and more efficient than injections

29 November 2007

A new version of Google Maps introduced this week includes a beta feature dubbed My Location that was designed to simulate the GPS experience on mobile phones and handheld devices that do not include GPS hardware, like Apple's iPhone. Essentially, the My Location feature takes information broadcast from mobile towers near non-GPS equipped mobile phones to approximate the device's current location on the map down to about ten city blocks. The My Location feature is currently available for most web-enabled mobile phones, including Java, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Nokia/Symbian devices — via Slashdot

Scientists conducting tests on two tasmanian devils have found one from Tasmania's west coast resistant to the devil facial tumour disease. The facial tumour disease is found across about 60 per cent of the state, and has killed up to 90 per cent of some populations. The devil is now listed as an endangered species

Owners of Apple's 13-inch notebooks are reporting that their Wi-Fi access is much less reliable after installing Mac OSX Leopard or more recent updates to Mac OSX Tiger, especially when the systems switch to battery power. System users in Apple's discussion forums say the problem first surfaced after the appearance of the Mac OSX 10.4.10 update this summer and so far is known to affect most models, though reports are currently scarce from buyers of Apple's fall 2007 units

Yahoo has reached a deal to start running advertisements in Adobe's popular PDF document-reading format. The service will allow publishers to make money by including adverts linked to the content of a PDF document in a panel at the side of the page. It is Yahoo's latest way of expanding the places it can advertise online following deals with the auction site Ebay and the cable TV group Comcast. The advertisements will not appear if the PDF document is printed

28 November 2007

Google is preparing a service that would let users store on its computers essentially all of the files they might keep on their personal-computer hard drives — such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images, say people familiar with the matter. The service could let users access their files via the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on with a password and share them online with friends. It could be released as early as a few months from now

Google today announced a new strategic initiative to develop electricity from renewable energy sources that will be cheaper than electricity produced from coal. The newly created initiative, known as RE<C, will focus initially on advanced solar thermal power, wind power technologies, enhanced geothermal systems and other potential breakthrough technologies. In 2008, Google expects to spend tens of millions on research and development and related investments in renewable energy

Google Israel gave up the IP address of a Blogger user without being compelled to do so by a court. A preliminary ruling was issued in which a court indicated that the slander the blogger was accused of probably rose to the level of a criminal violation. Google Israel then made a deal with the plaintiffs, local city councilmen whom the blogger had been attacking for a year. Google disclosed the IP address only to the court, which posted a message (Google says the anonymous blogger got it) inviting him/her to contest the ruling anonymously. When no response was received within three days, Google turned over the IP address to the plaintiffs' lawyers — via Slashdot

Federal prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to force Amazon.com to identify thousands of innocent customers who bought books online, then abandoned the idea after a judge rebuked them. In an order that was sealed but has now become public, US District Judge Stephen Crocker rejected the Justice Department's subpoena for details on Amazon's customers and their purchasing habits. Prosecutors had claimed the details would help them prove their case against a former Madison, Wisconsin, city official charged with tax evasion related to selling used books through Amazon

27 November 2007

Solving the last mile problem is a goal both the telecommunication and cable industries have pursued for years without discovering a single, easily implementable solution. Now, researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology think they have developed a new type of plastic optical fibre that could potentially be used to provide low-cost fibre connectivity from the consumer to the provider

A team of clockmakers broke into the Pantheon in Paris in September 2005 and spent a year fixing the historic and neglected clock, which had been abandoned by the authorities. They were prosecuted for breaking in, but have just been cleared of the charges in court. The group, Untergunther have a catalogue of subterranean lo-jinks to their name

The Court has ordered UMG Recordings, Warner Bros Records, Interscope Records, Motown, and Sony BMG to disclose their expenses-per-download to the defendant's lawyers, in UMG v Lindor, a case pending in Brooklyn. The Court held that the expense figures are relevant to the issue of whether the RIAA's attempt to recover damages of $750 or more per 99-cent song file, is an unconstitutional violation of due process — via Slashdot

Staying in touch via phone or web could soon get easier as work starts on a way to unite the internet and the telephone network. When finished the UK's national Enum directory will make looking up net phone numbers like finding a web site. Initially the directory will target the UK's net telephony networks so calls can cross between them more easily. But the directories are expected to one day hold details of the many different ways almost anyone can be contacted

26 November 2007

The controversial Google Street View project has arrived in Australia taking snaps in our major cities and towns. The project has already captured images at street level in 17 US cities and attached them to the highly popular Google Maps online application. It was launched in the US in May, and quickly attracted controversy after claims several images breached privacy

Once again, Monster.com has been hit by hackers. The job search site was hit by an IFRAME that linked to a malicious site. The attack took advantage of a cross-site scripting vulnerability and was most likely created using Neosploit

Facebook users are complaining over ads where their shopping habits are shared with their friends as if they are endorsing products. The best part is that you can opt out — if you click a box that disappears after 20 seconds... wait too long, and they assume you are totally fine with it

25 November 2007

Rupert Murdoch-owned British ISP Sky is migrating their customers to the Google Apps platform, and the customer experience is terrible. Their 1 million customers were told that they need to change their client settings to enable SMTP Authentication and other settings on a certain date — but not to do it before then or their e-mail would break; but if you don't do it on the date your e-mail will also break. Oh, and if you're a POP user you also need to enable that manually in the Skoogle interface, as seemingly they chose not to run a system-wide command to allow it for all users. In addition, if you want help then you're pretty much on your own. One user has made seven support calls and still not been able to access his e-mail since the migration. Hardly surprising that the story has made the papers with their help-desk in meltdown — via Slashdot

24 November 2007

German police are unable to decipher the encryption used in the internet telephone software Skype to monitor calls by suspected criminals and terrorists, Germany's top police officer, Joerg Ziercke, said. The encryption with Skype telephone software ... creates grave difficulties for us... We can't decipher it. That's why we're talking about source telecommunication surveillance — that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it's been decrypted

New Zealand scientists have found a bacterium, named Methylokorus infernorum, that eats a key global warming chemical. Found in a hot spring, the bug lives off of methane emissions from geothermically active areas. A scientist quoted in the article stated that a cubic meter of liquid containing the bacterium would consume about 11kg of methane each year. But Dr Stott cautioned that such an application was probably some years into the future. He said it was unlikely the micro-organism, which prefers acidic conditions of about 60°C, could ever be added to sheep or cows' food to stop the animals releasing methane — via Slashdot

23 November 2007

PayPal has unveiled Mobile Checkout, allowing people in Australia to buy movie tickets, flowers and other goods on-the-fly. The internet has already brought the world's shopping malls into the bedroom but now shopaholics can satisfy their impulses with a few button presses while walking home or riding a bus — as long as they have a PayPal account

An unconfirmed rumour claims that LinkedIn is in talks with media giant News Corporation over a possible buyout in January 2008

22 November 2007

Hot on the heels of online retail giant Amazon, book chain Dymocks is preparing to launch an electronic book reader in Australia before Christmas. Dymocks chief executive Don Grover said he was in final negotiations with a European e-book reader manufacturer and planned to make an announcement within the next 10 days. Update: the iLiad has been launched at an obscenely overpriced AU$899

Paleontologists discovered a giant fossilised claw that once belonged to an 2.5m long sea scorpion. The University of Bristol scientists uncovered the claw near Prum, Germany. It's approximately 400 million years old

21 November 2007

Registered Google users in the US, Australia, and New Zealand can move incorrect markers for their homes or businesses to the correct locations. Access to some listings is restricted — hospitals, government buildings, and businesses whose listings have been claimed through Google's Local Business Center. In addition, moving a place marker more than 200 yards (or 200 meters) from its original location requires a moderator's approval before the change shows up on the map. Once a marker has been moved, a Show Original link will direct users to the original location — via Slashdot

20 November 2007

Consumer demand for bandwidth could see the internet running out of capacity as early as 2010, a new study warns. US analyst firm Nemertes Research predicted a drastic slowdown as the network struggles to cope with the amount of data being carried on it. Such gridlock would drastically affect how people use the web and could mean the next Google or YouTube simply doesn't get off the ground, it said. The report said billions needed to be spent upgrading broadband networks

19 November 2007

The Georgia Institute of Technology is working on the theory that honeybees can give us hints about how to improve the speed and efficiency of Internet servers. Honeybees somehow manage to efficiently collect a lot of nectar with limited resources and no central command. Such swarm intelligence of these amazingly organized bees can also be used to improve the efficiency of Internet servers faced with similar challenges — via Slashdot

According to a thread on the forums of AnimeSuki, a popular anime bittorent index site, Comcast has begun sending DCMA letters to customers downloading unlicensed fan-subtitled anime shows via bittorrent. By unlicensed, they mean that no english language company has the rights to it

18 November 2007

iiNet has thrown down the gauntlet to Telstra and Optus with a set of aggressively priced broadband and phone bundles, but has joined the top two telcos in counting uploads on its new plans

When it comes to internet speeds, we've long-since consigned the humble kilobit-class connection to the dustbin, so a mathematics-based breakthrough has us wondering if megabit- and even gigabit-level connections will one day sound as quaintly archaic. Researchers at Japan's Tohoku University have tweaked existing protocols to enable standard fibre-optic cables to carry data at hundreds of terabits per second. At that speed, full movies could be downloaded almost instantaneously in their hundreds

17 November 2007

Rupert Murdoch's announcement this week that he expects to stop charging for access to the Wall Street Journal's Web site is the latest example of a publisher giving up on the subscription-based business model — a significant shift in the evolution of online content. In recent months, the Economist, the New York Times and the Financial Times have all moved content out from behind the wall, an industry metaphor for the location of paid online content

Several companies have announced solid state hard drives in excess of one terabyte in size

A paleontologist has discovered a 110 million-year-old dinosaur that had a mouth that worked like a vacuum cleaner, hundreds of tiny teeth and nearly translucent skull

16 November 2007

Five Australian-based journalists were deliberately killed by Indonesian troops in East Timor in 1975, an Australian coroner's court has ruled. Dorelle Pinch, deputy coroner of New South Wales, said the killings could constitute a war crime. The two Australians, two Britons and a New Zealander, known as the Balibo Five, were killed to stop them exposing the invasion of East Timor

The Telegraph is running a story about a new Unified Theory of Physics. Garrett Lisi has presented a paper called An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything which unifies the Standard Model with gravity — without using string theory. The trick was to use E8 geometry which you may remember from an earlier Slashdot article. Lisi's theory predicts 20 new particles which he hopes might turn up in the Large Hadron Collider — via Slashdot

Microsoft is now working on a system that will back up the contents of your brain. The pilot project lacks a direct brain interface, but MyLifeBits will provide a simulacrum of actual memories. No mention is made as to whether Microsoft will claim to own the digital rights to the content of your life, or what license fees you will have to pay to access your own memories — via Slashdot

15 November 2007

For the first time in more than 60 years a Colossus computer is cracking codes at Bletchley Park. The machine is being put through its paces to mark the end of a project to rebuild the pioneering computer. It is being used to crack messages enciphered using the same system employed by the German high command during World War II. The Colossus is pitted against modern PC technology which will also try to read the scrambled messages

The Kremlin is using Russia's new anti-software-piracy laws to target dissident media outlets and shut them down. This is an eerie echo of the Soviet era, when black marketeering and other universal activities were used as the excuse for arresting dissidents and other inconvenient people. The difference is that this time, the anti-piracy laws were enacted at the behest of the US trade representative, who made stringent patent and copyright enforcement a condition of the recent US-Russia free trade agreement, forcing Russia to take on board stricter laws than those in place in the US. This includes laws that would never pass Constitutional muster stateside, like a scheme for police licensing and inspection of CD and DVD presses — via BoingBoing

Google is undergoing an investigation by the European Union for its $3.1 billion acquisition of internet advertiser DoubleClick. The United States' Federal Trade Commission has been reviewing the acquisition since May

14 November 2007

CNET has branched out from tech news and reviews to launch its own online music service, the snappily titled CNET.com.au Music Centre. So far the site offers over 90,000 free downloads and streams from over 17,000 indy artists

Physiatrist Todd A Kuiken, MD PhD, has pioneered a technique known as targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR), that allows a prosthetic arm to respond directly to the brain's signals, allowing wearers to open and close their artificial hands and bend and straighten their artificial elbows nearly as naturally as their own arms. Doctors first perform nerve transfer surgery to redirect nerves that go to the amputated arm to the patient's chest muscles. Then when the chest muscle contracts, an electromyogram picks up the electrical signal to move the prosthetic arm. So when the patient thinks close hand, the hand closes. Now the team wants to see if they can extract more information from the electrical signals produced by the nerves to provide a greater number of hand and arm movements. They have been able to identify unique EMG patterns with 95% accuracy for 16 different elbow, wrist, hand, thumb and finger movements — via Slashdot

Online book seller and retail chain Dymocks has taken a leap into electronic publishing with the launch of Dymocks Digital, allowing customers to purchase audible and digital forms of the traditional paper book. Taking a lengthy 30 months to complete the project, Dymocks now offers some 13,000 audible and 120,000 readable titles which can be accessed through the company's Web site or new touch screen kiosks at the main Sydney store

Marvel is putting some of its older comics online Tuesday, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared. It's a tentative move onto the Internet: Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded, and new issues will only go online at least six months after they first appear in print

13 November 2007

One NATO figure said the effect was as big a shock as the Russians launching Sputnik. American military chiefs have been left dumbstruck by an undetected Chinese submarine popping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exercise and close to the vast USS Kitty Hawk. By the time it surfaced, the 160ft Song Class diesel-electric attack submarine had sailed within viable range for launching torpedoes or missiles at the carrier. The incident caused consternation in the US Navy, which had no idea China's fast-growing submarine fleet had reached such a level of sophistication — via Slashdot

The shadowy hacker and malware hosting network that only recently fled Russia to set up operations in China has now pulled the plug there and vanished yet again. An analyst at VeriSign's iDefense Labs unit said iDefense had tracked RBN's migration earlier in the week from servers based in Russia to ones running in China, after obtaining at least seven net blocks of Chinese IP addresses. As of Wednesday, RBN controlled 5,120 IP addresses assigned to Chinese service providers; known RBN clients were even seen using those addresses that day. But with its China move putting the spotlights of the media and the security community on the organization, RBN suddenly went offline on Thursday. They severed connections to six of the seven net blocks on November 8, the analyst said. RBN as a single organisation may be dead and gone; it may even now be breaking up into smaller pieces farmed out to multiple countries' Internet infrastructures — via Slashdot

There's a new antenna that consists of plasma and essentially vanishes when you turn it off. While it may seem to not have many uses in the commercial world, it is very important to military personnel who risk detection or for anybody wishing to avoid signal jamming

12 November 2007

The Mozilla Foundation's chief executive now earns roughly half a million in pay and benefits. With $70 million in assets, the Foundation gave out less than $300,000 in grants to open source projects in 2006. And in 2006 85% of their $66 million in revenue came from Google. When these figures first came to light, people worried whether Firefox was becoming a pawn in Google's cold war with Microsoft. The Foundation addressed these fears and largely laid them to rest; but now the worry is that, even though it's clear that the community's code is what makes Firefox successful, Mozilla may be becoming dangerously reliant on Google's cash — via Slashdot

The RCMP announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use [Google translation]. Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers, such as copyright violations related to medicine and electrical appliances, instead of the cash flow of large corporations. Around the same time that the CRIA successfully took Demonoid offline, the RCMP made clear that Demonoid's users don't have to worry about getting prosecuted, at least not in Canada. Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted, Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the RCMP, said in an interview. It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it — via Slashdot

Customers aren't the only ones frustrated with the high-definition format wars — Sony CEO Howard Stringer is reaching the end of his rope as well. Blu-ray, which is backed by Sony, was doing well up until recently and winning the war based on merits, Stringer said at an event in New York. That is, up until movie studio Paramount decided to change sides and go exclusively HD DVD in August. Things have apparently become more difficult since then, and the high-profile CEO is showing signs of wear

11 November 2007

DRM-free music sells at a much higher rate online than protected music, according to UK-based digital music store 7 Digital. In fact, customers buy it four times as often as they do DRMed music. As a result, almost 80 percent of the store's sales are of DRM-free content. 7 Digital may not sound familiar to some, but it carries over 3 million songs and has many selections from major artists in addition to independent labels

It looks as though the next meeting of the UN's Internet Governance Forum is about to descend into another heated debate about US control of key Internet systems. Although the initial purpose of this year's summit was to cover such issues as spam, free speech and cheaper access, it appears that nations such as China, Iran, and Russia, among others, would rather discuss US control of the Internet. In meetings leading to up to the second annual meeting of the IGF in Rio de Janiero on Monday, these nations won the right to hold an opening-day panel devoted to critical Internet resources. While a number of countries wanting to internationalise Internet control simply want to have more say over policies such as creating domain names in languages other than English, we can only speculate what additional motives might be driving nations that heavily censor the Internet and lock down the flow of information across it — via Slashdot

In Los Angeles criminal court, security consultant John Schiefer, 26, has admitted infecting the systems of his clients with viruses to form a botnet containing a maximum of 250,000 systems. Schiefer used his zombies to steal users' PayPal usernames and passwords to make unauthorised purchases, as well as to install adware on their computers without their consent. Schiefer agreed to plead guilty to four felony charges of accessing protected computers to commit fraud, disclosing illegally intercepted electronic communications, wire fraud and bank fraud. He will be sentenced 3 December and faces up to 60 years in prison and a fine of $1.75 million

Nissan is developing a paramagnetic iron oxide paint polymer. Using an electrical charge, the arrangement of iron oxide crystals can be tweaked, adjusting the car's colour. Nissan claims to have the technology on the market extremely soon, by 2010 if possible. However, there's a catch. A small amount of current is always needed to maintain the arrangement of iron oxide (your custom car colour). So when you leave your car parked/off, the car turns white

10 November 2007

Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wants to build a new line of defence against malicious traffic which has become today a billion-dollar shadow industry. As one of the most menacing aspects of botnets is that they can go largely undetected by a PC owner, he developed a new computer security technique for detecting network intrusions. His system has a 99.9% detection rate of malicious signatures, roughly equivalent to some of the best commercial systems. But it has zero false positives when commercial systems have high numbers. This new system could soon be available commercially

Musician Moby has become the latest artist to give away tracks for free, but not to just anybody... he's showing some love to independent filmmakers, letting indie, student and non-profit filmmakers use select songs for free

09 November 2007

Hushmail, a longtime provider of encrypted web-based email, markets itself by saying that not even a Hushmail employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted e-mail, since each message is uniquely encoded before it leaves your computer. But it turns out that statement seems not to apply to individuals targeted by government agencies

A new range of Fujitsu Siemens monitors don't draw power during standby. The technology uses capacitors and relays to avoid drawing power when no video signal is present. With political parties all over Europe calling for a ban on standby, this small development could end up as one of the most significant advances in recent times. The British Government estimates eight percent of all domestic electricity is consumed by devices in standby

08 November 2007

NASA and its Applied Sciences Program will be using 14 satellites to watch the Earth's environment and help predict and prevent infectious disease outbreaks around the world. Through orbiting satellites, data is collected daily to monitor environmental changes. That information is then passed on to agencies such as the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Defense who then apply the data to predict and track disease outbreaks and assist in making public health policy decisions. The use of remote sensing technology helps scientists predict the outbreak of some of the most common and deadly infectious diseases such as Ebola, West Nile virus and Rift Valley Fever

07 November 2007

Alcor has released the source for Quicksilver as a Google Code project. While Quicksilver has always had a highly extensible plugin system, this is great news for the code monkeys out there who can now really dig into the application

Thousands of PC users have been duped into surrendering sensitive information and installing malicious software after falling victim to a complex scam that continues to plague well-known web sites. The scam is the latest to piggyback on banner ads that are fed to high-traffic destinations. Malicious code hardwired into the ads prompts a pop-up that warns of a bogus security threat on the visitor's machine. It offers to fix the problem in exchange for a fee and for credit card information. The ad then attempts to install a back door on the victim's machine

The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee excoriated two top executives of Web firm Yahoo, for the firm's role in aiding China's totalitarian regime crack down on a Chinese journalist

Scientists say the colugo, which looks like a cross between a bat and a squirrel, is the last surviving example of a group of mammals called dermopterans. After our fellow primates — apes, monkeys and lemurs — dermopterans apparently share the most genetic markers with us

06 November 2007

It took investigators two years to infiltrate and bring down UK-based OiNK, an invite-only music sharing site that was much loved by its smallish community. As we reported at the time, the IFPI and the BPI lauded the takedown as a major victory against piracy. After the echoes of OiNK's final snort dissipated, one could hear the virtual rumbling of a new stampede: the post-OiNK explosion. The closure of OiNK has led directly or indirectly to the establishment of nearly half a dozen new file-sharing sites

Phoenix Technologies, a developer of BIOS software, is working on a new technology called Hyperspace that will allow you to instantly load certain applications like email, web browser and media player, without loading windows. It could even lead to tailoring of computers to even more specific demographics, like a student laptop preloaded with word processor, email and an IM all available at the press of a button

The Google Phone has arrived, sort of, but not in the long-rumoured embodiment that many had expected. Google announced this morning that it has developed a new mobile OS called Android — a result of its acquisition of a mobile software company of the same name in 2005 — that will allow the company to get Google's mobile apps into as many hands as possible starting in mid-2008. Android is Linux-based and open source, and aspects of the platform will be made available to handset manufacturers for free under the Apache license

05 November 2007

John Papandriopoulos, a Research Fellow with the ARC Special Research Centre for Ultra-Broadband Information Networks (CUBIN) has developed a method to reduce crosstalk interference in ADSL technologies to bring speeds up the theoretical maxima possible. With an Australian Federal election due in a few weeks, and both parties promising improved broadband speeds and access, this is a welcome development, hopefully enabling higher speeds without huge expenses — via Slashdot

Because of the malware now hidden in the attachment, this round of PDF spam is significantly more malicious than the flood that hit in August

The synergy between batteries and capacitors — two of the sturdiest and oldest components of electrical engineering — has been growing, to the point where ultracapacitors may soon be almost as indispensable to portable electricity as batteries are now. Some researchers expect to soon create capacitors capable of storing 50% as much energy as a lithium ion battery of the same size. Such capacitors could revolutionize many areas possibly from mobile computing (no worries about battery memory), electricity-powered vehicles, and more — via Slashdot

04 November 2007

A French judge has dismissed a defamation and privacy case against Wikipedia, after ruling the free online encyclopaedia was not responsible for information introduced onto its web site. The US-based Wikipedia Foundation, which is behind the popular compendium, was sued by three French nationals over a Wikipedia article that said they were gay activists. Judge Emmanuel Binoche ruled that a 2004 French law limited Wikipedia's liability and noted that contentious references in the disputed article had in any case been removed

Google has purchased the shortest possible domain name to make it easier for Chinese users to find Google: g.cn

03 November 2007

Joss Whedon of Buffy and Firefly fame has signed on to do another TV series on Fox starring Eliza Dushku. The series is going to be called Dollhouse, and the story surrounds a group of people programmed to do missions out of a sort of high-tech dorm — via Slashdot

JavaScript has become a crucial part of Websites built on AJAX underpinnings, which makes the upcoming revision to the ECMAScript standard crucial for the future of the Web. But in today's browser environment, no one vendor can impose an update path — which may set things up for a nasty conflict. A fight is being fought on blogs between Mozilla Chief Technology Officer (and creator of JavaScript) Brendan Eich, who wants to the new ECMAScript standard to be a radical upgrade, and Chris Wilson, architect of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, who would rather keep JavaScript as is and put new functionality into a brand-new language — via Slashdot

The University of Oregon has filed a motion to quash the RIAA's subpoena for information on student identities in what is believed to be the first such motion made by a university with support from the state Attorney General. The motion explains that it is impossible to identify the alleged infringers from the information the RIAA has presented

02 November 2007

If you've been waiting impatiently for Google to roll out IMAP access to your Gmail account, your wait is over — IMAP access is now available to all. Now everyone can turn Thunderbird into the ultimate Gmail IMAP client — via Lifehacker

A handful of consumer groups have filed a complaint with the FCC over Comcast's delaying some BitTorrent traffic. The complaint seeks fines of $195,000 for each Comcast subscriber affected by the traffic blocking as well as a permanent injunction barring the ISP from blocking P2P traffic. Comcast's defence is bogus, said Free Press policy director Ben Scott. The FCC needs to take immediate action to put an end to this harmful practice. Comcast's blatant and deceptive BitTorrent blocking is exactly the type of problem advocates warned would occur without Net Neutrality laws — via Slashdot

The Australian Defence Department has injected $4.4 million worth of funding to further the CSIRO's research into designing clothing which can be used as a self-recharging electrical source on the battlefield. The CSIRO's Flexible Integrated Energy Device (FIED) was one of eight proposals selected as part of the latest round of Defence Capability and Technology Demonstrator (CTD) Program funding announced in October

01 November 2007

Google has launched a system that will allow developers to create applications for a variety of social networks. Developers currently have to customise their designs for a particular site with many partnering with the hugely popular Facebook. Google's OpenSocial system will allow a wider distribution for tools like Facebook's music recommendation service iLike and its Top Friends application

New technology that can make tanks invisible has been unveiled by the Ministry of Defence. In secret trials last week, the Army said it had made a vehicle completely disappear and predicted that an invisible tank would be ready for service by 2012. The new technology uses cameras and projectors to beam images of the surrounding landscape onto a tank — via Warren Ellis

A team of researchers at UC Berkeley have invented a radio made of a single carbon nanotube. The device is just a few billionths of a metre in size — so small that it could fit inside a living cell, or float along in your bloodstream — via Gizmodo

Following the bust of the OiNK BitTorrent tracker, most of its 180,000 members are keeping their heads down and trying to stay inconspicuous. However, Trent Reznor, frontman of Nine Inch Nails isn't worried: I had an account there, he said. It was like the world's greatest record store

Search


Archives