January 2008 Archive

31 January 2008

Tens of millions of internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections. The outage, which is being blamed on a fault in a single undersea cable, has severely restricted internet access in countries including India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and left huge numbers of people struggling to get online

In an few hours from now The Pirate Bay team will probably be charged with aiding or facilitating copyright infringement. If they are found guilty, they could receive sentences of up to two years in prison, but the site will remain online, no matter what

Seven green groups have sued over a US Fish and Wildlife Service plan that would loosen restrictions on killing grey wolves in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming

30 January 2008

Swarms of robots that use electromagnetic forces to cling together and assume different shapes are being developed by US researchers. The grand goal is to create swarms of microscopic robots capable of morphing into virtually any form by clinging together — via Warren Ellis

Sellers Give Negative Feedback on eBay Changes EBay's highly touted cut in sellers' fees is not so clearly a boon for sellers as it may appear at first look. However, in some scenarios, sellers actually will end up paying more than they did before. In one comparison, the fees increased by 33 percent. What is more, eBay's changes to its feedback system have many sellers up in arms. Feedback, of course, has been the centre of the self-policing aspect of eBay through which buyers and sellers rate each other. Now, for the first time, sellers will not be able to leave negative or neutral feedback about buyers

Foxtel has officially unveiled its new HD service, including the new Hi-Def box, at a media conference in Sydney. The new service is called Foxtel HD+, but pricing and release date haven't been announced yet

29 January 2008

Sweden plans this week to charge the people running Pirate Bay, one of the world's most visited websites, with being accessories in breaking copyright law. Pirate Bay helps web surfers share copyrighted music and film files, which is illegal in many countries, including Sweden

The world's most powerful functional rail gun capable of accelerating projectiles up to Mach 8 has been delivered to the Navy. The new rail gun is a 32-megajoule Electro-Magnetic Laboratory Rail Gun. The Navy eventually hopes to have 64-megajoule ship mounted rail guns. The lab version doesn't look particularly menacing — more like a long, belt-fed airport screening device than like a futuristic cannon — but the system will fire rounds at up to Mach 8, drawing on tremendous amounts of electricity to generate the current for each test shot — via Slashdot

Here's something that isn't an urban legend — Snopes, the popular urban legends reference site, has been pushing malware, for at least six months, to users via ads displayed on its web site. No one seems to have called them on it until recently — Slashdot

A distributor of internet file-swapping software abruptly postponed the launch of its free online music service until it can finalise music licensing deals — a detail the company omitted when it threw a star-studded coming-out party over the weekend. Qtrax's ambitious, ad-supported music service promised unlimited, advertising-supported music downloads with the blessing of the major recording companies. That claim began to unravel just hours before Qtrax's scheduled debut on Monday when Warner Music Group issued a statement that it had not authorised the firm to distribute its artists' music. Other major record labels soon followed

28 January 2008

Amazon announced in a press release today their plans to sell DRM-free music worldwide through the Amazon MP3 store beginning later this year. This news is being viewed by some as the latest volley in Amazon's digital music sales war with Apple's iTunes. Since Amazon has completed its plans to offer DRM-free music from all four major record labels, the global availability of the MP3s can only be excellent news for customers — via Slashdot

Fraud Sciences, a private company, has developed technology designed to differentiate between real and fraudulent transactions. eBay's online payments division, PayPal, will pay US$169 million for an Israeli security company specialising in detecting online fraud. The deal should close within 30 days

Europe's top data protection officials are working to clarify a grey area of internet law: the legal status of an IP (Internet Protocol) address. The question of whether an IP address should be considered private data occupied much time at a hearing earlier this week at the European Parliament regarding Google's planned acquisition of DoubleClick. If a person can be identified by an IP address, then the address is private, said Peter Schaar, the German data protection commissioner and chairman of the Europe-wide privacy group, the Article 29 Committee

The Oregon attorney general's office is investigating the Recording Industry Association of America's practices regarding 17 University of Oregon students accused of copyright infringement. While the AG isn't minimising the seriousness of copyright violations, his office has submitted a brief questioning the data mining tactics and subpoena practices employed by the RIAA

27 January 2008

Sophos claims that they are detecting 6,000 new sites daily that have been compromised to serve malware to unsuspecting site visitors, with 80% of site owners not aware that they have been compromised — though this figure is probably on the low side — Slashdot

The Swiss authorities have warned a company that tracks file sharers for copyright violations that its tactics violate the country's telecommunication law

After the inevitable clamour to declare Blu-ray the one true high-definition optical disk format, comes the drive to make the technology more compact and — crucially — cheaper. Foremost in the hardware race is Sony, which has developed the world's smallest Blu-ray reader/writer module that also happens to be less costly than existing models

26 January 2008

The body which oversees the internet may become independent from the US Government for the first time, paving the way for one of the world's most important resources to be run by the private sector

A confidential informant says Google will stop monetising all domains if they are less then five days old. This potential new policy change by Google could stop all Domain Tasting in its tracks. The Add Grace Period (AGP) is a time period when registrars can delete a domain at no cost, but in this time frame a registrant could register millions of these temporary domains and place Google Adsense for Domains on them. The result is the ability to produce millions of temporary websites that literally generate millions of dollars in income per week for Google

25 January 2008

Reports are beginning to surface that some Web servers running Linux and Apache are unwittingly infecting thousands of computers, exploiting vulnerabilities in QuickTime, Yahoo! Messenger, and Windows. One way to tell if your machine is infected is if you're unable to create a directory name beginning with a numeral. Since details are still sketchy, the best advice right now is to take proactive steps to secure your servers — via Slashdot

An internet group calling itself Anonymous has declared war on the Church of Scientology, in the form of an ominous posting to the YouTube site — via Slashdot

24 January 2008

In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany's communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally paper-wolves and rip-wolves, German for shredders. As pressure mounted, agents turned to office shredders, and when the motors burned out, they started tearing pages by hand — 45 million of them, ripped into approximately 600 million scraps of paper. The machine-shredded stuff is confetti, largely unrecoverable. But in May 2007, a team of German computer scientists in Berlin announced that after four years of work, they had completed a system to digitally tape together the torn fragments. Engineers hope their software and scanners can do the job in less than five years

23 January 2008

The Australian Attorney-General's department is inviting submissions from the public on copying of movies and images in different formats for private use. These were sections of the Copyright Amendment Act introduced in December 2006 that made it legal for Australians to do things they'd been doing for decades, such as recording a tv broadcast to tape or disc, but illegal to watch such recordings more than once. The Minister is required by the Act to review these exceptions after two years — via BoingBoing

Jennifer Stoddart, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, is wary of DRM, and she's not afraid to tell other branches of government about her concerns. Stoddart has just sent a public letter to Jim Prentice, the Canadian Minister of Industry, telling him that his impending copyright reform bill should not protect any DRM that gathers and transmits personal data

Scientists at a British biotech company said they have evidence that their genetically modified mosquitoes, which are programmed for sudden, early death, can control the spread of dengue fever

22 January 2008

A US-based anti-spyware company has registered the .com.au.com domain name, which experts fear could be used by cybercriminals to create more convincing phishing attacks

A recently-released roadmap for the next major Window release — Windows 7 — indicates that Microsoft is planning to release the new operating system in the second half of 2009, rather than the anticipated release date of some time in 2010. This quickly-approaching release date would seem to be at least partially verified by news of a milestone build available for review by an anonymous third party — via Slashdot

Sydneysiders will have the chance to view the excavation of a First Fleet graveyard beneath Town Hall in the city's CBD today. The archaeological dig has so far unearthed 58 graves and the remains of four bodies in the area, which was one of Sydney's first cemeteries. It is part of a $60 million restoration of the historic building, which is being carried out over five years

21 January 2008

Apparently the RIAA is so busy suing consumers that they forgot to hire a decent programmer. With a simple SQL injection, all their propaganda has been successfully wiped from the site

A new report shows some populations of tasmanian devils may have developed resistance to the deadly facial tumour disease. In parts of Tasmania up to 90 per cent of the devil population has been wiped out by a contagious cancer-like facial tumour disease

20 January 2008

Weather information from thousands of personal weather stations are being used for weather forecasting by several private and government agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The Citizens Weather Observation Program (CWOP) was created by a few amateur radio operators experimenting with transmitting weather data with packet radios, but it has expanded to include Internet-only weather stations as well — via Slashdot

Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, research.google.com, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon

19 January 2008

Proprietary protocols are things from yesterday. Today, Opensource technologies are taking over the world! AOL/ICQ has just launched a test server using XMPP, an open technology. This means that you'll soon be able to talk to your ICQ/AIM contacts via Jabber. Google has already started using it

18 January 2008

Bionic Contact Lens May Lead to Overlay Displays A University of Washington researcher has developed a contact lens including circuitry and a matrix of LEDs. Although not yet a working prototype, this may be a foundation for terminator/robocop style overlay displays in which computer graphics could be superimposed on your normal vision. 'Building the lenses was a challenge because materials that are safe for use in the body, such as the flexible organic materials used in contact lenses, are delicate. Manufacturing electrical circuits, however, involves inorganic materials, scorching temperatures and toxic chemicals. Researchers built the circuits from layers of metal only a few nanometers thick, about one thousandth the width of a human hair, and constructed light-emitting diodes one third of a millimeter across — via Slashdot

An ultra-resolution broadband link has been unveiled, paving the way for people on opposite sides of the earth to direct brain surgery, conduct climate change experiments or interpret human genome data in real time with high-definition precision. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the ultimate aim was to deliver the high-tech broadband links to Australian homes. The new technology, which is 250 times faster than a standard broadband connection, has the potential to transform the way Australia interacts with the world

17 January 2008

The darkest ever substance known to science has been made in a US laboratory. The material was created from carbon nanotubes — sheets of carbon just one atom thick rolled up into cylinders. Researchers say it is the closest thing yet to the ideal black material, which absorbs light perfectly at all angles and over all wavelengths. The discovery is expected to have applications in the fields of electronics and solar energy

Sun Microsystems has agreed to buy open-source software maker MySQL for $US1 billion, and said its fiscal second-quarter net income nearly doubled on boosted margins, according to preliminary results

The Library of Congress is making over 3,000 photos available on Flickr for public tagging. The idea of the pilot project is to invite people to add metadata to images that previously had little. The library is hoping that the metadata will add new context and meaning to the photos and make them more accessible to the public

16 January 2008

Oracle said that it would acquire BEA Systems for $8.5 billion, just three months after BEA handily rejected its original unsolicited bid. The $19.38-a-share deal is 14 percent higher than Oracle's original offer of $17, and spares both companies the sort of ordeal that accompanied Oracle's hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft in 2003

After two months of downtime, it is still uncertain whether Demonoid will ever return. However, if it is up to The Pirate Bay, it will. The Pirate Bay has recently offered 2 servers to the Demonoid team, in Sweden of course

Stanford University researchers have made a discovery that could signal the arrival of laptop batteries that last more than a day on a single charge. The researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to give rechargeable lithium ion batteries — used in laptops, iPods, video cameras, and mobile phones — as much as 10 times more charge. This potentially could give a conventional battery-powered laptop 40 hours of battery life, rather than 4 hours

Japan's Panasonic has created the world's longest lasting alkaline battery, according to Guinness World Records. Panasonic promises its new Evolta battery cell — whose name is derived from evolution and voltage — will keep gadgets running 20 percent longer than offerings from rivals Duracell and Energizer, as well as its own upscale Oxyride batteries

15 January 2008

PIPE Networks is to go ahead with its $200M plan for a new international link between Australia and Guam

IBM, Nokia, Sony and Pitney Bowes are expected to announce Monday that they have put 31 inventions into an Eco-Patent Commons designed to make these Earth-friendly manufacturing and waste-reduction processes more widely available

Amazon offered free shipping in France, got sued for it by the French Booksellers' Union, and lost. Now it's choosing to pay €1,000 a day rather than follow the court's order

14 January 2008

Canadians can breathe a sigh of relief as the Canadian Federal Court of Appeal quashed a proposed levy on digital music players late last week. The proposed levies weren't cheap: CA$5 on each Memory Stick or SD card between 1GB and 4GB of memory, and digital audio recorder levies which top out at CA$75 for players with 30GB+ of space

Never one to settle for an open standard when the opportunity to push a proprietary alternative presents itself, Sony has announced that it will wade into the next-generation short-range interconnect wars with a proprietary new wireless spec called TransferJet

The One Laptop Per Child project is turning its attention to children in the United States. The XO laptop developed by the OLPC was conceived to boost educational efforts in developing nations. Now the OLPC has set up a US office and has begun talking to state governments about ways to get the laptop into the hands of the poorest American children. The organisation said it would formally launch its XO programme in America later in 2008

13 January 2008

Contrary to earlier predictions, Duke University engineers have found that a three-dimensional sound cloak is possible, at least in theory. Such an acoustic veil would do for sound what the invisibility cloak previously demonstrated by the research team does for microwaves — allowing sound waves to travel seamlessly around it and emerge on the other side without distortion

For ten years their home has been a 20ft cage set into the cliffs of Monte Carlo. But last week — for the first time in their lives — leopards Sirius and Pitou ran free across the plains of Africa. They tasted their new freedom in a game reserve after being rescued from Monaco zoo following a five-year campaign by The Mail on Sunday and The Born Free Foundation

One of the greatest challenges neurologists face is successful delivery of drugs to the brain. This is because a special filtering layer of tissue, called the blood brain barrier, protects the brain and spinal cord. Kumar and his colleagues from Harvard Medical School have developed a potentially revolutionary drug delivery method, taking advantage of a known master infiltrator of the brain: the virus responsible for rabies, also known as the rhabdovirus

12 January 2008

Last week, seven Swedish MPs wrote to a prominent Swedish tabloid newspaper Expressen to express their dissatisfaction with proposals for dealing with copyright infringers. Now, that number has increased to 13, and the issue seems to keep growing

The agency that governs educational technology in the United Kingdom has advised schools in the country to keep Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system and its Office 2007 software out of the classroom and administrative offices. Becta officials said a study the group commissioned found that upgrading school systems from Windows XP to Vista and Office 2007 would increase costs and create software compatibility problems while providing little benefit

A Polish teenager allegedly turned the tram system in the city of Lodz into his own personal train set, triggering chaos and derailing four vehicles in the process. Twelve people were injured in one of the incidents. The 14-year-old modified a TV remote control so that it could be used to change track points

Is the RIAA as we know it about to disappear? As rumours continue to swirl that EMI will pull its funding from music trade groups like the RIAA and IFPI, an IFPI spokesman says that the group is in the middle of a major internal review of its operations

11 January 2008

Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time. More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000

Sony BMG announced that it would become the fourth and final major label to begin selling digital music on Amazon.com, offering its entire catalog in the MP3 format by the end of the month

Matsushita will change its name officially to Panasonic, a name that has been used for many years for the firm's consumer products around the world

10 January 2008

Spinal cord damage blocks the routes the brain uses to send messages to the nerve cells that control walking. For years, doctors believed that the only way injured patients could walk again was to regrow the long nerve highways that link the brain and base of the spinal cord. Now, for the first time, a UCLA study shows that the central nervous system can reorganise itself and follow new pathways to restore the cellular communication required for movement

Microsoft said that it will offer $1.2 billion in cash for Fast Search and Transfer (FAST), a big player in the enterprise search market. The move is sure to shake up the enterprise search market, which thus far has been dominated by a series of smaller players like FAST, Autonomy and Vivisimo. Google has made some inroads, but for the most part the market is the realm of niche players. Microsoft is about to change that with FAST. You can expect Google to make a purchase in enterprise search along with traditional enterprise players like HP, IBM and the usual suspects

A failed effort to soften the noise from British military helicopters led to a breakthrough enabling surfaces from mobile telephone screens to car roof liners to be turned into stereo speakers. The technology was sold to Cambridge-based NXT, which christened it SurfaceSound and arranged for it to be crafted into Toyota cars, Gateway computers, greeting cards and more

09 January 2008

The expected price reconciliation between the iTunes UK store and the other European stores is officially in the works. Interesting to note that Apple is throwing down the gauntlet with the labels on UK vs Eurozone wholesale music pricing, so that we might see some subtractions from the UK store if the labels don't jump in line

TiVo's international general manager, Joshua Danovitz, has confirmed that TiVo in Australia will be able to record all free to air channels, it will also have access to a movie download store and about 100 free internet video channels. Exact pricing and a launch date is still unconfirmed, we will get the high-end series 3 version of the device. The series 3 contains dual high-definition TV tuners, so users can record two shows at once while at the same time watching a previously recorded show

Space shuttle astronauts will attempt an unprecedented in-orbit repair of key Hubble Space Telescope instruments during the servicing mission scheduled for August 2008. The repairs, along with the addition of two new instruments, will make Hubble 90 times as powerful as it was after its flawed optics were corrected in 1993

08 January 2008

Your next laptop could have a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge thanks to work being funded by the US Air Force Research Laboratory. The breakthrough betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source. As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years

In Sweden, the Jernhusen company, which owns Stockholm's central station, is planning to channel passenger warmth to heat a 13-storey office block being built next to the station. Heat exchangers in the station's ventilation system will convert the body heat into hot water, which will be pumped into the heating system of the building

Sony BMG Music Entertainment will offer tracks in MP3 format, without DRM, from 15 January in the US and from late January in Canada. The move is far from the all-digital service offered by its rivals, though. To obtain the Sony-BMG tracks, would-be listeners will first have to go to a retail store to buy a Platinum MusicPass, a card containing a secret code, for a suggested retail price of $12.99. Once they have scratched off the card's covering to expose the code, they will be able to download one of just 37 albums available through the service, including Britney Spears' Blackout and Barry Manilow's The Greatest Songs of the Seventies

07 January 2008

After losing some of its lustre on the personal computer, embattled Internet icon Yahoo is hoping to outshine Google and other rivals on the mobile phone. Yahoo has opened its mobile platform so outside programmers can develop new applications for Yahoo pages accessed on mobile handsets. Yahoo hopes the mini-applications, known as widgets, will help attract more on-the-go users, which will bring the company more money from advertising

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico have found a way of using sunlight to recycle carbon dioxide and produce fuels like methanol or gasoline. The Sunlight to Petrol project essentially reverses the combustion process, recovering the building blocks of hydrocarbons

06 January 2008

A malicious Facebook Widget actively spreading on the social networking site ultimately prompts users to install the infamous Zango malware. The tremendous success and lightning fast expansion of Facebook empowered the social networking giant with an impressive user base. Needless to say, in a digital world where web traffic equals money, such a user base attracts spammers, virus/spyware seeders, and other ethic-less online marketers like honey would attract flies — via Slashdot

Bill Gates and the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences this week donated $30 million to an ambitious telescope that researchers say will be able to survey the entire sky every three nights — something never done before. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project got $20 million from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10 million from Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates. Expected to see its first light in 2014, the 8.4m LSST will survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its 3 billion-pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move

The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilisations is receiving 500 times more data from an upgraded telescope and better frequency coverage than project planners anticipated, meaning the SETI@home project is in dire need of more desktop computers to help crunch the data

Until the early days of the Blair government the RAF's nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key. There was no other security on the Bomb itself. While American and Russian weapons were protected by tamper-proof combination locks which could only be released if the correct code was transmitted, Britain relied on a simpler technology

05 January 2008

Time Warner's Warner Bros studio has said it will exclusively release high-definition DVDs in Sony Corp's Blu-Ray format, dealing a big blow to Toshiba Corp's rival HD DVD technology

Just before year's end, ICANN/IANA sent out a short message saying that on 4 February 2008, IANA will add AAAA records for the IPv6 addresses of the four root servers whose operators have requested it. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is mostly responsible for the global Domain Name System, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the part of ICANN. That means that as of 4 February 2008, it will (theoretically) be possible for two IPv6 hosts to communicate across the IPv6 Internet without having to rely on any IPv4 infrastructure. It's been a long journey to get to this point

Russia's top-level domain — with the ASCII suffix .ru — translates into Cyrillic as .py, the domain name of Paraguay. That could pose security problems for Russian users. Kim Davies, who controls the domain names at the international domain naming agency Icann told the Guardian: Russia has a second top level domain name of .ru in ASCII code, but is pushing for .rf in Cyrillic. The internationalised domain name gives them an opportunity to do things which are now being tested in China, where they are currently using Chinese characters for three top-level domains: .net, .com and .cn

The UK government has published guidelines for the application of a law that makes it illegal to create or distribute so-called hacking tools

04 January 2008

Carbon may be losing its monopoly over the nanoworld. According to the latest calculations, tubes built out of the element boron could have many of the same properties as carbon nanotubes. And for some electronic applications, they should even be better than carbon

An Apple patent has recently surfaced for a dynamically changeable OLED keyboard. The keyboard would rely on OLEDs to provide the graphics on the key surfaces. The patent application also details how such a keyboard would be manufactured

Last month security researcher Benjamin Googins determined that Sears installed ComScore spyware without adequate disclosure. Sears said, yes we tell people about tracking their browsing. On 1 January spyware researcher Ben Edelman weighed in, noting that Sears' notice occurs on page 10 of a 54-page privacy statement, and twits Sears because its installation identifies the software as VoiceFive and later claims it's coming from a company called TMRG, Inc even though a packet sniffer confirms the software belongs to ComScore, adding "These confusing name-changes fit the trend among spyware vendors — via Slashdot

An antitrust lawsuit filed against Apple on 31 December charges the company with maintaining an illegal monopoly on the digital music market. The complaint takes issue with Apple's refusal to support the Windows Media Audio format

03 January 2008

The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has recently reported that two research teams have developed a new porous foam of an alloy that changes shape when exposed to a magnetic field. The NSF states that this new material is able to remember its original shape after it's been deformed by a physical or magnetic force. This polycrystalline nickel-manganese-gallium alloy is potentially cheaper and lighter than other materials currently used in devices ranging from sonar to precision valves. It also could be used to design biomedical pumps without moving parts and even for space applications and automobiles — via Slashdot

HECToR, the largest supercomputer in the UK, is around five times more powerful than its predecessor, HPCx, which is also at the University of Edinburgh. It measures up well internationally, sitting at 17 in the top500.org list of the most powerful computers in the world

It is not just the average net user who is a fan of social network sites, so are hi-tech criminals. So say security professionals predicting what net criminals will turn to in 2008 to catch people out. The quasi-intimate nature of the sites makes people share information readily leaving them open to all kinds of other attacks, warn security firms. Detailed information gathered via the sites will also help tune spam runs or make phishing e-mail more convincing

Michigan spam king Alan Ralsky, his son-in-law and nine others have been indicted in Detroit on charges of violating federal anti-spam laws. The 41-count indictment said Ralsky, his son-in-law, Scott Bradley, 46, of West Bloomfield, and others used unsolicited e-mail to pump up the price of largely worthless stock in Chinese companies and sold the stock reaping huge profits and leaving Internet subscribers who purchased it holding the bag

02 January 2008

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will launch an open-source search project, dubbed Wikia Search, on 7 January 2008 and eventually hopes to challenge Google and other established players. The project will allow technology enthusiasts to help filter sites and rank search results, using a community model akin to that of Wikipedia. However, the company is a for-profit organisation

In Service Pack 3 for Office 2003, Microsoft disabled support for many older file formats. If you have old Word, Excel, 1-2-3, Quattro, or Corel Draw documents, watch out. They did this because the old formats are less secure, which actually makes some sense, but only if you got the files from some untrustworthy source. Naturally, they did this by default, and then documented a mind-bogglingly complex workaround (KB 938810) rather than providing a user interface for adjusting it, or even a set of awkward Do you really want to do this? dialoueg boxes to click through. And of course because these are, after all, old file formats... many users will encounter the problem only months or years after the software change, while groping around in dusty and now-inaccessible archives — via Slashdot

The newest Project of Mozilla labs is Weave. It allows the user to save their browser settings on Mozilla servers (favourites, sessions, passwords... etc) and be able to load it wherever they are

01 January 2008

Scientists in Britain have come up with a solution for making electronic gadgets completely waterproof, using a type of coating that repels liquids. The technology has, up until now, been used for military gear, but the makers of Ion-Mask are already in discussion with three mobile phone manufacturers with a view to using the coating on their products — via Gizmodo

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