March 2008 Archive

31 March 2008

Virgin Media in the UK has announced that it is working with the music industry to chase down its file-sharing customers and disconnect them from the internet. At the same time, it will offer an enhanced service which will see its customers get free Usenet binaries access, untraceable by the music industry

If you've ever wondered where stolen credit card numbers end up, Finjan might have part of the answer. The security company-cum-cybersleuthing outfit has uncovered a Web site supermarket for stolen card data. The SellCVV2 Web site, as it is called, was found to be trading the card numbers and other data in a number of sophisticated ways. Criminals visiting the site would be able to earn discounts based on volume bought and choose from a range of tiers, starting at the least valuable Classic Visa or MasterCard — those with the lowest credit limits — through more valuable Gold, Platinum and Corporate levels

30 March 2008

Users of Google Calendar are angry and frustrated that they have been unable to access the Web-based application at various times over the past two weeks. Google, in a note on its Calendar help page, said Google Calendar was experiencing temporary performance issues that were affecting users of Google Account and Google Apps. It gave no indication of when the problem would be fixed. Google Calendar users who are unable to access their calendars are venting their frustrations on the Google Calendar Troubleshooting Group

Three-quarters of phishing sites are built on hacked servers that have been tracked down using pre-programmed Google search terms, according to research from brand-protection firm MarkMonitor. Among other activities, MarkMonitor tracks phishing attacks that target brand names. Researchers compiled a list of 750 Google search terms that are used to track down websites likely to have easily exploitable vulnerabilities — mostly PHP-based sites

29 March 2008

Mozilla Lab's push is to blur the edges of the browser, to make it both more tightly integrated with the computer it's running on, and also more hooked into Web services. So extended, the browser becomes an even more powerful and pervasive platform for all kinds of applications. Chris Beard, VP of Labs for Mozilla, wants the new online/offline, browser/service to be more intelligent on behalf of its users. Early examples of this intelligence include the awesome bar, which is what Mozilla calls the new smart address bar in Firefox 3. It offers users smart URL suggestions as they type based on Web searches and their prior Web browsing history. He's looking to extend on this with a linguistic user interface that lets users type plain English commands into the browser bar — via Slashdot

US cable operator Comcast said that it would change the way it managed its network and would co-operate with critics to resolve allegations that it had unreasonably interfered with some Internet file-sharing services like BitTorrent

28 March 2008

The Church of Scientology has come under fire for some items on their recently launched video channel. Most notably, claims have been leveled that dignitaries in one of their videos were faked and at least one of the people featured in the video is claiming their statements were taken out of context — via Slashdot

Whilst one site may have closed its doors thanks to the MPAA, after continuous legal pressure, another has prevailed today in court. Torrent.is has won in court over the Association of film rights-holder in Iceland (SMÁÍS)

27 March 2008

Due to server complications, CBC decided to team up with mininova and let them seed the torrent files for Canada's Next Great Prime Minister. It is great to see that mainstream broadcasters use BitTorrent to share their content online, and even better, that they use mininova's content distribution platform to do so

Adobe's Photoshop Express, its free, online version of Photoshop is live right now. Targeted at everyday consumers, it's Photoshop stripped down to a pretty slick Flash 9-powered web application

Low doses of hydrogen sulphide can safely and reversibly depress both metabolism and aspects of cardiovascular function in mice, producing a suspended-animation-like state that does not depend on a reduction in body temperature and include a substantial decrease in heart rate without a drop in blood pressure — via Slashdot

26 March 2008

When Windows 7 launches sometime after the start of 2010, the desktop OS will be Microsoft's most modular yet. Having never really been comfortable with the idea of a single, monolithic desktop OS offering, Microsoft has offered multiple desktop OSes in the marketplace ever since the days of Windows NT 3.1, with completely different code bases until they were unified in Windows 2000. Unification isn't necessarily a good thing, however; Windows Vista is a sprawling, complex OS. A singular yet highly modular OS could give Microsoft the best of all possible worlds: OSes that can be highly customised for deployment but developed monolithically

At noon today (Eastern Standard Time), the long dead ORDB spam identification system began returning false positives as a way to get sleeping users to remove the ORDB query from their spam filters. The net effect: all mail is blocked on servers still configured to use the ORDB service, which was taken out of commission in December of 2006. So if you're not getting any mail, check your spam filter configuration — via Slashdot

25 March 2008

Mozilla CEO John Lilly has hit out at Apple, accusing the company of doing a disservice to Windows users everywhere by including its Safari browser as a default add-on installation in the latest iTunes update, likening it to the way malware is distributed

Qantas will allow in-flight SMS and e-mail on select domestic flights by the end of the year after a successful trial of technology developed by aviation tech start-up AeroMobile

24 March 2008

Google has quietly introduced a new feature, called search-within-search, that is alarming some big-name Web publishers and retailers. They worry that users will be siphoned away through ad sales to competitors. What Google is doing is offering a secondary search option if the user initially searches explicitly for one of the brand-name destinations that Google has identified, such as "Best Buy." This secondary search lets users refine their query entirely within the pages of the desired site — but using Google's search, not the site's, and showing Google ads on the result pages, quite possibly ads from competitors — via Slashdot

There's unrest on the streets of Tibet — clashes between Tibetians and the Chinese military. However, there's unrest also on the net. Groups supporting freedom of Tibet have been attacked with highly targeted and technically advanced attacks. Quoting an Asia Free Press news report: AFP received an email Tuesday from someone claiming to be in Denmark, who had attached a file they said were pictures of Tibetans shot by the Chinese army. When AFP tried to open the attachment, a virus warning appeared

If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the first sale doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School's Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon's Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?

Luxim has developed a tiny, full-spectrum light bulb, based on a plasma of argon gas, that gives off as much light as a streetlight while using less power. The Tic Tac-sized bulb operates at temperatures up to 6000K and produces 140 lumens/watt, almost ten times as efficient as standard incandescent lamps, and twice the efficiency of high-end LEDs. The new bulbs also have a lifetime of 20,000 hours — via Slashdot

23 March 2008

Researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments have designed a new chip for portable electronics that could be up to 10 times more energy-efficient than present technology. Given its reduced power consumption, the new chip could lead to mobile phones, handheld computers and remote sensors that last far longer when running from a battery. Indeed, the power required could be so low that implantable medical devices such as pacemakers and health monitors could be powered indefinitely by a person's body heat or motion — no battery needed

22 March 2008

Hydrogen could be a clean, abundant energy source, but it's difficult to store in bulk. In new research, materials scientists at Rice University have made the surprising discovery that tiny carbon capsules called buckyballs are so strong they can hold volumes of hydrogen nearly as dense as those at the center of Jupiter

21 March 2008

The Federal Constitutional Court in Germany has ruled that the identities of file-sharers must remain private and can no longer be revealed to media companies who accuse them of copyright infringement. In future, only those accused of heavy crimes such as murder, child pornography or kidnapping will be revealed

A new superconducting material fabricated by a Canadian-German team has been fabricated out of a silicon-hydrogen compound and does not require cooling. Instead of super-cooling the material, as is necessary for conventional superconductors, the new material is instead super-compressed. The researchers claim that the new material could sidestep the cooling requirement, thereby enabling superconducting wires that work at room temperature

Intel has announced plans to sell a specialised Wi-Fi platform later this year that can send data from a city to outlying rural areas tens of miles away, connecting sparsely populated villages to the Internet. The wireless technology, called the rural connectivity platform, will be helpful to computer-equipped students in poor countries, says Jeff Galinovsky, a senior platform manager at Intel. And the data rates are high enough — up to about 6.5 megabits per second — that the connection could be used for video conferencing and telemedicine

20 March 2008

Boffins in the US have developed a microchip fan with no moving parts that operates silently and generates enough wind to cool a laptop computer. The solid-state fan, developed with support from the US National Science Foundation, is touted as the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size. The device produces three times the flow rate of a typical small mechanical fan and is one-fourth the size

Google plans to roll out enhancements to its online spreadsheet program, including the ability to display data in new ways using lightweight gadgets and to notify users via e-mail when data is changed. The enhancements will be extended later to the other Google Docs components — the word processor and presentation applications

Largely unnoticed by the public, botnets — compromised computers controlled by profit-minded crooks — have come to inundate the internet, spreading spam and infections, and stealing sensitive data

19 March 2008

Notebooks with solid state drives (flash-based) cost more than traditional hard drives, are an order of magnitude less reliable and do not perform as well when using Microsoft Outlook. A large computer manufacturer is getting around 20 percent to 30 percent of the flash-based notebooks it is shipping sent back because of failure rates and performance that simply isn't meeting customer expectations

Google Transit is coming to an Australian city near you. It's starting with Perth, with plans to add other Australian cities in the future. Transit is a feature of Google Maps that helps you to plan a trip using public transport options. You enter your start address, end address and departure or arrival time, and Google will tell you how to make it happen with public transport

British science fiction writer Sir Arthur C Clarke has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90. Born in Somerset, he came to fame in 1968 when a short story The Sentinel was made into the film 2001: A Space Odyssey by director Stanley Kubrick. His vision of future space travel and computing captured the popular imagination. A close aide said he died after a cardio-respiratory attack

Someone has posted a profile loaded with vicious accusations against a Brisbane teenager on a US website which wants to charge her a fee to remove the slurs. Samantha Fletcher, 15, says the cyber attack is the result of a schoolyard feud and wants the US website Dating Psychos to take down her profile, which accuses her of racially taunting classmates and insulting an anorexic student. She said the site had refused to remove the material unless she paid it $20

18 March 2008

Hot on the heels of a recent hack in which 10,000 sites were compromised, researchers have disclosed a new large-scale attack. Researchers at McAfee estimated that the attack has been active for roughly one week, and in that time frame has managed to place itself on roughly 200,000 web pages. Most of the infected pages are running the phpBB forum software, said McAfee. The compromised pages are embedded with a Javascript file that links to the site hosting the attack

China has blocked access to Google News and YouTube in an apparent attempt to stop the spread of video footage related the rioting going on in several cities in Tibet, including the capital Lhasa. Demonstrations in the city started on March 10, a day commemorating the anniversary of a 1959 uprising against Chinese rule after which the spiritual leader of the country, the Dalai Lama, fled to India

eBay will soon take over management of the affiliate programs for its core marketplace and for its Half.com site from ValueClick in the hopes that it can operate them more efficiently. In early April, EBay will begin to migrate the roughly 100,000 affiliates away from ValueClick's Commission Junction to the new in-house platform

17 March 2008

Demonoid, once one of the most popular BitTorrent trackers, has reappeared again, this time hosted in Ukraine. The web site is still down but the trackers are now fully operational again, perhaps a sign that Demonoid is crawling back up to speed?

Swedish courts will soon be able to force the country's Internet providers to produce information on suspected file-sharers in a move to crackdown on piracy

16 March 2008

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a voiceless phone call for the first time. With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice

Intel says it will ship quad-core chips designed specifically for laptops later this year. The quad-core chips, most likely for desktop replacement laptops, will be based on the Core 2 Duo microarchitecture and will ship in the third quarter. Intel declined comment on chip details, though enthusiast Web sites reported the chip is Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX9300. The chips will be manufactured using the new 45-nanometer process

The notorious spammer authorities dubbed the King of Spam is facing a possible 26-year jail sentence after pleading guilty in Seattle on Friday to charges of fraud and tax evasion. Robert Soloway, 28, had already been found guilty of spam charges in several civil cases — Microsoft won a US$7.8 million judgment against him in 2005 — but had avoided paying fines in those cases. The criminal charges to which he pleaded guilty on Friday followed his arrest in 2007 by the US Justice Department

15 March 2008

Yahoo has announced its adoption of some of the key standards of the semantic web. The technology is widely seen as the next step for the world wide web and it involves a much richer understanding of the masses of data placed online. The company said it would start to include some semantic web identifiers when indexing the web for Yahoo search. The move could mean a big boost for semantic web technologies which have struggled to win a big audience

From a windswept corner of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, Japan Steel Works controls the fate of the global nuclear-energy renaissance. There stands the only plant in the world, a survivor of Allied bombing in World War II, capable of producing the central part of a nuclear reactor's containment vessel in a single piece, reducing the risk of a radiation leak

Manufacturers of USB sticks and cards with fingerprint readers promise us that their data safes can only be opened with the right fingerprint. It turns out that an easy-to-find tool allows nosy parties to get around the protection in some products

Microsoft said it will acquire Kidaro, an Israel-based firm that has developed desktop virtualisation software to help enterprises more easily use and manage their virtual PCs

14 March 2008

Google launched a free hosted service on Thursday that helps web site publishers sell advertising faster and fill unsold slots on their sites. Ad Manager, which Google said has already been tested by a few businesses, is designed to streamline how ads are placed on web sites and generate performance reports detailing how successful those ads are in reaching consumers, including click through-rates and revenue paid by the advertisers for those clicks

Mozilla has posted the fourth beta download of its next-generation Web browser. It includes improvements in performance and memory use, stability fixes, and user-interface improvements

Once the darling of Wall Street but more recently known as the burying ground for Netscape, Time Warner's AOL is entering the social-networking arena with an $850 million acquisition of Bebo

Hackers looking to steal passwords used in popular online games have infected more than 10,000 web pages in recent days. The web attack, which appears to be a coordinated effort run out of servers in China, was first noticed by McAfee researchers on Wednesday morning. Within hours, the security company had tracked more than 10,000 Web pages infected on hundreds of web sites

13 March 2008

Intel confirms that it is close to unveiling a new line of solid-state drives for laptop and notebook PCs that will feature a storage capacity up to 160GB. An Intel spokesman said that the chip maker will introduce 1.8" and 2.5" solid-state drives offering between 80GB and 160GB diskless storage during the second quarter of 2008. The spokesman declined to provide further details about the ship date or disclose the storage density of the drives

Wikileaks has 208 scanned pages (in one PDF) relating to the Church of Scientology and its former Office of Special Affairs employee (and subsequent apostate) Frank Oliver. The documents are dated between 1986 and 1992 inclusive, when, according to the file, Frank Oliver was declared a suppressive person and excommunicated. Frank Oliver should be able to verify the material and has appeared in the media before on subjects relating to the church. Starting on page 107, the document shows that at the time of writing the Church of Scientology was still actively engaged in black propaganda (especially concerning psychiatry), fair game and infiltration

A new web service that lets users rate and comment on the uniformed police officers in their community is scrambling to restore service Tuesday, after hosting company GoDaddy unceremonious pulled-the-plug on the site in the wake of outrage from criticism-leery cops. RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto says he was given no notice of the suspension. When he called GoDaddy, the company told him that he'd been shut down for suspicious activity. When Sesto got a supervisor on the phone, the company changed its story and claimed the site had surpassed its 3 terabyte bandwidth limit, a claim that Sesto says is nonsense. How can it be overloaded when it only had 8,000 page views today, and 400,000 yesterday?

12 March 2008

Some of the largest book publishers in the world are stripping away the anticopying software on digital downloads of audio books

A bionic device the size of a pencil eraser — the labor of 20 years for a group of visionary Hub doctors and scientists — is offering hope that some forms of blindness could be alleviated within a few years. The Boston Retinal Implant Project, partially based at the VA Medical Center in Jamaica Plain, is one of 22 programs around the world working to restore vision to the degenerative blind. Their work: a bio-electronic implant that delivers images to the brain via a connector the width of a human hair

11 March 2008

No sooner has the battle for the next-generation high-definition DVD format ended, with Blu-ray triumphing over HD DVD, than a new contender has emerged. A new system that is incompatible with Blu-ray, called HD VMD, for versatile multilayer disc, is trying to find a niche. New Medium Enterprises, the London company behind HD VMD, says its system's quality is equal to Blu-ray's, but it costs less

Kevin Rudd's ambitious plan to help fund an $8 billion national broadband network has been hit by a delay of at least four months because of a longer than expected timeframe for confirming an expert panel and pressure from telecoms companies to extend the process

Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal. The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site. Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted

10 March 2008

The Coding Horror today wrote up a disturbing story sent in to them by a reader, who discovered that a (paid) Gmail archive tool, G-Archiver, was harvesting people's Gmail user names and passwords and emailing them to (presumably) the creator of the software. Deeply unethical, and possibly malicious — via Lifehacker

09 March 2008

On 22 June 2007, Defence Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged that the Pentagon's network had been successfully attacked the previous Wednesday, and that this attack was responsible for a disruption in email service to some 1,500 Pentagon employees. At the time, Gates downplayed the attack, saying that it affected only the Office of the Secretary of Defence's non-classified e-mail service and that there was no anticipated adverse impact on ongoing operations. It seems that the adverse impact of the June attack may have been much greater than Gates' early guidance implied. According to a top DoD technology official quoted at GovernmentExecutive.com, the thieves behind that attack seized an amazing amount of data

The BBC appears to have inadvertently removed the controversial DRM from its iPlayer video-on-demand service. Now, all BBC programmes are broadcast across the country in digital form without DRM, literally diffused at the speed of light in all directions without any restrictions, but the Beeb somehow believes that there's a new risk of piracy created by letting those same digital files out on the net

08 March 2008

The argument goes something like this: In a world of ubiquitous surveillance, you'll know all about me, but I will also know all about you. The government will be watching us, but we'll also be watching the government. This is different than before, but it's not automatically worse. And because I know your secrets, you can't use my secrets as a weapon against me. Except it doesn't work, because it ignores the crucial dissimilarity of power

Because using too many calendars can confuse rather than organise, Google has announced that its Google Calendar will play nice with Microsoft's Outlook Calendar. Earlier this week, Google announced Google Calendar Sync, a downloadable application that lets users synchronise events with Outlook Calendar. A user can determine information flow, as well as the frequency of the syncing

07 March 2008

The FBI acknowledged Wednesday it improperly accessed Americans' telephone records, credit reports and internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies. The breach occurred before the FBI enacted broad new reforms in March 2007 to prevent future lapses, FBI Director Robert Mueller said. And it was caused, in part, by banks, telecommunication companies and other private businesses giving the FBI more personal client data than was requested

06 March 2008

According to a new study just released in the UK, one of the biggest causes of copyright infringement is a lack of choice. The study further shows that one third of the Brits have downloaded copyright infringing content, or plans to do so in the future

Channel Seven's planned TiVo digital video recorder service could be scrapped within weeks if free-to-air broadcasters proceed with their biggest assault yet on pay television. The free-to-air industry is likely to launch its own FreeView-branded recorder early next year that will offer access to as many as 15 free digital TV channels and an electronic program guide

Microsoft has unveiled a test version of Internet Explorer 8, the next edition of its web browser. At Microsoft's MIX08 online technology conference, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team, provided a first glimpse at the successor to IE7, which was released in October 2006

05 March 2008

IBM researchers have achieved a new record in data transfer rates, 300Gbps, using their new Optochip fibre optic chip. IBM also claims its new chips operate at one-tenth of the power used by current commercial optical chips

04 March 2008

Nine Inch Nails are struggling to keep their website online after releasing their latest album as a partly free download

Microsoft has had a change of heart regarding IE8. The new version of the dominant browser will render in full standards mode by default. Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly

Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor released a 36-song instrumental collection, Ghosts I-IV, direct to the Internet via his official website. The album is available at a number of pricing options, beginning with a free sampling of nine of the songs. All 36 cuts can be had for as low as $5 (download), or for as high as $300, a signed limited-edition set that will ship in May (pictured). There's also a $10 double-disc CD set, which includes a 16-page booklet and ships on April 8, or a $75 package that includes two discs, a DVD and a deluxe book

03 March 2008

After taking control of Shareaza.com, imposters trying to pass themselves off as an open-source dev team have stepped up their action to destroy the GNU GPL licensed project. In an audacious move, lawyers representing Discordia Ltd have filed to register the Shareaza trademark at the US Patent Office

02 March 2008

Jeffrey White of Federal District Court in San Francisco, on Friday withdrew his earlier order disabling, Wikileaks.org, a web site that allows the anonymous posting of documents to discourage unethical behavior in governments and corporations

Most homes will have broadband communication speeds up to 100 times faster than what is currently available, under the Rudd Government's plan to wire Australia for the 21st century

A divided Virginia Supreme Court affirmed the nation's first felony conviction for illegal spamming on Friday, ruling that Virginia's anti-spamming law does not violate free-speech rights. Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, NC, considered among the world's top 10 spammers in 2003, was convicted of massive distribution of junk e-mail and sentenced to nine years in prison

01 March 2008

Vladimir Vukicevic of the Firefox team stumbled upon some questionable practices from Apple while trying to improve the performance of Firefox. Apparently, Apple is using some undocumented APIs that give Safari a significant performance advantage over other browsers. Of course, undocumented means that non-Apple developers have to try and reverse-engineer these interfaces to get the same level of performance — via Slashdot

Google launches Google Sites, a new piece of the Google Apps hosted collaboration and communication suites. Google Sites is the JotSpot hosted wiki service reborn. JotSpot's re-launch under a different name and a revamped architecture finally answers how this hosted wiki service was retooled, almost a year and a half after Google acquired the company

It might not look like much, but a single strand of your hair is now enough for forensic scientists to work out where you live. The new isotopic analysis technique could prove invaluable for criminal investigations

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