April 2008 Archive

30 April 2008

MySpace has won a legal decision against so-called spam king Sanford Wallace after he failed numerous times to turn over documents or attend hearings

Microsoft on Tuesday said it is delaying the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3 because of a newly uncovered glitch. The software maker said there is a compatibility issue between the XP service pack and Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System, a retail chain management program for small and midsize businesses. Microsoft finalised the code for Windows XP SP3 last week and had planned to make it broadly available starting Tuesday

Cray and Intel announced Monday a multiyear agreement to develop new high-performance supercomputers with future Xeon and other Intel processor technologies. Cray will still use AMD chips

29 April 2008

A University of Arizona (UA) team is working with NASA to design self-healing computer systems for spacecraft. The UA engineers are working on hybrid hardware/software systems using Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) to develop these reconfigurable processing systems. As the lead researcher said, Our objective is to go beyond predicting a fault to using a self-healing system to fix the predicted fault before it occurs — via Slashdot

The sharp acceleration of speculation in Internet names, a practice known as domain tasting in which names are registered by the millions and tested for their advertising prospects, is under scrutiny

28 April 2008

A new Australian green search engine seeking to capitalise on web surfers' eco-guilt has been barred by Google from using its search technology and advertising platform. Ecocho.com.au, launched just a week ago, promises to buy carbon offset credits that will result in two trees being planted for every 1000 searches made through the site. It gives users the option of searching through either Yahoo or Google and serves up their ads alongside search results. But like other green search engines, it is questionable whether Ecocho really is any more environmentally friendly than regular Google search. Furthermore, Ecocho's founder, Tim Macdonald, is also the co-founder of Found Agency, a high-profile search engine optimisation company that has been penalised by Google for breaking its rules in the past

InfoWorld confirms that Dell will sell and support Windows XP to consumers beyond the 30 June Microsoft sales cutoff date that Microsoft reaffirmed today, after comments from CEO Steve Ballmer yesterday seemingly indicated it might reconsider that decision. Dell will take advantage of a licensing option in Vista Business and Vista Ultimate that lets PC makers provide XP under the Vista license, which Microsoft calls a downgrade license. (Enterprises with site licenses have these same rights with any version of Vista.) In essence, the user is buying a Vista license that it can apply to XP, and Microsoft can still claim a Vista sale

27 April 2008

Sky One is hoping to continue the successful reinvention of the genre with a multimillion-pound remake of the 1970s British favourite Blake's 7. The broadcaster yesterday announced that it had approved the development of two new scripts from the production company that holds the rights to the series

The FBI has called for new legislation that would allow federal police to monitor the Internet for illegal activity. The suggestion from FBI Director Robert Mueller, which came during a House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing, appears to go beyond a current plan to monitor traffic on federal-government networks. Mueller seemed to suggest that the bureau should have a broad omnibus authority to conduct monitoring and surveillance of private-sector networks as well

26 April 2008

Being inside a pinball machine factory sounds exactly as you think it would. Across a 40,000-square-foot warehouse here, a cheery cacophony of flippers flip, bells ding, bumpers bump and balls click in an endless, echoing loop. The quarter never runs out. But this place, Stern Pinball, is the last of its kind in the world. A range of companies once mass produced pinball machines, especially in the Chicago area, the one-time capital of the business. Now there is only Stern. And even the dinging and flipping here has slowed: Stern, which used to crank out 27,000 pinball machines each year, is down to around 10,000

The regeneration of lost body parts has just moved from science fiction to US military policy. Yesterday the Department of Defense announced the creation of the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, which will go by the happy acronym AFIRM. According to DOD's news service, AFIRM will harness stem cell research and technology... to reconstruct new skin, muscles and tendons, and even ears, noses and fingers. The government is budgeting $250 million in public and private money for the project's first five years. NIH and three universities will be on the team

25 April 2008

Spammers are using an automated method to create bogus pages on Google's Blogger service, again highlighting the diminishing effectiveness of a security system intended to stop mass account registrations, according to security vendor Websense. The spammers are sending coded instructions to PCs in their botnets, or networks of computers that have been infected with malicious software

Ancient humans started down the path of evolving into two separate species before merging back into a single population. The genetic split in Africa resulted in distinct populations that lived in isolation for as much as 100,000 years. This could have been caused by arid conditions driving a wedge between humans in eastern and southern Africa

MP3tunes' CEO Michael Robertson sent out an email to all users of the online music backup and place-shifting service MP3tunes.com, asking them to help publicise EMI's ridiculous and ignorant lawsuit against the company. EMI believes that consumers aren't allowed to store their music files online, and that MP3tunes is violating copyright law by providing a backup service

24 April 2008

Last year, one out of every 909 e-mails was infected with malicious code. In 2008's first quarter, only one out of every 2,500 was infected. Good news? Not really — attackers have just changed tactics

Microsoft said Live Mesh, now in a limited preview, uses the Web as a hub to centrally connect people to the information, applications, people and devices they care about most

Microsoft has emailed former customers of MSN Music saying it would be turning off the DRM servers used to authorise playback of music purchased from the now-defunct MSN Music store

23 April 2008

PayPal has denied claims it plans to lock Safari users out of its online payments service as it reinforces its protections against online credit fraud. It has been previously reported that the company intends strengthening its defenses against phishing attacks. Early reports indicating Safari may be affected by the company move to block users of older or less secure browsers were incorrect

CSIRO's Australia Telescope National Facility has been awarded a private data highway — a 10 gigabit per second link — across the US by a major internet consortium and a US communications company

When Charlie Miller won $10,000 for hacking into a Macbook Air laptop last month, he exploited a flaw that had been publicly disclosed nearly a year before the contest. The flaw, it turns out, lay in an open-source software library called the Perl Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) library, which is used by many products including Apache, the PHP scripting language, and Apple's Safari browser, which Miller hacked to win the contest. Miller won $10,000 and a new Macbook Air last month after hacking into the laptop in a matter of minutes. The PWN2OWN contest invited hackers to try to install unauthorized software on fully patched Mac OS X, Windows and Linux computers using previously undisclosed zero-day flaws

Skype has introduced its first plan for so-called unlimited calls to overseas destinations. There are no long-term contracts — just a monthly fixed rate to dial landline numbers. Monthly packages to North America start from $3.95, Europe costs a dollar more while Asia rings in at $5.95. Consumers can choose from three types of subscriptions — 34 countries, several countries in a region or a single destination. The offering is extended to mobile calls in some countries

22 April 2008

An Australian team of researchers is developing next-generation discs that can store the contents of as many as 200,000 DVDs. The five-year, $1 million project at Swinburne University of Technology's Centre for Micro-Photonics is looking at how nanotechnology, particularly the use of nanoparticles, can be used to boost the amount of information contained on a disc

Australia will lead a worldwide revolt against new PayPal-only payment plans adopted by online auctioneer eBay at a conference in New Orleans kicking off this week. The charge is led by the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA), which consists of eBay's elite sellers. Combined, they generate more than $US400 million ($424.88 million) in sales each year on the web site

Six Apart, a blogging-software company that offers Movable Type and TypePad, has acquired creative agency Apperceptive and launched its own advertising network and consulting services division

21 April 2008

After 8 years of effort, InPhase Technologies is shipping the world's first holographic disk drive next month. They showed it at this week's NAB. With a 300GB 5.25" disk cartridge and a 50-year media life, the Tapestry 300r is aimed at the video and film archive market — via Slashdot

The Soviet Union may be in the dustbin of history, but there's one place the socialist utopia lives on: cyberspace. Sixteen years after the superpower's collapse, web sites ending in the Soviet .su domain name have been rising — registrations increased 45 percent this year alone. Bloggers, entrepreneurs and die-hard communists are all part of a small but growing online community resisting repeated efforts to extinguish the online Soviet outpost

20 April 2008

A leading contender to replace silicon as the basis for computing has made another step forward. Transistors one atom thick and ten atoms wide have been made by UK researchers. They were carved from graphene, predicted by some to one day oust silicon as the basis of future computing

Both the music and movie industries see file-sharing as a very real threat to their livelihood. Their approaches to the problem have differed, however, as the RIAA has targeted individual P2P users with lawsuits while the IFPI and MPAA have chosen to go after BitTorrent sites. The MPAA has scored some high-profile victories against P2P site operators and the men behind The Pirate Bay have been indicted by Swedish prosecutors, but many observers have questioned whether the motion picture industry's efforts are in fact backfiring, as traffic to popular BitTorrent sites and participation in swarms appears to be on the upswing

19 April 2008

PayPal, eBay's electronic payment service, plans to take the dramatic step of locking out people using older versions of web browsers in order to stem phishing attacks. PayPal said a significant group of people still use Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3, released in 1996, and IE 4, which debuted in 1997. Those browsers lack a phishing filter, which can block users from accessing a reported phishing web site

About one percent of the Web pages being delivered on the Internet are being changed in transit, sometimes in a harmful way, according to researchers at the University of Washington

This laboratory in a leafy part of Hampshire is where defence and security firm Qinetiq develops and tests its ion engines 𗾤 a technology that will take spacecraft to the planets, powered by the Sun. Ion engines are an electric propulsion system. They make use of the fact that a current flowing across a magnetic field creates an electric field directed sideways to the current. This is used to accelerate a beam of ions (charged atoms) of xenon away from the spacecraft, thereby providing thrust

18 April 2008

The first draft of a book which changed the world's attitude to evolution is available for the first time online. Papers which led to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution were previously only available to scholars at Cambridge University's library. The draft notes are among 20,000 archive items created by the 19th Century naturalist during his lifetime

Apple has fixed the Safari flaw that allowed the MacBook Air to be hacked at the CanSecWest security conference. Mozilla has also issued an update to fix a critical vulnerability in Firefox

New figures suggest that 92.3 percent of all email sent globally during the first three months of 2008 was spam. The data from Sophos also indicated that 23,300 new spam-related web pages were created every day during the period, or one about every three seconds. For the first time Turkey's contribution to the global spam problem puts it in the top three offending countries

17 April 2008

After the Guardian did their own investigation into the Mac clone maker Psystar, Gizmodo decided to take it a step further and see if they actually exist, in the physical sense. How could a company so brazenly challenge Apple and have little to no record of actually being a company? They set off to get pictures of both their supposed addresses, and found that they're as much vapourware as the Phantom Console of yore

Sun Microsystems pushed out a near final version of MySQL 5.1 on Tuesday, but is holding back the production release of the open-source database until it irons out some remaining bugs, officials said Tuesday. Sun wants to avoid issuing another buggy release of the database, which is what happened when MySQL, which Sun acquired in January, released MySQL 5.0 two years ago

Google has announces that they are experimenting with technologies to index the deep web, the sites hidden behind forms, in order to be the gateway to large volumes of data beyond the normal scope of search engines. Directions like nofollow and noindex are still respected, so sites can still be excluded from this type of search

16 April 2008

Windows XP Service Pack 3 is apparently set to debut later this month. While Microsoft has not commented, tech news outlets are reporting that the much-anticipated update will be available on 29 April

eBay Australia has applied for legal protection as it seeks to force members to use a payment gateway it owns for buying and selling goods. It is the ACCC's policy to grant immediate immunity from the date the notification is validly lodged. The public will have until 2 May to provide submissions. Meanwhile, an online petition against eBay's new policy has been established by Brisbane small business operator Daniel Gibney

Talk about a long silence — no one has heard their voices for 30,000 years. Now the long-extinct Neanderthals are speaking up — or at least a computer synthesiser is doing so on their behalf. Robert McCarthy, an anthropologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton has used new reconstructions of Neanderthal vocal tracts to simulate the voice. He says the ancient human's speech lacked the quantal vowel sounds that underlie modern speech

You can plug lots of handy items into your computer's USB port, from mobile storage devices to printers — but if you're not careful, you can also plug in a piece of damaging malware as well

15 April 2008

Dubai authorities have impounded two ships suspected of damaging undersea telecom cables in the Middle East earlier this year. One of the ships has reportedly been released after paying for the damage. The cable cuts, which disrupted Internet traffic in much of the Middle East, India and Pakistan, sparked a flurry of conspiracy theories that the series of outages in the region were not a coincidence. The action was taken after Reliance Globalcom provided details of its analysis of satellite images documenting the ship movements around the area of undersea cable damage

Companies will be able to intercept the emails and internet communications of their employees without their consent under new laws being considered by the Federal Government to protect the nation's critical infrastructure from a cyber attack

Monsanto already dominates America's food chain with its genetically modified seeds. Now it has targeted milk production. Just as frightening as the corporation's tactics — ruthless legal battles against small farmers — is its decades-long history of toxic contamination

14 April 2008

The Greens and privacy advocates have hit back against proposed laws which could allow companies to snoop on their workers' e-mails, but Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has said the laws are needed to protect vital electronic infrastructure from terrorist attacks

Victoria Police has been refused access to a self-proclaimed terrorist's personal Facebook details after the social networking web site demanded more information about an international counter-terrorism investigation into its member. Counter-terrorism agents were asked to supply more details about a death threat made via Facebook against a Melbourne Jewish woman and her family by an alleged member of the Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah

A new form of cloning has been developed that is easier to carry out than the technique used to create Dolly the sheep, raising fears that it may one day be used on human embryos to produce designer babies

13 April 2008

The Federal Trade Commission has proposed self-regulatory guidelines for companies that do behavioural targeting. That's good, but self-regulation is not enough. One idea starting to gain traction in Congress is a do-not-track list, similar to the federal do-not-call list, which would allow Internet users to opt out of being spied on

Researchers have found evidence during the last six months of the year that Internet fraudsters are adopting mainstream tactics, including hiring teams of hackers to create new viruses and offering volume discounts on stolen data to encourage larger orders. In some cases, stolen credit card numbers were sold in batches of 500 for a total of $200

12 April 2008

Yesterday, TorrentFreak reported that the popular BitTorrent tracker Demonoid was to be resurrected, under a new administrator. Now, less that a day later the site has < href="http://torrentfreak.com/demonoid-is-back-080411/">made its comeback after exactly 6 months of downtime

11 April 2008

Mobile phones, iPods and other consumer devices may soon be able to hold a hundred times more information than they do at present thanks to a breakthrough in storage technology. Scientists at IBM say they have developed a new type of digital storage which would enable a device such as an MP3 player to store about half a million songs — or 3,500 films — and cost far less to produce

10 April 2008

eBay is using Australia as a guinea pig to trial a new policy where all other modes of payment are barred except its own transaction gateway, PayPal. Direct deposits, personal cheques and money orders will no longer be payment options from 17 June. This is the first time these restrictions will be imposed by eBay anywhere in the world and could be enforced in other markets in the future

The European Parliament rejected attempts to criminalise the sharing of files by private individuals and threw out the idea of banning copyright abusers from the Internet. The vote was close, with 314 MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) voting in favour of an amendment to scrap what many consider draconian and disproportionate measures to protect copyright over the internet, and 297 voting against the amendment

A rare and primitive frog living in a remote Borneo stream has no lungs and apparently absorbs oxygen through its skin. The aquatic frog has evolved backwards, re-acquiring a primordial trait, David Bickford of the National University of Singapore and colleagues reported. Studying the frog could help shed light on how lungs evolved in the first place, they wrote in the journal Current Biology, adding that illegal gold mining in the area may threaten the unique species

09 April 2008

The United Nations refugee agency has unveiled a new partnership with Google to help track refugees from Iraq to Darfur and raise public awareness of its work. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) launched its new service using the Google Earth Outreach programme, which allows organisations to add their own data and information as a layer on top of the existing Google Earth service

For the first time, the amount of malicious software being released has outstripped that of legitimate software. Malware now makes up the majority of all new applications: 65 percent of the 54,609 applications developed and released to the public for Windows-based PCs in the past six months were malicious, according to Symantec's latest threat report

08 April 2008

Telstra says it has begun the process of laying down 9,000 kilometres of cable from Australia to Hawaii in a bid to improve internet speed

EMC reached a deal to buy data-storage firm Iomega for $US213 million ($228.84 million) in cash, scuttling a deal Iomega previously made with a group of Chinese companies. The two sides agreed to the deal after EMC sweetened its offer to $US3.85 a share

Yahoo has rejected Microsoft's takeover bid a second time as too low. Microsoft's initial offer was valued at $31 a share, but the declining price of Microsoft shares reduced the offer to just more than $29 a share

07 April 2008

Hundreds of police officers across South Australia caught using their work computers to illegally copy movie DVDs will escape prosecution. The activity — strictly banned under federal copyright laws — was detected during an audit conducted by the information technology branch of SA Police

Chinese authorities appear to have lifted a block on the English-language version of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, but politically sensitive topics such as Tibet and Tiananmen Square are still off limits. Internet users in Beijing and Shanghai confirmed on Saturday that they could access the English-language version of one of the world's most popular websites, but the Chinese language version was still restricted

06 April 2008

Northwestern University researchers have shown that a nano-engineered gel inhibits the formation of scar tissue at the injury site and enables the severed spinal cord fibres to regenerate and grow. The gel is injected as a liquid into the spinal cord and self-assembles into a scaffold that supports the new nerve fibers as they grow up and down the spinal cord, penetrating the site of the injury. When the gel was injected into mice with a spinal cord injury, after six weeks the animals had a greatly enhanced ability to use their hind legs and walk

Dell, the personal-computer maker that pioneered selling custom-made machines directly to clients, is moving away from its build-to-order model to reduce costs. Dell is limiting the degree to which buyers can dictate specifications while expanding its line of prepackaged models, operations chief Mike Cannon said Wednesday. Dell will also outsource more PC manufacturing to partners, he said

The internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds. At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, the grid will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds. The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call

05 April 2008

The next time your children get cavities, they might get tooth regeneration instead of fillings. That's because materials scientists are beginning to find just the right solutions of chemicals to rebuild decayed teeth, rather than merely patching their holes. Enamel and dentin, the materials that make teeth the strongest pieces of the body, would replace the gold or ceramic fillings that currently return teeth to working order

A lawyer who sent out hundreds of thousands of threatening letters demanding that alleged file-sharers pay 400 euros, has been banned from operating for 6 months. Elizabeth Martin, who had been working with Swiss anti-piracy outfit, Logistep, was condemned by the Paris Bar Council

04 April 2008

The head of one of Britain's biggest internet providers has criticised the music industry for demanding that he act against pirates. The trade body for UK music, the BPI, asked internet service providers to disconnect people who ignore requests to stop sharing music. But Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse, which runs the TalkTalk broadband service, is refusing. He said it is not his job to be an internet policeman

Microsoft has dropped two strong hints in the past two days that the next version of its Windows operating system will arrive in 2009, shaving up to a year off previous expectations. It could also be a signal that Microsoft intends to cut its losses with Windows Vista, which has been poorly received or shunned by customers, especially large companies. Microsoft has long said it wants to release Windows 7 about three years after Vista, which was released to manufacturing in November 2006 but not officially launched until January 2007. Given Microsoft's recent track record — Vista arrived more than five years after XP — most outsiders had pegged some time in 2010 as a safe bet for Windows 7's arrival

Microsoft has announced that a version of Windows XP Home will continue to be available until either 30 June 2010, or one year following the release of its next-generation Windows 7 operating system

03 April 2008

Firefox 3 Beta 5 was released today. This last beta release sports performance-boosting improved connection parallelism. Not only has 'the memory leak' been fixed: Firefox now uses less memory than other browsers. The final release of Firefox 3 is expected in June — via Slashdot

Google plans to split off its search marketing arm from its affiliate marketing business and sell the search marketing business at its recently acquired DoubleClick advertising technology unit. The online search and advertising leader is looking to spin off its Chicago-based search marketing business, Performics, which employs 200 of DoubleClick's 1,500 staff. Tom Phillips, director of DoubleClick's integration efforts with Google, said the company wants to dispose of the search marketing business to eliminate the perception Google might favor the unit in its search results and other efforts

Adobe is readying a new version of its Creative Suite, the software bundle that includes Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and other applications for print and Web design. Only this time there's a twist: The new version of Photoshop will support 64-bit memory addressing for the first time — but only if you're running Windows

02 April 2008

Microsoft's bid to make the Open XML (OOXML) file formats international standards has succeeded, barring any last-minute changes

The federal government has cancelled the contract for Optus and Elders to build a WiMAX broadband network

An embryonic planet detected outside our Solar System could be less than 2,000 years old. The ball of dust and gas, which is in the process of turning into a Jupiter-like giant, was detected around the star HL Tau, by a UK team. Research leader Dr Jane Greaves said the planet's growth may have been kickstarted when another young star passed the system 1,600 years ago

01 April 2008

Google Docs is getting offline access baked in with Google Gears starting with a small number of users today, the Official Google Docs blog reports — via Lifehacker

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