May 2008 Archive

31 May 2008

The Australian competition watchdog has accidentally revealed Google as the anonymous source of a submission that is highly critical of eBay's proposal to force its users onto the PayPal payments system

Teenage hackers temporarily hijacked and defaced several Comcast Web sites and redirected user e-mail in an exploit that appears to expose weaknesses in the Internet's Domain Name System

The worldwide boom in commodities has come to this: Even guano, the bird dung that was the focus of an imperialist scramble on the high seas in the 19th century, is in strong demand once again. Surging prices for synthetic fertilisers and organic foods are shifting attention to guano, an organic fertiliser once found in abundance on this island and more than 20 others off the coast of Peru, where an exceptionally dry climate preserves the droppings of seabirds like the guanay cormorant and the Peruvian booby

30 May 2008

Google used its annual developer conference here this week to show off its nearly completed mobile software system to about 3,000 computer programmers, hoping to cultivate more services and advertising. The demonstration, held Wednesday, represented the most extensive public look so far at the system, Android. First announced nearly seven months ago, it is an open-source platform being designed for smartphones and other mobile devices that surf the Web

Mozilla is hoping to set a Guinness World Record for the most number of downloads of an application in a day, on the release of its Firefox 3 Web browser. There is currently no official Guinness World Record for the total number of downloads of an application in a day. During the first 24 hours of Firefox 3's release, Mozilla is aiming for over 1.6 million downloads and hoping for five million, according to a Mozilla spokesperson

Austar has flagged it could open its service to allow access to any video content from the internet through its next-generation set-top box. A high-definition version of the company's MyStar digital video recorder — which was first launched in March — is due out in the second half of next year, containing a USB port and an internet port

An ancient gold cup mysteriously acquired by a British scrap metal dealer is to be sold at auction with an estimate of nearly $1 million, after languishing for years in a shoe box under its current owner's bed

29 May 2008

Solar-powered Apples may on the horizon with the filing of a patent for utilising solar cells in portable devices. The solar panels would be under the display of both handhelds and portable computers

Soul Communications, known internally by some staff as Two.Tel, is currently under investigation in four states for failing to pay wages and entitlements to staff. The revelation comes as the telco faces legal action from dealers claiming they will lose their businesses because Soul owes them more than $1 million in commission fees. Staff still working for Soul, a subsidiary of SP Telemedia which merged with Australian internet service provider TPG in April, yesterday said the business was in chaos. It is not related to private equity group TPG

A hacker has used a loophole to collect more than $50,000 from Google Checkout and online brokerage firms, a few cents at a time. When opening an online brokering account it is common practice for companies such as E-trade and Schwab to send a tiny payment — ranging from only a few cents to a couple of dollars — to verify that the user has access to the bank account listed. Services such as Google Checkout and Paypal use a similar tactic to verify credit and debit cards linked to accounts. According to court documents, Californian Michael Largent used an automated script to open 58,000 such accounts, collecting many thousands of these small payments into a few personal bank accounts

Darpa wants to develop a dynamic putty-like material that can be packed around a shattered bone, support the body while the patient heals — and bio-degrade, once it's all over. If successful, this Fracture Putty could rapidly restore a patient to ambulatory function while normal healing ensues, with dramatically reduced rehabilitation time and the elimination of infection and secondary fractures, the agency notes

28 May 2008

Cisco and the security community are debating the reality of rootkits attacking the Cisco's Internetwork Operating System (IOS) after a researcher presented a proof of concept attack, which threatens Cisco routers and voice over IP phones

Researchers have discovered a new species of spider on Western Australia's south coast. The group has also uncovered a population of an ancient arachnid known as the Assassin spider. The spiders were found at a number of sites along a 70 kilometre stretch of coastline near Albany. The Assassin spider is just five millimetres in length and, despite its name, is harmless to humans

A Singapore firm, VueStar has threatened to sue websites that use pictures or graphics to link to another page, claiming it owns the patent for a technology used by millions around the world. The company is also planning to take on giants like Microsoft and Google. It is a battle that could, at least in theory, upend the Internet. The firm has been sending out invoices to Singapore companies since last week asking them to pay up — via Slashdot

27 May 2008

A giant squid has been found off Portland in Victoria's south-west. The six-metre long, 230-kilogram squid was still alive when it was netted by commercial fishermen last night. Fisheries Victoria says the creature is being kept in a freezer and will be transferred to the Melbourne Museum. The museum is yet to confirm whether it will be used for scientific research or put on display

A $US1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit over YouTube's ability to keep copyrighted material off its popular video-sharing site threatens how hundreds of millions of people exchange all kinds of information on the internet, owner Google said

Samsung Electronics has announced the world's fastest, 2.5", 256GB multi-level cell (MLC) based solid state drive (SSD) using a SATA II interface. The new Samsung 256GB SSD is also the thinnest drive with the largest capacity to be offered with a SATA II interface

26 May 2008

StatoilHydro has decided to build the world's first full scale floating wind turbine, Hywind, and test it over a two-year period offshore Karmøy. The The company is investing approximately 400 million NOK. Planned startup is autumn 2009

The MPAA won judgments totaling $4M against two sites which merely link to infringing content. They're not arguing that it's an infringement of their distribution right, like the RIAA has with their making available argument. Instead, they got the sites for contributory copyright infringement, just like RIAA vs LimeWire. To translate all that legalese into English, search engines which primarily index copyright-infringing material and the people who run them may not be safe in the US. That applies even if the sites in question do not host any infringing materials, participate in, or encourage the infringement done by their users — via Slashdot

25 May 2008

Researchers at the University of Utah describe how the Lamprocyphus augustus', an inch-long Brazilian beetle, iridescent green scales are composed of chitin arranged by evolution in precisely the molecular configuration that has confounded the would-be fabricators of optical computers. By using the scales as a semiconductor mold, researchers hope to finally build the perfect photonic crystal

Legal action has been dropped against a 15-year-old who faced prosecution for branding Scientology a cult. The teenager held up a sign which read, Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult, in May outside its headquarters in the City of London

A group in Santa Fe says the city is discriminating against them because they say that they're allergic to the wireless Internet signal. And now they want Wi-Fi banned from public buildings. Arthur Firstenberg says he is highly sensitive to certain types of electric fields, including wireless Internet and cell phones. Firstenberg and dozens of other electro-sensitive people in Santa Fe claim that putting up Wi-Fi in public places is a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act

24 May 2008

A new open-source project called Cubit is an Azureus plugin that provides decentralized approximate keyword search of torrents in the network — via Slashdot

A Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster — in three months, he figures. Daniel Burd's project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment. He knew plastic does eventually degrade, and figured microorganisms must be behind it. His goal was to isolate the microorganisms that can break down plastic — not an easy task because they don't exist in high numbers in nature

One blogger has started an outcry about harassment as it applies to Twitter. While their written stance appears to support the safeguarding of abuse, Twitter appears to be waffling on the issue when it comes to the hard line of enforcement — via Slashdot

23 May 2008

A teenager is facing prosecution for using the word cult to describe the Church of Scientology. The unnamed 15-year-old was served the summons by City of London police when he took part in a peaceful demonstration opposite the London headquarters of the controversial religion. Officers confiscated a placard with the word cult on it from the youth, who is under 18, and a case file has been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service

Tired of the United States and the other 190-odd nations on Earth? If a small team of Silicon Valley millionaires get their way, in a few years, you could have a new option for global citizenship: A permanent, quasi-sovereign nation floating in international waters. With a $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, a Google engineer and a former Sun Microsystems programmer have launched The Seasteading Institute, an organisation dedicated to creating experimental ocean communities with diverse social, political, and legal systems

22 May 2008

Microsoft has announced Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will add support for the Open Document Format (ODF), Portable Document Format (PDF), and XML Paper Specification (XPS). ODF, a rival document format to Office's native format, has become popular with governments and schools. Microsoft, acknowledging requests for compatibility with ODF, released a converter to allow Word users to open documents saved in the OpenDocument format

First it was mobiles for nothing, now it's laptops for free, as telcos try to lure customers into their often-expensive 3G mobile data plans. Telstra is offering a zero-dollar laptop to the value of $700 to business customers signing up for a three-year contract on the telco's Next G mobile data service. But as with $0 phones, there is a catch. The plan costs $99 a month and includes a one-gigabyte data download allowance a month. Go over that limit and you are in for some hefty excess data charges

21 May 2008

Russell T Davies is to step down as executive producer of Doctor Who, the BBC has announced. Davies is credited with breathing new life into the show he brought back to television screens in 2005. Bafta-winning writer Steven Moffat will succeed Davies as lead writer and executive producer of the fifth series of Doctor Who

Apple's 3G iPhone will be available immediately after CEO Steve Jobs announces it at the WorldWide Developers Conference on 9 June, a confidential source has told Gizmodo

Carbon nanotubes, the poster child of the burgeoning nanotechnology industry, could trigger diseases similar to those caused by asbestos, a study suggests. Specific lengths of the tiny fibres were found to cause asbestos-like inflammation and lesions in mice. Use of asbestos triggered a pandemic of lung disease in the 20th Century

20 May 2008

A massive UK government database holding details of every phone call, e-mail and time spent on the internet by the public is being planned as part of the fight against crime and terrorism. Internet service providers (ISPs) and telecoms companies would hand over the records to the Home Office under plans put forward by officials. The information would be held for at least 12 months and the police and security services would be able to access it if given permission from the courts

In a world first, scientists have extracted a gene from the extinct Tasmanian tiger and successfully inserted it into a mouse embryo. It is the first time a gene from any extinct animal has been brought back to life inside another living creature. However, the researchers, from the University of Melbourne and the University of Texas, say the technology will not lead to the cloning of an entire Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine

Two research groups working independently have come up with what they say are cheap processes for growing nanowires to be used with solar cells. The hairy cells provide a direct path for electrons collected at the panel face to reach an electrode, something which has the potential to dramatically improve system efficiency — via Slashdot

19 May 2008

Microsoft has said it is considering a deal with Yahoo which would not involve a full buyout of the company. Microsoft's previous offer to buy Yahoo for $33 a share — a figure which valued the company at $47.5bn — was turned down. Last week Yahoo rebuffed billionaire investor Carl Icahn's plan to oust the current board over the failed merger. Now Microsoft says it is discussing with Yahoo an alternative transaction, but did not provide any detail

ASUS is to embed a lightweight, instant-on version of Linux called Splashtop into all its motherboards, following good feedback from customers. On Wednesday, DeviceVM, the company behind the distribution, said the hardware manufacturer would be putting Splashtop — which ASUS calls Express Gate — into a million motherboards a month. Splashtop includes a Firefox-derived browser and the Skype Internet-telephony application

18 May 2008

Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is out now

A Minnesota woman ordered to pay $222,000 in the first music download trial in the United States may get another chance with a jury. The issue is whether record companies have to prove anyone else actually downloaded their copyrighted songs, or whether it is enough to argue that a defendant made copyrighted music available for copying

17 May 2008

Historians have postulated that, without Bletchley Park, the Allies may never have won the war. But, despite an impressive contribution to the war effort, the Bletchley Park site, now a museum, faces a bleak future unless it can secure funding to keep its doors open and its numerous exhibits from rotting away. The Bletchley Park Trust receives no external funding. It has been deemed ineligible for funding by the National Lottery, and turned down by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation because the Microsoft founder will only fund internet-based technology projects

A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted a Missouri woman for her alleged role in perpetrating a hoax on the online social network MySpace against a 13-year-old neighbor who committed suicide. Lori Drew of suburban St Louis allegedly helped create a false-identity MySpace account to contact Megan Meier, who thought she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans. Josh didn't exist. Megan hanged herself at home in October 2006 after receiving cruel messages, including one stating the world would be better off without her

Double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius won his appeal Friday and can compete for a place in the Beijing Olympics. The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the 21-year-old South African is eligible to race against able-bodied athletes, overturning a ban imposed by the International Association of Athletics Federations. CAS said the unanimous ruling goes into effect immediately

16 May 2008

California's top court has ruled that a state law banning marriage between same-sex couples is unconstitutional. The state's Supreme Court said the right to form a family relationship applied to all Californians regardless of sexuality. The ban was approved by voters in 2000 but challenged by gay rights activists and the city of San Francisco. The state legislature twice passed laws to legalise gay marriage, but Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed them. He said California's court system should rule on the matter

CBS agreed to buy CNet Networks for about $1.75 billion, expanding its access to the burgeoning Internet advertising market. The company, which owns the CBS television network, said it offered $11.50 a share for CNet, based in San Francisco, whose board accepted it. The bid is a 45 percent premium above CNet's closing price of $7.95 on Wednesday

Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor and activist shareholder, proposed a dissident slate of directors for the Yahoo board on Thursday as he tries to force the company to restart talks to sell itself to Microsoft

Not satisfied with a future vision that already includes flexible screens and wafer-thin phones, a pair of Japanese companies has pushed the envelope to come up with far-fetched gadgets that do all of the above without ever going near a power socket. The key to the work by Mitsubishi Chemical and Sumitomo Chemical lies in so-called spreadable electronics — liquids containing molecules of the type used in OLED screens

15 May 2008

Inevitably, the Ministry of Defence papers, released to the public for the first time, will be known as Britain's X-Files. Over the next three or four years, 160 files will be handed over to the National Archives. Covering 1978 to 1987, the first group of eight files, one of which is more than 450 pages long, is available via its website today. Some of the incidents are truly bizarre, but although some UFO sightings remain unexplained there is no evidence in the files for alien contact. There simply is no saucer-in-a-hangar smoking gun, said Nick Pope, a former civil servant who worked at the MoD for 21 years, spending three years on its UFO desk

The United States has listed the polar bear as a threatened species, because its Arctic sea ice habitat is melting due to climate change. US government scientists predict that two-thirds of the polar bear population of 25,000 could disappear by 2050. However, the government stressed the listing would not lead to measures to prevent global warming

The Mormon Church has instructed its lawyers to gag the Internet over WikiLeaks' release of the 1968 and 1999 versions of its confidential handbook for Church leaders. Apart from attacking WikiLeaks, legal demands were sent to Jimmy Wales of the WikiMedia foundation for a WikiNews article merely linking to the material, and scribd.com has also been censored. WikiLeaks has (of course) refused to remove the documents — via Slashdot

Ask.com has bought a stable of Internet reference sites that includes Dictionary.com in its latest effort to distinguish itself from online search leader Google and other much larger rivals

14 May 2008

Air Force Colonel Charles Williamson III believes that the United States military should maintain its own botnet, both as a deterrent towards those who would attempt to DDoS government networks, and an offensive weapon to be used against the networks of unfriendly nations, criminal groups, or terrorist organisations — va Slashdot

ISPs will be granted a one-off Government subsidy towards the cost of installing filtering technology, as part of the Rudd Government's AU$125.8 million Cyber-safety plan. The plan, as pitched during the Rudd Government's Election campaign, will move the emphasis from parents onto Internet Service Providers to filter inappropriate content from the Web surfing experience of Australians. The Government is yet to provide details on how much of the $125.8 million will be used for the subsidies — but with $47.6 million of that sum going to the Australian Federal Police, $11.3 million to the Director of Public Prosecutions and $14.1 million to ACMA to expand its regulatory role— ISPs shouldn't be expecting a huge windfall

Microsoft on Tuesday announced it would restore support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to Microsoft Office for Mac, a direct result of complaints from users about the removal of the suite's cross-platform automation functionality

13 May 2008

The Federal Government has moved to establish a centralised database to host and manage all Australian citizens' personal details, so this information can be easily shared and accessed by any department. The Australian Taxation Office, Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Customs, Centrelink and other departments, are discussing the possibility of establishing a common registration process to improve information sharing

An Australian-developed signal processing technology has been licensed to a US company to deliver faster internet speeds with longer distance capabilities. Developed by researchers from the University of Queensland and Sydney University, the low complexity method enhances the capacity of copper wire broadband services, and has particular applications where high-quality broadband transmission of multimedia files is required

Google has rolled out a new technology which automatically blurs any human face appearing in street-level photographs taken for use in its mapping services by its fleet of camera-mounted vehicles. The blurring technology, which will be retrospectively applied to all existing Street View images and incorporated in all future releases of the popular mapping feature, is intended to mollify concerns about the potentially intrusive nature of the service. Google will shortly previewed the face-blurring technology on the Street View images found on its Manhattan maps

Google has joined the drive to make the web more social by introducing tools to enable people to interact with their friends. Friend Connect follows plans announced last week by the world's two biggest social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook. Data Availability and Connect let users move their personal profiles and applications to other web sites

12 May 2008

Consumer advocates are concerned a proposed merger between Westpac and St George Bank would reduce competition in the banking sector. If successful, the merger would be the biggest in Australian banking history, making Westpac the nation's dominant home lender with a 25 per cent market share and a 10-million strong customer base

Apparently, the folks in Bournesmouth didn't get the Google TISP joke, as they're laying fibre optic cable through the sewer system. The intended result: blazing fast connections that don't require digging up anything

Speculation is mounting that Time Warner's internet division, AOL, is set to launch its Advertising.com network in Australia. Such an entry would continue the rapid-fire shake-up of the Australian internet display industry currently under way, putting the big players under more pressure to retain their dominant market share. Advertising.com bills itself as the biggest network of its type, serving up video, mobile, display and search advertising on independent websites using technology to target and follow individual users

11 May 2008

The Reserve Bank has joined a chorus of high-profile organisations, including the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and Australian Bankers' Association (ABA) to denounce eBay's proposal to use PayPal as its main payment method. The RBA believes the new process will stifle competition and limit the ability for alternative payments systems to compete on an even keel

Rock Port only has a population of 1,316 but last week they threw the switch as America's first ever community completely powered by the wind. Yes, northwest Missouri is windier than central Missouri. It takes winds of up to 9-miles per hour to get those blades spinning. Rock Port is now powered by four wind turbines. In all, 79 turbines are operational in northwest Missouri

10 May 2008

A recently-discovered flaw in Gmail is capable of turning Google's e-mail service into a highly effective spam machine. According to the Information Security Research Team, Gmail is susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack that allows a spammer to send thousands of bulk e-mails through Google's SMTP service without fear of detection. This attack bypasses both Google's identity fraud protection mechanisms and the current 500-address limit on bulk e-mail

Computer attacks typically do not inflict physical pain on their victims. But in a rare example of an attack apparently motivated by malice rather than money, hackers recently bombarded the Epilepsy Foundation's web site with hundreds of pictures and links to pages with rapidly flashing images. The breach triggered severe migraines and near-seizure reactions in some site visitors who viewed the images. People with photosensitive epilepsy can get seizures when they're exposed to flickering images, a response also caused by some video games and cartoons

09 May 2008

Mozilla is redoubling its efforts to check user created add-ons for viruses and Trojans after it discovered that a language pack on its official add-on page had been infected for months with rogue code. Starting in mid-February, Vietnamese users of Mozilla's open source Firefox browser were at risk of infection from malicious Trojan Horse code seemingly accidentally embedded in a language pack available on its Add-ons site

Sun has released a major update to its open-source desktop virtualisation tool xVM VirtualBox, adding support for Apple's Mac OS X and Solaris host operating systems, in addition to other improvements

The first beta-test version of the OpenOffice.org 3.0 productivity suite was released on Wednesday, adding significant features such as improved Mac OS X support and support for the OpenDocument 1.2 standard

08 May 2008

iiNet has announced it will purchase fellow WA-based ISP Westnet in a deal worth $81 million, but will retain the staff and brand of the company. iiNet said it would cement the ISP as the third largest in Australia. With Westnet's 215,000 active services, including 138,000 broadband users, iiNet's total number of active services will grow to over 680,000, including over 470,000 dialup and broadband subscribers, said the announcement

Telstra will be the third mobile provider to sell the iPhone in Australia starting from the end of June. The news that Telstra will carry the Apple handset comes in light of the recent report that Optus also intends to sell the iPhone, and Vodafone's official announcement that it will be bringing the handset to 10 new markets

Once touted as a possible third option for home broadband that could compete with phone and cable companies, the idea of providing Internet service over power lines now looks like it has died in infancy. A Texas utility company said last week that it is taking control of the equipment that was to be used in the largest planned US deployment of broadband over power lines, or BPL — and won't be using it to provide Internet service

07 May 2008

Microsoft will resume two major Windows updates it had stalled due to a conflict it caused with one of its lesser-known software products. The software maker on Tuesday said it is releasing XP Service Pack 3 for Web downloads, and resuming automatic updates to Vista Service Pack 1, after developing a filter that will prevent machines running Dynamics RMS from getting either update

Optus, will extend its mobile network to reach 98 per cent of the population, as it aims to become the market leader in wireless communications. The expanded network will provide wireless, voice and broadband services and is expected to be completed by December 2009

Without more investment in high-speed fibre broadband, Australia's competitiveness will suffer, according to academic Internet service provider Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNet)

06 May 2008

Vodafone Australia has announced that it will be selling the iPhone in Australia later this year. The agreement is part of a wider global deal in which Vodafone will be selling the device in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey

The rock act Nine Inch Nails is offering its new album, The Slip, through its Web site for free. This appears to be the first time a superstar act has distributed an entire album without any opportunity for people to pay for it

Google has taken down the open-source project CoreAVC for Linux due to a DMCA complaint. The CoreAVC codec is a commercial high-definition H.264 DirectShow filter for windows provided by CoreCodec. The CoreAVC for Linux project provided various patches for Linux applications (mplayer, MythTV, xine) to use these DirectShow decoder filters in Linux. The takedown is quite controversial, as the CoreAVC project did not provide any copyrighted material — only the means to use the DirectShow filters in Linux — via Slashdot

05 May 2008

Australian credit card customers will soon have the option of signing their name or keying in a personal identification number (PIN) when shopping

The world's data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020. Over that time, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the electricity consumed by fast-expanding data centers will rise fourfold, the study estimates. The greenhouse gas impact of data centers is not yet counted and likely to be very significant

04 May 2008

Microsoft is withdrawing its offer for Yahoo after talks between the two companies broke down on Saturday. Microsoft hiked its offer to $33 a share, but Yahoo was holding out for $37 a share. The two sides met face to face again Saturday, but remained far apart

British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives. Prototypes could be on the front line by the end of the year, scuttling into potential danger areas such as booby-trapped buildings or enemy hideouts to relay images back to troops safely positioned nearby. Soldiers will carry the robots into combat and use a small tracked vehicle to transport them closer to their targets

03 May 2008

Microsoft has withdrawn Vista SP1 from automatic delivery in the wake of news that XP SP3 can cause data corruption in business apps

Amazon.com has filed a lawsuit challenging New York state's new law forcing online retailers to collect sales tax on shipments to state residents. On Friday, Amazon filed a complaint in the trial-level state Supreme Court in Manhattan objecting to the law, which was approved as part of the $122 billion state budget that Governor David Paterson signed last week. The law is expected to raise about $50 million

Even criminal hackers want to protect their intellectual property, and they've come up with a method akin to copyrighting — with an appropriate dash of Internet thuggery thrown in

02 May 2008

This week, the world marks an anniversary that has changed the face — and other anatomical regions — of e-mail inboxes everywhere: the first known spam e-mail was sent 30 years ago on Saturday

Computers that boot instantly to the exact place where you left off and mobile devices that don't need recharging for weeks. These are only some of the possibilities resulting from Hewlett-Packard research that proves the existence of what the company described as the fourth fundamental circuit element in electrical engineering

Yet another NSW Government infrastructure project has bit the dust, with the Minister for Commerce today announcing the promised free wireless broadband network for the Sydney CBD and other major centres would be scrapped

01 May 2008

A substantial hunk of IP address space has apparently been taken over by notorious mass e-mailing company Media Breakaway, formerly known as OptInRealBig, via means that are at best questionable. The block in question is 134.17.0.0/16, which has been documented in depth in an independent investigation — via Slashdot

PC giant Dell has turned to Officeworks to help unseat its closest rival Hewlett-Packard in a bitter market share war in Australia. After months trying to woo the the retail gods, Dell has found its match in Officeworks. Officeworks will start selling Dell computers, laptops, printers and flat panel displays next week. The PCs will cost between $999 and $1800

Microsoft likes digital photography enthusiasts as customers, and plans to release a free new utility designed to keep them wedded to Windows. Pro Photo Tools is geared for photography professionals and enthusiasts, and its first notable feature is the ability to geotag photos, or add geographic information showing where the picture was taken. Geotagging is an onerous chore with today's technology, but camera makers are working to build it into cameras, and it can pay off down the road

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