June 2008 Archive

30 June 2008

It used to be that just the entertainment industries wanted to control your computers — and televisions and iPods and everything else — to ensure that you didn't violate any copyright rules. But now everyone else wants to get their hooks into your gear. OnStar will soon include the ability for the police to shut off your engine remotely. Buses are getting the same capability, in case terrorists want to re-enact the movie Speed. The Pentagon wants a kill switch installed on airplanes, and is worried about potential enemies installing kill switches on their own equipment

A GoDaddy Vice President has been caught bidding against customers in their own domain name auctions. The employee Adam Dicker isn't just any GoDaddy employee; he's head of the GoDaddy subsidiary that controls the auctions. Dicker won some of the domains he bid for, and pushed up the bid price on auctions he didn't win. The conflict of interest is unethical, but could this practice also be illegal? Said a representative for a competitor, Even if controlled, that practice has bad news written all over it. This comes hot on the heels of news that despite earlier promises to ICANN to end their 60-Day ban on transfers, GoDaddy quietly circumvented it by forcing customers to agree to the ban anyway. ICANN doesn't appear to be investigating or asking follow-up questions about this. What can be done to force ICANN to police the registrars for which it is responsible? — via Slashdot

29 June 2008

Netgear launches Open Source edition of wireless-G router enabling Linux developers, geeks, hackers and enthusiasts to create Firmware for specialized applications Open Source Wireless-G Router (WGR614L) delivers higher processing power and more memory for a Wide Variety of customised applications. The product is supported by a dedicated and responsive open source community

A number of states have been considering laws that, under the guise of academic freedom, single out evolution for special criticism. Most of them haven't made it out of the state legislatures, and one that did was promptly vetoed. But the last of these bills under consideration, the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), was enacted by the signature of Governor Bobby Jindal yesterday. The bill would allow local school boards to approve supplemental classroom materials specifically for the critique of scientific theories, allowing poorly-informed board members to stick their communities with Dover-sized legal fees

28 June 2008

It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year. The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic — and worrying — examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Scientists say the ice at 90 degrees north may well have melted away by the summer

Intel researchers have built a superfast silicon chip for optical networking. It is Intel's latest advance in silicon photonics. The chip contains eight modulators that encode data onto light that enters and exits from the side via optical fibres. This chip can process 200 gigabits of data per second and is used to test designs that could ultimately process a terabit of data per second

On 30 June, US federal government officials expect to declare an early victory on the IPv6 front. But they admit that meeting their much-heralded 30 June deadline for IPv6 compatibility is just the opening salvo of a long-term battle to get their networks ready for the Internet of the future. Under a White House policy issued in August 2005, all federal agencies must demonstrate the ability to pass IPv6 packets across their backbone networks by this deadline

27 June 2008

The BBC has taken control of UK TV, buying Foxtel's remaining 60 per cent stake and the production company FremantleMedia's 20 per cent for an undisclosed sum. The BBC will add Children's channel, CBeebies, by mid 2009. Such a move could potentially putting it in direct competition with ABC3 if that should ever eventuate. Foxtel will also roll out a new documentary channel, BBC Knowledge

eBay has delayed its 15 July deadline to impose a new payment system until a review by the competition watchdog is completed. On its web site, eBay Australia said: Changes to eBay.com.au scheduled for 15 July are being postponed until the review process with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) regarding its recent draft notice is complete

A complete overhaul of the way in which people navigate the internet has been given the go-ahead in Paris. The net's regulator, ICANN, voted unanimously to relax the strict rules on so-called top-level domain names, such as .com or .uk. The decision means that companies could turn brands into web addresses, while individuals could use their names. A second proposal, to introduce domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts, was also approved

26 June 2008

Scientists have made a breakthrough discovery in the bizarre properties of glass, which behaves at times like both a solid and a liquid. The finding could lead to aircraft that look like Wonder Woman's plane. Such planes could have wings of glass or something called metallic glass, rather than being totally invisible

Apple iTunes users in Australia can now buy television shows — some of which have long been offered for free elsewhere — for the first time at $2.99 each, but unlike overseas there are no discounts for buying full seasons. After a protracted tussle with local networks and the studios for rights to distribute episodes to Australians via the internet, Apple has secured deals with the ABC and Nine networks in Australia, as well as Disney, ABC and MTV in the US

Microsoft and Google are living up to a promise they made in February by showing signs of OpenID support in its product code. Microsoft Passport and Google Accounts apparently have nothing on OpenID. The online account tool is showing signs of adoption in Microsoft's new HealthVault beta as well as in Google Maps code

25 June 2008

With many business and individual PC users rejecting Windows Vista, Microsoft took an unprecedented step this week by promising patches and updates for Windows XP for a full 13 years

Nokia has acquired the remainder of Symbian for $410 million and opened the popular mobile platform to challenge Google's Android, Microsoft's Open Windows, and even Apple's iPhone

More recently, challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using mobile phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise

24 June 2008

George Carlin, who died of heart failure Sunday at 71, leaves behind not only a series of memorable routines, but a legal legacy: His most celebrated monologue, a frantic, informed riff on those infamous seven words, led to a Supreme Court decision on broadcasting offensive language

Since launch last week in excess of 17.3 million downloads of Firefox 3 have taken place. The browser saw 8 million downloads within the first 24-hours of its release, more than ever downloaded in a single day before and a statistic currently being considered for inclusion within the Guinness Book of Records. Firefox 2 was downloaded 1.6 million times in its first 24 hours of release; to date, it has been downloaded more than half a billion times, according to Mozilla

The Macintosh platform is again under attack by malicious code writers. This time, it's multiple variants of a Trojan horse that could compromise machines running Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5. The Trojan, distributed as either a compiled AppleScript called ASthtv05 or as an application bundle called AStht_v06, exploits a recently discovered vulnerability with the Apple Remote Desktop agent. The ARD allows the Trojan to run as root

Finnish handset maker Nokia has taken GPS a step further with the announcement that it is acquiring Plazes, the developer of a social-networking Web site that lets friends locate each other

23 June 2008

In an response to the new wiretapping law that was introduced in Sweden this week, The Pirate Bay will ask international ISPs to block traffic to Sweden, to protect their customers. In addition, the BitTorrent tracker will add SSL encryption to their site, and roll out a new VPN service

Scientists have developed a technique for retrieving fingerprints from bullet casings and bomb fragments after they have been fired or detonated. The new method, which relies on subtle corrosion of metal surfaces is already being applied for the first time anywhere in the world by two British police forces. The patterns of corrosion remain even after the surface has been cleaned, heated to 600°C or even painted over. This means that traces of fingerprints stay on the metal long after the residue from a person's finger has gone

Hotmail's full version doesn't work with Firefox 3. Users get the following message when they try to log in: You are temporarily on the classic version of Windows Live Hotmail due to an error encountered during login. Before trying again, please clear your cache and cookies. (Clearing cache and cookies doesn't fix it.) The fault apparently lies with the Hotmail site, not Mozilla — via Slashdot

22 June 2008

The trickle of senior executives leaving Yahoo has turned into a flood. People close to the company confirmed on Thursday that three more senior executives — Qi Lu, Brad Garlinghouse and Vish Makhijani — were leaving. All were responsible for critical areas of Yahoo's business

Professor Stephen Hawking has revealed that he turned down the offer of a knighthood over 10 years ago. The Birthday Honours List 2008, released to coincide with the Queen's official birthday, once again contained nothing for Hawking, which has been puzzling some observers for many years. However, the scientist has released correspondence showing that he was approached with the offer of a knighthood over a decade ago but refused it on principle

21 June 2008

US physicists are using particles called excitons to develop transistors that could be better suited to fast communication. By eliminating the need to convert signals from electrons to photons, the new exciton-based transistors are expected to break traditional speed barriers between computing and communications signals

ISPs' methods for managing P2P traffic have come under intense scrutiny in recent months after the Associated Press reported last year that Comcast was actively interfering with P2P users' ability to upload files by sending TCP RST packets that informed them that their connection would have to be reset. Although Comcast has said it doesn't actively block any P2P protocols and merely "delays" P2P uploads during times of heavy congestion, the company has agreed to change its P2P traffic management policies and stop targeting traffic such as that of BitTorrent

20 June 2008

A British journalist won a legal test case over the confidentiality of reporters' contacts Thursday, after judges ruled against a court order seeking all his notes for a biography of a former Islamist radical. Civil liberties campaigners had feared the so-called production order, obtained by the Greater Manchester Police under anti-terrorism laws, could undermine the future of UK journalism

Sweden has adopted legislation that will give military intelligence sweeping powers to eavesdrop on all crossborder e-mail and telephone communications. After heated debate and last-minute changes late Wednesday, lawmakers approved the bill, which has outraged some lawmakers and prompted protesters to hand out copies of George Orwell's novel 1984 outside Parliament. Lawmakers approved the bill in a 143-to-138 vote Wednesday. One lawmaker abstained. The bill will become law in January

Anyone who persists in illicit downloading of music or films will be barred from broadband access under a controversial new law that makes France a pioneer in combating internet piracy. Under a cross-industry agreement, ISPs must cut off access for up to a year for third-time offenders

Dell will charge customers up to $50 for factory-installed Windows XP on some PCs after Wednesday. Buyers of the low-priced Vostro line of desktops and notebooks will pay $20 to $50 more for Windows XP Professional installed as a downgrade from Windows Vista Business or Vista Ultimate than they would for Vista only

19 June 2008

More than 1.6 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded from the Mozilla site in the first five hours. That eclipsed the downloads total for Firefox 2 on its first day. Mozilla said its open-source Firefox 3 browser has more than 15,000 improvements, including a smart location bar, malware protection, and faster performance

Scientists claim they have cured advanced skin cancer for the first time using the patient's own cells cloned outside the body. The 52-year-old man involved was free of melanoma two years after treatment

Online DVD retailer, EzyDVD, has salvaged an internet movie download service from the wreckage of failed start-up ReelTime Media. EzyDVD plans to use ReelTime's infrastructure to launch an online movie download service, EzyDownload in September after picking up the $5 million network for a few hundred thousand dollars last April

Four venture capital firms are betting internet startup LinkedIn is worth $US1 billion, highlighting the lofty hopes riding on online services that connect people with their friends, family and business associates. The 10-figure valuation is implied by a $US53 million investment being announced on Wednesday from Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partner

18 June 2008

We all know men hate to ask for directions. Apparently they loathe putting directions in computer code, too. Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres-and one of Silicon Valley's highest-ranking female programmers-insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more considerate of those who will use the code later. They'll intersperse their code-those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs-with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it. Men, on the other hand, have no such pretenses. Often, they try to obfuscate things in the code

Pressure is mounting on governments to resolve the internet address crisis amid fears the internet economy will stall as numbers run out in 2010-11. OECD telecommunications ministers, including Australia's Senator Stephen Conroy, are gathering in Seoul this week and have been warned that only 16 per cent of the currently used IP address space remains unallocated

eBay has unveiled plans to let outside software programs work inside the world's largest e-commerce site, joining a trend toward openness that fuelled the popularity of the social network website Facebook. At the online auction leader's annual conference for software developers in Chicago, eBay is laying out Project Echo, a plan to give independent developers a path to having their software featured within eBay's core site

Amazon, the online retailing giant with a fast-rising share of the consumer book market, has adopted the literary equivalent of a nuclear option for rebellious publishers who balk at its demands. In the latest in a series of disputes over the division of revenue from online sales, Amazon has disabled the buy now with 1 click icon on its British Web site for hundreds of books published by Hachette Livre UK

17 June 2008

Symantec chief executive John Thompson has warned the Government against trying to regulate the internet by filtering content at ISP level. Mr Thompson said governments should think carefully about whether profit-driven companies should be regulators

A recent study on the music consumption habits of today's youth shows that most of them download music illegally. However, music is more popular than ever and 80 percent of the participants indicate that they would pay for a legal filesharing service, if only one was available

Using the HARPS instrument at the ESO La Silla Observatory, they have found a triple system of super-Earths around the star HD 40307. Looking at their entire sample studied with HARPS, the astronomers count a total of 45 candidate planets with a mass below 30 Earth masses and an orbital period shorter than 50 days. This implies that one solar-like star out of three harbours such planets

The key to coaxing cells to regenerate might be to make things a little rough for them. Thomas Webster, a bioengineer at Brown University, has been developing implantable materials with nanoscale textures to mimic the roughness of living tissues. Now, his team has found that cartilage cells can adhere to and grow more densely on a surface covered with carbon nanotubes, particularly when they are also exposed to electrical stimulation. Webster believes that surfaces incorporating carbon nanotubes, which are not only textured but are also electrically conductive, could be a promising strategy for designing cartilage implants

16 June 2008

Most of the attention to the recent Google/Yahoo partnership has focused on the two companies' search advertising plans, but the deal has implications for instant messaging, too. Yahoo and Google have agreed to enable interoperability between their respective instant messaging services. So far, exactly what that means is anyone's guess. But the IM market could certainly benefit from a little more interoperability. Despite the fact that IM use is on the rise among home users and businesses alike, each separate IM network remains a walled garden, independent of all the others. Getting them to work together — similar to how e-mail works — would benefit everyone

Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically altered to provide renewable petroleum. For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant. The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South

Jamming the right two pieces of plastic together creates a thin but strongly conducting channel along the junction that acts like a metal, say Dutch researchers. The discovery could lead to a whole new way of making electronics from non-metallic materials, and even new superconductors

15 June 2008

Google is now offering searchers a way around one of the worst aspects of the web — Flash intro movies. All those web sites still living in 1998 when Flash intro movies were, uh, still a really bad idea, even then, now have a skip intro link beside their Google search result link — via webmonkey

Online auctioneer eBay says it will challenge the Australian competition watchdog's ruling to block a plan to force its users onto a PayPal-only payments system. In a statement issued this afternoon, eBay said it was disappointed with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission decision

Australian prisons are planning to block the use of mobile phones by inmates after the federal Government yesterday agreed to help remove a legislative ban on jamming devices

At the request of theatrical film makers, the FCC on Friday quietly launched a proceeding on whether to let video program distributors remotely block consumers from recording recently released movies on their DVRs. The technology that does this is called Selectable Output Control, but the FCC restricts its use. The MPAA wants a waiver on that restriction in the case of high-definition movies broadcast prior to their release as DVDs

14 June 2008

Most USB 2.0 flash drives look the same, but that doesn't mean they perform the same. Differences in the type of memory and, to a lesser extent, the type of I/O controllers used by USB drives can make one device perform two or three times faster and last (theoretically, at least) 10 times longer than another, even if both sport the USB 2.0 logo. Unfortunately for the average user, there are no accepted industry standards or certifications to judge what's inside a USB 2.0 flash drive on a store shelf. Without checking reviews or running benchmarks, the only rule of thumb is that the more expensive drives (and those which post performance numbers on the packaging) will tend to be the fastest and, perhaps, last the longest

An appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling and has now said that mod chips do not violate copyright laws. The case involved a mod chip seller, who imported mod chips for the XBox from Hong Kong and would sell the chips or mod the Xbox's himself. He was charged with copyright infringement and found guilty by a lower court. The appeals court has dismissed all charges, however — via Slashdot

A hacker who hijacked hundreds of PCs to create a botnet has been sentenced to 41 months in jail by a US court. Robert Matthew Bentley of Panama City, Florida also faces $65,000 (£33,000) in fines and will be under supervision for three years on his release. The hijacked PCs were used to attack other computers and install programs that plagued users with pop-up adverts. He was caught following an investigation by the Metropolitan Police's Computer Crime Unit

13 June 2008

Canada, one of the shining lights in the copyright and intellectual property world, has a shadow approaching that may dim that for all. The name of that shadow? Bill c-61, which was formally introduced by Industry minister Jim Prentice an hour or two ago. One of the highlights is the abolition of court's flexibility in statutory damages, fixing it at CA$500

An advanced satellite that will improve greatly the ability of UK military forces to communicate around the globe has been launched into space. The Skynet 5C platform rode into orbit atop an Ariane 5 rocket from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana. It joins the 5A and 5B satellites lofted successfully last year and which are already handling secure traffic for UK forces in Iraq and Afghanistan

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has narrowly won a House of Commons vote on extending the maximum time police can hold terror suspects to 42 days. Thirty-six Labour MPs joined forces with Conservatives and Lib Dems to vote against the proposals. But that was not enough to defeat them — although the government still faces a battle in the House of Lords

The Pentagon's non-lethal weapons division is looking for technologies that could disable aircraft, before they can take off from a runway — or block the planes from flying over a given city or stretch of land. The Directorate's program managers don't mention how engineers might pull off such a kill switch. But, however it's done, they'd like to have a similar system for boats, as well. They're looking for a device that can, from 100 metres away, safely stop or significantly impede the movement of vessels up to 40 feet long, with minimal collateral damage — via Slashdot

12 June 2008

WiMax is forecast to take off in the Asia Pacific region, reaching 43 million subscribers and estimated revenues of US$11 billion by the end of 2013 — but Australia will not be featuring heavily in the mass adoption. Australian WiMax users will only make up for two per cent of the multi-million dollar market in 2013

Mozilla announced Wednesday that it plans to release the final version of Firefox 3 on Tuesday, 17 June, less than a week away

Gears, Google's project to make Web browsers a better foundation for elaborate online applications, now supports Firefox 3

11 June 2008

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait. And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events

This Sunday, the Swedish Left Party voted in favour of a motion calling for the legalisation of sharing copyrighted files for personal use. The party, which currently holds 22 seats in the Swedish parliament, sees piracy as something positive, much like public libraries

Apple previewed the next generation of its popular Mac OS X operating system — Snow Leopard — on the opening day of the Mac-maker's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco

Three major US internet provides have agreed to block access to web sites and online discussion groups featuring child pornography. The pervasiveness of child pornography on the internet is horrific and it needs to be stopped, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said in a statement on the agreement with Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable

10 June 2008

Apple has unveiled a next-generation iPhone with faster internet access that will run on advanced wireless networks and sell for as low as US$199 — half the current entry-level price

All paper is made of cellulose, which at the nanoscale level is quite strong, but paper processing makes large, fragile fibers that break easily. Researchers in Sweden have have come up with a manufacturing process that keeps the fibers small, resulting in nanopaper with over 1.6 times the tensile strength of cast iron (214 megapascals vs 130 mPa). And since cellulose is the most abundant organic compound on the planet, it's cheap to use compared to other exotic, expensive-to-produce options — such as carbon nanotubes — via Slashdot

Scientists unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer on Monday, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise

The encyclopaedia Britannica web site is rolling out a new system allowing readers to potentially contribute to articles. Britannica has long been a vocal critic of Wikipedia's user-generated content, and has repeatedly attacked the accuracy of its articles. Unsurprisingly then, it is keen to stress that its new web site will not be following the Wiki-model, describing it as a collaborative process but not a democratic one. Indeed, under the new Britannica scheme those who wish to contribute will need to create a profile outlining their qualifications and expertise in the area they are commentating on. They will then be able to add comments to encyclopaedia entries, or write their own. This content will then be reviewed by the expert editors of the site, and if any of it is deemed worthy of inclusion, added to the main article with a credit

09 June 2008

In a first, Google is opening up its testing process by calling on tens of millions of Gmail users to put new features of the service through their paces. Gmail Labs has launched 13 settings for users to play around with and tell engineers directly what they think of them

A dog trained to sniff out pirated discs, from a Malaysian unit that has faced threats from criminals, has been found dead. Manny, a one-year-old golden Labrador which arrived in Malaysia in February, died about a week ago and that authorities were trying to determine how it died

Comcast may have agreed to end its practice of using forged TCP reset packets to hinder the P2P traffic of its customers, but the cable provider isn't out of the woods yet. Three class-action lawsuits were filed against Comcast this week in California, Illinois, and New Jersey, alleging that the company deceived and misled consumers by advertising that it offered unfettered access to all the content, services, and applications that the Internet has to offer

08 June 2008

Windows XP SP3 has been named as the culprit causing home routers to go into a crash and reboot cycle. One router maker has released firmware updates to fix the problem, but has not yet revealed what is actually different about XP SP3's networking stack or UPnP behaviour that causes the problem. Router maker Billion Managing Director Raaj Menon said as Microsoft plans to make Windows XP SP3 an automatic upgrade this month, the number of affected routers may increase significantly — via Slashdot

An animal welfare group charges that eBay sales of ivory are brisker than ever a year after the online marketplace promised to restrict the sale of products made from animal teeth and tusks — many of which come from endangered species. The International Fund for Animal Welfare is urging eBay to ban — not simply restrict — all such sales on its web market

After five years of futile efforts to find or confirm sightings of any Caribbean monk seals — even just one — the US government on Friday announced that the species is officially extinct and the only seal to vanish due to human causes

07 June 2008

Google has moved to convert its popular Gmail application from a proprietary service into a platform that developers can extend. Its launch of Gmail Labs provides a way to write and deploy modules

Intel has unveiled a new processor it says will change the information technology industry by powering small laptops at low cost. A version of the Atom can be used in mobile devices — iPhone-like tablets that provide a fuller internet experience than mobile phones do

Amazon.com was inaccessible to many US visitors for more than an hour and a half Friday. The site went offline completely by 10.21am PDT, but efforts to restore the site appeared to be taking effect about noon, said Keynote Systems, which monitors Web site responsiveness. As of 12.45pm, the site was working intermittently, with many product pages functioning but others still broken

06 June 2008

Before they have even hatched, cuttlefish embryos can peer out of their eggs and spot potential prey. It is the first time any animal has been shown to learn visual images before they are born

Researchers at the University of Washington have discovered serious flaws in the way that the copyright cartel's enforcers detect and complain about copyright infringement. The methods used by these enforcers are so sloppy that they sent a DMCA takedown notice to three campus laser-printers, alleging that the inanimate objects were downloading Iron Man and Indiana Jones. And yet these companies expect universities to take their notices seriously and spend their operating capital chasing down every wild accusation they make — via boingboing

Kaspersky Lab found a new variant of Gpcode which encrypts files with various extensions using an RSA encryption algorithm with a 1024-bit key. After Gpcode.ak encrypts files on the victim machine, it changes the extension of these files to ._CRYPT and places a text file named !_READ_ME_!.txt in the same folder. In the text file the criminal tells the victims that the file has been encrypted and offers to sell them a decryptor. Is this a look into the future where the majority of malware will function based on extortion? — via Slashdot

Customers of an Australian recruitment firm have been targeted with resumes booby-trapped with a backdoor trojan. Hackers are exploiting an email-forwarding feature offered by many recruitment firms, which automatically sends relevant resumes to customers when a new applicant uploads their CV to the recruitment firm's web site

05 June 2008

Google signed a US$146 million contract with US space agency NASA on Wednesday to lease 42.2 acres of open field at NASA Ames facility in Mountain View California to build a new facility. The 40-year agreement means Google will lease close to its own headquarters in Mountain View. By the end of 2013, Google said it will start construction on 1.2 million square feet of offices for research and development, in an effort to accommodate its growing staff of approximately 20,000. NASA Ames will oversee construction

eBay says PayPal's security features are second to none but its own subsidiary, Skype, allows customers to use a slew of payment schemes in Australia. Skype Australia has ruled out a PayPal-only model and is determined not to follow in its parent company's footsteps

Microsoft is boldly going where the company has never gone before — and no, it's not an operating system that won't crash, but rather into space. WorldWide Telescope is like Google Earth for the universe

04 June 2008

A team of Penn State scientists has discovered a new ultra-small species of bacteria that has survived for more than 120,000 years within the ice of a Greenland glacier at a depth of nearly two miles. The microorganism's ability to persist in this low-temperature, high-pressure, reduced-oxygen and nutrient-poor habitat makes it particularly useful for studying how life, in general, can survive in a variety of extreme environments on Earth and possibly elsewhere in the solar system

Seven universities in Australia and New Zealand will make a great leap into online lecturing today when American computer giant Apple launches a local iTunes U education site. The participants that will offer their teaching and research free for download on iPods are Griffith University, Swinburne University of Technology, the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, the University of NSW, the University of Western Australia and Otago University

Google has announced that Google Finance will report real-time prices on NASDAQ-listed securities. While real-time stock quotes are not new, they have long encumbered with subscriptions, legal agreements, or pay software. This may be the first free source for real-time quotes — via Slashdot

Apple has completed the construction of its big Sydney retail store, with the doors to open to the public in just over a fortnight. Located on the corner of George and King streets, the store would be handed over to Apple by the construction company at the end of the week

03 June 2008

A team of scientists from Boston College and Duke University has developed a highly-engineered metamaterial capable of absorbing all of the light that strikes it — to a scientific standard of perfection. The team designed and engineered a metamaterial that uses tiny geometric surface features to successfully capture the electric and magnetic properties of a microwave to the point of total absorption

Branchless retail bank ING Direct has led the way in using anti-money-laundering identification processes to come up with a method for opening an account purely online. The Dutch bank has claimed bragging rights for the first end-to-end online account opening facility in Australia

The rules governing domain name sales and transfers in Australia have been relaxed as domain name registry body auDA released its new change of registrant policy. The Australian Domain Name Administrator (auDA) announced the changes this week allowing domain names to be traded freely between interested parties, after a decision to loosen regulation surrounding domain transfer was agreed on by the agency's board in December last year

It is a national icon, one of the world's greatest tourist attractions — and an appalling advertisement for Italian builders. But now, 18 years after it was closed to the public for fears that it might topple over, the Leaning Tower of Pisa has been stabilised and has been declared safe for at least another three centuries

02 June 2008

You never know when the next breaking story might be right around the corner, but with ABC's new Google Earth layer, you'll get to see the news as it happens — whether it's just around the corner, or in another corner of the globe. Today, ABC announced the launch of ABC Earth, integrating ABC content, including video, audio and text, as a layer in Google Earth. This trial launch will feature live stories (with updates every two hours), archived reports from around the world, profiles of Australian regional centres, and reports from the award-winning Foreign Correspondent

They set sail for the other side of the world in search of fortune and freedom. For the millions of free settlers, Australia was a country of hope and promise — a chance to escape class systems, poverty and overcrowding. This week, more than 150 years on, their stories will be available online for the first time, giving their descendants the chance to trace their journeys. The collection will allow people to search 8.9 million names of passengers and crew who arrived in New South Wales as free settlers between 1826 and 1922. It follows the launch of the records of 160,000 convicts on the site last year. Ancestry.com.au spokesman Brad Argent said about seven million Australians were related to early settlers, giving the average Aussie a one-in-three chance of having a free-settler ancestor

01 June 2008

An explosion Saturday evening at a Texas-based, privately held server hosting provider has caused server outages effecting 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. According to The Planet's website, at about 5.00pm Saturday electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding their electrical equipment room. No injuries were reported and no servers were damaged or lost

You can look at almost anything on Google. Just don't try to sneak a peek of the homes in the private community of North Oaks. The city of 4,500 residents has demanded that Google Maps remove images of North Oaks homes from the website's Street View feature, where any Internet user can glimpse a home from the nearest road. North Oaks' unique situation, in which the roads are privately owned by the residents and the city enforces a trespassing ordinance, may have made it the first city in the country to request that the online search engine remove images from Google Maps

Seagate will introduce its first solid-state drive (SSD) storage and 2TB hard drive next year. The company's first SSD product will be targeted at enterprises that need speedy storage and can afford to pay a premium for the expensive drives. Seagate has no plans to release SSD drives for consumers, as the high prices could deter them for the next few years

Search


Archives