July 2008 Archive

31 July 2008

Amazon has introduced two new payment systems for merchants and consumers, which brings it into a market dominated by PayPal. Google introduced a similar system for merchants and consumers in 2006, also called Checkout, but it has not found favor with online retailers. Auction giant eBay, which owns PayPal, has prevented consumers from using the Google system

A 2,100-year-old computer found in a Roman shipwreck may have acted as a calendar for the Olympic Games. The Antikythera Mechanism has puzzled experts since its discovery by Greek sponge divers in 1901. Researchers have long suspected the ancient clockwork device was used to display astronomical cycles. A team has now found that one of the dials records the dates of the ancient Olympiad. This could have been to provide a benchmark for the passage of time. The device is made up of bronze gearwheels and dials, and scientists know of nothing like it until at least 1,000 years later

With the Internet increasingly taking on the role of the PC operating system and the growing prevalence of virtualisation technologies, there will be a day when the Microsoft Windows client OS as it's been developed for the past 20-odd years becomes obsolete. Microsoft seems to be preparing for that day with an incubation project code-named Midori, which seeks to create a componentised, non-Windows OS that will take advantage of technologies not available when Windows first was conceived

Three has launched a 3G SIM and data starter kit for those who want to get their iPhone from other carriers but use it on the 3 Network

30 July 2008

A research paper has suggested that a warp drive capable of moving a craft at faster than light speed could indeed be possible. The paper, Putting the 'Warp' into Warp Drive [PDF] by Gerald Cleaver and Richard Obousy, two Baylor University physicists, suggests that the speed of light could be broken by manipulating the fabric of space to create a bubble that a craft would ride upon. Einstein's laws of relativity would not be violated by such a drive since the craft itself would remain stationary and the bubble of space it moves in would be mobile. This would also shield passengers from the enormous G forces from such acceleration

One of Australia's largest eBay sellers has gone into liquidation, leaving hundreds of its customers out of pocket and with little hope of receiving purchased goods. The Queensland-based company, which is registered as EBS International but trades on eBay under the name ebusiness-supplies, has had liquidation firm SV Partners appointed as its external administrator

Alaska's Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator in US history, was indicted yesterday on seven charges of making false statements about more than $250,000 that corporate executives doled out to overhaul his Anchorage area house

Losing your glasses or forgetting the answer to a quiz question could hardly be classed as a matter of life or death. But that did not stop some callers in Somerset from hitting 999 (the UK's version of 000) and berating exasperated emergency operators about their wife's sub standard salmon sandwiches or their difficulties peeling potatoes. Now Avon and Somerset Police in the UK have turned to YouTube to shame timewasters for tying up a line where delays can cost lives. The force has posted the 999 calls on YouTube and hopes it will help track down hoax callers, who face up to six months in jail and a £5,000 fine in court

29 July 2008

A new search-engine platform has been unveiled by some former Google engineers. Dubbed Cuil, the new company claims to combine the largest Web index with content-based relevance and user privacy. However, for the moment, it's pretty lame and has a bit of an issue with associating some unrelated logos and photos with other content

During a visit to Australia this week, Flickr founder and former Yahoo staffer Stewart Butterfield criticised the search giant for its lack of an innovative culture compared to rival Google. I felt like the biggest problem while I was there [was] that management was oriented a little bit too much towards the quarterly results

A new $1,000 spray claims to protect notebook computers, iPods, mobile phones and other electronic gadgets from liquid, making them completely waterproof. The spray, called Golden Shellback Splash Proof Coating, is one thousandth of an inch thick. Sid Martin of the Northeast Maritime Institute, which created the product, said the spray forces the water to roll off electronic gadgets like water off a duck's back or just like after you waxed your car

Apple's Fairplay DRM, which protects all the applications you download from iTunes, has been hacked. The method for hacking this has actually been around for a while, but has been recently applied to Super Monkey Ball and distributed into the wild. To do this, you'll need a jailbroken iPhone and SSH installed (to transfer the game and to fiddle with permissions). The theory is a bit techy and complex, but the execution isn't too insane if you know your way around XCode and the command line

28 July 2008

Music fans might soon have their iPods searched by Customs officers at airport checks and face jail if a large amount of pirated music is found on them. The push for the unprecedented searches of travellers' laptops and MP3 players has been revealed in a leaked discussion paper relating to a treaty being negotiated by the Federal Government

The federal Government will embark on the next step of its internet filtering strategy after initial trials proved successful, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said. Senator Conroy today released the findings of a recently concluded ISP-level internet filtering trial conducted in Tasmania by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in a closed environment

27 July 2008

A Florida patent troll called Channel Intelligence is suing everyone from Lemonade to Remember the Milk for infringing on patent 6,917,941, which covers storing a wishlist in a database. Amazon and eBay are absent from the list of targets, even though they very likely store users' wishlists in a database. With any luck, perhaps one of the defendants will get to use that precedent PJ found the other day from In re Lintner, which said, '[c]laims which are broad enough to read on obvious subject matter are unpatentable even though they also read on non-obvious subject matter — via Slashdot

26 July 2008

The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even Google's search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when their systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once

This week, ISPs agreed to work with the BPI to reduce file-sharing in the UK. When someone gets caught the ISPs will send out a warning, 100% based on music industry provided evidence. Not even the ISPs know if the claims of the BPI are true, so the evidence is totally unchallenged, a perfect position for the music industry

Intel has unveiled eight new Integrated Processor chips that the company claims will yield new, higher levels of performance and energy efficiency versus traditional system-on-chip designs

25 July 2008

Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has unveiled Drizzle, a database project aimed at powering websites with massive concurrency as well as trimming superfluous functionality from MySQL. Drizzle will have a micro-kernel architecture with code being removed from the Drizzle core and moved through interfaces into modules. Akers has already selected particular functionality for removal: modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, access control lists and some data types

The spam king was sentenced on Tuesday to 47 months in prison, with a ruling that the court hopes sends a message to other online criminals. Robert Soloway, the man known as the spam king for the massive volume of spam he sent out, pleaded guilty to fraud, spamming and tax evasion after being indicted in May 2007. After an unusually long sentencing hearing lasting two-and-a-half days, Judge Marsha Pechman handed down her sentence in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle

The historic site of Britain's crucial code-breaking programme during the second world war is so shabby it has become a national disgrace. Bletchley Park, which helped launch the modern computer, is in a terrible state of disrepair because of a lack of investment, say professors and heads of science from universities across the country in a letter to the Times

The embarrassing details of Federal MPs listed on a popular online encyclopedia are being systematically removed by public servants. The politicians and their staff have also received editing instructions from Parliamentary Librarian Roxanne Missingham on how to remove "incorrect or biased'' information from the Wikipedia site. Outraged members of the volunteer Wikipedia community say they frequently catch politicians trying to censor entries

24 July 2008

The ABC's voracious and highly successful push into the digital domain has taken another mighty leap with the launch of ABC iView. The free internet TV service, which went live last night and is available at abc.net.au/iview, is the first real attempt by an Australian network to deliver comprehensive content online

Google has announced the debut of Knol, a Wikipedia-like online encyclopedia penned by authoritative sources. Here's how Knol works. Experts in a given subject log into a Google account and use the Knol software to post an item, also known as a knol. In some senses, the process is like producing a blog post — but in this case it's not something written off the cuff but carefully crafted to coherently explain a single subject. One key attribute: Knols are meant to be signed with the author's actual name. With permission, Google will actually verify the writer's identity, either by credit card or phone

Google's Blogger service is responsible for 2% of the world's malware hosted on the web, according to a new report from security firm Sophos. The security firm claims hackers are setting up pages on the free blogging service to host malicious code, or simply posting links to infected web sites in other bloggers' comments

Denmark-based Danamics has developed its first product, and it looks pretty special. The LM10 is a liquid metal based CPU cooler that combines liquid metal with an electromagnetic pump. It is claimed to be the world's best performing air-cooler and have cooling capabilities that exceed those of most water-cooling systems

23 July 2008

Broadband has for the first time outstripped dial-up as the main gateway to the internet for households. In 2006-07, 43 per cent of Australian homes had a broadband connection compared with 20 per cent with dial-up during the same period. Broadband penetration stood at a mere 16 per cent in 2004-05

Sensis has finally allowed Google's robots to index Yellow Pages content, meaning that Google now has access to Australian businesses which might otherwise never appear in online results

Channel Intelligence, a company based in Florida, filed a lawsuit for patent infringement in Delaware on Tuesday against a long list of startups and other companies and individuals who have one thing in common — they offer wish lists for products people may want others to buy for them. The complaint is embedded below. Our understanding is that many of these companies don't yet know they've been sued, as the documents are still in the process of being delivered to them. The patent in question, No 6,917,941, appears to cover the invention of creating a list of things in a database. It was issued in July 2005. Defendants include Lemonade, Scott Aikin, de Brun Design, Listafterlist, MindValley, My Life Registry, On My List, Remember The Milk, Shimon Rura, Stylehive, Sprout, Chad Van Norman, WhiteStripe, WishCentral, WishList and Zlio. Channel Intelligence alleges that none of the defendants have licensed their patent to create lists. In a database. Notable in their absence is Amazon, eBay and most other large etailers, all of which maintain wish lists for users

22 July 2008

The Federal Government will abolish certificates that give ministers sweeping powers to keep documents a secret as the first step in reforms to the Freedom of Information law

Telcos are resisting calls for tougher redundancy standards after last week's communications meltdown in Queensland. Optus subscribers in Queensland and northern NSW were left without phone, mobile or internet services for more than four hours when a major fibre optic cable was severed by a Gold Coast excavator last week

More than 80 Australian businesses are alleging the defunct Gold Coast 2Clix software company is holding years of their accounting data to ransom

21 July 2008

Researchers at Purdue University have overcome a major obstacle in reducing the cost of solid state lighting, a technology that could cut electricity consumption by 10 percent if widely adopted

Researchers say they have grown in mice the kind of functioning heart blood vessels that cardiac surgeons create with bypass operations. One ultimate goal is to replace some heart surgery with injections of laboratory-grown cells that would establish themselves in the body, providing a system of blood vessels for damaged hearts that need more oxygen

Rogers, a huge cable internet provider in Canada, has decided to hijack all unregistered domains, and replace them with Yahoo! advertisements. This means Rogers users who type in a domain that doesn't exist, are now getting Yahoo ads instead of the normal not found error. Interestingly, Rogers also decided to do this with subdomains

A discovery leads to questions about whether the odds of people sharing genetic profiles are sometimes higher than portrayed. Calling the finding meaningless, the FBI has sought to block such inquiry

20 July 2008

A federal judge has restored endangered species protections for gray wolves in the Northern Rockies, derailing plans by three states to hold public wolf hunts this fall

Scientists are searching within the virtual world and finding real viruses. Every hour, HealthMap, an infectious disease-tracking Web site, culls through news Web sites, public health list servs, the World Health Organization's online pages, and other Web sites in six different languages to pinpoint outbreaks of disease that real-world doctors can then act on

19 July 2008

Materials scientists have been singing graphene's praises since it was first isolated in 2005. The one-atom-thick sheets of carbon conduct electrons better than silicon and have been made into fast, low-power transistors. Now, for the first time, researchers have measured the intrinsic strength of graphene, and they've confirmed it to be the strongest material ever tested. The finding provides good evidence that graphene transistors could take the heat in future ultrafast microprocessors

Kaspersky Labs has discovered malware that inserts links to malicious Web pages within ASF media files, posing a danger to Windows users who download music files from P2P networks. Infected files launch IE and load a page that asks the user to download a codec. The download, a Trojan horse, installs a proxy program to route other traffic through the PC. The malware also has worm-like qualities, according to Secure Computing. It searches for MP3s, transcodes them to WMA format, wraps them in an ASF container, and adds links to further copies of the malware, all without modifying the .MP3 extension — via Slashdot

Google said it will pay US$140 million for a Russian contextual advertising company as it seeks to expand its services to advertisers and web site publishers outside the US. The 6-year-old company, Zao Begun but known as Begun, has a search and contextual advertising business, with about 40,000 advertisers and a network of 143,000 Russian-language web sites

18 July 2008

Google's most popular web applications will work offline. After Google Reader and Google Docs, two other services will integrate with Gears. Gmail and Google Calendar will add offline support in approximately six weeks

A 27-year-old man was sentenced to 30 months in prison Tuesday for blasting AOL subscribers with spam over a four-month period. Adam Vitale was also ordered to pay AOL US$180,000 in restitution, according to his attorney, David Touger. He was sentenced in US District Court for the Southern District of New York in Manhattan

Microsoft is in discussions with Time Warner over how to combine Microsoft and AOL's online groups

17 July 2008

Freeview will launch in Australian in 2009. The ABC, SBS, the Seven Network, the Nine Network, Network TEN, Prime, WIN and Southern Cross have joined forces to deliver the free-to-air digital television platform. The media companies will comprise a new not-for-profit organisation, chaired by the ABC's Kim Dalton. Freeview will offer 15 television channels from free-to-air broadcasters on digital platforms, including new channels from the big three commercial networks. It will not include subscription TV

Flash memory chips with a potential lifetime of hundreds of years have been developed by Japanese scientists. The new chips also work at lower voltages than conventional chips, according to the scientists from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and the University of Tokyo. Current Flash chips are estimated to have a useful lifetime of around a decade for most applications

Mozilla has patched a pair of critical vulnerabilities in Firefox, taking the unusual step of updating the older version 2.0 on Tuesday but delaying the fixes for the newer version 3.0 until Wednesday. Both updates, labeled Firefox 2.0.0.16 and Firefox 3.0.1, plug two holes rated critical by Mozilla, which uses a four-step threat ranking system. One of the flaws patched in 2.0.0.16 and 3.0.1 was credited to security researcher Billy Rios, who wrote last month about a blended threat to Windows users who had both Apple's Safari browser and Firefox installed on the same system

YouTorrent is without a doubt the most talked about newcomer in the BitTorrent scene this year. The site initially indexed all the popular torrent sites, but switched to purely verified torrents after receiving legal threats. Today, YouTorrent officially relaunches with 67,170 legal torrents, good for 6TBs of data

16 July 2008

UK ISPs will be invited to tender for a British government scheme to monitor all internet communications and telecommunications in the country. But Britain's information commissioner, Richard Thomas, has raised serious concerns about a government plan for a vast new database holding the telephone numbers and email accounts of everyone in the country

A deal struck today lets Google cloak identities of YouTube users while complying with a court order to show Viacom the video viewing habits of everyone who has ever used the popular web site

Tissue engineering has stalled in part because bioengineers haven't been able to replicate the structural complexity of human tissues. Now researchers have taken an important first step toward building complex tissues from the bottom up by creating what they call living Lego. These building blocks, biofriendly gels of various shapes studded with cells, can self-assemble into complex structures resembling those found in tissues

15 July 2008

eBay scored a major legal victory on Monday when a federal judge absolved it of taking more steps to police fake Tiffany jewelry sold on its web site and held that brand owners are ultimately responsible for protecting their own trademarks. All of Tiffany's trademark infringement claims against eBay were rejected — a knockout blow to the four-year-old lawsuit that had been closely watched by Internet companies as well as luxury goods makers seeking to stop the sale of counterfeit products online. The ruling is expected to be appealed

eBay's recent deal with Buy.com appears to be seriously irritating its veteran individual sellers. The deal allows Buy.com and other large fixed-price retailers to list millions of items on eBay without paying listing fees, and appears to be the direction that eBay will follow in the future. Understandably, individual sellers are outraged — via Slashdot

An Amazonian language with only 300 speakers has no word to express the concept of one or any other specific number, according to a new study from an MIT-led team. The team, led by MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson, found that members of the Piraha tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express relative quantities such as some and more, but not precise numbers. It is often assumed that counting is an innate part of human cognition, said Gibson, but here is a group that does not count. They could learn, but it's not useful in their culture, so they've never picked it up

The Kuiper belt object formerly known as (136472) 2005 FY9 has been rechristened Makemake and classified as a dwarf planet and plutoid by the International Astronomical Union, according to the United States Geological Survey. The reclassification occurs just a month after the latter category was created. The object was referred to by the team of discoverers by the codename Easterbunny, and the name Makemake comes from the creation deity of Easter Island, in accordance with IAU rules on naming Kuiper belt objects — Slashdot

14 July 2008

The IFPI and mediocre artists around the world are rubbing their hands in glee, after a proposal to extend copyright in the EU for another 45 years. The proposal, intended to benefit musicians, comes up for a vote on Wednesday. On the plus side, at the same time collecting societies are going to have their practices scrutinised

Internet-based payment service Paymate, a PayPal rival, has lodged a complaint with the competition regulator alleging that eBay has breached the Trade Practices Act. From 21 May, eBay amended its user agreement so sellers have to include PayPal as one of their payment methods for each listing. This conduct, argues Paymate, restricts its ability and that of other payment options to be adopted because eBay mandates PayPal for sellers

Japanese scientists have made a micro-sized sewing machine to sew long threads of DNA into shape. The work published in the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Lab on a Chip demonstrates a unique way to manipulate delicate DNA chains without breaking them

13 July 2008

The Pirate Bay have embarked on a project to encrypt all internet traffic, probably by means of an OS-level wrapper around all network connections, which would fall back to an unencrypted connection when the other end is not similarly equipped. The move has been prompted by a recent change in Swedish law, allowing the authorities to snoop on network traffic. This will be a boon to filesharers and anyone else concerned about authorities and trade groups' recent moves towards 'policing' network traffic at the ISP level — via Slashdot

It may be time to rethink the stereotype of grunting, wordless Neandertals. The prehistoric humans may have been quite chatty — at least if the ear canals of their ancestors are any indication. The findings suggest human speech may have originated earlier than some researchers contend

A group of Bangladeshi expatriates have developed a plan to bring affordable Internet access to their homeland through a blend of high-end wireless technology and what the company calls social entrepreneurship

12 July 2008

An appeals court in Germany has ruled that the owners of a network are not responsible for the copyright infringement of their users. The decision overturns a previous judgment that held an open WiFi network owner liable for damages, even if the infringer is a stranger making use of the network. Although the latest ruling may affect others across Europe, it's not likely to carry much weight in the US

Lively, an online tool, allows people to embody a cartoonish online avatar and have text-based conversations with friends and other Internet users in virtual chat rooms

A new way of capturing the energy from the Sun could increase the power generated by solar panels tenfold, a team of American scientists has shown. The new technique involves coating glass with a specific mixture of transparent dyes which redirect light to photovoltaic cells in the frame. The technology could be used to convert glass buildings into vast energy plants. The technology could be in production within three years

11 July 2008

Yahoo has introduced a new open Web services platform. Yahoo Search BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) gives outside developers unprecedented access to Yahoo's search technology

A statue symbolising the mythical origins and power of Rome, long thought to have been made around 500BC, has been found to date from the 1200s. The statue depicts a she-wolf suckling Remus and his twin brother Romulus — who is said to have founded Rome. The statue of the wolf was carbon-dated last year, but the test results have only now been made public. The figures of Romulus and Remus have already been shown to be 15th Century additions to the statue

US scientists have found evidence that water was held in the Moon's interior, challenging some elements of the theory of how Earth's satellite formed. The Moon is thought to have been created in a violent collision between Earth and another planet-sized object. Scientists thought the heat from this impact had vaporised all the water

The new iPhone OS 2.0 software has been unlocked and jailbroken. It was released just hours ago and it has already been cracked by the iPhone Dev Team. The first one took a couple of months, but this one was actually unlocked before Apple released it to the public

10 July 2008

Computer experts have released software to tackle a security glitch in the internet's addressing system. The flaw, discovered by accident, would allow criminals to redirect users to fake web pages, even if they typed the correct address into a browser. Internet giants such as Microsoft are now distributing the security patch

A group of Australian scientists has found a way to make the world's internet pipes run more than six times faster than today's best technology. The breakthrough breaks through technical ceilings holding back the hundreds of thousands of fibre-optic cables that ring the earth. The breakthrough was jointly discovered by photonics whizzes at Australian National University and Sydney University who found they could etch circuit-like patterns in glass to switch fibre-optic signals much faster than conventional electronics

After announcing that Browser Sync was being discontinued, a lot of people asked for Google to open source the code so development could continue. Well, they've done just that. The code for browser sync is now available on code.google.com, and a blog post about the release can be found on the Google open source blog — via Slashdot

Flickr, a popular online photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo, is teaming up with Getty Images to offer shutterbugs a chance to turn their hobby into a moneymaking endeavor. Under a partnership announced this week, Getty's editors will peruse Flickr to find pictures that may appeal to newspapers, magazines, book publishers, advertising agencies and other businesses

09 July 2008

Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers, the company's lingua franca for encoding various types of data, in order to set the stage for a wave of new releases. Practically everyone inside Google uses protocol buffers, states a FAQ page. We have many other projects we would like to release as open source that use protocol buffers, so to do this, we needed to release protocol buffers first

Mozilla's Asa Dotzler has said It's really hard for me to believe that either [Microsoft or Adobe] have the free and open Web at heart when they're actively subverting it with closed technologies like Flash and Silverlight. But are they really subverting it? Where is the line between serving the consumer and subverting the Web? This blog post makes the case that the W3C's glacial process should share in the blame for the growth of proprietary technologies — via Slashdot

Pioneer has developed a 16-layer read-only optical disc which it claims can store 400GB of data. The per-layer capacity is 25GB, the same as that of a Blu-ray Disc, and the multilayer technology will also be applicable to multilayer recordable discs. Multi-layered discs have been difficult to develop because crosstalk from adjacent layers and transmission loss mean that getting a stable signal from the disc is often nearly impossible

08 July 2008

An Australian living in East Africa has brought new meaning to the phrase keeping the bastards honest. In the past year-and-a-half, Julian Assange and his band of online dissidents have helped swing the Kenyan presidential election, embarrassed the US Government and sparked international scandal. His site, Wikileaks, provides a safe haven for whistleblowers to anonymously upload confidential documents and, after 18 months of operation, Assange says no source has ever been exposed and no document — now more than 1.2 million and counting — has ever been censored or removed. Now the site is expanding its focus on despotic regimes and shady corporate dealings to include religion and even the cult of celebrity

A US company, Sierra Nevada Corporation, claims it is ready to build a microwave ray gun able to beam sounds directly into people's heads. The device — dubbed MEDUSA (Mob Excess Deterrent Using Silent Audio) — exploits the microwave audio effect, in which short microwave pulses rapidly heat tissue, causing a shockwave inside the skull that can be detected by the ears. A series of pulses can be transmitted to produce recognisable sounds. The device is aimed for military or crowd-control applications, but may have other uses

Rant all you want in a public park. A police officer generally won't eject you for your remarks alone, however unpopular or provocative. Say it on the Internet, and you'll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed. Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors

After a frustrating few months of searching for a solution to the audio problems he encountered while ripping on-screen video with his Dell laptop, a ripten editor discovered that others were experiencing the same issue — and that the problem was not confined to Dell laptops. Apparently, the lack of a sound card Stereo Mix recording option is to blame — and numerous forum threads have suggested that the RIAA has put pressure on laptop manufacturers like Dell, Gateway and Pac Bell to remove it — via Gizmodo

07 July 2008

A device consisting of a giant rubber tube may hold the key to producing affordable electricity from the energy in sea waves. Invented in the UK, the Anaconda is a totally innovative wave energy concept. Its ultra-simple design means it would be cheap to manufacture and maintain, enabling it to produce clean electricity at lower cost than other types of wave energy converter. Cost has been a key barrier to deployment of such converters to date

When it comes to politicians taking a stand against anti-piracy bills, such as the three-strikes legislation that's being backdoored in Europe at the moment, the mind generally goes Swedish, to Rick Falkvinge for example. The mind doesn't tend to think of North American politicians, but there is an exception, in Canada's Charlie Angus

A site called LegalTorrents has just launched that hosts trackers and seeds for digital media licensed under the Creative Commons license. The site even provides a way to donate money to artists you like. LegalTorrents takes 15% off the top unless you are a member, which costs $50 one-time during the beta period — via Slashdot

06 July 2008

Bletchley Park — otherwise known as Station X to keep its location secret from the Germans — now houses many exhibits and other memorabilia reminding visitors of the outstanding work of trying to crack the Enigma code. It also houses recently rebuilt replicas of the two main codebreaking machines: the Colossus and the Bombe. But despite its obvious historical importance, the Bletchley Park Trust had been unable to win significant funding. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation turned down its request, while the National Lottery, now the Heritage Lottery Fund, said it was ineligible. But, following a change in funding criteria by the Heritage Lottery Fund, there is suddenly light on the horizon

One of Japan's biggest Internet service providers will soon begin imposing daily upload limits on its customers in response to a portion of its user base who upload massive amounts of data. OCN, the carrier operated by NTT Communications, will introduce a daily upload limit of 30G bytes from 1 August. Customers that exceed the amount will first be asked to observe it, but those that repeatedly break it will have their access suspended. Downloads will continue to be unlimited

Iran's parliament is set to debate a draft bill which could see the death penalty used for those deemed to promote corruption, prostitution and apostasy on the internet

05 July 2008

UK astronomers, as a part of the Dark Energy Survey collaboration, have reached a milestone in the construction of one of the largest ever cameras to detect dark energy by completing the shipment of the glass required for the five special lenses. Each step in the process of completing this sophisticated camera brings scientists closer to detecting the invisible matter that cosmologists estimate makes up around 75% of our universe

Google's plans to launch a mapping tool in the UK could be referred to the Information Commissioner. Street View matches photos of locations to maps, including passers-by who were captured as the photograph was taken. Privacy International, a UK rights group, believes the technology breaks data protection laws

04 July 2008

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled. The ruling comes as part of Google's legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement. Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a set-back to privacy rights

Slimy anti-virus provider AVG is spamming the internet with deceptive traffic pretending to be Internet Explorer. Essentially, users of the software automatically pre-crawl search results, which is bad, but they do so with an intentionally generic user agent. This is flooding web sites with meaningless traffic; on Slashdot, they're seeing them as 6% of their page traffic now. Best of all, they change their UA to avoid being filtered by web sites who are seeing massive increases in bandwidth from worthless robots — via Slashdot

With the push for more sustainable energy, easy DIY kits for alternative energy sources are likely to become quite popular in the coming years. We may see some big improvements in our ability to 'green up' if these photovoltaic curtains become widely available — via Slashdot

03 July 2008

For Tracy Mooney, a married mother of three in Naperville, Illinois, the decision to abandon cyber-sense and invite e-mail spam into her life for a month by participating in a McAfee experiment was a bit of a lark. The idea of the Spammed Persistently All Month (SPAM) experiment — which fittingly started on April Fool's Day — was to have 50 volunteers from around the world answer every spam message and pop-up ad they got. Mooney was game, especially since McAfee was giving a free PC to all participants — via Slashdot

Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period. The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads for web browser Firefox 3.0 took place in June. Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records called it an extremely impressive accomplishment

The International Music Score Library Project has re-opened to the public for good after a 10-month hiatus. All the news updates in the interim can be found linked to the main page. They take great pride in re-opening as it demonstrates their willpower to make the masterpieces of history free to the world; and moreover to make manifest that they will not be bullied by publishers sporting outrageous claims of copyright in a country where they clearly are expired — via Slashdot

Virgin Media, plagued by a recent flurry of bad publicity thanks to its policy of working with the music industry to warn file-sharers, has announced today that there is absolutely no possibility that it will disconnect its users from the Internet or hand over their details to the music industry

02 July 2008

Don Davis, who played the cantankerous father-figure of the Stargate SG-1, Major General George Hammond, passed away on 29 June. Davis' last Stargate appearance will be in the DVD movie Stargate: Continuum

Consumers will have to pay between $21 and $83 to downgrade from Windows Vista to Microsoft's older operating system, XP. Microsoft has been struggling to convince Windows XP users to embrace Vista and PC makers have shunned the new operating system as well due to negative feedback from customers. The new platform, they claim, is too bloated and slow when compared with its predecessor

A French court ordered eBay to pay €38.6 million (AU$63.84 million) to luxury goods group LVMH for allowing the sale of fake merchandise, in a ruling immediately appealed by the online auction web site. The decision, a month after eBay was ordered by another French court to pay handbag maker Hermes 20,000 euros for allowing the sale of counterfeits, is the latest episode in a long fight between luxury goods makers and the world's biggest online auctioneer

Apple will roll out movie sales on the Australian version of the iTunes store within the next month, with ISP iiNet hoping unmetered downloads will provide a download bonanza

01 July 2008

Just a week after Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.0, the open-source developer has proposed ship dates for the next version that, if approved, would produce an alpha release next month and a final no later than early 2009

Adobe announced that it provided some its Flash technology to Google and Yahoo in order to improve the indexing of SWF files and especially Flex applications. Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states

In his talks about the history of Apple, Steve Wozniak has often recounted how the 1971 Esquire article Secrets of the Little Blue Box set him on the road to phone phreaking. Now someone has obtained the FBI file of one of the phreaks, Joe Engressia (who later changed his name to Joybubbles), via Freedom of Information requests. The file reveals that Engressia was illegally wiretapped by the FBI and the phone company back in 1969. J Edgar Hoover considered the blind college student a national security risk and wrote a memo about him to John Ehrlichman — via Slashdot

Yahoo began pressing its case to shareholders that its board and management deserve a chance to prove they made the right move when they rejected a $47.5 billion takeover bid from Microsoft

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