August 2008 Archive

31 August 2008

In March, Microsoft announced that their upcoming Internet Explorer 8 would: use its most standards compliant mode, IE8 Standards, as the default. Note the last word: default. Microsoft argued that, in light of their newly published interoperability principles, it was the right thing to do. This declaration heralded an about-face and was widely praised by the web standards community; people were stunned and delighted by Microsoft's promise. This week, the promise was broken. It lasted less than six months

There is a new electronic capture device that has been developed primarily for law enforcement, surveillance, and intelligence operations that is also available to the public. It is called the Cellular Seizure Investigation Stick, or CSI Stick as a clever acronym. It is manufactured by a company called Paraben, and is a self-contained module about the size of a BIC lighter. It plugs directly into most Motorola and Samsung cell phones to capture all data that they contain. More phones will be added to the list, including many from Nokia, RIM, LG and others, in the next generation, to be released shortly. This device connects to the data/charging port and will seamlessly grab e-mails, instant messages, dialed numbers, phone books and anything else that is stored in memory. It will even retrieve deleted files that have not been overwritten. And there is no trace whatsoever that the information has been compromised, nor any risk of corruption

The South Australian Government says it is not concerned that consumers may cross the border to claim the new ten cent refund for beverage containers. From Monday, the refund for people who deposit a can or bottle at a South Australian recycling depot will increase from five cents

30 August 2008

Most of us tend to assume that spammers focus on the right-hand side of our email addresses — the part after the @. That's why big companies and webmail services have to filter out so much junk email: a spammer can try it on with zillions of potential victims in one swoop, simply by throwing everything they've got at any @hotmail.com address. However, it turns out that spammers could be more subtle creatures than we give them credit for. A paper presented by Clayton at CEAS 2008, the Conference on Email and Anti-Spam held last week at a Microsoft research facility in California, suggests that the text to the left of the @ also makes a serious difference to how much spam you're likely to receive. Analysing email traffic logs from Demon Internet, one of Britain's biggest ISPs, Clayton saw a marked difference between people's spam load depending on their names: specifically, those with names higher up the alphabet were more likely to get spammed than those closer to the bottom. According to his statistics, someone called Alison may expect around 35% of the email she receives to be spam, while Zadie may only get around 20% — even if both use the same email provider

Researchers discovered that cattle have a good sense of direction and tend to point in a northerly direction. It has long been observed that cows appear to have a talent for weather forecasting and are able to predict when rain is on the way, but until now their navigational abilities have been largely ignored. Their innate ability to find north is believed to be a relic from the days when their wild ancestors needed an accurate sense of direction to migrate across the plains of Africa, Asia and Europe. Dr Sabine Begall and colleagues from the University of Duisburg-Essen looked at thousands of images of cattle on Google Earth in Britain, Ireland, India and the USA. They also studied 3,000 deer in the Czech Republic. The deer tended to face north when resting or grazing. Although, in many cases, the images were not clear enough to determine which way the cattle were facing they were aligned on a north/south axis

Google unveiled on Thursday its plans for a store where mobile users can find Android applications, a concept similar to the iPhone's App Store. The first handsets running Android, expected to appear later this year, will include a beta version of the Android Market, Google's Eric Chu wrote in a blog post. Initially, users will at least be able to find free applications there. After that, Google expects to update the Market to allow users to buy and download paid content. The Market will feature a feedback and rating system similar to that used in YouTube, Chu said

Microsoft agreed Friday to buy Greenfield Online, owner of the European price comparison Web site ciao.com, for about $486 million to boost its Internet search and e-commerce business in Europe. Microsoft, whose $47.5 billion bid to buy Yahoo this year failed after a protracted battle, said on the acquisition should benefit its Live Search platform

29 August 2008

The ABC has forged partnerships with fellow public broadcasters in Britain and Canada to pool ideas on emerging broadcasting technologies as it seeks to cement its foothold in the rapidly evolving digital world. The national broadcaster's next digital drawcard, planned for a November launch, would be a mobile interactive kiosk that would enable viewers to tape themselves talking about whatever they want

A man who chose Lloyds is pants as his telephone banking password said he found it had been changed by a member of staff to no it's not. Steve Jetley, from Shrewsbury, said he chose the password after falling out with Lloyds TSB over insurance that came free with an account. He said he was then banned from changing it back or to another password of Barclays is better. The bank apologised and said the staff member no longer worked there

Civil libertarians are up in arms over moves to give Queensland Police and the Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) police phone-tapping powers

28 August 2008

The popularity of low-cost PCs around the world is driving explosive growth for SSDs (small capacity solid state drives), Samsung said Wednesday as it announced three new models of the device. The market for low-density SSDs will grow by 57 percent per year annually until 2011, due mainly to brisk demand for low-cost PCs, Samsung said

Google is considering allowing users of its search engine to tinker with query results by re-ranking them and commenting on them. The company has already run public tests on its search-results pages that contain up and down arrows next to listed links, as well as buttons that allow users to append comments to results

An investigation is under way into how a computer containing bank customers' personal data was sold on eBay

In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on an historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file — among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth — available to all on the Internet

27 August 2008

iPrimus will help its customers avoid nasty excess usage fees by shaping its mobile broadband plans once the limit is reached. Primus claims to be the first telco in Australia to offer shaping on 3G broadband, which it says will offer dialup speeds once the limit is reached. However, Virgin Mobile also offers a shaped service, though they only have a single 5GB plan

Google dropped Bluetooth and the GTalkService instant messaging APIs (application program interfaces) from the set of tools for the first version of the mobile phone OS, Android 1.0, according to the Android Developers Blog. But the company made clear that handsets using the Android OS will work with other Bluetooth devices such as headsets, for example

Steve Knightley is one half of Show of Hands, an award-winning acoustic and folk duo from the UK. Steve says he is thankful to the people that pirate the band's music and go out of their way to promote the band. In fact, he says the band utterly depends on them

26 August 2008

Privacy advocates think the next version of Internet Explorer, the program that connects most of us to the Web, is a step in the right direction. Advertisers? Well, they're not so sure. The advertising industry is bracing for trouble from the next version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, details of which were announced today, because it will offer a feature that blocks some ads and other content from third-parties that shows up on Web pages

Google's calculator has some trouble handling math with some large numbers, an issue that's not unheard of in computing circles but that might not sit well at a supremely nerdy company that's named after a humongous number

Australians living in metropolitan areas may be logging on to the internet using the Government's $4.7 billion national broadband network as early as next April, although regional users will not be so lucky

Internode has begun selling naked DSL on its own DSLAMs, including to customers living far away from their exchange

25 August 2008

Kevin Kelly has an interesting post about an archive designed with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years to serve future generations as a modern Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta disk contains analog human-readable scans of scripts, text, and diagrams using nickel deposited on an etched silicon disk and includes 15,000 microetched pages of language documentation in 1,500 different languages, including versions of Genesis 1-3, a universal list of the words common for each language, and pronunciation guides. Produced by the Long Now Foundation, the plan is to replicate the disk promiscuously and distribute them around the world in nondescript locations so at least one will survive their 2,000-year lifespan. This is one of the most fascinating objects on earth, says Oliver Wilke. If we found one of these things 2,000 years ago, with all the languages of the time, it would be among our most priceless artifacts. I feel a high responsibility for preserving it for future generations — Slashdot

A judge in New Zealand has banned the press from reporting online the names of two men accused of murder. The names of the men will be allowed to be reported in print as well as through Television and Radio broadcast. It would seem he has taken this step to prevent someone googling these peoples names in the future and finding them linked to a crime if found innocent — Slashdot

24 August 2008

A UK-built solar-powered plane has set an unofficial world endurance record for a flight by an unmanned aircraft. The Zephyr-6, as it is known, stayed aloft for more than three days, running through the night on batteries it had recharged in sunlight. The flight was a demonstration for the US military, which is looking for new types of technology to support its troops on the ground. Craft like Zephyr might make ideal platforms for reconnaissance

An international criminal gang has pulled off one of the most audacious cyber-crimes ever and stolen the identities of an estimated eight million people in a hacking raid that could ultimately net more than £2.8billion in illegal funds. A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group's online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia. It is a move that has been dubbed the greatest cyber-heist in world history. The attack scooped up the personal details of every single customer that has booked into one of Best Western's 1312 continental hotels since 2007

Despite coups, corruption and kidnappings, mobile phone maverick Denis O'Brien keeps pouring money into the world's poorest, most violent countries. His bet: Give phones to the masses and they'll fight your enemies for you

23 August 2008

The National Centre for State Courts, a nonprofit organisation, has sent file-sharing propaganda [PDF] to thousands of students. The supposedly educational materials, presented in the form of a comic strip, are intended to frighten students with gross exaggerations of the legal consequences of sharing music online (lose your scholarship to college, go to jail for two years, and more) — via Slashdot

You wouldn't begrudge the creators of what is probably the most perfectly flat mirror ever a moment of vanity. But rather than studying their own reflections, the Spanish scientists hope to use it to create a new type of microscope

Middle-class families in Mexico are having tiny transmitters implanted under their skin so that satellites can track them if they are kidnapped. Sales of the device have jumped by 13 per cent this year after kidnappings surged by almost 40 per cent in the country between 2004 and 2007

22 August 2008

The winner of several Eureka Science Awards in Australia is a crafty chick who devised a way to create solar cells cheaply using a pizza oven, nail polish and an inkjet printer. This was developed to address the high cost of cells and in particular for the world's poorest regions. She wanted to give the ~2 billion people around the world who don't have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy. This could have profound (and a good profound) implications for education and health in those in the poorest regions in the world. And it all started with her parents giving her a solar energy kit when she was 10

Even as more and more information goes digital, there is currently no sure-fire way to ensure that such data will be accessible in the future. But today, scientists are working on a solution. Pergamum uses individual building blocks consisting of a hard drive, a small, low-power processor similar to the kind used in an iPod, a flash memory card, and an Ethernet port. These units, called tomes, are connected using relatively inexpensive Ethernet switches. Each tome is like a minicomputer, but with very low power demands

21 August 2008

Acknowledging that most online shoppers cannot be bothered with auctions, eBay announced changes to its fee structure Wednesday that emphasised fixed prices over bidding. The move is intended to help eBay compete more effectively with Amazon.com and other big online retailers

Pool is a social media project developed by ABC Radio National. It's a place to share your creative work with the Pool community and ABC producers — upload music, photos, videos, documentaries, interviews, animations and more. It's a collaborative space where audiences become makers — via BoingBoing

Magpies can recognise themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals. It had been thought only four species of apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies, a species with a brain structure very different from mammals, could also identify themselves. It had been thought that the neocortex brain area found in mammals was crucial to self-recognition. Yet birds, which last shared a common ancestor with mammals 300 million years ago, don't have a neocortex, suggesting that higher cognitive skills can develop in other ways

Dr Richard Harrington thought he was buying just an interesting curio when he paid £20 for the fossilised insect encased in amber. But it turned out to be a long extinct type of aphid which became trapped in the resin as it seeped from a tree millions of years ago. It has now been named after Dr Harrington, vice-president of the UK's Royal Entomological Society, who specialises in aphids. He bought the fossil on the internet auction site from a man in Lithuania

20 August 2008

Turning conventional neuroscience on its head, new research suggests the human visual system processes sound and helps us see. Here's the basics of what was Neuroscience 101: The auditory system records sound, while the visual system focuses, well, on the visuals, and never do they meet. Instead, a higher cognitive producer, like the brain's superior colliculus, uses these separate inputs to create our cinematic experiences

Tough conditions in its New Zealand and China operations haven't deterred accounting software developer MYOB from splashing out $7 million to acquire Australian web hosting company SmartyHost. The buy is part of MYOB's plan to expand its web hosting and internet marketing services

Malicious hackers are using booby-trapped Flash banner ads to hijack clipboards for use in rogue security software attacks. In the Web attacks, which target Mac, Windows and Linux users running Firefox, IE and Safari, hackers are seizing control of the machine's clipboard and using a hard-to-delete URL that points to a fake anti-virus program

19 August 2008

Star Trek fantasies of interstellar civilisations and voyages powered by warp drive may no longer be the exclusive domain of science fiction writers, with two physicists from Baylor devising a new scheme to travel faster than the speed of light. Associate Professor Gerald Cleaver and Richard Obousy have come up with a novel idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics. A starship could warp space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it. By pushing the departure point many light years backwards while simultaneously bringing distant stars and other destinations closer, the warp drive effectively transports the starship from place to place at faster-than-light speeds

An international team of researchers led by Monash University has used chemicals found in plants to replicate a key process in photosynthesis paving the way to a new approach that uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The breakthrough could revolutionise the renewable energy industry by making hydrogen — touted as the clean, green fuel of the future — cheaper and easier to produce on a commercial scale

A new visual search engine could help photographers keep track of their photographs whenever, and wherever, they appear on the internet. The TinEye search engine, developed by Canadian company Idee, allows users to search by uploading a picture rather than typing in a keyword. It then conducts a pixel by pixel search across the internet, flagging up all instances of that image even if it's been cropped, merged or digitally altered in some way

18 August 2008

Critics of the Harper government's proposed changes to the Copyright Act have launched a cyber crusade to fight the controversial bill. They're using everything from Facebook to YouTube to Wikipedia to blogs to get their message out. They want the government to either scrap or make serious amendments to Bill C-61 when Parliament resumes next month. At the helm of the digital movement is Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa who specialises in Internet and e-commerce law. In addition to his own blog, Geist runs a Facebook group called Fair Copyright for Canada that boasts 90,000 members

We're nearing the tipping point for mobile computing to deliver timely, geographically and socially relevant information. Researchers in Japan recently proposed using data from vehicles' windscreen wipers and embedded GPS receivers to track the movement of weather systems through towns and cities with a precision never before possible. It may seem academic, but understanding the way severe weather, such as a typhoon, moves through a city could save lives. Further exploration can shed light on demographic, intellectual and epidemiological phenomena, to name just a few areas

17 August 2008

One of the driest deserts in the world, the Saharan Tenere Desert, hosted at least two flourishing lakeside populations during the Stone Age, a discovery of the largest graveyard from the era reveals. The archaeological site in Niger, called Gobero, was discovered by Paul Sereno at the University of Chicago, during a dinosaur-hunting expedition. It had been used as a burial site by two very different populations during the millennia when the Sahara was lush

The way bumblebees search for food could help detectives hunt down serial killers, scientists believe. Just as bees forage some distance away from their hives, so murderers avoid killing near their homes, says the University of London team. This geographic profiling works so well in bees, the scientists say future experiments on the animals could now be fed back to improve crime-solving

Hackers targeting Georgia in the midst of its conflict with Russia have started sending out a new batch of malicious spam messages, apparently with the aim of building a new botnet network of remote-controlled computers

Several industry sources have said that Western Digital is working on a 20,000 RPM Raptor hard drive. According to several sources close to the hard drive industry, Western Digital is working on a 20,000 RPM Raptor hard drive to combat the increasing pressure from SSD manufacturers

16 August 2008

Gmail users, including those who use it for work as part of the Google Apps hosted suite, are again reporting problems accessing the service. Reports started streaming into the official Gmail and Google Apps discussion forums on Thursday and continued Friday morning. It's the third time in the past two weeks that Gmail users have been locked out of their accounts due to the 502 Server Error login problem

In the ever-growing desire to product smaller, less costly yet more powerful and faster computers and storage devices, researchers today said they are looking at a way to use self-growing fabrics that will let manufacturers build nano-sized high resolution semiconductors and arrays that answer that craving said

Well, Phase I of the RIAA's misguided pursuit of an innocent, disabled Oregon woman, Atlantic vs Andersen, has finally drawn to a close, as the RIAA was forced to pay Ms Andersen $107,951, representing the amount of her attorneys fee judgment plus interest. But as some have pointed out, reimbursement for legal fees doesn't compensate Ms Andersen for the other damages she's sustained. And that's where Phase II comes in, Andersen vs Atlantic. There the shoe is on the other foot, and Tanya is one doing the hunting, as she pursues the record companies and their running dogs for malicious prosecution — via Slashdot

Researchers have devised an inexpensive way to produce plastic sheets containing billions of nanoantennas that collect heat energy generated by the sun and other sources. The technology, developed at the US Department of Energy's Idaho National Laboratory, is the first step toward a solar energy collector that could be mass-produced on flexible materials

15 August 2008

In a crucial win for the free software movement, a US federal appeals court has ruled that even software developers who give away the programming code for their works can sue for copyright infringement if someone misappropriates that material. The decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC, helps clarify a murky area of the law concerning how much control programmers can exert over their intellectual property once it's been released for free into the so-called open source software community

To most of us it has always seemed obvious that an octopus has eight arms. But experts have now revealed that this assumption is wrong — as two of their long tentacle-like limbs are in fact legs. A study by scientists at Sea Life centres across Europe found that the invertebrates move across the sea bed using their two rearmost limbs, leaving the other six free for the important business of feeding. Researchers who observed the creatures in action found they push off with the legs and then employ the other tentacles to pump themselves along. The study, the largest of its type carried out, was designed to show if octopuses favoured one side or the other. But it found that octopuses are ambidextrous, though many seem to favour their third arm from the front to eat with

In the warm, bubbling pools of Mono Lake in California, scientists have isolated a bacterium that fuels itself on arsenic

They may be first to see the sun, but they've been waiting quite a while for movie rentals and purchases from the iTunes store — now that patience has paid off, as movies have now arrived in a land down under. Aussie and Kiwi iTunes users can purchase and rent movies to their hearts' content. New releases on DVD will premiere day-and-date on the iTunes store at the same time as they're on sale in physical form in the two new countries of service

14 August 2008

A huge increase in the speed of the internet could be produced by slowing parts of it down, say researchers. Applying the brakes could be the metamaterials that may make it possible to create invisibility cloaks. The net's speed limit comes about not in transporting information, but in routing it to its various destinations. Metamaterials could replace the bulky and slow electronics that do the routing, paving the way for lightning fast speeds

Scientists at the University of California, Davis, have recently designed a contact lens prototype with a built-in pressure sensor using a novel process that etches tiny electrical circuits within a soft polymer material. The new development could help glaucoma patients to measure their current risk factor, thus replacing the current methods which require the constant visit of a clinician

A new SQL injection attack started circulating last week, and appears to have infected several thousand web servers as of late Friday evening. The attacks look similar to the one below, and attempt to query random valid files on the web server. The sysobjects and syscolumns tables queried are the give away: the attack is targeting machines running MSSQL server and storing the malicious HTML code in the database. It's also possible that web servers with Sybase database backends could also conceivably be exploited, as Sybase is largely using the same SQL syntax and table structure as MSSQL server

Several Internet and broadband companies have acknowledged using targeted-advertising technology without explicitly informing customers, according to letters released yesterday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. And Google, the leading online advertiser, stated that it has begun using Internet tracking technology that enables it to more precisely follow Web-surfing behavior across affiliated sites. The revelations came in response to a bipartisan inquiry of how more than 30 Internet companies might have gathered data to target customers. Some privacy advocates and lawmakers said the disclosures help build a case for an overarching online-privacy law

13 August 2008

BigPond is stepping up its presence in the digital music business with a new MP3 music download store that does away with restrictive copy protection locks. Telstra's ISP today announced it had made an Australian-first deal to offer music from Sony BMG, Universal, Warner Music and EMI, as well as independent labels such as MGM and Liberation. It will see the number of tracks on BigPond's online store grow from 20,000 to more than a million by January 2009

While the RIAA is busy changing its image to a snake eating its own tail, one man is busy digitising out-of-print 78s. There's a whole world of music that you don't hear anymore, and it's on 78 RPM records, he stated to Wired. Right now, you can find about 4,000 MP3s on his site, with no digital noise reduction implemented yet — via Slashdot

12 August 2008

Georgia and security experts have accused Russian state-sponsored hackers of breaking into Georgian government and commercial websites as part of a cyber war to supplement Russia's military operations in South Ossetia

A federal judge has blocked three MIT students from presenting a paper at the Defcon 16 security conference on hacking the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's CharlieCard system

Google said it has resolved an issue with its contacts system that caused many users of its Gmail service to have trouble accessing their online e-mail. The problems began at about 5.00pm EDT and an announcement on the company's Gmail Help Centre site said the issue is now resolved

In about 30 percent, the coils of their DNA carry a glitch, one that leaves their brains with few dopamine receptors, molecules that act as docking ports for one of the neurochemicals that carry our thoughts and emotions. A paucity of dopamine receptors is linked to an inability to avoid self-destructive behavior such as illicit drug use. But the effects spill beyond such extremes. Children with the genetic variant are unable to learn from mistakes. No matter how many tests they blow by partying the night before, the lesson just doesn't sink in

11 August 2008

Life takes Visa, says the credit card company's catchy and ubiquitous TV ads. And now, according to a group of security researchers speaking at the DefCon hacker conference Friday in Las Vegas, Medeco high-security locks take Visa, too. As well as MasterCard, American Express and Discover cards. To be more precise, the researchers say that plastic used in all of these credit cards can be easily fashioned into simulated keys that open three kinds of M3 high-security locks made by the Virginia-based Medeco Security Locks company — locks that are used to secure sensitive facilities in places such as the White House, the Pentagon, embassies and other buildings. Virtually all conventional pin-tumbler locks are vulnerable to this method of attack, and frankly nobody has really considered it or looked at it before, says Marc Weber Tobias, one of the researchers

Scientists have taken another step toward the goal of rendering objects invisible using high-tech cloaks that redirect light. Researchers for the first time demonstrated that a new material can bend visible light the wrong way in three dimensional tests. It builds on research that cloaks objects in the microwave wavelength

Three journalists for a French security magazine were kicked out of the Black Hat security conference after they allegedly sniffed the press room computer network

10 August 2008

The Pirate Bay has been censored in Italy following an urgent decree from a deputy public prosecutor. Pirate Bay's IPs and the domain name are inaccessible, as they are blocked by ISPs all over the country. Whether these blocks will be very effective, however, is doubtful, since The Pirate Bay has already announced several countermeasures

In the latest twist on electronics, Japanese scientists said on Thursday they have developed a rubbery material that conducts electricity, a finding that could be used to make devices that bend and stretch. The material, described by Tsuyoshi Sekitani of the University of Tokyo in the journal Science, could be used on curved surfaces or even in moving parts. Sekitani's team developed their material using carbon nanotubes, a long stretch of carbon molecules that can conduct electricity

Tingrui Pan and Hailin Cong, researchers at UC Davis, have designed a contact lens that keeps tabs on glaucoma all by itself. And they're working up to one that dispenses medication automatically, too. Their smart lenses are fitted with an organic polymer called polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), which is commonly used in biological applications. Since glaucoma develops as a result of raised pressure inside the eye, the goal of the lenses is to detect that intraocular pressure and mark warning signs

Yahoo said it will start letting users opt out of receiving customised advertising later this month, in an announcement the company made along with its response to a congressional inquiry about online privacy practices

09 August 2008

Mozilla has launched a prototype messaging Firefox extension that it says could eventually enable users to keep track of all of their electronic communications, including email, RSS, social networks and web discussions. Snowl enables users to prioritise messages by importance and have a search-based interface for message retrieval, according to Mozilla developer Myk Melez

A carbon membrane only a single atom thick has been used to create a pressurised balloon that is impermeable to gas. To make it, researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York inflated a sheet of graphene. This is a recently discovered carbon material just one atom thick, and is tipped to succeed silicon as the basis of computing

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is reporting an increase in the percentage of users who access search engines on a daily basis. Pew states that search engine use is fast approaching e-mail use. The percentage of Internet users who search on a typical day, according to Pew, grew 69 percent from January 2002 until May 2008

Google's Vint Cerf today offered some positive thoughts about how to do traffic management. In his view, it's all about the minimum guarantee, and users can do with that minimum bandwidth whatever they want

08 August 2008

New microchipped passports designed to be foolproof against identity theft can be cloned and manipulated in minutes and accepted as genuine by the computer software recommended for use at international airports. Tests for The Times exposed security flaws in the microchips introduced to protect against terrorism and organised crime. The flaws also undermine claims that 3,000 blank passports stolen last week were worthless because they could not be forged

Scientists have discovered a virus that can infect another virus. The fact that viruses can essentially get sick may change the debate over whether they are alive or not. Check out Nature for a slightly more technical article about the virophage — via Slashdot

What do you get when you combine images from Google Earth and the brainpower from researchers at Oak Ridge National Labs? Well in this case you get a tool that enables real-time status of the national electric grid that federal state and local agencies can use to coordinate and respond to major problems such as wide-area power outages, natural disasters and other catastrophic events

In a windowless underground computer lab in California, young men are busy cooking up viruses, spam and other plagues of the computer age. Grant Joy runs a program that surreptitiously records every keystroke on his machine, including user names, passwords, and credit-card numbers. And Thomas Fynan floods a bulletin board with huge messages from fake users. Yet Joy and Fynan aren't hackers — they're students in a computer-security class at Sonoma State University. And their professor, George Ledin, has showed them how to penetrate even the best antivirus software. The companies that make their living fighting viruses aren't happy about what's going on in Ledin's classroom. Managers at some computer-security companies have even vowed not to hire Ledin's students. The computer establishment's scorn may be hyperbolic, but it's understandable. Malware is spreading at an exponential rate

07 August 2008

More than a thousand hacked Web sites are serving up fake Flash Player software to users duped into clicking on links in mail that's part of a massive spam attack masquerading as CNN.com news notifications. The bogus messages, which claim to be from the CNN.com news Web site, include links to what are supposedly the day's Top 10 news stories and Top 10 news video clips from the cable network. Clicking on any of those links, however, brings up a dialog that says an incorrect version of Flash Player has been detected and that tells users they needed to update to a newer edition

A ring of identity thieves that targeted US retailers used sophisticated and multifaceted attacks to steal more than 40 million credit and debit card numbers from TJX, OfficeMax, Barnes & Noble and other companies. The attacks cost retailers and credit card companies tens of millions of dollars. Members of the ID theft conspiracy used wardriving techniques to find holes in wireless networks operated by retail stores. Once inside the networks, the thieves located and stole credit card transaction information stored on the retailers' networks

Flawed software patches from Nokia Siemens Networks have crippled Optus's 3G mobile network in Brisbane. Since 6.00am yesterday, Optus subscribers in Brisbane suffered from intermittent transmission of data and voice services as Australia's number two telco battled to reconfigure a recent upgrade to its new 3G software platform. The upgrade, which has been applied to all Optus 3G mobile switches nationwide, was supposed to provide efficiency gains in speed and capacity load. Instead, it triggered three separate network failures which combined to cause chaos for Optus customers in Queensland, NSW, the ACT and Victoria last week. As a result subscribers were left without mobile phone services for about 10 hours

In an effort to combat air pollution, a Dutch town has paved some of its streets with air-purifying concrete. It contains a titanium dioxide-based additive that utilises sunlight to turn car exhaust into harmless nitrates. It was shown to do this in a lab and now the scientists are interested in just how much this will affect the air quality around the road. They will sample the air quality by a normal road and by this newly paved one — via Slashdot

06 August 2008

Reporters covering the Beijing Olympics who are frustrated by Chinese Internet censorship can use free software tools developed to help Chinese users circumvent these controls, according to a representative of a group that develops such software

A new report from CSIRO's Energy Transformed Flagship and the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation contains exciting news for oil dependent rural and urban Australians. This podcast explains how plant matter which is currently wasted can be easily harnessed to make fuels at an equivalent cost of oil at $US40-60 a barrel

Australian consumers have been given a new advocate to represent their interests in the telecommunications sphere. Consumer law and small business experts have joined forces with representatives of indigenous and disabled Australians to form a new peak body aimed at giving the community a stronger platform to raise concerns about telecommunications issues. The federal Government announced the new organisation, the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN), today

Search giant Google today defended the incomplete Australian coverage provided by its Street View add-on to its Google Maps and Earth tools, after launching the service early Tuesday morning. Street View allows users of Google Maps and Earth to view street-side photos of the geographic locations they are viewing with the tools. The service has previously been available in the US and several other countries, but Australia only received the additional functionality today

05 August 2008

The Knights Templar are demanding that the Vatican give them back their good name and, possibly, billions in assets into the bargain, 700 years after the order was brutally suppressed by a joint venture between the Pope and the King of France. If the Holy See doesn't comply, the warrior knights, renowned for liberating the Holy Land, will deploy that most fearsome of weapons: a laborious court case through the creaking Spanish legal system

Criminals who use firearms may find it much harder to evade justice in future, thanks to an ingenious new bullet tagging technology developed in the UK. The tiny tags — just 30 microns in diameter and invisible to the naked eye — are designed to be coated onto gun cartridges. They then attach themselves to the hands or gloves of anyone handling the cartridge and are very difficult to wash off completely. Crucially, some of these nanotags also remain on the cartridge even after it has been fired. This should make it possible to establish a robust forensic link between a cartridge fired during a crime and whoever handled it

A gravity tractor could deflect an Earth-threatening asteroid if it was deployed when the asteroid was more than one orbit away from the potential impact, according to a new study. If the space rock was found heading straight for Earth, a combination of techniques — including a gravity tractor — might save the day. The study, carried out by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, shows that the weak gravitational pull of a nearby spacecraft could deflect a hypothetical asteroid 140 metres across, big enough to cause regional devastation if it hit Earth

Scientists have identified the world's smallest snake — a reptile about 4 inches long and as thin as spaghetti that was found lurking under a rock on the Caribbean island of Barbados. The new species, named Leptotyphlops carlae, is smaller than any of the other 3,100 previously known snake species, according to Pennsylvania State University biologist Blair Hedges, who also had helped find the world's smallest frog and lizard. It is one of about 300 different species of threadsnake and is a dark brownish gray with two yellow stripes, Hedges said. It was determined to be a newly identified species due to genetic differences from other snakes and its unique color pattern and scales

04 August 2008

Researchers and academics in Australia have been given a ten-fold bandwidth boost thanks to a network upgrade by Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARNet). The improvements will see users' 1Gbps link increased to 10Gbps. At this speed, it's about 10,000 times faster than normal ADSL2+ connections, AARNet chief executive Chris Hancock said

A Filipino scientist says he has created a new composite building board made of chicken feathers that could be a major breakthrough for the construction industry in Asia

The FBI removed computer records from the C Burr Artz Library this week. Darrell Batson, director of Frederick County Public Libraries, said two FBI employees came to the downtown Frederick library either Wednesday or Thursday. The agents removed two public computers from the library's second floor. They told him they were taking the units back to their office in Washington, DC

Researchers have found what appear to be remnants of pigment in fossilised feathers, opening the possibility of reconstructing the colors of many long-extinct animals

03 August 2008

The EFF has announced Switzerland, a tool for testing if your ISP is interfering with your Net connection . It's command-line only at this point. Of course the tool is FOSS, and you can contribute to it via its SourceForge project

Brian May, guitarist for Queen for the last 30 years, submitted his thesis for a PhD in astrophysics. The news now is that the thesis has been published. You, too, can read all about the population of tiny asteroids and space dust that cause the Zodiacal light. The completed thesis appears as the book A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud. May was awarded his PhD last summer and accepted a position as chancellor at a British university in November — via Slashdot

After witnessing countless corparate attempts to patent common practices or trademark common terms, and seeing the resulting PR fallout, one would think that companies would just stop trying. Dell, however, seems to think that it should be able to trademark the term cloud computing, a phrase that entered the tech lexicon many years ago to describe software processing that takes place on a distributed network, such as the Internet

02 August 2008

A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organisations

When TorrentFreak reported about the leak of a BuckCherry track last week, and specifically the band's response to it, they hinted that this could be a covert form of self-promotion. Indeed, after a few days of research they found out that the track wasn't leaked by pirates, but by Josh Klemme, the manager of the band

Apple has at last issued a patch for the DNS flaw considered one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities ever to affect the Internet. On Friday, Apple posted a security advisory saying that the patch will fix Apple's implementation of the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) DNS server in Mac OS X v10.4.11, Mac OS X Server v10.4.11, Mac OS X v10.5.4 and Mac OS X Server v10.5.4. The DNS flaw allows an attacker to execute a cache poisoning attack, where traffic to a legitimate domain name is redirected to a malicious one after an attack on a DNS server. The user can type in the correct name for a Web site, but get a fake one instead, which can enable a phishing attack. While some users might notice if they're directed to a odd-looking Web page, many people could be successfully fooled

Mozilla has announced the release of >Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1, Shiretoko, for developers and testers. Built on the pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, Shiretoko includes a variety of new features. Called an early developer milestone, the release includes bug fixes, improved Web standards support, Text API for the Canvas Element, support for border images and JavaScript query selectors, and improvements to the tab-switching function and the Smart Location Bar. Shiretoko is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux

01 August 2008

Ever try to remember who you bumped into at the store a few days back? Or exactly what the company president said at the morning meeting? Well, you're not alone. And IBM researchers are working on software that just may help you better recollect all the forgotten pieces of your life. This week, the company unveiled software that uses images, sounds and text recorded on everyday mobile devices to help people recall names, faces, conversations and events. Dubbed Pensieve, the software organises bits of collected information, stores them and then helps the user extract them later on

A US scientist has developed a new way of powering fuel cells that could make it practical for home owners to store solar energy and produce electricity to run lights and appliances at night. A new catalyst produces the oxygen and hydrogen that fuel cells use to generate electricity, while using far less energy than current methods. With this catalyst, users could rely on electricity produced by photovoltaic solar cells to power the process that produces the fuel

In a case of better late than never, Optus-owned Virgin Mobile is now offering the Apple iPhone 3G, and for cheaper than its competitors in Australia. Virgin Mobile's Australian web site lists the iPhone as available now and indicates two iPhone specific post-paid contracts. The lower of these plans includes a full subsidised 8GB model phone plus AU$520 in standard calls and messages credit, and 1GB of data for AU$70 per month over a 24-month term

US space scientists say liquid has been discovered on the surface of Titan, the largest moon of the planet Saturn

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