October 2008 Archive

31 October 2008

A headline-grabbing election promise to crack down on internet nasties looks to be in trouble as Senate opposition grows. As part of its election-winning pitch, the Rudd Government promised families far-reaching measures to block prohibited content at the internet server level. It now faces a concerted backlash against the proposal by the internet industry. The Greens have added their voice to Coalition concerns about the plan, with the Greens' communications spokesman calling the proposal daft

A small consumer electronics maker in Melbourne, which specialises in undercutting the big brands, has become the first in Australia to announce plans to launch a mobile phone based on Google's Android platform. Ruslan Kogan, 25 — who has been selling cut-priced Kogan-branded TV sets, GPS systems, DVD players and other gadgets over the internet from his base in Elsternwick for the past 2½ years — says he will sell the phone from 15 December for $199

Google on Thursday made its version of communally constructed online encyclopedia Wikipedia multi-lingual, opening its Knol compendium to nuggets of knowledge shared in French, Italian or German. The internet search powerhouse is inviting people to submit written knols, to indicate units of knowledge, in those languages as well as in English. Google's free Knol service has floundered since its July launch and international contributors could help it better compete with Wikipedia, which is consistently ranked among the most visited websites on the internet

A bargain-hunting investment consortium named Manhattan Software Bidco has offered around $443 million plus options in a takeover bid for Australia's leading accounting software brand, MYOB

30 October 2008

The tax details of thousands of people have gone missing, the Australian Taxation Office admitted. The ATO said that the CD was not encrypted and victims were only notified three weeks later. The disk contained the name, address and super fund tax file numbers for 3122 trustees and was being couriered to the ATO, but failed to reach the department. The Tax Office was notified about the missing CD on 3 October but only sent out letters to the victims on 24 October, offering to re-issue the tax file numbers for their super funds

Google's reach into the world's libraries looks more assured following a deal struck recently. The agreement with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers will resolve a number of lawsuits from the last three years. Google will establish a non-profit Book Rights Registry to ensure copyrighted works receive compensation via subscription services or ad revenue. The registry and settlements will cost Google $125m) However, the deal still needs approval from a US district court to resolve the pending lawsuits. If approved, the agreement will provide much wider access to out-of-print books and a great many in-print, in-copyright works

SanDisk has stepped up its efforts to convince corporates that USB sticks are a secure medium, adding built-in antivirus capability to its latest Cruzer drive. Any files copied or saved to the latest Cruzer Enterprise will automatically be scanned by a McAfee heuristics and antivirus engine that loads every time the drive is used. If it detects infected files being copied from a PC, all further transfers will be disallowed form that machine, stopping their spread

29 October 2008

The Federal Government is planning to make internet censorship compulsory for all Australians and could ban controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia. Australia's level of net censorship will put it in the same league as countries including China, Cuba, Iran and North Korea, and the Government will not let users opt out of the proposed national internet filter when it is introduced. Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy Minister Stephen Conroy admitted the Federal Government's $44.2 million internet censorship plan would now include two tiers - one level of mandatory filtering for all Australians and an optional level that will provide a clean feed, censoring adult material. Despite planning to hold live trials before the end of the year, Senator Conroy said it was not known what content the mandatory filter would bar, with euthanasia or pro-anorexia sites on the chopping block

The framed photograph will inevitably fade and yellow over time, but the digital photo file may be unreadable to future computers — an unintended consequence of our rapidly digitising world that may ultimately lead to a digital dark age, says Jerome P McDonough, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to McDonough, the issue of a looming digital dark age originates from the mass of data spawned by our ever-growing information economy — at last count, 369 exabytes worth of data, including electronic records, tax files, e-mail, music and photos, for starters. (An exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes; a quintillion is the number 1 followed by 18 zeroes.) The concern for archivists and information scientists like McDonough is that, with ever-shifting platforms and file formats, much of the data we produce today could eventually fall into a black hole of inaccessibility

The Tribler BitTorrent client, a project run by researchers from several European universities and Harvard, is the first to incorporate decentralised search capabilities. With Tribler, users can now find .torrent files that are hosted among other peers, instead of on a centralised site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova

US newspaper the Christian Science Monitor is to cease production as a daily title after 100 years, becoming the highest profile national title in the US to scale back on its print operation to combat rising costs and falling print sales. CSM announced yesterday that it will move all breaking news to a 24/7 web operation from April next year, though it will continue in print in the form of a new Sunday magazine. John Yemma, the CSM editor, said the new model would allow the publication to retain its eight international bureaux and still save money

28 October 2008

Google has quietly dispatched a team of experts from the US on a fact-finding mission to decide whether it should establish a data centre in Australia. In the past few weeks the team of about five Google US employees had been involved in high-level discussions with local data centre providers

The ABC is working closely with the internet industry to overcome service limitations holding back its newly launched internet broadcasting service iView. Ian Carroll director of the ABC's innovation group said that iView was being held back by limited download quotas available to Australian users. They were frightened of incurring crippling excess download charges if they used the service

Belgian ISP Scarlet scored an important victory in the first major European test of copyright law. The interim decision forcing them to block transfers of copyrighted materials via P2P has been reversed, because the judge agreed with Scarlet that the measures the Belgian RIAA proposed to implement proved to be ineffective. A final decision is expected next year — via Slashdot

Leading Internet companies, long criticised by human-rights groups for their business dealings in China, agreed Tuesday to new guidelines that seek to limit what data they should share with authorities worldwide and when they should do so. The guidelines call for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to try to reduce the scope of government requests that appear to conflict with free speech and other human rights principles. They also require participating companies to seek requests in writing, along with the names and titles of the authorising officer

27 October 2008

Family First Senator Steve Fielding wants hardcore pornography and fetish material blocked under the Government's plans to filter the internet, sparking renewed fears the censorship could be expanded well beyond illegal material. The Opposition said it would take a lot of convincing for it to support the controversial mandatory ISP filtering policy, so the Government would need the support of Senator Fielding as well as the Greens and Senator Nick Xenophon to pass the legislation

Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, are reporting a new way of creating computer chips that could revitalise optical lithography, a patterning technique that dominates modern integrated circuits manufacturing. By combining metal lenses that focus light through the excitation of electrons — or plasmons — on the lens' surface with a flying head that resembles the stylus on the arm of an old-fashioned LP turntable and is similar to those used in hard disk drives, the researchers were able to create line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds up to 12 metres per second, with the potential for higher resolution detail in the near future

AAPT became the first in the group to depart, then TPG-Soul announced its decision last Friday. Today, TransACT said it would pull out from Terria but would submit its own broadband bid solely covering the ACT. Terria now consists of five members

First Gordon Brown and Mervyn King, the Bank of England's governor, admitted that Britain was on the verge of recession. Then food sales were reported to have seen their biggest fall for 20 years. Last night came final and irrevocable proof that the country is entering tough economic times, unseen since the 80s: AC/DC have returned to the top of the album charts for the first time in 28 years

26 October 2008

Internal bleeding can cause irreversible haemorrhagic shock within 30 seconds or progressive shock within eight hours, either way, it's not good and the military wants a portable, noninvasive way to detect and stop it right on the battlefield. To that end, the Defence Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has contracted with Siemens Healthcare, the University of Washington's Centre for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound and Texas A&M to develop something called the Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation cuff. The cuff is a semi-automated, ultrasound device designed to cut blood loss and shock resulting from combat limb injuries, one that can be operated by any GI with minimal training

The Internet's key oversight agency issued preliminary guidelines for the introduction of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of alternatives to .com in the first sweeping changes to the network's 25-year-old address system. But individuals should forget about claiming a personal domain name suffix for themselves or their families. The application fee, scheduled to be disclosed Friday, is expected to approach $200,000 — partially refundable only in limited circumstances — to help cover the potential $20 million cost of crafting the guidelines and reviewing applications

An Australian and a Swedish researcher say they have proved honey bees are more intelligent than previously thought. Professor Mandyam Srinivasan from Queensland University and Dr Marie Dacke trained honey bees to count by placing food at different markers. Professor Srinivasan says he has also found bees can learn colours and smells and be trained to fly through complicated mazes

25 October 2008

Research chemists at Johns Hopkins University have developed a water-soluble, organic, self-assembling electronic wire suitable for use inside the human body. Derived from carbon materials, the lightweight, flexible wires can power pacemakers, reconnect damaged nerve tissues, while also interacting with real electronic device that could augment or stimulate organic function. But do not worry, for this is only step one of the long process of turning us all into Borg-like drones

The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. They are looking for contractors to provide a Multi-Robot Pursuit System that will let packs of robots search for and detect a non-cooperative human

One of the best-known Australian brand-names, Driza-Bone, is back under full local ownership

Lithographs that once belonged to a German duke and vanished when the Soviets occupied parts of Germany after World War II, have turned up at Sotheby's in London

24 October 2008

The Federal Government is attempting to silence critics of its controversial plan to censor the internet, which experts say will break the internet while doing little to stop people from accessing illegal material such as child pornography. ISPs and the government's own tests have found that presently available filters are not capable of adequately distinguishing between legal and illegal content and can degrade internet speeds by up to 86 per cent. Documents obtained by us show the office of the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, tried to bully ISP staff into suppressing their criticisms of the plan

McGill University researchers have discovered a new state of matter, a quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal, in a material very much like those used in the fabrication of modern transistors. This discovery could have momentous implications for the development of new electronic devices. Currently, the number of transistors that can be inexpensively crammed onto a single computer chip increases exponentially, doubling approximately every two years, a trend known as Moore's Law. But there are limits, experts say. As chips get smaller and smaller, scientists expect that the bizarre laws and behaviours of quantum physics will take over, making ever-smaller chips impossible

A US firm has unveiled plans to build a massive one-billion-dollar charging network to power electric cars in Australia as it seeks cleaner and cheaper options to petrol. Better Place, which has built plug-in stations for electric vehicles in Israel and Denmark, has joined forces with Australian power company AGL and finance group Macquarie Capital to create an Australian network. Under the agreement, Macquarie will raise one billion dollars to build electric-vehicle networks in the country's largest cities — Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane — while AGL will power the system with renewable energy

UCLA physicists demonstrated that if you pull off a piece of Scotch tape inside a vacuum chamber, the tape releases enough X-rays to image bones through skin. Grad student Juan Escobar and his colleagues managed to make an X-ray of a thumb using the technique. Apparently, Russian scientists reported fifty years ago that the act of peeling sticking tape can emit X-rays, but the new research confirms the early results

23 October 2008

One day before T-Mobile G1 goes on sale and one year after the first Android announcement, Google open sources Android. Android is not the first open source mobile OS, but it claims to be the first free, open source, and fully customisable mobile platform. Android offers a full stack: an operating system, middleware, and key mobile applications. It also contains a rich set of APIs that allows third-party developers to develop great applications

Owners of MacBooks with multi-touch trackpads can try out an experimental Firefox 3.1 build that supports finger gestures-swiping left and right for back and forward, pinch zooming, and twisting between tabs, amongst others. The gestures may or may not make it into the final 3.1 release, but at least one developer finds the tab-switching twist a big convenience — via Lifehacker

Google may strive not to be evil, but the company works directly with typosquatters to help them — and Google — make money, according to a class action lawsuit. The suit, filed by Harvard Business School professor Benjamin G Edelman, says that Google and the companies that are engaging in typosquatting are taking advantage of existing trademarks and should be stopped

The Bernard O'Brien Institute announced a significant advance in tissue engineering when it revealed how scientists had created living heart muscle cells from human fat

22 October 2008

McDonald's has announced it will roll out the largest network of free wireless internet in Australia, in partnership with Telstra. It will offer free wi-fi in 720 restaurants across Australia by March next year, with Queensland internet hotspots launching from late December onwards

Cray has announced the CX1 desktop supercomputer. Cray teamed with Microsoft and Intel to build the new machine that supports up to 8 nodes, a total of 64 cores and 64Gb of memory per node. CX1 can be ordered online with starting prices of $25K, and a choice of Linux or Windows HPC. This should be a pretty big deal for smaller schools and scientists waiting in line for time on the world's big computing centers, as well as 3D and VFX shops — via Slashdot

The iBurst wireless broadband network owned by failed Australian ICT products and services firm Commander would be shut down by 19 December, according to a failed bidder for the network

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has slapped telco company Dodo with a fine of $147,400 for allegedly engaging offshore call centres to make around 70 calls on its behalf to numbers on the Do Not Call Register. The penalty is the largest issued by ACMA since the Do Not Call Register legislation took effect in May 2007. The fines are set at $2,200 per call or up to a maximum of $110,000 per day

21 October 2008

For the second time this year, eBay has forgotten to adjust its clocks for daylight saving, creating mass confusion around when auctions will actually end. Clocks published on eBay auction pages are one hour behind, meaning the auctions are listed as ending an hour before they actually do. This causes confusion among buyers and means sellers could miss out on the typical surge of last-minute bids

Now here's a creative military operation: the British set up a fake Laundromat in Belfast, where they wanted to find IRA bomb-makers. They staffed the Laundromat with locals and sent out coupons to different neighbourhoods, with each neighbourhoods coupon a different colour. When people brought their clothes and coupons in, they got their clothes washed, but while their clothes were being washed, they were secretly being analysed for bomb-making chemical residue — via Gizmodo

Fans of Firefox get ready, because this version is simply an amazing feat of browser design. But you expected no less, right? The Test Center's reviewers loaded Firefox 3.1 beta on a Vista desktop outfitted with 2GB RAM and Pentium dual-core at 1.80GHz

20 October 2008

The Pirate Bay has always made it clear that they don't obey takedown requests from content owners. That doesn't stop Hollywood from going after the Pirate Bay's users, however, and they do so on a large scale. The Pirate Bay is well aware of these pirate tracking outfits, and does what it can to give them a hard time. Reporting fake peers is one of the tricks they use

Interpol chiefs will propose the use of automated facial-recognition technology at borders to flag up internationally wanted suspects. The UK already has airport gates equipped with such technology, intended to remove the need for a human border guard to check that a passenger's face matches the one recorded in his or her passport. Interpol database chief Mark Branchflower believes that his organisation should set up a database of facial-recognition records to operate alongside its existing photo, fingerprint and DNA files

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance. Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society

19 October 2008

OpenOffice.org last week released the first version of its open-source application suite written for Mac OSX. Although the organisation's web site is back online — it was knocked offline for several hours on Monday as demand exceeded server capacity — the version now available is bare-bones. Users can access the 163MB download installer, however

Flying in a plane made of a material called buckypaper may not seem too appealing at first, but this new type of carbon nanotube may be the future of lightweight, high strength composite. Discovered accidentally while trying to create the same conditions that exist in a star, buckypaper is far from reaching its potential, but what a potential it is

The Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA) doesn't index content like a standard search engine, but looks at markup, style, scripting and the technology behind pages. Based on those existing MAMA-ed pages, 80.4 per cent of sites use cascading style sheets (CSS), while the average web page has 47 markup errors and 16,400 characters. Should you want to know which country is using the AJAX component XMLHttpRequest the most, MAMA can tell you that it's Norway, with 10.2 per cent of the data set — via Slashdot

18 October 2008

New Zealand is known for sheep, rugby and dramatic filming locations. However, it will also be known for being the first place in the world with a 3-strikes law for copyright infringement. The Copyright Amendment Act 2008 gained royal assent earlier this year, and goes into effect at the end of February 2009. Opposition to this bill, despite being signed into law, is still growing though

Airport security in America is a sham — security theatre designed to make travellers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items — as Jeffrey Goldberg did with ease

A once-secret 1940s tunnel complex under the centre of London that housed military intelligence and linked the Cold War hotline phone between Washington and Moscow has been put up for sale

ComScore's most US search engine Rankings for August 2008 suggest that YouTube achieves a greater level of search traffic than Yahoo. If you were to consider YouTube's integrated search a regular search engine, you would have to hand Google the top two spots for search engine traffic. In combination, Google has about four times the search traffic of Yahoo and more than ten times the search traffic of Microsoft's MSN sites

17 October 2008

The Communications Data Bill (2008) will lead to the creation of a single, centralised database containing records of all e-mails sent, web sites visited and mobile phones used by UK citizens. In a carnivore-on-steroids programme, as all vestiges of communication privacy are stripped away> The BBC reports that Home Secretary Jacqui Smith says this is a necessity — via Slashdot

A prolonged, ongoing Gmail outage has some Google Apps administrators pulling their hair out as their end users, including high-ranking executives, complain loudly while they wait for service to be restored

A pair of paralysed monkeys regained the ability to move their arms after researchers wired individual neurons to the monkeys' arm muscles. A team of researchers at the University of Washington temporarily paralysed each monkey's arm, then rerouted brain signals from a single neuron in the motor cortex around the blocked nerve pathway via a computer. When the neuron fired above a certain rate, the computer translated the signal into a jolt of electricity to the arm muscle, causing it to contract. The monkeys practiced moving their arms by playing a video game — via Slashdot

16 October 2008

Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government's pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist, experts say. Under the government's $125.8 million Plan for Cyber-Safety, users can switch between two blacklists which block content inappropriate for children, and a separate list which blocks illegal material. Pundits say consumers have been lulled into believing the opt-out proviso would remove content filtering altogether

Steven Jobs, Apple's chief executive, has announced a new line of Apple laptop computers that he said were made with a new manufacturing process. Jobs introduced new versions of the company's MacBook Pro and MacBook portable computers that are carved from 1.1kg blocks of aluminium

Defendants can't deny police an encryption key because of fears the data it unlocks will incriminate them, a British appeals court has ruled

15 October 2008

Russian security developer Kaspersky Labs is boosting its local presence and anti-virus guru Eugene Kaspersky is here to announce the opening of a Melbourne office. Alexey Gromyko, formerly Kaspersky's Australia-New Zealand manager, has been appointed head of the company's Oceania business, operating out of Melbourne

The nightly builds of Firefox 3.1 have added a significant improvement to the session restore dialogue you normally see after a crashed browsing session. The upshot: Rather than displaying a modal dialog that requires you to restore your old session or start from scratch, Firefox will display an about:sessionrestore tab in which you can selectively disable any tab or window from the previous session before you continue with the restore. If you suspect any web site of causing your crash, the option to disable it from the session restore is a real boon

Dozens of country internet users have been disconnected because of a dispute between a service provider and its wholesale reseller. Customers of LiSP and GoBush Broadband lost internet services late last week

Authorities said Tuesday they have shut down one of the largest spam operations in the world, a vast network involving countries from New Zealand to China and the United States

A project to develop small solar panels that can be woven into people's clothing to generate electricity is among the research initiatives to have won funding from the federal government

14 October 2008

Quantenna Communications, expects to announce three chipsets that boost Wi-Fi signals with a small footprint. The chips are being designed to solve the problem of uneven Wi-Fi coverage that results when signals are forced to travel through walls, weakening their strength. The design also tries to avoid interference from other devices operating in the 2.4 or 5 Ghz bands with a dual-band chip and MIMO technology. The firm is offering a chipset for the 2.4 Ghz band, one for 5 Ghz, as well as a dual-band chipset

OpenOffice has released version 3 of its eponymous open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, which includes a native version for Mac OSX

Postage costs on eBay sometimes beggar belief (and lead to the suspicion that vendors are trying to use postage to bolster their own profits). In that context, a new move by eBay to restrict the amount of flat-rate postage that can be charged in some categories is welcome news for buyers, though it might not do much to please sellers who've already had a messy 2008 when it comes to eBay policy. The limits, which will come into effect from early November, apply to CDs ($5), DVDs ($8) and books ($6). Those are still somewhat higher than the likely standard postage costs in many cases, but at least the new policy sets a ceiling

Gordon Brown last night abandoned his parliamentary battle to allow police to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 42 days, after the Lords overwhelmingly rejected the proposal by 191 votes. In an emergency statement to MPs tonight, Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, said that the counter-terrorism bill would continue its journey through parliament without the 42 day measure

13 October 2008

AC/DC will release its new album Black Ice worldwide on 20 October, in physical format only since the band doesn't sell its music online. However, the upcoming album has already been digitised by pirates, as it leaked to BitTorrent five days ago. In that time it has taken the trackers by storm, racking up a staggering 400,000 downloads

It started with a Harvard physicist acting on a hunch. It ended up producing a new material, called black silicon, that could have a broad impact on technologies ranging from ultrasensitive sensors to photovoltaic cells. Black silicon was discovered because Dr Mazur started thinking outside the boundaries of the research he was doing in the late 1990s. His research group had been financed by the Army Research Organisation to explore catalytic reactions on metallic surfaces

12 October 2008

Perfect secrecy has come a step closer with the launch of the world's first computer network protected by unbreakable quantum encryption at a scientific conference in Vienna. The network connects six locations across Vienna and in the nearby town of St Poelten, using 200 km of standard commercial fibre optic cables. Quantum cryptography is completely different from the kinds of security schemes used on computer networks today. These are typically based on complex mathematical procedures which are extremely hard for outsiders to crack but not impossible given sufficient computing resources or time. But quantum systems use the laws of quantum theory, which have been shown to be inherently unbreakable

If you pay any attention to the endless debates over intellectual property policy in the United States, you'll hear two numbers invoked over and over again, like the stuttering chorus of some Philip Glass opera: 750,000 and $200 to $250 billion. The first is the number of US jobs supposedly lost to intellectual property theft; the second is the annual dollar cost of IP infringement to the US economy. These statistics are brandished like a talisman each time Congress is asked to step up enforcement to protect the ever-beleaguered U.S. content industry. And both, as far as an extended investigation by Ars Technica has been able to determine, are utterly bogus

Vodafone Australia's $500 million 3G network upgrade has been delayed after the company's equipment supplier, Ericsson, called for more time to finish the build. The carrier had set a self-imposed deadline of Christmas to complete the work

Instant Access Networks (IAN) has developed a patent-pending shielding technology that encloses a room or similar structure and protects it from EMP events. IAN's shielding, which includes electrically isolated layers of steel and aluminium, is up to 70 percent lighter than materials traditionally used by the military and other sources for EMP protection. This enables EMP-safe rooms to be portable. IAN's shielded rooms can protect mission-critical fibre optic network nodes and data or communication centres. They can also house generators, which, when several are connected, create a micro power grid, or microgrid, that can provide power to a campus or entire communities

11 October 2008

Scientists at the University of Dayton have created a peel-on, peel-off glue which mimics the wall-climbing abilities of Spiderman. The substance, based on the feet of the Gecko lizard, is three times stickier than existing adhesives. The material is so strong that a 4?4mm pad would be enough to hold a 1.5kg object such as a hardback book. However, it's likely too expensive for consumer use: one British scientist calculates that a single Post-it note using the glue would cost around a thousand dollars

A computer drive with the private details of a huge proportion of Armed Forces personnel is missing. The portable drive contains the names, addresses, passport numbers, dates of birth and driving licence details of around 100,000 serving personnel across the Army, Royal Navy and RAF, plus their next-of-kin details. It also has data on 600,000 potential services applicants and the names of their referees

The World Bank Group's computer network — one of the largest repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation — has been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year. It is still not known how much information was stolen. But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly-restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April. Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July

10 October 2008

Google is adding RSS to search result pages allows you to plug the feed into a newsreader and get notified of new listings automatically. The update to search results pages should happen soon according to a Google spokesperson

09 October 2008

Google is adding click-to-buy links to its YouTube video-sharing site. The new feature will let customers purchase songs and video games they like while watching videos on the site

Solyndra has developed a novel type of solar panel that's cheaper to install and produces more power than conventional panels. Unlike conventional solar panels, which are made of flat solar cells, the new panels comprise rows of cylindrical solar cells made of a thin film of semiconductor material. The material is made of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium. The new shape allows the system to absorb more light over the course of a day than conventional solar panels do, and therefore generate more power. What's more, arrays of these tubes offer less wind resistance than conventional flat solar panels, which makes them easier and cheaper to mount on roofs

08 October 2008

An ambitious project is under way in Wales to build one of the most advanced and secure data centres in Europe. Next Generation Data (NGD) is investing £200 million (US$346 million) to modify a 750,000 square-foot (69,677 square meters) factory built by LG more than a decade ago near Newport, Wales, intended for fabricating microchips but abandoned after the Asian financial crisis

Australia and its immediate neighbours are home to a third of the world's languages, most of which could disappear without trace. A national archive project is capturing what it can, and making the resource available online to researchers and regional cultural centres. The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) project has been recognised with the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) Award in humanities and social sciences. The project team will receive a server worth over $26,000 thanks to the prize's sponsor, Dell

Vodafone Australia is planning an aggressive expansion into regional centres despite the global financial crisis and expects to exceed Telstra's footprint. The plans would give Vodafone a retail presence of more than 400 stores, about 100 more than Telstra. Vodafone intends to bolster its chain of dealer stores run by owner-operators instead of franchisees

07 October 2008

Want to buy enough information about a stranger's credit card to steal their money? All it takes is one email and a transfer of funds through Western Union. The Herald found it was remarkably easy to unearth the online locations where hackers conduct a global trade in stolen credit card information. If you want the data from a standard Australian credit card, it will cost you just $US1.50 ($1.80). Rather rob from a gold card holder? That'll be $2.50, thanks

eBay will lay off about 10 per cent of its workforce, the company announced Monday in the US, and said third-quarter results will come in at the low end of expectations. The company also announced plans to acquire online payments business Bill Me Later for US$820 million in cash and approximately US$125 million in outstanding options, as well as Danish classifieds specialist Den Bla Avis and vehicle site BilBasen for approximately US$390 million in cash

A research group in Canada has discovered that Skype and its partner in China TOM Online have been spying on its users, eavesdropping on chat sessions and deploying software that searches for keywords. The revelations, in a report written by Nart Villeneuve at the Citizen Lab unit of the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, have horrified Skype users and could result in a user backlash against the service

06 October 2008

PayPal, the payment service used by 20 million online shoppers in Britain, has given in to consumer demands to offer full refunds to buyers defrauded on eBay. Previously, anyone using PayPal to buy items such as a laptop or furniture risked losing hundreds of pounds on something that might not work or even arrive. Consumers who buy an item worth more than £150 using PayPal on eBay will now have protection

A computer is as good as a second pair of eyes for helping a radiologist spot breast cancer on a mammogram, one of the largest and most rigorous tests of computer-aided detection found. Like spell-checkers looking for mistakes, the computers flag suspicious areas on X-rays for a closer look by a radiologist. Mammograms are used to screen women for early signs of breast cancer but the tests aren't perfect. In the US, the X-rays are read by a single radiologist and cancers are sometimes missed

UniverseToday has an interesting look at geomagnetic reversal, the process in which the Earth's magnetic poles trade places. The article cites known trends and recent studies to debunk doomsday myths and unsubstantiated claims about the process. One such study is attempting to model the earth's core with a 26-ton ball of molten metal. Another recently found evidence that the Earth has a second, weaker magnetic field. We do know that this magnetic pole flip-flop has occurred many times in the last few million years; the last occurred 780,000 years ago according to ferromagnetic sediment. A few scaremongering articles have said geomagnetic reversal occurs with 'clockwork regularity' — this is simply not true — via Slashdot

05 October 2008

Radiohead have joined FAC, which seeks to give artists greater control over their music. More than 60 artists, including Radiohead, Robbie Williams and the Kaiser Chiefs, have announced they have banded together to seek more rights over their music and break free of record labels

There are still places on the world where having anonymity might mean the difference between life and death. Covering one's tracks is considered to be of such paramount importance that we are now witnessing the rise of a Linux distro catering to the most paranoid. The alpha-alpha version of ParanoidLinux is now out. But is this the best way to protect oneself? Couldn't it be easily circumvented? — via Slashdot

04 October 2008

Does seeing through skin cells sound like crazy science fiction to you? Think again. Professor Leonid Yaroslavsky, a researcher from Tel Aviv University, Israel, thinks that humans have an ability to see through their skin. This discovery may lead to new therapies that could help the blind see

Weird Al has announced that with the Internet he can now release his songs for sale as he records each one rather than waiting for a whole album to be produced — via Slashdot

A new space race is officially under way, and this one should have the sci-fi geeks salivating. The project is a space elevator, and some experts now believe that the concept is well within the bounds of possibility — maybe even within our lifetimes

03 October 2008

We all know it and science has proved it — wires, string, and hair will inevitably tie themselves in knots. This astonishing non-revelation is one of 10 pieces of real research honoured this year with Ig Nobel Prizes. The spoof alternatives to the rather more sober Nobel prizes were presented in a ceremony at Harvard University. Other winners included studies that showed Coca Cola was an effective spermicide; and that fleas on dogs jump higher than fleas on cats

Since being released from prison eight years ago, Kevin Mitnick's brushes with the law have consisted of a few parking tickets and a citation for driving without a front license plate — that is, until he returned from a trip to Colombia two weeks ago. After landing at the Atlanta airport for a security conference, Mitnick was detained for four hours for reasons still not fully explained. To make matters worse, while customs officials in Atlanta were busy inspecting his cell phone, laptop, and luggage, police in Bogota were ripping open a package he had mailed to his US address on suspicion that it contained cocaine

02 October 2008

The federal Government says it may be flexible with mobile internet providers in its mandatory ISP filtering policy. The Australian Communications and Media Authority is planning to test internet filtering technology in a live environment after trials by the agency were deemed successful

One of the only Australian start-ups to present at the recent round of conferences in the US was Sydney-based spellr.us, which has launched a Web-based tool to check and monitor web sites for spelling mistakes. Founder Kevin Garber, who is also founder and general manager of spellr.us parent company Melon Media, told bootstrappr that the self-funded start-up grew from the need of some Melon's customers wanting to keep their web sites free from typos

Toshiba has unveiled a battery prototype that offers a 90 percent charge capacity in just 10 minutes. The Super Charge Ion Battery is capable of handling 5,000 to 6,000 recharge cycles, compared to the typical 500 offered by standard lithium-ion batteries. The new battery is composed of a durable material that offers a high level of thermal stability and prevents overheating. In addition, the unit will not explode when crushed

01 October 2008

A camera sold on eBay contained photos and confidential records of MI6 terror suspects. Photographs, fingerprints and confidential documents relating to suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists were allegedly found in the memory of the second-hand Nikon Coolpix camera, which was bought on the auction site for only £17. The confidential files were discovered after the buyer downloaded his holiday photos. He immediately reported the files to the police, who initially treated it as a joke

A collaborative effort by HP Labs and Rice University has produced a technique that could lower the cost of identifying dead zones in large wireless networks. The technique enables Wi-Fi architects to test and refine their layouts before a network is deployed

The infamous Gpcode ransomware virus that hit computers in July was the work of a single person who is known to the authorities. The individual is believed to be a Russian national, and has been in contact with at least one anti-malware company, Kaspersky Lab, in an attempt to sell a tool that could be used to decrypt victims' files

Detective work by an Australian online poker player has uncovered a $US10 million cheating scandal at two major poker websites and triggered a $US75 million legal claim. In two separate cases, Michael Josem, from Chatswood, analysed detailed hand history data from Absolute Poker and UltimateBet and uncovered that certain player accounts won money at a rate too fast to be legitimate

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