Column of the Wolf

Report Against Municipal WiFi Revealed As Bogus

A recent independent report did a hatchet job on municipal wireless networks, damning them as an expensive failure. Glenn Fleishman took the report to pieces in a series of long blog-posts, exposing its shoddy methodology and dubious provenance. Now he reports that the organisation that produced it, the New Millennium Research Council, is a front for the telecoms lobby — via Boing Boing

Microwaves Take Over In Car Chases

Eureka Aerospace in Pasadena is developing a High Power Electromagnetic System that can fry a vehicle's microchips and slow cars to a halt — it leaves the suspect in control of the car; he can steer, he can brake, he just can't accelerate. The antenna array could be mounted on police pursuit vehicles or helicopters. It's slated to be ready for testing by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department by late summer — via Boing Boing

Computer-Edited Photos Lead To Child-Porn Locale

Toronto police have found a new application for computerized photo editing. The police released edited photos on 3 February from a series of child pornography pics in an attempt to locate where the photos may have been taken. Two days later, they have identified the Port Orleans hotel in Disney World as being the location. This seems to be the first time photo editing has been used in law enforcement this way and strikes an interesting line between protecting the victims and being able to get public tips. It looks like it may be used quite heavily in the future given this success

Six Firms Form Holographic Versatile Disc Alliance

Fuji Photo and CMC Magnentics are two of six companies, who have formed a consortium to promote HVD technology, which they say can be used to put 1TB of data onto just one disc. The consortium say that a HVD disc could hold about 200 standard DVD's, and transfer data at speeds 40 times that of DVD, about 1GB per second. HVD is being seen as a possible successor to Blu-ray and HD-DVD technologies

Mozilla Sunbird's First Official Release

Sunbird, Mozilla's standalone cross-platform calendar project, has reached its first official relase: version 0.2, for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. This is good news for all of us waiting for decent free calendaring software

US Loses Ruling On Grey Wolves

A federal judge has struck down a Bush administration rule that lowered Endangered Species Act protection for wolves that are migrating out of strongholds in the Northern Rockies and Great Lakes into neighbouring states. In a ruling released yesterday, US District Judge Robert Jones in Portland rescinded the April 2003 decision by the US Fish and Wildlife Service which had divided wolf range into three areas and had reclassified the Eastern and Western populations as threatened instead of endangered. The agency had left wolves in the Southwest in the endangered category

Outrage Mounts Over Detention Centre Case

South Australian Premier Mike Rann wants an immediate investigation into why an Australian woman was held in the Baxter detention centre for four months. Cornelia Rau, 39, who went missing from the Manly psychiatric hospital in Sydney in March 2004, spent four of 10 months' detention in Baxter after being found in far north Queensland without identification. She spent the other six months in the Women's Correctional Centre in Brisbane, after Queensland police believed she was an illegal immigrant. She was turned over by police to immigration officials, who could not confirm her identity

Storms Bring Modem Mayhem

Some Optus customers are facing a $179 charge for a new modem following the storms that lashed the Victoria and NSW this week. Australian IT understands that the carrier has been called on to replace a large number of modems used for its HRC cable broadband service since the storms hit on Wednesday. Customers whose equipment is out of warranty will be charged $179 to replace their modems, which are only available from Optus

Windsor Staffers Back Bribe Claims

Two key witnesses appearing before a Senate inquiry in Canberra have backed bribery claims made by federal independent MP Tony Windsor. Mr Windsor says he was offered an overseas posting to quit politics, a claim he has repeated under oath at the inquiry. He says that businessman Greg McGuire made the offer on behalf of Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson and Nationals Senator Sandy Macdonald. Little Johnny Coward's cronies are still trying to weasel out of the charge

Canadian Government Weary Of Patriot Act

The Canadian government is moving to counter worries surrounding Canadian citizens' privacy being compromised by the United States' Patriot act. Apparently the FBI currently has the right, through Patriot, to search documents which may contain Canadian information sent to US firms carrying out work under contract. Thankfully, privacy still means something up there

Putin Opposes Media Restrictions in Anti-Terror Bill

Russian President Vladimir Putin has sent a statement to the State Duma, or lower house of parliament, attacking part of an anti-terror bill that would restrict media coverage of terrorist attacks and calling it unconstitutional. You've got to laugh when it's Russia who are more progressive than the so-called free west

MP3tunes Offers Music Service Without DRM

Former MP3.com chief and Lindows CEO Michael Robertson will reenter the music world next week with MP3tunes, a service that promises music without DRM restrictions. MP3tunes hopes to attract users who are fed up with restrictions on copying music from sites that use digital-rights-management techniques, such as iTunes

Corpse Soup

Six Romanians have been jailed for digging up the corpse of a cancer victim, ripping his heart out and eating it because they thought he was a vampire — via Warren Ellis

Amerikan Youth Hates Freedom, Likes That Fascist Groove Thang

When told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three American high school students said it goes too far in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories — via Warren Ellis

Car Key Code Cracked

The research team at Johns Hopkins University have found a way to crack the code used in millions of car keys, a development that could allow thieves to bypass the security systems on newer car models. This shouldn't affect Australia, as our codes are apparently tougher to crack for the time being