May 2006 Archive

31 May 2006

Scientists have discovered that Caribbean spiny lobsters, a social animal, do their best to stay the hell away from others that are sick. Biologist Mark Butler of Old Dominion University and his colleagues noticed that while healthy spiny lobsters spend their days in large groups, sick animals are left alone — via Boingboing

The US Patent and Trademark Office has rejected 19 of the 47 claims in a patent held by Forgent Networks, which the company has been using to assert licensing rights related to the JPEG digital image standard

After much bluster and several false starts, high-definition DVD products for home and PC have arrived — but in two incompatible formats, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. That means buyers will have to carefully weigh their options as we wait to see which — if either — technology will inherit DVD's crown

30 May 2006

China has launched a case against American chipmaker Intel's near-monopoly on encryption standards for wireless local area network equipment

29 May 2006

Amnesty International has a new online campaign against governments which censor websites, monitor online communications, and persecute citizens who express dissent in blogs, emails, or chat-rooms. The website, Irrepressible.info contains a web-based petition (to be presented at a UN conference in November 2006) and also a downloadable web gadget which displays random excerpts of censored material on your own web site

Optus has removed line rental fees from new home phone offering as internet telephony and low-cost mobile services continue to place pressure carriers' fixed-line revenue — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Apple has lost a legal bid to force two internet web sites to reveal sources behind two reports they published containing the technology company's commercial secrets

28 May 2006

France is contemplating legislation designed to to force compatibility between digital songs and the different machines that play them. Known colloquially as the iPod bill, it is opposed by Apple, the Business Software Alliance, and others who refer to it as state-sponsored piracy. Two versions of the bill have already passed France's Senate and National Assembly. Under the proposed law companies could have to reveal trade secrets of their software so that their songs can play on competitors' devices

Two exceedingly dim New York teenagers have been arrested after trying to extort $150,000 from the makers of MySpace, the popular online community site. MySpace discovered the intrusion earlier this year and blocked it. The Los Angeles-based company also reported the incident to authorities. During the course of the investigation, threats were made that unless $150,000 was paid, new exploit code would be released, according to the statement. By this time, the sting operation had been set up, so instead of meeting with MySpace late last week, the pair from New York met with undercover officers from the US Secret Service and the Los Angeles District Attorney's Bureau of Investigation

27 May 2006

A new Spam defence mechanism called BlackFrog has appeared in response to the demise of Blue Security's BlueFrog. The new service is based on a P2P network of clients, called the Frognet, which allows the opt-out service to continue functioning even after a server has gone down, making a DDoS attack like that which crippled BlueFrog ineffective against the new service

A plan for a cloaking device has been unveiled. The design is pioneered by Professor Sir John Pendry's team of scientists from the US and Britain. Proof of the ability of his invention could be ready in just 18 months time using radar testing. The method revolves around certain materials making light flow around the given object like water

26 May 2006

A new chapter in the story of computing has been written. Samsung has announced the world's first commercial PCs sporting flash memory instead of traditional hard drives

Yahoo and eBay are joining hands in a broad-ranging partnership that combines the strengths of both companies and promises to provide users of the popular Web sites with better services

Water behaving like a thin liquid or a dense vapor has been found 2,990 metres under the sea. At 298 bar and 407°C, seawater becomes a supercritical fluid that can diffuse diffuse through solids like a gas, yet dissolve things like a liquid

Scientists are recreating the human body on a microchip — using clumps of cells from different organs linked by fluid-filled channels — to reduce the amount of animal testing for drugs. The human-on-a-chip mimics the body's physiology on a miniature scale, including how each organ reacts to drugs and other chemicals

25 May 2006

ISPs are in the perfect position to kill vast armies of compromised computers — or bots — that are being used by cyber-criminals to launch the majority of spam and phishing attacks, according security specialists at the AusCERT 2006 conference

In a landmark development researchers have created an artificial penis that has allowed rabbits with damaged penises to successfully mate. The urologists say that the procedure might one day help treat men with severe erectile dysfunction

24 May 2006

In the wake of high-profile lawsuits involving BlackBerry and eBay, Congress is once again talking about fixing what the technology industry says is a thoroughly broken patent system

As Microsoft moves its internal desktop systems to Windows Vista, the company is contemplating whether to change a long running tradition and take away admin rights from its employees in order to improve security

The Department of Energy has filed a patent for hydrogen fuel balls. The proposed glass microspheres would each be a few millionths of a metre (microns) wide with a hollow centre containing specks of palladium. The walls of each sphere would also have pores just a few ten-billionths of a metre in diameter. They are supposedly safe and small enough to be pumped into a fuel tank in the same manner as petrol

Researchers at Stanford have developed a robot that mimics the extraordinary climbing skills of the Gecko. These creatures can climb sheer surfaces thanks to the intermolecular forces exerted by millions of tiny hairs their feet, called setae. The robot, Stickybot, has polymer pads on its feed with synthetic setae

23 May 2006

John Howard's junket to Ireland has allowed him to show the world his true colours. A talk at University College Dublin saw Howard out himself as rampant homophobe by claiming that it is not discrimination to deny gay men and lesbians equal marriage status with heterosexual couples and that most Australians do not want gay couples to have equivalent status. Howard's warmongering, racism and dodgy dealings in East Timor have seen several TDs plan to boycott his address to the Dáil — via The Pagan Prattle Online

eBay-owned shopping portal Shopping.com believes the Australian e-commerce market is finally ripe for the picking, and will launch its Australian service this week with 200 local retail partners

With regional Australia soon to be the happy recipient of a $1.1 billion communications funding package, the tiny wireless broadband firms that have sprung up around the bush don't know whether to laugh or cry

22 May 2006

Domain name registration company Melbourne IT Ltd has entered into a conditional agreement to acquire hosting group WebCentral in a deal valued at $61.3 million

Telstra says it can't put a timeline on a deal with the competition watchdog over the rollout of its proposed $5.7 billion fibre broadband network

Telstra has been forced to admit that mobile phone users in the bush could find themselves without an effective service in late 2008

21 May 2006

Pearl Jam released their first music video in quite a while under a Creative Commons licence allowing anyone to legally copy, distribute and share the clip for noncommercial purposes. Creative Commons thinks this may be the first video produced by a major label ever to be CC-licensed. So although the file is only available as a free download via Google Video through 24 May, fans can continue sharing it online themselves in perpetuity — via Slashdot

Official guidance on how to teach Scottish schoolchildren about gay sex is being issued for the first time since the abolition of laws which banned promoting homosexuality in schools

20 May 2006

Danish researchers found a simple way to make curiously shaped air holes in a bucket of water. Simply rig the bucket to have a spinning plate at the bottom, and depending on the speed, you can get an ellipse, three-sided star, square, pentagon, or hexagon. The effect may help explain such shapes seen in atmospheric disturbances on Earth and other planets — via Slashdot

Finnish metal band Lordi, who dress in monster masks and outlandish fantasy costumes, have taken the Eurovision Song Contest by storm — via The Pagan Prattle Online

19 May 2006

Google has snuck out the much anticipated street mapping data for Australia and New Zealand cities within Google Maps

Apple is suing Creative Technology, raising the stakes in the legal dispute over competing devices. Apple claims Creative Labs, the US division of Creative Technology, infringes four patents in its hand-held digital players — via digg

A new research project at MIT's Media Lab, entitled RadioActive, aims to turn every mobile phone or PDA carrying member of the public into a podcaster, and every mobile device into a virtual podcasting studio. The project defines a large-scale asynchronous audio messaging system in which voice messages can be threaded like text in a discussion forum as a method of discussion-on-demand — via Slashdot

18 May 2006

Blue Security, a prominent crusader against unsolicited e-mail ads withdrew from an escalating cyberwar with spammers on Wednesday after his Web site and numerous others came under a massive retaliatory attack

Natural allies in the music industry — record labels and a leading satellite service — are on opposing sides in a federal lawsuit over how consumers may legally record songs using next-generation radio devices

Creative Technologies, maker of the Zen media player, has joined the list of companies that have sued Apple for patent infringement. In this case, the technology in question is the interface used to find music on the iPod. Creative has asked a federal judge to issue an injunction blocking the sale of iPods and iPod Nanos in the US

17 May 2006

Australia is finally reforming its backwards copyright law, which made it illegal to record shows off the TV and radio, and to rip CDs for personal playback. However, in the process, they proposed a new law that is even more backwards — one that prohibits watching your recorded shows more than once, one that doesn't allow you to make backups of your CDs, and that doesn't let you loan them to friends — via Boingboing

Gmail has crippled its View as HTML functionality so as to comply with Adobe's PDF copy-control scheme. In case an email attachment is a DRMed PDF file (a PDF with copying and/or printing restrictions), clicking on the View as HTML link returns the message displayed in the screenshot — via Boingboing

Dutch scientists have developed a system for stopping racist chanting at football matches: they feed back the audio of the chant at a slight delay, and the resulting confusion makes it impossible for mobs of football hooligans to synch up their shouting with one another, leading to chaos — via Boingboing

16 May 2006

Google has opened its new Sydney office with a plan to snap up the top tech graduates from Australia's universities

Oracle will soon start hosting on-demand software services from data centres in Australia and other places outside the US for the first time

Bonza, sanga, and bogan are just some examples of the Australian vernacular being considered for inclusion in the next version of Microsoft Office 2007

Elections officials in several states are scrambling to understand and limit the risk from a dangerous security hole found in Diebold Election Systems's ATM-like touch-screen voting machines. Armed with a little basic knowledge of Diebold voting systems and a standard component available at any computer store, someone with a minute or two of access to a Diebold touch screen could load virtually any software into the machine and disable it, redistribute votes or alter its performance in myriad ways — via Bruce Schneier

15 May 2006

Australians will legally be able to record TV and radio programs and transfer material from CDs to mp3 players, under proposed copyright changes

New Zealand is not for sale, despite somebody in Australia trying to offload the nation of 4 million to the highest online bidder. With a starting offer of just one cent, brisk bidding for the prime chunk of South Pacific real estate quickly boosted the price to AU$3,000 before eBay pulled the plug on the auction this week

According to his official biography, Richard Kelly is the director of the acclaimed Donnie Darko, the writer of the less acclaimed Domino and a contender for the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes film festival. According to the Department of Homeland Security he is a suspected terrorist who may now be prevented from travelling to Cannes next week after the morons appear confused him with another man, James Kelly, who is on the terrorist watch list. Kelly's full name is James Richard Kelly — via Warren Ellis

14 May 2006

Believing that god created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno claimed. He has also said that the idea of papal infallibility had been a PR disaster. What it actually meant was that, on matters of faith, followers should accept somebody has got to be the boss, the final authority. It's not like he has a magic power, that God whispers the truth in his ear, he said — via Warren Ellis

The National Security Agency's goal to create a database of every call ever made inside the USA. Aided by the cooperation of US telecom corporations, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of tens of millions of Americans; the vast majority of whom aren't suspected of any crime. Only Qwest refused to give the NSA information because they were uneasy about giving information to the government without the proper warrants. The usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear

A strange-looking bear shot last month by a moronic American sports hunter, Jim Martell, turned out to be half polar bear, half grizzly. Officials seized the creature after noticing its white fur was scattered with brown patches and that it had the long claws and humped back of a grizzly. Now a DNA test has confirmed that it is indeed a hybrid

13 May 2006

The OpenStreetMap project to create a copyright-free map of the Isle of Wight was a success, so they're taking on Manchester next — via Boingboing

Google has unveiled several new offerings — Google Notebook, Google Co-Op Beta, Google Trends and Google Desktop 4 Beta — that could help searching become more of a group activity

Warner Bros is to sell movies over BitTorrent. Disappointingly, the pricing is set to be about the same as the DVD, even though the download will only become available at the same time as the DVD release and can only play on one machine, which all goes to prove that Warner Bros just don't get it

12 May 2006

The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping programme because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers security clearance

Dr Jonathan Spanier from Drexel University has come up with a novel way to greatly increase data storage density: water. Specifically, they propose using hydroxyl ions to stabilise minute ferroelectric wires. These wires could be many times smaller than what is possible today, enabling data densities in the neighborhood of 12-13 PB per cubic centimeter. While there are still many problems to be resolved before drives using these can be manufactured this technology does seem promising. For one thing, it would be non-volatile, but could apparently be made to act as RAM. The fact that this is coming out of a university gives me hope that this technology won't turn out to be just so much vapour — via Slashdot

Advances by CSIRO in material sciences are creating second skin technology that can protect the body against wounds and major traumas

11 May 2006

After more than a century in business, it would be understandable for a company to run out of fresh ideas. But 3M, the manufacturing conglomerate, is still at it, at age 104. The manufacturing conglomerate — an abrasives maker that broke out by inventing masking tape in 1925 — is introducing new products as if it were a startup

The UMass Lowell research group has joined groups from five other institutions and secured funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to pursue the possibilities of causing a limb to re-grow in an adult mammal. One form of newt, the Eastern or red-spotted newt—capable of limb regeneration, will be studied — via digg

Usually the only alcohol-powered muscles are the ones in barroom brawls, but one scientist is adding alcohol to artificial muscles to power robots and more. Scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas have developed artificial muscles — science's best attempt at mimicking natural muscles. But they're not made with the hydraulics or gears that power most of today's big, strong machines. These muscles are made of an elastic metal called shape memory wire

10 May 2006

Internet telephony is moving beyond small-scale pilots at the big end of town as large operations tackle 5000-plus handset rollouts

Signals from mobile phone masts have been used to measure rainfall patterns in Israel. The University of Tel-Aviv analysed information routinely collected by mobile networks and say their technique is more accurate than current methods used by meteorological services. The data is a by-product of mobile network operators' need to monitor signal strength. If bad weather causes a signal to drop, an automatic system analyzing the data boosts the signal to make sure that people can still use their mobile phones. The amount of reduction in signal strength gave the researchers an indication of how much rain had fallen

09 May 2006

Apple Computer is entitled to use the apple logo on its iTunes Music Store, a judge has ruled, rejecting a suit filed by Apple Corps Ltd, the guardian of The Beatles' commercial interest

After being told by banks and lenders across the UK that Chip and Pin is safe to use and provides better security (it doesn't, it just shifts financial liability for loss to the consumer instead of the lender) Shell have announced that they're suspending Chip and Pin at 600 of their Petrol stations in the UK after £1 million of customer money was stolen through a Shell Petrol station — via Snake Oil Labs

One of Alcatel's most senior executives is back in town as the vendor continues to push for a deal that would see Telstra construct a new AU$3 billion fibre broadband network

08 May 2006

Online file-sharing service BearShare, along with operators Free Peers Inc, is packing it up due to a $30 million settlement with the recording industry. The conditions of the settlement were agreed to by the P2P company to avoid further copyright infringement litigation

14 Pakistan International Airlines passengers awarded themselves an upgrade to the empty first class cabin of a flight from Islamabad to Manchester that was stuck, sweltering on the Islamabad tarmac for four hours. They switched to first class mid-flight and refused to go back to cattle-class. When the flight landed in the UK, they were arrested on suspicion of endangering the aircraft — via Boingboing

Ron Patrick has decided to go that little bit further by souping up his VW beetle with a jet engine. Serious planning went into the project. Patrick said, We did (computerised) structural analysis and we did stability analysis. And by god, you know what happens? It works!

07 May 2006

Rockbox isn't one of the many applications that run on the iPod software platform; rather, it's firmware that completely replaces the iPod's, with the goal of expanding the possibilities and the limits of the existing hardware

Tracing the lineage of Babel Fish [Yahoo portal], an online language translation service, to its beginnings is an instructive history lesson for those whose Internet experience begins and ends with Google

06 May 2006

The Reporters Without Borders internet annual report 2006 details and decries the rising tide of net censorship and lays the blame squarely on the west as the source for the technology that allows repressive regimes to stifle freedom on the web. China's success at censorship means it has effectively produced a sanitised version of the internet for its 130 million citizens that regularly go online. The wide-ranging scrutiny also means that it is the biggest jailer of so-called cyber dissidents. RSF estimates that 62 people in China have been jailed for what they said online — via Slashdot

Ben Edelman, a Massachusetts lawyer and spyware researcher, is one of the lawyers who filed a lawsuit this week against Yahoo on behalf of advertiser Crafts By Veronica, as well as other advertisers. The lawsuit, filed in US District Court in New Jersey, accuses Yahoo and its ad sales subsidiary Overture Services Inof charging higher rates for ads promised premium placement, but then placing those ads on spyware-vendor sites and on Web pages with URLs that are misspellings of popular sites

Warner Music Group rejected a $4.23 billion takeover offer from EMI Group, the world's third-largest music company, thwarting another effort by the two companies to merge

05 May 2006

Reports have emerged that those who have signed up for an antispam service from Blue Security have been targeted by spammers with a campaign of intimidation. Six Apart, which runs the popular LiveJournal and TypePad blogging services, became a collateral victim of the very big, very sophisticated denial of service attack mounted by a Russian spammer against Blue Security

OpenStreetMap, an organisation that is using consumer technology to create copyright-free maps, is meeting this weekend (5-7 May) on the Isle of Wight — to map the whole island and give the data away under a Creative Commons license — via Boingboing

Property investment and management group Investa is the latest Australian enterprise to implement an Internet Protocol telephony system

04 May 2006

The cloaking devices that are used to render spacecraft invisible in Star Trek might just work in reality, claim mathematicians Nicolae Nicorovici and Graeme Milton

ABC's web site crashed twice as internet users flocked to watch streaming versions of its most popular shows, including Lost and Desperate Housewives. It was the first time the shows were available online directly from the network, and the first time the advertising community had gotten a look at what ad products would be offered. It was also the first opportunity for the industry to gauge how popular such an ad-supported offering might be with consumers

Optus is preparing to release details of a $3 billion fibre network plan proposed by Telstra rivals within the next six to eight weeks

03 May 2006

Lakeshore GO Transit rail authority apologised after a mischievous rider hacked into the electronic message board to announce that Stephen Harper Eats Babies — via Warren Ellis

Two acquaintances of Jeremy Allan Steinke, a man accused of murdering his pre-teen girlfriend's family, say he professed to be a 300-year-old werewolf who liked the taste of blood — via Warren Ellis

Polar bears and hippos are among more than 16,000 species of animals and plants threatened with global extinction

Apple has renewed contracts with the world's four largest music companies to sell songs through its iTunes Music Store, after blocking their attempts to end iTunes' flat-rate pricing scheme

02 May 2006

The federal health and welfare smartcard project may be heading for big problems, according to experts concerned by a lack of detailed planning and apparent Government willingness to work outside the business case

Unions have labelled proposed independent contractor legislation worse than Work Choices, warning that the federal Government risks creating an underclass of IT contractors who will undercut the pay of salaried staff

Seiko Epson has succeeded in getting four online retailers of printer ink cartridges to stop selling a number of third-party ink cartridges designed for use in Epson printers. The four retailers are in Germany and agreed in out of court settlements to stop selling the cartridges, which Seiko Epson asserts infringe upon its intellectual property

01 May 2006

realestate.com.au has announcing that it has finalised an agreement to acquire all of the shares in Hubonline Global for A$6 million. REA will acquire 87% of the shares in the company for A$5.2 million at completion, and will acquire the remaining 13% within a likely timeframe of 3 months from completion

Banner ads for the National Australia Bank and St George Bank have mysteriously appeared on Pirate Bay, a bittorrent tracker web site, that directs visitors to potentially illegal content

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