August 2007 Archive

31 August 2007

You might remember the previous story about LiveJournal erroneously deleting hundreds of users as suspected paedophiles, spurred on by pressure from a group of bampots. Since then, they've been taking action against users hosting material on their servers that they believe to be illegal. Today, LiveJournal management have demonstrated a serious lack of understanding in how the internet works, declaring that users are responsible for the content of the web pages that they link to in their blog entries. A user points out the obvious flaw: I get ToS'd because the link's been redirected to a page full o' porn, even though context clearly shows that when I originally put up the link that it didn't actually land on a page of porn? One wonders how such a long-established blogging company can be so ignorant about the nature of the world wide web — via Slashdot

A small US startup has announced it has created a system for running Wi-Fi routers in remote places using only the power of the sun. Among the first round of products from Solis Energy is the Solar Power Plant, touted as being capable of supplying 12, 24 and 48 Volts DC for use in stand-alone applications such as surveillance cameras and outdoor Wi-Fi

Internet bandwidth could become a global currency under a new model of e-commerce developed by researchers from Delt University of Technology, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam and Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The application, available for free download, is an enhanced version of a program called Tribler, originally created by the Dutch collaborators to study video file sharing. Successful peer-to-peer systems rely on designing rules that promote fair sharing of resources amongst users. Thus, they are both efficient and powerful computational and economic systems. The researchers were inspired to use a version of the Tribler video sharing software as a model for an e-commerce system because of such flexibility, speed, and reliability — Slashdot

30 August 2007

The actor who plays the time-and-space warping Hiro Nakamura in the hit US TV show Heroes has made some positive comments about file-sharing after it became evident that French fans had either teleported into the future and watched the show before it aired on TV, or maybe downloaded it using BitTorrent

Building off the design mandates of CALEA, the FBI has constructed a point-and-click surveillance system that creates instant wiretaps on almost any communications device. A thousand pages of restricted documents released under the Freedom of Information Act were required to determine the veracity of this clandestine project. Called the Digital Collection System Network, it connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure — via Slashdot

Australia anti-spyware maker PC Tools, home of the great Spyware Doctor, has won their long running battle with adware publisher Zango, who today conceded defeat by voluntarily withdrawing its proceedings against them. Seems once they couldn't get a court to grant a Temporary Restraining Order, they saw they were screwed

The internet should not be used as a scapegoat for society's ills, said Vint Cerf, Google's net evangelist and a founding father of the network. He said the net was just a reflection of the society in which we live. Anyone regulating beyond what was clearly illegal put themselves on a slippery slope that could limit freedom of expression, he said. If it's not illegal, it raises a rather interesting question about where you do draw the line

29 August 2007

The contentious Russian music download site allofmp3.com looks set to resume business after a Moscow court ruled it was legal under the country's law. A statement on the website, shut down in July, said the service would resume in the foreseeable future. Before it closed, the cut-price music site claimed to be the second biggest seller of downloads after iTunes. It was the subject of countless lawsuits from UK and US record labels that claimed it violated copyright law. A representative of the music industry said if it started trading again it would still be in clear violation of copyright laws

Torrent indexing site Torrentspy.com appears to have disabled torrent searches for IPs that originate in the United States. Instead of a results page, users are directed to this page, which states: Torrentspy Acts to Protect Privacy. Sorry, but because you are located in the USA you cannot use the search features of the Torrentspy.com website. Torrentspy's decision to stop accepting US visitors was not compelled by any Court but rather an uncertain legal climate in the US regarding user privacy and an apparent tension between US and European Union privacy laws. The action is in response to a federal judge has ordering TorrentSpy to begin keeping server logs as it defends itself against an MPAA lawsuit. In her opinion, Judge Florence-Marie Cooper interpreted federal discovery rules broadly. She noted RAM's function as primary storage and that the storage of data in RAM — even if not permanently archived — makes it electronically stored information governed by federal discovery rules — via Slashdot

A Spiderman suit that enables its wearer to scale vertical walls like the comic and movie superhero could one day be a reality, according to a study. Natural technology used by spiders and geckos could help a human climb the side of a building or hang upside down from a roof, the analysis suggests. Both spiders and geckos possess tiny hairs that allow them to stick to surfaces. Some studies suggest that geckos can hold hundreds of times their own body weight

28 August 2007

Yahoo expands the Web mail service into a social communication tool — adding the ability to send text messages to mobile phones directly from e-mail. The Yahoo Mail update also adds more sophisticated capabilities to check maps, directions, hotel and travel information directly from the e-mail itself. You can forget about getting the SMS feature in Australia in the near future

Vint Cerf — one of the handful of researchers who helped build the internet in the 1970s — said that the television industry would change rapidly as it approached its iPod moment. The 64-year-old, who is now a vice-president of the web giant Google and chairman of the organisation that administrates the internet, told an audience of media moguls that TV was rapidly approaching the same kind of crunch moment that the music industry faced with the arrival of the MP3 player. 85% of all video we watch is pre-recorded, so you can set your system to download it all the time, he said. You're still going to need live television for certain things — like news, sporting events and emergencies — but increasingly it is going to be almost like the iPod, where you download content to look at later

Taiwan's leading computer seller Acer is to take over US PC maker Gateway in a US$710m deal. The takeover will create the world's third largest producer of personal computers, with shipments of more than 20 million PCs and sales of $15bn. The deal may also see Acer try to block Chinese rival Lenovo from buying Packard Bell's operations in Europe

27 August 2007

Tom Wood, a Year 10 Australian student has cracked the federal government's $84-million Internet porn filter in just 30 minutes. He can deactivate the filter in several clicks in such a way that the software's icon is not deleted which will make his parents believe the filter is still working. Tom says it is a matter of time before some computer-savvy kid puts the bypass on the Internet for others to use

With a 50-year collection of photos, videos, films and other material, NASA's archives from manned and unmanned space missions is almost as vast as outer space. And now, NASA is undertaking a project to put all of that material into a central archive that can be searched by space flight aficionados. NASA said it has reached a deal with the nonprofit, San Francisco-based Internet Archive to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection. The effort will be paid for solely through grants, foundations and individual contributions received by the Internet Archive

Reforms to the WHOIS database in order to address growing privacy concerns have once again come to a halt, leaving a seven-year-old debate to continue on how much personal information should be displayed to the public. WHOIS Working Group was pulled in two directions: one by those who want increased privacy protections for individuals registering domains and another by those who want easier and quicker access to WHOIS contact information in order to keep an eye on bad apples.But privacy advocates say that customers shouldn't have to pay to keep their information private — the WHOIS database should offer some level of privacy by default while still offering up enough information to be helpful

26 August 2007

A teenager in New Jersey has broken the lock that ties Apple's iPhone to AT&T's wireless network, freeing the most hyped mobile phone ever for use on the networks of other carriers, including overseas ones. George Hotz, 17, confirmed Friday that he had unlocked an iPhone and was using it on T-Mobile's network, the only major US carrier apart from AT&T that is compatible with the iPhone's cellular technology. The howto has be posted

Mempile, an Israeli storage technology company, is working on TeraDisc which is designed to fit 1TB on a single disk. The current prototypes can store 600-800GB per disk which is a lot of data. However Mempile boffins think that they can get this to a 1TB per 1.2mm thick disk soon. The company claims the disks can last 50 years and should be very reliable. However initial media and hardware will be quite expensive, with the drive setting you back $3,000 and the 600GB disk around $30-50

Scientists have suspected that the three known domains of life — eukaryotes, bacteria, and archaea — branched off and went their separate ways around three billion years ago. But pinning down the time of that split has been an elusive task. Now, a team of scientists present direct evidence that the three domains of life coexisted at least as long as 2.7 billion years ago. The discovery came from chemical examination of shale samples, loaded with oily lipid remains of archaea found in a deep Canadian gold mine near Timmins, Ontario, about 400 miles north of Toronto

25 August 2007

Staff in the Australian prime minister's department have been accused of editing potentially damaging entries in online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. Workers made 126 edits on subjects such as immigration policy and Treasurer Peter Costello. Amongst the changes was the eloquent Poo bum dicky wee wee, which gives an idea of the rocket scientists that Howard employees as minions. The details came from a new web site that tracks those who make edits. Staff from the CIA and the BBC among others have also made changes

The Bush administration has confirmed for the first time that American telecommunications companies played a key role in the NSA's domestic eavesdropping program after asserting for nearly two years that any role played by the companies was a state secret

Joop Houtkooper of the University of Giessen, Germany, said the Viking spacecraft may in fact have found signs of a weird life form based on hydrogen peroxide on the subfreezing, arid Martian surface. His analysis of one of the experiments carried out by the Viking spacecraft suggests that 0.1 percent of the Martian soil could be of biological origin

24 August 2007

Protesters are accusing police of using undercover agents to provoke violent confrontations at the North American leaders' summit in Montebello, Quebec. Such accusations have been made before after similar demonstrations but this time the alleged agents provocateurs have been caught on camera. A video, posted on YouTube, shows three young men, their faces masked by bandannas, mingling Monday with protesters in front of a line of police in riot gear. At least one of the masked men is holding a rock in his hand. Late Tuesday, photographs taken by another protester surfaced, showing the trio lying prone on the ground. The photos show the soles of their boots adorned by yellow triangles. A police officer kneeling beside the men has an identical yellow triangle on the sole of his boot. Quebec provincial police admitted Thursday that their officers disguised themselves as demonstrators during the protests — via Boing Boing

National Geographic is reporting on a deep-sea expedition in the North Atlantic where a team of 31 scientists have discovered new and rare marine animals, including a Jewel Squid (Histioteuthis) and Glass Squid — via Squid

Redheads are becoming rarer and could be extinct in 100 years. Less than two per cent of the world's population has natural red hair, created by a mutation in northern Europe thousands of years ago. Global intermingling, which broadens the availability of possible partners, has reduced the chances of redheads meeting and producing little redheads of their own. It takes only one red-haired parent to produce ginger-headed babies, but two redheads obviously create a much stronger possibility. If the redheads really want to save themselves they should move to Scotland. An estimated 40 per cent of Scots carry the red gene and 13 per cent actually have red hair

23 August 2007

Seagate Technology, best known as a maker of magnetic hard drives, plans to make storage components based on flash memory as well. Seagate's decision is a significant turning point in the religious war in the storage market. The flash versus magnetic debate has been issue number one in the storage world for the past two years

Brazil's government has promised to investigate allegations that its policy of settling landless communities in the Amazon is encouraging deforestation. Greenpeace has claimed that some of these areas are being exploited by logging companies, after what it says was an eight-month investigation. Brazil's environment ministry says deforestation in those areas is falling but it will investigate the claims. The government says land distribution to the poor is an important objective. But Greenpeace says the implementation of the policy is encouraging uncontrolled logging and deforestation in some parts of the Amazon

Experts expect an announcement within three to ten years from someone in the now little-known field of wet artificial life. That first cell of synthetic life — made from the basic chemicals in DNA — may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you'll have to look in a microscope to see it — via Warren Ellis

22 August 2007

Wal-Mart has hopped on the DRM-free bandwagon with the announcement that it will be participating in Universal's DRM-free sales pilot. The quality looks good: 256Kbps MP3 for 94 cents apiece, but customers are likely to be turned off by the retail chain's continued censorship — via Slashdot

Mutant frogs with gold skin and red eyes were reportedly found by school children in Shimanto, Japan. They're now on display at the Shimanto River Gakuyukan science centre. According to a centre spokesperson who says the golden specimens are highly unusual, the 2.4cm amphibians appear to be black-spotted pond frogs whose skin turned gold because of an albino mutation that prevents the formation of pigment cells — Boing Boing

John Stottlemire found a way to print duplicate coupons from Coupons.com by deleting some files and registry entires on his PC. Now he's being sued for a DMCA violation. He says, All I did was erase files or registry keys. Says a lawyer: [The DMCA] may cover this. I think it does give companies a lot of leverage and a lot of power. So now the copyright cartels are saying that not only can we not copy things on our computers, but we can't delete things on our computers? — Slashdot

21 August 2007

Video Ezy is planning to release an electronic movie rental box in time for Christmas in an attempt to hold off online competition. Video Ezy has ordered 10,000 home media centres from data communications producer Mobilesoft, at a cost of $4.5 million. The centres will underpin its electronic rental service. Customers will use the centres to play movies they have downloaded on portable storage devices in a store. Portable storage devices will be used to download files from in Video Ezy stores, and they can be watched on the media centres

A two day outage that left millions of Skype users unable to use the internet phone service was caused by an abnormally high number of restarts after people had downloaded a Windows security update. In an update to users on Skype's Heartbeat blog, employee Villu Arak said the disruption was not because of hackers or any other malicious activity. Instead, he said that the disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users' computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update. As Windows updates are a regular occurence, it seems odd that this would be the cause of the problem

Pay TV sales company Multi Channel Network has cast doubt on the future of the digital video-recording platform TiVo, which is backed by the Seven Network, telling advertisers the venture may never get off the ground. Rob Leach, head of MCN's interactive television division and formerly of British pay-TV company BSkyB, said TiVo had bombed in Britain after proving to be a difficult product to market partly due to high set-top box costs. The comments come after media buyers denied a report last week that 20 advertisers had paid $1 million to participate in interactive advertising trials on the TiVo platform

20 August 2007

The US Army recently unveiled a new hybrid-electric propulsion system for use in a new line of manned ground vehicles (MGVs). The new line will have eight different variants, all using the same chassis. The unique feature of the new MGVs is that the traditional engine has been decoupled from the drive train and is used only to recharge the battery and power other systems within the vehicle

Four journalists and one of their family members are suing Hewlett-Packard for obtaining their personal phone records. The journalists filed lawsuits in California this week. They claim that HP invaded their privacy. HP acknowledged in a US Securities and Exchange Commission filing last year that it investigated journalists in order to find out who, inside the company, had been leaking information to the press. The actions of HP board members and contractors led to congressional hearings about pretexting, the use of deception to obtain confidential and detailed phone records. They also led to the resignations of Board Chairperson Patricia Dunn and lawyer and ethics chief Kevin Hunsaker

Two years after announcing a somewhat vague software-distribution partnership, Google and Sun Microsystems have clarified their tactics for jointly attacking Microsoft and its ubiquitous Office software. Google has quietly begun including Sun's StarOffice suite of word processing, spreadsheets and other workplace-oriented programs for free as part of the Google Pack download

19 August 2007

A web site is aiming at blocking Firefox users. This because a fraction of the Firefox users installed an Ad Blocker and are therefor stealing money from web site owners that use ads. They recommend using IE, Opera or IE tab. From the site: Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers. The site is owned by a loony fundie by the name of Danny Carlton, so we know intelligence was a big part of his cunning plan — via Slashdot

Neuroscientists have discovered that long-term memories are not etched in a stable form, like a clay tablet, as once thought. The process is much more dynamic, involving a miniature molecular machine that must run constantly to keep memories going. Jamming the machine briefly can erase long-term memories

It's a battery that looks like a piece of paper and can be bent or twisted, trimmed with scissors or moulded into any shape needed. While the battery is now only a prototype, the researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who developed it have high hopes for it in electronics and other fields that need smaller, lighter power sources. Unlike other batteries, Prof Linhardt explained, it is an integrated device, not a combination of pieces. The battery uses paper infused with an electrolyte and carbon nanotubes that are embedded in the paper. The carbon nanotubes form the electrodes, the paper is the separator and the electrolyte allows the current to flow

18 August 2007

When implanted in the eye, mini-telescopes could help aging individuals with macular degeneration, a disorder of the retina affecting more than 1.75 million people in the United States alone. The implant was a huge help for two thirds of more than 200 patients who participated in a recent clinical trial. The developers of the technology, VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies, hope that FDA approval for the mini-scope is imminent — via Boing Boing

Andy Brice, a UK-based software developer, packaged up a little text file full of the words This software does nothing as an EXE and named it awardmestars. So far his self-proclaiming useless program has garnered sixteen 5-star awards from download sites he submitted it to. Brice concludes that many of the download sites are just electronic dung heaps, using fake awards, dubious SEO and content misappropriated from PAD files in a pathetic attempt to make a few dollars from Google Adwords — via Slashdot

Amnesty International has confirmed its controversial decision to back abortion in some circumstances, replacing its previous policy of neutrality. The human rights group will campaign for woman to have access to abortion in cases including rape and incest. The initial decision was taken in April, but Amnesty delegates meeting in Mexico gave it overwhelming support. Christian organisations, including the Roman Catholic Church, have threatened to withdraw support from the group

17 August 2007

A paper published by UCF researchers claims that bad movie physics hurt students' understanding of real world physics. Some people really do believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway, as depicted in the movie Speed. The professors published this paper out of fear that society will pay the price. One of the authors commented on advancements in the past years All the luxuries we have today, the modern conveniences, are a result of the science research that went on in the '60s during the space race. It didn't just happen. It took people doing hard science to do it — via Slashdot

A Russian court has found the former boss of www.allofmp3.com not guilty of breaching copyright, in a case considered a crucial test of Russia's commitment to fighting piracy. The allofmp3.com web site angered Western music companies by undercutting the price of downloads in deals they said breached copyright law. Denis Kvasov, head of MediaServices which owned the site, was put on trial after entertainment companies EMI Group, NBC Universal and Time Warner pressed for a prosecution

Canberra telco TransACT will be deploying fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) in the city from this month, with more FTTH tenders on the table. TransACT will switch on its fibre-to-the-home network on a test basis, with the service set to go live officially at the end of the month. The fibre network will be used in a new development in Forde, in the Gungahlin district of Canberra, and is expected to cover up to 1500 users within the next three years. As well as free-to-air TV and video on demand, residents of Forde will be offered a choice between two broadband packages using the fibre network — a 10Mbps/2Mbps, for mum and dad users, and a 30Mbps/10Mbps, aimed at power users and businesspeople working from home

16 August 2007

The future of iPlayer, the BBC's new online on-demand system for delivering content, is continuing to look bleaker. With ISPs threatening to throttle the content delivered through the iPlayer, consumers petitioning the UK government and the BBC to drop the DRM and Microsoft-only technology, and threatened legal action from the OSC, the last thing the BBC wanted to see today was street protests at their office and at the BBC Media Complex accompanied by a report issued by DefectiveByDesign about their association with Microsoft — via Slashdot

Minuscule wind engines could help to take computing power to the next level. US researchers have developed a prototype device that creates a breeze made up of charged particles, or ions, to cool computer chips. The ionic wind, the scientists say, will help to manage the heat generated by increasingly powerful, yet ever-shrinking devices

Multiple sclerosis is a serious, as-yet incurable neurological disease which causes blindness, paralysis and other serious symptoms. In a new development, a neuroimmunology researcher in Montreal has developed a therapeutic DNA vaccine. The cause of the disease is not fully understood, but it appears to be auto-immune

Google is shutting down a service that sold and rented online video, ending a 19-month experiment doomed by the proliferation of free clips on other web sites like Google's own YouTube subsidiary. The decision, confirmed late on Friday, underscores Google's intention to concentrate its financial muscle and brainpower on developing an advertising format to capitalise on the immense popularity of online video. YouTube, which Google bought last year for $US1.76 billion, is expected to be the focal point of the company's expansion into video advertising. Google executives hope to settle on an effective advertising system for video ads by the end of this year

15 August 2007

An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries. Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency's computers made edits to the page of Iran's president. It also purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. The tool trawls a list of 5.3m edits and matches them to the net address of the editor. Most of the edits detected by the scanner correct spelling mistakes or factual inaccuracies in profiles. However, others have been used to remove potentially damaging material or to deface sites

Much of Sydney's CBD as it appears in the satellite images on Google Maps Australia has been fuzzed out, just weeks before the APEC summit. Google says the imagery was downgraded as a result of a commercial issue with a supplier, but the move has aroused speculation it was done at the request of police in order to minimise the risk of a terrorist attack during the September summit, where Sydney will play host to 21 world leaders including Bush

A Japanese biker failed to notice his leg had been severed below the knee when he hit a safety barrier, and rode on for 2km, leaving a friend to pick up the limb. The 54-year-old office worker was out on his motorcycle with a group of friends in the city of Hamamatsu, west of Tokyo, yesterday, when he was unable to negotiate a curve in the road and bumped into the central barrier. He felt excruciating pain, but did not notice that his right leg was missing until he stopped at the next junction

14 August 2007

Federal district judge Dale Kimball issued a ruling on Friday declaring that Novell owns the UNIX copyrights. Kimball's ruling means that the end is near for SCO's protracted litigation trainwreck, an epic assortment of lawsuits that have achieved infamy in the tech industry. Judge Kimball finds that Novell never transferred ownership of the UNIX copyrights to SCO during or after a 1995 agreement between the two companies

The NSA wants automatic surveillance capabilities in telephone switches. But once such capabilities are built in, others could use them to intercept communications. Within ten0 years this could render the US vulnerable to attacks from terrorist groups across the globe, as well as from the military establishments of other nations. Such threats are not theoretical: In April 2004, phones belonging to members of the Greek government, including the prime minister, were spied on with wiretapping software that was misused — via Slashdot

Toshiba is recalling potentially dangerous notebook batteries for the third month in a row due to concerns about potential overheating. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) said 1,400 of the lithium-ion batteries containing Sony-made cells sold with Toshiba laptops pose a fire hazard. There have been three reports of models with those batteries overheating in other countries, but none of the incidents caused injury, according to the CPSC. Models affected by the recall include Toshiba's Satellite A100, Satellite A105 and Tecra A7. Customers whose notebook was made between January through June 2006 are eligible for a free replacement battery from the company by going to Toshiba's battery replacement Web site

13 August 2007

Forgent Networks, a patent troll, got the slap down by a TX jury in May when it invalidated a patent Forgent held regarding video teleconferencing over telephone lines, and today, its motion for a new trial against EchoStar was denied. In fact, the court awarded EchoStar $90k in costs. Forgent probably isn't crying that much though, it already extorted $28m from other defendants. Forgent made a business out of cheating companies for jpeg use — 'til their patent was largely invalidated on that front as well — via Slashdot

Chronos Chromos Concrete is a system that is able to dynamically display patterns, numbers and text in concrete surfaces. Application could include anything from products for the home to large scale architectural installations

Apple isn't just sitting on the sidelines as startups like iLike and MOG and others try to tackle the social music space. Apple has launched My ITunes, a set of widgets that may be a first step in taking their fair share of the social music market

12 August 2007

Add gBox to the growing list of online music services hoping to chip away at iTunes's dominance. The startup was forced out of a stealth mode when Universal announced it would test sales of some digital music without the customary copy-protection technology. Google will get standard advertising fees rather than a cut of sales under the arrangement

Oregon Health & Science University researchers have figured out how to turn a mouse into a factory for human liver cells that can be used to test how pharmaceuticals are metabolised. The technique could soon become the gold standard not only for examining drug metabolism in the liver, which helps scientists determine a drug's toxicity, but also can be used as a platform for testing new therapies against infectious diseases that attack the liver, such as hepatitis C and malaria

11 August 2007

Google has begun selling expanded online storage, targeted for users with large picture, music or video file collections. The prices range from $20 per year for 6 gigabytes of online storage; $75 per year for 25 gigabytes of storage; $250 per year for 100 gigabytes of storage; and $500 per year for 250 gigabytes of storage. According to the company's official blog, the storage can be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa; Gmail, a Google email application; and Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google's office applications

ISPs will be forced to filter web content at the request of parents, under a $189 million Federal Government crackdown on online bad language, pornography and child sex predators. The Prime Minister, John Howard, said that the Government would increase funding for the federal police online child sex exploitation team by $40 million, helping investigators to track those who prey on children through chat rooms and sites such as MySpace and Facebook. In a separate development, convicted sex offenders in NSW will have to register their email address with police as part of State Government efforts to stop them using the internet to prey on children

10 August 2007

Some Gmail users have seen their storage bumped to over 9GB — 9030MB, to be exact. If not a glitch, it means Google is playing catch-up with Yahoo, which now provides unlimited storage. With no other info, we can only assume the accounts are currently being selected at random

Universal Music have announced that they're going to try selling much of their catalogue without DRM from now until January. People who don't want to pay for music just download it from P2P, where all the music is already available for free, without DRM. If you want to convince people to buy your music, you can't start by making it worse than the free stuff. So it's inevitable that Universal would come around to this position. They're not selling DRM-free tracks through iTunes (where Apple charges a 30 percent premium) — they're selling them through Apple's competitors — via Slashdot

09 August 2007

Medical firm Johnson & Johnson is suing the American Red Cross, alleging the charity has misused the famous red cross symbol for commercial purposes. J&J said a deal with the charity's founder in 1895 gave it the exclusive use of the symbol as a trademark for drug, chemical and surgical products. It said American Red Cross had violated this agreement by licensing the symbol to other firms to sell certain goods. The charity described the lawsuit as obscene. It said many of the products at issue were health and safety kits and that profits from their sale had been used to support disaster-relief campaigns — via Ben Templesmith

The Australian coffee industry is furious at news that coffee giant Nestle is trying to get the exclusive rights to images of coffee in a coffee mug. It is just the latest high profile company to try to claim a common image. Recently there has been a legal battle between Cadbury and Darrell Lea over the colour purple, and Toyota has been considering action against Jetstar over the jumping used in the airline's advertising. The Nestle move has infuriated coffee traders and sellers — via Ben Templesmith

In a big win for TV viewers around the country, independent EPG provider IceTV has won their eight month battle against Channel Nine. This morning Justice Annabelle Bennett ruled in favour of IceTV that their EPG does not infringe Nine's copyright in their television schedule. The entire Nine Network case was dismissed, with IceTV declared an independent compilation built wholly by their own means

08 August 2007

Beginning this week, Google News will start posting user comments, but only from people actually featured in news stories. Newspapers that were unhappy about Google News using snippets of their articles will probably be even less pleased to see the new feature deployed, since Google could become an even more formidable player when it starts hosting original content. People or organisations that are mentioned in news stories can submit comments to the Google News team, which will then display those comments — unedited — alongside the Google News links to those stories. The new system will at first be deployed only within the US, but Google is open to expanding it to other regions if the trial goes well

A security expert hired by eleven Oklahoma State University students picked apart the testimony of the RIAA's own expert witness, pointing out the oversimplifications made by the RIAA in its lawsuits against suspected file-sharers

Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists. In earlier work the same team of theoretical physicists showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible. Now, in another report that sounds like it comes out of the pages of a Harry Potter book, the University of St Andrews team has created an incredible levitation effects by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together. Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts. Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person

07 August 2007

HTML 5 introduces new elements for the first time since the last millennium. New structural elements include aside, figure, and section. New inline elements include time, meter, and progress. New embedding elements include video and audio. New interactive elements include details, datagrid and command

DARPA, the Pentagon's way-out science arm, wants to make soldiers stronger, faster and generally kill proof. The key, the agency believes: Getting humans to act more like animals. The project has two main thrusts. The first is to enable soldiers to work better in extremes — high altitudes, brutal heat, and undersea depths. In each of these conditions, there are animals that handle these environments well. The second thrust is to make soldiers kill proof. Chemical and radiological dumps sites are actually teeming with life — filled with organisms that resist what's toxic to most. DARPA wants to mimic that, by creating a set of synthetic vitamins that forestal the onset of chemical and radiation poisoning

Caffeine may help older women ward off mental decline, research suggests. French researchers compared women aged 65 and older who drank more than three cups of coffee per day with those who drank one cup or less per day. Those who drank more caffeine showed less decline in memory tests over a four year period. The study, published in the journal Neurology, raises the possibility that caffeine may even protect against the development of dementia. The results held up even after factors such as education, high blood pressure and disease were taken into account

06 August 2007

Terrorists and other criminals could exploit a newly discovered software flaw to hijack massive computer systems used to control critical infrastructure like oil refineries, power plants and factories. Ganesh Devarajan, a security researcher with TippingPoint, demonstrated the software vulnerability he uncovered to attendees at the Defcon hacker conference on computer security

Social networking web sites such as MySpace.com are increasingly juicy targets for computer hackers, who are demonstrating a pair of vulnerabilities they claim expose sensitive personal information and could be exploited by online criminals. The flaws were demonstrated at the Black Hat and Defcon hacker conferences

05 August 2007

One of the largest surveys of music consumers (PDF: 2007 Digital Music Survey) to closely examine the question of DRM has an important two-part message for the music industry. The first is that DRM is definitely turning consumers off music sales, and charging them extra to get rid of it may be an uphill battle. The second message is that knowledge of DRM and its problems is spreading fast

Adium have noticed that there seems to be quite a bit of censorship on MSN. Essentially, a number of suspicious strings result in silent failure of delivery. The strings are unsurprisingly things like .scr and .info. They've started maintaining a list if you're interested

04 August 2007

NEC and Hitachi are teaming up on a liquid cooling system for hard drives. The goal is to cut down on noise levels while providing more efficient cooling. 'Hitachi and NEC are developing the water-cooled hard drive systems for desktop computers mainly to reduce noise levels to 25 decibels, 5 decibels quieter than a whisper. To do this, NEC and Hitachi actually wrap the hard drive in noise absorbing material and vibration insulation — via Slashdot

Amazon is announcing the launch of another web service that should appeal to developers. The previously rumoured Flexible Payments Service provides everything developers need to set up payments on their sites, far more so than the Paypal API — from one-time to recurring transactions, transactions limited by date, by the amount and much more

Elton John is whining that the internet is destroying good music and stopping people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff. He laments the way that the internet and the emerging industry of digital music has created a cold and impersonal world for artists to create new music in. Poor Diddums

03 August 2007

Microsoft has announced plans to pre-install an ad-laden version of Works on some manufacturers' PCs in coming months. Works is Microsoft's lightweight docs-and-spreadsheets software. The manufacturers involved were not disclosed. The adware Works will come with a pre-installed cache of ads that will be refreshed when the machine is online. Microsoft will decide by mid-2008 whether it can afford to forgo the $40 normally charged for Works

So, you get arrested for running an illegal online pharmacy and the judge orders you to stop selling medication over the Internet. Don't sit around and do nothing before the trial. Run off to the Dominican Republic on a false passport, withdraw money from an account ordered frozen, and start up another online pharmacy. It didn't end well for 27-year old Christopher William Smith, also known as Rizler. The world-reviled spammer and Internet drug dispenser received a 30-year sentence from a federal judge — Slashdot

02 August 2007

Ask someone to name a website and it's a virtual certainly they will say something ending with dot com: Amazon.com, eBay.com, Facebook.com, it doesn't matter what, it's the same suffix. Dotcom is the internet for most people. But that may all change next year when the top level of the net — the part after the dot — is liberalised. From 2008, anyone wanting their own piece of the internet is welcome to apply for it. It won't be cheap (there will an application fee of around $100,000) and it won't be simple (you have to prove you are capable of running a complex piece of the net's infrastructure) — but it could mean a change in the way the online world works

Dismissing a defamation suit brought by the inventor of DOS against a British writer, a judge has left unchallenged computer industry lore that holds the operating system Microsoft licensed to IBM in the 1980s — thereby launching Bill Gates' multibillion dollar software empire — was a knock off. In a book on American innovation, author Sir Harold Evans wrote that DOS inventor Tim Paterson relied heavily on an existing OS called CP/M (Control Program/Monitor) created by a programmer, Gary Kildall, who has since died. Microsoft in 1980 struck a licensing deal with Paterson's company — Seattle Computer Products — to obtain access to DOS and resell it to IBM

Researchers from the National University of Singapore, have recently developed a new way to make artificial bone from mineralised collagen. For some time scientists have tried to make nanosized artificial bone materials using various methods, And have recently turned their attention to mineralised collagen, a nanoapatite/collagen composite. This material is highly biocompatible and has the nanostructure of artificial bone. It could be used in bone grafts and bone-tissue engineering, among other applications — via Slashdot

01 August 2007

Air New Zealand and airliner manufacturer Boeing are secretly working with Blenheim-based biofuel developer Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation to create the world's first environmentally friendly aviation fuel, made of wild algae. The fuel is essentially derived from bacterial pond scum created through the photosynthesis of sunlight and carbon dioxide on nutrient-rich water sources such as sewage ponds

The New York Public Library has just installed an Espresso book-on-demand machine and they'll print 20 public domain titles from the Open Content Alliance free of charge for any patron — via Boing Boing

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