September 2008 Archive

30 September 2008

A pair of alleged scammers who made millions from unsuspecting Internet users have been outed, resulting in the disappearance of all their scam sites. Matt and Jake Dylewski infamously ran fullreleases.com, which sold monthly subscriptions in exchange for standard search results from popular torrent sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay

The much-troubled Iridium, the part-Australian owned company that operates a fleet of 66 satellites delivering wireless mobile services across the world, is planning to send up a new satellite network. Hopefully they'll provide a better service than the current one, which has its share of problems. To be fair, in Australia as elsewhere it does offer mobile phone services in remote areas no other service can reach, such as drilling rigs, deep sea fishing boats and surveying teams deep in the Tanami Desert of the Northern Territory

A glitch in Hutchison 3 Mobile's internet service has left some of its mobile broadband customers in four major capitals struggling to use some of the most popular sites on the web. The problem began to emerge after the carrier started issuing customers with a new set of IP addresses about a week ago

29 September 2008

O3B Networks has been quietly preparing itself over the last 12 months for the moment last week when it announced that it was going to be offering cheap, low latency satellite bandwidth that can cover any part of Africa by 2010. It has put in place early finance with Google, Liberty Global and HSBC

Blind-rights activists had noticed that blind people couldn't independently access iTunes or the iTunes U service. Jim Denham, the assistive technology coordinator at the Perkins School for the Blind, is looking forward to spending this rainy weekend, at home, on his computer. Thanks to a technological advance, Denham, who is blind, can sit at home by himself and browse among the thousands of audio books, podcasts and albums digitally stored on Apple's iTunes

28 September 2008

Oscar-winning film legend Paul Newman has died of cancer at the age of 83. The star of movies like Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid died in his Connecticut home on Friday, surrounded by family and close friends. A statement from Newman's family said: His death was as private and discreet as the way he had lived his life

Crimtrac's planned automatic number plate recognition system could become a mass surveillance system, taking as many as 70 million photos of cars and drivers every day across a vast network of roadside cameras. State and federal police forces want full-frontal images of vehicles, including the driver and front passenger, that are clear enough for identification purposes and usable as evidence in court

KDDI will launch a fibre-optic communications service with upload and download speeds each of up to one gigabit per secondon 1 October. The new service will target people living in single-family homes and low-rise apartment buildings. The traffic speeds will be the fastest in eastern Japan, up drastically from the current 100 megabits per second

27 September 2008

Google are putting forward a $10 million fund to help develop ideas from members of the public that will help to make the world a better place. This week, as part of their tenth birthday celebrations, Google have announce the launch of project 10^100 (ten to the 100th), an innovative scheme designed to inspire and fund the development of ideas that will help to change the world

To infinity and beyond. But first, Kent. Daredevil Swiss pilot Yves Rossy soared into the record books yesterday by making the first solo flight across the English Channel — using a single, homemade rocket-powered wing strapped to his back

Due to reasons yet to be determined, the web site of the World Wide Web Consortium, w3.org/w3c.org, is being filtered as child pornography by the Finnish ISP, DNA Internet

Google Translate added 11 new languages: Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Google's machine translation service now supports 35 languages and you can use it to translate text between any combination of languages

26 September 2008

For many blind or partially sighted people, implants that stimulate healthy nerve cells connected to their retinas could help restore some normal vision. Researchers have been working on such implants since the 1980s but with only limited success. A major hurdle is making an implant that can stay in the eye for years without declining in performance or causing inflammation. Now researchers with the Boston Retinal Implant Project, which was spun out of MIT, Harvard Medical School, and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in 1988, have developed hardware they say overcomes such issues. The implants have been tested in animals, and the group plans to start human trials by 2010

The Pirate Bay has successfully appealed the decision of an Italian judge who had ordered ISPs to block access to the popular BitTorrent tracker last month. The Court of Bergamo decided that this block was unlawful, and that Italian users should regain access to the site

Australian news aggregator Plugger.com.au will re-brand as Wotnews.com.au following a licensing and investment deal with high-profile Wotif.com founder and local multi-millionaire Graeme Wood

25 September 2008

Dozens of phone calls and emails today made one thing clear: none of Australia's telcos or handset manufacturers has briefed their staff on when mobile phones running Google's Android will be made available locally, if they are at all

It will soon be easier to switch your business to another bank, with the Australian Payments Clearing Association confirming financial institutions will be able to supply customers' direct debit and credit arrangements by 1 November. The listing and switching service is part of a Labor Government reform package aimed at promoting competition announced in February

The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva will be shut off until spring 2009 while engineers probe a magnet failure. The incident on 19 September caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak out into the experiment's 27km-long tunnel. Officials said the time required to fully investigate the problem precluded a re-start before the lab's winter maintenance period

Oracle, the world's No 3 software maker is teaming up with Hewlett-Packard to sell powerful, specialised computers that companies use to analyse data on their business activities. The move, which Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison announced yesterday, will expand Oracle's footprint in the hardware business and put pressure on smaller players Teradata and Netezza, which specialise in selling those devices, known as data warehouse appliances

24 September 2008

The first mobile phone powered by Google has launched, ready to do battle with Apple's iPhone for the top spot on tech addicts' Christmas gift lists. It goes on sale in the US next month, and is expected to arrive in British stores by early November. The arrival of Android signals the opening round of a battle between Google and rivals including Apple, Microsoft and Nokia to create the software that powers the next generation of internet-enabled mobile phones

SecureWorks published the locations of the computers, from which the greatest number of cyber attacks were attempted against its clients in 2008. The United States topped the list with 20.6 million attempted attacks originating from computers within the country and China ran second with 7.7 million attempted attacks emanating from computers within its borders. This was followed by Brazil with over 166,987 attempted attacks, South Korea with 162,289, Poland with 153,205, Japan with 142,346, Russia with 130,572, Taiwan with 124,997, Germany with 110,493, and Canada with 107,483

The lifeline linking notorious service provider Intercage to the rest of the Internet has been severed. Intercage, which has also done business under the name Atrivo, was knocked offline late Saturday night when the last upstream provider connecting it to the Internet's backbone, Pacific Internet Exchange, terminated Intercage's service. Intercage president Emil Kacperski said Pacific did not tell him why his company had been knocked offline, but he believes it was in response to pressure from Spamhaus, a volunteer-run antispam group, which has been highly critical of Intercage's business practices — via Slashdot

Vodafone today launched Australia's first unlimited music download service, allowing customers to access as many songs as they like for $2.75 a week. The subscription can be switched off at any time with one button on the handset but all tracks are then disabled until the user resumes paying the fees

23 September 2008

The Virginia Supreme Court declared the state's anti-spam law unconstitutional Friday and reversed the conviction of a man once considered one of the world's most prolific spammers. The court unanimously agreed with Jeremy Jaynes' argument that the law violates the free-speech protections of the First Amendment because it does not just restrict commercial e-mails. Most other states also have anti-spam laws, and there is a federal CAN-SPAM Act as well. The Virginia law is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, Justice G Steven Agee wrote

Microsoft has decided that Windows 7 won't include built-in programs for e-mail, photo editing, and movie making, as was done with Windows Vista. The software maker included Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, and Windows Movie Maker as part of Vista, but later chose to offer separate downloadable Windows Live programs that essentially replaced those components with versions that could connect to online services from Microsoft and others. Microsoft told CNET News late Monday that it has decided to remove those features entirely from Windows 7 and instead offer only the service-connected Windows Live versions as optional free downloads

22 September 2008

The email accounts of Internode users were stranded over the weekend as the internet service provider battled a major storage infrastructure failure and was forced to fall back to its disaster recovery centre to restore lost services

Yahoo Mail isn't the only Web-based mail service that could be duped into giving up someone else's account password, the tactic that some have argued was used to break into Governor Sarah Palin's e-mail earlier this week. Google's Gmail, Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo's Mail all rely on automated password reset mechanisms that can be abused by knowing a username associated with an account and an Computerworld reporters and editors were able to break into their own and colleagues' accounts on all three services, then reset passwords armed only with the account's username and the correct response to one of a limited number of common security questions, such as mother's maiden name, the name of a favorite pet or the make of a first car

21 September 2008

Two leading dissident Burmese websites have been shut down by a sophisticated cyber attack believed to have been initiated by the military junta a day before the first anniversary of Burma's so-called Saffron Revolution. The web sites, run by the Democratic Voice of Burma and The Irrawaddy news magazine, are operated by exiles in Norway and Thailand respectively. Both were disabled on Wednesday. Inside Burma, internet services were reportedly running slowly, suggesting an attempt by the regime to stem the flow of information in and out of the country at such a sensitive time

Gmail users may have noticed a recent spike in spam clogging their inbox, but Google says it has fixed the problem. For the second time in as many months Gmail users saw a sudden increase in spam, and they reported the issue in the webmail service's official discussion forum in recent days. On Thursday, a Google employee named Sarah chimed in by posting to the main thread devoted to this topic to say that the complaints were well-founded and had pointed Google toward a solution

Two digital rights advocacy groups have filed a lawsuit against the Office of the US Trade Representative in an attempt to get the office to turn over information about a secret international treaty being negotiated to step up cross-border enforcement of copyright and piracy laws. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge filed the lawsuit Wednesday after USTR ignored their repeated requests to turn over information about the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

20 September 2008

Plans to begin smashing particles at the Large Hadron Collider may be delayed after a magnet failure forced engineers to halt work. The failure, known as a quench, caused some of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100 degrees. The fire brigade were called out after a tonne of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel at Cern, near Geneva

A court has ruled that a site providing links to P2P downloads is operating legally. The Provincial Court of Madrid ruled that Sharemula.com, a site offering eDonkey links to movies, music, software and games does not break the law. The court's decision is final and cannot be appealed

Google and General Electric said on Wednesday that they would work together on technology and policy initiatives to promote the development of additional capacity in the electricity grid and of smart grid technologies to enable plug-in hybrids and to manage energy more efficiently. The companies said their goal was to make renewable energy more accessible and useful

With the addition of enterprise instant messaging pioneer Jabber, Cisco Systems bolsters what it calls its presence product portfolio and makes no bones about its overall goal: to become No. 1 in the unified communication/collaboration business

19 September 2008

Researchers at Cern have confirmed that the Large Hadron Collider managed only a few hours of operation before being shut down. The multi-billion dollar apparatus went live on 10 September and beams were sent around the 27km underground acceleration ring successfully. However, a large transformer failed a few hours into testing and has had to be replaced

The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency and other government agencies today on behalf of AT&T customers to stop the illegal, unconstitutional and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records. The five individual plaintiffs are also suing President George W Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, former Attorney General and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and other individuals who ordered or participated in the warrantless domestic surveillance

Amazon is readying a Content Delivery Network to compete with the likes of industry veterans Akamai Technologies and Limelight Networks. It's another step toward cloud computing

Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have achieved a breakthrough in the use of a one-atom thick structure called graphene as a new carbon-based material for storing electrical charge in ultracapacitor devices, perhaps paving the way for the massive installation of renewable energies such as wind and solar power

18 September 2008

Samsung Electronics, the South Korean consumer electronics giant, has made an unsolicited $5.85 billion cash offer for SanDisk, a Silicon Valley maker of flash memory cards that are critical components of popular devices like MP3 music players and digital cameras

Angus & Robertson today became the first Australian book chain to install the Espresso Book Machine, capable of printing, trimming and binding a paperback book on demand within minutes. Shoppers will initially be able to choose from several hundred out-of-print or difficult to get hold of books, but Angus & Robertson said the range would expand daily, reaching 10,000 within 18 months. They would cost the same as the current shelf price of paperbacks or less, the retailer said

Internet surfers will be able to walk through their favourite web sites as if they are characters in a computer game with the launch of one of the first 3D browsers in Australia today. Melbourne-based software developer ExitReality has created software that can be quickly downloaded to computers and that converts standard two-dimensional web pages into virtual rooms. Individual web users are then shown as avatars (virtual people) in the same way as people are featured in virtual games

17 September 2008

aaNet and TPG have both tweaked their ADSL plans, offering more quota at most price points

T-Mobile USA plans to begin selling the first smart phone powered by Google's new mobile software late next month, according to people familiar with the matter, facing off against Apple's iPhone and Research In Motion's BlackBerry with a device that blends aspects of both. While some wireless companies working with Google's Android mobile software have hit delays, the T-Mobile phone is coming out on schedule. Backers are optimistic Android-based handsets can take sales from rivals

In one more shock to a stunned Wall Street, Hewlett-Packard said it will cut more than 24,000 jobs over the next three years. The restructuring is expected to save about $1.8 billion a year

Can a city stop people from posting a link to its Web site? That's the question at the centre of a federal lawsuit brought by a Sheboygan woman against the mayor and other officials there, in what appears to be a first-of-its-kind case, according to an Internet law expert

16 September 2008

The website of popular magazine BusinessWeek has been attacked via SQL injection in an attempt to infect its readership with malware. Hundreds of pages in a section of BusinessWeek's website which offers information about where MBA students might find future employers have been affected — via Slashdot

The initiation of the World Wide Web Foundation has been launched with $5M of seed funding from the Knight Foundation. From the announcement: Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, unveils the World Wide Web Foundation. It aims to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand its capability and robustness, and to extend its benefits to all people on the planet — via Slashdot

Amazon's subsidiary the Internet Movie Database will allow users to watch feature films and TV shows for no charge on its web site, www.imdb.com. Over 6,000 titles will be available, including recent episodes of popular television shows like 24 and Heroes and classic films like Some Like It Hot

The use of nonclassified information, whether news accounts or other publicly retrievable information, is gaining credibility within the intelligence community. And officials say there can be good reasons for putting some of that open-source information under the secrecy umbrella. The information might be unclassified but our interest in it is not, General Michael Hayden, head of the CIA, told the conference

15 September 2008

Several industrialised countries, such as Great Britain, Spain, Australia and Italy, offer broadband speeds that on average are just below what is necessary to make good use of broadband applications, according to a study. These applications include watching videos on YouTube, video chatting and small file sharing. Sweden and The Netherlands have the best performing broadband internet connections in Europe, helped by investments in high-speed fiber-optic links and upgrades to cable TV networks, the study found

Scientists may soon shed light on a way to conquer superbugs with nanotechnology and a simple flip of a switch. A new type of paint for walls and ceilings may, when exposed to fluorescent light, be able to kill superbugs, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to preliminary studies led by Lucia Caballero from Manchester Metropolitan University in England. Many paints are infused with titanium dioxide for its brightening power. But when these particles are small, on the nanoscale of a billionth of a metre, they have more surface area exposed to light. As a result, they create a more reactive environment

14 September 2008

If you're a web developer looking forward to the new tools in HTML 5, the next generation of the language that powers the web, we have some bad news for you — you're going to waiting a while. Ian Hickson, the editor of the HTML 5 specification, recently outlined the time table for HTML 5 and, even assuming browser manufacturers embrace HTML 5 when it reaches the final draft stage, that puts HTML 5's widespread adoption at 2012. Worse, the final proposed recommendation won't be released until 2022

Scientists have made the world's first synthetic tree: a palm-sized duplication of the elegant process by which trees drink. Known as transpiration, the hydration process appears to require no biological energy. Scientists theorise that as evaporation occurs on the surface of a tree's leaves, the resulting drop in water pressure propels water from the earth and through their bodies. The same principle pulls oil through the wick of a candle

13 September 2008

The IEEE working group that is putting the finishing touches on the 802.11n 100Mbps wireless LAN standard is about to launch a new project, for a 1Gbps WLAN standard. That would mean gigabit Wi-Fi

Greek hackers were able to gain momentary access to a CERN computer system of the Large Hadron Collider while the first particles were zipping around the particle accelerator on 10 September. Scientists working at CERN were worried about what the hackers could do because they were one step away from the computer control system of one of the huge detectors of the machine, a vast magnet that weighs 12,500 tons, measuring around 21m in length and 15m wide/high. If they had hacked into a second computer network, they could have turned off parts of the vast detector and, said the insider, it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it — via Slashdot

Keeping in step with rival Web browsers from Microsoft and Google, Mozilla has announced a privacy mode for Firefox 3.1. The update is scheduled to be released in beta form in October

SanDisk has announced a new, 32-gigabyte CompactFlash card that it said can record more than 80 minutes of high-definition video. Called the Extreme III CompactFlash card, it targets photographers

12 September 2008

A recently released study has claims that the current Intellectual Property situation in the world is not working well. Driven by a fear of losing out, and bolstered by an attitude that profit is the aim of IP, progress is hampered. Not only by the entertainment industry, also in biotechnology where medicines are sometimes restricted or withheld, causing deaths

The Federal Government has been urged to fund the full cost of university research, with a report warning that Australia's commitment to innovation is stalling development. The report received more than 700 submissions and has made 72 recommendations across a range of areas such as business and education. Report head Terry Cutler warns Australia's innovation system must must be urgently remodelled

Schools in South Australia have complained they are being short-changed under Kevin Rudd's education revolution, forcing them to buy cheaper laptops and spend up to 30 per cent of their grants on Microsoft licensing and government fees. South Australian public schools are paying $250 for licensing fees for each new computer and a $40 state government administration fee. They also pay $6 a student to cover existing licenses. Replacement computers do not attract the $250 fee. It is understood the NSW, Victorian and West Australian governments will absorb the licensing fees, passing the entire $1000 grant to schools

Tiny invertebrates called water bears can survive in the vacuum of space, a European Space Agency experiment has shown. They are the first animals known to be able to survive the harsh combination of low pressure and intense radiation found in space. Water bears, also known as tardigrades, are known for their virtual indestructibility on Earth. The creatures can survive intense pressures, huge doses of radiation, and years of being dried out

11 September 2008

Last night, physicists near Geneva switched on the largest, most powerful scientific tool ever built and the world did not vanish down a black hole, as alarmists had predicted. Instead, the $US8 billion ($9.9 billion) Large Hadron Collider successfully sent the first beam of protons — members of a group of subatomic particles called hadrons — hurtling around a 27km circular tunnel running beneath Switzerland and France. The event caused sighs of relief from more than 2000 scientists from 150 institutes in 45 countries, including Australia, who had waited 14 years for the moment

The federal Government's plan to implement content filters at the internet service provider level is one step closer to reality with live trials set to commence after next month. The Government will seek expressions of interest in the second half of October for ISPs to participate in live trials

Google will begin selling ads on some cable networks owned by NBC Universal in a new partnership that will expand Google's efforts to become a force in television advertising. Under the agreement, NBC Universal will make a relatively small amount of advertising time on networks like MSNBC, CNBC, Sci Fi and Oxygen available for sale through Google's TV Ads program in the coming months, the companies said. The partnership could later be extended to other NBC Universal properties

Scientists say an understanding of how the Twin Towers collapsed will help them develop the materials needed to build fusion reactors. New research shows how steel will fail at high temperatures because of the magnetic properties of the metal. The New York buildings fell when their steel backbones lost strength in the fires that followed the plane impacts. Dr Sergei Dudarev told the British Association Science Festival that improved steels were now being sought. The principal scientist at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) said one of the first applications for these better performing metals would be in the wall linings of fusion reactors where temperatures would be in a similar range to those experienced in the Twin Towers' fires

10 September 2008

Google this week said it would anonymise user data received through search requests entered in its search engine and Chrome browser. In response to concerns over privacy, the company announced on Monday in the UK that it would anonymise the data within 24 hours of it being gathered. Writing on the official Google blog, senior vice president of operations Urs Holzle also noted that the data was, in any case, of limited potential use to Google

Google is to halve the amount of time it stores users' personal search data in response to continued pressure from the EU over its privacy policy. The search giant has said it will anonymise identifiable IP addresses on its server logs after nine months

Google is helping develop a system to bring high-speed internet connections to three billion people developing countries in Africa and elsewhere. The 03b Networks system aims to use satellites to provide broadband services at the same speeds as those on offer in rich countries. The service, which is due to begin in 2010, is also backed by cable operator Liberty Global and the bank HSBC. It aims to tap into booming mobile phone usage in the developing world. It will target markets in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East

A team of biologists and chemists is closing in on bringing non-living matter to life. It's not as Frankensteinian as it sounds. Instead, a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life

09 September 2008

A bid to save Britain's computing heritage has been given a $100,000 (£57,000) boost by a joint donation from US hi-tech firms IBM and PGP. The donation will help curate and restore exhibits at the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Pa The two firms said they hoped the money would kick-start further donations from the technology industry to make up an estimated £7m needed to run the museum. Exhibits include Colossus, thought by many to be the world's first computer

Over a period of twelve hours, between this Thursday night and Friday morning, American Rights Counsel LLC sent out over 4000 bogus DMCA takedown notices to YouTube, all making copyright infringement claims against videos with content critical of the Church of Scientology. Clips included footage of Australian and German news reports about Scientology, A Message to Anonymous/Scientology, and footage from a Clearwater City Commission meeting. Many accounts were suspended by YouTube in response to multiple allegations of copyright infringement. YouTube has yet to comment on the issue, and many of the accounts and videos pulled over the weekend have now been restored after those affected filed counter claims. However, the guilty-until-proven innocent method of dealing with notices like this may have to be re-evaluated. While filing a false DMCA notice is a criminal offense, prosecution in these cases rarely comes about

In its never-ending quest to organise the world's information, Google started to digitise old editions from newspapers like Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, St Petersburg Times, Today's News-Herald and make them available at Google News Archive

A giant statue of a Buddha has been discovered in central Afghanistan, near to the ruins of the world-famous Bamiyan Buddhas. Archaeologists say the 19m statue is in a sleeping position and dates back to the Third Century. Other relics such as coins and ceramics were also found. The Taleban blew up two giant standing Buddhas carved into the mountainside at Bamiyan — once a thriving centre of Buddhism — in 2001

08 September 2008

Sony Australia has issued a recall for over 4000 Vaio TZ series laptops that could potentially overheat or burn a user. The company said it recently discovered flaws with certain TZ series notebooks sold between May 2007 and July 2008

Apple has admitted that a British man played a part in developing the iconic and extremely profitable iPod, although he has so far received no money for his invention. In 1979 Kane Kramer from Hertfordshire filed a patent for a digital music player that stored just three and a half minutes of music to a solid state chip — limiting media options to just one short song. Nonetheless, a company was set up by Kramer to bring the IXI to a commercial release, but it slipped into the public domain in 1988 when the firm failed to raise the £60,000 needed to renew international patents. Because of this patent lapse, Kramer has received no money from the sale of any of the 163 million iPods Apple has so far sold. However, Apple recently contacted Kramer and hired him as a consultant in a legal case against another company that claimed the iPod infringed on its own patents, Burst

The mobile telephone records of Queensland motorists involved in serious crashes are being scrutinised, police have confirmed. It is to determine whether they were talking or texting at the time of the accident

Out of the 3 billion genetic letters that spell out the human genome, Yale scientists have found a handful that may have contributed to the evolutionary changes in human limbs that enabled us to manipulate tools and walk upright. Results from a comparative analysis of the human, chimpanzee, rhesus macaque and other genomes reported in the journal Science suggest our evolution may have been driven not only by sequence changes in genes, but by changes in areas of the genome once thought of as junk DNA

07 September 2008

An advanced electricity network, which uses distributed energy resources — local, low emission and renewable power — is the vision of a national, collaborative research cluster for Australia's future energy supply. The Intelligent Grid Cluster — officially launched in Sydney today by Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research — is a major collaborative research venture between the CSIRO and the university sector under the CSIRO Energy Transformed Flagship

US computer maker Dell is planning to sell its factories around the world to contract manufacturers within 18 months in a bid to save more than $US3 billion ($A3.7 billion) in costs. Most of the factories would be sold to manufacturers in low-cost Asian countries, who would then produce computers for the Texas-based company

06 September 2008

Samsung is eyeing a possible acquisition of memory chip-maker SanDisk. The company, which is the world's largest computer memory maker in the world, said it was considering various opportunities with regard to SanDisk but nothing has been decided yet

eBay has rolled out WorldofGood.com, a new online Green marketplace offering products that are made from recycled or natural materials. The site also allows shoppers to buy products built in developing nations. Thus, eBay said, the site has a positive impact on people and the planet

05 September 2008

Smartyhost, an Australian web hosting firm, has been adding Trojans to their clients websites for the past 6 months, potentially driving them off the web and out of business

It's the success story to beat all internet success stories. Ten years ago, on 7 September 1998, two young graduate students at Stanford University incorporated a company with the (then) odd-sounding name Google. Today, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are billionaires. Their company is hugely profitable; between April and June this year alone, it reported a turnover of $5.7bn (£3.2bn) and generated a net profit of $1.25bn (the first quarter was even more profitable). Not bad for a company that makes its money being a broker for and publisher of online advertising

Scientists have found that bumblebees learn from their near-death encounters with crab spiders and adapt their future foraging strategies. They watched real bees in an artificial meadow — containing yellow flowers and robotic crab spiders. Bees that had been captured spent longer inspecting flowers during subsequent foraging trips. They may outwit the spiders — but at the expense of valuable foraging time

The summer saw a surge in the number of hijacked home PCs or zombies, say security experts. The Shadowserver Foundation, which tracks zombie numbers worldwide, said it had seen at least a threefold increase in the last three months. More than 450,000 computers are now part of zombie networks, or botnets, run by hi-tech criminals, it said. The rise is believed to be linked to attacks that booby-trap web sites to try to infect the machines of visitors

04 September 2008

Criminals can remotely destroy incriminating evidence by exploiting security features on the Apple iPhone, a leading digital forensics expert has warned. The head of the Serious Fraud Office digital forensics unit Keith Foggon cautioned that the ability to remotely wipe the iPhone and other smart phones used by enterprises could be exploited by lawbreakers

California claims copyright to its laws, and warns people not to share them. And that's not sitting right with Internet gadfly, and open-access hero, Carl Malamud. He has spent the last couple months scanning tens of thousands of pages containing city, county and state laws -- think building codes, banking laws, etc. Malamud wants California to sue him, which is almost a given if the state wants to continue claiming copyright. He thinks a federal court will rule in his favor: It is illegal to copyright the law since people are required to know it. Malamud helped force the SEC to put corporate filings online in 1994, and did the same with the patent office. He got the Smithsonian to loosen its claim of copyright, CSPAN to stop forbidding people from sharing its videos, and most recently Oregon to quit claiming copyright on state laws — via Slashdot

Spammers are abusing free Web services to make their spam links look more legitimate, according to e-mail security vendor MessageLabs

03 September 2008

BBC Worldwide, Auntie's commercial arm, is developing a music download service, offering streamed for free and paid download works from its archive of music that bands have recorded for TV and radio in BBC studios. The Beeb's radio and television music shows frequently feature live sessions recorded at BBC HQ, often of current singles, acoustic versions of popular tracks, or cover versions of other artists' work. Radio 1's Live Lounge is a popular destination for pop artists, not to mention the John Peel Sessions. And don't forget the BBC has exclusive rights to broadcast Glastonbury

Perth-based internet service provider Westnet has started trialling ADSL2+ services using its new parent iiNet's broadband network, with a formal launch date likely to come before the end of the year

02 September 2008

Mozilla has extended its search deal with Google for another three years. In return for setting Google as the default search engine on Firefox, Google pays Mozilla a substantial sum — in 2006 the total amounted to around $57 million, or 85% of the company's total revenue. The deal was originally going to expire in 2006, but was later extended to 2008 and will now run through 2011

A well-known web site owner in one of Russia's most restive regions was shot to death after he was arrested by authorities on Sunday, according to Russian news reports. Magomed Yevloyev was whisked away by Russian Interior Ministry officials in Nazran, Ingushetia, shortly after he returned from a trip to Moscow. He was shot in the temple. Yevloyev ran a web site, focused on news from Ingushetia, an area sandwiched between Georgia's North Ossetia region to the west and Chechnya to the east. A court banned his Web site in August, calling it extremist

Oregon Health & Science University scientists have successfully produced functional auditory hair cells in the cochlea of the mouse inner ear. The breakthrough suggests that a new therapy may be developed in the future to successfully treat hearing loss

Employees are failing to properly archive e-mails, according to research, because they are often too busy or too unsure of their IT skills. Over 75% of employees said they received no guidance on the requirements and methods for e-mail storage, and more than a third said their company has no e-mail policy

01 September 2008

Google is developing a new web browser built from the ground up and based on WebKit, the same rendering engine that Safari uses. The browser, called Chrome, is open-source software built with security, compatibility and speed in mind. Each tab in the browser will be its own separate running process. For example, if JavaScript hangs in one tab, the other tabs will remain unaffected. The approach is similar to the way Mac OS X isolates applications in their own private areas to prevent one crash from taking down the whole system

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