Column of the Wolf

A daily mix of news covering technology, science, human rights, wolf news, stupid human tricks and many other topics.

26.06.2009

Apple Australia today confirmed it was directly selling unlocked iPhone 3GS devices in both the 16GB and 32GB models from its own outlets. The unlocked 16GB device will be sold at Apple stores for $879 while the 32GB model's price tag has been at $1040

After The Pirate Bay defendants lost a high-profile copyright infringement trial in Sweden, they charged that the judge belonged to pro-copyright groups and was therefore biased against them. A Court of Appeals ruling today disagrees; there will be no retrial

The Federal Government has now set its sights on gamers, promising to use its internet censorship regime to block web sites hosting and selling video games that are not suitable for 15 year olds. Separately, the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has been nominated by the British ISP industry for its annual internet villain award, competing alongside the European Parliament and French President Nicolas Sarkozy

Two major Australian university research units working independently said they were preparing to publish important quantum computing breakthroughs. Quantum computing is a field in its infancy, which promises incredibly quick calculations of momentous problems such as cracking every encryption system in use today. Research groups around the world are racing to produce practical quantum computing designs. A University of NSW senior scientist said the institution was close to publicising a major breakthrough involving a quantum computer that relied on atoms suspended in silicon. Another research group, at the University of Queensland, said it had become the first in the world to use a prototype quantum computer to calculate the energy of an atom

25.06.2009

Google has made several enhancements to its anti-malvertising site to help its ad network customers prevent attempts to distribute malware through advertising. The web giant launched an initial custom search engine at the beginning of the year, which is designed to allow ad networks to perform quick background checks on prospective advertisers to minimise the risk of malware

In an effort to save money, a village in central Germany has opted to turn off its street lights. But residents have no need to be in the dark: Using a mobile phone and code, they can order lighting for up to 15 minutes

Aviation Week reports on a television special from the National Geographic Channel on what may have been the world's first true stealth fighter, the Horten Ho 229, a wooden design that was to include a layer of carbon material sandwiched in the leading edge to defeat radar. Northrop Grumman, experts at stealth technology from their Tacit Blue and B-2 programs, have built a full-size replica of the airframe and tested it at their desert facilities where they determined that the design was indeed stealthy, and would have been practically invisible to Britain's Chain Home radar system of WWII — via Slashdot

24.06.2009

The company who also own's Bethesda's stable of powerhouse franchises now includes Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, and RAGE. In a move that few, if any, saw coming, Zenimax Media today announced the acquisition of id Software, the legendary creator of the DOOM, Wolfenstein, and Quake

The Regional Court in Hamburg, Germany, has ruled that file-hosting service Rapidshare must proactively filter certain content. Music industry outfit GEMA asked the court to ban Rapidshare from making 5,000 tracks from its catalogue available on the Internet. The court estimated the value of the tracks at $34 million

Sadly not — but the news that the US department of justice has secured guilty pleas from five prolific spammers, including Alan Ralsky, might make other US-based spammers pause for thought. And many of the most troublesome spammers are based in the US, although they use servers in China and other countries to serve their wares. Ralsky, 64, and his son-in-law, Scott Bradley, 38, face maximum sentences of six years in prison and $1m fines for breaking the CAN-SPAM act and additional charges of wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The latter activities will have attracted rather more law enforcement efforts than the first: the CAN-SPAM act, which became law in 2003, has been widely derided by anti-spam activists, partly because it gives spammers virtual carte blanche to spew out unwanted marketing messages without the receiver's permission, and bans individuals from suing the spammers — which could otherwise have shut many down

23.06.2009

The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale. Interviews with technology experts in Iran and outside the country say Iranian efforts at monitoring Internet information go well beyond blocking access to Web sites or severing Internet connections. Instead, in confronting the political turmoil that has consumed the country this past week, the Iranian government appears to be engaging in a practice often called deep packet inspection, which enables authorities to not only block communication but to monitor it to gather information about individuals, as well as alter it for disinformation purposes, according to these experts. The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia, the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed

Recognising that the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is increasingly used by the public as a news source, Google News began this month to include Wikipedia among the stable of publications it trawls to create the site

The impetus to regulate online marketing may be gathering steam. On 18 June a House of Representatives subcommittee held a hearing to take a closer look at how advertisers gather and use information on consumers' Web-surfing habits. Up to now the government has had a hands-off policy toward online marketing, giving companies relatively free rein in how they use tools that track what people do online and then use that data to deliver tailored marketing messages. Although regulation is likely to be far off, it would surely rewrite how Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and a wide range of other Internet companies grapple for share in the $25.7 billion online ad market

22.06.2009

Australian iPhone users have started downloading widely available configuration files to activate the device's tethering feature and bypass Optus' planned $10 monthly fee

Just two weeks after the Swedish Pirate Party won a seat in the European Parliament, the German PiratenPartei has gained a seat in the German government. Jörg Tauss has left the Social Democrats Party (SPD) and has joined the Pirate Party

21.06.2009

This may come as a surprise, but I have a lot of sympathy with artists' rights groups and even entertainment companies that mistrust giants like Amazon.com and Google. Now, it's not that I hate Amazon or Google, but I do understand that they are fast becoming the intermediary between creators and audiences (and vice-versa), and that this poses a danger to everyone involved in the creative industries

Threatened with losing the HP Wright Library to state budget cuts, volunteers from across Ventura County are coming together and pulling out all the stops — and, next weekend, literary icon Ray Bradbury — in their campaign to keep the Ventura library open

20.06.2009

The Chinese government will force the world's biggest technology company Google to block a raft of overseas sites on its search engine. This is China's third major internet censorship move in a month amid growing internet activism in the country and in the shadow of a strong online element in the disputed election in Iran. The attack on Google was issued under a pornography crackdown and comes only two weeks after the government surprised its media and technology sector by introducing the Green Dam Youth Escort filtering software onto every new computer sold after 1 July. It also came only a month after a range of international sites, including Microsoft Hotmail and micro-blogging site Twitter, were blocked ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre

Google has stepped up work to release a tool that will translate Farsi into English and vice-versa. The company told the BBC it was speeding up the project because of the huge interest in what was currently going on in Iran. At the same time, the world's biggest social networking site, Facebook, is launching a Persian version. Both companies say they hope their efforts will improve access to information and communication

Amid economic woes, stagnant growth, and a management shakeup, onetime social-networking pioneer MySpace has announced that it has cut its head count by slightly under 30 percent in what the company calls a return to start-up culture. Well, that's a nice way to put it. Reports had circulated that MySpace would be laying off nearly half its employees in a move that had delayed its relocation to a bigger office space in the Los Angeles area. With the layoffs, MySpace's full-time US employee roster will be down to 1,000 people — which means somewhere just south of 500 jobs were cut. MySpace said that the layoffs are evenly distributed across all US divisions of the company. Since MySpace also operates a number of offices overseas, it's not yet clear how they were affected (if at all), and representatives declined comment as to whether international offices would be affected down the road

19.06.2009

Rats are able to play the odds in a gambling task designed by scientists to test the biology of addiction. In the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, researchers describe how the rodents developed a strategy in a timed task where they make choices to earn treats. The rodents avoided high-reward options because these carried high risks of punishment — their sugar pellet supply being cut off for a period

The German lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, has adopted a new set of laws making it possible to block child pornography Web sites. The legislation requires Web hosting companies to post stop signs when internet users try to access child pornography sites. The bill still has to go through several stages before it becomes law. The motion has been the subject of a protest petition, with opponents claiming it is a first step towards Internet censorship. The petition has gathered 130,000 signatures calling for the bill to be scrapped

The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said. The agency's monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said

Personal data including the signatures of recipients has been exposed to those tracking deliveries on the Parcelforce web site, the BBC has discovered. A failure in the system allowed people using the mail tracing service access to the name, postcode and signature of various addressees. The breakdown put Parcelforce at risk of breaching data protection rules. The delivery service, part of the Royal Mail Group, apologised. It said the problem had been resolved

18.06.2009

In a dangerous judgment for British bloggers and whistleblowers, a British court has ruled (absurdly) that because blogging itself is a public activity, bloggers have no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding their identities, and newspapers are allowed to publish their identities if they can find them by fair or foul means. A British police detective who recently won the Orwell Prize for his excellent political writing used his blog to write highly critical accounts of police activities and unethical behavior, making very powerful enemies in the process. A well-funded newspaper with powerful connections quickly heard of his blog and decided it was absolutely vital to expose his identity using an investigative journalist. Like any good newspaper, the blogger anonymized the people and the locations in all the cases he discussed on his blog, but the newspaper alleges these were not sufficiently anonymised and complains that they could work out the identities, though British newspapers don't complain that they are allowed to publish the identities of men who are falsely accused of rape and cleared in court. The newspaper also helpfully contacted the blogger's employer, and his job is now threatened — via Slashdot

A black hole created by Israeli scientists won't destroy Earth, but it could make our planet just a little bit less noisy. Using Bose-Einstein condensates, the scientists created a black hole for sound. The new research could help scientists learn more about true black holes and help confirm the existence of as-yet to be discovered Hawking radiation

An international group of scientists has developed a polymer-based solar cell with an ability not yet seen in similar cells: almost every single photon it absorbs is converted into a pair of electric-charge carriers, and every one of those pairs is collected at the cell's electrodes

Weather balloons may soon provide the first affordable broadband Internet access to the one-billion-strong African mass market. Accountant Timothy Anyasi and petroleum engineer Collins Nwani, both Nigerian-born serial entrepreneurs based in the US, have secured exclusive rights to market a type of near-space technology — developed by American telecommunications company Space Data — throughout the African continent

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