Column of the Wolf

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

02.08.2008

A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organisations

When TorrentFreak reported about the leak of a BuckCherry track last week, and specifically the band's response to it, they hinted that this could be a covert form of self-promotion. Indeed, after a few days of research they found out that the track wasn't leaked by pirates, but by Josh Klemme, the manager of the band

Apple has at last issued a patch for the DNS flaw considered one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities ever to affect the Internet. On Friday, Apple posted a security advisory saying that the patch will fix Apple's implementation of the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) DNS server in Mac OS X v10.4.11, Mac OS X Server v10.4.11, Mac OS X v10.5.4 and Mac OS X Server v10.5.4. The DNS flaw allows an attacker to execute a cache poisoning attack, where traffic to a legitimate domain name is redirected to a malicious one after an attack on a DNS server. The user can type in the correct name for a Web site, but get a fake one instead, which can enable a phishing attack. While some users might notice if they're directed to a odd-looking Web page, many people could be successfully fooled

Mozilla has announced the release of >Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1, Shiretoko, for developers and testers. Built on the pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.1 platform, Shiretoko includes a variety of new features. Called an early developer milestone, the release includes bug fixes, improved Web standards support, Text API for the Canvas Element, support for border images and JavaScript query selectors, and improvements to the tab-switching function and the Smart Location Bar. Shiretoko is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux

01.08.2008

Ever try to remember who you bumped into at the store a few days back? Or exactly what the company president said at the morning meeting? Well, you're not alone. And IBM researchers are working on software that just may help you better recollect all the forgotten pieces of your life. This week, the company unveiled software that uses images, sounds and text recorded on everyday mobile devices to help people recall names, faces, conversations and events. Dubbed Pensieve, the software organises bits of collected information, stores them and then helps the user extract them later on

A US scientist has developed a new way of powering fuel cells that could make it practical for home owners to store solar energy and produce electricity to run lights and appliances at night. A new catalyst produces the oxygen and hydrogen that fuel cells use to generate electricity, while using far less energy than current methods. With this catalyst, users could rely on electricity produced by photovoltaic solar cells to power the process that produces the fuel

In a case of better late than never, Optus-owned Virgin Mobile is now offering the Apple iPhone 3G, and for cheaper than its competitors in Australia. Virgin Mobile's Australian web site lists the iPhone as available now and indicates two iPhone specific post-paid contracts. The lower of these plans includes a full subsidised 8GB model phone plus AU$520 in standard calls and messages credit, and 1GB of data for AU$70 per month over a 24-month term

US space scientists say liquid has been discovered on the surface of Titan, the largest moon of the planet Saturn

31.07.2008

Amazon has introduced two new payment systems for merchants and consumers, which brings it into a market dominated by PayPal. Google introduced a similar system for merchants and consumers in 2006, also called Checkout, but it has not found favor with online retailers. Auction giant eBay, which owns PayPal, has prevented consumers from using the Google system

A 2,100-year-old computer found in a Roman shipwreck may have acted as a calendar for the Olympic Games. The Antikythera Mechanism has puzzled experts since its discovery by Greek sponge divers in 1901. Researchers have long suspected the ancient clockwork device was used to display astronomical cycles. A team has now found that one of the dials records the dates of the ancient Olympiad. This could have been to provide a benchmark for the passage of time. The device is made up of bronze gearwheels and dials, and scientists know of nothing like it until at least 1,000 years later

With the Internet increasingly taking on the role of the PC operating system and the growing prevalence of virtualisation technologies, there will be a day when the Microsoft Windows client OS as it's been developed for the past 20-odd years becomes obsolete. Microsoft seems to be preparing for that day with an incubation project code-named Midori, which seeks to create a componentised, non-Windows OS that will take advantage of technologies not available when Windows first was conceived

Three has launched a 3G SIM and data starter kit for those who want to get their iPhone from other carriers but use it on the 3 Network

30.07.2008

A research paper has suggested that a warp drive capable of moving a craft at faster than light speed could indeed be possible. The paper, Putting the 'Warp' into Warp Drive [PDF] by Gerald Cleaver and Richard Obousy, two Baylor University physicists, suggests that the speed of light could be broken by manipulating the fabric of space to create a bubble that a craft would ride upon. Einstein's laws of relativity would not be violated by such a drive since the craft itself would remain stationary and the bubble of space it moves in would be mobile. This would also shield passengers from the enormous G forces from such acceleration

One of Australia's largest eBay sellers has gone into liquidation, leaving hundreds of its customers out of pocket and with little hope of receiving purchased goods. The Queensland-based company, which is registered as EBS International but trades on eBay under the name ebusiness-supplies, has had liquidation firm SV Partners appointed as its external administrator

Alaska's Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator in US history, was indicted yesterday on seven charges of making false statements about more than $250,000 that corporate executives doled out to overhaul his Anchorage area house

Losing your glasses or forgetting the answer to a quiz question could hardly be classed as a matter of life or death. But that did not stop some callers in Somerset from hitting 999 (the UK's version of 000) and berating exasperated emergency operators about their wife's sub standard salmon sandwiches or their difficulties peeling potatoes. Now Avon and Somerset Police in the UK have turned to YouTube to shame timewasters for tying up a line where delays can cost lives. The force has posted the 999 calls on YouTube and hopes it will help track down hoax callers, who face up to six months in jail and a £5,000 fine in court

29.07.2008

A new search-engine platform has been unveiled by some former Google engineers. Dubbed Cuil, the new company claims to combine the largest Web index with content-based relevance and user privacy. However, for the moment, it's pretty lame and has a bit of an issue with associating some unrelated logos and photos with other content

During a visit to Australia this week, Flickr founder and former Yahoo staffer Stewart Butterfield criticised the search giant for its lack of an innovative culture compared to rival Google. I felt like the biggest problem while I was there [was] that management was oriented a little bit too much towards the quarterly results

A new $1,000 spray claims to protect notebook computers, iPods, mobile phones and other electronic gadgets from liquid, making them completely waterproof. The spray, called Golden Shellback Splash Proof Coating, is one thousandth of an inch thick. Sid Martin of the Northeast Maritime Institute, which created the product, said the spray forces the water to roll off electronic gadgets like water off a duck's back or just like after you waxed your car

Apple's Fairplay DRM, which protects all the applications you download from iTunes, has been hacked. The method for hacking this has actually been around for a while, but has been recently applied to Super Monkey Ball and distributed into the wild. To do this, you'll need a jailbroken iPhone and SSH installed (to transfer the game and to fiddle with permissions). The theory is a bit techy and complex, but the execution isn't too insane if you know your way around XCode and the command line

28.07.2008

Music fans might soon have their iPods searched by Customs officers at airport checks and face jail if a large amount of pirated music is found on them. The push for the unprecedented searches of travellers' laptops and MP3 players has been revealed in a leaked discussion paper relating to a treaty being negotiated by the Federal Government

The federal Government will embark on the next step of its internet filtering strategy after initial trials proved successful, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said. Senator Conroy today released the findings of a recently concluded ISP-level internet filtering trial conducted in Tasmania by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in a closed environment

27.07.2008

A Florida patent troll called Channel Intelligence is suing everyone from Lemonade to Remember the Milk for infringing on patent 6,917,941, which covers storing a wishlist in a database. Amazon and eBay are absent from the list of targets, even though they very likely store users' wishlists in a database. With any luck, perhaps one of the defendants will get to use that precedent PJ found the other day from In re Lintner, which said, '[c]laims which are broad enough to read on obvious subject matter are unpatentable even though they also read on non-obvious subject matter — via Slashdot

26.07.2008

The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even Google's search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when their systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once

This week, ISPs agreed to work with the BPI to reduce file-sharing in the UK. When someone gets caught the ISPs will send out a warning, 100% based on music industry provided evidence. Not even the ISPs know if the claims of the BPI are true, so the evidence is totally unchallenged, a perfect position for the music industry

Intel has unveiled eight new Integrated Processor chips that the company claims will yield new, higher levels of performance and energy efficiency versus traditional system-on-chip designs

25.07.2008

Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has unveiled Drizzle, a database project aimed at powering websites with massive concurrency as well as trimming superfluous functionality from MySQL. Drizzle will have a micro-kernel architecture with code being removed from the Drizzle core and moved through interfaces into modules. Akers has already selected particular functionality for removal: modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, access control lists and some data types

The spam king was sentenced on Tuesday to 47 months in prison, with a ruling that the court hopes sends a message to other online criminals. Robert Soloway, the man known as the spam king for the massive volume of spam he sent out, pleaded guilty to fraud, spamming and tax evasion after being indicted in May 2007. After an unusually long sentencing hearing lasting two-and-a-half days, Judge Marsha Pechman handed down her sentence in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle

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