Category Archives: Technology

Researchers Break Video CAPTCHAs

After creating the Decaptcha software to solve audio CAPTCHAs, Stanford University’s researchers modified it and turned it against text and, quite recently, video CAPTCHAs with considerable success. Video CAPTCHAs have been touted by their developer, NuCaptcha, as the best and … Continue reading

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The Target Isn’t Hollywood, MPAA, RIAA, Or MAFIAA: It’s The Policymakers

Big Monopoly has learned in the past century that when they look like a little spoiled brat having a tantrum, politicians will throw taxpayer money their way to shut them up. Therefore, this is a behaviour they emulate as soon they are given a good … Continue reading

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You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You

Now that the SOPA and PIPA fights have died down, and Hollywood prepares their next salvo against internet freedom with ACTA and PCIP, it’s worth pausing to consider how the war on piracy could actually be won… Continue reading

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DARPA Works On Virtual Reality Contact Lenses

The Department of Defence (DOD) is working on contact lenses that would enhance soldiers’ vision to improve intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) activities without the need for specialised equipment that is currently used in the battlefield… Continue reading

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Trojan found that can break Yahoo CAPTCHA security in minutes

Researchers have discovered a malware engine that appears to be able to break the CAPTCHA security used by Yahoo’s webmail service after only a handful of attempts… Continue reading

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For ‘Malware as a Service’ merchants, business is booming

They are well organised. They pay close attention to product quality, working hard to make it effective and scalable. They are all about customer service, providing after-sales support… Continue reading

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EFF and Carpathia Hosting Help MegaUpload Users To Retrieve Their Data

Yesterday the news broke that personal files of MegaUpload’s users are at risk… Continue reading

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Primus customers in the dark over outage

Customers hosted at Primus Telecom’s Melbourne datacentre experienced outages this morning, with several sites forced offline… Continue reading

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Angry Birds boss: ‘Piracy may not be a bad thing: it can get us more business’

Rovio Mobile learned from the music industry’s mistakes when deciding how to deal with piracy of its Angry Birds games and merchandise, chief executive Mikael Hed told the Midem conference in Cannes this morning… Continue reading

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Dutch ISPs Refuse To Block The Pirate Bay

Two large ISPs in the Netherlands have said they will not be blocking subscriber access to The Pirate Bay, as demanded by the Hollywood supported anti-piracy outfit BREIN… Continue reading

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Facebook, Washington Accuse Marketing Firm of Clickjacking

Facebook and the state of Washington are suing an ad network they accuse of encouraging people to spread spam through clickjacking schemes and other tactics… Continue reading

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Why Twitter’s new policy is helpful for free-speech advocates

My initial reaction upon a cursory reading of the announcement was also that it wasn’t too bad, given the alternatives… Continue reading

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Twitter to censor content in some countries

Twitter has announced it will begin restricting tweets in certain countries, marking a policy shift for the social media platform that helped propel the popular uprisings recently sweeping across the Middle East… Continue reading

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MegaUpload Users Plan to Sue the FBI over Lost Files

In most reports following the MegaUpload shutdown, the site is exclusively portrayed as a piracy haven… Continue reading

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ISP data retention still an issue, Ludlam warns

Speaking at Electronic Frontiers Australia’s “War on the Internet” event on Saturday in Melbourne (full video available online here), Ludlam, who is the Communications Spokesperson for the Greens, said much of the thinking around t… Continue reading

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Stop ACTA: secretive treaty will bring in the worst of SOPA through trade obligations

ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, is the notorious, unprecedented secret copyright treaty that was negotiated by industry representatives and government trade reps, without any access by elected representatives, independent business, th… Continue reading

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Australia: US Copyright Colony or Just a Good Friend?

The Canberra Wikileaks cables revealed the US Embassy sanctioned a conspiracy by Hollywood studios to target Australian communications company iiNet through the local court-system, with the aim of establishing a binding common-law precedent which wo… Continue reading

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SOPA lessons for Australia

PIPA and SOPA may be dead in the water for now, but it’s worth remembering that the most controversial part of the legislation is something the Australian Government has been thinking about for years… Continue reading

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iPad dominates African business trends

Two years after the launch of the iPad, the tablet has a considerable footprint among business professionals — especially in Africa… Continue reading

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Australian tech startup BugHerd strikes gold, raising $500k

An Australian technology startup that aims to make reporting of website faults easier and more visual for non tech-savvy people today announced an investment of $500,000 from Melbourne-based venture capital firm Starfish Ventures… Continue reading

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Howto typeset Call of Cthulhu spells

The only thing cuter than this Game Master asking TeX gurus for help making his RPG notes look like they were scrawled by a gibbering madman, unhinged by the horrors he has witnessed is the serious responses, with examples of … Continue reading

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Twitter acquires antimalware company Dasient

Twitter has acquired Internet security firm Dasient, the Sunnyvale, California startup said on its blog on Monday… Continue reading

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.htaccess Files for the Rest of Us

.htaccess files are used to configure Apache, as well a range of other web servers. Despite the .htaccess file type extension, they are simply text files that can be edited using any text-editor. In this article, we’ll review what they are, and how y… Continue reading

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Backup your Mac App Store apps

The excellent ReadNow application, which allows you to easily read articles from your Instapaper and Read It Later articles on your Mac, has been pulled from the Mac App Store “…because of an infringement letter.” Developer Michael Schneider added “[… Continue reading

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DreamHost resets customer FTP passwords following database breach

Los Angeles-based Web hosting firm DreamHost reset the FTP and shell access passwords for all of its customers on Friday after detecting unauthorised activity within one of its database… Continue reading

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New Righthaven offers hosting service

After snatching a notorious copyright troll’s name at auction, a Swiss company is turning Righthaven.com into a web hosting service… Continue reading

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Google Tweaks Search Results to Punish Ad-Heavy Websites

Google has tweaked its search algorithm to punish websites with excessive advertising “above-the-fold”, that is, websites that stack the top of the page with nothing but advertisements… Continue reading

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Why Facebook Is Never Safe

How to use Facebook safely: Here’s the easy solution: don’t fucking surveil yourself! If you want to stay safe on Facebook, the answer is, you should not use it, and don’t tag people! There are benefits of using it, there are tradeof… Continue reading

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Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas… Continue reading

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Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview

At 40, the WikiLeaks founder comes across more like an embattled rebel commander than a hacker or journalist… Continue reading

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What Megaupload’s demise teaches about cloud storage

Megaupload users are crying foul after their personal files, not necessarily copyright-infringing material, stored with the file-sharing service was seized on Thursday along with a trove of illegally distributed copyrighted works… Continue reading

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Quantum computing could head to ‘the cloud’, study says

A novel high-speed, high-security computing technology will be compatible with the “cloud computing” approach popular on the web, a study suggests… Continue reading

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Spam-squirting hole found in McAfee antivirus kit

McAfee is promising to patch a vulnerability in its hosted anti-malware service after it found a flaw that allowed systems where the product was installed to be turned into potential spam-relay nodes… Continue reading

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Holographic storage’s corpse twitches

Failed holographic storage start-up InPhase is selling off its patents as Eugen Pavel’s Storex has developed 2nm optical lithography which could lead to a 100 exabyte optical disk… Continue reading

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Cockroach Cyborgs Get Their Own Power Source

Equipped with tiny sensors, insects could scout out buildings filled with noxious chemicals, check under rubble after an earthquake and go places no human spy ever could… Continue reading

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SOPA: copyright industry threat to internet in Australia

What initially sounded like a somewhat gormless idea — ?blacking out websites to draw users’ attention to the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP acts before US Congress — ?has turned out to be dramatic intervention in the battle aga… Continue reading

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Silver Ink Solution For Cheaper, Faster Flexible Circuits

A silver ink for printing high-performance electrical circuits on flexible substrates has been developed by a team at the University of Illinois… Continue reading

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Germany backs neo-Nazi database after far-right murders

German ministers have approved plans to establish a national register of far-right extremists, after revelations of 10 neo-Nazi murders since 2000.
It is thought there are almost 10,000 neo-Nazis in Germany and the database would include information h… Continue reading

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Another trans-Tasman link underway

The ditch between Australia and New Zealand is getting a lot more hectic with moves for another trans-Tasman cable link underway… Continue reading

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Dalek Camouflage

Six Daleks, labeled as Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne engines from the space shuttles Endeavour and Atlantis are invading being shipped to Stennis Space Centre in Mississippi to be refurbished for use in NASA’s new project, the Space Launch System (SLS) — … Continue reading

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Atlantis Computing promises diskless VDI

Virtual Desktop storage provider Altantis Computing today announced a new product that runs non-persistent virtual desktop environments using only server memory… Continue reading

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The Great Martin Luther King Copyright Conundrum

Believe it or not, to legally watch that famous Martin Luther King “I Have a Dream” speech — arguably one of the most hallowed moments in American history — costs $10 thanks to the twisted state of United States copyright law… Continue reading

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Facebook, Google argue against Web censorship in India

Facebook and Google told the Delhi High Court today that they cannot block offensive content that appears on their services… Continue reading

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Copper Thieves Battled With New Anti-theft Telecom Cable

The epidemic of telecom cable thefts has prompted a US company to develop a new design that drastically cuts down the copper content in a bid to deter metal thieves… Continue reading

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Zappos Hacked: Internal Systems Breached in Cyber Attack

Zappos.com, best-known for selling shoes and clothing online and its top-notch customer service and corporate culture, appears to be the latest victim of a cyber attack resulting in a data breach… Continue reading

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Twitter feed gives Swedes a new picture

An organic sheep farmer, a priest and a Bosnian immigrant are among those who have helped double Sweden’s Twitter followers in the past month… Continue reading

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Apple launches recycling scheme for iPhones, iPads, Macs and PCs in UK

Apple has launched a recycling scheme that could help you make money from your old iPhone, iPad, Mac or even Windows PC… Continue reading

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Viruses stole City College of SF data for years

Personal banking information and other data from perhaps tens of thousands of students, faculty and administrators at City College of San Francisco have been stolen in what is being called “an infestation” of computer viruses with origins in criminal… Continue reading

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Email after hours? It’s overtime by law for some

The backlash against 24-hour connectivity is gathering pace around the world… Continue reading

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The writer who made millions by self-publishing online

When historians come to write about the digital transformation currently engulfing the book-publishing world, they will almost certainly refer to Amanda Hocking, writer of paranormal fiction who in the past 18 months has emerged from obscurity to best… Continue reading

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