Historians have postulated that, without Bletchley Park, the Allies may never have won the war. But, despite an impressive contribution to the war effort, the Bletchley Park site, now a museum, faces a bleak future unless it can secure funding to keep its doors open and its numerous exhibits from rotting away. The Bletchley Park Trust receives no external funding. It has been deemed ineligible for funding by the National Lottery, and turned down by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation because the Microsoft founder will only fund internet-based technology projects
A federal grand jury on Thursday indicted a Missouri woman for her alleged role in perpetrating a hoax on the online social network MySpace against a 13-year-old neighbor who committed suicide. Lori Drew of suburban St Louis allegedly helped create a false-identity MySpace account to contact Megan Meier, who thought she was chatting with a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans. Josh didn’t exist. Megan hanged herself at home in October 2006 after receiving cruel messages, including one stating the world would be better off without her
Double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius won his appeal Friday and can compete for a place in the Beijing Olympics. The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the 21-year-old South African is eligible to race against able-bodied athletes, overturning a ban imposed by the International Association of Athletics Federations. CAS said the unanimous ruling goes into effect immediately
California’s top court has ruled that a state law banning marriage between same-sex couples is unconstitutional. The state’s Supreme Court said the right to form a family relationship
applied to all Californians regardless of sexuality. The ban was approved by voters in 2000 but challenged by gay rights activists and the city of San Francisco. The state legislature twice passed laws to legalise gay marriage, but Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed them. He said California’s court system should rule on the matter
CBS agreed to buy CNet Networks for about $1.75 billion, expanding its access to the burgeoning Internet advertising market. The company, which owns the CBS television network, said it offered $11.50 a share for CNet, based in San Francisco, whose board accepted it. The bid is a 45 percent premium above CNet’s closing price of $7.95 on Wednesday
Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor and activist shareholder, proposed a dissident slate of directors for the Yahoo board on Thursday as he tries to force the company to restart talks to sell itself to Microsoft
Not satisfied with a future vision that already includes flexible screens and wafer-thin phones, a pair of Japanese companies has pushed the envelope to come up with far-fetched gadgets that do all of the above without ever going near a power socket. The key to the work by Mitsubishi Chemical and Sumitomo Chemical lies in so-called spreadable electronics — liquids containing molecules of the type used in OLED screens
Inevitably, the Ministry of Defence papers, released to the public for the first time, will be known as Britain’s X-Files. Over the next three or four years, 160 files will be handed over to the National Archives. Covering 1978 to 1987, the first group of eight files, one of which is more than 450 pages long, is available via its website today. Some of the incidents are truly bizarre, but although some UFO sightings remain unexplained there is no evidence in the files for alien contact. There simply is no saucer-in-a-hangar smoking gun,
said Nick Pope, a former civil servant who worked at the MoD for 21 years, spending three years on its UFO desk
The United States has listed the polar bear as a threatened species, because its Arctic sea ice habitat is melting due to climate change. US government scientists predict that two-thirds of the polar bear population of 25,000 could disappear by 2050. However, the government stressed the listing would not lead to measures to prevent global warming
The Mormon Church has instructed its lawyers to gag the Internet over WikiLeaks‘ release of the 1968 and 1999 versions of its confidential handbook for Church leaders. Apart from attacking WikiLeaks, legal demands were sent to Jimmy Wales of the WikiMedia foundation for a WikiNews article merely linking to the material, and scribd.com has also been censored. WikiLeaks has (of course) refused to remove the documents — via Slashdot
Ask.com has bought a stable of Internet reference sites that includes Dictionary.com in its latest effort to distinguish itself from online search leader Google and other much larger rivals
Air Force Colonel Charles Williamson III believes that the United States military should maintain its own botnet, both as a deterrent towards those who would attempt to DDoS government networks, and an offensive weapon to be used against the networks of unfriendly nations, criminal groups, or terrorist organisations — va Slashdot
ISPs will be granted a one-off Government subsidy towards the cost of installing filtering technology, as part of the Rudd Government’s AU$125.8 million Cyber-safety plan. The plan, as pitched during the Rudd Government’s Election campaign, will move the emphasis from parents onto Internet Service Providers to filter inappropriate content
from the Web surfing experience of Australians. The Government is yet to provide details on how much of the $125.8 million will be used for the subsidies — but with $47.6 million of that sum going to the Australian Federal Police, $11.3 million to the Director of Public Prosecutions and $14.1 million to ACMA to expand its regulatory role— ISPs shouldn’t be expecting a huge windfall
Microsoft on Tuesday announced it would restore support for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to Microsoft Office for Mac, a direct result of complaints from users about the removal of the suite’s cross-platform automation functionality
The Federal Government has moved to establish a centralised database to host and manage all Australian citizens’ personal details, so this information can be easily shared and accessed by any department. The Australian Taxation Office, Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Customs, Centrelink and other departments, are discussing the possibility of establishing a common registration process to improve information sharing
An Australian-developed signal processing technology has been licensed to a US company to deliver faster internet speeds with longer distance capabilities. Developed by researchers from the University of Queensland and Sydney University, the low complexity method
enhances the capacity of copper wire broadband services, and has particular applications where high-quality broadband transmission of multimedia files is required
Google has rolled out a new technology which automatically blurs any human face appearing in street-level photographs taken for use in its mapping services by its fleet of camera-mounted vehicles. The blurring technology, which will be retrospectively applied to all existing Street View images and incorporated in all future releases of the popular mapping feature, is intended to mollify concerns about the potentially intrusive nature of the service. Google will shortly previewed the face-blurring technology on the Street View images found on its Manhattan maps
Google has joined the drive to make the web more social by introducing tools to enable people to interact with their friends. Friend Connect follows plans announced last week by the world’s two biggest social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook. Data Availability and Connect let users move their personal profiles and applications to other web sites
Consumer advocates are concerned a proposed merger between Westpac and St George Bank would reduce competition in the banking sector. If successful, the merger would be the biggest in Australian banking history, making Westpac the nation’s dominant home lender with a 25 per cent market share and a 10-million strong customer base
Apparently, the folks in Bournesmouth didn’t get the Google TISP joke, as they’re laying fibre optic cable through the sewer system. The intended result: blazing fast connections that don’t require digging up anything
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