Scientists are a step closer to creating a Star Trek-style cloaking device after demonstrating a material that makes objects beneath it appear to vanish. The material was used to hide a bump on a surface by interfering with the way light bounced off it, making it seem as though neither the cloak nor the bump was there. The cloak was designed to make objects invisible to infrared light, but the work paves the way for more advanced materials capable of cloaking objects in visible wavelengths. Some scientists believe cloaking materials could be used to hide unsightly buildings or high-security facilities, and even make vehicles seem to disappear from view
Researchers, political satirists and partisan mudslingers, take note: C-Span has uploaded virtually every minute of its video archives to the Internet. The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations and are sure to provide new fodder for pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally announce the completion of the C-Span Video Library
Spain is becoming the last bastion of common sense when it comes to peer-to-peer and file sharing, at least until the big media companies get their own way and change the law in the country altogether. Torrentfreak, the ever-vigilant blog focusing on BitTorrent and file-sharing issues, points to a recent lawsuit in Spain that ended quite favourably for both P2P users and link sites and dedicated search engines, and that found both use-cases to be perfectly legal in the country
More than 100 drivers in Austin, Texas found their cars disabled or the horns honking out of control, after an intruder ran amok in a web-based vehicle-immobilisation system normally used to get the attention of consumers delinquent in their auto payments. Police with Austin’s High Tech Crime Unit on Wednesday arrested 20-year-old Omar Ramos-Lopez, a former Texas Auto Center employee who was laid off last month, and allegedly sought revenge by bricking the cars sold from the dealership’s four Austin-area lots
Engineers designing the world’s fastest car believe they now have a solution to keep the vehicle flat on the ground. Bloodhound SSC is being built to smash the world land speed record by topping 1,000mph (1,610km/h). Initial iterations of the car’s aerodynamic shape produced dangerous amounts of lift at the vehicle’s rear. But the latest modelling work indicates the team has finally found a stable configuration, allowing the project to push ahead with other design areas
MySpace has taken a bold step and allowed a large quantity of bulk user data to be put up for sale on startup data marketplace InfoChimps. Data offered includes user playlists, mood updates, mobile updates, photos, vents, reviews, blog posts, names and zipcodes. Friend lists are not included. Remember, Facebook and Twitter may be the name of the game these days in tech circles, but MySpace still sees 1 billion user status updates posted every month. Those updates will now be available for bulk analysis
The Feds are on Facebook. And MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter, too. Law enforcement agents are following the rest of the Internet world into popular social-networking services, even going undercover with false online profiles to communicate with suspects and gather private information, according to an internal Justice Department document that surfaced in a lawsuit. The document shows that US agents are logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips
US regulators have unveiled the nation’s first plan to give every American super-fast broadband by 2020. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has submitted the plan to Congress, said broadband was the greatest infrastructure challenge
. It estimates that one-third of Americans, about 100 million people, are without broadband at home. The FCC’s goal is to provide speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps), compared to an average 4Mbps now
In this two-year-old classified Army Counterintelligence Centre report [PDF], American spooks set out to destroy Wikileaks by intimidating its sources. They cite as justification for this the fact that Wikileaks has outed American embarrassments and crimes including US equipment expenditure in Iraq, probable US violations of the Chemical Warfare Convention Treaty in Iraq, the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah and human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay
If you still enjoy reading newspapers in a semi-traditional format, Google has a fairly substantial archive of older papers in scanned form that can be searched from its Google News Archives section
The bacterial communities that live on human skin may form a bacterial fingerprint on the items that you touch. In a new study led by microbiologists Rob Knight and Noah Fierer of the University of Colorado, Boulder, researchers swabbed three different keyboards and nine mice for bacteria, then compared the genomic variation between the communities to deduce whose hands had been touching what. The people were clearly identifiable from the bacterial communities they’d transferred to their computer input devices
Are we alone in the universe? That’s the big question the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) seeks to answer, and so far the answer appears to be yes. In the half-century since Frank Drake first used a radio telescope to begin searching for alien radio signals, there has been no message from ET — indeed no artificial radio traffic of any description
The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15 March — the 25th birthday of the day the first dotcom name was registered
Pipe Networks’ shareholders have voted to approve a $373 million deal that will see the company acquired by TPG Telecom. The acquisition will give TPG an extensive dark fibre network across major Australian business centres, such as Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, and will also give it Pipe Networks’ newly lit-up Sydney to Guam international cable
Internet service provider Internode has signed up for 2.5 gigabits per second more international capacity from Southern Cross Cable’s Network and says it has plans to buy another 12.5 gigabits. Southern Cross had been providing 5Gbps to the ISP, with the increase announced today to take the purchased capacity to 7.5Gbps. Internode hopes to ramp up capacity to 10Gbps by the middle of this year and double it again next year
Internet filtering won’t prevent people deliberately looking for inappropriate material from accessing blocked content, according to security vendor, M86 Security. Six of the nine ISP participants in the URL-based Internet filter trial last year used M86’s R3000 filtering kit. The technology was originally developed for the education sector and was then applied to enterprise businesses
Apple has been dealt a severe blow having been told that it no longer has a monopoly on the letter i
as part of the name for its products. A trademarks tribunal has knocked back Apple’s bid to stop a small company from trademarking the name DOPi for use on its laptop bags and cases for Apple products. Apple argued that the DOPi name — which is iPod spelt backwards — was too similar to its own popular portable music player, which has sold in excess of 100 million units worldwide
When Google indexes so many billions of web pages that it doesn’t even bother listing the number any more, it’s hard to imagine that much lies beyond its far-reaching tentacles. Beneath, however, lies an online world that few know exists. It’s a realm of huge, untapped reserves of valuable information containing sprawling databases, hidden websites and murky forums. It’s a world where academics and researchers might find the data required to solve some of mankind’s biggest problems, but also where criminal syndicates operate, and terrorist handbooks and child pornography are freely distributed. At the same time, the underground web is the best hope for those who want to escape the bonds of totalitarian state censorship, and share their ideas or experiences with the outside world. Interested? You’re not alone. The deep web and its darknets
are a new battleground for those who want to uphold the right to privacy online, and those who feel that rights need to be sacrificed for the safety of society. The deep web is also the new frontier for those who want to rival Google in the field of search
The Department of Internal Affairs has admitted that the internet filter is now operational and is already being used by ISPs Maxnet and Watchdog. It appears that Maxnet have not told their customers that they are diverting some of their internet traffic to the government system to be filtered
Google’s chief executive expects the company will soon conclude negotiations with Beijing regarding the fate of its China business. In a related development, the internet search-engine giant told the US Congress that up to 25 countries had censored its services in recent years
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