AOL said that it plans to reduce its workforce by a third over the next several months. The company, which is based in New York but maintains a large campus in the Dulles area, employs about 6,900 people. The company is hoping to get as many as 2,500 workers to depart voluntarily and is offering extra severance pay to people who leave by the end of December
Engineering researchers at the University of Arkansas have developed a unique and robust method to prevent cloning of passive radio frequency identification tags. The technology, based on one or more unique physical attributes of individual tags rather than information stored on them, will prevent the production of counterfeit tags and thus greatly enhance both security and privacy for government agencies, businesses and consumers
Lord Mandelson will present the Digital Economy Bill to the public, which among other things is aimed at reducing illicit file-sharing. According to parts of the bill that leaked today, the legislation could lead to jail terms for file-sharers and unprecedented power for the entertainment industries
X-Flex is a new kind of wallpaper: one that’s quite possibly stronger than the wall it’s on. Invented by Berry Plastics in partnership with the US Army Corps of Engineers, this lifesaving adhesive is designed for use anyplace that’s prone to blasts and other lethal forces, like in war or natural-disaster zones, chemical plants or airports. To keep a shelter’s walls from collapsing in an explosion and to contain all the flying debris, you simply peel off the wallpaper’s sticky backing, apply the rollable sheets to the inside of brick or cinder-block walls, and reinforce it with fasteners at the edges. Covering an entire room can take less than an hour
Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers to third party brokers. Details emerged after the firm alerted the information commissioner, who said his office was preparing a prosecution
After discovering the Pirate Bay logo hadn’t been registered with the patent office, a Swedish company took the opportunity to claim it as their own in order to commercially exploit it. After bloodless negotiations, the company now seems prepared to play nice and let their application slide. But they don’t go away empty-handed
Officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) have made Europe’s first arrests in the battle against the ZeuS or Zbot Trojan which threatened to compromise thousands of computers. Officers from the PCeU, assisted by Greater Manchester Police, arrested a man and woman, both aged 20 years, in Manchester for offences under the 1990 Computer Misuse Act and the 2006 Fraud Act
Researchers have demonstrated a tiny chip based on silicon that could be used to diagnose dozens of diseases. A tiny drop of blood is drawn through the chip, where disease markers are caught and show up under light. The device uses the tendency of a fluid to travel through small channels under its own force, instead of using pumps
Revenue earned by artists from both concerts and recorded music sales has risen steadily over the past five years as revenue earned by labels has declined dramatically, therefore making the case that the only real loser from illegal file-sharing has been the record labels themselves
The city wifi system that was shut down by the MPAA
two weeks ago is back up. The Coshocton County courthouse based Wi-Fi system is up and running again after it was taken offline due to a single copyright infringement notice
Bacteria which glow green in the presence of explosives could provide a cheap and safe way to find hidden landmines. The bugs can be mixed into a colourless solution, which forms green patches when sprayed onto ground where mines are buried. Edinburgh University said the microbes could be dropped by air onto danger areas. Within a few hours, they would indicate where the explosives can be found
US military boffinry chiefs have stated that they will shortly issue a brace of contracts for refrigerator sized
laser blaster cannons. One of the deals will see a full-power ground prototype built which will be the final stage prior to America’s first raygun-equipped jet fighter
Mozilla will add a new lockdown feature to Firefox 3.6 that will prevent developers from sneaking add-ons into the program. The new feature, which Mozilla dubbed component directory lockdown
, will bar access to Firefox’s components
directory, where most of the browser’s own code is stored. The company has billed the move as a way to boost the stability of its browser
Today marks the end of an era, as The Pirate Bay team announces that the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker is shutting down for good. Although the site will remain operational for now, millions of BitTorrent users will lose the use of its tracker and will instead have to rely on DHT and alternative trackers to continue downloading
The communications watchdog has welcomed a bipartisan effort by Optus and Telstra to crack down on premium SMS providers operating on their networks. The decision of the two carriers follows industry statistics revealing skyrocketing complaints about premium SMS services and the Federal Court’s decision to impose $15.8 million worth of fines on a Queensland mobile messaging company and its directors for breaching spam laws. Telstra and Optus have agreed to engage mobile advertising and messaging compliance specialist WMC Global to monitor premium SMS services to ensure they comply with industry codes
Private New Zealand aerospace company Rocket Lab completed its final ground-based test today and is now ready to launch New Zealand into the space race with its Atea-1 launch vehicle
Seen by millions of people worldwide, the ship design used by The Pirate Bay is one of the most recognisable logos on the Internet today. But after discovering that the iconic emblem had not been officially registered, a Swedish company has hijacked the trademark as their own, with an eye on commercial exploitation
To the envy of geeks everywhere Australia’s most powerful computer has been officially launched in Canberra, ushering in a new era for scientific research. The supercomputer, jointly funded by the Australian National University, the CSIRO and the federal government, was officially launched by Science Minister Kim Carr at its new home today. The supercomputer will be operated by National Computational Infrastructure and director Lindsay Botten says the computer brings Australia’s capability into line with the top systems around the world
URL shorteners are problematical, as everybody knows, but with the rise of Twitter and its ilk they seem to be a necessary part of the landscape. Some of the biggest questions around services such as bit.ly, TinyURL, and is.gd is what happens when they go out of business (as tr.im did last August). Now a group of such companies, organised under the auspices of the Internet Archive, has formed a non-profit entity to hold URL-shortening databases in escrow, with the intent of continuing to resolve a member company’s links should it get out of the business. At announcement, the 301Works organization has 21 URL-shortener members, including the largest, bit.ly. Many others are not (yet) on board. The members have agreed to cede control of their domain names to 301Works.org should they exit the field, and to back up their URL mappings regularly to the organisation — via Slashdot
When a block of IP addresses or a collection of domain names becomes associated with bad action — spamming, jabbering, denial-of-servicing — various ad-hoc Internet groups will add it to a blacklist of rogue IPs
or badware domains
that are blocked at a very low level in the network. The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to readily diffuse an all clear
signal to everyone who follows along with this block, which means that gradually, the net is acquiring slums
— blocks of useful space that can’t be occupied by legitimate users because someone bad once lived there and now no one will accept their traffic — via Boing Boing
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