YouTube has offered a way for creators of videos which go viral to cash in on their success. The Google-owned video-sharing site said in a blog post that it was expanding its YouTube Partnership Program to the creators of successful one-off
videos. The program had previously focused on what YouTube described as prolific users who regularly produce videos that reach a wide audience
The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is on the cusp of launching a major revamp to how people contribute to some pages. The site will require that revisions to pages about living people and some organisations be approved by an editor. This would be a radical shift for the site, which ostensibly allows anyone to make changes to almost any entry
The organisation behind Wikipedia is getting a $2 million commitment from a philanthropic investment group started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Omidyar Network’s grant over two years will support Wikimedia Foundation’s key goals of bringing free educational content to people around the world and of supporting more people to help create that content
Australia enjoys high-speed wireless broadband from four carriers, each offering a choice between contract and pre-paid services. Now there’s one more option on the mobile broadband menu — short-term hire from as little as three days to a month. A new service launched by Laptop Connect allows businesses to rent a USB modem for $11 a day for a three-day minimum. Rates fall for longer hires, down to $5 a day for a full month
MYOB subsidiary SmartyHost has been castigated by the Australian Communications and Media Authority for breaching the Spam Act. An investigation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) found SmartyHost, was sending commercial emails to people who had asked to be removed from the sender list
Phantom customer support and selling corrupted software have swiftly turned into a comedy of errors for Adobe, and its customers are not laughing. Perth small business owner Robyn Browne had a difficult time with Adobe customer service. The latest meltdown, which affects customers globally, comes after last month’s call centre problems that resulted in clients being on hold for up to 40 minutes. Now customers are claiming to have been in the phone queue for two hours
Only one crime was solved by each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city’s surveillance network has claimed. The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals. In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers. David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent
Researchers used stem cells to grow a replacement tooth for an adult mouse, the first time scientists have developed a fully functioning three-dimensional organ replacement. The researchers at the Tokyo University of Science created a set of cells that contained genetic instructions to build a tooth, and then implanted this tooth germ
into the mouse’s empty tooth socket. The tooth grew out of the socket and through the gums, as a natural tooth would. Once the engineered tooth matured, after 11 weeks, it had a similar shape, hardness and response to pain or stress as a natural tooth, and worked equally well for chewing. The researchers suggested that using similar techniques in humans could restore function to patients with organ failure
Neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita hypothesised in the 1960s that we see with our brains not our eyes
. Now, a new device trades on that thinking and aims to partially restore the experience of vision for the blind and visually impaired by relying on the nerves on the tongue’s surface to send light signals to the brain
Parasitic infections and other diseases usually associated with the developing world are cropping up with alarming frequency among US poor, especially in states along the US-Mexico border, the rural South and in Appalachia, according to researchers. Government and private researchers are just beginning to assess the toll of the infections, which are a significant cause of heart disease, seizures and congenital birth defects among black and Hispanic populations. One obstacle is that the diseases, long thought to be an overseas problem, are only briefly discussed in most US medical school classes and textbooks, so many physicians don’t recognise them
Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google’s attempt to create what could be the world’s largest virtual library. Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive. They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works
Cars with video displays on their sides that show up only when the video plays. Pocket-sized video screen roll-ups. Wall-hanging TVs thin as cardboard. A new form of LED display can make it all possible
The word tweet
may have entered the international lexicon thanks to an explosion in 140-character microblogging messages, but an attempt by Twitter’s founders to trademark it has been rejected
Israeli scientists have developed new technology to fight biological identity theft after realising that DNA evidence found at crime scenes can be easily falsified. The researchers showed that with the use of basic equipment and know-how, anyone can obtain artificial DNA that can be incorporated into genuine human blood or saliva, or directly planted at a crime scene
People with conditions such as HIV, TB and malaria should not rely on homeopathic treatments, the World Health Organisation has warned. It was responding to calls from young researchers who fear the promotion of homeopathy in the developing world could put people’s lives at risk. The group Voice of Young Science Network has written to health ministers to set out the WHO view
Stress tests conducted by Sydney-based researchers have revealed that the infrastructure-on-demand services offered by Amazon, Google and Microsoft suffer from regular performance and availability issues
Faced with global warming and potential oil shortages, the US navy is experimenting with making jet fuel from seawater. Navy chemists have processed seawater into unsaturated short-chain hydrocarbons that with further refining could be made into kerosene-based jet fuel. But they will have to find a clean energy source to power the reactions if the end product is to be carbon neutral
Historians, literary detectives and even courts of law rely on methods that identify the author of a text by their writing style. But a new study suggests that some of these so-called stylometry techniques are easily fooled, even by people without linguistic or literary training
Little more than a week after Nambu Network said it would shutter its URL-shortener tr.im, and just days after the service was reactivated, its founder now says he will take the code open-source and give up the attractive URL
A model who was slammed with derogatory terms by an anonymous blogger has the right to learn the identity of her online heckler, a judge ruled. In August 2008, a user of Blogger.com, Google’s blogging service, created Skanks in NYC
, a site that assailed Liskula Cohen, 37, a Canadian-born onetime cover girl who has appeared in Vogue and other fashion magazines. The blog featured photos of Cohen captioned with terms including psychotic
, ho
, and skank
. On Monday, New York Supreme Court Judge Joan Madden ruled that Google must hand over to Cohen any identifying information it possesses about the blog’s creator
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