In the seminal science fiction book Dune
, Frank Herbert envisioned the Fremen collecting water from the air via moisture traps and dew collectors. Science Daily reprints a press release from the Fraunhofer Institute in Stuttgart, where scientists working with colleagues from Logos Innovationen have developed a closed-loop and self-sustaining method, no external power required, for teasing the humidity out of desert air and into potable water via Slashdot
Sweden’s Pirate Party has won a seat in the European Parliament. The group — which campaigned on reformation of copyright and patent law — secured 7.1% of the Swedish vote. The result puts the Pirate Party in fifth place, behind the Social Democrats, Greens, Liberals and the Moderate Party
The third contaminated pet food scare in six months has upset veterinarians and prompted calls for stronger regulations. The Australian company Virbac has pulled some products from veterinarians’ shelves after small-animal specialists established a possible link between Vietnamese-made dog dental chews and an outbreak of mysterious illnesses in dogs
The Pirate Party has won a huge victory in the Swedish elections and is marching on to Brussels. After months of campaigning against well established parties, the Pirate Party has gathered enough votes to be guaranteed a seat in the European Parliament
Xunlight, a startup in Toledo, Ohio, has developed a way to make large, flexible solar panels. It has developed a roll-to-roll manufacturing technique that forms thin-film amorphous silicon solar cells on thin sheets of stainless steel. Each solar module is about one metre wide and five and a half metres long
An American ISP allegedly involved in distributing spam and images of child abuse has been thrown off the net. The US Federal Trade Commission asked for Pricewert LLC’s net links to be severed after it had gathered evidence of the firm’s criminal
connections. The FTC alleges that Pricewert had created one of the leading US-based havens for illegal, malicious, and harmful content
. Pricewert denied the allegations and said it would fight them in court
So where do these notions of so many billions in lost revenue come from? I found the original report. It was written by some academics you can hire in a unit at UCL called Ciber, the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (which seeks to inform by countering idle speculation and uninformed opinion with the facts
). The report was commissioned by a government body called Sabip, the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property. On the billions lost it says: Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10bn (IP rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs.
What is the origin of this conservative figure? I hunted down the full Ciber documents, found the references section, and followed the web link, which led to a 2004 press release from a private legal firm called Rouse who specialise in intellectual property law. This press release was not about the £10bn figure. It was, in fact, a one-page document, which simply welcomed the government setting up an intellectual property theft strategy. In a short section headed background
, among five other points, it says: Rights owners have estimated that last year alone counterfeiting and piracy cost the UK economy £10bn and 4,000 jobs.
An industry estimate, as an aside, in a press release. Genius
Hackers love a challenge. And more than that, they love cash. That’s what Telesign found out this week. A provider of voice-based authentication software, the company challenged hackers to break into its StrongWebmail.com Web site late last week. The prize? US$10,000. On Thursday, a group of security researchers claimed to have won the contest, which challenged hackers to break into the Web mail account of StrongWebmail CEO Darren Berkovitz and report back details from his 26 June calendar entry. The hackers, led by Secure Science Chief Scientist Lance James and security researchers Aviv Raff and Mike Bailey, provided details from Berkovitz’s calendar to IDG News Service. In an interview, Berkovitz confirmed those details were from his account
As if flying around in the dark swooping and diving to catch insects was not tricky enough, bats also listen for their fellow hunters. A study has revealed how these winged mammals recognise other bats’ voices
Those are some of the sounds that have been missing from computer graphic simulations of water and other fluids, according to researchers in Cornell’s Department of Computer Science, who have come up with new algorithms to simulate such sounds to go with the images. The sounds produced by pouring and splashing water actually result from the vibration of trapped air bubbles. Cornell researchers can simulate those sounds by computing how the bubbles would behave. The work by Doug James, associate professor of computer science, and graduate student Changxi Zheng will be reported at the 2009 ACM SIGGRAPH conference Aug. 3-7 in New Orleans. It is the first step in a broader research program on sound synthesis supported by a $1.2 million grant from the Human Centered Computing Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to James, assistant professor Kavita Bala and associate professor Steve Marschner
Google has rolled out an experimental new search product called Google Squared. Google Squared does not provide a list of links to web pages, like with a traditional Google search, but presents information derived from a query in a spreadsheet-like grid called a square. Users of google.com/squared can then build, modify and refine their square through further Web searches. Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn’t find webpages about your topic — instead, it automatically fetches and organises facts from across the internet,
Google said in a preview of the product last month
Google has expanded Google Flu Trends, its online tool for tracking influenza outbreaks, to Australia and New Zealand. Google said it had built a flu model for the state of Victoria by working with its own search data and historical flu data from the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory. We then extrapolated this model to produce flu models at a national and state level for the rest of Australia,
Google said in a blog post. Tasmania and Northern Territory were not included, Google said, because there was not a large enough volume of search queries to be accurate
An extrasolar planet has been found by observing subtle changes in a star’s position in the sky for the first time. The technique, called astrometry, is best suited to finding planets at great distances from their stars, complementing more common techniques, which tend to turn up planets orbiting their stars at close range. The planet’s star is also the lightest known to host a planet, and researchers hope other such discoveries will shed light on how common planets are around low-mass stars, which far outnumber their higher-mass cousins
Commonwealth Bank customers are being inundated with phishing attacks, some at a rate of several scam emails a day, sent by cyber criminals seeking to steal passwords and credit card details. The scammers, who are specifically targeting the bank in a sustained assault, are bombarding customers with several clever variations of the email ruse — such as using bogus call centres — in an attempt to hook even tech-savvy web users. The emails have largely managed to evade spam filters using methods such as images instead of text
Chinese censors blocked access to Twitter and other popular online services today, two days before the 20th anniversary of the crackdown on democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. The move came amid increasing pressure on dissidents, in a reflection of the authorities’ anxiety ahead of the sensitive date. Hundreds died as the army forced its way through Beijing to clear away demonstrators from the capital’s political heart in June 1989, but the issue is taboo on the mainland. The photo-sharing site Flickr, email service Hotmail and other services were also unavailable this evening
Twenty-five years ago, inside the bowels of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, a young artificial intelligence researcher received his first desktop computer — the Soviet-built Elektronika 60, a copy of an American minicomputer called a PDP-11 — and began writing programs for it. But not numerical ones. He ended up creating one that would infest the dreams of those who played it, spurring addictions and even the suspicion that it was a Russian plot to divert the youth of America in a pointless exercise
Google will be offering integrated public transport information — that is, maps and real-time timetables — for Canberra and Sydney from later in June
. The Canberra service will cover the entire ACTION bus network, which is good news. The Sydney announcement unfortunately is less impressive: it only covers the inner-city monorail and tram services, which to be perfectly honest are overpriced tourist traps with zero integration with the rest of the system
The Federal Court has granted interim orders against three companies over allegations of setting up false dating profiles and SMS spamming. The Australian Communications and Media Authority alleges that the three companies involved — Mobilegate, Winning Bid and Jobspy — had set up false dating profiles to deceptively obtain user details and had sent SMS messages persuading people to reply to the messages, which were charging them up to $5 per message. They had also used images of people without consent
Lawyers ACS:Law have entered the anti-piracy revenue generation scheme previously inhabited by Davenport Lyons. They write to alleged file-sharers demanding payment of hundreds of pounds or face legal action. However, those same individuals can point the finger straight back, since ACS:Law are copyright infringers themselves
In an unprecedented effort to crack down on self-serving edits, the Wikipedia supreme court has banned contributions from all IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates. Closing out the longest-running court case in Wikiland history, the site’s Arbitration Committee voted 10 to 0 (with one abstention) in favor of the move, which takes effect immediately
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