All of Europe’s energy needs could be supplied by building an array of solar panels in the Sahara. Technological advances combined with falling costs have made it realistic to consider North Africa as Europe’s main source of imported energy. By harnessing the power of the Sun, possibly in tandem with wind farms along the North African coastline, Europe could easily meet its 2020 target of generating at least 20 per cent of its energy from renewable sources
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a way to charge lithium ion batteries in seconds, instead of hours, that could open the door to smaller, faster-charging batteries for mobile phones and other devices
Major security vendors Symantec, Sophos and Kaspersky yesterday said their products would block legalised hacking attempts by NSW Police under new legislation as they would any other security threat to users
Google’s Gmail e-mail service is down for an undetermined number of users, and while the outage has been partially fixed, some people could be locked out of their accounts for many more hours. In its latest update about the problem, posted at around 9.30 am US Eastern Time on Tuesday, Google said that it could take between 24 hours to 36 hours from that moment to restore all affected accounts
Google will block an iPhone application that harnesses its Google Talk chat program to provide a free text-message service after too many users flocked to download it. The Infinite SMS app, which cost US$0.99 and let users send unlimited text messages from an iPod or iPhone, quickly became one of the 10 most-downloaded apps in the iPhone Store after its release last month, developer Inner Fence said in a statement on its Web site
Sydney police have charged two men over what is alleged to be a multi-million dollar credit card fraud racket involving online auction giant eBay. NSW Police today issued a statement saying the pair had purchased more than $4.5 million in goods using fake credit cards bearing bank details skimmed or stolen from legitimate card-holders
. The goods were then allegedly sold online through eBay and other sites
Civil rights and privacy advocates yesterday expressed concern about a NSW Parliament proposal that would allow the state’s police to remotely access a suspect’s computer for up to 28 days without disclosing the hack for some time
Researchers say a chimpanzee at a Swedish zoo has proven that apes are as capable of forward planning as humans. Zoo minders have uncovered hundreds of stone caches being used by the chimp to hoard ammunition to hurl at visitors. The chimp at the centre of this study, an alpha male in his 30s called Santino, lives at Furuvik Zoo to the north of Stockholm
Australia will lift a 13-year ban on using foreign aid funds to support family planning and safe abortions in poor nations. Foreign Affairs Minister Stephen Smith announced his decision to scrap the ban at a meeting of Labor MPs and Senators this morning, after months of internal party consultation about a policy shift. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told the meeting he did not personally support the change and had had longstanding conservative views on abortion — but said there had been a clear majority view in the Labor caucus for change
The UK government wants to cut out users rights to access Internet content, applications and services. Some of the information used to justify the change has been cut and pasted from the Wikipedia. Amendments to the Telecoms Package circulated in Brussels by the UK government, seek to cross out users’ rights to access and distribute Internet content and services. And they want to replace it with a principle
that users can be told not only the conditions for access, but also the conditions for the use of applications and services. The UK government texts have been heavily criticised by the French campaigning group La Quadrature du Net. It is believed that they could have been drawn up by the UK regulator, Ofcom
In today’s Crikey email I have reported that Freeview Australia, the marketing arm for Australia’s free to air television industry, were indeed behind attempts to suppress a spoof video sending up the new digital multichannels. This is despite Freeview’s denials to me yesterday
The 14 year old daughter of a city counselor in Spain is the source of a small political crisis in the city of Getafe. The girl used her mother’s work 3G modem to download some episodes of the popular TV-show Lost
, resulting in a massive $40,000 bill
Telcos can expect more downward pressure on their fixed-line income as the emerging generation of adolescents start leaving the nest, new research has revealed. The research by the federal communications regulator shows that 18 to 24 year-olds are relying on mobiles phones when they leave home and choosing not to sign up for landlines. The Australian Communications and Media Authority’s research, which was conducted by Roy Morgan between May and June 2008, revealed that 79 per cent of 18 to 24 year-olds used mobile more frequently than fixed-line services. By contrast, senior citizens used fixed-line services more frequently and saw little need to use a mobile phone
The shrill bleeps from 80s home computers and the hammering clicks of ancient calculating machines are noises that many people would prefer to forget, but not chip-tune musician Matthew Applegate. He plans on assembling a virtual orchestra of 20 retired relics of computing at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. The choice of venue will even allow Applegate to feature the famous Colossus Mark 2 computer in the event, which was used for code-breaking in World War II and was recently reconstructed at Bletchley Park in 2007
Mininova, one of the leading BitTorrent sites, has been suffering from a massive DDoS attack over the past few days. Originating from a botnet spanning three continents, the attacks vary in strength and are causing the site to be completely inaccessible at times. The Mininova team is working on a solution
Exact replicas of a man’s thumb bones have been made for the first time using a 3D printer. The breakthrough paves the way for surgeons to replace damaged or diseased bones with identical copies built from the patients’ own cells. In theory, you could do any bone,
says Christian Weinand of the Insel Hospital in Berne, Switzerland, head of the team that copied his thumb bones. Now I can put spares in my pocket if I want,
he says
Truman, a 7-foot-long, 30-pound octopus at the New England Aquarium squeezed his body into a 14-inch square acrylic box today in pursuit of food, aquarium officials said. The 30-minute performance drew a crowd of staff and guests. The caretakers for the octopi at the aquarium place food inside locked boxes as an enrichment activity. The idea is that the animals, who are very intelligent, must figure out how to unlatch the boxes and get the food, aquarium officials said in a news release
A company that allegedly sold workers’ personal details, including union activities, to building firms is to be prosecuted by the information watchdog. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said the Consulting Association, in Droitwich, had committed a serious breach
of the Data Protection Act. The ICO said a secret system had been run for over 15 years to enable firms to unlawfully vet job applicants. Unions have called on the government to outlaw blacklisting
practices
If you ask security experts why more cyber criminals aren’t brought to justice, the answer you will probably hear is that US authorities simply aren’t getting the cooperation they need from law enforcement officials in Russia and other Eastern European nations, where some of the world’s most active cyber criminal gangs are thought to operate with impunity. But I wonder whether authorities in those countries would be any more willing to pursue cyber crooks in their own countries if they were forced to confront just how deeply those groups have penetrated key government and private computer networks in those regions?
Australian governments may soon have the world’s most secure data communication system if trials of a locally-developed quantum cryptography technology are successful. The system is built on Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), considered the world’s most secure medium, which uses special lasers capable of detecting the slightest attempt to eavesdrop. It could remove the need for governments to use couriers to deliver one-time keys for sensitive information
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