Google has apologised for the two and a half hour Gmail outage on Tuesday morning, and admitted that the cause was down to datacentre maintenance
Google’s Gmail was down for hours overnight, one of the longest e-mail outages for the search giant. Gmail is the third most popular e-mail service, with 113 million users, and the outage could mean a refund for Google’s business customers. Google postings said Gmail had some problems
, and an analyst said Google needs to correct them
Ireland’s largest ISP won’t block The Pirate Bay — the embattled BitTorrent search engine and tracker — absent a court order. Eircom is aware of copyright infringement issues but will not block The Pirate Bay unless major record labels can obtain a court order requiring it and other ISPs (Internet service providers) to do so
The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia reports that all of its user data was irretrievably lost in the 30 January database crash that knocked the service offline. That means that users who were unable to recover their bookmarks through publicly available tools (including other social media sites and the Google cache) have lost all their data. Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff said last week that the service’s MySQL database included nearly half a terabyte of data
The University of Adelaide has decided to replace an in-house email system with Gmail for its more than 16,000 students. The non-financial
agreement with Google will allow all undergraduate, honours and postgraduate coursework students to change over from their University of Adelaide email account to a new Google account from 16 March this year and will also allow them to use Google Calendar and Google Talk instant messaging
The team behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution has unleashed plans for its October 2009 release, adding a new name with an Australian flavour to the company’s alliteration menagerie: Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala. The release is aimed squarely at cloud computing, with the intention to incorporate programming interfaces from the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to allow for quick deployment of cloud applications. The ability to create an EC2-style cloud will be included courtesy of the Eucalyptus project
A new technique developed by scientists at UC Berkeley and University of Massachusetts Amherst may drastically increase the ability of devices to store things. Cal officials called the technique innovative and easily implemented
, on Thursday. The method lets microscopic nanoscale elements precisely assemble themselves over large surfaces. Scientists said the technique could soon open doors to dramatic improvements in the data storage capacity of electronic media
In a discovery that could radically change how the world fights influenza, researchers have engineered antibodies that protect against many strains of the virus, including even the 1918 Spanish flu and the H5N1 bird flu. The discovery, experts said, could lead to the development of a flu vaccine that would not have to be changed yearly. And the antibodies already developed can be injected as a treatment, going after the virus in ways that drugs like Tamiflu do not
Irish internet users are to be blocked from accessing music swapping web sites, as internet service providers bow to pressure from the music industry. Eircom, the country’s biggest internet provider, is to start blocking its internet customers from accessing music swapping
At the 81st annual Academy Awards, Slumdog Millionaire
won eight Oscars, including best picture, director and adapted screenplay, completing a joyful ride that had carried it to wins at the Golden Globes, Writers Guild, Directors Guild and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards
The Met Police got a short sharp rap over the knuckles yesterday, as the Office of the Information Commissioner questioned what looks very much like a blanket policy to force CCTV onto public houses in certain parts of London
Some 120 protesters descended upon the parliament in the capital, Wellington, and handed over an e-petition against the amendments with over 12,000 signatories, and a traditional one with 148 names, to the United Future party leader Peter Dunne. Section 92A which will force ISPs to disconnect customers who have allegedly infringed copyright. The demonstrators were waving black placards reading ISPs are not a court
and Fair go, not Fear go
The basic concept of space-based solar power (SBSP) is having solar cells in space collecting energy from sun, then converting the energy into a low intensity microwave beam, sending it down to Earth where it is collected on a rectenna, and then fed into the power grid to provide electricity. Almost 200 million gigawatts of solar energy is beamed towards the Earth every second, which is more energy than our civilisation has used since the dawn of the electrical age. We only need a way to harness that energy and make it usable. Space Energy’s vision is to help create an energy-independent world, and improve the lives of millions of people by bringing a source of safe, clean energy to the planet from space. They are looking to become the world’s leading, and perhaps the first, SBSP enterprise
Spammers have cracked Microsoft’s latest defence against abuse of its Live Hotmail e-mail service using a sophisticated network of hacked computers that receive encrypted instructions from a central server. The botnet, or collection of compromised PCs, can decipher Live Hotmail’s CAPTCHA registration safeguard in about 20 seconds
Hackers broke into a computer at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts last July and stole tens of thousands of customer credit card numbers. The break-in occurred at a property belonging to a Wyndham franchisee, but that computer was linked to other company systems. That intrusion enabled a hacker to use the company server to search for customer information located at other franchised and managed property sites,
the company said in a statement disclosing the breach
In an about-face following a torrent of online protests, Facebook is backing off a change in its user policies while it figures how best to resolve questions like who controls the information shared on the social networking site
A small but important uptick in electrical output from the solar panels on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit this month indicates a beneficial Martian wind has blown away some of the dust that has accumulated on the panels. The cleaning boosts Spirit’s daily energy supply by about 30 watt-hours, to about 240 watt-hours from 210 watt-hours. The rover uses about 180 watt-hours per day for basic survival and communications, so this increase roughly doubles the amount of discretionary power for activities such as driving and using instruments. Thirty watt-hours is the amount of energy used to light a 30-watt bulb for one hour
— via OneCelledCreature
The prosecution has dropped the most serious charges against the irreverent Swedish filesharing service The Pirate Bay on only the second day of its trial for assisting widespread copyright infringement. After being unable to prove in court that illegally distributed files had used The Pirate Bay site — despite clear markers in the files, which are labelled with the Pirate Bay name — the prosecution, representing a swathe of high-profile music and film companies including Warner Bros, MGM, Universal and EMI — had to abandon almost half the charges. Co-defendant Fredrik Neij said that prosecutor Håkan Roswall had misunderstood the technology and that his evidence did not implicate The Pirate Bay
Global handset makers and telecommunications providers, including Telstra, have banded together to develop a universal charger for mobile phones by January 2012. The charger would work on any brand of mobile phone, meaning users would only need one charger for any handset purchased. The move, led by industry group the GSM Association, involves 17 major mobile operators and manufacturers including Nokia, Motorola, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and Vodafone. Apple and Research In Motion, maker of BlackBerry devices, are not part of the initiative
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