Consumers will no longer have to wait weeks or even months after a film is released on DVD to watch it on pay-TV or download it over the internet, with major studios planning simultaneous roll-outs. Australia’s biggest video rental group predicts a major film studio will begin simultaneously releasing movies to DVD and video-on-demand by March
Wikinews has learned that at least six of the United Kingdom’s main ISPs have implemented monitoring and filtering mechanisms that are causing major problems for UK contributors on websites operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, amongst up to 1200 other websites. The filters appear to be applied because Wikimedia sites are hosting a Scorpions album cover which some call child pornography. The Scorpions are a German rock band who have used several controversial album covers and are perhaps best known for their song, Rock You Like a Hurricane
A material that can be squirted into broken bones, where it hardens within minutes, has been developed by UK scientists. The toothpaste-like substance forms a biodegradeable scaffold over which the body’s own bone grows
A coroner has matched a dismembered female right foot discovered on the British Columbia coastline in November with a left foot discovered in May. Both feet were encased in New Balance running shoes and were among five feet that have mysteriously floated ashore in Canada’s West Coast area since 2007. A sixth foot was found on the shores of Washington State’s Orcas Island in Puget Sound in August
Visitors to the world’s largest adult BitTorrent tracker were met with a surprise this morning. According to Google and Firefox, users accessing Empornium.us are exposed to four trojan horses and three exploits. The malware doesn’t appear to be hosted by the site itself, but it is coming from outside sources — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Famed former pinup model Bettie Page is hospitalised in intensive care after suffering a heart attack in Los Angeles
Ceramics are lightweight and hard, but you can’t make jet engines out of them because they’d shatter like dinner plates. So, materials scientists have been trying to mimic natural materials that combine strength (a measure of resistance to deformation) with toughness (a measure of resistance to fracture). In particular, they’ve looked to the porous but resilient material called nacre that lines abalone shells. Now researchers have developed a method for manufacturing nacre-like materials in the lab. These new materials have mechanical properties similar to metal alloys and are the toughest ceramics ever made. The new method could lead the way to ceramic structural materials for energy-efficient buildings and lightweight but resilient automobile frames
With its £4,000 price tag, the Tesla supercomputer is beyond the reach of most consumers, but is expected to revolutionise the way scientists and medical professionals carry out their work. The gadget’s power will allow doctors to process the results of brain and body scans much more quickly. This would allow them to tell patients within hours instead of days whether they have a tumour
The Number Resource Organisation, which is made up of the five Regional Internet Registries, announces today that the rate of new entrants into the IPv6 routing system has increased by approximately 300 percent over the past two years. This growth has been helped by the active promotion of IPv6 by the five RIRs and their communities; and developing economies, such as India, are playing an increasingly important role in generating demand for global IPv6 deployment
Community advocacy group Get Up says the Federal Government’s commitment to internet censorship will slow down speeds and hurt the economy. The Federal Government will place mandatory filters on the internet as part of its cyber-safety plan, but Get Up says it will bring speeds to a crawl and limit productivity. Meanwhile, Telstra chief operating officer Greg Winn says the federal Government’s attempt to censor the internet is akin to trying to boil the ocean
The fingerprints and DNA samples of more than 857,000 innocent citizens who have been arrested or charged but never convicted of a criminal offence now face deletion from the national DNA database after a landmark ruling by the European court of human rights in Strasbourg. In one of their most strongly worded judgments in recent years, the unanimous ruling from the 17 judges, including a British judge, Nicolas Bratza, condemned the blanket and indiscriminate
nature of the powers given to the police in England, Wales and Northern Ireland to retain the DNA samples and fingerprints of suspects who have been released or cleared. The judges were highly critical of the fact that the DNA samples could be retained without time limit and regardless of the seriousness of the offence, or the age of the suspect
A British doctor volunteering in DR Congo used text message instructions from a colleague to perform a life-saving amputation on a boy. Vascular surgeon David Nott helped the 16-year-old while working 24-hour shifts with medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres in Rutshuru. The boy’s left arm had been ripped off and was badly infected and gangrenous. Mr Nott, 52, from London, had never performed the operation but followed instructions from a colleague who had
A jellyfish-like hydrozoan with a novel power to rewind its life cycle has been spreading rapidly around the world’s oceans without anyone taking much notice
The first mobile phone running Google’s Android operating system will hit Australia on 29 January, with a company called Kogan Technologies announcing the imminent release of an Android-based handset it calls the Agora
Online retail website Amazon has launched a UK music download service. Amazon MP3 will sell tracks from 59p and albums from £3. The new music store will offer more than 3 million songs that will work on any digital music player, including Apple’s iPod. Unlike many files from Apple’s iTunes store, which can only be played through its iTunes interface or on an iPod, the music available from Amazon will be free from the constraints of digital rights management (DRM)
From 3 December companies will be able to buy addresses associated with a new web domain. Called .tel, the domain is intended to act as a universal contact point rather than as a hook on which to hang web sites. Owners of .tel domains will be encouraged to populate it with details about how they can be contacted. The domain is designed to work on the web and with mobile phones such as the Apple iPhone and Blackberry
Pioneer is exhibiting its super multi-layer read-only optical disc which features 16 separate layers on a single side with 25GB storage capacity on each layer for a total capacity of 400GB at the IT Month fair taking place in Taipei. According to Pioneer’s internal roadmap, its super multi-layer technology development is read-only discs in 2008-2010, rewritable discs in 2010-2012 and 1TB disc in 2013
The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation’s telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans’ private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants. At issue in the high-stakes showdown are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program in the years following the 11 Spetember terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution
The worm exploiting a critical Windows bug that Microsoft patched with an emergency fix in late October is being used to build a new botnet. Ivan Macalintal, a senior research engineer with Trend Micro, said that the worm, which his company has dubbed Downad.a
— it’s called Conficker.a
by Microsoft and Downadup
by Symantec — is a key component in a new botnet that criminals are creating. We think 500,000 is a ball park figure,
said Macalintal when asked the size of the new botnet. That’s not as large as some, such as [the] Kraken [botnet], or Storm earlier, but it’s still starting to grow
Voluntary self-regulation means that, for the foreseeable future, Google and its legal team will continue to exercise extraordinary power over global speech online. Which raises a perennial but increasingly urgent question: Can we trust a corporation to be good — even a corporation whose informal motto is Don’t be evil
?
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