Intel and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies will produce solid-state drives. The enterprise-class SSDs are aimed at performance and reducing costs. Intel and Hitachi expect their SSDs to deliver high IOPS performance. The chips used in the SSDs will be produced by IM Flash Technologies
Outgoing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin is pushing for action in December on a plan to offer free, pornography-free wireless Internet service to all Americans, despite objections from the wireless industry and some consumer groups
Adelaide Metro has given its blessing to Google to launch an online transport application that helps commuters find their way around the city. Google Transit feeds off bus, tram and train timetables to help commuters plan journeys and plot routes in Adelaide
Vodafone and Dell have partnered to launch Australia’s first $0 3G netbook bundle next month. Netbooks are mainly used to connect to the internet and have smaller form factors and less applications compared with laptops. Similar to the ubiquitous mobile phone sales model where customers pay for a hardware and service bundle in monthly instalments, the Vodafone and Dell partnership will offer the Inspiron Mini 9 at no cost upfront with 5GB of data for $69.95 per month over a two-year contract
Google is expected to launch the New Zealand version of its Street View mapping application tomorrow. The free software lets Internet users take a virtual walk
down city streets and view photos of the scene from any angle on their computer screens
A new analysis of botnets has come up with a possible reason for their prodigious ability to infect PCs — many anti-virus programs are near to useless in blocking the binaries used to spread them. According to FireEye chief scientist Stuart Staniford, detection rates are so poor that, on average, only around 40 percent of security software can detect binaries during the period of greatest infectivity and danger, namely the first few days after a particular variant starts being used by botnet builders
Researches at the University of Washington have recently developed a system, which for the first time, offers an instantly customisable approach to user interfaces. Each participant in the program is placed through a brief skills test and then a mathematically-based version of the user interface optimised for his or her vision and motor abilities is generated. The current off-the-shelf designs are especially discouraging for the disabled, the elderly and others who have trouble controlling a mouse, because most computer programs have standardised button sizes, fonts, and layouts, which are designed for normal users
A federal jury here has handed down what legal experts said was the country’s first cyber-bullying verdict, convicting a Missouri woman of three misdemeanor charges of computer fraud for her involvement in creating a phony account on MySpace to trick a teenager who later committed suicide. The jury deadlocked Wednesday on a fourth count of conspiracy against the woman, Lori Drew, 49, and the judge, George Wu of the US District Court for the Central District of California, declared a mistrial on that charge
Amazon is using the Thanksgiving break to quietly release some bad news — they’re shutting down one of its web services — Alexa Web Search. The service, which we first covered way back in 2006, is already closed to new customers, and existing users have until January 26, 2009 to move on to something else.—Amazon says in an email to developers that the reason for the closing is low usage, and I believe them. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all offer competing services. On the Alexa Web Search site itself Amazon says the service has been deprecated
, which is a fancy word for shut down
Bloggers across Mumbai fed live updates of the action after Islamist gunmen attacked the heart of the Indian financial capital, highlighting the emergence of citizen journalists in news coverage. Some, including a blogger named Vinu, were furiously uploading photos of damage from the attacks that killed at least 101 people and injured at least 314. Scores of foreigners, including Westerners, were trapped in luxury hotels. Images of the attacks also surfaced on the photo-sharing Web site Flickr. Some bloggers provided running descriptions and commentaries from near the action, while others vented emotions
It’s the ultimate form of solar power: eat a plant, become photosynthetic. Now researchers have found how one animal does just that. Elysia chlorotica is a lurid green sea slug, with a gelatinous leaf-shaped body, that lives along the Atlantic seaboard of the US. What sets it apart from most other sea slugs is its ability to run on solar power. Mary Rumpho of the University of Maine, is an expert on E chlorotica and has now discovered how the sea slug gets this ability: it photosynthesises with genes stolen
from the algae it eats
An Estonian ISP that temporarily hosted the command-and-control servers for the Srizbi botnet, responsible for a large portion of the world’s spam, has cut off those servers, according to computer security analysts. Starline Web Services, based in Estonia’s capital Tallinn, had hosted four domain names identified as the control points for Srizbi, according to researchers from computer security firm FireEye
A big spam-spewing botnet shut down two weeks ago has been resurrected, security researchers said today, and is again under the control of criminals. The Srizbi
botnet returned from the dead late Tuesday when the infected PCs were able to successfully reconnect with new command-and-control servers, which are now based in Estonia. Srizbi was knocked out more than two weeks ago when McColo Corp, a hosting company that had been accused of harbouring a wide range of criminal activities, was yanked off the Internet by its upstream service providers
Until today, uTorrent — the client of choice for most BitTorrent users — was only available on Windows PCs. Now, after years of waiting, Mac users finally have the chance to try uTorrent, to see for themselves how it fares against the competition
YouTube, after years of complaints over the size of its video player, expanded the size of its screen, adopting a widescreen format
If you were to soak even your best raincoat underwater for two months it would be wet through at the end of the experience. But a new waterproof material developed by Swiss chemists would be as dry as the day it went in. Lead researcher Stefan Seeger at the University of Zurich says the fabric, made from polyester fibres coated with millions of tiny silicone filaments, is the most water-repellent clothing-appropriate material ever created. Drops of water stay as spherical balls on top of the fabric and a sheet of the material need only be tilted by 2 degrees from horizontal for them to roll off like marbles. A jet of water bounces off the fabric without leaving a trace
Facebook’s leaders are smiling as the company announced an antispam victory. The popular social-networking Web site was awarded more than $873 million in damages against a Canadian spammer
Samsung has announced that it is mass-producing 256GB solid-state disk drives that deliver double the performance rate of its earlier 64GB and 128GB drives. The new SSDs are designed for use in laptop and desktop PCs and are available for resellers today. Samsung said it has been able to narrow the disparity between read and write speeds on the drive from previous models to about 10%. That yields a sequential read rate of 220MB/sec. and sequential write rates of 200MB/sec
The Australian subsidiary of the non-profit One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organisation today said it would commence a local “Give 1, Get 1” program on November 30 that would deliver the machines to both geeks and disadvantaged children. The initiative will provide a XO laptop to a child in remote Australia or the Pacific Islands for each laptop purchased. The cost of a laptop is US$399 (plus shipping and GST). The devices can be ordered online
The Rudd government has finished its one-year anniversary by honouring an election commitment to remove discrimination against same-sex couples from a wide range of federal laws
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