The prototype of a short-range gigabit wireless chip, which promises more than 2Gbps throughput speeds and costs just AU$10, will be unveiled by the end of this year, according to researchers from National ICT Australia
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created the world’s first material that reflects virtually no light
. This anti-reflection technology is based on nanomaterial and could lead to the development of more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs and smarter
light sources. In theory, if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls, giving a sense of floating free in infinite space
VMware is introducing a public beta version of ACE 2 Enterprise Edition, an upgrade of its two-year-old ACE program for virtualising desktop computers so they can run multiple software or operating systems. One of the new features is Pocket ACE, which allows the user to store the ACE desktop virtualisation tool on a USB drive, a portable hard drive or an Apple iPod, plug it into a remote computer and run the virtualisation software on that computer
Most people just grumble and hit delete, but when Gordon Dick received a spam message advertising Internet services, he fought back. The 30-year-old Web marketing specialist from Edinburgh sued the sender, Transcom Internet Services, in small-claims court. The court ordered the company to pay $1,445 in damages and $1,190 in court costs. If someone was throwing stones through your window, would you just ignore it?
Dick said. It’s anti-social behaviour and they shouldn’t be doing it in the first place
The sale of imitation samurai swords could be banned by the end of the year in the UK. Importing or hiring the weapons could also be made illegal following a string of samurai sword attacks in recent years. Breaching the ban, which is targeted at cheap imitation samurai swords rather than the more expensive genuine collectors’ items made by licensed swordsmiths in Japan, would result in up to six months in jail and a £5,000 fine
Access to YouTube has been suspended in Turkey following a court order. The ban was imposed after prosecutors told the court that clips insulting former Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had appeared on the site. According to Turkish media, there has been a virtual war
between Greek and Turkish users of the site, with both sides posting insulting videos
Google is developing a program to help academics around the world exchange huge amounts of data. The firm’s open source team is working on ways to physically transfer huge data sets up to 120 terabytes in size. Google sends scientists a hard drive system and then copies it before passing it on to other researchers
OpenID has gained two more high profile Internet company supporters. WordPress announced their support and 37Signals support is nigh. These two organisations join Digg, Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, LiveJournal, MediaWiki and others in their support of OpenID
Japan’s public broadcaster NHK reported late last week that the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry plans to introduce Linux for use within classrooms across the country in the near future
The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalises the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned
Dell is considering offering the Linux operating system as an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows on its personal computers. The PC maker said it received more than 100,000 customer requests for Linux in a suggestion box
posted on Dell’s Web site less than three weeks ago
As of today, the Ubuntu development branch includes a tool called Proprietary Drivers manager
that makes it easy for users to activate proprietary drivers. Together with the graphical frontends to Beryl and Compiz this will make the activation and experience of the 3D desktop very pleasant
Our closest invertebrate relative, the humble sea squirt, can regenerate its entire body from just tiny blood vessel fragments. The entire regeneration process, which in part resembles the early stages of embryonic development, can produce an adult sea squirt in as little as a week. The finding could illuminate not only the evolutionary origins of regeneration in all organisms, but also subsequent changes to it during vertebrate evolution
The Chinese government began blocking access to the popular blogging site LiveJournal on Friday, cutting off its citizens from the roughly 1.8 million blogs the service hosts. SixApart, the company behind LiveJournal, says there are 8,692 self-reported Chinese bloggers on the site, a number that’s likely low since it’s based on information volunteered in user profiles. China has blocked the site before, for no clear reason — then unblocked it again just as mysteriously, without any concessions from the company. The timing of the block coincides with the National People’s Congress meeting in Beijing, says Xiao Qiang, a Chinese dissident and founder of the China Digital Times. According to Xiao, the event is often accompanied by stepped up security and a worsening of China’s notorious internet censorship policies
Charlie Brooker, writing in the Guardian, reviews his phone under the headline, My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots.
It gets even better from there. This may be the best mobile phone review ever written — via Bruce Sterling
A team of British scientists has set sail on a voyage to examine why a huge chunk of the earth’s crust is missing, deep under the Atlantic Ocean — a phenomenon that challenges conventional ideas about how the earth works. The 20-strong team aims to survey an area some 3,000 to 4,000 metres deep where the mantle — the deep interior of the earth normally covered by a crust kilometres thick — is exposed on the sea floor. Experts describe the hole along the mid-Atlantic ridge as an open wound
on the ocean floor that has puzzled scientists for the five or so years that its existence has been known because it defies existing tectonic plate theories of evolution
The US Department of Transportation (DOT) has banned Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 2007 from its offices, and is considering switching its operations to Macs and PCs running Novell’s SuSe Linux. The DOT enacted the ban in mid-January because certain applications essential to the agency’s function can’t run on Windows Vista
Random House and HarperCollins have agreed to allow book browsing and searching on all their books
The recent 2.1.1 release of the popular blog software WordPress was compromised by a cracker who made it easier for to execute code remotely. This is interesting because the official release was quietly and subtly compromised, and has been in the wild for a few days now. There’s no word on if any affected sites have been compromised, but anyone running WordPress is urged to upgrade to 2.1.2 immediately
A genuine crack for Windows Vista has just been released, which allows a pirated, non-activated installation of Vista (Home Basic/Premium and Ultimate) to be properly activated and made fully-operational. Unlike cracks which have been floating around since Vista RTM was released in late November, this crack doesn’t simply get around product activation with beta activation files or timestop cracks — it actually makes use of the activation process. It seems that Microsoft has allowed large OEMs like ASUS to ship their products with a pre-installed version of Vista that doesn’t require product activation — apparently because end users would find it too inconvenient
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