For centuries, readers thumbed through the crackling pages of Sweden’s Post-och Inrikes Tidningar newspaper. No longer. The world’s oldest paper still in circulation has dropped its paper edition and now exists only in cyberspace
A German court on Monday ruled that police cannot remotely search criminal suspects’ computer hard drives over the Internet without their knowledge. The decision of the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe bars police from using the online Trojan horse
method, which involves using a computer program to search through remote hard drives over an Internet connection, unless parliament passes a law explicitly allowing it. Police will still be allowed to seize evidence from computer hard drives when conducting searches in person
Almost all printers secretly print dots without your consent which are invisible to the naked eye and apparently Xerox and possibly others have included this technology which FBI is using to keep an eye even on groups such as Greenpeace and United for Peace and Justice. The EFF has released a guide explaining how to read the date time, and printer serial number from forensic tracking codes in a Xerox DocuColor color laser printout
I’m sure many people wondered if Google will release a presentation tool, after building Google Docs&Spreadsheets. Well, the answer is yes, and the code-name of the tool is Presently (a play on Writely, the name of the online word processor bought by Google). You will be able to convert a document into a presentation, create slides and view the presentation in full-screen
Germany has ordered the arrest of 13 suspected CIA agents over the alleged kidnapping of one of its citizens. Munich prosecutors confirmed that the warrants were linked to the case of Khaled al-Masri, a German national of Lebanese descent. Mr Masri says his case is an example of the US policy of extraordinary rendition
— a practice whereby the US government flies foreign terror suspects to third countries without judicial process for interrogation or detention — via Warren Ellis
The BBC Trust, an independent oversight body, they are now allowed to release their iPlayer
, enabling the download and viewing of BBC owned content such as Doctor Who. Unfortunately the Trust also mandated the use of DRM to enforce a 30 day playable period, and exempted classical music performances from being made available. There will now be a 2 month consultation period. According to one of the trustees, the Trust could still change its mind if there was a public outcry and it was backed up by evidence
A team of scientists from Washington, Wisconsin, and Germany combined a ceramic barium titanate and white-hot molten tin with an ultrasonic probe. The new material was, in some tests, almost 10x more resistant to bending than diamond. As the material cools, its crystal structure changes, causing its volume to expand. Because they are held inside the tin matrix, strain builds up inside the barium titanate, at a particular temperature that energy is released to oppose a bending force
Break out your spandex pants, start practicing your karate kicks; David Lee Roth is officially returning as the front man for Van Halen. Founding band member Eddie Van Halen made the first official announcement, saying It feels like a whole new beginning to be back with Dave and to be playing with my brother and my son. We look forward to going on tour.
Roth, an original member of Van Halen, quit the group in 1985. He rejoined the band briefly in 1996, only to quit again a few months later. Roth hasn’t performed live with the group since 1984
Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine the IPCC major climate change report. Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute, an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — via Warren Ellis
Given some jelly mixed according to standard procedures and a vertical wall, it is not possible to nail the former to the latter and have it stay there for any significant amount of time. Furthermore, these experiments were conducted by nailing the jelly to a horizontal surface which was then gradually tilted. Nailing jelly to a wall while the wall is vertical is an intractable problem in itself due to the difficulty in picking up jelly with the hands without it disintegrating — via Improbable Research
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has issued a warning to ISPs to come clean about their broadband speeds. ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel says he is unhappy with the use of the phrase up to
in some advertisements about Internet speeds. He has told the Sydney Institute any service provider continuing to make misleading statements may face litigation
Police in the United States are investigating a media company for causing a massive security scare after police overreacted in Boston. A marketing campaign for Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force turned into a day-long terrorism scare for the city and a public relations nightmare for Turner Broadcasting System Inc over a bunch of blinking boxes that were mistaken for bombs. Major disruptions occurred throughout metropolitan Boston, beginning at 8am local time and then in the afternoon, as calls came in about suspicious-looking devices attached to bridges, roadways and an MBTA bus station
Fox has given Matt Groening the rights to do four straight to DVD movies for Futurama, even after they cancelled the show a few years ago. The series, has been picked up for more episodes, but not by Fox. Comedy Central will be airing new episodes after the straight to DVD movies have been released
Researchers at the University of Southern California have designed a phosphorescent dye molecule that emits near-infrared light and have used it to make long-lasting organic light-emitting diodes. The diodes could be used to make a cheap and flexible near-infrared display that would be unreadable to the naked eye but could be read with night-vision goggles. Such a display could be integrated into a soldier’s uniform or a device that could be stashed in a pocket, allowing soldiers to read communications at night without being spotted by enemy snipers
Along with today’s iPod Shuffle line additions, Apple has released the promised 802.11n Enabler for compatible Macs. The software is available via a software download from the Apple Store for $2.99 (US$1.99) unless you buy the Airport Extreme base station which includes the software at no additional cost
One of the main challenges in developing microscale robots lies in miniaturising their power and propulsion. Now, researchers in the US may have found a solution to this problem, by exploiting the natural movement of bacteria to propel micro-objects through water
Adobe Systems intends to submit its ubiquitous PDF format to ISO as part of its ongoing format war with Microsoft and Vista. The announcement comes the day before Microsoft’s competing format XPS (XML Paper Specification) ships with the new Windows Vista operating system and Office 2007 software suite. Formally known as Metro, XPS has been described as a PDF killer
intended to break PDF’s decade-long role as the de facto standard for printable documents
Because the new 45-nanometer transistors from IBM and Intel are smaller, they can switch on and off more quickly, roughly 300 billion times per second in Intel’s case. Intel has code-named its new 45-nanometer chips Penryn and plans to produce next-gen Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, and Xeon chips this year, all with Penryn designs
Security researcher Alex Ionescu claims to have successfully bypassed the much discussed DRM protection in Windows Vista, called Protected Media Path
, which is designed to seriously degrade the playback quality of any video and audio running on systems with hardware components not explicitly approved by Microsoft. The bypass of the DRM protection was in turn performed by breaking the Driver Signing / PatchGuard protection in the new operating system. Alex is now quite nervous about what an army of lawyers backed by draconian copyright laws could do to him if he released the details, but he claims to be currently looking into the details of safely releasing his details about this at the moment though
Wolves in the northern Rockies will be removed from the endangered species list within the next year a move that would open the population up to trophy hunting. Federal officials are expected to announce the plan Monday. The agency also will finalise removal from the list of a separate population of wolves in the Great Lakes region
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