From 8 December, it will be once more legal to own and operate an MP3 Transmitter in the UK, primarily used to convey music between an MP3 player such as Apple’s iPod to your home or car stereo. The device was originally banned because their transmissions can override and interfere with legal radio stations, which is prohibited by the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949. Strong consumer demand for the devices and pressure from Liberal Democrats were among the primary motivators for the amendment
Mobile phone owners will be allowed to break software locks on their handsets in order to use them with competing carriers under new copyright rules. Other copyright exemptions approved by the Library of Congress will let film professors copy snippets from DVDs for educational compilations and let blind people use special software to read copy-protected electronic books. All told, Librarian of Congress James H Billington approved six exemptions, the most his Copyright Office has ever granted. For the first time, the office exempted groups of users. The new rules will take effect Monday and expire in three years. In granting the exemption for mobile phone users, the Copyright Office determined that consumers aren’t able to enjoy full legal use of their handsets because of software locks that wireless providers have been placing to control access to phones’ underlying programs
Toshiba plans to release another marvel next year, an SD card that can hold a whopping 8GB of data. That’s 2,000 songs or 2,500 pictures from a 6-megapixel digital camera
Rubber tyres, the kind that lie at the bottom of rivers and at the back of junkyards the world over, could be ideal water filters says an environmental engineer at Penn State university in the US. Yuefeng Xie says his crumb rubber
suffers none of the problems of traditional water filtration systems and as a result can filter wastewater up to four times faster
Scientists have taught dolphins to combine both rhythm and vocalisations to produce music, resulting in an extremely high-pitched, short version of the Batman theme song. The findings, outlined in two studies, are the first time that non-human mammals have demonstrated they can recognise rhythms and reproduce them vocally
Thiago Olson, a 17 year old Michigan teen, was able to create a small fusion device in his parents’ basement. The machine uses a 40,000 volt charge and deuterium gas to create the small reaction, which he says looks like a small intense ball of energy
. The teen’s fusion device is obviously not a self-sustaining reactor, but it still shows how fusion technology is becoming more accessible. Hopefully this points to a future where large scale fusion reactors are both economical and widely used
It’s a huge challenge: how to store digital files so future generations can access them, from engineering plans to family photos. The documents of our time are being recorded as bits and bytes with no guarantee of readability down the line. And as technologies change, we may find our files frozen in forgotten formats. Popular Mechanics asks: Will an entire era of human history be lost?
After three years of delays, a massive database containing personal information on every Australian with a phone number could soon be protected. A Bill before federal Parliament includes fines up to $66,000 or two years imprisonment for anyone misusing personal information in the Telstra-managed phone directory. It is three years since the Australian Communications and Media Authority raised concerns about misuse of data in the Integrated Public Number Database, a complete and always up-to-date electronic directory of all listed and unlisted phone numbers and contact details. It is used by emergency services, telcos and producers of public number databases, but only emergency services are authorised to access silent lines
Tipped off by three plastic pipes mysteriously skimming the ocean’s surface, authorities seized a homemade submarine packed with three tons of cocaine off Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. Four men traveled inside the 50-foot wood and fiberglass craft, breathing through the pipes. The craft sailed along at about 7 mph, just 6 feet beneath the surface
A law is being rushed through the Australian legislature that will criminalise great swaths of the citizenry. The Internet Industry Association of Australia is posting warning scenarios spelling out how far-reaching this law would be
Local broadband TV provider ReelTime Media is negotiating with at least two US studios
to enable Australian consumers to download episodes of US TV series 24 hours after transmission there. If negotiations are successful, it will shake up free-to-air TV, which holds back broadcasting many US TV program seasons for the Australian ratings season between February and November. Any deal would allow consumers to download episodes for 72 hours only. Any such partnership will be keenly contested by the Australian commercial networks
Universal Music Group has filed a lawsuit against MySpace for infringing copyrights of thousands of its artists’ works. Universal, owned by French media giant Vivendi, filed the suit at the US District Court Central District of California, Western Division. The lawsuit accuses MySpace of allowing users to upload videos illegally and taking part in the infringement by re-formatting the videos to be played back or sent to others
Unlike salamanders and lizards, most animals have lost the ability to replace missing limbs. But a research team in San Diego has been able to regenerate a wing in a chicken embryo — a species not known to be able to regrow limbs — suggesting the potential for such regeneration exists innately in all vertebrates, including humans
Lauren Weinstein raises an alarm about a new Google service, Click-to-Call. The service seems ripe for abuse of several kinds. One red flag is that Google falsifies the caller-ID of calls it originates for the service. Up to now, the typical available avenue for manipulating caller-ID has been pay services that tended to limit the potential for large-scale abuse since users are charged for access. Google, by providing a free service that will place calls and manipulate caller-ID, vastly increases the scope of the problem. Scale matters
Nobel Prize winning scientist Paul Crutzen has suggested deliberately spreading a layer of particulate matter in the upper atmosphere to help reflect some of the sun’s energy in an effort to combat global warming. He reminds us that the eruption of the volcano Pinatubo in 1991 cooled the planet by as much as 0.9 degrees; he believes his computer simulations show a similar effect from deliberate injection of sulfur into the atmosphere by humans. Whatever the feasibility of the idea, as the president of the National Environmental Trust has said, We are already engaged in an uncontrolled experiment by injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere
Researchers at Dresden University believe that sabres from Damascus dating back to 900 AD were formed with help from carbon nanotubes. Sabres from Damascus are made from a type of steel called wootz. But the secret of the swords’ manufacture was lost in the eighteenth century. At high temperatures, impurities in the metal could have catalysed the growth of nanotubes from carbon in the burning wood and leaves used to make the wootz,
Paufler suggests. These tubes could then have filled with cementite to produce the wires in the patterned blades,
he says
The MPAA has launched yet another defensive attack
, this time on a small business that is pre-loading movie DVDs onto iPods and reselling them. The original DVDs of the movies that are loaded are also given to the customer. The MPAA is claiming that the service Load ‘N Go Video offers is completely illegal because ripping a DVD is against the DMCA. The MPAA is also suing the company for copyright violation — via Slashdot
Steve Bracks has seized on a secret deal the Liberal Party has struck with fundamentalist hate preacher Danny Nalliah not to decriminalise abortion. The Premier said the Liberal action was odd and that party leader Ted Baillieu should not have his policy constructed behind the back door
by other groups
Three million Britons have been issued with the new hi-tech passport, designed to frustrate terrorists and fraudsters. So why did Steve Boggan and a friendly computer expert find it so easy to break the security codes? — via Bruce Sterling
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