Wikipedia has become accessible in China after being blocked for more than a year, attracting applause from free media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders
Mirrors in orbit around Mars could create Earth-like conditions on a small patch of the planet’s surface, according to a NASA-funded study. The extra sunlight would provide warmth and solar power for human explorers, but some experts say the mirrors may be hard to deploy — via Warren Ellis
Broadband internet access is becoming so vital for businesses that it can be seen as a new utility comparable to water and electricity, a new United Nations report has revealed
Deep in the most remote jungles of South America, Amazon Indians are using Google Earth, GPS and other technologies to protect their fast-dwindling home. Tribes in Suriname, Brazil and Colombia are combining their traditional knowledge of the rainforest with Western technology to conserve forests and maintain ties to their history and cultural traditions. Indians use Google Earth to remotely monitor their lands by checking for signs of miners and GPS to map their lands. Google Earth is used primarily for vigilance,
says Vasco van Roosmalen, program director of a nonprofit involved in the project
A group of Saitama used car salesmen whose idea of punishing a co-worker allegedly involved using him as a target for air rifle practice and as an ashtray are now being targeted themselves, but by crime fighters. At first, all three allegedly told the cops they tortured the man as a joke. But there wasn’t much funny about the fact that their co-worker had to be rescued by public health authorities and shunted away in a mental hospital for a couple of weeks — via Warren Ellis
The tangle of cables and plugs needed to recharge today’s electronic gadgets could soon be a thing of the past. Researchers at MIT have outlined a relatively simple system that could deliver power wirelessly to devices such as laptop computers or MP3 players. In a nutshell, their solution entails installing special non-radiative
antennae with identical resonant frequencies on both the power transmitter and the receiving device. Any energy not diverted into a gadget or appliance is simply reabsorbed. The system currently under development is designed to operate at distances of 3 to 5 metres, but the researchers claim that it could be adapted to factory-scale applications, or miniaturized for use in the microscopic world
Junichiro Mine, 27, an unemployed man of Toyota, Aichi Prefecture, was arrested Wednesday for strangling a woman he had got acquainted with through a suicide web site — via Warren Ellis
CSIRO has had an important win in a court case in the US in its battle to be paid royalties for its Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology. CSIRO was granted a US patent for this technology in 1996. Yesterday, in the US Federal Court of the Eastern District of Texas, Judge Davis granted summary judgment in favour of CSIRO in regard to the patent’s validity. He also granted summary judgment that the defendant, Buffalo Technology, had infringed CSIRO’s patent
Sun is considering releasing its Solaris operating system under the General Public License, raising the possibility of cross-pollination with Linux. The server and software company previously made Solaris an open-source project called OpenSolaris in 2005, releasing source code under the Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL). However, Sun this week chose the GPL for its open-source Java effort
Scientists have found a new pain killer based on human saliva. Apparently 1 gram of the new drug provides as much pain blocking as 3 grams of morphine. The drug blocks the breakdown of the body’s natural pain killing mechanism. Scientists say the molecule is simple and synthesis is expected to be simple — via Slashdot
Google is adding a customised start page to its Google Apps for Your Domain program, a set of online tools that companies can privately brand for their users, free of charge
Sun Microsystems is releasing the code for the Java programming language, marking one of the biggest contributions to the open-source community under the GNU General Public License
Telco Internode will deploy some AU$3.5 million of broadband infrastructure through rural South Australia in a new project responding to the needs of a regional group of local councils
Well, so much for closing piracy loopholes! With Windows Vista and Office 2007 only just going Gold, and not even available to Microsoft beta testers, developers or volume licence subscribers, the first cracked versions have already hit the pirate boards
Randy Wooten, mayoral candidate for Waldenburg Arkansas (a town of eighty people), discovered that the electronic voting system hadn’t registered the one vote he knew had been cast for him… because he cast it himself. The machine gave him zero votes. That would be an error rate of 3%, counting the actual votes cast — 18 and 18 for a total of 36 — via Slashdot
A dead man has been blamed for hundreds of speeding offences in Australia in what police believe is a major fraud designed to help motorists avoid traffic fines. Police in Sydney said 240 people were under investigation over the speeding scam, where hundreds of motorists blamed either the same dead man, or a person living in another state, for driving their cars at the time of the speeding offences
Last year for the first time, proceeds from cyber crime were greater than proceeds from the sale of illegal drugs, according to comments by Valerie McNiven, an adviser to the Treasury Department. The profile of the typical cyber criminal is changing fast, too. If you think that’s a lone hacker sitting in a college dorm or a basement recreation room, think again. Cyber crime is rapidly evolving from the domain of misguided pranksters, to elaborate, profit-driven schemes involving organized-crime syndicates that may be based around the block, or halfway around the world. It’s estimated that 85% of malware today is created with profit in mind. The sobering corollary to that statistic: only 5% of cyber criminals are caught and prosecuted
Telstra finally launched uncapped ADSL1 and ADSL2+ broadband services, more than 18 months after some competitors started offering the higher speed services. However, the telco will only sell ADSL2+ services in locations where competitors are already offering the higher speeds. It will offer the uncapped ADSL1 service nation-wide as a wholesale offering to competitors
A new Australian study has recommended doctors use Google to help diagnose difficult cases, despite indications it’s only 60 per cent accurate. Specialists at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane studied how effective the world’s largest and most popular search engine is for helping diagnose rare diseases. The work, published online today by the British Medical Journal, recommends specialists use Google because it is now a source of three billion journal articles, more than any specialist search engine
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