The RIAA brought a file-sharing lawsuit against a guy who died; they offered the departed’s family a 60-day grieving period before they began to depose his children for the suit against his estate — via Boing Boing
Air travellers leaving the United Kingdom on Thursday faced the strictest security measures in years: iPods, mobile phones, laptops, and even books and magazines were no longer permitted as carry-on items
Sources at PC and notebook component makers indicated that Apple will launch its MacBook laptops using Intel’s new 64-bit Merom CPU in September, with associated OEM makers, such as Asustek (MacBook) and Quanta Computer (MacBook Pro), expected to benefit from that
Scientists in England have gathered definitive evidence that a kind of cancer in dogs, known as Sticker’s sarcoma, is contagious. It is spread by tumour cells getting passed from dog to dog through sex or from animals biting or licking each other. Robin Weiss and his colleagues did genetic studies on the tumour cells from 40 dogs with Sticker’s sarcoma, collected from five continents, which showed that all the tumour cells are clones of each other. The parent cell probably arose in a domesticated dog of Asian origin — perhaps a husky — hundreds of years ago, and perhaps more than 1,000 years ago. A similarly transmissible cancer has recently been discovered spreading through populations of Tasmanian devils
Sony’s new Blu-Ray drives won’t be able to play Blu-Ray DVD movies, because they couldn’t meet all the requirements set out by the cartel that controls Blu-Ray DRM — via Boing Boing
Attack code exploiting a recently-patched vulnerability in Windows operating system has been posted to the Internet, prompting concerns of a widespread attack. The software was added to the widely used Metasploit project — a favorite of both security researchers and malicious hackers — at around 1.00am Thursday morning Pacific Time, according to HD Moore, the Metasploit project leader. It works very reliably against Windows 2000 and Windows XP systems that do not have SP2 [Service Pack 2] installed,
he said in an e-mail
Security features in the kernel of Microsoft’s forthcoming operating system, Windows Vista, obstruct innovations by antivirus and other security applications, security vendor Symantec has claimed
US scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory say detecting biowarfare agents will become a lot easier thanks to a new barcode
system based on biosensing nanowires
Detective Senior Constable Mark Thomas, an officer involved in the prosecution of 13 accused terrorists, has told a court he gleaned much of his knowledge of terrorism from the internet and admits he’s no expert on the subject
The Indian high court has ordered Coke and Pepsi to produce the formulas for their soft-drinks, on the back of a report that says that Pepsi contains 30 times the amount of pesticide reported in 2003, while Coke’s level has gone up 25-fold — via Boing Boing
Google has signed a $900m deal with Fox to provide search capabilities for Fox sites, the most noteworthy of which is MySpace. This deal does not include FoxSports.com, which already has a deal with MSN. Google claims that MySpace was an important site to be involved with given its rapid popularity growth. Google also signed a deal with MTV earlier in the week
Researchers at the University of Washington have discovered a possible nonvolatile magnetic semiconductor and are investigating its use for spintronics
, an emerging technology that is concerned with manipulating and controlling the charge, flow and magnetism of electrons. The possibilities for the material cobalt green
, a paint developed by American Revolution era artists, as a spintronics material is exciting. Should the magnetic properties of the paint at room-temperature prove able to reliably control the wild spinning of excited electrons in a processor, not only could the size of processors reduce substantially, but the constant limiting factor, how to keep things cool, could disappear
Chancellor Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister in waiting, has bought the idea that all electronic transactions in the UK should be linked to a central government/police database. Every cash withdrawal, every credit card purchase, ever loyalty card use… And that data should flow back from the police database to the loyalty card provider. So, for example, not only would the government know what books you were buying, but the bookstore would also know if you had an outstanding speeding ticket
AOL has released the search logs of over 650,000 users for research purposes. This looks like it may become a public relations disaster for AOL, as well as a privacy nightmare for the users involved as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch notes: AOL has released very private data about its users without their permission. While the AOL username has been changed to a random ID number, the ability to analyze all searches by a single user will often lead people to easily determine who the user is, and what they are up to. The data includes personal names, addresses, social security numbers and everything else someone might type into a search box
— via Slashdot
The nation of Cameroon, which controls the .cm top level domain, has typo-squatted all of the .com domain space. They have placed a wildcard DNS record to redirect all traffic to an ad-based search page. Unlike the earlier case of Verisign putting a wildcard in the real .com domain, ICANN has very little direct control over what a nation can do with their own TLD — via Slashdot
Reading blogs via popular RSS or Atom feeds may expose computer users to hacker attacks, a security expert warns. Attackers could insert malicious JavaScript in content that is transferred to subscribers of data feeds that use the popular RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom formats, Bob Auger, a security engineer with Web security company SPI Dynamics, said last Thursday in a presentation at the Black Hat security event in Las Vegas
Google has started warning people when search results could potentially lead them to malicious code. The search giant is using data from the Stop Badware Coalition to flag sites that are potentially host to malicious software. Google, along with Sun Microsystems and Chinese PC maker Lenovo, announced support for the group in January. People who attempt to go to a Web site that has been identified as risky by the coalition are taken to a warning page. Warning — the site you are about to visit may harm your computer!
the page states in bold type, then suggesting users can learn more about malware and how to protect yourself at StopBadware.org
How much greater data density? In the Hitachi Maxell device, a single disc about 1 cm larger in diameter than a CD will buy you 300GB. By way of contrast, HD-DVD currently offers a maximum of 30GB on a 2-layer disc, and Blu-ray tops out at 50GB. Although upgrades are in the works that promise to increase the capacity of both of those formats, even the most pie-in-the-sky predictions fall short of what is planned for merely the first commercial generation of holographic storage. Future plans for that medium include boosting the capacity to 800GB in two years, and 1.6TB per disc by 2010
The Domesday Book has gone online. As one of the earliest public records goes online, anyone with an internet connection will be able to access this important document. Amongst other interesting facts, the BBC is reporting that the Book can still be used today in court for property disputes. In an interesting development, the National Archives are making online searches free, but downloads of data will cost £3.50. Similar launches of historical web sites in the past have struggled to keep up with server loads in their first days and weeks, so it remains to be seen whether the Domesday Book online will be more or less fragile than the parchment originals — via Slashdot
Brazil has published a list of more than 5,000 generic terms from the Portuguese language related to Brazilian plant biological diversity to raise awareness and prevent further misuse of trademarks that hinder Brazilian exports. The Brazilian government has been, and is, involved in a number of trademark disputes with companies that, for example, take a name of a fruit in Brazilian Portuguese and trademark it to get exclusive rights to commercialise it under that name in a certain country or region. This hinders Brazilian exports, especially when it happens in larger markets, Cristiano Franco Berbert of the Permanent Mission of Brazil in Geneva told Intellectual Property Watch
RSS – Posts