A group of four Connecticut librarians recently announced that the US government had requested to view private patron records and also threatened imprisonment if the librarians spoke up about it — via digg
American trade negotiators have threatened to scuttle Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organisation unless the country shuts down the AllOfMP3.com website, which sells music under Russian copyright law, despite the ire of the RIAA and its international puppet organisation, IFPI — via Boing Boing
Ricoh is pioneering the use of plant-based plastics at its global headquarters in Japan
A flood of legislation released by the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act threatens to drown whole classes of consumer electronics
Recent research, shows that at the lowest temperature point at which the change of state occurs — called the Quantum Critical Point — the Han purple pigment actually loses a dimension: it goes from 3D to 2D — via digg
A farmer somewhere south of Rotherham and east of Sheffield proves to have even iffier field-based hand-writing than Eddie with his poorly rendered arse (KMZ)
A meteor which crashed into Antarctica probably caused the biggest mass extinction in the Earth’s history and likely spawned the Australian continent, scientists say
Folks who value creative content rescued from obscurity may be concerned about major fee increases proposed by the US Copyright Office. At the end of this month, they plan to double the fee for copyright records searching from $75 to $150 per hour (it was $20/hr as recently as 1999), and add a new $100 fee just to give frugal searchers an estimate of how much a real search is likely to cost — va Boing Boing
Computer games in the hands of the elderly are shaping up as the latest weapons in the war against Alzheimer’s
Henry and Roma Gerbus received a phone call from a man named Ed claiming he had purchased their old hard drive at a flea market. They had previously taken their computer to Best Buy to have the hard drive replaced and were told that the store would destroy it. Now it has turned up at a flea market, still containing their personal information, such as bank account numbers and Social Security numbers. The Gerbus’ are a little perplexed and are very worried about identity theft
The competition regulator yesterday gave its strongest indication yet that Telstra could scrap its proposed AU$2 billion next generation broadband network by the end of this month
Inspired by Emil Stenström’s Levels of CSS knowledge, Roger Johansson started thinking about the extreme difference in HTML knowledge among people working in the web industry. It spans all the way from people who know next to nothing about it to those who know it well enough to write the actual HTML specifications — via digg
ThePirateBay.org, a longtime fixture of the BitTorrent community, is currently under investigation. Their servers have been seized by the Swedish police
A takeover battle looms for iiNet after fellow Perth telco Amcom snapped up a 19.9 per cent stake for $18 million, taking advantage of a plunge in the market value of the struggling No3 internet provider
The technology that helped make black-light posters and concert T-shirts a cultural mainstay is now being used to make fuel cells, chip packages and PC components
In yet another blow against free speech rights, the Supreme Court decided that government employees who report wrongdoing do not enjoy 1st Amendment rights while on the job
Scientists have discovered that Caribbean spiny lobsters, a social animal, do their best to stay the hell away from others that are sick. Biologist Mark Butler of Old Dominion University and his colleagues noticed that while healthy spiny lobsters spend their days in large groups, sick animals are left alone — via Boing Boing
The US Patent and Trademark Office has rejected 19 of the 47 claims in a patent held by Forgent Networks, which the company has been using to assert licensing rights related to the JPEG digital image standard
After much bluster and several false starts, high-definition DVD products for home and PC have arrived — but in two incompatible formats, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. That means buyers will have to carefully weigh their options as we wait to see which — if either — technology will inherit DVD’s crown
China has launched a case against American chipmaker Intel’s near-monopoly on encryption standards for wireless local area network equipment
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