Google Date lets you enter a date and then searches using Google for what happened on that date and shows results — via digg
Microsoft has taken the wraps off Internet Explorer 7, releasing the new beta version of its Web browser to the general public for testing. Of interest to web monkeys, they’ve killed off the CSS star hack without fixing the problems it was used to workaround
A former postal worker who had been put on medical leave for psychological problems shot five people to death at a huge mail-processing centre and then killed herself. The attack Monday night in Santa Barbara, California was also the biggest bloodbath at a US postal installation since a massacre 20 years ago helped give rise to the term going postal — via Warren Ellis
Five current and former National Security Agency employees have said that the agency frequently retaliates against whistleblowers by falsely labeling them delusional
, paranoid
or psychotic
A study was done where people put on glasses which inverted the image. They saw everything upside-down, but after wearing them constantly for a few days, their brains were retrained to flip the image right-side-up again. When they took the glasses off, the image was upside-down again — via digg
The Russian justice ministry has asked a court to shut down the Russian Human Rights Research Centre, one of the country’s oldest human rights group — via Boing Boing
James Hansen, longtime director of the agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the top climate scientist at NASA, says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming — via digg
US Representative Marty Meehan’s staff has been heavily editing his Wikipedia bio, among other things removing criticisms. In total, more than one thousand Wikipedia edits in various articles have been traced back to congressional staffers at the US House of Representatives in the past six months
Canada’s biggest record label, publisher and management company is helping out a family sued by the RIAA for copyright infringement. The privately-owned Nettwerk Music Group is intervening because the current actions of the RIAA are not in their artists’ best interests
According to a new UK survey done for the BBC, only 48 percent of Britons accept evolution. Forty-percent of the 2,000 participants think that creationism or intelligent design should be taught in schools — via Boing Boing
Google’s new China search engine not only censors many web sites that question the Chinese government, but it goes further than similar services from Microsoft and Yahoo by targeting teen pregnancy, homosexuality, dating, beer and jokes. In addition, contrary to Google founder Sergey Brin’s promise to inform users when their search results are censored, the company frequently filters out sites without revealing it
A court has ruled that Google’s caching and displaying of millions of web-pages is legal. Google Cache is the service that offers to show you stored versions of the web-pages that turn up in the results for your Google searches. Until recently, no court had ruled on the legality of this, and it was unclear whether this would qualify as a fair use
. If not, Google and a number of other caching services, particularly the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, would have been in deep trouble — via Boing Boing
Joshua Philip Martin was in his fourth day on the job as a rescue-squad worker in Russell County when, in a playful mood, he decided to reach into the front seat of the ambulance and zap one of his co-workers with the defibrillator paddles. Earlier in the week, a judge convicted Martin, 25, of involuntary manslaughter — via Warren Ellis
The ACLU has received complaints from six organisations and nearly two dozen people who fear they have been spied upon, photographed, videotaped or had their events infiltrated by government agents. They say none of them did anything that would justify surveillance but rather are critics of the Bush administration — via digg
The collision was inevitable. Google has vowed to provide unbiased, accurate, and free access to information
to people around the world, while touting a corporate motto of don’t be evil
. And China, which controls information with an iron grip, has blossomed into the world’s second-biggest and fastest-growing Internet market. For those wondering what would happen when the irresistible force of Google and its altruistic motives finally met up with the immovable object of China, with its lure of higher profit, the answer came when Google unveiled its first search service inside China. Its concession: Google will play by government rules and censor results of sensitive queries, such as Falun Gong
or multiparty elections
. There’s already a workaround
A rodent-eating snake and a hamster have developed an unusual bond at a zoo in the Japanese capital, Tokyo. Their relationship began in October last year, when zookeepers presented the hamster to the snake as a meal. The rat snake, however, refused to eat the rodent. The two now share a cage, and the hamster sometimes falls asleep sitting on top of his natural foe. As a joke, the zookeeper said they named the hamster Gohan — the Japanese word for meal — via Rogue Sun
A 20-year-old Californian, Jeanson James Ancheta, accused of using hundreds of thousands of hijacked computers to damage systems and send waves of spam across the internet, has pleaded guilty to US federal charges
Bioengineers at Columbia University Medical Centre in New York City are starting to engineer living heart tissues to fix these damaged hearts. Their patches for broken hearts are made of heart tissue grown in the lab. Right now, animal trials are just starting and it will take at least a decade before human trials begin
Researchers at Ohio State University may have identified a new and unusual tumour suppression gene that could effect cancers of the lung, head, and neck. The gene, known as TCF21, is silenced in tumour cells through a chemical change known as DNA methylation, a process that is potentially reversible
Russia’s federal security service, the successor to the KGB, has launched a cold-war style attack on non-governmental organisations and human rights groups, linking them with alleged espionage by British diplomats in Moscow
RSS – Posts