Optus has begun shifting its 200,000+ DSL customers across to its new copper wire based broadband network in a move that could help wipe more than $1 billion a year from Telstra’s revenues
British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s plan to introduce national identity cards has suffered a setback, with the House of Lords voting to force the government to provide more details on the cost of the controversial scheme
Sony BMG has finally jumped on the iTunes bandwagon, with the music giant today confirming it had added its roster of artists to Apple’s Australian on-line music store
Security experts and privacy advocates unanimously agree that ID cards will not protect Australia from terrorist attacks, despite Attorney-General Philip Ruddock saying the key reason
for an Australian ID card would be national security
Police may charge a BASE jumper who was rescued from a cliff face in national park in south-east Queensland. The man’s parachute failed seconds after he jumped, sending him crashing into the cliff at Christmas Creek near Beaudesert. His parachute tangled on a rock ledge about 50 metres from the top of the cliff and an SES volunteer was lowered to the man, before five men waiting at the top pulled them to safety
It seems likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft
— via Warren Ellis
A Swedish farmer sentenced to gaol for shooting a wolf preying on his sheep petitioned the government on Thursday for a pardon as a dispute grew between the wildlife lobby and farmers alarmed at growing wolf numbers. Depleted by centuries of hunting, Sweden’s wolf population has benefited from preservation programmes and legislation to now number about 150. Wolves have even been seen near Stockholm. Animal rights groups say the population is still critically low, making it vulnerable to inbreeding and disease, but the farming and hunting lobby says wildlife laws introduced in 2001 leave their livestock and dogs unprotected from attack
Idaho Department of Fish and Game intends to kill up to 75% of the wolves in the Lolo elk zone to bolster struggling elk herds there, pending approval from the Idaho Fish and Game commission and the US Fish and Wildlife Service — via TidePool
Several researchers from Sandia National Laboratories, led by principal investigator Susan Rempe, are part of a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary team developing a nano-size battery that one day could be implanted in the eye to power an artificial retina — via Warren Ellis
The future of humanity could lie within a large concrete room, hewn out of a mountain on a freezing island just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole. The facility is designed to hold around 2 million types of seed, representing all known varieties of the world’s crops. The Norwegian government is planning to create the seed bank next year to safeguard the world’s food supply against nuclear war, climate change, terrorism, rising sea levels and earthquakes
Symantec has fessed up to using a rootkit-type feature in Norton SystemWorks that could provide the perfect hiding place for attackers to place malicious files on computers. The anti-virus vendor acknowledged that it was deliberately hiding a directory from Windows APIs as a feature to stop customers from accidentally deleting files but, prompted by warnings from security experts, the company shipped a SystemWorks update to eliminate the risk — via digg
Stan Howard faces prosecution for felling endangered trees as his brother, brother of Australian Prime Minister John Howard, prepared to host a major six-nation conference on climate change
This hyperdrive motor would propel a craft through another dimension at enormous speeds. It could leave Earth at lunchtime and get to the moon in time for dinner. There’s just one catch: the idea relies on an obscure and largely unrecognised kind of physics — via Warren Ellis
If you are scuba diving, be sure not to swim anywhere near any ship or installation that has been protected by the Raytheon Corporation’s new swimmer denial
system. Otherwise you will very quickly feel extremely sick and probably drown. Raytheon’s underwater sensors detect any unwelcome presence and trigger an underwater sound system that emits extremely powerful pulses of low frequency audio. The pulse rate and audio frequency are chosen to make human organs resonate like organ pipes, causing swimmers to vomit into their masks or suffer internal ruptures — via Warren Ellis
Mozilla has released the first major update to Thunderbird. Version 1.5 includes an automated update system, in-line spell checking, an a bunch of other additions and improvements
A press release from Nikon UK has announced plans by Nikon in Japan to reduce its production of film cameras and related products to just a handful of items — via digg
Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is getting out of the domestic mobile phone market after selling its stake in Virgin Mobile Australia to joint venture partner Optus for AU$30 million. But the Virgin brand will go on after the company granted Optus, Australia’s second biggest telco behind Telstra, a 15-year licence to use the name
Steve Jobs has introduced a new notebook and an iMac computer that use Intel’s latest Core Duo processor. The iMac announcement is six months ahead of the schedule outlined by Apple last year
Angry members of MySpace, the personal file-sharing website for young adults, are accusing Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation of censoring their postings and blocking their access to rival sites. The 38 million subscribers to MySpace discovered that when they wrote to each other about rival video-swapping site YouTube, the words were automatically deleted, and attempts to download video images from YouTube led to blank screens. The protests gathered pace, and when 600 MySpace customers complained and a campaign began to boycott the site and relocate to rival sites News Corp relented and restored the links
The 8000-tonne japanese whaling factory ship Nisshin Maru broke away from a supply ship it had loaded with whale meat and steered a deliberate collision course towards the 949-tonne Arctic Sunrise, the smaller of two Greenpeace ships chasing the whaling fleet. The Japanese are claiming they were rammed, but this wouldn’t be the first time they’ve lied about ramming Greenpeace vessels
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