A grandmother stopped an intruder from entering her home by lobbing a heavy garden gnome at him. Jean Collop was woken early on Tuesday morning by the sound of an intruder on the roof of her home in Wadebridge, southwest England. I grabbed the first thing that came to hand — one of my garden gnomes — and hurled it at him, and hit him,
she recalled. He lay there and I began to scream. I went back into the kitchen and found a rolling pin in case he came down. I didn’t want to break another gnome
— via BoingBoing
Scientists at Harvard University have shown how ultra-cold atoms can be used to freeze and control light to form the core
— or central processing unit — of an optical computer. Optical computers would transport information ten times faster than traditional electronic devices, smashing the intrinsic speed limit of silicon technology. This new research could be a major breakthrough in the quest to create super-fast computers that use light instead of electrons to process information. Professor Lene Hau is one of the world’s foremost authorities on slow light
. Her research group became famous for slowing down light, which normally travels at 186,000 miles per second, to less than the speed of a bicycle
Cyber criminals are starting to use fake blogs to snare new victims. The bogus web journals are being used as traps that infect visitor’s machines with keylogging software or viruses — via Geek News Central
Indian police have charged 80 people for burying children alive in an ancient Hindu ceremony known as the festival of pits
. The ceremony, in which children — some less than a year old — are buried alive briefly and then dug up, happened on Monday in southern Tamil Nadu state
BBC, Channel 4, British Film Institute and OU (Open University) issue call to action for Creative Archive Licence. Media and arts organisations, universities and libraries have today been urged to join an innovative new scheme designed to give the public access to footage and sound from some of the largest film, television and radio archives in the UK, as well as specially commissioned material
Downhill Battle have a new open source video platform — a publishing tool based off of BattleTorrent and a video player written in Python. They’ve started a whole new organization to sponsor the project. They say TV channels
will be made out of RSS feeds and anybody can subscribe to another user’s content channel. The system is being designed for the express purpose of putting broadcasting in the hands of individuals. I like this idea of using recent advances in filesharing and syndication to allow aggregated content to be delivered to your desktop
John Pinnock, the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, says he needs the power to investigate customer complaints over content issues as well as carriage services. Pinnock said the fact he was prohibited from investigating complaints about content was one of the key limitations of his office
Sony’s rolling out their new line of flash-based music players to the market these days. More stylish than ever, they surely look like a serious attempt to regain territory lost to the iPod, and perhaps even to create the Walkman of the 21st century. And it looks like Sony has finally given in to consumer pressure: these new MP3 players
can finally play MP3 natively, not just Sony’s proprietary ATRAC format. But wait — you cannot just put your MP3s onto the device, you have to run them through Sony’s obfuscation software first. The obfuscated files, when installed properly on the device, can be played. But you can’t just move them around, share them with your friends, whatever. Well, of course the obfuscation scheme has already been broken by a brave hacker — via Slashdot
With new features in the latest version of MySQL, like subqueries and a new binary format, the company has become a stronger competitor against much larger companies, and seems poised to bite into their revenues. Even more importantly MySQL might actually spark some fundamental changes in the market
Australia’s peak communications industry body has cleared the way for the launch of broadband services several times quicker than existing ADSL offerings
Telstra BigPond is temporarily disconnecting compromised computers from its network to stem a tide of malware swamping its servers and delaying e-mail and Web site requests
One of the fathers of the internet has warned that a surge in demand for new online addresses from devices such as mobile phones could stress the capacity of the world’s computer communications system. Vint Cerf, chairman of ICANN, said the current version of the internet had space for more than 4 billion addresses, enough to last until 2020
Australians are driven to pirated music because just 65% of the country’s top music tracks are available from the three legitimate online music sites, according to a study on the digital downloads industry
Online retail giant Amazon has acquired US-based print-on-demand company BookSurge. The privately owned inventory-free book printing and fulfilment company based in South Carolina already provides a print-on-demand service for out-of-print or hard-to-find books, available for sale on Amazon.com or as a service to other publishers and authors. And other retailers, wholesalers and distributors use its wholesale platform, called BookSurge Direct. But Amazon hopes the deal will primarily allow it to offer a wider range of more rare titles, including foreign language translations, to its readers
Notoriously crap ISP, BigPond, has taken exception to a recent Whirlpool survey in which most respondents rated Bigpond’s customer service as awful
or average
. Perhaps, instead of unleasing its PR flunkies, it should be fixing its appalling service
ICANN, the internet’s authority for web addresses, has officially designated .jobs and .travel to be used the internet, with discussions continuing on other extensions including .asia
Mike Bolesta — Baltimore County resident, innocent citizen, owner of Capital City Student Tours — recently found himself under arrest, himself transported to the Baltimore County lockup in Cockeysville, where he’s handcuffed to a pole for three hours while the US Secret Service is called into the case. His crime? He shopped at Best Buy, where it seems the staff are so moronicly stupid that they are unable to recognise US$2 bills as the legal tender they are
The Wikimedia Foundation hopes to sell an English version of Wikipedia on CD-ROM and DVD before the end of the year. A boxed set of the German language version of Wikipedia has been available since last year
A 21-year-old man, Charles Stergios, was sentenced in US District Court in Maine to more than six years in prison for perpetrating an extensive Internet fraud scheme. He was ordered to pay nearly $118,000 in restitution to his victims. It seems that the federal prosecutor had tried to score Stergio a shorter amount of jail time, but Judge George Singal, who was not bound by the plea bargain agreement, decided on a harsher sentence on the grounds that he did not think that the defendant had sufficiently accepted responsibility
Primus Telecom will enter the local phone market using exchange equipment being installed for DSL broadband. Primus said it was upgrading 200 exchanges around Australia, with 100 more due to have equipment installed over the next year
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