Alice Springs’ council is poised to sign an agreement with Veridas Communications for city-wide wireless broadband, reducing its dependence for services on what one alderman claims is an uncooperative
Telstra
Anyone who has ever developed a web site knows that cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility is a nightmare, mainly due to Microsoft’s willful non-compliance with the CSS2 standard. It seems Microsoft will continue their poor support for CSS2 even in the IE7.0 release. This may have worked when IE was the only game in town, but now that Firefox is a serious player, it won’t help them keep market share as they think it will
News agency Agence France Presse has sued Google, alleging the Web search leader includes AFP’s photos, news headlines and stories on its news site without permission. The French news service is seeking damages of at least $17.5 million and an order barring Google News from displaying AFP photographs, news headlines or story leads, according to the suit filed Thursday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. Google is in the process of removing French news agency Agence France Presse (AFP) from its Google News service, which aggregates links to online articles and accompanying photos from about 4500 news outlets
Computers deliberately left open to online attack are being used to place spies in the hacker-controlled networks of infected machines. The fake zombies are deployed by members of the German Honeynet Project
Jon Johansen has published a small program which allows the acquisition of DRM-free files from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. He explains that his program works by bypassing iTunes which adds the DRM itself at the end of the transfer. His program, pymusique, is Windows-only compliant but it’d be easy to port it to other platforms. Alas, Apple were far from amused and have blocked the security hole the hack exploited. Pymusique is, once again, functional
Canadian blogger Jeremy Wright was detained and interrogated by US Immigration when he arrived in New York last week for a meeting with a media company to discuss a business opportunity in the area of blogging. It appears that the immigration people simply did not believe that Jeremy could make a living as a blogger. As a result they gave him the third degree for several hours — including a strip search — and incorrectly informed him that he was banned him from entering the US — via NevOn
MIT has recommended Brazil install open source software instead of proprietary software offered by Microsoft on thousands of computers that will be sold to the poor
A fireball created in a US particle accelerator has the characteristics of a black hole, Horatiu Nastase has said. The Brown University physicist thinks the particles are disappearing into the fireball’s core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as matter falls into a black hole and comes out as Hawking
radiation
The pilot episode of the BBC’s highly anticipated new Doctor Who series may have been intentionally leaked onto file-sharing networks to generate buzz. Earlier this month, the 45 minute premiere episode, entitled Rose
, showed up on BitTorrent. The appearance of the episode generated a flood of discussion in online forums, blogs and the mainstream media. As a result, interest in the show, which debuts 26 March on BBC One, has skyrocketed
The newly invented Building in a Bag is made from cement impregnated fabic, that is sealed in an easily transportable plastic bag. You literally just add water, and then inflate. Twelve hours later, you have a ready to use building. Possible uses include shelter for disaster areas, and instant field hospitals
In what is probably the most moronic corporate idea I’ve heard in a long time, McDonald’s is testing the use of remote call centres to handle drive-through orders. Company officials said the idea is aimed at reducing the number of mistakes at the window. Apparently McDonald’s brain trust has never heard of Chinese whispers
For the second time in about a month, a dog has been found hanged in suburban St Louis, and police are trying to determine if there is a connection — via Warren Ellis
The FTC has asked a US District Court to bar Spyware Assassin and its affiliates from offering consumers free spyware detection scans and from selling antispyware software, alleging that the software is not effective
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer said that California could no longer justify limiting marriage to a man and a woman. The ruling came after litigation stemming from the city’s decision last year to allow gays to marry. Those marriages were ruled invalid by the state‚Äôs Supreme Court but it then referred the issue to a lower court — via Warren Ellis
US politicians and journalists have said that internet bloggers should enjoy traditional press freedoms and not face regulation as political groups
Telemarketers world-wide are realising they can dodge long-distance costs, and US Do Not Call
restraints, by voice spamming VoIP users. Different from spam over internet telephony because it’s not automated, an analyst predicts homes and businesses could see some 150 calls a day from overseas call centres
A leading internet security researcher has warned that personal home computers were never designed to act as secure ATMs and could not be trusted for internet banking or any other online transaction. Yet Australian banks continued to promote internet banking as safe because they did not want to pay for the only technology that could guarantee internet transaction security — a home eftpos system
Apple won the green light to subpoena amateur publishers for their confidential sources, a Californian Judge ruled today. Apple Computer, which wants to discover who leaked product information to three web sites, can now proceed with its subpoena against one of the ISPs hosting two of the websites, Santa Clara county court Judge James Kleinberg has ruled, as well as the web sites themselves
A french appeal court has ruled in favour of a filesharer who downloaded 500 odd movies, on the grounds that they were private copies, that he didn’t redistributed them and that a tax was payed on blank media
The Bureau of Meteorology has upgraded its Web-based rain radar service, adding enhanced maps and finer grades of rain to a service that already ranks as the most popular and fastest-growing educational and government Web site in Australia
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