Computer helpdesk employee Philip Cummings had more than just a day job: he’s just gone down for 14 years in the biggest identity theft case ever. Apparently fake ID goes for as little as $60, and the total stolen over just a couple of years was somewhere in the $50-100 million range
An avalanche of malicious traffic knocked many of Macquarie’s customers’ offline earlier this week — just days after the company had upgraded its security systems
The discovery of two ancient devils
has challenged the traditional view of our distant ancestors as rat-sized creatures that scurried around the feet of dinosaurs. That view is now challenged after the discovery of two beautifully preserved fossils of related 130-million-year-old mammals, both bearing a resemblance to the Tasmanian Devil. They were found preserved in rock composed of volcanic and former riverbed sediments in north-eastern China’s Liaoning Province
With the hope of returning at least one corner of the web to its non-commercial roots, Google watcher Daniel Brandt, who curates the NameBase archive, has released the source code to a Google scraper. Brandt has been making an ad-free proxy available for two years using Google’s little known minimal ie
interface. By using this proxy, users bypass both Google’s notorious 2038
cookie (that’s when it expires) and the text ads. Brandt fully expects Google to throw legal and technical resources at him, but says he welcomes the challenge if only to clarify copyright issues. Google took people’s free stuff and made a $50 billion business from it, he argues
Both John Howard and Phillip Ruddock’s noses have been put firmly out of joint over the US announcing that it will release former terror suspect Mr Mamdouh Habib with no charges after three years of illegal torture and detention in Guantanamo Bay. Is anyone really surprised that the whiny toad is refusing an apology or compensation. If he can’t say sorry to the nation’s Aborigines, he certainly won’t be able to apologise to a single man
Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage after her former boyfriend, Geoffrey Jones, 37, rejected her advances at the end of a drunken house party. She yanked off his left testicle, which was later handed to him by a friend with the words: That’s yours
. Monti initially tried to hide the testicle by putting it in her mouth, but released it. Doctors were unable to reattach the organ — via Warren Ellis
IBM has announced that it will turn 500 of its software patents over to a patent commons
that can be freely implemented by anyone. This is big news for free software authors, since it’s often impossible for all-volunteer projects to defend themselves from patent infringement claims when there is a bogus software patent (like the thousands that IBM has accumulated) that overlaps with their work — via BoingBoing
The embattled undersea cable and satellite joint venture between Telstra and Hong Kong-based Pacific Century CyberWorks, Reach, has announced plans to dump external data customers to make way for the data capacity demands of its shareholders
BigAir, is offering 10Mbps broadband service to some of its residential customers. The ISP, which specialises in providing internet access for residents of low-rise apartments and tower blocks, claimed that the new offering was the fastest available in Australia. However, the 10Mbps service costs over 16 times as much as most basic ADSL services, priced at $500 per month with downloads capped at 100GB
Oracle has released Oracle Database Lite 10g, aimed at mobile devices, including laptop computers and PDAs. The software provides mobile users with seamless synchronisation with enterprise systems
Asked to forecast the impact of the Internet on society in the coming decade, a group of technology leaders and scholars have offered both dire predictions and high hopes
Rats can tell the difference between Dutch and Japanese, suggests a new study. But it is not because some spy agency has bioengineered them to eavesdrop on conversations in Tokyo or Amsterdam. They are simply recognising the difference in rhythmic properties of the languages, says Juan Toro, a neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona in Spain, whose study is part of an effort to trace the origins of the skills that humans use to analyse speech
BBC techies are advising staff not to use the corporation’s own news ticker service, Newsline. An item in the corporation’s internal mag Ariel
reported that high network load because of the application had prompted the advice. However, the BBC says the only reason staff are told not to use Newsline internally is that its developers haven’t produced an version of the application compatible with Windows XP or Mac OS X
Blogs and message forums buzzed this week with the discovery that a pair of simple Google searches permits access to well over 1,000 unprotected surveillance cameras around the world — apparently without their owners’ knowledge. Apparently many of the cams are even aimable. Oops!
Flash memory pioneer SanDisk has created a memory card packaging technology that enables memory cards to plug into both SD card slots and USB ports. The approach eliminates the need to use SD-to-USB adapters when accessing the contents of an SD card on a laptop, PC, or other system that lacks an integrated SD card slot
Rich is both a case modder and Lego fan, so it should come as no surprise that he combined his two loves to build Lego case mods. These are not just a Lego shell around a case, he’s used the Lego to support everything
It is the news that all sloths have been waiting for. Scientists in Germany have found that too much exercise is bad for you
eBay is spearheading a major recycling initiative involving manufacturers, government agencies and environmental groups to reduce the amount of computer equipment in the waste stream
CD sales rose by 2.3% in the US in the year 2004 despite the growing popularity of legal digital music downloads through services such as iTunes. On the other hand, a report from last July noted that pirated CD sales have hit a record high. Sounds like the RIAA should be going after the real pirates, not little Susie or Grandma
Australian journalists who witnessed a confrontation between Indonesian soldiers and alleged separatists in tsunami-ravaged Sumatra yesterday were ordered to leave the area and warned not to report on the incident
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