The United States is close to deciding whether to spend tens of millions of dollars establishing permanent joint training facilities in northern Australia for its military forces
Maria Isabel had been raped, beaten, stabbed in the chest and tied up with barbed wire before a blow to the back of her head finally killed her. Such murders have become common in Guatemala, where there are now daily reports of killings but rarely news of any arrests. Such unchecked misogyny, with no clear motive, is reminiscent of the situation in Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican city just over the border from Texas where around 100 serial-type sexual murders over the last decade have become an international cause célèbre
Microsoft says it will ask a European court this week to suspend parts of the European Commission’s landmark decision that ordered it to stop business practices that violate antitrust law
NetGear’s WG602 access point has a hidden password that provides remote and local administrative control. Unlike Linksys’, where turning the firewall on (which is on by default, but a researcher found new units in which it was off when taken out of the box), the NetGear hole cannot be disabled. The backdoor seems to have been created by the vendor that packaged the device for NetGear
Marvin Heemeyer, a muffler shop owner who plowed a makeshift armoured bulldozer into several buildings after a dispute with city officials, was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound after a SWAT team cut their way into the machine with a blowtorch early Saturday
Yahoo’s new browser toolbar is advertised to clean out adware and spyware from the user’s PC. They forgot to mention that Yahoo excludes by default two popular adware/spyware applications — Claria (ex-Gator) and WhenU.com — Claria has commercial bonding with Yahoo
An open source Solaris is in the works, Sun spokesperson Russ Castronovo has confirmed. However, he declines to reveal any significant details about the project, including what software license Sun will use, whether all of the components of the operating system will be open-sourced, and when, exactly, Sun intends to release an open source Solaris
It has been announced that the latest version of Shareaza, a popular P2P application for Windows, was released under the GPL. Currently the source code is hosted by the Shareaza servers, but the announcement makes mention of the code becoming a project on Sourceforge. The binaries are still available for Windows only, but I imagine it is only a matter of time before a Linux port emerges
A smart bullet that can be fired at a target and then wirelessly transmit back useful information has been developed by US researchers. The projectile, created at the University of Florida in Gainesville, US, is 1.7 centimetres in diameter can be fired at from an ordinary paint-ball gun. The front is coated in an adhesive polymer that sticks it to the target. Inside, the elongated projectile holds a sensor, a tiny wireless transmitter and a battery. This enables it to report back its findings to a laptop or handheld computer up to 70 metres away. It can also reusable, because compressed gas within the gun provides the propulsion — via Die Puny Humans
Nokia’s new 3220 camera air phone is an effort on the part of the company to gain market share that has been slipping away to manufacturers of mobiles considered trendier than Nokia’s older standby models. A motion sensor in the 3220 makes the lights blink in a sequence that spells out letters when the handset is waved. Joi Ito ponders the joys of an airtexting enabled BlackBerry and its potential as a hecklebot
The German inventor who pioneered the technology behind the Sony Walkman has won a multimillion-pound payout nearly 30 years after dreaming up his invention. Andreas Pavel’s original 1970s concept of the stereobelt
revolutionised portable listening and Sony’s version — the Walkman — became a global hit. Now the 57-year-old stereo enthusiast, who works in Milan, is threatening to use his payout to sue Apple Computer, whose iPod portable music player is the digital successor to the Walkman. He is believed to be considering cases in Italy and Canada, where his patents were filed later and may still be valid
Who says the cold war is over? Wren Turbines, a UK based manufacturer of scale modeling jet engines, usually for remote control aircraft, has provided the engines for a 130kg+ scale replica of Boeing’s B-52. At roughly $3000 per turbine, this is a serious piece of engineering
If you need factual film background beyond what the Internet Movie Database can offer, then Masters of Cinema may be for you. The site has news and articles about classic foreign cinema and features links to Web information on scores of noted directors such as Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Antonioni and Hitchcock. Release dates of selected movies on DVD are also a feature — via journoz
In celebration of D-Day, Colossus, one of the earliest electronic code-breaking machines, has been rebuilt after ten years of effort by computer conservationists. Colossus was used to break the Lorenz cipher. Remarkably, the use of parallel processing (five tape channels) and short gate delay time (1.2µs) allows the Colossus to match the speed of a modern PC
The recording industry is testing technology that would prevent consumers from making copies of CD burns, a piracy defence that could put some significant new restrictions on legally purchased music
An 11-year-old girl led a fellow sixth-grader, Satomi Mitarai, to an empty classroom during their school lunch hour Tuesday, slit her throat and slashed arms with a box-cutter and left her to bleed to death — via Die Puny Humans
Tim Robinson has built a computer capable of solving polynomial equations — using Meccano. His difference engine uses a similar approach to Babbage’s design. He’s also created a differential analyser complete with a GUI. Both could be scaled up indefinitely to handle larger problems
Some critics say the endless stream of hugely popular reality television shows are as dull as watching paint dry. Well, now they can test the theory with a live, eight-week round-the-clock Webcast of just that. Billed as the ultimate reality TV show
, British pay-channel UKTV Style promises a wall, some brushes and different types of paint in its program Watching Paint Dry
Found a copy of the amusing Bollywood inspired Peugeot 306 sculptor ad — via boingboing
Another corporate 70s Bollywood spoof, this time by Absolut Vodka. A ten minute film, made in 2002 and filmed in India. Absolut Mulit is a Bollywood pseudo history of the mullet. Really well-crafted, with awesome songs and dancing. Low-level product placement — no actual bottles or mention of vodka — but the familiar Absolut shape makes subtle appearances — via boingboing
Queensland Internet service provider OnTheNet claims it is the first non-Telstra ISP in the state to install broadband ADSL infrastructure into telephone exchanges
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