One of Australia’s key beef customers, South Korea, has confirmed that some United States beef is being illegally labelled and sold as Australian product. South Korea banned imports of US beef when a case of mad cow disease was discovered in Washington State before Christmas, leaving Korean wholesalers with product still to sell. Mike Heywood from Meat and Livestock Australia says as a result Australian beef is in high demand, leading to the labelling scam
More than three years after launching consumer-grade ADSL, Telstra will extend the reach of the broadband service from 3.5 to more than four kilometres from enabled telephone exchanges. The move will extend ADSL coverage to an additional 400,000 homes, increasing from about 75% to 90% of households
The head of the Prison Service the number of inmates serving short-term prison sentences had soared and called for minor offenders to be given non-custodial punishment
More than five million aerial photographs of World War II are to be made publicly available on the internet at Evidence in Camera. The pictures will go online on Monday. Taken by the RAF, they were used by Allied commanders to help devise their strategy during the six-year conflict
Oracle is ready to extend its Linux Everywhere
campaign to client systems. At next week’s LinuxWorld in New York, Oracle will announce that it will enable the Mozilla browser to run Oracle applications in the coming year
The Israeli soldier accused of killing Tom Hurndall, the British peace activist who died last week, tried to cover up his crime by asking for his commander’s permission to shoot an armed man
moments after he had already fired the fatal shot
There’s pretty cool interactive site to the xBox game Fable. It works like the old choose your own adventure stories. Shame about the annoying Flash reloads for each page
Nice Mazda Flash animation showing one of their cars turning into an Autobot
In an event that most Doctor Who fans thought couldn’t happen, another lost episode of Doctor Who has turned up. It’s Episode Two of the 1965 William Hartnell serial, The Daleks’ Master Plan
. No word yet as to how it will be released, this news is just breaking today apparently. This is great news for fans, as the last time a lost episode was turned up was in 1999, and most folks had given up hope there were any others left to be discovered. For those who don’t know, in the ’70s the BBC routinely junked old stories. Not just Dr Who, but all their shows. Repeats and sales weren’t an issue then. There’s something like 115 or so lost Doctor Who episodes total
Troy Javaher and Frank Weyer, operating under the newly formed company Nizza Group, are suing Network Solutions and Register.com for infringing on its e-mail and domain naming patent, which covers assigning each member of a group an URL of the form name.subdomain.domain and an e-mail address of the form name@subdomain.domain
David Cogswell has an interesting article at Online Journal following the dodgy policies of BushCo’s anything goes attitude to holding absolute power and ponders that they are not above assassinating political rivals when smear tactics and legal battles fail
Warp Records, an independent label for electronic music (featuring artists such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Boards of Canada), has made their entire back catalog available thru Bleep, a new digital download service. To quote from the FAQ: We are at present the only store to offer very high quality MP3 files
and Bleep music has no DRM or copy protection built in. We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals
Just looking through the logs, always interesting reading to see what weird search terms people use on the site, when I ran across an MT-Blacklist comment denial from IP 68.173.7.113 — which is one of the New York based Road Runner servers.
On 10 January, over a period of six minutes, this particular comment spammer — pushing sex, drugs, weight loss, baldness cures and, would you believe, online privacy — tried to spam the site 93 times. A handful snuck through, bringing the hit up to a hundred, and all were promptly added to my blacklist and submitted to Jay Allen’s Comment Spam Clearinghouse. After the initial assault, the spammer must have decided to test the waters and sent a single spam two and half hours later, with a follow up an hour after that. Both were denied.
And on other site related matters, we’ve just updated MovableType to version 2.661, which has added a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can be limited over a set time period, an automatic IP address ban based on an abnormal number of comments from the same address in a short period of time and the format of links in comments has been changed to redirects to stop spammers trying to boost their PageRank.
Unfortunately, there’s an XHTML bug in the MT update that was only partially fixed by the 2.661 release. Jacques Distler has a patch available to fix the problem.
Comedienne Margaret Cho was recently speaking at a MoveOn event. Matt Drudge subsequently posted excerpts from her speech, and she was inundated with hate-mail for being overweight, Chinese, gay and a Democrat. Cho’s publicist then posted all of this hate mail, complete with names and email addresses, on her web site — via Darren Barefoot
A group of international telecom providers, ISPs and software companies plan to form a neighbourhood watch to oust junk e-mail from their collective networks
Does the amount of time it takes your PC to boot up drive you mad? Well for those using multimedia PCs as the heart of their home entertainment system, the following will be music to your ears. InterVideo of California has launched the INstantOn PC which boots up in less than 10 seconds, giving all but instant access to TV, CDs or DVDs and internet radio. The trick is running all the entertainment functions on a pared-down version of the open-source Linux operating system, which is small enough to be held in a read-only memory chip
Optus has released new plans for its cable broadband and dial-up Internet products, but OptusNet DSL customers will have to wait until March for new pricing
The estate of JRR Tolkien won a cybersquatting case against Alberta Hot Rods, a Canadian-based operator which registered jrrtolkien.com and linked it to its commercial celebrity Web site. The group — which has already lost domain name cases brought by actors Pierce Brosnan and Pamela Anderson, and author Michael Crichton — was found to have no legitimate rights
Finally got my arse in gear down to Reverse Garbage, well tagged along with a friend is closer to the mark, a small warehouse full of the stuff that normally gets dumped by manufacturers. The place is a hit with teachers as it is a treasure trove of kids craft supplies. I’ve been to the smaller Casula outlet, which is now closed thanks to the inept and corrupt Liverpool Council, but it was great to finally see headquarters.
My friend was in search of dacron filling, my partner asked me to keep an eye out for metal offcuts and I had no particular item in mind. No luck with the items we’d planned on, but I did come back with some interesting stuff.
- Three end spools of yarn that will make a hefty warp for rag rugs
- Two squirty water bottles left over from a channel seven Olympics campaign
- Two empty metal 35mm film cans, I had to wait until a bus load of Japanese students had finish pawing through the bin first, don’t know what I’ll do with them but I like film things and metal tins are always cool
- A large offcut of commercial carpet for Malamute’s kennel
- 4m² of Astroturf that I still have no idea of my partner’s plans for usage
Worth dropping by if you’re in the Marrickville area.
Almost 500 Australian information technology jobs could shift to India under a new deal between Telstra and IBM worth up to $200 million and will save the telco about $75 million
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