Before there was Google or any other search engine, there was a phone-based information hotline at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. It was set up 40 years ago to control rumors at a time when the campus was embroiled in racial violence and anti-war protests. The student union was firebombed in 1970, the same year violence erupted at Kent State University. A few months after the union burned, two teens were shot and killed at the University of Kansas — and there was a citywide curfew. Like other campuses across the country, the University of Kansas set up a hotline to try to quell rumours, says historian Doug Harvey. Surprisingly, the hotline is still being used today
Ever copied and pasted text from various web sites and found some extra text in your clipboard that wasn’t included in the text you selected? Here’s how to stop this annoying (and privacy-invading) behaviour:
127.0.0.1 tcr.tynt.com
via lifehacker
The consumer watchdog has accused telephone and internet giant Optus of misleading consumers with ads claiming new phone and broadband plans allow for unlimited
internet access and home phone calls. The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission launched action in the Federal Court in Melbourne yesterday accusing Optus of falsely advertising to consumers that there were no limits to the plans
Iridium continues its push into the market for satellite data and telemetry services, as it announced the company that would build its second generation of satellites. Amid a great deal of pomp and circumstance including the ringing of the opening bell at Nasdaq, Iridium announced Thales Alenia Space, a joint venture between French owned Thales (67%) and Italian based Finmeccanica (33%), would be designing and building the new satellites. Iridium’s old network of 66 satellites was designed for voice calls; the new satellites will also be able to handle data more efficiently, and include cameras as well. The company also plans to share the satellite platforms with some scientists for use in studying the Earth
In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer. Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defence, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists. The legal justification for arresting the shooter
rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also include an exception for recording in public places where no expectation of privacy exists
(Illinois does not) but in practice this exception is not being recognised
Schoolboy Hibiki Kono climbs a sheer brick wall after turning himself into Spiderman — with the help of two £14.98 Tesco Value vacuum cleaners. Clever Hibiki, 13, made his incredible climbing machine in school technology lessons. The lad, who is a big fan of the superhero, spent five months designing and making the gadget. He attached two giant suckerpads to the 1,400-watt cleaners — and uses the vacuum suction to grip the wall and support his weight
Australia’s peak science body stands to reap more than $1 billion from its lucrative Wi-Fi patent after already netting about $250 million from the world’s biggest technology companies, an intellectual property lawyer says. The CSIRO has spent years battling 14 technology giants including Dell, HP, Microsoft, Intel, Nintendo and Toshiba for royalties and made a major breakthrough in April last year when the companies opted to avoid a jury hearing and settle for an estimated $250 million. Now, the organisation is bringing the fight to the top three US mobile carriers in a new suit targeting Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile. It argues they have been selling devices that infringe its patents
This week Ottawa will try once again to update Canada’s copyright law that Industry Minister Tony Clement says has holes big enough to drive a Mack truck through
. The Copyright Act of Canada has not had a significant rewrite since 1988, at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy and an iPad was just a twinkle in some inventor’s eye. The trick — one the Conservatives and Liberals before them couldn’t master — is to find a balance between right of consumers’ and the rights of the artists or creators to not have their work ripped off
Is Google responsible for giving out bad directions through its Google Maps service? We’re about to find out. After Googling walking directions for a trip in Park City, Utah, Lauren Rosenberg claims she was led onto a busy highway, where she was struck by a vehicle. She’s now suing Google for damages
Ten engineering students from Britain hope to tackle the Pan-American Highway — all 15,000 miles of it — in the last thing you’d think to do it in: an electric car. Not just any electric car, mind you, but one originally designed for racing. Racing Green Endurance, which consists entirely of students at Imperial College London, has converted a Radical SR8 to battery electric power. As if that weren’t impressive enough, they plan to spend three months driving it from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to Tierra Del Fuego to show people that EVs can be quick, they can be cool and they can go the distance
Government agencies are exposing taxpayers to fraud through gaps in their control and reporting of embezzlement, identity theft, leaks and privacy breaches. One in seven federal departments and agencies does not have a fraud-control plan, the Australian National Audit Office discovered in a joint investigation with the Australian Institute of Criminology
Thunderbird has a little problem about writing mail in HTML or TEXT format. Once you configured HTML or TEXT format, you cannot switch between them on the fly. So, this is quite nice tip if you want to choose on the fly if write an HTML or TEXT mail. If you would like to send in HTML format, hold the SHIFT key while pressing the REPLY TO button (or the WRITE NEW MAIL one). This will allow you to compose one HTML mail even if you configured your THUNDERBIRD to compose always in TEXT format — via San Baldo
Blizzard founder, Frank Pearce reckons that fighting piracy with DRM is a losing battle. His company — which is responsible for the biggest videogame of all time, the worryingly-addictive online fantasy role player World of Warcraft — is to release Starcraft 2 on 27 July and Pearce has told Videogamer that the title won’t be hobbled with the kind of crazy copy protection schemes which have made Ubisoft very unpopular in gaming circles of late
Three men are facing federal fraud charges for allegedly raking in more than US$100 million while running an illegal scareware
business that tricked victims into installing bogus software. Two of the men, Bjorn Sundin and Shaileshkumar Jain, operated an antivirus company called Innovative Marketing, which sold products such as WinFixer, Antivirus 2008, Malware Alarm and VirusRemover 2008. The third man charged, James Reno, ran Byte Hosting Internet Services, the company that operated Innovative Marketing’s call centres
Warner Bros has been sued by a German technology firm which claims the movie and television production company pirated its anti-piracy technology. German firm Medien Patent Verwaltung claims that in 2003, it revealed a new kind of anti-piracy technology to Warner Bros that marks films with specific codes so pirated copies can be traced back to their theaters of origin. But like a great, hilariously-ironic DRM Ouroborus, the company claims that Warner began using the system throughout Europe in 2004 but hasn’t actually paid a dime for it
The UK’s Times and Sunday Times are putting up search walls in addition to pay walls. The papers, which plan to start charging users for access to their newly redesigned web sites in late June, will prevent Google and other search engines from linking to their stories. Although they are not the first papers to erect pay barriers around their content, the papers are going a step further by making most of their site invisible to Google’s web crawler. Except for their home pages, no stories will show up on Google
A British scientist claims to have become the first human to be infected by a computer virus, in an experiment he says has important implications for the future of implantable technology. Dr Mark Gasson from the University of Reading infected a computer chip which was then implanted in his hand with the virus and then transmitted it to a PC to prove that malware can move between human and computer
One of the main advantages of OLED is that it can be flexible — so flexible, in fact, that it can be wrapped around a pencil. Taking 2007’s .3mm prototype Sony’s made a new one just 80μm-thick. That’s about ten times the size of a red blood cell, or just a tiny bit thinner than a single hair. The whole OLED measures 4.1-inches in size, and has a 432 x 240 resolution and a contrast ratio of under 1,000:1. It’s another world first, boasting that it’s the first time an OLED panel can still stream video while being rolled up (around a cylinder with a 4mm radius) and stretched
The lead scientists of a Japanese research team said that they have found a material that could be used to make a lower-price super disc with data storage capacity thousands of times greater than a DVD. According to Shin-ichi Ohkoshi, chemistry professor at the University of Tokyo, the material transforms from a black-colour metal state that conducts electricity into a brown semiconductor when hit by light. The material can switch back and forth between the metal and semiconductor states at room temperature when exposed to light, creating an effective on-off function for data storage. The material is made from a new crystal form of titanium oxide
An Australian Federal Police (AFP) operation to rescue a hacked database of 60,000 domain names’ usernames and passwords and 13,000 credit card numbers — to use as evidence — was almost foiled when the hackers were tipped off and went into a deletion frenzy
RSS – Posts