Internet public key cryptography pioneer Whitfield Diffie says Google can see what everyone in the world is interested in
, and warns there will be security and intellectual property challenges ahead as cloud computing gathers steam. Cloud computing means you are doing your computing on somebody else’s computer,
Professor Diffie told the AusCERT 2010 conference yesterday. Looking ahead a little, I firmly believe cloud — previously called grid computing — will become very widespread. It’s much cheaper than buying your own computing infrastructure, or maybe you don’t have the power to do what you want on your own computer.
But Stanford University’s visiting scholar at the Centre for International Security and Cooperation and former Sun chief security officer warns that companies that base their business on third-party proprietary systems will have to find ways of protecting their trade secrets
After a few weeks of rumours, Seagate’s senior product manager Barbara Craig has confirmed to Thinq that we are announcing a 3TB drive later this year,
but the move to 3TB of storage space apparently involves a lot more work than simply upping the areal density. The ancient foundations of the PC’s three-decade legacy has once again reared its DOS-era head, revealing that many of today’s PCs are simply incapable of coping with hard drives that have a larger capacity than 2.1TB
Julian Assange, the Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks, says he had his passport taken away from him at Melbourne Airport and was later told by customs officials that it was about to be cancelled. Last year Wikileaks published a confidential Australian blacklist of websites to be banned under the government’s proposed internet filter. The Age has been told that Assange’s passport is classified normal
on the immigration database, meaning the Wikileaks director can travel freely on it
Experts who studied almost 13,000 cell phone users over 10 years, hoping to find out whether the mobile devices cause brain tumours, said on Sunday their research gave no clear answer. A study by the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the largest ever to look at possible links between mobile phones and brain cancer, threw up inconclusive results but researchers said suggestions of a possible link demanded deeper examination
TextEdit is a nice, lightweight text editor, but in at least one sense it’s too lightweight: It doesn’t have a word-count feature. MacOSXHints.com reader mprussel figured out a solution: An Applescript that “adds a word (and character) count pop-up dialog” to OS X’s built-in editor — via Mac OS X Hints
Google announced Friday that it will shut down the Internet store it used to sell its Nexus One smart phone, the flagship device for Google’s Android operating system
With all the privacy issues surrounding Facebook, many people are considering quitting the site altogether. If you’re not ready to take it that far, here’s how to avoid the privacy breaches without completely deleting your account and losing touch with your friends — via lifehacker
Hollywood’s landmark copyright battle against Perth internet provider iiNet will resume in the Federal Court on 2 August. The full bench of the Federal Court will over four days hear an appeal against Justice Denis Cowdroy’s ruling in favour of iiNet last February. At the time Justice Cowdroy found that the ISP couldn’t be held liable for copyright breaches carried out by its customers. iiNet, which has lodged its own notice of contention against some aspects of the ruling, has been defending the allegations since November 2008
Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service suffered its fourth power outage in a week on Tuesday, with some customers in its US East Region losing service for about an hour. The incident was triggered when a vehicle crashed into a utility pole near one of the company’s data centres, and a transfer switch failed to properly manage the shift from utility power to the facility’s generators
The world will soon run out of internet addresses unless organisations move to a new internet protocol version, according to the head of the body that allocates IP addresses. Rod Beckstrom, chief executive of ICANN, says only 8 or 9 per cent of IPv4 addresses were left and companies need to switch to the new standard of IPv6 as quickly as possible
Microsoft’s announcement this week that it is preparing to end support for machines running Windows XP SP2 not only represents a challenge for the thousands of businesses still running SP2, but also is the end of an era for both Microsoft and its customers. By the time Microsoft drops support for XP SP2 on 13 July, Windows XP will be nearly nine years old. The OS was released in August 2001 as a replacement for Windows 2000 and was the last full release of Windows before Microsoft started its Trustworthy Computing effort. Very soon after the famous memo from Bill Gates appeared, attention both inside and outside the company focused on hardening Windows XP
Authorities in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh are planning to set up an outsourcing unit in a jail. The unit will employ 200 educated convicts who will handle back office operations like data entry, and process and transmit information. The project will begin at Charlapally Central Jail, near the state capital Hyderabad, in the next four months
Two privacy watchdogs are writing to Google asking why the internet company has been collecting information about household wireless networks. Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) says the internet giant has been taking down the data as it drives through Australian neighbourhoods taking photos for its Street View service. By clicking on a map Google’s Street View allows internet users to view a photo of the streetscape. EFA and the Australian Privacy Foundation are worried the data gathered during this process could be misused
eBay Australia sellers will no longer be forced to offer PayPal as a payment mechanism following the intervention of the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC). Two years ago, eBay made two significant moves — it tried to mandate that sellers offer PayPal and pushed for PayPal to be the only electronic payment platform on ebay.com.au. The second proposition drew the ire of both buyers, sellers, the ACCC and even the Reserve Bank but the first idea went through largely unchallenged. Since then the ACCC has been investigating complaints that eBay may have engaged in conduct that could contravene the Trade Practices Act by forcing sellers to offer PayPal, its subsidiary
Last month it became apparent that several Hollywood movie studios had threatened to take legal action against the owner of ISP CyberBunker, the current bandwidth provider for The Pirate Bay. Now, according to fresh information from a reliable source, the studios have come good on their threats
There have already been plenty of questions over who owns
the ebooks you’ve bought, with stories of remotely deactivated books and remotely deactivated features — neither of which happens when you have a real physical book. But there are also other concerns opened up by newly activated features. Apparently one new feature — sent in by a few concerned readers — is that Amazon will now remotely upload and store the user notes and highlights you take on your Kindle, which it then compiles into popular highlights
Metamaterials are man-made substances designed to do some very weird things that natural materials don’t. The path of a beam of light through a natural material like glass is predictable, but scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have engineered an optical material that bends light in the wrong direction. This new negative-index metamaterial (NIM) could have several valuable uses including invisibility cloaking, superlensing (imaging nano-scale objects using visible light) and improved light collection in solar cells
The husband-and-wife team of Arlen and Diane Chase tried a new approach to mapping archaeological sites using airborne laser signals that penetrate the jungle cover and are reflected from the ground below. They yielded 3-D images of the site of ancient Caracol, in Belize, one of the great cities of the Maya lowlands. In only four days, a twin-engine aircraft equipped with an advanced version of lidar (light detection and ranging) flew back and forth over the jungle and collected data surpassing the results of two and a half decades of on-the-ground mapping, the archaeologists said. After three weeks of laboratory processing, the almost ten hours of laser measurements showed topographic detail over an area of 80 square miles, notably settlement patterns of grand architecture and modest house mounds, roadways and agricultural terraces
Researchers have developed a way to attack desktops by bypassing a majority of antivirus software running on Windows. Popular products offered by McAfee, Trend Micro, AVG and Sophos have been identified as susceptible to the exploit
Twitter has fixed a major bug that saw many users of the service appear to lose all of their followers and friends. The problem began when a flaw was uncovered that allowed people to force others to follow
them on the site. People who typed accept
followed by a person’s Twitter name forced the user to be added to their list of followers. The hack was quickly passed around the social network with many people using it to force celebrities to follow them. It could have easily allowed spammers to insert messages into thousands of accounts
RSS – Posts