As millions of people wait for the arrival of Christmas in just a couple of weeks time, the festivities have come early for BitTorrent fans. A few hours ago the mighty Demonoid fully returned and the good news is that there appears to be little data loss. Users are feverishly uploading fresh torrents right now
Audio DRM has all but dissapeared from MP3s. Apple said earlier this year that there would be no more DRM on music available via the ITunes music store. However, as prolific writer and blogger Cory Doctorow has found out, they still require DRM on their Audiobooks
IT security firm Sophos has announced its latest probe into how easy it is to steal identities via Facebook and found that user negligence is worst in 2009. We assumed things would be better in 2009 but the situation is worse. This really is a wake-up call,
said Paul Ducklin, head of technology, Sophos Asia-Pacific (Sydney)
A broad swath of American enterprise ranging from major software makers to motion picture and music companies are joining forces to oppose a new international treaty that would make books more accessible to the blind
They’re the scourge of the Internet right now and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation says they’ve also raked in more than US$150 million for scammers. Security experts call them rogue antivirus programs. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Centre issued a warning over this fake antivirus software Friday, saying that Web surfers should be wary of sudden pop-up windows that report security problems on their computers
Waste plastic from throwaway
carrier bags can be readily converted into carbon nanotubes. The chemist who developed the technique has even used the nanotubes to make lithium-ion batteries. This is called upcycling
— converting a waste product into something more valuable. Finding ways to upcycle waste could encourage more recycling: for instance, bacteria can convert plastic drinks bottles into a more expensive plastic. The carrier-bag-to-nanotube technique was developed by Vilas Ganpat Pol at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and converts high or low-density polyethylene (HDPE and LDPE) into valuable multiwalled carbon nanotubes
A worldwide coalition of Non-Governmental Organisations, consumers unions and online service providers associations publish an open letter to the European institutions regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) currently under negotiation. They call on the European Parliament and the EU negotiators to oppose any provision into the multilateral agreement that would undermine the fundamental rights and freedoms of citizens in Europe and across the world
A consortium including Google and KDDI has signed a deal to build and operate an international undersea cable system, estimated to cost $US400 million ($436m). Globe Telecom, part owned by Singapore Telecommunications, and units of Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications are also part of the consortium. he cable system, named Southeast Asia Japan Cable, has a design capacity of 17 terabits per second upgradeable to 23 Tbps, the highest capacity system ever built so far, the companies said in a joint statement. It is targeted to be operational by the second quarter of 2012
Germany has unveiled the world’s most powerful weather supercomputer that scientists hope will provide critical data on global warming for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Weighing in at 35 tonnes and using 50 kilometres of cables, the supercomputer named Blizzard
is capable of 158 teraflops, or 158 trillion calculations, per second
Aspiritech, a Chicago based non-profit company, has launched a program to train high-functioning autistic people as testers for software development companies. The company says autistics have a talent for spotting imperfections, and thrive on predictable, monotonous work. Aspiritech is not the first company to explore the idea of treating this handicap as a resource. Specialisterne, a Danish company founded in 2004, also trains autistics. They hire their workforce out as hourly consultants to do data entry, assembly line jobs and work that many would find tedious and repetitive — via Slashdot
As promised, Facebook has begun rolling out new privacy options to its 350 million users. Watch out for the Everyone
setting. On Wednesday morning, users began seeing a message offering a new, simplified privacy settings page and the ability to set specific options for every post made to Facebook. The changes, first announced this summer, again promised last week, and available today, give users much tighter control of who sees what, down to the individual reader, if desired
Facebook has agreed to shut down a program that sparked a lawsuit alleging privacy violations, and set up a $9.5 million fund for a nonprofit foundation that will support online privacy, safety and security. The lawsuit centers around Facebook’s Beacon program, which let third-party web sites distribute stories
about users to Facebook. Beacon was launched in November 2007 and less than a year later plaintiffs filed a class action lawsuit alleging that Facebook and its affiliates did not give users adequate notice and choice about Beacon and the collection and use of users’ personal information
. In addition to Facebook, the lawsuit’s defendants include Blockbuster, Fandango, Hotwire, STA Travel, Overstock.Com, Zappos.com and Gamefly
Google has introduced a new approach to presenting news online by topic, developed with The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that if the experiment succeeded, it would be made available to all publishers. The announcement of the living stories
project shows Google collaborating with newspapers at a time when some major publishers have characterized the company as a threat. Google has also taken steps recently to project an image of itself as a friend to the industry
Seagate’s new Pulsar solid-state drive for enterprise servers incorporates technology to protect data in transit in the event of a power failure. The Pulsar is the first offering in a product line Seagate expects to expand and comes in 50GB and 200GB capacities. SSD vendors like Seagate are expecting exceptionally strong growth in 2010 and 2011
Google and several other Internet giants are lobbying the UK government to drop a proposal that would allow the secretary of state to introduce new changes to copyright law. The proposal is part of Britain’s Digital Economy bill, a comprehensive package of legislation that contains other controversial measures, including a requirement for ISPs to track illegal file sharing and possibly suspend the accounts of repeat offenders. Last week, Google along with Yahoo, Facebook and eBay sent a letter to Peter Mandelson, first secretary of state and head of the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), asking the government to drop the 17th clause of the bill
Google has announced the fruits of its earlier deal with Twitter, showing off how it has decided to present real-time Internet content within search results. Amit Singhal, Google fellow, introduced the real-time section during an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. We are here today to announce Google real-time search,
Singhal said, calling it Google relevance technology meets the real-time Web
. Twitter search will show the latest matches for a particular search term, but Google wants to do more than sort results by time
Amazon has no plans to open stores anywhere in the world, it said on Sunday, in response to a report it was planning to open high street shops in Britain. A spokesman for the group said it had no plans to open physical stores after the Sunday Times reported the group was looking to cash in on the rising customer demand for so-called click and collect services, where customers buy goods online and pick them up from a shop
Imagine a world where your contact lenses double as a personal computer display, superimposing information in front of you. That virtual-reality dream, a staple of sci-fi movies, is a step closer thanks to the work of Seattle scientists who have been developing a prototype to generate images inside a contact lens. The information would appear about 50 centimetres from the user’s eye. The technology is some years off, but a researcher, Babak Parviz, and his colleagues at the University of Washington last week unveiled a prototype at a Beijing biomedical conference. My group works on building nano-scale electronic, optical, and biomedical devices,
Professor Parviz said. We also work on integrating these devices into unconventional substrates — for example glass, plastic, paper. Since I put contact lenses on pretty much every morning, I guess it was just a matter of time putting the two together and wondering what we can do if we start putting these … tiny devices on a contact lens
What does googling
mean? Google can tell you. The search giant has quietly rolled out Google Dictionary, which presents definitions and synonyms. Exactly what you’d expect from a dictionary. In addition to Google’s own database of definitions, looking up a word on the Dictionary website provides a list of definitions pulled from a variety of academically authoritative sources (oh, and Wikipedia). It has a few cool features. You can mark words with the star button and come back to them later, see a list of recent searches and switch to translator resources or dictionaries for other languages — not to be confused with Google Translate. Dictionary companies have expected Google would saunter into their realm any day
Usage of the open-source MySQL database is set to decline if Oracle succeeds in buying the software’s owner, Sun Microsystems, according to new data released by analyst firm The 451 Group on Friday. The firm polled 347 open-source software users. While 82.1 percent of respondents use MySQL today, that figure will drop to 72.3 percent by 2014. Fifteen percent said that if Oracle buys Sun, they would be less inclined to use MySQL. Only 6.3 percent indicated they would be more likely to use the database under Oracle’s stewardship
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