Technology

The mental and emotional storm that struck America on 11 September 2001 with the attacks on New York and Washington has been recreated with the release of more than half a million pager messages sent on that day. The whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published the messages over a 24-hour period beginning on Tuesday at dawn, releasing them in batches in chronological order as if in real time. The massive archive includes thousands of messages from US officials including Pentagon workers and New York police, as well as members of the public from all over America, which together provide an insight into the initial chaos and confusion, followed by a dawning horror as 9/11 unfolded

Mobile operators are unable to comply with proposed anti-copyright theft legislation that requires them to identify unlawful file-sharers. In the wake of the Digital Economy Bill, published on Friday, Mobile Broadband Group chief Hamish MacLeod told ZDNet UK that the government’s plans to force ISPs to hand over customer data to rights holders and potentially disconnect persistent infringers would apply to mobile operators. However, he said, operators have a problem with identification [of unlawful downloaders] to the telephone

Australia’s financial transactions regulator has given eBay subsidiary PayPal Australia until May next year to bulletproof its online payment service against money launderers and terrorism financiers

Allianz Australia expects to save more than $1 million by switching from Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Linux for key applications. The move involves dropping the traditional Wintel (Windows-Intel) platform for a virtualised IBM mainframe running on Linux. The migration is part of a $4m technology infrastructure overhaul to match Allianz’s growing business requirements

Google’s dual-pronged operating-system strategy will likely produce a single OS down the road, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin

New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real. Researchers there are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning your skin into a screen. The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolves away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about 1 millimetre, and just 250 nanometres thick. The sheet of silk will keep them in place, molding to the shape of the skin when saline solution is added

AOL said that it plans to reduce its workforce by a third over the next several months. The company, which is based in New York but maintains a large campus in the Dulles area, employs about 6,900 people. The company is hoping to get as many as 2,500 workers to depart voluntarily and is offering extra severance pay to people who leave by the end of December

Engineering researchers at the University of Arkansas have developed a unique and robust method to prevent cloning of passive radio frequency identification tags. The technology, based on one or more unique physical attributes of individual tags rather than information stored on them, will prevent the production of counterfeit tags and thus greatly enhance both security and privacy for government agencies, businesses and consumers

X-Flex is a new kind of wallpaper: one that’s quite possibly stronger than the wall it’s on. Invented by Berry Plastics in partnership with the US Army Corps of Engineers, this lifesaving adhesive is designed for use anyplace that’s prone to blasts and other lethal forces, like in war or natural-disaster zones, chemical plants or airports. To keep a shelter’s walls from collapsing in an explosion and to contain all the flying debris, you simply peel off the wallpaper’s sticky backing, apply the rollable sheets to the inside of brick or cinder-block walls, and reinforce it with fasteners at the edges. Covering an entire room can take less than an hour

Staff at mobile phone company T-Mobile passed on millions of records from thousands of customers to third party brokers. Details emerged after the firm alerted the information commissioner, who said his office was preparing a prosecution

Officers from the Metropolitan Police’s Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) have made Europe’s first arrests in the battle against the ZeuS or Zbot Trojan which threatened to compromise thousands of computers. Officers from the PCeU, assisted by Greater Manchester Police, arrested a man and woman, both aged 20 years, in Manchester for offences under the 1990 Computer Misuse Act and the 2006 Fraud Act

The city wifi system that was shut down by the MPAA two weeks ago is back up. The Coshocton County courthouse based Wi-Fi system is up and running again after it was taken offline due to a single copyright infringement notice