Technology

A man who discovered a technology integral to wireless internet while searching for exploding black holes has won this year’s Prime Minister’s Prize for Science. John O’Sullivan, 62, a CSIRO researcher from Sydney, received his $300,000 award from Kevin Rudd at Parliament House last night. Dr O’Sullivan’s invention, now used by almost a billion people a day, had its genesis in a 1977 paper he wrote about how a set of mathematical equations could be used to sharpen images from optical telescopes

The Stockholm District Court has taken action against two founder members of The Pirate Bay. Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij are now banned from operating the site and will have to pay fines of $71,000 each if they continue. This, despite the fact that they nor the site remain in Sweden

Xerox announced a new silver ink (among other things) that it’s calling, and apparently is, a breakthrough in printable electronics, a leading edge concept that’s generated a lot of discussion but few actual products to date, largely because of the issues that Xerox’s new technology addresses. In concept, printable electronics is just what it sounds like: using a printer, basically an ink jet, to print electronic circuits. If you can do that reliably, you can print electronic devices for far less than current methods cost. You can also print the devices on a variety of new materials

Visitors to technology blog Gizmodo are being warned that they could have picked up more than tips about the latest must-have gadget. According to security firm Sophos, the web site was delivering advertisements laced with malware last week. A statement on the Gizmodo web site admits that it was tricked into running Suzuki adverts which were in fact from hackers. It follows a similar problem on the New York Times web site

The internet is on the brink of the biggest change to its working since it was invented 40 years ago, the net regulator ICANN has said. The body said it that it was finalising plans to introduce web addresses using non-Latin characters. The proposal — initially approved in 2008 — would allow domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts

Geocities We always imagined how this might end: GeoCities would finally take down all of the animated under construction signs, and we’d hear one last Midi file to the tune of horns playing taps. Instead, GeoCities will probably go down with a whimper today. Time is up for Yahoo’s scheduled closing of perhaps the most significant virtual museum in recent history. Years ago a central meeting place for a massive chunk of American Web surfers, GeoCities will lock its doors and take millions of pages offline

With more than half a million visits a day, EZTV is the leading TV-torrent release group. It therefore comes as no surprise that rumours and confusion spread when the site went offline earlier this week. EZTV users can be reassured though, the downtime is caused by technical issues and not any legal trouble as some had suggested

The consumer watchdog says there will be a zero tolerance approach to dodgy telecommunications companies while the Federal Government has threatened a legislative crackdown after new figures showed a significant rise in complaints against telcos

A new mobile phone charger that will work with any handset has been approved by the International Telecommunication Union. Industry body the GSMA says that 51,000 tonnes of redundant chargers are generated each year. Currently most chargers are product or brand specific, so people tend to change them when they upgrade to a new phone. However, the new energy-efficient chargers can be kept for much longer. The GSMA also estimates that they will reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by 13.6m tonnes

All 1.6 million books digitised so far by the Internet Archive, the San Francisco-based non-profit dedicated to the universal sharing of knowledge, will be available free to children around the world who have laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC)

Discarded and left-for-dead, old TV broadcast channels (called white spaces) that have been freed up by the transition to digital TV in the US are being given new life and used to wirelessly deliver high-speed Internet connectivity to business, education and community users. Under an experimental license granted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Spectrum Bridge designed and deployed a wireless TV white spaces network to distribute broadband Internet connectivity in Claudville, Virginia. To ensure the local residents make the most of this new high-speed connectivity, Dell, Microsoft and the TDF Foundation have contributed software and hardware to the local school and the town’s new computer centre

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC has shut down no fewer than 800 scam web sites and arrested members of 18 syndicates behind the fraudulent scheme in a renewed bid to clap down on internet fraudsters through an initiative tagged project eagle claw

Profits at online auction giant eBay have fallen by 29% as it continued to struggle amid the weak economy. It made $350m in the third quarter from $492m in the same period a year earlier as customers showed reluctance to spend. But the firm’s overall sales rose 6% to $2.4bn as more people used its PayPal division to pay for things online

Twitter, the microblogging company which lets users express their thoughts in text message-length bursts, has proven itself the most desirable property on the internet by announcing deals with both Microsoft and Google