Two people have been successfully prosecuted for refusing to provide authorities with their encryption keys, resulting in landmark convictions that may have carried jail sentences of up to five years. The government said today it does not know their fate
Google has unveiled a new version of its search engine which it says will be faster and more accurate than ever before. The upgrade, which insiders have dubbed caffeine
, was announced after the company opened up access to web developers. It is intended to replace the technology giant’s main search engine after tests have been completed
A new software component that ensures an operating system will never
crash has been developed in Australia, and is potentially destined to earn billions of dollars in royalties. The secure embedded L4 (sel4) micro-kernel is the result of around five years’ research at National ICT Australia (Nicta). A kernel manages a computer system’s resources, including memory and processors. Like a traffic warden, it checks
if the roads are clear before letting school children or vehicles pass
Failing to find a larger company to acquire it, Nambu Network will shut down its link shortening service. Tr.im has thousands of users and creates tens of thousands of URLs per day for social media users
Facebook has acquired fellow Silicon Valley startup FriendFeed, in the clearest sign yet that it plans to extend its lead over rivals such as MySpace and Twitter. The world’s largest social networking company said it was acquiring its Californian neighbour for an undisclosed sum — believed to be in the tens of millions of dollars — in an attempt to hire the best engineers
Come September, some customers of Australian Capital Territory internet service provider TransACT will be able to select a 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload broadband service. The data charges alone, excluding charges that any of the 11 ISPs that can deliver services across its network, will be $89.95 per month
Whistleblower web site Wikileaks has published in full the Vodafone/2degrees story censored earlier this week by the New Zealand Commerce Commission. Wikileaks has provided several links to access the full story, from countries outside New Zealand, including Sweden, US, Finland, the Netherlands and Tonga. The organisation said that the file it had made available for download directly affects the country’s telecommunications regulations
Unknown hackers broke into the web site of the Melbourne International Arts Festival (MIAF) this week, in what appeared to be a similar attack to one perpetrated last week on the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF)
A notorious patent case about a technology that allows people to search multimedia content may finally be coming to a close. Earlier this week, a judge ruled that two patents initially awarded to Encyclopedia Britannica are invalid. The patents were built on the infamous 5,241,671 patent first unveiled by Compton’s NewMedia in 1993 at the Comdex trade show. That patent, which covered the retrieval of information from multimedia content and is now owned by Britannica, would have been relevant to the many companies selling multimedia CD-ROMs at the time
As researchers rush to commercialise printable batteries that pattern organic semiconductors onto paper-thin, flexible substrates, a German team claims to be on-track for a 2010 product launch. Scientists at the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems together with colleagues from Chemnitz University of Technology and Menippos GmbH (all based in Chemnitz, Germany) collaborated on product development. They are targeting applications such as smart credit cards with battery-powered displays to show balances and other account information. Fraunhofer’s batteries use zinc anodes and manganese cathodes, which react with one another to produce electricity. The materials slowly dissipate over the lifetime of the battery, making them suitable for short-term applications like greeting cards with built-in music players
Looking into Iran’s portion of the Internet is not an easy task. But the network security firm Arbor Networks recently released traffic data for both internal and external-facing Internet service providers in the country. This data shows that the country continues to filter Internet traffic and that its ISPs can filter larger quantities of data than before
The long-absent PC brand Gateway has been re-launched in Australia, attempting to target the fashion-conscious consumer. Acer, who acquired Gateway in 2007, has positioned the cow-patterned brand at the style-conscious, realigning the Acer brand for the tech-savvy, while its Emachines division will be targeted at the budget-oriented
user. There are no plans to bring the Packard Bell brand into Australia. Unlike in the past, Gateway machines will be found in retail stores rather than a direct sales model, with Harvey Norman listed as the major launch partner
A massively co-ordinated
attack on web sites including Google, Facebook and Twitter was directed at one individual, it has been confirmed. Facebook told BBC News that the strike was aimed at a pro-Georgian blogger known as Cyxymu
Malaysia is considering the establishment of an Internet filter, similar to China’s abandoned Green Dam
project, a source familiar with the process told Reuters on Thursday. News of the proposal emerged within days of police arresting nearly 600 opposition supporters at a weekend rally denouncing a government that has ruled this Southeast Asian country for 51 years. A vibrant Internet culture has contributed to political challenges facing the government, which tightly controls mainstream media and has used sedition laws and imprisonment without trial to prosecute a blogger
In the latest phase of the nanotechnology revolution, scientists have built a collection of minuscule objects from DNA, including toothed gears, curved tubes, and a wireframe beach ball five millionths of a centimetre in diameter. As well as being able to hold vast amounts of information, DNA is tough and flexible, making it an attractive candidate for use as a nanomaterial. Advances in molecular biology in recent decades have meant that scientists are well equipped to work with DNA and program it to do whatever they want
Micro-blogging service Twitter and social networking site Facebook have been severely disrupted by hackers. Twitter was taken offline for more than two hours whilst Facebook’s service was degraded
, according to the firms. The popular sites were subject to so-called denial-of-service attacks on Thursday, the companies believe
Google’s adventures in the media world took a fresh twist today, after it announced it was selling off its radio assets while simultaneously spending more than $100m buying leading online video company On2
Telstra could face a fine of up to $300 million after admitting to the Federal Court it was guilty of misleading and deceptive conduct in denying competitors access to its copper network
Media giant News Corporation Ltd intends to charge for all its news webhttp://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/News-Corp-to-charge-for-all-news-websites-pd20090806-UMS5P?OpenDocumentsites in a bid to lift revenues, as the transition towards online media permanently changes the advertising landscape
Yahoo will be able to quit its internet search deal with Microsoft if it fails to meet certain market share and revenue targets. Yahoo can abandon the deal if Microsoft does not produce advertising revenue per search within a certain — undisclosed — percentage of Google’s. It can also walk away if the share of search queries falls below a certain percentage of the market
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