More than half of the Internet service providers (ISPs) taking part in the Federal Government’s ISP filtering trial have reported minimal speed disruptions or technology problems. Of the nine participating ISPs, iPrimus, Netforce, Webshield, Nelson Bay Online and OMNIconnect told ARN they had seen no slowdowns in Internet speeds or problems with the filtering solutions in place. Of the remaining four ISPs, Tech2U and Highway1 were unable to respond by time of publication while Unwired and Optus refused to comment
Russia’s most powerful business lobby moved to clamp down on Skype and its peers this week, telling lawmakers that the Internet phone services are a threat to Russian businesses and to national security. In partnership with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s political party, the lobby created a working group to draft legal safeguards against what they said were the risks of Skype and other Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services
News Limited has decided to replace its web publishing system, Open Text-owned Vignette, with rival FatWire. Vignette will be replaced over the next few months, according to sources. Vignette has been acquired by Open Text, which announced the completion of the acquisition yesterday. It promised to continue supporting Vignette products and the company’s install base
Internet service provider Karoo, based in Hull, has changed its policy of suspending the service of users suspected of copyright violations. The about face was made following a BBC story outlining the firm’s practice. Karoo issued a statement on Friday, saying that it has been exceeding the expectations of copyright owners
Today is a big day in Zappos history. This morning, our board approved and we signed what’s known as a ‘definitive agreement’, in which all of the existing shareholders and investors of Zappos (there are over 100) will be exchanging their Zappos stock for Amazon stock. Once the exchange is done, Amazon will become the only shareholder of Zappos stock. Over the next few days, you will probably read headlines that say ‘Amazon acquires Zappos’ or ‘Zappos sells to Amazon’. While those headlines are technically correct, they don’t really properly convey the spirit of the transaction. (I personally would prefer the headline ‘Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree…‘)
By adding fluorescent dyes to DNA and then spinning the DNA strands into nanofibres, researchers at the University of Connecticut have made a new material that emits bright white light. The material absorbs energy from ultraviolet light and gives off different colours of light — from blue to orange to white — depending on the proportions of dye it contains
Google has begun operating a data centre in Belgium that has no chillers to support its cooling systems, a strategy that will improve its energy efficiency while making local weather forecasting a larger factor in its data centre management
New Technology to Make Digital Data Self-Destruct
A group of computer scientists at the University of Washington has developed a way to make electronic messages self destruct
after a certain period of time, like messages in sand lost to the surf. The researchers said they think the new software, called Vanish, which requires encrypting messages, will be needed more and more as personal and business information is stored not on personal computers, but on centralised machines, or servers
The identities of more than four million Britons are being offered for sale on the internet. Highly sensitive financial information, including credit card details, bank account numbers, telephone numbers and even PINs are available to the highest bidder. At least a quarter of a million British bank and credit card accounts have been hacked into by cybercriminals, exposing consumers to huge financial losses
The notorious Kazaa peer-to-peer file sharing service is back from the dead three years after it was shut down by the music industry in a $150 million lawsuit. But the software looks entirely different this time around, with users forced to pay for their music instead of trading tracks illegally
A Texas startup plans to build a data centre powered by energy from huge wind farms in the Texas panhandle and the Gulf of Mexico. Baryonyx Corp.has been awarded three wind energy leases for 8,000 acres onshore in Dallam County, Texas and another 38,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico, the company said. Baryonyx has also acquired 8 acres of land in Stratford, Texas for its data center project
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, Google Earth 5.0 now incorporates the landscape and terrain of our closest and dearest celestial relative, the Moon. Earth’s moon, often known as the Moon, or simply just Moon
for short, is the rocky, cooler companion to the star of our local cosmic show, the Sun. And if you’re familiar with Google Earth 5.0, you’ll know what to expect of its appearance within this update
The detailed service records of 250,000 medieval soldiers — including archers who served with Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt — have gone online. The database of those who fought in the Hundred Years War reveals salaries, sickness records and who was knighted. The full profiles of soldiers from 1369 to 1453 will allow researchers to piece together details of their lives
In response to rumours circulating the internet about a flesh eating
robot project, Cyclone Power Technologies Inc and Robotic Technology Inc would like to set the record straight: This robot is strictly vegetarian. RTI’s patent pending robotic system will be able to find, ingest and extract energy from biomass in the environment. Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes human bodies
, the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips — small, plant-based items for which RTI’s robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI
They sometimes call national security the third rail of politics. Touch it and, politically, you’re dead. The cliché doesn’t seem far off the mark after reading Mark Klein’s new book, Wiring up the Big Brother Machine … and Fighting It. It’s an account of his experiences as the whistleblower who exposed a secret room at a Folsom Street facility in San Francisco that was apparently used to monitor the Internet communications of ordinary Americans
If you’re into keeping tabs on irony, check this out. Amazon apparently sent out its robotic droogs last night, deleting copies of the George Orwell novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four from Kindles without explanation, then refunding the purchase price. As you can imagine, a lot of people caught in the thick of Winston and Julia’s love story aren’t very happy — and rightfully so — the idea that we own
the things we buy is pretty fundamental to… ownership. We’re not sure exactly what happened, but it seems that the publisher of said novels, MobileReference, has changed its mind about selling content on the Kindle, and poof! Amazon remotely deleted all previously purchased copies. It’s all a bit Orwellian, is it not?
On 1 September, Millenniata, a start-up company based in Springville, will release a new archive disk technology to preserve data at room temperature for 1,000 years. It’s like writing onto gold plates or chiselling information into stone. Dubbed the Millennial Disc, it looks virtually identical to a regular DVD, but it’s special. Layers of hard, persistent
materials (the exact composition is a trade secret) are laid down on a plastic carrier, and digital information is literally carved in with an enhanced laser using the company’s Millennial Writer, a sort of beefed-up DVD burner. Once cut, the disk can be read by an ordinary DVD reader on your computer
It is an axiom that on the Internet nobody knows that you are a dog
. By the same token, it is all but impossible to know whether you are from North Korea or South Korea. That puzzle is plaguing law enforcement investigators in several nations who are now hunting for the authors of a small but highly publicised Internet denial-of-service attack that briefly knocked offline the Web sites of some United States and South Korean government agencies and companies
The Queensland Police plans to conduct a wardriving
mission around select Queensland towns in an effort to educate its citizens to secure their wireless networks. Wardriving
refers to the technique of searching for unsecured wireless networks by driving the streets armed simply with a laptop or smartphone seeking network connections. When unsecured networks are found, the Queensland Police will pay a friendly visit to the household or small business, informing them of the risks they are exposing themselves to
Popular social networking site Facebook is breaching Canadian law by holding on to users’ personal information indefinitely, a report has concluded. An investigation by Canada’s privacy commission found the US-based website also gave confusing or incomplete
information to subscribers. Facebook says it is aiming to safeguard users’ privacy without compromising their experience of the site
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