The burning hot sun at the equator is a far cry from the weak sunlight that reaches higher latitudes. To make the most of such different conditions you need specially tailored solar cells, according to UK firm Quantasol. So the company has come up with a new solar cell design that can be tuned to the light at a particular latitude, and in the process broken a 21-year-old efficiency record for one type of solar cell
Optus today confirmed it will launch its D3 satellite, which will be used to provide more pay-TV channels, in mid-August. The director of Optus Satellite Paul Sheridan said the new satellite will significantly increase its capacity. Foxtel will be the largest customer of the new satellite, which will carry its new suite of HD pay-TV and other channels. Foxtel has previously said it intends launching more than 20 new channels this year
Email logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point. That’s the tantalising suggestion to emerge from the pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees. After US energy giant Enron collapsed in December 2001, federal investigators obtained records of emails sent by around 150 senior staff during the company’s final 18 months. The logs, which record 517,000 emails sent to around 15,000 employees, provide a rare insight into how communication within an organisation changes during stressful times
Mozilla fired another shot in the browser wars today with the release of Firefox 3.5. The browser, which was previewed before going to the Release Candidate stage, was driven by quality instead of a timeline, according to the company. The focus for this version of Firefox is speed. Vlad Vukicevic, tech lead for the Firefox project at Mozilla, says that the main significance [of the browser upgrade] is that Firefox 3.5 is really, really fast
. Aside from the speed boost, Firefox 3.5 also boasts HTML 5 capabilities for handling audio and video, and a JavaScript performance and stability boost courtesy of the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine
Amazon cut ties today with its business affiliates in Rhode Island to protest a provision in the draft state budget that would force the company to collect sales tax. Rhode Island is now the second state where affiliates in the program, known as Amazon Associates, have been cut off over the sales tax issue. Earlier this month the Seattle-based online retailer also closed its affiliates’ accounts in North Carolina
The communications regulator has sounded the alarm after receiving a number of complaints from Australians who received SMS messages containing death threats. The threats, which tell the victim I am about to kill you
unless they contact an email address, are part of an SMS scam campaign designed to con targets out of personal details, cash and passwords. The warning from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) today comes after this website reported yesterday how scores of Australians had received SMS spam messages saying they have won $123,000, but must reply with their email address for instructions on how to claim the prize. The campaign is a ruse, attempting to trick people into paying $1000 for courier fees in order to claim a non-existent prize
A new Trojan horse program being distributed by tens of thousands of recently hacked Web sites hijacks search results so that Google.com users can scarcely tell that their Web searches are being funneled through third-party sites. Earlier this month, security experts at Websense warned that some 40,000 Web sites were hacked and seeded with code that bombards a visitor’s PC with a virtual kitchen sink worth of browser exploits, all in an effort to install a Trojan horse program. Websense named this mass compromise Nine-Ball
, and the Trojan dropped on victimized PCs was thought to install a range of malicious software
One of the largest spam blacklists in the world, developed in Australia, is up for sale and the creator has already received offers of more than $1 million. Proposals have come from all over the world and dubious
organisations have been especially keen on the acquisition. The list, popularly known as SORBS or spam and open relay blocking system, was created in 2002 by programmer Michelle Sullivan (then known as Matthew Sullivan), who used to work at the University of Queensland. SORBS is a free service that sets up virtual spam traps
to identify and block senders of unsolicited bulk email
id software’s John Carmack has begun delivering on his love of the iPhone with a brand new game made just for the platform called Doom Resurrection, available right now on the App Store. There’s nothing small about this game at all — it offers up 76 mb of original id shooter, including eight levels total
According to gaming company Global Gaming Factory X, it is in the the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m (SEK 60 million). The acquisition is scheduled to be completed by August and will see the site launch new business models to compensate content providers and copyright owners
Two senators plan to introduce a bill that would bar foreign companies that sell technology to Iran from receiving federal contracts. Senators Charles Schumer, D-NY, and Lindsey Graham, R-SC, said they wrote up the legislation after the Wall Street Journal reported on June 22 that a joint venture of Nokia of Finland and Siemens AG of Germany had sold a sophisticated Internet-monitoring system to Iran in 2008. Schumer and Graham’s bill would require the Obama administration to identify foreign companies that export sensitive technology to Iran and ban them from bidding on federal contracts, or renew expiring ones, unless they first stop exports to Iran
Trading virtual currency for real goods has been banned in China, putting hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity at risk. In addition to its ongoing crackdown on Internet porn, the Chinese government has declared that virtual currency cannot be traded for real goods or services. Virtual currency, as defined by Chinese authorities, includes prepaid cards of cyber-games, according to a joint release issued by China’s Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Commerce on Friday
Britain is hiring former computer hackers to join a new security unit aimed at protecting cyberspace from foreign spies, thieves and terrorists, the country’s terrorism minister said. Alan West said the technology-savvy staff would join efforts to trace the source of — and prevent — cyber attacks on Britain’s government, businesses and individuals. The country also will develop its capability to wage cyber warfare against the country’s foes, he said
The gas tank of the future may be full of chicken feathers. Engineers have discovered a way to store large amounts of hydrogen fuel using carbonised downy fluff, which could help pave the way to clean, green cars. A practical hydrogen car has been elusive for decades. Before the announcement this week by University of Delaware engineers, a nonstop trip from Portland to Eugene in a hydrogen car would need a tank bigger than 100 gallons to store liquid or gaseous fuel, even under high pressure. Treated chicken feathers work like a sponge. They soak up large amounts of hydrogen and hold it in a small space so the tank can be a conventional size and the fuel won’t need to held under dangerously high pressures. Hydrogen creates only water vapor when it burns, unlike gasoline that emits carbon dioxide, a culprit in climate change
Commonwealth Bank’s web banking service NetBank failed today, in what could be a hacker attack, leaving thousands of customers unable to access their accounts via the internet. A recorded message on the bank’s phone access line acknowledged the problem with NetBank, saying it was working to resolve this as a matter of emergency
. The bank blamed intermittent network issues
and gave no set time for the entire system to be restored
For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban. But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia. Times executives believed that publicity would raise Mr Rohde’s value to his captors as a bargaining chip and reduce his chance of survival. Persuading another publication or a broadcaster not to report the kidnapping usually meant just a phone call from one editor to another, said Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times. But Wikipedia, which operates under the philosophy that anyone can be an editor, and that all information should be public, is a vastly different world. A dozen times, user-editors posted word of the kidnapping on Wikipedia’s page on Mr Rohde, only to have it erased. Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing — a convoluted game of cat-and-mouse that clearly angered the people who were trying to spread the information of the kidnapping. Even so, details of his capture cropped up time and again, however briefly, showing how difficult it is to keep anything off the Internet — even a sentence or two about a person who is not especially famous. The sanitising was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at The Times. In an interview, Mr Wales said that Wikipedia’s cooperation was not a given. We were really helped by the fact that it hadn’t appeared in a place we would regard as a reliable source,
he said. I would have had a really hard time with it if it had
Amazon carried through with threats to end its relationship with online businesses based in North Carolina Friday, raising the stakes in a game of chicken over online sales taxes. The local businesses, which Amazon calls affiliates
, refer customers to the retailer through ads on their own Web sites. Typically, the ads recommend specific books or music. North Carolina lawmakers have proposed applying sales taxes to those transactions, something Amazon says would be unconstitutional. The company won’t specify how many affiliates it has in the state
When FreeLegoPorn.com began publishing pornographic images created with Lego toys, Lego acted quickly. The content available on the site consisted of animated mini-figures doing very explicit things. We were not amused,
says Peter Kjaer, an attorney for Denmark-based Lego. Lego didn’t go to court. Instead it filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Organisation, which ruled in its favor. The domain registrar for FreeLegoPorn.com, GoDaddy.com, eventually shut down the site and transferred the domain name to Lego under ICANN rules. But it’s not just Lego and Verizon that are suffering. Green energy is a hot topic, so cybersquatters have been targeting wind and solar energy start-ups. And malicious sites can create havoc with a brand’s reputation. Cybersquatting activity rose by 18% last year, with a documented 440,584 cybersquatting sites in the fourth quarter of last year alone, according to MarkMonitor’s annual Brandjacking Index report. And WIPO cited an 8% jump in dispute filings in 2008, to 2,329 complaints — a new record. Now, ICANN is preparing to open a potentially unlimited number of new top-level domains as early as the first quarter of 2010 — via Slashdot
This community has complained long and loudly about the very one-sided approach to copyright, and the not-so-slow erosion of the public domain. On top of the corporate lobbying to remove increasingly larger parts of the public domain, there is now an growing pattern whereby works are directly taken from the public domain and effectively stolen by a single company leveraging protections provided under copyright law. The Register’s article is based on a paper by Jason Mazzone at the Brooklyn Law School, which starkly details the problems that are now becoming evident as entities grab control over public domain works. The paper proposes some possible solutions, such as amending the Copyright Act. From the abstract: Copyright law itself creates strong incentives for copyfraud. The Copyright Act provides for no civil penalty for falsely claiming ownership of public domain materials. There is also no remedy under the Act for individuals who wrongly refrain from legal copying or who make payment for permission to copy something they are in fact entitled to use for free. While falsely claiming copyright is technically a criminal offense under the Act, prosecutions are extremely rare. These circumstances have produced fraud on an untold scale, with millions of works in the public domain deemed copyrighted, and countless dollars paid out every year in licensing fees to make copies that could be made for free
— via Slashdot
Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard has unveiled a prototype of the solar-powered plane he hopes eventually to fly around the world. The vehicle, spanning 61m but weighing just 1,500kg, will undergo trials to prove it can fly through the night. Dr Piccard, who made history in 1999 by circling the globe non-stop in a balloon, says he wants to demonstrate the potential of renewable energies. The final version of the plane will try first to cross the Atlantic in 2012
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