Apple is planning a major East Coast data centre to boost the capacity of its online operations, and may invest as much as $1 billion in building and operating the huge server farm. The company is considering locations in North Carolina, where officials are rushing to pass enhanced tax breaks to woo Apple to their state rather than neighboring Virginia, which just passed its own incentives for data centre projects
In a small town just across the border from Germany, a small group of Dutch scientists and one irrepressible Austrian salesman have dedicated themselves to the task of reinventing one of the great inventions of the 20th century — Polaroid’s instant film. Digital cameras are ubiquitous, cheap and easy to use — the reasons Polaroid stopped making the film last year — so what this group in Enschede is attempting may seem hopelessly retrograde. But to them, that is exactly the point. They want to recast an outdated production process in an abandoned Polaroid factory for an age that has fallen for digital pictures because they think people still have room in their hearts for retro photography that eschews airbrushing or Photoshop
Hundreds of thousands more Australians have turned to illegal download sites in the past year to save money on movies, music, software and TV shows during the economic downturn, new figures show. Total visits by Australians to BitTorrent websites including Mininova, The Pirate Bay, isoHunt, TorrentReactor and Torrentz grew from 785,000 in April last year to 1,049,000 in April this year, Nielsen says. This is a year-on-year increase of 33.6 per cent
Google has announced a new centralised collaboration tool called Google Wave that mashes together emails, instant messaging and wiki style communication into one service that will be open sourced and run on its own protocols. Developed in Google’s Sydney office by the same team of brothers that created Google Maps, Jens and Lars Rasmussen, the project originally dubbed Walkabout
has been in development for over two years
The EU passed the Data Retention Directive years ago, a law that demands ISPs and search engines hold onto data long enough to help the cops (but not long enough to cause privacy problems). But Sweden never passed it into national law, and the European Commission has now sued the country to make sure a bill appears
Victorian police are investigating a massive identity fraud involving the personal details of thousands of Australians that have been available on a blog site for more than a month. The data, discovered by The Australian, includes thousands of Visa, Mastercard and American Express numbers, including expiry dates, together with home addresses, phone numbers and email addresses. The list was posted on a free blogging site, where it was copied by search engine Google as part of its routine cataloguing of internet sites on 21 April
A UK researcher has spent years interviewing people about whether DRM has affected their ability to use content in ways ordinarily protected by the law. Surprise! It has, even leading one sight-impaired woman to piracy
Facebook has gotten $200 million from a Russian investment group in exchange for a small stake in the nation’s largest social networking company. The deal places the value of the site, known for allowing people to connect through SuperPokes
and virtual gifts, at $10 billion. Digital Sky Technologies, with headquarters in Moscow and London, will get a 1.96 percent stake in the company for its investment. It will not have a seat on Facebook’s board
The Rudd Government has indicated that it may back away from its mandatory internet filtering plan. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy today told a Senate estimates committee that the filtering scheme could be implemented by a voluntary industry code. Senator Conroy’s statement is a departure from the internet filtering policy Labor took into the October 2007 election to make it mandatory for ISPs to block offensive and illegal content. Responding to questions from shadow communications minister Nick Minchin on how the government may go about imposing the internet filtering scheme, Senator Conroy said that legislation may not be required and ISPs may adopt an industry consensus to block restricted content on a voluntary basis
A Brisbane man has invented a simple, low-cost online authentication system that would allow banks to offer one-time passcode security to all their customers. Internet database manager Matthew Walker has won a patent for PassWindow, which synchronises a part-pattern printed on a see-through card window with the rest of a unique pattern generated on the computer screen to display a numeric code. Online users hold their card against the screen to reveal a randomly created six-digit number that securely authenticates their financial transactions. Mr Walker said PassWindow did the same job as hardware tokens but for almost no cost, so banks could offer that level of security to all customers, rather than just their high-wealth or business clients
For the business traveler, Wi-Fi is important — crucial, even. But more important than sustenance? That’s exactly what was found in a recent survey by American Airlines and HP, where some 47% of business travelers responded that Wi-Fi was the most important airport amenity, outscoring basic travels needs such as food by nearly 30 percentage points
The request from four major record labels to fine the Pirate Bay operators for every day the site remains up and running was declined by the Swedish District Court today. Contrary to what the labels had requested, the court said it wants to hear the defendants before it will take any action
New Zealand last week got the option to access full two-way Twitter service via local SMS, but Twitter promises that Australia is still under consideration for a similar arrrangement
Greenlanders are hooking up to the Internet in droves since the Greenland Connect sea cable was connected to the island on 24 March. Within the first month of its operation, Internet use jumped 25 percent. Sermitsiaq reports Tele Greenland’s new ADSL Premium service is particularly popular, luring hundreds of customers with its faster speed and larger capacity for downloading at a single set rate. In anticipation of a big increase in their Internet customers, Tele Greenland has already approached the government and asked it to lower rates by 35 million kroner
YouTube is deleting thousands of sexually explicit videos after it was hit by an organised attack yesterday in a prank known as Porn Day
. The video-sharing website, owned by Google, has removed most of the porn clips but some content could be available for days as YouTube deletes the offending material. The pranksters hid the porn amid innocent footage of celebrities such as Hannah Montana and Jonas Brothers. Members of the 4Chan message board, which focuses mostly on Japanese anime and manga, have claimed responsibility for uploading the porn, apparently in response to YouTube’s stance on copyright music videos
The UK government has pushed back on requests that a historic site used by Britain’s top code-breakers during World War II should be elevated to the same status as the Imperial War Museum. Responding to a question from Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall, whose parents met while stationed at the Bletchley Park site during the war, the deputy chief whip of the House of Lords, Lord Davies of Oldham said that while the government was keen to support the site, there would be no moves to link the site to the Imperial War Museum
Pro-copyright lobbyists and anti-piracy outfits have a clear idea of what is needed to manipulate the minds of the younger generations. The MPAA most famously handed out a merit patch in respecting copyright
to LA Boy Scouts, and now the Copyright Alliance has entered US classrooms in an attempt to educate today’s youth about the benefits of copyright
Wiring up Australia’s river systems, electricity grids, health systems and transport with smart infrastructure networks, as well as beefing up broadband, could add 70,000 jobs and boost GDP by up to $80 billion within 10 years, according to a new report. The Access Economics report on the benefits of intelligent technologies, sponsored by IBM, predicts a 1.5 per cent boost to GDP over 10 years that would increase the net present value of GDP in the range of $35 billion to $80 billion
Cybercrime fighter Eugene Kaspersky can’t help but be impressed by the slick operations behind the Conficker botnet, and says that it could have been worse had the botnet been after more than just money
Allowing ISPs to have too much would drastically hinder the chances of fresh new startups developing into major businesses — as happened with Google
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