Community advocacy group Get Up says the Federal Government’s commitment to internet censorship will slow down speeds and hurt the economy. The Federal Government will place mandatory filters on the internet as part of its cyber-safety plan, but Get Up says it will bring speeds to a crawl and limit productivity. Meanwhile, Telstra chief operating officer Greg Winn says the federal Government’s attempt to censor the internet is akin to trying to boil the ocean
A British doctor volunteering in DR Congo used text message instructions from a colleague to perform a life-saving amputation on a boy. Vascular surgeon David Nott helped the 16-year-old while working 24-hour shifts with medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres in Rutshuru. The boy’s left arm had been ripped off and was badly infected and gangrenous. Mr Nott, 52, from London, had never performed the operation but followed instructions from a colleague who had
The first mobile phone running Google’s Android operating system will hit Australia on 29 January, with a company called Kogan Technologies announcing the imminent release of an Android-based handset it calls the Agora
Online retail website Amazon has launched a UK music download service. Amazon MP3 will sell tracks from 59p and albums from £3. The new music store will offer more than 3 million songs that will work on any digital music player, including Apple’s iPod. Unlike many files from Apple’s iTunes store, which can only be played through its iTunes interface or on an iPod, the music available from Amazon will be free from the constraints of digital rights management (DRM)
From 3 December companies will be able to buy addresses associated with a new web domain. Called .tel, the domain is intended to act as a universal contact point rather than as a hook on which to hang web sites. Owners of .tel domains will be encouraged to populate it with details about how they can be contacted. The domain is designed to work on the web and with mobile phones such as the Apple iPhone and Blackberry
Pioneer is exhibiting its super multi-layer read-only optical disc which features 16 separate layers on a single side with 25GB storage capacity on each layer for a total capacity of 400GB at the IT Month fair taking place in Taipei. According to Pioneer’s internal roadmap, its super multi-layer technology development is read-only discs in 2008-2010, rewritable discs in 2010-2012 and 1TB disc in 2013
The Bush administration on Tuesday will try to convince a federal judge to let stand a law granting retroactive legal immunity to the nation’s telecoms, which are accused of transmitting Americans’ private communications to the National Security Agency without warrants. At issue in the high-stakes showdown are the nearly four dozen lawsuits filed by civil liberties groups and class action attorneys against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other carriers who allegedly cooperated with the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program in the years following the 11 Spetember terror attacks. The lawsuits claim the cooperation violated federal wiretapping laws and the Constitution
The worm exploiting a critical Windows bug that Microsoft patched with an emergency fix in late October is being used to build a new botnet. Ivan Macalintal, a senior research engineer with Trend Micro, said that the worm, which his company has dubbed Downad.a
— it’s called Conficker.a
by Microsoft and Downadup
by Symantec — is a key component in a new botnet that criminals are creating. We think 500,000 is a ball park figure,
said Macalintal when asked the size of the new botnet. That’s not as large as some, such as [the] Kraken [botnet], or Storm earlier, but it’s still starting to grow
Voluntary self-regulation means that, for the foreseeable future, Google and its legal team will continue to exercise extraordinary power over global speech online. Which raises a perennial but increasingly urgent question: Can we trust a corporation to be good — even a corporation whose informal motto is Don’t be evil
?
Intel and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies will produce solid-state drives. The enterprise-class SSDs are aimed at performance and reducing costs. Intel and Hitachi expect their SSDs to deliver high IOPS performance. The chips used in the SSDs will be produced by IM Flash Technologies
Outgoing Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin is pushing for action in December on a plan to offer free, pornography-free wireless Internet service to all Americans, despite objections from the wireless industry and some consumer groups
Adelaide Metro has given its blessing to Google to launch an online transport application that helps commuters find their way around the city. Google Transit feeds off bus, tram and train timetables to help commuters plan journeys and plot routes in Adelaide
Vodafone and Dell have partnered to launch Australia’s first $0 3G netbook bundle next month. Netbooks are mainly used to connect to the internet and have smaller form factors and less applications compared with laptops. Similar to the ubiquitous mobile phone sales model where customers pay for a hardware and service bundle in monthly instalments, the Vodafone and Dell partnership will offer the Inspiron Mini 9 at no cost upfront with 5GB of data for $69.95 per month over a two-year contract
Google is expected to launch the New Zealand version of its Street View mapping application tomorrow. The free software lets Internet users take a virtual walk
down city streets and view photos of the scene from any angle on their computer screens
A new analysis of botnets has come up with a possible reason for their prodigious ability to infect PCs — many anti-virus programs are near to useless in blocking the binaries used to spread them. According to FireEye chief scientist Stuart Staniford, detection rates are so poor that, on average, only around 40 percent of security software can detect binaries during the period of greatest infectivity and danger, namely the first few days after a particular variant starts being used by botnet builders
Researches at the University of Washington have recently developed a system, which for the first time, offers an instantly customisable approach to user interfaces. Each participant in the program is placed through a brief skills test and then a mathematically-based version of the user interface optimised for his or her vision and motor abilities is generated. The current off-the-shelf designs are especially discouraging for the disabled, the elderly and others who have trouble controlling a mouse, because most computer programs have standardised button sizes, fonts, and layouts, which are designed for normal users
A federal jury here has handed down what legal experts said was the country’s first cyber-bullying verdict, convicting a Missouri woman of three misdemeanor charges of computer fraud for her involvement in creating a phony account on MySpace to trick a teenager who later committed suicide. The jury deadlocked Wednesday on a fourth count of conspiracy against the woman, Lori Drew, 49, and the judge, George Wu of the US District Court for the Central District of California, declared a mistrial on that charge
Amazon is using the Thanksgiving break to quietly release some bad news — they’re shutting down one of its web services — Alexa Web Search. The service, which we first covered way back in 2006, is already closed to new customers, and existing users have until January 26, 2009 to move on to something else.—Amazon says in an email to developers that the reason for the closing is low usage, and I believe them. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all offer competing services. On the Alexa Web Search site itself Amazon says the service has been deprecated
, which is a fancy word for shut down
Bloggers across Mumbai fed live updates of the action after Islamist gunmen attacked the heart of the Indian financial capital, highlighting the emergence of citizen journalists in news coverage. Some, including a blogger named Vinu, were furiously uploading photos of damage from the attacks that killed at least 101 people and injured at least 314. Scores of foreigners, including Westerners, were trapped in luxury hotels. Images of the attacks also surfaced on the photo-sharing Web site Flickr. Some bloggers provided running descriptions and commentaries from near the action, while others vented emotions
An Estonian ISP that temporarily hosted the command-and-control servers for the Srizbi botnet, responsible for a large portion of the world’s spam, has cut off those servers, according to computer security analysts. Starline Web Services, based in Estonia’s capital Tallinn, had hosted four domain names identified as the control points for Srizbi, according to researchers from computer security firm FireEye
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