Developers working on Mozilla’s next browser have added a privacy mode to the still-under-construction Firefox 3.1, a major milestone in the development of the upgrade. The most recent test build of Firefox 3.1 adds what Mozilla calls Private Browsing
An inch-long array of some of the tiniest solar cells ever built has been successfully tested as a power source for microscopic machines. Instead of using silicon, Xiaomei Jiang of the University of South Florida and her colleagues turned to a polymer (a long organic molecule made of repeating structural units). The polymer they selected has the same electrical properties as silicon wafers, but can be dissolved and printed onto flexible material
In a technical session on Thursday afternoon, Microsoft provided the clearest public indication that it is planning on getting Windows 7 completed in time to run on PCs that ship for next year’s holiday buying season
The video website YouTube is preparing to link up with Hollywood to show full-length films for free over the internet, it has emerged. The site — already used by millions of people every day to watch short video clips — confirmed that it was in negotiations with major studios as it gets ready to launch an online movie service. Free films, running with advertising, would mark a radical advance for the video-sharing website as it looks to profit from its massive popularity
Under Government plans to monitor internet traffic, raw data would be collected and stored by the black boxes before being transferred to a giant central database. The vision was outlined at a meeting between officials from the Home Office and Internet Service Providers earlier this week. It is further evidence of the Government’s desire to have the capability to vet every telephone call, email and internet visit made in the UK, which has already provoked an outcry
Security researchers say they’ve developed a way to partially crack the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) encryption standard used to protect data on many wireless networks
An application has expectedly quit. Windows 3.x has come to the closing moments of its long life. On 1 November Microsoft stopped issuing licences for the software that made its debut in May 1990 in the US. The various versions of Windows 3.x (including 3.11) released in the early 1990s, were the first of Microsoft’s graphical user interfaces to win huge worldwide success. They helped Microsoft establish itself and set the trend for how it makes its revenues, and what drives the company until the present day
Solid-state drives with random write speeds as much as 100 times faster than existing systems. That’s the promise of a next-generation patented flash management system
unveiled by SanDisk
Britain’s code-cracking and computing heritage has won a lifeline in the form of a donation from English Heritage. The grant of £330,000 will be used to undertake urgent roof works at Bletchley Park — where Allied codebreakers worked in World War II. Discussions are also in progress on a further three-year, £600,000 funding programme for the historic site
The search-advertising marriage between Google and Yahoo has been called off. Google wasn’t willing to go forward with the deal in the face of promised Department of Justice action
Inventor Mitch Altman explains why he open-sourced his TV-B-Gone kit, the original stealth keychain fob for defeating TVs in public places. The title of the article is Patent-B-Gone
and perhaps the most interesting fact is that Mitch’s brother is a patent attorney, but he still decided to release an open source hardware version of the TV-B-Gone, with pretty impressive results — via Slashdot
Ministers have been forced to order an emergency shutdown of a key Government computer system to protect millions of people’s private details. The action was taken after a memory stick was found in a pub car park containing confidential passcodes to the online Government Gateway system, which covers everything from tax returns to parking tickets. An urgent investigation is now under way into how the stick, belonging to the company which runs the flagship system, came to be lost
Open wireless networks have served as a successful defence strategy for several alleged filesharers, as it is often impossible for content owners to prove that the person they accuse, has actually distributed the files they claim they did. Unfortunately, for the customers of the UK ISP Karoo, running open WiFi might also get them disconnected — even if it’s unintentional
Google and Telstra subsidiary Sensis has signed a deal to integrate the data from its Yellow Pages business listings into Google Maps Australia
A recent compromise at a corporation led to a significant amount of data being stolen, underscoring that traditional software defenses are hard pressed to catch obfuscated attacks, security firm Finjan said in its monthly analysis of Internet threats. In the report, dubbed the Malicious Page of the Month, the company claims that a desktop PC at an unnamed firm had been infected with a data-stealing Trojan horse. The attack succeeded because the firms antivirus software and static Web filters could not identify the scrambled attack code as a threat, Finjan stated in the report. The result: The malicious software downloaded code from a server in Utah and sent files and transcripts of a number of corporate users to a second server in Texas
The leaders of three of Australia’s largest internet service providers — Telstra Media’s Justin Milne, iiNet’s Michael Malone and Internode’s Simon Hackett — have, in video interviews with ZDNet.com.au over the past few months, detailed technical, legal and ethical reasons why ISP-level filtering won’t work. Critics of the policy also say that users will have no way to know what’s being filtered — via Slashdot
Games firms are accusing innocent people of file-sharing as they crack down on pirates, a Which? Computing investigation has claimed. The magazine was contacted by Gill and Ken Murdoch, from Scotland, who had been accused of sharing the game Race07 by makers Atari. The couple told Which they had never played a computer game in their lives. The case was dropped, but Which estimates that hundreds of others are in a similar situation
A headline-grabbing election promise to crack down on internet nasties looks to be in trouble as Senate opposition grows. As part of its election-winning pitch, the Rudd Government promised families far-reaching measures to block prohibited content at the internet server level. It now faces a concerted backlash against the proposal by the internet industry. The Greens have added their voice to Coalition concerns about the plan, with the Greens’ communications spokesman calling the proposal daft
A small consumer electronics maker in Melbourne, which specialises in undercutting the big brands, has become the first in Australia to announce plans to launch a mobile phone based on Google’s Android platform. Ruslan Kogan, 25 — who has been selling cut-priced Kogan-branded TV sets, GPS systems, DVD players and other gadgets over the internet from his base in Elsternwick for the past 2½ years — says he will sell the phone from 15 December for $199
Google on Thursday made its version of communally constructed online encyclopedia Wikipedia multi-lingual, opening its Knol compendium to nuggets of knowledge shared in French, Italian or German. The internet search powerhouse is inviting people to submit written knols
, to indicate units of knowledge, in those languages as well as in English. Google’s free Knol service has floundered since its July launch and international contributors could help it better compete with Wikipedia, which is consistently ranked among the most visited websites on the internet
RSS – Posts