Crimtrac’s planned automatic number plate recognition system could become a mass surveillance system, taking as many as 70 million photos of cars and drivers every day across a vast network of roadside cameras. State and federal police forces want full-frontal images of vehicles, including the driver and front passenger, that are clear enough for identification purposes and usable as evidence in court
KDDI will launch a fibre-optic communications service with upload and download speeds each of up to one gigabit per secondon 1 October. The new service will target people living in single-family homes and low-rise apartment buildings. The traffic speeds will be the fastest in eastern Japan, up drastically from the current 100 megabits per second
Google are putting forward a $10 million fund to help develop ideas from members of the public that will help to make the world a better place. This week, as part of their tenth birthday celebrations, Google have announce the launch of project 10^100 (ten to the 100th), an innovative scheme designed to inspire and fund the development of ideas that will help to change the world
Due to reasons yet to be determined, the web site of the World Wide Web Consortium, w3.org/w3c.org, is being filtered as child pornography by the Finnish ISP, DNA Internet
Google Translate added 11 new languages: Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Google’s machine translation service now supports 35 languages and you can use it to translate text between any combination of languages
The Pirate Bay has successfully appealed the decision of an Italian judge who had ordered ISPs to block access to the popular BitTorrent tracker last month. The Court of Bergamo decided that this block was unlawful, and that Italian users should regain access to the site
Australian news aggregator Plugger.com.au will re-brand as Wotnews.com.au following a licensing and investment deal with high-profile Wotif.com founder and local multi-millionaire Graeme Wood
Dozens of phone calls and emails today made one thing clear: none of Australia’s telcos or handset manufacturers has briefed their staff on when mobile phones running Google’s Android will be made available locally, if they are at all
The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva will be shut off until spring 2009 while engineers probe a magnet failure. The incident on 19 September caused a tonne of liquid helium to leak out into the experiment’s 27km-long tunnel. Officials said the time required to fully investigate the problem precluded a re-start before the lab’s winter maintenance period
Oracle, the world’s No 3 software maker is teaming up with Hewlett-Packard to sell powerful, specialised computers that companies use to analyse data on their business activities. The move, which Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison announced yesterday, will expand Oracle’s footprint in the hardware business and put pressure on smaller players Teradata and Netezza, which specialise in selling those devices, known as data warehouse appliances
The first mobile phone powered by Google has launched, ready to do battle with Apple’s iPhone for the top spot on tech addicts’ Christmas gift lists. It goes on sale in the US next month, and is expected to arrive in British stores by early November. The arrival of Android signals the opening round of a battle between Google and rivals including Apple, Microsoft and Nokia to create the software that powers the next generation of internet-enabled mobile phones
SecureWorks published the locations of the computers, from which the greatest number of cyber attacks were attempted against its clients in 2008. The United States topped the list with 20.6 million attempted attacks originating from computers within the country and China ran second with 7.7 million attempted attacks emanating from computers within its borders. This was followed by Brazil with over 166,987 attempted attacks, South Korea with 162,289, Poland with 153,205, Japan with 142,346, Russia with 130,572, Taiwan with 124,997, Germany with 110,493, and Canada with 107,483
The lifeline linking notorious service provider Intercage to the rest of the Internet has been severed. Intercage, which has also done business under the name Atrivo, was knocked offline late Saturday night when the last upstream provider connecting it to the Internet’s backbone, Pacific Internet Exchange, terminated Intercage’s service. Intercage president Emil Kacperski said Pacific did not tell him why his company had been knocked offline, but he believes it was in response to pressure from Spamhaus, a volunteer-run antispam group, which has been highly critical of Intercage’s business practices — via Slashdot
The Virginia Supreme Court declared the state’s anti-spam law unconstitutional Friday and reversed the conviction of a man once considered one of the world’s most prolific spammers. The court unanimously agreed with Jeremy Jaynes’ argument that the law violates the free-speech protections of the First Amendment because it does not just restrict commercial e-mails. Most other states also have anti-spam laws, and there is a federal CAN-SPAM Act as well. The Virginia law is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution,
Justice G Steven Agee wrote
Microsoft has decided that Windows 7 won’t include built-in programs for e-mail, photo editing, and movie making, as was done with Windows Vista. The software maker included Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, and Windows Movie Maker as part of Vista, but later chose to offer separate downloadable Windows Live programs that essentially replaced those components with versions that could connect to online services from Microsoft and others. Microsoft told CNET News late Monday that it has decided to remove those features entirely from Windows 7 and instead offer only the service-connected Windows Live versions as optional free downloads
The email accounts of Internode users were stranded over the weekend as the internet service provider battled a major storage infrastructure failure and was forced to fall back to its disaster recovery centre to restore lost services
Yahoo Mail isn’t the only Web-based mail service that could be duped into giving up someone else’s account password, the tactic that some have argued was used to break into Governor Sarah Palin’s e-mail earlier this week. Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo’s Mail all rely on automated password reset mechanisms that can be abused by knowing a username associated with an account and an Computerworld reporters and editors were able to break
into their own and colleagues’ accounts on all three services, then reset passwords armed only with the account’s username and the correct response to one of a limited number of common security questions, such as mother’s maiden name, the name of a favorite pet or the make of a first car
Two leading dissident Burmese websites have been shut down by a sophisticated cyber attack believed to have been initiated by the military junta a day before the first anniversary of Burma’s so-called Saffron Revolution. The web sites, run by the Democratic Voice of Burma and The Irrawaddy news magazine, are operated by exiles in Norway and Thailand respectively. Both were disabled on Wednesday. Inside Burma, internet services were reportedly running slowly, suggesting an attempt by the regime to stem the flow of information in and out of the country at such a sensitive time
Gmail users may have noticed a recent spike in spam clogging their inbox, but Google says it has fixed the problem. For the second time in as many months Gmail users saw a sudden increase in spam, and they reported the issue in the webmail service’s official discussion forum in recent days. On Thursday, a Google employee named Sarah chimed in by posting to the main thread devoted to this topic to say that the complaints were well-founded and had pointed Google toward a solution
Two digital rights advocacy groups have filed a lawsuit against the Office of the US Trade Representative in an attempt to get the office to turn over information about a secret international treaty being negotiated to step up cross-border enforcement of copyright and piracy laws. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge filed the lawsuit Wednesday after USTR ignored their repeated requests to turn over information about the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
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