Pool is a social media project developed by ABC Radio National. It’s a place to share your creative work with the Pool community and ABC producers — upload music, photos, videos, documentaries, interviews, animations and more. It’s a collaborative space where audiences become makers — via Boing Boing
Tough conditions in its New Zealand and China operations haven’t deterred accounting software developer MYOB from splashing out $7 million to acquire Australian web hosting company SmartyHost. The buy is part of MYOB’s plan to expand its web hosting and internet marketing services
Malicious hackers are using booby-trapped Flash banner ads to hijack clipboards for use in rogue security software attacks. In the Web attacks, which target Mac, Windows and Linux users running Firefox, IE and Safari, hackers are seizing control of the machine’s clipboard and using a hard-to-delete URL that points to a fake anti-virus program
Star Trek fantasies of interstellar civilisations and voyages powered by warp drive may no longer be the exclusive domain of science fiction writers, with two physicists from Baylor devising a new scheme to travel faster than the speed of light. Associate Professor Gerald Cleaver and Richard Obousy have come up with a novel idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics. A starship could warp
space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it. By pushing the departure point many light years backwards while simultaneously bringing distant stars and other destinations closer, the warp drive effectively transports the starship from place to place at faster-than-light speeds
A new visual search engine could help photographers keep track of their photographs whenever, and wherever, they appear on the internet. The TinEye search engine, developed by Canadian company Idee, allows users to search by uploading a picture rather than typing in a keyword. It then conducts a pixel by pixel search across the internet, flagging up all instances of that image even if it’s been cropped, merged or digitally altered in some way
Critics of the Harper government’s proposed changes to the Copyright Act have launched a cyber crusade to fight the controversial bill. They’re using everything from Facebook to YouTube to Wikipedia to blogs to get their message out. They want the government to either scrap or make serious amendments to Bill C-61 when Parliament resumes next month. At the helm of the digital movement is Michael Geist, a professor at the University of Ottawa who specialises in Internet and e-commerce law. In addition to his own blog, Geist runs a Facebook group called Fair Copyright for Canada that boasts 90,000 members
We’re nearing the tipping point for mobile computing to deliver timely, geographically and socially relevant information. Researchers in Japan recently proposed using data from vehicles’ windscreen wipers and embedded GPS receivers to track the movement of weather systems through towns and cities with a precision never before possible. It may seem academic, but understanding the way severe weather, such as a typhoon, moves through a city could save lives. Further exploration can shed light on demographic, intellectual and epidemiological phenomena, to name just a few areas
Hackers targeting Georgia in the midst of its conflict with Russia have started sending out a new batch of malicious spam messages, apparently with the aim of building a new botnet network of remote-controlled computers
Several industry sources have said that Western Digital is working on a 20,000 RPM Raptor hard drive.
According to several sources close to the hard drive industry, Western Digital is working on a 20,000 RPM Raptor hard drive to combat the increasing pressure from SSD manufacturers
Gmail users, including those who use it for work as part of the Google Apps hosted suite, are again reporting problems accessing the service. Reports started streaming into the official Gmail and Google Apps discussion forums on Thursday and continued Friday morning. It’s the third time in the past two weeks that Gmail users have been locked out of their accounts due to the 502 Server Error
login problem
In the ever-growing desire to product smaller, less costly yet more powerful and faster computers and storage devices, researchers today said they are looking at a way to use self-growing fabrics that will let manufacturers build nano-sized high resolution semiconductors and arrays that answer that craving said
Well, Phase I of the RIAA’s misguided pursuit of an innocent, disabled Oregon woman, Atlantic vs Andersen, has finally drawn to a close, as the RIAA was forced to pay Ms Andersen $107,951, representing the amount of her attorneys fee judgment plus interest. But as some have pointed out, reimbursement for legal fees doesn’t compensate Ms Andersen for the other damages she’s sustained. And that’s where Phase II comes in, Andersen vs Atlantic. There the shoe is on the other foot, and Tanya is one doing the hunting, as she pursues the record companies and their running dogs for malicious prosecution — via Slashdot
In a crucial win for the free software movement, a US federal appeals court has ruled that even software developers who give away the programming code for their works can sue for copyright infringement if someone misappropriates that material. The decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC, helps clarify a murky area of the law concerning how much control programmers can exert over their intellectual property once it’s been released for free into the so-called open source
software community
They may be first to see the sun, but they’ve been waiting quite a while for movie rentals and purchases from the iTunes store — now that patience has paid off, as movies have now arrived in a land down under. Aussie and Kiwi iTunes users can purchase and rent movies to their hearts’ content. New releases on DVD will premiere day-and-date on the iTunes store at the same time as they’re on sale in physical form in the two new countries of service
A huge increase in the speed of the internet could be produced by slowing parts of it down, say researchers. Applying the brakes could be the metamaterials
that may make it possible to create invisibility cloaks. The net’s speed limit comes about not in transporting information, but in routing it to its various destinations. Metamaterials could replace the bulky and slow electronics that do the routing, paving the way for lightning fast speeds
A new SQL injection attack started circulating last week, and appears to have infected several thousand web servers as of late Friday evening. The attacks look similar to the one below, and attempt to query random valid files on the web server. The sysobjects and syscolumns tables queried are the give away: the attack is targeting machines running MSSQL server and storing the malicious HTML code in the database. It’s also possible that web servers with Sybase database backends could also conceivably be exploited, as Sybase is largely using the same SQL syntax and table structure as MSSQL server
Several Internet and broadband companies have acknowledged using targeted-advertising technology without explicitly informing customers, according to letters released yesterday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. And Google, the leading online advertiser, stated that it has begun using Internet tracking technology that enables it to more precisely follow Web-surfing behavior across affiliated sites. The revelations came in response to a bipartisan inquiry of how more than 30 Internet companies might have gathered data to target customers. Some privacy advocates and lawmakers said the disclosures help build a case for an overarching online-privacy law
BigPond is stepping up its presence in the digital music business with a new MP3 music download store that does away with restrictive copy protection locks. Telstra’s ISP today announced it had made an Australian-first deal to offer music from Sony BMG, Universal, Warner Music and EMI, as well as independent labels such as MGM and Liberation. It will see the number of tracks on BigPond’s online store grow from 20,000 to more than a million by January 2009
While the RIAA is busy changing its image to a snake eating its own tail, one man is busy digitising out-of-print 78s. There’s a whole world of music that you don’t hear anymore, and it’s on 78 RPM records,
he stated to Wired. Right now, you can find about 4,000 MP3s on his site, with no digital noise reduction implemented yet — via Slashdot
Georgia and security experts have accused Russian state-sponsored hackers of breaking into Georgian government and commercial websites as part of a cyber war to supplement Russia’s military operations in South Ossetia
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