This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! have joined the board. The OpenID Foundation was formed in early 2006 by seven community members with the goal of helping promote, protect and enabling the OpenID technologies and community. Today’s announcement marks a milestone in the maturity and impact that the OpenID community has had
Pentagon-backed researchers want the prosthetics to feel like real limbs, so they’re creating patches of synthetic skin that’ll provide direct feedback to the brain
After two years of waiting, Australian and New Zealand residents can now officially order Photobooks, calendars, postcards and prints directly from iPhoto. Pricing is reasonably competitive too, given the convenience of publishing directly from iPhoto. Picture Books start from $39.99, calendars are $26.99, postcards and greeting cards range from $1.99 to $2.69 while individual prints start at 29c. More detailed pricing is available from Apple
An estimated 1.7 million Internet users in the UAE have been affected by the recent undersea cable damage. Internet data was majorly affected as it is the biggest capacity carried by the undersea cables. However, all voice calls, corporate data and video traffic were also affected. A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each
TPG and SP Telemedia (SOUL) and have announced a merger in a deal worth $250 million
An open wireless network led to a Danish police investigation of a stolen credit card. The police wanted to confiscate the author’s computer. When the author’s roommate agreed to also let the police look at her first generation iMac, they were frustrated because they thought the iMac was just the screen. They wanted to know where the actual computer was and got rather heated about finding it, according to the author of Rottin’ in Denmark
The Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and communications minister Stephen Conroy this morning announced Telstra would turn on the ADSL2+ broadband capability it has at 900 exchanges around the country. Telstra reversed its decision of keeping the ADSL2+ DSLAMs in cold storage because the new Labor government gave it an assurance it would not have to provide ADSL2+ wholesale access to other ISPs
Google is adding more e-mail security and storage products for businesses, sharpening its aim on a Microsoft stronghold while the competition between the two rivals also heats up in Internet search and advertising
A new chip uses so little power, it could enable sensors, communication devices and other gadgets that run on body heat and movement alone. The chip uses 70 percent less voltage than current chip technologies. It could lead to an order-of-magnitude increase in energy efficiency for electronics in the next five years
The first big steps on the road to overhauling the net’s core addressing system have been taken. On Monday the master address books for the net are being updated to include records prepared in a new format known as IPv6. Widespread use of this format will end the shortage of addresses that sites can be given. The net’s current addressing scheme is expected to exhaust the pool of unallocated addresses by 2011
Yahoo would consider a business alliance with Google as one way to rebuff a $US44.6 billion takeover proposal by Microsoft. Yahoo management is considering revisiting talks it held with Google several months ago on an alliance as an alternative to Microsoft’s bid
Another Middle East undersea internet cable has been damaged, adding to disruption in Indian online services caused when several lines were cut earlier this week. The Falcon cable was cut 56 kilometres from Dubai, between Oman and the United Arab Emirates, according to its owner FLAG Telecom, part of India’s Reliance Communications
The Italian parliament may have unwittingly legalised sharing music over P2P networks. A new copyright law, passed by both houses of parliament, would allow Italians to freely share music over the Internet as long as it was noncommercial and the music degraded
TechCrunch reports that News Corp is also frantically trying to put together a competing bid for Yahoo, with the help of private equity firms. This makes sense, given News Corp’s previous interest in trading MySpace for a big Yahoo equity stake
Amazon’s just bought audiobook provider Audible, the exclusive provider of audiobooks to iTunes, Amazon’s rival for audio downloads. Even though Apple says it prefers that its suppliers deliver non-DRM media (and even though Audible’s DRM does nothing to prevent piracy), Audible has a mandatory DRM policy for the books it sells. That is to say, even if they author doesn’t want DRM on his or her books, Audible will only deliver those books with DRM on them. As part of the deal, an Amazon spokesman said: Audible’s audio books are wrapped in a layer of DRM, which Amazon does not plan to remove unless customers start to complain
— via Boing Boing
Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6bn in cash and shares. The offer, contained in a letter to Yahoo’s board, is 62% above Yahoo’s closing share price on Thursday. Yahoo cut its revenue forecasts earlier this week and said it would have to spend an additional $300m this year trying to revive the company. It has been struggling in recent years to compete with Google, which has also been a competitor to Microsoft
A team of scientists at Stanford University has tracked the movement of carbon nanotubes through the digestive systems of mice. They’ve determined that the nanotubes do not exhibit any toxicity in the mice, and are safely expelled after delivering their payload. As a result, the study paves the way toward future applications of nanotubes in the treatment of illnesses — via Slashdot
LAN technology recently passed a milestone — it has been around for 30 years, some of them tumultuous. But while the LAN seems ubiquitous now, there are those who think its future may be more troubled than its past
Tens of millions of internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections. The outage, which is being blamed on a fault in a single undersea cable, has severely restricted internet access in countries including India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and left huge numbers of people struggling to get online
In an few hours from now The Pirate Bay team will probably be charged with aiding or facilitating copyright infringement. If they are found guilty, they could receive sentences of up to two years in prison, but the site will remain online, no matter what
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