A Polish teenager allegedly turned the tram system in the city of Lodz into his own personal train set, triggering chaos and derailing four vehicles in the process. Twelve people were injured in one of the incidents. The 14-year-old modified a TV remote control so that it could be used to change track points
Is the RIAA as we know it about to disappear? As rumours continue to swirl that EMI will pull its funding from music trade groups like the RIAA and IFPI, an IFPI spokesman says that the group is in the middle of a major internal review of its operations
Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau’s repeated failures to pay phone bills on time. More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000
Sony BMG announced that it would become the fourth and final major label to begin selling digital music on Amazon.com, offering its entire catalog in the MP3 format by the end of the month
Matsushita will change its name officially to Panasonic, a name that has been used for many years for the firm’s consumer products around the world
Microsoft said that it will offer $1.2 billion in cash for Fast Search and Transfer (FAST), a big player in the enterprise search market. The move is sure to shake up the enterprise search market, which thus far has been dominated by a series of smaller players like FAST, Autonomy and Vivisimo. Google has made some inroads, but for the most part the market is the realm of niche players. Microsoft is about to change that with FAST. You can expect Google to make a purchase in enterprise search along with traditional enterprise players like HP, IBM and the usual suspects
A failed effort to soften the noise from British military helicopters led to a breakthrough enabling surfaces from mobile telephone screens to car roof liners to be turned into stereo speakers. The technology was sold to Cambridge-based NXT, which christened it SurfaceSound
and arranged for it to be crafted into Toyota cars, Gateway computers, greeting cards and more
The expected price reconciliation between the iTunes UK store and the other European stores is officially in the works. Interesting to note that Apple is throwing down the gauntlet with the labels on UK vs Eurozone wholesale music pricing, so that we might see some subtractions from the UK store if the labels don’t jump in line
TiVo’s international general manager, Joshua Danovitz, has confirmed that TiVo in Australia will be able to record all free to air channels, it will also have access to a movie download store and about 100 free internet video channels. Exact pricing and a launch date is still unconfirmed, we will get the high-end series 3 version of the device. The series 3 contains dual high-definition TV tuners, so users can record two shows at once while at the same time watching a previously recorded show
Your next laptop could have a continuous power battery that lasts for 30 years without a single recharge thanks to work being funded by the US Air Force Research Laboratory. The breakthrough betavoltaic power cells are constructed from semiconductors and use radioisotopes as the energy source. As the radioactive material decays it emits beta particles that transform into electric power capable of fueling an electrical device like a laptop for years
In Sweden, the Jernhusen company, which owns Stockholm’s central station, is planning to channel passenger warmth to heat a 13-storey office block being built next to the station. Heat exchangers in the station’s ventilation system will convert the body heat into hot water, which will be pumped into the heating system of the building
Sony BMG Music Entertainment will offer tracks in MP3 format, without DRM, from 15 January in the US and from late January in Canada. The move is far from the all-digital service offered by its rivals, though. To obtain the Sony-BMG tracks, would-be listeners will first have to go to a retail store to buy a Platinum MusicPass, a card containing a secret code, for a suggested retail price of $12.99. Once they have scratched off the card’s covering to expose the code, they will be able to download one of just 37 albums available through the service, including Britney Spears’ Blackout
and Barry Manilow’s The Greatest Songs of the Seventies
After losing some of its lustre on the personal computer, embattled Internet icon Yahoo is hoping to outshine Google and other rivals on the mobile phone. Yahoo has opened its mobile platform so outside programmers can develop new applications for Yahoo pages accessed on mobile handsets. Yahoo hopes the mini-applications, known as widgets
, will help attract more on-the-go users, which will bring the company more money from advertising
A malicious Facebook Widget actively spreading on the social networking site ultimately prompts users to install the infamous Zango
malware. The tremendous success and lightning fast expansion of Facebook empowered the social networking giant with an impressive user base. Needless to say, in a digital world where web traffic equals money, such a user base attracts spammers, virus/spyware seeders, and other ethic-less online marketers like honey would attract flies — via Slashdot
Bill Gates and the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences this week donated $30 million to an ambitious telescope that researchers say will be able to survey the entire sky every three nights — something never done before. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project got $20 million from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10 million from Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates. Expected to see its first light
in 2014, the 8.4m LSST will survey the entire visible sky deeply in multiple colors every week with its 3 billion-pixel digital camera, probing the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and opening a movie-like window on objects that change or move
The longest-running search for radio signals from alien civilisations is receiving 500 times more data from an upgraded telescope and better frequency coverage than project planners anticipated, meaning the SETI@home project is in dire need of more desktop computers to help crunch the data
Time Warner’s Warner Bros studio has said it will exclusively release high-definition DVDs in Sony Corp’s Blu-Ray format, dealing a big blow to Toshiba Corp’s rival HD DVD technology
Just before year’s end, ICANN/IANA sent out a short message saying that on 4 February 2008, IANA will add AAAA records for the IPv6 addresses of the four root servers whose operators have requested it.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is mostly responsible for the global Domain Name System, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the part of ICANN. That means that as of 4 February 2008, it will (theoretically) be possible for two IPv6 hosts to communicate across the IPv6 Internet without having to rely on any IPv4 infrastructure. It’s been a long journey to get to this point
Russia’s top-level domain — with the ASCII suffix .ru — translates into Cyrillic as .py, the domain name of Paraguay. That could pose security problems for Russian users. Kim Davies, who controls the domain names at the international domain naming agency Icann told the Guardian: Russia has a second top level domain name of .ru in ASCII code, but is pushing for .rf in Cyrillic.
The internationalised domain name gives them an opportunity to do things which are now being tested in China, where they are currently using Chinese characters for three top-level domains: .net, .com and .cn
The UK government has published guidelines for the application of a law that makes it illegal to create or distribute so-called hacking tools
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