Hot on the heels of online retail giant Amazon, book chain Dymocks is preparing to launch an electronic book reader in Australia before Christmas. Dymocks chief executive Don Grover said he was in final
negotiations with a European e-book reader manufacturer and planned to make an announcement within the next 10 days. Update: the iLiad has been launched at an obscenely overpriced AU$899
Registered Google users in the US, Australia, and New Zealand can move incorrect markers for their homes or businesses to the correct locations. Access to some listings is restricted — hospitals, government buildings, and businesses whose listings have been claimed through Google’s Local Business Center. In addition, moving a place marker more than 200 yards (or 200 meters) from its original location requires a moderator’s approval before the change shows up on the map. Once a marker has been moved, a Show Original
link will direct users to the original location — via Slashdot
Consumer demand for bandwidth could see the internet running out of capacity as early as 2010, a new study warns. US analyst firm Nemertes Research predicted a drastic slowdown as the network struggles to cope with the amount of data being carried on it. Such gridlock would drastically affect how people use the web and could mean the next Google or YouTube simply doesn’t get off the ground, it said. The report said billions needed to be spent upgrading broadband networks
The Georgia Institute of Technology is working on the theory that honeybees can give us hints about how to improve the speed and efficiency of Internet servers. Honeybees somehow manage to efficiently collect a lot of nectar with limited resources and no central command. Such swarm intelligence of these amazingly organized bees can also be used to improve the efficiency of Internet servers faced with similar challenges — via Slashdot
According to a thread on the forums of AnimeSuki, a popular anime bittorent index site, Comcast has begun sending DCMA letters to customers downloading unlicensed fan-subtitled anime shows via bittorrent. By unlicensed
, they mean that no english language company has the rights to it
iiNet has thrown down the gauntlet to Telstra and Optus with a set of aggressively priced broadband and phone bundles, but has joined the top two telcos in counting uploads on its new plans
When it comes to internet speeds, we’ve long-since consigned the humble kilobit-class connection to the dustbin, so a mathematics-based breakthrough has us wondering if megabit- and even gigabit-level connections will one day sound as quaintly archaic. Researchers at Japan’s Tohoku University have tweaked existing protocols to enable standard fibre-optic cables to carry data at hundreds of terabits per second. At that speed, full movies could be downloaded almost instantaneously in their hundreds
Rupert Murdoch’s announcement this week that he expects to stop charging for access to the Wall Street Journal’s Web site is the latest example of a publisher giving up on the subscription-based business model — a significant shift in the evolution of online content. In recent months, the Economist, the New York Times and the Financial Times have all moved content out from behind the wall
, an industry metaphor for the location of paid online content
Several companies have announced solid state hard drives in excess of one terabyte in size
Microsoft is now working on a system that will back up the contents of your brain. The pilot project lacks a direct brain interface, but MyLifeBits
will provide a simulacrum of actual memories. No mention is made as to whether Microsoft will claim to own the digital rights to the content of your life, or what license fees you will have to pay to access your own memories — via Slashdot
For the first time in more than 60 years a Colossus computer is cracking codes at Bletchley Park. The machine is being put through its paces to mark the end of a project to rebuild the pioneering computer. It is being used to crack messages enciphered using the same system employed by the German high command during World War II. The Colossus is pitted against modern PC technology which will also try to read the scrambled messages
The Kremlin is using Russia’s new anti-software-piracy laws to target dissident media outlets and shut them down. This is an eerie echo of the Soviet era, when black marketeering and other universal activities were used as the excuse for arresting dissidents and other inconvenient people. The difference is that this time, the anti-piracy laws were enacted at the behest of the US trade representative, who made stringent patent and copyright enforcement a condition of the recent US-Russia free trade agreement, forcing Russia to take on board stricter laws than those in place in the US. This includes laws that would never pass Constitutional muster stateside, like a scheme for police licensing and inspection of CD and DVD presses — via Boing Boing
Google is undergoing an investigation by the European Union for its $3.1 billion acquisition of internet advertiser DoubleClick. The United States’ Federal Trade Commission has been reviewing the acquisition since May
CNET has branched out from tech news and reviews to launch its own online music service, the snappily titled CNET.com.au Music Centre. So far the site offers over 90,000 free downloads and streams from over 17,000 indy artists
Physiatrist Todd A Kuiken, MD PhD, has pioneered a technique known as targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR), that allows a prosthetic arm to respond directly to the brain’s signals, allowing wearers to open and close their artificial hands and bend and straighten their artificial elbows nearly as naturally as their own arms. Doctors first perform nerve transfer surgery to redirect nerves that go to the amputated arm to the patient’s chest muscles. Then when the chest muscle contracts, an electromyogram picks up the electrical signal to move the prosthetic arm. So when the patient thinks close hand
, the hand closes. Now the team wants to see if they can extract more information from the electrical signals produced by the nerves to provide a greater number of hand and arm movements. They have been able to identify unique EMG patterns with 95% accuracy for 16 different elbow, wrist, hand, thumb and finger movements — via Slashdot
Online book seller and retail chain Dymocks has taken a leap into electronic publishing with the launch of Dymocks Digital, allowing customers to purchase audible and digital forms of the traditional paper book. Taking a lengthy 30 months to complete the project, Dymocks now offers some 13,000 audible and 120,000 readable titles which can be accessed through the company’s Web site or new touch screen kiosks at the main Sydney store
Marvel is putting some of its older comics online Tuesday, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared. It’s a tentative move onto the Internet: Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded, and new issues will only go online at least six months after they first appear in print
The shadowy hacker and malware hosting network that only recently fled Russia to set up operations in China has now pulled the plug there and vanished yet again. An analyst at VeriSign’s iDefense Labs unit said iDefense had tracked RBN’s migration earlier in the week from servers based in Russia to ones running in China, after obtaining at least seven net blocks of Chinese IP addresses. As of Wednesday, RBN controlled 5,120 IP addresses assigned to Chinese service providers; known RBN clients were even seen using those addresses that day. But with its China move putting the spotlights of the media and the security community on the organization, RBN suddenly went offline on Thursday. They severed connections to six of the seven net blocks on November 8,
the analyst said. RBN as a single organisation may be dead and gone; it may even now be breaking up into smaller pieces farmed out to multiple countries’ Internet infrastructures — via Slashdot
There’s a new antenna that consists of plasma and essentially vanishes when you turn it off. While it may seem to not have many uses in the commercial world, it is very important to military personnel who risk detection or for anybody wishing to avoid signal jamming
The Mozilla Foundation’s chief executive now earns roughly half a million in pay and benefits. With $70 million in assets, the Foundation gave out less than $300,000 in grants to open source projects in 2006. And in 2006 85% of their $66 million in revenue came from Google. When these figures first came to light, people worried whether Firefox was becoming a pawn in Google’s cold war with Microsoft. The Foundation addressed these fears and largely laid them to rest; but now the worry is that, even though it’s clear that the community’s code is what makes Firefox successful, Mozilla may be becoming dangerously reliant on Google’s cash — via Slashdot
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