Technology

Researchers at Dartmouth University have recently discovered that infrequent anonymous contributors, so called Good Samaritans, are as reliable as registered users who update constantly and have a reputation to maintain — via Slashdot

A single hard drive with four terabytes of storage (4TB) could be a reality by 2011, thanks to a nanotechnology breakthrough by Japanese firm Hitachi. The company has successfully managed to shrink the read-write head of a hard drive to two thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair. The smaller head can read greater densities of data stored on the disk. Hitachi said the advance would fuel the terabyte era, with a 4TB drive able to hold more than a million songs

A number of Australian ADSL broadband providers are gearing up to launch naked DSL plans, enabling users to for the first time bypass costly line rental charges. iiNet’s plans are scheduled to launch in November, while Engin’s will debut during the first quarter of next year. TPG and Internode have also indicated they will unveil naked DSL plans in the near future

California’s Jeffrey Kilbride and James Schaffer of Arizona, have been sentenced to more than five years in federal prison. Both were convicted of conspiracy, money laundering, fraud, and transportation of obscene materials

Since the Internet came into widespread use, those among the 70 percent of the world that doesn’t speak English have argued that the Web is inaccessible. So next week the nonprofit group contracted by the US government to run the Internet will begin testing domain names in other alphabets. On Monday, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will conduct a test to see whether domains written entirely in foreign scripts can work without crashing the Net. For several years, the company has allowed domains that are half in foreign characters, such as [Chinese text].com or [Arabic text].org. For the test, domain names will look like [Korean text].[Korean text]. The long road to this stage, which comes nearly a decade after the technology for creating multilingual domains was invented, has left many in the non-English-speaking world impatient and angry. Questions of political and linguistic sovereignty, alongside accusations of American digital colonialism, have motivated some countries to create their own Internets, effectively mounting a challenge to the World Wide Web

Yahoo! Music General Manager Ian Rogers recently gave a speech to some music executives about the future of the Internet music business and promised his company will not be involved in Digital Rights Management any more

A virtual character, or avatar, for all the virtual worlds in which people play is the goal of a joint project between IBM and Linden Lab. The computer giant and the creator of Second Life are working on universal avatars that can travel between worlds. The project aims to open up virtual worlds by introducing open tools that work with any online environment. The companies hope to boost interest in virtual worlds as well as make them easier to navigate

Mozilla has announced a new initiative to bring Mozilla to the mobile web, including a fully functional mobile version of Firefox. The focus will be part of Mozilla 2, the big revision coming after Gecko 1.9 and Firefox 3. Minimo, the previous attempt to port Mozilla to mobile platforms, is apparently dead, but has already provided us with valuable information about how Gecko operates in mobile environments, has helped us reduce footprint, and has given us a platform for initial experimentation in user experience via Slashdot

Just three weeks after Mozilla spun off its Thunderbird to a new subsidiary, the only two paid developers working on the e-mail client said they were quitting the company. Both Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu used terse blog posts last week to announce that their last day with Mozilla will be Friday

Google bought Finnish startup Jaiku, which makes a mobile phone application people can use to send short messages about where they are and what they’re doing. Google believes Jaiku’s technology can help develop new ways to use mobile devices. Founded last year in Helsinki, Jaiku specialises in mobile phone software that makes it easier to share updates about their whereabouts and thoughts. The concept, known as microblogging, also is being promoted by another startup, San Francisco-based Twitter

A malicious hacker broke into an eBay server last week and temporarily suspended the accounts of a very small number of members. eBay has secured and restored the affected accounts and is calling the affected users without specifying how many accounts the hacker accessed and tinkered with

Seagate’s hybrid hard drives hit the market on Monday, joining hybrids from Samsung in creating a new storage category that combines the best of flash with traditional magnetic recording technology

Microsoft is to allow pirated copies of Windows XP to download and install Internet Explorer 7 without gaining Windows Genuine Advantage authentication, which is a move to boost security but not encourage piracy, according to the software giant