Microsoft is currently aiming to release the next version of the Windows operating system in about three years. Previously known as Vienna, the OS is now simply known internally as 7
. Microsoft’s big goal with 7 is to recapture a regular release schedule for their operating system product
Google announced it would set aside at least $4.6 billion to purchase a slice of the public airwaves in an upcoming government auction of radio spectrum. The company is imposing one condition on its money: It will only participate, it says, if the Federal Communications Commission requires that all bidders for the radio waves be forced to adhere to principles of Internet openness
Google has announced the acquisition of ImageAmerica, a company that builds high-resolution cameras for the collection of aerial imagery
Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets. The team combined carbon nanotubes with tiny carbon buckyballs (fullerenes) to form snake-like structures. Add sunlight to excite the polymers, and the buckyballs will grab the electrons
The FBI has used PC spyware for the first time to reveal the identity of an offender who sent bomb threats to a high school in Washington state. According to heise Security, a declaration from the FBI official who applied for the search warrant describes the mode of operation of the spyware which the FBI is using under the abbreviation CIPAV (Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier)
The launch of Australian Screen was met with an unfortunate fate: by 10.00am the site had crashed. The new site, which serves excerpts of Australian film and television archives crashed once users — primarily teachers and students — began accessing the new service
It has long been suspected that there is a silent policy that makes Hotmail automatically delete the majority of attachments to save on bandwidth and internal disk space. Therefore it really doesn’t matter if every client has access to 2GB of storage since they don’t deliver the attachments to fill that space up anyway. If that truly is the case, then Microsoft may be liable for several hundred million cases of conspiracy and mail fraud — via Slashdot
A recent appeals court case dealt with Drug Enforcement Administration agents using a key logger to investigate a suspect using PGP and Hushmail. That invites the obvious question: Will security companies ever intentionally overlook police spyware? There were somewhat-muddled reports in 2001 that Symantec and McAfee would do just that, so over at News.com we figured we’d do a survey of the top 13 security firms. We asked them if it is their policy to detect policeware. Notably, Check Point said it would afford law enforcement
the courtesy of whitelisting if requested. We’ve also posted the full results, with the companies’ complete answers. Another question we asked is if they have ever received a court order requiring them to overlook police key loggers or spyware. Symantec, IBM, Kaspersky, and others said no. Only Microsoft and McAfee refused to answer — via Slashdot
Sci Fi announced that Farscape would be resurrected online in ten short webisodes to be produced by the Jim Henson Company. There are hints that Ben Browder and Claudia Black will both be both available
American Media has decided to suspend publication of Weekly World News, both the print publication and the web site. No reason was given at press time, although reliable sources do tell us that management turned down at least one offer to buy the publication. The weekly supermarket tabloid–known as the home of Bat Boy
and other less-than-probable stories–has long had staffing connections with the science fiction, fantasy, and horror fields
A 1935 analogue computer, built at Cambridge University and used to help plan the Dam Busters attacks on the Ruhr hydro dams in World War II, has been restored and put on display at Auckland’s Museum of Transport and Technology. The computer came to New Zealand around 1950 and was used, ironically, to build hydro dams there — and to calculate rabbit population numbers — via Slashdot
Aaron Swartz today announced the launch of the new Open Library project. The goal of the project is to produce the world’s greatest library on the Internet free for anyone to use. Starting with the Internet Archive’s book scanning project and organising the insertion of new content via a wiki-type model the project seems to be off to a great start. The demo, source code, and mailing lists were all opened up today in hopes of drawing interest from the public at large — via Slashdot
Scientists have discovered that carbon nanotubes have remarkable springy properties, which could make them ideal for use in artificial muscles. Currently, electroactive polymers are most commonly used to make artificial muscles, but these lack mechanical robustness. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute tested the nanotubes by repeatedly squashing them between metal plates — via Slashdot
In March, the Justice Department’s Inspector General revealed that FBI agents had sent a flurry of fake emergency letters to phone companies, asking them to turn over phone records immediately by promising that the proper papers had been filed with US attorneys, though in many cases this was a complete lie. More than 60 of these letters were made public as part of a FBI document dump in response to a government sunshine lawsuit centered on the FBI’s abuse of a key Patriot Act power
The unavailable_after
tag will allow you to tell Google when Googlebot should no longer crawl that page. This tag comes in handy when you have a limited time offer promotional page, and on this page, the promotion will expire on a specific date
You’re allowed to be Hitler, but don’t even try being Gay on social networking site Facebook. It’s been revealed that the popular web site — which boasts it has more than 30 million members from around the world — does not allow people with the common Anglo Saxon surname Gay to join, assuming it is not a legitimate name. Thousands of people across Australia share the surname
Apple has bought out CUPS, the common UNIX printing system. The name may not sound familiar, but it’s part of every Mac OS X installation. CUPS implements a cross-platform printing system based on the Internet Printing Protocol and is, according to its web page, the defacto standard printing system for Linux
Environmental concerns are driving companies to rethink their data centre strategy, especially in the area of storage systems, since storage accounts for 30 to 40 percent of power used in data centres
EFF has obtained FBI documents showing years of chronic problems with its use of National Security Letters (NSLs). The issue first drew widespread attention four months ago, when the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General released a report revealing extensive misuse of NSLs in a sampling of four FBI field offices. These findings were, unfortunately, not surprising to critics of the Bureau’s NSL power. Before the USA PATRIOT Act was passed in 2001, the FBI could unilaterally issue these demands only to obtain the records of suspected terrorists or spies. Under the changes made by the controversial anti-terrorism law, however, the FBI can now use NSLs to get telephone, Internet, financial, credit, and other personal records about anybody — without any court approval — as long as it believes the information could be relevant
to an authorised terrorism or espionage investigation
Alexander Ratushnyak compressed the first 100,000,000 bytes of Wikipedia to a record-small 16,481,655 bytes (including decompression program), thereby not only winning the second payout of The Hutter Prize for Compression of Human Knowledge, but also bringing text compression within 1% of the threshold for artificial intelligence. Achieving 1.319 bits per character, this makes the next winner of the Hutter Prize likely to reach the threshold of human performance (between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per character) estimated by the founder of information theory, Claude Shannon and confirmed by Cover and King in 1978 using text prediction gambling. When the Hutter Prize started, less than a year ago, the best performance was 1.466 bits per character — via Slashdot
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