DARPA [Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency], the US military’s occasionally eccentric death-tech hothouse, is often lauded as having created the internet. Under its old name ARPA, the agency oversaw development of the so-called Arpanet, forerunner of today’s IP net. Now, however, DARPA reckons the internet needs to be reinvented. This week the Pentagon’s radical-boffinry specialists issued a request for revolutionary ideas
Warner Music Group, Sony BMG and the billionaire Len Blavatnik on Thursday announced the creation of a digital music venture in Russia to sell products in one of the world’s biggest markets for pirated content
Manufacturers are being offered the world’s highest capacity optical storage technology to license, reportedly, leap-frogging 300GB holographic disks and offering 1TB in a DVD-size disk. But the technology has not been commercialised and product could be three to five years away
The BBC has been accused of forcing people to use Microsoft operating systems and has been threatened with a complaint to the European Commission. The charge concerns the use of Microsoft technology in the corporation’s forthcoming DRM iPlayer. The BBC has said it does intend to allow access to its content from computers with other operating systems
The eagerly awaited new album by Prince is being launched as a free CD with a national Sunday newspaper in a move that has drawn widespread criticism from music retailers. One music store executive described the plan as madness
while others said it was a huge insult to an industry battling fierce competition from supermarkets and online stores. Prince’s label has cut its ties with the album in the UK to try to appease music stores
Brisbane City Council is trialling new solar powered public rubbish bins which compact rubbish and email the council when they are full. In the next few months, 10 bins will be trialled in the CBD and Fortitude Valley at a cost of $30,000. Lord Mayor Campbell Newman says they will help council officers respond quickly to overflowing rubbish
Westnet has admitted it has been employing traffic prioritisation on its network — but hadn’t mentioned it to its customers until now. The company made the announcement on its blog, revealing that it has been prioritising some latency sensitive
applications, such as gaming, Web browsing, e-mail and VoIP, ahead of peer-to-peer traffic for over a year
Mozilla and Google are collaborating on an effort to make web applications work offline. Firefox 3 will be the first internet browser to offer offline web application support when it launches at the end of this year. Mozilla is working with open-source messaging provider Zimbra, for example, to offer offline features for its email service — such as saving emails typed offline to a drafts
folder, ready to be sent when the user next connects
Microsoft will begin selling PCs in India next month as part of its Unlimited Potential
program, an event that will mark the software giant’s first entry into the PC sales business. Dubbed the IQ PC, the machines will cost RS21,000 (about $525), are manufactured in partnership with Zenith, and will sport AMD Athlon CPUs. Aimed primarily at students, the desktop PCs will initially be made available in a limited number of retail outlets in Pune and Bangalore. After a three-month trial, the program will be expanded if sales are strong enough to warrant it
Researchers at University of Maryland have developed a prototype of what may be the next generation of personal computers. The new technology is based on parallel processing on a single chip and is capable of computing speeds up to 100 times faster than current desktops
. The prototype ‘uses rich algorithmic theory to address the practical problem of building an easy-to-program multicore computer
Online auction site eBay has made public the details of a three-year long campaign to curb online fraud being perpetrated from criminals in Romania — an effort that has resulted in several hundred arrests
Seagate Technology is serving up its first 1-terabyte hard drives. The company announced today that it will offer 1TB hard drives for retail and enterprise, beginning in the third quarter of this year
Google is taking a novel approach to global censorship by asking US trade officials to treat Internet restrictions as international trade barriers, similar to other hurdles to global commerce
Google is in acquisition discussions with telephone management startup GrandCentral. The basic idea around GrandCentral is one phone number for all your phones, for life
. If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number. What happens when that person calls that number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time
Some ISPs are resorting to a new tactic to increase revenue: inserting advertisements into web pages requested by their end users. They use a transparent web proxy (such as this one) to insert javascript and/or HTML with the ads into pages returned to users. Neither the content providers nor the end-users have been notified that this is taking place, and I’m sure that they weren’t asked for permission either — via Slashdot
According to Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing Group, Vista is far more secure than competing platforms — or even previous Windows iterations
Dell took notice earlier this year when customers and the media reiterated complaints over the glut of crapware, or preinstalled PC software, packaged with new computers. Many PC makers said they do offer ways for consumers to wipe a new computer’s slate clean. But this week, Dell announced it would hand more control over to customers during the purchase process. Dell.com customers buying an XPS system, Inspiron notebook or Dimension desktop can select a no software preinstalled
option. This will eliminate productivity, ISP, photo and music software, but not everything
As many as 1500 Pentagon computers were brought offline on Wednesday in response to a cyber attack. Defence Secretary Robert Gates reported of the fallout both that the attack had no adverse impact on department operations
and that there will be some administrative disruptions and personal inconveniences
. When asked whether his own e-mail had been compromised, Gates responded, I don’t do e-mail. I’m a very low-tech person
— via Slashdot
A small New York state college will be the site of the first large-scale wireless LAN based on the draft 802.11n high-throughput standard. Within the next two weeks, Morrisville State College will start initial testing of thin access points from Meru, plus the vendor’s existing 802.11abg devices and early models of its recently announced 11n device, the AP300. Even at this stage, the net is posing intriguing new challenges for Morrisville, Meru and IBM Global Technology Services, the systems integrator for the project
For months, the industry has been calling on Microsoft to ease restrictions forcing customers to use only the priciest versions of Windows Vista for desktop virtualisation, which it had planned this week before changing its mind at the last minute
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