Hitachi has started to ship its 1TB hard disk drives introduced early this year commercially. But the hard drive that represents a milestone in desktop data storage costs a little less than two times higher compared to slightly less capacious one, which makes it not very affordable
Telstra has dusted off its project to build a residential broadband network worth at least $4 billion, laying out a proposal for competitor access at a closed industry meeting in Sydney. The updated network plan for a fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) network features the latest copper-wire-based broadband technology, VDSL2, which offers speeds of up to 100Mb per second, five times faster than currently available ADSL2+. The plan is also likely to strand up to $500 million worth of investment in ADSL2+ technology by Telstra’s rivals, including Optus, iiNet, Primus and Internode
Microsoft has released an emergency security patch to plug a hole in several versions of Windows — including Vista, which the software maker has touted as its most secure operating system ever. Microsoft was so worried about the hole — which allowed hackers to break into personal computers and install malicious software — that it pushed out the critical security fix a week ahead of a regularly scheduled update
The military-appointed government of Thailand has blocked access to YouTube and several other Internet sites in a crackdown on material seen as denigrating the country’s monarch. We have blocked YouTube because it contains a video insulting to our king,
Winai Yoosabai, head of the censorship unit at the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, said
Along with James Doohan’s cremated remains will also travel the ashes of one of NASA’s first space travelers, Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, aboard a privately-built rocket set to launch from New Mexico this month. The launch of a SpaceLoft XL rocket built by the private firm UP Aerospace is scheduled for 28 April. SL-2, as it has been dubbed, will lift off from Spaceport America, a state-funded launch site near Upham, New Mexico and about 72km north of the city of Las Cruces
Google has thrown its hat into the ring against Microsoft and (reportedly) Yahoo and AOL over the sale of DoubleClick. Google’s entry into the bidding may boost the price for the remaining pieces of DoubleClick (parts of the company having already been sold off) to $2 billion, twice what its current owners paid for the whole thing
Behold, the world’s first open-source car. Cumbersomely dubbed c,mm,n
(say common
), the vehicle was introduced at AutoRAI in Amsterdam. The project is a product of the Netherlands Society for Nature and Environment, better known as the Stichting Natuur en Milieu
, along with a trio of universities: Eindhoven, Enschede, and Delft. So how is the c,mm,n open-source? The entire vehicle’s genetic makeup (specifications, technical drawings, etc.) are available online to anyone, and the car’s creators hope that people will adapt it to their needs and wants, with the caveat that they must share their modifications with the rest of the community
EMI’s entire digital music catalogue will be available in premium DRM-free form via iTunes in May, the music label said Monday at a press conference in London. Beatles tunes under EMI’s control, however, are not part of the plan. Major music label EMI Group plans to sell a premium level of digital downloads through Apple’s iTunes Store. For $1.29 per song, consumers will be able to buy higher-quality digital music lacking digital rights management. Higher-quality music files, which will play on any computer and any digital-audio player, will not replace the copy-protected EMI music currently sold through iTunes. Rather, they will complement the standard 99-cent iTunes downloads and will be sold at a premium: $1.29 per song. Consumers who have already purchased EMI tracks containing Apple’s FairPlay copy protection will be able to upgrade them to the premium version for 30 cents, EMI said. Full albums in DRM-free form can be bought at the same price as standard iTunes albums
SonyBMG, the world’s second-biggest music company, will no longer accept hard copy demos from bands. Instead, budding musicians will be asked to sign up to a record label website such as www.columbiademos.co.uk or www.rcademos.co.uk to blog their music, photos and videos
IBM is soon to launch a multimedia browser to make audio and video content accessible to people with vision impairments. Codenamed the Accessibility Browser — or A-Browser — the software was created by a blind employee in Japan. The A-Browser will give blind and partially-sighted people the same control over multimedia content that sighted people have using a mouse. IBM says it will be available later this year and hopes it will be free
The European parliament’s Commitee for Legal Affairs approved an amendment presented by EMP Nicola Zingaretti, that makes piracy a felony — but only if a monetary profit is made
A California judge handed a victory to Kaleidescape, which manufactures home media servers, ruling that the company’s products do not violate the DVD industry’s CSS license. The company was sued by the DVD Copy Control Association, which said that Kaleidescape’s media servers violate its standard licensing contract
The move to open up the application programming interfaces (APIs) to Yahoo Mail is meant to encourage Web developers to build applications that use the mail service. The company expects these third-party mashups
, hybrid software that combines content from more than one source, will bring in more customers
With at least 46 million consumer records accessed by hackers, the TJX case outranks the previous largest case tracked by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse: a June 2005 disclosure by credit card processor CardSystems that hackers accessed accounts of 40 million card holders
Yahoo has announced that they will be offering unlimited email storage starting this coming May. The launch is all a part of Yahoo’s ten year anniversary. While not all users will see their storage caps disappear right away Yahoo is promising that this feature will eventually reach their entire population
A Norwegian team has made the first piece of hardware that uses evolution to change its design at runtime to solve the problem at hand in the most effective way. By turning on and off its genes
it can change the way it works, and it can go through 20,000 – 30,000 generations in just a few seconds. That same number of generations took humans 800,000 – 900,000 years
Apple is throwing its weight behind the music industry’s efforts to protect the album format by allowing fans to buy complete digital albums without having to pay again for songs they already own. The record industry is keen to maintain the profitable album format, which is under threat as users of web-based music download stores, such as Apple’s iTunes and Napster, prefer to buy individual songs rather than whole albums. Apple said it was introducing a Complete My Album
service that offers customers who want to turn individual tracks into an album a 99-cent credit for every song they have already purchased from the album
Microsoft is warning users of a new exploit that could allow an attacker to control which sites a user can visit. The vulnerability lies within the Web Proxy Auto Discover (WPAD) component
Just a couple of weeks ago Sandisk introduced a 32GB solid-state drive. Now Samsung has one-upped them, unveiling a 64GB solid-state drive. They are expecting to begin shipping in the second quarter of this year. Samsung says the device can read 64 MB/s, write 45 MB/s, and uses just 0.5 W when operating (0.1 W when idle). In comparison, an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive reads at 15 MB/s, writes at 7 MB/s, and consumes 1.5 W when either operating or idle
Web sites that feature the TRUSTe security certificate are two times more likely to contain badware than Web sites without any security certification, researcher Ben Edelman alleges
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