Technology

A disc drive manufacturer has patented a process that may bring about computer hard drives and handheld devices that can store as much as a terabyte of information. Researchers at Seagate Technology acknowledge that such levels of storage on small, commercial products are still five years to a decade away, but they feel confident they’ve hit on a way to overcome a major limitation in disk manufacturing and capacity via digg

Over a million MySpace users have been exposed to spyware that exploits a Windows vulnerability through a banner ad on the site. Those using Internet Explorer that has not been patched against the Windows Meta File vulnerability could be exposed to spyware and adware

Internode is planning a trial of a new flavour of ADSL it says will provide a major lift to upstream data speeds. An adjunct to the ADSL2+ standard, the Annex M protocol has the potential to lift data upload speeds to 2.5 Mbps, compared to the 1Mbps available under the current Annex A already in use. Download speeds remain the same, at 24Mbps

A plane made almost entirely out of printed parts flew last weekend at an airshow in Britain. It was made by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works and is a 28m unmanned vehicle made of radar-absorbing composites via Boing Boing

A Net neutrality law isn’t needed because the US already has antitrust laws that would keep broadband carriers from acting in an uncompetitive manner, Internet pioneer David Farber said Monday in a debate against TCP/IP co-creator Vinton Cerf

Giant office equipment maker Ricoh will next year supply an optical component that reads both HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs. The move could take the heat out of the battle between rivals Toshiba and Sony over next-generation DVD formats

The Australian domain name regulator will seek to expand its powers beyond basic domain administration in an extraordinary general meeting of its members to be held in mid-August

Researchers at Hewlett-Packard have developed a tiny wireless memory spot chip that can store up to 100 pages of text. Developed over four years by HP Labs in Bristol, the chip is about the size of the head of a match and could potentially store a patient’s medical chart on a hospital band

A research group in China has reportedly developed a third-party application that allows users to communicate with Skype Voice-over-Internet (VoIP) phone calls. Skype has issued a statement that there is no evidence of such reverse-engineering and that, even if true, such a clone would not have the feature set and reliability of Skype

Demand for interoperability will pressure vendors like Apple to bring down technology barriers — or face consequences — via digg

A little-known capability in Google’s search engine has helped security vendor Websense uncover thousands of malicious Web sites, as well as several legitimate sites that have been hacked. By taking advantage Google’s binary search capability, Websense has created new software tools that can sniff out malware using the popular search engine. Websense researchers Googled for strings that were used in known malware like the Bagel and Mytob worms and have uncovered about 2,000 malicious Web sites over the past month

Researchers at Microsoft this week released a new report and tool aimed at preventing Web spammers from exploiting Internet search engines to drive traffic to spam URLs. The tool, called the Strider Search Defender, identifies spam URLs that are being distributed through social networking, forum and blog-hosting Web sites, and can prevent those URLs from being indexed by search engines, said Yi-Min Wang, group manager of the Cybersecurity and Systems Management Research Group in Microsoft Research