The National Security Agency’s goal to create a database of every call ever made inside the USA. Aided by the cooperation of US telecom corporations, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of tens of millions of Americans; the vast majority of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. Only Qwest refused to give the NSA information because they were uneasy about giving information to the government without the proper warrants. The usefulness of the NSA’s domestic phone call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear
The OpenStreetMap project to create a copyright-free map of the Isle of Wight was a success, so they’re taking on Manchester next — via Boing Boing
Google has unveiled several new offerings — Google Notebook, Google Co-Op Beta, Google Trends and Google Desktop 4 Beta — that could help searching become more of a group activity
Warner Bros is to sell movies over BitTorrent. Disappointingly, the pricing is set to be about the same as the DVD, even though the download will only become available at the same time as the DVD release and can only play on one machine, which all goes to prove that Warner Bros just don’t get it
Dr Jonathan Spanier from Drexel University has come up with a novel way to greatly increase data storage density: water. Specifically, they propose using hydroxyl ions to stabilise minute ferroelectric wires. These wires could be many times smaller than what is possible today, enabling data densities in the neighborhood of 12-13 PB per cubic centimeter. While there are still many problems to be resolved before drives using these can be manufactured this technology does seem promising. For one thing, it would be non-volatile, but could apparently be made to act as RAM. The fact that this is coming out of a university gives me hope that this technology won’t turn out to be just so much vapour — via Slashdot
After more than a century in business, it would be understandable for a company to run out of fresh ideas. But 3M, the manufacturing conglomerate, is still at it, at age 104. The manufacturing conglomerate — an abrasives maker that broke out by inventing masking tape in 1925 — is introducing new products as if it were a startup
Usually the only alcohol-powered muscles are the ones in barroom brawls, but one scientist is adding alcohol to artificial muscles to power robots and more. Scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas have developed artificial muscles
— science’s best attempt at mimicking natural muscles. But they’re not made with the hydraulics or gears that power most of today’s big, strong machines. These muscles are made of an elastic metal called shape memory wire
I was trawling through some random blogs the other night when I should have been working on my uni assignment, and I came across a bizarre factoid about the connection between Sailor Moon and Mozilla Firefox. Now that’s geeky.
Signals from mobile phone masts have been used to measure rainfall patterns in Israel. The University of Tel-Aviv analysed information routinely collected by mobile networks and say their technique is more accurate than current methods used by meteorological services. The data is a by-product of mobile network operators’ need to monitor signal strength. If bad weather causes a signal to drop, an automatic system analyzing the data boosts the signal to make sure that people can still use their mobile phones. The amount of reduction in signal strength gave the researchers an indication of how much rain had fallen
Apple Computer is entitled to use the apple logo on its iTunes Music Store, a judge has ruled, rejecting a suit filed by Apple Corps Ltd, the guardian of The Beatles’ commercial interest
After being told by banks and lenders across the UK that Chip and Pin is safe to use and provides better security (it doesn’t, it just shifts financial liability for loss to the consumer instead of the lender) Shell have announced that they’re suspending Chip and Pin at 600 of their Petrol stations in the UK after £1 million of customer money was stolen through a Shell Petrol station — via Snake Oil Labs
One of Alcatel’s most senior executives is back in town as the vendor continues to push for a deal that would see Telstra construct a new AU$3 billion fibre broadband network
Online file-sharing service BearShare, along with operators Free Peers Inc, is packing it up due to a $30 million settlement with the recording industry. The conditions of the settlement were agreed to by the P2P company to avoid further copyright infringement litigation
Ron Patrick has decided to go that little bit further by souping up his VW beetle with a jet engine. Serious planning went into the project. Patrick said, We did (computerised) structural analysis and we did stability analysis. And by god, you know what happens? It works!
Rockbox isn’t one of the many applications that run on the iPod software platform; rather, it’s firmware that completely replaces the iPod’s, with the goal of expanding the possibilities and the limits of the existing hardware
Tracing the lineage of Babel Fish [Yahoo portal], an online language translation service, to its beginnings is an instructive history lesson for those whose Internet experience begins and ends with Google
The Reporters Without Borders internet annual report 2006 details and decries the rising tide of net censorship and lays the blame squarely on the west as the source for the technology that allows repressive regimes to stifle freedom on the web. China’s success at censorship means it has effectively produced a sanitised
version of the internet for its 130 million citizens that regularly go online. The wide-ranging scrutiny also means that it is the biggest jailer of so-called cyber dissidents. RSF estimates that 62 people in China have been jailed for what they said online — via Slashdot
Ben Edelman, a Massachusetts lawyer and spyware researcher, is one of the lawyers who filed a lawsuit this week against Yahoo on behalf of advertiser Crafts By Veronica, as well as other advertisers. The lawsuit, filed in US District Court in New Jersey, accuses Yahoo and its ad sales subsidiary Overture Services Inof charging higher rates for ads promised premium
placement, but then placing those ads on spyware-vendor sites and on Web pages with URLs that are misspellings of popular sites
Warner Music Group rejected a $4.23 billion takeover offer from EMI Group, the world’s third-largest music company, thwarting another effort by the two companies to merge
Reports have emerged that those who have signed up for an antispam service from Blue Security have been targeted by spammers with a campaign of intimidation
. Six Apart, which runs the popular LiveJournal and TypePad blogging services, became a collateral victim of the very big, very sophisticated denial of service attack mounted by a Russian spammer against Blue Security
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