In preparation for a possible legal challenge, the Electronic Frontiers Foundation is requesting your help in identifying which printers are embedding traceable information in the documents they produce. Printer manufactures added this technology under persuasion from the government inorder to help combat counterfeiting operations, however this technology defeats the presumed anonymity most people expect from the documents they print
Free web space services are increasingly being used to host spyware, with Internet security firm Websense claiming more of such dodgy material was found on free hosting services during the first two weeks of July than in May and June combined. These fraudulent, free personal Web sites have an average lifespan of two to four days, making them difficult to trace,
said an executive from the company
Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head. As the lovely Feòrag notes; Looks like someone’s implementing the literal kill file!
It’s not a head exploding button, but it’s close enough
The first mirrors have been cast for the world’s largest telescope. The result of cooperation from some of the foremost institutions in education and science in the nation, the Giant Magellan Telescope stands to operate at a resolution 10 times larger than the Hubble. The project, set to be constructed in Chile, is slated for completion in 2016
The Telecommunications Workers’ Union of Canada has been locked out by Telus, a large phone company and ISP. Two of TWU’s sites (including Voices for Change, a message board where union members can discuss issues such as being without a contract for 1666 days and last having received a general wage increase 2031 days ago). Telus is playing very dirty — they’re blocking access to the union’s web site so that their workers and the general public are cut off from legitimate debate about this action. This is inexcusable: imagine if this phone company chose to block all calls into union headquarters. OpenNet Initiative has done a report on the incident showing that by blocking the Union’s IP address Telus not only blocked access to the union’s sites, but also to an engineering company; a breast cancer fundraising site; an alternative medicine site based in Australia; and a Colorado based electronic recycling company
, as well as more than 760 other domains — via BoingBoing
In a continuation of their free software friendly activities the BBC has announced that they want to open up their TV listings to creative developers. They explain; Developers and designers are being encouraged to come up with innovative ways of using TV and radio schedules by taking part in a BBC competition. The competition, announced at the Open Tech conference in London, has been organised by the BBC’s backstage developer network. Backstage lets people remix the BBC’s content to make new applications. We want people to innovate and come up with prototypes to demonstrate new ways of exploring the BBC’s TV schedule
Two recent Utah high school graduates won the first-ever Ricoh Sustainable Development Award for inventing a better car air conditioner based on the Peltier effect. The peltier chips used in the device are more energy-efficient, last between 20 and 30 years, are solid-state, and don’t harm the environment with ozone-depleting freon like today’s car air conditioners
Like viruses and worms, spyware has become yet another scourge for enterprises. But it is possible, perhaps even likely, that spyware is becoming far more than a mere nuisance. With its potential for being used to do corporate espionage, spyware presents a security threat to more parts of a company than many CIOs might realise
The open source Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client will be updated for the second time in a week, due to code changes that have unintentionally stopped some third-party extensions from functioning correctly
Major record labels in Australia have finally won a legal battle against a Queensland man and his ISP for alleged music piracy
A Japanese love hotel has apparently worked out how to make a buck for couples with a yen for partaking in the pleasures of the flesh. The hotel has set aside two rooms where any action that goes on is automatically beamed onto the Net to be viewed by paying subscribers — via Warren Ellis
With a billion-dollar DVD market hanging in the balance, studios and manufacturers are facing off in a standards war that could decide the future of home entertainment
The people over at Treehugger have found an amazing little article on how to build a 5m – 3kW+ output wind turbine. Apparently this is the latest project of OtherPower.com and the site has a variety of other engergy saving/producing projects including a Homebrew Maytag Gas Battery charger — via Slashdot
A Dutch court has rejected a request by an internet piracy watchdog group to force five internet service providers to hand over personal data on people downloading large amounts of music and films
Software giant Microsoft has moved to quash claims it gave preferential treatment to adware maker Claria, amid talks of a merger
Wireless broadband users in Australia could enjoy maximum surfing speeds of 75 megabits per second by mid-2006
The second series of The Mighty Boosh
will be available to stream from 19 July, a full week before starting its run on BBC 3. It is one of a number of pilots that BBC Television will be undertaking over the next few months, exploiting the opportunities that new technologies offer to look at how programmes might be delivered beyond the traditional linear broadcast
Popular Science has a how-to article up on turning a backpack into a portable, solar-powered Wi-Fi hotspot. Its secret ingredient: the Junxion Box. Plug a cellular-network card into the book-size open-source-based device and you have an instant Wi-Fi hotspot, with speeds averaging around 700 kilobits per second. Just the thing for sharing bandwidth with your mates on a roadtrip
A company that provides high-speed internet access over electrical power lines on has received a major investment from Google, Hearst and Goldman Sachs
Secure optical data storage could soon literally be at your fingertips thanks to work being carried out in Japan. Yoshio Hayasaki and his colleagues have discovered that data can be written into a human fingernail by irradiating it with femtosecond laser pulses. Capacities are said to be up to 5 mega bits and the stored data lasts for 6 months — the length of time it takes a fingernail to be completely replaced
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