EU lawmakers overwhelmingly voted down a controversial bill on software patents Wednesday, ending what had become one of the biggest legislative battles in the EU for years
Apple has wasted little time establishing the groundwork for its forthcoming Intel-based Mac machines, already porting Firefox to the Mactel
platform
Australia’s internet connections are relatively inefficient
in dealing with traffic from different time zones, according to new research. Scientists from the University of New England at Armidale in northern NSW, have concluded that Australia is basically out of phase with global traffic
, based on initial statistics from about 40 monitoring sites around the world, in countries such as the US, Britain, Switzerland and South America. The study has found Australia is performing no better than Kazakhstan for internet congestion
These people spent ten hours constructing their very own Imperial II-class Star Destroyer from Lego and capturing over 7000 frames of the process with their webcam
Broadband specialist Internode’s e-mail servers were brought to their knees last week in a spam attack that competitor iiNet says is routine for ISPs
The Nazis went to great lengths to encipher their secret messages, building mechanical scramblers. The most famous of these was the Enigma machine, which was secretly cracked by Alan Turing and his team of Bletchley Park codebreakers. Here is a functional papercraft Enigma Machine to print, fold and assemble — via boingboing
Jonathan Huebner, a Naval Air Warfare Centre physicist, claims that the rate of technological innovation is actually decreasing, not increasing exponentially as some people believe. Huebner says that there are now fewer important technological developments per billion people
than at any time since the 17th century. He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead
Robots will be patrolling Japan’s streets, offices, shopping malls and other public places for the safety of the people. Guardrobo D1 is equipped with a camera and sensors to detect any signs of trouble. It will then alert the human guards via radio with camera footage of possible troubles. This is one of the technological advancement vital to the aging population of Japan, where 1 in 5 Japanese are over 65 years old
According to security vendor Sophos, there’s a 50% chance your unprotected Windows PC will be compromised within 12 minutes of going online
Radio National’s podcasting experiment has been so successful that another raft of specialist programs will be made available online from 9 July
iPod Photo has now become iPod and iPod U2 also gets the colour and photo capabilities. What gets me is the capacity differences, it’d be nice if there were a 40GB or something in between the 20 and 60GB ones. Maybe Apple are trying to sell more top of the range pods by only offering fence sitting people like me, who would look at entry level products and go, ‘I’d like a little more than that, what’s the next model up’, to buy the top of the range, ie most expensive model, as the mid option. (Then again, when I purchased my iPod, I went ‘fuck it’, and got top of the range at the time). I’m not sure that made a lot of sense but hopefully you get the idea.
The whole paying extra for a damn firewire cable sucks alot.
Podcasting stuff in the new iTunes is a good idea, I hope it doesn’t suck.
For the second time within the past year, an Indymedia server has been seized in the United Kingdom. This time it is the Bristol Indymedia server (currently redirected to the United Kollectives IMC site); this follows on from the Ahimsa seizure last October. The current seizure was carried out using a search warrant by the UK police at approximately 16:30GMT on 27 June 2005. This was despite being warned by lawyers that this server was considered an item of journalistic equipment and so subject to special provision under the law
(press release). Bristol Indymedia is currently being supported by the National Union of Journalists, Liberty and Privacy International. Other media organisations have declared their support — via Slashdot
Jon Lech Johansen (known for his work on decrypting DVD security codes) has created a patch for the Google Video Viewer — less than 24 hours after the search giant shipped the video playback plug-in, a tool based on the open-source VideoLAN media player. The patch, released on Johansen’s ‘So Sue Me’ blog, effectively disables a modification Google made to the VideoLAN code to prevent users from playing videos that are not hosted on Google’s servers — via BoingBoing
A power supply problem on an undersea cable has severed all outside Internet connectivity to Pakistan. Many businesses have been seriously impacted. Repairs will involve some disruption to access from other countries, and are tentatively scheduled for overnight
Advanced Micro Devices has fired off a federal antitrust lawsuit against Intel, claiming that its rival has a monopolistic grip on the PC industry. The suit, filed Monday in the US District Court in Delaware, details alleged scare tactics and coercion that AMD claims Intel imposed on 38 companies, including large-scale computer makers, small system builders, wholesale distributors and retailers
The first voice-operated computer assistant is installed in space — its operators hope it is more reliable than the treacherous HAL from the movie 2001
Internet song-swapping web sites like Grokster can be held liable for copyright infringement, the US Supreme Court has ruled, siding with the entertainment industry in its effort to curb online piracy
Google has hugely expanded the areas of the world that it covers with satellite imagery. Egypt, Iraq, mainland Europe and the UK have all now got satellite coverage to a lesser or greater degree. You can now go see sights like Buckingham Palace or the Arc de Triomphe. Sydney is also available and you can zoom in quite nicely, provided you don’t want to go further North than Central Station, as the entire North Shore is missing
Last year the Kurtztown Area High School approved a program which gave every student an iBook. Now thirteen students face felony charges for violating the district’s usage policy. The secret password, 50Trexler
, was widely-known among the student body and distributed early in the school year. It allowed between 80 and 100 students to reconfigure their laptops. The more computer-savvy students began to disable the administrations’ ability to spy on the students’ computer use. For others, it became a game, trying to outsmart the administration and compete with fellow students who held the secret
According to security company Secunia, a new browser flaw could allow attackers to trick users into relinquishing sensitive information such as passwords. The flaw is unusual in that it affects every mainstream browser and can be exploited on the Mac OS X operating system as easily as on Windows
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