Technology

Grafedia is hyperlinked text, written by hand onto physical surfaces and linking to rich media content — images, video, sound files, whatever. Grafedia can be written in letters or postcards, on the body as tattoos, on the street, or anywhere you feel like putting it. Viewers click on these Grafedia hyperlinks with their mobiles by sending a message addressed to the word + @grafedia.net to get the content behind the link

Two researchers, from the Florida Institute of Technology and Boston-based Security Innovation, surprised the audience at a computer-security convention last month with their finding that a version of Microsoft Windows was more secure than a competing Linux operating system. This week, the researchers released their finished report, and it included another surprise: Microsoft was funding the project all along

Mozilla Firefox 1.0.2 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 have been released

Yahoo has announced that it will give users of its free web e-mail service 1GB of mail storage matching offerings of rival provider Google

Cybersource says it’s currently talking to two domestic banks about providing Linux-based bootable CDs to consumers to ensure Internet banking security

New technology from IBM is designed to stop spam by identifying the Internet domain it came from, and can help spot online scams such as phishing attacks and e-mail spoofing. The company announced the release of FairUCE, or Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial E-mail for the company’s AlphaWorks advanced technology program, citing a newly released IBM survey that found spam is 76% of all e-mail and may cost US companies $17 billion to fight this year

Adrian Bowyer, a researcher at the University of Bath, UK, is working on a 3D printer that can be used to print out all the parts necessary to make 3D printers.

Bowyer has already produced an electronic circuit by squirting the alloy inside a plastic autonomous robot, which itself was created using a commercial 3D printer. Because the heated syringe he used is very similar to the nozzle that deposits plastic layers in the printer, he envisions squirting both plastic and metal from the same nozzle in future self-replicating machines.

The machine need not be capable of assembling itself, he says, only producing all the necessary parts, with the exception of the microprocessors and the lubricating grease. These could later be added and the various parts clipped together, Bowyer says. People are quite capable of assembling things if they want to, he adds. I am not interested in self-assembly, just self-copying.

OurMedia is a service that will host your open-licensed materials forever, for free, with unlimited bandwidth. They’re under high load right now, but I’m sure they’ll be running more smoothly as they throw more servers at the problem — via BoingBoing

Would-be search king Ansearch has ruffled a few feathers among Australia’s top corporate brands by registering misspellings of well-known internet domain names in an attempt to drive traffic to the search engine

The State Library of NSW has launched the first stage of a project to put an AU$1.5 billion collection of Australian culture online

Computer chips capable of speeding data around by rippling the electrons on the surface of metal wires just got a step closer. Mark Brongersma, at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, has found a new way to model the three-dimensional propagation of these ripples — called plasmons — in two dimensions. He says the new model is much simpler and more intuitive than existing simulations and will be crucial in the design of plasmonic components for computer chips — via Warren Ellis

Yahoo has bought Ludicorp Research and Development — the company behind popular photo sharing site Flickr. According to the company blog; Flickr is going to continue with business as usual — except it won’t have to draw straws to decide who gets paid. No financial terms were disclosed — via Warren Ellis

Alice Springs’ council is poised to sign an agreement with Veridas Communications for city-wide wireless broadband, reducing its dependence for services on what one alderman claims is an uncooperative Telstra

Anyone who has ever developed a web site knows that cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility is a nightmare, mainly due to Microsoft’s willful non-compliance with the CSS2 standard. It seems Microsoft will continue their poor support for CSS2 even in the IE7.0 release. This may have worked when IE was the only game in town, but now that Firefox is a serious player, it won’t help them keep market share as they think it will

Computers deliberately left open to online attack are being used to place spies in the hacker-controlled networks of infected machines. The fake zombies are deployed by members of the German Honeynet Project