Lost your mobile phone, pocket personal computer/personal digital assistant or laptop? There’s a good chance you’ve left it in a taxi. And you’re less likely to reclaim your property than for it to stay missing
Developers are working to add protection against online fraud to the next version of the Thunderbird open-source e-mail application
Google may be preparing to offer free Voice Over IP telephone service in the UK, which sounds related to Google starting to buy dark fibre
The FBI is fighting in court to limit how hard it has to search for government documents requested by the public under the Freedom of Information Act, one of the main laws for ensuring openness in government. If the bureau prevails, people could have a diminished chance of getting documents from the nation’s most famous law enforcement agency — via MemoryBlog
Australia’s communications regulator has set up a broadband over powerline information portal as it considers what rules must govern the delivery of telecommunications services using electrical power wiring
The VersaLaser is a desktop computer peripheral that takes your drawings and spits out products made of wood, plastic, fabric, paper, glass, leather, stone, ceramic, rubber
. It’s a nicely designed package, available in a range of colours, including purple, but the US$10,000 price tag means it will be languishing on the wishlist for quite some time to come
Sony missed out on potential sales from MP3 players and other gadgets because it was overly proprietary about music and entertainment content
Have a look at this terrifying restyling of the original CSS Zen Garden markup. It’s 100% standards-compliant, but in the vein of a Geocities site circa 1997. The goggles do nothing!
Comment spam is in many ways even more annoying than regular email spam, since you generally have to do more than just hit the delete button to get rid of it. Its defining characteristic is that spammers abuse websites where the public can add content (blogs, wikis, forums, and even top referrer lists) to increase their own ranking in search engines. It seems, however, that the days of content spam are numbered: today Google announced that, in partnership with MSN Search, Yahoo! and major blogware companies, that they have implemented a way to block content spam. There is a MovableType plugin available to take advantage of the change
The German national library, Deutsche Bibliothek, has received a copyright exemption that allows it to crack the DRM on the media in its collection, after it became obvious that copy protections would not only annoy teenage school boys, but also prohibit the library from fulling its legal mandate to collect, process and bibliographic index important German and German-language based works
. This is fantastic news — and it should be a lesson to libraries, schools, institutions that serve the disabled, archivists, and others that they needt o fight for their own exemptions. We need to riddle the ban on circumventing DRM with so many little holes that it simply deflates upon itself — via BoingBoing
The bastards at Hewlett-Packard have region coded inkjet printers to only accept region appropriate ink cartridges. Like a $56 Bic pen, restricting use to a single country and then saying you are not trying to make money on it. They aren’t the only one’s, Apple are also dumbing down standards for the local US market making the computers useless outside of the country — via BoingBoing
After just announcing that they have added the Australian dollar to their accepted currencies, PayPal has launched its Australian web site which is designed to cater exclusively for Australian users
Toshiba has developed software, called Ubiquitous Viewer, to remotely operate a PC using a mobile phone. The software is installed on the mobile phone and on a client computer running Windows. The software recreates the desktop of a PC or notebook PC on the mobile phone’s screen. The user can use the PC via the mobile phone to complete tasks such as reading e-mail messages and editing documents
Thirteen metres beneath the streets of Rome, archaeologists have discovered what people are calling a new Pompeii that has been buried for nearly two millennia. Using video cameras, a team of researchers has unveiled a mosaic, in almost perfect condition, showing a team of naked men at the time of Emperor Nero, trampling the grape harvest
Ah, geek love in sensible trousers.
It probably says more about the weirdness of Teen Beat magazine than anything, but someone has dug up a 1983 photo spread the magazine did on then up and coming Bill Gates.
I’m left wondering what they were thinking with the poses. Is this some strange 80s teen equivalent of the naked girl draped over a car?
Note the Mac behind him in the first shot.
Firefox has nibbled away more ground from Microsoft over the past month and now has a market share of nearly 5%
Google has released free software called Picasa 2 for organising and finding the hundreds or thousands of digital photos often stored on a computer’s hard drive. The program tries to do away with such complexities as file names and folders. Photos are dumped into one bucket and sorted by date, but the software can quickly pull photos from date ranges or events as requested. The new version lets users mark their favourite photos with a gold star and search only for those
Google is looking for Strategic Negotiator candidates with experience in identification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network. Dark fibre refers to fibre optic cable that’s already been laid, but is not yet in use. Thousands of miles of dark fibre is available in the United States, but there have been few takers due to the high costs of making it operational
Tiny robots powered by living muscle have been created by scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles. The devices were formed by growing
rat cells on microscopic silicon chips, the researchers report in the journal Nature Materials. Less than a millimetre long, the miniscule robots can move themselves without any external source of power. Muscles like these could be used in a host of microscopic devices — even to drive miniature electrical generators to power computer chips
ISPs could be forced to protect gullible Australians, with the ASIC proposing a filtering system to block access to fraudulent web sites
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