Technology

For the DIY set, a home made mp3 player built into a little tin box for around $50

The LiveJournal data centre Internap suffered a critical power failure, leaving all of LiveJournal and its content temporarily offline and requiring the revival of 100+ servers. This isn’t the first time Internap has screwed over LiveJournal, I can’t see it being a terribly good publicity move for them

A Polish woman who pretended to be a ghost and haunted an Alpine castle was sentenced to four months in prison by an Italian court. Police were called in to investigate mysterious creaking doors and other unexplained nocturnal noises heard in 15th century Castel Coldrano, near the Swiss and Austrian borders, by a female occupant who ran the castle’s cultural centre. Video cameras placed by investigators revealed the noises to be man — or woman — made, and arrested the 42-year-old Pole, whose husband worked for the centre. Police said she was motivated by a personal rancour against the manager, and charged her with harassment and incidental damage to the castle — via Warren Ellis

Ben Edelman has published a list of major investors in spyware companies totaling over $139 million in venture capital

The software is aimed at making encrypted e-mail communications simple enough for even computer novices to use. Ciphire, developed by Ciphire Labs in Munich, Germany, uses a technique called public key cryptography to sign and encrypt e-mail messages. Once loaded on to a computer hard drive the software performs all of the complex tasks involved behind the scenes. Ciphire also works with almost any e-mail software client — like Microsoft Outlook, for example — without requiring prior configuration

Computer helpdesk employee Philip Cummings had more than just a day job: he’s just gone down for 14 years in the biggest identity theft case ever. Apparently fake ID goes for as little as $60, and the total stolen over just a couple of years was somewhere in the $50-100 million range

An avalanche of malicious traffic knocked many of Macquarie’s customers’ offline earlier this week — just days after the company had upgraded its security systems

With the hope of returning at least one corner of the web to its non-commercial roots, Google watcher Daniel Brandt, who curates the NameBase archive, has released the source code to a Google scraper. Brandt has been making an ad-free proxy available for two years using Google’s little known minimal ie interface. By using this proxy, users bypass both Google’s notorious 2038 cookie (that’s when it expires) and the text ads. Brandt fully expects Google to throw legal and technical resources at him, but says he welcomes the challenge if only to clarify copyright issues. Google took people’s free stuff and made a $50 billion business from it, he argues

Yep, that time of year again, time for a Mac conference. Steve Jobs unveiled the iPod shuffle, the Mac mini and iWork.

Lucie’s quick takes on these:

iPod shuffle is the size of a pack o’ gum, has no screen but can run on 2 AAA batteries when the internal one is drained, and has a flash based memory unlike the iPod. Love the battery thing, would be nice to see that incorporated to the rest of the iPod family. With the $150 price tag surely this baby will catch the eye of even the most cynical anti-iPodders.

What do you do with excess igloo shaped iMacs? Crush it into a small rectangle, trim off the monitor and keyboard, finish it off with that famous Apple styin’, and voila! Mac mini. This ‘puter is BYO mouse, keyboard and monitor/tv. It’s also the cheapest Mac ever! So if you’re a Windows iPodder, you might want to take a longer walk on the Apple side.

iWork is Keynote (slideshow program), and Pages (word processor). It’s cheap and Pages imports and exports Word docs. This is very good and means that you don’t need to fork out a lot of cash to create and view Word docs. Yay!

Side note: I like the new graphics on the iWork and iLife boxes.

The embattled undersea cable and satellite joint venture between Telstra and Hong Kong-based Pacific Century CyberWorks, Reach, has announced plans to dump external data customers to make way for the data capacity demands of its shareholders

BigAir, is offering 10Mbps broadband service to some of its residential customers. The ISP, which specialises in providing internet access for residents of low-rise apartments and tower blocks, claimed that the new offering was the fastest available in Australia. However, the 10Mbps service costs over 16 times as much as most basic ADSL services, priced at $500 per month with downloads capped at 100GB

Oracle has released Oracle Database Lite 10g, aimed at mobile devices, including laptop computers and PDAs. The software provides mobile users with seamless synchronisation with enterprise systems

Asked to forecast the impact of the Internet on society in the coming decade, a group of technology leaders and scholars have offered both dire predictions and high hopes

BBC techies are advising staff not to use the corporation’s own news ticker service, Newsline. An item in the corporation’s internal mag Ariel reported that high network load because of the application had prompted the advice. However, the BBC says the only reason staff are told not to use Newsline internally is that its developers haven’t produced an version of the application compatible with Windows XP or Mac OS X

Flash memory pioneer SanDisk has created a memory card packaging technology that enables memory cards to plug into both SD card slots and USB ports. The approach eliminates the need to use SD-to-USB adapters when accessing the contents of an SD card on a laptop, PC, or other system that lacks an integrated SD card slot