The contentious Surveillance Devices Act has been passed. The act will allow Federal Police to obtain warrants to secretly install spyware onto users computers enabling them to monitor e-mail, online chats, word processor and spreadsheets entries and even bank personal identification numbers and passwords
Alek’s Christmas Lights Webcam is back again which allows you to: pan/zoom the webcam and control the 17,000 christmas lights — yep, turn ’em on and off and annoy my understanding neighbours!
You’ve got to laugh, because it’s all a hoax. The lights are real, the web control system isn’t
Australia’s spies are to have their intelligence gathering capacity boosted by a new highly classified IT and communications project being run by the Defence Signals Directorate, which includes database and storage, real time processing and intriguingly, a variety of radio interface technologies. It’s a safe bet that any data gathered will be happily passed on the US and vast bulk will be corporate espionage for a fee and not actual security work
Former CIA Director George Tenet has suggested that access to networks like the World Wide Web might need to be limited to those who can show they take security seriously. The national press were excluded from the event, at Mr Tenet’s request
About 80,000 students and staff are being told to use an alternate browser. The Penn State ITS department sent the alert because the threats are real and alternatives exist to mitigate Web browser vulnerabilities
The all free dictionaries project focuses on maintaining free dictionaries (now more than 90 with more than 3,300,000 translations). They are designing a new system which will unite them all into one universal dictionary for all languages. The universal dictionary will be soon available for free under GPL
A coalition of American internet and finance firms and law enforcement agencies has been launched in a bid to halt the growing number of online phishing scams. The group called Digital PhishNet is a collaborative operation of technology, banking, financial services and online auction firms with law enforcement to tackle phishing
, a scheme based on use of faked or spoofed
web sites
Seiko Epson is on schedule to commercialise OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen technology for televisions in 2007 but some significant research issues remain. OLED screens produce pictures that proponents say are extremely bright and crisp compared to those shown on PDP (plasma display panels) and LCDs. Another advantage is that OLEDs should be cheaper. However, at present OLED panels don’t last long
Corporate business is discovering that e-mail within professional circles is showing that millions of highly educated people are functionally illiterate. Shame the morons are blaming e-mail rather than the political interference that has destroyed the educational system
True to the saying no honour among thieves
, adware company, Avenue Media, is finding that competing adware company, DirectRevenue, is detecting and deleting their software. Now Avenue Media is crying foul and have filed a lawsuit against DirectRevenue stating that DirectRevenue knowingly and with intent to defraud, exceeded its authorized access to users’ computers
— via Slashdot
Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 has been released. Virtual folders and RSS integration, coupled with the recent hype surrounding Firefox, might give the product some serious momentum
Powell spoke before congress, detailing that complaints to the FCC are up from 14,000 in 2002, to nearly 240,000 in 2003. There were only 350 complaints during 2000 and 2001. Powell failed to mention however that 99.8% of those complaints came from PTC (Parents Television Council). It means that really a tiny minority with a very focused political agenda is trying to censor American television and radio
Designers say that the Cell
processor that will power the next version of the PlayStation game console will also be adaptable for advanced scientific research, but you won’t have to be a rocket scientist to program it
Australian Consumers’ Association health spokeswoman Nicola Ballenden says that E-Health initiatives intended to improve public health outcomes while cutting costs are being hijacked by greedy
software makers, drug marketers and pharmacists
FairUCE, which stands for Fair use of Unsolicited Commercial Email
, is an SMTP proxy, running between multiple instances of Postfix, that verifies e-mail by attempting to verify the sender through lookups, a user customised challenge/response. It claims to be able to stop a vast majority of spam
without the need for content filters, and virtually eliminates spoofed addresses, phishing, and even many viruses with a few cached DNS look-ups and a couple of if/then statements
The passage of the US Free Trade Agreement enabling legislation has been thrown into doubt after the government agreed to an eleventh hour review of key concerns outlined by the Internet Industry Association. The IIA claims the legislative changes would make possession of pirated materials a criminal offence, and could make ISPs criminally liable for pirated material that exists on their systems. The IIA also believes the system of take-down orders proposed through the legislation would put an onerous administrative burden on its members
A study by US researchers, Pew Internet, suggests musicians do not agree with the tactics adopted by the music industry against file-sharing. While most considered file-sharing as illegal, many disagreed with the lawsuits launched against downloaders. Independent musicians, in particular, saw the internet as a way to get around the need to land a record contract and reach fans directly
A group of gamblers who won more than £1m at the Ritz Casino by using laser technology have been told by police they can keep their winnings. A laser scanner linked to a computer was allegedly used to gauge numbers likely to come up on the roulette wheel
If you have a laptop, desktop and work PC keeping the information from Firefox and Thunderbird synced with each other is hard, not to mention the extensions. John Haller has packaged both Firefox and Thunderbird into Flash drive friendly
executables which can be run directly from a USB flash drive — Portable Firefox and Portable Thunderbird
A brain
, grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists
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