Rumours have flown around the Web about Google’s potential plans to release a Web browser. These rumours have been fuelled by a number of high-profile hires that Google has made, including various people who worked on Microsoft Internet Explorer, added to the fact that Google Inc. has registered the domain name gbrowser.com. A Google spokesman refused to comment on reports surrounding the Google browser, but analysts believe they may have some substance. James Governor, a principal analyst at Red Monk, said that he would be surprised if Google was not working on browser technologies. He does not think it will create a new proprietary browser. Instead, he expects Google to build on Mozilla, the open-source browser
Telstra competitors are rushing to build their own high-speed internet networks, eyeing the promise of the voice, video and faster data triple-play as the wrecking ball for the telecoms giant’s broadband dominance
What seems to be an embarrassing blunder by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in its hunt for online pirates has prompted Linux Australia to contact its legal representatives and warn of a possible breach of Australian law
A recent Symantec internet security threat report shows that Australia is a world leader in phishing scams and the fourth most common launching pad for internet attacks
These days you can’t give away your GMail invitations. The people over at Isnoop.net have went and designed an automatic GMail invite spooler that takes your unused GMail invites and hands them out to people looking for an account.
People with available invites send them to the spooler’s address (gmail@isnoop.net), and it automatically adds them to an available pool. People who need addresses can then get invites from this pool, as necessary.
It’s a good place to dump those excess invites, and anybody who needs a GMail invite can pick one up there, easily. Saves time for everybody, really — via boingboing
The FTC is considering imposing a bounty on spammers. They are guessing it would take between $100,000 to $250,000 to get people to rat out their friends and coworkers. Interestingly enough is that it is higher than rewards in most high-profile criminal and terrorism cases. For example, the FBI pays $50,000 for tips leading to the arrests of most of its top 10 fugitives
ginmar takes us on an enlightening look at the nanny mindset in charge of filtering content that US GIs can look at:
I can’t get to Victoria’s Secret any more. That means that Pat Robertson is, in fact, in charge of what we can see and read. And you know, I’m a girl, which means they’re censoring me from looking at halfway decent underwear! Jesus Fucking Christ, if I can be trusted with a fucking weapon, can’t I be trusted with a fucking thong? Because I’m really trying to see what kind of danger this could pose to anybody. I suppose I could make a slingshot out of the damned thing. That’ll terrify the insurgents!
Run, Ahmad! They’re using Rocket-Propelled Undies!
Mozilla.org has unleashed a triple threat; Firefox 1.0PR, Thunderbird 0.8, and Mozilla Suite 1.7.3
Nokia has signed a licensing agreement to support the use of Secure Digital (SD) flash memory cards in its mobiles. The company also will continue to support MultiMediaCards
The National Australia Bank is about to pilot a new service delivering internet banking passwords via SMS
Transitive Corporation, a Silicon Valley startup, claims to have cracked one of most elusive goals of the software industry: a near-universal emulator that allows software developed for one platform to run on any other, with almost no performance hit. They claims their QuickTransit software allows applications to run transparently
on multiple hardware platforms, including Macs, PCs, and numerous servers and mainframes
Linux backers have agreed on a standard version of the operating system so that programs written for one Linux distribution will work with others
Grameen Bank, famous for pioneering micro-credit programs in Bangladesh, has launched a new idea to empower the poor: arming beggars with mobile phones so they can sell a roving service for cash
A US federal judge has thrown out a state law requiring internet service providers to block web sites containing child pornography, saying the method used also caused massive suppression
of free speech
It eats flies and stinks to high heaven, but if this robot works, it will be an important step towards making robots fully autonomous. To survive without human help — perhaps to rove in dangerous or inhospitable terrain — a robot needs to generate its own energy. Now a robot has been developed that catches flies and digests them in a special reactor cell to generate electricity — but to do so it will most likely have to attract flies by using a stinking lure made from human excrement
Optus has hit back at claims that its broadband service, OptusNet, has run out of international bandwidth, saying the article printed on technology news web site Whirlpool is greatly exaggerated
GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium. GmailFS is a Python application and uses the FUSE userland filesystem infrastructure to help provide the filesystem, and libgmail to communicate with Gmail.
GmailFS supports most file operations such as read, write, open, close, stat, symlink, link, unlink, truncate and rename. This means that you can use all your favourite unix command line tools to operate on files stored on Gmail.
Sydney security firm DataDot is on the verge of sealing $140 million worth of business with Russia thanks to a law that will make an Australian technology compulsory for all new cars by 2006
Jason Jepson, the rocket scientist responsible for Star38, a service that fools caller ID systems [BugMeNot], has decided to sell the business. It seems he didn’t reckon on the man in the street find his service less than ideal, but it took harassing e-mail, phone messages and a death threat taped to his front door to convince him of the error of his ways
I’ve had the new version of MovableType for about a month, I’ve just been waiting for a public version of MT-Blacklist to hit the streets before I installed MT. Finally the wait was over.
So MT went in on Wednesday, closely followed by MT-Blacklist. I managed to pull it off with only two spam hits during the install. I’d been beta testing MT 3.1, so had already had the ooh and aah moment over its new interface, but MT-Blacklist was as cool as Jay promised.
There’s still a few bugs there, which I seem to remember were mentioned in his post on the emergency release. But it is a tidy piece of work that does its job well.
I did find that I really missed the joy of hitting a dirty great big despam
button from the old version, but the extra add-on includes that in the main MT interface and when I finally noticed it — a major facepalm moment — I was back to killing the fresh spam, quickly and efficiently.
MT-Blacklist is happily moderating suspect comments, but MT is sending the damn things live. Also found that I’m having rebuild problems. The dodgy comments are killed off, but I’m not getting an index rebuild to remove them from the index page. No idea if this is MT, the Blacklist, my apparently continuing rebuild nightmare from MT 2.6 or some other server weirdness. Annoying and I can deal with it, but I’d love to narrow down the culprit.
Considering that my activity log was nearly all spam attacks, having the Blacklist log as a separate entity makes life easier. The Blacklist stats have provided endless entertainment too, 576 dodgy spam commenting arseholes have been blacked since Wednesday. Woohoo! Perhaps I’m easily amused, but I love that feature so much.
So, happy with the changeover, love the new MT-Blacklist and all is right with the world. Aside from somebody else’s Coldfusion install on my server deciding to eat all available CPU capacity every half hour, but that’s not my problem to sort out.
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