Technology

The world’s largest truck is the Liebherr T 282B, used for hauling in the mining industry. At more than 7 metres tall and 14 metres long, the 200 tonne monstrosity can still putt along at 64 kilometres per hour. New Scientist has published an interview with Francis Bartley, head of R&D for Liebherr:

The first time I was in it at a mine, the driver started to drive away and actually ran into the back of a service truck. It seems we mashed it down to the ground. I saw someone yelling, but we didn’t feel a thing.

Delicious giant Tonka toy goodness — via boingboing

Microsoft has issued a security update which changes settings in Internet Explorer to protect users of its Internet Explorer browsers from a new virus risk, although it has not actually patched the flaw. Download Mozilla now

Google changed its Gmail membership policy this week to prevent people from profiting on the sale of popular e-mail names

It’s been a big couple o’ weeks for Apple with their WWDC thang, preview of Tiger aka Mac OS 10.4, release of Airport Express, new G5 line up and the announcement of their new cinema displays.

Another rumour though has been brought to my attention: Apple quits taking iMac orders; New model in September. Hmmm… interesting indeed, will these new breed iMacs be a totally different beast to the igloo flat-panel macs, or something shinier akin to the G5 and G4 PowerBooks. Only time and maybe some overzealous mac heads on mac rumour sites will tell.

Looks like Sony’s offering up an iPod challenger, the NW-HD1 Network Walkman Digital Music Player. A sneak peak can be seen here.

The NW-HD1, (they really need a far sexier name), is smaller and lighter than the iPod, and a bit bigger than the iPod Mini and holds 20G worth of music. As for battery life, it boasts a 30 hour rechargeable battery. Price? Looks to be about AU$800 with an August-ish release.

Will I be cashing in my beloved 30 Gigger (iPod) for one of these? No.

Will it offer some healthy competiton for Apple? Yes.

Security weaknesses in Microsoft’s server and browser software are taking their toll on Australian Internet banking sites. According to St George Bank, AusCERT and the Australian High Tech Crime Centre are helping local financial institutions track down the origins of a new Trojan that’s helping online criminals defraud consumers of their savings. BHODemon is a free tool that will list all Browser Helper Objects that are installed on a Windows system by scanning the registry and give you the ability to disable them. This will also list good BHOs as well, but nevertheless is a useful tool in detecting and disabling malicious software. Download Mozilla now

mozilla.org today released upgrades to both Firefox 0.9 (0.9.1) and Thunderbird 0.7 (0.7.1) to fix some minor bugs present in both releases. Both releases correct some flaws in the extension system that some users may have been experiencing, as well as a new icon set for the navigation toolbar on Windows and Linux in Firefox 0.9.1

Regular readers will recall that I have been in job limbo lately (and in the sense of doing meaningful work, ever since the dot com years). Over the past month or so I have even been reduced to the mind numbing horrors of helpdesk.

Today the clouds have parted to reveal glorious IT sunshine. As of the beginning of August I will be following in the footsteps of the great Ryan Heise and starting my new job as… drumroll… Oracle Hax0r.

w00t!

Apple have released some shiny new aluminium cinema displays in 20 (AUD$ 2,299), 23 (AUD$3,499) or a whopping 30-inch (AUD$5,999) options.
Yes you read right, the 30-inch cinema display is even more expensive than the top of the range G5 going for AUD$5,299.

It’s swively so you can adjust your viewing angle easily, has a gazillion ports and you can get a wall mounting kit so that you can behold it’s floating majesty and save desk space.

Ice cream tycoons Ben and Jerry gave Penn State US$600,000 to develop a refrigerator that uses sound waves instead of freon to keep food cool.

The mad-scientist design of the fridge is very impressive — via boingboing

Users are being told to avoid using Internet Explorer until Microsoft patches a serious security hole in it. The loophole is being exploited to open a backdoor on a PC that could let criminals take control of a machine. The threat of infection is so high because the code created to exploit the loophole has somehow been placed on many popular web sites. Experts say the list of compromised sites involves banks, auction and price comparison firms and is growing fast

An interesting article about the absentee rate of PCs in various UK workplaces. While the average employee was out sick seven days a year, the average PC was inoperable due to a virus nine days a year. There’s also mention of junk e-mail’s impact on productivity, with one business reporting that 99.84% of all incoming mail is spam

Hewlett-Packard has discovered a memory flaw that could be in as many as 900,000 of its notebook computers and is offering customers free memory modules as a remedy

Microsoft has announced a massive expansion in storage capacity of 250MB for users of its free Hotmail service, but just when the extra megabytes will become available to local users isn’t clear