Domain Names Australia Pty Ltd and its director Chesley Paul Rafferty have been found guilty by the Federal Court of breaching the Trade Practices Act, following the company’s re-registration mailout scam in 2003
David Bowie has asked bedroom DJs to create a new track for an internet competition by bootlegging his songs. The British music star has given fans the right to create a new song by using computer music software to blend or mash up
two existing tracks. The winning song will be released as an MP3 and its creator will win a car
A start-up called Stretch says that its new software-configurable design allows processors to add instructions while they’re operating
Airplanes, whether manned or unmanned, need to travel at various speeds. For example, a surveillance plane needs to fly fast to reach its destination point. Then, it needs to reduce its speed to achieve its surveillance mission. But with its fixed wings, it doesn’t offer the same level of efficiency during these two phases. That’s why Penn State engineers have devised airplane wings that change shape like a bird and have scales like a fish. Right now, the team has only built a tabletop model
Just back online after a two and a half hour blackout. Most annoying.
Means of commuication with the outside world were limited to phone, but it brought some interesting news.
Local electricity company is refusing to answer questions and relayed media reports are saying 11,000 homes were affected. I’d say it’s a pretty safe bet that figure is short by a factor of ten.
While the electrical companies may not give a shit about me, they were definitely in suck up mode when it came to Westfield, who were running on emergency generators. Energy Australia admitted responsiblity to Westfield, but refused to say what happened, current rumour is that someone over at the M7 construction site at Casula stuck a bulldozer through a major supply line or accidentally killed the high tension powerlines.
Energy Australia were more than happy to keep Westfield in the loop, will nice little calls to check if the power was on yet. They’re a power utility and they don’t know? A little scary.
It took another twenty minutes for them to get my power back up after Westfield were placated.
Whatever they did, I’m betting they’re thanking their invisible friends it happened during the day and not when a heap of angry commuters got home. Idiots.
With Google reportedly on the verge of going public, more and more people want to know what makes Google tick. The Observer, serves up the answers to our questions
Professor Paulo Galluci and his team have built a working model of Leonard Da Vinci’s clockwork powered car, designed in 1478. Previous attempts have been made to create the vehicle, but they failed to work properly. This is thought to be due to a misunderstanding of the original design, which is corrected in the new model. Apart from the 1/3 scale replica, the team have also made a full size model but have not dared to test it. Professor Galluzzi explained; It is a very powerful machine. It could run into something and do serious damage
Americans have seen their first pictures of flag-draped coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq after the Pentagon briefly lost control of images it had long sought to keep out of the public eye
An international effort to dismantle major internet piracy groups has identified more than 100 people in the US and abroad involved in the theft of more than $US50 million in music, movies, games and computer software — nice to see they live in a little fantasy world where they believe this will make a difference
Many customers looking for mobile phone retreads [BugMeNot] are more interested in price tags than multimedia messaging or games; they just want to make a phone call. But there is also the mobile equivalent of the preowned BMW. ReCellular resells about four million handsets in bulk worldwide each year. Of the 1.5 million it resells in the US, mostly for use on prepaid plans, plenty are higher-end with cameras and bells and whistles
Despite claims of advanced proprietary technology
, Google’s opt-in porn filter proves no better than the primitive tools of the last decade, blocking many harmless sites
Despite the infinite climb data speeds seem to be making, scientists at Stanford say we’ll eventually hit a barrier due to the inability to keep the data stable after a certain transfer speed. But no worries just yet; the watermark they’ve set is still 1,000 times faster than what we have now. Apparently the scientists confirmed this problem by firing up the particle accelerator at Stanford University and blasting electrons at a piece of the magnetic material used to store computer data
The FBI is trying to convince the government to mandate that providers of broadband, Internet telephony, and instant-messaging services build in backdoors for easy wiretapping. That would constitute a sweeping expansion of police surveillance powers. Instead of asking Congress to approve the request, the FBI (along with the Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration) are pressing the FCC to move forward with minimal public input
Toshiba has developed a hard drive for notebook computers that can hold 100GB of data. The new hard drive offers a quarter more storage space than the company’s current highest capacity notebook drive and is the first 2.5-inch drive from any manufacturer to store 100GB. The company expects to begin selling it later this year
Language experts believe that text messages, e-mails and the push for faster and more efficient communications are taking their toll on grammar. Queensland University of Technology sociolinguistics lecturer Jo Carr said people using e-mail and SMS text messaging were unconcerned about grammar and punctuation
Clever geometry is the basis of a new material that is said to be ideal for secure data encryption and dense optical information storage. The material consists of a lattice of onionlike spheres in which the particle core and its layers each contain a different dye. The material can hold four or more pieces of information in one spotónot just two as in binary optical data storage. And it opens a door to high-density three-dimensional optical data storage
Researchers have set a new data transmission record over the Internet2’s high-speed backbone. The new record announced Tuesday at the Spring 2004 Internet2 member meeting in Arlington, was for transmitting data over nearly 11,000 km at an average speed of 6.25 Gb/s. This is nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. The network link used to set the record spans from Los Angeles to Geneva, Switzerland
Yahoo has fixed a bug in its Web based e-mail system that would have allowed attackers to seize control of users’ e-mail accounts
A flaw in TCP, the most popular communications protocol for sending data on the Net, could let attackers shut down connections between servers and routers, according to an advisory released Tuesday by Britain’s national emergency response team
An AOL job listing indicates intentions to recharge its neglected portal and Web browser, and take Netscape in a dramatically different direction
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