Tim Berners-Lee has been promoted to Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire for coming up with the world wide web that we all use. Characteristically modest, he said that he was an ordinary person who created something that just happened to work out
Australia has proposed that all national communications regulators develop a multi-lateral memorandum of understanding (MoU) on spam to boost the fight against unwanted bulk email. MoUs are already used to underpin several international internet structures, such as IP address space
Nice to see that journalistic standards haven’t changed much in a hundred years. The Virginian-Pilot dug up an article originally published about the first powered flight story and discovered that it didn’t just have the odd typo, it was utter bollocks from beginning to end — via Neil Gaiman’s Journal
Disney has revised its online privacy policy to allow the sharing of user information to third parties, the company confirmed on Tuesday. New registrants who accept Disney’s privacy policy during registration also accept all marketing options by default. They have to manually turn them off later if they want to opt out. A Disney representative said the changes were made to help customer service operate more effectively between its offline and online businesses
David Byrne, Talking Heads frontman, has turned PowerPoint into a visual art medium in a satiric DVD/Book combo titled Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information. Byrne claims that, The genius of it is that it was designed for any idiot to use
The night before the funeral, the family gathered at the undertakers for a final private farewell, when they heard the sound of his mobile ringing from within the sealed coffin. Several distressed members of the family had to leave the funeral home whilst staff rushed to remove the phone
A Dutch invention is promising to make vehicles at least 50% more efficient and also bring down the soot and carbon dioxide emissions. This is made possible by replacing the conventional wheels by in-wheel electric engines which are normal electric engines turned inside out. No transmission is necessary as the in-wheel engines are powered by battery-packs installed on the vehicle. A diesel-powered generator which replaces the original engine on the vehicle charges the battery-pack continuously. The Dutch company E-Traction has built a bus using this technology that will undergo testing for the next six months
Microsoft’s Research group are working on a technique to combat spam. Dubbed the Penny Black project, it involves making e-mail senders perform a computation taking around 10 seconds, which their recipients can then check for. This delay would limit bulk e-mailing speeds to around 8000 a day, meaning that to spam all of those fresh, guaranteed 25 million addresses
would take approximately 8.5 years
Software companies in India are embracing the trend where source code for the software being bought or sold is kept safe with an escrow agent with carefully drafted agreements. This allows the buyer to get hold of the source code in cases where software was licensed from a start-up which has now folded or a breach of contract regarding the maintenance services that were agreed upon can be proven. The source code is automatically released upon the occurrence of any of the events mentioned in the escrow agreement and the buyer will be able to study the source code and continue to provide support services for the software bought without relying on the employees of the software supplier
Lawrence has spent over six years collecting video and other hacks for game consoles. He has recently put together the fourth revision of his video signal primer, expanded to six pages now, including subjects like chroma subsampling, horizontal colour resolution and the interesting revelation that your eyes suck at blue
My latest aggregator toy is nntp/rss. It’s a Java-based bridge between RSS feeds and NNTP clients, enabling you to read your favorite RSS syndicated content within your existing NNTP newsreader. RSS feeds are represented as NNTP newsgroups, providing a simple, straightforward and familiar environment for news reading
Maids in Hong Kong can draw a higher salary if they’re computer-literate enough to defrag hard-drives, reinstall operating systems, and do other sysadminly chores. But some have rebelled against the shift to computer-literate cleaners
Rocket have a Xmas game that pretty well mirrors the reality of surviving the office break-up party.
Amuse yourself by shaking the crap out of the occupants of the snowglobe. Hear them scream as they thump off the walls of their glass domed prison.
And my favourite… prepare to be sucked into the addictive joy of Shuffle the Penguin.
An appeals court upheld a verdict to clear Jon Johansen, a 20-year-old Norwegian, of DVD piracy charges on Monday, dismaying Hollywood studios who cluelessly claimed that the decision would encourage hackers
A spammer’s claim to his clients that he had an agreement with anti-spam technology vendor Brightmail to not block his traffic was contradicted by Brightmail officials. Notorious spammer, Scott Richter, is currently being prosecuted for fraud and his claims against Brightmail are part of his defence
Spam is robbing Australian businesses of at least $2 billion annually, according to one estimate — and there’s little governments can do about it
Optus is planning to double its revenues to about $11 billion annually in the next seven to 10 years and is considering using offshore call centres as early as next year as part of its growth push — you have to wonder if this plan is less about the money and more about solving the problem of their current dodgy locally outsourced call centre generating more complaints against the company than all other services combined
I’ll be spending this xmas pretty much by myself (as my girlfriend is visiting her family in Casino), so we had xmas before she left, and I netted some nice stuff:
- Large metal cocktail shaker in the form of a penguin
- Cocktail knickbacks (Hawthorn strainer, lemon zester, muddler, ice tongs, and that cool airlock thingy that sits atop a bottle of spirits and lets you pour a shot at a time)
- Shorts that appear to be brown but apparently fade into a camouflage pattern as the years wear on
- Lots of books (Nietzsche, James Joyce, and HG Wells mostly, plus a big tome of Norman Spinrad’s bitchy critical writing)
- And I finally cracked and bought myself a GameCube and a big stack of games: Metroid Prime, Pikmin, Animal Crossing, and Sonic Mega Collection (a disc of twelve old sonic games which are just as fresh as the day I first played them)
Have you folks gotten anything yet?
Dodgeit allows you to create throw-away email addresses (for crappy registration sites), and then delivers the email that comes into the resulting mailbox as an RSS feed that you and everyone else who can guess at your throwaway email addy can read
The recording industry can’t force Internet providers to identify music downloaders, a federal appeals court said Friday in a major decision shielding online privacy while undercutting the industry’s anti-piracy campaign
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