Since the dawn of the information age, computer security commandos have battled the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: child pornographers, drug lords, mafiosi, and terrorists. A noble struggle, to be sure, but mostly vapourware. The Feds have a massive, multi-agency plan to protect the national information infrastructure. Get ready for IT police and network smart bombs. Because of the inroads the Internet and other digital network technologies have made into everyday life over the last decade, it is increasingly possible to amass Big Brother-like surveillance powers through Little Brother means. The basic components include everyday digital technologies like e-mail, online shopping and travel booking, ATM systems, mobile phone networks, electronic toll-collection systems and credit-card payment terminals
The Japanese Government is funding the development of diamond-based semiconductors to replace silicon chips. The main advantages of diamond include heat resistance and higher electrical resistance — via Slashdot
The Chinese Government has ordered the closure of more than 3,300 Internet cafés for safety reasons after a fire destroyed an underground cafe in Beijing in June this year
In an attempt to out do Clark Griswold, Alek installed 22,000 Xmas lights on the outside of his house alone. A webcam that allows you to turn the lights on and off and see the results of your handiwork. It only works between 6pm and 10pm MST and I can’t imagine the neighbours are happy — via Slashdot
A Japanese manufacturer has come up with a spherical PC [translation], it comes in silver or an attractive shade of lime. PCs are enough trouble without having to worry about them accidentally rolling off your desk
A consortium of three universities and four Japanese companies is investing $25M into a project, that is supposed to deliver a 1.5TB DVD by 2010. Multiple layers being used for storage and, more importantly, they claim it will be backwards compatible to existing DVD technology
New Jersey has just enacted legislation that would require all handguns to be able to recognise their owners and only fire when their owners grip them. Gun manufacturers will be required to implement this within three years of the New Jersey Attorney General’s approval of an acceptable, commercially available model — via Slashdot
Google has quietly launched an Australian site, google.com.au. Most Australian internet users typing in the google.com address will be re-directed to the local site, which allows them to restrict searches to Australian web sites
Industry sources say that Microsoft have Macromedia in their sights. Whilst it could just be holiday gossip, if they do pull it off it could have a significant impact on the cross-browser compatibility of Flash applications — via Slashdot
The University of Alberta‘s undergraduate computing science student group modded the office shredder — with duct tape, 110v case fans and an Athlon fan — to increase the speed of the paper shredder from 12 to 37 pages shredded before overheating — via Slashdot
The US Copyright Office asked for public comment on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and it got it. Critics worry about everything from losing great art to restricting blind people’s access to information
Data recorders in aeroplanes, the so-called black boxes, describe what went wrong after a disaster. Now, medical devices are emerging to act like a black box in the human body, except they’re being used to prevent disaster
Yahoo is planning to acquire search engine specialist Inktomi in a deal worth $235 million as it aims to strengthen its search services
British mobile phone maker Sendo filed a suit in a US federal court against its former partner Microsoft, accusing it of stealing its technology and customers
While the volume of e-mail has kept growing, the tools most people use for mail have barely evolved in the past two years
Forbes just put out a list of 85 breakthroughs since 1917 (sneakers) that have revolutionised the way we live. This is interesting on a number of levels, a reminder of the past (modem: 1962), and a frightening realisation that not much of interest has come out of the last 10 years (only 4 of the 85 ideas) — via Slashdot
The South Australian control team in charge of a new satellite hopes experiments to be conducted on the FedSat will pave the way for new mobile phone technology
Slaughter, and then worse, came to Butare, a sleepy, sun-bleached Rwandan town, in the spring of 1994. Hutu death squads armed with machetes and nail-studded clubs had deployed throughout the countryside, killing, looting and burning
Barry Shein is president of The World, a small ISP in Boston. Founded in 1989, The World was the first dial-up Internet service provider in the world. It has survived competition from the telecoms and weathered the dot-com meltdown, but Shein is worried that it won’t survive spam
The multinational creation, KaZaA, has become the most popular online file-swapping system in the world that a coalition of entertainment companies has filed suit to shut it down
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