The Recording Industry Association of America’s web site was unreachable over the weekend due to a denial-of-service attack. The apparently deliberate overload rendered the RIAA.org site unavailable for portions of four days and came after the group endorsed legislation to allow copyright holders to disrupt peer-to-peer networks
Australian businesses are well placed for attacking the Asia-Pacific broadband market if they play to their strengths, but are being hindered by the low penetration of Australian broadband. Perhaps it has something to do with Telstra’s continual problems involving broadband applications going missing and substantial delays in connection times
In South Australia’s outback, history has been made with a team from the University of Queensland successfully launching their supersonic air-breathing scramjet engine atop a rocket. Until yesterday morning no organisation, including NASA in the United States, has been able to successfully launch a scramjet — an air-breathing supersonic engine
Like other researchers who’ve backed down for fears of Hollywood reprisals, open-source guru Bruce Perens said he would not include details about how to circumvent DVD player controls in an open-source presentation
Biologists and technologists at the University of California, Berkeley have spent the past four years developing a tiny robot, called the Micromechanical Flying Insect, that they say will one day fly like a fly — via Slashdot
Afraid that Peru may adopt a bill decreeing the use of open-source software in all government systems, Microsoft apparently enlisted the American ambassador in Lima to help try and convince the Peruvians to kill the legislation
Makers of Australian digital-TV set-top boxes have rejected calls for dual-tuner boxes, which give free-to-air and pay-TV networks separate gateways to viewers’ homes
As part of a series of new storage policies aimed at driving more people toward its paid services, Microsoft has instituted a plan to delete sent Hotmail messages that are more than 30 days old. Early last week, it began erasing all messages in subscribers’ Sent file transmitted before 16 June
Owners of PlayStation consoles who modify their machines to play games bought overseas have had a win in the Federal Court. Sony Computer Entertainment has failed in its claim that chipping
breaks copyright laws
IBM and Linux combined represent a threat and inspiration as Microsoft drives into enterprise computing. Computing giant IBM wages war against Microsoft in lucrative corporate accounts while Linux, the low-coast threat to Windows, wins supporters in fertile developer communities
A Houston computer security analyst has been charged with hacking after demonstrating the insecurity of a county courts wireless LAN. Stefan Puffer, 33, was indicted by a Grand Jury with two counts of fraud for allegedly breaking into Harris County district clerk’s wireless computer system. It’s believed to be the first case of its kind in the US
One of the more amusing displays that was on display at Siggraph was a sword-fighting simulator that used a virtual reality headset along with a virtual sword
that had two gyro motors running it that allowed for tactile force feedback — via Slashdot
Arcade in a Box is essentially a PC ready to play MAME, but built into a console with true arcade parts for the buttons and joystick for a more authentic arcade video game experience. It’s not quite as realistic as, say building your own cabinet, but it definitely is a lot less time consuming
Princeton officials entered the Yale Online web site on several occasions and viewed admissions decisions. Princeton officials claim they were simply researching security for their own web site — via Slashdot
Some people are trying to reduce their electronic presence, and discovering that doing so is not as simple as it would seem. Seems these people forgot that they were the idiots that published the data online in the first place
American defence contractors, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, are developing a 100-kilowatt infrared laser weapon for the F35 Joint Strike Fighter that may be powerful enough to blind people on the ground, even if they are relatively far from the target — via Slashdot
The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman is currently evaluating Telstra’s ADSL service level agreement, as customers of the network continue to suffer lengthy outages
SkyTower, a US-based technology company, is planning to launch crewless solar-powered airplanes that would provide entire cities with broadband Internet access and 3G mobile services coming from 70,000 feet above the ground
A flaw in the way annual software usage statistics are compiled may have led to legal distribution of open-source programs being lumped with illegal trafficking in desktop applications, inflating losses to industry through phantom
piracy. The annual software piracy statistics — published by trade groups the US Business Software Alliance and Business Software Association of Australia — are compiled from several sources but none take into account the growing use of open-source desktop applications
It seems as if the JPEG Committee has noticed the recent patent fuss, and is working on the prior art angle. Good to know that even though there’s a new standard, the committee is standing by their previous work. Meanwhile, the ISO standards body will take the unprecedented step of withdrawing the JPEG image format as a formal standard if Forgent Networks, a small Texan company, continues to demand royalties on a seventeen-year old patent — via Slashdot
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