Thirty years ago, a simple message launched a revolution in the history of human communications. That dispatch is now considered the first e-mail, or electronic message, to have been sent from one computer to another through a network. Devised by BBN Technologies scientist Ray Tomlinson, the system for sending e-mail was initially a demonstration of what ARPAnet — the Internet’s precursor — could do
iPrimus, is scrapping its unlimited DSL plan and has given users a month’s notice to find an alternative service
Disgruntled Dingo Blue customers are threatening to swap providers unless service levels are returned to what they were before last week’s redeployment of dial ports caused major congestion
Australia’s love affair with mobile phones looks set to pay environmental dividends following the launch of a mobile handset recycling scheme. Established by Planet Ark in conjunction with major mobile phone retail outlets, the scheme aims to recycle 500,000 handsets in the next 12 months
Toshiba is bringing its low-temperature polysilicon display technology to notebooks in hopes of eventually lowering their price. Such technology is already used in smaller devices, including some handheld computers and mobile phones, and offers higher quality images using fewer components — 40 percent less, according to Toshiba — than its counterpart called amorphous silicon
The pending liquidation of Excite@Home has AT&T offering to pick up some assets — to creditors’ dismay — but a buyer for the Excite portal could be harder to come by
SETI@home, the peer-to-peer computing project that ties together millions of computers to examine radio waves coming from space, has 3 million users — and thousands of new people sign up to crunch data each day — making the entire SETI@home network more powerful than the biggest of supercomputers. So powerful, indeed, that there is the possibility of running out of data to process. To solve this problem, SETI@home is installing a Linux-based, super-fast digital data recorder that was donated by Hewlett-Packard. According to the company, the new machine can record data 10 times faster than the previous recorder
How to build your own supercomputer: Take a few off-the-shelf, stripped-down PCs, add some network switches, a maze of Ethernet cabling and some home-grown Linux software, and you’ll be well on your way. Hewlett-Packard, together with a national laboratory in France, tried this recipe out. To the great surprise of many scientists, it worked. What they ended up with is the I-Cluster, a Mandrake Linux-powered cluster of 225 simplified PCs from HP that has benchmarked its way into the list of the top 500 most powerful computers in the world
Optus has admitted that it has lost some e-mails belonging to several thousand of its dial-up Internet subscribers following a system glitch over the long weekend and for the second time in seven days, Telstra BigPond Mail customers with user names beginning with the letters P and F are being affected by a technical glitch which is leading to delays in receiving e-mail
Internet filters designed to keep pornography away from children were banned at San Francisco city libraries despite a federal law mandating them
AdKey’s software allows web sites to lock out users who use apps that block banners and pop-up ads
Motorola researchers have successfully demonstrated a methane gas-powered fuel cell, which can provide enough juice between chargings for a month of mobile phone calls
A new and controversial proposal under consideration by the World Wide Web Consortium could open the way for companies to claim patent rights — and demand royalties — on standards authorised by that body
A US court shut down thousands of web sites after it determined that they diverted web surfers and held them captive while bombarding them with ads for pornography and gambling
The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a massive technological change, converting to mass-producing chips with copper, rather than aluminium, wires. The weird part: Almost no one seems to be having major problems. Copper, which conducts electricity better than aluminium, gives designers an avenue to break through looming physical barriers that could prevent further boosts in chip performance
The Australian government has been criticised for using the fear generated by the 11 September terrorist attacks on the US to push through the controversial Cybercrime Bill Thursday night. The bill allows police to intercept Australians’ telephone, Internet and e-mail communication encourages lazy policing
and corruption
An audit of ten Australian Federal Government web sites has found most contained serious security holes and were at risk from hackers. While Bug hunter, Rain Forest Puppy, crafts a full disclosure policy to nudge vendors to acknowledge and fix security holes in software products, or be expose
Optus dial-up internet users could lose access to some overseas web sites and e-mail after network administrators voted to blacklist Optus for refusing to crack down on an alleged spam gang. Optus has made the SPEWS.org list, described by insiders as the nuclear weapon
of the anti-spam lobby, for allegedly housing a known spammer on its dial-up network
CSIRO has been developing methods to compare search engine performance so users can choose the best engine for their needs. Dr David Hawking of CSIRO’s Electronic Content Technologies group says that search engine performance varies according to the task
A new breed of security tool powered by Artificial Intelligence has been implemented by a major Australian telco and has sparked interest from the Defence Force and the country’s big four banks in the wake of the recent wave of debilitating virus attacks
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