Graphene, the strongest material on Earth, could help boost broadband internet speed, say UK researchers.
Scientists from Manchester and Cambridge universities, have found a way to improve its sensitivity when used in optical communications systems.
Their discovery paves the way for faster electronic components, such as the receivers used in fibre optic data connections.
Graphene was discovered in 2004 and has been hailed as a wonder material
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Leaked documents from the US Embassy in Canberra reveal that Hollywood studios chose to go after third-largest internet provider iiNet, rather than Telstra, in a hard-fought online copyright case set to be heard for a third time by the High Court in Sydney.
The group of 34 companies, including Village Roadshow and the Seven Network, has this month been granted special leave to appeal a full bench Federal Court decision in February upholding Justice Dennis Cowdroy’s landmark 2010 ruling that Perth-based ISP iiNet had not authorised its customers to infringe copyright online.
WikiLeaks‘ latest release of cables includes one dated November 30, 2008 — just 10 days after the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) filed legal action claiming iiNet had infringed copyright by not taking reasonable steps to prevent unauthorised use of films and TV programs by its customers.
And the cable, from US Ambassador Robert McCallum, shows the studios wanted to avoid a stoush with the big guns
Telstra BigPond, which holds about half of the local market — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In the eyes of many gamers, Portal publisher Valve can do no wrong and their latest comments aren’t likely to hurt their image.
Speaking with Kotaku, Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell has slammed aggressive DRM and dismissed piracy as a non-issue.
We’re a broken record on this,
Newell told Kotaku.
This belief that you increase your monetisation by making your game worth less through aggressive digital rights management is totally backwards.
It’s a service issue, not a technology issue. Piracy is just not an issue for us
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Google Plus’s controversial identity policy requires all users to use their real names
. Commentators have pointed to problems with this, including the implausibility of Google being able to determine correctly which names are real and which ones are fake. Other problems include the absurdity of Google’s demand for scans of government ID to accomplish this task and the fractal implausibility of Google being able to discern real from fake in all forms of government ID.
Google argues that people behave better when they use their real names. Google also states it is offering an identity service, not a social network, and therefore needs to know who you are and, thirdly, that no one is forcing you to use Google Plus.
However valid the first two points may be, they are eclipsed by the monumental intellectual dishonesty of that last one — no one’s holding a gun to your head, so shut up if you don’t like it — via redwolf.newsvine.com
To-do apps are notorious for being difficult to navigate and more time-consuming to use and manage than the tasks you may be trying to track. FolderBoy takes a different approach to helping you organise your projects, using folders to organise categories or projects and tasks that can live in multiple categories.
It isn’t like Apple cuts corners when it comes to design. But that’s never kept us from setting our own desktop backgrounds or installing skins for our favourite apps. Customising the Dock might not be quite as simple, but that shouldn’t stop you from giving a personal touch to one of the best aspects of the OS X interface — via Mac|Life
Scientists working at the Institute of Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers (IUSL), which is part of the City College of New York (CUNY), have discovered a new way of mapping spiralling light that could allow telecommunications operators the ability to harness untapped data channels
” within fibre optic broadband ISP cables — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A federal judge in California has dismissed a pair of cases that were filed last year against Microsoft and Yahoo by a bulk emailing firm that argued the companies violated antitrust laws when their spam filters blocked its emails.
Microsoft’s SmartScreen spam filter technology started to block messages from the company, Holomaxx, after the Redmond company found their contents to be harassing
and otherwise objectionable
, according to court papers — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Hackerspaces are the digital-age equivalent of English Enlightenment coffee houses. They are places open to all, indifferent to social status, and where ideas and knowledge hold primary value. In 17th-century England, the social equality and merit-ocracy of coffee houses was so deeply troubling to those in power that King Charles II tried to suppress them for being “places where the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers”. It was in the coffee houses that information previously held in secret and by elites was shared with an emerging middle class. They were held responsible for many of the social reforms of the 18th century, when English public life was transformed.
Hackerspaces could prove to be as important for reform in the digital age. While collectives of rogue hackers such as Anonymous and Lulzsec have grabbed headlines with their mischievous hacks of personal information from Sony, News International and governments, hackerspaces have quietly focused on creating alternatives to the things they see wrong in society: secretive government, unfettered corporate power, invasion of privacy. Bradley Manning, the US Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking files to WikiLeaks, attended the launch of BUILDS, a hackerspace at Boston University last year. In Sweden the hacker collective Telecomix has been involved in keeping lines of communication open in middle eastern countries when political leaders shut down networks — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Apple said on Wednesday that Steve Jobs, its co-founder and chief executive, would step down. Tim Cook, the chief operating officer, will take over the position.
In a letter sent to Apple’s board of directors and the Apple community
, Mr Jobs said he would like to remain as chairman of the board and an Apple employee, if the board sees fit. I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know,
Mr Jobs wrote. Unfortunately, that day has come
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Facebook and Twitter are preparing to stand firm against government ministers’ calls to ban people from social networks or shut their websites down in times of civil unrest.
The major social networks are expected to offer no concessions when they meet the home secretary, Theresa May, at a Home Office summit on Thursday lunchtime.
Ministers are expected to row back on David Cameron’s call for suspected rioters to be banned from social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, following the riots and looting across England a fortnight ago — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Mitch Winehouse has been forced to return fans’ donations to the posthumous Amy Winehouse Foundation, explaining that a dick head
beat them to registering the organisation’s name. While their solicitors wrangle with the nomenclatural opportunist, Mitch has apparently put the foundation on hold.
Somebody else pinched [the name] off of us before we could get it registered,
Mitch told BBC Newsbeat last week. All these donations which are coming in — we don’t know what to do with them at the moment.
He has since decided to send the donations back — we haven’t got [a] bank ac in that name
, he wrote on Twitter. It takes time
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Solid-state data centres are moving closer with the release of Pure Storage’s FlashArray FA-300 Series. Pure says its FlashArray is the first true
all-flash enterprise array and costs less than disk-centric arrays. An analyst said Pure Storage’s FlashArray FA-300 Series is differentiated from its competitors by enterprise-like features
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Last month we reported on a threat made by AFACT to Australian ISP’s — talk to us on a graduated response
, OR ELSE. Since no-one apparently took the offer up, the or else
has appeared, in the form of the Australian Attorney General.
The Australian has confirmed that Attorney-General Robert McClelland will be holding a meeting with copyright advocacy groups next month and has invited some ISPs to take part. The meeting will reportedly be to negotiate more copyright protection
laws.
A letter, obtained by The Australian, has stated that the meeting will allow stakeholder (read: Copyright Industry) views to be pitched to the government, as advice
. While ISP’s have been invited, no invitations have apparently been sent to groups looking out for the public interest — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The hack of a commercially available insulin pump that diabetics can control wirelessly has attracted the attention of US lawmakers who oversee the safety of the nation’s airwaves.
In a letter drafted earlier this week, US Representatives Anna Eshoo and Edward Markey asked members of the Government Accountability Office to ensure that wireless-enabled medical devices will not cause harmful interference to other equipment
and are safe, reliable, and secure
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
This week, I talked with Dan Russell, a search anthropologist at Google, about the time he spends with random people studying how they search for stuff. One statistic blew my mind. 90 percent of people in their studies don’t know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page! I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don’t use it at all.
90 percent of the US Internet population does not know that. This is on a sample size of thousands,
Russell said. I do these field studies and I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve sat in somebody’s house as they’ve read through a long document trying to find the result they’re looking for. At the end I’ll say to them, ‘Let me show one little trick here,’ and very often people will say, ‘I can’t believe I’ve been wasting my life!’
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
US computer giant IBM has announced that it has developed prototypes of computer chips that mimic the way the human brain works.
The New York-based company known as Big Blue said on Thursday the experimental cognitive computing chips
could eventually lead to machines that emulate the brain’s abilities for perception, action and cognition
.
These chips are another significant step in the evolution of computers from calculators to learning systems, signalling the beginning of a new generation of computers,
said Dharmendra Modha, project leader for IBM Research.
Future applications of computing will increasingly demand functionality that is not efficiently delivered by the traditional architecture,
Mr Modha said.
Why pay Apple $69.99 when you can build your own Lion install drive for the App Store purchase price of $29.99 — plus the cost of an inexpensive thumb drive. Here’s how to create a full install on a drive, not just the recovery disk that we recently posted about — via TUAW
Lion’s recovery partition is a wonderful idea, but doesn’t really help out if your hard drive fails. That’s why yesterday’s announcement of the Recovery Disk Assistant from Apple was welcome news to a lot of people who were trying to figure out how they could easily create a recovery disk on external media. Here’s how you can do make your own recovery disk using the assistant — via TUAW
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