One of the world’s biggest collections of historic books, pamphlets and periodicals is to be made available on the internet for the first ailable on the internet for the first time.
The British Library has reached a deal with search engine Google about texts dating back to the 18th Century.
It will allow readers to view, search and copy the out-of-copyright works at no charge. Google will also make the books available on its site — via redwolf.newsvine.com
African governments are turning to more sophisticated techniques to block internet sites and bloggers who they perceive to be a threat.
That is the conclusion of The Committee for the Protection of Journalists, who together with the internet giant Google SA, have gathered African journalists together in Johannesburg’s financial hub Sandton to take stock in the wake of the North African uprising — via redwolf.newsvine.com
It took Ben Hosken 1½ days to create an application about Sydney Buses that people wanted to use. It took the government two weeks to close it down — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A new study tries to sharpen our understanding of the highly verbal parasites known as trolls. Trolls – call them internet trolls, if you like – are in some ways quite similar to Plasmodium falciparum, a protozoan parasite that causes malaria in large numbers of human beings. Both kinds of parasite are maddeningly difficult to suppress. They manage, again and again, to return after we thought we’d seen the last of them. Each can, if left untreated, cause agony or worse.
These trolls infect any place where people gather electronically to converse by writing comments to each other. Trolls creep into and crop up anywhere they can, wheedling for attention in chat rooms, Twitter streams, blogs, and, as you may have noticed, in the comments section of online news articles
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
The announcement from the HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) says that it will utilise web robot
software to search the internet and find targeted information about specified people and companies. HMRC also says that by using the software it can more accurately pinpoint people who have failed to pay the right tax.
But it seems that the government software will also be used to locate people who are trading without informing HMRC — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Five dollars for control over 1,000 compromised email accounts. Eight dollars for a distributed denial-of-service attack that takes down a website for an hour. And just a buck to solve 1,000 captchas.
Those are the going rates of cybercrime, the amounts criminals pay other criminals for the technical services necessary to launch attacks. It’s the kind of IT outsourcing no legitimate company would ever conduct, but it’s a profitable business if done effectively.
This criminal underground was detailed Wednesday in a highly entertaining talk given by researcher Stefan Savage at the annual Usenix technical conference in Portland, Ore. Outrageous examples of outsourced cybercrime drew laughter from the audience, but Savage also presented an empirical approach to researching computer crime and devising the most effective – meaning the most financially feasible – methods of stopping it — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A new printing method makes it possible to produce large sheets of metamaterials, a new class of materials designed to interact with light in ways no natural materials can. For several years, researchers working on these materials have promised invisibility cloaks, ultrahigh-resolution “superlenses,” and other exotic optical devices straight from the pages of science fiction. But the materials were confined to small lab demonstrations because there was no way to make them in large enough quantities to demonstrate a practical device — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Airbus unveils its vision for air travel in 2050, complete with a transparent plane, auto-morphing seats, and virtual golf — via drich13.newsvine.com
Security software maker Kaspersky Lab has told its Australian call centre provider that its services are no longer needed — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A safety device that projects a bright green laser image of a bike on to the road ahead — alerting motorists to its presence — could be a life saver.
Developed by Emily Brooke, a student at the University of Brighton in England, the invention has won her a place at Babson College in Massachusetts in the US, on an entrepreneurship programme, the university said.
Her innovation, BLAZE, is a small, battery-powered device that is attached to the handlebars of bicycles, motorcycles or scooters, and projects a laser image on to the road ahead — via redwolf.newsvine.com
For years now Chinese authorities have been installing spying devices on all dual-plate Chinese-Hong Kong vehicles, enabling a vast network of eavesdropping across the archipelago, according to a Hong Kong newspaper.
The report in Apple Daily states that the recording devices began being installed as inspection and quarantine cards
in July 2007. They were installed without charge by the Shenzhen Inspection and Quarantine Bureau on thousands of vehicles — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In a decision with likely wide-ranging impact, a judge in Las Vegas today dismissed as a sham an infringement case filed by copyright troll Righthaven LLC. The judge ruled that Righthaven did not have the legal authorization to bring a copyright lawsuit against the political forum Democratic Underground, because it had never owned the copyright in the first place. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Fenwick & West LLP, and Las Vegas attorney Chad Bowers are defending Democratic Underground — via redwolf.newsvine.com
As rumored, GPS device company Garmin has bought its European competitor Navigon AG. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but previous reports have indicated that the company was acquired for roughly $72 million. Navigon will operate as a subsidiary of Garmin — via redwolf.newsvine.com
It appears as if PayPal global president Scott Thompson has landed in Australia briefly. We’re not sure why he’s here, at this point, but he did stop in for a brief interview with Business Spectator supremo Alan Kohler as a guest on Kohler’s Inside Business slot on the ABC. Perhaps the most interesting part of the interview is Thompson’s statement that PayPal could become a viable option for customers to pay for items at normal retail store checkouts — instead of just online:
Well one of the big trends that’s happening in Australia and around the world is all those devices in retail stores are actually now being connected to networks, and we view that as a massive opportunity for PayPal because now we can be a tender type, an option for payment at point of sale because that device is essentially a computer when it’s connected to a network
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
There is no logical reason for anyone — let alone an efficiency-minded, business-focused, cost-benefit-analyzing IT manager — to build, buy or use computer hardware tarted up with brash, shiny wood, aluminum, scrollwork, gearwork and all the other tropes of steampunk that should combine into absolutely hideous aesthetics but, in the right hands, don’t.
There is no defensible reason to pay between $1,100 and $1,500 for a custom-made keyboard. There’s not even a good work-related reason to look at the images here, let alone go see artist Datamancer’s other work, except that they are beautiful — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Earlier this year Google launched a piracy blacklist and began filtering keywords from its Instant and Autocomplete services. A necessary measure to counter online copyright infringement according to the search giant, but not everyone agrees. To partially undo Google’s censorship efforts, the MAFIAA Fire
team has now released the Gee! No evil!
Firefox add-on.
When Homeland Security’s ICE unit started seizing domain names last year, a group called MAFIAA Fire
decided to code a browser add-on to redirect the affected websites to their new domains.
A perfect illustration of John Gilmore’s famous quote: The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Creating an email alias for a group of contacts isn’t usually considered quick or easy, but Fiesta makes it a two-minute process. There’s no signup required, and setting up a group email is as simple as sending a message to every contact you want in the group, and adding your desired group address in the CC field (like lifehacks@fiesta.cc). Fiesta then sends a message confirming the list name and informing everyone in the list that they’ve been successfully added. Easy as that, every contact on the list can now communicate with every other member by using a single email address — via Lifehacker
Can you feel that weird sensation in the pit of your stomach? That’s future shock. We’ve toiled 15 years through the Web era, building up tool after tool after tool to make it easier for people to connect, communicate, share, trade, and coordinate. We have systematically removed every bit of friction our culture has ever had that prevents people from coming together — to whatever end. So now they do. Some create the nearly endless factuality of Wikipedia, others want to pop some pills and watch the pretty colours.
Government — every government, everywhere in the world — is in roughly the same position the recording industry occupied in early 1999, just as Shawn Fanning unleashed Napster and changed media distribution forever. Now it’s power that’s being shared — power that states have held onto zealously, power which increasingly slips through their fingers, because it has become a slippery, digital quantity, and governments are fundamentally unprepared for this. Just as the record companies were unprepared for filesharing — via redwolf.newsvine.com
There are three quick steps to angering a federal judge: first, launch the country’s largest file-sharing lawsuit against 23,322 anonymous defendants, even though most of them don’t live where you filed the suit. Second, request expedited discovery
in the case, allowing you to quickly secure the subpoenas necessary to go to Internet access providers and turn those 23,322 IP addresses into real names. Third, don’t even bother to serve the subpoenas you just told the court were so essential to your case.
Federal Judge Robert Wilkins of Washington, DC this week blasted the conduct of Dunlap, Grubb, and Weaver, the attorneys behind the lawsuit, calling it inexcusable
. Dunlap, Grubb, and Weaver helped kickstart the current frenzy of P2P lawsuits last year after filing cases under the name US Copyright Group
. The 23,322-person case, their largest to date, involves the film The Expendables — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Japanese inventors have devised a gadget to make you prick up your ears — electronic cat’s ears.
Strap on the furry headgear, and its ears are programmed to move in ways that reflect the user’s inner mood — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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