Under the new US Order, the saving and planting of seeds will be illegal and market will only offer plant material produced by transactional agribusiness corporations
The Norwegian government has decided to kill five of the country’s wolves — a quarter of the entire population. The Norwegian Directorate for Nature has granted licences to hundreds of farmers to kill the wolves as a measure to prevent the loss of domestic livestock, primarily sheep. Three of the wolves have already been shot
The German national library, Deutsche Bibliothek, has received a copyright exemption that allows it to crack the DRM on the media in its collection, after it became obvious that copy protections would not only annoy teenage school boys, but also prohibit the library from fulling its legal mandate to collect, process and bibliographic index important German and German-language based works
. This is fantastic news — and it should be a lesson to libraries, schools, institutions that serve the disabled, archivists, and others that they needt o fight for their own exemptions. We need to riddle the ban on circumventing DRM with so many little holes that it simply deflates upon itself — via BoingBoing
The bastards at Hewlett-Packard have region coded inkjet printers to only accept region appropriate ink cartridges. Like a $56 Bic pen, restricting use to a single country and then saying you are not trying to make money on it. They aren’t the only one’s, Apple are also dumbing down standards for the local US market making the computers useless outside of the country — via BoingBoing
India’s state-run telecom giants launched what they described as one of the world’s cheapest broadband services. Which just goes to prove that privatisation never works
The attorney general of Texas has sued two men — one of them a 22-year-old University of Texas student — accused of running one of the world’s largest spam operations
The United States has quietly acknowledged that it had stopped searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — one of its key reasons for invading the country
Australian journalists who witnessed a confrontation between Indonesian soldiers and alleged separatists in tsunami-ravaged Sumatra yesterday were ordered to leave the area and warned not to report on the incident
Britain has unveiled a proposal for the world’s wealthiest nations to immediately freeze US$3b in annual debt repayments from countries hit by the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster
There is a shift in attitude by consumers and major companies towards micropayments [BugMeNot], fueled by continuing advances in information technology and a relentless search for new consumers, the trend is likely to continue
The huge construction dome of the now bankrupt zeppelin maker CargoLifter, has been turned into an indoor tropical island. For about €20 a day you can swim in the sea, take a walk in the rain forest or go to a beach party. While it is snowing outside, it’s a always a pleasant 25°C on the island. And there are no tsunamis. It’s bigger than Biosphere2 (it fits the Eiffel Tower) but there’s less sunlight. Would you spend your vacation in there? The Germans don’t seem to be very eager
Federal officials are developing government-wide identification card standards for federal employees and contractors to prevent terrorists, criminals and other unauthorized people from getting into government buildings and computer systems. The project is known as the Personal Identity Verification Project, and is being managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology
Russia has announced that it will no longer ferry US astronauts to space for free as it has been doing for two years. From 2006 the US will be expected to pay
An all IPv6 backbone was launched this weekend in China. CERNET2 is the biggest next-generation Internet network in operation in the world and connects 25 universities in 20 cities. The speed in the backbone network reaches 2.5 to 10 gigabits per second and connects the universities at a speed of 1 to 10 gigabits per second
Hundreds of thousands of secret Whitehall files are being shredded before the public gains the right to see them under the Freedom of Information Act on 1 January. Figures obtained by The Independent show a dramatic escalation in the destruction of confidential papers before the new rights of access come into force. Whitehall departments, including the Department of Trade and Industry, have almost doubled the number of files they have destroyed since the Freedom of Information Act became law
A European court on Wednesday dealt a blow to Microsoft, ordering the company to start offering a version of Windows without a bundled-in media player. Bo Vesterdorf, president of the European Court of First Instance, said that Microsoft must comply with penalties imposed by the European Commission in March even as the company’s appeal wends its way through the system
A US civil liberties group has obtained documents detailing fresh claims of abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and claims the White House authorised the use of inhumane interrogation techniques
Bank robbers in Northern Ireland have stolen at least £20m in what could be Britain’s biggest ever bank heist
The retarded monkey boy is drawing up plans to disable sections of the GPS network in the event of a terrorist attack, it seems the retarded monkey boy is of the opinion that terrorists don’t use maps and street directories. The rationale seems to be that it would prevent said terrorists from using the GPS system to direct some sort of attack. The plan would shut down access not only to the GPS satellite network, but projects like the EU’s Galileo. Ironically, this comes alongside the President’s plan to strengthen the GPS network against deliberate jamming
Fed up with paying some €100,000 a year to cut the grass on its out-of-town roads with tractor-mowers, the local government of Treviso, near Venice, bought six donkeys to do the work instead
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