The Library of Congress is to archive every single public tweet ever made. Twitter says since they started in 2006, billions of tweets have been created and 55m are sent every day. The digital archive will include tweets from President Barack Obama on the day he was elected as well as the first tweet from co-founder Jack Dorsey
A cyber attack earlier today left Optus’s business customers with limited internet access to the US and wreaked havoc on corporate email systems. An Optus spokeswoman confirmed that a denial-of-service attack on one of the carrier’s business customers swamped the link, slowing internet traffic to a trickle
Child pornographers can be captured and prosecuted without having to resort to mandatory internet filters, says Barack Obama confidante and US Ambassador to Australia Jeff Bleich. The Rudd government has said the mandatory filters are crucial in its arsenal of online weapons aimed at stamping out child pornography and other forms of illegal material
Internet Industry Association (IIA) chief executive officer Peter Coroneos has said he plans to ask his members to sign a declaration calling for more transparency in the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) talks being held this week in Wellington, New Zealand. Unfortunately, The US Trade Representative issued a release just prior to the launch of the New Zealand round of ACTA negotiations that has left no doubt that the US is the biggest barrier to official release of the ACTA text. The full text of the release is couched in terms of improving transparency, but is really a thinly-veiled shot at the European Union’s public demands for release of the text
MI5 is ditching staff who lack computer skills in a programme of compulsory and voluntary redundancies. The Intelligence and Security Committee said the service had been reviewing its staff profile and one area of concern was the level of IT skills. MI5 director general Jonathan Evans told the committee: I think some of the staff perhaps aren’t quite the ones that we will want for the future.
It also said MI5 faced cuts because of the state of the public finances
For the second time in two weeks, bad networking information spreading from China has disrupted the Internet. On Thursday morning, bad routing data from a small Chinese ISP called IDC China Telecommunication was re-transmitted by China’s state-owned China Telecommunications, and then spread around the Internet, affecting Internet service providers such as AT&T, Level3, Deutsche Telekom, Qwest Communications and Telefonica
When Exit International wanted to ensure its members could access its pro-euthanasia material, set to be blocked under the government’s proposed Internet content filter, it turned to the Pirate Party of Australia. The Pirate Party hates the Internet filter and readily put Exit International in contact with member David Campbell, from Newcastle IT shop ClearComputers. The brief? To teach 70-year olds to bypass the Internet filter. Campbell accepted the challenge, and proved breaking the filter is not just child’s play. Your grandma can do it too
For $5000 you could buy a round the world air ticket — maybe even two — a Prada handbag, or a dozen Apple iPads. Or you could buy 1GB of mobile data on TPG’s $49.99 Super Cap plan when you go over the 500MB per month cap
Google should not expect to be beyond international criticism while it offers the US Government access to its data on request but lambasts other governments for interfering with the rights of online users
Delegates to the University of Hertfordshire’s Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture
conference to be held on 16-17 April will have their food served to them out of coffins as part of a mission to encourage students of all ages to study literature. English lecturer Sam George, who has just launched a Master of Arts degree in vampire fiction at Hertfordshire, said the most famous vampire narrative of all, Dracula, was written by Irishman Bram Stoker and set in London and Whitby in Yorkshire, but that now with the Twilight
saga and True Blood
, modern vampires have become Americanised
A new species of giant lizard has been discovered in the Philippines. The 2m-long reptile is a monitor lizard, the group to which the world’s longest and largest lizards belong. The monitor, described as spectacular by the scientists who found it, lives in forests covering the Sierra Madre mountains in the north of the country. The striking reptile has bright yellow, blue and green skin, and survives on a diet of just fruit, yet until now it has escaped the eyes of biologists
A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that regulators had limited power over Web traffic under current law. The decision will allow Internet service companies to block or slow specific sites and charge video sites like YouTube to deliver their content faster to users. The court decision was a setback to efforts by the Federal Communications Commission to require companies to give Web users equal access to all content, even if some of that content is clogging the network
Memory sticks and CDs containing the personal details of 9,000 school children have been stolen from a house in north London. The devices storing names, addresses and dates of birth of pupils in Barnet were taken during in a break-in at a council employee’s home two weeks ago
A police investigation into the theft of £10,000 of watches has been scuppered after DNA evidence was found to belong to identical twins. Blood containing DNA matching that of James and John Parr, 25, was found on glass at the scene. However, the Crime Prosecution Service (CPS) has decided not to press charges against the Manchester twins — who both deny responsibility — as it would be impossible to determine if one or the other of them was responsible
When the science writer Simon Singh sat down to write an opinion piece on chiropractors two years ago, he could have had little inkling of the nightmare that lay ahead. Yesterday, after a court of appeal ruling hailed as a resounding victory
for Singh, he has been spared having to stand up in court and prove that the comments that sparked a libel suit from the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) were factually correct — an experience that the three appeal judges compared to an Orwellian ministry of truth
. The landmark ruling will allow the writer, whose battle has become a catalyst for demands for libel law reform, to rely on a fair comment
defence of his statements about chiropractors. It will also strengthen the position of others — from science writers and medical professionals to bloggers — who face libel suits, as the judges made clear the court was not the place to settle scientific controversies
An elaborate scheme to get the husband of a co-worker he was obsessed with locked up in jail, backfired on Ilkka Karttunen, a 48-year from Essex. His plan was to get the husband arrested so that he could have a go at a relationship with the woman, and to do this he broke into the couple’s home while they were sleeping, used their family computer to download child pornography and then removed the hard drive and mailed it anonymously to the police, along with a note that identified the owner
The European Space Agency is moving forward with a plan to land an autonomous spacecraft on the moon by 2017, with the idea a manned vehicle could land there sometime in the future. It’s a mission NASA had on its roadmap before the current budget debate, but such plans seem doomed now
Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honour that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1.00am (Central Daylight Time) 1 April, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka
A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W Bush
realestate.com.au has confirmed its subscriber database was illegally accessed and the matter had been referred to Victoria Police. The popular real estate web site admitted that its mailing list had been used by a third party, which asked people for money to arrange property inspections. The fraudulent email directed consumers to respond directly to a Gmail address, instead of using the agent enquiry tool on realestate.com.au
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