Wikipedia has inadvertently blocked Qatar from editing pages thanks to the technical workings of an automated censor imposed by the sole national high speed ISP. The temporary 12 hour autoban was due to spam-abuse coming from the IP address in question, but the fact that this belongs to the country’s sole high-speed internet provider had the unintended consequence of stopping Qataris from editing the wiki. Wikipedia has since narrowed the ban down to anonymous users from the affected IP, meaning existing accounts from Qatar should now be back online. This raises a number of issues about internet connectivity in small countries and any company allowed to run ISPs in a monopoly situation — via Slashdot
The world’s top spy chiefs — including the heads of the CIA and British, Australian and Canadian agencies — have been meeting in secret in New Zealand — via Monsters and Critics
For the first time the rising ocean levels have washed away an inhabited island. Lohachara island was at one point home to some 10,000 people. It, along with several other spits of land near the Indian mainland, is now permanently underwater. As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities. Eight years ago the first uninhabited islands — in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati — vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented
Around the time that the great pyramids were built in Egypt and Stonehenge was erected in England, a young woman living in what is now Iran lost an eye and was fitted with a prosthetic device. The find supports speculation that such prosthetics were available to a fortunate few in the ancient world. The newly found eye looked like the real thing
The DMCA-like amendments to the New Zealand Copyright Act passed their first hurdle in parliament, with an overwhelming 113 to 6 vote to pass the Bill to the Commerce Select Committee for further discussion. The detail-oriented can read the full debate (or rather lack of debate), and one enterprising New Zealand legal blogger has an excellent series of posts on the Bill, its background, and its implications. New Zealanders interested in fighting this legislation have until the 16th of February 2007 to make submissions to the Select Committee, before the committee makes its recommendations and sends the Bill back for a second reading — via Slashdot
CSIRO has won another small battle in its long fight against the globe’s technology giants over wireless LAN royalty payments. The court cases brought against CSIRO over its 1996 patent have been moved from California to Texas, where the science agency recently won a case on the same issue
Nanotechnology, the use of subatomic materials as microscopic building blocks for thousands of consumer products, has turned into a big business so quickly that few are monitoring its effects on health and the environment. So the government of Berkeley, California, is intending for the city to be the first to step into the breach and try to regulate this industry
When Iranian journalist Mojtaba Saminejad was sentenced to prison for insulting his leader, it was not for a newspaper article. His story was posted on his personal Web blog. Nearly one-third of journalists now serving time in prisons around the world published their work on the Internet, the second-largest category behind print journalists, the Committee to Protect Journalists said in an analysis released Thursday
German Minister of the Interior, Gunther Beckstein, is seeking jail time for violent game developers, publishers, and players. The draft law, a reaction to a school shooting that shook German public opinion last month, will come before the upper house of parliament next year. But it is already sending shockwaves through the 2m-strong German online gaming community
Starting next year, French deputies will use desktops and servers running Linux, Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser, and OpenOffice.org, an open-source alternative to Microsoft Office
A new telescope has been unveiled in Mexico by President Vicente Fox. The Large Millimeter Telescope will be used to pick up electromagnetic radiation known as millimetre waves emitted 13 billion years ago, when the first stars burst into existence, astrophysicists say. The $128M telescope is a joint project between Mexico and the US. With an antenna diameter of 164 feet, the LMT dwarfs existing millimetre-wave telescopes and should be able to pick up signals from the faintest objects in outer space
From 8 December, it will be once more legal to own and operate an MP3 Transmitter in the UK, primarily used to convey music between an MP3 player such as Apple’s iPod to your home or car stereo. The device was originally banned because their transmissions can override and interfere with legal radio stations, which is prohibited by the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949. Strong consumer demand for the devices and pressure from Liberal Democrats were among the primary motivators for the amendment
The Chinese GPS system, Beidou, is apparently to be opened up for free access within China, worrying European investors on the €2.5 billion competing project, Galileo. Initially, China had declared that access to their system would be restricted to the military, and Europe had planned to recoup some of the cost of their system by selling licenses to China. Michael Shaw, from the US government’s National Space-based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Coordination Office in Washington DC, said, Frankly, China’s behavior towards Europe is not so different to how Europe behaved with us when GPS was the only game in town a decade ago
— via Slashdot
A key oversight agency has approved a .asia
domain for Internet addresses, supplementing suffixes available for individual countries, such as .cn
for China and .jp
for Japan. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers earlier approved .eu
for the European Union. Made up of groups that run domain names for China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and other countries, the DotAsia Organisation plans to explore permitting domain names in Asian languages under .asia
Microsoft is making several key changes to its forthcoming Windows Vista operating system in an attempt to soothe European antitrust worries, while keeping its worldwide distribution plans on schedule
The Australian ISP Exetel has decided to cut bandwidth for P2P traffic in half from noon to midnight. This move will save Exetel about $45,000 per month, while it only takes $75,000 to implement the bandwidth throttling mechanisms
In conflict zones, children are often killed by the live leftovers of war — unexploded bombs or landmines can be mistaken as toys. In Singapore, activist and designer Rapp Collins created frisbees that look like landmines, and volunteers are scattering them throughout the city — via Boing Boing
China has partially unblocked Wikipedia. Wikipedia refused to censor itself to appease totalitarian Beijing, but China unblocked it anyway. China needs Wikipedia and Chinese net-users would access it using circumvention tools — the block on Wikipedia made Chinese Wikipedia users into automatic dissidents. Readers in China report having problems getting to the Chinese language version, and English-language articles on certain subjects, such as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 — via Boing Boing
Mark Thomas, the stand-up comedian, has done more to expose illegal arms deals than the Ministry of Defence, the Export Control Organisation and HM Revenue and Customs put together, simply by searching the internet and the trade press and attending the arms fairs the British government hosts — via Defense Tech
Telstra has launched a AU$1 billion NEXT G mobile broadband network, offering high-speed wireless mobile and Internet access to 98 percent of Australians. NEXT G, which boasts 12 channels of Foxtel television, sport and movie downloads, is more than 100 times bigger geographically and up to five times faster than any other 3GSM network in Australia
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