Fred Jerome of the Gene Media Forum has recently written a book called The Einstein File: J Edgar Hoover’s Secret War Against the World’s Most Famous Scientist
. The book talks about how the FBI spied on Einstein and identifies some of the people who said he was a spy. Jerome sued the government to obtain access to the 1,427 page file — via Slashdot
A possible challenge to the ban on Baise-Moi is being planned by the manager of Melbourne’s Lumiere cinema, which is now the only cinema showing the controversial French film in Australia
The company RealNames, which tried to make a buck off of the domain name gold rush by adding their own layer on top of the ICANN system, is going out of business. To review, the RealNames system is a browser plugin which redirects a user who types cookies
in the IE address bar to Nabisco.com. The reason for the closure appears to be the decision by Microsoft to not renew their agreement with RealNames which expires in June — via Slashdot
NASA needs parts no one makes any more. So to keep the shuttles flying, the space agency has begun trolling the Internet — including Yahoo and eBay — to find replacement parts for electronic gear that would strike a home computer user as primitive. Officials say the agency recently bought a load of outdated medical equipment so it could scavenge Intel 8086 chips — a variant of those chips powered IBM’s first personal computer, in 1981
Friends of the Earth is calling for better testing of chemicals in products used by consumers, without using animals. It says the chemical industry promotes the use of unnecessary tests on laboratory animals, while attacking new standards for chemical products. The environmental group refers to the industry’s criticism of new safety suggestions in the interests of animal welfare as hypocritical
Guinness has recognised a NASA invention as the world’s lightest solid. The material is nicknamed solid smoke
because of its cloudy appearance and super-light weight. It weighs only three milligrams per cubic centimetre and is 99.8% air
European functionaries recently commissioned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas to create a new logo for the EU. To capture the diversity and unity of Europe in a single image, Koolhaas put all the colours of the national flags of the EU’s constituent states on a single flag of many vertical stripes. While perhaps laudable in theory, however, the resulting bar code
design invites parody
Lawrence Wollersheim, a former Scientologist, who received US$8.7 million from the church this week 22 years after first suing it for mental abuse hailed the settlement on Saturday as a victory that could unleash a flurry of similar lawsuits
Mash-ups are songs created by digitally synchronising instrumental tracks with vocal tracks from two or more existing songs. Often the source songs are wildly disparate, and the result is frequently better sounding than you might first expect
Microsoft could have to make radical changes to meet European regulatory concerns, changes that go well beyond what is being demanded of it in the US
The ACCC has called for a review of the Trade Practices Act to consider jail terms for executives found guilty of collusion
The British Board of Film Classification has demanded a cut in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones for a head-butt. The one second cut means the difference between a 12
and a PG
certificate
A Los Angeles radio station is planning to auction off a Russian Buran space shuttle and the minimum asking price is $6 million
Microsoft was convicted of software piracy by a French court last year. The company was fined three million francs in damages and interest for violation of intellectual property because of the illegal inclusion of another company’s proprietary source code in SoftImage 3D, an animation package
Sci-fi readers often deplore book best-seller lists — because review editors actively ignore many sci-fi sales, since they don’t consider that stuff popular
, even though sci-fi titles often sell in far greater numbers than serious
highbrow literature. But this all might change soon, with the launch of Bookscan; new technology that tracks actual sales at the cash register with greater precision than ever before — via Slashdot
The traditional method for trying out new consumer technologies is to get people to live with them for a while, and then ask them how they fared. Dutch electronics company Philips, however, prefers to take a family, lock them up in a home of the future
for two months and subject them to 24-hour video scrutiny
Bugs that eat roads and buildings. Biocatalysts that break down fuel and plastics. Devices that stealthily corrode aluminium and other metals. These are just a few of the non-lethal weapons that the US has tried to develop, or is trying to develop. But quite how close such weapons are to reality we may never know. The US National Academy of Sciences is refusing to release dozens of reports proposing or describing their development, even though the documents are supposed to be public records
Rick Boucher, said last July that he wanted to amend the DMCA to permit certain fair uses
of digital content, such as backing up an audio CD by bypassing copy protection technology. In an interview on Thursday, Boucher said he now has sufficient support — from the tech industry, librarians, and Internet activists — to feel comfortable introducing his bill in the next month
Microsoft has come up with another novel way to make its software compulsory — an annual subscription licensing system for schools where you have to pay for all of the computers you’re using, even if you don’t want them to run the Microsoft software you’re licensing. This includes Macs and PCs running Linux
A security hole affecting old copies of some Microsoft Office applications may have left a legacy of data leaks with the potential to reveal sensitive information and weaken security on government and commercial Web sites around the world
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