The fate of the free Net may rest in the hands of a university student in Sweden making less money than a coffee slinger at Starbucks. While the first generation of file-trading technologies fights over Napster’s leavings, more radical Net programmers are still committed to building a wholly anonymous, virtually untraceable way of communicating and trading files online. Chief among these is Freenet, an open-source project viewed by many as the ultimate inheritor to Napster’s original promise of free online file swapping
Solving a 30-year-old scientific mystery, physicists have found the most convincing evidence yet that neutrinos — elusive subatomic particles that were thought to have no mass whatsoever — have a tiny wisp of heft after all
A 10-year-old Chilean boy who had been abandoned by his parents survived for two years in a cave with a pack of stray dogs who scavenged for food with him and may even have suckled him
Telstra said a core router linking Sydney and Los Angeles was causing degraded performance to Internet traffic between Australia and the United States. While their broadband service has had a 13-hour outage preventing BigPond Cable and ADSL customers accessing the most basic of Internet services — e-mail
Hacker group 2600 Australia today warned soft drink maker Coca-Cola Amatil to increase the security of online competitions after today publishing part of the process it says the company uses to verify competition entries
Villains have all the fun. Even when it comes to kid’s stuff. As Mitchel Resnick of the MIT Media Lab pointed out, the movie Toy Story says a lot about what our culture lauds and what it disapproves of in children. The story’s hero, Andy, has a bedroom full of well-kept toys — frequently played with but never adapted or modified. The arch-nemesis Sid, on the other hand, turns everything he can into ghastly hybrids like a spider with a baby doll’s head and Erector Set legs
Apple Computer, which gained fame with its iconoclastic marketing, has told the Church of Satan it does not want to be associated with it
Octavio Soares takes Timorese children from refugee camps to orphanages in Java. His aim is to indoctrinate them as pro-Indonesia activists
President of the World Federation of Neurology, Dr James Toole, proposes that world leaders aged over 60 should be required to pass regular mental competence tests to prove they can still do their jobs
Look at it this way: the retarded monkey boy hasn’t barfed on anyone yet, and he’s only mispronounced one world leader’s name so far. The bad news is it was the only guy over there who likes the US, and he has only two syllables in his name
Still reeling from revelations that its advertising department had concocted a phoney film critic and used him to promote four Columbia Pictures releases, Sony Pictures Entertainment has now admitted that two of its own employees posed as ordinary moviegoers in on-the-street interviews to promote another Columbia release last summer
Shell is to invest $1 billion into alternative energy R&D over the next 5 years. It’s looking at big offshore wind farms in the North Sea, solar power, and research into geothermal energy and biomass
One scientist has stuck out his neck and stated that global warming has little to do with human activity, is a natural cyclical phenomenon to do with carbon dioxide-water exchange, and things could start cooling down in a few years
Despite two major outages, Telstra says BigPond customers will not be compensated for service disruptions which have left them high and dry for close to 24 hours
Velda González may be 68 years old, the vice president of the Senate in Puerto Rico and a grandmother several times over. But none of that mattered to US Navy officials who treated her like trash, which is the same way they’ve treated so many others who have been arrested for protesting the Navy’s bombing exercises on the island of Vieques
Bigger is better in America — apparently even when it comes to god. Mega-churches, giant houses of worship that draw congregations of up to 20,000 to weekend services, are thriving, and super-sized houses of worship have become fixtures of America’s religious landscape, in spite of criticism from some traditionalists that they are a sort of religion lite
A travelling digital film festival run by a punk rocker continues to tour America, harkening to a time when freaks ruled the Internet and major media corporations refused to contemplate a future online
Researchers are using spider genes to get potatoes and tobacco plants to produce large quantities of silk protein, which they hope to be able to weave into fibres and fabrics
Philips and E-Ink have demonstrated the first high-resolution electronic ink displays for use in handheld devices. They aim to have them on the market within two years
Japanese scientists have developed tiny spinning screws, 8mm long and under 1mm diameter, that can swim along veins or burrow through flesh taking drugs to infected tissues. The swimming micro-machines are based on cylindrical magnets, and can screw through 2cm of beef steak in 20 seconds. It could also be used as a New Age silent assassination weapon
RSS – Posts