They aren’t selling personal supercomputers at Best Buy just yet. But that day probably isn’t too far off, as costs continue to fall and supercomputers become easier to use. Silicon Graphics International on Monday released its first so-called personal supercomputer. The new Octane III system is priced from $7,995 with one Xeon 5500 processor. The system can be expanded to an 80-core system with a capacity of up to 960GB of memory
Demon Internet has sent out a spreadsheet containing the personal details of thousands of customers with one of its new ebills. The spreadsheet contains email addresses, telephone numbers and what appears to be usernames and passwords for the ebilling system
The US inflated the $700,000 bill for damages it slapped on UFO hacker Gary McKinnon by stuffing it with costs incurred for patching the gaping holes the hacker had exposed in its computer security, according to a document filed with the Supreme Court. The US had not taken reasonable steps to protect its security and now expects McKinnon to pick up the bill, said an expert witness statement made in McKinnon’s ongoing appeal against a US extradition order
A business opportunity scammer has been held in contempt for the second time by a federal court and ordered to turn over the title of his home in Las Vegas or face jail time. The court found that the operator of the scam, Richard Neiswonger, failed to deliver marketable title to his home, in violation of a previous court order entering a $3.2 million judgment against him. The FTC charged that the defendant deceived consumers with false promises that they could make a six-figure income by selling his asset protection services
to those seeking to hide their assets from potential lawsuits or creditors
The lack of SMS integration is a perennial complaint for Australian Twitter users. Chime goes a fair way to solving that problem, letting you update your Twitter status via an Australian phone account
The Walt Disney Company’s proposed $4 billion acquisition of Marvel Entertainment may come with a headache: a brand-new superhero copyright dispute. Heirs to the comic-book artist Jack Kirby, who has been credited as the co-creator of characters and stories behind Marvel mainstays like the X-Men
and Fantastic Four
, among many others, last week sent 45 notices of copyright termination to Marvel, Disney, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures and others who have been making films and other forms of entertainment based on the characters
Australia’s consumer watchdog is leading an international crackdown on internet scams, particularly those taking advantage of the global financial crisis to lure people in. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission says the scams are costing Australian consumers $1 billion a year, and that criminals are using the global financial crisis to lure people in
Researchers at the Hohenstein Institute in Stuttgart, Germany developed a method to embed multipotent mesenchymal stem cells onto the surface fibres of common surgical fabric implants. Using such a product it may be possible to directly motivate the regrowth of critical tissue, such as myocardium after a heart attack
Scientists are operating in an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty
because libel laws biased in favour of the plaintiff are making them wary of challenging bogus claims about health products, Richard Dawkins has claimed. Dawkins told the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth that scientists should settle their differences in the lab, not in court, and that libel laws that made it too easy for people to be sued could have disastrous consequences
for the public interest. He condemned the way London had become the libel capital of the world
and backed Liberal Democrat proposals that were approved by the conference for the libel laws to be reformed to provide a better balance
in favour of free speech
A French court has ordered online auction site eBay to pay 80,000 euros ($135,524) to Louis Vuitton for selling fake luxury perfumes
Telstra is believed to be planning to launch a personal video recorder and set-top box, likely to be called the T-box, as early as December, in a bid to shift the entertainment, news and sport content it offers under the BigPond brand from people’s computers to their televisions. The strategy, which puts Telstra into direct competition with Foxtel (which has its own iQ set-top box), enables the telco to retain a content play if it is forced to divest its 50 per cent shareholding in the pay-TV company
Will the world’s fastest land animal make a comeback in India, nearly half a century after it became extinct in the country? A serious initiative is afoot to bring the cheetah back to India and make it, as many wildlife experts say, the flagship species
of the country’s grasslands, which do not have a single prominent animal now. A similar effort in the 1970s — India was then talking to Iran, which had around 300 cheetahs at that time — flopped after the Shah of Iran was deposed and the negotiations never progressed
Last month TorrentFreak reported on DigiProtect, the anti-piracy company with the tagline Turn Piracy Into Profit
. A manager from DigiProtect revealed some of the inner workings on how the company operates but according to a lawyer who defends alleged file-sharers, he may have revealed just a little too much
A campaign backed by automakers and some lawmakers to make electric or hybrid cars noisier in a bid to increase safety for pedestrians and cyclists has taken a strange, Blade Runner
-type twist. Nissan sound engineers have announced that the Leaf electric car set for release next year will emit a beautiful and futuristic
noise similar to the sound of flying cars — or spinners
— that buzz around 2019 Los Angeles in Ridley Scott’s dystopian thriller based on a Philip K Dick science fiction novel
The founders of Skype are escalating their legal battle with eBay. Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who became billionaires after selling Skype to eBay in 2005, filed a copyright lawsuit on Wednesday against Skype in the United States District Court of Northern California. The suit comes a little more than two weeks after eBay announced it would sell most of Skype for $1.9 billion to a consortium of investors led by the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. In the court filing, Joltid, a company owned by the Skype founders, claims that eBay violated copyright law by altering and sharing the peer-to-peer source code behind the free Internet calling service. The Skype founders maintained ownership of that source code after selling Skype to eBay in 2005, and licensed it to eBay
After an earlier decision failed to reach its objective, this week a Brazilian court made an unprecedented ruling against file-sharing clients. Following legal action by anti-piracy groups against a website offering a file-sharing client for download, the court decided that software which allows users to share music via P2P is illegal
Microsoft has filed five civil lawsuits in King County Superior Court in Seattle against alleged malvertisers. Malvertising camouflages malicious code, and Microsoft wants to stop it
After Australia’s Senator Stephen Conroy’s plans to filter the Internet earned him the title of Internet Villain of the Year, today there is more chin-scratching over the plans. Speaking yesterday, the Senator Conroy said there has never been any suggestion that the government could or would block P2P traffic
Using Google to research a news story is easy on your iPhone. Which is why one lawyer wants jurors to stop doing it
Porcupine quills and cactus spines are among the tools used to prepare a £1m hoard of Viking treasure to go on public show in York on 17 September
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