There was the Minister for Communications on the ABC’s Q & A answering questions about the blocking of internet filters and an ACMA blacklist
which has been leaked and published. Conroy explained reports of a Queensland dentist’s web site had been inadvertently put on the list because it had been hacked by a Russian mob
. At the very same time, hackers had attacked the government’s Classification Board web site. The site remained hacked for several hours before it went offline
Google engineers say it was not expensive and required only a small team of developers to enable all of the company’s applications to support IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol
A big explosion, in the name of science, scared a lot of people in a small town. Mythbusters went to Yolo County and ended up with a bigger bang than expected.
It was a boom that was just — I had never heard anything like that before, it was really weird,
said Sherril Stephens. The explosion was so big it shook the town of Esparto, knocking Stephens off her couch and breaking her front window
Making changes to Google’s search infrastructure is akin to changing the tires on a car while you’re going at 60 down the freeway
, according Urs Holzle, who oversees the company’s massive data centre operations. Google updates its software and systems on an ongoing basis, usually without incident. But not always. On 24 February a bug in the software that manages the location of Google’s data triggered an outage in Gmail, the widely-used webmail component of Google Apps
An Ontario court has ordered the owners of the FreeDominion.ca to disclose all personal information on eight anonymous posters to the chat site. The required information includes email and IP addresses. The case arises from a lawsuit launched by Richard Warman, the anti-hate fighter, against the site and the posters. The court focused heavily on the Ontario Rules of Civil Procedure, which contain a strong duty of disclosure on litigants
Police have raided a Wikileaks associate’s homes in Dresden and Jena after the web site published a list of banned web sites. Theodor Reppe owns the German domain registration for wikileaks.de, one of the many URLs used by the whistleblowing web site
Privacy watchdogs in the United Kingdom want to close down Google Street View, only days after the service was launched in the country. Google has already received hundreds of requests to take down photos of various areas in the UK and could even face legal actions
YouTube confirmed its web site was being blocked in China, although the California firm offered no explanation for why Chinese authorities were barring access to the popular video-sharing service
Many moons ago, it seemed that the geek world stopped with every new Linux kernel release. Those days have long since passed and the most striking feature of the 2.6.29 release is the replacement of Tux the penguin with Tuz the Tasmanian devil. Born as the mascot for the 2009 instalment of linux.conf.au, Tuz was destined to go worldwide when Linux creator Linus Torvalds agreed that the 2.6.29 release should use the little guy as a replacement for the standard Tux image that appears during the start-up of Linux, in order to raise awareness about the plight facing the devil species
Application fees will be scrapped, cabinet documents will be made available sooner and a pro-disclosure culture encouraged under a Rudd Government overhaul of Freedom of Information laws announced today. Under the changes, announced by Cabinet Secretary and Special Minister of State John Faulkner in Sydney, all application fees will be abolished, and all charges for a person seeking access to their own information will be removed. The first hour of decision-making time will be free for all FOI requests, and there will be a five-hour charge-free decision-making period for requests made by not-for-profit organisations and journalists. Cabinet documents, which are currently kept secret for 30 years, will be available after 20 years, and the period for which cabinet notebooks are kept under wraps will be shortened from 50 to 30 years
TelstraClear, Telstra’s New Zealand subsidiary, has hired one of the worlds best known hackers — a teenager known as Akill
. Nineteen-year-old Owen Thor Walker became the subject of a US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) cyber crime investigation spanning the United States, Europe and New Zealand and dubbed Bot Roast
. New Zealand police finally caught him last year and he admitted to being the ring-leader, code-named Akill, of a group known as the A-Team
iiNet has pulled out of the federal Government’s internet filtering trials. iiNet only agreed to participate in the trial to demonstrate that the filter was flawed and a waste of taxpayers’ money, iiNet managing director Michael Malone said. Mr Malone cited drawn-out negotiations with the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE), constant changes in policy, and last week’s leak of a secret internet blacklist as reasons for pulling out
An international team of researchers has successfully treated dogs with the canine form of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a rapidly progressing and ultimately fatal muscle disease that afflicts one out of every 3,600 boys. The researchers used a novel technique called exon skipping to restore partial function to the gene involved in Duchenne. The study, published in Annals of Neurology, gives hope that a similar approach could work in humans
Following a mountain of bad publicity and strong objections from just about everyone except the entertainment industries, New Zealand’s proposed guilty upon accusation
Section 92A anti-piracy law has been scrapped
Internet auction site eBay has defended the way in which it handles reports of counterfeit goods, saying that it has delisted millions of items and suspended tens of thousands of seller accounts last year. However, its actions may not be enough to stop a lawsuit brought by a luxury goods retailer, which maintains that eBay needs to do more to stop online auctions of counterfeit products. eBay spokesperson Nicola Sharpe notes that 100 percent of reported listings are removed, with 70 to 80 percent removed within 12 hours. Site policy has zero tolerance for sellers who list counterfeit items, and will also suspend any seller who lists a counterfeit item more than one time. Background information is also used to prevent sellers from creating a new profile and re-listing items. Sharpe reports that 2.1 million listings were removed in 2008 based on VeRO reports, and 30,000 sellers suspended
Last week Google further expanded their Street View imagery in Australia so you can visit even more cities, towns and rural areas. In particular, they’ve included new imagery in parts of Sydney, around Port Lincoln in South Australia, in rural New South Wales, and in many parts of Queensland including wilderness areas around the Staaten River national park, and around Taylor’s Beach, Tweed Heads, and Cairns
Scientists in Britain plan to become the first in the world to produce unlimited amounts of synthetic human blood from embryonic stem cells for emergency infection-free transfusions. A major research project is to be announced this week that will culminate in three years with the first transfusions into human volunteers of synthetic
blood made from the stem cells of spare IVF embryos. It could help to save the lives of anyone from victims of traffic accidents to soldiers on a battlefield by revolutionising the vital blood transfusion services, which have to rely on a network of human donors to provide a constant supply of fresh blood
The Federal Government will begin trawling blog sites as part of a new media monitoring strategy, with official documents singling out a web site critical of the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy. Tender documents issued by the Department of Broadband Communications and the Digital Economy reveal it is looking for a monitoring service for print and electronic media
. The department later attached a clarification confirming this included blogs such as Whirlpool
. Whirlpool has strongly criticised Senator Conroy’s plan to filter internet content and his handling of the Government’s $15 billion national broadband network. It is a community-run forum devoted to discussing broadband internet access
Makers of fake anti-virus software are exploiting search engines to drive people to sites peddling scareware
. Using popular and mis-spelled search terms, the criminals divert people to sites that are seeded with fake warnings about virus infections. The pop-up warnings claim that a visitor’s PC is riddled with malicious programmes and spyware. Research suggests some criminals are making as much as $10,000 a day from fake security software
The entertainment industry managed to convince the French government to draft a law that will make it possible to disconnect people from the Internet, if they receive more than two copyright infringement warnings. Sadly, most of the politicians who plan to sign the law into action have no clue what they’re dealing with
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