In some universe, the name Syfy
is less geeky than the name Sci Fi
. Dave Howe, president of the Sci Fi Channel, is betting it’s this one. To that end, the 16-year-old network — owned by NBC Universal — plans to announce that Syfy is its new name 16 March at its upfront presentation to advertisers in New York
Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founders of the world wide web, said that he was concerned about the emergence of user profiling on the internet and snooping
. The British computer science professor and guru underlined that one of the biggest challenges is to ensure that information available online is used transparently for the specific purpose that its owner intended or consented to, avoiding privacy pitfalls
Legislation to boost NSW Police covert searching and computer hacking powers looks set to go ahead after facing almost no opposition in the lower house of the NSW Parliament earlier this week
Google’s hardly publicised method for sending free text messages has been revoked after traffic from a popular iPhone app became too much. Google has started to block Infinite SMS and all other third-party software that’s been piggybacking the text messaging feature available in Gmail. Enabled in December via the Labs, the possibility of sending free SMS messages right from the Gmail chat window was quickly targeted by the Inner Fence developers who last month released Infinite SMS, a paid ($0.99) app for the iPhone and iPod touch which used the function to let users send as many text messages they want for free (if you don’t count the one-time fee of course)
A recent Raincoast Conservation Foundation research study in British Columbia has shown there are significant differences between gray wolves and the coastal variety. Chris Darimont from UC-Santa Cruz has a doctorate in wolf ecology and was one of the researchers studying the unique wolves for the last five years. They are truly island wolves. They swim between foraging patches on islands, such as in the Broken Group or Clayoquot Sound. We are saying, tongue-in-cheek, that this is our newest marine mammal,
stated Darimont. On the coast and neighboring islands there are only small deer to provide meat, so they adapted to using seafood in their diets. On the islands furthest away from the mainland, 75% of their food intake comes from the sea
Governments looking to silence critics and stymie opposition have added DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks to their censoring methods, according to a security expert speaking at the Source Boston Security Showcase. As the use of DDOS for political gains increases, expect the Internet to become more militarized said Jose Nazario, senior security researcher at Arbor Networks
Vodafone has signed a deal with three of the UK’s biggest record labels in a bid to offer customers Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free music on their mobiles. Vodafone said the deals with Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and EMI would allows customer to download tracks from a catalogue of millions
Superconductors, materials that carry electricity without resistance, can be divided into two broad groups depending on how they react to a magnetic field — or so physicists thought. New experiments show that one well-studied superconductor actually belongs to both groups at the same time. If the experiment is true, this would add a whole new class of superconductors
, says Egor Babaev, a theorist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The advance may not immediately lead to new gadgets and applications, but it suggests that superconductivity, which has already netted four Nobel Prizes, may be an even richer phenomenon that previously thought
Bugs that skate on water can do it because their feet are superhydrophobic. Chinese scientists applied a similar coating to a tiny copper mesh boat, and suddenly it could hold three times the weight. The superhydrophobic coating creates a cushion of air around the boat, putting an invisible bubble between it and the water. The boat is literally floating on air, while the water tries to touch it but can’t. What’s creepy is that the coated boats sink immediately when immersed in organic liquids like ethanol and acetone
In an unprecedented move, Australia’s communications regulator has threatened to fine a company up to $11,000 a day for indirectly leaking part of its top-secret list of banned internet web pages. The action by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has wide ramifications for media companies, online publishers, web hosting suppliers and any organisation that publishes feedback from readers or customers on their web site
Material scientists from the University of Southern Mississippi have created a new polymer that can fix its own scratches under regular sunlight, a feat that has no end of practical applications
Australian authors and publishers are set to receive a windfall from Google’s project to put millions of books online. In recent weeks several Australian publishing industry bodies, such as the Australian Society of Authors, the Copyright Agency Limited and the Australian Publishers’ Association, have been contacting members to let them know about the settlement Google has reached with American authors and publishers. Under the terms of this settlement, copyright holders are to be paid US$60 ($91.85) a book and US$15 an article or chapter copied from the more than 7 million items in the Google Library project
The US Department of Homeland Security plans to study the possibility that human body odour could be used to tell when people are lying or to identify individuals in the same way that fingerprints can
Software used to control thousands of home computers has been acquired online by the BBC as part of an investigation into global cyber crime. The technology programme Click has demonstrated just how at risk PCs are of being taken over by hackers. Almost 22,000 computers made up Click’s network of hijacked machines, which has now been disabled. The BBC has now warned users that their PCs are infected, and advised them on how to make their systems more secure
A recent report has revealed that France’s national police force has saved an estimated 50 million euros since 2004 by adopting open source software and migrating a portion of the organisation’s workstations to Ubuntu Linux. They plan to roll out the Linux distro to all 90,000 of their workstations by 2015
All of Europe’s energy needs could be supplied by building an array of solar panels in the Sahara. Technological advances combined with falling costs have made it realistic to consider North Africa as Europe’s main source of imported energy. By harnessing the power of the Sun, possibly in tandem with wind farms along the North African coastline, Europe could easily meet its 2020 target of generating at least 20 per cent of its energy from renewable sources
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a way to charge lithium ion batteries in seconds, instead of hours, that could open the door to smaller, faster-charging batteries for mobile phones and other devices
Major security vendors Symantec, Sophos and Kaspersky yesterday said their products would block legalised hacking attempts by NSW Police under new legislation as they would any other security threat to users
Google’s Gmail e-mail service is down for an undetermined number of users, and while the outage has been partially fixed, some people could be locked out of their accounts for many more hours. In its latest update about the problem, posted at around 9.30 am US Eastern Time on Tuesday, Google said that it could take between 24 hours to 36 hours from that moment to restore all affected accounts
Google will block an iPhone application that harnesses its Google Talk chat program to provide a free text-message service after too many users flocked to download it. The Infinite SMS app, which cost US$0.99 and let users send unlimited text messages from an iPod or iPhone, quickly became one of the 10 most-downloaded apps in the iPhone Store after its release last month, developer Inner Fence said in a statement on its Web site
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