The framed photograph will inevitably fade and yellow over time, but the digital photo file may be unreadable to future computers — an unintended consequence of our rapidly digitising world that may ultimately lead to a digital dark age, says Jerome P McDonough, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to McDonough, the issue of a looming digital dark age originates from the mass of data spawned by our ever-growing information economy — at last count, 369 exabytes worth of data, including electronic records, tax files, e-mail, music and photos, for starters. (An exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes; a quintillion is the number 1 followed by 18 zeroes.) The concern for archivists and information scientists like McDonough is that, with ever-shifting platforms and file formats, much of the data we produce today could eventually fall into a black hole of inaccessibility
The Tribler BitTorrent client, a project run by researchers from several European universities and Harvard, is the first to incorporate decentralised search capabilities. With Tribler, users can now find .torrent files that are hosted among other peers, instead of on a centralised site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova
US newspaper the Christian Science Monitor is to cease production as a daily title after 100 years, becoming the highest profile national title in the US to scale back on its print operation to combat rising costs and falling print sales. CSM announced yesterday that it will move all breaking news to a 24/7 web operation from April next year, though it will continue in print in the form of a new Sunday magazine. John Yemma, the CSM editor, said the new model would allow the publication to retain its eight international bureaux and still save money
Google has quietly dispatched a team of experts from the US on a fact-finding mission to decide whether it should establish a data centre in Australia. In the past few weeks the team of about five Google US employees had been involved in high-level discussions with local data centre providers
The ABC is working closely with the internet industry to overcome service limitations holding back its newly launched internet broadcasting service iView. Ian Carroll director of the ABC’s innovation group said that iView was being held back by limited download quotas available to Australian users. They were frightened of incurring crippling excess download charges if they used the service
Belgian ISP Scarlet scored an important victory in the first major European test of copyright law. The interim decision forcing them to block transfers of copyrighted materials via P2P has been reversed, because the judge agreed with Scarlet that the measures the Belgian RIAA proposed to implement proved to be ineffective. A final decision is expected next year — via Slashdot
Leading Internet companies, long criticised by human-rights groups for their business dealings in China, agreed Tuesday to new guidelines that seek to limit what data they should share with authorities worldwide and when they should do so. The guidelines call for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to try to reduce the scope of government requests that appear to conflict with free speech and other human rights principles. They also require participating companies to seek requests in writing, along with the names and titles of the authorising officer
Family First Senator Steve Fielding wants hardcore pornography and fetish material blocked under the Government’s plans to filter the internet, sparking renewed fears the censorship could be expanded well beyond illegal material
. The Opposition said it would take a lot of convincing
for it to support the controversial mandatory ISP filtering policy, so the Government would need the support of Senator Fielding as well as the Greens and Senator Nick Xenophon to pass the legislation
Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, are reporting a new way of creating computer chips that could revitalise optical lithography, a patterning technique that dominates modern integrated circuits manufacturing. By combining metal lenses that focus light through the excitation of electrons — or plasmons — on the lens’ surface with a flying head
that resembles the stylus on the arm of an old-fashioned LP turntable and is similar to those used in hard disk drives, the researchers were able to create line patterns only 80 nanometers wide at speeds up to 12 metres per second, with the potential for higher resolution detail in the near future
First Gordon Brown and Mervyn King, the Bank of England’s governor, admitted that Britain was on the verge of recession. Then food sales were reported to have seen their biggest fall for 20 years. Last night came final and irrevocable proof that the country is entering tough economic times, unseen since the 80s: AC/DC have returned to the top of the album charts for the first time in 28 years
Internal bleeding can cause irreversible haemorrhagic shock within 30 seconds or progressive shock within eight hours, either way, it’s not good and the military wants a portable, noninvasive way to detect and stop it right on the battlefield. To that end, the Defence Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has contracted with Siemens Healthcare, the University of Washington’s Centre for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound and Texas A&M to develop something called the Deep Bleeder Acoustic Coagulation cuff. The cuff is a semi-automated, ultrasound device designed to cut blood loss and shock resulting from combat limb injuries, one that can be operated by any GI with minimal training
The Internet’s key oversight agency issued preliminary guidelines for the introduction of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of alternatives to .com
in the first sweeping changes to the network’s 25-year-old address system. But individuals should forget about claiming a personal domain name suffix for themselves or their families. The application fee, scheduled to be disclosed Friday, is expected to approach $200,000 — partially refundable only in limited circumstances — to help cover the potential $20 million cost of crafting the guidelines and reviewing applications
An Australian and a Swedish researcher say they have proved honey bees are more intelligent than previously thought. Professor Mandyam Srinivasan from Queensland University and Dr Marie Dacke trained honey bees to count by placing food at different markers. Professor Srinivasan says he has also found bees can learn colours and smells and be trained to fly through complicated mazes
Research chemists at Johns Hopkins University have developed a water-soluble, organic, self-assembling electronic wire suitable for use inside the human body. Derived from carbon materials, the lightweight, flexible wires can power pacemakers, reconnect damaged nerve tissues, while also interacting with real electronic device that could augment or stimulate organic function. But do not worry, for this is only step one of the long process of turning us all into Borg-like drones
The latest request from the Pentagon jars the senses. They are looking for contractors to provide a Multi-Robot Pursuit System
that will let packs of robots search for and detect a non-cooperative human
One of the best-known Australian brand-names, Driza-Bone, is back under full local ownership
Lithographs that once belonged to a German duke and vanished when the Soviets occupied parts of Germany after World War II, have turned up at Sotheby’s in London
The Federal Government is attempting to silence critics of its controversial plan to censor the internet, which experts say will break the internet while doing little to stop people from accessing illegal material such as child pornography. ISPs and the government’s own tests have found that presently available filters are not capable of adequately distinguishing between legal and illegal content and can degrade internet speeds by up to 86 per cent. Documents obtained by us show the office of the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, tried to bully ISP staff into suppressing their criticisms of the plan
McGill University researchers have discovered a new state of matter, a quasi-three-dimensional electron crystal, in a material very much like those used in the fabrication of modern transistors. This discovery could have momentous implications for the development of new electronic devices. Currently, the number of transistors that can be inexpensively crammed onto a single computer chip increases exponentially, doubling approximately every two years, a trend known as Moore’s Law. But there are limits, experts say. As chips get smaller and smaller, scientists expect that the bizarre laws and behaviours of quantum physics will take over, making ever-smaller chips impossible
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