Amazon.com was inaccessible to many US visitors for more than an hour and a half Friday. The site went offline completely by 10.21am PDT, but efforts to restore the site appeared to be taking effect about noon, said Keynote Systems, which monitors Web site responsiveness. As of 12.45pm, the site was working intermittently, with many product pages functioning but others still broken
Before they have even hatched, cuttlefish embryos can peer out of their eggs and spot potential prey. It is the first time any animal has been shown to learn visual images before they are born
Researchers at the University of Washington have discovered serious flaws in the way that the copyright cartel’s enforcers detect and complain about copyright infringement. The methods used by these enforcers are so sloppy that they sent a DMCA takedown notice to three campus laser-printers, alleging that the inanimate objects were downloading Iron Man and Indiana Jones. And yet these companies expect universities to take their notices seriously and spend their operating capital chasing down every wild accusation they make — via Boing Boing
Kaspersky Lab found a new variant of Gpcode which encrypts files with various extensions using an RSA encryption algorithm with a 1024-bit key. After Gpcode.ak encrypts files on the victim machine, it changes the extension of these files to ._CRYPT and places a text file named !_READ_ME_!.txt in the same folder. In the text file the criminal tells the victims that the file has been encrypted and offers to sell them a decryptor. Is this a look into the future where the majority of malware will function based on extortion? — via Slashdot
Customers of an Australian recruitment firm have been targeted with resumes booby-trapped with a backdoor trojan. Hackers are exploiting an email-forwarding feature offered by many recruitment firms, which automatically sends relevant resumes to customers when a new applicant uploads their CV to the recruitment firm’s web site
Google signed a US$146 million contract with US space agency NASA on Wednesday to lease 42.2 acres of open field at NASA Ames facility in Mountain View California to build a new facility. The 40-year agreement means Google will lease close to its own headquarters in Mountain View. By the end of 2013, Google said it will start construction on 1.2 million square feet of offices for research and development, in an effort to accommodate its growing staff of approximately 20,000. NASA Ames will oversee construction
eBay says PayPal’s security features are second to none but its own subsidiary, Skype, allows customers to use a slew of payment schemes in Australia. Skype Australia has ruled out a PayPal-only model and is determined not to follow in its parent company’s footsteps
Microsoft is boldly going where the company has never gone before — and no, it’s not an operating system that won’t crash, but rather into space. WorldWide Telescope is like Google Earth for the universe
A team of Penn State scientists has discovered a new ultra-small species of bacteria that has survived for more than 120,000 years within the ice of a Greenland glacier at a depth of nearly two miles. The microorganism’s ability to persist in this low-temperature, high-pressure, reduced-oxygen and nutrient-poor habitat makes it particularly useful for studying how life, in general, can survive in a variety of extreme environments on Earth and possibly elsewhere in the solar system
Seven universities in Australia and New Zealand will make a great leap into online lecturing today when American computer giant Apple launches a local iTunes U education site. The participants that will offer their teaching and research free for download on iPods are Griffith University, Swinburne University of Technology, the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne, the University of NSW, the University of Western Australia and Otago University
Google has announced that Google Finance will report real-time prices on NASDAQ-listed securities. While real-time stock quotes are not new, they have long encumbered with subscriptions, legal agreements, or pay software. This may be the first free source for real-time quotes — via Slashdot
Apple has completed the construction of its big Sydney retail store, with the doors to open to the public in just over a fortnight. Located on the corner of George and King streets, the store would be handed over to Apple by the construction company at the end of the week
A team of scientists from Boston College and Duke University has developed a highly-engineered metamaterial capable of absorbing all of the light that strikes it — to a scientific standard of perfection. The team designed and engineered a metamaterial that uses tiny geometric surface features to successfully capture the electric and magnetic properties of a microwave to the point of total absorption
Branchless retail bank ING Direct has led the way in using anti-money-laundering identification processes to come up with a method for opening an account purely online. The Dutch bank has claimed bragging rights for the first end-to-end online account opening facility in Australia
The rules governing domain name sales and transfers in Australia have been relaxed as domain name registry body auDA released its new change of registrant policy. The Australian Domain Name Administrator (auDA) announced the changes this week allowing domain names to be traded freely between interested parties, after a decision to loosen regulation surrounding domain transfer was agreed on by the agency’s board in December last year
It is a national icon, one of the world’s greatest tourist attractions — and an appalling advertisement for Italian builders. But now, 18 years after it was closed to the public for fears that it might topple over, the Leaning Tower of Pisa has been stabilised and has been declared safe for at least another three centuries
You never know when the next breaking story might be right around the corner, but with ABC’s new Google Earth layer, you’ll get to see the news as it happens — whether it’s just around the corner, or in another corner of the globe. Today, ABC announced the launch of ABC Earth, integrating ABC content, including video, audio and text, as a layer in Google Earth. This trial launch will feature live stories (with updates every two hours), archived reports from around the world, profiles of Australian regional centres, and reports from the award-winning Foreign Correspondent
They set sail for the other side of the world in search of fortune and freedom. For the millions of free settlers, Australia was a country of hope and promise — a chance to escape class systems, poverty and overcrowding. This week, more than 150 years on, their stories will be available online for the first time, giving their descendants the chance to trace their journeys. The collection will allow people to search 8.9 million names of passengers and crew who arrived in New South Wales as free settlers between 1826 and 1922. It follows the launch of the records of 160,000 convicts on the site last year. Ancestry.com.au spokesman Brad Argent said about seven million Australians were related to early settlers, giving the average Aussie a one-in-three chance of having a free-settler ancestor
An explosion Saturday evening at a Texas-based, privately held server hosting provider has caused server outages effecting 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. According to The Planet’s website, at about 5.00pm Saturday electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding their electrical equipment room. No injuries were reported and no servers were damaged or lost
You can look at almost anything on Google. Just don’t try to sneak a peek of the homes in the private community of North Oaks. The city of 4,500 residents has demanded that Google Maps remove images of North Oaks homes from the website’s Street View feature, where any Internet user can glimpse a home from the nearest road. North Oaks’ unique situation, in which the roads are privately owned by the residents and the city enforces a trespassing ordinance, may have made it the first city in the country to request that the online search engine remove images from Google Maps
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