Kevin Rudd’s ambitious plan to help fund an $8 billion national broadband network has been hit by a delay of at least four months because of a longer than expected timeframe for confirming an expert panel and pressure from telecoms companies to extend the process
Kentucky Representative Tim Couch filed a bill this week to make anonymous posting online illegal. The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site. Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted
The Coding Horror today wrote up a disturbing story sent in to them by a reader, who discovered that a (paid) Gmail archive tool, G-Archiver, was harvesting people’s Gmail user names and passwords and emailing them to (presumably) the creator of the software. Deeply unethical, and possibly malicious — via lifehacker
On 22 June 2007, Defence Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged that the Pentagon’s network had been successfully attacked the previous Wednesday, and that this attack was responsible for a disruption in email service to some 1,500 Pentagon employees. At the time, Gates downplayed the attack, saying that it affected only the Office of the Secretary of Defence’s non-classified e-mail service and that there was no anticipated adverse impact on ongoing operations
. It seems that the adverse impact of the June attack may have been much greater than Gates’ early guidance implied. According to a top DoD technology official quoted at GovernmentExecutive.com, the thieves behind that attack seized an amazing amount
of data
The BBC appears to have inadvertently removed the controversial DRM from its iPlayer video-on-demand service. Now, all BBC programmes are broadcast across the country in digital form without DRM, literally diffused at the speed of light in all directions without any restrictions, but the Beeb somehow believes that there’s a new risk of piracy created by letting those same digital files out on the net
The argument goes something like this: In a world of ubiquitous surveillance, you’ll know all about me, but I will also know all about you. The government will be watching us, but we’ll also be watching the government. This is different than before, but it’s not automatically worse. And because I know your secrets, you can’t use my secrets as a weapon against me. Except it doesn’t work, because it ignores the crucial dissimilarity of power
Because using too many calendars can confuse rather than organise, Google has announced that its Google Calendar will play nice with Microsoft’s Outlook Calendar. Earlier this week, Google announced Google Calendar Sync, a downloadable application that lets users synchronise events with Outlook Calendar. A user can determine information flow, as well as the frequency of the syncing
The FBI acknowledged Wednesday it improperly accessed Americans’ telephone records, credit reports and internet traffic in 2006, the fourth straight year of privacy abuses resulting from investigations aimed at tracking terrorists and spies. The breach occurred before the FBI enacted broad new reforms in March 2007 to prevent future lapses, FBI Director Robert Mueller said. And it was caused, in part, by banks, telecommunication companies and other private businesses giving the FBI more personal client data than was requested
According to a new study just released in the UK, one of the biggest causes of copyright infringement is a lack of choice. The study further shows that one third of the Brits have downloaded copyright infringing content, or plans to do so in the future
Channel Seven’s planned TiVo digital video recorder service could be scrapped within weeks if free-to-air broadcasters proceed with their biggest assault yet on pay television. The free-to-air industry is likely to launch its own FreeView-branded recorder early next year that will offer access to as many as 15 free digital TV channels and an electronic program guide
Microsoft has unveiled a test version of Internet Explorer 8, the next edition of its web browser. At Microsoft’s MIX08 online technology conference, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team, provided a first glimpse at the successor to IE7, which was released in October 2006
IBM researchers have achieved a new record in data transfer rates, 300Gbps, using their new Optochip
fibre optic chip. IBM also claims its new chips operate at one-tenth of the power used by current commercial optical chips
Nine Inch Nails are struggling to keep their website online after releasing their latest album as a partly free download
Microsoft has had a change of heart regarding IE8. The new version of the dominant browser will render in full standards mode by default. Developers wishing to use quirks mode for IE6- and IE7-compatible rendering will have to opt in explicitly
Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor released a 36-song instrumental collection, Ghosts I-IV
, direct to the Internet via his official website. The album is available at a number of pricing options, beginning with a free sampling of nine of the songs. All 36 cuts can be had for as low as $5 (download), or for as high as $300, a signed limited-edition set that will ship in May (pictured). There’s also a $10 double-disc CD set, which includes a 16-page booklet and ships on April 8, or a $75 package that includes two discs, a DVD and a deluxe book
After taking control of Shareaza.com, imposters trying to pass themselves off as an open-source dev team have stepped up their action to destroy the GNU GPL licensed project. In an audacious move, lawyers representing Discordia Ltd have filed to register the Shareaza
trademark at the US Patent Office
Jeffrey White of Federal District Court in San Francisco, on Friday withdrew his earlier order disabling, Wikileaks.org, a web site that allows the anonymous posting of documents to discourage unethical behaviour in governments and corporations
Most homes will have broadband communication speeds up to 100 times faster than what is currently available, under the Rudd Government’s plan to wire Australia for the 21st century
A divided Virginia Supreme Court affirmed the nation’s first felony conviction for illegal spamming on Friday, ruling that Virginia’s anti-spamming law does not violate free-speech rights. Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, NC, considered among the world’s top 10 spammers in 2003, was convicted of massive distribution of junk e-mail and sentenced to nine years in prison
Vladimir Vukicevic of the Firefox team stumbled upon some questionable practices from Apple while trying to improve the performance of Firefox. Apparently, Apple is using some undocumented APIs that give Safari a significant performance advantage over other browsers. Of course, undocumented
means that non-Apple developers have to try and reverse-engineer these interfaces to get the same level of performance — via Slashdot
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