Shannon Larratt of BME and ModBlog has made what looks like an emergency post [since deleted] about a hostile takeover attempt of BME — via Warren Ellis
Copyright lawyers from Harvard’s Berkman Center have written an article in the Harvard Crimson excoriating the Harvard Coop bookstore for claiming that its prices are intellectual property
— via Boing Boing
New Zealand police have launched a wiki open at anyone wanting to edit and make suggestions to the Police Act as part of a wider revamp. New Zealand’s current Police Act is nearly 50 years old. In March 2006 a review undertaken. Following this a new website wiki.policeact.govt.nz has been launched to allow people to suggest wording for the new Policing Act. The wiki version of the Policing Act will be viewed by New Zealand parliamentarians, before an official bill is introduced into Parliament — via Boing Boing
Burma’s bloggers are using the internet to beat censorship, and tell the world what is happening under the military junta’s veil of secrecy
Got US$1.5 million lying around? You can buy a Titan Missile Silo [eBay listing] and wait out the apocalypse. Not sure where the silo is, but the real estate agent (who wants a US$10,000 earnest money
escrow before he’ll show it to you) has an Orange County 949 area code — via boingboing
Scientists in India have just made a breakthrough, a so-called Holy Grail in the illumination industry
in producing an LED that emits pure white light, suitable for interior lighting of homes, offices, etc. The challenge has been developing a combination of materials that will produce this light, which they believe they have
Amazon has launched the public beta of its new digital music portal called Amazon MP3, which will feature two million songs from 180,000 artists and 20,000 labels, all without DRM. Separate songs will sell for $.89 or $.99 and albums will range in cost from $5.99 to $9.99, with the best selling albums coming in at $8.99. It looks like it’s locked down to US customers only
The Sex Pistols returned to the studio recently to re-record Anarchy in the UK
for Neversoft’s upcoming Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock. Activision announced the Sex Pistol’s re-recording, as the publisher claims it was unable to locate the original multi-tracks
Starting 12 November, The One Laptop Per Child Project will sell its affordable XO laptop to Americans for a brief period of time, but there’s a slight catch: US buyers must purchase two computers — one for their own child and one for a child in the developing world — for a total cost of US$399 — via Slashdot
It seems that Microsoft support will allow anybody with a copy of Vista Ultimate or Business to call and request a downgrade disc themselves, just like it says in the licence terms. So there you have it, anyone can pick up a Vista downgrade disc as long as they have a nice enough version of Vista — via Gizmodo Australia
Random House and eMusic have begun to sell DRM-free audiobooks on their site. This is pretty big news, since iTunes has an exclusive deal with Audible for ebooks, and Audible won’t sell non-DRM ebooks (though they have other non-DRM products), even when the author doesn’t want any DRM
A method developed at Colorado State University for crafting solar panels has been developed to the point where they are nearly ready for mass production. Produced at less than $1 per watt, the panels will dramatically reduce the cost of generating solar electricity and could power homes and businesses around the globe with clean energy for roughly the same cost as traditionally generated electricity — via Slashdot
The Pirate Bay has been digging through the enormous chunk of leaked email from MediaDefender, the sleazy enforcers used by the entertainment industry to fight P2P, and they’ve discovered evidence of illegal sabotage. So they’re suing all the big movie and record comapnies in Sweden — via Boing Boing
While Microsoft is still pushing Vista hard, the company is quietly allowing PC makers to offer a downgrade
option to buyers that get machines with the new operating system but want to switch to Windows XP. The program applies only to Windows Vista Business and Ultimate versions, and it is up to PC makers to decide how, if at all, they want to make XP available. Fujitsu has been among the most aggressive, starting last month to include an XP disc in the box with its laptops and tablets
Google is planning to span the Pacific Ocean with its own undersea fibre optics cable
The Open Mobile Terminal Platform — a forum dominated by operators but including manufacturers such as Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and LG — announced that its members had agreed on micro-USB as the future common connector
London has 10,000 crime-fighting CCTV cameras which cost ¬£200 million but an analysis of the publicly funded spy network has cast serious doubt on its ability to help solve crime. In fact, four out of five of the boroughs with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average. The study found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any — via Slashdot
Former defence minister Kim Beazley has told how Australia cracked top-secret American combat aircraft codes in the 1980s to enable the shooting down of enemy aircraft. The radar on Australia’s US-made Hornets could not identify most potentially hostile aircraft in the region — they were set up for European threats — but despite many requests, the codes were not provided, so In the end we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves
. The Americans knew what the Australians were doing and were intrigued by the progress they made — via Slashdot
Google has quietly introduced a new app of sorts called Shared Stuff, a social bookmarking service offering a strange balance of Google Bookmarks, del.icio.us, and Google Reader shared feeds with a heavy dose of Gmail integration
Mozilla has announced a new initiative to overhaul email and internet communications in general. The new company, MailCo, will be given $3 million in startup capital from Mozilla to start with the Thunderbird code and work from there. MailCo will be led by David Ascher of ActiveState fame and, according to him, will be a for-profit venture without the emphasis on profit — via Slashdot
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