BBC shows such as Doctor Who and EastEnders are to be made available on-demand after the BBC’s iPlayer service was given the green light. The service — which will launch later this year — allows viewers to watch programmes online for seven days after their first TV broadcast. Episodes can also be downloaded and stored for up to 30 days
The Ontario government has given approval for a California company to construct a massive solar farm
near Sarnia that will blanket an area larger than all three Toronto islands with hundreds of thousands of sun-soaking panels. It will be the largest solar power station in North America and among the most expansive in the world to use photovoltaic cells that produce electricity when exposed to sunlight. Once complete, the 40-megawatt Sarnia project will be able to supply enough emission-free electricity to power between 10,000 and 15,000 homes on sunny days
Steve McQueen’s 1963 Ferrari is expected to fetch US$800,000 to US$1.2m at auction in August. Christie’s auctioneers unveiled the metallic-brown Ferrari 250 GT Berlinetta Lusso on Friday. McQueen bought the car, with beige leather interior, in 1963 and used it as his everyday runaround for 10 years. It’s probably the best example of a Ferrari Lusso that’s out there on the marketplace,
said Christie’s Christopher Sanger. The car will be sold at auction on 16 August at Monterey Jet Centre in California
Mozilla has unveiled new details of its schedule for Firefox 3, the next major upgrade to the popular open-source browser. Alpha editions of Firefox 3 will be released monthly, said Mike Schroepfer, the company’s vice president of engineering, in a posting to the mozilla.dev.planning forum. The new schedule shows three more previews — Alphas 4, 5 and 6 — be released near the end of April, May, and June, respectively, with a feature-complete Beta 1 dropping into testers’ hands 31 July
Two security experts have discovered a way to inject false messages — some amusing and others potentially frightening — into car satellite navigation systems. Andrea Barisani, chief security engineer for Inverse Path and Daniele Bianco, a hardware hacker at Inverse Path, used off the shelf equipment to transmit messages to their car satellite navigation system warning of conditions ranging from foggy weather to terrorist attacks. They presented their findings on Friday at CanSecWest a security conference taking place this week in Vancouver
Spinal Tap is back, and this time the band wants to help save the world from global warming. The mock heavy metal group immortalised in the 1984 mockumentary, This is Spinal Tap
, will reunite for a performance at Wembley Stadium in London as part of the Live Earth concerts scheduled worldwide for 7 July
Your next eBay purchase could arrive at your door in a brown Amazon box. Amazon is expanding a program designed to allow independent sellers to use its network of distribution centres to store and ship their products, according to Jeffrey Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive. Since last fall, the program, Fulfillment by Amazon, has allowed independent sellers who list their goods on Amazon to use its network of more than 20 distribution centers around the world to fill orders. Now Amazon, which is based in Seattle, is opening the program to vendors who list their items elsewhere on the Web — on their own site, through Google, or even on Amazon’s e-commerce rival, eBay
The $100 laptop introduced by Nicholas Negroponte as part of the One Laptop Per Child program will end up costing $175. The demand for the program is apparent as seven nations have expressed interest in being in the initial wave to buy the little green-and-white XO
computers — Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand, Nigeria and Libya — but it remains unclear which ones will be first to pony up the cash
An anti-spam organisation filed a federal lawsuit Thursday targeting so-called spam harvesters, who facilitate the mass distribution of junk e-mail by trolling the Internet and collecting millions of e-mail addresses. The lawsuit was filed in US District Court in Alexandria by a Utah company called Unspam Technologies. The company runs a Web site called Project Honey Pot dedicated to tracking spam harvesters worldwide. Project Honey Pot has collected thousands of Internet addresses that it has linked to spam harvesters, but it so far has been unable to link those addresses to an actual person. The lawsuit names a variety of John Does as defendants, and the plaintiffs hope that the legal process will allow them to track the actual people who are harvesting the e-mail addresses, said lead attorney Jon Praed with the Arlington-based Internet Law Group
European astronomers have spotted what they say is the most Earth-like planet yet outside our solar system, with balmy temperatures that could support water and potentially life. They have not directly seen the planet, orbiting a red dwarf star called Gliese 581, but measurements of the star suggest that a planet not much larger than the Earth is pulling on it, the researchers say in a letter to the editor of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth’s radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky, like our Earth, or covered with oceans,
study leader Stephane Udry, of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, said. It appears to have a mass five times that of Earth
Ty Roberts, CTO of Gracenote, made the claim this week that the music industry was about to cave in the next six months
on the issue of DRM, at least when it comes to downloads
Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs indicated on Wednesday he is unlikely to give in to calls from the music industry to add a subscription-based model to Apple’s wildly popular iTunes online music store
Kodak has decided to attempt to buck the trend set by HP by offering low cost printers and reasonably priced ink cartridges. Three of their new printers start at US$149, with ink cartridges costing US$9.99 for a black cartridge and US$14.99 for a five color cartridge. To counter, HP has announced a release of lower-priced cartridges, though with less ink and they are still more expensive than Kodak’s. It will be a matter of time to see whether Kodak can upset the practice of ink cartridge extortion
The tyranny of two-dimensional computer and TV displays could soon be over. A team of MIT researchers has proposed a way to make a holographic video system that works with computer hardware for consumers, such as PCs with graphics cards and gaming consoles. The display, the researchers say, will be small enough to add to an entertainment center, provide resolution as good as a standard analog television, and cost only a couple hundred dollars
A pregnant cow being chased by police and firefighters caused more than $41,000 of damage on a three-hour rampage through the German city of Hanover. The cow, Uschi, escaped from a farm late on Monday and became increasingly violent as she encountered shocked drivers and pedestrians in the city. Pursued by the farmer, television camera crews and 30 police and firefighters, the Charolais cow lashed out at cars, benches, garden fences and whatever else got in her way during the five-kilometre chase. After more than three hours on the loose, Uschi was brought down by tranquilliser darts, without harming her unborn calf
A man cut off his penis with a knife in a packed London restaurant. Police were forced to use CS gas to restrain the man when they entered the Zizzi restaurant in The Strand on Sunday evening. The man was then taken to hospital in south London where his condition is stable. It is understood surgeons were unable to reattach his penis
Indian police discovered a human bones factory
in an eastern state on Monday and arrested six people for illegally trading in skeletons, a senior officer said. The arrested men told police the bones were sold to medical students and used in traditional medicine. Investigators found dozens of skeletons — treated with chemicals — laid out to dry in the sun when they reached a river bank in Keshia, 200 kilometres north of Kolkata
A super-hard material that is tough enough to scratch diamond could be made cheaply and easily, a new study suggests. The material is made from the metal rhenium and the element boron and resembles both a metal and a crystal in structure
Free online encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the most popular sites on the Web, and Jimmy Wales has operated the multilingual virtual encyclopedia for 6 years without the first ad. Wikipedia have announced that they may add some trivia games and quiz programs in an effort to boost funds in support of the site. Wales has said that the firm will hold off on advertising for now, but turning down millions of dollars in ad revenue that could be applied to humanitarian causes had caused Wales to take pause to consider the lesser of evils
Amazon wants to launch an online music store next month to challenge Apple and is working on plans to sell music with reduced protection against copyright infringement. The internet giant has approached all the music majors in the past fortnight and said that it wanted to sell unprotected MP3 songs in May as it tries to follow Apple in shaking up the music industry. However, it remains unclear if Amazon will meet its deadline. The internet retailer has been trying, unsuccessfully, over 18 months to break into the market dominated by Apple iTunes, which has a share of about 80 per cent
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