The Chinese government began blocking access to the popular blogging site LiveJournal on Friday, cutting off its citizens from the roughly 1.8 million blogs the service hosts. SixApart, the company behind LiveJournal, says there are 8,692 self-reported Chinese bloggers on the site, a number that’s likely low since it’s based on information volunteered in user profiles. China has blocked the site before, for no clear reason — then unblocked it again just as mysteriously, without any concessions from the company. The timing of the block coincides with the National People’s Congress meeting in Beijing, says Xiao Qiang, a Chinese dissident and founder of the China Digital Times. According to Xiao, the event is often accompanied by stepped up security and a worsening of China’s notorious internet censorship policies
Charlie Brooker, writing in the Guardian, reviews his phone under the headline, My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots.
It gets even better from there. This may be the best mobile phone review ever written — via Bruce Sterling
A team of British scientists has set sail on a voyage to examine why a huge chunk of the earth’s crust is missing, deep under the Atlantic Ocean — a phenomenon that challenges conventional ideas about how the earth works. The 20-strong team aims to survey an area some 3,000 to 4,000 metres deep where the mantle — the deep interior of the earth normally covered by a crust kilometres thick — is exposed on the sea floor. Experts describe the hole along the mid-Atlantic ridge as an open wound
on the ocean floor that has puzzled scientists for the five or so years that its existence has been known because it defies existing tectonic plate theories of evolution
The US Department of Transportation (DOT) has banned Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 2007 from its offices, and is considering switching its operations to Macs and PCs running Novell’s SuSe Linux. The DOT enacted the ban in mid-January because certain applications essential to the agency’s function can’t run on Windows Vista
Random House and HarperCollins have agreed to allow book browsing and searching on all their books
The recent 2.1.1 release of the popular blog software WordPress was compromised by a cracker who made it easier for to execute code remotely. This is interesting because the official release was quietly and subtly compromised, and has been in the wild for a few days now. There’s no word on if any affected sites have been compromised, but anyone running WordPress is urged to upgrade to 2.1.2 immediately
A genuine crack for Windows Vista has just been released, which allows a pirated, non-activated installation of Vista (Home Basic/Premium and Ultimate) to be properly activated and made fully-operational. Unlike cracks which have been floating around since Vista RTM was released in late November, this crack doesn’t simply get around product activation with beta activation files or timestop cracks — it actually makes use of the activation process. It seems that Microsoft has allowed large OEMs like ASUS to ship their products with a pre-installed version of Vista that doesn’t require product activation — apparently because end users would find it too inconvenient
Scientists at the University of Manchester have created the world’s thinnest substance, a sheet of carbon one atom thick. Called graphene
, the substance will revolutionise the computer industry, allowing transistors to be built on a far smaller scale than today. The team has already used the substance to build a transistor for single electrons
Computer hackers have scored a victory in their battle against Sony and the way the company controls its PlayStation Portable (PSP) handheld games console. Last month three hacker teams — Noobz, Team C+D and a group led by PSP hacker Dark Alex — co-ordinating their efforts over the internet, found a flaw in the most recently released version of the firmware — version 3.03. Using this flaw they devised a way to unlock all PSPs, regardless of their age or the firmware running on it
Emergency workers attending the scene of a dirty
bomb or nuclear blast could soon have a drug to help protect them
The BBC has struck a content deal with YouTube, the web’s most popular video sharing website, owned by Google. Three YouTube channels — one for news and two for entertainment — will showcase short clips of BBC content. The BBC hopes that the deal will help it reach YouTube’s monthly audience of more than 70 million users and drive extra traffic to its own website. The corporation will also get a share of the advertising revenue generated by traffic to the new YouTube channels
Australia’s first commercial wave-generated power station will in weeks begin supplying homes south of Sydney with electricity and fresh drinking water, courtesy of the sea. Lying anchored just 100 metres (yards) off a popular surf beach near Wollongong, a city of around 200,000 people just south of Sydney, the 485-tonne plant will power 500 homes along the local grid. Electricity is generated when waves wash into a funnel facing the ocean, driving air through a pipe and into a turbine capable of pumping 500kw of clean power each day into the local grid. The A$6 million (US$4.7 million) floating plant, built to withstand a 1-in-100 year storm, can also desalinate 2,000 litres of drinking water each day for almost as many homes as it powers
An antiviral drug widely used to treat hepatitis B causes some people with HIV to become rapidly resistant to their medication. The finding could have major implications for over four million people worldwide who are jointly infected with hepatitis B and HIV
Watch Violet the octopus stalk and kill a live crab.
The useless twats at Channel Ten claim to have signed Torchwood. What a nightmare. I can see it now; the show will overhyped in a manner contrary to its style prior to screening, butchered beyond belief when it does air, suffer from unannounced timeslot changes before being banished to 2:00am, then it’ll be ditched halfway through its run with no further word. Where the hell was Aunty while Ten was poaching on their patch?
Hoping to get a jump on Google and other competitors, Adobe plans to release a hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing application within six months. The online service is part of a larger move to introduce ad-supported online services to complement its existing products and broaden the company reach into the consumer market
New technology developed by Keio University researchers that creates artificial bacterial DNA that can carry more than 100 bits of data within the genome sequence. The researchers claimed that they encoded e= mc² 1905!
on the common soil bacteria, Bacillius subtilis. The bacteria-based data storage method has backup and long-term archival functionality
Virtualisation software vendor Parallels has released an update to its Parallels Desktop virtualisation software for Intel-based Apple Macs. The biggest update to the new version is Coherence, a feature that enables Mac users running Parallels to run and access Windows applications from their Mac desktops via virtualisation rather than switching between operating systems
The Canadian parliament has voted against renewing anti-terror laws that had been introduced after 11 September 2001. The rejected laws included provisions to hold terror suspects indefinitely, and to compel witnesses to testify, and were in some sense Canada’s version fo the Patriot Act. The laws were voted down in the face of claims from the minority Conservative government that the Liberal Party was soft on terror, and despite the fact that Canada has faced active terrorist cells in their own country. The anti-terror laws have never been used, and it was viewed that they are neither relevant, nor needed, in dealing with terrorist plots. Hopefully more countries will come to the same conclusion — via Slashdot
When Firefox 3.0 is released later this year, the open-source browser is likely to contain a host of new features, including offline support for Web applications and new bookmark and search features. Mozilla released the second alpha version of Firefox 3.0 earlier this month
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