A new assessment from Deloitte & Touche predicts that global traffic will exceed the Internet’s capacity as soon as this year. Why? The rapid growth in the number of global Internet users, combined with the rise of online video services and the lack of investment in new infrastructure
If you’re worried about what your neighbours think of you why not follow Malaysia’s lead and ban the journalists who are intent on asking those tricky questions
The New Media division will disappear under a wide-ranging restructure announced by ABC managing director Mark Scott today. Mr Scott says the changes will enable the ABC to maintain its leadership in the digital media world. The changes to be introduced in coming weeks in consultation with staff includes pursuing the potential for new revenue streams afforded by digital technology, including video-on-demand, the digitisation of the ABC archive and partnerships to disseminate ABC content more widely
Steve Jobs has written an essay on the Apple site about DRM, iTunes and the iPod. Perhaps it was prompted by the uncomfortable pressure the EU has been putting on Apple to open up the iPod. Jobs places the blame for the existence and continuing reliance on DRM squarely on the music companies. Quoting: Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly
— via Slashdot
To help make kids aware of alternatives to proprietary software the Ile-de-France, the political district of greater Paris, will give 175,000 school children and apprentices USB keys loaded with open-source software. With a word-processing program, audio and video playback capabilities, an email client and an IM client, these are essentially computers on a stick. The council touts this as representing for students a tool of freedom and mobility between their school, cybercafes and their home or friends’ PCs
Reintroducing wild wolves to the Scottish Highlands would help the local ecosystem, a study suggests. Wolves, which were hunted to extinction in Scotland in the late 1700s, would help control the numbers of red deer, the team from the UK and Norway said. This would aid the re-establishment of plants and birds — currently hampered by the deer population, they write in Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Kodak’s revolutionary new ink can quickly create prints with an archival life of 100 years, versus standard inkjet photos that go the way of toilet paper after 15. And the ink costs half the price
For centuries, readers thumbed through the crackling pages of Sweden’s Post-och Inrikes Tidningar newspaper. No longer. The world’s oldest paper still in circulation has dropped its paper edition and now exists only in cyberspace
A German court on Monday ruled that police cannot remotely search criminal suspects’ computer hard drives over the Internet without their knowledge. The decision of the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe bars police from using the online Trojan horse
method, which involves using a computer program to search through remote hard drives over an Internet connection, unless parliament passes a law explicitly allowing it. Police will still be allowed to seize evidence from computer hard drives when conducting searches in person
Almost all printers secretly print dots without your consent which are invisible to the naked eye and apparently Xerox and possibly others have included this technology which FBI is using to keep an eye even on groups such as Greenpeace and United for Peace and Justice. The EFF has released a guide explaining how to read the date time, and printer serial number from forensic tracking codes in a Xerox DocuColor color laser printout
I’m sure many people wondered if Google will release a presentation tool, after building Google Docs&Spreadsheets. Well, the answer is yes, and the code-name of the tool is Presently (a play on Writely, the name of the online word processor bought by Google). You will be able to convert a document into a presentation, create slides and view the presentation in full-screen
Germany has ordered the arrest of 13 suspected CIA agents over the alleged kidnapping of one of its citizens. Munich prosecutors confirmed that the warrants were linked to the case of Khaled al-Masri, a German national of Lebanese descent. Mr Masri says his case is an example of the US policy of extraordinary rendition
— a practice whereby the US government flies foreign terror suspects to third countries without judicial process for interrogation or detention — via Warren Ellis
The BBC Trust, an independent oversight body, they are now allowed to release their iPlayer
, enabling the download and viewing of BBC owned content such as Doctor Who. Unfortunately the Trust also mandated the use of DRM to enforce a 30 day playable period, and exempted classical music performances from being made available. There will now be a 2 month consultation period. According to one of the trustees, the Trust could still change its mind if there was a public outcry and it was backed up by evidence
A team of scientists from Washington, Wisconsin, and Germany combined a ceramic barium titanate and white-hot molten tin with an ultrasonic probe. The new material was, in some tests, almost 10x more resistant to bending than diamond. As the material cools, its crystal structure changes, causing its volume to expand. Because they are held inside the tin matrix, strain builds up inside the barium titanate, at a particular temperature that energy is released to oppose a bending force
Break out your spandex pants, start practicing your karate kicks; David Lee Roth is officially returning as the front man for Van Halen. Founding band member Eddie Van Halen made the first official announcement, saying It feels like a whole new beginning to be back with Dave and to be playing with my brother and my son. We look forward to going on tour.
Roth, an original member of Van Halen, quit the group in 1985. He rejoined the band briefly in 1996, only to quit again a few months later. Roth hasn’t performed live with the group since 1984
Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine the IPCC major climate change report. Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute, an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — via Warren Ellis
Given some jelly mixed according to standard procedures and a vertical wall, it is not possible to nail the former to the latter and have it stay there for any significant amount of time. Furthermore, these experiments were conducted by nailing the jelly to a horizontal surface which was then gradually tilted. Nailing jelly to a wall while the wall is vertical is an intractable problem in itself due to the difficulty in picking up jelly with the hands without it disintegrating — via Improbable Research
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has issued a warning to ISPs to come clean about their broadband speeds. ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel says he is unhappy with the use of the phrase up to
in some advertisements about Internet speeds. He has told the Sydney Institute any service provider continuing to make misleading statements may face litigation
Police in the United States are investigating a media company for causing a massive security scare after police overreacted in Boston. A marketing campaign for Cartoon Network’s Aqua Teen Hunger Force turned into a day-long terrorism scare for the city and a public relations nightmare for Turner Broadcasting System Inc over a bunch of blinking boxes that were mistaken for bombs. Major disruptions occurred throughout metropolitan Boston, beginning at 8am local time and then in the afternoon, as calls came in about suspicious-looking devices attached to bridges, roadways and an MBTA bus station
Fox has given Matt Groening the rights to do four straight to DVD movies for Futurama, even after they cancelled the show a few years ago. The series, has been picked up for more episodes, but not by Fox. Comedy Central will be airing new episodes after the straight to DVD movies have been released
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