Google’s German web site was waylaid for two hours because its address was mistakenly reassigned. The temporary takeover of the site just after midnight was not the result of a hacker attack. Rather, it appears that the German organisation that assigns domain names, the DeNIC, made an error and registered www.google.de as available and immediately gave it away
Europe is upping the pressure on Apple to open up its restrictive DRM that ties iTunes to the iPod. Norway ruled last year that the iPod-iTunes tie-in was unreasonable and gave Apple a deadline to make a change to its policies, but was unsatisfied with the response they got. Now France and Germany have joined forces with Norway, making it a lot harder for Apple to just walk away from those markets
A North Dakota man aims to be the first hemp farmer in the United States. That is, the first one since the practice was made illegal in 1938 and only allowed again temporarily as part of the WWII war effort. After 10 years of recent effort by North Dakota lawmaker David Monson, he is now poised to receive a license to grow the crop beloved by sustainability advocates — as long as he gets fingerprinted first
The British Broadcasting Corporation said Monday that it was in discussions with the search engine company Google about putting some of the BBC’s programming on the online video site YouTube
The plaintext exploit used to partially crack HD-DVD a couple of weeks ago was brought to bear on Blu-Ray by the same gents this weekend–and it worked a treat
Australians are likely to miss out on the option of upgrading to Microsoft’s new Windows Vista and Office 2007 software through a new Internet download service
Record companies are considering ditching DRM for their MP3 albums. For the first time, flagging sales of online music tracks are beginning to make the big recording companies consider the wisdom of selling music without rights management
technologies attached. Most independent record labels already sell tracks digitally compressed in MP3 format, which can be downloaded, e-mailed or copied to computers, mobiles, portable music players and compact discs without limit. Partially, the independents see providing songs in MP3 as a way of generating publicity that could lead to future sales. Should one of the big four take that route, however, it would be a capitulation to the power of the Internet, which has destroyed their monopoly over the worldwide distribution of music in the past decade and allowed file-sharing to take its place —l via Slashdot
As Microsoft prepares to release Windows Vista to the masses, disparate Linux camps are banding together to prepare a counterattack. The Open Source Development Labs is merging with the Free Standards Group to form The Linux Foundation. The goal of the new group is to streamline efforts and help the open-source operating system compete more effectively against proprietary platforms. Community groups, universities, and industry players — including HP, Hitachi, Fujitsu, IBM, Intel, Novell, NEC, and Oracle — are coming together under the new flag
The Center for Consumer Freedom placed ads in the NYT attacking PETA, a radical pro-animal group. A little digging reveals that the Center for Consumer Freedom
is an astroturf organisation (fake grassroots) funded by the fast-food companies that PETA opposes — via Boing Boing
MySpace.com has filed a lawsuit against the self-proclaimed Spam King
for allegedly blasting the portal with spam through the use of compromised user accounts. MySpace also seeks a permanent injunction to bar Scott Richter, who has fought with Microsoft and the state of New York over spam, and his affiliates from using the popular social networking site, according to a MySpace announcement
Researchers have been able to encode an image into a photon and to later retrieve it intact. It’s analogous to the difference between snapping a picture with a single pixel and doing it with a camera — this is like a 6-megapixel camera… You can have a tremendous amount of information in a pulse of light, but normally if you try to buffer it, you can lose much of that information… We’re showing it’s possible to pull out an enormous amount of information with an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio even with very low light levels
Banks and credit card companies are rushing to notify their customers to keep an eye out for fraudulent activity on their accounts after several retailers discovered thefts of customer data from their computer systems. TJX, the parent company of Marshalls, TJ Maxx, and several other national chains, said hackers breached a system that handles credit card, debit card, and check transactions in the United States and Puerto Rico. The company also said there is a possibility the breach is as far-reaching as the United Kingdom and Ireland
Apple plans to open up protected music and movies content bought from the iTunes Store. The iPod maker is expected to make two announcements this week — the first will be to allow streaming of protected AAC content via USB; the second will be to licence its Fairplay DRM to the company’s Made For iPod licencees
The invisible RFID ink process developed by Somark involves a geometric array of micro-needles and an ink capsule, which is used to tattoo
an animal. The ink can be detected from 4 feet away — via Warren Ellis
A 13-year-old girl’s father and stepmother were arrested after the teen told police she had been locked in a room for nearly two years, allowed out only for meals, chores and one-minute timed bathroom breaks. Clint Engstrom, 32, and Lynn Engstrom, 35, were charged Tuesday with one count each of causing mental harm to a child, a felony
There’s a new twist in the ongoing battle between the next-generation, high-definition DVD standards: Hackers have cracked the antipiracy software on several movies published in the HD DVD format. Perhaps ironically, hackers chose to break the copy-protection system in Universal’s Serenity
, a 2005 science fiction film about a renegade crew of space outlaws. The hackers are distributing copies of the films using BitTorrent, a once-controversial file-sharing tool that is working to clean up its reputation by forging partnerships with TV and movie companies. Hmm… as this crack
is on a movie-by-movie basis, I’m seeing this as a workaround rather than a global format crack
Seagate claims the 2.5-inch Savvio 15K, which comes in 36GB and 73GB models, needs 30 percent less power than any other 15K drive. That’s good news to data centres coping with the high cost of cooling bills, as ultradense architectures, including blade servers that pack high-powered machines into racks like sardines, prove harder and harder to cool
Researchers at the University of Alberta Department of Medicine have shown that an existing small, relatively non-toxic molecule, dichloroacetate, causes regression in several different cancers. But there’s a catch: the drug isn’t patented, and pharmaceutical companies may not be interested in funding further research if the treatment won’t make them a profit. In findings that astounded
the researchers, the molecule known as DCA was shown to shrink lung, breast and brain tumours in both animal and human tissue experiments
MGM has announced the extension of the hit Stargate SG-1 franchise with two movies based on the popular series. Stargate: The Ark of Truth
will bring a conclusion to the primary storyline of the past two seasons of SG-1 and Stargate: Continuum
is the usual time paradox tale
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