Well, so much for closing piracy loopholes! With Windows Vista and Office 2007 only just going Gold, and not even available to Microsoft beta testers, developers or volume licence subscribers, the first cracked versions have already hit the pirate boards
Randy Wooten, mayoral candidate for Waldenburg Arkansas (a town of eighty people), discovered that the electronic voting system hadn’t registered the one vote he knew had been cast for him… because he cast it himself. The machine gave him zero votes. That would be an error rate of 3%, counting the actual votes cast — 18 and 18 for a total of 36 — via Slashdot
A dead man has been blamed for hundreds of speeding offences in Australia in what police believe is a major fraud designed to help motorists avoid traffic fines. Police in Sydney said 240 people were under investigation over the speeding scam, where hundreds of motorists blamed either the same dead man, or a person living in another state, for driving their cars at the time of the speeding offences
Last year for the first time, proceeds from cyber crime were greater than proceeds from the sale of illegal drugs, according to comments by Valerie McNiven, an adviser to the Treasury Department. The profile of the typical cyber criminal is changing fast, too. If you think that’s a lone hacker sitting in a college dorm or a basement recreation room, think again. Cyber crime is rapidly evolving from the domain of misguided pranksters, to elaborate, profit-driven schemes involving organized-crime syndicates that may be based around the block, or halfway around the world. It’s estimated that 85% of malware today is created with profit in mind. The sobering corollary to that statistic: only 5% of cyber criminals are caught and prosecuted
Telstra finally launched uncapped ADSL1 and ADSL2+ broadband services, more than 18 months after some competitors started offering the higher speed services. However, the telco will only sell ADSL2+ services in locations where competitors are already offering the higher speeds. It will offer the uncapped ADSL1 service nation-wide as a wholesale offering to competitors
A new Australian study has recommended doctors use Google to help diagnose difficult cases, despite indications it’s only 60 per cent accurate. Specialists at Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane studied how effective the world’s largest and most popular search engine is for helping diagnose rare diseases. The work, published online today by the British Medical Journal, recommends specialists use Google because it is now a source of three billion journal articles, more than any specialist search engine
Google accidentally sent out e-mail containing a mass mailing worm to about 50,000 members of an e-mail discussion list focused on its Google Video Blog
Google wants to make the information it stores for its users easily portable so they can export it to a competing service if they are dissatisfied. Making it simple for users to walk away from a Google service with which they are unhappy keeps the company honest and on its toes, and Google competitors should embrace this data portability principle
The Chinese GPS system, Beidou, is apparently to be opened up for free access within China, worrying European investors on the €2.5 billion competing project, Galileo. Initially, China had declared that access to their system would be restricted to the military, and Europe had planned to recoup some of the cost of their system by selling licenses to China. Michael Shaw, from the US government’s National Space-based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Coordination Office in Washington DC, said, Frankly, China’s behavior towards Europe is not so different to how Europe behaved with us when GPS was the only game in town a decade ago
— via Slashdot
Adobe will contribute source code to the Mozilla Foundation as the two organisations aim to establish a standard scripting language that developers can use to create interactive applications for Adobe’s Flash Player and Mozilla’s Firefox browser
The dentist’s drill is the epitome of pain and discomfort in the modern world, but that could soon change. Bio-medical research and the advent of cold plasma needles could eliminate the need for drilling teeth
Neanderthals may have given the modern humans who replaced them a priceless gift — a gene that helped them develop superior brains. And the only way they could have provided that gift would have been by interbreeding. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides indirect evidence that modern Homo sapiens and so-called Neanderthals interbred at some point when they lived side by side in Europe
A spam-sending Trojan dubbed SpamThru
is responsible for a vast amount of the recent botnet activity which has significantly increased spam levels to almost three out of every four emails. The developers of SpamThru employed numerous tactics to thwart detection and enhance outreach, such as releasing new strains of the Trojan at regular intervals in order to confuse traditional anti-virus signatures detection
Piracy statistics are labelled self-serving hyperbole
in a draft government report. A confidential briefing for the Attorney-General’s Department, prepared by the Australian Institute of Criminology, lashes the music and software sectors
Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have announced that they have engineered a strain of the AIDS virus that fights AIDS. This strain of AIDS works like a vaccine and improved the immune system of the test subjects. After three years on this new therapy, no side effects have been observed
Peter Jenner, former manager of bands like Pink Floyd, T Rex and The Clash, states in an interview with the Register that music label executives have lost faith in DRM and dollar-per-track online music selling isn’t working too well as a model. He predicts that in two to three years time, many countries will have moved to a blanket licensing regime — via Slashdot
An internet advertising firm called Zango has agreed to pay $US3 million (AU$4 million) to the US government to settle allegations that its pop-up ad software was secretly installed on millions of personal computers
A new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research, a UK think tank, has some concrete suggestions on how to reform the UK’s dated intellectual property laws. The starting point for its deliberations is the notion that knowledge is both a commodity and a public good, and it recommends that the UK move from a model where knowledge is ‘an asset first and a public resource second’ to one where knowledge is primarily a public resource and secondarily an asset. Is that an anti-business attitude? The report’s authors don’t think so — via Slashdot
Malware writers have used a Wikipedia article and special storage features to attempt to plant malicious code on unsuspecting users’ systems, the online encyclopedia’s organisers have confirmed — via digg
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