This week’s launch by Google of an online spreadsheet, which is currently being tested by a limited set of users, has stirred up a lot of controversy around the Internet. There are privacy concerns about users storing financial data on Google’s servers. Just how secure are these servers, and how long will Google guarantee to maintain users’ data?
A man shouting that god would keep him safe was mauled to death by a lioness in Kiev zoo after he crept into the animal’s enclosure — via The Pagan Prattle Online
The military wants to turn odour recognition into a science to help fight terror. The Unique Signature Detection Project
, is designed to help identify terrorists based on scents they secrete in their sweat, tears, urine and other bodily fluids — via digg
A team of scientists and surgeons at the Bernard O’Brien Institute of Microsurgery at Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital have developed a method of growing new organs within a patient’s body. The cells have been grown in a plastic chamber under the patients’ skin
Queensland Police are to be given power to force suspects to hand over passwords and encryption codes
Those looking forward to built-in Adobe PDF support in the forthcoming Office 2007 productivity suite and Windows Vista operating system might have to go without. Microsoft announced that it will remove support for the electronic document technology after negotiations with Adobe broke down
Chemical abortion will be available in far north Queensland from next month following the importation of Australia’s first consignment of the RU486 abortion pill
A group of four Connecticut librarians recently announced that the US government had requested to view private patron records and also threatened imprisonment if the librarians spoke up about it — via digg
American trade negotiators have threatened to scuttle Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organisation unless the country shuts down the AllOfMP3.com website, which sells music under Russian copyright law, despite the ire of the RIAA and its international puppet organisation, IFPI — via Boing Boing
Ricoh is pioneering the use of plant-based plastics at its global headquarters in Japan
A flood of legislation released by the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act threatens to drown whole classes of consumer electronics
Recent research, shows that at the lowest temperature point at which the change of state occurs — called the Quantum Critical Point — the Han purple pigment actually loses a dimension: it goes from 3D to 2D — via digg
A farmer somewhere south of Rotherham and east of Sheffield proves to have even iffier field-based hand-writing than Eddie with his poorly rendered arse (KMZ)
A meteor which crashed into Antarctica probably caused the biggest mass extinction in the Earth’s history and likely spawned the Australian continent, scientists say
Folks who value creative content rescued from obscurity may be concerned about major fee increases proposed by the US Copyright Office. At the end of this month, they plan to double the fee for copyright records searching from $75 to $150 per hour (it was $20/hr as recently as 1999), and add a new $100 fee just to give frugal searchers an estimate of how much a real search is likely to cost — va Boing Boing
Computer games in the hands of the elderly are shaping up as the latest weapons in the war against Alzheimer’s
Henry and Roma Gerbus received a phone call from a man named Ed claiming he had purchased their old hard drive at a flea market. They had previously taken their computer to Best Buy to have the hard drive replaced and were told that the store would destroy it. Now it has turned up at a flea market, still containing their personal information, such as bank account numbers and Social Security numbers. The Gerbus’ are a little perplexed and are very worried about identity theft
The competition regulator yesterday gave its strongest indication yet that Telstra could scrap its proposed AU$2 billion next generation broadband network by the end of this month
Inspired by Emil Stenström’s Levels of CSS knowledge, Roger Johansson started thinking about the extreme difference in HTML knowledge among people working in the web industry. It spans all the way from people who know next to nothing about it to those who know it well enough to write the actual HTML specifications — via digg
ThePirateBay.org, a longtime fixture of the BitTorrent community, is currently under investigation. Their servers have been seized by the Swedish police
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