The crew of a luxury cruise ship used a sonic weapon that blasts earsplitting noise in a directed beam while being attacked by a gang of pirates off Somalia. The Seabourn Spirit had a Long Range Acoustic Device installed as a part of its defence systems
CBS and NBC have announced deals to offer replays of prime-time programmes for 99 cents per episode, shifting television toward a sales model that gained popularity with downloaded music. But the shows will only be available over Comcast on Demand, not for download
A man who decapitated 17-year-old Morgan Jay Shepherd with a tomahawk in a suburban back yard later was said to have played with the teenager’s head, rolling it in a paddock as if it were a bowling ball. Christopher Clark Jones, 22, told detectives in the interview recorded in April that his co-accused, James Patrick Roughan, 25, stomped on Shepherd’s head several times before stabbing him with a kitchen knife, then decapitating him. We’d all had quite a bit to drink,
he said — Warren Ellis
The Department of Immigration confirmed that it has not monitored the $1 per hour labour market operating in privatised detention centres, while the contract holder Global Solutions Limited expects to make a profit of $6 million this year
A South African woman was killed by hundreds of thousands of enraged bees after her vehicle hit an electricity substation in Johannesburg that contained their hive ‚ via Boing Boing
Grokster has agreed to shut down its service under a settlement with the RIAA
Sony is likely to abandon its practice of region coding games for its PlayStation 3 console. Sony’s current crop of PlayStation and PlayStation 2 consoles contains technology that blocks the use of illegal copied games. It also prevents the use of game and DVD discs that have been region coded for other markets. However, Sony Computer Entertainment Australia managing director, Michael Ephraim, said the company was unlikely to continue the policy as international television standards emerge
Here’s me dressed as d’Artagnan (of three musketeers fame) for a costume party. Thought you might find it amusing.
The nation’s third-largest ISP has stopped accepting ADSL customers in regional areas in protest over claims of unrealistic pricing by Telstra
A Trojan horse discovered on Tuesday includes a fully working — but pirate — copy of an anti-virus application called ExoVirusStop by exoSyphen Studios. Mobile phone malware is often disguised as a security application in order to dupe the user into installing it. However, the latest version of Doomboot, which attacks the Symbian platform, is the first to contain a fully working copy of an anti-virus application
Physicists at the Australian National University have successfully used bright lasers to prevent transmitted data from being hacked. Their breakthrough was based on work done by Einstein and his colleagues in 1935 who uncovered a phenomenon known as entanglement, a theory which described the way particles of energy interacted predictably with each other
Five ISPs have been recruited by the government to hunt down virus-infected computers used to send spam or launch DDoS attacks from Australia
There is a draft proposal for law in Westchester County in New York state that would outlaw unsecured wi-fi connections. Public internet access would require a network gateway server with a firewall and also require home/business office users to install firewalls to protect personal info, even if their connection is encrypted. Violations would carry fines of $250-$500
Tony Abbott, Federal Health Minister and professional loony fundie, has announced $300,000 worth of funding for three lunatic fringe pro-life organisations providing counselling services for women with unintended pregnancies. The Australian Federation of Pregnancy Support Services, The Caroline Chisolm Society and the Foundation for Human Development will receive $100,000 each. Greens Senator Kerry Nettle says the groups are biased, religious organisations and will not refer a woman for an abortion, even if that is what she has asked for
Carnegie Mellon University is fighting back against a requirement that taps on campus internet access must be quickly obtainable. The technology that would allow the FBI to monitor internet access, after a court order, at the flip of a switch
would cost at least $450 per student
Federal prosecutors have indicted a 20-year-old California man for installing adware on 400,000 Windows machines he compromised with a variant of RxBot. Jeanson Ancheta allegedly pulled in $60,000 in affiliate fees from porn pop-up company Gammacash, and 180solutions subsidiary ZangoCash. The feds hope to seize his BMW.
Sony has issued a patch to purportedly kill the rootkit, in which they lie about the danger it posed. But it seems that the patch does not remove the rootkit, it just gets rid of the $sys$ cloaking. A lot of the chatter about the Sony rootkit has been about other malware authors using files/processes/reg keys starting $sys$, which would then be invisible on machines with the Sony rootkit installed. It might be worth checking to see if you own any of the corrupted CDs — via Boing Boing
As Google put thousands of public domain books online Thursday, Amazon.com responded by announcing plans to allow people to read books on the Web. Meanwhile, Random House, the world’s largest publisher of trade books, said it had come up with a business model for allowing people to pay to view its books on the Internet
The Online Freedom of Speech Act was defeated in the House of Representatives yesterday. The Act would have immunised political bloggers from having to comply with hundreds of pages of FEC rules
A number of mobile phones and SIM cards were seized during a surprise search at Bang Kwang prison in Nonthaburi province. The search was part of the prison’s attempts to prevent inmates from running illicit drug operations from behind prison walls. We have found a mobile phone hidden in food, in pork leg stew. SIM cards were found inside a dried squid. One was found stuffed inside a dead toad which was thrown over the prison wall
— via Boing Boing
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