The effort to ban municipal networks in Texas has failed. Texas House Bill 789 originally had provisions to ban muni wireless networks. The Senate passed a significantly rewritten version, without a ban. A conference committee failed to reach agreement, so the bill died when the Texas legislature adjourned this weekend
A Carnegie Mellon engineer is in the early stages of adding legs to a camera-in-a-pill that doctors currently use to see inside the intestine. Metin Sitti, director of the NanoRobotics Lab, is putting a three-footed system through its paces in pig intestines — via BoingBoing
Clayton Hallmark, on IndyMedia out of Argentina, predicts that cheap Asian computing appliances with an Open Source Operating System on a chip will be the ultimate Microsoft killer. References to the US$220 Mobilis out of India suggest the begining of newer, more powerful and cheaper things to come
The British Medical Journal has discovered something which may have escaped the attention of the less well-informed reader: that long pointy knives are sharp and can be stuck into people thereby causing them damage or even provoking a death-related incident. The solution? Oblige long pointy knife manufacturers to make the knives less pointy by rounding off the tips
Looks like Microsoft will not support IE7 on Windows 2000. It should be no surprise that we do not plan on releasing IE7 for Windows 2000… Some of the security work in IE7 relies on operating system functionality in XPSP2 that is non-trivial to port back to Windows 2000.
While security fixes will still be available until 2010, I guess that means the only browsers with tabs for W2K will be Opera and Firefox. All the details about an Microsoft product’s fall into senility available at the lifecycle page. Which pretty much means Microsoft are shooting themselves in the foot and handing the browser game over to Mozilla, Opera and other alternatives
Some of the largest Israeli companies are involved in the major industral espionage case, in which private investigators implanted specially crafted Trojan horses on the computers at unsuspecting companies in a bid to obtain priviledged financial and technical data. Given the current state of Windows security and advances in spyware, probably any company has become a very easy target for such spy attack from competitors
Internet security company CipherTrust on Thursday breathed life into its ZombieMeter, a new system that tracks traffic from compromised PCs around the world
The suspicious package
that caused Interstate 75 and Daniels Parkway to be shut for more than an hour Monday was not an explosive pipe bomb — but rather wrapped-up plastic foot-long penis. Someone took construction-grade plastic, molded it into a penis and wrapped it with duct tape,
said Lee County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Charles Ferrante. They wrote ‘Happy Father’s Day’ on the duct tape…
— via Warren Ellis
Two WWII-era Japanese soldiers have been discovered living in a Filipino jungle. They knew the war was over, but they still saw no reason to come out of hiding for all these years. According to Japanese media reports, the pair had been living with Muslim rebel groups and at least one of them has married a local woman and had a family. It has been speculated there could be as many as 40 Japanese soldiers living in similar conditions in the Philippines — via BoingBoing
The large lump of felted Tinkerbell fuzz has been spun into yarn. The staple was fairly short, but having spun Siberian Husky, I was comfortable spinning the fibre.
The only difficulty was that it had a tendency to felt during handling, so I needed to work on small amounts at a time. The spun yarn was quite unexpected; feeling cool and silky to the touch.
There’s not enough to ply on itself an have enough yarn for a project, so I thought I’d ply it with Tussah Silk. The silk has a natural creamy colour that should set off the grey of Tinkerbell’s fuzz well.
Tinkerbell Fur Ball originally uploaded by Red Wolf
Tinkerbell is Moonbeam’s cat. Moon gathered some of the shed fibre for me and shipped it from Canada to Australia for me to spin.
Tinkerbell’s fur managed to survive the rigours of travelling through Canada Post and then Australia Post and arrived in a large grey felted furball.
I thought that perhaps it had gotten a bit of rough-handling from the postal services, but when I started to work with it I discovered that Tinkerbell fuzz will felt up if you look at it the wrong way.
Microsoft has alerted users that Netscape’s latest browser appears to break the XML rendering capabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Dave Massy, a senior programme manager for IE, warned users in a blog posting that after installing Netscape 8, IE will render XML files as a blank page, including XML files that have an XSLT transformation. What a week for Netscape 8.0; first the browser needed several fixes hours after its release, then it was discovered that without IE installed, Netscape 8.0 will not install, and now IE needs Netscape uninstalled to work
Judicial activism is taking hold in France, much to the dismay of the recording industry, as judges are beginning to suspend the sentences of convicted file swappers. Further, they believe they are starting a revolution against the draconian laws at the base of the industry’s legal agenda, and that sometimes laws need to be changed. Says Judge Dominique Barella of the laws against file swapping in today’s society: It is similar to the sociological consequences of the Prohibition period in the U.S. (during the 1920s). Certain laws can have unexpected consequences on society
First there was the printing press, around 1452. Then, in 1799, there was lithographic printing. And now, in 2005, there’s bacterial printing. The new technique allows live bugs to be pressed onto solid surfaces at very precise distances from each other and in a variety of patterns. The aim is to explore how bacteria influence each other at various distances. Understanding how they operate will help efforts to develop new ways to thwart their attacks on the human body
A 50,000-strong swarm of spider crabs has clustered at the southern end of Port Phillip Bay, delighting Museum Victoria scientists who managed to film the rare gathering. Marine scientists Mark Norman and Julian Finn said the crawling carpet of crabs
covered an area the size of a football ground. Dr Norman said the crabs were normally found in small groups in the bay and Bass Strait. The reason for the mass gathering was not known, but it was likely to be related to breeding
Angered by the growing number of internet scams, online vigilantes
have started to take justice into their own hands by hacking into suspected fraud sites and defacing them
Amnesty International has accused governments around the world, including Australia’s, of abandoning their commitments to human rights in the so-called war on terror
. The human rights group said the international community lacked the willpower and the means to prevent and punish atrocities. Amnesty’s 308-page annual review covered 145 countries. In it, it said the anti-terrorism tactics used have not only failed to prevent attacks on civilians, but encouraged what it described as the rampant abuse of human rights
The new version of the iPod plugin for Winamp allows you to copy music from your iPod to your computer
eBay have removed the MI5 bugging device from auction soon after a verified bid of $3000.00 was made. Sinn Fein are now selling it on their online bookshop via BoingBoing
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