Sick of being ignored by the major carriers, an Adelaide council has signed off on a contract to build its own broadband network with state government assistance. Salisbury City mayor Frank Zappia said that up to 66% of the municipality’s estimated 5,000 businesses are currently unable to gain access to broadband services. The situation forced the City of Salisbury to take matters into its own hands and scratch together $1 million from its own and state coffers to fund its own broadband network
Google has stopped downloads of Accelerator, blaming capacity problems, after some users complained their privacy had been invaded
Self-replicating robots are no longer the stuff of science fiction. Scientists at the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York have created small robots that can build copies of themselves — via meta-roj blog
Toshiba has developed a new DVD-ROM: 45GB spread over 3 layers. The new discs have the ability to record twelve hours of high-definition movies on a single disc. They’ve also added a dual-layer hybrid ROM disc comprised of a dual-layer HD DVD-ROM side and a dual-layer DVD-ROM side
Microsoft has come up with a unique solution to the legendary Blue Screen of Death in the next version of Windows. With the release of Longhorn, the Redmond behemoth has added a red screen to face users when their system crashes. They just don’t get it
Yahoo plans to launch a trial version of Yahoo Music Unlimited, a new, aggressively-priced online music subscription service. For an introductory price of $59.88 a year, or $6.99 when paid monthly, the service will give users access to over 1 million songs from all major record labels and most independent labels. Don’t get too excited, Yahoo will offer tracks in the appalling Microsoft’s Windows Media Audio format
Mark Hachman, a Yank living in London, tried to get broadband connected to his apartment and fell afoul of BT bureaucracy: Someone, raised amidst the elegant lattice of custom and tradition that serves as the foundation of English society, came up with a very elegant, very British, solution to broadband policy here. And it absolutely, positively sucks
AOL is launching a beta version of AOL Instant Messenger Mail, with a free web mail service containing 2GB of storage — via Geek News Central
A power outage at one of eBay’s major hosting facilities in the San Francisco area hit the popular online auction service late Monday
Google and security experts said a recent outage of the internet search giant’s web site was not caused by hackers. Heading off fears that the brief blackout was a web hijacking incident Google said it was not a hacking or a security issue
Two vulnerabilities in the popular Firefox browser have been rated extremely critical
because exploit code is now available to take advantage of them. The update is now available
Scientists believe they have found a wholly new species of mammal deep in the heart of one of the richest, least studied and most endangered wildlife areas on Earth. The discovery of an apparently new kind of fox in the dense forests of central Borneo is an extremely rare event. Only a handful of new mammals have been discovered in the whole world over the past 70 years
A stray nursing dog in Nairobi, Kenya discovered an abandoned baby in a plastic bag and carried her back to its other puppies. It’s not clear how many days the dog took care of the infant before she was found — via BoingBoing
Brazil has rejected the retarded monkey boy‘s AIDS-relief money because it came with strings attached: a requirement to condemn prostitution, rather than working with sex-workers to promote safe sex. The Bush AIDS money comes with requirements to block abortion, birth control and sex education in favour of abstinence programs — via BoingBoing
A school resource officer arrested an 11-year-old Rawlinson Road Middle School student Wednesday after the boy went to school with ten nails in his pocket — via meta-roj blog
Researchers from the University of California and the Doheny Eye Institute have successfully implanted a tiny electronic eye implant with a video camera mounted on a pair of sunglasses into 6 patients, allowing them to detect light and motion. The implant is a 4-by-4 grid of electrodes which connects to damaged photoreceptors (rods and cones) on the patient’s retina. It works by stimulating the photoreceptors, transmitting signals through the optic nerve to the brain. The implant only works on patients with degenerated rods and cones, and is named after Argus, the Greek god who had 100 eyes. If the implants continue to be a success, the artificial retinas could be available to the public within the next three years — via Slashdot
Vacuum Elevators of Florida have released a one-man elevator system that easily slots into buildings. It looks and works much like a pneumatic tube message delivery system, but larger. It has gone on sale in the US for around US$20,000 and uses only electricity to power vaccum-inducing suction turbines that can lift 204kg several floors up. They claim it provides a smooth ride but from the video it looks like it could use some oil — via Slashdot
Morse Code is actually faster than text messaging. 93 year old Gordon Hill transmitted a message faster than 13 year old Brittany Devlin, despite Devlin’s liberal use of texting slang
. And the fabulous quote they were they sending: Hey, girlfriend, you can text all your best pals to tell them where you are going and what you are wearing
— via textually
Scientists from University of Michigan have developed a new type of fibre-reinforced bendable concrete. The new concrete looks like regular concrete, but is 500 times more resistant to cracking and 40% lighter in weight. Tiny fibres that comprise about 2% of the mixture’s volume partly account for its performance. Also, the materials in the concrete itself are designed for maximum flexibility. Because of its long life, the Engineered Cement Composites (ECC) are expected to cost less in the long run, as well
The rise of the iPod and digital video technology has forced the federal government to rethink copyright laws. Under current laws it is illegal to copy a CD onto a digital music recorder such as an iPod or to videotape a television program. But millions of Australians breach these sections of the copyright laws as a matter of course every day
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