The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is coordinating an international operation to trace the source of spam e-mails that aim to defraud Internet users
Lexmark is dead in the water with their hopes to use the DMCA to force their customers to buy their over-priced toner. Their request for another hearing has been denied
A breakaway faction of the W3C called WHAT-WG, or the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group — which includes Apple, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera — is threatening to revolt over electronic forms standards. WHAT-WG has announced its intention to submit the draft to the W3C, posing the potentially awkward possibility of the consortium advocating two conflicting avenues for Web forms. The fate of a standard could also determine whether the order form could be accessed in any standards-compliant Web browser, or if it would be available only to users of a particular operating system — an outcome that has browser makers and others worried about the role of Microsoft — via Slashdot
An 800-kilometre-wide sea, surviving as broken plates, appears to lie just beneath the surface in observations from the Mars Express spacecraft. The sea is just 5° north of the Martian equator and would be the first discovery of a large body of water outside the planet’s polar ice caps
Just when you thought it wasn’t posible to come up with a new way to get caffeine into your system: Spazzstick Caffeinated Lip Balm — via boingboing
Spazzstick is a high quality lip balm that contains caffeine, which absorbs directly through your lips as you use it. It was developed by an Alaskan Police Officer, who needs both quality lip balm for the cold and the ability to stay awake during long shifts. Spazzstick is made in a beautiful little Eskimo Village called Kaktovik, AK, by the inventor of Spazzstick and his hoards of worker trolls in a vast underground volcano lair
Hunter S Thompson, the American counterculture writer, has been found dead at his home in Colorado. His body was found by his son, Juan, after he had shot himself. He was 67. He pioneered gonzo journalism
, a factual style in which the writer was an essential part of the story. Worthwhile checking out The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders
Telstra has resolved its long-running broadband pricing dispute with competition regulators, avoiding potentially massive fines with the promise of a rebate to its competitors
According to NSW Justice Minister John Hatzistergos, the Commonwealth need to conduct a trial of mobile phone jamming equipment in prison under the usual dodgy excuse of combat terrorists
Triode Internet used to owned by a friend, but he recently sold it to a bunch of monkeys who seem completely clueless about running either an ISP or a business.
What few staff they have are treated with contempt by the new owner. The single tech guy is run off his feet and not capable of dealing with requests from tech-savvy clients. And anything that goes wrong is immediately declared to be the fault of the previous owner.
The server my site used to live on had been a bit iffy for quite some time, I knew this. Apparently the monkeys now running Triode didn’t. For months I have had to put up with the server running out of room because they haven’t been maintaining it properly.
A shift to a new server was all well and good. Aside from the small inconvenience of said monkeys being incapable of installing basic perl modules.
Before the server shift, I specifically mentioned the perl modules I would need to run my site. These weren’t arcane modules, they were relatively standard fare for many web sites and necessary for running something like Movabletype. I was assured that they were already installed and running on the the server, as were several other instances of Movabletype. When I tried to install Movabletype on the new server, I discovered that the information given to me by D&M Technologies was a blatant lie. The modules hadn’t been installed and there was no way the software could run without them. I then spent several weeks getting the runaround about the modules being installed tomorrow — tomorrow never came — before I was ignored altogether.
Having a web site down for this length of time with no adequate explanation was not a joyous experience. I had no choice but to find an alternate host to get everything back up and running.
A request for a refund for six months hosting was laughed at and all complaints were palmed off as the fault of the previous owner or the mystical flag of all our other customers are happy, what’s wrong with you
was waved. Both of which are complete bollocks. Case in point being that spam skyrocketed when they took over because they refuse to maintain spam filters and all queries I had submitted about this were ignored.
They couldn’t sort out my ISP account properly and when told to leave it alone, went ahead with a change anyway. Billing is appalling late and always incorrect. And yet, this is still claimed to be all the fault of the previous owner, despite the problems only occurring since they took over.
So if you’re looking for a completely incompetent ISP and clueless web host these guys will do right by you. For everyone else, stay well away from any ISP run by D&M Technologies, which includes; Triode Internet, Goanna Internet, Aussie Dial and Aussie ISP. The fact that they tried to seek an exemption from the TIO Scheme says that they can’t be trusted.
I think I’m doing well to be shot of them.
American soldiers traumatised by fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are to be offered the drug ecstasy to help free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares — via BoingBoing
The last of the big green leaves on the left is done. There’s one more really large one to go on the right of the fox, but I’m waiting on the wool I need to get ordered in.
Strangely enough, it seems that every time I go in for wool, at least one of the colours I need is out of stock. Most annoying.
The blue-green leaves on the left have just been started and background around the top left of the tapestry has been done
The University of Southampton has launched a new semantic web interface, called mSpace, that it says will make searching for information online, and learning about a subject, much easier. mSpace is a framework that gathers information sources and presents them to the user in a single window. It can potentially be applied to any subject, provided the basic information is available. The researchers say this means users will no longer have to wade through lists of undifferentiated data when researching a subject
Social networking is out and straight invitations are in at Google’s free e-mail service, but the official line is that the shift does not signal an end to Gmail’s beta status
Telstra is blaming network congestion for ongoing problems with its BigPond e-mail service. Network congestion had seen some users getting messages that the service was unavailable. BigPond spokesman Craig Middleton said he was unaware of any specific cause of the network congestion
Sony hopes to dethrone Apple’s iPod as the hottest portable music player with a new product to be released by the end of the year
An online forum with eBay’s Australian trust and safety director has highlighted the frustration many local users of the auction site feel at the speed of response to problems with fraud and account spoofing
Secrecy surrounds the harvest of a hemp crop destined to be turned into two houses on the New South Wales north coast. Around 2.5 million plants will be used to build what is believed to be the first hemp houses in Australia
Plans to privatise the £48 billion clean-up of UK nuclear sites could put public safety at risk. Government advisers fear that financial pressures will encourage the companies to cut corners and will increase the risk of accidents
Hard to scratch, chemically stable, inexpensive, environmentally friendly and readily available, so-called transparent transistors are an entirely new class of materials
The lovely Feòrag reminded me about an amusing tale I read about in one of Murdoch’s propaganda rags last week.
A couple of houses in Newcastle have had roof tiles broken by chickens. The article above fails to mention that the chooks were both frozen and the houses only a mile apart.
With the second chicken, the cops gave up on the theory that the chickens had fallen from the external luggage locker of a passing light aircraft. I’m left wondering who carries a frozen chicken with them when flying, perhaps it’s common with Newcastle law enforcement.
The plods now think the chickens are being launched by someone with a giant rubber band. My mother favours a larger version of the DIY orange launcher. I reckon someone’s made themselves a trebuchet, mostly because I really like trebuchets.
I expect there’s more frozen chicken ordnance that was probably scoffed by the household dogs after impact or was assumed to be the work of kids. As there were only the two that incidents that damaged the roofs that were brought to the attention of the local constabulary.
A third chook has since landed, prompting the amusing quote from the homeowner: The cat found it first and he was pretty excited about it
, but Police are still baffled.
They have managed to come up with an even dumber and more convoluted theory to explain the situation. This time a supermarket is dumping frozen chooks at the city dump and birds are carrying them off and dropping them in flight. Leaving aside the fact that the chooks are still quite well frozen from the time they leave the supermarket freezer to the time they land on the roof, we really don’t have birds big enough to cart off an entire frozen foul.
The cops up Newcastle way are looking decidedly silly over their crackpot ideas. It would be nice if they inverted the amount of energy they’ve expended in coming up with increasing stupid theories with actually looking for an answer, but I can’t see that happening until a chook lands on the bonnet of their Police cruiser.
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