Australian journalist kidnapped by Iraqi militants, John Martinkus, never thought that the search engine Google would one day save his life. Martinkus was freed by his captors on Sunday after they Googled his name on the Internet to check if he was telling the truth about his affiliation with public broadcaster SBS. His captors investigated his background on the internet to make sure he was not a contractor for the US or a CIA agent
An Oregon college student’s flat-screen Toshiba TV which was releasing the 121.5 MHz international distress signal. He was unaware of the issue until local police, search and rescue and civil air patrol members showed up at his apartment’s door. Apparently the signal was strong enough to be picked up by satellite and then routed to the Air Force Rescue Centre in Virginia. Quite impressive — luckily Toshiba is offering him a free replacement
On a shelf in a locked basement room underneath the British Museum, are kept 11 wooden tablets; they are covered in purple velvet. And no one among the museum’s staff — including Neil MacGregor, the director — is permitted to enter the room. The tablets — or tabots — are sacred objects in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and are regarded as representing the original Ark of the Covenant, which housed the Ten Commandments and the Orthodox Church has been lobbying for their return — or at least easy access to them — for more than 50 years — via Pagan Prattle
According to an advisory by security web site Secunia, Norton AntiVirus contains a security flaw that could allow a malicious user to disable the software’s auto-protect feature
The British Library is creating an archive to store the e-mails of the nation’s top authors and scientists, as the written word is replaced by electronic messages. A spokeswoman says it welcomes e-mails from prominent people in all walks of life
Google’s free e-mail service, Gmail, has begun using antispam technology supported heavily by archrival Yahoo. Messages from Gmail sent Monday indicated that they were encoded with DomainKeys technology, as evidenced by logs in the message headers. When an e-mail header from a Gmail message was opened, a code reading DomainKey-Signature
appeared. DomainKeys is a technology backed by Yahoo that tries to cross-check e-mail messages to verify their origination. The idea is to thwart e-mail spoofers
, which are spam messages that pretend to be from legitimate Internet addresses
Google watchers abuzz about the new desktop tool are already betting on its next product: instant chat. Code uncovered in the Google Desktop Search tool suggests that the company may have broader plans to integrate IM into its growing list of products
The British High Court has ordered ISPs to hand over the names and addresses of 28 alleged music pirates to Britain’s trade body for the recording industry
Fears of a terrorist attack are not sufficient reason for authorities to search people at a protest, a federal appeals court has ruled, saying 11 September 2001, cannot be the day liberty perished
. A three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously Friday that protesters may not be required to pass through metal detectors when they gather next month for a rally against a US training academy for Latin American soldiers
Former TIA personnel are moving their data mining [BugMeNot] operations offshore, to the Bahamas, to escape US privacy rules and make a buck. I’m waiting for somebody to publish the private data (financial, medical, legal) of federal officials and their families on an open internet web server out of the Bahamas. Is this what it will take for the US to enact stringent privacy rules? — via Slashdot
The owners of a German shepherd were celebrating yesterday after winning a £60,000 legal battle to prevent him from being put down
A Croatian armed robber abandoned a bank hold up after the cashier, safe behind behind bulletproof glass, laughed at his order to stick ’em up, rang her boss to say she was being robbed and asked him to call the police
Google Desktop is a new desktop program that allows users to search the web as well as their own computer files in a move analysts said could be a challenge to Microsoft
An international study has found a rapid decline in the world’s amphibians with the extinction of more than 120 species over the past 24 years
All you need to do to get off a do-not-fly-list is modify your name in some way by adding a middle initial or a suffix. In other words, the folks responsible for the list are too stupid to figure out how to prevent false positives, but a true terrorist can get off the list by adding a middle initial
The European Patent office in Munich had granted a patent to Monsanto on 21 May 2003. The patent covered wheat exhibiting a special baking quality that Monsanto claimed to be its invention. However, Greenpeace proved in its opposition that the wheat variety was bred by Indian farmers for improving its baking quality and it was not a genetically-engineered invention as claimed by Monsanto
Plans to fully privatise Telstra could be jeopardised by a Coalition revolt after the Queensland National Party president declared that MPs would not rubber-stamp the sale
Australian and British scientists have achieved a technical breakthrough to help control insects that have developed resistance to common agricultural pesticides. Developed by the NSW Department of Primary Industries and Rothamsted Research in the UK, the technique relies on the use of naturally occurring enzyme inhibitors to disarm an insect’s defence system. The enzyme inhibitor acts first to shut down an insect’s resistance mechanisms. A few hours later, while the bug’s defences are still low, the pesticide kicks in
Sony’s latest DVD Burner can be connected directly to your VCR or Camcorder to record or back up your home movies, TV shows, whatever. It can also be hooked up to a PC via a USB 2.0 connection. The device effectively removes the PC from the equation, giving users an easier way to make their own DVDs. No word yet if it will record straight from your television, or from your DVD Player to circumvent copy-protection
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