Slashdot Mirror

littlekorea writes "The online music services of Apple and Google are likely to be challenged by a Sydney-based company that has been granted three new patents around file hashing and deduplication. The patents are being managed by Kevin Bermeister, of Altnet/Kazaa fame, who believes that the technology behind P2P music services has been commercialized by the music industry without license." In semi-related patent troll news, Google is being sued over using interactive panoramic images in Streetview. Because QuickTime VR didn't exist years before the patent was filed.

aesoteric writes "A legion of Silverlight developers have threatened revolt after Microsoft made no mention of Silverlight or .Net in the vendor's brief video preview for its upcoming Windows 8 operating system. Developers expressed fears Microsoft might let their investment in skills 'die on the vine' as Redmond finally embraces open standards. Microsoft, for their part, have told developers they can't say more until September."

aesoteric writes "A legion of Silverlight developers have threatened revolt after Microsoft made no mention of Silverlight or .Net in the vendor's brief video preview for its upcoming Windows 8 operating system. Developers expressed fears Microsoft might let their investment in skills 'die on the vine' as Redmond finally embraces open standards. Microsoft, for their part, have told developers they can't say more until September."

schliz writes "The Australian Tax Office plans to track employees' keystrokes and mouse clicks in attempts to address the growing incidence of repetitive strain injuries (RSI) among staff. It hopes to purchase commercial, off-the-shelf 'pause or exercise break software' that delivers safety messages to users, while determining 'more information about the nature of computing use in the workplace.'"

schliz writes "From the itnews article: 'Bioengineers from the University of Auckland have developed cheap, lightweight rubber power generators that could harvest up to a Watt of power if embedded in shoes. The researchers built on "dielectric elastomer generator" technology that used the movements of a flexible, non-conductive material to build up charge in attached electrodes.'"

schliz writes "Marketing giant Epsilon knew that it was vulnerable to an attack for 'some months' before suffering a high-profile breach last week. According to Epsilon's technology partner ReturnPath, the breach was part of a series of socially engineered attacks discovered in November."

schliz writes "Australian law enforcement has flagged virtual worlds as a 'growing area of interest' in its fight against money laundering and cybercrime. Police are reportedly investigating unnamed virtual worlds, as well as online money transfer services such as e-gold and Hawala/Hundi."

aesoteric writes "The Australian National Audit Office has called on all Australian government agencies to block free web-based email services like Gmail and Hotmail to mitigate security and information integrity risks. The auditor noted that such public email services 'should be blocked on agency IT systems, as these can provide an easily accessible point of entry for an external attack and subject the agency to the potential for intended or unintended information disclosure.' Not surprisingly, the move is seen by some as an attempt to prevent a WikiLeaks-style disclosure from occurring."

aesoteric writes "The Australian National Audit Office has called on all Australian government agencies to block free web-based email services like Gmail and Hotmail to mitigate security and information integrity risks. The auditor noted that such public email services 'should be blocked on agency IT systems, as these can provide an easily accessible point of entry for an external attack and subject the agency to the potential for intended or unintended information disclosure.' Not surprisingly, the move is seen by some as an attempt to prevent a WikiLeaks-style disclosure from occurring."

schliz writes "Salk Institute director Terrence Sejnowski has called for more power-efficient, parallel computing architecture to support future robots that could keep up with the human brain. While human brains had 100 billion neurons and required only 20 Watts of energy, today's most powerful supercomputer, the 2.57 PFlop Chinese Tianhe-1A, requires four megawatts, and still has trouble with vision, motion, and 'common sense,' he said."

natecochrane writes "The CEO of Australia's No.2 telco, Optus, has called for a "Baby Bell" solution to handle what he says is a growing threat to competition in the emerging $43 billion Australian national fibre-broadband network. Paul O'Sullivan says that only by breaking up the network architect NBN Co and tendering out its services, overseen by an independent board (much like Australia's Reserve Bank the Fed), can competition be preserved. And he had a few choice words to say about Australia's 'No.2' ISP, iiNet: 'If you take into account we operate a cable network and not ADSL [primarily] we're still significantly larger than iiNet.'"

aesoteric writes "The Full Bench of Australia's Federal Court (three judges) has dismissed the film industry's appeal against a February 2010 judgment that found ISP iiNet had not authorised copyright infringement on its network. However, the ruling was a 2-1 majority and the judges have made several concessions to the Hollywood film studios. In particular, they set out a prescriptive path for the film industry to change the way it identifies alleged copyright infringers. The ruling says that if the film industry amends the format of its notices of infringement, pays the ISP to vet the notices and indemnifies the ISP against any fallout from disconnecting a customer, then disconnection is a reasonable step the ISPs should take to combat piracy. Essentially, the ruling gives internet service providers no absolute protection over the actions of their subscribers."

aesoteric writes "The Full Bench of Australia's Federal Court (three judges) has dismissed the film industry's appeal against a February 2010 judgment that found ISP iiNet had not authorised copyright infringement on its network. However, the ruling was a 2-1 majority and the judges have made several concessions to the Hollywood film studios. In particular, they set out a prescriptive path for the film industry to change the way it identifies alleged copyright infringers. The ruling says that if the film industry amends the format of its notices of infringement, pays the ISP to vet the notices and indemnifies the ISP against any fallout from disconnecting a customer, then disconnection is a reasonable step the ISPs should take to combat piracy. Essentially, the ruling gives internet service providers no absolute protection over the actions of their subscribers."

aesoteric writes "The Full Bench of Australia's Federal Court (three judges) has dismissed the film industry's appeal against a February 2010 judgment that found ISP iiNet had not authorised copyright infringement on its network. However, the ruling was a 2-1 majority and the judges have made several concessions to the Hollywood film studios. In particular, they set out a prescriptive path for the film industry to change the way it identifies alleged copyright infringers. The ruling says that if the film industry amends the format of its notices of infringement, pays the ISP to vet the notices and indemnifies the ISP against any fallout from disconnecting a customer, then disconnection is a reasonable step the ISPs should take to combat piracy. Essentially, the ruling gives internet service providers no absolute protection over the actions of their subscribers."

mask.of.sanity writes "The United States and Australia will enter bilateral talks in an attempt to unify controversial policies that would force internet providers to retain logs on the online habits of citizens. The US has urged Australia to take a moderate approach as it drafts its legislation and said it should not keep logs for longer than a year. Some EU nations keep the logs for as long as five years, although European nations disagree over the need for the plan." And of course, that's also how long we should keep recordings of everyone's phone calls, and copies of their (opened) mail, too.

schliz writes "When building a network from scratch, Argentine ants tend to connect their nests in the way that, while more inconvenient for individual ants, requires the minimum amount of trail. Researchers studying 'supercolonies' of the ants found them building networks that closely resembled the mathematical shortest path — a Steiner tree. They hope to apply their work to self-healing, organic computing networks of self-organising sensors, robots, computers, and autonomous cars." This story adds to the earlier report of ants' networking prowess.

schliz writes "Harvard University researchers have assembled nanowires into tiny 'logic tiles' that can perform adder, subtractor, multiplexer, demultiplexer and clocked D-latch functions. While the 960-square-micrometre chips are not currently as dense as 32nm CMOS technology, the researchers say future versions could be up to 100 times more efficient than current electronics, and could yield low-power, application-specific 'nanocontrollers' for use in tiny embedded systems and biomedical devices."

aesoteric writes "Microsoft has finally decided to push out an update to disable AutoRun in its XP operating system, a Windows feature that had been increasingly exploited by virus writers over the years. But because Microsoft still sees AutoRun as a feature and not a security hole, it isn't calling its Windows Update a "security update" but rather an "Important, non-security update" — but it effectively disables the AutoRun feature anyway."

schliz writes "Judging by the time it took for Egypt to go offline and back online, the Internet Society speculates that the country's connectivity is controlled by a 'series of phone calls', rather than a 'kill switch'. The Government-imposed internet blackout lasted five days, beginning last Friday, and ending on Wednesday."

schliz writes "Net activists at Telecomix are preparing darknets, encryption, proxies and VPNs to protect Egyptians' online freedom when the Government-imposed Internet blackout ends. Today, Telecomix regarded Egypt as being on "the same level as North Korea and Burma in internet censorship" amid rumours that Egyptian phone lines were to be shut down. Analysts and the Internet Society have also warned of technical and business difficulties to come — including BGP churn and commercial fears of doing business in Egypt."

littlekorea writes "Defense lawyers are increasingly gaining permission from US courts to mine the private comments and postings on Facebook accounts to be used as evidence during trials. The first example — noted in Slashdot in September — has given way to an avalanche of new cases — and a worrying precedent that judges consider social networking content to be public data."

schliz writes "Researchers have called for the development of a messaging framework that could increase the probability that our interplanetary messages are detected and deciphered – assuming Orson Scott Card's vision of telepathic buggers doesn't come true. The trio of postgraduate astrophysicists suggest a Messaging to Extraterrestrial Intelligence protocol (METI — PDF) for signal encoding, message length, information content, transmission method and periodicity. The protocol could be tested via a website that allows users to create, retrieve and decrypt sample messages that conform to the protocol — which also demonstrates communication across human cultural boundaries, they say."

littlekorea writes "The Australian Government has released a common operating environment desktop policy that — among security controls aimed at reducing the potential for leaks of Government data — mandates the ECMA-376 version of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) standard and productivity suites that can 'read and write' the .docx format, effectively locking the country's public servants into using Microsoft Office. The policy [PDF] also appears to limit desktop operating systems to large, off-the-shelf commercial offerings at the expense of smaller distributions."

littlekorea writes "The Australian Government has released a common operating environment desktop policy that — among security controls aimed at reducing the potential for leaks of Government data — mandates the ECMA-376 version of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) standard and productivity suites that can 'read and write' the .docx format, effectively locking the country's public servants into using Microsoft Office. The policy [PDF] also appears to limit desktop operating systems to large, off-the-shelf commercial offerings at the expense of smaller distributions."

littlekorea writes "Microsoft's much-maligned Vista operating system has been named in the top three of 26 tools tested by the European Commission to filter out web content deemed inappropriate for children. The EC tests found that none of the 26 products enjoyed a 100 percent success rate, failing to block over one in five adult sites. It also found that few tools could overcome the workarounds available through cache or translation sites."

schliz writes "Online dating company Gotham Dating Partners has announced plans to create profiles for non-registered individuals based on publicly available information from social networking sites, e-mail registries, mailing lists, marketing surveys, government census records, real estate listings and business websites. Although the Australian Privacy Commissioner has warned that the automatic creation of identifiable profiles of individuals without their knowledge is 'not good privacy practice,' Gotham Dating Partners does not expect to face any privacy issues from the move, which is expected to boost its membership from 6.5 million to 340 million worldwide."

aesoteric writes "As parts of the Australian state of Queensland either experience or prepare for the worst floods to ravage the state in over 100 years, Australia's techies have taken it upon themselves to keep communications services on as the crisis unfolds. One man is mirroring flood information from a faltering Brisbane City Council website, and others have opened WiFi channels in their neighbourhood whilst mobile signal gets choked. But there is major damage to telco networks — at least one major fibre link has been severed by flood waters, telephone exchanges have been knocked offline and cell towers put on battery or generator back-up (or offline altogether). On a sombre note, the floods have claimed 10 lives, including children, and 78 people are still missing after facing a torrent of water up to 8 metres (26 feet) high."

aesoteric writes "As parts of the Australian state of Queensland either experience or prepare for the worst floods to ravage the state in over 100 years, Australia's techies have taken it upon themselves to keep communications services on as the crisis unfolds. One man is mirroring flood information from a faltering Brisbane City Council website, and others have opened WiFi channels in their neighbourhood whilst mobile signal gets choked. But there is major damage to telco networks — at least one major fibre link has been severed by flood waters, telephone exchanges have been knocked offline and cell towers put on battery or generator back-up (or offline altogether). On a sombre note, the floods have claimed 10 lives, including children, and 78 people are still missing after facing a torrent of water up to 8 metres (26 feet) high."

aesoteric writes "An EMC test engineer has pleaded guilty to stealing almost $1 million worth of kit from his employer. He reportedly stole the unspecified goods from the storage giant's North Carolina factory using 'a small bag' to smuggle the kit out before selling it on the internet under a pseudonym."

aesoteric writes "Microsoft has announced that it will open a new datacenter in Washington State housed in a 'modern' barn-like structure that is 'virtually transparent to ambient outdoor conditions'. It was not the first time Microsoft had toyed with the idea of a datacenter without walls. In September 2008, it successfully ran a stack of HP servers in a tent for seven months, apparently with no failures."

schliz writes "Vint Cerf, Google, ICANN and California Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack have opposed a recently revealed UN initiative to regulate the internet. Congresswoman Mack put forward a US resolution that the United Nations and other international governmental organisations maintain a 'hands-off approach' to the internet, arguing that 'the internet has progressed and thrived precisely because it has not been subjected to the suffocating effect of a governmental organization's heavy hand.' Meanwhile, the so-called 'father of the internet,' Vint Cerf, called on stakeholders to sign a petition to mobilize opposition of the UN's plan. 'Today, I have signed that petition on Google's behalf because we don't believe governments should be allowed to grant themselves a monopoly on Internet governance,' said Cerf, who is also Google's chief internet lobbyist."

schliz writes "Researchers have made headway into developing spintronic RAM by successfully transferring spin information from an electron to a more robust atomic nucleus and accessing the information 2,000 times in 100 seconds before it decayed (abstract). The demonstration was conducted using phosphorus-doped silicon in a highly magnetized, low-temperature environment (8.59 Tesla, -269.5 degrees Celsius). Other researchers have achieved spin lifetimes of 30 hours in a weaker magnetic field (0.3 Tesla)."

Dangerous_Minds writes "News has surfaced in the wake of the WikiLeaks story that the United Nations is mulling total inter-government regulation of the internet. The initiative was spearheaded by Brazil and supported by other countries including India, China, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. Drew Wilson of ZeroPaid commented that while the Cablegate story may be bad, attempting to destroy WikiLeaks would only make matters worse for various governments around the world, given what happened when the music industry shut down Napster ten years ago."

schliz writes "Arizona State researchers have been working on a 'self-healing' polymer that uses a fibre optic 'nervous system' to detect and fix cracks. The system recovers up to 96 percent of an object's original strength in laboratory tests. It could find use in 'large-scale composite structures for which human intervention would be difficult,' such as wind turbines, satellites, aircraft, or the Mars Rover."

aesoteric writes "A 30-year-old IT worker at a Florida-based health centre was this week sentenced to 19 months in a US federal prison for hacking, and then locking, her former employer's IT systems. Four days after being fired from the Suncoast Community Health Centers' for insubordination, Patricia Marie Fowler exacter her revenge by hacking the centre's systems, deleting files, changing passwords, removing access to infrastructure systems, and tampering with pay and accrued leave rates of staff."

aesoteric writes "The explosion of blogging, tweeting and other online diversions has reached into US jury boxes, in many cases raising serious questions about juror impartiality and the ability of judges to control their courtrooms. A study by Reuters Legal found that since 1999, at least 90 verdicts have been the subject of challenges because of alleged Internet-related juror misconduct — and that more than half of the cases occurred in the last two years. Courts were fighting back, with some judges now confiscating all phones and computers from jurors when they enter the courtroom."

littlekorea writes "The central IT office of the Australian Government has advised its agencies to offer alternatives to Adobe's Portable Document Format to ensure folks with impaired vision are able to consume information on the Web. A Government-funded study found that PDFs can present themselves as image-only files to screen readers, rendering the information contained within them unreadable for the vision impaired."

philmarcracken writes "The Senate recently passed a bill through the Lower House for the separation of Telstra's retail and wholesale arms and now that same bill has just scraped by in the Upper House; 30 to 28. The deal is worth $11 billion AUD for Telstra and is welcomed by them despite Coalition opposition. This paves the way for the governmental body NBNco to use Telstra's existing assets and expedite laying fibre optic cables to the larger population densities."

aesoteric writes "Software giant CA has filed suit against an Australian software developer over a program that allegedly enabled companies to migrate off CA database platforms onto IBM DB2. It claimed the software 'reproduced' portions of confidential source and object codes without permission and deprived CA of license fees. CA also disputed claims that its database platform was 'dying.'"

schliz writes "Researchers have devised a theoretical quantum computer that could function even if one in four qubits were missing. The design is claimed to be the first that tolerates both qubit loss and decoherance to this extent. It performs calculations by measuring, rather than manipulating qubits, so there are fewer points of failure."

littlekorea writes "MessageLabs claims to have discovered that the systems of one of its customers were hacked by spammers after an entire block of MessageLabs IP addresses was blocked by antispam service SORBS. Customers of the managed email service had problems with outbound mail last week after MessageLabs' IP addresses were included in SORBS' block list. The Symantec-owned service provider has assured customers it has systems in place to prevent such incidents from happening again."

littlekorea writes "MessageLabs claims to have discovered that the systems of one of its customers were hacked by spammers after an entire block of MessageLabs IP addresses was blocked by antispam service SORBS. Customers of the managed email service had problems with outbound mail last week after MessageLabs' IP addresses were included in SORBS' block list. The Symantec-owned service provider has assured customers it has systems in place to prevent such incidents from happening again."

mask.of.sanity writes "A top bureaucrat from the Australian Attorney-General's department has said telcos are wrong to complain about changes to the country's wiretapping laws, which will force them to report every product and network system change to law enforcement for approval, lest they affect the ability to intercept communications. The telcos argue there are simply too many products and network architecture changes to report and that it would become overbearing. It's the latest in a string of changes to communications law in the country, and comes as the government mulls data retention and the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement."

schliz writes "An Australian man has been served a restraining order via Facebook, after unsuccessful attempts by police to reach him by phone and in person. The man was a 'prolific Facebook user' who had allegedly threatened, bullied and harassed a former partner online. He was served both interim and final intervention orders by Facebook, after a local magistrate upheld the interim order indefinitely."

schliz writes "Scientists have identified nanoscale changes in aging lithium-ion batteries that could be responsible for their degradation over time. By dissecting and examining dead batteries, they found that some lithium was irreversibly lost from the positive to negative electrode of dead batteries, and no longer participated in charging and discharging. They discovered that finely-structured nanomaterials on dead batteries' electrodes had coarsened in size, and theorise that the coarsening of the cathode may be responsible for the loss of lithium."

aesoteric notes that a future version of Canon's document management system will include the exciting breakthrough technology that will OCR your printed and scanned documents, and prevent distribution of keywords. Documents containing the offending words can be sent to the administrator, without actually telling the user just what word tripped the alarm. The article notes that simply using 1337 for example will get around it.

schliz writes "Murdoch University professor Graham Mann is developing algorithms to simulate 'free thinking' and emotion. He refutes the emotionless reason portrayed by Mr Spock, arguing that 'an intelligent system must have emotions built into it before it can function.' The algorithm can translate the 'feel' of Aesop's Fables based on Plutchick's Wheel of Emotions. In tests, it freely associated three stories: The Thirsty Pigeon; The Cat and the Cock; and The Wolf and the Crane, and when queried on the association, the machine responded: 'I felt sad for the bird.'"

schliz writes "Free software activist Richard Stallman has called for the end of the 'war on sharing' at the World Computer Congress in Brisbane, Australia. He criticized surveillance, censorship, restrictive data formats, and software-as-a-service in a keynote presentation, and asserted that digital society had to be 'free' in order to be a benefit, and not an attack. Earlier in the conference, Stallman had briefly interrupted a European Patent Office presentation with a placard that said: 'Don't get caught in software patent thickets.' He told journalists that the Patent Office was 'here to campaign in favor of software patents in Australia,' arguing that 'there's no problem that requires a solution with anything like software patents.'"

schliz writes "Free software activist Richard Stallman has called for the end of the 'war on sharing' at the World Computer Congress in Brisbane, Australia. He criticized surveillance, censorship, restrictive data formats, and software-as-a-service in a keynote presentation, and asserted that digital society had to be 'free' in order to be a benefit, and not an attack. Earlier in the conference, Stallman had briefly interrupted a European Patent Office presentation with a placard that said: 'Don't get caught in software patent thickets.' He told journalists that the Patent Office was 'here to campaign in favor of software patents in Australia,' arguing that 'there's no problem that requires a solution with anything like software patents.'"

schliz writes "Free software activist Richard Stallman has called for the end of the 'war on sharing' at the World Computer Congress in Brisbane, Australia. He criticized surveillance, censorship, restrictive data formats, and software-as-a-service in a keynote presentation, and asserted that digital society had to be 'free' in order to be a benefit, and not an attack. Earlier in the conference, Stallman had briefly interrupted a European Patent Office presentation with a placard that said: 'Don't get caught in software patent thickets.' He told journalists that the Patent Office was 'here to campaign in favor of software patents in Australia,' arguing that 'there's no problem that requires a solution with anything like software patents.'"