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Australia

New Zealand Joins Aussie Bid For Vast Radio Telescope Array 60

Posted by timothy from the was-in-the-neighborhood dept.
schliz writes "A radio telescope in New Zealand has joined five in Australia to challenge Southern Africa to host the international Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in 2012. The newly connected telescope in Warkworth, New Zealand (PDF), is connected to an Australian data processing facility via a 1 Gbps network. Each telescope reportedly produces up to 1 Tb of data per hour of observation. IBM expects the whole of the SKA to produce an exabyte of data per day."
GNOME

Ubuntu's "Lucid Lynx" Enters Beta 366

Posted by timothy from the but-that-danged-button-arrangement-sucks dept.
ActionDesignStudios writes "The upcoming release of Ubuntu, titled 'Lucid Lynx,' has just entered the beta cycle. Alongside the usual desktop and server versions, a special version has been released that is designed to run on Amazon's EC2 cloud service. This release of Ubuntu does away with the brown 'Human' Gnome theme we've all become accustomed to, replaced by a new version Canonical says is inspired by light. The new release also includes much better integration with social networking services such as Twitter, identi.ca and Facebook, among others."
Books

Filming For The Hobbit Begins In July 298

Posted by samzenpus from the chip-the-glasses-and-crack-the-plates dept.
krou writes "Sir Ian McKellen has revealed that filming for The Hobbit and its sequel is scheduled to begin in July, and will take approximately a year to complete. Casting is now 'taking place in LA, London and New York,' and [director Guillermo] Del Toro is already 'living in Wellington, close to the Jacksons and the studio in Miramar.' Apparently the script is still being worked on, and 'the first draft is crammed with old and new friends, again on a quest in Middle-earth.' The planned sequel to The Hobbit is to be an original story not written by Tolkien, covering the 60 years between The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings."
Censorship

A Sad Day For the New Zealand Internet 221

Posted by timothy from the if-you-can't-read-this-you-know-why dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Another one bites the dust, as New Zealand's Internet filter stealthily goes live with two smaller ISPs, and three of the largest already rumoured to have signed up to do the same. However, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is apparently 'committed to helping people to circumvent government internet filtering,' so perhaps the USA will launch an invasion to free the poor downtrodden Kiwis from their own evil government?" Clever of one of the acquiescing ISPs to have named itself "Watchdog."
The Internet

New Zealand Legislature Mulls File-Sharing Bill 54

Posted by timothy from the flee-to-australia-oh-wait dept.
bitserf writes from New Zealand: "Our overlords in government have decided to try and push through some file-sharing legislation. In the bill remains the controversial provisions for three-strikes removal of internet access, though interestingly, nothing prohibiting users from moving to other ISPs. Text of the bill can be found here. Interesting timing, considering ACTA negotiations due to be held in Wellington in April."
Bug

Scaling Algorithm Bug In Gimp, Photoshop, Others 368

Posted by kdawson from the black-is-black-sometimes dept.
Wescotte writes "There is an important error in most photography scaling algorithms. All software tested has the problem: The Gimp, Adobe Photoshop, CinePaint, Nip2, ImageMagick, GQview, Eye of Gnome, Paint, and Krita. The problem exists across three different operating systems: Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. (These exceptions have subsequently been reported — this software does not suffer from the problem: the Netpbm toolkit for graphic manipulations, the developing GEGL toolkit, 32-bit encoded images in Photoshop CS3, the latest version of Image Analyzer, the image exporters in Aperture 1.5.6, the latest version of Rendera, Adobe Lightroom 1.4.1, Pixelmator for Mac OS X, Paint Shop Pro X2, and the Preview app in Mac OS X starting from version 10.6.) Photographs scaled with the affected software are degraded, because of incorrect algorithmic accounting for monitor gamma. The degradation is often faint, but probably most pictures contain at least an array where the degradation is clearly visible. I believe this has happened since the first versions of these programs, maybe 20 years ago."
Australia

Operation Titstorm Hits the Streets 458

Posted by timothy from the koala-masks dept.
schliz writes "Hacker group 'Anonymous' is organising international, real-life protests of the Australian mandatory internet filter this coming Saturday. Protests will take place in major Australian cities as well as at Australian embassies around the world. The protests are said to be the second stage of 'Operation Titstorm,' which unleashed a prolonged DDoS attack on Australian government websites last week. Organisers of the so-called Project Freeweb said: 'If passed, this legislation will set a disturbing precedent at an international level. The public, not the Government, should have the right to decide what is deemed appropriate for you or your family to be exposed to.'"

Comment Re:How far should social responsibility reach? (Score 1) 144

by kinko (#30930028) Attached to: Twitter Developing Technology To Thwart Censorship

just to pick nits, I think the Sea Shepard vessels are careful not to break any Australian or New Zealand laws when they are in Australian or New Zealand waters. All the "action" happens in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica.

They're definitely not following the established "rules" of the sea though, in terms of who has right-of-way...
Education

NZ School Goes Open Source Amid Microsoft Mandate 305

Posted by kdawson from the kiwis-and-penguins-sittin'-in-a-tree dept.
Dan Jones writes "Kiwis have built an entire school IT system out of open source software, in less than two months, despite a deal between the New Zealand government and Microsoft that effectively mandates the use of Microsoft products in the country's schools. Albany Senior High School in the northern suburbs of Auckland has been running an entirely open source infrastructure since it opened in 2009. It's using a range of applications like OpenOffice, Moodle for education content, Mahara for student portfolios, and Koha for the library catalogue. Ubuntu Linux is on the desktop and Mandriva provides the server. Interestingly, the school will move into new purpose-built premises this year, which include a dedicated server room design based on standard New Zealand school requirements, including four racks each capable of holding 48 servers for its main systems. The main infrastructure at Albany Senior High only requires four servers, suggesting an almost 50-fold saving on hardware requirements."
Microsoft

Jeremy Allison Calls Microsoft Dangerous Elephant 306

Posted by CmdrTaco from the tell-us-how-you-really-feel dept.
oranghutan writes "At the annual Linux.conf.au event being held in Wellington, NZ, one of the lead developers for the Samba Team (and Google employee) Jeremy Allison described Microsoft as 'an elephant that needs to be turned to stop it trampling the open source community.' Allison has been an outspoken critic of the vendor since he quit Novell over a deal it did with Microsoft that he saw as dangerous to open source intentions. And now he has evolved his argument to incorporate new case studies to explain why Microsoft's use of patents and its general tactics on free software are harmful.
Operating Systems

Next Linux Kernel Due Early March 196

Posted by timothy from the that's-what-I-call-a-public-good dept.
swandives writes "The Linux.conf.au is in full-swing in Wellington, New Zealand, and Computerworld Australia has an interview with Jon Corbet in the leadup to his Kernel Report. The latest kernel release is due early March and will include reversed-engineered drivers for Nvidia chipsets."
Space

Aboriginal Folklore Leads To Meteorite Crater 233

Posted by samzenpus from the bunyip-approved dept.
An anonymous reader writes "An Australian Aboriginal dreaming story has helped experts uncover a meteorite impact crater in the outback of the Northern Territory. From the article: 'One story, from the folklore of the Arrernte people, is about a star falling to Earth at a site called Puka. This led to a search on Google Maps of Palm Valley, about 130 km southwest of Alice Springs. Here Hamacher discovered what looked like a crater, which he confirmed with surveys in the field in September 2009.'"
Privacy

New Zealand Cyber Spies Win New Powers 132

Posted by timothy from the mmm-new-powers dept.
caeos writes "New cyber-monitoring measures have been quietly introduced in New Zealand giving police and Security Intelligence Service officers the power to monitor all aspects of someone's online life. The measures are the largest expansion of police and SIS surveillance capabilities for decades, and mean that all mobile calls and texts, email, internet surfing and online shopping, chatting and social networking can be monitored anywhere in New Zealand. The New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS or SIS) is an intelligence agency of the New Zealand government."
Media

New Zealand Reintroduces 3 Strikes Law 165

Posted by samzenpus from the no-more-chances dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The New Zealand government has reintroduced a newly rewritten addition to the Copyright Act which will allow rights' holders to send copyright notices to ISPs, and force them to pass them on to account holders. Section 92A of the Copyright Act will allow rights holders to take people who have been identified as infringers more than three times in front of a Copyright Tribunal. This law will allow the Copyright Tribunal to hand down either a $15,000 fine or six months internet disconnection. The law specifies that the account holder himself is responsible for what is downloaded via the account, and doesn't make allowances for identifying the actual copyright infringer if there are multiple computers tied to an account."

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