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Australia

Australian Government Delays Internet Filter Legislation 255

Posted by timothy from the by-that-time-the-frog-will-be-asleep dept.
An anonymous reader writes "It seems the Australian federal government is being forced to delay the introduction of its proposed and much-hated, much-maligned Internet filter. It will not be introduced in the next two sittings of parliament, which realistically delays it until after the next election. News on withdrawing the filter, which was a promise from the previous election, has disappointed lobbying groups such as the Australian Christian Lobby."

Comment Re:wagging the dog (Score 1) 840

by Nok (#31993900) Attached to: Pope Rails Against the Internet and Transparency

There are only a tiny few hand picked quotes in that article. After reading a number of other articles on this it appears that he is really talking about things like Facebook, hoping that new media doesn't dehumanise us;

  "the aim of this congress is precisely to recognize faces, and therefore to overcome those collective dynamics that can lead us to lose a sense of the depths people have, to remain on the surface. When this happens those people become bodies without a soul, objects to be exchanged and consumed."

Lets face it, how connected are you really to @joeblow on twitter or your other connections?
Cellphones

Wi-Fi In a SIM Card 126

Posted by kdawson from the personal-bubble dept.
gaijin_ writes "What if, rather than buying a MiFi or using a Wi-Fi router app like those on the Palm Pre Plus, you could stick a SIM in any device and have a shared 3G connection? That's what Sagem Orga and Telefonica are promising: they've developed the SIMFi, a USIM card with an embedded Wi-Fi radio that, when dropped into any standard handset, can share the 3G HSPA connection with various Wi-Fi clients as an instant access point."
Idle

Directed Energy Weapon Downs Mosquitos 428

Posted by samzenpus from the two-pound-hammer-and-ten-penny-nail dept.
wisebabo writes "Nathan Myhrvol demonstrated at TED a laser, built from parts scrounged from eBay, capable of shooting down not one but 50 to 100 mosquitos a second. The system is 'so precise that it can specify the species, and even the gender, of the mosquito being targeted.' Currently, for the sake of efficiency, it leaves the males alone because only females are bloodsuckers. Best of all the system could cost as little as $50. Maybe that's too expensive for use in preventing malaria in Africa but I'd buy one in a second!" We ran a story about this last year. It looks like the company has added a bit more polish, and burning mosquito footage to their marketing.
Handhelds

IdeaPad U1, What We Wanted the iPad To Be 401

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i'd-use-one-of-those dept.
Xanator writes "With the announcement of the iPad, the Lenovo IdeaPad U1 Hybrid appears to have gone unnoticed, but maybe we ought to pay it more attention. It's a netbook with a removable screen that turns it into a tablet (switching OS from Windows 7 to a tablet OS within 3 seconds), and it appears to offer what many of us wanted from the iPad. Quoting Engadget: 'When docked, the U1 looks and feels like any other laptop, with an Intel CULV processor and a 128GB SSD running Windows 7 Home Premium. You actually wouldn't know there's a slate hiding in there — until you pull it out and watch it switch to Lenovo's Skylight UI, a process that was smooth and quick for us. Lenovo says the goal is for the full switch to occur in under 3 seconds.'"
Cellphones

Mining EXIF Data From Camera Phones 175

Posted by kdawson from the know-where-you-did-it-last-summer dept.
emeitner notes that folks at the Internet Storm Center wrote scripts that harvested 15,291 images from Twitpic and analyzed the EXIF information. This reader adds, "While mining EXIF data from images is nothing new, how many people would allow this data to leave their cell phone if they knew what it contained? The source code for the scripts is also available from the article." "399 images included the location of the camera at the time the image was taken, and 102 images included the name of the photographer. ... The iPhone is including the most EXIF information among the images we found. ... It not only includes the phone's location, but also accelerometer data showing if the phone was moved at the time the picture was taken and the readout from the [built-]in compass showing in which direction the phone was pointed at the time."
Censorship

Anonymous Speaks About Australian Gov't. Attacks 235

Posted by kdawson from the not-a-spokesman-mind dept.
daria42 writes "The loose-knit collective of individuals known as 'Anonymous' has broken its silence about the distributed denial of service attacks on the Australian government. An individual (who insisted he or she is not a spokesperson for the group) said the attacks were more effective at stopping the government's Internet filtering project than signing a petition, and that the attacks could go on for months." The site where some members of Anonymous are said to hang out, 4chan, got a visibility boost yesterday when its founder moot spoke at the TED conference.
The Courts

Submission + - Landmark ruling gives Australian ISPs safe harbor (itnews.com.au)

Submitted by omnibit
omnibit writes: Today, the Federal Court of Australia handed down its ruling in favor of the country's third largest ISP, iiNet. The case was backed by some of the largest media companies, including 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. They accused iiNet of approving piracy by ignoring thousands of infringement notices. Justice Cowdroy said that the "mere provision of access to internet is not the means to infringement" and "[c]opyright infringement occured as result of use of BitTorrent, not the Internet...iiNet has no control over BitTorrent system and [is] not responsible for BitTorrent system." Many internet providers had been concerned that an adverse ruling would have forced themselves to police internet traffic and comply with the demands of copyright owners without any legislative or judicial oversight.
Earth

Huge Phishing Attack On Emissions Trade In Europe 114

Posted by timothy from the feel-good-measures dept.
bratgitarre writes "A targeted phishing scam on companies trading with greenhouse gas emission certificates in Europe has reaped millions, Der Spiegel reports. By sending phishing e-mails to companies in Australia and New Zealand purporting to be from the German Ministry for Environmental Protection (German article, Google translation) the criminals obtained login credentials for companies owning polluting permissions. They then swiftly sold them to other polluters in various European countries. Damages are probably huge for a single incident, as 'one medium-sized German company alone had lost allowances worth €1.5 million ($2.1 million).' German federal officials, who can trace some of the transactions, claim that out of 2000 certificate sellers, seven responded to the scam."
Medicine

The Lancet Recants Study Linking Autism To Vaccine 590

Posted by kdawson from the reel-in-the-wingnuts dept.
JamJam writes "The Lancet, a major British medical journal, has retracted a flawed study linking the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to autism and bowel disease. British surgeon and medical researcher Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues originally released their study in 1998. Since then 10 of Wakefield's 13 co-authors have renounced the study's conclusions and The Lancet has said it should never have published the research. Wakefield now faces being stripped of his right to practice medicine in Britain. The vaccine-autism debate should now end."
Security

Submission + - Botnet targets Web sites with junk SSL connection (goodgearguide.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "More than 300 Web sites are being pestered by infected computers that are part of the Pushdo botnet. The FBI, Twitter and PayPal are among the sites being hit, although it doesn't appear the attacks are designed to knock the sites offline. Pusho appears to have been recently updated to cause computers infected with it to make SSL connections to various Web sites — the bots start to create an SSL connection and then disconnect, a process that is repeated."
Google

Harsh Words From Google On Linux Development 948

Posted by timothy from the constructive-criticism dept.
jeevesbond writes "The alpha version of Google Chrome is now available for GNU/Linux. Google Chrome developer and former Firefox lead Ben Goodger has some problems with the platform though. His complaints range from the lack of a standardised UI toolkit, inconsistencies across applications, the lack of a unified and comprehensive HIG, to GTK not being a very compelling toolkit. With Adobe getting twitchy about the glibc fork and previously describing the various audio systems as welcome to the jungle, is it time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular?"
Hardware Hacking

Developer Creates DIY 8-Bit CPU 187

Posted by Soulskill from the now-that's-impressive dept.
MaizeMan writes "Not for the easily distracted: a Belmont software developer's hand-built CPU was featured in Wired recently. Starting with a $50 wire wrap board, Steve Chamberlin built his CPU with 1253 pieces of wire, each wire wrapped by hand at both ends. Chamberlin salvaged parts from '70s and '80s era computers, and the final result is an 8-bit processor with keyboard input, a USB connection, and VGA graphical output. More details are available on the developer's blog."

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