Apparently a company named The Pond Inc. sells a product called "Subtle Butt". It's a fart neutralizer and, if you ask me, it's a science breakthrough that's long overdue. So serve up the beans and burritos. A few 5-packs delivered to your "long winded" friend and you'll never be gassed again. (Oh, it might be a very good idea to make that an anonymous gift.)

A mere 9.95 for the fart busters, but the company's demo is priceless.

DAVE ITZKOFF | June 19

NYT - A Minneapolis jury ruled on Thursday that a 32-year-old woman must pay $1.92 million to six record companies for illegally downloading songs released by those labels from the Internet, Agence France-Presse reported.

The woman, Jammie Thomas-Rasset, a single mother of four from Brainerd, Minn., was found liable for violating the copyrights of major labels including Sony BMG, Warner Brothers and Universal by downloading 24 songs from Kazaa, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service.

THE REGISTER - Opera raised the browser feature ante today by announcing Opera Unite - placing a web server in every client and encouraging end users to share content from their own desktop with the world.

Rather than compete with the cloud-based services that are currently so popular, Opera is proposing, and enabling, a return to how the internet used to work: everyone runs their own host device, with their own applications running on their own hardware, which can then be accessed from anywhere using any web browser.

All this functionality is intended to be rolled into the Opera browser, and is currently available in a Beta release, along with a few applications to demonstrate the kind of functionality Opera thinks could become standard fare.

Taipei | June 15

DPA - Three Taiwan university students have invented a motorcycle helmet
that can generate electricity and power a scooter's lights.

Cheng Shiu University outside the south-western city of Kaohsiung announced the invention Friday, saying it plans to find a factory to mass-produce the helmets.

The students fixed five tiny fans that are also generators onto the front of the helmet so that when the motorcycle starts running, wind blow the fans and the fans produce electricity, said Professor Chen Feng-shih, who supervised the invention.

Through a Bluetooth wireless transmitter, the power is sent to the motorbike to power the scooter's front and back lights, brake light and direction indicators.

It can also power a pair of direction indicator and brake lights on the back of the helmet.

This is great news for internet freedom.

France's highest court has inflicted an embarrassing blow to President Sarkozy by cutting the heart out of a law that was supposed to put France in the forefront of the fight against piracy on the internet.

The Constitutional Council declared access to the internet to be a basic human right, directly opposing the key points of Mr Sarkozy's law, passed in April, which created the first internet police agency in the democratic world.

The strongly-worded decision means that Mr Sarkozy's scheme has backfired and inadvertently boosted those who defend the free-for-all culture of the web.

more

h/t Primalfire

I'm running the iPhone 1.1.4 software. It's hacked so that I can use international sim cards. Does anyone know of an easy to install hack for version 2.2? I really need to upgrade, as I have a few iPhone apps I want to use. Suggestions welcome.

Ki Mae Heussner & Ned Potter | May 30

ABC News - Online Encyclopedia Says Church -- and Critics -- Pushed Own Agendas

In one of the longest-running disputes in Wikipedia's history, the Web site's arbitration committee said, "All IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates, broadly interpreted, are to be blocked as if they were open proxies." An IP address is a code that identifies a computer's location on the Internet.

The committee said online contributors, using computers apparently owned by the church, were coordinating to change articles about Scientology and advance a single, specific viewpoint.

"You could imply that there is a conflict of interest," said Dan Rosenthal, a media contact for Wikipedia. "Rather than two unrelated people getting together," he said advocates of scientology were "getting together, saying, 'Let's work together to make this a more pro-scientology article.'"

The committee's decision also blocks some critics of Scientology from editing articles on the topic.

May 20

BBC -

The different colours and polarisations of light access different images

A new optical recording method could pave the way for data discs with 300 times the storage capacity of standard DVDs, Nature journal reports.

The researchers say this could see a whopping 1.6 terabytes of information fit on a DVD-sized disc.

They describe their method as "five-dimensional" optical recording and say it could be commercialised.

The technique employs nanometre-scale particles of gold as a recording medium.

Researchers at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia have exploited the particular properties of these gold "nano-rods" by manipulating the light pointed at them.

The team members described what they did as adding three "dimensions" to the two spatial dimensions that DVD and CD discs already have.

The Guardian, By Tim Dowling, May 21

Warning: the 20-year-old Global Positioning System (GPS) that makes your car satnav work could soon fail. GPS devices calculate your position using signals from four different orbiting satellites, and a minimum of 24 satellites is required to keep the network running. There are currently 31 in operation, but several are well past their life expectancy and a US Air Force programme to replace them is way behind schedule. This time next year, we might have to revert to old-fashioned maps to find our way - only some younger drivers will have no experience of this ancient method of navigation. So how do maps work? Space does not permit full written instructions, but here are some Frequently Asked Questions to get you started:

CNN/Cnet - Many people found Google's search site was extremely slow or inaccessible Thursday, and other reports pointed to troubles with other properties including YouTube, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google Docs, AdSense, and Blogger. The Internet was abuzz about widespread trouble with Google's services Thursday. Judging by a Twitter search for #googlefail, the problem was international in scope, though it wasn't immediately clear how universal the problems were. Google didn't immediately comment for this story, though it did confirm an earlier Google News outage that lasted about three and a half hours.

New York | May 13

GenomeWeb - The American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, along with a number of other plaintiffs, filed a lawsuit yesterday alleging that the BRCA gene patents "stifle research that could lead to cures and limit women's options regarding their medical care."

The suit was filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York against Myriad Genetics, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the University of Utah Research Foundation, which holds the patents to the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. The research foundation exclusively licensed the rights to perform diagnostic tests on the genes to Myriad, which provides genetic testing for ovarian and breast cancer.

May 6

BBC - Twelve million computers have been hijacked by cyber-criminals and detected by security vendor McAfree since January, the firm has said. It reports there has been a 50% increase in the number of detected so-called "zombie" computers since 2008.

The true number of newly-hijacked PCs is likely to be higher than those detected by McAfee alone. The figures come as a report from Deloitte said a global approach to cyber-security is needed. "Doing nothing is not an option," said Deloitte's Greg Pellegrino. Everything that depends on cyberspace faces unprecedented risks said Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (DTT).

Brad Stone | May 5

NYT - The iPod stemmed losses in the music industry. The Kindle gave beleaguered book publishers a reason for optimism.

Now the recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industries are hoping for their own knight in shining digital armor, in the form of portable reading devices with big screens.

Unlike tiny mobile phones and devices like the Kindle that are made to display text from books, these new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. And they might be a way to get readers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web.

Such e-reading devices are due in the next year from a range of companies, including the News Corporation, the magazine publisher Hearst and Plastic Logic, a well-financed start-up company that expects to start making digital newspaper readers by the end of the year at a plant in Dresden, Germany.

But it is Amazon, maker of the Kindle, that appears to be first in line to try throwing an electronic life preserver to old-media companies. As early as this week, according to people briefed on the online retailer’s plans, Amazon will introduce a larger version of its Kindle wireless device tailored for displaying newspapers, magazines and perhaps textbooks.

CBC/AP | April 23

CBC - The defence lawyer in the Pirate Bay file-sharing case said Thursday he will demand a retrial after the judge who presided over the case acknowledged he was a member of several copyright-protection organizations.

Last week a Stockholm district court convicted four men linked to the Pirate Bay file-sharing site of breaking Sweden's copyright law.

Couples to test 'intimacy' device Mutsugoto

Couples in long distance relationships are being sought to try out a prototype device designed to communicate intimacy from their bedrooms.

Moray-based technology laboratory, Distance Lab, hopes to find three couples willing to use Mutsugoto.

The device allows couples, who are separated by distance, to draw in light on each other's bodies or beds.

Edward Cody | Paris | April 20

WaPo - A globe-spanning U.N. digital library seeking to display and explain the wealth of all human cultures has gone into operation on the Internet, serving up mankind's accumulated knowledge in seven languages for students around the world.

James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress who launched the project four years ago, said the ambition was to make available on an easy-to-navigate site, free for scholars and other curious people anywhere, a collection of primary documents and authoritative explanations from the planet's leading libraries.

The site (www.wdl.org) has put up the Japanese work that is considered the first novel in history, for instance, along with the Aztecs' first mention of the Christ child in the New World and the works of ancient Arab scholars piercing the mysteries of algebra, each entry flanked by learned commentary. "There are many one-of-a-kind documents," Billington said in an interview.

Robert S. Boyd | Washington | Apr 21

McClatchy Newspapers - Thanks to exponential increases in computer power — which is roughly doubling every two years — robots are getting smarter, more capable, more like flesh-and-blood people.

Matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult — perhaps impossible — challenge.

Nevertheless, robots guided by their own computer "brains'' now can pick up and peel bananas, land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer or the violin, find earthquake victims or explore craters on Mars.

At a "Robobusiness" conference in Boston last week, companies demonstrated a robot firefighter, gardener, receptionist, tour guide and security guard.

You name it, a high-tech wizard somewhere is trying to make a robot do it.

...and much more at Pink Tentacle

And what's that? You don't know about steam punk?

Nate Anderson | Stockholm, Sweden | April 17

ARS Technica - The Pirate Bay "spectrial" has ended in a guilty verdict, prison sentences for the defendants, and a shared 30 million kronor ($3.5 million) fine. According to the Swedish district court, the operators of the site were guilty of assisting copyright infringement even though The Pirate Bay hosted none of the files in question and even though other search engines like Google also provide direct access to illegal .torrent files.

The press conference held after the verdict, and attended by the operators seemed... subdued.

Cell Phone Towers Pretending To Be Trees

Some of the evergreens, the designers failed stupendously! :-)

The first evergreen’s branches look realistic, but it’s far too tall.

Many more at the above link.

Marwaan Macan-Markar | Bangkok | April 8

IPS - Suwicha Thakhor's nightmare in a Thai jail is set to continue after a court delivered a harsh verdict this week that contained a unequivocal message - the Internet in this country is being policed with the aim of limiting free expression.

On Apr. 3, the criminal court sentenced the 34-year-old father of three children to 10 years in jail for posting an image on the Internet that was deemed to have insulted the Thai royal family. Suwicha's sentence - initially for the maximum of 20 years but reduced to half - has pushed this South-east Asian nation to join the ranks of countries where bloggers can be imprisoned for expressing their views, such as Thailand's western neighbour, military-ruled Burma.

Siobhan Gorman | Washington | April 8

WSJ - Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

Are there any readers out there who own a Kindle, version one or two--although preferably two? If so, I would be very interested in your personal experience and or critique of it?

As a bibliophile myself, there is something about the tactile pleasure of a book, I keep hearing good things about the Kindle and have seen two here already in Istanbul, although in the hands of tourists. The idea of carrying around a library of books that only weighs 10 ounces, well, I'm tired of carrying around six or seven or even more books with me about every country I visit.

Apr 6

BBC - Details of user e-mails and net phone calls will be stored by internet service providers (ISPs) from Monday under an EU directive.

The plans were drawn up in the wake of the London bombings in 2005.

ISPs and telecoms firms have resisted the proposals while some countries in the EU are contesting the directive.

Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said it was a "crazy directive" with potentially dangerous repercussions for citizens.

All ISPs in the European Union will have to store the records for a year. An EU directive which requires telecoms firms to hold on to telephone records for 12 months is already in force.

The data stored does not include the content of e-mails or a recording of a net phone call, but is used to determine connections between individuals.

I'm curious about something. I am having the absolute worst time connecting to the internet here in Istanbul. I am not sure if it is my system--a Mac--or just issues with Istanbul's wireless infrastructure. I am inclined to the latter. Let me explain by asking a question first. Which is worse: slow speeds or intermittent, on again and off again connectivity? I have to say I am terribly disappointed right now as speeds in South East Asia were slow, but connectivity was a guarantee. But here? Speeds are very nice, but access goes on and off according to I know not what. Any suggestions, other than a smart-ass comment to abandon my Mac, are most welcome.

Update: It's just poor connectivity issues, as I thought, because my iPhone has issues connecting as well, and those are made for all wi-fi networks. You gotta love Starbucks for at least getting wi-fi (and free wi-fi in Istanbul, no less) right. The coffee isn't so hot. But the bandwidth is a nice change. Now, if I can just convince my landlord to move the wireless router from the fourth floor to the first I will be a happy camper. It'll take an act of God, however. Can't have it all, now, can we?