MyResearchSpace

Ok, so Google doesn’t own files that you upload to Google Docs as people have slightly freaking out about. The key thing however is that people (Journalists) are confusing  ownership of the content uploaded to […]

The Hack

Christmas definitely did not arrive for strategic intelligence analysis firm Strategic Forecasting Inc (Stratfor). Their site was hacked by Anonymous on Christmas eve, their web site defaced, over 2GB of emails removed, and the Stratfor private subscriber list and details of 90,000 credit cards from subscribers taken.

The stolen…[Read more]

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of newspapers are somewhat exaggerated. Traditional media however, is experiencing the “perfect storm” of declining circulations and advertising revenues and […]

A new web technology is promising to do for video what the web originally did for text. Called Popcorn, it brings interactivity to video so that as the video is playing, other things can be synchronised with […]

Thoughts of UWA Researchers.

By Professor Stephan Lewandowsky People distrust science for many reasons, but this can be overcome. Jody Art THE STATE OF SCIENCE: Why do people distrust science? Why do some of us reject consensus on a whole range of scientific findings? As Professor Stephan Lewandowsky explains, it often comes down to the way we look at the world. What does [...]

Anonymous versus Los Zetas drug cartel … a merry Mexican dance Threats of exposure have been met with threats of murder – or so it seems. Eneas. In recent weeks, the fractured nature of Anonymous, the hacktivist collective, has come to the fore after it declared war on Los Zetas , a Mexican drug cartel. Dubbed “Operation Cartel”, it was [Read more]

Diaspora co-founder dead at 22 Ilya Zhitomirskiy, left. To his right is Dan Grippi, one of the four Diaspora founders. Flickr/campuspartymexico. Diaspora co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy passed away over the weekend. The 22-year-old was one of four former NYU student developers of Diaspora, an open source social network platform that has been…[Read more]

New Conversation Article

On July 19th this year, a Doctor Nefario arrived at Seattle airport and was asked if he had enough money to cover his stay in the US. He replied that he did, but it was in Bitcoin, an electronic cryptographic currency. Unfortunately, not only did the Customs and Border Protection Authority not know what Bitcoin was, [...]

Some people,  including on this site, have suggested there’s a loophole in Apple’s new iCloud that will allow people who illegally download music to somehow “launder” their dirty music files, getting a nice clean, and legal, license to the music stored on iCloud. This argument is flawed for two main reasons. The first has to do [...]

Google is hoping that the saying “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again” will work out for them with  Google+. Launched as a private beta version on Tuesday, Google+ is the search giant’s latest attempt at a version of Facebook. The company has tried this before with products such as Orkut, Google Wave and Buzz. [...]

A fresh storm has blown into Google’s new Google+ service. The company has been suspending accounts because they contravene Google’s  Community Standards – ostensibly to stop fake or spam accounts being created. This means any name Google has determined is not the person’s real name has resulted in an automatic suspension. The suspension has…[Read more]

The phrase “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” was coined by American computer programmer Eric S. Raymond to distinguish two different approaches to the development of software. The Bazaar  was likened to the slightly chaotic but powerful collective approach behind the development of  open source software. The Cathedral represented the traditional,…[Read more]

Las Vegas has a long association with people on the fringe of society but even Hunter S. Thompson’s characters  Raoul Duke and his drug-soaked Samoan lawyer would have found visitors to the  DefCon hacker conference at the extreme edge of these fringes. As the late, great Gonzo journalist would have put it: “There was madness in any direction, [...]

In the jungles of Guyana, a PhD candidate used Facebook to get ichthyologists around the world to identify hundreds of fish that they had pulled out of a river they were surveying ( Science Daily ) – the point about all of this is that the Australian Federal Government is spending millions to try and develop eResearch infrastructure [...]

Asking whether a personally controlled electronic health record (PCEHR) will improve health outcomes for a patient is a bit like asking whether online banking improves a person’s ability to manage their finances. To a large extent, it is not the point – the banking industry provided online banking as a continuing process of improving their [...]

It seems that Apple is not happy with Samsung copying everything they do and is going after them in the US courts. Engadget has the story and points out that this is as much a swipe at Google for the Android system as it is about Samsung’s inability to be creative on its own. So who [...]