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OCAU News |
Tuesday Afternoon
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Tuesday, 5-November-2013 14:10:46 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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The Melbourne Cup is on in under an hour from now - you can keep up to date with info in this thread.
Long-term friend of OCAU John Selby has featured in a story about the right to be forgotten. New legislation in America and Europe are making it easier for young people to remove outdated material from websites. Should we adopt similar laws here, and what are the issues?
The US Government have siezed millions in bitcoins related to The Silk Road. The Silk Road made a small fortune during its two and a half years as the web’s biggest anonymous black market for illegal drugs. As of Friday, at least one $28.5 million chunk of that fortune now belongs to the FBI.
Meanwhile a Norwegian man bought $27 worth of bitcoin in 2009 and forgot about them, until realising recently they're worth $886k. Koch exchanged one fifth of his 5,000 bitcoins, generating enough kroner to buy an apartment in Toyen, one of the Norwegian capital’s wealthier areas. I remember people mining bitcoins on OCAU a few years ago - have you got a small fortune lying around on a USB stick somewhere? :)
Andypoo made me nostalgic with this link about Funway Kits which were a great way of teaching Australian kids about electronics. The Funway book was very popular (and still is with some schools, Scout groups and so on), so Dick published volume two from 1980. Finally some “real” projects – twenty kits that required soldering and could be of some real use in the world. Items such as a shortwave radio, intercom, timing devices, digital counters, and a mosquito repeller of dubiuos success. However they sold very well, and in 1984 the final volume of the Funway trilogy was published – another ten projects – “each with an integrated circuit!”
Also from the past, some MS-DOS Viruses in action on Wired. Back in 2004, a computer worm called Sasser swept across the web, infecting an estimated quarter million PCs. One of them belonged to Daniel White, then 16 years old. In the course of figuring out how to purge the worm from his system, the teenager came across the website of anti-virus company F-Secure, which hosted a vast field guide of malware dating back to the 1980s, complete with explanations, technical write-ups, and even screenshots for scores of antiquated viruses. He found it intoxicating. “I just read all I could,” he says, “and when I’d read all of that I found more sources to read.” He’d caught the computer virus bug.
Google and Yahoo are apparently outraged about NSA snooping. "We do not provide any government, including the US government, with access to our systems. We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform."
You will probably be able to stay connected for the whole flight in future. That was fast -- mere hours after the FAA said it would allow the use of personal electronics during takeoff and landing, airlines have begun flying under the relaxed rules. Passengers on both Delta and JetBlue aircraft are now free to use their mobile gadgets at nearly every stage of flight. Other major US carriers have yet to officially embrace the lightened regulations, although American Airlines tells Bloomberg that it's already applying for clearance.
Windows 8.1 might upset your mouse, warns Microsoft. There are three issues Microsoft says its working to fix. They include mouse jittering as you move it through a game, mouse movement not being to scale even after acceleration is turned off, and measured mouse polling rate having a lower reporting frequency than expected. Microsoft seems to have found the culprit for the jitter issue, which "occurs in some games because Windows 8.1 handles the games' checks for the mouse status different."
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