J ROC writes "Phone numbers on Canada's Do-Not-Call registry have apparently been sold to off-shore telemarketers, scam artists, and other ne'er-do-wells, according to reports in the Globe & Mail and CBC News. The CRTC, which runs the registry, sells lists of phone numbers online for a small fee; making it available to anybody who might be interested in buying it, including con artists. I guess this explains why, ever since I added my number to the registry, I've been getting phone calls from 000-000-0000 trying to interest me in some free vacation scam. Canada's Privacy Commissioner is currently investigating."

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CWmike writes "US Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) told Microsoft this week that US citizens should get priority over H-1B visa holders as the software vendor moves forward on its plan to cut 5,000 jobs. 'These work visa programs were never intended to allow a company to retain foreign guest workers rather than similarly qualified American workers, when that company cuts jobs during an economic downturn,' Grassley wrote in a letter sent Thursday to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. The letter asked Microsoft to detail the types of jobs that will be eliminated and how those cuts will affect the company's H-1B workers." Reader theodp adds, "On Friday, Microsoft coincidentally announced it would postpone construction of a planned $500 million data center in Grassley's home state of Iowa, although work on data centers in Chicago and Dublin will continue."

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Tony Dennis the inquirer

We're migrating to Palm 2.0 says Handcase

Sylvie Barak the inquirer

Like everyone else

somanyrobots writes with this excerpt from the Dallas News: "In a major defeat for social conservatives, a sharply divided State Board of Education voted Thursday to abandon a longtime state requirement that high school science teachers cover what some critics consider to be 'weaknesses' in the theory of evolution. Under the science curriculum standards recommended by a panel of science educators and tentatively adopted by the board, biology teachers and biology textbooks would no longer have to cover the 'strengths and weaknesses' of Charles Darwin's theory that man evolved from lower forms of life. Texas is particularly influential to textbook publishers because of the size of its market, so this could have a ripple effect on textbooks used in other states as well."

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LISTEN TO AUDIO INTERVIEW NOW

Tech Wired Australia recently interviewed user Matthew Law from online forum Whirlpool. Matthew submitted an abortion website to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) for review as to whether such content is prohibited in Australia.

Now, you may be wondering why Matthew submitted such site for review. It was ‘all in the name of science’ so to speak, to test how ACMA would handle the submitted site. On the 6th of January Matthew submitted the site to ACMA that he found by doing a random google search on “abortion”; 15 days later he received a response:

“Following investigation of your complaint, ACMA is satisfied that the internet content is hosted outside Australia, and that the content is prohibited or potential prohibited content.“

“The Internet Industry Association (IIA) has a code of practice (http://www.iia.net.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=415&Itemid=33) for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which, among other things, set out arrangements for dealing with such content.  In accordance with the code, ACMA has notified the above content to the makers of IIA approved filters, for their attention and appropriate action.  The code requires ISPs to make available to customers an IIA approved filter.“

Now this may not seem that bad as I would think some parents (that have installed such filters) would like to have the option to block such content. The problem that does arise though, is that the Australian Government want to implement a mandatory Internet filter that will block your access to such sites. If that policy goes through, then you won’t have access to such sites at all.

If you were blocked from seeing content of any nature the Government deemed inappropriate, would you be happy?

zwei2stein writes "I found this question with far-reaching implications in the off-topic section of a forum I frequent: 'My economics teacher is forcing us to give up all of our work for the semester. Every page of notes and paper must be turned over to her to be destroyed to prevent future students from copying it. My binder was in my backpack, and she went into my backpack to take it. Is that legal?' Besides the issue with private property invasion, which was the trigger of that post, there is much more important question: Can a teacher ask a student not to retain knowledge? How does IP law relate to teaching and sharing knowledge? Whose property are those notes?"

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JobsEnding writes with this quote from IBTimes: "A British court ruled on Friday that a man who hacked into US military computers will be given permission for a judicial review against his extradition to the United States. Hacker Gary McKinnon, 42, who had been diagnosed recently with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism, has admitted hacking into the military computers. His lawyers had said McKinnon was at risk of suicide if he were extradited." We discussed the granting of McKinnon's extradition in 2006 when it was first granted, as well as a profile of the man more recently.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is making a sneaky move in getting more pennies in its pot by quietly reducing the amount of users who can set up a free Google Apps account.

French start-up Leyio has unveiled a portable storage device that allows users to share information between units over Ultra-Wideband (UWB).

Intel chairman Craig Barrett is planning to step down from his position later this year.

Nearly three-quarters of the top 100 sites on the web host malicious code or redirect users to malicious sites, according to new research from content security provider Websense.

The organisation behind the .mobi top-level domain (TLD) is to allow domains of just one or two alphanumeric characters.

netizen writes "CircleID is reporting a large-scale DDoS attack affecting all of Network Solutions' name servers for the past 48 hours, potentially affecting millions of websites and emails around the world hosting their domain names on the company's servers. The NANOG mailing list indicates that it is due to a very large-scale UDP/53 DDoS which Network Solutions has also confirmed: 'There is a spike in DNS query volumes that is causing latency for the delay in web sites resolving. This is a result of a DDOS attack. We are taking measures to mitigate the attack and speed up queries.""

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Confessions of a dangerous fanboi

Opinion On Saturday, January 24th, the Apple Macintosh turns 25. Over the short history of personal computing, no machine has inspired so much love and so much loathing, so many fanatical fans and so many frothing detractors.…

erickhill writes with word that scientists from the University of Maryland have successfully transferred information from one charged atom to another without having it cross the intervening space of about one meter. The academic paper is available in the journal Science, though it requires a subscription to see more than the abstract. Scientists have previously teleported unmolested qubits between photons of light, and between photons and clouds of atoms. But researchers have long sought to teleport qubits between distant atoms. Light's high speed of travel makes photons good transporters of information, but for storing quantum information, atoms are a much better choice because they're easier to hold on to. 'This is a big deal,' comments Myungshik Kim, a quantum physicist at Queen's University Belfast in the United Kingdom. 'To store information as it is in quantum form, you have to have a teleportation scheme available between two stationary qubits. Then you can store them and manipulate them later on.'"

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Sylvie Barak the inquirer

Going out in style

XenServer revolution

As it preps the next release of its XenServer virtual machine hypervisor, Citrix is reliving the American Revolution.…

Egan Orion the inquirer

Lower profits trigger cutbacks