Operation Titstorm hits the streets

Operation Titstorm will hit the streets of Australian cities in a "peaceful protest" against mandatory internet censorship this Saturday.

Dubbed 'Project Freeweb', the protest is organised by members of hacker group Anonymous, which took credit for last week's prolonged DD0S attack on Australian Government websites.

Events are planned in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, Newcastle and Canberra at various times on 20 February. More than ten members of Anonymous are expected to attend each event.

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Scientists build sensor networks for your missing pens

CSIRO researchers have developed miniature sensors that track lab equipment, coffee mugs and staplers in the office.

Called Fleck Nano, the sensors build on CSIRO's existing Fleck technology that is being commercially produced for monitoring cows on farms.

Fleck sensors collect data like location and temperature. They form an ad-hoc mesh network, and communicate with static nodes and each other via radio waves.

CSIRO ICT Centre researcher Phil Valencia said they were similar to active RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, which also transmit signals autonomously.

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Anonymous blasts government sites for the second day

Hackers continued to bombard the Australian Parliament House website with traffic for a second straight day as part of Operation Titstorm.

A spokesman for the Attorney-General's department confirmed the attack "continued to affect the availability of the Parliament House website.

"Visitors to this site are receiving an error message stating that the service is unavailable," the spokesman said.

Google to build fibre-to-the-home-network in the U.S.

Search giant Google plans to build a super high-speed broadband network for up to half a million people around the United States in order to experiment with the possibilities of a network running at 100 times current speeds.

The company has long argued that it can sell more Web ads -- the way it makes money -- by encouraging Internet use. It imagines three-dimensional conferencing and classes, faster movie downloads and new businesses taking advantage of the speeds that are only theoretical for most people now.

Google hits back at Facebook with Buzz

Google today launched Buzz, a social networking module that sits on top of Gmail and allows users of the webmail program to share photographs, links and videos with other Gmail users.

The news comes just days after US-based online analysis firm Hitwise revealed that during 2009, Facebook had become the biggest referrer of news content - beating even Google News.

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Microsoft launches surface, unveils partners and customers


Curtin University has today announced that it intends to deploy Microsoft Surface units, the table-like computing device that responds to multi-user, multi-touch technology.

The announcement was made at a press conference this morning where Microsoft officially launched Microsoft Surface for commercial use in Australia, nearly three years after it was made available in the US.

Kim Wisniewski, systems engineer at Curtin said Microsoft Surface represented "the absolute and fundamental technology for it to explore engagement methods for students.

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Google cold on voluntary YouTube filtering

Google Australia could not give the Government an assurance it would voluntarily remove all refused classification content from YouTube, its policy head said today.

The search giant was responding to comments by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy to a Senate Estimates Committee yesterday that the Government was reaching out to Google to filter out refused classification video content on YouTube.

"YouTube has clear policies about what content is not allowed, for example hate speech and pornography and we enforce these, but we can't give an assurance that we would voluntarily remove all Refused Classification (RC) content from YouTube," Google Australia's head of policy Iarla Flynn said.

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