A senior Google engineer has told how he was “wowed” by an Australian search engine tool developed at the University of New South Wales.

“I think it’s pretty special,” said Mr Rob Pike, a principal engineer at the world’s leading internet search company, speaking about the Orion search engine process.

Earlier this year, Google bought the rights to the advanced text search algorithm for an undisclosed sum and hired the doctoral student who developed it, Mr Ori Allon.

Mr Pike, who splits his year between Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California and the Sydney office, says he often visits universities and checks out research projects.

“[But] this is the first time I’ve walked out and said: ‘Wow! We should buy this stuff’. So it’s pretty unique,” Mr Pike said in an interview.

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Source: SMH

SHOCKING new figures show UK perverts are trying to access child porn websites 35,000 times a day.

Figures from internet provider BT show online paedophiles attempted to view four million illegal child pornography sites in the past four months alone.

There are fears the overall number could be much higher, as BT accounts for around just a third of the internet market.

Bids to visit banned child porn sites have more than tripled since screening was introduced by BT in June 2004. The Cleanfeed programme, which prevents users from accessing sites blacklisted by the Internet Watch Foundation, initially registered 10,000 attempts by BT’s 3.1 million domestic users each day.

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Source: The Sun via Flexbeta

According to this news post, industry leaders are plotting to highjack the world wide web and setup subscrition fees to stream media and do other activities. The news post reads, “all of us–from content providers to individual users–would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing “platinum,” “gold” and “silver” levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.”

Source: The Nation via Flexbeta

Dispatch from the future:
FROM: Carter Kohl, 34 inches, 30 pounds, 17 months.
TO: Friends and family.
MESSAGE: Feel free to contact me. Even though I cannot read just yet, you can still send me e-mail. My parents will read it to me and will help me respond to all your messages. In advance, thanks for getting in touch. I’ll be reading and replying back to you before you know it!

Young Carter may not know it, but along with a galloping number of tiny citizens, he is already wired. Despite his limited lexicon, featuring the words fish and light (pronounced “ish” and “ite”), Carter possesses his own e-mail address and an inbox filling up with messages from family and fans.

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Call it a flickr.com for the unwilling: Users of P-to-P (peer-to-peer) networks are finding photos stored in shared folders are being published on a new voyeuristic Web site that went live a few days ago, but the site may violate laws, a legal expert said. Fitography.com is perhaps another example of how the Internet can be both prying and surprising. Since it started Dec. 30, reams of searchable photos have been posted, running the gamut from the mundane to the eccentric to the slightly disturbing: an outdoor barbecue, a crowd at a Pearl Jam concert; a group of U.S. Army soldiers posing with actor Denzel Washington, a woman giving birth in an operating room.

In a Thursday news release announcing the site’s launch, the webmaster is identified as Brad Gosse of Yourbrain Media Inc., a company based in Orangeville, Ontario. Gosse is quoted in the release as warning users of P-to-P networks such as Limewire and Kazaa to be careful what photos they place in the shared folders of those applications. P-to-P programs typically have a folder that allow remote users to access and download that content, but users can turn off the file-sharing feature.

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Source: InfoWorld via MSFN

Stop, hold the presses! The RIAA is not the evil spying corporation that we’ve been reading about the past year.

No contrary to popular belief it is not the RIAA who employee techs to spy on naughty people downloading copyrighted material, it’s Bay TSP. Bay TSP is a comprehensive, automated 24×7 surveillance operating with worldwide coverage of:

- Websites
- All major P2P networks
- 65,000+ newsgroups
- FTP sites
- IRC
- Auction/retail sites

The RIAA/MPAA are clients of Bay TSP who collect all the data and work out exactly what pirated movie or software application is popular each month and whom is downloading it.

According to Bay TSP last month, The Interpreter was the most popular movie after being downloaded 50,336 times, shortly followed by The Skeleton Key at 47, 348. Interestingly the most pirated software was SUSE Linux 9.0 at 78, 159 copies followed by Acrobat 7 at 43, 803.

The data is comprehensive pinpointing the peak time of day, average shared files per user and how this varies across different methods of sharing files. It’s impressive that this kind of data can be extracted from file sharing networks, IRC and newsgroups to name a few but is it stopping piracy? You have to wonder whether said data is being collected until such a time when the companies have more power to act against those who pirate copyrighted materials.

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Source: Neowin

HOLLYWOOD studio Warner Brothers said it plans to put thousands of episodes of old television classics online for free under a groundbreaking deal with America Online.

The two companies, part of the Time Warner group, said they would team up to launch a new broadband network in January called In2TV, allowing users to stream thousands of old episodes for free on AOL.com.

Billing the new service as the “world’s first internet-based TV archive,” they said In2TV would blaze a trail for TV over broadband, which is now available in more than half of all US households.

Along with Lynda Carter’s star-spangled corset-wearing “Wonder Woman” from the 1970s, other blasts from the past on In2TV will include “Falcon Crest”, “La Femme Nikita”, “Lois and Clark,” “Growing Pains” and John Travolta’s TV debut, “Welcome Back Kotter”.

In its first year the service will offer around 3,400 hours of programming from 4,800 episodes - or 300 episodes a month - taken from some 100 series of popular Warner Bros shows from the past, AOL spokeswoman Ruth Sarfaty AFP.

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Source: AustralianIT