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In the UK laptop computers were restricted from being taken aboard planes recently after a foiled terrorist plot. It was believed that latpops could be used to hide a liquid or gel based explosive inside them. However, just as we were starting to think we we could take out laptops on board again the news has broken that Virgin Atlantic has confirmed that it is temporarily restricting the use of Dell and Apple laptops on its flights as the well documented string of battery problems threatens cause issues on flights. In a move prompted by recent issues relating to overheating laptop batteries manufactured by Sony, the airline said cabin staff will ask all users of Dell and Apple portables to remove batteries from the products when onboard.
However, this could be extended to uses of the popular IBM / Lenovo Thinkpad laptops as a flaming ThinkPad notebook had to be extinguished at Los Angeles International airport. Also this week it appears Toshiba will be recalling laptops and said it would replace about 340,000 cells used in Satellite, Satellite Pro, Equium and Tecra laptops. Toshiba insisted that unlike the case with those earlier recalls there was no danger of batteries overheating.
Also while we are on air travel make sure you don’t loose your laptop, ipod or blackberry as a US flight was diverted after an unclaimed BlackBerry was deemed to be a risk. Also in Canada, an iPod that had fallen into a plane’s lavatory was seen as a “suspicious package”.

Original text from the age online http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/new-browser-offers-stealth-mode-surfing/2006/09/21/1158431835805.html

A free, portable web browsing tool designed to boost privacy for internet users has been unleashed this week by human rights group, Hacktivismo.
The TorPark download is a modified version of the portable Firefox browser and can be loaded onto a memory stick, for use at home or on any public computer, said the group, which describes itself as a collection of computer security experts committed to "developing technologies in support of the highest standards of human rights".
The Torpark private browsing technology covers users' tracks by linking their computer to a distributed network of servers called the Tor Network via an encrypted tunnel which allows them to surf the internet anonymously.
The creators of the software said it was built to defend against common practises such as tracking IP addresses used by numerous websites and ISPs for traffic analysis, which can also be monitored to pinpoint a user's identity.
However, a number of security agencies around the world have raised their eyebrows at this new network and its products. And they are specially concerned that this browser called Hacktivismo was formed out of the hacking group The Cult of The Dead Cow, which operates under a remit to fight "anyone or any government that aspires to limit free speech".

Mobile phones are becoming all the rage, we all know that! Its unavoidable that our kids are going to come home from school one day and ask their parents for a prepaid mobile phone. Then they are going to see an add on TV with some ring tone they like and try and send off for it and suddenly find themselves signing up for a minimum five dollar a week spend on their prepaid account.

Mobile phone ring tone “club”s basic terms and conditions say “Access to the Service. In order to use the Service you must be 16 years of age or have bill payer's permission. The contract is void where prohibited. In order to use the Service, you must also have a mobile communications subscription with a participating carrier or otherwise have access to a mobile communications network for which Company makes the Service available, and pay any service fees associated with any such access. In addition, you must provide all equipment and software necessary to connect to the Service, including, but not limited to, a mobile handset or other mobile access device that is in working order and suitable for use in connection with the Service.”
Translated into English means you must be older than 16 to use mobile phone ring tone “club”, have a telephone service that allows mobile phone ring tone “club” to direct bill that service and have the correct mobile phone to access mobile phone ring tone “club”s material. Mobile phone ring tone “club” is not responsible for you signing up to a get ring tones when your handset won’t accept them or cannot download them using WAP.

When a child with a mobile phone sees the commercials on TV they don’t stop to read the fine print and the commercials are based on the premise you are sending an SMS to get one ring tone. However, if you stop and find out about it you realize that your entering into an agreement to receive so many ring tones each week for a set fee. Just buying a new simcard and changing the number may not excuse you of any debt occurred on the old number, it imperative that you cancel the service with the mobile phone ringtone “club” and express your distaste in the way these guys do business at the same time.

Having a mobile phone is a big responsibility and kids can learn to use them wisely by signing up to prepaid. However, Telstra have issued a new service especially for children and safety conscious parents. Called Tictalk it’s a small stop watch sized mobile phone, that has educational games and other features. But its designed for parents to be able to program it to govern its use. I am yet to see first hand one of these devices but from the information I have been supplied http://www.telstra.com.au/kidsintouch/index.htm its a step in right direct for a telco to take if the product takes off.

I was watching the glass house last night and was shocked to see them discussing Steve Irwin a little bit too close to his official farewell. But Dave Hughes made a good point, whilst Australian’s deal with death and tragedy by making jokes on about the situation the use of technology meant the jokes hit our in boxes and our mobile phones as with in seconds but it was way too soon for people to start cracking jokes about this tragedy. Also he said the jokes weren’t that good.

I cannot blame the technologies for the speed it took for these to circulate as I remember the end of the space shuttle challenger, which blew up at 5am Australian NSW time but by the time I got to school the Need Another Seven Astronauts was running around the play ground. This predated email and mobile phone SMS.

But the thing that people are upset about is the fact that some bent and twisted indervidual of a computer flash programmer has come up with this game http://13gb.com/media/game/707f5b5f0e6f62b9ae5795c1549698ce/terriirvinsrevenge.swf called Terri Irwins revenge, it’s a shooter up set in ocean when the idea of the game was to shoot the stingrays. Quite a stink has been raised about this game being placed up on the net. Whilst I know this is probably someone’s way of dealing with the tragedy but people really need to think first about how it might effect people who see your project.

50 years of high speed computing in Australia and 50 years of the Hard Drive to store the data on and now in this modern day and age, music and television shows both at the broadcasters and the receivers ends in titems like broadcast operation computers and Tevo reception units.

I look at the my 10mb hard drive that I now use as a door stop, the drive actually still functions but I haven’t fired it up for some time. It stands 5 inches high, and is about 12 to 14cm long and weights a kilogram and a half. This drive was created in the mid 1980’s. However, the original hard drive first created 50 years ago was made up of 50 disks 24 inches in diameter and stored a massive 5mb in data. The machine stood as high as a fridge and weighed a tone

The original drive was a bit of a tourist attraction as You could see the head assembly moving back and forth, It was quite noisy too. Heaps has changed since IBM released the IBM 350 RAMAC drive now we have drives that are as small as 2.5 inches and millimeters high which hold a whopping 300gb. However, terabyte drives go on sale by the end of year and these drives hold 2000 times the size the original did. IBM’s hard drive business was bought by Hitachi, are along with IBM marking this historic event.

Star Trek has been credited with inspiring many of our computer devices today, from the VOIP WAP driven lapel communicator now used by security and nursing staff in British hospitals, to the palm pilot and tablet PC’s of today, video conferencing and the automatic door.

Thanks Star Trek for inspiring our computer geeks into creating these devices.

I was mortified to find out how many business happily hand over passwords to technicians they hire from firms to service their machines. You wouldn’t give them the keys to the safe but no worries here is my internet password, my administrator passwords and others.

Whilst its true technicians will need access to areas on your machines care should be taken when allowing them to keep such information. A good technician who is working on site will ask you to enter passwords in so they do not remember them. This might seem like a pain as they may ask you several times for passwords when doing the task but it means that your data is secure.

There have been numerous cases where businesses have been accessed by technicians who have worked on their machines at times and these guys have stolen information. Security is paramount as your data can equate to millions of dollars in productivity.

The University of Sydney is planning to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the building of the first high-speed computer in an Australian university. It was known as Silliac and it was the biggest computer of its time The computer was constructed in the School of Physics building with assistance from Standard Telephones and Cables Pty Ltd (now Alcatel Australia), with the first successful scientific calculation on the machine performed on July 4, 1956. It was officially opened on September 12, 1956. But the lack of parts finally saw the computer dismantled in 1969.

SILLIAC was "an almost exact copy of the automatic computer at the University of Illinois, the ILLIAC, and as it is the Sydney version of the ILLIAC, it has been called the SILLIAC", according to the SILLIAC Programming Manual. ILLIAC (completed in 1952) was an early member of the IAS Princeton family of computers.

Google History.
According to Google lore, company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were not terribly fond of each other when they first met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science in 1995. January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website. Larry, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines. Their unique approach to link analysis was earning BackRub a growing reputation and a year later it was time to go looking for buyer or atleast a venture capitalist.
Amazingly enough they were friends with the founder of yahoo but he encouraged them to form their own. How silly was he? But they did find a venture capitalist in Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems. So pressed for time and impressed with the technology of google as it was now called he just wrote them a cheque for $100,000 us on the spot
In 1998 google set up in a garage they leased of a friend and its three staff worked hard on the project, although google.com was still in beta it was receiving over 10,000 hits in a day. It was not long before they outgrew this little office and now with 8 employees they moved into a small office at a university and RED HAT the creators of an open source linux project signed on as their first cooperate search customer. This was because Google had committed itself to running its servers on a great open source operating system called LINUX.

In 1999 they removed the beta label of their search engine after the company moved to its new home which was affectionately called googleplex

How google searches?
Google has a technology called a Googlebot which is Google's web crawling robot. This program and hardware finds and retrieves pages on the web and hands them off to the Google indexer. It's easy to imagine Googlebot as a little spider scurrying across the strands of cyberspace, but in reality Googlebot doesn't traverse the web at all. It functions much like your web browser, by sending a request to a web server for a web page, downloading the entire page, then handing it off to Google's indexer.
Googlebot gives the indexer the full text of the pages it finds. These pages are stored in Google's index database. This index is sorted alphabetically by search term, with each index entry storing a list of documents in which the term appears and the location within the text where it occurs. This data structure allows rapid access to documents that contain user query terms.
To improve search performance, Google ignores (doesn't index) common words called stop words (such as the, is, on, or, of, how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters).
This is different compared to other search engines that rely on what is called meta tags. Meta tags are hidden within the code in the website and often website creators in the early days were able to fool search engines by putting the incorrect meta tag information in the coding of the website. It became prevalent when adult sites kept appearing in searches which were not requesting such content. Google became popular because of its googlebot and google indexer technology actually looked at the content of the website not the meta tags and thus accurate provided the content requested.
It stores the information on the index servers in its massive database.

How a search is done?
When you access googles website and place a search request the web server accesses the index severs and then once it receives back the information displays the links to the sites that are appropriate. However, the index server also stores your search request and the response it gave you back, this sort of technology means that google is able to return information quicker than other search engines and more accurately.

What did we do before google?
Well we went to news papers for our news, we also relied more on written texts. However, the information received in print form could be anywhere from 6months to 3 years out of date before it arrived at the printing press. We then moved onto CD ROM technologies and then when the internet came along moved to search engines and websites, google has really just changed the way we look for information.
It interesting to note that there are hardly any printed format encyclopedias in book form these days rolling off the press, they are now either on DVD or subscription website.
Googles Limitations:
Google as in the search engine is only limited by the accuracy of the content it scans, it cannot guarantee the sites it displays to you contains accurate information about the search, only that it does match the search request you put into the system.

Google censorship:
Google is arguably the world's most popular search engine. However, contrary perhaps to a naive impression, in some cases the results of a search are affected by various government-related factors. That is, search results which may otherwise be shown, are deliberately excluded. The suppression may be local to a country, or global to all Google results.
A Google search is not simply a raw dump of a database query to the user's screen. The retrieval of the data is just one step. There is much post-processing afterwards, in terms of presentation and customization.
When Google "removes" material, often it is still in the Google index itself. But the post-processing has removed it from any results shown to the user. This system can be applied, for quality reasons, to remove sites which "spam" the search engine. And that is, by volume, certainly the overwhelming application of the mechanism. But it can also be directed against sites which have been prohibited for government-based reasons for example china’s political policies.

Googles future..
It’s a strong company launching new products and services, the search engine continues to grow in sized and strength and more googleplexes are built around the world. The latest googleplex is the size of four football fields and has cooling towers to remove the heat from its massive banks of servers. Google technologies are working on products like voice over IP, desktop search engines to find items on your own PC, google earth, google mars and many others. But recently their work with distributed computing projects which allow users who have downloaded a plug in for the google toolbar to turn their computer into part of massive super computer and work on university projects when your machine is idol.

Microsoft has released beta 2 of the next version of Windows Media Player for Windows XP, adding more online stores for buying digital music and letting users share content across various devices. I downloaded media player 11 beta 1 and found it to be extremely buggy and it crashed every time I played an mp3 file through. I am hoping that media player 11 beta 2 will have the errors that cause the crashes fixed.
Microsoft released a new test version of Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP on its website (American site only www.microsoft.com)