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Today's news: Google smacks China

January 13th 2010 01:42
google china
Google has accused China of hacking into Gmail accounts, and has threatened to walk out of China as a consequence.

Google has just issued a statement saying it has uncovered a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China". The email accounts targeted were those of human rights activists.


Google did not name the Chinese government, but it didn't have to. And it did say it was "no longer willing to continue censoring our results" on its Chinese search engine, as the government requires.

China may be the world's population leader and a global economic super-heavyweight, but this is a fight which it may want to back away from. Civil unrest is never far from the surface in any community ruled by a totalitarian regime, and the humiliation of a Google walk-out, and the focus it would bring on Beijing's heavy-handed approach to many social issues, will have it considering its response to Google's allegations very carefully.

Google is itself a super-heavyweight in the human conscious, and it will not have understaken this course of action lightly. In announcing the end of the co-operative search engine censorship agreement, Google has come out swinging. It decided to do more than put its hand up and complain. It decided to throw a swinging, stinging counter-punch.

That means the Chinese must react — to simply accept Google's smack on the bottom would be an enormous loss of face.


Google is playing hardball on this one, and the world awaits Beijing's reaction. But none more than a billion growingly affluent and cosmopolitan Chinese citizens who have hopes for a better world.
The New York Times


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Top job

January 5th 2010 22:44
burj khalifa
There are about 24,000 windows in the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, and the contract to clean them has been won by an Australian company.

The company, named Cox Gomyl, designed and built a US$7.35 million window-washing system for the Dubai megatower. It will take about three months to clean the whole building. The cleaners will rely on three things to do the job: state-of-the-art, 16-tonne cages which travel along tracks fixed to the outside of the building; personal electrolyte packs and custom-made clothing which resembles a space suit; and, for the actual cleaning of the windows, a bucket, a sponge, soap and water.

Cox Gomyl spokesman Dale Harding described the 828-metre, 200-storey building as "wide".

"People focus on the height of the building ... but really the breadth and width of the building is just huge when you're standing next to it," he said, still counting windows.

The company will also wipe down the Hubble Telescope, the orbit of which passes close to the higher levels of the building, and provide a crew for the fly-through spaceship cleaning station on the roof.

abc.net.au, telegraph.co.uk; images: Bloomberg (top), AFP/Getty Images


burj khalifa


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Who wants to be a solitaire?

January 4th 2010 00:11
lifegem diamond
Technology is marvellous with so many amazing things achievable nowadays. For example, just how deprived were our grandparents who lived in a time when, if a loved one died, it was not possible to turn their remains into a diamond?

Today it is. Just go to www.lifegem.com and see.

The American company says, "Your LifeGem memorial will offer comfort and support when and where you need it, and provide a lasting memory that endures just as a diamond does. Forever."

Just in case you have found the opening paragraphs of this article surreal, or find yourself blinking rapidly and repeatedly saying "Huh?", let us put this plainly: LifeGem takes the corpse of your loved one, and burns it, and gathers the carbon, and turns it into a diamond and, after you hand over a lot of money, gives you the gem.

Is this morbid or perhaps tacky? Heck, no!

"If you desire an everlasting connection to the one you have lost, the LifeGem is right for you. Each LifeGem, as a celebration of life, tells a unique story and represents a new beginning," says the company blurb.

The process, LifeGem says, involves six months during which the ashes are heated to produce graphite which is then placed into a diamond press and subjected to high pressure. What comes out is a raw crystal that is then polished and shaped. You can even choose your own colour — blue, red, green, yellow and "now even colorless" are available.

"Like a sunset captured in time or a wave upon the ocean, each LifeGem will have its own individual hue within the color family you choose."

The managing director of LifeGem in the UK, David Hampson, told the BBC, "Some people may think that it's not for them and we expect a lot of people will feel like that. But it really is a 21st Century version of Victorian mourning jewellery, of chopping off a piece of hair and putting it in a locket."

Nice try David, but we'll stick with the hair in a locket option.

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archbishop vincent nichols

Internet social networking sites which promote themselves as communities are in fact undermining community life. So are texting and emails.

[ Click here to read more ]
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google logo
In the beginning there was Gates, and he was good. A bit nerdy, perhaps, but good.

He built Microsoft, and it was bad. Not at first, perhaps, when it was all new and exciting. But after it became big and lots and lots of people got their fingers in the pie, Microsoft became the richest purveyor of the worst rubbish in the history of retailing


[ Click here to read more ]
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Goodbye email, hello Google Wave

May 28th 2009 18:23
Google Wave

Google is as we write unveiling in San Francisco what could be the Next Big Thing in "real-time, yet organised, Internet communication".

[ Click here to read more ]
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Do not adjust your sets

March 18th 2009 20:14
freeview television TV plasma LCD

As a service to the people of Melbourne, Australia, I would like to say this: do not throw your plasma and LCD televisions in the rubbish bin.

[ Click here to read more ]
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iPhoney

November 20th 2008 13:25
iPhone

A man discovered by his wife to be taking pictures of his genitals with his iPhone and then sending the pictures to another woman, has denied responsibility. It was all due, he said, to an "iPhone glitch".

[ Click here to read more ]
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Why haven't cell phones killed us all?

October 18th 2008 06:38
cell phone dangers

Figures from early 2008 show that more than one billion people worldwide use cell/mobile phones. Between 60,000 and 70,000 mobile phones are sold each day in the United States. In Hong Kong and Singapore, total mobile phones in use exceeds total number of citizens.

[ Click here to read more ]
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Vista: unloved and unwanted

September 10th 2008 11:17
chrome
Google software engineer Ben Goodger introduces Chrome. (Photo: AP)


Is Windows Vista the most undesirable software offering ever


[ Click here to read more ]
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