It’s Friday, and here’s some interesting and sometimes bizarre news generated from our own industry sector. Enjoy…
French campaign to abolish piracy caught pirating
The French agency tasked with enforcing strict anti-piracy regulations has been left severely embarrassed after the revelation that its logo contains pirated material.
The Hadopi agency unveiled its new logo at a ceremony presided over by French culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand, who said that the agency “finally had a face”.
However, within hours Hadopi was forced to withdraw and rework the logo after it emerged that it had used a font owned by none other than France Telecom.
Read more….
Church holds blessing for mobile phones
A British church held an unusual ceremony when a vicar blessed the mobile phones of workers in the City of London financial district. The special service on Monday at the St. Lawrence Jewry church, which dates back to 1136, was attended by around 80 people who held their phones and other gadgets in the air while vicar David Parrott blessed them. The idea came from a historic tradition where workers would bring the tools of their trade such as ploughs to be blessed on the first Monday after people return to work following Christmas. Read more…
Ladies’ handbags lighter thanks to technology
Technological advances have led to a sharp fall in the weight of women’s handbags, research from British department store chain Debenhams has revealed. Women’s handbags now weigh an average of 1.5 kg (3 lb), 57 percent less than the average of two years ago thanks to a new generation of smaller, lighter multi-purpose gadgets such as the iPhone and Blackberry that have replaced heavy laptops, old fashioned mobile phones, music players and paper organizers. Read more…
Australian killed by server
On a more sombre note, a man has died after a server fell on him in Laverton North, West of Melbourne, whilst a workmate was unloading from a truck with a forklift. The server was reportedly two metres tall, “as big as a fridge” and weighed 200kg. The equipment had started to slip from the forklift and it appears that the man had tried to stop it. This is one danger of working with computers we hadn’t considered before. Read more…
Computer on a flash drive
We may soon be able to trade our laptops for a secure flash drive sized for a key ring, Lockheed Martin Corp, the world’s biggest aerospace company, said recently.
Lockheed’s new “IronClad” brand USB drive would pack an entire operating system, software, settings and files onto a flash drive that could be used with virtually any computer in the world.
The operating system runs directly off the flash drive. As a result, a user’s files never touch the borrowed computer’s hard drive and the device leaves no trace where it was plugged in. Read more…
Neighbour sued for using Wi-Fi router
A Santa Fe man is being sued by a neighbour who is alleging that the neighbour’s mobile phone and wi-fi router are making him ill. Arthur Firstenberg, who has actively opposed the proliferation of wireless systems in public buildings, claims he has been made homeless by the neighbour’s rejection of his requests. Read more…
Wi-Fi defied by ‘kryptonite’ chicken wire
Two things beloved by San Francisco resident Galen Pewtherer just couldn’t get along: his Edwardian-style house and wireless Internet access. That is because Mr. Pewtherer’s 80-year-old building in the Mission District, like thousands of other old homes in the Bay Area, was built with the technological equivalent of kryptonite in its walls – chicken wire. Metal wiring inside old plaster walls blocks wireless signals, frustrating San Francisco residents as wireless-equipped devices like iPhones and laptops proliferate. Read more…