Wide Area News
Cracked it
by Russell Brown
The Australian Government’s $84 million internet clean-up system was no match for a bright teenager.
Remember that “cleaning up the internet” package announced by the Australian Government? Well, the official government PC filtering system has already been cracked by a bright 16-year-old. Private-school student Tom Wood told reporters it took him 30 minutes to find a way to deactivate the filter while leaving its icon displaying, thus giving parents the impression that it was still working.
Which showed, he said, that spending $84 million to develop the software overseas had been “a horrible waste of money. The government could get a much better filter for a few million dollars made here,” said Wood, “rather than paying overseas companies for an ineffective one.”
After the Herald Sun newspaper ran a story about this, the government added an Australian-developed filter to its support website. Wood cracked that in 40 minutes, before telling the same paper: “Filters aren’t addressing the bigger issues anyway. Cyber-bullying, educating children on how to protect themselves and their privacy are the first problems I’d fix … They really need to develop a youth-involved forum to discuss some of these problems and ideas for fixing them.”
Wood, who says he is a past victim of cyber-bullying, seems likely to be an Australian success story. But he has already done his government a service by underlining the fact that technical solutions will never entirely fix social problems.
MEANWHILE, IN THE US, a 17-year-old has found a way to unlock Apple’s iPhone, making it available for use on networks other than the ones with which Apple has made exclusive service deals (AT&T in the US, Orange Mobile and others in Europe).
The hack devised by George Hotz isn’t something that most people will want to try at home – it involves re-soldering the iPhone’s circuit board, erasing its firmware and reprogramming the flash memory – but the very fact that a schoolboy can undo the basis of big-money deals between corporations is remarkable.
Hotz also showed that he understood the value of fame. As news reports of his feat spread, he put one of his two hacked iPhones up for auction on ebay. At the time of writing, bogus bets have driven the price past $100 million, but when the smoke clears, it still seems likely that the 17-year-old will have earned himself a substantial college fund.
He had another strategy, too. In a live interview on CNBC, Hotz declared: “If anyone from Google is watching, I want an internship with you.”
OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, we have increasingly expected to take our information technology to go, rather than be tethered to a desk or a cable. Portable devices – laptop computers, mobile phones, PDAs – are the facilitators of busy lives.
But the rechargeable batteries in those devices are a problem. In the US alone, hundreds of millions of rechargeable batteries are sold every year. And although those batteries might not be much of a concern while they’re in use, they make nasty waste products, adding the likes of cadmium, mercury and other heavy metals to a burgeoning waste stream.
The only answer until now has been to encourage battery recycling programmes. But Sony has come up with a better answer – a battery that runs on sugar.
Sony’s new bio-battery generates electricity from carbohydrates by using enzymes as catalysts, a system that resembles those used in biological organisms. In Sony’s promotional video, the battery is primed with a squirt from a Powerade-type energy drink.
The prototype reportedly generates 59 milliwatts of electricity. Sony hooked up four of them to drive a small flash-memory-based music player and attached speakers. Better yet, the 3.9cm cubic casing is made from a vegetable-derived plastic.
Sony, of course, has a special motivation to get more benign battery technologies to market. It was the supplier of more than four million lithium-ion batteries for Dell laptops that had to be recalled after about 350 of them overheated and, in some cases, caught fire, causing skin burns and property damage.
Email: russb@dubwise.co.nz
