'Extinct' animals back from the dead

Rediscovered: the bridled nailtail wallaby was feared extinct until it was found in 1973

Rediscovered: the bridled nailtail wallaby was feared extinct until it was found in 1973

Australian biologists say animals that have been feared extinct are often rediscovered, and conservation efforts too often focus on creatures that will never be found again.

A study by the University of Queensland's Dr Diana Fisher and Dr Simon Blomberg appears today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

They examined 187 species of mammal that have been thought to have become extinct since 1500, and found 67 have since been rediscovered.

Dr Fisher says the study found mammals whose habitats have been partly destroyed are the most likely to be found again.

Mammals thought to have been killed off by introduced predators, disease, or human hunting are least likely to be rediscovered.

Dr Fisher says knowing the factors that cause extinction are important in assessing the likelihood of success in saving threatened species.

"It's fruitless putting a lot of effort into big charismatic animals that are very unlikely to be found," she says.

"You could get a better conservation outcome by focusing more effort on the sort of things that will be found."

She says it makes more sense to focus on species whose habitats have been cleared.

"It's not too late to find a lot of these species somewhere else where they might be persisting," she said.

"They might not hang on forever if they don't get found and protected."

Lost cause

Dr Fisher says the thylacine or tasmanian tiger is one example of a species which there is little hope of finding again.

"For mammals, [the thylacine] is the only one that most people have ever heard of, and it's something that attracts a lot of attention," she said.

"Since the year that the last one died ... there's been at least 25 really major searches and a whole lot of amateurs looking for it since.

"They haven't found it, and it's pretty obvious that it's extinct ... but if you don't find something you can keep looking forever."

Public profile

Dr Fisher says Australia has one of the highest rates of mammal extinction in the world, but many Australians are unaware of which animals are close to extinction.

The success stories are often mammals which are less familiar to the public, like the bridled nailtail wallaby.

Dr Fisher says this small wallaby used to be widespread from Victoria up to Charters Towers in Queensland, but by 1930 was thought to be extinct.

"In 1973 in central Queensland at a cattle property, a local guy was fencing the place in preparation for clearing it," she said.

"He saw this animal; it's got a distinctive marking, so luckily he recognised it.

"At that stage they had just been showing Elizabeth Gould's prints of extinct animals in the Women's Day magazine that his wife had at home. He told the Parks Service and they bought the place."

She says the bridled nailtail wallaby has since been reintroduced to new sites and is thriving.

"It's pretty unlikely it would have survived had that place been cleared," she said.

Source http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/29/3024873.htm

Twitter Meltdown the Work of Hobbyists, Not Malicious Hackers

One day after the Great Twitter Meltdown, details of how pranksters gleefully redirected users and spewed out retweets full of gibberish continue to emerge. What's surprising is that instead of criminals and attackers intent on taking over computers or stealing information, most of the perpetrators were just curious users trying to see what they could do with the security hole.

According to various reports, the programming XSS flaw on Twitter's home page was initially discovered by Masato Kinugawa, a Japanese developer, who used the code to create rainbow-colored tweets. Another was a Norwegian Ruby programmer named Magnus Holm, who has the dubious distinction of having The New York Times claim he created the first worm to use the XSS exploit. Holm reportedly saw Kinugawa's code and played with the idea. Holm extended the code to retweet itself by tweeting, "meh, this worm doesn't really scale. the users can just delete the tweet," and including a link with an "onmouseover" command.

The XSS bug caused the tweet to be retweeted the instant someone's mouse cursor touched the link.

Holm said he just wanted to "experiment" with the flaw and was surprised his worm spread to at least 200,000 users.

Another curious user was Pearce Delphin, a 17-year-old boy from Australia, who modified Kinugawa's code and created his own tweet "uh oh" with the onMouseOver JavaScript command embedded.

"I did it merely to see if it could be done … that JavaScript really could be executed within a tweet," Delphin told AFP.

Others quickly picked up and modified the code to create their own versions, performing auto-retweets and redirecting to pornographic sites. Some were funny. Most were not.

Despite the havoc and huge amounts of spam, most of the created worms turned out to be harmless pranks intended to sow confusion. Kaspersky Lab estimated up to 500,000 people may have been affected.

"We are not aware of any issues related to it that would cause harm to computers or their accounts," Twitter said.

Visitors on the Twitter page belonging to Sarah Brown, the wife of the U.K. prime minister, were redirected to a Japanese porn site. Another worm sent gibberish spam messages to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibb's 100,000 followers. One worm even "rickrolled" users, a widespread Web prank in which unwitting users are instantly sent to a Website playing 1980s singer Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" music video.

Despite the company's claims that no harm was done, The New York Times claimed one instance of a worm downloading malicious code from a Russian server onto the user's computer.

Kinugawa discovered the bug and notified Twitter on Aug. 14. Twitter said in the blog post that developers had fixed the security hole last month, but a site update, unrelated to the new site redesign unveiled earlier this month, reintroduced the bug on the old design. Users who already switched to the new design or are using third-party apps to read their tweets were unaffected. Users with JavaScript blockers such as the NoScript add-on for Mozilla Firefox browsers were also spared.

Twitter acted quickly to close the hole. Reports indicate the company first became aware of the problem at 5:24 a.m. EDT and had the flaw patched by 10:23 a.m. EDT. According to the company, there was no need to change passwords because user account information was not compromised through this exploit.

The XSS bug that brought Twitter down to its knees is a fairly elementary mistake. In fact, cross-site scripting flaws exist in seven out of 10 of all Websites, according to WhiteHat Security. Considered relatively benign by Website operators and developers, what happened to Twitter indicates that it can be a real problem. The bug was easy to exploit and spread amazingly fast, and it was done by a handful of hobbyists, not malicious hackers.

Source http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Twitter-Meltdown-the-Work-of-Hobbyists-Not-Malicious-Hackers-316813/

Nokia X2's Official Price Raised to Rs. 6,579

Nokia has sent us an official Press Release where the price of the Nokia X2 has been revised to Rs. 6,579. This is slightly more expensive than the Rs. 5,999 price tag for which the phone was initially being sold. You might want to check with your dealer for the original market rice of the phone, which we believe is much lower than the stated MRP.

Nokia's low-end X Series phone, the X2, was first heard of back in April 2010. The phone has now made its official entry to India - five months after its existence was revealed.

The X2 which was supposed to be officially here by June has seen its launch delayed by almost three months. Now that the phone is here, let's take a look at its specs again.




The X2, as evident from the naming scheme, will be positioned below the X3 and is a mid-range handset. It boasts of a 2.2 inch QVGA display, dedicated music keys, dual speakers, Bluetooth 2.1, 3.5mm headset jack, FM radio, Nokia Messaging, Facebook integration and microSD card support. The phone, unlike most other X-Series handsets, runs Nokia's proprietary S40 OS.

The highlight of the phone is its impressive 5 megapixel camera at the rear. This is a rather surprising because the X3, which is positioned above the X2, has a 3.2 megapixel camera.




The X2 was supposed to be priced at around the Rs. 5,000 mark when we first heard of it. However, it's a tad more expansive and has been priced at Rs. 5,999 in India. The phone is officially on sale now.

Source http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Nokia_X2s_Official_Price_Raised_to_Rs_6579/551-112773-893.html

BSNL Gifts Free Cellphones to Rural Poor in Rajasthan

1,000 members of BPL (Below Poverty Line) families from Rajasthan were given a free mobile phone (with a SIM card) each yesterday by BSNL, as part of their corporate social responsibility program.

The event took place in Phagi, a part of Ajmer District and BSNL claims that Rs. 12.85 lakh was spent on the scheme. While the government obviously claims that the entire event was a success, some media outlets have a different point of view. A story on IBN Live opines that instead of gifting mobile phones to villagers, they would have gained more from distribution of free grain (which had been otherwise lying unused and rotting in state warehouses).

While, we at PC World India try to keep our stories clean of sermonizing especially in matters political, we can’t help but feel that the journalist has a point. This comes to light especially when the story quotes a villager as saying that they didn’t understand what they could do with the mobiles and would have rather preferred the food grains.

Looking at the issue from the government’s point-of-view, it does seem like a no-lose situation to hand out mobile phones especially taking into consideration the way technology (especially the Internet) has permeated in some manner to rural India.

Maybe if the government does follow up with free grain distribution soon, this story may get a completely unapologetic happy ending.

Source http://www.pcworld.in/news/bsnl-gifts-free-cellphones-rural-poor-rajasthan-35082010

MTS launches three new smartphones in India

MTS, the mobile telephony services brand of Sistema Shyam TeleServices (SSTL), has launched new Internet enabled smartphones - the Buzz, Alive & Ivory.

MTS said that the new smartphones features CDMA2000 technology platform, supports voice and net enabled data services, and offers Internet connectivity with speeds up to 3.1 Mbps.

The new phones also provides direct access to around 15 social networking sites including facebook, twitter, windows live messenger, yahoo and Google search to its subscribers.

The Buzz is a dual mode (CDMA/GSM) messaging and social networking handset, with QWERTY keypad and offers stereo FM Radio with MP3 player, a 1.3MP camera and expandable memory up to 4GB.

Alive is a 3G-CDMA touch screen phone which offers an in-built Opera mini browser, expandable memory up to 8GB, multi-format music player, 1.3 MP camera with video recording and Bluetooth with A2DP.

The new Ivory features a 3.2" WQVGA full touch screen, mobile TV, Microsoft exchange push mail, Wi-FI, 2 MP camera, Bluetooth and expandable memory up to 4GB.

SSTL president and CEO Vsevolod Rozanov said that MTS smart phones are among the fully loaded devices with the 3G capabilities, and will take smart phone services in India to a new level ensuring further expansion of subscribers in India.

Source http://mobility.cbronline.com/news/mts-launches-three-new-smart-phones-in-india_080910

RIM Acquires document app developer DataViz

As an effort to give BlackBerry a productivity boost, RIM has acquired DataViz, a developer of Exchange and Office solutions based on Microsoft licences. According to Crack Berry, Dataviz, the maker of the popular Documents To Go software was acquired by RIM for $50 million, but the companies has not made any statement regarding the news.

Founded in 1984, DataViz offers a suite of mobile apps for all of the major Microsoft Office formats: Word to Go, Sheet to Go, Slideshow to Go, and PDF to Go. The free version loaded on most BlackBerrys allows the users to read any files for PowerPoint, Word, Excel, or Adobe Reader, but have to shell out some cash for the premium version to do any mobile editing.

DataViz announced that it would not be making a webOS version of Documents To Go. In a statement on its Facebook page, the company said, "We regret to announce that we have made the difficult decision to not produce a Web OS version of Documents To Go. We would like to explain in more detail the reasoning behind our decisions thus far."

Source http://www.siliconindia.com/shownews/RIM_Acquires_document_app_developer_DataViz-nid-71375.html

Samsung to challenge iPad with own tablet

Samsung Electronics' first tablet computer will go on sale in two weeks, it said on Thursday, joining the hunt to challenge Apple's iPad. Global handset vendors and PC makers including Nokia, LG Electronics and Hewlett-Packard Co are moving into the new category of devices, between traditional PCs and smartphones, taking a cue from Apple. Dell Inc said last month it was launching its new tablet device called the Dell Streak to U.S. customers.

"We see huge potential for this kind of product," YH Lee, head of marketing at Samsung Mobile, told Reuters in an interview on sidelines of the IFA consumer electronics fair. The new Galaxy Tab, with a 7-inch screen, will go on sale in European markets in mid-September. The device, which uses Google's Android software, offers access to books, films and music.

"Samsung is betting big on the tablet category with this device," said Ben Wood, research director at CCS Insight, adding the success of Galaxy Tab -- which is clearly smaller than iPad with its 9.7-inch screen -- will depend on pricing. "If positioned carefully the Galaxy Tab could emerge as an operator-friendly alternative to Apple's iPad as it could be subsidised to extremely low price points in the run-up to the lucrative holiday sales season," he said.

Samsung declined to give the price of Galaxy Tab, saying it will depend on operator packages in different countries. YH Lee said most European operators selling Samsung phones were set to also sell the Tab to their clients, and several operators would sell it in the United States. Last week research firm iSuppli forecast the iPad will likely account for nearly three-quarters of worldwide tablet shipments this year, and hold at least 70 percent of the market in 2011 and 62 percent by 2012.

Samsung said the market was far from fixed yet. "The market opportunity is wide open. We believe our Galaxy Tab will fill the big white space," said YH Lee. Privately held British firm Binatone unveiled at IFA several Android-powered tablets, with prices starting from 170 euros ($217.6).

Source http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/infotech/hardware/Samsung-to-challenge-iPad-with-own-tablet/articleshow/6479919.cms