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A video grab released by the European Space Agency (ESA) shows a Soyuz rocket carrying a Galileo satellite launching from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan December 28, 2005. (REUTERS/ESA/Handout)

Richard Balmforth, Reuters, reports:

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The European Union launched its first Galileo navigation satellite on Wednesday, moving to challenge the United States’ Global Positioning System (GPS).

Russian space agency Roskosmos said the 600 kg (1,300 lb) satellite named Giove-A (Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element) went into its orbit 23,000 km (15,000 miles) from the earth after its launch on a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur cosmodrome in the middle of Kazakhstan’s steppe.
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Google, via Slashdot, :

It turns out that looking at the aggregation of billions of search queries people type into Google reveals something about our curiosity, our thirst for news, and perhaps even our desires. Considering all that has occurred in 2005, we thought it would be interesting to study just a few of the significant events, and names that make this a memorable year. (We’ll leave it to the historians to determine which ones are lasting and which ephemeral.) We hope you enjoy this selective view of our collective year.

A look back at 2005 wouldn’t be complete without some lists. Here are three from us to you, representing some of the most popular searches this year on Google.
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Jonny Evans, Macworld.co.uk, reports:

Microsoft has killed Internet Explorer on the Mac.

The software giant will end support for it at the end of the year (i.e.in 13 days) and will make no additional security or performance updates available from that point.
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ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN, The New York Times, reports:

WASHINGTON - The National Security Agency first began to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on telephone calls and e-mail messages between the United States and Afghanistan months before President Bush officially authorized a broader version of the agency’s special domestic collection program, according to current and former government officials.
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The ramps generate up to 50kW of power

BBC News reports:

Dorset inventor Peter Hughes’ Electro-Kinetic Road Ramp generates around 10kW of power each time a car drives over its metal plates.

More than 200 local authorities had expressed an interest in ordering the £25,000 ramps to power their traffic lights and road signs, Mr Hughes said.
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JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU, The New York Times, reports:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.
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AFP reports:

A systematic effort by hackers to penetrate US government and industry computer networks stems most likely from the Chinese military, the head of a leading security institute said.

The attacks have been traced to the Chinese province of Guangdong, and the techniques used make it appear unlikely to come from any other source than the military, said Alan Paller, the director of the SANS Institute, an education and research organization focusing on cybersecurity.
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KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, The New York Times, reports:

It started as a joke and ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker losing his job and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, suffering a blow to its credibility.

A man in Nashville has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville.

Brian Chase, 38, who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company, told Mr. Seigenthaler on Friday that he had written the material suggesting that Mr. Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. Wikipedia, a nonprofit venture that is the world’s biggest encyclopedia, is written and edited by thousands of volunteers.

Mr. Seigenthaler discovered the false entry only recently and wrote about it in an op-ed article in USA Today, saying he was especially annoyed that he could not track down the perpetrator because of Internet privacy laws. His plight touched off a debate about the reliability of information on Wikipedia - and by extension the entire Internet - and the difficulty in holding Web sites and their users accountable, even when someone is defamed.
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Reuters reports:

TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) — Japanese brokerage Mizuho Securities scrambled on Friday to clean up the mess left by a trader who mistakenly offered tens of thousands of shares for 1 yen apiece, costing the firm at least $224 million.
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joris Evers, Staff Writer, CNET News.com, reports:

A new worm that targets users of America Online’s AOL Instant Messenger is believed to be the first that actually chats with the intended victim to dupe the target into activating a malicious payload, IM security vendor IMlogic warned Tuesday.

According to IMlogic, the worm, dubbed IM.Myspace04.AIM, has arrived in instant messages that state: “lol thats cool” and included a URL to a malicious file “clarissa17.pif.” When unsuspecting users have responded, perhaps asking if the attachment contained a virus, the worm has replied: “lol no its not its a virus”, IMlogic said.
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Forbes, via DefenseTech.com, via BoingBoing, reports:

Worn on a collar or mounted on a wall, the Dog Bio Security System translates barking into alarms for police or military. Bio-Sense Technologies spent two years capturing the sound waves of woofs and arfs, encoding them to be read by a digital signal processor. All dogs emit the same type of bark when they sense trouble. The device can distinguish this bark from a dog’s “Hello.” A consumer version costs $100. A high-end version costs tens of thousands of dollars but is still 25% the cost of video surveillance.

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God Bless the Internet. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, along comes this…

Ceci Connolly, Washington Post Staff Writer, reports:

BATON ROUGE, La. — Early in the afternoon of Aug. 29, as Hurricane Katrina bore down on the Gulf Coast, the phones inside the Louisiana State Police emergency operations center here began ringing with frantic pleas for help — 467 that first day.

Families perched on rooftops, a grandmother trapped in an attic, gunfire outside a hospital. As the floodwaters rose, so, too, did the calls — to 1,875 the following day, to 3,108 on Aug. 31, and to 3,284 on Sept. 1. The vast majority came from 70 miles away in New Orleans, but what was strange was not the volume of calls or that they were made, but how they ended up so far away from the people who needed help.

Floodwaters had forced 120 operators at the 911 center to abandon the New Orleans police headquarters. Emergency calls were supposed to be routed to the fire department but its main station was already abandoned. And so — after hours of confusion — many calls were shunted north to Baton Rouge, where unsuspecting emergency personnel suddenly found their phones ringing off the hooks.

The disintegration of New Orleans’s 911 system carries national implications for future disasters, said public safety experts. While some communities boast sophisticated, high-tech centers with elaborate contingency plans, most cities have older systems lacking adequate backup measures for massive disasters.

“People in our country have gotten to believe that no matter what kind of trouble you get into, all you have to do is dial 911,” said William Smith, chief technology officer at BellSouth, which is the phone carrier for New Orleans 911 calls. “That’s not necessarily the case.”
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AAP, ZDnet (AU), via Slashdot, reports:

Glitches in a new customs computer system have caused a massive container backlog at NSW’s largest port and threaten to bring it to a standstill, the state government says.

NSW Ports Minister Eric Roozendaal today said Port Botany was at 90 per cent capacity and space was “rapidly diminishing”.

The federal government agency Australian Customs’ integrated customs management system has been unable to clear containers quickly enough.

The industry estimates cargo clearance rates at Port Botany and Melbourne — two of the nation’s most important ports — are down to 30 per cent of normal levels because of the system. “Almost two months before Christmas, Port Botany is almost full and delays are at critical levels for products coming into NSW busiest port,” Roozendaal said in a statement.

“There couldn’t be a worse time to introduce a new computer system.”
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Sandra Jontz, Stars and Stripes, reports:

On Tuesday, the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps blocked all access to commercial e-mail services, such as Yahoo!, Hotmail, America Online and Google, from overseas government computers.

And not just at office workstations.

The block includes access to e-mail services from computers at base libraries and liberty centers that are connected to an official government network.
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The Associated Press reports:

SANFORD (Florida) - Hundreds of cases involving breath-alcohol tests have been thrown out by Seminole County judges in the past five months because the test’s manufacturer will not disclose how the machines work.

All four of Seminole County’s criminal judges have been using a standard that if a DUI defendant asks for a key piece of information about how the machine works - its software source code, for instance - and the state cannot provide it, the breath test is rejected, the Orlando Sentinel reported Wednesday.

Prosecutors have said they do not know how many drunken drivers have been acquitted as a result. But Gino Feliciani, the misdemeanor division chief in the Seminole County State Attorney’s Office, said the conviction rate has dropped to 50 percent or less.

Seminole judges have been following the lead of county Judge Donald Marblestone, who in January ruled that although the information may be a trade secret and controlled by a private contractor, defendants are entitled to it.

“Florida cannot contract away the statutory rights of its citizens,'’ the judge wrote.

Judges in other counties have said the opposite: The state cannot turn over something it does not possess, and the manufacturer should not have to turn over trade secrets.

Published: Jun 5, 2005

Red Herring reports:

XO Communications has connected its telecommunications facilities to Stealth Communications’ VoIP peering fabric, allowing the carrier to bypass the public telephone network and its termination fees.

Stealth operates a Voice Peering Fabric (VPF), essentially a wide-area Ethernet network that is a kind of private Internet, allowing member carriers to route calls to each other’s subscribers without the calls going through the public telephone network.

For instance, a call from an XO subscriber to an RCN subscriber will never leave the network and will be free to the subscriber making the call.

XO, the largest of the member companies on Stealth’s VPF, will become the main outlet for calls to subscribers of traditional telephone companies, the companies said on Tuesday. Calls from a VPF member carrier to a public network subscriber will be routed through XO, which is one of the largest non-Bell carriers in the United States.
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ROBERT A. GUTH , Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, reports:

REDMOND, Wash. — Jim Allchin, a senior Microsoft Corp. executive, walked into Bill Gates’s office here one day in July last year to deliver a bombshell about the next generation of Microsoft Windows.

“It’s not going to work,” Mr. Allchin says he told the Microsoft chairman. The new version, code-named Longhorn, was so complex its writers would never be able to make it run properly.

The news got even worse: Longhorn was irredeemable because Microsoft engineers were building it just as they had always built software. Throughout its history, Microsoft had let thousands of programmers each produce their own piece of computer code, then stitched it together into one sprawling program. Now, Mr. Allchin argued, the jig was up. Microsoft needed to start over.
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City-Medium-City. Kunsthaus Graz
Oct 01, 2005 – Jan 08, 2006
(Visual analysis of Graz)

SENSEable City Lab, MIT Carlo Ratti (coordinator), Daniel Berry, Andrea Mattiello Eugenio Morello, Andres Sevtsuk Design team: David Lee, Xiongjiu Liao, Jia Lou, Sonya Y Huang, Daniel A Gutierrez In collaboration with A1 – Mobilkom Austria writes:

> The city demands continuous interpretation
Today the experience, infrastructure and morphology of the city are more closely related than ever before. The profusion of handheld electronic devices with increasingly powerful networking capabilities offers its users new modes of interaction within the urban environment. It also provides designers, artists, and theoreticians a new means for engaging and understanding the city. Therefore, forget old ways to describe cities!

> Real-Time Graz
Digital Derive harnesses the potential of mobile phones as an affordable, ready-made and ubiquitous medium that allows the city to be sensed and displayed in real-time as a complex, pulsating entity. Because it is possible to simultaneously ‘ping’ the cell phones of thousands of users – thereby establishing their precise location in space at a given moment in time – these devices can be used as a highly dynamic tracking tool that describes how the city is used and transformed by its citizens. The polis is thus interpreted as a shifting entity formed by webs of human interactions in space-time, rather than simply as a fixed, physical environment. Digital Derive provides a platform upon which the contemporary city can register the flux and traces its self-constructing and open-ended nature. Previous initiatives, notably Laura Kurgan’s ‘You Are Here: Museu’ (1996) and the Waag Society’s ‘Amsterdam Real-Time’ (2002) initiated this process by exploring the qualities and potential of GPS technology. Digital Derive builds on an expands these efforts by using cell phone technology, for the first time, to radically increase the interactive capacity and number of users involved in the mapping of the city. Digital Derive (re)presents the city displayed simultaneously in the Kunsthaus Graz and in a publicly accessible website.
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The BBC reports:

Software giant Oracle is buying US rival Siebel Systems in a deal worth $5.85bn (£3.2bn) in cash and stock.

Oracle is offering $10.66 per Siebel share, 16.8% more than Siebel’s closing share price on Friday.

Siebel makes software to help companies manage their relationships with clients. The takeover by Oracle had long been predicted by analysts.

It is the latest acquisition by Oracle which bought another rival, Peoplesoft, in December last year for $10bn.

Board backing

“In a single step, Oracle becomes the number one CRM [customer relationship management] applications company in the world,” said Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison.

“Siebel’s 4,000 applications customers and 3.4 million CRM users strengthen our number one position in applications in North America and move us closer to the number one position in applications globally.”
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Wolfgang Gruener, Senior Editor, Tom’s Hardware Guide, reports:

London - Ebay today announced that it will purchase VoIP company Skype in a deal valued between $2.6 and $4.1 billion. The acquisition will allow the online auction leader to access Skype’s 54 million users and further diversify its revenue streams with Skype’s VoIP services - while free PC-to-PC-based calls will continue to be offered.

The acquisition comes after rumors about a possible deal between the two companies surfaced in the past week and confirms the mainstream appeal of VoIP communications for the business world. According to a statement released on Monday, Ebay intends to integrate Skype into its marketplace and payments platform. “Skype, Ebay and PayPal will create an unparalleled ecommerce and communications engine for buyers and sellers around the world,” a statement said.

Skype, barely two years old, did not come cheap for Ebay. The online auction house pays $2.6 billion in cash and stock - roughly 371 times the revenue Skype achieved in 2004 - plus a performance-based bonus, which could amount to $1.5 billion and will be due in 2008 to 2009 time frame.
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Red Herring reports:

The Shenzhen branch of China Telecom, China’s largest telecommunications carrier, has begun blocking VoIP calls in a possible effort to stanch the massive loss of revenue it could sustain if a substantial percentage of that country’s 100 million Internet users switch their long-distance calling to services like Skype.
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CNN reports:

MOBILE, Alabama (CNN) — More than 656,000 homes and businesses across Alabama were without electricity Tuesday, and water and debris still closed off many roads.

In a demonstration of Katrina’s wide reach, more than 182,000 customers in the Birmingham area and another 132,000 in and around Tuscaloosa — both cities more than 150 miles inland — were without power.

Alabama Power spokesman Bernie Fogarty warned customers they would be in for a “prolonged outage.”
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The Associated Press reports:

NEW YORK - A former America Online software engineer was sentenced yesterday to a year and three months in prison for stealing 92 million screen names and e-mail addresses and selling them to spammers who sent out up to 7 billion unsolicited e-mail messages.
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On Slashdot, wandazulu writes “Peter Salus over at UnixReview.com is reporting that AT&T Department 1127, responsible for creating and maintaining Unix, has been officially disbanded. (more…)