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Techweb is carrying a story on the availability of an independently released 'unofficial' service pack for Windows 98 Second Edition.

The service pack includes 70 hot fixes, a solution to the 512MB memory limit of Windows 98 SE, and better USB support, claimed Coskun on his Web site.

The self-extracting, self-installing pack only includes updates to the operating system, not fixes for such bundled software such as Internet Explorer or Media Player.

Official (non-critical) Windows 98 support ended in June last year..

ZDNet Australia notes that Domain Names Australia and its director Chesley Paul Rafferty have been found guilty by the Australian Federal Court, following the company's re-registration mailout scam in 2003.

The 25-year-old former school friends operate a number of internet related companies either separately or as joint directors and shareholders. Some of these companies have sent letters to businesses and organisations that are, according to regulatory and consumer authorities, misleading and deceptive or intended to be so because they look like invoices for the renewal of internet domain name registrations.

With one exception, the letters invited owners of .com.au, .co.uk and .co.nz websites to register names in the parallel .net.au, .net.uk or .net.nz domains.

The full story can be read here, while an earlier article about the scam can be seen here.

Wired is carrying an interesting report on the modernisation of Madrasas in Pakistan.

"These madrasas have been forced by the government to appear modern," said Mohammed Riaz Durrani, an Islamic academic. "The police have been raiding madrasas on the pretext of searching for militants. Some madrasas don't want to be harassed. So they are toeing the government line of modernizing. What better way to do it than say you are teaching computers?"

"There will be no compromise on the content of Islamic education," Ashrafia's principal, S.M. Rafia, said. "If we make too many drastic changes too often, it will be an admission that something was wrong. And we would like to believe that nothing was ever wrong with the madrasas."

Now we're going to being seeing technically competent terrorists? *Al Qaeda's haxxor division*

ZDNet India reports on the TRAI's (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) effort to improve broadband penetration in India.

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India will soon recommend allowing Internet service providers to utilise Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd's last mile network to offer broadband services. The regulator will also recommend a tax holiday for companies in this space.

The full story is available here.

IBM and Stanford University on Monday launched a joint research center focused on an area of nanotechnology called spintronics. Information Week is carrying this article which focuses on one of the more immediate applications of spintronics - in the development of Magnetic RAM (or MRAM). Magnetic RAM is non-volatile, and thus can retain loaded data, once the computer has been shut down.

Spintronics is already being used in a few devices, most notably in hard-drives in the market today. More information on this subject can be found here and here.

A chip start-up called Stretch has announced the availability of a processor named the S5000, which it claims is fully reconfigurable and reprogrammable during run-time.

The chip combines an existing RISC (reduced instruction set computing) architecture with a large reconfigurable area of programmable logic called the Instruction Set Extension Fabric, ISEF. The company's own C/C++ compiler automatically spots areas in a program that require intensive computation and creates new instructions for the processor to handle those tasks.

Technology Review has an article on the claims of two inventors who are staking claim to a new technology which allows for directional emissions of sound waves.

Known as directional sound, it uses an ultrasound emitter to shoot a laserlike beam of audible sound so focused that only people inside a narrow path can hear it.

Norris and Pompei both envision a family of four sitting in a car enjoying four different musical selections or radio broadcasts at once?with no headphones. They also see street-level billboards or displays in retail locations that speak only to one passing consumer at a time, or a crowded trade show in which the cacophony of thousands of product demonstrations is replaced by thousands of focused beams of sound confined to their own exhibits. Rather than using a megaphone, a police officer could control crowds by directing his or her voice only at a person creating a disturbance.

If someone could extend this into a directional noise-blocker as well, I should be able to get a few more hours sleep everyday ;) The full article can be read here.

Jon Johansen of DeCSS fame has released an alternative to the legally plagued Playfair program. Playfair allows iTunes users to decrypt the downloaded AAC files, allowing them to be played on any device which supports AAC playback.

To commemorate the Hubble telescope's 14th anniversary, NASA has released another photo, this one depicting the brilliant aftermath of a collision between galaxies. The resulting "ring galaxy" appears as a swirling ring of blue stars surrounding a yellow glow -- the remains of what had once been a spiral galaxy.

Wired has this story, along with a slideshow of some of the more spectacular photos taken by Hubble over the years. Space.com has a write-up as well, with links to more galleries.

Following the success of IIT-Powai's initiative, IITs and IIMs around the country are setting up their own centres to build and promote innovative entrepreneurial start-ups. The Economic Times is carrying this article.