Archive for: australia

Massive Attack Touring

Feel massive_attack_logolike going out, but only got your dark, intense face with you? Fear not! Massive Attack have announced a Spring tour, playing big venues in the States, Australia and Belgium (but not in the UK for some reason). The tour supports their new album Heligoland Massive Attack - Heligoland, their 5th studio album.Hopefully we can look forward to some gigs nearer to Bristol once they’ve come home after this lot:

03-12 Perth, Australia – Kings Park
03-15 Sydney, Australia – Opera House Forecourt
03-19 Canberra, Australia – Royal Theatre
03-20 Melbourne, Australia – Sidney Myer Music Bowl
03-23 Brisbane, Australia – Riverstage
03-25 Auckland, New Zealand – Vector Arena
05-07 Toronto, Ontario – Sound Academy
05-09 Toronto, Ontario – Sound Academy
05-11 New York, NY – Terminal 5
05-12 New York, NY – Terminal 5
05-18 Los Angeles, CA – Wiltern Theater
05-19 Los Angeles, CA – Wiltern Theater
05-25 San Francisco, CA – Warfield Theater
05-27 San Francisco, CA – Warfiled Theater
05-30 George, WA – Sasquatch Festival
09-03 Antwerp, Belgium – Sportpaleis

Rick Roll’D: Rick Astley iPhone Worm Eating Up Australia

rick-astleyAccording to the BBC, iPhone owners in Australia got quite a surprise this week when they found their phones displaying a wallpaper of Astley’s photograph with a message: “Ikee is never going to give you up.”

The Ikee in question is a worm that affects a jail-broken phones, where a user has removed Apple’s protection mechanisms to allow the phone to run any software.

“The creator of the worm has released full source code of the four existing variants of this worm,” wrote Mikko Hypponen of security firm F-secure.

“This means that there will quickly be more variants, and they might have nastier payload than just changing your wallpaper.”

Bad things. Far, far worse than any Rick Astley song!

Currently the worm has only been found in Australia, where the hacker, Ashley Towns, who wrote the program lives. The 21-year-old said he created the virus to raise the issue of security.

The blending of Rick Astley into Towns’ security awareness project is downright genius; what says be careful with your hand-held device better than Rick Astley?

Lady Sovereign Detained in Australia and Pleads Guilty To Assault and Disorderly Conduct

lady sovereign

It has been reported by Spinner that Lady Sovereign was detained in Australia over the weekend after she spat at a nightclub doorman. Lady Sovereign arrived in Australia on the Friday to perform on Saturday at the Parklife Festival Tour. After pounding back a few at the popular Brisbane-area gay nightclub Beat, she was arrested for an altercation with the nightclub doorman.

On Saturday Lady Sovereign pleaded guilty to both assault and disorderly conduct in court. She was fined $400 Australian and forced to pay $200 to the doorman. Although the judge did not convict the rapper, he schooled her on the “serious health implications” that spitting has in public.

Even though she was reprimanded, she still managed to make her afternoon slot at the Parklife Festival. Shortly after, Lady Sovereign took to her Twitter account and slammed the local Brisbane law enforcement.

“Brisbane police need to go catch some real criminals … What a waste,” she wrote. “Spitting in someone’s face is nasty, but how about a guy dressed up as a girl running at you in the toilets and punching you in the head? Yes, that’s what happened prior to the spitting. So everyone please stop calling me nasty.

“If you was there you would understand,” she further explained. “The transvestite must have been a regular because I didn’t see no one dragging his ass out of the club that night.”

Not so tough in person, just on Twitter! Lady Sovereign just grow up.

Nokia Announces Their “Comes With Music” Service will be Opening in Mexico, Italy and Sweden

Nokia has announced that it will be launching it “Comes with Music” offering in Italy, Sweden and Mexico in the coming months. Nokia initially launched their Comes With Music service in the UK and Singapore and its already announced it will launch in Australia later this month.

The company has also announced three new music phones in its XpressMusic range: the 5730, 5330 and 5030. The first two of those will be Comes With Music handsets in selected markets.

45,000 People Downloaded The New u2 Album via Torrent Sites in 2 Weeks

Music Ally has reported that over 445,000 people illegally downloaded the new U2 album. All these downloaded were alleged to happen between the 18th of February till the 3rd of March from BitTorrent sites.

The chart supplied by the company shows the spike in downloads following the album’s leak in February, apparently due to it being accidentally made available for sale on an Australian digital music store ahead of its official release on 2nd March.

The debate is always would these people have purchased the album if it wasn’t leaked on BitTorrent clients? No one can really answer that question, but I’m sure that certain sales would have happened because of this.

Overall this does make me think that the claims of the Pirate Bay in the last couple weeks that “80 percent of all their torrents are legal”, cant be true.

The Beatles will be on Rock Band coming September 9th

Harmonix has confirmed that its Beatles-themed music game will be released on 9 September this year, and will be called The Beatles: Rock Band. An official site has gone live today inviting gamers to sign up for alerts when pre-ordering begins.

It’s a big deal – the game will launch simultaneously in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and other countries, and will be available on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii.

The game will include support for guitar, bass, mic and drums, but will also offer “a limited number of new hardware offerings modeled after instruments used by John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr throughout their career”.