8 February 2006 Technology News

• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 11:05

  In federal e-security we trust? Not a chance
  
  Do you trust the federal government when it comes to your privacy and the handling of your personal information? Is your personally identifiable data handled by the government in a way that your privacy might be breached or such that your data is safe? Inquiring minds want to know.
  
  And just in time, a privacy think tank called the Ponemon Institute has issued its 2006 Privacy Trust Study of the United States Government. The report ranks public perception of the privacy protection practices of federal agencies, based on responses to various survey questions. More than 70 agencies were evaluated, and each was assigned a privacy trust score by factoring together positive and negative survey responses.
  
  Let's turn to the bad news first. The least-trusted federal agencies, starting from the bottom, are: the Department of Homeland Security, the Transport Security Administration, the CIA, the Department of Justice, the Office of the Attorney General, the National Security Agency, the Bureau of Citizenship & Immigration, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 11:08

  Study: Cell phones a hazard on flights
  
  Severe accidents could be the consequence of airline passengers defying the cell phone ban and making calls while flying, a new study has shown.
  
  Despite the U.S. ban on cellular calls on airplanes, air travelers have a hard time keeping their hands off their mobiles and often make calls during critical stages of the flight such as final approach, according to a research team from Carnegie Mellon University.
  
  As part of the study, released Monday, the research team filled their hand luggage with a broadband antenna and spectrum analyzer and boarded random airplanes crossing the Northeast United States. Picking up signals from cell phone calls onboard, they found that an average of one to four calls are made on every U.S. commercial flight.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 11:12

  Global handset makers locked in merger dance
  
  Your new handset is certainly better and may be cheaper than your previous phone, but the choice of brands will reduce drastically in the coming years as smaller players exit the cutthroat market.
  
  High research-and-development costs and a trend toward low-margin but high-volume phones are likely to force further consolidation among mobile handset makers.
  
  The global top five--Nokia, Motorola, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics and Sony Ericsson--already make roughly 75 percent of all mobile phones.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 11:17

  'World of Warcraft' hits 6 million milestone
  
  The number of "World of Warcraft" customers worldwide has hit 6 million, Blizzard Entertainment announced on Wednesday, and a version of the popular game will soon be out in Spanish.
  
  The VU Games-owned developer's European branch announced that the company is prepping a Spanish edition of its massively multiplayer online role-playing game for release in Europe, where English, French and German versions of the game are already available.
  
  "We look forward to offering Spanish-speaking players in Europe a version of 'World of Warcraft' tailored specifically for them," Blizzard president and co-founder Mike Morhaime said in a statement. "The enthusiasm for the game here has been overwhelming, and we're pleased that this new localized version will make 'World of Warcraft' accessible to an even wider audience."
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 11:21

  Burning Man vets bring Wi-Fi to Katrina region
  
  As veterans of Burning Man, the annual art festival held in a remote Nevada desert, Tom Price and a group of about 20 others who have been volunteering with post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction in Mississippi are used to persevering in forbidding environments.
  
  But when members of the group wanted to stay in touch with friends and family, and needed to keep up with the contract jobs that allow them to spend weeks and months on the Gulf Coast, the nearly complete lack of Internet access posed a problem.
  
  Now the group, known as Burners Without Borders, is using new Kyocera mobile hot-spot technology to create a wide-area-network in an area with little, if any, Internet access. Their shoestring network, based on $250 routers and $150 wireless cards, could prove to be a model for other volunteer groups in disaster areas.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 11:40

  Need your PC fixed? Get ready to pay up
  
  Technology is a wonderful thing, when it works. Just as cars run reliably but lawn mowers never start, many people wonder why humans are capable of creating amazing technology but can't make PCs that average people can understand.
  
  As a result, demand for PC support services is booming even as retailers and PC vendors pare down their standard warranties. Fed up with pleasant but unsatisfying support answers, PC users are increasingly willing to pay for support from those companies. Third-party PC support is becoming big business, with Best Buy aggressively promoting the services of the Geek Squad and vendors like Dell jumping to provide their own touch.
  
  It's not completely clear how big the market is for premium consumer support, said Matt Healey, an analyst with IDC. However, the overall market for Windows support last year was $7.8 billion, which includes everything from corporate server support to consumer PCs. It's safe to say the market size for consumer support measures in the "billions," he said.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 11:47

  Yahoo gets early win on trade secrets case
  
  A California state judge has given Yahoo its first legal win against a start-up that Yahoo sued for stealing trade secrets.
  
  Yahoo sued San Francisco-based wireless content provider MForma earlier this week, contending that a group of former Yahoo employees left the company and took proprietary source-code and business information to their new jobs.
  
  A judge on Wednesday granted Yahoo's request for a temporary restraining order, barring MForma employees from using or disclosing any proprietary Yahoo information in their work.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 11:55

  Spam and scams prompted AOL's fee-based e-mail
  
  American Online says it's waging a fierce battle against Internet scam artists and is unconcerned that not everyone approves of its new approach to protecting users from phishing schemes and spam.
  
  A plan by AOL and Yahoo to charge mass e-mailers a fee for guaranteed delivery of messages to subscribers has run into very vocal opposition from a consortium of nonprofit and public interest groups, including MoveOn.org Civic Action, the AFL-CIO, Gun Owners of America and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
  
  The fee, scheduled to take effect in 30 days, is little more than an "e-mail tax" say opponents of the plan. Paying for e-mail will thwart the growth of grassroots organizations and divide mass e-mailers into two groups: elites who can afford to communicate with a mass audience, and those who can't and are locked out, says Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 12:07

  Microsoft: Our engine to be better than Google soon
  
  Microsoft will introduce a search engine better than Google in six months in the United States and Britain followed by Europe, its European president said on Wednesday.
  
  "What we're saying is that in six months' time we'll be more relevant in the U.S. market place than Google," said Neil Holloway, Microsoft president for Europe, Middle East and Africa.
  
  "The quality of our search and the relevance of our search from a solution perspective to the consumer will be more relevant," he told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 12:09

  China creates own Internet domains
  
  China has announced it is creating a new set of domain names based on Chinese characters.
  
  China has created three of its own top-level domains that will use the domain names .cn, .com and .net, in Chinese. The domain names were launched Wednesday by the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry.
  
  The creation of Chinese character domain names has led to speculation that China could break away from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) completely, and undermine the global unity of the Domain Name System (DNS), the network of servers that resolves domain name requests.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 12:11

  ICANN board approves settlement, price hikes
  
  In a rare show of internal discord, the group that sets domain name regulation has approved a controversial proposal extending VeriSign's lucrative .com monopoly and allowing for price increases for those domains.
  
  The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted 9-5 on Tuesday in favor of a settlement agreement that grants VeriSign the right to raise fees on .com domains by 7 percent annually.
  
  The settlement, which arose out of a lawsuit filed by VeriSign against ICANN after the Site Finder flap in 2003, will be lucrative for both organizations. Based on the 48.1 million .com domains currently active at $6 per year, VeriSign is guaranteed at least $288.6 million in annual revenue--with price hikes at a rate that far outpaces inflation.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 12:47

  The driving force behind Yahoo Research
  
  Prabhakar Raghavan is modest for a man changing the world.
  
  As head of technology research at Yahoo, the 45-year-old is a key figure in leading the development of the Internet, arguably the most important technology of our time. Products emerging from his laboratories are used by hundreds of millions of Internet users across the globe, including countless consumers and businesses.
  
  More broadly, these innovations--Internet search, e-commerce, online entertainment, content-sharing and instant messaging, to name but a few--affect everything from how people relate and connect to one another, to how information is distributed and consumed, to how goods and services are bought and sold.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 13:05

  Congress gives online colleges a boost
  
  It took just a few paragraphs in a budget bill for Congress to open a new frontier in education: Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid.
  
  That change is expected to be of enormous value to the commercial education industry. Although both for-profit colleges and traditional ones have expanded their Internet and online offerings in recent years, only a few dozen universities are fully Internet-based, and most of them are for-profit ones.
  
  The provision is just one sign of how an industry that once had a dubious reputation has gained new influence, with well-connected friends in the government and many congressional Republicans sympathetic to their entrepreneurial ethic.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 13:13

  Publicis to surf marketing waves of the future
  
  As Google ventures deeper into the mainstream areas of media and advertising, many of the reigning powers there are watching with a mixture of fascination and fear.
  
  "Is Madison Avenue about to get Googled?" the trade publication Adweek asked recently, after Google decided to buy a company that sells radio advertising and made forays into areas like video distribution.
  
  On the Champs-Élysées, however, moves are afoot to forestall any such Googling. Last week, the Publicis Groupe, the advertising heavyweight based in Paris, opened Denuo (Latin for "anew"), with about 15 marketing futurists to spot new media and marketing technologies on behalf of clients, investors and, not least, Publicis itself.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 13:16

  NASA laser device could assist at crime scenes
  
  Warning: Objects in this photo may appear exactly to scale.
  
  Technology developed by NASA engineers lets photographers add measurements to objects in a picture with the use of laser dots, the space agency said this week. That tool, which has helped NASA scientists find and analyze damage to spacecraft, may soon be widely useful to police investigating crime scenes.
  
  The device, called the Laser Scaling and Measurement Device for Photographic Images, is a black box weighing about half a pound, and attaches directly to a camera. With twin lasers an inch apart, the tool can project a pattern of dots in a photographer's field of vision. Once the image loads into specialized software, the photographer can then set points of interest within the picture and set distances between those references.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 13:18

  New Mexico spaceport gets bankrolled
  
  New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson signed legislation into law on Wednesday that will allow his state to begin investing $110 million in a facility to launch tourists into space.
  
  "These bills will help create tremendous economic impact for New Mexico, and particularly Southern New Mexico," Richardson said in a statement on the planned spaceport in Upham near the White Sands Missile Range.
  
  "This is a unique opportunity for New Mexico to be on the ground floor of a new industry that will bring new companies, more high-wage jobs and opportunities that will move our state's economy forward," he added.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 13:21

  Pay By Touch wants your fingers to do the shopping
  
  More than two decades after bar code scanners were introduced for supermarket checkout lines, the grocery store industry is buying into another promising new technology that could make shopping more efficient and secure, and cut costs for retailers.
  
  Solidus Networks, a start-up that operates as Pay By Touch, has developed a biometric fingerprint scanner that in recent months has experienced a surge in orders from community grocers and U.S. national chains. One of the company's first big customers was Piggly Wiggly Carolina, which last year purchased fingerprint scanners for all of its 118 stores after a four-store pilot program found shoppers who paid by fingerprint moved through the checkout line faster and returned to the store more often.
  
  "We found that the people who used it started visiting our stores more often and spending more dollars," says Rich Farrell, vice president of information services at Piggly Wiggly. During a three-month pilot test, 15 percent of shoppers at participating stores signed up for the service, in which they completed a transaction with a fingerprint instead of entering a PIN code or signing a receipt. Store visits among those shoppers went up 12 percent, resulting in a 15 percent increase in spending.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 13:23

  Sensor instantly detects cocaine in blood
  
  Researchers have created a sensor to instantly test for cocaine in a person's blood, streamlining a process that otherwise takes hours.
  
  The group, which includes scientists from the University of California at Santa Barbara, a Nobel prize winner and two high school students, said the sensor could also conceivably be used to test for exposure to biotoxins and other substances.
  
  The sensor contains a specific, artificially fabricated DNA molecule that reacts when it meets cocaine. In seconds, the molecule turns from a floppy, formless shape into a rigid structure. When adding a blood or saliva sample contaminated with cocaine to the sensor, the change can be instantly measured by sending electrons through the DNA and seeing how they travel.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 13:31

  Turning nature's design into scientific breakthrough
  
  When Jay Harman was a skinny 10-year-old swimming off the coral reefs of Australia's western coast, he had an insight that 37 years later would lead him to invent an industrial design that could change personal computing, aeronautics and how drinking water is purified.
  
  As a nature-loving boy, the young Australian just wanted to swim faster, so he watched how fish moved through water and how seaweed undulated against the reef when a wave crashed.
  
  The shape he noticed that day was a simple curve that fluidly formed into a spiral. From then on, Harman would see spirals as a common design in nature--in pinecones, whirlpools, a puff of smoke.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 13:37

  iPod Hi-Fi has big-sounding ambitions
  
  Steve Jobs is a self-confessed audiophile.
  
  He's spent, well, a lot of money on speakers in his time, he told a small audience of reporters Tuesday. But he said he's now giving up those expensive speakers for the new iPod Hi-Fi, Apple's new speaker accessory for the iPod music player.
  
  Whether that's literally true, or a bit of Jobsian hyperbole to underscore a point, it's undeniable that Apple's new speakers do push the company further out of the computing world and into the home electronics business--if only a little further.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 13:40

  Toshiba to release HD-DVD player
  
  A Toshiba Entertainment representative told CNET Japan that the company plans to release titles in the HD-DVD format on March 28. This supports the company's assertion during January's Consumer Electronics Show that it would release an HD-DVD player in March. At the time, Toshiba said the first players would cost $499 and $799.
  
  Jiji-tsushin, a news outlet in Japan, reported that Toshiba will release a HD-DVD drive for PCs in April and an HD-DVD recorder in May. Toshiba earlier said they would release a notebook with an HD-DVD drive and discuss the specs this quarter. Toshiba leads the HD-DVD camp. Sony, Samsung and Philips are part of the rival Blu-ray camp. Blu-ray players will come out later in the year and cost more.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 13:44

  Apple launches new Intel Mac Minis, iPod Hi-Fi
  
  CUPERTINO, Calif.--Apple Computer on Tuesday introduced its third Intel-based Mac, a revamped version of its petite Mac Mini.
  
  The new Mac Mini will be available, starting immediately, in two models. The low-end model sells for $599 and comes with a 1.5GHz Intel Solo single-core chip, a 60GB hard drive and a combo drive that can play DVDs and burn CDs.
  
  The higher-end version will sell for $799. It comes with a dual-core 1.67GHz Core Duo processor, an 80GB hard drive and a SuperDrive that burns CDs and DVDs.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  2 Mar 06, 13:47

  Origami: Enough of anything?
  
  Microsoft's Origami is shaping up to be cheaper and smaller than today's Tablet PC, but the device will likely miss the software maker's most ambitious targets for size, price and battery life.
  
  When Chairman Bill Gates first outlined the notion of an ultramobile PC at a hardware conference last year, he talked about a device that would weigh less than a pound, have all-day battery life and could cost less than $800, possibly as little as $500.
  
  Those are still Microsoft's goals when it comes to its much talked-about Origami project. However, the first Origami devices, which are set to arrive before the end of April, will likely not reach those lofty ideals. Instead, the machines are likely to start somewhere near the $800 mark and have battery life that hovers around four hours, according to a source familiar with the first-generation products.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  3 Mar 06, 23:28

  Intel issues revenue warning
  
  Intel warned on Friday that its first-quarter revenue will fall below expectations, marking the second consecutive quarter in which the chip giant has surprised Wall Street.
  
  The company cited weaker-than-expected demand for its chips and a slight decline in market share as the reason for the warning. The chip giant also issued an earnings warning for the fourth quarter of last year.
  
  Intel said it now expects its first-quarter revenue to be in the range of $8.7 billion to $9.1 billion, compared with its previous forecast of $9.1 billion to $9.7 billion.
• ndmmxiaomayi

  3 Mar 06, 23:30

  The new Salesforce approach to outages
  
  Salesforce.com has responded to some of the criticism it has suffered after service outages left users without their CRM services for as long as an hour and a half.
  
  These problems hit the headlines just before last Christmas when Salesforce faced its biggest outage to date. Since then the service has suffered intermittent faults, prompting the company to launch its own service to track outages.
  
  The service, trust.salesforce.com, launched late last month, tracks the system performance of Salesforce's four main servers--two in the U.S., one covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and one covering the Asia-Pacific region. At the end of each day it publishes a performance summary, with a traffic-light color-coding system using green, amber and red to indicate good service, minor problems and outages, respectively.