Tech World

How Losing Your Phone Could Cost You

2009-07-24T21:01:00.000-07:00

Today’s mobile phones store a whole lot of your personal information. Here’s what you need to do to protect the data on your phone...

A lost or stolen smartphone is more than just an inconvenience.It can lead to identity fraud or corporate espionage,and even compromise the integrity of your medical records.In March, Connecticut-based security vendor Credent Technologies reported that 80 percent of users store on their phones information needed for identity fraud. Based on a survey of 600 commuters in London railway stations, the study also found that 24 percent of cell phone owners store PINs and passwords on a handset, 11 percent store personal identification info, and 10 percent store credit card numbers. If your mobile phone is stolen, the thief can do a reverse lookup of your cell number to obtain your name and address. That and a stored credit card number can lead to “account takeover,” where the thief changes an existing account’s billing address. And unless your card issuer calls you, the absence of your monthly statement might go unnoticed. With such info, a thief could also open new accounts using your name. As you often wouldn’t know these accounts are being opened, this problem can take much longer to resolve. And if you use your phone to access e-mail, a thief might too.

Put Your Phone on Lockdown

The best way to keep your e-mail accounts secure is to lock your mobile phone when you’re not using it—a password lock, that is. (The Credent survey found that some 40 percent of users didn’t employ a password to lock their phones.) For the iPhone, arguably the most popular mobile phone today, you’ll want to combine Auto-Lock, enabled by default to turn off the screen-based keypad after a preset amount of time, with Passcode Lock, to turn the phone on manually. To enable the latter, tap Settings, then General, then Passcode Lock. Tap Turn Passcode On, and then enter a secure password. For other phones, check the tools or settings section. Samsung’s Mobile Tracker feature silently sends two text messages to numbers programmed in by the phone’s rightful owner as soon as the SIM gets swapped. The text messages contain the new SIM’s phone number, so even if you lost your phone, you can hound the thief till he gets a new number and another new number and so on....

Protect Company Info

Many people also use mobile phones for remote access to their workplaces. Since nearly half of mobile phone users don’t lock or otherwise restrict access, thieves may use such a vulnerable stolen phone to gain access to an employer’s internal network.

Security vendors such as Lumension now offer businesses an application Click ME that allows your employer to lock a lost phone or erase sensitive data remotely (currently available only for Windows Mobile); for the iPhone, Apple has a remote-wipe feature http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/ .Another step to protect stored data is to disable Bluetooth. Although it’s a short-range signal, some malware uses Bluetooth to suck data from your phone surreptitiously. Also, while most mobile phones use cellular connections to access the Internet, the iPhone has a Wi-Fi option for faster, high-bandwidth applications like streaming video. That opens up the possibility of connecting to rogue Wi-Fi networks full of keylogging malware.

To turn off Wi-Fi or set a prompt for each new connection, touch iPhone Settings• Wi-Fi; then select accordingly.

Stop Mobile Bank Heists

Have you recently started using mobile banking? The good news is that generally no personal banking data—such as your account information—is kept on the phone itself. However, a criminal can still use your phone to access your bank accounts directly.

Mobile banking sessions occur in one of three ways: You download an app to your phone; the bank exchanges encrypted SMS messages with your phone; or the bank uses your phone’s mobile browser to show account information.

In any case, notify your bank—shortly after you notify your cellular carrier—of any lost or stolen phone. If the bank uses a client-side application, it can remotely disable it. If the bank uses the interchange of SMS or a mobile browser connection, its device ID service can block contact from the stolen phone.

Protect or Detect

A host of third party software is available that will not only protect your data, it will ensure that the mobile thief will never enjoy his newest heist. These include PhoneBAK Mobilephone, Guardian 2.1, Gadget Trak and WIMP. These software send out SMSes using the thief ’s SIM card to pre-defined numbers, that contain IMEI, IMSI*, Area Code and Cell ID*.You can also
get the phone’s GPS location (if your phone has internal GPS) and wipe out sensitive personal data stored on the device and media card.

New Nokia phone has mobile-payment SIM card

2009-04-27T08:20:00.000-07:00

The new Nokia 6216 classic handset, announced on Thursday, incorporates support for NFC (Near Field Communication) technology on the SIM card, paving the way for operators to more easily deploy mobile-payment systems.

NFC is a wireless communication technology with a range of a few inches, and it is considered easy to use and quick to set up. It lets users, for example, pay for goods by simply waving their NFC-enabled handset in front of a contactless reader.

The 6216 classic is Nokia's third mobile phone with integrated NFC support, but the first that puts the secure element of the technology - which, for example, can be used to store credit-card information - on the SIM card, according to Jeremy Belostock, head of near field communications at Nokia.

The secure element has on existing NFC-enabled Nokia phones been stored on the phone itself. Moving it to the SIM card is something operators have wished for, because it makes it easier for them to roll out services, according to Belostock. For end users it means they can switch phones, and bring their mobile wallet with them, he said.

The 6216 classic is expected to start shipping in the third quarter of 2009 in selected parts of Europe and Asia. It will cost about €150 before taxes and subsidies, according to Nokia.

The use of the NFC has slowly started to take off. Earlier this month Malaysian operator Maxis - working with Visa, Nokia and Maybank - started offering mobile payments, and more operators are on the way, according to Belostock.

Nokia is still the only mobile phone vendor pushing the technology. More choice is needed for the technology to take off, and that will start to arrive next year, according to Belostock. Currently, slow sales of mobile phones are holding the technology back, he said.

Robots act as scientists without assistants

2009-04-07T08:55:00.000-07:00

The era of the robot scientist may soon be upon us.

Two teams of human scientists Thursday unveiled their work with robots that not only perform experiments, but also come up with new ones. The prototypes tackled physics and biology problems that require simple, repetitive experiments, proceeding by trial and error to uncover knowledge, according to studies published in the journal Science.

These robots don't look like R2-D2 and C-3PO from Star Wars. They look like van-size computers, but with robotic arms to do tasks that would otherwise be done by human assistants.

"The prospect of using automated systems as assistants holds vast promise," David Waltz of Columbia University and Bruce Buchanan of the University of Pittsburgh say in a journal commentary. Robot scientists could "increase the rate of scientific progress dramatically, (and) in the process, revolutionize the practice of science," they write.

"Scientists should be using their brains rather than their hands," says computational biologist Ross King of the United Kingdom's Aberystwyth University, who led one robot effort. Adam, the team's $1 million prototype robot scientist, reports new findings about yeast genes in one of the studies. The robot can start more than 1,000 biology experiments a day over a five-day period.

King's team manually confirmed the biochemistry results that explained the genetic workings of yeasts, which have eluded researchers for decades. "There is a lot of work to do, even in creatures we think are well-understood," King says.

Adam may next systematically tackle how bits of "RNA" genetic material affects roundworms in a similar bid to map the genetic workings of the common lab creature.

The other robotic scientist, reported on by Cornell University's Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt, tests pendulums and springs to figure out the physics laws that govern their movements. "A lot of science today, especially cosmology and genomics, is generating massive amounts of data that scientists have to wade through," Lipson says. "We need a way like this one to make it easier."

Simply by experimenting, the robot deduced the equations governing motion and the physical laws behind them for these simple machines.

On the yeast study, King sought more credit for the robot: "We wanted to make Adam a co-author on the report, but they wouldn't go for that."

Microsoft Launches Internet Explorer 8

2009-03-20T08:53:00.000-07:00

Microsoft today announced the availability of Windows Internet Explorer 8 web browser. According to a press release the new IE has been designed from ground up to provide consumers with ease of use; faster navigation and enhanced security and privacy, Internet Explorer 8 can be downloaded from www.microsoft.com/ie8, starting 9:30 PM (IST) today.

Among the new features in IE include Accelerators, Visual Search and Web Slices. The release claims that all these features cut down the number of clicks required for common tasks on the Internet. Accelerators speed up everyday online tasks like search, email, social networking etc. within the active web page; Web Slices appear in the browser’s ‘Favorites’ bar and allow users access to updated information from their most visited websites, without physically going there; and Visual Search provides image based search results from the browser’s home page.

IE8 also includes features to aid in security and privacy such as In Private Browsing that provides users the choice of going private on the internet, and ensuring that browsing history and related data are not retained locally on the PC they are using; Compatibility View that lets users fix display problems such as out-of-place menus, images and text with a button that displays those pages as they were designed to be viewed and crash recovery, which automatically restores and reloads tabs, and any information the user may have already entered on the page (such as when writing an e-mail or filling out a form) after recovering from a crash.

SanDisk Sansa SlotRadio

2009-03-04T23:59:00.000-08:00

Why pay 99 cents a track for music when you can get the player and 1000 songs for $100? The 1.5-inch-square SlotRadio takes fingernail-size, high capacity memory cards; the base model ships with a card that contains 1000 songs handpicked from Billboard charts in six genres (alternative, country, urban), or grouped by theme (“chillout” or “workout”). Additional 1000-song slot cards will be available later this year for $40 a piece. The catch? Someone else picks the songs, not you. But with artists like Keith Urban, The Killers, and U2 on the bill, there is sure to be something for everyone. The device’s touch screen and side buttons enable you to jump between genres and skip songs you don’t like; or you can tune in the built-in FM radio.

Hackers swarm bank accounts

2009-02-24T21:56:00.000-08:00

New and nasty banking trojans are on the rise on the Internet and attacking online bank accounts. The new trojan programs — which wait on your hard drive for an opportunity to crack your online banking account — are different from traditional "phishing" e-mail scams that try to trick you into typing your login information at fake bank websites.

They're invisible, can steal data multiple ways and require no action by the victim to be launched. "Phishing doesn't work as well as it used to," says Patrik Runald, security specialist at F-Secure, the Internet security firm.

"Banking trojans provide a very effective and direct means for the bad guys to get their hands on the money." Banking trojans can be gotten by clicking on a viral link to a greeting card or video that arrives in e-mail spam. Or, they can be picked up by clicking to a Web page that's been corrupted by hackers. F-Secure tallied 59,177 unique banking trojans circulating on the Internet in 2008, up from 15,969 in 2007. The escalation partly underscores how intensively criminal hackers churn out new variants to escape detection by antivirus programs.

Banking trojans "are more advanced and evolving faster than antivirus solutions," says Gunter Ollmann at IBM Internet Security Systems. The American Bankers Association acknowledges the rise. Doug Johnson, vice president of risk management policy, notes that most U.S. banks try to make certain that online customers log in from their usual computer. Losses caused from unauthorized transactions aren't known. Banks generally don't disclose them.

A typical banking trojan remains dormant until the customer logs on to a banking website. It then steals usernames and passwords by capturing keystrokes or copying the log-on page after the victim has filled it out. So-called man-in-the-middle trojans go further. One type makes illicit cash transfers while the victim is legitimately logged on.

Another can reproduce a copy of the Web page showing account balances — except with the balances altered to show the numbers the victim expects to see. This buys time for the thief to drain the account and hide his trail, Ollmann says. Despite the trojans, Johnson of the bankers' association insists "online banking, on balance, is safe."

Game is child's play for robot

2009-02-24T06:47:00.000-08:00

A robot at the centre of the development of artificial intelligence has gone on display, playing the child's game of rock, paper, scissors.

Developers hope Berti (Bristol Elumotion Robotic Torso 1) and other robots could eventually be used in the likes of land mine clearance.

The robot, created by Bath robotics firm, Elumotion and on show in London, is designed to mimic human gestures.

A spokesman said such robots could also be used in prosthetic limb development.

He said this would possibly help people who had been in car accidents.

"They could also carry out extremely dangerous jobs such as land mine clearance," he said.

Visitors to the Science Museum in London's South Kensington will see Berti give a short speech, using a computer-generated voice, as well as making hand gestures.

Craig Fletcher of Elumotion said Berti cost around £200,000 to build.

He said: "Berti was certainly a challenge to build. To mimic human gestures a robot must be both lightweight and powerful."

The Day Google Stopped Working

2009-02-02T04:44:00.000-08:00

Human error caused a glitch that returned the message "this site may harm your computer" for all Google search results for about an hour on Saturday, the company said, but the mistake was Google's and not StopBadware.org's.

Google Saturday morning released an update to its list of URLs known to install malicious software and "unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs," Google Vice President of Search Products & User Experience wrote in an official Google blog post explaining the glitch.

"Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file."

Mayer's original blog posting Saturday morning made it sound like the human error was on the part of StopBadware.org, a nonprofit organization Google and other IT companies and academic institutions work with to warn Internet users about sites known to install malicious software on computers that visit those sites. However, an updated blog posting clarified that the problem was on Google's end.

Initially, Mayer wrote that Google periodically receives updates to the URL list and had received such an update Saturday morning, but her revised blog post said instead that "we periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning," and then explained the '/' mistake.

As the StopBadware blog explained it after the first Google blog went up publicly (and was circulated to reporters) as its explanation of the problem: "Google generates its own list of badware URLs, and no data that we generate is supposed to affect the warnings in Google's search listings."

Users who clicked on Google results during the glitch period got an "interstitial" warning page saying that there could be malicious software at the site they were trying to reach and referring them to StopBadware.org for more information, the organization's blog said. "This led to a denial of service of our website, as millions of Google users attempted to visit our site for more information," it said.

StopBadware operates as a partnership among academic institutions, IT companies and volunteers. It is operated out of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Its site was back up and running Saturday, if slowly at times given how many people were trying to obtain information from the organization.

In both the initial post and the update, Mayer apologized in her post to anyone who was inconvenienced by the glitch and to site owners whose pages were incorrectly labeled as being malicious. "We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in place to prevent it from happening again," she wrote.may be harmful to your computer."

Some press reports earlier in the day said that Google had also stopped flagging known bad sites, but according to StopBadware that wasn't the case and Google was correctly flagging those sites as malicious.

MelZoo takes on Google with split-screen search

2009-01-20T02:49:00.000-08:00

The latest in a long line of challengers to Google emerged at the weekend with the launch of a search engine called MelZoo, which has been designed to maximise user productivity.

The site differs from most other web search tools in that the results screen is divided in two. The left side shows search listings, while the right side displays the corresponding web pages.

MelZoo claimed that this feature speeds up the search process by making sites load quicker, and by removing the need for users to keep multiple tabs and browser windows open to preview search queries.

It also means that users do not have to click on individual results to see the desired page, or switch back and forth between web site and search engine.

MelZoo differs from its rivals by not charging advertisers when users simply preview their site, meaning that only "true and meaningful hits" are charged via the cost-per-click model, according to the firm.

"MelZoo has improved the experience of browsing the internet in a totally different way. For years people have used an old technique - text only - to browse the web. MelZoo has revolutionised the way users will browse the web," said MelZoo chief executive Alex De Backer.

"In addition MelZoo is a welcome novelty for the advertisers, as it offers higher quality visitors at a lower cost."

Motorola unveils its new Recycled Cell phone (The World’s First Carbon Neutral Cellphone)

2009-01-15T22:48:00.000-08:00

Green innovations are taking center stage at this year’s CES, with many big name companies embracing sustainable design. Motorola is doing their part to tackle the massive problem of consumer e-waste with the release of the world’s first carbon neutral cellphone. The Renew W233 is the first certified Carbonfree cell phone on the market and features a 100% recyclable housing made from recycled water bottles.

The consumer electronics industry survives through constant innovation, with companies constantly seeking out the next best thing. But what happens to all of those outdated gadgets as they are replaced? In the United States alone, 426,000 cellphones are retired each day, and a staggering number of these wind up in landfills.

Motorola’s Renew W233 cellphone features an admirable set of sustainable features that directly address the phone’s carbon footprint and life cycle. By partnering up with Carbonfund.org Motorola offsets the energy to manufacture, distribute, and operate the phone by investing in renewable energy sources and reforestation. Once the phone reaches the end of its life cycle it can be easily recycled by placing it in a prepaid envelope that is provided in the box. Additionally, the phone’s packaging consumes 22% less material and the manual is printed on post consumer recycled paper with soy-based inks.

The phone offers a simple feature set and will be situated in an affordable price bracket, making it available to a wide range of users. It’s great to see large electronics manufacturers making sincere efforts to consider the sustainability of their products!

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Robots @ HOME : The upcoming Revolution

2008-12-27T06:07:00.000-08:00

Normally, we think of robots as humanoid and self-aware, like Rosie or Data. Some day, they might be more like that, but robots are here in our homes today, cleaning our floors and even making our coffee. What does the future of human-robot relations hold?

You might not think you have robots Latest News about robots in your house, but think again. There's your dishwasher, for instance; you put dishes in it, walk away, and a half hour later they're clean. Same thing with your washing machine. Or your programmable coffeemaker.

Though these everyday mechanical devices aren't humanoid, they are on the robotic spectrum, in the sense that they perform functions with minimal human involvement.

"People use the word 'robotics' a lot, and it means a lot of different things," Rich Hooper, a robotics consultant who develops and designs computer-controlled machines for Austin, Texas-based Symtx, told "Robotics has gotten so loosely defined that it means almost anything with movable parts."

Steve Rainwater, a robot technologist and editor of the Robots.net blog, agrees.

"'Robot' is a word that's almost impossible to define; it has come to be used for too many different things these days," Rainwater told, "Personally, I think of robots as autonomous machines that evolved initially with the help of humans. I also tend to think of the word robot as an ideal that we haven't really achieved yet, rather than just a description of the artifacts that have resulted from trying to realize that ideal."

Growth of an Industry

Whether they're called robots or just smart machines, these devices are quickly becoming an everyday feature of our lives. In fact, according to a study done by the International Federation of Robotics, there were 3.4 million personal domestic service robots in use at the end of 2007, and it predicted another 4.6 million domestic service robots will be sold between 2008 and 2012.

"The first possibility is that we'll eventually have general purpose humanoid robots that do many tasks and interact with us more or less like we interact with each other," Rainwater said. "This is the future so often predicted in science fiction stories. You might want to ask your household robot to do the dishes, babysit the kids, mow the lawn, or play a game of chess with you."

The smart machine path is one other -- perhaps more likely -- future.

"The other possibility is that homes of the future will have function-specific robotics integrated transparently into the house itself," Rainwater said. "The house will become a network of smart machines that interact with you and each other."

The Future Is Now

iRobot is one company that helped to make robots part of our everyday lives. There's the Roomba, which is an automatic vacuum cleaner, and the Scooba, an automatic floor washing system. Then there's the pool-cleaning Verro and the gutter-cleaning Looj.

"Roomba made practical robots a reality for the first time and showed the world that robots are here to stay," the company's Web site says. "With nearly two decades of leadership in the robot industry, iRobot remains committed to providing platforms for invention and discovery, developing key partnerships to foster technological exploration and building robots that improve the standards of living and safety worldwide."

Founded in 1990 by roboticists Colin Angle and Helen Greiner and headquartered in Bedford, Mass., iRobot has more than 400 employees and a wide selection of household robots.

Other robots available to consumers now are items like the Clocky, an alarm clock that spins away if it's chased, produced by Nanda; or security robots that travel around the premises of a home or business sold by companies like MobileRobots.

Honda has also been working on a humanoid robot project called "Asimo." Still in the development phase, Asimo can carry trays, push carts, climb stairs, and do a number of other tasks. In the future, it might be used to care for the elderly, provide service at social functions, and do simple housework. It is also being developed to work in conjunction with other appliances.

"In the home, Asimo could someday be useful as it can connect wirelessly to the Internet to retrieve requested data, for example," Alicia Jones, Honda's North American Asimo Project Supervisor, told TechNewsWorld. "Asimo could also be integrated with other household electronics so that it could control those devices as requested by a user. Of course, it will still be some time before Asimo is ready to help in other ways in the home."

Robot Rights

Robots continue to fascinate people, if only because they see themselves reflected in these machines. And as they become more common, questions of the ethics of this kind of labor might come to the fore.

"If you're doing something that a human can do, you might as well have a human do it," Hooper said. "As much as I like robots, I don't really identify with them."

Rainwater argues the other side of this debate, suggesting that robots might eventually have something akin to basic human rights.

"Robots are fascinating because, unlike all the other machines we humans have invented, they're the first that may someday have the capacity to be our friends and companions," Rainwater said. "In a sense they're our children. Some people think robots may even eventually become our evolutionary successors. That's something to think about before you kick that robot dog that's annoying you."

R u planning to Skip Windows Vista & move onto Windows 7.0?

2008-12-16T07:33:00.000-08:00

Is Windows 7.0 what Vista should have been?

Speaking at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Orlando, Microsoft CEO , Steve Ballmer said, “Windows 7 will be Vista, but a lot better”. So, if Windows 7.0 is a lot better than Vista and is being released earlier than its scheduled launch in 2010, why would anyone upgrade to Vista? Whether it is an individual or an enterprise, a new operating system involves a lot of overhaul and streamlining. So, ifyou are on a Windows XP platform and were on the verge of jumping onto the Vista bandwagon, it’s time to reconsider. Skip Vista. Moving on to Windows 7.0 is clearly your best bet today.

Windows 7.0 a major release, in what way?

Microsoft claims that Windows 7.0 is a major release but it seems more like a correction to Vista and hence people already on Vista are likely to see very few “ground breaking” improvements. In fact Windows 7.0 brings a lot of corrections and tweaking that were required in Vista. Some even treat it like a Vista Service Pack 2, and I wouldn’t totally disagree on that, except for the fact that this service pack will come with a lot of hype and will cost you a lot of money. The fact that Microsoft promises a very smooth and effortless migration from Windows Vista to Windows 7.0 is a clear indication that the core “engine” has been tweaked and modified but not restructured. Windows 7 improves on some unique features that Vista introduced but ended up taking a lot of flak for poor implementation.

The UAC for example is supposed to make Windows the most secure ever, but the obstructive nature of implementation caused a lot of angst amongst users. The UAC is a lot more practical and tuned to be less annoying with fewer prompts to users. Another change comes in the form of system performance; while the system requirements remain the same, initial reports suggest that the OS is faster off the blocks on the same hardware. Issues with file transfer rates between folders and partitions have also been ironed out along with a better search feature. Along with these, there are a host of improvements and features that make Windows 7.0 the product that Vista should have been in the first place. The Windows Vista to Windows 7.0 reminds me of the Windows 95 to Windows 98 days when Windows 98 was found to be a better version of Windows 95 and acceptability was a lot better.

So why call it Windows 7.0?

With “Windows Vista” not being the most successful chapter in Microsoft’s history, no matter what magic is done to Vista, it would remain Vista. Hence Microsoft had to create a new brand and build the hype and marketing machinery around it to ensure it comes out as a brand new product compelling enough for users to upgrade to. What are your thoughts and expectations on Windows 7.0, will you take the plunge?

Put an End to Cell Phone Spam

2008-12-10T04:42:00.000-08:00

Stop spammers from hassling you by keeping unwanted text messages, e-mail, and voice calls from reaching your mobile phone.

It's a sad fact that most of us are exposed to an endless flood of unsolicited messages from purported international dignitaries, dubious pharmaceutical salespeople, and pornographers--a deluge that invades our PCs each day. To make matters worse, spam is now infiltrating the mobile phone, too, where it not only wastes your time but also costs you money. Text messages consume your precious data allowance, and sales calls eat away your valuable voice minutes.

The good news: It doesn't have to be that way. Follow these tips, and you'll eliminate spam from your phone. Whether you get uninvited text messages, e-mail spam on your smart phone, or even sales calls, you can stop all forms of cellular spam by taking these easy steps.

Block Text-Message Spam

Some people go years without ever receiving text-message spam, while others are bothered frequently. Though mobile spam is usually against the law, sales pitches might come to you legally as a result of your buying something on your phone. Illegal messages might appear because a spammer guessed your phone number. And since mobile phone companies allow PCs to send you text messages at a certain e-mail address, often your_phone_number@your_phone_company.com, spammers need only make an educated guess to come up with thousands of valid addresses.

You can disable or modify your phone's e-mail address to block unwanted messages, while still permitting texts from other phones. Text-message blocking methods vary from carrier to carrier, but usually you can find helpful tools on your carrier's Web site. For example, with AT&T, sign in to mymessages.wireless.att.com instead of the main billing site. Click the two check boxes to block MMS (multimedia message service) and text messages sent through e-mail.

Additionally, most carriers let you create an alias for your phone's e-mail address, so you can use something other than your phone number. Changing your address will help thwart most text spam that could come from someone guessing or knowing your phone number. With AT&T, choose the drop-down menu to block messages, and then click Message Options to configure your new e-mail address. Click Submit to save the changes.

Stop E-Mail Spam From Reaching Your Smart Phone

Unlike PC-based e-mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook, most mobile e-mail clients have no way to identify and filter spam on their own. Using a Web-based filter to sort out messages before they even reach your cell phone's mail client is a great way to reduce the flow of spam.

Activate the settings through your e-mail host, usually your ISP or Web mail service. With Yahoo Mail, for example, first sign in to the Web mail site through mail.yahoo.com. Click the Options link in the upper right. Click Spam Protection to verify that Yahoo is filtering messages, and click Turn SpamGuard ON if it isn't already enabled. Other Web mail services, such as Gmail, always leave spam filtering active at the server.

If you receive e-mail through a Web host (your address looks like our_name@your_domain.com), visit the host's control panel or setup area. The specific steps may vary; contact your tech support if you need help.

In my case, I started with my host's bundled SpamAssassin instead of adding a paid alternative. I clicked the button to enable the server-side filter, and I also enabled the Spam Box option to deliver marked mail to an alternate folder. That way I can occasionally sift through those messages to identify any false positives, but they're not clogging my iPhone's e-mail inbox.

Coupled with an IMAP account, which primarily stores mail on a server instead of in a client, Spam Box saves me from downloading those messages onto my phone, though I still could do so if I wished. If you have e-mail through work, your IT department likely already uses a server-side filter similar to Spam Box; check with your IT manager if you're unsure.

Other actions can prevent junk mail from reaching your phone without involving a filter. Spammers often need your contact information to get in touch, so protect your address. When registering with a bank, cable provider, or other company, scrutinize the forms for opt-out or opt-in mailing lists to keep your address free from solicitations.

Never post your personal e-mail address online, such as in a forum; spammers can find it there to add you to lists. Even for buying things online, consider setting up a secondary e-mail address to keep your main account clean. Additionally, you could create an account exclusively for your mobile phone and be even more restrictive in sharing it than you are with your main account.

Just as they do for text messages, spammers can hit your e-mail address by sending a huge volume of messages to randomly guessed addresses at major domains. Short addresses at common domains--such as google.com, yahoo.com, or earthlink.net--are easier to guess. To reduce your chance of being victimized, use eight characters or more, including numbers and punctuation, in your address. Most of all, when you do receive spam, don't click any links inside (including any apparent "unsubscribe" links), or even load the images. Both can be ways to verify that your address is active, which will ensure that you get a whole lot more junk.

Block Sales Calls to Your Cell Phone

Telemarketing is especially annoying when it reaches your mobile phone, costing you money to hear a sales pitch. Be cautious in giving your mobile number to companies, and especially be aware of opting in or out of a company sharing or selling that information.

If you do give out a mobile number, be sure to tell companies that it's mobile. If someone calls with a pitch, ask them to take you off their list, and also mention that they have called a mobile number. It's illegal for telemarketers to use autodialers to reach mobile numbers, so they'll likely respond quickly if you let them know.

The National Do Not Call Registry can add another layer of protection, with caveats. The list is a database of numbers that telemarketers can't call, but loopholes allow calls from political groups, surveys, and companies with which you've established a business relationship. Nearly the same restrictions on sales calls apply to mobile phones already; however, if you've begun to receive sales calls on your cell phone, adding your number to the Do Not Call Registry can be the easiest way to stop them.

- Zack Stern, PC World

Internet Access from Your Car

2008-10-18T02:01:00.000-07:00

If you’ve ever been jammed into the backseat of a cramped car on a lengthy road trip, then you’ve probably also longed for the sweet embrace of Internet access in your vehicle. If Chrysler has its way, you’ll soon be able to log onto a Wi-Fi network from the comfort of your own car. The Los Angeles Times says the auto manufacturer plans to start offering to build 3G–to–Wi-Fi routers into its 2009 model-year cars, cleverly secreted somewhere in the car. Chrysler optimistically thinks that you ought to be able to pull down data at between 600 and 800 Kbps and upload at 200 Kbps.

Naturally, this will all come at a cost—you’ll have to shell out a monthly fee for the
Internet access. As well as buy a Chrysler.—dan moren

Why Are iPod Accessories So Darn Pricey?

2008-10-10T00:03:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder why a lot of iPod and iPhone accessories seem kind of, well, overpriced? Popular mechanics reports that Apple uses a proprietary authentication chip in its portables that makes it impossible for third-party companies to create iPod- and iPhonecompatible accessories without signing an often-costly agreement with Apple.

For instance, I could go on eBay and buy a generic $2 video cable that would work just fine with my iPod video. New iPhones and iPods, however, require the “officially licensed” Apple cables, nd these can run up to $50.

Needless to say, the chip not only increases prices, but forces accessory companies to cut corners and cheapen production to pay for the Apple license while maintaining a consumer-friendly price point.

Of course, it’s understandable that Apple would want to have some control over the quality of accessories designed for its products, but most of the manufacturers interviewed estimated that up to $20 of the retail cost of iPod and iPhone speakers is directly attributable to fees levied by Apple. Ouch.—david dahlquist

Protect Your Photos With Watermarks

2008-10-04T08:41:00.000-07:00

Add a digital signature to your images to deter online photo theft...

Theft comes in many forms, but it doesn't matter whether we're talking about your car or an old cassette tape of Frampton Comes Alive that you left lying around at work; you feel violated either way. Digital photos are no different. I hear stories all the time about people who post photos to online photo sites and later see one of their images gracing some stranger's blog. How can you protect what's rightfully yours?

Let's get this out of the way right up front: Whenever you post a photo on the Internet, there's a potential for theft. You can never completely protect a photo from being used without your permission. That said, there are several strategies you can employ to keep them a little safer. Let's talk about each one.

Keep It Small

Resizing your photos won't necessarily keep someone from "borrowing" your work without permission, but it will definitely limit what they can do. Suppose you take an awesome photo--one that wins the Hot Pic of the Week contest, perhaps. If you post the full-size image to a Web site, anyone could potentially use all that resolution to make high-quality prints.

Instead, resize your image for the Web. An easy way is to use the resizer that's built into Windows:
Right-click the photo, choose Send to, Mail Recipient, and then pick Small or Medium from the Attach Files dialog box.
You could resize your photos using your photo editor. In Adobe Photoshop Elements, open a photo and choose File, Save for Web. There, you can specify the file type, the specific pixel size, and the amount of compression to use. The advantage to this method is that Photoshop Elements shows you before and after images side-by-side so you can see the effect of compression on the image, and it tells you, even before saving the photo, what the final file size will be.

Turn on the Protection

The next step up in the war on photo theft is using the protection built into your photo-sharing Web site. The tools at your disposal will depend upon what Web site you use, but many sites allow you to limit who can view your photos and even who can download them.

In Flickr, for example, look under any of the photos that you've uploaded and you'll see text that says "Anyone can see this photo (edit)." Click "edit" to limit viewing to just certain people. To block the ability to download a photo from Flickr, click Your Account, select the Privacy and Permissions tab, and click "Who can download your stuff" to edit those settings.

Add a Watermark

Now we're bringing in the big guns. A watermark is text that appears in your photo, generally to identify who owns it and to discourage people from using it. There are a lot of programs that can watermark your photos (Adobe Photoshop Elements, however, isn't one of them). Corel's Paint Shop Pro has this capability, making it easy to add a watermark before uploading the file.

To add a watermark in Paint Shop Pro, select Image, Watermarking, Visible Watermark. In the Visible Watermark dialog box, you'll need to browse to another image on your computer that contains the text you want to embed in your photo. An easy trick is to create a new file in Paint Shop Pro and use the text tool to type your name and a copyright notice on a white background. Save the file and use it whenever you want to add a watermark. You can choose to put it in the corner of the photo, in the center, or even tile it all over the image.

If you don't have Paint Shop Pro, don't fret: There are many watermarking programs available. You might want to try Visual Watermark ($25) or Batch Watermark ($25), for example.

Visible watermarks are easy to apply, but they are undeniably ugly. I don't recommend using them unless you have a business that you're trying to protect. Another alternative is to embed an invisible watermark.

If you have a photo that you're willing to go to court to protect, then there's nothing quite as potent as an invisible watermark. An invisible watermark embeds information in the photo that can prove you are the copyright holder. Again, Paint Shop Pro can help you out: Select Image, Watermarking, Invisible Watermark to embed this information in a photo. To take advantage of an invisible watermark, though, you generally need to subscribe to a service that maintains watermarking information on the Internet, such as MyPictureMarc.

Of course, since you can't see an invisible watermark on the surface of a photo, some people use both visible and invisible watermarks for the highest levels of protection. That said, I wouldn't bother with the time and possible expense involved in using invisible watermarks unless you are truly serious about protecting your photos--they are useful only if you are willing to stand before a judge to recover damages.

Some Final Thoughts

As I mentioned earlier, there's no way to ensure that your photos won’t get misappropriated. If you use a photo sharing site that lets you lock out downloads, visitors still have access to the ubiquitous print screen button on their keyboard. Some people don't mind cropping around visible watermarks or using the Clone tool in their photo editor to digitally remove it.

In my opinion, the best course is to take reasonable, simple precautions:
> Don't post any photo to the Web that you aren't willing to see show up on someone else's site; and post only photos that have been resized to fit the screen, so they can't be used in high-resolution commercial projects like books or posters.

Orkut removes communities that support Indian Terrorists

2008-09-27T07:24:00.000-07:00

Google's social networking site Orkut has blocked access to a community on the site that supports the Indian Mujahideen, the terrorist group that claimed responsibility for bomb blasts in various Indian cities including Delhi.

The community "Indian Mujahideen Fan Club" appears on a search of Orkut's communities. It says "Support them. They are fighting for our rights and justice". But if a user clicks on the community link, the page of the community "Indian Mujahideen Fan Club" is no longer available for viewing, as it is said to violate Orkut's terms of use.

Google strongly condemns illegal activities and those that encourage terrorism and violence, the company said in a statement. Once content is reported or flagged, Google reviews any community or profile against its terms of service and community standards that prohibit illegal activity, and if there are violations, it acts quickly to remove inappropriate content, it added.

The community had been blocked at the request of users, and not the country's law enforcement agencies, according to informed sources. It is not known when the Indian Mujahideen site was blocked on Orkut, and what content was found objectionable. Google was not available for further comment on this issue.

Another community on Orkut called "Indian Mujahideen" has not been blocked although the description of the community calls for support to the Indian Mujahideen, as "they are fighting for the justice and the enemies of Islam".

Indian police suspect that terrorists use the Internet and tools like e-mail, chat and social networking sites to plan terrorist attacks.

India has the third-largest number of users of Orkut, according to data on its Web site. Indian members of Orkut account for 17.3 percent of people using the social networking site, as against 51.3 percent from Brazil, and 17.6 percent from the US.

The social networking site has been frequently targeted by various groups in India protesting against political content that was found objectionable by them. It was sued in court in 2006, for example, by a lawyer objecting to content on Orkut which he said was inimical to the country.

Does Apple IPhone got a new Foster Sibling in China???

2008-09-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

We Indians definitely don't believe in less of Chinese. We love Chinese food and Chinese gadgets, especially Chinese phones.

They have got touch screens, cameras, bluetooths, FM and televsions. And what's more, these hot phones are a steal at Rs 4,000.

But there is a catch. They often come with a sneaky surprise!

The camera stops working within days, the voice isn't clear and the shop refuses to exchange or repair it for these phones come with no guarantees.

They are unknown brands with unknown quality, so if the screen conks off or the batteries explode - grin and bear it.

And their radiation levels are high which is very harmful for men especially for it can affects their virility.

There's more. Every phone is branded with an International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, but Chinese phones have fake IMEI's.

National President Indian Cellular Association, Pankaj Mohindroo says, "It's simply like a car without a number plate. It has no identity and no parentage."

So besides being unreliable, these phones are also illegal.

A Chinese company has developed a phone which has an uncanny resemblance with Apple’s iPod-mobile phone combo. Talk about coincidental inspiration!

The phone includes a 16:9 screen, a 3.2 inch LCD and 1.3MP camera. A 256MTF card is bundled along with an expansion slot for more storage. And as though this wasn’t enough, the Chinese phone also features a touchscreen…what a coincidence once again!

But interestingly the Chinese handset includes the ability to use 2 SIM cards simultaneously without requiring to switch the phone on and off.

The phone comes pre-loaded with the “Double Dragon in Tang Dynasty” game.

The iPhone’s foster Chinese sibling is available via Light in the Box for $199.67. And yes, it’s “NOT FOR SALE” in the US and Canada.

Does it really make a difference!?

Microsoft and Google Give The Browser a Rewrite

2008-09-10T21:34:00.000-07:00

Your Web browser is probably the most important program on your computer, and it's now getting the competition it deserves.

Mozilla Firefox, the most successful challenger to Microsoft's incumbent Internet Explorer, is an outstanding piece of work and more than deserving of the raves it has won since its debut four years ago. (I made it my default browser in Windows even before its 1.0 version arrived.) But its developers don't have a monopoly on all the bright ideas in browsing; people looking for better ways to the Web have two new options.

One comes from Microsoft, which two weeks ago shipped an impressive, but unfinished, release of IE's next version. The other comes from Google, which last week offered a preview of its own browser.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 ( http://microsoft.com/ie) and Google Chrome ( http://google.com/chrome) each show thoughtful attention to the ways busy people who don't read manuals try to read the Web.

Both browsers are free downloads for Microsoft's Windows XP or Vista, though Google says it's working on Mac and Linux versions of Chrome.

IE 8 looks like the disappointing IE 7 Microsoft released in 2006, but it's considerably more useful. It catches up with two of Firefox's best conveniences -- the auto-complete function that takes you to recently visited pages whether you type their address or their title and the "find as you type" searching that jumps to matching text on a page as you type your query. It also adds useful tweaks of its own

One deals with tabbed browsing, the feature that lets you flip among open Web pages in a single window as if they were tabbed folders in a drawer. Microsoft's developers noticed how Web readers will open a set of links from one page in new tabs, then not read these pages until later; to help you keep your place, IE 8 dyes the tabs of pages opened from one site in one color.

The blank page that loaded when you opened a new tab in IE now features links to pages you've viewed before and such options as "accelerators" -- shortcuts to Web services such as mapping and word-translation sites that you can invoke with a right-click. There's also "InPrivate browsing," an option that, like the "private browsing" in Apple's Safari, lets you visit sites without the browser keeping any record of your activity there.

IE 8 also adds sturdier defenses against hostile Web sites and some performance tune-ups, though it's still slower and it uses more memory than Firefox.

This browser has looked stable in a couple of weeks of testing. But some sites that tweaked for old versions of IE look off-kilter in this version -- a side effect of earlier IE editions' weaker support for Web standards.

Google's Chrome shares some features with IE 8 and Firefox, such as smart address auto-completion and find-as-you-type searching. But it's far simpler than either, tossing aside many browser traditions.

Chrome dispenses with the usual lineup of address bar and search bar; here, you type either a site's address or words to describe the site you want, and Chrome's smart enough to know the difference. The program then condenses the standard lineup of menus to two small drop-down items and retires the bookmarks menu in favor of a new-tab start page that presents your bookmarks and thumbnail images of recently visited pages.

This absence of clutter could make Chrome the perfect starter browser -- if only it came pre-installed on a new computer.

Chrome matches Safari's private browsing and IE 8's InPrivate option with a similar mode, "incognito." But it leaves out such common features as support for the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) updates offered by many sites and the add-ons and extensions you can use to customize IE and Firefox.

Chrome also showed its beta status in such glitches as text that briefly vanished as I typed it into an online form and Flash videos that randomly stopped playing after a couple of seconds.

But the biggest issue with this browser is the brand name. Google does some great work, but do you want it providing all of your Internet experiences? Would you eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same restaurant?

In that light, the best feature of Chrome may not be its simplicity but its open-source code, free for anybody to inspect and, if they wish, improve. (Credit where it's due: A chunk of this code comes from the WebKit open-source core of Apple's Safari, which itself dates to an earlier project, KHTML.)

Both IE 8 and Chrome attempt to cure a common ailment of Web browsing by running separate pages in separate blocks of code so that when one page crashes, you can keep viewing any other pages you have up. That technique eats a fair amount of memory, but as memory gets cheaper, this tradeoff may not seem so bad.

New home door locks can be opened or closed online

2008-09-07T22:32:00.000-07:00

What if locking the front door of your home while you're away were as easy as hopping on the Internet?

Ingersoll-Rand Co.'s Schlage unit is showing off door locks that can be wirelessly set or opened via the Internet, from a mobile phone or a computer.

The battery-operated locks have keypads that are locked and unlocked with 4-digit access codes (or old-fashioned keys, as a backup). Users who forget to lock a door and want to enter their code remotely can hop onto a Web portal or an application added to their mobile phones. These password-protected portals also let people change, activate or disable the codes.

The company says the wireless signals sent to the locks are encrypted.

A Schlage kit that includes the lock and the wireless bridge to communicate with the locks sells for $299, plus there's a $13 monthly fee to use the applications that let the locks be controlled remotely. The system, which Schlage bills as the first of its kind, will be available in late October.

Here Comes the GOOGLE BROWSER!!

2008-09-04T06:56:00.000-07:00

Google Inc's new browser software is designed to work "invisibly" and will run any application that runs on Apple Inc's Safari Web browser, company officials said on Tuesday.

The company said the new Web browser, dubbed Google Chrome -- a long-anticipated move to compete with Microsoft Corp, Mozilla Firefox and other browsers -- is now available for download at www.google.com/chrome

The public trial of the Google browser will be available in 43 languages in 100 countries, Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president of product management said at a news conference at the company's Mountain View, California headquarters.

"You actually spend more time in your browser than you do in your car," Brian Rakowski, group product manager for the browser project, said of the significance of offering a faster browser and forcing greater competition in the market.

Google Chrome relies on Apple's WebKit software for rendering Web pages, he said. It also has taken advantage of features of community-developed browser Firefox from Mozilla Corp. Google is a primary financial backer of Mozilla.

"If you are Webmaster, and your site works in Apple Safari then it will work very well in Google Chrome," Pichai said.

Officials said Chrome's code would be fully available for other developers to enhance. A Google official said it planned to share code that makes Chrome work with WebKit openly with other WebKit open source developers.

Apple WebKit is widely used by Web developers, not simply for Apple applications like the iPhone but also by Google itself with its mobile phone software, called Android.

"We have borrowed good ideas from others," Pichai said. "Our goal here was to bring our point of view but do it in a very open way," he said in response to a reporter's question.

"We don't want to live in a world where all that (innovation) is locked up and kept secret," Google co-founder Larry Page told the news conference. Page was a primary supporter of the Chrome project among Google's executive team.

Sergey Brin, Page's fellow co-founder, said Google planned to continue to work closely with Mozilla and hoped to see future version of Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox become more unified over time.

"It is probably worth noting that they (Mozilla Corp) are across the street and they come over here for lunch," Brin said of Mozzilla employees visits to cafeterias at the Googleplex headquarters. "I hope we will have more and more unity over time."

Chrome introduces various features that promise to make Web browsing faster, more secure and stable. The browser allows users to keep working even when one of its open windows crashes.

Chrome is designed to take advantage of multi-core chips, recently offered by Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices, which allow computers to handle multiple processes simultaneously and with greater speed, Google engineers said.

VIRUS in SPACE??? Weird!!

2008-08-30T01:24:00.000-07:00

Computer virus in space - NASA astronauts get hit

Scientists from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) were busy fighting a computer virus that managed to infect one of the laptop computers used by astronauts on the space station, a spokesman for the US space agency said.

Citing security concerns, NASA Wednesday declined to identify the virus, or how it made its way to the space station.

But the space news site SpaceRef.com, which first reported the infection, identified the virus as 'W32.Gammima.AG'. Referring to NASA's daily status reports, the site said the virus was probably transmitted on a flash disk drive which somehow had not been scanned.

The malware is a year-old Windows worm designed to steal information from players of 10 different online games, some of them specific to the Chinese market. Among the games are ZhengTu, HuangYi Online and Rohan.

NASA said that new anti-virus programmes had been installed on the station's computers and that the worm posed no threat. 'It was never a threat to any command-and-control or operations computer,' NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries told Computerworld magazine.

Can GPS units mark the scene of a crime ??

2008-08-29T03:49:00.000-07:00

Like millions of motorists, Eric Hanson used a GPS unit in his Chevrolet TrailBlazer to find his way around. He probably didn't expect that prosecutors would eventually use it too — to help convict him of killing four family members.

Prosecutors in suburban Chicago analyzed data from the Garmin GPS device to pinpoint where Hanson had been on the morning after his parents were fatally shot and his sister and brother-in-law bludgeoned to death in 2005. He was convicted of the killings earlier this year and sentenced to death.

Hanson's trial was among recent criminal cases around the country in which authorities used GPS navigation devices to help establish a defendant's whereabouts. Experts say such evidence will almost certainly become more common in court as GPS systems become more affordable and show up in more vehicles.

"There's no real doubt," said Alan Brill, a Minnesota-based computer forensics expert who has worked with the FBI and Secret Service. "This follows every other technology that turns out to have information of forensic value. I think what we're seeing is evolutionary."

Using technology to track a person's location is nothing new. For years, police have been able to trace cellphone signals and use other dashboard devices such as automatic toll-collection systems to confirm a driver's whereabouts.

But the growing popularity of GPS systems — in cars, cellphones and other handheld devices — gives authorities another powerful tool to track suspects.

Among recent cases:

• In September, a man in Butte, Mont., pleaded guilty to rape shortly after a judge ruled that evidence from the GPS unit in his car could be used against him at trial. Prosecutors planned to use it to show that Brian D. Adolf "prowled" through town looking for a victim.

• In New Brighton, Pa., a trucker's GPS system led police to charge him with setting his own home on fire. GPS records showed his rig was parked about 100 yards from his house at the time of the fire.

• In the case of a missing Chicago-area woman named Stacy Peterson, investigators sought GPS records from the SUV owned by her husband, former police officer Drew Peterson. She still hasn't been found, and no one has been charged.

Developed for the military, GPS navigation systems started showing up in cars in the 1990s. Prices have dropped sharply in the past few years, and many units are now available for less than $150.

The Consumer Electronics Association estimates 20% of American households own a portable GPS system and 9% have vehicles equipped with in-dash systems.

A GPS unit receives signals from satellites to determine its position on the ground. That data can be used by mapping software to display the device's location to within a few yards.

Detectives are often able to extract map searches and desired destinations that have been entered into a GPS unit by the user. Some devices are equipped with a "track back" feature that can show where the unit was at a particular time.

"What we're dealing with here is a use of the technology that I don't think the good people at Magellan or Garmin or TomTom really thought about when they were developing it," said Brill, referring to manufacturers of GPS devices.

Law enforcement sometimes uses secretly planted GPS devices to monitor suspects. The practice, often done without a warrant or court order, has been criticized by privacy advocates who argue that it is unconstitutional.

The GPS feature on a cellphone has already helped solve at least one crime. In 2006, police in Virginia Beach used the GPS on a homicide victim's cellphone to find the phone and her purse in a garbage can behind a home. The home was linked to the man who was eventually charged with killing her.

Jon Price, a trainer at Garmin, the leading maker of commercial GPS units in the U.S., started getting calls five years ago to work with law enforcement in cases involving GPS data from the company's units was being used as evidence.

Price estimates he's helped with about 25 criminal cases, some of them involving GPS-equipped boats running drugs out of South America. He's testified as an expert witness in a half-dozen cases, including the Hanson murder trial.

"Typically the GPS data being used is for the purpose of contradicting (defendants') alibis," Price said.

GPS data is usually just one part of the criminal case because attorneys also have to prove the defendant possessed the unit and entered the information into it.

But Renee Hutchins, a University of Maryland law professor and former defense attorney, recently wrote an article suggesting GPS data is protected under the Fourth Amendment. She said police should only be allowed to acquire it by showing probable cause and getting a warrant signed by a judge.

"I think that in the last couple of years, people are starting to be aware that if they have these units in their car, people can keep track of you," Hutchins said. "I think it's a growing public awareness. The problem is ... that most people feel like, 'I'm not doing anything wrong, so who cares?' But I think that's the wrong way of looking at it."

Shape shifting robots ( TRANSFORMERS!! )

2008-08-27T03:01:00.000-07:00

Specifically mentioning Intel is doing work on providing wireless power and building tiny machines that can take on the appearance of anything from cellphones to human beings.

We all remember Transformers, yeah that cheesy but awesome movie about shape shifting robots that rampaged through movie screens quite a while ago.

It looks like the folks at Intel loved the movie so much they want to make it real. Intels chief technology officer said that the gap between human and machine intelligence will largely close by 2050 and we should really let the future Terminators have shape-shifting abilities.

Specifically mentioning Intel is doing work on providing wireless power and building tiny machines that can take on the appearance of anything from cellphones to even human beings. That's quite a tall order but the guy likely won't be around to be criticized if he's wrong anyway so what's the harm?

A ROBOT with a Brain of Rat???? Weird!!!

2008-08-25T08:13:00.000-07:00

British scientists have created a biological robot that is controlled by rat neurons.

The robot can be wheeled around and is linked wirelessly to a bundle of neurons kept at body temperature in a sterile cabinet.

This biological 'brain' signals the robot to make its way shoving away objects in its path.

Developed by researchers at the University of Reading, the robot is now being taught to become familiar with its surroundings.

"This new research is tremendously exciting as firstly the biological brain controls its own moving robot body, and secondly it will enable us to investigate how the brain learns and memorises its experiences," The Independent quoted Professor Kevin Warwick, who led the project, as saying.

Now, the researchers are working towards getting the robot to learn how to navigate.

It won't be long, that the robot will be able to recognise familiar surroundings it has memorised.

In fact, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have also built a similar mobile machine.

According to New Scientist magazine, US team was training the robot as if it was an animal learning tricks.

IPhone 3G in India on August 22nd 2008..

2008-08-15T07:57:00.000-07:00

India to Get iPhone 3G on August 22

The official date for the India launch of the Apple iPhone 3G will be on 22nd August, 2008.

Its Vodafone India and Airtel who will launch the Apple iPhone 3g first on 18th August in India.

Where to buy Apple iPhone in India?

iPhone will be available at Vodafone and Airtel locations across India. Which means there’s probably one near you.

If you are Vodafone India Customer, you can follow this link to find a nearest Vodafone Store to buy Apple iPhone. If you haven’t booked one in advance, you can pre-register one by going this link. Once you have pre-registered, you will be updated on latest news on Apple India iPhone 3G. Every feature in Apple iPhone may not be supported by Vodafone India networks. So you should be aware of what features would work.

If you are Airtel India Customer, follow this link to Airtel India’s dedicated webpage of Apple iPhone India. Click on the link ‘Book Your iPhone’ and you will have to fill your Name, Email, Phone and City. Enter correct and valid information so that you won’t miss news on Apple iPhone India from Airtel. You can also find nearest Airtel India store by following this link.

iPhone 3g Cost in India

Apple iPhone 3G will be launched in India by Vodafone late August 2008. And probably after the 15 days, Vodafone started selling; Airtel India will bring iPhone 3G to Indian Customers.

Initially, only the 8 GB version of the iPhone 3G will be officially launched in India by Vodafone and Airtel. Apple iPhone 3G handset price to be expected to cost between Rs. 12,000 to Rs. 14,000. This price does not include the data plan cost that a iPhone 3G user will have to pay to its network provider.

Where can I find more Apple iPhone India information?

Here is the Apple India’s Dedicated Webpage on Apple iPhone India. Click here for a guided tour on iPhone. If you want know all detail on Apple iPhone features follow this link. Click here to find more information on syncing your iPhone. Also visit Apple Asia’s Online Support Page.

AIR Apps Bring the Web to Your Desktop.

2008-08-08T07:58:00.000-07:00

AS IF THE line between desktop applications and Web services weren’t fuzzy enough already, Adobe has introduced a technology called Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) that promises to blur the difference further—for the good. The technology enables Web site owners to build services—anything from a media player to a backup service to an auction watchdog— that Web surfers can access easily and quickly, whether online, offline, or via a cellphone or other mobile device.

Video Viewer

AOL hopes to make browsing and viewing videos easier with a free AIR application called AOL Top 100 Music Videos. This convenient add-on lets you browse and play popular music videos. And taking advantage of local system resources, the software can integrate features such as bookmarking favorite videos, personalizing content with feedback, and sharing videos with other AOL Top 100 Music Videos users.

Auction Watch

EBay Desktop is a free Adobe AIR app that allows you to keep tabs on your eBay auctions or to browse new gear without having to launch a Web browser. EBay Desktop can send you product availability notifications and auction updates in real time, too, according to eBay.

Backup Buddy

Xdrive, a long-standing online storage service, has undergone a major Adobe AIR face-lift. The results of the makeover are visible in the free Xdrive Desktop Lite beta. Once you’ve set up the program and got it running, AOL says, you’ll find that grabbing data from your Xdrive account on the Web is as easy as grabbing it from your computer’s local C: drive.

10 Things iHate About The iPhone

2008-08-08T07:38:00.000-07:00

FOR MANY IT’S the Holy Grail of cell phones. And while those who walk the straight and narrow wait for its legit arrival to our shores, the gray market has ensured that the less scrupulous among us get early dibs on it. But the most golden Apple product to date is not tarnish free. Here are my top 10 gripes with the iPhone.

1. Locked to One Carrier:
We know that Apple sold unlocked iPhones in UK and some European countries, but they also jacked up prices over there. The phone sold in the US exclusively with an AT&T contract is considerably cheaper. What remains to be seen is how they chose to approach the Indian market

2. A 2MP camera is disappointing:

No one is expecting their camera phone to ape a DSLR but think in a scenario where 3.2MP cameras are the norm, this is a tad disappointing. The worst is you can’t shoot video and there is no flash — not even an LED flash. And the image quality won’t stop press any time soon.
3. No standard 3.5mm headphones port:

While Apple may have intended the iPhone to be a fancy music player with phone functionality; it’s disappointing to see that our standard headphones do not work with its Recessed jack port. Even an adapter like the one that manufacturers like Nokia and Sony Ericsson include is missing.

4. On-screen keyboard:

The keyboard looks nice but you can wave one-handed operation goodbye. Unlike other phones with physical keypads single hand typing is a pain.Things might have been better if landscape mode was supported while typing messages.

5. Restricted Bluetooth:

While the Bluetooth 2.0 connectivity is appreciated, it is restricted to calls and has no A2DP support. To make things worse, synching data and transferring files via Bluetooth is out of the question and you are bound by your data cable.

6. Non-removable battery:

The not so powerful battery is sealed and not accessible to users. If one has to replace it, users would need to send it to the Apple center.And considering that even the most basic Chinese knock-offs offer this it’s really not a tall order.

7. No MMS:

The absence of this feature is a let down. You have to go through the tedious process of sending it as an attachment via e-mail.

8. Buggy Multi-tasking:

Switching from one application to another requires you hit the home button once and touch the program you want to launch. This is troublesome as there is no shortcut to take you to the program you want to launch in one go.

9. Browser requires full attention:

No Browsing in the background is supported. While on the Edge network and after waiting for the full pages to load, if you want to Switch to another application, the browser will not run in the background.

10. No FM:

Come on Apple, learn it from the Chinese, they pack everything into a Rs. 5000 phone, performance notwithstanding. Would it hurt to add an FM radio?Hopefully, when it hits the market, in a month or two, this list will be down to zero

Nokia Moves a Step ahead..

2008-07-30T09:23:00.000-07:00

THE NOKIA N82 is the latest from the Finnish phone manufacturer’s ever-improving N-Series stable. The candy bar design phone packs a punch with goodies that range from a 5 MP sensor camera with Xenon flash to a GPS function. It has almost everything the N95 8GB has except for the smaller 2.4 inch screen and it only comes with a 2GB microSD card.

We like its standard 3.5 mm jack port, vibrant display that supports up to 16 million colors, screen orientation that changes from portrait to landscape depending on how you hold the phone (iPhone-anyone?), sliding camera cover that switches the camera on and off and a host of rich connectivity features.

The body has a chrome finish that is mostly made up of the plastic the phone owes its light weight to. The build quality is decent and its size is a few millimeters longer and wider than the older N73 but it is a lot slimmer.

If one has to complain about the design, it would be the thin and unconventional keypad that Nokia has employed. If you send a lot of text messages, you may find this inconvenient. Also the white key labels are not the easiest to read either against the shiny metallic finish, especially under bright sunlight. The placement of the buttons did not pose much of a problem but the shortcut button right next to the flat navigational pad that launches media interface tends to get in the way. The TV-out function is a bonus and can be connected to your TV at home, and the connection port that doubles up as a headset port is conveniently located on the top of the phone. It uses micro-USB and a Bluetooth 2.0 for data transfer. Since the former is not yet used in many devices, make sure you keep the cable safe.When it comes to phone

functions, the N82 performed basic phone functions effortlessly. That said,the messaging features may not please everybody. Its 128MB RAM let us carry out multitasking without any delay and delivered what it promised. Its much touted 5MP camera outperformed many of the 5MP camera phones. The auto-focus outclassed the N95 8GB camera, it produced warmer pictures than the Sony Ericsson K850i, and sharper and richer colors than the Samsung G800. When it came to low light shooting, the Xenon flash was one of the best. Its macro mode shooting is above par. But while it maintained rich color reproduction, pictures lacked details but that is only when it was compared to the stand-alone mid range digital camera.

Its video capturing capability at VGA resolution is also praiseworthy and the audio recording also had a lot of clarity. Apart from its imaging capability, its music player pumped out decent sound. FM radio worked fine and reception was exceptional. Its onboard speaker volume was not too loud but was far from dismal. The usability of the A-GPS feature with bundled Nokia Maps depends on the network from your cellular provider.

While it may not be fully featured as the Nokia Navigator, it let us view our current location and search point of interest and voice guided navigation is available at extra cost. Its rich connectivity features that include 3G with HSDPA, EDGE and WiFi support mean you get more than one way to check your mail or browse the versatile built-in browser. Its Symbian S60 v3 with Feature Pack 1 ensures you are not running out of applications even if you are not satisfied with its pre-bundled applications like Quick Office, PDF reader, Zip utilities, Barcode scanner etc.

N-games preview is available but it may not be the best control tool considering
the not so friendly keypad design. Its battery lasted for 2 days under normal usage which is average. Overall, the performance of the N82 is impressive and for the price and features, we highly recommend it if you are still in doubt over which camera phone to buy without compromising on other functions.

AnyTV - Watch TV online without TV Tuner card..

2008-07-21T09:16:00.000-07:00

AnyTV Screenshot

AnyTV is a free software program that claims that you will be able to watch over 2,620 TV programs on your computer while connected to the Internet. In addition they toss out that some 4,750 radio stations can be listened to as well and another 6,910 video clips can be viewed also. With this in mind, I decided to give AnyTV a try. On their site they state:

Watch news, entertainment, documentaries, music, sports, shopping, languages, cartoons, learning, culture, religious channels, live cameras etc .. from all over the world. Get immediate access to thousands of free streaming Internet TV channels, Online Radios.

anyTV is a completly FREE Software. It contains absolutely NO ADWARE, NO SPYWARE, NO REGISTRATION, NO POPUPS, NO MALWARE or other unwanted software.

The channels are constantly updated to bring you up-to-date channel list. You can filter channels by genre, country, bitrate or content. Set up a favorites list for quick access to your favorite Radio/TV/Video channels online. Watch in regular or full-screen mode. anyTV supports both Windows Media & RealVideo. Channels from more than 100 countries.

The download is small. Only 757kb. There is no information in the FAQ section so you are on your own figuring out how to use the software. In theory the program promises that you will be able to watch a lot of TV. But in reality I wasn’t able to do this at all. I finally got two TV stations working properly, but they were in a foreign language and I didn’t have a clue as to what I was watching.

AnyTV software is located here.

Curious robots could search for intelligent life on distant planets

2008-07-08T23:27:00.000-07:00

A spaceship descends with a thunderous roar and deposits a futuristic probe before taking off again. The Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator (EVE) soon activates and begins flying around, scanning the barren surface for signs of life.

Scientists today can only dream of having a robotic explorer like EVE from the Disney/Pixar film WALL-E. But some researchers are working on autonomous spacecraft, airships and rovers that can cooperate intelligently while exploring distant worlds.

"The orbiter gives you global perspective, the aerial platform a more regional perspective, and that helps determine where to deploy ground assets in a targeted fashion," said Wolfgang Fink, a physicist at Caltech in Pasadena, California.

Fink's vision of "tier-scalable reconnaissance" starts with an orbiting spacecraft to make a global survey for interesting scientific targets, before deciding on its own where to deploy an airship such as a dirigible. The airship could look even closer at a region to find the best landing site, and finally drop a rover or some other surface explorer. That surface explorer could then move quickly to the target area.

A demonstration of how such a surface explorer might deploy will take place in the Mars Science Laboratory mission, slated for a 2009 launch. NASA's Sky Crane carrier will hover above the surface of Mars on retrorockets while lowering an SUV-sized rover using a winch and tether.

ROBOTS ON MARS: Mars Science Laboratory mission page

Some Mars missions have already demonstrated the advantage of coordinating orbiters with surface explorers. Scientists used data from three Mars orbiters to determine the landing site for NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, and also turned orbiter cameras on the lander as it descended to the surface. Of the three orbiters, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has even helped NASA's separate Spirit and Opportunity Rovers navigate around obstacles on the Martian surface.

However, Fink and his collaborators want to take humans out of the loop and develop robots which can decide independently when and where to go. That becomes crucial for future missions to distant places such as the moons of Saturn or Jupiter, where a command signal from Earth can take over an hour to reach robotic explorers.

The key rests with software algorithms that help robots make command decisions on their own. Fink's group has begun testing such algorithms by using three small rovers and a camera that looks down on a simulated indoor landscape. The camera identifies both targets and obstacles, which allows the rovers to deploy and drive around obstacles to reach their targets — all without human intervention.

"Integration is the biggest challenge," Fink noted. "At Caltech, we are now at the point where we're implementing a test-bed outdoors to develop the software to demonstrate this in action."

The outdoors test would involve a miniature airship taking the place of the camera. Researchers from around the world would be able to give commands to the airship via Internet and watch it move and deploy the rovers on its own.

The field tests may pave the way for using similar command software on the proposed NASA and European mission to Titan or Europa. Fink and other researchers involved with the planning have begun discussing how such a mission might shape up by the 2017 launch date.

"A Titan mission would have the orbiter deploying a balloon, and we're already thinking about having a lander," Fink explained. "There you have a three-tier mission."

The tiered approach may eventually take the form of a robot that "does its own reconnaissance, goes out and looks for anomalies, finds something interesting and makes contact with the sender," Fink said, pointing to the Imperial probe from The Empire Strikes Back which lands on the ice planet Hoth.

Perhaps best of all, intelligent robots could react quickly to surprises and investigate anomalies — such as a geyser on Saturn's moon Enceladus, or a landslide on Mars.

"Curiosity in itself is not present in any of our machine systems," Fink said, remarking upon WALL-E's childlike tendencies which appear to distract EVE but eventually help her mission. "That curiosity drives action."

Top 10 Cell Phone-PDAs

2008-06-03T06:01:00.000-07:00

These are the top cell phone-PDAs today, but ratings and rankings can change quickly due to pricing and technology changes, so check back frequently for the latest info.

1. RIM BlackBerry Pearl 8120

Design: Candy bar
Carrier: AT&T
OS Supported: Symbian
Battery Life Average (hh:mm): 9:43
Price When Reviewed: $250

Pros

Excellent multimedia features and Wi-Fi
Elegant design

Cons

Available only to corporate buyers
Captured video looked grainy

2. RIM BlackBerry Curve 8320

Design: Candy bar
Carrier: T-Mobile
OS Supported: Proprietary
Battery Life Average (hh:mm): 10:00
Price When Reviewed: $300

Pros

Wi-Fi support
2-megapixel camera

Cons

Inconsistent voice quality
Expensive

3. RIM Blackberry Pearl

Design: Candy bar
Carrier: T-Mobile
OS Supported: J2ME
Battery Life Average (hh:mm): 8:34
Price When Reviewed: $150

Pros

Stellar messaging capabilities
Adds a camera

Cons

Lacks a full QWERTY keyboard
Keys can be difficult to press

4. T-Mobile Dash (Windows Mobile 6)

Design: Candy bar
Carrier: T-Mobile
OS Supported: Windows Mobile
Battery Life Average (hh:mm): 8:40
Price When Reviewed: $150

Pros

First phone to offer Windows Mobile 6
Svelte design

Cons

Lacks applications for editing files

5. T-Mobile Shadow
Design: Slide
Carrier: T-Mobile
OS Supported: Windows Mobile
Battery Life Average (hh:mm): 10:00
Price When Reviewed: $200

Pros

Well-designed screen gives easy access
Smooth jog wheel facilitates navigation

Cons

Audio quality on calls sounded tinny

6. Apple iPhone

Design: Candy bar
Carrier: AT&T
OS Supported: Proprietary
Battery Life Average (hh:mm): 10:00
Price When Reviewed: $399

Pros

* Innovative design
* Good mobile Web browser

Cons

* Expensive
* No third-party non-Web apps (like Word)

7. Palm Centro (AT&T)

Design: Candy bar
Carrier: AT&T
OS Supported: Palm
Battery Life Average (hh:mm): 6:47
Price When Reviewed: $200

Pros

Petite, attractive design
Excellent call quality and battery life

Cons

Lacks Wi-Fi and GPS
Plastic case feels a bit fragile

8. T-Mobile Wing

Design: Slide
Carrier: T-Mobile
OS Supported: Windows Mobile
Battery Life Average (hh:mm): 10:00
Price When Reviewed: $350

Pros

Touch screen display
Roomy, slide-out keyboard

Cons

Some buttons are poorly designed
Limited integrated storage

9. RIM BlackBerry 8820 (T-Mobile)

Design: Clamshell
Carrier: T-Mobile
OS Supported: Proprietary
Battery Life Average (hh:mm): 10:00
Price When Reviewed: $350

Pros

Supports voice over Wi-Fi
Excellent e-mail handling

Cons

Voice over Wi-Fi and GPS cost extra
No camera

10. Palm Centro

Design: Candy bar
Carrier: Sprint
OS Supported: Palm
Battery Life Average (hh:mm): 4:19
Price When Reviewed: $100

Pros

Excellent call quality
Petite, attractive design

Cons

Plastic case feels a bit fragile
Lacks Wi-Fi and GPS

Microsoft, HCL strengthen partnership

2008-06-02T09:28:00.000-07:00

Microsoft and HCL Infosystems announced a set of initiatives to strengthen their existing alliance, at an event held in Mumbai.

The companies have unveiled plans for the creation of a joint Center of Excellence (CoE) for the development of vertical-specific customized solution frameworks for India; the launch of a Windows OS laptop at Rs.16,990 under the MiLeap brand of HCL leaptops; and generating an industry-ready workforce certified in Microsoft technologies at the HCL Career Development Centers, which will offer a unique learning experience.
The announcement was made at an event attended by Kevin Turner, COO, Microsoft, Ravi Venkatesan, Chairman, Microsoft India, and Ajai Chowdhry, Chairman and CEO, HCL.

Speaking at the event, Kevin Turner, said, “For over 22 years, Microsoft and HCL have partnered with each other to promote the use of information technology in India. We are delighted to reinforce this association and empower Indian consumers and businesses with the latest and best that technology has to offer.”

HCL, which launched the MiLeap series of laptops earlier this year, even announced the roll out of the Windows OS enabled MiLeap. Available at Rs 16,990, it is the lowest priced Microsoft Windows XP powered laptop in the market. The MiLeap H Series runs on Windows XP Home, has a 30 GB HDD and is broadband ready.

Microsoft and HCL Infosystems have also established a new Center of Excellence (CoE) with over 500 software professionals to create, design and deploy Microsoft technologies-based solution frameworks across various industry verticals. The CoE will leverage the System Integration capabilities of HCL and Microsoft’s innovative suite of products in the area of IT requirement of customers across different verticals, including Telecom, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance, Power, Defense, Retail, eGovernance, Media & Entertainment, and Microsoft technology-based horizontal solutions in Health, Railways and Airports.

The third part of the strategic alliance includes an agreement by Microsoft and HCL to train and certify 50,000 students on Microsoft technologies, in three years, across 100 training centers; the HCL Career Development Centers have been set up by HCL. The curriculum used will be the Microsoft Official Curriculum, a comprehensive and structured learning methodology designed and developed by Microsoft. The goal of the Microsoft-HCL training initiative is to enhance the employability of students and help the Indian IT industry retain its competitive edge. The training will also provide a targeted framework for IT Managers to validate core technical, professional and architectural skills. The Microsoft-HCL partnership is targeted at creating a sustained supply of skilled and certified manpower to address the employability issues of the IT and ITES industry.

Commenting on the various initiatives announced, Ajai Chowdhry, said, “Both HCL and Microsoft are key players in the Indian market, and this alliance has brought value to the Indian customer with over three decades of innovation, passion and defining of markets. I am sure that this alliance will further enable overall development in our country with IT as the key enabler.”
Adding to this, Ravi Venkatesan, said, “All three initiatives announced today are very significant to our continual efforts at partnering the Indian industry in its quest for success by leveraging the power of IT and enabling the uptake of IT across India”.

Top 10 MP3 Players (Flash-Based)

2008-05-11T10:30:00.000-07:00

1. Creative ZEN

Pros
• Feature-heavy
• SD card slot for instant memory upgrades

Cons
• One-handed operation a little tricky
• Skimps on bundled accessories

2. Creative Zen V Plus

Pros
• High audio quality
• Mini-USB instead of proprietary port

Cons
• Bundled accessories are few

3. Apple iPod Nano

Pros
• Slim, elegant design
• Attractive video playback

Cons
• Lacks radio
• Doesn't allow voice recording

4.iRiver Clix Gen 2

Pros
* Beautiful AMOLED display
* Simple, intuitive controls

Cons
* Easy to accidentally click controls

5. Apple iPod Touch

Pros
• Beautiful AMOLED display
• Simple, intuitive controls

Cons
• Easy to accidentally click controls

6. SanDisk Sansa Connect

Pros
* Downloads songs over Wi-Fi
* Nice color screen

Cons
* Slightly sluggish interface
* Expensive

7. Samsung YP-P2

Pros
• Sharp and cinematic 16:9 screen
• Several customizable sound settings

Cons
• Touch screen smudges easily

8. Microsoft Zune 8GB Red

Pros
• Wireless syncing
• Intuitive controls and interface

Cons
• A bit bulky

9. SanDisk Sansa View

Pros
• Easy-to-use raised click wheel
• Surprisingly clear sound and vibrant screen

Cons
• Unintuitive menu navigation
• No charger or cables aside from USB connection

10. SanDisk Sansa e280

Pros
• Rhapsody integration
• Card slot for extra memory

Cons
• Controls are uncomfortable to use
• Disappointing audio quality

Freebies that will help clean up your PC, reduce browser clicking, and--when you're ready to kick back--entertain.

2008-05-08T23:43:00.000-07:00

Like people, PCs can get the winter blahs, working hard on those long, dark evenings. Their drives fatten with unnecessary data, while we users get tired of repetitive clicking. Give everybody a mini vacation with these three freebies: a utility to jettison unnecessary files, a Firefox add-on that should cut back on clicks, and, just for kicks, a colorful game demo.

Tone Up Software

Over time, programs balloon with unnecessary junk. CCleaner gives apps the once-over and tells you what excess material it can shed.

Unlike many cleaning programs, Pirisoft's CCleaner doesn't stop at the obvious (browser caches, temporary files, the Recycle Bin); it also scrubs out temporary files from a long list of programs by Adobe, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nero, Norton, and other companies. You can exclude folders from the cleaning, and you can tag others outside the default profile for emptying. The sheer volume of expendable files might surprise you.

This freebie has a few useful extras, too, such as an uninstaller and a Registry scanner. It's like spring cleaning-regardless of the actual season.

Search Results: Snap to It!

Everybody wants lots of search results, but clicking each one gets dull fast. If you're using Firefox, you can deal with those results all at once with the free Snap Links extension, which lets you draw a box around a group of links and either open or save them. It's as simple as a right-click-and-drag: In my tests with various search engines and PCWorld.com search re-sults, it worked swimmingly.

By default, Snap Links opens all your chosen links in new tabs in the original window. But author Pedro Fonseca makes sure to give you choices. Holding down when you start drawing your magic box produces a menu of options. You can open the links in a new window (or several), bookmark them, or save the results to the Clipboard. Fight click tedium by making any of these the default for handling selected links.

Fight Disease the Fun Way

Flu shots. Hand sanitizer. Nasty zinc tablets. Health precautions are a drag. But with the game Nanotron, you can line up ranks of goofy-looking germs and shoot them down, arcade-style, to stop their merciless advance through Patient B-145A's liver.

In the free demo you can enjoy ten levels of play. Armed with a bat, you bounce a red ball off the invading germs, destroying some and mutating others into more useful forms. (The makers at Orbital Cows Entertainment describe the game play as a cross between arcade classics Breakout and Space Invaders.) In addition, different types of germs drop various power-ups and power-downs-an extra ball, a germ-damaging nano-pill, a bat-shortening pill, and so forth-to keep things lively.

When you win the demo, your name goes on the scoreboard, just as it does in the arcade. To continue the fight for Patient B-145A, pay $20 for the full version to unlock the challenges of the next 50 levels. Dare your friends to top your high score-just make sure they use hand sanitizer before touching your keyboard.

Orkut Adds Status Updates

2008-05-05T01:13:00.000-07:00

Orkut is rolling out a new feature which allows you to set your status message. It’s pretty similar to the one which is implemented in Facebook, but Orkut allows emoticons (smiles) to be added in your status message.

Surprisingly, status updates don’t show up in your updates, just like how they do in Facebook. This means, when you update your status, it wouldn’t be published in your friend’s updates. That makes it a little pointless to have another status update, since Orkut already uses our Google Talk status message. I find it a little odd to have two status updates in a single profile page.

I come across so many people on Orkut, who use last name to shout their status. Hopefully, those people will adapt to the new status update feature. It would have been awesome, if Google provided some basic integration with Twitter. I seriously hate updating my status on more than one service.

Dell set to focus on India, China

2008-04-16T07:35:00.000-07:00

Dell founder Michael Dell has said that his firm would focus on India and China to become the number one PC maker in the world. Michael Dell had taken over as the company’s CEO after the firm was pushed behind by Hewlett Packard, which is now the number one PC maker in the world. Since he took over, the sales of Dell PCs have touched 19 per cent from 11 per cent. The turnaround strategy charted by Michael Dell involves tapping first time users in developing markets. The company is also planning to sell its computers through stores by changing the traditional model of delivering on orders. Michael Dell added that the company would also be focusing more on design rather than stressing on utility alone.

Dell, the world's No. 2 PC maker, is developing new models aimed at Chinese and Indian consumers to drive sales in fast-growing Asian markets, CEO Michael Dell said Thursday.

CEO Michael Dell says the company wants to drive growth in Asian markets such as India and China.

Personal computer makers increasingly are designing products with Chinese buyers in mind. Both Dell and China's Lenovo Group unveiled low-cost PCs last year for rural and novice users.

"This year, we plan to introduce 50 percent more notebook platforms than we introduced last year, including exciting new products aimed exactly at Chinese customer needs," Dell said at a news conference.

New models are meant to meet "specifically the requirements that we see in countries like China and India," he said.

Dell says its consumer sales in China grew by 54 percent last year, more than three times the industry average of 17 percent.

"When we look at the potential for expansion, we do see enormous opportunity ahead," Dell said. "As far as the U.S. goes, I think the U.S. will be OK, but not the fastest-growing. We expect more growth in Asia."

The company last month reported its fourth-quarter profit fell 6.4 percent and cautioned that more cautious spending by U.S. customers could hurt its business.

Dell says it has about 18 percent of China's market by revenue and 10 percent by number of units sold. Worldwide, it has a 16.1 percent market share, according to consulting firm Gartner Group.

In a bid for a bigger share of China's market, Dell broke with its Internet sales model and struck a deal in September to sell PCs through the country's biggest electronics retailer, Gome Group.

Dell's retail presence in China will expand to 1,200 cities by the end of this year, up from just 45 in 2007, said Amid Midha, Dell Greater China president, who appeared with Dell.

"By this summer, we will have more unique products coming to China," Midha said.

The Round Rock, Texas-based company has two factories in Xiamen, a southeastern Chinese city, and a design center in Shanghai that the company says is its biggest outside the United States. Dell said the company expects its purchases of components and other products in China to rise by 27 percent this year to $23 billion.

The company is undergoing a restructuring that Dell said has made growth in China "dramatically better" than a year ago.

Still, Midha said, "We have a lot of things to do before we can consider ourselves to be successful in China."

Also Thursday, Dell said it will donate $210,000 to build six education centers in China to teach computer skills to the children of migrant workers.

Dell shares rose 50 cents to close at $20.01 Thursday

Future cell phones will serve as a mobile tourist guide

2008-04-13T09:30:00.000-07:00

Washington, April 12 (ANI): Future cell phones may act as a mobile tourist guide, and provide tourists with information on whatever they see while journeying.

The target seems achievable with an eye-Phone technology that emerged as a regional winner in the European Satellite Navigation Competition, sponsored by ESA's Technology Transfer Programme, recently.

Ernst Pechtl and Hans Geiger, who jointly own a company called SuperWise Technologies AG, are the persons behind this phone.

The new technology is based on a combination of three modern technologies that are known as satellite navigation localisation services, advanced object recognition, and relevant internet retrieved information.

To use the technology, all that a tourist needs to do is to take a photograph of a thing of interest with a mobile phone, and select the item with the cursor.

The pre-processed information on the selected object will then be sent back to the mobile phone in real time.

"It could be a building, a mountain, a tree, plant or a special event such as a local festival. The amount of information you receive depends on you, if you want to know more you just click the 'more button' and you trigger a more detailed search responding to your profile of interest. Applications include tourism, education, remote healthcare, security, science, etc," said Pechtl.

Frank M. Salzgeber, head of ESA's Technology Transfer Programme Office, said: "The eye-Phone is a good illustration of the potential of satellite navigation systems when their positioning information is combined with other communication and information technology. With the improved accuracy of the European Galileo system in comparison to existing systems, the prospects will be amazing."

The researcher revealed that an innovative artificial intelligence system developed by SuperWise Technologies AG, known as the Apollo image-recognition system, lies behind the eye-Phone.

"The key to the eye-Phone system is the object recognition done by the Apollo software. Nothing in the world is able to do what our software does," said Pechtl.

"It's a unique piece of software that can carry out object recognition within images, a very tricky task. It is self-learning and after a short and very simple training session it can identify any object in the world," added Pechtl.

SuperWise Technologies now has its eyes set on collaboration with mobile phone operators to provide the eye-Phone functionality as an additional function for subscription.

Pechtl said that a prototype should be ready during the mid of 2008 and, thereafter, it would take another 12 to 18 months to work out deals with mobile phone operators. (ANI)

Adobe Launches a New Media Player

2008-04-10T04:43:00.000-07:00

Adobe Systems debuted a new media playing software, Adobe Media Player 1.0 (AMP) along with online programming instructional video content on how to use the company's products, it said Wednesday.
The move makes Adobe the latest player to get into the online video space, offering not only software that rivals Apple's Quicktime and Microsoft's Windows Media Player, but also video content such as episodes of "CSI: Miami" and "CSI: New York," along with other feature programming and music videos.
Based on Adobe's Flash technology, Adobe Media Player contains both content creation and playback components, and is available for Windows and Mac.
Adobe Media Player may be downloaded for free at [http://www.adobe.com/products/mediaplayer/]. Pricing information for the video content publishing software was not immediately available.
Additionally, Adobe TV material can be viewed at http://tv.adobe.com/. All of the instructional videos on the site were created using only Adobe software for the relevant components, the company said.

Yahoo will challenge You Tube

2008-04-10T04:38:00.000-07:00

Yahoo is planning to show amateur vid-eos on its popular online photo-sharing site, Flickr. This is an attempt by the web major to offer competition to popular video site You Tube which is run by rival Google. The new technology set in place by Flickr will allow amateur filmmakers to upload their videos. Anyone can see these videos though the person who uploads can restrict access. As of now, Yahoo is giving only paid members of Flickr the right to upload videos. You Tube is more open and allows every Internet surfer to freely upload videos. However, Flickr believes that its approach will give a more ‘personal touch’ to the site since members can keep their videos and pictures together.

Sony Unveils First Internal Blu-ray Disc Drive

2008-03-26T03:00:00.000-07:00

Sony Electronics unveiled its first internal Blu-ray disc (BD) ROM drive (BDU-X10S) for the computer. The drive offers consumers an option to upgrade their desktop to a Blu-ray player, which can also play DVDs and CDs.The BDU-X10S now comes bundled with the CyberLink’s PowerDVD BD Edition software for playing movie titles, recorded Blu-ray disc home videos, DVD-ROMs and CD-ROMs. It also supports playback of recorded Blu-ray discs in MPEG-2 or H.264 format, standard DVD-Video discs or recorded DVDs encoded with MPEG-2 or AVCHD formats.The internal drive allows fast and easy transfer of data or videos through its high-speed Serial ATA (SATA) interface.

Its standard 5.25-inch form factor enables easy installation in desktop PCs running Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows XP operating systems.Other technical specifications include, 8x DVD ROM (Read Only), 24X CD-ROM (Read Only), data buffer size of 4MB, physical dimension of 5.25 x 1.63x 7.0 inch and installation angle supporting both vertical and horizontal.Sony BDU-X10S is available through Rashi and its branches throughout India for Rs. 16,950 and enjoys one year warranty.

Google's Top 17 Easter Eggs, Gags, and Hoaxes

2008-03-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

Google makes your life easier with great search, but did you also know it's loaded with pranks, goofs, and put-ons

Buried Deep in Google
Google Web site--and many of the company's software programs--are loaded with gags, goofs, and Easter eggs that have helped Google maintain a fun-loving spirit in the cutthroat world of Web competition.
Of course, Google always has a good idea. Thousands of our readers have enjoyed past explorations of wonders like "The Strangest Sites in Google Earth" and "The Most Spectacular Sights in Google Sky."

BlackBerry under security scrutiny in India

2008-03-13T04:33:00.000-07:00

Indian government officials, telecommunications service providers, and executives of Research In Motion (RIM) are expected to meet on Friday to work out a solution to demands from the Indian government that it should have access to, and the ability to intercept, e-mail sent over RIM's BlackBerry service, according to a report on Wednesday in an Indian newspaper, Business Standard.
RIM has declined to comment on the government's concerns, which have so far delayed the government's award of a license to offer BlackBerry services to Indian mobile services operator Tata Teleservices.
Other operators, who already hold a license to offer BlackBerry services in India, have been asked to give the government access and the right to intercept e-mail, under threat of cancellation of their BlackBerry licenses by March 31. These operators include Vodafone Essar, the Indian joint venture of Vodafone Group and Reliance Communications, a large Indian mobile services provider.
RIM did not respond to an e-mail asking if it is prepared to give the Indian government access to its encryption algorithms and to messages on its service.
Under India's Information Technology Act of 2000, the government has the right, under certain circumstances, to intercept electronic communications for security reasons and in the national interest. Security agencies say that terrorists are increasingly using the Internet and applications such as e-mail to communicate with one another.

HP Shows Off Future Printing Technologies

2008-03-12T08:55:00.000-07:00

Hewlett-Packard offered a peek into future printing technologies, introducing a new inkjet printer that prints thousands of pages per minute and ink that retains its shine even when exposed to extreme elements.
HP's water-based Latex Ink is specially formulated to embed in a surface and become part of a media print, said Stephen Nigro, senior vice president of HP's graphics and imaging business. HP's Latex Ink can withstand snow and rain and is useful for large-format media used on billboards and outdoor signs.
The company also launched the Inkjet Web Press printer, which can print up to 2,600 A4-sized color pages a minute at a cost of under US$0.01 per color page, Nigro said.
The products were introduced at an event in Tel Aviv.
The Latex Ink includes a specially created formula, called latex polymer, that provides the print surface its durability and color, according to HP. Water-based ink ejected carries the latex polymer and pigment particles to the surface. The inks are 70 percent water and 30 percent of additives and other inks, HP said. The ink was developed by HP and HP Labs.
Unlaminated outdoor displays using the ink can last up to three years, while unlaminated in-window displays can last up to five years.
The printer cartridge uses recyclable material and the company has developed new recyclable substrates for the ink to make printing environmentally friendly, HP said. Other printing technology for large-format media include UV (ultraviolet) curable ink, which interacts with an ultraviolet light source to create a print.
Avoiding speculation, Nigro said Latex Ink may or may not reach consumers in the future. For now, the ink is targeted at enterprises including companies creating billboards, Nigro said. HP is expected to announce products using the ink technology later this year.
HP also showed the Inkjet Web Press, a printer that prints up to 2,600 A4-sized color pages a minute. The printer will be able to print on pages up to 30 inches (76.2 centimeters) wide, Nigro said. It is targeted at replacing the printed pages coming from traditional offset presses.
A printing job with a traditional offset press takes hours and it's not possible to print on demand. With a traditional offset press, a machine first creates a physical plate with the image etched on it, which is then sent to print. With the Inkjet Web Press platform, hitting the print button sends the image directly to a printer, making high-volume printing more productive by eliminating analog elements like a plate, Nigro said.
The printer is capable of printing broadsheet newspapers and other documents, he said.
The Inkjet Web Press is a breakthrough product as it is 20 percent faster than any other inkjet printer on the market, said Gilles Biscos, president of Interquest, an analysis firm. The speed and width makes it flexible for many different marketplaces including direct mail and books, he said. HP has been in the inkjet business and its research is trickling into many consumer and enterprise spaces.
The printer is built around the Scalable Printing Technology (SPT) platform, which improves the quality of prints by spraying more ink on pages using thousands of nozzles on a single printhead. SPT is already in use on printers like HP's Photosmart, Nigro said. HP introduced the Photosmart Minilab ml1000 inkjet printer earlier this year, which can print 4-by-6-inch photos as fast as 1,500 prints per hour.
Both announcements are part of HP's attempt to create a revenue stream by offering more printer supplies, management tools and services. As printer prices decline, customers will continue to pay for supplies like cartridges and services like digital photo prints, which will ultimately generate larger revenues than printer units shipped, HP executives have said.
HP has about a 1.8 percent share in the pages printed segment, and doubling that, will double HP's printing revenue, Vyomesh Joshi, executive vice president of HP's Imaging and Printing Group, said in an speech last week.
In 2009, 53 trillion documents will be printed, of which 9 percent will be digital, Nigro said. Creating digital pages like image files creates new printing opportunities, like ordering bound specialty photobooks online. That is not possible with an analog press as set-up costs could be high, he said.

Mobile Version Of Silverlight Unveiled

2008-03-12T08:54:00.000-07:00

Microsoft released the beta versions of Silverlight 2.0, Expression Studio 2.0, and Internet Explorer 8, furthering its offerings in the Web technologies space.
Silverlight is Microsoft's Rich Internet Application (RIA) development tool, and Expression Studio is its media application design suite. The releases were announced at MIX '08, the Redmond, Washington-based company's annual conference focusing on Web technologies, in Las Vegas.
Among the new functionality, RIA application developers and designers have the ability to better monetize their sites, and extend these applications to the mobile space.
Besides providing cost effective ways to deliver better user experience through video content, with the Silverlight technology, Microsoft is "offering better business opportunities for developers to integrate advertising or other monetization models in their sites," said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET developer division.
The new Silverlight release follows Silverlight 1.0, which currently sees 1.5 million installations per day, said Guthrie — a rate the company expects will further accelerate with the new beta.
In fact, advertising will "be the primary way that you and we monetize the Web", said Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, to the crowd of developers at the event's opening keynote. Given that growth in user engagement is what drives advertising, he added, Microsoft's role in monetizing the Web will be to create an ad platform for the relevant stakeholders.
The acknowledgment that advertising is the "economic engine of the Web", said Ozzie, is the driver behind Microsoft's US$44.6 billion bid for online search giant Yahoo! in February.
A partnership was also announced between Microsoft and New York-based Internet advertising company DoubleClick.com to support Silverlight 2.0 for DoubleClick In-Stream, which lets publishers serve, forecast and report on in-stream video ads. Both companies see a need to support media and publishers with engaging video experiences, said DoubleClick's vice-president of advertising products, Ari Paparo. "DoubleClick and Microsoft compete on many fronts but at the same time we cooperate," he said.
Deploying and monitoring ads aside, the new Silverlight has cross-browser and cross-platform capabilities, and lets developers build RIA apps for mobile devices. Guthrie said Microsoft is trying to get Silverlight "installed on as many mobile devices as possible" whether they're Windows Mobile or some other operating system.
To illustrate that cross-platform belief, Microsoft announced a partnership with mobile handset vendor Nokia Corp. to deliver Silverlight on its S60 model on the Symbian operating system.
The new Silverlight also provides multi-language support, enabling developers to build RIA apps using any .Net language. As well, a WPF User Interface Framework allowing developers to use controls to build sites with more advanced features like layout management and data mining support.
In tandem with the WPF UI Framework, Microsoft announced it released the code for the controls under an open source license so that the developer community can build their own controls. Also in the area of open source, the company released a testing framework for Silverlight under open source license.
Other new Silverlight functionality include robust networking and integrated data support.
Several Canadian customers were on hand to discuss RIA apps built on Silverlight, including Oakville, Ontario-based TheWeatherNetwork.com. Silverlight's cross-platform interoperability solved the significant cross-platform access challenge it faced with almost two million users across Canada demanding better targeted data access regardless of the platform, said TheWeatherNetwork.com's manager of online applications, Carrie Lysenko.
Further compounding the issue, she added, is the fact that weather and weather-related data, like traffic, can be tricky content to convey. Also, with Silverlight, the ability to monetize applications through "subtle, not intrusive" advertisements while running the business is crucial given the company is private and "ad-supported".
Another customer, Advanced Publishing Corp., a provider of digital content for the publishing industry said its users enjoy new interactive features — a "critical component" of the company's presentation, said Ed Matthews, the Saint John, New Brunswick-based company's director of product development and client services.
A third customer, Guelph, Ontario-based eMedia Interactive, which builds a range of Web sites including Hockey.com, said it benefited from the developer-designer workflow, enabling the startup to quickly and cost effectively make improvements to the site, said its chief technology officer, Lance Mohring.
Microsoft's rival in the RIA space, San Jose, California-based Adobe Systems, last month released the production versions of its Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a cross-operating system runtime for building RIA apps using Flash, Flex, HTML, and Ajax; and Flex Builder 3, the integrated developer environment for building Flex-based RIA applications.
Like Microsoft's move into the RIA mobile space, Adobe has also said it wants its AIR runtime to eventually extend to that arena.
In the open source area, Adobe launched two open source projects to its developer community, BlazeDS and Open Flex SDK, with the goal of driving adoption of its RIA platform.

Apple Unveils iPhone SDK

2008-03-09T04:51:00.000-07:00

Apple unveiled the iPhone SDK (software development kit) at a special event at the company's headquarters in California. Apple executives said the SDK provides developers with the same tools it uses to develop applications for the iPhone.Applications for the iPhone will be built on a Mac using Xcode, the same development tool used to build Mac OS X applications. Using the tool, developers can memory usage and other ways that applications can affect the iPhone hardware.
Apple also introduced a new development tool called iPhone Simulator. This tool runs on a Mac, and simulates the entire API stack of the iPhone OS. Apple said that you can run your iPhone application in the simulator, which gives developers an incredible turnaround time on development.
Scott Forstall, Apple's vice president of iPhone Software, explained that Apple had to build a version of its development framework, Cocoa. Dubbed Cocoa Touch, the new development tools are based on the touch interaction with the iPhone instead of the keyboard and mouse interaction users have with a desktop computer.
Forstall said the SDK is made up of several Core technologies. Much of what you find in the iPhone operating system is the same as what you would find in the Mac, except power management, which is even more robust on the iPhone, according to Apple. Core Services, Core Location and Core Audio will also be available to developers.
"So we have a fantastic set of tools, in addition to the amazing set of frameworks that make up the iPhone OS," said Forstall.
Apple also took some time to show off some of the newest Web apps that run in Safari. Forstall highlighted sites like Facebook and Bank of America during his talk.

Microsoft Releases Silverlight 2, IE8 Betas

2008-03-06T01:50:00.000-08:00

Moving forward with next-generation software in two critical realms, Microsoft released initial public beta versions of its Silverlight 2 multimedia presentation technology and the Internet Explorer 8 browser.

The company announced the releases at its Mix08 conference in Las Vegas.

Implemented as a plug-in, Silverlight is Microsoft's horse in the industry's race to provide the most eye-catching visual effects; it competes with Adobe's Flash Player and related technologies. Silverlight is cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device, Microsoft said.

Version 2 features support for managed code and developing with multiple languages, including IronRuby, IronPython, JavaScript, and .Net. The beta is available from Microsoft's Web site.

Internet Explorer 8, meanwhile, offers capabilities such as improved interoperability and full compliance with the Cascading Style Sheets 2.1 specification. That beta is available at Microsoft's official Internet Explorer 8 page.
With Silverlight 2, Microsoft brought out a host of early adopters, including NBC Sports, which is using Silverlight for upcoming Olympics coverage; Hard Rock International, of Hard Rock Cafe fame; and Cirque du Soleil. Display capabilities both for the Web and mobile devices were highlighted.

NBC Sports plans to use Silverlight to Webcast 2,200 hours of coverage. "You're going to be able to go online and you're going to be able to consume video how you want it, when you want it," said Perkins Miller, senior vice president of NBC Sports and Olympics.

Hard Rock showed a Silverlight application enabling users to zoom in onto pictures of rock memorabilia, while Cirque du Soleil showed a performer-casting intranet application featuring video. In the mobile space, Weatherbug demonstrated a weather information application running on a Nokia phone.

Microsoft's Silverlight impressed Mix08 attendee Chris Pels, president of iDevTech, a consulting firm focused on Microsoft technologies. "I think it really takes the user experience to a different level and especially through the browser," Pels said.

"I was very interested in the mobile device aspect of it, too," he said. Microsoft Silverlight still must prove itself in the marketplace, Pels said.

Among the Silverlight innovations touted by Microsoft is "adaptive streaming," which gauges bandwidth capabilities on the client.

"Basically, it can automatically pick the appropriate bit rate and encoding to use," said Scott Guthrie, general manager in the Microsoft Developer Division. He had recently blogged about many of the capabilities cited at the event.
Also featured in Silverlight 2 are SOAP and REST (Representational State Transfer) support and capabilities for cross-domain networks, for calling services on a network. Sockets-level programming for the client is enabled as well.

While the predecessor Silverlight 1 focused on video, Silverlight 2 has emphasized .Net development and transactional functions.

A rich UI framework in Silverlight 2 is based on Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) technology. "What this gives you is a really rich way to use controls to build your sites," Guthrie said. Data binding, styling, and animation are enabled.

Silverlight has a default look and feel but also can be customized; beyond setting styles and colors, implementers can control templating capabilities and do custom state changes.

Silverlight developer tools include Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008 and Expression tools. These tools and XAML can be used to help position Silverlight as a platform for serving up display advertising. A preview of Visual Studio and Expression Blend capabilities for Silverlight are now shipping.

Microsoft announced a beta release of its Expression Studio 2 tool, featuring PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) in the Expression Web tool and Silverlight support. The beta is accessible from the Microsoft Expression site.
In conjunction with the Silverlight 2 beta, Microsoft is shipping via an open source license 2,000 unit tests that cover Silverlight.

Microsoft also plans to improve WPF later this year, offering more controls, streamlined setups, and improvements for startup performance and graphics.

With Internet Explorer 8, CSS 2.1 support will help developers and designers write pages once and have them render properly across different browsers, Microsoft said. A WebSlices capability enables users to mark parts of pages as WebSlices and monitor information. A Favorites bar displays WebSlices visuals.

New navigation features for AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) also is featured in Internet Explorer 8, focused on the back/forward navigation stack and address bar. Enhanced protection from deceptive Web sites is featured, as are phishing filter enhancements.

Microsoft representatives did not have information on when Internet Explorer 8 or Silverlight 2 would be ready for general release.

Also announced at Mix08 was a preview of SQL Server Data Services, providing a building-block, on-demand service for developers and businesses seeking data storage.

Microsoft Opens Up Windows Live Services

2008-03-06T01:48:00.000-08:00

Microsoft is expected to discuss several technologies pertaining to its Live Platform at the Mix08 conference in Las Vegas this week, including APIs for messaging and sharing contacts.

In his blog from last week, Microsoft's David Treadwell, corporate vice president for Live Platform services at Microsoft, noted several developments pertaining to Windows Live, which is Microsoft's hosted services platform. The company, he said, is opening up the Windows Live Messenger network for third-party Web sites to reach 300 million-plus Windows Live Messenger users.
"When a third party integrates the Windows Live Messenger Library into their site they can define the look and feel to create their own IM experience," Treadwell said. "Unlike the existing third-party wrappers for the MSN Protocol (the underlying protocol for Windows Live Messenger) the Windows Live Messenger Library securely authenticates users, therefore their Windows Live ID credentials are safe."

Also, Microsoft has progressed to beta with the Windows Live Contacts API, an HTTP-based service for developers to programmatically submit queries to and retrieve results from the Windows Live Contacts Address Book database service.

"Web developers can use this API in production to enable their customers to transfer and share their contacts lists in a secure, trustworthy way (i.e., no more screen scraping — a great step on the road toward data portability," Treadwell said.

Another technology that has progressed to beta is Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live, for hosting and streaming cross-platform media experiences and rich interactive applications running on Windows and Macintosh.

"We are increasing the free hosting and storage limit to 10GB," Treadwell said.

Treadwell also said Microsoft is making a large investment in unifying developer platform protocols for services on the Atom format.

"At Mix we are enabling several new Live services with AtomPub endpoints which enable any HTTP-aware application to easily consume Atom feeds of photos and for unstructured application storage. Or you can use any Atom-aware public tools, or libraries such as .Net WCF Syndication, to read or write these cloud service-based feeds," he said.

The company's Application Based Storage API service, which allows developers to store a small amount of state/configuration data in Windows Live data centers on behalf of a user, will be available this week.

Treadwell said Microsoft would make its Windows Live Photo API service and documentation available this week. The API allows users to securely grant permission for third-party Web sites to create, read, or update photos stored on Windows Live.

Yahoo Sets Up New Lab in India

2008-03-04T02:18:00.000-08:00

Yahoo is establishing a lab in Bangalore, India, where the company already has research and development (R&D) operations. While the current R&D done by Yahoo in India is focused on new products and engineering, the focus of the new lab will be on long-term research, a spokeswoman for the company said.

Yahoo Labs Bangalore will be a center of excellence for next generation search and advertising technologies, focused on making the Web more relevant and simple for users and advertisers, Yahoo said.

The company has hired Rajeev Rastogi, who has moved from head of Bell Labs India to lead the new lab, and assemble a team of scientists and engineers to focus on new approaches to information extraction and machine learning, multimedia and query processing, the company said.

It did not provide details of the number of staff it plans to hire for the lab. The company plans to hire sociologists, micro-economists, and computational scientists among other categories of staff for the lab, the spokeswoman said.

Yahoo already employs some 1,500 staff in India, which it plans to take to over 2,000 by the end of this year. Yahoo Research & Development is involved in the development of some of Yahoo's key products and services such as mobile Internet and search.

Yahoo has similar labs in New York, Santiago, and Barcelona, along with Santa Clara, Burbank and Berkeley in California.

Microsoft Puts Silverlight On Nokia Phones

2008-03-04T02:14:00.000-08:00

Microsoft hopes to push through adoption of its Silverlight technology by announcing strategic partnerships at its annual MIX 08 conference, including a deal with Nokia to put the technology on mobile devices.

Through a deal expected to be announced today, Microsoft is working with Nokia to put Silverlight — a competitor to Adobe's Flash technology — on wireless devices for the first time, said Tom Honeybone, senior director in Microsoft's developer division. Silverlight is a cross-platform plug-in that lets developers create multimedia and rich internet applications (RIAs) and then run them from the browser.

At MIX, Nokia plans to reveal a beta programme for its runtime for Silverlight on its Series 60 and Series 40 mobile phones, as well as demonstrate Silverlight applications running on the handsets, he said. By the end of the year, Nokia plans to ship handsets with the runtime embedded that can run Silverlight applications, beginning first with the high-end Series 60 smartphones, Honeybone said. Silverlight on Series 40 phones and on Nokia's tablet devices will be available thereafter.

Microsoft eventually plans to include a runtime for Silverlight in its Windows Mobile platform, but it chose Nokia as the first company to bring Silverlight to handsets because of the company's prominent position in the mobile handset market, Honeybone said. "Series 60 is the clear leader," he said. Nokia is not currently one of Microsoft's Windows Mobile handset partners, though there have been rumours that the company eventually will sign on to build Windows Mobile devices alongside competitors such as Sony Ericsson and HTC.

Microsoft will be developing a portability kit so Nokia can port Silverlight from the desktop to its mobile platform; that kit eventually will be available to other handset providers as well, Honeybone said.

Microsoft released Silverlight 1.0 in September 2007 as a plug-in for browsers that could work on Windows, Linux and the Mac platform. Microsoft developed the technology to displace Adobe's Flash, which currently has about 97 percent to 99 percent penetration on the web as a technology for delivering multimedia content and RIAs.

Flash also is available on wireless devices as Flash Lite; the technology is available on more than 450 million phones, according to Adobe.

Microsoft recently renamed its forthcoming 1.1 version to Silverlight 2, saying it's more stable and fully baked than merely an incremental release. The company has said Silverlight 2 will be available in beta form in the first quarter of the year. It's not unlikely that release will be made available this week at MIX, though Microsoft has not said this and would not comment till Monday.

As Microsoft prepares to make Silverlight more ubiquitous, the company is using its own reach on the web to promote its use. The company has been using Silverlight on some of its own websites, confirmed Brian Goldfarb, group product manager, developer platform, at Microsoft.

Silverlight is not a required download to view the sites and users can opt out when prompted to download Silverlight, "but they will miss out on some great rich media content", he said.

Microsoft also has been using Silverlight as the delivery mechanism for some company-generated video, and its use was indeed required in at least one of those instances. Last week, a participant had to download Silverlight to view CEO Steve Ballmer's keynote webcast live from the Microsoft's Windows Server launch event in Los Angeles.

Goldfarb said Microsoft will continue to use Silverlight more and more as part of its web content delivery strategy, including webcasts and other video presentations on the web.

Microsoft also is using partners to promote Silverlight adoption. One of the first partners to develop on Silverlight and use it as a delivery mechanism, MLB.com, now requires the use of Silverlight for baseball enthusiasts to view games, audio and video. And at MIX, AOL is expected to demonstrate a free webmail product built on Silverlight 2, according to AOL.

Google Launches Website-Building Application

2008-03-01T00:20:00.001-08:00

Google launches Google Sites, a new piece of the Google Apps hosted collaboration and communication suites. Google Sites is the JotSpot hosted wiki service reborn.

JotSpot's re-launch under a different name and a revamped architecture finally answers how this hosted wiki service was retooled, almost a year and a half after Google acquired the company.

With Google Sites, teams within an organization can build websites to collaborate on projects. It's not necessary to know HTML nor web design to create the sites, according to Google.

"Information in organizations is siloed. Teams have difficulty pulling together all the information they need to collaborate," said Rishi Chandra, Google Apps product manager.

"With Google Sites, teams can bring this all together in one central place."

Teams can embed a variety of files and content from other Google applications and services, including video clips from YouTube, images from Picasa and Apps' spreadsheets, text documents, presentations and calendars.

Google Sites aims to be a simpler, more scalable and less expensive alternative to products like Microsoft's SharePoint and IBM's Lotus Notes, said Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google's Enterprise unit.

Google acquired JotSpot in October 2006, closed off new account registrations for it and kept mostly mum about its plans. Although Google continued supporting existing JotSpot customers, they sometimes complained about hosting outages and performance problems and about lack of responsiveness for technical support queries.

Jay Dempsey, marketing director at Heritage's Dairy Stores, in Thoroughfare, New Jersey, had big plans for JotSpot. However, Heritage's, a user since 2005, hasn't touched JotSpot in the past six months. Google's long silence made Dempsey concerned that the product could be phased out.

"I didn't know where they were going with it, so I backed off using it and didn't pursue any [new projects], because I was afraid it would be a waste of our time," Dempsey said.

About 20 users at Heritage's had been successfully using JotSpot, mostly to collaborate on coordinating IT projects. Dempsey had plans to roll out JotSpot broadly among the company's over 500 employees.

Now, no one uses it. The former JotSpot users at Heritage's are back using conventional software applications like Microsoft's Excel to keep tabs on team projects. Dempsey first heard about Google Sites late Wednesday afternoon from IDG News Service.

A Google spokesman said that existing JotSpot users will be notified via e-mail on Thursday about Google Sites. Most JotSpot wikis will be migrated to Google Sites, while a few with many customized features built using JotSpot's APIs will have to be moved later, Glotzbach said.

Founded in 2004, JotSpot had an installed base of thousands of organizations when Google acquired the company. JotSpot had been praised for its ease of use and extensible architecture.

Like Google Sites, JotSpot let users create collaborative Web sites without the need for programming knowledge, and users could embed in them applications and components, like spreadsheets, calendars and documents. Some JotSpot applications will be ported over to Google Sites, while others will be phased out, the Google spokesman said.

Google Sites will lack the APIs that let external developers create applications for JotSpot and customize it. However, Glotzbach said the Apps team will explore giving Google Sites an API. Still, Google Sites isn't completely closed in this regard. The service can run Google Gadgets, which are simple HTML and Javascript mini-applications that can be added to Web pages.

With the service, users can build websites of many types, including intranets, blogs and public sites for a variety of purposes, Glotzbach said. Google Sites is available to users of Apps' Standard, Education, Premier and Team editions.

Rebecca Wettemann, a Nucleus Research analyst, recommends that large enterprises planning to broadly offer Google Sites establish a structure and hierarchy for its sites.

"Just like with any intranet strategy, it's not just about posting pages but making sure that people can find the information they need," Wettemann said. Still, it will be inevitable that Google Sites be used in an ad hoc, under-the-radar manner in some organizations, particularly because it is so easy to use, she said.

The addition of Google Sites is the latest improvement to Google Apps, an example of a new breed of hosted collaboration and communication software seen as a threat to conventional software designed to be installed on customers' PCs and servers, like Microsoft's Office, Exchange and SharePoint and IBM's Lotus/Domino.

Google Apps has been activated on over 500,000 organizations, most of them small and medium-size businesses.

Hackers Ramp Up Facebook, MySpace Attacks

2008-02-25T01:47:00.007-08:00

Hackers are actively exploiting an Internet Explorer plug-in that's widely used by Facebook and MySpace members with a multi-attack kit, a security company warned Friday.

The exploit directed at Aurigma's Image Uploader, an ActiveX control used by Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites to allow members to upload photos to their profiles, is just one of five in a new hacker toolkit being used by several Chinese attack sites, said Symantec Corp.Attacks begin when users receive spam or an instant message with an embedded link, said Darren Kemp, the Symantec analyst who authored the advisory.

The link takes users to a bogus MySpace log-in page, which tries to steal members' credentials as it also silently probes the their computers for vulnerabilities in Uploader, Apple's QuickTime, Windows and Yahoo Music Jukebox.Although the Windows and QuickTime bugs were patched 8 and 13 months ago respectively, the Uploader and Yahoo vulnerabilities were made public and fixed only within the last few weeks.

Kemp noted the hackers' fast reaction time. "[This demonstrates] how quickly attackers are leveraging new vulnerabilities," said Kemp. "It is unlikely that attackers will stop trying to leverage this vulnerability any time soon."The Aurigma bug was disclosed at the end of January by researcher Elazar Broad; shortly after that, a spokeswoman for Facebook and MySpace claimed that the social networking sites were alerting members of the danger.

New bugs cropped up a week later, however, forcing Aurigma to again patch the ActiveX control. Not until Feb. 13 did the company claim "Image Uploader is safe again!"Yahoo, meanwhile, plugged a pair of holes in Music Player on Feb. 6, two days after Broad published attack code for both.Symantec has been tracking attacks against the Aurigma vulnerabilities most of the month.

More than three weeks, ago, for example, another of its analysts reported seeing evidence of a new multi-exploit hacker toolkit -- presumably the same one analyzed by Kemp -- that included an Image Uploader attack.Exploits against ActiveX controls are nothing unusual; scores of bugs in the Microsoft-made technology were uncovered and exploited in 2007, according to Symantec. It counted 210 ActiveX vulnerabilities in the first half of last year alone, a prime factor in making IE a popular attack target.In fact, after the Uploader and Yahoo Music Jukebox vulnerabilities were disclosed, the U. S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), which is part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, recommended IE users disable ActiveX.Kemp, however, saw the social networking angle as just as important.

"Given the growing popularity of social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, attacks leveraging vulnerabilities in their client-side components are not surprising," he wrote in the warning.Symantec urged users to update the Image Uploader ActiveX control to version 4.5.57.1.

Apple Cuts iPod Shuffle Price, Unveils 2GB Model

2008-02-21T07:07:00.000-08:00

Apple has cut the price of the iPod shuffle and introduced a new version of the product with twice the capacity of the existing model.The company has cut the price of the 1GB version of the device to $64 from $96. Apple also confirmed plans to introduce a 2GB model of the iPod shuffle for $88. The new model ships "later this month", the company explained."At just $49, the iPod shuffle is the most affordable iPod ever," said Greg Joswiak, Apple's vice president of worldwide iPod product marketing."The new 2GB model lets music lovers bring even more songs everywhere they go in the impossibly small iPod shuffle."

Three Secrets for Better Digital Photographs

2008-02-20T23:54:00.000-08:00

Smarter cameras and advanced technology yield better images than a 1-hour photo shop used to create. But why stop there? A few simple editing tricks will improve almost any shot. Here are three of my favorites.

Fix the Color Balance

Your camera measures the light each time it snaps a picture, setting the color balance so all colors in a scene look accurate. If photos seem too blue or too red, your white balance may be out of whack.
One way to obtain accurate colors is to set the white balance by hand before taking the shot. Check the camera’s manual for instructions on accessing its white balance control. Dial in a setting designed for your conditions (such as daylight or indoors).
Another option is to tweak the colors afterward through an image editing program. In Photoshop Elements, for example, click the Quick Fix tab and drag the Temperature slider until colors look right (see the screen shot above).

Correct the Exposure
Even pros underexpose or overexpose a shot occasionally. You can improve most photos by using the Levels or Histogram control in your photo editor. In Photoshop Elements, open the image and choose Enhance•Adjust Lighting•Levels.
You’ll see a graph (called a “histogram”) that shows the distribution of bright and dark pixels in your photo. If lots of pixels are crowded against the right side of the graph, the image is probably overexposed. Conversely, a concentration of pixels on the far left of the graph may indicate underexposure. To lighten the whole photograph, drag the White Point on the right side of the graph to the left; to darken the photo, drag the Black Point on the left side to the right. To adjust only the midtones in the photo, drag the middle arrow to the left or right.

Straighten Verticals

Have you ever seen a photo of a tall building that looks as though it’s ready to fall over? That effect is called “perspective distortion,” and photography pros use expensive hardware to avoid it. The rest of us can use a little digital trickery instead.
In Photoshop Elements, you can reduce the intensity of the distortion by choosing Filter•Correct Camera Distortion. Adjust the Vertical Perspective setting to reduce the perspective distortion. (You must crop the photo to eliminate the tapered bottom.) Many people prefer to use a Photoshop plug-in filter designed for perspective correction, such as Andromeda Software’s LensDoc. The program corrects various lens-distortion effects, and it can make the architecture in your shots appear as straight and true as the Tower of Pisa (when construction of the building began in 1173).

Lenovo K200 PC Launched in India

2008-02-20T23:50:00.001-08:00

Lenovo launched the K200 desktops in the Indian market.
The Lenovo K200 features IntelCore2 Duo 2.2 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, 250 GB hard disk, DVD RW, 16 in 1 card reader, Graphics SIS Mirage 3 +Graphics, Ethernet 10/100, optical mouse, built-in modem and Vista Home Basic.
The Lenovo K series desktop incorporates the Lenovo’s vantage technology along with one-key recovery, one-key antivirus, file management and installing drivers and software. The One key recovery function allows users to recover from a mishap by only one touch, thus providing a very stable and efficient rescue system. The One-key Antivirus permits virus scanning and killing even when the OS and the anti-virus software does not work. The K200 desktop is also engineered with an anti-bacterial keyboard which uses special materials on the surface of the keys to restrain bacterial growth.
The Lenovo K200 is available from Rs. 23,050 onwards and come with one year onsite warranty.