The social networking and 'micro-blogging' website Twitter, which allows members to post short text messages online, is being treated as the new frontline of internet conversation. Bob Pearson, head of communities and conversation at computer company Dell, said his company had generated $1million (£610,000) in sales through alerts posted to Twitter. PR staff at PepsiCo posted messages on the site after users began criticising of one of the company's advertisements, which depicted a cartoon calorie committing suicide. Huw Gilbert, communications manager for PepsiCo International, "tweeted", or posted a public message, in reply. "Huw from Pepsi here," he wrote. "We agree this creative is totally inappropriate; we apologise and please know it won't run again." One member "tweeted" back: "Thank you . . . for having the guts to get on Twitter on behalf of Pepsi and give us an update on the suicide ad." Other companies that have accounts to promote products and provide customer service on the website include Comcast, JetBlue and Home Depot. Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motors, used Twitter to answer criticism about the way his company had filed a lawsuit against a website selling unauthorised bumper stickers. ( www.telegraph.co.uk )

Source

Experts at the research unit of the US Department of Justice are working on the creation of two non-lethal weapons that would use laserlight or microwaves to cause pain from a distance. The police will use the new weapons to subdue suspects. The devices are under development by the National Institute of Justice, a research, development and evaluation agency of the US Department of Justice. Both projects are being developed on knowledge collected from the controversial project of Pentagon, called Active Denial System, which for the first time was shown to the public in 2007. The ADS uses a 2 meter beam, consisted of short microwaves, to hot up skin's outer layer, thus causing pain to a person. The new non-lethal weapons will use technology similar to ADS but their beams will be only a few centimeters across. These devices are developed to elicit a repel reaction (a strong urge to break away from the beam). Experts at NIJ favor the new weapons over those that cause blunt trauma, like rubber bullets. However, unlike weapons that cause blunt traumas, the new devices are being developed to cause pain with almost no signs of injury. It is worth noting that current blunt trauma weapons may break bones or in some cases even kill, thus the new project is quite welcome. At the same time Pentagon's ADS had problems too - experts carried out a thousand tests during which two people reported second-degree burns.

Researchers called the new laser weapon Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response, shortly PHaSR. It looks like a massive rifle. PHaSR was created in 2005 and it was used by the US air force agency with the goal of temporarily dazzling enemies. NIJ engineers upgraded the device so it would also heat up human skin. They believe the weapon could be used in prison, law enforcement and a variety of other scenarios. The second weapon of NIJ currently represents a tabletop prototype, its range is less than a meter. According to the agency's spokesperson, a 15-meter range backpack-sized prototype will be presented to the public in 2009. Engineers believe that a portable mini-ADS device may prove to be rather useful due to the fact that microwaves are able to penetrate human skin more effectively than the infra-red beam.

( www.infoniac.com )

Source

Experts at the 25C3 Security Congress Berlin have found a weakness in internet digital certificates that allows attackers to forge certificates that are fully trusted by all commonly used web browsers. The researchers from universities in Switzerland and the Netherlands warned that these weaknesses make it possible to impersonate secure websites and email servers and to perform virtually undetectable phishing attacks. When you visit secure websites with URL starting 'https', a small padlock symbol indicates that the website is secured using a digital certificate issued by one of a few trusted Certification Authorities (CAs). To ensure that the digital certificate is legitimate, the browser verifies its signature using standard cryptographic algorithms. The team of researchers has discovered that one of these algorithms, known as MD5, can be misused. Some weaknesses in MD5 were first highlighted in 2004, but the new security holes allow hackers to create their own rogue Certification Authority. ( www.techradar.com )

Source

The spokesman’s office of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it created the channel – idfnadesk – on Monday to “help us bring our message to the world.” The channel currently has more than 2,000 subscribers and hosts 10 videos, some of which have been viewed more than 20,000 times. The black-and-white videos include aerial footage of Israeli Air Force attacks on what are described as rocket launching sites, weapons storage facilities, a Hamas government complex and smuggling tunnels. One video shows what is described as a Hamas patrol boat being destroyed by a rocket fired from an Israeli naval vessel. The IDF spokesman’s office said that some of the videos it had posted to the channel had been removed by YouTube. “We are saddened that YouTube has taken down some of our exclusive footage showing the IDF’s operational success in operation Cast Lead against Hamas extremists in the Gaza Strip,” the IDF spokesman’s office said. “As the state of Israel again faces those who would see it destroyed, it is imperative that we in the IDF show the world the inhumanity directed against us and our efforts to stop it,” it said. ( www.telegraph.co.uk )

Source

Facebook began to increase between 2-3pm - the hour before Her Majesty's speech was broadcast, a survey found. By 5pm it had increased by 25 per cent as broadband Britons contacted their friends and family. But according to the survey, from internet service provider Plusnet, which analysed web usage and traffic over the festive period, the number one website on Christmas Day was Google. Facebook finished second, with rival social networking site Bebo coming in ninth - just behind messaging site MSN. Shopping sites, including Amazon, iTunes, eBay, Argos and Play.com also proved big hits over Christmas and Boxing Day.

( www.telegraph.co.uk )

Source

In the last few days thousands of PC users have illegally downloaded a beta of Microsoft's forthcoming Windows 7 operating system via peer-to-peer software sharing sites. Copies of the software are changing hands via sites such as Pirate Bay and Mininova, with Computerworld reporting:"Mininova listed almost 20 Windows 7 BitTorrents — some of them duplicates of the ones that appeared in searches of Pirate Bay. Two of the torrents on the Mininova site had more than 4,500 seeders each." ( www.techradar.com )

Source

Sony Ericsson's next 'next-gen' phone – which we are tentatively referring to as Xperia 2 – will be released late in 2009 and will NOT be manufactured by HTC according to sources in the Far East. Digitimes reports that rumours suggesting that a number of other Taiwan-based handset makers are in the running to nab the lucrative mobile manufacturing contract – specifically, Pegatron Technology (a spin-off of Asustek) and Mobinnova (a handset maker under Foxconn Electronics).

( www.techradar.com )

Source

Surviving websites may be forced to supplement their revenue with pay-subscriptions, selling members' data or extra financing, the researchers said. The gloomy forecast comes as growth predictions for digital advertising have halved from 17.2pc to 7.2pc for next year, according to eMarketer. The Deloitte research shows that as revenue declines, the cost of storing electronic data has soared to more than $100m (£68m) a year for larger sites, as users increasingly want to upload memory-hungry photos and videos. "The book value of some social networks may be written down and some companies may fail altogether if funding dries up," said Paul Lee, Deloitte director of research for technology and telecommunications. "Average revenue per user for some of the largest new media sites is measured in just pennies per month, not pounds.

"This compares with a typical average revenue per user of tens of dollars for a cable subscriber, a regular newspaper reader or a movie fan." Analysts estimate that there are more than 1,000 social networking sites on the internet, with 100 big players hosting profiles for 22pc of UK internet users. The best known, including MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, are likely to be more resilient in the face of the advertising slowdown. However, many of the most popular social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, do not yet generate large profits. "Neither [Facebook or Twitter] has yet demonstrated that it can make money on a scale that matches its number of users," said Madan Sheina, an analyst at Ovum. "Twitter has yet to sketch out plans to monetise its blogging site. Revenue has always been an issue for Facebook."

( www.telegraph.co.uk )

Source

The latest sighting of the machine comes on a Japanese Sony website, which shows a female model slipping it into her handbag. It appears to use a longer design than is common on current netbooks, lending credence to the notion that it will be different in a very Sony way.
( www.techradar.com )

Source

However, the survey by the Washington-based Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that television remains the preferred medium for Americans. The research found that Americans had changed their news-consumption habits significantly in just the last year. Forty per cent of the 1,489 people surveyed by Pew said they get most of their news from the internet, up from 24 per cent in September 2007, and more than the 35 per cent who cited newspapers as their main news source. But 70 per cent said television is their primary source for national and international news. Only 59 per cent of people younger than 30 years old prefer television, Pew said, down from 68 per cent in the September 2007 survey. ( www.telegraph.co.uk )

Source

Trawling through new patent applications for future gadgets is generally fun, if not necessarily very productive, as is the case with a new device someone at Nokia seems to have dreamed up. The company's application for patents to cover an odd-looking four-piece phone seems unlikely to ever become an actual product, but it's worth a look anyway. ( www.techradar.com )

Source

The QR bar codes allow users to pick up information with the swipe of a mobile phone and have rapidly gained cult status in Japan. From scanning a poster to obtaining cinema times to swiping a pack of tomatoes to find out the size of the farm on which they were grown, there are few aspects of Japanese society untouched by the codes. One example, the ChocoQR, is both innovative and edible and an addition to an ever-growing list of Japanese products into which the small square codes have been fully integrated as society increasingly revolves around mobile phones. The technology is poised to revolutionise the British consumer landscape following the launch of the first major QR code marketing campaign in the UK. Pepsi has placed QR codes on 400 million products for the first time, offering mobile phone-friendly consumers instant access to games, videos, websites, prizes and other entertainment at the swipe of a phone. While QR codes have slowly been creeping into the British consumer scene in the past year, it is the first time a major company has employed the technology on such a scale. Bruno Gruwez, marketing director for Pepsi UK, said: "Not everyone in the UK is going to know how to use QR codes, but we're targeting early adopters. "Young adults and our drinkers very much live in the digital world, so the way we communicate with them is evolving rapidly. "Mobile internet has formed an increasingly significant part of our communications over the last few years and QR codes allow us to go even further, transforming the can into a gateway between the consumer and their digital world." He added: "The widespread use of QR codes in Japan gives a taste of what's to come in the UK, and I expect that we'll see other consumer brands following our lead in using this technology." ( www.telegraph.co.uk )

Source

Researchers at Princeton University in America have discovered an entirely new way to generate laser light. The new lasers were found after scientists working with a quantum cascade laser noticed an unexpected beam – and one that needed less power than a conventional laser beam. Quantum cascade lasers are much smaller than the solid-state lasers found in DVD players. These nanotechnology devices are a tenth as thick as a human hair and 3 millimeters long. Despite their tiny size, quantum cascade lasers are made of hundreds of layers of different semiconductor materials, each one just a few atoms thick. The new type of laser is less sensitive to temperature changes and seems to run well at lower currents, characteristics that make it suitable for the next generation of medical devices and industrial sensors. ( www.techradar.com )

Source

In the largest cybersquatting judgment ever, a federal court in the Northern District of California has awarded Verizon $33.15 million (£22.5 million) from an Internet domain registration company that registered hundreds of domains using Verizon trademarks. OnlineNIC, a company based in San Francisco, had registered at least 663 domain names in its campaign against Verizon. Some were identical to Verizon brands, others were close enough to potentially confuse customers or anyone who accidentally mis-typed URLs - a practice known as typosquatting.

( www.techradar.com )

Source

The new 'emergency notification system' will be put into place next year to replace an existing siren that sounds in the event of a crisis. The current siren is regarded as inadequate way of warning people living in Plymouth, Devon - an area which is described as "hazard rich" - due to the dockyard's nuclear facilities, its Royal Navy weapons depot, a large petrol terminal, a fuel depot and a gas pipeline. So in the event of a nuclear leak, residents living within a 2km (2000m) zone around the site will receive a text message warning them of the danger. The messages will be sent to mobile phones and landlines, giving information on the incident and advice on what to do in order to protect themselves. Giles Perritt, Plymouth City Council's lead officer on civil protection, said: "It will be a warning not just of radiological threats but anything in that part of the city. "We have identified that the dockyard siren does not really do the trick in terms of letting people know quickly." Mr Perritt said in addition to the "20,000 households along the estuary", other areas of the city such as Ernesettle, Torpoint and Saltash will receive texts. Some residents have dismissed the idea as "ridiculous". ( www.telegraph.co.uk )

Source

Garmin is developing an Android based mobile phone to be released in 2009, despite the failure to launch its well-publicised Nuviphone project. Garmin is best known for its range of sat-navs, but the parallels with mobile phones are easy to see. Indeed, with the likes of Google's G1 Android making use of Google Maps and Streetview, it seems only a matter of time before mobile phones can be plugged into vehicles to act as fully fledged sat-navs. Mindful of this, Garmin is actively looking at the mobile phone market and although the Nuviphone has yet to emerge, perhaps a move to the Android engine will galvanise matters. ( www.techradar.com )

Source

The Campaign Against a Surveillance Society has written to the local office of Google to request that the service be discontinued in Japan as it violates the public's privacy. The innovative function provides a 360-degree, street-level view of hundreds of spots across Japan. It caused controversy shortly after its introduction in the country, however, when some images showed the faces of men and women entering short-stay "love hotels" in Tokyo's Shibuya nightlife district. Yasuhiko Tajima, a professor of constitutional law at Tokyo University and head of the group opposed to Street View, told Reuters: "We strongly suspect that what Google has been doing deeply violates a basic right that humans have. "It is necessary to warn society that an IT giant is openly violating privacy rights, which are important rights that the citizens have, through this service." Google Japan failed to return calls to the company's offices on Monday, but a statement on the Google website said, "Street View only features photographs taken on public property and the imagery is no different from what a person can readily see or capture walking down a street. ( www.telegraph.co.uk )

Source

Microsoft has announced that it is to give an extension to the life of its workhorse operating system, Windows XP. Originally the computer giant had asked for retailers to stop requesting Windows XP licences as of 31 January 2009. This has now been extended by five months, to 30 May 2010. Many retailers had already been trying to buy the licenses in bulk before the allotted date, now the distributors have a five-month reprieve to sell to XP-hungry consumers. Although the reason for the extension has not been announced, with the netbooks suing the OS likely to increase in the next year, Windows XP has seen something of resurgence.

( www.techradar.com )

Source

Wireless internet beat Sky+, Sat Navs, iPods and Blackberries to top the poll in a leading gadget magazine. The survey asked readers to choose the greatest technological innovation of the past ten years. Wireless internet was voted for by more than a third of the readers of Stuff. Fevzi Turkalp, who runs the Gadget Detective website, said it was hard to disagree with wireless internet winning most people's votes. It is likely to change far more people's lives over the next decade, he added, as more cities around the country adopt Wi-Max technology, which will transform Wi-Fi hot spots into large areas where people can log onto the internet for free. "Though the jury is still out on whether Wi-Fi technology is completely safe for your health," he said. Other technologies that have won people over in the last decade have been gadgets that have given people far more choice and made their lives far simpler, though many of the winners in the poll were not the first to market. ( www.telegraph.co.uk )

Source

Hardly a surprise to hear, but it looks like Gizmondo 2 is going to miss its mooted release in 2008, with the return of the much-maligned handheld console now skidding and crashing into 2009. Gizmondo creator Carl Freer informed Swedish blogger Hans Sandberg that the credit crunch "has affected us in our ability to fund and get funded in regards to the manufacturing of components." "I was at one point thinking of abandoning the whole project," explained Freer, as our hearts skipped a beat! "I didn't see a way out of it; a way to fund it."( www.techradar.com )

Source

According to a British specialist in robotics, there is an urgent need in ethics guidelines to control the utilization of robots in caring for children and elderly people. The case of Professor Noel Sharkey, of the Department of Computer Science, was published in latest issue of the journal "Science". The professor considers that the use of robots is constantly increasing, which may lead to unexpected risks and ethical issues. Pr. Sharkey expressed special concerns over the influence of "personal care" robots on children and elderly, representing the most vulnerable groups within a society. The expert stated that today there are about 14 companies that create child care robots in Japan and South Korea. Pr. Sharkey is worried about the fact that the steady increase of such robots could "lead to neglect and social exclusion." He outlined that teddy bears become redundant among children, who choose robots and get attached to them. Although, in short-term, robots may provide an entertaining experience for children, who are curious about the machines, in long-term children may get attached to robots, which may lead to psychological problems due to the lack of human contact.

The professor gave example of monkeys who were exposed to personal care robots. They showed inability to deal with other monkey and thus were unable to breed. According to Sharkey there are a lot of robots today that help elderly people. One of them is "My Spoon" - a Japanese creation that automatically feeds elderly. There is also a Japanese electric bathtub robot that washes and rinses older people automatically. The expert is also concerned about the use of robots in military operations, and namely about the location and automatic destruction of targets without human interference. "The ethical problems arise because no computational system can discriminate between combatants and innocents in a close-contact encounter," outlines Sharkey. ( www.infoniac.com )

Source

Internet search giant Google has been accused of back-tracking on its support for net neutrality amid claims that it is trying to broker a deal that would mean its content and services are transmitted more quickly over the internet than that of its competitors. The Wall Street Journal claims that Google is hoping to locate its servers alongside those of internet service providers' to speed up the delivery of its products and services to web users by creating a Google-only "fast lane" for its internet traffic. But Google said the newspaper has misunderstood its intentions, and that it continues to believe in the principle of net neutrality, whereby all content transmitted over the internet – be it a pirated song or legal download from a service such as iTunes – is given equal priority by internet service providers.

Google has said that what it in fact intends to do is co-locate its servers next to those of the internet service providers in order to carry out a process known as "edge caching", where popular content is delivered from nearer to where most people are searching for it, thereby speeding up download and delivery times. It means that a copy of, say, a video clip that's popular with British web users, could be stored on servers in London or Edinburgh, rather than having to be transmitted half-way round the world wide web from Australia, where the clip may originate, every time someone in the UK wants to watch it. ( www.telegraph.co.uk )

Source

Accepting change is hard. It's the same reason old people are disgusted by young people talking loudly on mobile phones and why middle-aged people listen only to Paul Weller records and complain that modern music is 'just banging sounds'. It's also why the idea of replacing our gaming PCs' hard drives with solid state drives seems like madness. The idea of a glorified memory card being better than several decades of established, reliable mechanical technology? Nonsense? Unfortunately, the jig is up. The future is coming on quick and the venerable hard drive may not be able to stand against it. Over the last year, solid state storage has quietly established itself as a reliable mainstay in both netbooks like the Eee PC and in high-end laptops. The capacity may still be rock-bottom, but the Windows load times are frighteningly fast.

What's been slower is the crossover to desktops, as it's hard to take a full-size PC with less than 500GB of storage seriously. Now that the technology's a couple of generations along, the sort of speeds an SSD offers are frankly astonishing. 32GB, 64GB or even 128GB may seem like a miserably small amount of space, but bear in mind that Vista and its pagefile only needs about 20GB. That leaves room enough for your most played couple of games plus Office and Photoshop, all of which will enjoy dramatically quicker load times. The rest of your stuff can lurk on a cheapie half-terabyte secondary hard drive. Soon enough, SSDs themselves will hit that half-terabyte mark, and noisy, sluggish HDDs will be a thing of the past. ( www.techradar.com )

Source

Imagine if 25 million mobile phones were suddenly cut off for good here in the UK, the US or any other part of the Western world – there would be uproar. Still, that's what the Indian government is planning to do there next month as part of a so-called security move. The telecoms ministry of India believes that around 25 million of the country's 315 million mobile phones have fake IMEI numbers or none at all. Without the hardwired codes that are used to identify individual handsets, tracking and stopping illegal activities becomes that much harder. Last month's Mumbai attacks are seen as a key factor in the move. Consequently, the government department is telling phone operators to disconnect all mobiles without proper IMEIs from 6 January next year. ( www.techradar.com )

Source

Running Java benchmark tests on both Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux has shown that yet again, Vista came last. The comparison tests were executed on a Dell Inspiron 1525 notebook with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 processor, 3GB of DDR2 memory, a 250GB Hitachi HTS543225L9A300 HDD, integrated Intel 965 graphics, and a screen resolution of 1280 x 800. The face-off was between Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 and Ubuntu 8.10. Vista used Java 1.6.0_07, while Ubuntu Linux used Java 1.6.0_10. Both Java versions were the stock releases for each operating system at the time of testing.

The Java benchmark tests included Sunflow Rendering System, Bork File Encrypter, Java SciMark, and Java 2D Microbenchmark. All tests ran the same compiled Java byte-code on both Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista. The first test up was with the Sunflow Rendering System. Although that heavily stresses the CPU, both operating systems performed equally. Next up was the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) test, where the fastest performance was seen using Sun's Java stack on Ubuntu 8.10. There Ubuntu significantly outperformed Vista, as it was about 30 per cent faster. The Successive Over Relaxation (SOR) test with Java SciMark also ran fastest on Ubuntu, as the test ran about 33 per cent faster under Linux than it did under Vista. On the Monte Carlo test with Java SciMark, Vista was again blown out of the water, as the JVM was a whopping three times faster on Ubuntu.

The SciMark composite performance test showed Ubuntu turning in the best performance yet again, as it came up as the top performer there too at 50 per cent faster compared to Vista. Vista did come out on top in one test. Its j2dbench performance was a lot better, yet this was most likely due to the Intel graphics stack lacking performance optimisations in Linux.

( www.theinquirer.net )

Source

Hot on the heels of the FLASH, RUSH2 and INFERNO, it appears the Motorola leak department has gone into overdrive by spilling the beans on three more handsets. So say a big hello to the NIAGRA, FAIRBANKS and HARMONY, Motorola's attempt to ward off the evil credit crunch feeling that has been dominating its offices of late. The NIAGRA is clearly the prettiest of the bunch here, with an angular chassis and RAZR style flush buttons, thus enabling a thinner form factor from this slider, and could even be part of the RAZR range that Moto will never, ever be able to put down. ( www.techradar.com )

Source

According to the Grauniad, Apple insiders and third party developers have been dropping hints that the next iteration of OSX, currently codenamed Snow Leopard, will be released into the wild at the eagerly-anticipated annual shindig. And apart from the widely-predicted slimming down of the OS, pundits are predicting two major changes to the way the operating system crunches numbers. Grand Central is a new technology designed to better use the Intel processors inside all modern Macs. But OpenCL promises to make even the lowliest Mac into a speed demon by passing chunks of complex calculations onto unused graphics card processing power. Low-end Macbooks currently have 16 processors sitting idle on the graphics card most of the time. Using this additional number-crunching facility can speed up some operations tenfold. Top-end Mac Pros have up to 64 GPU cores sitting around doing not a lot most of the time and so may benefit from GPU offloading even more. Apple originally said that the new OS would be ready for a June release, but it looks like Macaddicts' intense excitement over OpenCL has accelerated the process somewhat. And with Windows 7 looming on the horizon, Apple's got good reason to want to get Snow Leopard out the door sooner rather than later. ( www.theinquirer.net )

Source

Google has taken the aggressive step of advising some of the people using its Gmail webmail to use Chrome or Firefox rather than Internet Explorer. When users log into their Gmail using Internet Explorer a red text link appears at the top right of the page saying 'get faster Google Mail.' If you click on the link then you are taken through to a Google answers page that suggests that you should use a faster browser. The suggestions it makes are Google's own Chrome browser or Firefox 3.0.

( www.techradar.com )

Source