Google is undergoing an investigation by the European Union for its $3.1 billion acquisition of internet advertiser DoubleClick. The United States’ Federal Trade Commission has been reviewing the acquisition since May
CNET has branched out from tech news and reviews to launch its own online music service, the snappily titled CNET.com.au Music Centre. So far the site offers over 90,000 free downloads and streams from over 17,000 indy artists
Physiatrist Todd A Kuiken, MD PhD, has pioneered a technique known as targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR), that allows a prosthetic arm to respond directly to the brain’s signals, allowing wearers to open and close their artificial hands and bend and straighten their artificial elbows nearly as naturally as their own arms. Doctors first perform nerve transfer surgery to redirect nerves that go to the amputated arm to the patient’s chest muscles. Then when the chest muscle contracts, an electromyogram picks up the electrical signal to move the prosthetic arm. So when the patient thinks close hand
, the hand closes. Now the team wants to see if they can extract more information from the electrical signals produced by the nerves to provide a greater number of hand and arm movements. They have been able to identify unique EMG patterns with 95% accuracy for 16 different elbow, wrist, hand, thumb and finger movements — via Slashdot
Online book seller and retail chain Dymocks has taken a leap into electronic publishing with the launch of Dymocks Digital, allowing customers to purchase audible and digital forms of the traditional paper book. Taking a lengthy 30 months to complete the project, Dymocks now offers some 13,000 audible and 120,000 readable titles which can be accessed through the company’s Web site or new touch screen kiosks at the main Sydney store
Marvel is putting some of its older comics online Tuesday, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared. It’s a tentative move onto the Internet: Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded, and new issues will only go online at least six months after they first appear in print
One NATO figure said the effect was as big a shock as the Russians launching Sputnik
. American military chiefs have been left dumbstruck by an undetected Chinese submarine popping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exercise and close to the vast USS Kitty Hawk. By the time it surfaced, the 160ft Song Class diesel-electric attack submarine had sailed within viable range for launching torpedoes or missiles at the carrier. The incident caused consternation in the US Navy, which had no idea China’s fast-growing submarine fleet had reached such a level of sophistication — via Slashdot
The shadowy hacker and malware hosting network that only recently fled Russia to set up operations in China has now pulled the plug there and vanished yet again. An analyst at VeriSign’s iDefense Labs unit said iDefense had tracked RBN’s migration earlier in the week from servers based in Russia to ones running in China, after obtaining at least seven net blocks of Chinese IP addresses. As of Wednesday, RBN controlled 5,120 IP addresses assigned to Chinese service providers; known RBN clients were even seen using those addresses that day. But with its China move putting the spotlights of the media and the security community on the organization, RBN suddenly went offline on Thursday. They severed connections to six of the seven net blocks on November 8,
the analyst said. RBN as a single organisation may be dead and gone; it may even now be breaking up into smaller pieces farmed out to multiple countries’ Internet infrastructures — via Slashdot
There’s a new antenna that consists of plasma and essentially vanishes when you turn it off. While it may seem to not have many uses in the commercial world, it is very important to military personnel who risk detection or for anybody wishing to avoid signal jamming
The Mozilla Foundation’s chief executive now earns roughly half a million in pay and benefits. With $70 million in assets, the Foundation gave out less than $300,000 in grants to open source projects in 2006. And in 2006 85% of their $66 million in revenue came from Google. When these figures first came to light, people worried whether Firefox was becoming a pawn in Google’s cold war with Microsoft. The Foundation addressed these fears and largely laid them to rest; but now the worry is that, even though it’s clear that the community’s code is what makes Firefox successful, Mozilla may be becoming dangerously reliant on Google’s cash — via Slashdot
The RCMP announced that it will stop targeting people who download copyrighted material for personal use [Google translation]. Their priority will be to focus on organized crime and copyright theft that affects the health and safety of consumers, such as copyright violations related to medicine and electrical appliances, instead of the cash flow of large corporations. Around the same time that the CRIA successfully took Demonoid offline, the RCMP made clear that Demonoid’s users don’t have to worry about getting prosecuted, at least not in Canada. Piracy for personal use is no longer targeted,
Noël St-Hilaire, head of copyright theft investigations of the RCMP, said in an interview. It is too easy to copy these days and we do not know how to stop it
— via Slashdot
Customers aren’t the only ones frustrated with the high-definition format wars — Sony CEO Howard Stringer is reaching the end of his rope as well. Blu-ray, which is backed by Sony, was doing well up until recently and winning the war based on merits, Stringer said at an event in New York. That is, up until movie studio Paramount decided to change sides
and go exclusively HD DVD in August. Things have apparently become more difficult since then, and the high-profile CEO is showing signs of wear
DRM-free music sells at a much higher rate online than protected music, according to UK-based digital music store 7 Digital. In fact, customers buy it four times as often as they do DRMed music. As a result, almost 80 percent of the store’s sales are of DRM-free content. 7 Digital may not sound familiar to some, but it carries over 3 million songs and has many selections from major artists in addition to independent labels
It looks as though the next meeting of the UN’s Internet Governance Forum is about to descend into another heated debate about US control of key Internet systems. Although the initial purpose of this year’s summit was to cover such issues as spam, free speech and cheaper access, it appears that nations such as China, Iran, and Russia, among others, would rather discuss US control of the Internet. In meetings leading to up to the second annual meeting of the IGF in Rio de Janiero on Monday, these nations won the right to hold an opening-day panel devoted to critical Internet resources
. While a number of countries wanting to internationalise Internet control simply want to have more say over policies such as creating domain names in languages other than English, we can only speculate what additional motives might be driving nations that heavily censor the Internet and lock down the flow of information across it — via Slashdot
In Los Angeles criminal court, security consultant John Schiefer, 26, has admitted infecting the systems of his clients with viruses to form a botnet containing a maximum of 250,000 systems. Schiefer used his zombies to steal users’ PayPal usernames and passwords to make unauthorised purchases, as well as to install adware on their computers without their consent. Schiefer agreed to plead guilty to four felony charges of accessing protected computers to commit fraud, disclosing illegally intercepted electronic communications, wire fraud and bank fraud. He will be sentenced 3 December and faces up to 60 years in prison and a fine of $1.75 million
Nissan is developing a paramagnetic iron oxide paint polymer. Using an electrical charge, the arrangement of iron oxide crystals can be tweaked, adjusting the car’s colour. Nissan claims to have the technology on the market extremely soon, by 2010 if possible. However, there’s a catch. A small amount of current is always needed to maintain the arrangement of iron oxide (your custom car colour). So when you leave your car parked/off, the car turns white
Paul Barford, a computer scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wants to build a new line of defence against malicious traffic which has become today a billion-dollar shadow industry
. As one of the most menacing aspects of botnets is that they can go largely undetected
by a PC owner, he developed a new computer security technique for detecting network intrusions. His system has a 99.9% detection rate of malicious signatures, roughly equivalent to some of the best commercial systems. But it has zero false positives when commercial systems have high numbers. This new system could soon be available commercially
Musician Moby has become the latest artist to give away tracks for free, but not to just anybody… he’s showing some love to independent filmmakers, letting indie, student and non-profit filmmakers use select songs for free
Hushmail, a longtime provider of encrypted web-based email, markets itself by saying that not even a Hushmail employee with access to our servers can read your encrypted e-mail, since each message is uniquely encoded before it leaves your computer
. But it turns out that statement seems not to apply to individuals targeted by government agencies
A new range of Fujitsu Siemens monitors don’t draw power during standby. The technology uses capacitors and relays to avoid drawing power when no video signal is present. With political parties all over Europe calling for a ban on standby, this small development could end up as one of the most significant advances in recent times. The British Government estimates eight percent of all domestic electricity is consumed by devices in standby
NASA and its Applied Sciences Program will be using 14 satellites to watch the Earth’s environment and help predict and prevent infectious disease outbreaks around the world. Through orbiting satellites, data is collected daily to monitor environmental changes. That information is then passed on to agencies such as the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Defense who then apply the data to predict and track disease outbreaks and assist in making public health policy decisions. The use of remote sensing technology helps scientists predict the outbreak of some of the most common and deadly infectious diseases such as Ebola, West Nile virus and Rift Valley Fever
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