Samsung has developed a new super chip with enough capacity to store 36,000 high-resolution photographs or 40 movie files
Australian researchers developing a Bionic Eye say early tests have succeeded in stimulating limited visual sensation in people suffering a rare form of genetic blindness
It turns out that to use UnBox, the user has to download software from Amazon that contains a Windows service (ADVWindowsClientService.exe). Tom Merritt over at C|Net reports that the service tries to connect to the internet quite frequently. Even tweaking msconfig could not prevent it. So, in summary, to be allowed the privilege of purchasing a video that I can’t burn to DVD and can’t watch on my iPod, I have to allow a program to hijack my start-up and force me to login to uninstall it? No way. Sorry, Amazon. I love a lot of what you do, but I will absolutely not recommend this service. Try again
— via Slashdot
An incredibly diverse coalition of high-powered public interest groups, industry associations, and corporations have signed an open letter to the US Patent and Trademark Office rejecting the Broadcast Treaty, a US-led UN initiative that could do untold harm to artists, tech and telecoms companies, scholars, and people with disabilities
Samsung’s US Web site is hosting a Trojan horse that logs keystrokes, disables antivirus applications and steals online banking access codes, according to Internet security firm Websense
New Zealand’s lead state sector agency yesterday responded to criticism of its new digital rights management guidelines, saying the policy does not alter its support for open source software in government agencies
Xerox has lifted the veil from some of its research and development work in the field of printing. They demoed the very intriguing transient documents. These offer the prospect of reusable paper in the sense that the content is automatically erased after a period of time, ready for fresh printing. Inspired by the fact that many print outs have a life-span of a few hours (think of the emails you may print out just to read, or the content you proof read on the train journey back home), the specially prepared paper will preserve its content for up to 16 hours
Amazon.com has launched it’s Amazon Unbox video store. Looks like about 1300 movies and 350 tv series, at US$9.99 and up for movies and US$1.99 per TV episode. Downloads come with a DVD quality version and a version more appropriate for portable players (using Windows DRM). Also, videos can be re-downloaded from your Amazon media library — via Slashdot
Google has launched a free news archive service enabling internet users to search for printed articles dating back to the 1700s
In an effort to track down the source of information leaks by Hewlett-Packard insiders, private investigators working for the company obtained reporters’ telephone records without permission. The reporters’ records were accessed as part of a private investigation into news leaks that was initiated by company Chairwoman Patricia Dunn
Sony will delay the launch of its PlayStation 3 Australia and Europe giving rivals Microsoft and Nintendo a free run at the Christmas shopping season
FreeDOS 1.0 has been released only a little bit later than planned. The 1.0 milestone is considered to be a stable and viable MS-DOS replacement
and features long filename support, HIMEM and EMM386 management, and CD-ROM support
Apple may soon launch a service that allows users to download feature-length films, boosting its presence in the digital home
Matsushita Electric Industrial said Tuesday it has begun recalling 6,000 lithium-ion batteries used in Panasonic-brand notebook computers on concerns they might overheat
Google is asking surfers with time on their hands to help it categorise and label the images indexed by its search engine, building a database of knowledge about the contents of the images
Google, which refused in the past year to hand over user search data to US authorities fighting children’s access to pornography, said yesterday that it was complying with a Brazilian court’s orders to turn over data that could help identify users accused of taking part in online communities that encourage racism, pedophilia and homophobia. The difference, it says, is scale and purpose. The Justice Department wanted Google’s entire search index, billions of pages and two months’ worth of queries, for a broad civil case. Brazil, by contrast, is looking for information in specific cases involving Google’s social networking site, Orkut
Canadian Ministers of Education are pushing a copyright proposal that will harm Internet access and a copyright group is seeking to create a new license for Internet content. Access Copyright, a copyright collective, wants to use a new international text standard to license everything from books to blogs. Geist outlines in his blog how Canadians can fight back against these proposals — via Slashdot
There’s a new video codec out there that claims to offer up to 40 percent better video quality
but that resets your computer’s DNS settings — opening the way for Trojans, rootkits or whatever. Techworld warns that zCodec looks professional enough, is widely available, and comes in at 100KB — via Slashdot
Researchers at Microsoft have completed work on a prototype framework called BrowserShield that promises to intercept and remove, on the fly, malicious code hidden on Web pages, instead showing users safe equivalents of those pages. The BrowserShield project, an outgrowth of the company’s Shield
initiative, could one day even become Microsoft’s answer to zero-day browser exploits such as the WMF (Windows Metafile) attack that spread like wildfire in December 2005
The recently released Browzar
web browser, based on the Internet Explorer core, is designed to protect a user’s privacy whilst surfing the Internet and be an effective throw-away
browser. However many who deal with the removal of malware have flagged this software as malware. The application Browzar has been branded adware
by many because it directs web searches to online adverts. Some technical experts also say Browzar, which claims to leave no trail of web pages visited, does not work. Browzar’s developers say they are examining the feedback but strongly deny that it is adware
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