2010/10/26

NEW NET Issues List for 26 Oct 2010

Below is the final list of issues for the Tuesday, 26 October 2010, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering. This week we're upstairs at Tom's Drive In, 501 N Westhill Blvd, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA -- if there's a chain across the steps, ignore it and come on upstairs.

The ‘net

1. Live Documents Challenges Google, Microsoft and Zoho http://business.rediff.com/special/2010/oct/11/spec-sabeer-bhatias-next-mega-project.htm “…The Live Documents service offered…InstaColl is already a big success in India especially among the education fraternity…Bhatia…was on a visit to India to sign a contract with the Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) for Live Documents. The company has also signed up with the Karnataka government, which will implement the use of Live Documents in all 300,000 personal computers in government offices across 30 districts…The product was developed with the help of just 30 people…all Indians, and all based out of Bangalore…At the core of InstaColl's Live Documents is Adobe's Flash technology, the reason why it is perhaps the only company in Asia to get nominated for the Adobe Max Awards…InstaColl's office productivity suite runs on both…Internet browser (cloud) as well as on the desktop…with 100 per cent feature compatibility with Office…Bhatia does not want to stop here. He is also working with a couple of "cool" product ideas for Sabse Technologies. Sabse already has a free video conferencing platform in the cloud, called SabseBolo. Besides, the company's consumer application 'jaxtr', which enables one to make free calls internationally from any mobile phone…”

2. What’s Next for Posterous: Geo, Groups, Premium http://gigaom.com/2010/10/20/whats-next-for-posterous-geo-groups-premium/ Posterous, the email-based blogging platform, emphasizes simplicity and ease of use, yet it keeps adding new features…We are on the WordPress* end of the spectrum, but people think we’re micro-blogging because we’re so simple…The company has some new features in the works: increased support for groups, premium accounts for businesses, proximity-based geoblogs, and a better bookmarklet to bring in outside content…” [do you use Posterous.com or scribd.com, or do you know people who do? – ed.]

3. CarWoo Takes the Cheap Suit Out Of Car Sales http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/10/carwoo-takes-the-cheap-suit-out-of-car-sales/ If you’ve ever contacted a car dealer online, you’re familiar with the internet sales pitch: relentless phone calls and e-mails…CarWoo, aims to change that by connecting you with firm offers from dealers while preserving your privacy. The new service only helps out with new car sales right now, though the company says it may open up to used cars…Shoppers pay a fee to CarWoo and select the car they want…CarWoo will facilitate quotes from two to five nearby dealerships. Buyers are free to negotiate the final price…The process is transparent, and both the buyer and the dealers involved see all of the offers that come in. Buyers indicate how much they’re willing to pay and sellers decide whether the offer is acceptable. Dealers can see the negotiations in real time and — if they are able — can undercut their competitors directly to offer the best price…CarWoo has about 3,200 dealers participating nationwide, with 50 more added each week…Because potential car buyers have to put down money up front, dealers can be sure the leads they get from CarWoo are customers who are ready to buy…Whether customers decide the service is worth a fee of $39 or $79 remains to be seen, but we can certainly imagine some weary souls with inboxes full of spam from dealerships might be interested in negotiating the price of a used car at their own desk rather than the sales manager’s…”

4. ROME, a Content Creation and Publishing Tool for Virtually Anyone http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/10/introducing-the-public-preview-of-project-rome-a-content-creation-and-publishing-tool-for-virtually-anyone.html “…You…want to create an interactive report complete with video and music, spice up presentations with animation and interactivity, craft a visual email with self-created graphics, or design and publish your first website for the world to see. But, you don’t know where to start…we’re excited to offer a first look into Project ROME, an all-in-one content creation and publishing application for use at home, work or school*. It is intended for virtually anyone who wants to add the power of video, audio, photos, graphics, text or animation into everyday projects — from printed materials and presentations to digital documents and websites…Our goal is to make Project ROME so intuitive and fluid, that the technology doesn’t get in your way of expressing ideas with video, audio, photos, graphics, text and animation…Project ROME is for those of us who aren’t professional designers, but want to express our ideas in a more powerful way using digital content…Adobe is offering Project ROME as a free preview – a public beta. We invite you to check it out at http://rome.adobe.com...please tell us what you think. For teachers, we made a special version for you to try – Project ROME for Education…”

5. 100 Mbps DSL is Here & 800 Mbps is Around the Corner http://gigaom.com/2010/10/25/100-mbps-dsl/ “…a new breakthrough shows that it will only be a matter of time before DSL broadband crosses the 800 Mbps threshold…we are beginning to see the commercial availability of DSL that can deliver 100 Mbps…While fiber networks are better in the long run, most phone companies need to squeeze out more from their copper networks without losing too much ground to cable broadband rivals…Ikanos, a maker of broadband chips today introduced a new technology, NodeScale Vectoring, DSL access technology that allows connections at 100 Mbps and higher…the cost of deploying this technology is about a tenth of the cost of building a fiber to the home network…NodeScale technology allows carriers to eliminate the crosstalk that occurs on copper pairs when offering very high-speed Internet. The cross talk introduces noise in the network, which in turn limits the line quality and thus reduces the performance of the network…NodeScale essentially tames cross talk at the DSLAM level as opposed to line card vectoring which treats every line card as a separate crosstalk domain…”

6. Researchers to develop 1 Terabit Ethernet by 2015 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/emergingtech/researchers-to-develop-1-terabit-ethernet-by-2015/2397 “…current Ethernet technologies may not be able to keep up with the speed and bandwidth required for applications like streaming high definition video, cloud computing, and distributed data storage…researchers with the Terabit Optical Ethernet Center (TOEC) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) are aiming for 1 Terabit Ethernet over optical fiber — 1 trillion bits per second — by 2015 and 100 Terabit Ethernet by 2020. Google, Verizon, Intel, Agilent Technologies and Rockwell Collins are partnering with TOEC…Today’s networking equipment is hitting a wall as 100 Gigabits per second is implemented because of the amount of power needed to run and cool the required systems…Using energy-saving technologies based on photonics is the path forward…Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs report that optical transmission gear consumes more than a factor of 10 less than other network technologies such as cellular base stations and packet routers…”

7. LimeWire Is Officially Dead http://www.businessinsider.com/limewire-officially-dead-seeks-resurrection-2010-10 LimeWire, which was once the iTunes of file-sharing software, is officially dead…the Lime Group received a permanent injunction (PDF here) this afternoon from U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood ordering it to stop distributing and supporting LimeWire…It's quite a downfall for a piece of software that was once found on one-third of all PCs worldwide…Earlier this month, the company contacted me to talk about plans for a forthcoming service that will launch with a different name…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

8. Japan has national botnet warriors; why don't we? http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/10/japan-has-a-national-botnet-fighter-wheres-ours.ars “…the United States…more PC botnet infections than any other country in the world. Microsoft reports 2.2 million US PCs hijacked for cybercrime or distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks…government…measures ought to bear fruit in the next geological era or two. But in the meantime, how about we do what Japan did and set up a national botnet fighter?...Launched in 2006, it's called the Cyber Clean Center—a joint project of Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications and its Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. Over sixty of Japan's Internet Service Providers work with the center, as do Symantec, Microsoft, McAfee, and six other security companies. Cyber Clean does the usual good stuff, trying to raise public awareness…But the Cyber Clean operation goes a massive step further than public education. It searches for bot-infected PCs, then engages in a series of "attention rousing activities" to get the user to realize that her computer has been hijacked…the project's latest "activity report" says that, as of August, it has collected almost 17 million bot samples and deployed over half a million "attention rousing" messages. An estimated 32.3 percent of users contacted actually go to their deinfestation page and download the relevant cleaning software, according to the organization. The campaign says it has counted 1,312,083 disinfectant downloads so far…”

9. Firesheep Extension Lets You Hack Into Twitter, Facebook Accounts Easily http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/24/firesheep-in-wolves-clothing-app-lets-you-hack-into-twitter-facebook-accounts-easily/ “…Developer Eric Butler has exposed the soft underbelly of the web with his new Firefox extension, Firesheep, which will let you essentially eavesdrop on any open Wi-Fi network and capture users’ cookies…As soon as anyone on the network visits an insecure website known to Firesheep, their name and photo will be displayed” in the window. All you have to do is double click on their name and open sesame, you will be able to log into that user’s site with their credentials. One word: wow…” http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/25/lazy-hackers-twitter-firesheep-boasts-100000-downloads-faceboo/ “…In roughly 24 hours, Firesheep has been downloaded more than 104,000 times, as would-be-hackers — or the merely curious— downloaded the Firefox extension to test the exploit…” http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2010/10/26/firesheep-usage-leads-to-idiocy.html “…In response to the rapid uptake of Firesheep, Jonty Wareing has just released a somewhat different tool called Idiocy. This acts as "a warning shot to people browsing the internet insecurely" by sniffing network traffic to see if anyone is visiting the Twitter website over an unencrypted HTTP connection; and if they are, it will hijack the session and automatically post a tweet to warn them that they are vulnerable. The tweets helpfully include a link to a page which explains what happened, and how to prevent it happening in the future…”

10. Every UK email and website to be stored http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8075563/Every-email-and-website-to-be-stored.html “…plans are expected to involve service providers storing all users details for a set period of time. That will allow the security and police authorities to track every phone call, email, text message and website visit made by the public if they argue it is needed to tackle crime or terrorism…The move was buried in the Government's Strategic Defence and Security Review, which revealed: "We will introduce a programme to preserve the ability of the security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to obtain communication data and to intercept communications within the appropriate legal framework…Communications data provides evidence in court to secure convictions of those engaged in activities that cause serious harm. It has played a role in every major Security Service counter terrorism operation and in 95 per cent of all serious organised crime investigations…”

11. Bredolab botnet shut down http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002056.html “…The Dutch National Crime Squad has announced a major takedown…Bredolab is a large family of complicated, polymorphic trojans. They have been distributed via drive-by-downloads and email. Bredolab is known to be connected to email spam campaigns and rogue security products. And the size of the botnet was massive: over 30 million infected computers and close to 150 command & control servers…the crime squad has announced that they will be sending a warning to infected PCs…they will probably use the existing botnet infrastructure to send a program to all infected machines, showing them a warning…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

12. TomTom, HTC team up on mobile navigation http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-20020144-94.html TomTom and HTC…announced today that HTC Locations, the smartphone maker's new mapping and navigation service, will come preloaded with TomTom's "location-rich" maps…Since TomTom's maps will come preloaded, the companies are promising quick access to maps and locations…Though the TomTom maps and locations will be freely and automatically available on the phones, users who want turn-by-turn directions will still need to buy and download them through HTC Locations or HTC Sync…TomTom's maps and HTC Locations will also compete with the free Google Maps, which already has a home on many Android phones and other mobile devices…”

13. Windows Phone 7 Review http://www.anandtech.com/show/3982/windows-phone-7-review “…mobile wars have only just begun and despite the advantage enjoyed by Apple and Google, there is no end in sight. In another twelve months we will see fierce competition from HP, Microsoft and Nokia. There’s a lot at stake, and no company is willing to give up the opportunity to own the next-PC market without a hell of a fight…Windows Phone 7 is a significant departure from anything Microsoft has ever done in the past, from a UI standpoint that is. In my opinion it’s more beautiful than anything else on the market today - including Apple’s iOS…Flipping through pages upon pages of square app icons just isn’t the most efficient way to do it…When you unlock your iPhone or Android phone you’re dropped into what’s effectively your smartphone desktop. In iOS, that’s just a collection of app icons with a 4-icon dock at the bottom. Android gives you more of a modern desktop with icons and optional widgets. Windows Phone 7 effectively drops you into the first layer of a start menu - that’s your desktop…”

14. T-Mobile to debut tethering plan on November 3rd, $14.99 http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/10/26/t-mobile-to-debut-tethering-plan-on-november-3rd-14-99/ “…America’s fourth largest carrier will begin to offer/charge for tethering on November 3rd. The Tethering and Wi-Fi Sharing Add-On, which will have a monthly cost of $14.99, will allow customers to use their smartphones as a tethered modem or Wi-Fi hotspot. Starting on 11/3, in order to legally share your device’s internet connection on T-Mobile, you’ll need: a 3G or HSPA+ capable device, an unlimited web plan of $19.95 or higher, and the $14.99 tethering add-on. The offering will be available to both postpaid and Flex Pay customers who meet the above requirements…”

15. Wi-Fi Direct Products Connect Without A Network http://www.informationweek.com/news/infrastructure/remote_access/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227900741 The first batch of Wi-Fi Direct products were formally certified Monday, launching a wireless technology in which devices will be able to communicate directly with each other without being on a network or without first connecting to a network access point…We designed Wi-Fi Direct to unleash a wide variety of applications which require device connections, but do not need the Internet or even a traditional network,” said Edgar Figueroa, CEO of the Wi-Fi Alliance, in a statement. “Wi-Fi Direct empowers users to connect devices -- when, where and how they want to…Broadcom cited the examples of friends in a train or on a beach connecting seamlessly with each other without network assistance. Citing file transfer and gaming applications as possible apps, Nagarajan said mass-market adoption will “depend on the type of applications that make use of the disruptive connection mechanisms offered through Wi-Fi Direct…”

16. Ortustech reveals 4.8-inch 1080p display that puts Apple’s Retina Display to shame http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/ortustech-reveals-4-8-inch-1080p-display-that-puts-apples-retina-display-to-shame-20101026/ Once you see one, it’s hard to go back from Apple’s Retina Display, their super high-density touch panel for the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch…As pixel-dense as it is, it isn’t full high-definition. Enter little-known panel maker Ortustech, a joint venture between Casio and Toppan Printing…Ortustech is showing off a doozy of a display this week: a 4.8-inch HAST (Hyper Amorphous Silicon TFT) LCD with a 160 degree viewinng angle, 16.8 million colors, a truly retina display caliber pixel density of 458ppi and… oh yeah… a 1920 x 1080 resolution…”

17. Walgreen’s now selling a $99 Android tablet http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2010/10/26/walgreens-now-selling-99-android-tablet/ “…the Maylong M-150, a 7″ (800×480) Android tablet. It runs v1.6 on a 400MHz CPU and 256MB RAM. It has Wifi, a resistive touchscreen, speakers, microSD card slot, and it even ships with a dongle that provides 10/100 and USB ports. The product page lists that the M-150 ships with a full browser, reading app, Youtube, and a video player…”

Open Source

18. Asterisk 1.8 - Major Release Sports 200 New Features http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/asterisk/asterisk-18---major-release-sports-200-new-features.asp “…Asterisk 1.8 includes includes new security features, integration with IPv6 and extensive feature additions…if someone wants to develop a product or solution based on Asterisk 1.8, now is a great time to get in, because you'll get four years of support from Digium...The new ISDN features in Asterisk 1.8 are a big step forward for the European Asterisk community…Even without the ISDN enhancements, the pure performance jump in 1.8 is significant. We can save money on hardware because more calls can be handled by a single Asterisk installation…some highlighted new features in Asterisk 1.8…Secure real-time transport protocol (RTP) support—New end-to-end VoIP encryption of signaling and media to compliment the existing encrypted signaling support…SRTP support will…allow for government and financial deployments of the Asterisk platform…Calendar integration—Support for Microsoft Exchange, CalDav and iCalendar. This is a pretty cool feature. If for instance your Calendar has you listed as in a meeting, Asterisk can automatically send the caller to your voicemail…Channel event logging (CEL)—Enhanced call tracking and logging for better audit trail and billing purposes…Google Talk and Google Voice support—Inbound and outbound support for Google Talk and Google Voice calling…”

19. Ten reasons Linux is the best choice for kids http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/desktop-os/2010/10/17/ten-reasons-linux-is-the-best-choice-for-kids-40090466/ “…keeping our children's computers running can be a bigger challenge than sorting out the adults at work. But if you install Linux at home, you can avoid the headaches. That's because sound reasons exist for migrating young users from other operating systems…Viruses and malware…Youngsters are prone to opening and installing things they shouldn't. Because you can't watch them all the time, you can't know where they're getting those applications or attachments from…With Linux, this concern evaporates…Security…If you don't give your children the root password, they can't run with root privileges…Cost effectiveness…Age-specific tools…Netbooks…the Linux operating system is ideally suited to run on netbooks…Agile learners…Most kids will master the Linux operating system quickly…Learning opportunities…Open source suits education. It practically screams: "Open me up and learn…”

20. Most Touch Screen ebook Readers Run on Linux http://steamingopencup.blogspot.com/2010/10/most-touch-screen-ebook-readers-run-on.html Want to go on an ebook-reading marathon for two weeks? You don’t need an iPad. All you need is a decent touch screen ebook reader. They can last more than 10 days…E-ink displays, which most of these ebook readers use, consume less power, are less susceptible to glare, are less strenuous to the eyes, and most of all, cost much less than even the most basic iPad…why did I…leave the numero uno ebook reader on the market today - Amazon’s Kindle - out of the picture. Because I find clicking buttons so outdated and flicking through virtual pages with fingers so cool…You know what else most of them have in common aside from the e-ink display? - a Linux-based OS…”

SkyNet

21. Google Engineer Builds Facebook Disconnect http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/20/google-facebook-disconnec/ “…Google engineer Brian Kennish, inspired by the most recent Facebook privacy and data debacles…decided to create “Facebook Disconnect” i.e. a Google Chrome extension that obliterates all Facebook Connect functionality and all traffic from third party sites to Facebook servers…Facebook Disconnect will “presumably” prevent the sending of data back to Facebook across the one million sites that use the Facebook Connect service…he created the extension to help quell his desire to delete his Facebook account…with absolutely no encouragement from Google or Facebook, despite the fact that he works for the former, “Nobody at Google asked or encouraged me to do so, or probably, even knows who I am…”

22. Google Ventures Invests In Local Deals Site Signpost http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/20/signpost-local-deals/ “…Google Ventures didn’t just invest in a Groupon clone…Signpost…looks to help you find the best deals in your neighborhood…you’ll find a listing of deals at restaurants, retailers, and other merchants located in your city (you can zoom in if you want to restrict your search to within a few-blocks)…unlike sites like Groupon, there are dozens or even hundreds of deals visible on Signpost at once, ranging from happy hour at your local bar to a 40% discount at a nearby spa…The site’s biggest difference from Groupon, though, is the source of its deals: instead of having a salesforce reaching out to merchants, most deals are submitted by other users…if you notice that your local coffee shop is offering a two-for-one special on drinks, you can log onto Signpost and tell your friends. At this point there isn’t much incentive to do this — you can earn karma points but can’t exchange them for anything — but it sounds like Signpost has plans to encourage posting more deals down the line…”

23. Google Docs Gets Drag-and-Drop Support http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371150,00.asp “…Google is making it a little bit easier to spruce up a document with the addition of a drag-and-drop option to Google Docs, which will allow users to pull an image directly from the desktop and place it on the page. "Google documents already has three ways to add images: you can choose them from your hard drive, add them by URL, and you can find them using Google Image Search…In January, Google launched cloud storage for any type of file that included up to 1GB of free storage…”

24. Business Photos Help Build Google Places/Maps Brand Identity http://searchengineland.com/business-photos-help-build-google-placesmaps-brand-identity-53925 Google’s effort to bring photographers to local businesses to capture interior and exterior images now bearing fruit…the images that its contractors have been collecting (all over the world) are now online…Users and potential customers who look online for local businesses can now see more high-quality photos that give them a sense of what a place is really like. The photos may include the storefront, decor, layout, merchandise, food, signage about hours and accepted payment types, and other items that help people learn more about a business…Business owners can also add their own images and video as well and Google continues to encourage them to do so…By building out your Place page with visuals and other relevant business information – such as hours of operation, offers and more – you’ll help potential customers learn more about you and feel like they know what to expect when they actually walk through your doors…Google’s push to enrich Places with images, reviews, Street View, video, and so on, is an effort to make Places the favored local consumer resource online and in mobile. A more complete set of data and information will also help them successfully compete for consumer attention with Facebook Places/Pages…Places Pages remain somewhat buried behind the “more info” link within Maps, although they do surface in SERPs for business name lookups…”

25. Google Groups Data To Be Destroyed! http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=308700 I'm not sure what's worse here: the fact that some of my data is going to go away, or the fact that I found this out almost by accident…I find Google Groups to be very useful; it solves an important problem. I rely on it…So I was quite disturbed when I went to create a page within a group, and I came across this rather mildly-headlined Notice About Pages and Files…Notice the last line of the third paragraph: "In February 2011, we will turn off the pages and files features, and you will no longer be able to access that content…I suspect there are significant numbers of people who will discover it too late, the way Google is playing this one…you can save your data if you (1) find out about its impending doom and (2) move it to Google Docs or Google Sites. Both of these require action on your part, and if you don't act your data will quietly become unavailable (same as "destroyed")…”

26. Google Tests 1G-bps Broadband Network at Stanford http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Networking/Google-Tests-1Gbps-Broadband-Network-at-Stanford-University-244231/ “…Google struck a deal with Stanford University to build a broadband network fueling Internet speeds of up to 1G bps for 850 homes owned by faculty and staff on the campus…The search engine, which depends on fast broadband connections to ensure its applications serve consumers effectively, said in February it planned to test such networks in American communities serving 50,000 to 500,000 people. Google accepted applications from municipalities all over the country through March and will announce the winner or winners by the end of the year…”

General Technology

27. Apple Killed The CD Today http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/20/a-compact-death/ “…The CD and other optical discs, like DVDs and Blu-rays, are obviously going to live on for a while as a way to transport media. But make no mistake that today, with two unveilings, Apple has effectively sealed the fate of the optical disc in the computer industry. Soon, it will go the way of the floppy disk…I came to the realization that I had never once used the optical drive in my current MacBook Pro, and it was simply taking up a lot of space and was making my computer unnecessarily bulky…DVD to reinstall OS X and other software…has been replaced with a super-slim USB stick…flash memory cards…are already blowing DVDs out of the water when it comes to storage…we may see more drives like this one (which use much less plastic than typical USB flash drives — and appear to even use less plastic than optical discs)…soon the optical drives will start to fade out of existence…” http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/10/why-apple-saddled-the-macbook-air-with-gimped-cpus.ars “…the Macbook Air has been updated. But if you were hoping for enough CPU muscle in the new models to keep a bunch of Flash-addled webpages from bringing the entire portable to its knees, then you're going to be sorely disappointed—the Core 2 Duo is still with us in the new models. In fact, the 11" Macbook Air actually trails its predecessor in clockspeed, while the 13" model hasn't changed at all…”

28. Chinese Chip Closes In on Intel, AMD http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/26596/ “…The Loongson processor family (known in China by the name Godson), is now in its sixth generation. The latest designs consist of the one-gigahertz, eight-core Godson 3B, the more powerful 16-core, Godson 3C (with a speed that is currently unknown), and the smaller, lower-power one-gigahertz Godson 2H, intended for netbooks and other mobile devices…Intel's Xeon processor uses a 32-nanometer process…while the Godson 3B uses 65 nanometers, leading to significantly slower processing speeds. But the Godson 3C processor will leapfrog current technology by using a 28-nanometer process, although this will only increase its clock speed by about a factor of two…With its eight additional cores, this should make the 3C about four times as fast as the Godson 3B…China's Dawning 6000 supercomputer, originally slated for completion in mid-2010, will instead debut in 2011, using the Godson 3B…the Dawning supercomputer…could…rank on the Top 500 list of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world…”

29. Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: "Mac OS X meets the iPad" http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/10/mac-os-x-107-lion-mac-os-x-meets-the-ipad.ars “…Jobs gave the first sneak peek at the eighth major version of Mac OS X. Codenamed "Lion,"…the new version will bring new features and innovations developed for its iOS mobile operating system…multitouch gestures, an app store, an app home screen, full-screen apps, auto save, and auto resume on launch…Jobs was careful to note that the Mac App Store won't be the only place to get applications—just "the best place."…To better manage currently running apps, Apple has combined windowed apps, full-screen apps, Exposé, and Spaces into what it calls Mission Control…Mac OS X 10.7 Lion will launch in summer 2011…”

30. The robot that reads your mind to train itself http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11457127 “…the Neural Systems Laboratory, University of Washington, hopes to take brain-computer interface (BCI) technology to the next level by attempting to teach robots new skills directly via brain signals. Robotic surrogates that offer paralyzed people the freedom to explore their environment, manipulate objects or simply fetch things has been the holy grail of BCI research for a long time. Dr Rao's team began by programming a humanoid robot with simple behaviours which users could then select with a wearable electroencephalogram (EEG) cap that picked up their brain activity…The team reasoned that giving the robot the ability to learn might just be the trick to allow a greater range of movements and responses…"What if the user wants the robot to do something new?...The brain is organised into multiple levels of control including the spinal cord at the low level to the neocortex at the high level," he said…To emulate this kind of behavior…Dr Rao and his team are developing a hierarchical brain-computer interface for controlling the robot…”

DHMN Technology

31. Houston Group Gets White Space Rollout Grant http://www.tvtechnology.com/article/107946 “…Technology For All (TFA) provides Internet service to Houston's working-class East End neighborhood using a variety of unlicensed spectrum ranging from 900 MHz through 5 GHz. Under a $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation, researchers at Rice University and TFA will develop and test custom-built networking gear as well as consumer devices that can use TV band white space frequencies and seamlessly switch between different frequency bands…While a Wi-Fi node can provide a higher data rate, a white-space node can cover a much larger area. The project will study how dynamic network architecture can combine these strengths…An ars technica article, Prof's bring free "Super WiFi to working-class Houston said the area where they plan to offer the service has five empty TV channels available…that may not be the case. The Show My White Spaces tool from Spectrum Bridge showed only one channel available for fixed devices: Channel 2. There are no channels for portable 100 mW devices, and only nine channels for 40 mW portable devices in Houston. If the Spectrum Bridge analysis is correct, TFA and Rice will need to get a waiver of the rules to allow fixed operation on one or more of the eight channels (four VHF and four UHF) reserved for wireless microphone use…I shifted the analysis to Beaumont, Texas (about 75 miles distant) and found two low-band VHF channels (5 and 6) that were available for fixed white space devices, and eight UHF channels that could accommodate 40 mW portable devices…”

32. Unlicensed Use of Wireless "White Space" “…In addition to the requirement that mobile phones, netbooks, tablets and other devices have access to the information needed to determine their position and consult an FCC-approved geographic database listing licensed broadcast spectrum users…in their area, the FCC reserved two vacant UHF channels for licensed wireless microphones and other low-power auxiliary service devices in all areas of the country…Cambridge Consultants…is developing a product called InCognito, a package of microprocessors, circuit design and software that makers of mobile phones, computers, set-top boxes and wireless base stations can use to enable their devices to find available white spaces by linking up to the free-spectrum database when it becomes available…Microsoft chose a different path, feeling "strongly" that a database lookup function was sufficient in lieu of a spectral-sensing capability…if the database indicates vacant white space in the area of a laptop or mobile phone, that device should be able to connect to the Internet via that white space without interfering with local TV stations or wireless mics…”

33. Nvidia Tegra 2 Has Ten Confirmed Design Wins http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mobile/display/20101010132042_Nvidia_s_Tegra_Starts_to_Get_Popular_Among_Manufacturers.html “…tablets with Tegra 2 that have been announced include the Toshiba Folio 100, Malata SMB-A1011, E-Noa Interpad, Hannspree Hanns Mart, Viewsonic G Tablet, Mouse Computer LuvPad AD100, Notion Ink Adam and KNO tablet…LG Electronics has also announced that Tegra 2 will power its smartphones. Tegra-powered devices currently shipping include the Microsoft Zune HD and Samsung M1 portable media players and the Toshiba AC100 smart companion MID (powered by Tegra 2)…Tegra has a serious drawback, it does not include baseband processor functionality so to integrate more performance-related logic…Nvidia is not alone with its highly-integrated SoCs for advanced devices…Marvell, Samsung, Qualcomm…are already offering system-on-chip products with extreme performance for smartphones or tablets…”

34. What Rapleaf Knows About You http://gigaom.com/2010/10/24/what-rapleaf-knows-about-you/ “…Wall Street Journal’s Emily Steel has written an in-depth (and excellent) expose…RapLeaf’s privacy policy states it won’t “collect or work with sensitive data on children, health or medical conditions, sexual preferences, financial account information or religious beliefs.” After the Journal asked RapLeaf whether some of its profile segments contradicted its privacy policy, the company eliminated many of those segments. Segments eliminated include: interest in the Bible, Hispanic and Asian ethnic products, gambling, tobacco, adult entertainment, “get rich quick” offers and age and gender of children in household. RapLeaf says many of its segments are also “used widely by the direct-marketing industry today…Rapleaf knows your real names and email addresses…Rapleaf sells pretty elaborate data that includes household income, age, political leaning, and even more granular details…Politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, are using Rapleaf…When a person logs in to certain sites, the sites send identifying information to RapLeaf…RapLeaf installs a “cookie,” a small text file, on the person’s computer containing details about the individual (minus name and other identifiable facts). Sites…include…Pingg.com…About.com…TwitPic.com…”

35. Giving Yourself a Sixth Sense for Wireless Networks http://imakeprojects.com/Projects/wifi-heartbeat/ “…This project is for a small electronic unit that allows the user to sense the presence and relative signal strength of wireless hotspots. It can be worn as a pendant or carried in a pocket. It is "always on" and communicates the presence and signal strength of an in-range hotspot by way of sequences of pulses - like a heartbeat you can feel. The stronger and faster the "heartbeat", the stronger the wireless signal detected…”

36. DIY 2.4GHz Spectrum Analyser http://www.wireless.org.au/~jhecker/specan/ This is a simple project that allows you to monitor the 2.4GHZ ISM band in your immediate vicinity. There many wireless devices available on the market now that broadcast in the 2.4GHz spectrum including Bluetooth, 802.11a/b ethernet (WiFi), Zigbee, wireless USB, cordless phones, wireless mice and keyboards and the humble microwave oven. Depending where you live in the world your government has allocated a roughly 80MHz block for transmitting all manner of data starting at 2.4GHz. It's getting a bit crowded in this band, especially if you live in a built up urban area. With this project you can monitor what's going on and figure out what channel to change your WiFi network to in order for it to keep working when your neighbor rudely sets up their wireless network on the same channel as you…”

37. Sensor network at Kew Gardens http://www.lkl.ac.uk/projects/vesel/index.php?q=node/97 The wireless sensor network has been installed in a student plot at Kew Gardens, in which will be grown French beans and courgettes…This simple sensor network aims to harness agricultural intelligence to build a capable decision support system for farmers…Our particular implementation of such a wireless sensor network is innovative in two ways. We are working on interfacing it with other parts of the VeSeL resource kit, including fixed computers and mobile devices, to support local and remote monitoring and action. More broadly, these innovations designed initially for small scale contexts in the developing world could have applications in the developed world in terms of power conservation techniques and methods of data collection, storage and delivery in unstable communications infrastructure…”

Leisure & Entertainment

38. Netflix Accounts For 20% Of Peak U.S. Internet Bandwidth http://www.multichannel.com/article/458744-Netflix_Accounts_For_20_Of_Peak_U_S_Internet_Bandwidth_Study.php Netflix represents more than 20% of downstream Internet traffic during peak times in the U.S…North American households use a median of 4 Gigabytes per month of Internet bandwidth, whereas in Asia-Pacific region the median is 12 Gigabytes…in North America the average time a fixed connection is active is 3 hours, whereas in Asia-Pacific it's closer to 5.5 hours…Netflix, which had about 16.9 million subscribers as of the end of September 2010, provides its "Watch Now" Internet streaming service on more than 100 devices…”

39. Target Unveils In-Store Facebook Photo Printing http://www.allfacebook.com/target-unveils-in-store-facebook-photo-printing-2010-10 Grandma…can’t log on to see your photos from last night (although that might be a good thing). Unless you decide to print them at home or struggle through an hour of trying to set her up with a Facebook account that she’ll never know how to use on her own, Grandma will be entirely oblivious to your online existence. Until today. Target has just announced Facebook connectivity with their in-store KODAK photo kiosks…shoppers can now log on at the kiosk and browse their photo albums directly…All the KODAK kiosk print options…can be fully integrated with your Facebook photos…This comes on the heels of Facebook’s recent decision to support photo downloads and allow high resolution photos, suggesting that something’s afoot. Clearly, Facebook is setting themselves up as the premier photo utility for its casual users – why go to Flickr, for example, if you’re already logged in to Facebook…”

40. Zynga worth more than Electronic Arts http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/26/is-zynga-worth-more-than-electronic-arts/ “…Zynga is currently valued at $5.27 billion on SharesPost, a secondary market, where Zynga employees can sell shares that they own in the private company. Redwood City, Calif.-based EA is worth $5.24 billion in public trading on the Nasdaq stock market…Many hope that Zynga will go public, but it hasn’t done so yet…Starting with Texas Hold Em Poker, Zynga managed to grab lots of users on Facebook and figured out how to make money from a small percentage of them. Adopting the “virtual goods” business model pioneered by South Korea’s Nexon for online games, Zynga charged real money to players for virtual currency, which was used to buy poker chips and other virtual goods in Zynga games…thanks to virtual goods sales, Zynga is expected to grab roughly a third of the $1.6 billion market for virtual goods in the U.S. in 2010…Zynga really took off in the middle of 2009 when it launched FarmVille, which is still the No. 1 game on Facebook with 57.4 million monthly active users…”

41. Cryptic to make Champions Online MMO free-to-play http://www.geek.com/articles/games/cryptic-to-make-champions-online-mmo-free-to-play-20101026/ “…Cryptic and publisher Atari have decided to switch to a free-to-play model for the superhero MMO. Revenue will be generated from an in-game store using real-world money converted to whatever currency the game uses. A subscription option will still exist, classed as “Gold status”, which will allow access to additional content and features…The decision by Cryptic comes after seeing a number of other high-profile MMOs switch to the freemium model. The most recent of those has been Lord of the Rings Online and Everquest II…With so many MMOs switching to free-to-play you have to wonder if we will ever see a subscription-only MMO released again…”

42. Minecraft Halloween Update will feature fire-spitting squidlings http://www.geek.com/articles/games/minecraft-halloween-update-will-feature-fire-spitting-squidlings-and-hellish-new-underworld-20101025/ “…those who worry that developer Notch may have forgotten about his delightful voxel-based world-build game can rest assured that he’s hard at work, plugging away at a new Halloween Update that is set to add not just six new block types… but an entirely new, ghost-filled dimension to the mix…The dimension is accessed through a player built portal, and once there, you will find yourself in a fiery, chthonic world made mostly of a red stone that, once ignited, will burn literally forever. That’s problematic enough, but becomes even more dangerous when you add the new Ghast enemy type into the mix: polygonal squidlings that shoot fire at the player. Even if they don’t fireball you, though, they’ll surely hit some of the red rock that makes up this extra-dimensional world… at which point the entire tunnel you’ve dug will instantly turn into an inferno…”

Economy and Technology

43. Doxo Launches Paperless Billing Service http://www.businessinsider.com/doxo-2010-10 Doxo, a Seattle-based startup that has been operating in stealth since 2008, is finally showing off its paper-free service for billing and other mailings…Doxo is a single dashboard for managing all of the banks, wireless providers, utilities, and other businesses that would otherwise send you snail mail every month. You can manually upload documents to Doxo, but the real value comes from Doxo's partners, which will send you bills and notifications electronically through Doxo…almost everyone still gets old-fashioned paper bills. The problem is that going paperless is a lot of work. You need to sign up for dozens of online accounts and remember when to check in with each to pay your balance. Doxo is…putting all of your online billing activity in a single location attached to a single username and password. Doxo will live or die by the businesses it signs up…Doxo is backed by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos…”

44. Y Combinator is The Disruptor In The Valley http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/1108/best-small-companies-10-y-combinator-paul-graham-disruptor.html Justin Kan and Emmett Shear watched their first startup, an online calendar called Kiko, implode…in 2006. They sold Kiko's scraps on eBay for $258,000 and wondered what to do with their lives. So the pair did the only thing they could think of: They went to see Paul Graham at his house in Cambridge, Mass…Graham sat them down and helped bang out a plan to create Justin.tv, now the Web's biggest portal for live video, with 31 million users a month…Graham is the father of Y Combinator, a startup-rearing juggernaut that's part incubator, part drill sergeant and part liaison to the investor class. Y Combinator--a computer term for a program that runs other programs--has fired up 200 companies since 2005…YC's three-month boot camp for startups, run twice a year in Mountain View, Calif., attracts 1,000 applicants for roughly 40 spots. Graduates are expected to emerge with a working product, customers and revenue. They also get a crack at pitching their ideas to investors on Demo Day…YC puts up $11,000, plus $3,000 per founder, for each company in return for a piece of pure equity of around 5%. That equity could be worth real money should the companies take off…Of the 36 startups in YC's recent class, ended in August, 30 have raised fresh capital, many of them over $1 million. "We didn't mean to invent this new model," says Graham, who at 45 has sandy hair and a youthful earnestness. "It all happened by accident…”

45. Ozzie's 'doomsday' memo warns Microsoft of post-PC days http://www.hpcwire.com/offthewire/Fusion-io-Creates-New-Technology-Alliance-Program-105386758.html “…Ray Ozzie's just-published memo is a "doomsday-ish" missive that calls on the company to push further into the cloud or perish…His "Dawn of a New Day" memorandum, which was dated Oct. 28, is an attempt to focus Microsoft's attention on the day when PCs will no longer rule consumer or business computing…If you do a tag cloud of the memo, you'll see he rarely mentions the words PC or Windows…The words that are most prominent," Miller noted, "are devices and services, and that shows that Ozzie believes the future will revolve around connected devices and continuous services." In a nutshell…Ozzie's memo spells out the time when the PC -- the foundation of Microsoft's 35-year-old business, particularly its lucrative Windows franchise -- has been replaced by a slew of simple, low-cost devices that are constantly connected to the Internet, and through that, to cloud-based services…tomorrow's devices…They're relatively simple and fundamentally appliance-like by design, from birth. They're instantly usable, interchangeable, and trivially replaceable without loss."…Ozzie's…telling Microsoft that it needs to look forward or you're not going to own the market in the future," Miller said. "He's trying to get Microsoft to start thinking about a day when the hegemony of Windows is a thing of the past…”

46. PayPal Introduces its Micropayment Solution http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/paypal_introduces_its_micropayment_solution.php “…PayPal, one of the most popular online payment providers, announced today the unveiling of a micropayment solution…the new product will offer low fees and a seamless integration that "lets consumers pay for digital goods and content in as little as two clicks…there are a couple of problems with selling cheap digital goods. For consumers, it's a matter of time and hassle, while merchants often have to contend with high transaction fees and lost sales…the new solution offers PayPal's competitive fee structure for micropayments, with pricing at 5 percent plus 5 cents for purchases under $12. A number of companies have already signed on, including Facebook, Autosport.com, FT.com, GigaOM, Justin.tv, Ooyala, Plimus, Tagged, Tyler Projects and Ustream. The decision to purchase digital goods and content usually happens on impulse, so the act of paying needs to be as quick as that impulse…”

Civilian Aerospace

47. Virgin Galactic CEO Branson Opens First Commercial Spaceport http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371395,00.asp “…Sir Richard Branson celebrated the completion of Spaceport America, the first commercial purpose-built space port…The spaceport includes a two-mile long runway…It's 42 inches thick and can support every existing type of space craft currently in existence…The runway was dedicated in a celebration that included Branson, Richardson, about 30 of 380 Virgin Galactic future astronauts who got to see Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo jet carry the SpaceShip Two in a landing and flyover…Our spaceship is flying beautifully and will soon be making powered flights, propelled by our new hybrid rocket motor, which is also making excellent progress in its own test program…Branson said that he plans to be taking passengers into space in nine to 18 months…”

48. NASA Awards Contract To Team FREDNET Google Lunar X PRIZE Contender http://www.space-travel.com/reports/NASA_Awards_Contract_To_Team_FREDNET_Google_Lunar_X_PRIZE_Contender_999.html Team FREDNET has been awarded a NASA Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data (ILDD) contract at the maximum government purchase value of $10.01 million. As a recipient of this ILDD contract, Team FREDNET will offer technical data relating to its robotic Google Lunar X PRIZE landing mission…The X PRIZE Foundation started with the brilliant vision of "Revolution through Competition." Team FREDNET took the next logical step to employ "Revolution through Open Collaboration" and utilizes volunteer efforts around the world to increase its ability to achieve profitable, privately funded, beyond-government sponsored space commercialization…Our 700+ global volunteer Team FREDNET members are (beyond) thrilled to be selected by NASA for the Innovative Lunar Demonstrations Data award…This is a significant milestone that proves the viability of our distinguishing collaborative thought leadership in our goal to become the first open-source organization to place an intelligent rover on the surface of the Moon…”

Supercomputing & GPUs

49. GPU’s and Particle Accelerators http://www.wtkr.com/news/dp-nws-cp-fastest-computer-20101022,0,3766615.story “…The video game industry is helping Jefferson Lab researchers solve some of science's most baffling mysteries…researchers at the Department of Energy nuclear physics lab booted up what they say is Hampton Roads' most powerful computer system. They didn't use secret government equipment, but rather graphics processing units…Researchers at…Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility…turbocharged 266 central processing units, the part of a computer that functions like a brain, with 480 graphics processing units. As a result, the system absorbs information 1 million times faster than a standard computer…The system also relied on $5 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the federal economic stimulus plan…Approximately $3.3 million went towards the equipment, including the graphics processing units and servers. Researchers spent the rest developing the system, such as creating a code that married the various components together, and staffing the system through 2013.”

50. Nvidia looks to the future of GPU computing http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/application-development/2010/10/26/nvidia-looks-to-the-future-of-gpu-computing-40090520/ “…We've had parallel GPU computing for several years, but why is it really taking off now? A: It showed up at a time when performance was having a very difficult time scaling because of power and architectural challenges for processors that were designed for instruction-level parallelisation. It wasn't until recently that parallel computing — inspired a lot by Cuda — made people realise that there are whole areas in computing science that we can tackle…When you can do something 10 or 100 times faster, something magical happens and you can do something completely different…Will Cuda persist alongside open-standard OpenCL and other approaches, or will everyone switch to a common parallel computing standard?...We put a lot of energy into developing OpenCL. We're the first to market with every release of OpenCL and are known to have the best implementation…But the challenge with GPU computing is that it's changing so fast. We're improving performance by a factor of four every other year…the reason why Cuda is more adopted than OpenCL is simply because it's more advanced. We've invested in Cuda for much longer. The quality of the compiler is much better. The robustness of the programming environment is better. The tools around it are better. There are more people programming it…It turns out that parallel computing as we've implemented it is successful because we didn't try to take over the CPU. We didn't wake up and say we've invented something that's going to disrupt the CPU…”


*****

2010/10/19

NEW NET Issues List for 19 Oct 2010

Below is the final list of issues for the Tuesday, 19 October 2010, NEW NET (Northeast Wisconsin Network for Economy and Technology) 7:00 - 9:00 pm weekly gathering. This week we're upstairs at Tom's Drive In, 501 N Westhill Blvd, Appleton, Wisconsin, USA -- if there's a chain across the steps, ignore it and come on upstairs.

The ‘net

1. Skype 5 launches with Facebook integration and group video calls http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/14/skype-5-launches-with-facebook-integration-and-group-video-calls/ “…Skype today has officially released the next version of its Windows client, Skype 5.0, which brings with it group video conferencing and Facebook integration…It first offered the ability for five-person video chats in May…In September, the company extended group video chat to support 10-person conversations. Eventually, Skype will charge for group video chats, but for now users can try out the service for free…the official release of Skype 5 is the first time we get to see Facebook’s integration into the software…the partnership is a win for both companies: Facebook gets access to a robust voice and video calling platform, and Skype will see a massive surge in new users from Facebook’s 500 million users…who never saw a reason to in the past…Skype 5 also introduces a more refined interface and better overall call quality. The new interface should make it more intuitive to use existing Skype features like screen sharing…” [this is a good thing if it pushes Google to put more effort into a unified communication interface – ed.]

2. Microsoft Bing, Facebook Social Search Cheered by Analysts http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Microsoft-Facebook-Social-Search-Cheered-by-Analysts-502220/ “…Microsoft Oct. 13 said it will soon begin indexing Facebook user profiles to surface contacts that are relevant to the searcher…For example, a user searching for a restaurant may see comments from his or her Facebook friends who went to that restaurant and liked it…By being able to bring data from Facebook into…search results…the search engines can leverage the social info they lacked to keep people on their sites longer…Bing's new functionality…may affect a minority of searches that they conduct…one could argue that people may not get terrific value out of knowing what their friends liked because people click "like" buttons for anything from true advocacy to a desire to get discounts, win prizes or play a game…Bing…search share is 11 percent…Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it clear that he viewed Microsoft as a "scrappy startup" hungry to excel in social search…”

3. How a Physically Aware Internet Will Change the World http://mashable.com/2010/10/13/sensors-internet/ “…the Internet has had an impact on creativity, global business and economic growth that surpasses even the wildest expectations of the innovators who created it. But if you ask me, we still haven’t even scratched the surface. The next revolution of the Internet is not going to be built on manual input of information by 500 million or a billion users. Rather, there is much greater potential in connecting computers to sensors so that valuable new information can be created automatically without human data entry…Most of us have only recently become aware of sensors from swinging Wii tennis rackets, or switching our smartphones from landscape to portrait mode. What you may not realize, however, is that sensors are being created that are a a thousand times more sensitive than this and can be harnessed to have an incredible global impact…Take, for example, a food production chain. A network of biochemical sensors can understand where and how food is being produced and stored by “smelling” it. Then, the sensors can tell if the food is contaminated…If interconnected motion and heat sensor devices were spread out around your home, a computer system could understand when you leave a room, and would, for example, know when to turn off the lights automatically and unobtrusively…an ideal world, we will have incredibly small sensor technology…spread out all over the world. We will have sensors…lying alongside highways to measure traffic flow and road conditions, or in our homes and offices to watch how we are using our spaces…there are many relevant security and privacy challenges that follow from this vision, but I believe they can and will be solved…”

4. Microsoft Office 365 http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20020029-56.html “…Microsoft announced today that it is adding Web-based versions of Office to its collection of hosted software for business. The company will also offer traditional Office as a subscription-based service. As expected, the company also rebranded the product…Business Productivity Online Suite will now be known as Office 365…The move is a huge bet for Microsoft. Office, along with Windows, is one of the two big profit centers for the company. Offering it as a subscription has the potential to make the company's total sales larger and more predictable, but also runs the risk of cutting into profits…”

5. Scribd’s books and magazines get rich links, thanks to Apture http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/19/scribd-apture/ Apture, a startup trying to improve online reading with a smooth way to explore extra content…will soon work on the millions of documents shared on Scribd…When users highlight a word or phrase, a box appears above the selected text, offering an opportunity to learn more. If users click on the box, Apture opens a small window with Web content from sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Flickr…Scribd doesn’t host traditional Web content…This is written content that normally wouldn’t have any links to the online world at all…The new partnership is the online equivalent of opening a book and finding that you can watch videos or read articles related to anything inside…”

6. Greater Manchester Police tweets sparking interest http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-11542935 “Call 686 "Man shouts 'you're gorgeous' to a woman". Call 674 "Confused man reports his TV is not working". These are just some of the hundreds of calls Greater Manchester Police has received from members of the public since it started "tweeting" about them at 0500 BST. The force has set up a 24-hour Twitter feed so every call it receives can be made public..The calls about serious incidents, such as robbery, assault, rape and threats to kill have been interspersed with people asking the police to do things far from their job requirements…The Twitter feed has caught the interest of members of the public, with 12,000 people following it…Many have been leaving tweets praising the constant updates saying it "makes fascinating reading". SaddleworthSal posted: "It's addictive…”

Security, Privacy & Digital Controls

7. 2.2 million US PCs in botnets http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11531657 “…The US leads the world in numbers of Windows PCs that are part of botnets…More than 2.2 million US PCs were found to be part of botnets, networks of hijacked home computers, in the first six months of 2010…the research revealed that Brazil had the second highest level of infections at 550,000…"Once they have control of the machine they have the potential to put any kind of malicious code on there," said Mr Evans. "It becomes a distributed computing resource they then sell on to others."…a botnet called Lethic sent out 56% of all botnet spam sent between March and June even though it was only on 8.3% of all known botnet IP addresses…”

8. Little Brother is Watching http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17FOB-WWLN-t.html In George Orwell’s “1984,”…the goal of communications technology was brutal and direct: to ensure the dominance of the state…As the Internet proves every day, it isn’t some stern and monolithic Big Brother that we have to reckon with as we go about our daily lives, it’s a vast cohort of prankish Little Brothers equipped with devices that Orwell, writing 60 years ago, never dreamed of and who are loyal to no organized authority. The invasion of privacy…has been democratized. For Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers University student who recently committed suicide after a live-stream video of an intimate encounter of his was played on the Web, Little Brother took the form of a prying roommate with a webcam. The snoop had no discernible agenda other than silly, juvenile troublemaking…There are also times, of course, when Little Brother does a positive service to society by turning the tables on the state and watching the watchers. The other day a video emerged that seemed to show an Israeli soldier dancing in a mocking manner around a cowering Palestinian woman whom he appeared to have under his control…Even Big Brother…had a motive for his peeping — to maintain order, to shore up his position and to put down possible rebellions — but I and the countless Little Brothers like me lack any clear notion of what we’re after…Big Brother may have stifled dissent by forcing conformity on his frightened subjects, but his trespasses were predictable and manageable…Little Brother affords us no such luck, in part because he dwells inside us rather than in some remote and walled-off headquarters. In the new, chaotic regime of networked lenses and microphones…point every which way and rest in every hand…”

9. Your Memories Will Be Rewritten: Product Placement Coming to Your Facebook Photos http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_product_placement.php The human brain's predictable fallibility leaves us susceptible to the creation of false memories by brand marketers through retroactive product placement into our photos posted on Facebook and other social networks…Changing pictures on Facebook to include product placement will create false memories…We will have memories of things we never did with brands we never did…all of a sudden, our future decisions are in the hands of people who want to make money off of us…[The movie] Inception made it seem like implanting a false memory was hard, but it turns out that it's really easy to make false memories. It takes one session of less than an hour, or a couple of paragraphs…”

Mobile Computing & Communicating

10. Verizon Wireless, AT&T to Sell IPad in Retail Stores Oct. 28 http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/207838/verizon_wireless_atandt_to_sell_ipad_in_retail_stores_oct_28.html Verizon…announced that it would begin selling the Wi-Fi version of the iPad, bundled with its MiFi portable hot spot device…AT&T announced that it too would begin selling the Wi-Fi + 3G version of the tablet at retail stores…Since the iPad's 3G chip doesn't function on Verizon's network, the company will offer three bundles of the Wi-Fi model and a Verizon MiFi 2200 portable hot spot; the bundles run $630 for a 16GB model, $730 for a 32GB model, and $830 for a 64GB model…Verizon will also be selling the Wi-Fi iPads without the MiFi for $500, $600, and $700 respectively…Customers who purchase the MiFi bundle can sign up for a no-commitment 1GB monthly plan for $20 a month…”

11. Opera Mobile for Android http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/opera_mobile_for_android_on_its_way_opera_11_gets_extensions.php “…The upcoming Opera Mobile for Android will offer two notable features: hardware acceleration and pinch-to-zoom…In Opera's two other mobile browsers, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, there are only two levels of zoom - on for the full page width and one zoomed in for reading text. With pinch-to-zoom, however, Opera Mobile for Android users will be able to choose their own zoom level…”

12. Eyetracker Warns Against Momentary Driver Drowsiness http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101013083307.htm “…According to the German Road Safety Council…one in four highway traffic fatalities is the result of momentary driver drowsiness. Researchers…have developed an assistant system that tracks a driver's eye movements and issues a warning before the driver has an opportunity to nod off to sleep. The special feature of the Eyetracker is that it can be installed in any model of car. There is no need for a complicated calibration of the cameras…The system does not require a PC or a laptop. "What we have developed is a small modular system with its own hardware and programs on board, so that the line of vision is computed directly within the camera itself…the Eyetracker can be connected directly to the car's trip computer. If the camera modules detect that the eye is closed for longer than a user-defined interval, it sounds an alarm…the Eyetracker is only roughly half the size of a matchbox and practically undetected when mounted behind the sun visor and in the dashboard. The tiny lenses are just three to four millimeters in diameter…”

13. HP Reveals webOS 2.0, Palm Pre 2 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/hp_reveals_webos_20_arriving_friday_on_palm_pre_2.php HP today has officially introduced webOS 2.0, the biggest update to what was formerly Palm's mobile operating system, one of the assets gained by HP back in April when it acquired Palm, Inc for $1.2 billion. Now called HP webOS, the updated operating system will make its debut this Friday on the new Palm Pre 2 smartphone…”

14. Windows Embedded Automotive 7 http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20019978-56.html “…Microsoft's latest in-car software is dubbed Windows Embedded Automotive 7. The new software builds in the latest version of Microsoft's Tellme speech recognition technology as well as a version of Silverlight…While Microsoft has wrapped up its work on the new car software, it must now be designed into new vehicles, which tend to have a long design cycle of at least 18 months to 24 months, so it will be some time before Redmond's latest is on the road…”

15. Mobile Barcode Scanning up 700% This Year http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2010/10/mobile-barcode-scanning-up-700-percent-in-2010.php “…According to a new consumer adoption study from barcode technology provider ScanBuy, barcode scanning is up 700% in 2010…Although the report doesn't look at usage beyond the company's own technology, ScanBuy is one of the industry leaders in barcode scanning…The report's findings include a number of key data points…1D (UPC) and 2D (QR) codes are being scanned equally…Linking to a website is the most popular action delivered by a 2D barcode scan, with 85% of scans…Health and beauty products were the most popular items among 1D (UPC) scans, with 21%. They were followed by groceries (14.4%), books (12.6%) and kitchen items (9.2%)…Android was the most popular smartphone platform, with 45% of barcode users…followed by Blackberry (27%), iPhone (15%), Symbian (9%), Java (3%) and Windows Mobile (1%)…”

Open Source

16. Android Chief Andy Rubin Sends His First Tweet — And It’s Aimed At Steve Jobs http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/19/andy-rubin-twitter/ “…Apple CEO Steve Jobs went on a bit of a tirade against Google and Android in particular…that couldn’t have made Android chief Andy Rubin too happy…he decided to awaken his dormant Twitter account and send his first tweet…it’s clearly (but subtly) in response to Jobs…here is Andy Rubin’s first tweet: the definition of open: “mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make”…that’s Rubin using some geeked-out lingo to explain exactly what open is to Steve Jobs. In other words: Android…Rubin has about 100 followers right now. That should skyrocket shortly…”

17. Microsoft posts video of customers criticizing OpenOffice http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/10/microsoft-posts-video-of-customers-criticizing-openoffice.ars “…Microsoft has compiled comments from 15 customers who switched to Office after evaluating OpenOffice. The result: this video recently posted to the company's office videos YouTube channel…A few hours after this story was published, Microsoft set the video as "private," meaning it can no longer be viewed by the public. We found it hosted on Microsoft.com. After we found the Silverlight version, Microsoft set the YouTube video back to public…The three minute video is well constructed, though it has no pretense of objectivity…only choosing quotes from customers who have switched back to its productivity suite. The video has 17 quotes in total, 14 of which complain about how OpenOffice leads to higher long-term costs, poor interoperability, lower productivity, decreased efficiency, and overall frustration (students, it can even affect your grades)…After doing a little digging, we found that these quotes are actually from case studies and press articles from the last four years…”

18. Manage Google Services from the Command Line on Linux http://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/371342-manage-google-services-from-the-command-line-on-linux “…Google's services have crept into my daily routine to the point that I'm using Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs all the time. But I also like doing things from the command line, which is why I'm using GoogleCL to connect to Google services from the command line…GoogleCL supports Google Docs, Picasa, Blogger, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, and YouTube. If you're wondering why it doesn't support Gmail, just remember that you can already interact with Gmail services via POP3, IMAP, and SMTP — so you can already set up text-based mailers and CLI tools to work with Gmail if you like. The GoogleCL tools are offered as source, generic Debian packages, and also as Windows packages…”

19. Howto connect multiple networks over the Internet the cheap way http://robert.penz.name/312/howto-connect-multiple-networks-over-the-internet-the-cheap-way/ I’m quit often asked by 2 types of people how to connect cheaply multiple networks securely over the Internet. The first type are owners of small companies which have more than one office and want to connect them to their central office. And the other type are people who are the de facto IT guy for their family and friends and need an easy way to get into the the other networks…most of them start with with remote connection software like Teamview, VNC, but at some point thats not enough anymore…The solution that I implement for them is based on the OpenVPN which is a well know, free and secure Open Source VPN solution, which is able to run on cheap hardware…You want a system with which nobody messes around and so it works for years without ever touching it again. And yes that is possible with the proposed solution. If you can’t reach the router it normally a ISP problem or power outage…you can also use this setup to let road warriors into your network over the Internet…So about what hardware I’m talking? An Accesspoint/DSL/Cable Router which is able to run OpenWRT, or any other system for which OpenVPN is available. I basically stick with systems that can run OpenWRT…I’m almost always use a Linksys WRT54GL which you get under 40 Euros. But you’re free to use anything else. e.g. a friend of mine has a setup working with a SheevaPlug and Debian on it, an other has a setup running with DD-WRT…”

SkyNet

20. YouTube Rolls Out Leanback on Eve of Google TV’s Launch http://mashable.com/2010/10/15/youtube-leanback-google-tv/ YouTube is preparing itself for this weekend’s big rollout of Google TV with a launch of its own: the full release of YouTube Leanback, its made-for-TV experience. Leanback, revealed in May at the Google I/O conference, is a core component of Google’s strategy to bring online video to the living room screen. It provides for a simplified YouTube experience and interface, offering simple keyboard commands, an advanced search interface, and a visual UI for browsing through YouTube clips and shows…YouTube Leanback is all about Google TV; it is the way the company wants users to experience YouTube while they are surfing the web on their TVs…We’re about to find out if consumers want the Internet on their TVs. Google hopes that people will do things such as favorite TED videos at work so they can watch them later at home. The company says that users of Leanback watch twice as much video as users of the regular YouTube interface…”

21. Google In-Page Analytics: Visual context for your Analytics data http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/10/introducing-in-page-analytics-visual.html When looking at Google Analytics reports, sometimes it’s difficult to visualize how visitors navigate on a given website page. To make this visualization easier, some users keep the website open in another browser tab so they can reference it while looking through reports….We’re releasing a new feature into beta: In-Page Analytics. With In-Page Analytics, you can see your Google Analytics data superimposed on your website as you browse…”

22. Google Voice Update Brings Search for Texts and Voicemail Transcripts http://phandroid.com/2010/10/18/google-voice-update-brings-search-for-texts-and-voicemail-transcripts/ Google’s Voice application has just been updated to version 0.4.2.8 and brings with it the ability to search your voicemail transcripts and text messages. Searching text messages is nothing too exciting, but searching transcripts should do well to make a lot of people happy…”

23. Google Instant Costly as it Prepares for Mobile http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Google-Instant-Costly-as-it-Prepares-for-Mobile-127034/ Google Instant cost the search engine a lot of money to build and it burns through a lot of hardware and software computing resources. But people like it, so it's going mobile this fall…Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's senior vice president for product management, asserted…that not only was Instant not created to help Google make more money, but that "from a resource standpoint, it's actually pretty expensive.”…Google…purchased additional computer servers to deliver the results, but declined to say how many new machines and what the cost was to not only build Instant but keep it pumping out queries with each tap of a keystroke as it does today. The cost of search has steadily increased over the years as we develop new innovations to serve users," the spokesperson said…Google…Instant…serves an average of 5 to 7 times more result pages for some queries…”

24. Google Demo Slam: Something Weird Begins On Wednesday http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/18/google-demo-slam/ This morning, we were alerted to a site at the URL demoslam.com…Currently, the site…shows some weird Wall-E-like figures sitting in the rain while a figure in a green cap mows some lawn that doesn’t exist…The page reads: “Google Demo Slam: Technology is awesome. Learning about it isn’t. Until now.” Below that, it says “Welcome to Demo Slam. Where a little creativity takes tech demos from mundane to mind-blowing. All thanks to people like you. So come watch, choose your favorites and most importantly, show the world what you can do…it sounds like Google is hosting some sort of competition to see what people on the Internet can come up with using their various products and technologies…”

25. Google to bring Dead Sea Scrolls online, giving free, global access to ancient text http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-ml-israel-ancient-scrolls-online,0,7435884.story Israel's Antiquities Authority is partnering with Google to bring the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls online. The project will grant free access to the 2,000-year-old text…by uploading high-resolution images…The scrolls will be available in both original languages and in translation…this will ensure the originals are preserved while broadening access to the priceless artifacts…”

General Technology

26. Iomega rolls out USB 3.0 SSD flash drives http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/EMC-Iomega-Unveils-HighSpeed-SSD-Desktop-Storage-Drives-111156/ “…Iomega started shipping a new, host-powered external 1.8-inch USB 3.0 SSD flash-based storage drive with built-in encryption that could spell the beginning of the end for spinning-disk portable drives on the desktop. The new SSD-based machines, about the size of an iPhone, will be available in early November in 64GB, 128GB and 256GB capacities…the new SSD drives can be dropped from a height of 10 feet and continue to work…They have no moving parts, fast application loading, and high I/O transfer speeds…they are great for transferring high-definition video, digital images, graphics and music," Huberman said. "They're really what professional videographers, photographers and other creative professionals can use for deadlines and temporary digital storage."…the new SSD flash drive is up to 10 times faster than USB 2.0 drives and is about twice as fast as a 7200 RPM SATA hard drive utilizing the same USB 3.0 interface…The new SSD drives are not inexpensive. The 64GB unit is priced at $229, the 128GB for $399, and the 256GB for $749…”

27. Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie leaving Microsoft http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/10/chief-software-architect-ray-ozzie-leaving-microsoft.ars In a very surprising move, Microsoft has announced that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, will be stepping down from his position and leaving the company…Ozzie joined Microsoft in 2005 when the software giant acquired his company Groove Networks. In 2006, when Gates announced his upcoming retirement from day-to-day activities at Microsoft, Ozzie took over Bill Gates' position as Chief Software Architect and Ballmer assumed Gates' other role as CEO…Ray Ozzie is (or was) the most senior technical person at Microsoft, regarded by many as the person intended to provide the company's technical vision after the departure of Bill Gates. However, Ozzie's role at Microsoft has never seemed particularly clear, and company insiders felt his impact was superficial. It's also claimed that he rubbed other Microsoft employees the wrong way…” http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2010/10/ray-ozzie-steps-down.php “…This move by Ozzie could mean one of two things…The tanker has successfully turned, and Ozzie doesn't see himself as necessary to the process anymore…The tanker is in a more precarious position than we previously thought, and the captain is abandoning ship…"It was sad to see Ray leave. His original vision and what Microsoft delivered were becoming more disparate by the day…From an Enterprise 2.0 stand point, it's tremendously disappointing to see Ray leave Microsoft…The true infusion of collaborative constructs into business process to accelerate performance has only begun and Ray's departure cannot be seen as anything but untimely. This has to be a happy day for SharePoint competitors…”

28. Why CPUs aren’t getting faster http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25875/ “…The Central Processing Unit (CPU)--the component that has defined the performance of your computer for many years--has hit a wall…the next-generation of CPUs…have to contend with multiple walls--a memory bottleneck (the bandwidth of the channel between the CPU and a computer's memory); the instruction level parallelism (ILP) wall (the availability of enough discrete parallel instructions for a multi-core chip) and the power wall (the chip's overall temperature and power consumption). Of the three, the power wall is now arguably the defining limit of the power of the modern CPU…chip manufacturers have been forced to create "systems on a chip"--conurbations of smaller, specialized processors…so sprawling and diverse that they've caused long-time industry observers…to question whether the original definition of a CPU even applies to today's chips…with this generation of chips, Intel is innovating anywhere but in the CPU itself…The brain is full of high specialized processing cores as well as general computational capabilities. If silicon continues to follow the trend laid down by evolution, we can expect future "CPUs" in which the "central" processing unit is less and less important, and task-specific processors proliferate…”

29. WD breaks capacity limit with 3TB hard drive http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20019961-1.html “…Western Digital announced the availability its own 3TB and 2.5TB internal hard drives--the latest in the WD Caviar Green family--that you can bring home and install in your computer. This is great news for those who want a second and large hard drive for their computer that runs Windows 7 or Vista…Seagate has been hesitating to release the 3TB Barracuda XT internal hard drive--which it used to make the FreeAgent GoFlex Desk external hard drive and the BlackArmor NAS server--as a standalone product…because of the limitations in existing PC motherboards and in Windows operating systems…32-bit Windows operating systems generally support only the legacy Master Boot Record (MBR), which has the cap partition size of 2.19TB, to manage the hard drive. This means, the system won't see more than 2.19TB of storage, regardless of how much larger the hard drive's actual capacity is. On top of that, all Windows computers that use the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS)-based motherboards, which are the majority of computers on the market, can't boot from a hard drive that's larger that 2.19TB, either, due to the limitation of BIOS protocols…possibly by the end of next year, MBR will be completely replaced by GUID Partition Table (GPT), which is supported by both Windows 7 and Windows Vista, and the BIOS will be replaced by the new Extensive Firmware Interface (EFI). Then and only then, Windows users will no longer need to worry about hitting the barrier in the storage space…Western Digital has a quick solution for consumers to immediately take advantage of its new ultra high-capacity hard drives. The company bundles the new WD Caviar Green 2.5TB and 3TB hard drives with an Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI)-compliant Host Bus Adapter (HBA), in the form of a PCI Express add-in card…this card is an SATA storage controller that…enables the operating system to use proper software driver to correctly support large capacity drives. This allows computers that run Windows 7 and Vista, both 64-bit and 32-bit, to use the new hard drives, at their full capacity, as secondary drives, as long as they are formatted using GPT…”

DHMN Technology

30. Southampton scientists develop new method to identify people by their ears http://www.soton.ac.uk/mediacentre/news/2010/oct/10_107.shtml “…ears have certain advantages over the more established biometrics, such as face recognition, as they have a rich and stable structure that is preserved from birth to old age, and instead of ageing they just get bigger. The ear is not affected from changes in facial expression and remains fixed in the middle of the side of the head against a predictable background, unlike face recognition which usually requires the face to be captured against a controlled background. ..the fact that ears can be concealed by hair led Professor Nixon and his team to further research their use as a biometric and to come up with new algorithms to make it possible to identify and isolate the ear from the head. This new technique achieved 99.6 per cent success at identifying ears from over 250 images, despite hair concealment and possible confusion with spectacles…”

31. D-Space personal info for marketers http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20019867-36.html “…Rapleaf…has been acquiring Facebook user numbers and profiles from apps, matching them up to its own database of Internet users, and selling it to their business model when they started their business."…Rapleaf, a San Francisco-based "people search" company…had been packaging up publicly available but difficult-to-compile data about tens of millions of individual Web users and using a side business called TrustFuse to sell it to marketers who could match it to e-mail addresses…” http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2010/10/latest_facebook_privacy-news_s.html “…Facebook has been enabling this kind of open access to user information since its inception and that anyone searching for it doesn't need an app to find it…your Facebook username or profile number -- is already public data in most cases. Unless you disable the "public search" feature…anybody can see your name and photo by typing in the right address…even if you have opted out of public search, any of the 500 million-plus users on Facebook can see what the Palo Alto, Calif., social network defines as public data: name, picture, gender and networks. Facebook's adjustable default privacy settings will also let strangers see some of your friends [or let strangers see your data via your friend’s account]…this whole episode confirms two general principles to remember when thinking about electronic privacy breaches. 1) Data will leak by accident for a variety of benign reasons…2) Some companies won't resist the temptation to use data they weren't supposed to see…” http://goo.gl/aUpr “…The only way to stop the application developers from peeping into your own Facebook world, Felt says, is to not put any applications on your personal profile. The vast majority of applications don't need your private data to do their thing, she notes, and yet all of them have access to whatever you can see…”

32. Breadboard launches augmented reality art exhibit throughout Philadelphia http://technicallyphilly.com/2010/10/18/breadboard-launches-augmented-reality-art-exhibit-throughout-city “…Breadboard — an initiative hosted by the University City Science Center — launched the local version of the Virtual Public Art Project, a national augmented reality art program…users can load up three-dimensional images that correlate geographically with popular Philadelphia landmarks…[Augmented Reality] is certainly going to crash through our lives through commerce and advertising. The fact that there’s an organization that exists now and is using this technology and exploring creative and artistic aspects, we thought was a really good project to bring to Philadelphia…Artists responded to a call from Breadboard and were trained through workshops about basic 3D modelling tools, with help from VPAP at Next Fab Studio…The art…is supported by augmented reality app platform Layar on the iPhone and Android-powered devices. The software additionally enables users to access other reality “layers” provided by other companies in the Philadelphia region…Breadboard emerged out of 30 plus years of EKG programming, but to really embrace some of the operating model we had developed, embrace our partnership with Next Fab Studio and do a lot more with technology…”

33. Pioneer Preps Laser Head-up Display for vehicles http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/207248/pioneer_preps_laser_headup_display_for_2012.html Pioneer is developing a head-up display for cars that links in with the navigation function available on many modern smartphones. A prototype of the device…at Japan's Ceatec electronics show…uses a laser to display bright, high-contrast, full-color images on a screen that would be mounted above the dashboard, between the driver and the windscreen. To the driver the projected images would appear in the lower part of the windscreen…The screen used in the prototype is about double the size of a car's rear-view mirror, which makes it larger than most current head-up display systems…The most common feature in connected navigation systems is the ability to download the latest road conditions. Some systems use the link to update databases of convenience stores and gas stations, and some provide daily updates to gas prices. Static databases will become a thing of the past in automotive navigation during the next 10 years…”

34. Tonchidot Raises $12 Million for Augmented Reality/Social Gaming Platform http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/30/tonchidot-raises-12-million-round-b-expands-new-augmented-realitysocial-gaming-platform-globally/ “…augmented reality startup Tonchidot has raised $12 million…from various Japanese companies, including the country’s second biggest telco KDDI…Tonchidot…is known for Sekai Camera, its hit augmented reality (AR) application that’s available for free on the iPhone, Android, iPad, and on the web…the fresh money will be used for expanding the company’s app platform (Sekai Apps) that makes it possible for third parties to release social/location-based/AR games within the Sekai Camera application…these titles will constitute the third wave of innovation in the rapidly growing mobile gaming space – following “traditional” mobile games and location-based services like Foursquare…SoLAR stands for “Social, Location, Augmented Reality”. The first two SoLAR titles already added to Sekai Camera are third-party action game Kaboom and a unique Twitter app called CooKoo…a quirky mix between Twitter client and AR-powered, location-based social game that transforms your tweets into pigeons…”

35. Censorship Circumvention Tools Aren't Widely Used http://www.technologyreview.com/web/26574/ Users in authoritarian regimes either don't know about…or aren't interested…tools like Tor and Freegate that can…access the Internet freely from anywhere…the most popular circumvention tools aren't the ones designed to protect dissidents…most of the people who are avoiding censorship restrictions are using simple proxies to do so, which connect users to blocked content but don't typically take steps to conceal the identity of the person accessing the information…simple proxies…in many cases…were not blocked by government filters the way that tools specifically designed for censorship circumvention were…many people may simply not be interested in censorship circumvention…the group of people who want to participate in these political conversations may be smaller than we've generally hoped…”

Leisure & Entertainment

36. Canon PowerShot SX30 IS Review http://www.photographyblog.com/reviews/canon_powershot_sx30is_review/ The Canon PowerShot SX30 IS is a brand new super-zoom camera sporting an incredible 35x zoom lens equivalent to a focal length of 24-840mm. The lens construction comprises multiple special lens elements including an Ultra-low Dispersion (UD) element as well as a Hi-UD element, compensating for light aberrations while maintaining high image quality across the entire zoom range…the 14 megapixel SX30IS also features full manual controls…The Canon PowerShot SX30 IS is…priced at…$429.99…the Canon SX30 IS offers a frankly incredible zoom range that's much more portable and cheaper when compared with its equivalent on a DSLR…the SX30 IS truly is a one-stop-shop for all your photography needs. The massive focal range is backed up by respectably bright apertures of f/2.7 and f/5.8 at either end, while the 4.5-stop image stabilisation system is better than many Canon pro lenses…the 720p HD video quality is more than adequate for most users and situations. It boasts stereo sound courtesy of microphones positioned either side of its lens…You can also take advantage of the 35x zoom during recording…”

37. Angry Birds free on Android http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/10/15/angry-birds-for-android-available-for-free/ “…Why is Angry Birds free on Android? We want to make Angry Birds available for as many people as possible…Angry Birds will run on second generation Android devices and upwards, with Android platform 1.6 or later. Your device needs to support OpenGL ES 2.0. QVGA display resolution is not supported currently, but we will add support for QVGA devices soon. Angry Birds Android features mobile advertising. A future update will include the option to purchase and opt out of advertisements…download Angry Birds on your device for free exclusively from GetJar (http://www.getjar.com/angry-birds). It will soon be available on the Android Market and Motorola SHOP4APPS, free of charge as well…”

38. The Evolution of the E-book: When is a Book Not a Book? http://gigaom.com/2010/10/15/the-evolution-of-the-e-book-when-is-a-book-not-a-book/ “…Borders has joined forces with a service called Bookbrewer to provide a simple service that allows bloggers or anyone else with an idea to publish what is effectively an e-book, and get it distributed through all the major e-book platforms…The Bookbrewer service allows writers to upload their content — which can be any length — set their own suggested price…then publish an e-book in the open ePub format that can be downloaded for the iPad, the Kindle, the Kobo or any other e-reader. The service has two tiers: one costs $89.99 and gives authors an ISBN, the universal book-tracking number used in the publishing industry, and the $199.99 advanced package also gives the author a master ePub file they can share or upload wherever they wish. Amazon…Kindle Singles…is designed for pieces that are…between 30 and 90 printed pages…The company said it’s looking for submissions from outside the traditional publishing industry, including “serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers.”…the tablet could become a platform for authors of all kinds…anyone with something they might feel deserves a larger audience…it’s like the early days of the Gutenberg revolution…The advent of tablets and e-bookstores dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for…writers, who would previously have had to find an agent and a publisher…and would have had to pay them a handsome share of any revenue…through services like Bookbrewer and Kindle Singles, they can reach what is potentially a much larger audience, and maybe even make some money…e-book publishers pay authors as much as 70 percent of the revenue their books make. The e-book market as a whole continues to grow rapidly…sales climbed 172 percent in August…the book as we know it is undergoing a fundamental transformation, just as so many other forms of content are…”

39. Augmented reality monster hunt with Layar http://recombu.com/apps/manchester-gets-augmented-reality-monster-hunt-with-layar_M12538.html Mobile augmented reality technology is cool, sure, but what is it for? Making virtual zombies appear around Manchester, judging by the latest project to use AR browser Layar…the Manchester Monster Hunt…is taking place over the next couple of weeks. Simply fire up the Layar app on your iPhone or Android handset…Get close enough to them, and not only will they look photogenic through your phone's camera, but you'll be able to 'slay' them and win prizes…new monsters are being released into the wild every week…Vampires, Zombies and Werewolves have all had their turn - this week it's Ghosts, with Demons and Witches to come…”

40. Oprah and Ellen onboard to help Microsoft flog Kinect http://www.thetechherald.com/article.php/201042/6304/Oprah-and-Ellen-onboard-to-help-Microsoft-flog-Kinect In a move that almost guarantees mass market exposure across North America as the holiday season looms, software giant Microsoft is to use both The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Ellen DeGeneres Show to help market its upcoming Kinect motion-control videogame peripheral…Not limited to restricting its Kinect marketing drive to just Oprah and Ellen, Microsoft has also revealed that its promotional campaign for Kinect includes partnerships with Burger King, Kellogg's and Pepsi – the latter deals consisting of 400 million cans of Pepsi Cola and Diet Pepsi and 60 million Kellogg's cereal boxes…Microsoft's Kinect platform (which was previously known as Project Natal) uses dual camera technology to scan and track real-world game players, transferring their virtual interactions directly into videogame worlds without the need for a conventional button-heavy gamepad controller. The standalone Kinect sensor officially launches in the United States on November 4 and will cost $150 USD. A special Xbox 360 console bundle including Kinect and 4GBs of Flash storage will also be available for $300…”

41. Augmented reality technology fuses physical and virtual http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/oct/18/technology-fuses-physical-and-virtual/ At Qualcomm’s Sorrento Valley headquarters, Jay Wright holds a Nexus One smart phone over a game board. Up pops Blue Bomber — one of the two robotic fighters in the classic Rock’em Sock’em Robots…Look away from the phone screen, and all that’s there is the game board. This is mobile augmented reality…The technology uses the camera on a smart phone to trigger software that displays three-dimensional graphics onto real-world images…Instructions — or how-to guides — that pop up on the phone for assembling everything from furniture to electronics also have potential for the technology…If you’re teaching physics, why not build a little interactive 3-D physics simulation that looks like it’s sitting on the textbook page instead of a bunch of static diagrams?” said Blair MacIntyre, head of the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech University…And then there’s advertising — where augmented reality may have its biggest bang…Augmented reality…roots date back to aircraft maintenance, where workers repairing complex wire harnesses would overlay a schematic on a display screen as they were working on the harness, so they knew where wires should go without having to constantly turn away and consult the paper schematic…For Qualcomm, being an early proponent of augmented reality helps drive demand for its chips, particularly its Snapdragon applications processor…Qualcomm is calling on software developers to help build augmented reality applications. It released a software tool kit for developers, and it’s sponsoring a $200,000 contest for the best augmented reality applications on Android…Just how big will augmented reality applications become? There are limitations, said MacIntyre, the Georgia Tech professor who has worked closely with Qualcomm. He doesn’t think, for example, that people will want to walk down the street holding up their phones to get information…ABI Research forecast that revenue related to augmented reality on cell phones will grow from $6 million in 2008 to $350 million by 2014…”

Economy and Technology

42. How much money social media sites can make you http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/14/report-how-much-money-social-media-sites-can-make-you/ “…data compiled by online ticket seller Eventbrite showed that across all social channels, there was a clear gain in dollar amount every time a consumer “shared” news about one of the firm’s events — data that has a direct corollary to any company using social media as a way to advance its brand…The dollar gain was clear, with the most recent data showing that over the past 12 weeks, one share on Facebook equals $2.52, a share on Twitter equals $0.43, a share on LinkedIn equals $0.90, and a share through an “email friends” application equals $2.34…Eventbrite found that in its case, Facebook is now the number one referring site for traffic to the company’s site, surpassing Google, with each Facebook share driving 11 visits back to Eventbrite.com…”

43. Intuit’s New Version Of Quicken Gets Mintified http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/14/intuits-new-version-of-quicken-gets-mintified-with-financial-data-insights-and-more/ One of the reasons Aaron Patzer founded personal finance site Mint.com was because of his frustrations with Intuit’s financial management software Quicken…Mint.com…was bought by Intuit for $170 million in the Fall of 2009…Patzer, who is now vice president and general manager of Intuit’s personal finance group…This is the first version of Quicken to reflect the collaboration of…Quicken Desktop and Mint.com…includes 360-degree financial view that brings together all accounts, including bank, credit card, investment and retirement. Intuit has also added support for 7,000 more banks and now lists 12,000 banks and credit union…One feature that is clearly lacking between Quicken and Mint is the ability to sync your Quicken desktop software with your Mint.com web account, and integrate the data…Patzer says that this will soon be added to the suite of products… the Intuit acquisition doesn’t seem to have stunted Mint.com’s growth. Patzer says that the platform has grown from 1.7 million users in September of 2009 to 4.2 million…”

44. How Intel clawed huge profits from the global downturn http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/10/four-ways-that-intel-rode-the-downturn-to-record-profits.ars “…Intel's…Q4…for 2009 (an 875 percent year-over-year increase in net income, for instance)…has more than just recovered the ground it lost in 2008…despite the anemic, tentative nature of the global recovery so far…Many of the gains in the past two earnings reports have come from Intel's datacenter division, where the ongoing cloud computing buildout is boosting the company's server revenues…the cloud is to the server room what the temp worker is the full-time employee, and Intel is now a major temp provider…the Chinese stimulus…has been a consistent factor in Intel's recent performance, and as such it represents another way that Intel has made lemonade out of economic lemons…the semiconductor…companies cut R&D, sold off adjacent businesses, and just focused on staying in the black…In contrast to the rest of the industry, Intel kept its R&D budget flat throughout the downturn…The chipmaker's commitment to R&D is already starting to pay off in consumer electronics and mobiles…much of the money the US has been printing and pumping into the economy has gone into emerging markets…Intel cited strong demand from emerging markets as a major factor in its earnings growth…”

45. 60 percent of Apple’s sales are from products that did not exist three years ago http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/10/19/chart-apples-new-revenue-streams/ Fully 60% of Apple's (AAPL) quarterly sales now come from two products -- the iPhone and the iPad -- that didn't exist three years ago. "Note the seasonality with the holiday spikes…This last quarter is not a holiday quarter. Now imagine what next quarter will look like on this chart…”

Civilian Aerospace

46. Industry leaders gather in Cruces for Spaceflight Symposium http://www.lcsun-news.com/las_cruces-business/ci_16368867 “…As completion of Spaceport America looms, excitement has continued to build, and more and more people seem to accept that commercial space flight will be a reality in southern New Mexico…Virgin Galactic, Armadillo Aerospace, Boeing, as well as NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Neil Sheehan, just to name a few, will be in Las Cruces this week for the sixth International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight. More than 400 attendees are expected this year…On Friday, a runway dedication at the spaceport will include Virgin founder Richard Branson and Gov. Bill Richardson…We want to have the people in the business community in Las Cruces hooked up with the people in business who are coming to the symposium who know they eventually want to be where the center for commercial space is…”

47. NASA to Spend Up to $30 Million on Private Moon Data http://www.space.com/news/nasa-contracts-private-moon-data-101015.html NASA has signed six contracts worth as much as $30 million in all to purchase data from private teams competing to send homemade robots to the moon. The U.S. space agency awarded small, firm-fixed price contracts worth at least $10,000 to six teams competing in the Google Lunar X Prize contest to design, build and launch private moon probes…these contracts send a clear signal to the investment community that NASA is ready to purchase lunar data, even from small, entrepreneurial firms…The NASA money comes in addition to the $30 million prize purse up for grabs in the Google Lunar X Prize competition. Twenty-two teams are racing to land a robot on the lunar surface, have it move at least 1,650 feet (500 meters) and transmit data and images back to Earth…”

48. NASA To Crowdsource Software Development http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/enterprise-apps/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=227800070 NASA has collaborated with Harvard University to open a new virtual laboratory in which software developers can compete to create code for the space agency…NASA researchers will use the NASA Tournament Lab, an online environment, to ask for a solution to a computational or complex data-processing challenge…The Obama administration has encouraged government agencies to use challenges to foster innovation and make the U.S. more competitive overseas in technology and science. NASA especially has embraced this strategy, offering numerous developer challenges to help it develop new technology…The Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science is hosting the lab under the direction of a crowdsourcing scholar, Harvard Business School Professor Karim R. Lakhani…”

Supercomputing & GPUs

49. Microsoft Patents GPU-Accelerated Video Encoding http://www.conceivablytech.com/3421/business/microsoft-patents-gpu-accelerated-video-encoding/ Microsoft has been granted a key patent that defines one of the primary uses of graphics processors in the future: Video encoding…Microsoft applied for the patent…in October 2004 and was granted a patent to its invention today. It outlines a concept where the GPU is used, among others, to perform motion estimation in videos, the use of the depth buffer of the GPU, to determine comprising, collocating video frames, mapping pixels to texels, frame processing using the GPU and output of data to the CPU. The patent appears to cover all bases of GPU-accelerated video encoding…The first GPU-accelerated video-encoder we know of was Elemental’s Badaboom, which is now potentially infringing Microsoft’s patent…”

50. Photonic Fence Blasts Mosquitos with Lasers http://www.switched.com/2010/09/23/photonic-fence-blasts-mosquito-with-lasers “…an effective and marketable mosquito-zapping laser fence could be on the horizon. Intellectual Ventures (IV) continues to develop and demonstrate its anti-malaria technology, which relies heavily on Nvidia's Graphics Processing Unit…While a laser-guided mosquito defense system obviously sounds awesome, the GPU contributes a particularly incredible function to IV's Photonic Fence. The mosquito defense system not only distinguishes between different types of insects so that it can determine which pests to blast, but it also identifies the mosquitoes that carry malaria. Once the GPU recognizes a carrier, the pest defense, uh, fence cripples the vermin by blasting off its wings…”

51. For Proprietary HPC, Hope Springs Eternal http://www.hpcwire.com/blogs/For-Proprietary-HPC-Hope-Springs-Eternal-104997544.html “…commodity-based HPC systems -- basically, we're talking x86 Linux clusters -- dominate the industry…because of the presence of a healthy supercomputing segment (systems over $500K), this dominance is not completely overwhelming…IDC estimates about three-quarters of HPC server revenue comes from x86-based systems…companies who come up with proprietary technologies…have had limited success in this market. Often very limited…Although ClearSpeed's accelerators offered even better performance per watt than GPGPUs, the proprietary nature of the technology kept HPC users away in droves…x86 silicon is used to take advantage of the cost benefits of volume server chips (not to mention the x86-centric software ecosystem)…There are other possible variations on the pure commodity HPC theme…Appro's…HF1 server…incorporated overclocked x86 Xeon CPUs along with a liquid cooling system to compensate, with the idea of providing a souped-up box for high frequency trading (HFT)…Convey Computer Corporation…with a "hybrid-core" model that employs x86 processors along with an FPGA as the co-processor…the co-processor to be loaded with a "personality" that extends the x86 instruction set for a particular class of applications -- bioinformatics, seismic processing, data mining, financial analytics…IBM's Blue Gene and its newer Power7-based HPC servers…rely on custom ASICs and other hardware…the Green Flash project…is to design a special-purpose supercomputer to perform climate simulations based on a much higher resolution cloud model…if NVIDIA has its way, system vendors will be able to create a general-purpose supercomputer with the performance characteristics approaching that of an Anton or Green Flash a few years down the road. The GPU maker's future generation processors, Kepler in 2011 and Maxwell in 2013, will be 3 and 10 times more powerful, respectively, than the current Fermi processors…”

52. The Second Coming of TSUBAME http://www.hpcwire.com/features/The-Second-Coming-of-TSUBAME-104970024.html When the TSUBAME 2.0 supercomputer is formally inaugurated in December, it will officially be declared the fastest supercomputer in Japan. However, it’s not simply speed that separates this machine; boasting a raw performance of 2.4 petaflops, the new TSUBAME exceeds the total FLOPS capacity of all other government and academic supercomputers in Japan today…the institute added 170 NVIDIA Tesla S1070 servers (680 GPUs) as part of the TSUBAME 1.2 upgrade, which increased the machine's peak performance from 80 to 141 teraflops. This 1.2 incarnation also turned out to be the first GPGPU-powered supercomputer to earn a spot on the TOP500 list…TSUBAME 2.0 will use the company's latest ProLiant SL390s G7 server for its compute infrastructure. Specifically, the 2.4 petaflops of compute power will be derived from 1,442 compute nodes: 1,408 of which are the new SL390s G7 nodes, each equipped with two Intel Westmere EP CPUs (6-core, 2.93 GHz) and three NVIDIA M2050 "Fermi" modules. The system will also include 34 Nehalem EX-based nodes hooked up 34 10-series Tesla S1070 servers. Total memory capacity for the system is 80.6 TB of DRAM, plus 12.7 TB of local GDDR memory on the GPU devices. Each node will also be outfitted with either 120 GB, 240 GB or 480 GB of solid state disk (SSD) local storage for a total of just under 174 TB. External storage is provided by over 7 PB of DataDirect Networks gear, including a 6 PB Lustre partition plus another petabyte of NFS/iSCSI-based disk. An 8 PB Sun SL8500 tape system represents the final layer to TSUBAME's storage infrastructure. The whole cluster is woven together with QDR InfiniBand, in a full bisection, fat tree architecture…”

53. Jefferson Lab cluster tops 100 teraflops http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-jefferson-lab-cluster-tops-100.html “…Jefferson Lab's…supercomputer, called Hadron, was built with components that were purchased and cobbled together over the last year. It runs on both video game graphics cards and ordinary computer processors. About 90 percent of its computing power comes from the video game graphics processing units, or GPUs. The Hadron system contains 480 GPUs and 266 CPUs…We bought two different types of GPUs. We bought gaming cards, and we bought graphics cards in the professional line for supercomputing. These cards are similar to the gaming cards, but they are configured somewhat differently and have error-correcting code built-in," Watson explained. "Some calculations we can do equally well on either card, and we do those calculations on the gaming cards. There are some calculations that involve much more, and those have to be on the professional-quality cards." Hadron is being used to compute how the building blocks of matter, quarks, build the protons, neutrons and other particles that makeup everyday matter…Watson used about $1 million of a nearly $5 million grant received as part of ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) funding under the auspices of the Department of Energy's USQCD (US Quantum Chromodynamics) collaboration to purchase the 352 gaming cards and 128 professional graphics cards and associated hardware currently installed in the Hadron system. A chunk of the grant also went toward funding the effort to create computer code to adapt the GPUs for scientific computing…”


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