The free for all in YouTube may soon come to an end. The popular website has decided to introduce recognition technology from September to prevent uploading of copyrighted videos. A lawyer representing YouTube told a United States court hearing a copyright case that the company was planning to deploy recognition technology which akin to the one used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The new technology would help the website to quickly identify digital fingerprints on copyrighted videos and shut them down within a minute. At present, hundreds of thousands of videos of all kinds are indiscriminately uploaded in every day.
HCL’s new range of desktop computers contains chipmaker Intel’s latest high-tech quad-core processor. This is akin to a machine having four brains working in tandem. Needless to say, this increases the performance range of the PC several fold, something that inveterate gamers and multimedia professionals were longing for. HCL is the first to launch desktops on quad-core platform in India. The PCs are priced between Rs 40,000 and Rs 90,000. Intel claims that apart from delivering greater performance, quad-core processors will also cut power consumption by as much as 40 per cent.
Microsoft has sold about 60 million copies of its new operating system Vista until now. Unveiling the latest sales figures, Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said in a none-too-subtle manner that in the first five weeks after its launch, Vista had overtaken the entire installed base of rival Apple. Turner’s upbeat announcement comes after wide speculation in the media that Vista was not doing well. Laptop maker Acer recently stated openly that most of the industry was disappointed by Vista. Analysts are not too impressed by the latest sales figures either since they include the 42 million computers covered under volume license agreements. Vista had sold 20 million copies the month after its launch. After that, sales had levelled out probably because of reports about teething problems. It seems that slow and steady pace is continuing
The Windows Genuine Advantage tool developed by Microsoft has helped sleuths to bust the biggest ever software piracy racket. Under WGA, users have to validate their operating system with Microsoft to update software. This helped MS detect lots of pirated versions of its programmes. Making use of this data, the FBI the other day busted the China-based racket which had distributed pirated Windows software worth $2 billion in more than 27 countries. CDs of pirated software worth $500 million were seized from the racket’s base in Guandong province. It had been bringing out and selling pirated versions of Microsoft’s popular products including Windows Vista and MS Office 2007.
Major PC manufacturer Acer has expressed deep disappointment with Microsoft’s latest operating system Windows Vista. Acer’s chief Gianfranco Lanci told a newspaper that the entire industry was disappointed by Vista though he was the first person to say it openly. Acer is the fourth largest PC maker in the world. Vista has had a slow start and Microsoft has been pushing it.
Stung by criticism on their hostility to privacy, major search engines are now shortening the time span in which they will retain user data relating to searches. Microsoft said the other day that it will retain search information only for 18 months. This follows Google’s announcement a few weeks ago that it would restrict data retention to 24 months at the most. Another popular search engine, Ask.com, went a step further and has said that it would give users the option to erase data soon after a search. Yahoo is also expected to announce its policy to restrict data only for 13 months soon. The flurry of announcements have come in the wake of sharp attacks on Google by privacy advocates who said it could build up psychological profiles of users with all the data retained in its various applications.
Africa is still a dark continent as far as Internet connectivity is concerned. Latest reports point out that less than four percent of the continent’s population is connected to the Web and majority of them are in South Africa. Even the meagre infrastructure in many countries of Africa had been destroyed in civil conflicts and this has hampered connectivity. As of now, even an email message from an African country has to be routed through United States or Britain, jacking up costs heavily. About 75 per cent of Africa’s Internet traffic is carried out with the help of others.
Microsoft is tentatively planning to release the next version of its Windows operating system in 2010. The present version, Windows Vista, was released five years after Windows XP hit the market. Its production and release was marked by many delays and MS had promised that this would not occur again. It has revamped its Windows team to avoid such delays. the new version is codenamed Windows 7 for the time being.
The first low-cost laptops produced under the One Laptop per Child Project will reach kids in developing countries by October 2007. OLPC was conceived by tech guru Nicholas Negroponte in 2002 and he has faced both bouquets and brickbats for the idea. The XO laptop he designed is a rugged green coloured machine which can survive the heat and dust of a third world existence. It is priced at $100, has a flash memory of 1 GB and a pared down operating system which will fit the needs of school kids. Most importantly, it is energy efficient and can be charged with solar power or even a foot pump. This innovative design did not earn the praise of corporates. Intel, for instance, called it a gadget and Microsoft said its screen was way too small. Negroponte, however, pointed out sagely that it was just an educational tool for poor kids.
Intel and HCL will introduce Classmate PCs for students in India from August. The PC will be priced at Rs 18,000 initially. The cost may go down further. The chipmaker is already holding talks with education departments of various states to market at least 10,000 Classmates in the coming year. It will offer monthly instalment schemes for schools and provide teachers’ training and customised software as add-ons. The PCs, with a child-friendly and colourful interface, will be powered by Intel processor 900 MHZ. Intel has already carried out pilot projects with Classmate PCs at schools in Delhi and Bangalore. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project of Nicholos Negroponte will soon market its low cost PC in third world countries. Microsoft has also announced plans to launch its cheap IQ PC for students in India.
A 75-year-old woman living at Karlstard in Sweden has the fastest residential internet connection in the world at 40 gigabytes per second. Sigbritt Lothberg had only recently started browsing the Internet and did not know anything about computers a few years ago. She had never used computer in her entire life. Her connection was tweaked and speeded up by her son Peter along with Hafsteinn Jonsson, head of the Karlstad city network, with the help of a new modulation technique. It became so fast that Sigbritt can now download a full length movie in two seconds flat. But she is only using the connection to read online newspapers. Now, she is extremely happy by using Internet.
Microsoft’s profits rose by seven per cent to touch $3.4 billion in the first quarter of 2007, thanks mainly to the success of its new operating system Vista. However, Microsoft mandarins were not grinning from ear to ear as the company had lost money on the much-hyped Xbox game console, which turned out to have many hardware flaws. It had extended the warrantee for the console to three years as part of its damage control exercise and would have to spend an extra $750 million for this. The console imbroglio is reported to have reduced profits by about $1.06 million. However, Vista and MS Office 2007 together bolstered earnings this quarter. Microsoft is hoping to do better next year when it will release new server software and the much-anticipated Halo 3 video game.
Google, which is yet to dispel the ongoing controversies over its privacy policy, has shortened the lifespan of its cookies. The company has disclosed that henceforth its cookies stored on the computers of site visitors will auto delete after two years. It will stay on if the user pays a visit to a Google site again. Privacy advocates had complained that storage of cookies took away the freedom of the user to decide his priorities. However, a better option for all site visitors would be to delete cookies from time to time.
Yes, researches in India (Satyabama University) have found a kind of wearable Bluetooth device that is capable of sending text messages to the nearest hospital when the wearer's heart shows any signs of extreme distress, heart strokes etc.. The Telemedicine, as they named the device, regularly records the patient's ElectroCardioGram (ECG) and sends the level to his/her cell phone. If it detects any signs of sudden cardiac failure, sends a text message to one of the local hospitals nearby alerting the issue. Now this device not only saves the 'precious' lives but also eases the job of a Doctor unlike before where the Doctor needs to analyse the patient for diagnosis. The only difference between this wearable and the other previously developed device is that it carefully reads the ECG levels and elimates any ambiguity before sending the text message. Thus improving the efficiency.
While this particular device has many priceless advantage, one has to think on the other way round-its side effects. Studies shows that Cell phone, Bluetooth ray exposures are harmful to human beings. With this being the case, actual implementation of the device is still followed by a question mark.
The entire thesis of this Telemedicine device will be completed in December.
For those who love mind-boggling varieties of videos, there is YouTube. For those who want more quality stuff, Sony has launched Crackle. It is much more elegant than YouTube and has more interesting and thought-provoking videos. Users can submit videos as in YouTube, but a team of Crackle experts and editors will judge them before putting them on the site. Also, the site gives awards for the best videos and the award winners will get a chance to discuss film ideas with Sony executives. There are around 1,000 professionally produced videos being streamed in Crackle at present and Sony has also launched Crackle Studios to produce more videos for the site.
Yes it is..Electronics giant Sony has patented a liquid airbag which will be used to protect hard disks from damage. The company is planning to use this airbag in various products including laptops, mobile phones, media players and cameras. Even if the equipment suffers a fall and gets damaged, the hard disk and key electronic equipment will survive as the airbag will cushion the shock. It will have inbuilt protrusions to help absorb powerful impacts. Sony spokespersons have disclosed in a statement to media that the liquid used in the airbag could be water or silicon oil.
Advanced Micro Devices will start selling its quad core microprocesors named Barcelona from September to take on its rival Intel, which brought out is quad core processors last year. As the saying 'Last but not Least' AMD Quad core is expected to be 50% faster than Intel's. The picture that shown here is the original architecture of AMD Quad Core taken from a non-proffessional camera. Though the speculations suggests that this chip is faster than Intel Quad Core we will have to wait and see how efficient it is.
Websites and emails that ‘phish' for personal information have not come down though widely-used browsers including Internet Explorer and Firefox have ‘antiphishing' features now. The browsers warn Net users about sites which are blacklisted but phishers have now found a way to circumvent this, says Mr David Jevans, chairman of the Anti-Phishing Working Group. Clever phishers are now registering new domains for each of their adventures. By the time the browsers blacklist them, they would have already cheated many users. Then they would register another domain. Jevans points out that phishing domains rose from about 11,000 last year to more than 37,000 by May this year. According to researchers of Cambridge University, each phishing site is able to attract and cheat 30 users in a few hours before it is blacklisted. This is a good business. The only long-term solution is authentication of each site, which is easier said than done.
Hackers have once again broken into Microsoft’s digital rights management system aimed at protecting copyrighted material including music. The FairUse4M programme available online will help hackers to ‘drag and drop’ protected music files, turn them into MP3s and play and share them at will. Earlier versions of the same programmes had caused much heartburn to MS and it had plugged loopholes in its DRM system to combat the menace. But music industry watchers say that DRM will be out of vogue soon since hackers will always find a way.
Korean electronics giant LG is partnering with Google to develop a ‘YouTube’ phone which will allow users to easily upload videos on the popular site. Bloggers who have had a sneak peak at the phone’s visuals online are already speculating about it excitedly. The phone, with a three-inch touch screen, will dispense with the keypad as is the wont now and will have a five megapixel camera. It will have video editing facility, apart from an MP3 player and FM radio. The You Tube phone is expected to hit the markets by the end of the year. LG’s Google phones are already available in European markets and offer a single-click access to all of Google’s applications.
The top 20 IT companies of the country earned $28 billion in 2006-07. This is 42 per cent more than the revenue earned the previous year. According to an annual survey conducted by DataQuest, 11 of these companies — Wipro, TCS, Infosys, Satyam, HCL Technologies, Teledata Informatics, Redington India, HCL Infosystems, Tech Mahindra, Patni, Computer Systems and Moser Baer —accounted for $17 billion. The other big earners are global names—HP, IBM, Ingram Micro, Oracle, Cognizant, Cisco, Intel, Mic-rosoft and Lenovo — and they earned $11 billion, recording a 39 per cent growth in revenue. Dataquest cited these figures as an indication of the maturity of the Indian IT industry. The survey also found that major IT companies were spreading their network into smaller cities and towns.
HCL, India’s largest manufacturer of personal computers, is bringing out the country’s first PC with One Terabyte hard drive capacity. The new PC is mainly intended for design and animation professionals. Geeks who crave for higher capacity machines can also opt for it. It will use the 1 TB Deskstar hard drive which was recently launched with much fanfare by Hitachi. HCL will introduce two models, an entry level machine and a high-end digital content creation workstation. Both of them will offer ten times more storage space than ordinary PCs. The high end model would have Quadro FX 1500 and Adobe Production Studio Premium as add-ons. The entry level model will be priced at Rs 35,000 and the digital content creation workstation at Rs 99,000.
Faster computers need faster memories and DDR3 (Double Data Rate Three) modules are the latest rage in the market. The DDR3 is faster than DDR2, which had just started getting fashionable, and also consumes less power. As the name suggests, these devices help data to move twice as fast. Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) , the memory standards association, has predicted a bright future for DDR3 and ASUSTEK has become the first company to induct it in a motherboard. It will enable about 1,600 million transfers per second.
Hackers are working to unlock Apple Inc.'s iPhone, but the job appears to be more difficult than initially expected. They hoped that modifying the iPhone's bootloader -- the program that runs before the operating system is loaded -- would unlock the handset. But that turned out to be a dead end, as the bootloader code must be signed using a 1,024-bit RSA private key employed by Apple. Now, the hackers on iphone are working to create an assembler utility for the iPhone's processor. Once they have the ability to write programs for the iPhone, they can write one to unlock the handset. The iPhone is locked for use with AT&T Inc.'s EDGE network. Unlocking the iPhone will allow the handsets to be used with other operators, including carriers in Asia and Europe, where the phone is not yet available. While hackers have yet to unlock the iPhone, they have made other breakthroughs since overcoming the activation hurdle. For instance, hackers last week released a tool that allows users to install custom ringtones on the iPhone.
PC World magazine has selected Dell’s multimedia laptop, the XPS M1210, as the ‘number one’ laptop available in the market at present. According to the magazine, the well-designed laptop with a ‘bright’ screen has everything that a user would aspire for. Apart from regular features, the laptop has a media direct button which can quickly access movies, music files and video clips. There is also an external USB TV tuner, a webcam and an integrated broadband antenna. Using the ‘WiFi Catcher’ switch one can scan for any kind of wireless signal. Loaded with Windows Vista, M1210 has a 2-GHz Core 2 Duo T7200 processor, 2GB RAM and a graphics controller supporting basic 3D gaming, all for $999 (Nearly Rs.40,000). What more could a laptop user ask for?
Though Windows Vista did not have an earth-shaking take-off it would become the operating system of majority of computers in the world in five years, according to research firm International Data Corporation. More than 93 per cent of computers in the world are run on one Windows version or the other. Windows XP itself took five years to break through. The ID prediction comes amid reports that many companies and individuals are hesitant to upgrade to Vista because of the teething problems relating to peripherals and programmes.
Chipmaker Intel and the One Laptop per Child project have decided to stop sniping at each other and become pals. The OLPC project was launched by MIT’s tech guru Nicholas Negroponte to provide low-cost laptop to kids in third world countries. Intel, which is also trying to market its low-cost Classmate PC, had crossed swords with OLPC several times. Negroponte blew his top after Intel’s top honcho recently termed the OLPC machine a ‘mere gadget’. There were speculations that Intel was deriding the project since the low-cost laptop was using chips made by rival AMD. However, the firm seems to have had second thoughts and has now climbed on board the OLPC project along with other big corporate sponsors such as Google. An Intel representative will also be inducted in the OLPC board. We don’t yet know if its chips would be inducted in the machine.
Fujitsu has broughtout a portable hard drive with the biggest ever capacity of 300GB. It can snugly fit into pockets and can store cartloads of data. The portable drive is essentially meant for business people and has an integrated USB 2.0 cable to ensure easy connectivity. It has an omni-directional shock mounting design, which means that it will survive most falls and blows. There is also an additional data protection suite and an encryption facility to ensure privacy. It can also be utilised as a backup application for an entire computer. Portable drives are not just data carriers but fashion statements too and Fujitsu's slim, sleek and stylish 2.5 inch product is no exception.
A sadistic malware which mocks users with a voice message while vandalising their hard drives has been detected by security researchers. The BotVoice-A Trojan enters computers through downloads. Once it is in, it starts erasing data from the hard drive while saying, "You have been infected and your system files have been deleted. Sorry. Have a nice day and bye-bye." This message, which is created by using the Windows text reading facility, is repeated again and again till nerves are frayed or the hard drive is empty. "I haven't seen brainless vandalism like that for years," said a bewildered security researcher.
Cyber criminals exploit ‘basic instincts' of trust, fear, greed, lust and love to work their scams through spam, according to a study sponsored by antivirus developer McAfee. The study titled ‘Mind Games,' authored by two forensic psychologists, says that most scams succeed through the use of ‘familiarity and legitimacy'. For instance, cyber crooks use the names of trusted banks to ‘phish' for personal data. Nowadays, they also booby trap trusted websites such as You Tube. The other tactic to exploit fear, through slick and polished mails such as ‘urgent security notification' or ‘update your account records'.
Logitech, a major manufacturer of computer peripherals, has come out with a cordless mouse which uses a laser sensor to move the cursor on screen. The mouse, named Logitech® MX Air™, also has Logitech’s Freespace motion control tech, which enables gesture commands. This means that you don’t have to click but merely move the cursor to the required application for it to open. Logitech promises that the mouse will also be able to distinguish between unintended arm movements and deliberate movements. The intelligent rodent will ignore the former. And to move down the page you just have to swipe your finger on the scroll panel. The mouse will scurry into the market this August. Meanwhile, the company has launched its fun mice—Racer, Tiger and Zebra.
Social networking is not just for youth and adults but for kids as well. Many kids aged from 6 to 10 are now logging into Club Penguin and Webkinz to chat with their friends and play games. They are more of online playgrounds than social networking sites. After all, where would kids want to group and chat? These sites are fast getting popular and a comScore study says that visitors to Club Penguin went up three times last year, while Webkinz’ clientele grew 13 times. The sites have strong filters preventing foul language and eliciting of personal information. But there are no controls at all on throwing online snowballs at each other.
Inspired by success of the roaring Orkut, Rediff India has launched a social networking and content sharing site named iShare. It will enable users to share photos, videos, content, blogposts and music. A simple utility tool has to be downloaded and installed in the computer to enable active sharing and this will help users to upload videos and music from mobiles and mp3 players easily. The website supports several formats including mpeg, wmv and avi. Rediff India claims that iShare will be the first exclusive social networking site for Indians, both within the country and abroad. The company has also tied up with Zee Televsion to enable singers aspiring to take part in the popular ‘Saregama' show to upload their audio files on iShare.
A major museum tracing the history of computers is being set up in Bletchley Park in London, where the first ‘modern' computers were set up during World War II. The main attraction of the museum would be the aptly named Colossus computer which was rigged up to enable code breakers to intercept communications of German generals at the peak of the war. It will enable visitors to trace the evolution of the computer from the Colossus, which could not be fit into a large room, to hand-held PCs which will snugly fit into coat pockets. One fascinating aspect of the museum is that all the computers displayed there would be functioning ones, including the Colossus, which has now been restored.
A new virus is playing a nasty game using Internet Explorer and Firefox, rival browsers jostling for space in desktops. Security researchers say that it uses IE to force Firefox to open ‘windows' to download malware and to alter security settings in the PC. It is a roundabout way of making mischief and seems all the more funny because of the rivalry between the two browsers. A Symantec researcher said that the virus made use of flaws in both the browsers. "Here we have a case of two very complex applications that simply don't play nice together," he said. "When you put them both on the same machine it becomes a security problem.
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