Technology in your hands.

Researchers are cannibalising the Sony PlayStation 3 console and other gaming hardware, turning them into low-cost supercomputers to model pharmaceutical molecules and black holes, the weekly New Scientist says.

The PS3 console uses a Cell chip, made by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, that comprises a central processing unit and eight slave processors and can run on the open-access Linux operating system.

The chip is prized by chemists and physicists because the kinds of calculations required to make high-quality graphics for games are similar to those used to simulate reactions between particles, ranging from the molecular to the astronomical.

University of Massachusetts astrophysicist Gaurav Khanna has strung together 16 PS consoles to simulate gravity waves that occur when two black holes collide, the British magazine says.

Another innovation is a graphics processor made by NVIDIA that boosts gaming-image quality in personal computers.

By using the C programming language to run the chip, University of Illinois chemist Todd Martinez found he could run calculations 130 times faster than on an ordinary PC.

His is now calculating the energy of the electrons in 1,000 atoms, which add up to the size of a small protein…

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Users seeking a divorce from Facebook are finding their personal data may be kept as alimony payments.

Several users who have tried to leave Facebook have posted unflattering tales of their experiences online, with some saying it has taken weeks or months to extract themselves entirely from the popular social networking service.

A Facebook spokesperson told eWEEK that users can remove their information from Facebook by deactivating their accounts. Once a user deactivates the account, their profile becomes inaccessible on the main Facebook service, and the data is kept by Facebook only to allow easy reactivation.

For those users not interested in any further relationship with the site, they may delete their profile, which means their name and all e-mail addresses associated with the account are deleted from Facebook servers.

What Facebook doesn’t explain in its statement, or in its help section, is the hoops users have to jump through to delete their accounts…

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Over the past few days I posted two sets of benchmarks comparing Windows Vista RTM with Vista SP1 (first post here, second here). These posts generated a lot of feedback, and from reading this feedback it’s clear that what many people are really interested in is not the performance differences between Vista RTM and Vista SP1, but between Vista SP1 and XP SP2.

A few days ago I posted in reply to several TalkBack comments that I wouldn’t carry out these tests until XP SP3 is released. There didn’t seem any point. That didn’t satisfy the crowds who wanted to see Vista SP1 and XP SP2 go head to head. So, to cut a long story short, the pestering continued and I eventually gave in. So what follows are the fruits of nearly two whole days of work at the PC Doc HQ (the test was hampered by the death of a motherboard, something which rendered hours of work obsolete).

How does Windows Vista SP1 compare to Windows XP SP2? Read on …

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As Microsoft awaits a response from the Yahoo board on its $44.6 billion hostile takeover bid, Redmond showed that it is moving forward with new online advertising technologies it has already acquired.

At an event on Tuesday, Microsoft’s adCenter Labs demonstrated seven new advertising concepts including contextual video ads, image categorization and advertising analytics. Microsoft acquired aQuantive, an online advertising and technology firm, last year for $6 billion, its largest acquisition ever — until the Yahoo bid.

Previewing the demo, CEO Steve Ballmer told financial analysts Monday, “We’re in the course of building an online business, and an online business is typically advertising funded. That’s a new muscle, a new set of skills that we’re building.”

At Tuesday’s event, Tarek Najm, a technical fellow at Microsoft, said, “Solutions to today’s challenges must be capable of handling and understanding the complexity of vast amounts of data. To address that challenge, we are developing advertising algorithms that can anticipate and understand consumer behavior faster than the speed of thought.”

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Mozilla has released Firefox 3 Beta 3, the latest test version of the open source Internet browser. Firefox 3 Beta 3, released Tuesday, is intended for testers and developers; casual Internet users are advised not to download it. Known issues, including lack of compatibility with Windows Live Mail and systems freezes in Google Docs, make this release unsuitable for general use.

Beta 3 includes more than 1,300 fixes from the previous version. In addition to better performance and stability, Beta 3 includes improved security, ease of use, and personalization.

In terms of both form and function, the updated browser is now more elegantly integrated with Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows Vista.

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Web browsing and searching are becoming increasingly risky activities, according to a report published by Google on Tuesday.

“In the past few months, more than 1% of all search results contained at least one result that we believe to point to malicious content and the trend seems to be increasing,” said Niels Provos, a security engineer at Google, in a blog post.

Provos said that in the year and a half since Google began tracking malicious Web pages, the company has found more than 3 million unique URLs on more than 180,000 Web sites that attempt to install malware on visitors’ computers.

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Someday, your shirt might be able to power your iPod — just by doing the normal stuff expected of a shirt.

Scientists have developed a way to generate electricity by jostling fabric with unbelievably tiny wires woven inside, raising the prospect of textiles that produce power simply by being stretched, rustled or ruffled by a breeze.

The research, described in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature, combines the precision of ultra-small nanotechnology with the elegant principle known as the piezoelectric effect, in which electricity is generated when pressure is applied to certain materials.

While the piezoelectric effect has been understood at least as far back as the 19th century, it is getting creative new looks now, as concerns about energy supplies are inspiring quests for alternative power sources.

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Here’s a heads-up on the evolving security threats we can expect to see in the coming year, including emerging menaces such as badvertising, adsploits, anti-social networking, lieware, and whaling.

By the end of 2008, McAfee Avert Labs predicts it will have identified some 550,000 malicious programs, a 54% increase from 2007. With all the new malware emerging, we can expect new terminology to describe these constantly morphing threats. Here, then, is our only slightly tongue-in-check attempt to predict some of the rising threats in 2008 and the language that may be employed to describe those threats.

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Microsoft is planning to release 12 security bulletins next week, the company said Thursday. The latest dozen fixes to Microsoft’s software are scheduled for release on Feb. 12. Microsoft plans to hold a Webcast on Feb. 13 to address customer questions.

Microsoft’s February Patch Day will offer information about seven critical and five important vulnerabilities. The affected Microsoft software includes Active Directory, ADAM, IIS, Internet Explorer, Jscript, Office, VBScript, Visual Basic, Windows, Works, and Works Suite.

There’s something for Mac users, too: Microsoft plans to address a vulnerability in Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac. While the company has not yet said what this vulnerability is, it probably has something to do with the Excel bug that surfaced in mid-January. The company issued a security advisory on Jan. 15 stating that it was investigating reports of a flaw in Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 2, Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Excel 2000, and Microsoft Excel 2004 for Mac…
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Mozilla on Friday released Firefox 2.0.0.12, an updated version of the upstart browser that has won over roughly one out of every five Internet users worldwide. The 2.0.0.12 update addresses 10 security advisories, three of which Mozilla classifies as critical.

One of the critical advisories has to do with the way that images are handled on Web pages with designMode frames, an HTML property that allows Web documents to be edited. The vulnerability could potentially be exploited to steal a user’s browsing history, crash Firefox, or execute arbitrary code. The second critical advisory has to do with memory corruption crashes in the browser engine used by Firefox and other Mozilla products like Thunderbird. The third outlines a flaw that could allow JavaScript privilege escalation and the ability to execute arbitrary remote code.

In its 2007 security report, Secunia analyzed a limited set of vulnerabilities that were disclosed publicly, before vendor notification, and found that Mozilla on average patched Firefox flaws more quickly thanMicrosoft patched holes in Internet Explorer.

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