Archive for December, 2008
December 20th, 2008 | 
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Breaking news: something’s happening to the internet, right now. We’re just not quite sure what.
Interoute, the internet networks company, reports that three of the four internet sub-cables that run from Asia to North America have been damaged.
These carry more than 75 per cent of traffic between the Middle East, Europe and America. It’s hard to gather what this actually means – is it that the internet is down or (more likely) significantly slower than usual between the Middle East and America? (If you’re reading this, let’s face it, the internet has not shut down altogether)…
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A British scientist is calling for immediate introduction of robot ethics guidelines amid surging use of the machines and concern about their lack of human responsibility while caring for children or the elderly.
In an article published Thursday in the US journal Science, Noel Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield, argues that the steady increase in the use of robots in day-to-day life poses unanticipated risks and ethical problems.
Outside of military applications, Sharkey worries how robots – and particularly the people who control them – will be held accountable when the machines work with “the vulnerable,” namely children and the elderly, stressing that there are already robotic machines in wide use such as the Japanese meal assistance robot “My Spoon.”…
It is often assumed that touch-screen device can be made smaller, because they do away with the need for buttons. But paradoxically, they are often larger than the push button gadgets they replace, according to Patrick Baudisch at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, and Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington.
It’s the “fat finger” problem that is to blame. It is hard to hit small touch targets on a screen because your finger hides what you are aiming for.
Last year, Baudisch and Daniel Wigdor of Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led a team that developed a fix to that. Their “transparent” LucidTouch device let users interact with a screen from the reverse sideMovie Camera.
A new, smaller prototype created by Baudisch and his student Gerry Chu at the University of Toronto takes the idea further. Called NanoTouch, it has a 6-centimetre (2.4 inch) screen and a touch pad of the same size on the back . It can detect the touch or press of a finger, allowing the user to move a tiny cursor around and click and drag with it…
If you?ve ever found yourself working at a coffee shop or other locale when your laptop battery is nearing its end?only to find that every outlet in the place has already been hogged?it would seem that you have no choice but to head home. The Voltaic Generator laptop bag ($499) offers the option to plug your notebook right into its solar-charged battery for few more hours of juice. The Generator is the only notebook bag capable of providing a charge to a laptop (other solar and wind chargers to date haven?t been powerful enough)…
Microsoft yesterday rolled back a recent change to Windows Live Hotmail, more than a month after users had complained bitterly about a new interface the company unveiled in September.
“We heard many users say that they had trouble navigating through Hotmail, especially if they had a smaller monitor,” Microsoft’s Hotmail team wrote on its company blog. “We’ve decided to make a significant change in our product: Hotmail will scroll like classic Hotmail.”
Hotmail users who logged onto the service also received a message alerting them to the change. “We’ve changed the way that scrolling works for users who have the reading pane turned off. It’ll look more like Classic Hotmail if your reading pane is off,” the message read.
Hundreds of users had complained about the new interface on earlier blog entries by the Hotmail developers, upset over the interface redesign and angry about glitches that prevented them from reading their mail. Some also dinged Hotmail’s new look and navigation…
The group representing the U.S. recording industry said Friday it has abandoned its policy of suing people for sharing songs protected by copyright and will work with Internet service providers to cut abusers’ access if they ignore repeated warnings.
The move ends a controversial program that saw the Recording Industry Association of America sue about 35,000 people since 2003 for swapping songs online. Because of high legal costs for defenders, virtually all of those hit with lawsuits settled, on average for around $3,500. The association’s legal costs, in the meantime, exceeded the settlement money it brought in.
The association said Friday that it stopped sending out new lawsuits and warnings in August, and then agreed with several leading U.S. Internet service providers, without naming which ones, to notify alleged illegal file-sharers and cut off service if they failed to stop…
The drumbeat of news, and Microsoft’s own warnings that attacks were on the rise, prompted some to recommend that IE users abandon the browser for an alternative, such as Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera Software’s Opera or Google’s Chrome.
“That advice just wasn’t merited,” argued Schultze, “particularly with the patch coming.”
Kandek urged people to apply the patch immediately and said that enterprises should be able to deploy the fix without much testing. “You should be able to roll it out with your normal patch process,” he said. “I think any fallout should be minor. Fixes for Word, PowerPoint and especially IE, you should be able to [deploy] quickly without much testing necessary.”
The patch is available for users of Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008 and can be downloaded and installed via the Microsoft Update and Windows Update services, as well as through Windows Server Update Services…
Google is shifting its Web browser out of test mode just 100 days after its debut, an unusually quick transition for a company known for keeping the “beta” tag on some products for years.
Thursday’s removal of the test label from Google’s browser, called Chrome, underscores its importance to the Internet search leader.
Google is trying to lure Web surfers away from the leading browsers, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Firefox.
In the process, Google hopes Chrome makes it easier to gather insights about users’ preferences and extends the popularity of its online applications, which are supposed to run more smoothly and quickly in Chrome.
Since its Sept. 2 introduction, Chrome has attracted more than 10 million active users around the world, according to a Google blog posting that announced the browser’s upgrade.
