Spooks want govt to block out Skype

Intelligence agencies have asked the government to consider blocking Skype as operators of the popular global VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) engine are refusing to share the encryption code that prevents Indian investigators from intercepting conversations of suspected terrorists.

    The Cabinet Committee on Security has accepted in principle the recommendation but has not set a date for initiating action. The urgency to track Skype calls stems from the fact that terrorists — as the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai showed — are increasingly using VoIP services. The shift to VoIP has been prompted by the growing ability of intelligence agencies to intercept mobile and other calls.
    Like the BlackBerry service, VoIP operators send their signals under a specific code which makes it difficult for others to decipher. Sources said Skype has shared its encryption code with the US, China and other governments but is refusing to accept similar Indian requests.
    Since Skype is not registered here, Indian authorities have been forced to mull the drastic option of blocking its gateways here. This, however, may not be entirely effective as Skype can route traffic through other service providers. The agencies say blocking the gateways will at least serve as a signal to local service providers against carrying traffic from Skype or any other similar service provider who does not share the encryption code with the government.
    Sections 4 and 5 of the Telegraph Act gives government the right to grant licence for any kind of telephony and also the right to intercept. Last year, government amended Section 69 of the Information Technology Act to empower itself to take over servers of Net and telecom service providers and demand the encryption code. This may still be no remedy against recalcitrant overseas service providers who usually have their servers abroad.
    Last year, the government had a similar run-in with Canada’s Research in Motion, BlackBerry makers and service providers, and the UAE-based satphone operator Thuraya.
VoIP Decoded
Analog voice signals (the kind heard on phone) are converted to digital format, compressed into IP packets and transmitted over Internet For this, VoIP systems employ audio codecs (programs) which encode speech as digital audio VoIP thus turns a standard Internet connection into a way to place free phone calls, bypassing phone network
sourcr:timesofindia

Nokia's new netbook

Nokia's new netbook computer, the Booklet 3G, is seen at the Nokia corporate headquarters in Helsinki in this August 24, 2009 file photo. As computer makers roll out their new notebooks and netbooks ahead of the end-year holiday shopping season, razor-thin, sleek and colorful are most definitely in, as are arresting designs in an ever-expanding array of choices.

new robotic Product from Panasonic

This combo picture shows an employee of Japanese electronoics giant Panasonic demonstrating a new robotic product that transforms from a bed (L) into a wheelchair (R) at the annual Home Care and Rehabilitation Exhibition in Tokyo. The innovation is designed to help people with limited mobility maintain an independent lifestyle. Japan has one of the world's oldest populations and faces a constant shortage of care workers

Apple passes 2 billion app downloads

Apple Inc said on Monday that downloads from its iTunes applications store have passed 2 billion and it now has more than 85,000 apps available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

It did not say how many of the applications delivered were sold and how many were free. The apps store has inspired rival stores and helped boost iPhone sales since the summer of 2008.

Apple said it has sold more than 50 million iPhones and iPod Touch devices in 77 countries. AT&T Inc is the exclusive U.S. provider for iPhone.

One Big Step for India, A Giant Leap for Mankind

Nasa Probe On Chandrayaan Finds Water On Moon’s Surface

It is a giant leap for India’s space programme and the biggest scientific discovery of the 21st Century. India’s maiden moon mission, Chandrayaan-1, has found water, a discovery that scientists say will upend thinking about space and boost research. And, of course, it has helped shake off the failure tag from the Rs 386-crore Chandrayaan-I project that was aborted last month.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) Chairman Madhavan Nair gives a press conference at the ISRO office in Bangalore on September 25, 2009. Nair confirmed the discovery of water molecules by the moon mineralogy mapper (M3) through its Lunar mission Chandrayaan-1.

Jim Green, director, Planetary Science Division, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters holds a spoon to illustrate the amount of water discovered on the surface of the moon at a briefing to discuss new science data from the moon collected during national and international space missions September 24, 2009 at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. NASA scientists have discovered water molecules in the polar regions of the moon. Instruments aboard three separate spacecraft revealed water molecules in amounts that are greater than predicted, but still relatively small. Hydroxyl, a molecule consisting of one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom, also was found in the lunar soil. The findings were published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science. NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3, instrument reported the observations. M3 was carried into space on Oct. 22, 2008, aboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Data from the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer, or VIMS, on NASA's Cassini spacecraft and the High-Resolution Infrared Imaging Spectrometer on NASA's EPOXI spacecraft contributed to confirmation of the finding. The spacecraft imaging spectrometers made it possible to map lunar water more effectively than ever before.

Philips Big Blu-Ray player

Philips Consumer Lifestyle Vice President Mahesh Krishna poses with the Big Blu-Ray player range and cinema 21.9 at their launch in New Delhi  Philips launched what they call the world's first cinema-proportioned LCD television screen in India.

Oceansat-2

India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) C-14 blasts off carrying the ocean monitoring satellite Oceansat-2 along with six nano European satellites from the Satish Dhawan space centre at Sriharikota, about 100 km (62 miles) north of the southern Indian city of Chennai September 23, 2009.

Sony PlayStation 3

A woman holds the controller of a new PlayStation 3 which was released in September 2009 at Sony Computer Entertainment booth during the Tokyo Game Show 2009 press and business day at Makuhari Messe on September 24, 2009 in Chiba, Japan. The Game show will run until September 27 and is expecting 180,000 visitors over the 4 days. 180 companies and groups are exhibiting at the show.

Yahoo Will Spend More Than $100 Million To Try To Connect With You

Yahoo unveiled a new branding campaign at a press conference in New York City, centered around personalization and connecting directly with consumers. The Web company’s new tagline is, “It’s Y!ou” (with the awkward Yahoo exclamation point in there). Yahoo wants to make the Web personal and it is emphasizing the various ways it does that through the Yahoo home page, search, and individual properties. The company will be spending “more than $100 million” on this new branding campaign, CEO Carol Bartz reveals.

NASA Road-Tests New Moon Rover

The space agency's current plan is to send humans back to the moon by 2020, and this includes using a new exploration vehicle called Lunar Electric Rover (LER). About the size of a small pickup truck, LER has 12 pivoting wheels that enable the rover to move in any direction and turn on a dime; it features a tilting cockpit for close-up views of the terrain; and it runs on batteries and fuel cells.

A Salt and Paper Battery

Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden have made a flexible battery using two common, cheap ingredients: cellulose and salt. The lightweight, rechargeable battery uses thin pieces of paper--pressed mats of tangled cellulose fibers--for electrodes, while a salt solution acts as the electrolyte.

The new battery should be cheap, easy to manufacture, and environmentally benign, says lead researcher Maria Stromme. She suggests that it might be used to power cheap medical diagnostics devices or sensors on packaging materials or embedded into fabric. "You don't need advanced equipment to make the batteries," Stromme says, "so they could be made on site in developing countries."

The new battery uses a type of rechargeable thin-film design that many other researchers and companies have been working on for several years.

Thin-film batteries typically use solid electrolytes instead of liquid or gel, and their electrodes are typically made of lithium combined with metals such as nickel, cobalt, or manganese. The salt-and-paper battery is an ideal replacement for the lithium ones used in many low-power portable devices, such as wireless sensors, smart cards, medical implants, and RFID tags. "For these applications, the thinner and smaller the battery, the better," says Sara Bradford, an energy and power consultant at Frost & Sullivan.

Thin-film batteries have other attractive features. They have a long shelf life, retaining their charge after being stored for many years, and they can be charged and discharged tens of thousands of times, says Raghu Das, CEO of research company IDTechEX and an expert on printed electronics, "enabling wireless sensors that can last for decades with an appropriate energy harvester attached."

However, only a handful of startups, such as Infinite Power Solutions in Littleton, CO, and Solicore in Lakeland, FL, have generated enough venture backing to bring their batteries to market. Cymbet in Elk River, MN, and Excellatron in Atlanta, GA, are other strong contenders with market-ready technologies. More than four million thin-film batteries will ship this year, according to a May 2009 report by market research firm NanoMarkets.

source:technologyreview

3-D television expected to come to homes in 2010

Three-dimensional images are expected jump out of movie theaters and into living rooms by next year.

Sony and Panasonic say they will release home 3-D television systems in 2010; Mitsubishi and JVC are reported to be working on similar products.

Google’s dominance

Google’s dominance of the Internet in the United States is hard to overstate. The company accounts for two-thirds of all Web searches, it owns YouTube, which is 10 times more popular than its nearest competitor, and it is No. 1 in areas like maps and blogging. Over all, Internet users in the United States spend 9 percent of their time online on some Google service, according to comScore.

Yet there are places where Google is far more dominant. India and Brazil stand out, according to new data that comScore made available to The New York Times. In those countries, for every hour people spend online, about 18 minutes are on a Google service.

To be precise, Google accounts for nearly 30 percent of people’s online minutes in Brazil and nearly 29 percent in India. The next country in terms of Google’s dominance is Ireland, where it accounts for 16 percent of online minutes.

The global average is 9.4 percent, or slightly higher than in the United States.

Google’s gaping lead over rivals in Brazil and India is in part the result of an anomaly: Orkut, Google’s social network, which has been a failure pretty much everywhere else in the world, is No. 1 in those two countries. But Orkut is only part of the story.

In Brazil, Google captures nearly 90 percent of all searches, 71 percent of the time spent on maps (compared with just 42 percent here) and 43 percent of the time spent on blogs (compared with 30 percent here). In India, it represents 88 percent of searches, 64 percent of maps and 48 percent of blogs. Gmail accounts for nearly half of the Indian Web e-mail market, compared with just 6.4 percent here.

Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis for comScore, said that Google’s dominance in those countries has historical reasons. While on opposite sides of the world, when it comes to the Internet, India and Brazil developed in parallel, he said.
 
“Part of the explanation was that Google emerged onto the scene at the time these markets were developing,” Mr. Lispman said. “As Google became the default search engine, the brand extended to these other services.”
There are other countries, of course, where Google has not been able to beat local brands — notably China, the Internet market with the most users, where it lags behind Baidu, and Russia, where Yandex is the leading search engine.

But India is ranked seventh, and Brazil ninth, in terms Internet use globally. They are also two of the fastest-growing markets.

That growth obviously bodes well for Google. It also suggests that Google still has room to increase its dominance in the United States and makes it clear just how challenging it is for a rival like Microsoft to compete against Google globally.

The New Faces of Android

Several new devices will test the appeal of Google's mobile platform.

A wave of new devices powered by Google's Android platform look set to test the flexibility and appeal of the software.
Within the last week, LG, Motorola, and INQ Mobile all announced Android phones, which will join offerings from Samsung and HTC. Few details have been released about INQ's and LG's phones, but Motorola's device, known in the United States as the CLIQ, boasts an interface designed specifically for accessing social media.

The CLIQ's interface organizes information on the phone into "streams," weaving data from the phone's address book with information posted on social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Users can respond to messages through a number of social channels without having to log in or out of accounts or switch applications.

Google's Street View Maps

Google employee Arthur Poirier, on a camera-equiped tricycle, records images for Google's Street View Maps in Paris, Friday, Aug. 7, 2009. The U.S. company has hired two young cyclists to ride through gardens, historical sites and other pedestrian-only areas on the three-wheeler to take thousands of digital photos.

Microsoft unveils more-powerful Zune media player

Microsoft (MSFT)  is unveiling its latest offering in the MP3 player market, a sleek high-definition device capable of playing HD movies and HD radio known as, appropriately, Zune HD.

Available in 16GB and 32GB versions at $220 and $290, Zune HD features a vibrant organic LED color screen with multi-touch technology. Retail outlets will sell both platinum and black versions, while several other colors will be available at Zuneoriginal.net. It's Wi-Fi enabled with a web browser, so movies and music can be downloaded on the go or at Zune.net. The company was planning to have as many as 500 HD (720p) movies available for rent/sale by today. It also plans to feature a few free applications  at launch in the Zune Marketplace, including a calculator, weather, and some games. In the next few months, apps for Twitter and Facebook  will become available, as well as several 3D games including Project Gotham Racing.

Microsoft  has enjoyed some impressive early reviews for the product, which is clearly aimed at Apple's iPod Touch device.

Microsoft OneApp

Microsoft OneApp is a new technology that unlocks the potential of feature phones in emerging markets. The software allows customers to access applications such as Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live Messenger.

Motorola 'Cliq'

Motorola Inc CEO Sanjay Jha displays his company's new "Cliq" cellphone in San Francisco, California September 10, 2009. Motorola Inc on Thursday took the wraps off the new cellphone that uses Google's Android software and seeks to tap into the popularity of online social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Google launches online news reader 'Fast Flip'

Internet giant Google has unveiled its "Fast Flip" online news reader. featuring stories from major media outlets, including the BBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Google, which launched Fast Flip at the TechCrunch50 technology conference in San Francisco, compared using the quick-loading product to flipping through the pages of a magazine "really fast without unnatural delays."

Fast Flip allows users to quickly browse through news stories from the websites of Google's three dozen partners.

A Web surfer can quickly jump from one article to the next using large arrows at speeds significantly faster than the time it usually takes to load a Web page.

"As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting," Fast Flip developer Krishna Bharat, a Google engineer, said in a blog post on Monday.

Other companies supplying content include magazines such as the Atlantic, BusinessWeek, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Marie Claire, Newsweek and Popular Mechanics, as well as online news sites TechCrunch, Salon and Slate.

The Mountain View, California-based Google has had a strained relationship with some US publishers and Bharat said the Internet company would share advertising revenue from Fast Flip with its media partners.

The firm's popular news aggregator website Google News has drawn fire from a number of US newspaper owners for linking to their articles without payment.

The Internet search and advertising heavyweight has dismissed the criticism and countered that it is providing newspapers a free service by driving traffic to their websites.

"Partners will share the revenue earned from contextually relevant ads" on Fast Flip, Bharat said. "This gives publishers an opportunity to introduce new readers to their content."

The new feature, the Google engineer argued, will allow readers to scan articles faster, thus reading more of them and bringing more ad revenue to publishers.

"The publishing industry faces many challenges today, and there is no magic bullet," he continued. "However, we believe that encouraging readers to read more news is a necessary part of the solution."

With print advertising revenue and circulation declining, US newspaper publishers have been actively searching for ways to earn more money from the Web, including possibly charging for content online.

Fast Flip allows readers to browse stories by topic, by publication or by "most viewed," "most popular" or even "recommended."

It shows only the first page of a story and users who want to read more have to click through to the website of the host publication.

Through the feature, users can share content with friends or members of a social network and Google said it is offering a mobile version.

For the moment, Fast Flip is considered an experimental "Google Labs" product. It is accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com.

NEC, Casio, Hitachi Merge Cellphone Operations

NEC Corp., Casio Computer Co. and Hitachi Ltd. said Monday that they have agreed to merge their mobile-phone handset operations in a move that would create Japan's second-largest cellphone maker by shipments after Sharp Corp. The integration will take place in April 2010 and the three companies will form a new joint venture called NEC Casio Mobile Communications for the purpose.