Graphics chips rev up research results

A better graphics card means PC games look more realistic

Every serious PC gamer knows what a difference a good graphics card can make to the fun they have.

But it is not just hardcore gamers who have recognised the worth of a PC graphics card.

Increasing numbers of research scientists have woken up to their potential too.

But the scientists in question are not using the cards to appreciate the detail in PC games such as The Witcher. Instead they are using them as cheap sources of supercomputer-class processing power.

"They give a phenomenal bang for the buck," said Mike Giles, professor of scientific computing at the University of Oxford.

Prof Giles said the way that graphics cards were built made them very good at the repetitive computational tasks many scientists use to test theories, models and predictions.

Spot checks

Professor Susan Hagness from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has turned to graphics cards to quickly analyse breast scans to spot cancer in its early stages.

Dr Hagness said official figures suggest x-rays missed 20% of the cancers that were present when a woman underwent screening.

Women want scan results as quickly as possible

Dr Hagness' team is using microwaves to scan tissue and then pumping the results through hardware made by Canadian firm Acceleware which bolts together several graphics cards into a mini computational cluster.

The dedicated hardware meant that results emerged in a matter of hours rather than days, said Dr Hagness.

This was essential when the technique began to be used in a clinical setting, she said.

"Any woman who undergoes screening mammography wants the results straight away."

Hardware helper

Prof Giles, who is using graphics processors to do financial modelling, said the chips were very good at doing the same thing many different times.

By contrast the Intel or AMD chips inside a typical desktop machine were good at doing many different things at the same time.

Graphics cards had far more processing cores - which execute program instructions - than Intel or AMD chips, said Prof Giles, adding that each one of the cores could do one run of the same simple task.

The financial models that Prof Giles is running test the same algorithm on each core but each one gets different random numbers as input.

With the latest graphics processors having more than 100 processing cores that can add up to a lot of number crunching.

Modelling financial markets helps firms weather stock movements

"Each core is logically very simple but its floating point capability is the same as an Intel chip," said Prof Giles.

Developments in methods of writing code to handle the processing was also making graphics processors much more attractive, he said.

"In the early days you could only use graphics cards for graphics," said Prof Giles.

In particular, he said, graphics card maker Nvidia had released software tools called Cuda (Compute Unified Device Architecture) that made it much easier to write code.

"For a while there were only hard-to-use shader languages," said Prof Giles, "Cuda is a much more usable development environment."

Flow control

By harnessing that processing power many scientists are getting results from simulations far faster than before.

PhD student Tobias Brandvik and Dr Graham Pullan in the Whittle Laboratory at the University of Cambridge engineering department had sped up simulations of turbine blade designs by 40 times by using a few graphics cards.

Each blade, said Dr Pullan, was custom designed for the jet or power plant in which they will be used.

Tiny improvements in efficiency have big rewards in turbine engines

But, he said, even with this formidable level of complexity the design process models the turbulent air rather than accurately representing or resolving it.

"With a cluster of graphical processing units, we could hope to use, say, 10 million cells," he said. The simulation run would take the same amount of time as existing models.

"Then, we would resolve some of the larger turbulent eddies," said Dr Pullan. "In general, the more we resolve and the less we model, the more accurate the theory."

An alternative would be to stick with 500,000 cells and try lots more blade designs or include blades upstream and downstream to get a better overall picture of air flowing through a turbine.

Tiny improvements in design can have a huge payoff, said Dr Pullan.

"It's all about making the absolute best efficiency possible," he said.

"Improvements of even 1% in fuel consumption, for jet engines, or 1% in electricity power generated, for steam or gas turbines for power generation, is highly sought after."Damming concern Science icon Bitter memories

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Dumb terminals provide smart solution

NComputing, a privately held company based in Silicon Valley, believes its solution is cheaper and more effective than technology pushed by firms such as Intel, Asus and Microsoft, and the not-for-profit organisation One Laptop Per Child.

"So why not take that machine and share it with multiple users at the same time?"

NComputing's solution is to share the resources of a single PC across up to 30 other users by hooking up low-cost terminals, known as a thin client, which are connected across a wired network.

The terminals, which are about the size of a small paperback book, are plugged into a monitor and keyboard and for users the experience is no different from logging into a normal PC.

"The key to the technology is our software that turns the machine into multi-user system," said Mr Booth.

"It sends an image of their desktop off to the box at the other end of cable."

The terminals buffer the screen image passed to and from the central PC and only register a change on the screen in order to minimise the impact on the system's resources.

"It's very efficient. Every extra user demands only an extra 100Mb of memory and the network bandwidth utilisation for most applications is in the hundreds of kilobits."

There are limitations: the network can struggle to deal with the bandwidth needed to send full screen video to a number of terminals and the hardware is not suited for use with 3D graphics.

The terminals work with both Windows and Linux operating system. A software licence needs to be bought for each user accessing Windows.

You hear a lot on the news about OLPC and other initiatives but no-one has ever heard of NComputing

NComputing has sold more than 500,000 terminals to more than 70 countries, including the UK and US, as well as developing nations like Bangladesh.

Mr Booth said: "You hear a lot on the news about OLPC and other initiatives but no-one has ever heard of NComputing. We are deploying a solution for 35 per terminal while the OLPC laptop costs more than 100.

The cost of each terminal does not include a mouse, keyboard or monitor, however.

"A lot of schools have old screens and keyboards which are unused. In the developing world there are lot of programmes to recycle the West's screens and keyboards," said Mr Booth.

The user experience is like logging on to your own PC

NComputing is taking advantage of Moore's Law, which states that computing power doubles every 18 months.

He added: "It's been stuck at 300 for the last few years. You can't really drive down the price any more - the processor, the motherboard, the hard drive - it's a zero margin for manufacturers at the bottom end of the market."

The company's biggest deployment of late has been in the Republic of Macedonia, which has bought 180,000 terminals.

Mr Booth said: "The government decided it wanted to transform the country into a knowledge-based economy within five years and they were going to invest in computers for every student in the country.

"The cheapest way to do it was with us. We have already deployed 90,000 of the 180,000 terminals."

Thin client technology is not new - it has been used widely in banking and sectors which want to avoid placing sensitive information on individual PCs.

NComputing has also been deploying its technology in factories where operating conditions are not suitable for ordinary PCs.

In Creuzberg, Germany, timber firm Pollmeier has replaced PCs on the factory floor with the dumb terminals, which are much more robust, as there are no moving parts.

"We're also putting these terminals in schools in inner London, and inner New York. Our goal is to connect the next billion internet users around the world," said Mr Booth.

Damming concern Science icon Bitter memories

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PlayStation speeds password probe

The Cell chip has several processing cores to do number crunching

The powerful chip at the heart of Sony's PlayStation gaming console has been used to crack passwords faster than ever before.

Security researcher Nick Breese used a PS3 to crack supposedly strong eight-character passwords in hours.

Typically, previous attempts to crack such passwords took days to get the same result.

Eight-character passwords are used to protect PDF and Zip files as well as those produced by Microsoft Office.

The work to turn the PS3 into a password cracker was carried out by Nick Breese, who works for Auckland-based Security Assessment.

The Cell processor at the heart of the PS3 is the key to speeding up the time it takes to crack a password.

In a presentation given at the Kiwicon security conference in mid-November, Mr Breese said a powerful Intel chip could crank through 10-15 million cycles per second.

The architecture of the Cell processor meant it could speed through 1.4 billion cycles per second. This speed boost was possible because each Cell chip had several processing cores - each one of which could be effectively trying passwords at the same time.

This was important when attempting "brute force" attacks that go through all possible combinations for a password.

Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, Mr Breese said although the PS3 could be used to crack eight-character passwords featuring letters and numbers, stronger encryption systems - such as those used to safeguard web transactions - remained safe.

Mr Breese's research comes soon after work by Russian company Elcomsoft to use graphics cards to speed up password cracking.Damming concern Science icon Bitter memories

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Arrests made in botnet crackdown

The FBI said more than $20m has been stolen via botnets

Police in New Zealand have questioned a teenager believed to be the ringleader of an international cyber-crime group.

The group is alleged to have infiltrated more than one million computers and skimmed millions of dollars from people's bank accounts.

The teenager, who is 18, cannot be named for legal reasons but was known by an alias as "Akill".

He was detained as part of an FBI crackdown on hi-tech criminals who run botnets - networks of hijacked PCs.

Global crackdown

After being questioned "Akill" was released without charge, but police say he is still being investigated.

Police allege that he was responsible for setting up a global network of hijacked PCs - known as a botnet.

The term describes the process of installing malicious software on PCs around the world to collect information such as login names, bank account details and credit card numbers.

The FBI estimates that 1.3 million computers were under the control of "Akill" and were used to embezzle millions of dollars.

The FBI is running a campaign against botnet controllers

The 18-year-old was detained in New Zealand's North Island city of Hamilton.

He could face charges which carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison.

The arrest comes as part of the FBI's Operation Bot Roast II - the second phase of its campaign to tackle those who set up and run botnets for criminal gain. The running total of money stolen by the botnets is $20m (9.7m).

The botnets were used to commit a variety of crimes. Some were simply used to steal saleable personal data, others acted as relays for spam and phishing and some were used to flood other websites with data to knock them offline.

The first phase of the FBI campaign identified more than one million computers in the US that were part of botnets and produced several arrests.

The second phase has resulted in three new indictments of people that ran botnets; jail sentences for three others and guilty pleas from a further two botnet controllers.

To stay safe, the FBI urged PC users to install and maintain anti-virus software, employ a firewall, use strong passwords and not open unknown attachments on e-mail messages.Damming concern Science icon Bitter memories

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Facebook dismisses privacy fears

The firm's first overseas office will be located in London

Facebook's 40 million users should not worry that personal details will be available to anyone searching the net.

That was the message from executives at the social network who are in London to set up their first overseas office.

Facebook's plan to make user profiles available to search engines has provoked anxiety amongst some users and attacks from privacy campaigners.

But the firm's head of privacy said that the idea that personal data would be exposed was "completely wrong".

"The only data that will be available is your profile picture and your name - and then only if you agree that your profile should be searchable," said Chris Kelly.

Common sense

Facebook announced the move to open users' profiles to search engines such as Google in early September.

In addition, the firm has added a public search function to its site which will initially allow anyone, even if they are not registered with the site, to search for a specific person

At the time of the announcement, Om Malik, an influential blogger, wrote: "This is yet another small step in the overall erosion of personal privacy."

"We are slowly leaving digital litter all over the web, and some day it is going to cause problems."

But Mr Kelly insisted that the company offered new users plenty of advice on protecting their profiles from unwanted visitors, and 20% had changed their privacy settings.

But he said people had to use common sense: "You would not walk down the street with your mobile phone number written on your forehead, and you shouldn't do that on Facebook either."

Facebook had been working with the Home Office in Britain on child protection and privacy issues, he added.

Word score

Later this month Facebook will open an office in London's Soho, the first overseas operation for a firm whose 300 staff are mostly based in Palo Alto, California.

With 5.2 million users active in the last month, the UK is Facebook's fastest growing market.

Other sites are more popular than Facebook in the UK

It is attracting rather older users than in the USA, where it started as a network for college students. 54% of UK users are over 25, and the over-35s are the fast growing age group.

"The service is now incredibly diverse," said Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook's Vice-President for Product Marketing.

"75% of our users are outside college - a significant majority are in the 30 plus age demographic. It's a social utility that has become very pervasive and useful for a wide variety of people."

Mr Palihapitiya also revealed that Facebook now aimed to have 60 million active users worldwide by the end of this year, having already passed its original 2007 target of 40 million users.

This year's rapid expansion has been partly fuelled by the opening up of Facebook to outside software developers in May.

So far they have created 3000 applications, and 80,000 developers around the world are working on new ones, in effect transforming the social network into an operating system for no payment.

Chamath Palihapitiya points to the two young Indian developers who have produced a Facebook scrabble game that is now amongst the most popular applications: "You have Fortune 500 companies doing this and you've got two kids in India. It's very empowering for the whole community."

Social battleground

But the big question for those developers and for the Facebook management is how to introduce more sophisticated advertising to the site, to generate more revenue without annoying users.

The Facebook executives are vague about their plans but it is clear they want to give advertisers more opportunities to target individuals according to their interests.

So someone who lists Forty year Old Virgin as one of their favourite films could find a trailer for Knocked Up popping up on their page.

While Facebook is attracting all the attention at the moment, it is worth remembering that it is still not the most popular social network in Britain.

That is either MySpace or Bebo, according to whether you believe Nielsen netRatings or Comscore.

But Nielsen is predicting that Facebook will overtake MySpace in the UK this month.

Social networking is now a very big business and the UK market is a key battleground.Damming concern Science icon Bitter memories

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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Protests force Facebook to change

Facebook members have forced the social networking site to change the way a controversial ad system worked.

More than 50,000 Facebook users signed a petition calling on the company to alter or abandon its Beacon advertising technology.

When Facebook users shopped online, Beacon told friends and businesses what they looked at or bought.

Many considered the data sharing to be an intrusion that exposed them to more scrutiny than was comfortable.

Privacy please

In response to the demands, Facebook's 55 million members will have more control over whether data about what they do online is used for Beacon.

Before the changes, Beacon was an "opt out" system and many complained that they missed the chance to avoid using it when it was introduced in early November.

Now Beacon will be an "opt in" system that only tracks data if explicit permission is granted to Facebook to do so.

More than 40 websites, including Fandango.com, Overstock.com and Blockbuster, signed up to use Beacon software on their webpages and report what Facebook users did when they visited.

Beacon embarrassed many doing Christmas shopping online

"It also says a lot about the ability of internet users to band together to make a difference," said Adam Green, a spokesman for MoveOn.

Facebook apologised for its actions via a letter on its website.

"We're sorry if we spoiled some of your holiday gift-giving plans," read the letter. "We are really trying to provide you with new meaningful ways, like Beacon, to help you connect and share information with your friends."

Industry commentator Om Malik said Facebook users had to be certain to opt out completely from Beacon otherwise Facebook would still collect data from partner sites - even if that data was not shared more widely.

The changes to Beacon may not be the last that Facebook has to make to the technology.

Two rights groups, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy, are believed to be compiling a complaint to the US Federal Trade Commission about it.Damming concern Science icon Bitter memories

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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Spacewalking astronauts hook up Harmony module

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- A pair of spacewalking astronauts finished wiring the international space station's newest room on Saturday, crossing the last major task off their to-do list before the next shuttle mission early next month.

Astronaut Peggy Whitson works on the international space station during a spacewalk Saturday.

Commander Peggy Whitson and Daniel Tani hooked up more electrical and fluid connections linking the space station and the Harmony compartment that was delivered by the shuttle Discovery last month.

Harmony will serve as a docking port for a new European laboratory named Columbus. The shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to deliver the lab in two weeks. A Japanese lab set to be delivered early next year also will dock to the school bus-sized module.

Flight controllers on the ground were checking all of Harmony's systems Saturday to make sure the module would be ready to accommodate the new lab.

"It looks good so far," Mission Control told the astronauts as they floated back into the hatch at the end of the spacewalk.

Much of Saturday's work involved lugging a second 18-foot, 300-pound tray holding fluid lines to Harmony and bolting it down. The lines carry ammonia, a coolant. The astronauts moved and installed another fluid tray on Tuesday.

"Don't rush," Whitson told Tani as they struggled to move the bulky tray. They took turns handling the equipment, with one astronaut passing it to the other and then crawling forward for another hand-off.

"Cool, I can feel the ammonia rushing in," Tani commented after he hooked up one of the fluid lines.

Tani also spent about an hour inspecting a jammed joint that is needed to turn one of the space station's two sets of huge solar wings. The gear has been experiencing electrical current spikes and must be repaired over the coming months to continue station construction.

Last month, Tani found steel shavings inside the joint while spacewalking during Discovery's visit. He found similar debris on Saturday.

Guided by an engineer on the ground, Tani and Whitson took digital pictures of the joint's inner workings and described the debris and damage they could see. Most of the shavings were concentrated in one area, Tani said, and nearly everything else was covered with a fine dust.

The area of the joint that Tani uncovered will remain exposed so astronauts can shoot video of it later. Spacewalkers also may conduct additional inspections during Atlantis' visit to the space station.

The space station's three residents have been working almost nonstop since Discovery's departure on November 5, and just last week moved Harmony to its permanent location. This is their third spacewalk and the last planned before Atlantis arrives.

The American spacewalkers' Russian crewmate, Yuri Malenchenko, remained in the station during Saturday's outing.

Atlantis is scheduled to blast off on December 6.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Review: Toshiba laptop a solid choice for gamers on a budget

(CNET.com) -- The current flood of excellent gaming laptops (Dell's XPS M1730, HP/Voodoo's Envy, and Alienware's m9750) means that PC gamers have plenty of choices when it comes to picking a new mobile rig.

To break through the clutter, Toshiba, not exactly the first name that comes to mind when you think of gaming, would have to offer something special. By putting dual SLI Nvidia GeForce 8600M GPUs in its standard 17-inch Satellite chassis for as little as $1,999, the company has done just that. Our slightly upgraded Satellite X205-SLi3 cost a little more at $2,499, but that's still a few hundred dollars less than the cheapest SLI configurations from Alienware or Dell (although they start with the higher-end Nvidia 8700). If you're looking to harness the power of dual video cards without sending your bank account into the red, the X205 walks the fine line between mainstream and gamer.

From the outside, the Satellite X205 is nearly identical to the other laptops in Toshiba's current lineup, such as the Satellite P205, with the same rounded edges, black accents, and silver interior. The back of the lid has a subtle red-on-black design, which Toshiba calls Flare Carmine. As a fixed configuration, the color scheme and components cannot be customized. At almost 9 pounds without the A/C adapter, it's a big, bulky machine, but still about 2 pounds lighter than the massive Dell XPS M1730. Our main gripe is the giant "TOSHIBA" emblazoned in 1-inch silver letters across the laptop's lid and the backlit Satellite logo on the front edge. A little branding is fine, but it makes you feel like a walking billboard.

The X205's keyboard has a somewhat uncomfortably shortened space bar, but at least it also manages to fit in a full numeric keypad. Since it's a Toshiba, we know that there will be separate page-up and page-down keys, which is usually the first thing other laptop makers cut. Above the keyboard sits a row of basic media controls and quick-launch buttons for your media player and Web browser, as well as Toshiba's standard Harman-Kardon speakers, giving you four speakers plus a subwoofer, and excellent (for a laptop) sound. For a more multimedia experience, with better media controls but without the SLI graphics, Toshiba's Qosmio line is a longtime favorite.

The 17-inch wide-screen LCD display offers a 1,680 x 1,050 native resolution, which is standard for a screen this size, but not as high as the 1,920 x 1,200 resolution found in higher-end 17-inch laptops such as the Dell XPS M1730. The display is clear and bright, but slightly too glossy for our tastes, picking up a lot of light reflections from the room.

By offering inexpensive SLI, we suspected that the X205 might skimp on other ports and connections, but the laptop packs in just about everything we'd want, including an HDMI output, Bluetooth, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and a bundled external USB TV tuner and Media Center remote control. The cheaper $1,999 version (called the X205-SLi1) includes these extras, but drops the screen resolution to 1,440x900, the hard drive from 320GB to 240GB, and the CPU from an Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 to a slower T7250.

In our performance benchmarks, the X205 was a strong performer, only marginally slower than systems with faster processors -- the Voodoo Envy (T7700) and the Dell XPS M1730 (X7900). At these speeds, the minor performance differences in most applications will be transparent to users. With dual GPUs as its main selling point, it's the X205's gaming performance that's important. Even though the DirectX 10 Nvidia GeForce Go 8600M GT isn't the top of Nvidia's line, the dual chips provided decent frame rates, even if it couldn't touch the faster (and much more expensive) SLI Nvidia 8700 GPUs found in the Dell XPS M1730. The system easily beat Voodoo's recent 15-inch gaming laptop, the Voodoo Envy M:152. In anecdotal testing, we loaded up EA's Crysis, a challenging, resource-hungry game for any PC to run. After struggling to run the game on several laptops, we were pleasantly surprised to find it working well on the X205 at a reasonable 1,024x768 resolution, with the visual options all set to medium.

Unfortunately, battery life is the Achilles' heel of this otherwise impressive system. At only 65 minutes on our DVD battery drain test, this was one of the shortest-lived laptops, desktop replacement or otherwise, we've seen. Even the XPS M1730, with more powerful components (and more flashing lights), managed to run for closer to 90 minutes.

Toshiba backs the Satellite P205-S6237 with an industry-standard one-year warranty; extending the warranty to three years costs $134, with express and onsite upgrades available for an additional fee. Support is accessible through a 24-7 toll-free phone line, an online knowledge base, and both a carry- and mail-in repair service.

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Baking soda could help save planet

(PopSci.com) -- In recent months, PopSci has covered various scientists' plans to curb global warming through carbon sequestration, mainly by feeding it to algae to make biofuel, or burying it underground.

Skymine uses the carbon dioxide emitted from smokestacks to make baking soda.

Today, a company called Skyonic announced a novel new system, Skymine, which uses the carbon dioxide emitted from smokestacks to make baking soda. According to Skyonic CEO Joe David Jones, the system will be powered by waste heat from factories, and will produce food-grade baking soda.

Last year, the utility company Luminant installed a pilot version of the system at its Big Brown Steam Electric Station in Fairfield, Texas.

There's still quite a bit of work to be done to make the current system viable on a large scale, but the baking soda idea offers solutions to some of the economic problems posed by other carbon sequestration methods.

For starters, according to Jones, the stuff can be sold for home or industrial use or buried harmlessly in landfills or abandoned mines.

Jones apparently got the idea for the SkyMine system while watching a Discovery Channel show with his kids. He pulled out an old college science textbook and immediately turned to a passage about converting C02 to baking soda. He'd found it interesting years ago and highlighted it for future reference

Copyright © 2007 Popular Science

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Cleaning up in 'fab world'

Each manufacturing plant, or "fab", may cost billions of dollars and is a triumph of engineering.

But working inside these hi-tech plants can be a surreal experience, says Dr Peter Wilson of the University of Southampton.

Its pristine white walls, secure air locks, sterile air and ethereal yellow lighting makes it seem like you have arrived in the belly of an orbiting space station.

I can still remember the first time I went there.

It was set in classic "tumbleweed" territory - a small town in Arizona with just one road and the factory.

The temperature was over 100 degrees outside, with dust everywhere, but when you crossed the threshold into the plant, the air-conditioning kicked in and you felt like you were in a different world.

This is a common experience to anyone who works in the silicon manufacturing sector. The world outside and the fab world inside are on two different planes.

The boundary can transcend geographic and political boundaries - it can become impossible to tell which country you are in, when everyone is wearing a mask, and is dressed head to foot in shapeless, white hooded-suits.

'Bunny men'

Outside, we worry about dirt on our shoes and wipe our feet, or perhaps wipe some dust off our laptop screen. In fab world, we worry about a few atoms contaminating the environment.

If dust falls on the delicate silicon wafers on which chips are printed it can render them useless.

Modern transistors - the tiny switches at the heart of these devices - are described in terms of the smallest feature sizes that can be made, such as a 45 nanometres, or 45 billionths of a meter.

To put this in perspective, the average human hair will be between 20 and 100 micrometers across - over a thousand times larger - and a typical dust particle will be anything from 1 to 100 micrometres.

Dust and contaminants must be kept out.

The fab is a place for chips, not for people. As a result, only the pure and the clean are given permission to penetrate its' inner chambers.

Anyone that enters must go through a strict set of procedures.

All of the trappings of the outside world must be left behind, whether clothes, jewellery or even make-up.

A series of ante-chambers serve as prep rooms where workers change into a series of gowns and gloves, collectively known as a "bunny suit".

Sticky floors make sure that no one treads in any contaminants and an air shower before entry makes certain that any loose particles are stripped away.

Skin flakes, lint, hair and anything else gets sucked into the grate in the floor.

Pure products

And then it's onwards into the hum of the clean rooms. Stark white walls reflect the yellow sodium lights from above and a constant breeze blows down from the ceiling taking any particles through the gridded floor.

Fab world is an expensive place and, hence, it never stops Sand to silicon chip

Everything taken in either needs to be cleaned with alcohol or specially designed. Even the paper we use to take notes is designed from a special lint-free material.

Inside, humans very rarely come into contact with the rainbow-streaked discs of reflective silicon on which the chips are cut.

Instead, they are there to trouble shoot and monitor that everything goes correctly.

The silicon wafers are handled on monorails that move above the fab floor and the processing is done by complex vacuum sealed robots.

The wafers enter one end of the line costing a couple of hundred dollars and appear at the other - weeks later - patterned with billions of transistors and worth tens of thousands of pounds.

The silicon itself is not made at the fab - the ultra pure ingots (up to 99.99999999% pure) are produced and cut by specialist companies and sold to the chip makers.

The fab world's magic is creating the incredibly complex patterns of wires and circuitry on chips the size of a postage stamp time and time again

That alchemy can cost billions of dollars.

Non-Stop

Each layer of a processor is constructed using a mask which is like a stencil, to highlight the areas to be deposited, etched or doped.

Nano chip designer

Doping involves adding impurities to the silicon to change its electrical characteristics - something which has to be done with astonishing precision.

Each mask used to cost several thousand pounds but as the complexity of chips has increased, and the smallest possible feature size has reduced, the number and intricacy of these masks has increased.

In addition, the size of individual features is now smaller than the wavelength of light that used to be used to pattern them, which means the use of some clever optics is required.

The yellowish lights used inside the fab are to make sure that they do not interfere with this process.

The result of all of this is that an individual silicon integrated circuit may require masks that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, or perhaps even millions of pounds, to produce and machines that cost a similar amount.

Fab world is an expensive place and, hence, it never stops.

The plants churn out chips every single day of every year. So called giga-fabs may process more than 100,000 wafers every month, each containing hundreds of chips.

Each one of the 10mm by 10mm silicon squares is a triumph of design.

As a chip designer, the impact of the incredible complexity of fab world has led to an amazing transformation in what we can do on a single chip.

The products of this strange and surreal place have burst out of its confines and have pervaded every facet of the outside world from computers and mobile phones to aircraft and microwave ovens.

Yet, incredible as it is to visit, fab world is also a place that is blissful to leave.

At the end of the day there's no better feeling than being able to rip off the itchy bunny suit, step outside into the searing heat and once again get dirty.

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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Do you know what they know about you?

Two computer discs holding the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16 have gone missing. The scandal of the 25 million missing records has highlighted the vulnerability of data.

It is easy to develop a sense of creeping paranoia when you begin to contemplate just how many companies, government departments and other organisations know your personal data.

She said it would be naive to think that an encounter with one organisation means one isolated database is queried. Typically data is gathered from many sources before a decision is reached.

For instance the USVISIT border system, which is consulted when Britons cross from the UK to the US, mines about 30 separate databases as it checks identities.

Ms Gallagher and colleague Peter Bradwell will release their report in early December.

"Pretty much every organisation you engage with day-to-day - from clicking your Oyster card to ordering your take away - means sharing personal information."

That sharing of data, she said, has become entwined with modern life and it was a mistake to think that sharing information so often only has a downside.

You are not going to get people complying with data protection on the basis of good will

Anyone that tries to stop their personal data leaking away often find they are denied benefits enjoyed by those that are happier to share.

For instance, paying cash for everything will keep your name off credit checking databases. However, without the re-assurance of that check banks and credit card companies may refuse to issue a loan or mortgage. Data control

And there are a lot of people within companies, government and other organisations that are allowed to use data that can be used to identify you.

According to the 2006/7 annual report from the Information Commissioner there are more than 287,000 data controllers in the UK who have a responsibility for making sure that personal data is used correctly.

Personal data in this sense is information that can be used to identify an individual.

Many of those data controllers will oversee many more who actually do the job of maintaining and expanding the databases holding the data.

And it does not stop there. The web is helping that data take wing and travel farther than ever before.

Government departments are increasingly sharing data

What few people realise, said Ms Gallagher, was that handing over data to one organisation can mean that it reaches many others and becomes an entry on the database they maintain.

"There is no awareness of what happens to that data when you give it away," said Ms Gallagher.

"It is not so much the organisations with which you willingly share data," she said, "it is where it goes after that."

Many organisations that collect data, such as credit checking agencies, were under commercial pressure to widen the scope of what they collect, said Ms Gallagher.

No longer are firms just interested in the basic facts about you - now what matters as much as what type of credit card you own is when you go shopping, which stores you visit and what you buy.

That pattern holds as much information as the raw facts about you - it helps companies decide which socio-economic bracket to put you and how to go about tailoring marketing to fit you and your lifestyle.Watching them

Surveillance and the collection of data about people has become so pervasive that it has spawned a dedicated research organisation - the Surveillance Studies Network.

Dr Kirstie Ball, a senior lecturer at the Open University, said that although many social scientists been studied the subject for years the pervasiveness of that scrutiny was prompting an upsurge of interest.

"That personal data held by every organisation you interact with runs the parameters of your existence, your consumption, your entitlements," she said.

Almost every time you fill in a form the data makes it to a database

"We're all interested in the collection and application of personal data and its consequences for individual rights and social science concepts such as trust and discrimination," said Dr Ball.

"It merits study and understanding because its consequences can be tangible," she said.

For instance, she said, an employee ticking the wrong box when they enter your data into a database could mean a person ends up labelled as a former criminal or credit liability.

It is possible to ask to see the data that companies and organisations hold about you, but a very small number of people take up this opportunity to vet what is known about them. Making sure all of it is accurate would be a mammoth task.

For Ms Gallagher at Demos beefing up the power of the Information Commissioner to enforce the Data Protection Act would help redress some of the imbalance between the data companies hold about us.

"Organisations and companies should be responding to the way we live," she said.

Only by using those powers will the creeping spread of that data be held stemmed.

"You are not going to get people complying with data protection on the basis of good will," she said. "Data is just too valuable."

Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs has set up a Child Benefit Helpline on 0845 302 1444 for customers who want more details.Hotel drama Race against time Fantastical feast

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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Music copyright in the spotlight

The website gathered out of copyright musical scores

Within a matter of months, the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) featured more than 1,000 musical scores for which the copyright had expired in Canada.

Within two years - without any funding, sponsorship or promotion - the site had become the largest public domain music score library on the internet, generating a million hits per day, featuring over 15,000 scores by over 1,000 composers, and adding 2,000 new scores each month.

In mid-October this year the IMSLP disappeared from the internet.

Universal Edition, an Austrian music publisher, retained a Canadian law firm to demand that the site block European users from accessing certain works and from adding new scores for which the copyright had not expired in Europe.

The company noted that while the music scores entered the public domain in Canada 50 years after a composer's death, Europe's copyright term is 20 years longer.

The legal demand led to many sleepless nights as the student struggled with the prospect of liability for activity that is perfectly lawful in Canada.

The site had been very careful about copyright compliance, establishing a review system by experienced administrators who would only post new music scores that were clearly in the Canadian public domain.

Notwithstanding those efforts, on 19 October, the law firm's stated deadline, the student took the world's best public domain music scores site offline.

There is little doubt that the site was compliant with Canadian law.

Not only is there no obligation to block non-Canadian visitors, but the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that sites such as IMSLP are entitled to presume that they are being used in a lawful manner. The site would therefore not be subject to claims that it authorised infringement.

Further, while there have been some suggestions that the site also hosted works that were not in the Canadian public domain, Universal Edition never bothered to provide the IMSLP with a complete list of allegedly infringing works.

Although IMSLP is on safe ground under Canadian law, the European perspective on the issue is more complicated.

There is no question that some of the site's music scores would infringe European copyright law if sold or distributed in Europe. However, the IMSLP had no real or substantial connection - the defining standard for jurisdiction - with Europe.

Indeed, if Universal Edition were to file a lawsuit in Austria, it is entirely possible that the Austrian court would dismiss it on the grounds that it cannot assert jurisdiction over the Canadian-based site.

Geist: Making sites comply with all laws is an impossible task

This case is enormously important from a public-domain perspective.

If Universal Edition is correct, then the public domain becomes an offline concept, since posting works online would immediately result in the longest copyright term applying on a global basis.

Moreover, there are even broader implications for online businesses. According to Universal Edition, businesses must comply both with their local laws and with the requirements of any other jurisdiction where their site is accessible - in other words, the laws of virtually every country on earth.

It is safe to say that e-commerce would grind to a halt under that standard since few organisations can realistically comply with hundreds of foreign laws.

Thousands of music aficionados are rooting for the IMSLP in this dispute. They ought to be joined by anyone with an interest in a robust public domain and a viable e-commerce marketplace.

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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Content carve up of net begins

Internet law professor Michael Geist looks at the way that cable firms are starting to shackle the net access they offer.

Some cable firms are treating net access like they do TV scheduling

Years later, those services are gradually morphing into "the internet as cable" as broadcasters and service providers steadily move toward the delivery of content online that bears a striking resemblance to the conventional cable model.

Cable television has its virtues - some consumer choice, the ability to time shift programs by recording them with a VCR or PVR, and video on-demand - but it is largely built around limiting consumer control.

Cable distributors determine channel choices, geographic distribution, and commercial substitution (typically with input from a broadcast regulator), offer only limited interactivity, and quietly even possess the ability to stop consumers from recording some programs.

Until recently, the internet was precisely the opposite, offering unlimited user choice, continuous interactivity, and technological capabilities to copy and remix content.

That is gradually changing as broadcasters seek to re-assert greater geographic control over their content and service providers experiment with cable-like models for prioritised content delivery.

Some US broadcasters are selling downloads through services such as Apple iTunes or Amazon.com, yet the unmistakable trend is toward free, ad-supported streaming of content mere hours after it first appears on commercial television.

Each major US broadcaster already offers a handful of shows in this manner with ambitious plans to expand their services in the months ahead.

NBC and Fox recently unveiled Hulu.com to some critical acclaim, while Comedy Central created a new site for the popular Daily Show that features a complete archive of eight years of programming.

Non-Americans, alas, are generally locked out of these sites due to licensing restrictions.

Foreign broadcasters have been scrambling to buy the internet rights to US programming, both to protect their local broadcasts and to beef up their online presence.

US broadcasters may eventually decide it is more profitable to stream their content on a worldwide basis and to remove longstanding geographic restrictions, however, for the moment they are parceling up the internet as they would a broadcast destined for multiple cable markets.

The Daily Show has proved popular on net video sites

Broadcasters are not alone in working to bring the cable model of control to the internet.

Large net service firms are engaged in similar activities, with a history of blocking access to contentious content, limiting bandwidth for alternative content delivery channels, and raising the prospect of levying fees for priority content delivery.

While these issues had been perceived to be predominantly North American concerns, they are beginning to surface elsewhere.

For example, when earlier this year the BBC launched its internet-based iPlayer, several broadband providers floated the prospect of charging the BBC for delivering its content on their networks.

These issues may ultimately sort themselves out.

Users have many easily-obtainable tools to defeat geographic blocking and net firms may find themselves subject to net neutrality legislation if they continue to abuse the public's trust by failing to maintain their networks in a transparent, neutral fashion.

Yet if broadcasters and service providers are left to their own devices, it appears that they are increasingly ready to redefine the internet on cable to the internet as cable.

Source from: news.bbc.co.uk

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Topical waters

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Research published last month paints an increasingly gloomy picture of the accelerating rate of climate change, raising genuine fears that efforts to combat carbon emissions may already be too late to restrict seismic changes in the earth's temperatures.

Plankton bloom off the coast of Norway as seen from the ESA satellite Envisat on 10 June 2006.

Compiled by a group of eminent scientists and published in the U.S. journal 'Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)the report suggests that greenhouse gases are rising at a faster rate now than they did in the 1990's.

The scientists cite three main causes for this alarming rise; Growth in the world economy, increased fossil fuel emissions since 2000 and a decline in the efficiency of the ocean and land 'sinks' to absorb carbon emissions.

In the wake of this troubling new data about ocean carbon absorption, a range of geo-engineering solutions are being hotly debated in the scientific community and piloted by eco-businesses. The hope is that by intervening in the ocean's eco-system we will be able to reverse or stabilize the rates of growth in global warming.

The oceans are natural 'CO2 sinks' (a reservoir that absorbs atmospheric carbon). Phytoplankton -- microscopic organisms that congregate near the ocean surface - absorb atmospheric CO2 through photosynthesis. At the end of their lifetime -- usually only a few days -- they fall to the ocean floor carrying with them the CO2.

Scientists have known for some time that large swathes of the earth's oceans harbor extremely low densities of phytoplankton. These areas are known as HNLC (high-nutrient, low-chlorophyll) zones and are thought to be caused by a scarcity of iron.

This iron-deficiency theory was first postulated in the 1930's by English scientist Joseph Hart.

But it wasn't until the 1980's that the American oceanographer John Martin measured the iron content of the seawater in HNLC zones and found negligible amounts.

He argued that the sea gets it iron from dust swept into the sea from the land, and that wind currents weren't carrying iron to HNLC areas. Martin tested his hypothesis in Antarctica and found that phytoplankton thrived in jars of seawater infused with iron.

Martin's discoveries set in motion further research in this area and it was in the spirit of his work that a ship named Weatherbird II set sail for the tropical waters of the eastern Atlantic earlier this month.

Its mission is to carry out Martin's experiment on a much grander scale, pouring iron ore into the ocean in an attempt to stimulate plankton growth and assess the wider effects on sea life.

The pilot study has been organized by Planktos, a Californian-based eco-restoration company.

"This really might be an incredible solution," Planktos CEO Russ George told CNN.

"In climate change we talk about a tipping point, but in oceans and ocean life we are far over that tipping point," he said.

George has been involved in the carbon credit business for over 30 years. He started a tree planting company in British Columbia and estimates that he has planted over a quarter of a billion trees in Canada alone. A subsidiary company, KlimaFa Ltd is currently restoring forests in the European Union with over 100,000 hectares of land in Hungary being replenished.

It was when the Kyoto accord was first signed in 1997 that George started thinking of new ways to sell carbon credits and started researching iron fertilization. He is confident that it will be a success.

"20 years and 100-200 million dollars of public funds have identified this iron tonic solution as a way to restore the productivity of the ocean," he said.

Yet Planktos is a constant target for groups who don't buy into the idea of carbon offsets.

In a joint statement in August 2006 Greenpeace, the WWF and Friends of the Earth said: "Carbon offsets should only be seen as a last resort" and that "purchasing offsets can be seen as an easy way out for governments, businesses and individuals to continue polluting without making changes to the way they do business or their behavior".

George has had to put up with protesters continually claiming that the technology that Planktos is trialing isn't regulated.

"Any new technology in climate change that produces offsets has to go through a multi-tiered independent third party, transparent certification process. It's the most rigorous regulatory process on earth for any new technology," said George.

But opponents remain unconvinced. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a vocal critic of Planktos, has, according to George, threatened to 'intercept' the Weatherbird II if attempts are made to carry out research.

George believes that the technology is the world's best hope. "We've lost 17 percent of all plant life in the Atlantic, 26 percent in the North Pacific and in the sub-tropical oceans 50 percent or more of plant life has disappeared," he said.

The pilot study is scheduled to last several months and the results will be keenly monitored by scientists.

CNN spoke to Professor Jef Huisman from the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics in the Netherlands about iron fertilization.

"It is often discussed among scientists and we have mixed feelings about it," he said. "We know it could potentially reduce the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, but we don't know what the consequences are."

Asked about the research about to be conducted by Planktos, Professor Huisman said: I think it's an interesting idea as well as a dangerous idea. Interesting because we know that if we can increase the primary production and there will be a larger intake of carbon dioxide in to the ocean.

"But is also dangerous. Just as you fertilize on land you will change the eco-system. Whereas we have experience of what happens in a meadow, we have no experience of what would happen with the eco-system species composition in the ocean. What happens if you do large scale iron fertilization? We have no idea which species are going to profit or whether it will cause harmful algal blooms.

Professor Huisman predicts that once the iron goes into the ocean that there will be a strong increase in phytoplankton species.

"I would expect the small phytoplankton species -- that have a fast growth rate - will be there first," he said. "Secondly you would have slow plankton species that would catch up and start grazing on the phytoplankton species."

Huisman, an expert in aquatic microbiology, is currently researching the phenomenon of the deep chlorophyll maximum -- a layer of phytoplankton found in tropical and sub-tropical oceans. He thinks that iron fertilization studies should be done in water tanks before heading out to sea.

"You could put an entire community from the pacific ocean in a 50 meter tank. There you could have a controlled experiment and the iron will not be eroded by ocean currents," he said.

Despite constant haranguing from eco-protesters, Planktos' Russ George remains defiant and somewhat evangelical about the potential of "iron-seeding".

"We are all here at the behest of the green plants in the ocean," he said. "4 percent of the planet is covered in rainforest. 72 percent of the planet is ocean. In the last five years we've lost all the rainforests worth of ocean plant life."

If the pilot study is successful, George envisages container ships "re-booting" the oceans back to levels they where at 30 years ago. "It is the single great hope we have," he said.

According to two eminent British environmental thinkers, increasing the uptake of CO2 by the oceans could be effected by vast vertical pipes beneath the surface of the ocean.

Writing in the journal Nature, James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis and Chris Rapley head of London's Science Museum argue that pumping nutrient-rich water from the depths of the oceans up to the sea's surface would allow the ocean to absorb more CO2.

The idea is to have literally millions of pipes -- 100 meters long and 3 meters wide -- reaching down to the depths of the ocean. They could, the inventors suggest, sequester a sizable chunk of annual human carbon emissions.

Professor Huisman isn't so sure that the plan would work though. "Concentrations of CO2 are higher in the deeper oceans," he said. "The major effect would be that carbon dioxide levels deep in the ocean would be brought to the surface. It is the opposite of what you would want."

But he remains positive about utilizing the oceans. "If you could increase the uptake of the oceans it would really help with the greenhouse effect."

Source from: edition.cnn.com

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Russia to build new space port

MOSCOW, Russia (AP) -- Russia is planning a new rocket launch facility that will be prepared to put a manned mission in space by 2018, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported Wednesday.

The Vostochny, or Eastern, cosmodrome in the far eastern Amur region, which borders China, will take a decade to complete, ITAR-Tass quoted First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov as saying.

The first unmanned launches from the mixed military and civilian facility should come by 2015, with manned launches following in 2018, Ivanov was quoted as saying.

He said would be built in the same area as Svobodny, an existing facility for unmanned launches that the government decided to shut down earlier this year, ITAR-Tass reported. It was unclear whether the new complex would be built on the same site.

Russia launches all its manned missions -- many involving U.S. and other foreign crew members -- from the Soviet-built Baikonur cosmodrome in neighboring Kazakhstan. Russia leases the facility from Kazakhstan, whose government has complained about dangers and environmental damage from failed launches.

Russian space officials have said they plan to use both facilities, at least for some time after the new one is built.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Shareholders OK Sirius, XM merger

NEW YORK (AP) -- Shareholders approved a deal Tuesday to allow Sirius Satellite Radio Inc. to acquire its rival XM Satellite Radio Holdings Inc. for about $5 billion, but the largest hurdle has yet to come -- regulatory approval in Washington.

The firms say the deal will offer pricing and programming options. Critics say it will create a monopoly.

Shareholders of Sirius and XM had been widely expected to approve the deal, which would allow the companies to save costs on programming, acquiring subscribers and broadcasting. Shareholder advisory firms had already endorsed the deal.

More difficult will be getting the deal approved in Washington, where the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission must both give their blessing. Several consumer groups have opposed the combination, saying it would create a monopoly that could hurt consumers.

Sirius said in a statement that more than 96 percent of the shareholder votes cast approved the acquisition, while XM said 99.8 percent of its shareholders were in favor. The companies said they still hoped to complete the deal by the end of the year.

The FCC had originally said the two satellite radio companies couldn't combine, but that rule can be changed. Sirius and XM have argued that satellite radio now faces more competition for listeners since the boom in digital listening devices like Apple Inc.'s iPod, Internet radio and cell phones that can play music.

Sirius and XM have said that a combined company would offer listeners more pricing options and greater choice and flexibility in the channel lineups they receive.

Sirius and XM now offer packages of music, talk, sports and other programming for a fixed rate of $12.95 a month. Many of the music channels are commercial-free, and unlike terrestrial radio, the signals can be received anywhere in the U.S.

If the deal is approved, the companies have said they would offer pricing plans ranging from $6.99 per month, for 50 channels offered by one service, up to $16.99 a month, where subscribers would keep their existing service plus choose channels offered by the other service. It isn't possible now to pick channels one by one.

The deal calls for XM shareholders to receive 4.6 shares of Sirius for every share they own, which values XM at $16.56 a share or about $5 billion, based on current share prices.

Sirius shares rose 22 cents or 6.5 percent to close at $3.63 Tuesday, while XM shares gained $1.33 or 9.7 percent to $15.06.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Review: Wireless sync, podcast integration give Zune an edge

(CNET.com) -- Having survived its freshman hazing, the Zune is back for its sophomore revenge, and the iPod has every reason to be frightened. The Zune 4 (4GB, $149) and Zune 8 (8GB, $199) offer a leaner, lighter version of Microsoft's full-size Zune 80 MP3 player (80GB, $249).

With a new hardware and software design, wireless sync capability, subscription music compatibility, and integrated support for audio and video podcasts, the Zune 4 and Zune 8 are poised to compete directly with the third-generation Apple iPod Nano.

Design

The Zune 4 and Zune 8 are Microsoft's first foray into smaller, flash memory-based MP3 players. Zune 4 and Zune are identical to one another in every way but storage capacity, and both come in red, black, green, and pink. Measuring a slight 3.6 inches by 1.6 inches by 0.33 inch, the flash-based Zunes are considerably slimmer than their 80GB hard-drive-based sibling. In the overcrowded marketplace of flash-based MP3 players, however, the dimensions of the Zune 4 and 8 are hardly noteworthy. That said, the Zune 4 and Zune 8 have a nice shape, which feels reminiscent of the first-generation iPod Nano.

One design feature that distinguishes the Zune 4 and Zune 8 from the competition is Microsoft's decision to use a glass-covered LCD instead of plastic. The 1.8-inch glass screen not only lends the device a sophisticated feel, it also provides a more scratch-resistant surface with less optical distortion than the ubiquitous plastic variety. Although the 1.8-inch screen seems minuscule compared with the opulent 3.2-inch screen on the 80GB Zune, the oversized font on the main menu affords a legibility rarely found on pint-size MP3 players.

Another unique design feature is a completely new navigation control that Microsoft dubs the Zune Pad. Think of the Zune Pad as a cross between a standard four-direction navigation pad and a laptop's touchpad. With the Zune Pad, users can navigate menus by either pressing or sliding their finger in four directions and select items by clicking the middle of the pad. We were initially skeptical about the Zune Pad's usability compared to the tried-and-true click pad of the first-generation Zune, but after just a few minutes we found the Zune's old interface to be positively archaic. Navigating lengthy song lists is a breeze, especially with an accelerated scroll kicking in when the pad is held down. The new Zune Pad interface also lets you skip through songs, photos, and radio stations with just a light brush of the finger. Buttons for play/pause and menu still flank each side of the Zune's control pad, and behave exactly as they did in the first-generation Zune. It's hard to say whether the Zune Pad interface is actually better than Apple's patented iPod wheel navigation, but it is certainly comparable. We found the Zune Pad made scrolling long lists of artists much easier than using a scroll wheel, but the iPod's center select button is more reliable than the ambiguously defined button found on the Zune.

The entire Zune product line uses a new graphic user interface that no longer looks like a rehash of the Portable Media Center operating system found on the Toshiba Gigabeat S. While the critically beloved "twist" interface of first-generation Zune remains, the main menu has been replaced with stunning, oversized text that takes readability to the next level. You can customize this same main menu with a background image from your digital photo collection. Existing Zune loyalists will be happy to know that Microsoft is offering the new Zune operating system as a free upgrade to all first-generation Zune owners.

We're also happy to see that the back of the Zune covered with rugged, matte-finished aluminum, etched with the Zune logo. Microsoft has also partnered with a handful of graphic artists to create custom-etched versions of the 4, 8, and 80GB Zunes, which can be ordered directly from Microsoft at ZuneOriginals.net.

Features With subscription music support, video playback, Wi-Fi music sharing, a high-quality photo viewer, an RBDS-enabled FM radio, and composite video output, the features on the first-generation Zune were already impressive. The second-generation Zunes maintain all of the compelling features of the original and also includes new features such as audio and video podcast support and a unique ability to automatically sync content over a home's wireless network.

Ever since Apple rolled podcast support into its iPod and iTunes products back in 2005, no one has been able to match their seamless integration of audio and video podcast discovery, subscription, and management tools (although Creative's Zencast alternative gets close). With the latest refresh of the Zune PC software, first- and second-generation Zune owners can now enjoy audio and video podcasts with the same ease as their iPod contemporaries. Podcasts now have their own directory within the main menu of the Zune, which is subdivided between audio and video podcasts.

The Zune PC software also includes a new podcast tab that allows users to browse through a growing library of podcasts. If your favorite podcast can't be found in the directory, the software lets you both recommend the podcast for inclusion and lets you add the podcast manually by copying and pasting its URL into the Zune software. In the end, podcast downloads, auto-sync preferences, and subscription management match that of iTunes. In fact, Microsoft takes podcast integration a step further by allowing users to unsubscribe from podcasts directly on their Zune -- a great feature for podcast junkies who want to tidy up their subscriptions on the go. (Editors' note: Microsoft removed the podcast unsubscribe feature from the Zune's initial firmware release due to instability. Microsoft plans to reintroduce the feature in its next firmware update.) We're also happy to see that the Zune includes a playback resume option that automatically bookmarks your place in a podcast when you can't listen to it all in one sitting.

The Zune 4 and Zune 8's piece de resistance is their ability to wirelessly sync content from your PC over your home Wi-Fi network. The feature requires a one-time setup to familiarize the Zune with your home network, after which it will remember to look for the network automatically each time you plug it in for a recharge. If you're within range of your wireless network but don't feel like recharging your player to trigger the wireless sync, you can also initiate the sync manually by digging through the Zune's settings. Of course, you can always connect the Zune directly to your computer using the included proprietary USB cable, but the wireless option is a neat trick.

The Zune 4's and Zune 8's audio, video, photo, and radio features are largely unchanged from the first generation--not a bad thing, really. The Zune's music player supports MP3, WMA, protected-WMA (Zune Marketplace only), WMA Lossless, and AAC music file formats. The continued support for AAC opens the door for iPod converts, although you won't be able to transfer DRM-protected iTunes purchases or Windows' older DRM-9 files.

The Zune supports WMV, MPEG-4, and H.264 video formats natively at a DVD-quality 30 frames per second rate. Windows Media Center users will be happy to know that the Zune also imports DVR-MS recorded video content. Although the Zune's screen displays at a 320x240 resolution, video files stored on the Zune can be as large as 720x480. Unfortunately, the Zune 4 and 8 do not share the same TV output feature included on the 80GB Zune, so the support for 720x480 files is pointless.

The Zune 4 and 8 display RBDS (Radio Broadcast Data System) station information, distinguishing their FM radio as one of the best on a handheld device. Depending on the broadcaster, the Zune's FM radio displays a station's call letters, genre, and occasionally shows the currently playing artist and song information. Users can also switch between European, North American, and Japanese radio bands from the Zune's radio settings menu. The Zune's radio depends on a connected pair of headphones (any will do) to act as an antenna, however, so don't be surprised when the radio doesn't work while the Zune is connected to an AV dock.

Aside from its wireless sync capability, the little Zunes' most notable feature is their ability to share music and photos between users. With the latest version of the Zune PC software, the social aspect of recommending music and showing off your music interests can now reach beyond Zune users who are within range of your Wi-Fi antenna. Zune users are now encouraged to set up their Zune Card, a Last.FM-style Web page that reveals your listening habits and favorite songs to the world, and opens up the opportunity to discover and recommend new music through interaction with other Zune users. The new Zune Card online community may be a bit much for some people, but plans to integrate the Zune Card for use with larger social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace may provide an automatic way to update your friends on your musical tastes.

While the Zune is one of the more full-featured MP3 players on the market, it lacks some competitive features. If you're looking for a voice recorder, line-input recorder, or FM radio recorder, you'll need to look elsewhere. Without support for Audible audio books or audio file bookmarking, the Zune is also not our first choice for book lovers. Considering the restrictive capacity of the Zune 4 and 8, we would have liked an SD memory card expansion slot as well. Still, far and away the most shocking feature omission in the latest crop of Zunes is an audio EQ control.

Software

Using the Zune also means using the Zune's PC-only software. The Zune software has seen a major overhaul from its earliest days, with a shockingly clean and bright interface. New icons lining the bottom edge of the software make playlist creation and content syncing much more intuitive. Fans of Windows Media Player will definitely need some time to adjust to the new file and category organization, but we believe the new system is more intuitive.

As with iTunes, the main benefit of the Zune's dedicated software is the ability to integrate an online music store (Zune Marketplace) alongside your own music library. The Zune Marketplace is also seeing a refresh, with added DRM-free download content, more attractive artist pages, better genre-based editorial content, a podcast directory, and more granular subcategories within genres. The Zune Marketplace is still missing the TV and movie content found through competitors such as iTunes, but it does offer music videos. Expect Microsoft to make another big push for its all-you-can-eat Zune Pass music subscription service to coincide with the launch of their MP3 players.

Performance

The Zune's Achilles' heel is its built-in Wi-Fi antenna. As any laptop owner knows, a Wi-Fi antenna sucks a lot of juice and can wreck battery performance. To optimize the Zune's battery life in spite of its Wi-Fi capabilities, Microsoft decided to ditch the built-in audio equalizer found on the first-generation Zune. While one can argue that EQ presets are simply a Band-Aid for poor quality earbuds, there's just no way to feel good about having a perfectly good feature ripped away from a product. We cut Microsoft a little slack on excluding EQ from the 80GB Zune because they bundled it with high-quality dynamic driver earphones. Unfortunately, the basic earbuds that come with the Zune 4 and Zune 8 just don't compare. Listening on our full-sized Ultrasone HFI-700 headphones, we were more than satisfied with the Zune's fidelity (especially considering its support for the WMA Lossless audio format). That said, bass addicts, control freaks, and people with partial hearing loss will certainly be disappointed with the Zune's lack of sound enhancement.

The 1.8-inch screen used on the Zune 4 and 8 is adequate for short video podcast content, but nowhere close to the luxurious, movie-worthy 3.2-inch screen found on the 80GB version. With flash-based MP3 players such as the Creative Zen and Sansa View offering larger screens along with memory expansion and EQ, the value of the Zune 4 and 8 is not as cut-and-dried as its high-capacity kin. Despite its size, however, the Zune's glass-covered, 320x240 LCD presents excellent viewing angles, with above-average clarity and color. Zune's support for Windows Media Center DVR content is a bonus, but you probably won't want to watch an entire TV show on such a small screen.

The battery life of the 4 and 8GB Zune is about average for this type of device, but we expected much better. With the Wi-Fi feature turned off, Microsoft rates the 4 and 8GB Zune's battery life at 24 hours for audio, and 4 hours for video. Those numbers aren't bad, but we doubt many users will think to turn off the Wi-Fi feature. Once testing is complete, we'll update this review with results from our CNET Labs.

Final thoughts

With every MP3 player manufacturer coming out with their own takes on the video-capable, flash-based MP3 player, Microsoft's spin on the theme is somewhat predictable. Wireless sync and podcast integration give the Zune an edge over its competition, however. Still, we're much more enthusiastic about Microsoft's high-capacity 80GB Zune.

Source from: edition.cnn.com

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Zoo's panda cub named Zhen Zhen

SAN DIEGO, California (AP) -- The San Diego Zoo's panda cub finally has a name: Zhen Zhen, or Precious.

Meet Zhen Zhen: San Diego Zoo's panda cub born in August gets 'Precious' name.

Following Chinese tradition, the zoo waited until the cub, which was born August 3, was 100 days old before giving her a name Monday.

According to zoo officials, Zhen Zhen won out over 2,400 names submitted by zoo visitors.

Thirty-six percent of voters chose the name from among the four finalists.

The other choices were Li Hua, or Beautiful China; Ming Zhu, or Bright Treasure; and Xiao Li, or Little Beauty.

The cub is still living out of public view in a private den with her mother, the panda Bai Yun, but can be seen via the zoo's Web cam.

Zhen Zhen is the third cub born to Bai Yun and her consort, Gao Gao, since 2003.

The panda couple has been one of the most reproductively successful ever in captivity.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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China probe captures lunar image

BEIJING, China (AP) -- China displayed the first image of the moon captured by its Chang'e 1 lunar probe at a gala ceremony Monday, marking the formal start of the satellite's mission to document the lunar landscape.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao unveils the moon image captured by China's lunar orbiter Chang'e 1.

Unveiling the image at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, Premier Wen Jiabao hailed it as a major step in "the Chinese race's 1,000-year-old dream" of exploring the moon. The black and white image clearly showed craters on the moon's surface.

China hopes the probe, launched late last month, will have surveyed the entire surface of the moon at least once by early next year.

The probe's launch closely followed the start of a similar mission by Japan, prompting speculation over a new space race in Asia. India plans to launch a lunar probe in April.

Chinese officials, however, have played down talk of such competition, saying Beijing wanted to use its program to work with other countries and hoped to join in building the international space station.

"We have a very open program and we are willing to cooperate according to common international practices," said Sun Laiyan, head of the China National Space Administration.

In 2003, China became only the third country in the world after the United States and Russia to send a human into Earth's orbit, following that up with a two-man mission in 2005. But Sun said China had no plans to put a man on the moon -- yet.

"For the time being we have no plans to send any Chinese onto the moon," he said.

"So please do not put even more pressure on our shoulders. But having said that, I'm confident that one day China will send its taikonaut on the moon and I hope to see that day," Sun said at a news conference, using the Chinese term for astronaut.

The Chang'e 1 satellite, slung into space by a Long March 3A rocket, will survey the moon's surface using stereo radar and other tools as a precursor to a planned lunar landing in 2012 and a mission to gather lunar samples by 2020.

Chinese space officials have said they were being careful not to travel territory already covered by the space programs of Russia, the U.S., Japan and the European Space Agency.

China's space program is backed by the country's secretive military. While Beijing insists it is committed to a peaceful space program, analysts point to numerous potential applications for its technology.

China alarmed the international community in January when it blasted apart an old satellite in space, using a land-based missile.

Sun twice referred to the space program as fulfilling "national security" needs, but did not elaborate.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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FBI: Millions of computers roped into criminal 'robot networks'

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- More than 1 million computers in the last five months have become part of robot networks, or "botnets," in which hackers take over computers without their owners' knowledge and use them in criminal campaigns, the FBI said Thursday.

FBI Director Robert Mueller says botnets are "the Swiss Army knives of cyber crime."

The bureau in June announced Operation Bot Roast to stop this emerging type of cyber attack, which the FBI estimates has resulted in $20 million in losses and theft.

More than 1 million computers were infected with botnets when the FBI launched Bot Roast, and another million have been identified since then. Industry numbers suggest there are millions more.

According to an FBI news release, New Zealand authorities in tandem with the FBI searched the home of an individual -- identified only by the cyber name, "AKILL" -- whose "elite international botnet coding group" is suspected of infecting more than 1 million computers.

Since the operation was launched, 13 search warrants have been served around the world, and eight individuals -- in Washington, Pennsylvania, Florida, California and Kentucky -- have been indicted or found guilty of crimes related to botnets. Such crimes include fraud, identity theft and denial of service attacks in which computer Web sites and other resources are made unavailable.

The schemes target more than individual computer users. The FBI in a news release said recent attacks have ensnared a major financial institution in the Midwest and the University of Pennsylvania.

FBI Director Robert Mueller noted in a speech earlier this month that there is potential to attack entire networks, send spam, infect computers and inject spyware -- not to mention more sinister crimes that threaten national security.

"Botnets are considered the Swiss Army knives of cyber crime. You name it, they can do it," Mueller said during a speech at Penn State University. "A botnet could shut down a power grid, flood an emergency call center with millions of spam messages or disable a military command post."

Here's how botnets work: A hacker known as a "botherder" takes over computers using viruses, worms or Trojan horses. A Trojan horse is software that appears to perform a harmless task while cloaking its true function.

Computer users unwittingly grant access to the botherder by clicking on an advertisement, opening an e-mail attachment or providing information to a "phishing" Web page, which is a phony site that mimics a legitimate site.

Once they have access, botherders use the computers for their criminal enterprise, making it difficult to trace.

According to a September report from Symantec Corp., China had the most infected computers at 29 percent, followed by the United States at 13 percent. However, Symantec said, 43 percent of all command-and-control servers -- which botherders use to relay commands to infected computers in their network -- were located in the United States.

Symantec reported that in the first half of 2007 it had detected more than 5 million computers that had been used to carry out at least one cyber attack a day.

The number represented a 17 percent drop since the previous reporting period, Symantec said.

The decrease is indicative of stronger computer security and law enforcement initiatives like Operation Bot Roast that are forcing botherders to abandon the technique, Symantec reported.

Protecting your computer is as easy as "putting locks on your doors and windows," according to an FBI news release. Make sure your anti-virus software is up to date, install a firewall, use complicated passwords and be careful opening e-mail attachments and advertisers' links on Web sites, the bureau advised.

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PC stripper helps spam to spread

By deciphering the text, victims get to see more explicit images

A virtual stripper is helping to defeat anti-spam security checks.

Spammers have created a Windows game which shows a woman in a state of undress when people correctly type in text shown in an accompanying image.

The scrambled text images come from sites which use them to stop computers automatically signing up for accounts that can be put to illegal use.

By getting people to type in the text the spammers can take over the accounts and use them to send junk mail.

Text chat

The scrambled text systems used to defeat automatic sign-ups are known as Captchas or "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart".

Typically they feature a disfigured word or one overlaid with artefacts that make it difficult for anyone but a human to decipher.

Many computer criminals have been trying to crack these systems to get at the net-based resources, such as e-mail accounts or blogging tools, they are designed to protect.

"The free e-mail services, so far, have been extremely successful at using Captchas to recognise a human being or an automatic program," said Raimund Genes, chief technology officer at Trend Micro.

The Windows game uses humans to crack anti-spam security

The novel system for getting round Captchas uses images of a woman called "melissa" who invites victims to decipher the scrambled text. Entering the correct text produces another image and another chunk of scrambled text.

Mr Genes said the Captchas seen with the first versions of the malicious program are all taken from the sign-up system for Yahoo webmail.

In the past many viruses have tricked people into opening booby-trapped attachments with the false promise of seeing explicit images, said Mr Genes, but this was one of the first to actually show people more images if people respond.

Because of the effectiveness of this technology, we have begun to see scammers adapt their tactics

Mr Genes said the program could prove because "the average male e-mail user would want to see more".

So far the two security firms who have spotted the program, Trend Micro and Panda Security, have not seen many copies of it in the wild suggesting few people have been caught out.

Mr Genes said it was very likely a proof of concept program that might find wide use in the future.

"Maybe they are trying it out to slip under the radar," he said. "More and more malware does not want to get any publicity, it wants to be silent and hidden."

The virtual stripper program arrives on machines that are already infected with malicious software, said Mr Genes. The program comes to life when the Internet Explorer browser is used on infected machines.

The Captcha-busting program can run on Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, and Server 2003.

Mr Genes recommended that people run anti-virus, anti-spyware and web watching programs to avoid infection and to install updates as soon as they become available.

A Yahoo spokesperson said: "Yahoo began deploying Captcha more than six years ago to help combat the ability for malicious programs to send spam.

"Because of the effectiveness of this technology, we have begun to see scammers adapt their tactics, where human beings solve the puzzles the viruses cannot."

The company added: "Yahoo is continuing to innovate in our defenses against this type of abuse. We have a number of mechanisms to help us detect and respond to abuse."Fantastical feast Verbal blows 'St Petersburg clan'

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FBI tries to fight zombie hordes

The vast majority of hijacked computers are Windows PCs

The FBI is contacting more than one million PC owners who have had their computers hijacked by cyber criminals.

The initiative is part of an ongoing project to thwart the use of hijacked home computers, or zombies, as launch platforms for hi-tech crimes.

The FBI has found networks of zombie computers being used to spread spam, steal IDs and attack websites.

The agency said the zombies or bots were "a growing threat to national security".

Signs of trouble

The FBI has been trying to tackle networks of zombies for some time as part of an initiative it has dubbed Operation Bot Roast.

This operation recently passed a significant milestone as it racked up more than one million individually identifiable computers known to be part of one bot net or another.

The law enforcement organisation said that part of the operation involved notifying people who owned PCs it knew were part of zombie or bot networks. In this way it said it expected to find more evidence of how they are being used by criminals.

"The majority of victims are not even aware that their computer has been compromised or their personal information exploited," said James Finch, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division.

Many people fall victim by opening an attachment on an e-mail message containing a virus or by visiting a booby-trapped webpage.

Many hi-tech criminals are now trying to subvert innocent webpages to act as proxies for their malicious programs.

Many bots are used to send out junk mail or spam

Those in charge of botnets, called botherders, can have tens of thousands of machines under their control.

Operation Bot Roast has resulted in the arrest of three people known to have used bot nets for criminal ends.

One of those arrested, Robert Alan Soloway, could face 65 years in jail if found guilty of all the crimes with which he has been charged.

In a statement about Operation Bot Roast the FBI urged PC users to practice good computer security which includes using regularly updated anti-virus software and installing a firewall.

For those without basic protections anti-virus companies such as F Secure, Trend Micro, Kaspersky Labs and many others offer online scanning services that can help spot infections.

The organisation said it was difficult for people to know if their machine was part of a botnet.

However it said telltale signs could be if the machine ran slowly, had an e-mail outbox full of mail a user did not send or they get e-mail saying they are sending spam.Fantastical feast Verbal blows 'St Petersburg clan'

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