China indicates interest in buying maglev train technology

Beijing - China on Wednesday signalled its interest in acquiring the technology for a German-developed magnetic-levitation, or maglev, train.

"We would greet the sale of the magnetic train technology from the German developers to Chinese firms," said the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planning agency.

It added that it hoped China could win the technology at an "attractive price."

However, the German conglomerate ThyssenKrupp, which developed the Transrapid system with Siemens, rebutted speculation that it might sell the propulsion technology or a license to China after high costs last month killed a maglev track that had been planned between downtown Munich and its airport.

China is home to the only Transrapid track in commercial service. The track runs between downtown Shanghai and the city's airport.

Xie Weida, deputy director of the Railway Institute at Shanghai's Tongji University, who was involved in the development of the Shanghai line, warned that the cost of such know-how would be extremely expensive but would allow China to produce maglev trains itself and market them internationally.

An expansion of the Shanghai line is planned, but it has been put on hold because of protests by residents. Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng recently ruled out a completion of the expansion by the Shanghai-hosted World Expo 2010 as originally planned.

For More Details

Security Safer by Design

Every Mac is secure — right out of the box — thanks to the proven foundation of Mac OS X. Apple engineers have designed Leopard with more security to protect your personal data and make your online life safer.

Safe and easy.

The security features built into Leopard are unobtrusive, easy to use, and accessible to everyone. And Apple responds quickly to any threat, providing timely software updates that make installing the latest security enhancements one-click simple.

Secure from the open source.

Apple engineers use a variety of approaches to identify potential security threats and proactively protect the OS against them. Since the core of Leopard is open source, Apple gets the benefit of a worldwide community of security researchers who help to further improve security on the Mac. Apple also works with a number of security organizations, including CERT/CC, FIRST, the FreeBSD security team, and the Department of Homeland Security.

Danger-free downloads.

Sometimes innocent-looking files contain malicious applications in disguise. That’s why files downloaded using Safari, Mail, and iChat are screened to determine if they contain applications. If they do, Leopard alerts you, then warns you the first time you open one. You decide whether to open the application or cancel the attempt. And Leopard can use digital signatures to verify that an application hasn’t been changed since it was created.

DIY encryption.

The Disk Utility tool in Leopard helps you create encrypted disk images using 128-bit or even stronger 256-bit AES encryption. Safely email documents, files, and folders to friends and colleagues, save the encrypted disk image to CD or DVD, or store it on your Mac or a network file server.

Connect with confidence.

The VPN client in Leopard offers increased compatibility with the most widely used VPN servers on the Internet. So connecting to corporate networks securely — without additional software — is fast and easy.

Safe to share.

New sharing preferences in Leopard show you which folders your Mac is sharing and give you more control over who can access shared folders. Add users from your Address Book, create new file-sharing accounts so friends and family can securely access your files, or tie into a corporate directory to add users from your network. Sharing options abound in Leopard.

Sandbox tested.

Sometimes hackers try to hijack an application to run malicious code. Sandboxing helps ensure that applications do only what they’re intended to by restricting which files they can access, whether they can talk to the network, and whether they can be used to launch other applications. Helper applications in Leopard — including the software that enables Bonjour and the Spotlight indexer — are sandboxed to guard against attackers.

For More Info

MultiCore-Fire on all cylinders

Today’s Mac computers offer astounding performance with up to eight cores of processing power. How do you take full advantage? Simple — with Leopard. A rearchitected system, finely tuned key applications, and powerful new tools for developers make Leopard the perfect OS for your multicore Mac.

Why multicore matters.

For decades, faster processors meant better application performance but hotter, power-hungrier chips that were far from mobile-friendly. New multicore processors help solve the power problem, but don’t necessarily improve application performance. That’s where Leopard comes in, providing powerful tools that make it easy to reap the benefits of multicore computing.

Multiple cores, multiple efficiencies.

The new Leopard scheduler is very efficient at allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. So Leopard spends less time managing tasks and more time performing computations. A new multithreaded network stack speeds up networking by handling network inputs and outputs in parallel.

Multicore apps in Leopard.

Apple engineers have updated several applications in Leopard — including Mail, Address Book, and Font Utility — to be fully multicore ready. Each of these apps breaks up processor-intensive actions into a series of more manageable steps that execute one by one on single-CPU computers and in parallel on newer, multicore systems. Cocoa uses the same technology to speed up Spotlight searches and Dictionary lookups.

Smooth operator.

How did Apple engineers pull this off? By using NSOperation, a breakthrough new API that optimizes applications for the world of multicore processing. Independent chunks of computation (operations) are added to NSOperationQueue, which dynamically determines how many operations to run in parallel based on the current architectures. So there’s no need to hand-code the complexities of threading and locking. You simply describe the operations in a program along with their dependencies. Cocoa takes care of the rest.

Pass it on.

To support the message-passing model popular in scientific computation — which has long needed to distribute calculations across multiple processes — Leopard includes the popular open source OpenMPI implementation of the MPI 2.0 standard. OpenMPI works with Xgrid, seamlessly supports both PowerPC- and Intel-based Mac computers, and makes it easy to add drivers for low-latency interconnects. And Xcode for Leopard includes the various MPI “compilers” (preprocessors) that streamline the process of writing MPI-compliant programs.

For More Info

Core Animations-Drag and Drop

Welcome to the next level in computer animation. No, it’s not a feature film — it’s your desktop. Core Animation is a framework that makes it simple for Mac developers to add visually stunning user interfaces, graphics, and animations to applications. Without any advanced graphics techniques, you can create fluid, stutter-free effects and experiences as groundbreaking as Time Machine and the new Dock.Order from depth.
Using Core Animation, Mac developers can create snazzy animations in their programs using different media types, such as text, 2D graphics, OpenGL renderings, and video, simultaneously. These items are placed on layers, and a scene can contain a few layers or thousands of layers, each with its own content. Core Animation can add different effects to layers, then composite and render them in real time. When content changes, Core Animation updates it automatically.
Two heads are better than one.

Core Animation performance benefits from multiple cores in the latest Intel-based Mac computers. When developers use Core Animation in an application, the framework can take advantage of processor threads. On a multicore Mac, that means the application runs on one core, and Core Animation graphics tasks run on the other.
Shift from manual to automatic.

No need to create animations by managing individual elements on a frame-to-frame basis. Just describe the start state, the end state, and any interim states or keyframes, and let Core Animation do the rest. You can also describe how your animation should react to user input, and it adjusts accordingly. Core Animation opens up the power of Apple’s graphics technologies and proven aesthetics to every developer. You’ll be seeing its effect in a new generation of amazing apps to come.

For More Info

Mobile Phone Signal And Battery Meters

Why does the first bar of the battery life take 36 hours to go away, and the other 3 seem to vanish in 10 minutes? How do my calls get dropped when I CLEARLY have full bars? Read on m'friend.

Battery Meters

We're in a world that sends robots to outerspace, has cured innumerable diseases, and FINALLY allows us to play Super Monkey Ball using accelerometers on a portable device - you'd think we'd be able to measure the amount of charge on a battery. Truth is, we can - and accurately too. But you'd never know it in your every day life...36 hours to dissipate all the power, but plug it in for 10 minutes and miraculously it appears that you're back to full strength? How can that be? We all know it's not actually back to full (or >80% as the bars would suggest), so what is actually going on? Marketing.

Like everything else, that battery meter is controlled by software, and that software is controlled by humans - at least for now. In related news...

Signal vs. Noise

We all know AT&T's pitch, "More Bars in more Places," but what does that really mean? We've also all had calls dropped only to look down at the phone to notice "full bars." The issue is that the meter only tells one half of the story.

When your phone is on standby and you're likely to look at the meter, those "bars" are the combination of two factors: the raw signal strength received from the cell tower, and the signal to noise ratio (the SNR) - essentially, how well the tower can hear your phone based on how much other noise (data) you are competing with. The SNR is by far the most significant component in determining call quality, but because the SNR is constantly changing the phones display a blend of the two measurements, and are set to give far too much weight to the signal strength of the tower.

When you are actually on a call, your phone and the tower are in in two-way communication, and the meter reads more precisely, but you're generally not looking down at the meter at those times.

When you see full bars, what you're seeing is that your phone is hearing the the local signal loud and clear, but what is not shown is if the tower can hear your phone shout back. Throughout your call, the amount of data being sent to your tower can change frequently, and when a deluge hits, it's as though you're pissing into a waterfall. In this case, you're not actually being lied to, just selectively informed. More marketing.

For More Details

Homeland Security: We can seize laptops for an indefinite period

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has concocted a remarkable new policy: It reserves the right to seize for an indefinite period of time laptops taken across the border.

A pair of DHS policies from last month say that customs agents can routinely--as a matter of course--seize, make copies of, and "analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, re-enter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States." (See policy No. 1 and No. 2.)

DHS claims the border search of electronic information is useful to detect terrorists, drug smugglers, and people violating "copyright or trademark laws." (Readers: Are you sure your iPod and laptop have absolutely no illicitly downloaded songs? You might be guilty of a felony.)

This is a disturbing new policy, and should convince anyone taking a laptop across a border to use encryption to thwart DHS snoops. Encrypt your laptop, with full disk encryption if possible, and power it down before you go through customs.

Here's a guide to customs-proofing your laptop that we published in March.

It's true that any reasonable person would probably agree that Customs agents should be able to inspect travelers' bags for contraband. But seizing a laptop and copying its hard drive is uniquely invasive--and should only be done if there's a good reason.

Sen. Russell Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, called the DHS policies "truly alarming" and told the Washington Post that he plans to introduce a bill that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches.

But unless Congress changes the law, DHS may be able to get away with its new rules. A U.S. federal appeals court has ruled that an in-depth analysis of a laptop's hard drive using the EnCase forensics software "was permissible without probable cause or a warrant under the border search doctrine."

At a Senate hearing in June, Larry Cunningham, a New York prosecutor who is now a law professor, defended laptop searches--but not necessarily seizures--as perfectly permissible. Preventing customs agents from searching laptops "would open a vulnerability in our border by providing criminals and terrorists with a means to smuggle child pornography or other dangerous and illegal computer files into the country," Cunningham said.

The new DHS policies say that customs agents can, "absent individualized suspicion," seize electronic gear: "Documents and electronic media, or copies thereof, may be detained for further review, either on-site at the place of detention or at an off-site location, including a location associated with a demand for assistance from an outside agency or entity."

For More Details

Battles and Bids Over Pay by Touch

Pay By Touch, with revenues of approximately $70 million and at its height some 750 employees, has grown mainly through acquisition. Between 2005 and 2007, it bought at least six companies, including rival biometrics firm BioPay, and CardSystems Solutions, an Arizona-based credit-card payment processor. In December, 2006, Pay By Touch paid $100 million in cash and stock to acquire original loyalty marketer S&H Solutions, the 110-year old company behind S&H green stamps.

With its fingerprint payment technology slow to pay off, Pay By Touch this year started focusing on other lines of business. It signed grocers including Ohio's Dorothy Lane Markets and Harps Food Stores of Arkansas to a loyalty marketing program aimed at offering personalized coupons and deals to consumers who scanned their fingerprints with an in-store kiosk. Consumers who joined the program received personal offers and coupons based on purchasing history. Another line of business aimed at using fingerprints to help make check-cashing more secure had gained some traction with small banks.

Control Battles

But the company still needed more cash to fund operations. Last February, Pay By Touch raised $163 million from three hedge funds—Plainfield, Och-Ziff Capital Management (OZM), and Farallon Capital Management. Plainfield secured its portion of the loan, worth about $50 million, with Pay By Touch shares owned personally by company founder Rogers. Those shares amount to a 20% ownership stake in Pay By Touch but carry "supermajority" voting rights that give the holder control of 64% of the voting shares, enough to control the company.

The loan agreement calls for Plainfield to assume control of Rogers' shares in the event of a default. On Oct. 15, Plainfield's court complaint declared Pay By Touch in default because it failed to deliver its 2005 audited financial results by an Aug. 31, 2007, deadline. That set off a volley of lawsuits and legal moves. Having assumed Rogers' voting power, Plainfield created a new board of directors for Pay By Touch, reinstating two directors that Rogers had suddenly fired on Oct. 11, and a third who had resigned on Oct. 12.

On Oct. 18, Pay By Touch's Delaware lawyers disputed the validity of Plainfield's action, citing a technicality in the company's bylaws. Plainfield then issued a new order that would have seated Plainfield's new board on Nov. 1. But late on the night of Oct. 31, four Pay By Touch employees filed an involuntary petition aimed at forcing the company into bankruptcy. Rogers has also sought personal bankruptcy, in a case filed in the same court on the same day. Rogers didn't respond to an e-mail seeking comment, and Pay By Touch declined to make him available for an interview.

Usually a bankruptcy filing stays other pending litigation, but the judge in the bankruptcy case has allowed the Delaware case to proceed. A Delaware judge has issued a status quo order, forcing the company into management under the care of a temporary custodian and a temporary board of directors. A trial over control of the company in Delaware is set for Dec 21.

For More Info

New DNS exploit now in the wild and having a blast

About two weeks ago, we covered the release of a DNS security fix meant to patch a vulnerability in the system that matches domain names with IP addresses. The flaw had been discovered by security researcher Dan Kaminsky some months earlier but, at the time, details on the exploit were being kept secret. That information has since leaked thanks to an accidental blog post by someone at Matasano Security. Fast forward four days, and hackers, enterprising little children that they are, have released an exploit aimed squarely at the vulnerability.

This would be less of an issue if the widely released patch from two weeks ago had been fully deployed, but a number of companies or ISPs don't seem to have gotten the memo. Accordingly to Kaminsky, some 52 percent of DNS servers are still vulnerable to the attack. This is a marked improvement from the 86 percent vulnerability rate in the days immediately following the patch's release, but it's still far too high, especially with dangerous code now squirreling its way across the Internet. Patch deployment is not an instant process, even if the company is on the ball, but we'll hopefully see the number of patched DNS servers skyrocket in the next few days.

Some publications have dubbed the attack Metasploit, but that term refers to the open-source Metasploit Framework that was used to develop it. As for the exploit itself, it's a new variation on a classic DNS poisoning theme. It disrupts the normal translation functions of a DNS server, causing it to redirect users to websites other than the ones they intended to visit. A poisoned DNS server, for example, could send someone to www.RussianMalware.com when they had actually typed www.google.com into the address bar. DNS poisoning isn't new—vulnerabilities have existed for over a decade—but the one Kaminsky discovered increases the power of a successful attack.

Kaminsky has now detailed the methodology of a standard DNS poisoning attack and provides additional information on the vulnerability he discovered. As he describes it, a DNS lookup request is essentially a race between a good guy and a bad guy, each of whom possess certain advantages. The good guy knows when the race begins, and he knows the secret code that's been sent along with that request in order to verify that the response coming back is actually authentic. The bad guy doesn't have this code, but he actually decides when the request goes out, and he knows about the request before the good guy does.

Normally, the good guy wins the vast majority of these races, and the bad guy is forced to race again and again in an attempt to guess the right authentication value before the good guy provides correct information. What Kaminsky discovered, and what the new hack exploits, is a vulnerability in the recursive nature of the DNS system. DNS is designed to "bump" your request along until it reaches a server that can answer the client's request. If you ask www.DNSTarget.com for a location it doesn't know, DNSTarget.com can refer you to A.DNSTarget.com, B.DNSTarget.com, and so on, until it finds the requisite information. A.DNSTarget.com is what's called an "in-bailiwick" relative to DNSTarget.com—the information that comes back from that server is automatically trusted and passed on.

Therein lies the problem. Instead of launching an attack straight at www.dnstarget.com and losing 99 percent of the time, the bad guy attacks one of the recursive in-bailiwick servers and then feeds it false information. The in-bailiwick server communicates that data back to DNSTarget.com, which then caches the response—that way, it doesn't need to look the information up again. Problem is, the server has cached poisoned information and doesn't know it. Until that information drops out of the server's cache, the bad guy has effectively won the race.

For More Info

Digital Domain First It Was Song Downloads. Now It’s Organic Chemistry.

AFTER scanning his textbooks and making them available to anyone to download free, a contributor at the file-sharing site PirateBay.org composed a colorful message for “all publishers” of college textbooks, warning them that “myself and all other students are tired of getting” ripped off. (The contributor’s message included many ripe expletives, but hey, this is a family newspaper.)

All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere.

Consider the cost of a legitimate copy of one of the textbooks listed at the Pirate Bay, John E. McMurry’s “Organic Chemistry.” A new copy has a list price of $209.95; discounted, it’s about $150; used copies run $110 and up. To many students, those prices are outrageous, set by profit-engorged corporations (and assisted by callous professors, who choose which texts are required). Helping themselves to gratis pirated copies may seem natural, especially when hard drives are loaded with lots of other products picked up free.

But many people outside of the students’ enclosed world would call that plain theft.

Compared with music publishers, textbook publishers have been relatively protected from piracy by the considerable trouble entailed in digitizing a printed textbook. Converting the roughly 1,300 pages of “Organic Chemistry” into a digital file requires much more time than ripping a CD.

Time flies, however, if you’re having a good time plotting righteous revenge, and students seem angrier than ever before about the price of textbooks. More students are choosing used books over new; sales of a new edition plunge as soon as used copies are available, in the semester following introduction; and publishers raise prices and shorten intervals between revisions to try to recoup the loss of revenue — and the demand for used books goes up all the more.

Used book sales return nothing to publishers and authors. Digital publishing, however, offers textbook publishers a way to effectively destroy the secondary market for textbooks: they now can shift the entire business model away from selling objects toward renting access to a site with a time-defined subscription, a different thing entirely.

The transition has already begun, even while publishers continue to sell print editions. They are pitching ancillary services that instructors can require students to purchase, just like textbooks, but which are available only online on a subscription basis. Cengage Learning, the publisher of Professor McMurry’s “Organic Chemistry,” packages the new book with a two-semester “access card” to a Cengage site that provides instructors with canned quizzes and students with interactive tutorials.

Ronald G. Dunn, chief executive of Cengage Learning, says he believes the printed book is not about to disappear, because it presents a large amount of material conveniently. Mr. Dunn predicted that textbook publishers were “headed for a hybrid market: print will do what it does best, and digital will do what it does best.”

Whether students will view online subscriptions as a helpful adjunct to the printed textbook or as a self-aggrandizing ploy by publishers remains to be seen.

As textbook publishers try to shift to an online subscription model, they must also stem the threat posed by the sharing of scanned copies of their textbooks by students who use online publishing tools for different purposes. The students who create and give away digital copies are motivated not by financial self-interest but by something more powerful: the sweet satisfaction of revenge.

Mr. Dunn says that online piracy is “a significant issue for us.” His company assigns employees to monitor file-sharing sites, and they find in any given month 200 to 300 Cengage textbook titles being shared. The company sends notices to the sites, demanding that the files be removed and threatening legal action.

For More Info

The Future of Biotechnology

[This lecture is based on interviews with 150 of the world’s top scientists, many of them Nobel Laureates or directors of major scientific laboratories, about their conception of the science of the next 20 to 50 years. Many of these predictions are contained in my book, Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century. Of course, errors will be made, but the predictions in this article are not mere idle speculation, but reflect a fairly accurate description by the experts in biotechnology about the evolution of their field.]

Back in the 1980s, when the idea of the Human Genome Project was first proposed by a handful of biologists, the overwhelming reaction was negative, with scientists arguing that it would be prohibitively expensive and would consume too much time and resources. Only a handful of genes had been sequenced, at great expense, and many felt that a crash project to sequence the entire human genome would be impractical and adversely affect funding for other worthwhile projects.

Today, we realize that many of these pessimistic predictions were incorrect in part because of Moore’s Law. The biology of gene sequencing has now been automated and roboticized, with the power of computers doubling every 18 months and results being shared instantly on the internet. This is one of the most important factors driving the ever-accelerating pace of biotechnology. This, in turn, has translated into a new Moore’s Law for biotechnology: that the number of genes which are sequenced doubles every year. This means that the cost of sequencing a DNA base pair went down from $5 per base pair to a few cents today. Within 20 years, we may have personalized DNA sequencing and also an “encyclopedia of life” in which all major life forms are decoded.

This new Moore’s Law, in turn, allows one to make rough predictions about the progress of biotechnology into the next 20 years. Although predictions mentioned here are inevitably based on incomplete information, they will hopefully serve as a useful guide to make plausible projections for the future.

For More Information

Nabbed for speeding? GPS data could get you off the hook

As anyone who has ever gotten a speeding ticket knows (full disclosure: I never have... knock on wood), you often have very little ammo to fight back against the reading that the all-knowing radar gun spat out. But thanks to more sophisticated and affordable technology, that could be changing. GPS data was able to get a California teen off the hook for allegedly going 17 miles per hour over the speed limit, simultaneously casting doubt on the accuracy of police radars and giving hope to tech-savvy drivers.

The story started out simply enough. 18-year-old Shaun Malone was caught by a police radar going 62 in a 45 mph zone last summer. Under most circumstances, most people would assume that this was all simply true—it's not unheard of for teenagers to speed, after all. Malone's parents knew differently, though. It turns out that they had installed a GPS device from Rocky Mountain Tracking in his car in order to monitor his driving behavior.

But this was far more sophisticated than your everyday "turn left at the stop light" kind of GPS device—it tracked his speed, sending signals every 30 seconds, and was even capable of sending e-mail alerts to Malone's parents if Shaun ever exceeded 70mph. (I'm thanking my lucky stars right now that my parents didn't have access to this technology when I was a teenager.) According to the data from Shaun's GPS device, he and his parents argued that he was going exactly 45mph at almost the exact time the police radar clocked him going 62.

For More Info

P&G backs out of drug development deal with ARYx Therapeutics

Singapore, July 7, 2008: Fremont, California-based biopharmaceuticals company ARYx Therapeutics has said that American major Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals has backed out of a collaboration agreement between the companies.

P&G utilized a one-time thirty-day cancellation option linked to the completion of a Thorough QT (TQT) study to end the collaboration agreement between the companies covering the late-stage development and commercialization of ATI-7505, a prokinetic agent in Phase 2 clinical trials for chronic constipation and functional dyspepsia.

"We are surprised P&G would cancel our collaboration after receiving the results of the TQT study given that we achieved a successful result at the study's primary endpoint, and are disappointed in their decision to return the rights to ATI-7505 to us. We have been informed by P&G their decision is based on their view of certain commercial and technical criteria, and that the program no longer fits into their future plans. This decision by P&G does not in any way diminish our confidence in ATI-7505, and we believe the results from the TQT study, along with continued positive clinical and preclinical data, will allow moving ATI-7505 into late-stage development once the program is in the hands of a new partner," said Dr. Paul Goddard, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of ARYx Therapeutics.

As part of thed eal, according to a company release, the results from the just-completed TQT study qualified ARYx for the Tier 1, or highest, milestone payment from P&G. The collaboration agreement provides P&G a thirty-day option period from the lock of the database for the TQT study to cancel the collaboration or agree to pay ARYx the milestone payment provided for under our collaboration agreement. P&G has exercised their option to cancel the agreement effective immediately. However, P&G has also been very supportive in agreeing to a transition plan for handing the program back to ARYx to allow it to pursue an optimal partnering package.

As part of the transition plan, the on-going phase 2 studies in chronic constipation and functional dyspepsia will be terminated in an orderly method. No new patients will be enrolled and those currently on therapy will be withdrawn from the studies over the coming weeks, the release added.

For More Info

Detect Spy Cameras

Malaysia declared free from deadly bird flu virus

Malaysia has been declared free from avian influenza, three months after the deadly virus was detected in poultry from a village in the central Selangor state, a minister announced Monday.In June, the H5N1 strain of bird flu was discovered after a poultry rearer from the Paya Jaras Hilir village in Selangor, next to the capital Kuala Lumpur, reported that 60 of his chickens had suddenly died over three days.

Health ministry officials immediately screened villagers and conducted checks on all birds and poultry.

“The prompt action by the Veterinary Services Department to stamp out the bird flu outbreak according to the protocol had been effective,” said agriculture minister Muhyiddin Yassin.

Following three months of surveillance and laboratory tests that have not shown any traces of the virus, the country had fulfilled conditions set by the World Organisation for Animal Health and has been “declared free from the disease”, Muhyiddin was quoted as saying by the official Bernama news agency.

Following the outbreak in June, a total of 4,226 chicken, ducks and other birds were culled, incurring a cost of 39,939 ringgit ($11,735) in compensation paid out to the livestock owners, he said.

Muhyiddin said the government was still taking preventive measures against the virus, such as conducting checks on poultry farms, prohibiting the import of chicken, ducks and other birds from countries affected by the disease and intensifying checks at border checkpoints to curb smuggling.

“The government has so far spent almost 10 million ringgit ($2.9 million dollars) in compensation to the affected poultry rearers.

“Almost 80,000 birds were culled since the first bird flu case was detected in 2004,” he said.

Following news of June’s outbreak, neighbouring Singapore stopped import of poultry and eggs from the affected area.

For More Info

Is agricultural biotechnology safe?

Many of us are concerned by the possible risks of agricultural biotechnology. For example, when you grow transgenic crops, can their modified genes alter wild varieties of similar wild plants? The latest issue of the California Agriculture magazine carries several articles focusing on transgenic crops, fish and animals. And some discoveries are alarming: "one of the world’s most important crops, sorghum, spontaneously hybridized with one of the world’s worst weeds, johnsongrass, even when they were grown up to 330 feet apart; furthermore, the two plants are distinct species with different numbers of chromosomes." Read more for selected excerpts of these three important research papers.

California Agriculture is a peer-reviewed journal reporting research, reviews and news from the Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources of the University of California. Its latest issue contains several articles about transgenic crops, fish and animals which show that "crop transgenes wander in the environment" and asks the question: "But is this is cause for worry?"

Here is a link to the abstracts of this July-September 2006 issue.

Let’s start with the paper about transgenic crops, "When crop transgenes wander in California, should we worry?" (PDF format, 10 pages, 1.08 MB). Here is the introduction of this article from Norman C. Ellstrand.

The movement of transgenes into populations for which they are not intended remains a primary concern for genetically engineered crops. Such gene flow in itself is not a risk. However, we know that the transfer of genes from traditionally improved crops into wild populations has already resulted, on occasion, in the evolution of weeds more difficult to control, as well as an increased extinction risk for rare species. Just like traditional crops, genetically engineered crops could occasionally create the same problems.

Before going further, do you have an idea of what kind of genetically enhanced products exist today? Below is a picture that will show you that there are many food products genetically engineered (Credit: Stephen Ausmus, USDA-ARS).

For More Info

Biotechnology: The Invisible Revolution

Jado initiates phase II trails of lead RAFT modulator in urticaria

04 Jul 2008 - JADO Technologies GmbH, a developer of RAFT intervention therapeutics, announced the start of a Phase II study to evaluate the safety and efficacy of oral TF002, a formulation of miltefosine, in patients with antihistamine resistant urticaria. TF002 exerts anti-inflammatory activity via RAFT modulation. RAFTs are sub-compartments in the lipid membrane of cells that play a role in the complex physiological processes, such as immune and inflammatory response.
Anzeige


"The start of this systemic trial continues JADO's product development strategy in allergy. Having identified that miltefosine acts via a RAFT mechanism, we want to ensure that we continue to capture the value of the product in the allergy field with our formulations," noted Charl van Zyl, CEO of JADO. "We have made excellent progress with our studies and believe data from this study will continue to support our multi-faceted development program for TF002."

The randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study will enroll a total of 75 patients in 7 German centers. The primary end-point of the study is urticaria symptoms assessed by urticaria activity score (UAS) at the end of treatment.

JADO is investigating topical and oral versions of TF002 in Phase II trials in several allergy indications. Proof of concept with the topical formulation in a Phase II study of atopic dermatitis has been achieved. The company and academic collaborators also recently published in Science proof of concept for its Alzheimer's RAFT inhibitor program.

For More Info click Here

Biotechnology & Gene Therapy

Intel says to prepare for 'thousands of cores

Intel is telling software developers to start thinking about not just tens but thousands of processing cores.
Intel currently offers quad-core processors and is expected to bring out a Nehalem processor in the fourth quarter that uses as many as eight cores.

But the chipmaker is now thinking well beyond the traditional processor in a PC or server. Jerry Bautista, the co-director of the Tera-scale Computing Research Program at Intel, recently said that in a graphics-intensive environment the more cores Intel can build the better. "The more cores we have the better. Provided that we can supply memory bandwidth to the device."

On Monday, an Intel engineer took this a step further. Writing in a blog, Anwar Ghuloum, a principal engineer with Intel's Microprocessor Technology Lab, said: "Ultimately, the advice I'll offer is that...developers should start thinking about tens, hundreds, and thousands of cores now."

He said that Intel faces a challenge in "explaining how to tap into this performance." He continues: "Sometimes, the developers are trying to do the minimal amount of work they need to do to tap dual- and quad-core performance...I suppose this was the branch most discussions took a couple of years ago."

For More Info

Google, Yahoo spiders can now crawl through Flash sites

As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else. Part of the reason for this is because Flash is so inherently un-Googleable; anything that goes into a Flash-only site is basically invisible to search engines and therefore, the world. That will no longer be the case, however, as Adobe announced today that it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines.

This announcement has been a long time coming, as Flash developers have been wishing for ways to make their content searchable for close to a decade. Adobe acknowledges this in its announcement, saying that although search engines are able to index static text and links within Flash SWF files, "[Rich Internet Applications] and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states—a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies."

This announcement may also result in some major usability changes (for the better) for Flash on the web. In a post to its Webmaster Central Blog, Google wrote that it can now index all kinds of textual content in SWF files, like that included in Flash gadgets, buttons, menus, entirely self-contained Flash web sites, "and everything in between." Google can now also follow URLs embedded within Flash files to add to the crawling pipeline. This new indexing technology does not, however, include FLV files (video files that are found on sites like YouTube) because those are generated as videos and don't contain any text elements like an SWF file does.

For More Info

Which Linux Distributions Are Dying?

I just read Louis Gray’s post titled “On the Web, If You’re Not Growing, You’re Dying.” It gave me a chilling realization about web services. Like everything else, what goes up must come down. This must apply to Linux distributions too, right? So, what’s happening with Linux? Which distributions are growing? Like Louis Gray, I’m going to use data from Google Trends. People searching the name of Linux distributions on Google can be considered new users. After all, wouldn’t experienced Linux users already know where the websites of the big Linux distributions are?

So, what does this tell us? First of all, Ubuntu is pretty close to being considered the face of Linux. Second, it’s the newer distributions like Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, and Fedora that new Linux users are going for. Of course, it’s mainly Ubuntu, but I believe that there could be plenty of new users arrinving at the Fedora and OpenSUSE communities if both distributions work hard to become more user friendly.

So? What’s going to happen to the distributions like Debian and Slackware? I’ll leave that to you.

i80and’s EDIT: While it is true that Ubuntu is increasingly becoming Linux to many people, DistroWatch.com shows that not all is doom and gloom for the “classic” distros; Slackware had been on a rise for the past 6 months as of 07/01/08, as has Debian. However, broadening the statistic query to the past 12 months unsurprisingly shows a generally more neutral growth, with Debian still gaining H.P.D (Hits Per Day) whereas Slackware falls.

For More Info

The Cookie-Cutter Image Hover Effect

Today I am going to share an interesting and super-cool way to create a dynamic hover effect for images. I call this flexible format the "cookie-cutter effect", and you'll find out why in a moment. First, I shall go off on a tangent to maintain my reputation. This day in age, alot of navigational bars on web sites are image-based. Designers prefer to use graphics because it helps make the navigation more stunning and visually appealing (eye candy). Another thing that is becoming nearly mandatory is a hover effect for each of the links, meaning the image changes slightly when the user has positioned their cursor over it. This sends an instant visual cue to the user and lets them know exactly what they are pointing at. It may seem a little silly to think a user does not know where their mouse is pointed, but that certainly is not the case. The map in the center of your local shopping mall with a big arrow that says "You are here" is not silly either, it is actually helpful to some. Unfortunately, there is a pretty durastic downfall to using graphics for key elements such as navigation: they seriously lack extensibility. Say you want to increase the brightness of the hover effect by a few shades. This task, at the very least, requires knowledge of a graphics editing program. Usually some design talent is required too. In many cases this situation cannot be avoided, but the approach that I am discussing in this post will at the very least allow greater flexibility than the norm.
Let's Begin

Demo Image 1To demonstrate the technique, I went ahead and created some random image with my first name next to an odd shape. I stuck the shape in there to illustrate that this approach is applicable to more than just textual images. In the end, the main part of this image (currently black) will be able to be changed to any color we want using CSS only. Consider the base image to the right as the opposite of what we want. The plan is to turn the text into the transparent part, and the background of the the image to a solid white. The result will be somewhat of a template, if you will. We will be able to use any background color or image behind it to essentially alter the part of the image that is actually intended to represent the foreground. I became aware of the usefulness of this concept when I read Jason Santa Maria's post the other day about his new blogging expedition. He intends for each post to have its own design theme/color scheme. Currently, he has the inverse effect of what I am demonstrating in this post; the background color of his navigational links change. This was accomplished by using normal transparent images like the one above, and is still flexible and cool. But, what if you want the color of the text to change? I'm sure Jason knows the answer.

For More Info

Major Update to Weave Prototype, 0.2 Development Milestone

As the Web continues to evolve, and more of our lives move online, we believe that web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information.

Weave is Mozilla Labs’ project to develop a coherent framework and platform for deeply integrating online services with the browser. Our goals are to enhance the Firefox user experience, increase user control over their personal information, and provide new opportunities for developers to build innovative online experiences.

Today we’re releasing an update to the core data synchronization components of Weave in preparation for the introduction of data sharing and third-party APIs.
Major Updates and Features

* Significant reworking of the installation and setup experience.
* Support for major browser data types, including bookmarks, browsing history, cookies, saved passwords, saved form data, and tabs.
* Intelligent scheduler for determining when to synchronize data between browser and server to improve performance.
* RSA public/private keys and AES encryption of all user data on the client side through NSS, the crypto library used by Firefox.
* End-to-end encryption, with initial support for secure sharing of data with a 3rd party and with XMPP-based notifications of shares.


For More Info

AT&T memos detail iPhone 3G unbricking tool, crowd planning, more...

A recent series of internal memos from AT&T to its Mobility staffers reveal a variety of preparatory measures ahead of next month's iPhone launch, including the deployment of an iPhone 3G unbricking tool, ongoing 3G network optimizations, regional advertising campaigns, and calls for part time crowd control, inventory runners, and floor coordinators.

iTunes Activation App

Specifically, one memo issued late last week noted that all company owned retail stores would soon see their desktop systems updated with an icon (below) "for the iTunes utility that will be used for ubricking iPhone 3G devices during the activation process." Employees were asked not to use the partial iTunes software until launch day, but were told that they "WILL need this icon for iPhone 3G launch on July 11th!"
The instructions support expectations that, at least in the case of sales at AT&T stores, each iPhone 3G will need to be unboxed and fully activated at the point of sale. In a second memo, the wireless carrier put out a call for additional part time staffers for launch weekend, which listed among the available positions a back office manager / inventory runner whose job would include bringing iPhone 3Gs from the inventory room to retail sales consultants and then helping to unbox them in order "to facilitate unbricking."

For More Info

Google and Creator of ‘Family Guy’ Strike a Deal

LOS ANGELES — Google is experimenting with a new method of distributing original material on the Web, and some Hollywood film financiers are betting millions that the company will succeed.

In September, Seth MacFarlane, creator of “Family Guy” on television, will unveil a carefully guarded new project called “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy.” Unlike “Family Guy,” which is broadcast on Fox, this animation series will appear exclusively on the Internet.

The innovative part involves the distribution plan. Google will syndicate the program using its AdSense advertising system to thousands of Web sites that are predetermined to be gathering spots for Mr. MacFarlane’s target audience, typically young men. Instead of placing a static ad on a Web page, Google will place a “Cavalcade” video clip.

Advertising will be incorporated into the clips in varying ways. In some cases, there will be “preroll” ads, which ask viewers to sit through a TV-style commercial before getting to the video. Some advertisers may opt for a banner to be placed at the bottom of the video clip or a simple “brought to you by” note at the beginning.

Mr. MacFarlane, who will receive a percentage of the ad revenue, has created a stable of new characters to star in the series, which will be served up in 50 two-minute episodes.

In an interview, he described the installments as “animated versions of the one-frame cartoons you might see in The New Yorker, only edgier.”

For More Info

Firefox 3 CPU Usages Problem

I installed Firefox 3 on Windows XP SP3 on my dell laptop. The Firefox process CPU usage keeps varying between 2-3% and 6-7%. I was totally surprised by this behavior, how such popular software is having so obvious problem.

His is really a very serious issue. It can drain your laptop battery very quickly. My advice to all the users of this blog is to stay away from Firefox 3 till they release an update to fix the issue. You may think of switching back to Firefox 2 or may be even to internet explorer.

After searching the net to fix the problem I have found the following solution but none of them work in my case. You may try if they can help you.

First options I found is:

One user fixed this problem on my system (Windows XP) by unchecking the two boxes in Tools -> Options -> Security -> “Tell me if…”
He also deleted the urlclassifier3.sqlite file in C:\DoOne more solution state that :

The fix is actually pretty simple and involves changing the state of “browser.cache.memory.enable” in Firefox’s “about:config“.

• Type “about:config” into the FIrefox 3 RC1 location bar and tell it you’ll be careful (you’ll see what I mean).
• When the list of configuration options shows up, type “cache” without the quotes into the search bar as shown above. A list of all entries will appear with the word “cache” in them.
• Change the state of the “browser.cache.memory.enable” entry to “false” by double clicking on the entry itself. Make sure the state has indeed changed to “false”.
• Restart the browser and you’re done.

Kindly do let me know If someone is having a working solution for this problem.

For More Info

Think Rogers iPhone plans are unfair? Try living in Sweden

While Canadians have been shortchanged with Rogers iPhone plans there are still some people getting an even worse deal, the Swedes.

In Sweden and the Nordic countries TeliaSonera is selling the iPhone and the plans has turned the Swedish Apple community against Apple and Telia.

So for a 16GB iPhone you might end up spending $4 356 over 2 years if you want unlimited data.

Come on Steve do you really think most Swedes, or even most Swedish Apple fans are willing to pay between $2 405 - 4 356 to get a new Apple phone. I could buy two Macbook Air and a cheap SonyEricsson phone instead.

I will stick with my hacked first generation iPhone for now even though I have waited a LONG time for this moment. Thanks for screwing up this moment for us!

For More Details

Can Weeds Help Solve the Climate Crisis?

Ziska, a lanky, sandy-haired weed ecologist with the Agriculture Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, matches a dry sense of humor with tired eyes. The humor is essential to Ziska’s exploration of what global climate change could do to mankind’s relationship with weeds; there are many days, he confesses, when his goal becomes nothing more than not ending up in a fetal position beneath his battleship gray, government-issue desk. Yet he speaks of weeds with admiration as well as apprehension, and even with hope.
It is easy to share the admiration and apprehension when you consider the site that Ziska planted with weeds in downtown Baltimore in the spring of 2002. Tucked in next to the city’s inner harbor, the site is part of a barren expanse of turf rolled out over a reclaimed industrial landscape. This unfertile scrap seems an unlikely choice for growing anything, but Ziska saw in it, ominously perhaps, a model of where the global habitat as a whole is headed.

For More Info

5 Ways to Make Your Company Gen Y-Friendly

Facing a potential onslaught of baby boomer retirements and a smaller pool of Generation X employees to replace them, IT managers who want to create or sustain a Best Place to Work environment will need the additional help of another group of professionals: Generation Y. Also known as Millennials, this group consists of nearly 80 million individuals born roughly between 1979 and 1999. They are the workforce of the future.

But what will it take to attract and keep these individuals? Are Generation Y's ideas about what makes a great employer different from those of other generations?

Yes, and no.

In many ways, the Millennial generation wants exactly what professionals from previous generations expect from employers. When polled for a recent study by our company and Yahoo HotJobs, the most senior members of Generation Y - those aged 21 to 28 and beginning their careers - placed salary, benefits and opportunities for professional growth at the top of their lists.

This isn't to say, however, that they are like their predecessors in every way. In terms of their workstyles, professional expectations and career concerns, they show some distinct preferences. Based on their responses to the survey, here are a few suggestions for making your company Gen Y-friendly.

For More Info

Another Inventor Of The Internet Wants To Gag It

Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title:" Inventor of the Internet" in news articles. According to Wikipedia, he's the father of networking through data packets. And he's turned his attention to everyone's favorite data packet topic: Peer-to-Peer filesharing. He's established a company called Anagran, and says their devices can sort out which file transfers on the tubes are P2P, and -- you guessed it -- can throttle them in favor of other, more "high-priority" traffic.
At Structure 08, he laid out the problem: 5 percent of the Net's users are running P2P transfers taking up 80 percent of its capacity, which is dramatically limiting the available bandwidth available to everyone else. Roberts' company, Anagran, is able to detect which "flows" are P2P traffic, and reduce the bandwidth available to these communications when other users' systems want it. Roberts says that Anagran's technology even functions when P2P transfers are encrypted.

For More Info

Taser "Parties" Pitching Them To Women

Dana Shafman throws "Taser parties" to try to sell the weapons to women -- civilian women.

Shafman, 35, from Scottsddale, Ariz., remarked to Early Show co-anchor Maggie Rodriguez at one such party, "There's Tupperware parties ... and there's candle parties, and there's every other party, but there's no party that addresses safety."

The stun-gun-type weapons have proven controversial, even in the hands of law enforcement officers, but Shafman, who heads ShieldHer.net, says it's time they were sold to everyone. "I think," she says, "we rely on others to make us safe, versus actually thinking about how we can make ourselves safer."

Adding yet another layer of controversy is the attractive colors and packaging the Tasers now come in, about which Shafman says, "That's just so that the consumer market is more aware of the product and it's more appealing to them, because there is a level of fear associated with the product, because they've not had any hands-on use with the product, which is why we push the Taser party for the education portion of the product."

Women get to shoot Tasers at targets at the parties.

Rodriguez allowed herself to be on the receiving end and says, "I was surprised. I felt paralyzed almost and incredible pain."

For More Info

An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant Sometimes, software isn't so magical. Even for Bill Gates.

For the opening piece in our series on Gates leaving daily life at Microsoft, one goal was to give a clear picture of the Microsoft co-founder's role inside the company, as a gauge of the impact his departure will have. As part of that, I went back through the internal e-mails turned over in the antitrust suits against the company, looking for new insights into his personality.

Read on past the jump for one of the gems that turned up, showing Gates in the role of chief rabble-rouser. (Original document: PDF, 5 pages.) It shows that even the Microsoft co-founder -- who champions the "magic of software" -- isn't immune to the frustrations of everyday computer users. Keep in mind that this was more than five years ago, so it doesn't necessarily reflect the specific state of things now. At the bottom, see what Gates said when I asked him about the message last week.

For More Info

Mining for Molecules in the Milky Way

Clouds like this one are the raw material for new stars and planets. We know that complex chemistry builds prebiotic molecules in such clouds long before the stars and planets are formed. There is a good chance that some of these interstellar molecules may find their way to the surface of young planets such as the early Earth, and provide a head start for the chemistry of life. For the first time, we now have the capability to make a very thorough and methodical search to find all the chemicals in the clouds," said Anthony Remijan, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).

In the past three years, Remijan and his colleagues have used the GBT to discover ten new interstellar molecules, a feat unequalled in such a short time by any other team or telescope.

The scientists discovered those molecules by looking specifically for them. However, they now are changing their strategy and casting a wide net designed to find whatever molecules are present, without knowing in advance what they'll find. In addition, they are making their data available freely to other scientists, in hopes of speeding the discovery process. The research team presented its plan to the American Astronomical Society's meeting in St. Louis, MO.

As molecules rotate and vibrate, they emit radio waves at specific frequencies. Each molecule has a unique pattern of such frequencies, called spectral lines, that constitutes a "fingerprint" identifying that molecule. Laboratory tests can determine the pattern of spectral lines that identifies a specific molecule.

Most past discoveries came from identifying a molecule's pattern in the laboratory, then searching with a radio telescope for that set of spectral lines in a region of sky. So far, more than 140 different molecules have been found that way in interstellar space.

The new study reverses the process. The astronomers will use the GBT to study a cloud of gas and dust in detail, finding all the spectral lines first, then later trying to match them up to molecular patterns using data-mining software.

For More info

Meet the iPod Doctor: He makes house calls

NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Ramon Reyes had a problem. He could only get sound from one channel on his iPod video player. At first, he thought his ear-buds were busted. But he replaced them with a pricey new pair made by Sony, and it didn't make any difference.

So on a recent sunny afternoon, Reyes stood outside his office in lower Manhattan, chewing gum, and waiting for a visit from Demetrios Leontaris, better known as the iPod Doctor. Leontaris spends his days cruising Manhattan and tending to the needs of distressed owners of Apple's ubiquitous portable music player.

Leontaris, a heavy-set guy from blue collar Union City, N.J., soon arrived in the black Pontiac Aztek that doubles as his office. He rolled down the window, eyeballed Reyes' iPod, and offered a diagnosis: The headphone input jack was broken. "It's fairly common with this model," the iPod Doctor said reassuringly.

Sitting in the driver's seat of the Aztek, Leontaris opened Reyes' iPod and replaced the damaged part with the swift, graceful movements of a concert pianist. "There you go," he said, returning the refurbished device to its owner.

Reyes put his buds in his ears and gave his iPod a listen. "Excellent," he said, smiling and nodding his head to a beat that only he could hear. The iPod Doctor collected his standard $70 fee for the repair and headed off for another appointment.

For More Info

The Thin Laptop Wars

The paperback edition of War & Peace, a bottle of wine, the world's smallest cat--all of these things weigh a good deal more than the Portégé R500-S5007V introduced by Toshiba last week.

The neatest trick: Unlike Apple's (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) 3-pound MacBook Air, the 2.4-pound Toshiba (other-otc: TOSBF.PK - news - people ) includes the optical drive that the MacBook Air lacks while cramming in 128 gigabytes worth of storage, thanks to the world's largest capacity flash memory-based hard drive. All this, and it's just one hundredth of an inch thicker than the Apple.

The catch: Toshiba's new machine won't be available until the third quarter of this year, and even then it will carry a price tag that makes Apple customers look downright thrifty: $2,999.

In Pictures: Seven Thin Laptops

To be sure, a new class of lightweight, cheap laptops is emerging as well. Computers such as the Asus Eee PC 900, the HP Mini-Note 2133 and the Intel Classmate PC sell for well under $500. But they also suffer from cramped keyboards, dinky screens and relatively pokey processors.

If you want it all, and you want it small, then you're going to have to pay a great deal more than $500. While notebook computer prices are falling fast, notebooks that are still able to lighten the load while packing serious computing power command a premium price.

For More Info

Drivers Log 30 Billion Fewer Miles in US

Earlier I talked about how March represented a dramatic drop in vehicle miles traveled, but that’s nothing compared to a recent report stating that Americans have cut back 30 billion miles over the last six months. The drop was measured between November 2007 - April 2008, and compared to the same period from a year ago. Overall the drop was only 1%, but compared to an annual increase of 1-2%, the difference from the norm is actually a bit bigger.

The drop is the largest it’s been since the fuel crisis of 1979-1980, and with fuel prices looking to stay high, may represent a permanent change in the way Americans think about travel. Here’s what USA Today has to say about the difference between now and the last fuel crisis (which I wasn’t alive for!):

“It’s not a blip,” said Marilyn Brown, professor of energy policy at Georgia Tech, citing data showing surging transit ridership, dropping sales of sport-utility vehicles and sharply increased demand for gas-efficient vehicles. “I think the difference between now and 1979, when prices were comparable when you adjust for inflation, is there’s a sense of sustained pain. There’s a sense that the era of cheap energy is a thing of the past.”

This comes amid a flurry of TV, magazine, and newspaper stories about people hopping on the bike, moving closer to work, and dumping their gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs at any cost. My experience with change in the US would suggest that the news is exaggerating the reality of the situation, but these new, hard numbers suggest that isn’t the case at all. Even though some aren’t changing their habits at all, enough are doing it to make the largest drop we’ve seen in decades.

For More Info

Bangladesh 'losing on corruption'

Corruption in Bangladesh has continued to thrive since the interim government took power last year pledging to tackle it, Transparency International says.

Thousands of people, including leading politicians and businessmen, have been detained in a crackdown on crime.

But the watchdog said that in some sectors of the country corruption had actually increased since January 2007.

One of the survey's authors said corruption remained a deep-rooted menace in Bangladesh.

Bribes

The military-backed government has not been afraid of going after some of the most influential people in Bangladeshi public life in its attempt to rid the country of corruption.

More than 150 leading politicians, officials and businessmen, as well as in some cases their wives and children, have been put behind bars.

Two former prime ministers, Sheikh Hasina and Khaleda Zia, are facing charges of graft and extortion, and so is Khaleda Zia's son, Tareque Rahman, who used to be described as the most powerful man in Bangladesh.

His lawyer claims that Mr Rahman has been so badly tortured since being arrested a year ago that unless he receives medical treatment soon, he might no longer be able to walk.

In its latest campaign against crime, the police say they have arrested more than 25,000 people over the past three weeks.

This has put such a strain on the prisons, that the Home Ministry is considering releasing hundreds of prisoners who have served half their sentences.

But despite these draconian measures, Transparency International says that corruption has in some cases actually gone up since the government took over.

For More Info

Study links hours in front of TV to obesity

TORONTO -- Canadians who are spending lots of their leisure time in front of screens -- especially TV screens -- are more likely to be obese, a new study suggests.

It's been known for awhile that rising screen time, as it's called, is contributing to childhood obesity. But this study, drawing from data in Statistic Canada's Canadian Community Health Survey, is one of the first looking to see if there is a link between screen time and obesity among Canadian adults.

And there appears to be.

Adults who watch more than 21 hours of TV a week were 80 per cent more likely to be obese than people who watched five hours or less television. Men who spent a lot of their leisure time in front of a computer screen were 20 per cent more likely to be obese and women were 30 per cent more likely than people who didn't send much time in front of a computer.

"From this, we would suggest that decreasing television viewing time in particular may be to the advantage of people at risk of overweight or obesity,'' said Mark Tremblay, one of the authors and the director of the Healthy Active Living and Obesity Research Institute at the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa.

The study, based on a survey of 42,600 men and women aged 20 to 64, found that in 2007, nearly three out of every 10 Canadian adults reported they watched an average of 15 or more hours of television a week and nearly two in 10 said they watched 21 or more hours a week.

Frequent leisure time computer use was less common, with about 15 per cent of adults reporting they averaged 15 or more hours a week at their computers. Only six per cent reported 21 hours or more a week of leisure computer screen time and nearly a third said they spent none of their leisure time in front of a computer screen.

For More Info

Download Day is here!

The Best Firefox Yet

With more than 15,000 improvements, Firefox 3 is faster, safer and smarter than ever before.

To download click here

The Safest Web Browser

Firefox keeps your personal info personal and your online interests away from the bad guys.

So How Do We Do It?

What makes Firefox different? Most importantly, we’re open. That means anyone around the world (and we have thousands of experts watching our back) is able to look into our code and find any potential weak spots in our armor.

And when we hear about a problem, we roll up our sleeves and get to work fixing it right away. It’s in your best interest (and ours) to take care of the issue, even if it means admitting we’re a little less than perfect.

Simply put, your security is our top priority.

There’s a Method to Our Madness.

Nobody loves the Internet more than we do. But, scammers, spammers and trigger-happy viruses are true threats, so you need to protect yourself while using the Web.

For More Info

Why Firefox Matters

If you use the Web for a living you're probably enjoying your shiny new toy already: the official release of Firefox 3. The team at Mozilla, the group behind the free Firefox Web browser, is gunning to set a record for most downloads in a 24-hour period.

Mozilla's definitely on track with its bigger goal: taking a big bite out of Microsoft's (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) browser monopoly. Firefox grabbed 18.41% of the market in May, up from just 11% during the year-ago period, according to Web tracker NetApplications. Microsoft, by contrast, has fallen to 73.75% from 84% over the same period.

Of course, it's easy to dismiss the importance of the Web browser. The software is free, and Microsoft crushed its only serious commercial competition, Netscape, almost a decade ago. As recently as 2005, Microsoft owned 95% of the market.

But don't be fooled. Firefox has become one of the most important pieces of software around today as consumers shift from using their PCs to run applications living on their hard drives to a communications device able to connect with applications living on distant servers. As Saul Hansell at The New York Times pointed out, the browser is poised to unlock a slate of new applications in the years to come.

And, thanks to Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), Mozilla has plenty of money. Google funnels tens of millions dollars to Mozilla in exchange getting for a valuable spot on the default home page of the browser preferred by the most avid Web surfers and developers.

As long as Google keeps the money flowing, Firefox's small team of developers moves quickly. Firefox was the first to introduce new features, like tabbed browsing, that have now become ubiquitous.

For More Info

High-Speed Storm Radars to Track Tornadoes, Fend Off Tragedy

When tornadoes start killing Boy Scouts, the world pays attention. But even as a deadly EF-4 tornado whipped through Little Sioux, Iowa, with 145-mph-plus winds last Wednesday night, federal climate scientists and a group of university researchers were in the early phases of testing high-tech replacements for an aging Doppler radar system. Twisters across the United States in 2008 are headed for a record-setting pace (February's 148 nearly doubled a 37-year-old record); however, by 2013 a new network of satellites could be triangulating microfrequencies from the sky to Wi-Fi for real-time reactions to dangerously shape-shifting weather patterns.

America's current system for detecting tornadoes—about 120 Next Generation Radar, or NEXRAD, devices tracking a storm's direction and velocity—has been the backbone of weather prediction since the early 1990s, but experts say it is deeply flawed. The radars are tilted upward from the Earth half a degree, which may not seem like much—until you factor in the curvature of the Earth. By the time you get 40 or 50 miles out, radar beams are more than one-half mile high, therefore missing the bottom third of the troposphere where severe weather often begins to form. And at 5 to 6 minutes for a complete area scan, NEXRAD simply remains too slow.

The Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) network aims to address both problems, with short-range-satellites targeting the bottom of a storm and refreshing much more often—as in every minute. "CASA radars are gap-filling radars," explains Harold Brooks, a research meteorolgist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is developing the system with four schools across the country. "While the main NEXRAD radars give a really good view of the storm aloft, CASA radars could be set up to probe that area where the NEXRAD radars don't see."

This new rig borrows technology from the U.S. Navy, which for years has been using a similar system to track vessels on the seas. CASA radars, however, will be installed just a few miles away from each other on rooftops, cell towers and other existing infrastructure. The first testbed is a network of four nodes in the middle of Tornado Alley in southwestern Oklahoma; other early sites include Houston and Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. CASA officials expects to see at least quasi-operational CASA networks within the next five years to address some well-known gaps in the NEXRAD system, and widespread deployment within the next 15 years.

For More Info

From the Ashes of the First Stars

What did the first quasars look like? The nearest quasars are now known to be supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies. Gas and dust that falls toward a quasar glows brightly, sometimes outglowing the entire home galaxy. The quasars that formed in the first billion years of the universe are more mysterious, though, with even the nature of the surrounding gas still unknown.

Above, an artist's impression shows a primordial quasar as it might have been, surrounded by sheets of gas, dust, stars and early star clusters. Exacting observations of three distant quasars now indicate emission of very specific colors of the element iron. These Hubble Space Telescope observations, which bolster recent results from the WMAP mission, indicate that a whole complete cycle of stars was born, created this iron, and died within the first few hundred million years of the universe.

For More Info

Internet fraud has taken a sinister new turn

IN 2003 a hacker released a piece of malicious software (malware), commonly known as "Blaster", which spread worldwide in a matter of days and caused major internet congestion.

The main purpose of this malware was to render the Microsoft web unusable for regular web surfers. It was written by a disgruntled consumer eager for notoriety.

Unfortunately, those days are gone. These days, most internet attacks are much more sinister and are designed for financial gain, not cyber infamy.

Organised crime has identified the web as a goldmine – providing opportunities to launch cyber attacks that will earn large amounts of money at a relatively low risk.

A "compromised" computer – one that has been attacked – via the internet has become a commodity on the underground economy, an online equivalent of the black market.

Once a computer is compromised, it can be used for a variety of purposes designed to make money, including stealing users' personal identity information, like internet banking logins. It's relatively easy and it's the websites we visit every day that make it money for jam for criminals.

Malware has increased in sophistication during the past few years and is developed much like the mainstream software providers develop software. There are "off-the-shelf" and freely available tools which simplify developing and deploying malicious software. Once an attacker has the malware, they then need to distribute it; again this service can be bought.

The most popular method for delivering this malware to potential victims is to send an email with a link to a malicious website. These emails range in their topics, from seeing the latest celebrity video or sensational headlines relating to current events – e-mails we are likely to receive on a daily basis and not think twice about clicking on and passing on.

For More Info

Software Notebook: This Dream Home comes with a Mouse

JONATHAN CLUTS is the type of guy who once rewired his dorm room to control all the lights from a central switchbox. And as a kid, he thought it would be great to be an "Imagineer," one of the creative minds behind the Disney theme parks.

He hasn't realized that particular ambition, but he has come pretty close as the director of Microsoft's strategic prototyping team, including oversight of the futuristic Microsoft Home on the company's Redmond campus.

And in an extension of that role, Cluts, 47, is one of the key people behind the new Innoventions Dream Home attraction at Disneyland. The project, scheduled to open Monday, is a partnership of Microsoft and other companies.

The Dream Home is a modern-day sequel to the Monsanto House of the Future, a Disneyland attraction from 1957 to 1967. The new Dream Home project, in Disneyland's Tomorrowland, includes some futuristic technology concepts, like its predecessor.

But the companies made a conscious decision to focus more on technological capabilities that are possible today, though not widely used.

"It's real. This isn't science fiction, and it's not pure extrapolation," Cluts said last week. "You can integrate much of what you see here now."

The problem with going purely futuristic is that people get home and say, "Wow that's cool, but it's never going to happen," Cluts explained.

By focusing on current scenarios, the Dream Home also doubles as a subtle promotional vehicle for Microsoft. For example, the dining room table is a collection of Microsoft Surface tabletop computers that display photos and videos when members of the home's fictional family place their mobile phones on the top.

Microsoft Surface computers are currently being deployed in commercial settings, so that scenario is already possible, but versions for consumers aren't expected to be available for a few years.

For More Info