Science and technology news blog

Europe is set to launch its most sophisticated weather and climate satellite to date.

The Metop spacecraft will be lofted into its 850km-high polar orbit by a Soyuz-Fregat vehicle from Kazakhstan.

The platform should improve forecasting globally, and give scientists detailed data they can use to refine models describing how Earth’s systems work.

Metop has eight instruments to gather a range of data about the planet’s atmospheric and surface conditions.

The Soyuz is scheduled to lift off from Baikonur spaceport at 1628 GMT on Tuesday. Controllers will be hoping for a clean getaway having seen three previous launch attempts frustrated by technical difficulties.

Despite the best efforts of anti-games crusader Jack Thompson, a judge in the US has decided against banning the sale of Rockstar’s Bully (renamed Canis Canem Edit in Europe) in Florida.

After viewing a two-hour tape of in-game footage submitted by the games’ publisher, Miami-Dade County judge Ronald Friedman agreed the game did not feature content or gameplay that would warrant banning the title.

Lawyer Thompson had previously been granted the right to preview a copy of Bully in order to have its content assessed by a third party.

After the Miami-Dade County’s judgement, Thompson sent an open letter criticising Friedman and his methods, stating: “What you conducted in your chambers, Judge, was the equivalent of Iran leading UN weapons inspectors around the country taking them to places where the illegal activity was not occurring.”

Britain’s Vodafone Group on Monday unveiled its 3G handset lineup ahead of the key Christmas season, including phones that enable Web access at broadband speeds and its first-ever devices sourced from South Korea’s LG Electronics.

The mobile-phone giant, which is trying to push higher-paying 3G services to boost slowing sales growth, said it would sell 10 exclusive 3G phones sourced from top European, U.S. and Asian manufacturers, with five of them at entry-level prices.

Vodafone will sell six HSDPA phones—devices that allow Internet downloads at speeds several times those of current 3G phones—made by Motorola and Samsung Electronics.

These phones will enable faster access to multimedia services such as mobile TV and full-track music downloads, faster downloads of music and video files, and high-speed downloads of e-mails when the handset is used as a modem.

HSDPA, or High-Speed Downlink Packet Access, could help mobile operators offer speeds of 1.8 megabits per second to start with, rising to as much as 14mbps soon, bringing broadband speeds to mobile devices. Existing 3G networks at best offer Internet speeds of about 384 kilobits per second.

Vodafone said its handset range this holiday season would include Vodafone Live with 3G handsets, all offering mobile-TV services. Fourteen phones will offer its Radio DJ service that lets customers access music according to their tastes.

Vodafone said its handset range also includes for the first time two 3G phones produced by LG, including the South Korean firm’s popular LG KU800, a slider phone with a touch keypad.

Apparently, Janus Friis and Niklas Sennstrm, the two co-founders of the popular Skype company, are planning to reveal later this fall the latest details about their new project, at which they’ve been working on since June.

According to Business Week, Friis and Sennstrm are decided to take over the Internet and its popular video services, by “inventing” a new video site that combines professionally produced TV and video with the interactive tools of the Web.

It is called the Venice Project and it can be found at: www.theveniceproject.com. According to the same source, the site began a limited session of beta-testing this summer and the admitted number of testers is around 100 persons.

The so-called beta test will be expanded dramatically by the middle of November, he said. “By the end of the year, everyone will be able to download it. Hopefully, it’s viral and it gains traction,” Friis said.

The Venice Project will also get a new name soon, but no indication to what that name could be was given.

The Venice Project is currently trying to convince a range of small, medium, and large media and TV companies to place their full-length, professionally produced content on the network, although anyone will be able to post video on the network. It’s also talking to advertisers and marketers that could place video ads on the network. “People love to watch TV. They love professional storytelling by people who know what they are doing. And people love the Internet, because of the choice and the social qualities. We are trying to bring the best of both worlds together,” Friis said.

The new Web service is clearly targeted at much bigger businesses like Yahoo Video or YouTube and Google Video.

In an ironic twist, the anticipated price of the 2007 model of the “$100 laptop” will be $138. Announced last month by Nicholas Negroponte, the chairman of the One Laptop Per Child association, the projected price will drop to $100 by the end of 2008 and $50 in 2010.

The announcement came at the second annual AMD Global Vision Conference in Pasadena, Calif.

The non-profit, Delaware-based OLPC association was the brainchild of several professors at MIT, including Negroponte. OLPC’s goal is to engineer and produce a low-cost laptop – the $100 laptop – that will be available for use in developing countries “to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment, and express themselves,” the OLPC Web site states.

“The project has its roots in everything that [Nicholas Negroponte, Seymour Papert, and I, among others] have been working on for more than 30 years at MIT,” said Walter Bender, president of OLPC software and content. The initiative was first announced to the public in Jan. 2005 by Negroponte at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

OLPC plans to perform field testing with all of its launch countries this fall, Bender said. There has been no official release confirming the launch countries, but initial discussions have been held with China, India, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Nigeria, and Thailand.

“What I can say for sure is that we plan to do most of our testing in the field, and that Thailand is among the most probable locations for that testing,” Michail Bletsas, the OLPC chief connectivity officer, wrote in a Sept. 27 e-mail.

It is unclear whether the recent coup in Thailand will affect the country’s plans to test and to purchase the laptop.

The OLPC has been sending developer boards all over the world for the past several months, Bletsas said. The fully functional “alpha” machines will not be shipped overseas until November.

Google is trying out a new search service designed to make it easier for computer programmers to find bits of code online.

Google Code Search will make it easier for software developers to find programming code directly, without having to trawl through groups, forums, and discussions to find it.

The idea of releasing this specialised search engine came from Google engineers themselves, who use similar code searching tools internally when developing Google software.

The search engine is aimed at both professional programmers and students or IT enthusiasts who want to improve their coding and software development. “Most of the code is open source so you can reuse it. But I don’t think that’s the primary use – it’s more about how to learn about things and, when you’re building open-source packages, to make sure you’re doing it the right way”, said Tom Stocky, a Google product manager.

The search also allows programmers to look for specific coding terms, restrict the search to certain computer languages, or look for bits of code that fall under a specified licensing agreement.

Best Buy unveiled the Best Buy Digital Music Store, a new service powered by the RealNetworks’ Rhapsody 4.0 music service, and features both a permanent download store and a subscription download service. As part of this launch, Best Buy also will carry and promote the SanDisk Sansa e200R Rhapsody MP3 players, which have been optimized to work seamlessly with the Best Buy Digital Music Store. The Best Buy Digital Music Store and the Sansa e200R MP3 players will both be available at participating Best Buy stores as of Sunday, October 15th

By aligning with RealNetworks and SanDisk, Best Buy leverages its position as an entertainment leader, its understanding of consumers, and the strengths of RealNetworks and SanDisk to bring a compelling end-to-end music solution to its customers. Best Buy is the No.1 retailer of MP3 players in the U.S. SanDisk is the No.2 manufacturer of MP3 players in the United States, and has been growing market share rapidly over the past year. RealNetworks is the No.1 digital music subscription services provider, with more than 1.6 million subscribers. The Best Buy Digital Music Store powered by Rhapsody is part of an agreement between Best Buy and RealNetworks relating to digital content services. As part of this agreement the parties will be jointly promoting the Best Buy Digital Music Store in connection with Rhapsody optimized devices. Best Buy intends to include Best Buy Digital Music Store software and service offers in its stores, and on Bestbuy.com.

Rhapsody 4.0 gives the Best Buy Digital Music Store an innovative and customer friendly music listening experience. Based on the critically acclaimed Rhapsody digital music service, Rhapsody 4.0 adds more flexibility and features to help listeners discover new music, and was specifically designed for tight integration with the Sansa e200R MP3 player.

The Best Buy Digital Music Store offers millions of songs that can be accessed in two different ways: Customers can purchase songs, subscribe to the service for unlimited music listening. The music can be played on a computer or loaded onto the Sansa e200R, or any compatible MP3 player, and can be listened to without limits as long as the subscription is active.

Game maker Electronic Arts Inc. said Thursday it is entering into a partnership with Hilary Duff, the celebrity pop artist, actress and philanthropist, to make her inaugural game debut in the PC game franchise, The Sims. She will appear in The Sims 2 Pets, along with her pet dog Chihuahua Lola, the company announced.

The game will be released on 17 October in North America and 19 October across Europe for Sony PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube and as a PC expansion pack to the original PC game, The Sims 2. There will be a version for Nintendo DS, which will be available later in October.

EA said Duff and Lola will appear in different scenes on each of the game’s platforms and will be fully interactive. Players will be able to dress up Duff and make her do their bidding or have their own created Sims characters mingle with her.

The highly popular The Sims involves controlling the lives of simulated people and players can choose from any existing cat and dog breeds. They can also create their own pets, having distinct body shapes, markings and personalities.

EA released The Sims 2 in September 2004, has so far sold seven million units worldwide and the game has been adjudged best PC game of 2004.

Duff, herself a Sims enthusiast, said she had logged hundreds of hours playing the game and she was encouraged by the chance to be in the next version. “I love creating Sims characters and guiding them through life, designing their houses and then blinging them out with cool furniture. Now, in The Sims 2 Pets, EA has combined two things I really enjoy – pets and The Sims!”

The Sims 2 Pets has involvement of other celebrities. It has got musical contributions from among others teen pop duo AJ & Aly, girl group Pussycat Dolls, alterna-rockers The Flaming Lips and nerdcore group Hot Chip.

Rod Humble, executive producer for the Sims division in EA said Hilary is the perfect partner for The Sims 2 Pets. She was involved in every step of the process, from creating the Hilary and Lola characters to designing some of the tricks dogs can do in the game, he added.

Since Charles Bennett and his team first proposed quantum teleportation in 1993, science fiction enthusiasts have had to be content with frustratingly prosaic examples of the principle. However, at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, physicists have passed a milestone that will help to bring some practical applications of teleportation within sight.

Glowing caesium

“This is the first time teleportation has been achieved between the ‘flying’ medium of light and the ‘stationary medium’ of atoms,” said Eugene Polzik of Copenhagen. “Such teleportation could serve as a main building block of a quantum network connecting distant quantum processors.”

Quantum teleportation cleverly evades one of the best known peculiarities of quantum states – their inability to be measured precisely. Only some of the information of a quantum state can be learned in a single measurement, and once that measurement is made, the quantum state is effectively destroyed.

To get around this problem, which prevents communication in the classical manner, quantum teleportation makes use of a pair of entangled states. One half of the pair is kept by the sender (affectionately known as “Alice” to quantum physicists), while the other is taken by the receiver (“Bob”) on his travels.

When Alice wants to transmit the quantum state of new particle to Bob, she performs a joint measurement, called a “Bell measurement”, on both it and her half of the entangled pair. She then sends the result over to Bob using any classical means available (telephone, homing pigeon, etc.). Then, by using his half of the entangled pair, he can “reconstruct” an exact copy of the initial state.

Microsoft today released what it believes will be the last test version of Windows Vista before the product goes to manufacturing.

The company made Vista Release Candidate 2 (RC2), or build No. 5744, available to participants in its Customer Preview Program, as well as to TechBeta, TechNet, Technology Adoption Program, and MSDN members.

The previous test release of Vista, RC1, received “excellent feedback” from the estimated 3 million people who tested it, according to Microsoft. The company is using that feedback to put the finishing touches on the overall quality and performance of the operating system, it said.

Microsoft said that it is still on target to release Vista to business customers next month and to consumers in January 2007, though the company continues to give itself an out to miss those dates by saying that the quality of the product is its highest priority. The release of Vista has already been delayed several times.

Still, leading financial analyst Rick Sherlund of Goldman Sachs Group said in a research note this week that he believes all indicators point to a timely release for Vista.

“We had been skeptical of the launch schedule after Beta 2 shipped with problems in May, but the team seems to be making great progress in addressing issues of performance, reliability and compatibility,” he wrote in his note.

Sherlund also said in his report that he expects Microsoft will soon be releasing discount coupons for Vista to customers who purchase PCs that are capable of running Vista before the OS is available. Microsoft has confirmed it has plans to do this, but has officially remained mum on the time frame.

In his report Sherlund wrote that Goldman Sachs has recently updated its financial outlook for Microsoft based upon both a timely release date for Vista and the imminent release of upgrade coupons.

Nintendo may not have said it outright during their big announcement about the price and release date of the Wii, but the video game console war taking center stage this holiday season has as much to do with philosophy as it does Mario and the Master Chief. It doesn’t involve the Nietzsche or Kant textbook kind necessarily, but rather a change in the philosophy of what a video game console looks like and who should want to play it.

In a particularly funny Ali G skit from the HBO show, Sasha Baron Cohen’s character tells an ad exec that his girlfriend leaked his idea of the Playstation 2 to Sony years before it came out. Ali G’s top secret proposal for the PS2? A “better” version of the original Playstation. As funny and ridiculous as this sounds, this is exactly the approach Sony, Microsoft, and to a lesser extent, Nintendo have taken to new consoles-a virtual “arms race” of bigger, faster, and better machines. The console war of the past decade has consistently boiled down to choosing one brand name over a similar brand name, the video equivalent of Pepsi versus Coke. The only real way each system differentiated itself from the others was through making certain games exclusive to a particular system. Much to the frustration of many gamers, if you wanted Halo, you had to buy an Xbox. If you wanted to avoid waiting six months for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, you had to have a Playstation 2.

This same status quo is basically true for the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. The PS3 has Blu-Ray technology, and the Xbox has its user-friendly Live online going for it, but they are still basically different sides to the same coin. Nintendo, though, has other plans. By releasing a cheap (at $250, half as much as the PS3), underpowered (the lackluster specs are causing some to call it GameCube 2.0) and innovative system to compete with the hardware beasts that are the PS3 and Xbox 360, Nintendo appears to be abandoning the “more is more” philosophy. Instead, Nintendo is beating the populist drum and desperately wanting the Wii to be everything to everyone.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the market for strong authentication products was the tech industry’s equivalent of “Coke or Pepsi?” Companies had just a few choices, including secure tokens such as RSA’s popular SecurID and chip-enabled smart cards from companies such as Axalto and Cemplus.

Cards and tokens are still the name of the game for many companies, and the smart-card industry expects 2007 to be one of their best years ever. But behind the scenes, there’s plenty going on in the once-staid market for user authentication technology.

Why? Pick your reason. Phishing attacks and targeted “spear phishing” make it easy for fraudsters to get the credentials they need to penetrate sensitive systems such as online banking and e-commerce sites, not to mention enterprise applications.

Wi-Fi makes it possible to drop into enterprise networks behind the firewall, and evolving rootkit techniques make malicious code detection so difficult that it’s almost worth forgetting about. And let’s not forget: PKI solutions are expensive.

In any case, the free-for-all on enterprise networks and enterprise data has spurred rapid evolution in the industry and raised an army of startup companies with new takes on the old authentication problem.

Among the trends to watch:

Biometrics

Biometrics have been the “next big thing” for more than a decade, but a combination of factors has recently spurred enterprise adoption. Major PC makers such as Lenovo have integrated biometric scanners into their devices, and USB-enabled scanners are more affordable.

A new generation of behavioral biometrics is also gaining traction. Financial risk management vendor Fair Isaac recently introduced a new product called Falcon One for Online Access, which monitors customer behaviors, such as typing and mouse pad patterns.

RSA, soon to be part of storage giant EMC, acquired voice recognition technology vendor PassMark Security in April; and BioPassword, another behavioral biometric vendor, says its typing analysis technology can weed out fraudsters even after they’ve stolen your user name and password.

Microsoft has launched a public beta of its Windows Live QnA.

The service allows users to post questions to a public forum and provide answers to questions asked by other users.

Site visitors vote for the most relevant answers.

Users earn one reputation point for rating answers, five for answering questions and gain a total of 20 points if their answer is rated the best one.

The more points a user has, the higher they rise on a ten-step reputation scale. The highest level requires 100,000 points.

The beta is limited to U.S. users for now and is part of Microsoft’s portfolio of Live Software services that include the Live.com portal, Windows Live Messenger and the Spaces blog service.

The new Microsoft service is similar to Yahoo! Answers and Google Answers.

The Google service, however, pays users for providing answers where the Yahoo! and Microsoft ones provide bragging rights only.

People on the road will be able to download hundreds of music files in seconds around 2010 thanks to the new portable Internet technologies of Samsung Electronics.

Samsung, the world’s third-largest cell phone producer, yesterday demonstrated a super-fast mobile Internet platform at the Fourth-Generation (4G) Forum on Cheju Island.

The wireless technologies of Samsung promise a downlink speed of 100 Mbps (megabits per second) for users on the move and 1Gbps (gigabit per second) for those at a standstill.

The throughput of 1Gbps, which enables people to download 300 music files at 2.4 seconds or a movie file in 5.6 seconds, is even faster than today’s maximum landline connectivity of 100 Mbps.

Demonstration sessions took place here at a specially designed bus, which showed 32 high-definition channel broadcasts, Internet access and video telephony at the same time.

In addition, Samsung disclosed lab experiments in which it reached a transmission rate of 3.5Gbps with a terminal moving at five kilometers per hour.

The company said that the speed enabled by multiple antennas is notable because 2.5Gbps has been regarded as the limit of wireless transmission speed.

Noting that the speeds meet the requirements of 4G, Samsung President Lee Ki-tae said that he is proud to show off 4G technologies at the ongoing forum for the first time in history.

Microsoft confirmed today that Toshiba will manufacture its Zune music player, a product intended by the company to take on Apple Computer’s successful iPod.

The confirmation follows reports of a regulatory filing Toshiba made to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that mentions the device and its features. “Toshiba is manufacturing the device and the [FCC] report is legitimate,” a spokesperson for Microsoft’s public relations firm said.

She declined to say if other hardware makers also would be building Zune players, adding that Microsoft will reveal further details about Zune in the next few weeks.

More Details

In addition to the name “Zune,” the device also is referred to as “Pyxis” in Toshiba’s filing. A collaborative service for Zune users, something akin to Apple’s iTunes software and service, is called “Argo.”

The FCC filing contains photos of what Toshiba’s Zune player will look like. Here is a PDF of a document that shows photos of the front and back of the device, which looks similar to Apple’s original iPod, but bigger.

According to the Zune “user’s manual” included in the filing, the Zune device will include 30 gigabytes of storage, wireless capabilities, and an FM radio tuner.

The wireless capabilities will allow users to search for other Zune devices within range and share music, photos, playlists, and other media content with those devices.

After months of speculation, Microsoft confirmed in July that it was developing a music player and service to rival Apple’s iPod and iTunes. If other attempts to unseat the iPod are any indication, Microsoft will have a tough road ahead. Earlier this week, Dell stopped selling its DJ Ditty music player on its Web site and ended development of its own line of music players.