Thursday, 22 September 2011

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 Survival mode preview

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 gets its very own Horde mode, Chris Schilling goes hands-on with the world’s most popular shooter

Modern Warfare 3
Confession time: I’m terrible at online shooters. Yet this fact apparently makes me the perfect guinea pig to test out Modern Warfare’s newest game mode. My host from Sledgehammer Games (co-developing the latest entry in the world’s biggest shooter franchise with original developers Infinity Ward) explains that Survivor is for those who want something akin to the multiplayer experience minus the ignominy of being shot every five seconds. After all, it can be hard to level up when you can barely stay alive long enough to fire off a round, let alone send anyone to the morgue. “We have 33 million players now,” I’m informed. “Naturally, some are better than others.”
Survival sees one or two players tackle increasingly difficult waves of enemies in a more realistic take on World at War’s Nazi Zombies mode. The one level here at GAMEfest takes place in a grey Parisian suburb, apparently cordoned off from the rest of the city for the purposes of urban warfare. It’s not the only gamey element in what otherwise seems like an authentic depiction of modern conflict – between rounds you can access laptops which offer weapons, armour, ammunition and tactical support options in return for the cash you’ve earned for every kill. You can still access them during each round, but you’ll need to put some space between you and the enemy, or get your partner to watch your back while you tap in your request for a holographic site and a few mags.
Wave 1 starts with a small group of shotgun-wielding attackers, and gradually the action escalates. Seven or eight waves in and you’ll be forced to take down a helicopter. Shortly afterwards a Juggernaut (basically a super-soldier with bomb-proof armour) appears on the scene. He’s fairly swiftly disposed of, thanks to our deployment of Delta Squad – a group of four soldiers dropped into battle to track the players’ every move and provide assistance in the close-quarters firefights. A mobile turret positioned on a car’s roof is enough to deal with the next wave of foes, though my partner is forced to revive me at one stage, while I return the favour shortly afterwards. Players can crawl slowly while bleeding out, but only the assistance of a team-mate will prevent death, and game over.
Yet this isn’t a war that can ever be truly won, with an infinite number of waves preventing even the most ardent Call of Duty fan from reaching the finish. I’m informed that the best Sledgehammer employees have managed is Wave 38, while a pair of expert players brought in to test the difficulty level apparently reached 57. Enemy groups won’t vary in size nor in their configuration, though their positioning will adjust according to the players’ locations, thus preventing sneaky players from camping at spawn points.
The Paris level, like all other Survival stages, is all but identical to the multiplayer map; indeed, every online level will be playable in this form. It’s likely to be one of the most compact maps in the entire game, with narrow streets and back-alleys keeping the action focused within a small area. It’s classic COD – slickly-presented skirmishes with intense bursts of roaring gunfire as bullets bite chunks out of Parisian masonry and thud into flesh. Friendly fire is turned on by default, but barring one minor incident involving a particularly feeble throw of a frag grenade the two of us reach Wave 11 without any serious problems.
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Cloud gaming takes off in the UK with BT and OnLive

BT has announced a partnership with cloud-based gaming service OnLive.

Homefront review
Homefront is a large-scale warfare multiplayer that will be available on OnLive
BT has announced a partnership with cloud gaming service OnLive that will offer to its broadband customers access to more than 100 internet-based video games.
The agreement will also mark the launch of OnLive’s on-demand video game service, a new platform that delivers console-quality video games on virtually every device using a broadband connection.
Three months free and unlimited access to a PlayPack of new and old titles, from Batman: Arkham Asylum to Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition will be offered to BT subscribers. Users can play on their HDTV via the OnLive Game System or on any PC, Mac or tablet via a small browser download.
“We just want to give our customers the chance to try it, and with more than 100 premium games available, choosing what to play will be the hardest part,” said Warren Buckley, managing director of BT Retail’s Customer Service.
OnLive is a game service that uses video compression technology to deliver high-quality games over the internet. Since the games run in OnLive’s data hub, users can play games on their television without needing a games console and even play on most low-performance computers.

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“OnLive will utterly transform gaming in the UK,” said OnLive Founder and CEO Steve Perlman. “No discs, big downloads or specialised hardware are needed.” Perman stressed also the importance of OnLive’s social features, such as watching people play games live with voice chat and Facebook integration.
New OnLive UK members can purchase their first OnLive game for just £1 for a limited time only, OnLive has announced.
“We’re excited to bring an incredible range of social features to the UK that are unique to the OnLive world,” said John Spinale, OnLive VP of Games and Media, “OnLive UK gamers will immediately find themselves immersed in OnLive’s international massive spectating and voice chat community, which adds an unprecedented dimension to the gaming experience.”
The special PlayPack subscription offer is open to any BT customer, 18 years of age or over with BT home broadband who register online at www.bt.com/onlive by January 31, 2012.
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Google+ opens social network to everyone

Google+ is being opened up for anyone to join after two-and-a-half months in closed testing.
The search firm’s latest foray into social networking was initially offered to journalists and people working in technology related fields.
However, members’ ability to invite friends meant its user base quickly grew to tens of millions.
Google+ has been praised for several innovative features including its multi person “hangouts” video chat.
Two weeks after it launched, the company announced that its service had attracted 10 million users.
It has not produced official figures since then, although estimates by web analytic firm Comscore put membership at 25 million by the end of the first month.
Despite users’ apparently rapid uptake, research carried out by Australian web software maker 89n suggested that the rate of public posting was declining. The survey did not take account of private postings.
Social search
Alongside its full public launch, Google is adding several new features to the service, including video hangouts on Android smartphones – allowing multi-person chats.
Users will also be able to share the content of their computer screens with whoever they are talking to.
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The big question is whether the 750 million people who currently use Facebook and the 100 million who are signed up to Twitter will decide they need to move ”
Rory Cellan-Jones Technology correspondent, BBC News
  • Read Rory’s thoughts in full
Another notable addition is the integration of search within Google+, allowing members to find results from socially shared information, as well as across the wider web.
The prospect of “social search” through Google would appeal to businesses, according to social networking specialist Matt Rhodes from Fresh Networks.
“Brands know that a lot of people who come to them come through search and anything they can do make themselves come up through the right terms or higher up the rankings is important. Commercially that is the opportunity,” he said.
“If you are logged into Google and search for supermarkets, if some of my friends have plus 1′d Tesco or commented about it, that might push Tesco above Sainsbury’s in my search results.”
Rivals’ response
The rise of Google+ has not gone un-noticed by its competitors.
Facebook has recently rolled out a number of innovations which many observers have characterised as a direct response to the Google challenge, although the company argues that these have been in the pipeline for far longer.
These include a revamp of the social network’s friend system, making in easier to add people to categories, similar to Google Circles.
Earlier this week it was revealed that Facebook users would be able to connect their status updates directly to their Twitter feed, in a move that may enhance the appeal of both Google rivals.
Conversely, Google finds itself in the unusual position of being a minority player in the market, facing Twitter’s 200 million users and Facebook’s 750 million.
Vivik Gundotra, Google’s senior vice president of social business told the BBC that he welcomed the competition.
“We suspect people use many different tools to share,” he said.
“The most popular mechanism people use to share today is email. So we think there’s lots of room for innovation.
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We like our PCs — but love our Macs

An American Customer Satisfaction Index report released Tuesday shows consumers are the happiest that they've ever been with their computers.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Americans’ satisfaction with their personal computers is at an all-time high, but buyers’ happiness with Apple’s Macs continues to top Windows PCs.
An American Customer Satisfaction Index report released Tuesday shows that consumers are the happiest that they’ve ever been with their computers. The 16-year old survey found that PCs scored a rating of 78 out of 100, matching the record score set last year.
Ironically, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500) was the only Windows PC manufacturer to score a higher rating this year than in 2010. HP decided last month to get out of the PC business.
HP’s score of 78 was up one point from the 77 it scored in 2010. Compaq, a low-end HP brand, had a satisfaction score of 75 in the 2011 survey, up from 74 last year.
Other Windows PC makers, including Dell (DELL, Fortune 500), Acer and some smaller manufacturers like Toshiba, Lenovo and Sony (SNE), all achieved the same ratings this year as they did in 2010: They all tied with a satisfaction rating of 77.
This year was the first since 2008 that PC satisfaction didn’t rise. Last year, all PC makers’ scores had risen about 4% from 2009.
But Apple’s (AAPL, Fortune 500) satisfaction rating climber higher this year, blowing past its rivals with a score of 87, up from 86 in 2010. This year marks the eighth straight year in which Apple led the PC category.
“Apple’s customer satisfaction dominance has been unassailable for the past eight years,” said Claes Fornell, founder of the ACSI, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based research group. “Apple’s winning combination of innovation and product diversification has kept the company consistently at the leading edge.”
ACSI noted that Apple’s recent dominance in PC satisfaction is fed by the company’s halo effect from its other devices. Apple dominates the portable music player market with its iPod lineup, it jump-started the smartphone market with the iPhone, and it reinvented the tablet market with the iPad.
Apple says that by creating great customer experiences around its popular devices, it can generate positive associations with its other products, including its Macintosh line.

Can Windows 8 save the PC from extinction?

The iPad may boost Mac sales, but it’s having the opposite effect on Windows PC sales.
PC sales have tumbled in the United States. The unstable economy has contributed significantly to that, but the iPad has also chomped away at the PC. When HP decided to exit the PC business, CEO Leo Apotheker cited as a prime reason that “the tablet effect is real.”
The good news for PC makers is that Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500) has gotten the message loud and clear. Windows 8, which is expected to debut sometime next year, will be optimized for tablets.
Still, Apple’s PC market share is growing fast. In the United States, it commands just shy of 11% of the market, good enough for third place, according to Gartner. Sales at market leaders HP and Dell are sinking.
People may love their Windows computers, but PC makers are finding affection doesn’t always translate into robust sales. To top of page
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New law bans warrantless cell phone searches

In recent months the issue of warrantless cell phone searches has arisen in several states with varying results.
If you get arrested in California for any reason, the photos, e-mails and other personal data on your cell phone are now a bit safer from prying police eyes. A new law now requires law-enforcement officers in that state to obtain a warrant before searching the cell phone of a person placed under arrest.
This law overrides a January ruling by the California Supreme Court. According to California Sen. Mark Leno, who sponsored the legislation, this ruling had “legalized the warrantless search of cell phones during an arrest, regardless of whether the information on the phone is relevant to the arrest or if criminal charges are ever filed.”
The new California law unanimously passed in the state Assembly. Today the office of Gov. Jerry Brown confirmed that since the governor did not make a specific decision on this legislation, it became automatically enrolled as a law this week.
Under this legislation, California law enforcement officers must first obtain a search warrant when there is probable cause to believe a suspect’s portable electronic device contains evidence of a crime.
The Peace Officers Research Association of California, which opposed the law, argued: “Restricting the authority of a peace officer to search an arrestee unduly restricts their ability to apply the law, fight crime, discover evidence valuable to an investigation and protect the citizens of California.”
The California legislature disagreed, finding that “once in the exclusive control of the police, cellular telephones do not ordinarily pose a threat to officer safety.” Furthermore, lawmakers found that existing practices — including confiscating the phone (without searching it) or promptly applying to a judge for a search warrant — alleviate concerns about destruction of evidence.
This isn’t just about cell phones. The wording of this law specifically refers to “portable electronic devices,” defined as: “any portable device that is capable of creating, receiving, accessing, or storing electronic data or communications.”
So in addition to cell phones this might conceivably cover tablet computers, laptops, netbooks, e-readers, media players, gaming devices, digital cameras, audio recorders, external hard drives, flash drives and other devices available now or in the future.
The new law can strengthen the rights to freedom of speech and assembly in California. The prior court ruling — though aimed mainly at gathering evidence about criminal activity such as drug deals or prostitution — also could be used by police to gain intelligence about the identities or activities of people at protests or other public or private gatherings.
Hanni Fakhoury, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explained why law-abiding citizens should worry about warrantless cell phone searches. “It’s really easy to pick on people who have been arrested and charged with crimes. But that subset could get expanded to cover everyone. Also, an arrest is not the same as a conviction.”
The new law also strengthens California’s protections for journalists and their sources, according to the California Newspaper Publishers Association. The state’s “shield law,” which prohibits the state or other litigants from subpoenaing reporters’ unpublished notes or other sensitive information related to their work.
Many reporters keep such information on their cell phones and other devices, and it’s not unheard of for journalists to get arrested in California.
Fakhoury noted that once police do obtain a warrant to search an arrestee’s phone or other portable electronic device, it’s possible that everything on that device might become fair game for law enforcement or prosecution.
“If they have a search warrant, depending on its scope, it might be tough to restrict what information on phones they get and how they use it,” he said. “Courts are divided on this. They recognize that there must be limits to searches — but they also know that incriminating evidence can be anywhere, and it’s likely to be hidden.”
In recent months the issue of warrantles
s cell phone searches has arisen in several states with varying results. For instance, the Ohio Supreme Court barred warrantless cell phone searches, but lower courts in Georgia and Florida have upheld such searches.
And in May the Oregon Supreme Court declined to hear the case of James Tyler Nix, which could have disallowed warrantless cell phone searches in that state.
Fakhoury of EFF believes that California’s new law sends a strong message to other courts and legislatures around the U.S. — including the U.S. Supreme Court.
“I certainly see this issue ending up in the U.S. Supreme Court at some point,” said Fakhoury. “None of the cases involved relied solely on state law. They all raised constitutional issues. There would be no reason for the Supreme Court not to get involved.
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Third of under-tens ‘own mobiles’

An iphone
Nearly a third of children aged ten or under now have their own mobile phone, according to survey of parents.
One in ten said their child was using an internet capable smartphone, such as the iPhone or Android devices.
The research by cloud security firm Westcoastcloud questioned 2,000 families about their technology ownership.
It comes as the government considers mandatory content filters for net connections used by children.
In those households surveyed, 16% of children owned their own laptop, while 18% had a flat-screen TV in their bedroom. A quarter of those aged ten or under had an email address while 8% had a social networking account.
Most parents agreed that 10 was a suitable age for children to have their own phone with the majority (69%) saying they bought one to keep in touch with their offspring when they are out.
A quarter of children owned a Nintendo Wii, and around 16% had a digital music player.
Parents appeared to have mixed attitudes to how much they monitored what their children did online. More (21%) said they didn’t follow their child on a social network than those that did (13%).
By contrast, only 12% said they left children to ‘play’ unmonitored when using a laptop or computer.
There was also an even spilt when it came to using parental controls with just under half (49%) saying they blocked access to certain sites while the remainder admitted they had no controls.
For Will Gardner of children’s charity Childnet, the findings reiterate the need for parents to understand how their children are using technology.
“It is important to help ensure parents are aware of the full functionality of the technology that young children are accessing and that they are able to use the tools and give the support that young people need to stay safe and get the most out of these devices,” he said.
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) has set up a website – thinkuknow – in order to offer advice and guidance on how youngsters use technology.
“We know that technology, especially mobile phones, are now part of parcel of childrens’ everyday lives. They allow the internet to be at the fingertips of young people, which means it is now increasingly difficult for parents to manage their child’s use of it,” said a CEOP spokesperson.
The government is currently considering the recommendations of the Bailey Review which calls for internet service providers to automatically offer parents software that will filter out harmful content.
The measures could be included in the revised Communications Act, due by 2015.
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Users not happy with new Facebook changes

The Ticker, a fast-scrolling rail full of friends' activity, was one of the big Facebook changes rolled out Wednesday.
Facebook has made big changes to users’ pages, and people are responding in droves with their metaphorical “dislike” buttons.
News Feeds were popping with not-so-gentle complaints Wednesday as many of the social-networking behemoth’s 750 million users began seeing the overhaul.
“This is absolutely the worst of the many wrong-headed ‘improvements’ you have made, and that’s quite a feat,” a user named Franklin Habit wrote on the site’s official Facebook page. “I think Facebook’s usefulness to me has now been outstripped by its lack of ease in use.”
Others were more succinct.
“This sucks,” wrote user Brandon Howell. “That is all.”
To be fair, griping about Facebook changes is a time-honored hallmark of the site. Change is hard for some people, and users grumble every time Facebook revamps their pages.
And it’s perhaps a touch on the ironic side that many of the current complaints are coming from folks who, in turn, complained in December when the current format was rolled out. Or the time before. And the time before that.
Which isn’t to say that the changes aren’t pretty dramatic.
Instead of defaulting to your friends’ most recent posts, the News Feed (which people hated when it was introduced) is now topped in many cases by what Facebook calls “Top Stories” for you. It uses an algorithm that combines such factors as which friends you interact with most and which friends’ posts have the most comments and “likes” on them.
That algorithm, of course, was in its infancy on Wednesday, leading many users to say the top stories that Facebook suggested were random, at best.
“The ‘top stories’ needs to be gotten rid of,” wrote user Kristy Montaney. “They’re out of context and I want to check my News Feed from most recent to oldest, none of this ‘top stories’ stuff.”
In a post on The Facebook Blog, developer Mark Tonkelowitz said the idea is to help people who may not log in to the site all the time find the best content, not just the newest.
“Now, News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper,” he wrote. “You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top.”
If you check Facebook more frequently, he said, you’ll see newer stories at the top of your feed.
The other most glaring change Wednesday was a new, scrolling rail on the right side of the home page. Facebook calls it The Ticker. We’re partial to “The ADD Bar,” because the feature seems pitched to our attention-deficit lifestyles with its rapidly streaming nuggets of friends’ activity.
If a friend “likes” an update, comments on a post or subscribes to a page, it now pops up in the — OK, we’ll say it — somewhat Twitter-like timeline.
Haters were calling it distracting. But Tonkelowitz believes the Ticker plugs the gap in the time lag the News Feed sometimes experiences, letting users have more real-time interactions.
One apparent quirk of the Ticker is that when a friend interacts with a nonfriend (say, likes the status update of someone you’re not friends with), clicking on that activity will show the original post.
Tonkelowitz’s blog post said the Ticker “shows you the same stuff you were already seeing on Facebook.” But, Wednesday morning, clicking on a few items there seemed to show updates and other posts by nonfriends, even when those users’ privacy settings appeared to make their posts private.
Facebook did not immediately respond Wednesday to a message seeking clarification on how that feature works. The company may explain the new changes further at f8, its annual conference, on Thursday.
In the history of Facebook changes, the pattern has typically been that users complain loudly at first and threaten to leave the site but then eventually learn to live with, if not like, the new approach.
This time may be somewhat more interesting in that it’s the first major Facebook overhaul since Google rolled out its rival social networking site, Google+.
Many of the anti-change posts Wednesday were coupled with threats to defect to Google+ if things aren’t changed back.
And interestingly — and, we have to assume, coincidentally — the Facebook overhaul was announced on the same day that Google+, previously an invite-only affair, was opened to the public.
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Sunday, 18 September 2011

What’s up with that Google orange?

Google's
Friday’s Google “doodle” on the search engine’s main page might be one of its most random. But if you don’t have scurvy (and we’re going to go ahead and assume you do not), you should probably take a moment to say thanks.
Instead of its usually multi-hued logo, Google welcomed visitors to its main search page Friday morning with a citrusy image of what appear to be oranges, grapefruits and strawberries growing together in a stylized field.
The Google doodles usually are designed to note a holiday or other observance or honor someone staffers find worthy. And this might be one of their most random.
Happy birthday, Albert Szent-Györgyi.
Szent-Györgyi was a Hungarian physiologist and Nobel laureate who, in the 1930s, discovered Vitamin C. He would later research muscle movement and development and was active in the Hungarian resistance during World War II
Worth noting: Delicious citrus fruits aside, Szent-Györgyi first extracted Vitamin C from paprika.
Unlike some of Google’s doodles, Friday’s is not interactive. Two of the site’s most popular have been a playable guitar to commemorate the birthday of rock pioneer Les Paul and a Pac-Man game replacing the page’s logo to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the iconic video game.
Both of those interactive doodles were so well received they got their own permanent pages.
Clicking Friday’s logo led to search results for Szent-Györgyi’s name. Google’s official blog had not been updated with a post about the doodle, as it often is, as of Friday morning.
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Linux Hit by Malware

Linux community sites were taken offline due to a number of alleged malicious attacks that managed to dent the Linux’s myth of impenetrability.
linuxtarget.jpg
The non-commercial Linux Foundation has published a message saying that it, Linux.com, and also all their subdomains had been taken down for the time of dealing with a security breach.
It is believed that the attack relates to an earlier intrusion on another Linux community website – Kernel.org. According to industry experts, the Linux Foundation and Kernel.org are actually online neighbours in the particular network block. However, LinuxFoundation.org has been offline for almost a week thus far, which is rather a considerable time for many.
The post explained that website administrators were in the “process of securely restoring all services as quickly as they only could”. However, they currently warn of a necessity to consider passwords and SSH keys that might have been used on the website.
For people claiming that Linux defences are close to unassailable, this news is a tad embarrassing of. Some of the malware experts admit it shouldn’t have come as a great surprise that Linux system’s security had failed. They confirm that there actually has been malware for Linux for a long time now, but lots of users didn’t realize it, because there was too much malware for Windows operating system in comparison.
Meanwhile, LinuxFoundation, when approached by the media in attempts to find out if there was any more information available, told that they are keeping to investigate and are currently doing whatever they can to expedite restoring all their domains. The company promised they would communicate with everyone when the service is back online. Unfortunately, they didn’t say anything else thus far. Nor they disclosed what kind of malware was the reason of websites failure or if it even was malware at all.
The news may mean that Linux is not that perfect as it used to be for many people, who mainly chose it for its consistence to malware attacks. Meanwhile, the attacks could at least mean that Linux operating system is considered prominent enough to serve as a target of criminal attention, thus playing down past accusations that it was “nothing more than hobby software”.
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Sony asks gamers to sign new terms or face PSN ban

Hacking attacks compromised the accounts of some 100 million PSN users
Continue reading the main story

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Sony is preparing to ban gamers from the PlayStation Network (PSN) unless they waive the right to collectively sue it over future security breaches.
The firm has amended PSN’s terms and conditions and users have to agree to them next time they log in.
The move comes months after a string of hacking attacks compromised over 100 million accounts of the PlayStation Network subscribers.
It is, however, possible to opt out of the agreement within the next 30 days.
Gamers will now have to try to resolve any legal issues with an arbitrator picked by Sony, before being able to file a lawsuit.
The new clauses, dubbed “Binding Individual Arbitration,” state that “any Dispute Resolution Proceedings, whether in arbitration or court, will be conducted only on an individual basis and not in a class or representative action or as a named or unnamed member in a class, consolidated, representative or private attorney general action”.
The re-written terms and conditions are being presented to gamers when they log in, but some have questioned who will notice the changes.
Tech news site The Register wondered who would notice the small print outlining the opt-out terms, and not simply click the “agree” box having scrolled all the way down.
Those that want to opt out will have to send a letter to Sony’s Los Angeles headquarters in the US.
Once they do, the subscribers will be able to keep their right to file a class action lawsuit without any need for arbitration.
But before subscribers have a chance to opt out, they will still be required to agree to the new terms the next time they log into their accounts.
Otherwise they will not be able to use the online services.
Attacks and apology
A class action lawsuit filed against Sony in April after the first attack, in which the details of 77 million users were stolen and PSN went offline for 40 days, could end up costing the Japanese electronics giant billions of dollars.
Sony Online Entertainment, the company’s computer games service, was also hit, as well as the Sony Pictures website, exposing personal information for 25 million more accounts.
In addition, personal data of 2,000 consumers was stolen from a Sony Ericsson website in Canada and details of 8,500 users were leaked on a Sony Music Entertainment website in Greece.
Some time later, a group called Lulz Security claimed to have broken into Sonypictures.com.
Sony has since apologised over the security breaches and offered compensation packages.
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Artificial blood vessels created on a 3D printer

Artificial polymer vessel Artificial blood vessels could help those in urgent need of an organ transplant
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Artificial blood vessels made on a 3D printer may soon be used for transplants of lab-created organs.
Until now, the stumbling block in tissue engineering has been supplying artificial tissue with nutrients that have to arrive via capillary vessels.
A team at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany has solved that problem using 3D printing and a technique called multiphoton polymerisation.
The findings will be shown at the Biotechnica Fair in Germany in October.
Out of thousands of patients in desperate need of an organ transplant there are inevitably some who do not get it in time.
In Germany, for instance, more than 11,000 people have been put on an organ transplant waiting list in 2011 alone.
To make sure more patients receive these life-saving surgeries, researchers in tissue engineering all over the globe have been working on creating artificial tissue and even entire organs in the lab.
But for a lab-made organ to function, it needs to be equipped with artificial blood vessels – tiny and extremely complex tubes that our organs naturally possess, used to carry nutrients.
Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

The individual techniques are already functioning and they are presently working in the test phase”
Dr Gunter Tovar Fraunhofer Institute, Germany
Numerous attempts have been made to create synthetic capillaries, and the latest one by the German team seems to be especially promising.
“The individual techniques are already functioning and they are presently working in the test phase; the prototype for the combined system is being built,” said Dr Gunter Tovar, who heads the BioRap project at Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB in Stuttgart.
Elastic biomaterials
3D printing technology has been increasingly used in numerous industries, ranging from creating clothes, architectural models and even chocolate treats.
But this time, Dr Tovar’s team had a much more challenging printing mission.
To print something as small and complex as a blood vessel, the scientists combined the 3D printing technology with two-photon polymerisation – shining intense laser beams onto the material to stimulate the molecules in a very small focus point.
The material then becomes an elastic solid, allowing the researchers to create highly precise and elastic structures that would be able to interact with a human body’s natural tissue.
So that the synthetic tubes do not get rejected by the living organism, their walls are coated with modified biomolecules.
Such biomolecules are also present in the composition of the “inks” used for the blood vessel printer, combined with synthetic polymers.
“We are establishing a basis for applying rapid prototyping to elastic and organic biomaterials,” said Dr Tovar.
“The vascular systems illustrate very dramatically what opportunities this technology has to offer, but that’s definitely not the only thing possible.”
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Google Warned Iranian Users

A few days ago Google has issued a warning to its Iranian users of Gmail system, mentioning a digital certificate hack, which could have resulted in a hacker mimic the company’s email system in that country.
google-iran(3).JPG
Eric Grosse, vice president of security engineering at the company, explained that although internal systems of Google weren’t compromised, the company was directly contacting possibly affected users in Iran, providing similar data online, because their top priority was to protect the privacy and security of its customers.
The hack in question, which happened because of a security lapse at Dutch digital security company called DigiNotar, was thought to affect around 300,000 Gmail users in the country. Google warns that the hacker could trick Iranian Gmail users into visiting some fake versions of the Google website, thus obtaining access to users’ accounts.
The company recommended its Iranian users of Gmail to change their passwords and update their account recovery data. They also advised to remove any suspicious forwarding addresses and clients able to access their accounts. Meanwhile, the Iranian perpetrator, who referred to himself as “Comodohacker” claimed he was a 21-year-old software engineering student, saying that has also stolen certificates for more than 500 websites. The list of the affected services includes such giants as Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter, let alone the CIA and Israel’s Mossad.
When the digital certificates were stolen that are meant to guarantee the sites are genuine, it consequently exposed a huge flaw in the basic precepts of online security, according to security experts. Despite the fact that all the popular Internet browsers’ developers have already revoked digital certificates from DigiNotar, it can still be possible that some other firms issuing digital certificates have been compromised as well, but this time the hack wasn’t detected.
The purported hacker gave an email interview, saying that he was acting alone. However, he gave a hint that he had given his data to the Iranian government. He claimed that he was absolutely independent and only shared his findings with a few people in Iran, who are free to do whatever they want with his findings. He also boasted that his country should have control over such giants as Google and Yahoo, and that’s why he was breaking all encryption algorithms
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Monday, 12 September 2011

New Open Social Network Attracts Users

Although most people haven’t even heard of it, Diaspora is an up and coming social network. It is currently receiving much more attention because of Google+’s “real names” policy.
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Users switch to Diaspora network after learning that there is a network just like Google+, but having nothing to do with the search giant, joining which you are able to be who and how you want to be, and still have full ownership of the content and data you put there.
Diaspora is an open-source social network, which is now invite-only and working in alpha mode, getting ready to release beta. The network runs on free software which can be developed by anyone having a bit of coding know-how, so the community involvement in operating the website can’t be underestimated.
Contrary to Facebook and Google+, which are company-run businesses aiming to get as much information from the users as they possibly can, Diaspora has an entirely different view. The site operators promise that with the new social network users take the decision what they would like to share, and with whom. Meanwhile, they retain full ownership of all their data, like friend lists, messages, pictures, and profile details. Since the users own their pictures, they shouldn’t have to give that up just to share the images.
The site features a de-centralized architecture, running on several different servers owned by no particular person or entity. In addition, Diaspora has pretty much the same functionality of Google+, including some of the features that Google has been praised for, like the “circles” feature. Meanwhile, Diaspora has “aspects” working the same way, and the feature was introduced in November 2010. It also doesn’t have character limits to posts, and offers “markdown” – a tool to format posts for added creativity.
The main question is now how Diaspora is going to lure users away from Facebook and Google. And here it gets interesting – it just isn’t going to do that. Instead, Facebook and Google are losing users on their own, and those switch to Diaspora. Google is particularly pushing Internet users away with the nymwars, a battle against the company’s strict enforcement of “no pseudonyms”. Meanwhile, Facebook is doing the same by insisting it has too much control over all of the users’ information and material. Soon we’ll see whether an open project like Diaspora can make Google and Facebook bring down their walls.
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Yahoo Fired Its CEO

Yahoo is reported to fire its CEO Carol Bartz by phone. If some of you remember, she was hired with great fanfare, and the move was targeted at saving the search giant from obscurity. Nevertheless, she didn’t do a lot, except making a deal with Microsoft.
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Yahoo has recently released a statement, saying that Bartz had been “removed” from her position. The post will be taken by Timothy Morse, chief financial officer, for now. Yahoo will then be looking for someone else.
According to media reports, Carol Bartz sent a goodbye letter to employees from her tablet, saying that she was very sad to tell everyone she had been fired over the phone by the company’s chairman of the board. Carol expressed her pleasure to work at the company and wished everyone the best.
Meanwhile, Yahoo has consistently lost ground on advertising within the past years. For example, even Facebook seems to overtake Yahoo in 2011 and collect the biggest slice of Internet display advertising dollars in the United States.
Carol Bartz was hired by Yahoo 2 years ago to replace its co-founder Jerry Yang, who also failed to turn the search engine around. When she joined the company, Yahoo’s shares were trading for around $12. However, when Wall Street heard of her exit, the shares jumped more than 6% in after-hours trade to $13.72. Later Wall Street lost interest in Carol Bartz, because she didn’t do that much. Moreover, she mishandled the Yahoo’s strained relationship with Chinese Alibaba Group, which had handed Alipay to the search engine. Alipay was controlled by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, most likely without the search giant’s knowledge. Meanwhile, Alibaba was claiming that the company was fully aware of the transaction.
Just in the beginning of this past summer, Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock for some reason gave his public support to Carol Bartz at Yahoo’s annual general meeting. This seems strange when compared with the decision to fire her by phone just three months later.
One of the interesting facts of Carol Bartz’s career is that she once went as far as to tell Michael Arrington, the owner of the Techcrunch service to “f*** off” during an interview at some industry event. By a coincidence, Michael Arrington quit his company at the same time that Bartz was fired. In other words, it seems that they were both “f***ed off” at the same time. Yahoo’s senior executive, who later worked for AMD, claimed that the company’s building in Satan Clara has bad feng shui. It seems that Carol Bartz will now agree with him.
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WikiLeaks Founder Waded into Guardian

In the first statement after uncensored WikiLeaks cables have been published to the media, the founder of the WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has managed to wade into his ex-business partner The Manchester Guardian.
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Talking through a video link while addressing a technology trade fair in Germany, Julian Assange claimed a hack from The Guardian had caused publishing the password to the encrypted files in his book. This, he claimed, led to a situation where a number of people accessed the uncensored files, but others couldn’t. Assange reportedly said that it caused a case where any spy agency had the content in question, while the mentioned people didn’t.
WikiLeaks founder claimed there had been a race between the bad guys and the good guys. Meanwhile, it was necessary for them to keep the side of the good guys. However, WikiLeaks posted over quarter of a million of cables on Friday, thus allowing open access to potentially sensitive diplomatic sources to anyone in the world.
In respond, British The Guardian announced that it, together with a number of its international media fellows, including German Der Spiegel, American New York Times, French Le Monde, and Spanish El Pais, all deplored the move of WikiLeaks to post the uncensored State Department cables, because this decision may put sources at risk.
Julian Assange emphasized that a sensitive password which was used to decrypt the files in question was previously published in a book written by David Leigh, who was the paper’s investigative reporter and a collaborator-turned-critic of the Wikileaks’ founder. While blaming people, Julian Assange also managed to wade into another ex-partner, WikiLeaks defector Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Assange announced that the latter disclosed to media outfits the information of where to look for the uncensored files and how to use the password. He also claimed that Daniel Domscheit-Berg was engaged into spreading the location of a hidden encrypted file, which was locked with the password in question, with selected media outfits with the sole purpose to gain personal benefit.
Meanwhile, The Guardian, Leigh and all the others have denied the claim that they had been responsible for the leak in question. In respond, it points out that WikiLeaks published the encrypted file to the Internet by accident, as well as that Julian Assange has never bothered to change the password encrypting it.
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Saturday, 10 September 2011

Microsoft online services hit by major failure


Hotmail screenshot
Hotmail, Office 365 and Windows Live Skydrive were unavailable to millions of users
Millions of Microsoft users were left unable to access some online services overnight because of a major service failure.
Hotmail, Office 365 and Skydrive were among the services affected.
Microsoft was still analysing the cause of the problem on Friday morning, but said it appeared to be related to the internet’s DNS address system.
Such a major problem is likely to raise questions about the reliability of cloud computing versus local storage.
Especially embarrassing is the temporary loss of Office 365, the company’s alternative to Google’s suite of online apps.
Its service also went offline briefly in mid-August, less than two months after it launched.
The latest disruption is believed to have lasted for around two-and-a-half hours, between 0300 GMT and 0530 GMT.
In a blog, posted at 0649 GMT, Microsoft said: “We have completed propagating our DNS configuration changes around the world, and have restored service for most customers.”
The Domain Name System (DNS) is responsible for translating URL web addresses , such as bbc.co.uk into the internet’s native system of IP addresses, e.g. 212.58.246.95.
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German court upholds Apple patent claim


A German court has upheld a ban on the sale of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, saying it did infringe Apple patents.
It was asked to reconsider a previous ruling that elements of the tablet’s design were copied from the iPad.
Galaxy Tab and iPad, AFP/Getty
That decision led to a Europe-wide ban, which was later lifted amid concerns about the court’s power to impose such a broad embargo.
The latest hearing went in Apple’s favour and means the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is again banned from sale across Germany.
Dusseldorf regional court judge Johanna Brueckner-Hoffmann said that the “minimalist, modern form” of the two products gave a “clear impression of similarity”.
In the early stages of the dispute, Apple had won the right for the ban to be imposed continent-wide. However, that was lifted following a challenge by Samsung.
Its re-imposition, albeit only within one country, marks yet another round in the ongoing patent battle between Apple and Samsung.
The two electronics giants currently face each other in courtrooms in Australia, North America and Asia.
Apple has also been successful in winning a sales ban of several Samsung phones across Europe following court action in the Netherland
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Supercomputer predicts revolution


Protesters in Egypt
Sentiment mining showed a sharp change in tone around Egypt ahead of President Mubarak’s ousting
Feeding a supercomputer with news stories could help predict major world events, according to US research.
A study, based on millions of articles, charted deteriorating national sentiment ahead of the recent revolutions in Libya and Egypt.
While the analysis was carried out retrospectively, scientists say the same processes could be used to anticipate upcoming conflict.
The system also picked up early clues about Osama Bin Laden’s location.
Kalev Leetaru, from the University of Illinois’ Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science, presented his findings in the journal First Monday.
Mood and location
The study’s information was taken from a range of sources including the US government-run Open Source Centre and BBC Monitoring, both of which monitor local media output around the world.
News outlets which published online versions were also analysed, as was the New York Times‘ archive, going back to 1945.
In total, Mr Leetaru gathered more than 100 million articles.
Reports were analysed for two main types of information: mood – whether the article represented good news or bad news, and location – where events were happening and the location of other participants in the story.
Nautilus The Nautilus SGI supercomputer crunched the 100 million articles
Mood detection, or “automated sentiment mining” searched for words such as “terrible”, “horrific” or “nice”.
Location, or “geocoding” took mentions of specific places, such as “Cairo” and converted them in to coordinates that could be plotted on a map.
Analysis of story elements was used to create an interconnected web of 100 trillion relationships.
Predicting trouble
Data was fed into an SGI Altix supercomputer, known as Nautilus, based at the University of Tennessee.
The machine’s 1024 Intel Nehalem cores have a total processing power of 8.2 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second).
Based on specific queries, Nautilus generated graphs for different countries which experienced the “Arab Spring”.
In each case, the aggregated results of thousands of news stories showed a notable dip in sentiment ahead of time – both inside the country, and as reported from outside.
Egypt sentiment graph
Media “sentiment” around Egypt fell dramatically in early 2011, just before the resignation of President Mubarak.
For Egypt, the tone of media coverage in the month before President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation had fallen to a low only seen twice before in the preceding 30 years.
Previous dips coincided with the 1991 US aerial bombardment of Iraqi troops in Kuwait and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq.
Mr Leetaru said that his system appeared to generate better intelligence than the US government was working with at the time.
Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

If you look at this tonal curve it would tell you the world is darkening so fast and so strongly against him that it doesn’t seem possible he could survive.”
Kalev Leetaru University of Illinois
“The mere fact that the US President stood in support of Mubarak suggests very strongly that that even the highest level analysis suggested that Mubarak was going to stay there,” he told BBC News.
“That is likely because you have these area experts who have been studying Egypt for 30 years, and in 30 years nothing has happened to Mubarak.
The Egypt graph, said Mr Leetaru, suggested that something unprecedented was happening this time.
“If you look at this tonal curve it would tell you the world is darkening so fast and so strongly against him that it doesn’t seem possible he could survive.”
Similar drops were seen ahead of the revolution in Libya and the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s.
Saudi Arabia, which has thus far resisted a popular uprising, had experienced fluctuations, but not to the same extent as some other states where leaders were eventually overthrown.
Mapping Bin Laden
In his report, Mr Leetaru suggests that analysis of global media reports about Osama Bin Laden would have yielded important clues about his location.
Bin Laden map Media reports mentioning Osama Bin Laden may have helped narrow down his location
While many believed the al-Qaeda leader to be hiding in Afghanistan, geographic information extracted from media reports consistently identified him with Northern Pakistan.
Only one report mentioned the town of Abbottabad prior to Bin Laden’s discovery by US forces in April 2011.
However, the geo-analysis narrowed him down to within 200km, said Mr Leetaru.
Real time analysis
The computer event analysis model appears to give forewarning of major events, based on deteriorating sentiment.
However, in the case of this study, its analysis is applied to things that have already happened.
According to Kalev Leetaru, such a system could easily be adapted to work in real time, giving an element of foresight.
“That’s the next stage,” said Mr Leetaru, who is already working on developing the technology.
“It looks like a stock ticker in many regards and you know what direction it has been heading the last few minutes and you want to know where it is heading in the next few.
“It is very similar to what economic forecasting algorithms do.”
Mr Leetaru said he also hoped to improve the resolution of analysis, especially in relation to geographic location.
“The next iteration is going to city level and beyond and looking at individual groups and how they interact.
“I liken it to weather forecasting. It’s never perfect, but we do better than random guessing.”
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