Crime-fighting robots with access to citizen databases will be patrolling the streets by 2084, according to an academic at the University of Sheffield.

Robotics expert Professor Noel Sharkey predicts that humanoid robots, that are able to arrest people, will have access to integrated databases of information on British citizens, including bank accounts, tax and movements, to enable them to identify who people are.

The “superior knowledge robots” will, according to Sharkey, be able to use their “super strength and inability to feel pain” to arrest criminals.

They will have human features and will be able to detect weapons including guns, knives and explosives, and recognise drunks and aggressive behaviour in large areas.

By 2070, police will also have the aid of autonomous police cars, which will be able to recognise speeding cars, identify license plates and automatically take fines from bank accounts and add points on driving licences.

The project examined the future of the robot in the UK and how it will be developed to aid police. The research was based on recent robotic developments around the world, and on current ideas and trends from robotics experts.

Amazing technology from Japan
but can you guess what it is ?

Look closely and guess what they could be…

Are they pens with cameras?

Any wild guesses? No clue yet?

Ladies and gentlemen… congratulations!
You’ve just looked into the future… yep that’s right!
You’ve just seen something that will replace your PC in the near future.

Here is how it works:

In the revolution of miniature computers, scientists have made great developments with bluetooth technology.. .

This is the forthcoming computers you can carry within your pockets .

This ‘pen sort of instrument’ produces both the monitor as well as the keyboard on any flat surfaces from where you can carry out functions you would normally do on your desktop computer.

One laptop is lost every two days by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) with 659 reported stolen and 89 lost by the department in the past four years.

The 659th stolen laptop belonging to an MoD official and containing sensitive information was taken from the Britannia Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool on Thursday.

An MoD spokesman said the laptop was encrypted and Merseyside Police were investigating the theft.

Last week defence secretary Des Browne issued revised laptop figures after “anomalies in the reporting process” were discovered.

He confirmed that 658 laptops had been stolen and 89 lost since 2004, almost double the previous figure released by the MoD. Only 32 have been recovered. The latest theft brings the total number of computers lost by the MoD in the past four years to 748,

The ministry also revealed last week that 121 of its USB memory sticks have been either lost or stolen since 2004.

Information on three was secret and 19 carried data classified as restricted.

Defence minister Bob Ainsworth gave the information on the memory sticks in response to a parliamentary question tabled by Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather.

“It seems this government simply cannot be trusted with keeping sensitive information safe. It is frightening to think that secret MoD information can be lost or stolen,” she said.

The MoD has recalled 20,000 laptops to be encrypted. The move comes after last month’s Burton report found that although MoD policies and procedures are “generally fit for purpose”, there are a number of areas in which it “needs to do better” to protect personal data.

IBM (NYSE:IBM) snared the top three spots in the TOP500 Supercomputer record book and had a total of 210 systems on the list, the most of any upper computer vendor, the company said Wednesday.

IBM also had the most aggregate performance on the list with 5.6 petaflops—48 percent of the total—and the most systems in the top 10, top 50 and top 100.

The official results were reported during the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany, where the bi-annual listing of the World’s TOP500 Supercomputer sites was released.

Leading the pack was IBM’s much- ballyhooed Roadrunner supercomputer, which operates at 1 petaflop or 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

The speed demon was built for the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.

Roadrunner is powered by 12,240 IBM PowerXCell 8i Cell Broadband Engines—the specialty chips that power popular video game consoles. In addition, 6,562 AMD (NYSE:AMD) Opteron dual-core processors perform basic compute functions on Roadrunner, which free the cell chips for the math-intensive calculations.

Taking second place in the fastest computer category is the IBM Blue Gene/L system at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California. The supercomputer clocks in at 478 teraflops or 478 trillion calculations per second.

IBM’s Team Blue Gene held the No. 3 spot with a 450 teraflop performance from the Blue Gene/P system. The supercomputer is housed at Argonne National Lab in Chicago.

IBM said it also has the most power-efficient systems. They are the IBM QS22 PowerXCell 8i-based supercomputers at IBM Germany and Fraunhofer; and the Los Alamos system.

According to the Top500 rankings, IBM also has the fastest machine in Europe, the Blue Gene/P at Juelich Research Centre in Germany.

The TOP500 Supercomputer Site is compiled and published by supercomputing experts Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany

Three major Internet provides have agreed to block access to websites and online discussion groups featuring child pornography, New York state attorney general said Tuesday.

“The pervasiveness of child pornography on the Internet is horrific and it needs to be stopped,” Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said in a statement on the agreement with Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable.

“We are attacking this problem by working with Internet Service Providers to ensure they do not play host to this immoral business,” he said, adding that the agreement “should serve as a model for the entire industry.”

Internet providers had initially refused to control the content of communication between online users, but they finally agreed to block the pedophile content, Cuomo said.

The agreement covers the entire United States and Cuomo said he was negotiating similar deals with other Internet providers.

“Online child pornography represents one of the worst abuses of the Internet,” said Jeff Zimmerman, senior vice president and chief ethics officer at Time Warner Cable.

“Among the steps Time Warner Cable is taking are removing Newsgroups from our Internet service,” Zimmerman said, referring to online discussion groups.

Verizon, with 8.2 million users, and Time Warner, with 7.9 million, are among the five largest Internet provides in the world. Sprint is one of the three biggest mobile phone companies.

News by : AFP
Date: 6/11/2008

Microsoft’s TownSquare internal social network provides employees with feeds and updates about their colleagues

At the request of its SharePoint and Office product development teams, Microsoft ’s Office Labs operation has created and is testing a prototype of an internal social network that can provide employees with feeds and updates about their colleagues.

Chris Pratley, general manager of Office Labs , is slated to disclose details of the prototype — called TownSquare — Thursday at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. He spoke to Computerworld about the project, which was launched in January and has already been used by about 8,000 Microsoft employees.

With a layout that is strikingly similar to Facebook.com’s (in which Microsoft invested $240 million in October 2007), TownSquare is fueled by enterprise news feeds that use Web services to query SharePoint for public information, such as promotions and company anniversaries, about an employee.

TownSquare also notifies users when a document or file is modified. Users can customize their feeds and monitor who is receiving information about them.

In early January, Pratley’s group told 100 Microsoft employees about the network. Since then, 8,000 employees who learned of TownSquare by word of mouth have visited the network at least once, Pratley noted. About 700 use it daily.

Some Microsoft customers, which he declined to name, are testing the TownSquare network for use in their companies.

Office Labs works as a sort of advance development team that tests technology concepts suggested by employees and, as in this case, development teams. Pratley stressed that TownSquare is not a product, but a platform to test the technology concepts. By hammering out the various likes and dislikes of its users before releasing a product, “We’re trying to get version three goodness into a first release,” he added.

“We have instrumentation ?so we know which things people use,” Pratley noted. “We share that with the client teams we work with. They take the knowledge about usage so they don’t make so many mistakes in product design.”

Many third party vendors have targeted SharePoint as the core data source for information to feed their enterprise social networking and other Enterprise 2.0 applications. Several have announced upgrades to their products or new integration with SharePoint this week at the conference.

Anecdotal evidence has shown that employees like the TownSquare tool, Pratley noted. Employees especially appreciate being able to monitor the creation and editing of documents by colleagues, he added. One employee used the network to find a sponsor within Microsoft to fund her trip to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

“That is the kind of information that spreads through an enterprise social network,” he said. “By posting it out there, the people interested can pick up on it, and other people can ignore it. It’s a way to keep in touch in a social way with people you work with.”

Like Facebook , TownSquare also includes a photos of users and allows them to note when they are away from their workstations, such as at a meeting or in the cafeteria for coffee.

While some employees have expressed initial surprise at all the information that Microsoft has about them in its intranet, once people see the type of information that is included in the feeds about them, “they see it’s pretty safe stuff and say okay,” Pratley said.

By Heather Havenstein, Computerworld

Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP/Vista/2000/Server 2003/Server 2008 (KB950759)
Security issues have been identified that could allow an attacker to compromise a system that is running Microsoft Internet Explorer and gain control over it. You can help protect your system by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Security Update for Windows XP/Vista/Server 2003 (KB951376)
A security issue has been identified that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to compromise your Microsoft Windows-based system and gain control over it. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Security Update for Windows XP/Vista/Server 2003 (KB950762)
A security issue has been identified that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the affected system to stop responding. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Cumulative Security Update for ActiveX Killbits for Windows XP/Vista/2000/Server 2003/Server 2008 (KB950760)
Security issues have been identified in ActiveX controls that could allow an attacker to compromise a system that is running Microsoft Internet Explorer and gain control over it. You can help protect your system by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Security Update for Windows XP/Vista/2000/Server 2003/Server 2008 (KB951698)
A security issue has been identified in Microsoft DirectShow that could allow an attacker to compromise your Windows-based system and gain control over it. You can help protect your computer by installing this update from Microsoft. After you install this item, you may have to restart your computer.

Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool - June 2008 (KB890830)
After the download, this tool runs one time to check your computer for infection by specific, prevalent malicious software (including Blaster, Sasser, and Mydoom) and helps remove any infection that is found. If an infection is found, the tool will display a status report the next time that you start your computer. A new version of the tool will be offered every month. If you want to manually run the tool on your computer, you can download a copy from the Microsoft Download Center, or you can run an online version from microsoft.com. This tool is not a replacement for an antivirus product. To help protect your computer, you should use an antivirus product.

‘Slap in the face’ to UK business, says SEO firm

The hosting of UK government sites such Job Centre Plus and the Pension Service in the US is a slap in the face to UK businesses, according to search engine optimisation firm NetCallidus.

Routine research and analysis performed by the the company discovered a number of .gov.uk sites being hosted in Sunnyvale, California.

“At a time when the UK economy is teetering on the edge of a recession, this is an out and out insult,” said Mark Furber, managing director of NetCallidus.

“There is no good reason why this work should be given to another country. It might save a few pounds, but sends the wrong message about how much the government cares about British business.”

Furber believes that this socially irresponsible and that the work would be better done by a UK business anyway.

“We always advise our clients to host their websites in the country they are aiming at, as it is one of the factors that can influence search engines like Google.”

“These sites are clearly aimed at UK people so should be hosted in the UK to ensure that the highest number of people find them.”

Furber also highlighted issues around latency, security and management as reasons for governments to host public service sites within their own country.

The various departments were not immediately available for comment regarding this issue.

Written by Ian Williams

AMD Nvidia Cannot Get USB 3.0 Specifications from Intel Corp.
by Anton Shilov

Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia Corp. and Via Technologies have not yet started development of their own next-generation universal serial bus (USB) controller as they cannot get specifications of the bus from Intel Corp. The latter denies any wrongdoing or intention to affect competitive positions of AMD, Nvidia and others as well as claims that the spec is not finalized.

“The challenge is that Intel is not… giving the specification to anybody that competes with CPUs and chipsets,” a source close to AMD who is familiar with the dispute between chipset developers and Intel is reported to have said by News.com web-site.

While retaining full backward compatibility with USB 1.0 and USB 2.0, devices that feature USB 3.0 will be able to transfer data at up to 10 times higher speed compared to USB 2.0, or at 4.8Gb/s, meaning that a file as large as 600MB could be transferred in just a second in the best case scenario. In addition, the USB 3.0 specification will be optimized for low power and improved protocol efficiency. USB 3.0 ports and cabling will be designed to enable backward compatibility as well as future-proofing for optical capabilities.

In late 2007 the world’s largest x86 chip supplier formed USB 3.0 promoter group, consisting of HP, Intel Corp., Microsoft Corp., NEC Corp., NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments. Even though AMD, Nvidia and Via are the world’s largest providers of computer core-logic sets after Intel Corp., they are not a part of USB 3.0 promo group, but are members of USB Implementers Forum.

Sources close to AMD and Nvidia claim that Intel already has working chip with USB 3.0 support, which means that the specification is complete and the chipmaker may handle it to the industry and competitors. In fact, Intel demonstrated USB 3.0 operation at last year’s Intel Developer Forum, though, it has never said that the technology had been finalized by that time.

“Just as with previous generations of USB, Intel is working hard to get the complete spec to the industry with as little delay as possible in order to drive the wide adoption of USB 3.0. Intel only gives it out once it’s finished. It’s not finished. If it was mature enough to release, it would be released. If you have an incomplete spec and give it out to people, these people will build their chipsets and you’ll end up with chipsets that are incompatible with devices. That’s what Intel is trying to avoid,” a source at Intel was quoted as saying.

AMD and Nvidia need to have time to design their controllers according to any specification. Therefore, in case Intel does not provide the USB 3.0 spec soon enough, the companies plan to start to design based on their understanding of the final specification. This may cause incompatibility issues, however, both AMD and Nvidia reportedly do not want to lose competitive advantage of their platforms in the form of USB 3.0.

“We are starting development on it right now. A separate specification – though designed to be compatible with the Intel USB 3.0 spec – has the potential to create incompatibilities. This is not good for users. But we have no choice,” a source close to AMD was quoted as saying.

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the IBM BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.