May 2008 Archives

"Talk about right place, right time. Quite by chance, astronomers have captured footage of a star blowing itself to smithereens.

Stars heavier than about eight times the mass of the sun meet their deaths in catastrophic explosions when their core runs out of fuel. The core can collapse into a black hole or neutron star, generating a shock wave that ploughs outwards, blasting the star's atmosphere apart.

Hundreds of supernovae are seen every year, but usually days or weeks after the event (in the Earth's time frame), when the optical glow of radioactive nickel in the debris reaches a peak. By then it is often too late to determine what kind of star exploded or what events led up to the blast.

Alicia Soderberg from Princeton University and her colleagues were using an X-ray detector on NASA's Swift space telescope to observe a galaxy 88 million light years away when they saw a brief but intense X-ray signal. This is characteristic of a supernova explosion, and is emitted by hot gas trapped just behind the shock wave as it bursts out of a star. "It only lasted a few minutes and then the whole show was over," says Soderberg."

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"A third giant red storm has flared up on Jupiter, joining the Great Red Spot and the recently developed Red Spot Junior. The spot, along with new measurements of record-high wind speeds on Red Spot Junior, come at a time when the solar system's largest planet is experiencing a time of global upheaval.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is an ancient, hurricane-like storm that may have been raging for 340 years or more, based on early observations with telescopes. At three times the width of Earth, it is the largest storm in the solar system.

It was recently joined by a similar, but smaller storm called Red Spot Junior. Red Spot Junior grew out of the merger of three smaller, white storms between 1998 and 2000 and turned red in 2006. It is about the size of Earth.

Now, a third red spot, about half the size of Red Spot Junior, has broken out on the giant gaseous planet. The spot, previously a white storm, now appears red in Hubble Space Telescope images taken on 9 and 10 May. The observations were led by Imke de Pater of the University of California, Berkeley, US.

No one knows for sure what gives the three spots their red colour. But one theory is that especially violent storms dredge up material from deeper in Jupiter's atmosphere, such as phosphorus-containing molecules, which undergo chemical reactions that turn them red when exposed to sunlight."

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"It's the basement apartment like no other. Life has been found 1.6 kilometres beneath the sea floor, at temperatures reaching 100 °C.

The discovery marks the deepest living cells ever to be found beneath the sea floor. Bacteria have been found deeper underneath the continents, but there they are rare. In comparison, the rocks beneath the sea appear to be teeming with life.

John Parkes, a geobiologist at the University of Cardiff, UK, hopes his team's discovery might one day help find life on other planets. He says it might even redefine what we understand as life, and, bizarrely, what we understand by "age".

Parkes has been hunting for deep life for over 20 years. Recently, he and his colleagues examined samples of a mud core extracted from between 860 metres and 1626 metres beneath the sea floor off the coast of Newfoundland.

They found simple organisms known as prokaryotes in every sample. Prokaryotes are organisms that often have just one cell. Their peculiarity is that, unlike any other form of life, their DNA is not neatly packed into a nucleus."

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"A new analysis of a canyon in the US state of Idaho lends support to the idea that Mars, which boasts similar canyons, had substantial rainfall and major floods early in its history.

Idaho's Box Canyon resembles a snake, with a sinuous body and a rounded head (see image at right). One theory suggests that such "amphitheater-headed" canyons form slowly, as seeping groundwater gradually erodes canyon walls in the snake's head.

That process might create some canyons in softer rock, say researchers led by Michael Lamb of the University of California, Berkeley, US. But they say such slow seepage could not have transported the metre-sized boulders that were carried downstream in Box Canyon, which is carved into harder basaltic bedrock.

"It requires a lot of water to remove them," Lamb says.

In fact, it would have required a megaflood - a catastrophic outpouring of massive amounts of water in a relatively short period. Such megafloods occurred numerous times in the western US several tens of thousands of years ago and played a significant role in shaping the landscape."

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"The technology needed to send a robotic probe to another solar system is far in the future at best. But one scientist says it's not too soon to start thinking about how to avoid contaminating extrasolar planets with hitchhiking microbes from Earth.

Even today's fastest spacecraft would take tens of thousands of years to reach the Sun's nearest neighbours, Proxima and Alpha Centauri, which lie just over 4 light years away and may host an Earth-like planet.

But some proposed technologies - such as nuclear propulsion, solar sails, and antimatter drives - could theoretically get a spacecraft to other solar systems in a human lifetime.

However far in the future such technologies may be, it is worth thinking about the potential problem of contaminating other solar systems with Earth life, according to a new paper by Charles Cockell of the Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research at Open University in Milton Keynes, UK.

Why should we take the trouble to avoid such interstellar contamination? First, there is the "utilitarian desire to preserve examples of other life of potentially enormous scientific interest", Cockell says. In previous writings, he has also argued that humans have an ethical responsibility to avoid harming life in other solar systems."

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"As Burma's government finally allows foreign aid workers into the country, the UN is warning that only a few weeks remain before the country's main rice crop, in the hard-hit Irrawaddy Delta, must be planted.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation says that the damage caused by Cyclone Nargis to the region's irrigation canals and tidal defenses will have to be repaired before soils can start to recover from salt damage. So even if the next crop gets planted, it could yield less rice than usual.

Nargis, which hit southern Burma on 2 May, is now thought to have killed 134,000 people and left 2.4 million homeless. The UN estimates that only a quarter of the victims have received any assistance. There are reports of cholera among survivors, who have little or no shelter or clean water.
No-go delta

Foreign aid workers, and ordinary Burmese trying to bring help from elsewhere in the country, have been banned from going deep into the delta region. It was not immediately clear whether Friday's announcement, made by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon after a meeting with the junta's chief, General Than Shwe, meant foreign aid workers would be able to enter the delta, or when."

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"Landing on Mars is hard - as any glance at a list of failed missions will tell you. That's why there will be cheering and genuine relief this Sunday if all goes well and the Phoenix mission touches down safely on the planet's barren northern plains.

So far the indications are good. Mission controllers based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, US, say the spacecraft is healthy and behaving as it should.

Mars is cooperating, too. The weather reports are about as favourable as weather reports can get when you're landing on a -90 °C barren desert more than 270 million kilometres from the nearest motel.

The mission is not the first to attempt to explore Mars in a region far from the Red Planet's equator. In 1999, Mars Polar Lander, equipped with some of the same experiments that today make up Phoenix's science package, failed to reach the south polar regions of Mars intact.

Scientists have good reason for wanting to explore Mars at high latitudes. Remoting sensing indicates the presence of ice just below the surface where Phoenix will land. If it's really there, and accessible to Phoenix, the ice will carry detailed information about the Red Planet's climate history."

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"Indonesia is still digging in its heels over access to the most recent strains of the H5N1 flu virus.

Hit by most of the recent human cases of H5N1, Indonesia holds virus samples that could help develop the most effective vaccine if H5N1 goes pandemic. But the country has refused to share its samples without guarantees from rich nations that it will be allowed access to vaccines derived from them. So far it has sent the World Health Organization samples from only two of its 16 known cases this year.

A partial solution was reached last week when the Indonesian health minister announced that she will send gene sequences from the country's virus samples to a public database. Although this will allow researchers to track how the virus is evolving, vaccine development normally requires the viruses themselves and Indonesia is still mostly refusing to send those to foreign labs.

There may be another hope: the European Union has just approved Prepandrix, an H5N1 vaccine made by GlaxoSmithKline. Although based on a 2004 virus from Vietnam, it managed to elicit immune reactions to other strains of H5N1 in human trials."

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"IF YOU thought it was hard finding the email address that some other john.smith hasn't already bagged, that's nothing compared with the difficulty you'll have getting an internet connection for your computer after 2011.

As of this month 85 per cent of the 4.3 billion available Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which identify devices connected to the net, are already in use. Within three years they will all be used up, according to a report by the OECD. "The situation is critical for the future of the internet economy," it says.

The report urges governments and businesses to upgrade from the current version, IPv4, to IPv6, which effectively has an unlimited number of IP addresses. IPv6 has been available for more than a decade but service providers have been slow to adopt it."

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"NEW YORK (Reuters) - Napster Inc., the digital music service, on Tuesday opened the world's biggest MP3 download store with more than 6 million songs in a direct challenge to Apple Inc's iTunes store.

The new Web-based music store will have digital songs from all major music labels as well as thousands of independent labels. The MP3-format songs will be compatible with the vast majority of digital media devices and mobile phones including Apple's popular iPod as well as its iPhone.

Before now Napster has focused on selling all-you-can-eat monthly streaming music subscription packages but has struggled to win over the majority of fans who want to be able to transfer songs they like on to a portable device such as the market-leading iPod.

The new Napster service tries to take on Apple's dominance in digital music by offering fans more songs without copy protection or digital rights management (DRM). Most of the six million songs on the iTunes Music store are available with Fairplay DRM, which prevents the songs from being played on most portable players other than the iPod."

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"TOKYO (AFP) - MySpace launched new services in Japan on Tuesday a day after Facebook launched a Japanese version amid growing competition here between social networking sites.

MySpace said it was partnering with 33 companies in Japan to create and encourage new stars and strengthen its support for the 55,000 artists and professionals who are registered with the site.

"Due to this partnership, we will energise the market by offering opportunities to young creators to release a CD, produce or participate in various events," it said in a statement.

MySpace's partners include some of Japan's largest recording companies EMI Music Japan and AVEX Entertainment, as well as the music shop HMV. They will organise auditions and talent shows to seek out new artists.

MySpace entered the Japanese market in 2006 in a joint venture between News Corp. and Japanese Internet giant Softbank Corp., hoping to entice customers away from Japan's hugely popular online social networking site Mixi."

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"MOSCOW (Reuters) - Google Inc dominates Internet searches across the world with a major exception of Russia, a gap which Russian-born co-founder Sergei Brin is keen to fill, he said in a newspaper interview.

"Now, we have incorporated far better morphology, which is very important in (the) Russian language," Brin said referring to a search technique which examines word construction.

Local Internet company and search engine Yandex receives about twice as many searches a day, Brin told Russian business newspaper Vedomosti during his first visit to Moscow in 4-1/2 years. "We think our search is better but it (Yandex) also has many talented people."

In February Yandex said it planned to float shares on Nasdaq later this year, an IPO which analysts estimated could value the company at around $3 billion.

Russia is an increasingly important market for Internet search engines which generate an estimated $40 billion a year from advertising worldwide. Internet user numbers are booming in Russia, which has a population of 142 million."

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"PARIS (Reuters) - The world's top handset maker Nokia Oyj expects the role of the Linux operating system in its product portfolio to increase as the role of its Internet-focused devices grows, company officials said.

Linux has so far had little success on cellphones, but its role is increasing as more new Linux-based models reach the market, while Google Inc gave it a vote of confidence by using it to build its Android platform on.

Nokia itself has used Linux for years in its Internet tablets, large phone-like devices used to access Internet on the go, but lacking calling functionality. "We will expand that range, and we believe that the role of Linux will grow," said Nokia spokesman Kari Tuutti.

Linux is the most popular type of open source operating system which is available to the public to be used, revised and shared -- meaning it has a large developer community which could result in more attractive programs and lower costs for the likes of Nokia.

Nokia has used the tablets to target technology-savvy consumers or support emerging technologies like WiMAX.

"It's going to be terribly important," Nokia's Chief Financial Officer Rick Simonson told an investor conference when asked about the role of Linux-based tablets."

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"WASHINGTON - A Cisco Systems Inc. executive told a Senate subcommittee Tuesday that comments in an internal document about China's goal to "combat" a religious group did not reflect the company's views on censorship.

The PowerPoint presentation, which described China's technology status, included a slide that referred to goals to stop network-related crimes, guarantee the security and services of a public network and "combat 'Falun Gong' evil religion and other hostiles." Falun Gong is a spiritual movement banned by the Chinese government, which considers it a dangerous cult.

"In no case does the document propose that any Cisco products be provided to facilitate the political goals of the government and no reference to applications of our products to the goals of censorship or monitoring," Cisco general counsel Mark Chandler told the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on human rights and the law.

The subcommittee heard testimony from Cisco, Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. executives about how U.S. Internet and technology companies do business with certain governments that censor and suppress the free speech of their citizens.

Chandler said that Cisco regrets that comments from a Chinese government official were included in the 2002 presentation, which also mentioned other technology projects.

However, Shiyu Zhou, deputy director of the humans rights group Global Internet Freedom Consortium, said Cisco's presentation offered planning, construction, technical training and other services to help China improve law enforcement and security network operations."

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"WILMINGTON, Del. - Lawyers on both sides of a shareholder lawsuit over Yahoo Inc.'s board's handling of Microsoft's $47.5 billion takeover offer are accusing one another of turning it into a public relations battle.

A Delaware judge weighing the shareholders' request to make their complaint against the company public held a private phone conference with lawyers for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo and dissident shareholders Tuesday morning.

Plaintiffs' attorney Joel Friedlander wrote in a letter to Chancellor William Chandler III last week that Internet pioneer Yahoo is trying to "whitewash embarrassing documents" it believes will damage the board's efforts to repel a proxy fight by activist investor Carl Icahn.

The two sides will submit additional arguments this week and next, and the judge will rule after that, Friedlander said Tuesday.

Much of the information the defendants want to keep secret, according to Friedlander, involves employee severance plans that Yahoo adopted shortly after software maker Microsoft Corp. made its initial bid on Jan. 31.

Adoption of the severance plans was an "unreasonable defensive measure" that breached the board's fiduciary duty to maximize value for Yahoo shareholders, the plaintiffs claim.

Icahn has nominated an alternate slate of candidates to oppose Yahoo's 10 current directors, including Chief Executive Jerry Yang, at Yahoo's July 3 annual meeting."

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"BOSTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) has proposed to buy Yahoo Inc's (YHOO.O) search business and take a minority stake in the Web pioneer, stopping short of a full-out merger, a person familiar with the discussions said on Monday.

As part of the deal Yahoo would put its Asian assets, including significant minority stakes in Yahoo Japan (4689.T) and China's Alibaba Group, up for sale, while Microsoft would buy a chunk of what remains of the company, the source said.

The talks were revealed by the two companies on Sunday, but they declined to reveal the terms of the discussions. Earlier this month, Microsoft walked away from a proposal to acquire Yahoo for $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, after Yahoo rebuffed the offer, saying it would only settle for $37 a share.

The new deal, if completed, would forge an alliance between the two companies that would represent an alternative means of competing with rival Google Inc (GOOG.O), whose ubiquitous search engine has made it an online advertising powerhouse.

The proposal represents an outline of Microsoft's current thinking and it does not yet put a value on Yahoo's search business, said the source, who was not authorized to speak on the record because the discussions are confidential."

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"A NASA review appears to spell the end for Gravity Probe B, the project conceived in the 1960s to measure how the Earth warps the fabric of nearby space-time.

A panel of about 15 experts commissioned by NASA analysed the performance of 10 NASA astrophysics missions that are currently operating in Earth orbit. A copy of the "senior review" obtained by New Scientist concludes that extending the lifetimes of the top nine missions "would be certain to deliver unique data of high scientific value". But Gravity Probe B didn't make the cut because the panel doubted further analysis of its results would yield significant new information.

Building and launching spacecraft is expensive, so maximising the use of those already in orbit can offer big benefits. But the expert panel said NASA didn't have the budget to support all the worthwhile missions.

It recommended that Gravity Probe B receive no additional funding after its current funding runs out in September.

Launched in 2004, the satellite used four precision-engineered gyroscopes to measure two effects - called the geodetic effect and frame dragging - predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity.

The probe's data was unexpectedly noisy due to solar flares in March 2005 that interrupted the satellite's observations, as well as unexpected torques on the gyroscopes that changed their orientation, mimicking relativistic effects. Additional interruptions ultimately chopped the observing time into seven intervals, which reduced the precision the probe could attain."

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"NASA has cleared the space shuttle Discovery for launch on 31 May to deliver the centrepiece of Japan's space programme, a massive laboratory named Kibo, to the International Space Station.

Lift-off is scheduled for 1702 EDT (2102 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with docking at the space station expected two days later. "Right now we're in great shape," said launch director Mike Leinbach.

Officials said they were not expecting any delay to the shuttle mission due to the ongoing investigation of Russian Soyuz spacecraft that malfunctioned while returning space station crew members to Earth.

During the last two Soyuz landings, in April 2008 and October 2007, the craft descended more steeply than planned and landed off course.

That has raised questions about the use of a Soyuz spacecraft currently attached to the station as a means of escape for the station crew in an emergency.

But the agency's associate administrator for space operations, Bill Gerstenmaier, said that despite the two problematic Soyuz flights, the vehicle is considered safe enough to rely on for emergency returns.

He said he had visited Russia during the previous week to meet with the investigation team and did not see any concerns big enough to delay the shuttle launch. "I talked to [the team] about us setting up for the 31st launch," he said. "They told us that they were ready for us to go fly.""

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"The unlikely story of advanced 3G cellular service in the world's most tightly controlled and secretive country has turned another chapter with the start of network trials.

Cellular carrier Orascom said on Monday that it has completed the first 3G call on a WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) trial network in North Korea, and is working towards a commercial launch there later this year.

Orascom, based in Egypt, said in January that a 25-year exclusive license to offer 3G cellular service in the country had been awarded to CHEO Technology, a joint venture in which Orascom holds a 75 percent stake and Korea Post and Telecommunications holds the remaining 25 percent.

A full commercial service is scheduled to begin in the second half of the year, Orascom said.

In January, Orascom said it intended to provide voice, data and value-added services across the network, which represents a US$400 million investment."

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"Games consoles contain toxic chemicals that would not be allowed in young childrens' toys, even though the technology to eliminate them is available, according to a study by environmental lobby group Greenpeace. However, manufacturers are starting to eliminate some toxic chemicals from their products, Greenpeace said.

Greenpeace analyzed a PlayStation 3, a Wii and an Xbox 360 Elite for its report "Playing Dirty," published Tuesday.

The consoles, all bought in Europe last November, appeared to comply with the recently introduced European Union legislation on the reduction of hazardous substances (RoHS), as Greenpeace found no mercury or cadmium, and only trace amounts of lead and chromium. Some chemicals may have slipped by the testers, as Greenpeace did not have the resources to analyze every single component in the devices, it said.

However, the consoles all contained toxic or undesirable chemicals such as beryllium, found in circuit board contacts; PVC, found in electrical insulation; phthalates, used to soften plastics, and bromine, used as a fire retardant. Phthalates can have an effect on sexual development, especially in males, and some are banned from children's toys and childcare articles, especially if they can be chewed. (Game consoles are not considered toys under European legislation.) The other chemicals typically cause problems when products are disposed of: in landfill they can lead to pollution of water supplies, while if incinerated, they may release toxic particles into the atmosphere. Beryllium poses the biggest hazard to workers involved in recycling, Greenpeace said."

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"TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese videogame maker Square Enix Co Ltd (9684.T) said it is considering taking stakes in game developers to combat rising competition from established game publishers and other entertainment companies.

"Economies of scale and breadth of scope are getting important. It may be a business alliance or it may be us taking a stake in others, but we need to go beyond traditional Square Enix," Square Enix President Yoichi Wada told the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in Tokyo on Tuesday.

"We face competition not only from Japanese videogame companies but from game companies worldwide. We also see some new players from outside the videogame industry coming in," he said.

Game makers are rapidly consolidating to boost their competitiveness, with Electronic Arts (ERTS.O) planning to take over rival videogame maker Take-Two Interactive Software Inc (TTWO.O), while Vivendi's (VIV.PA) game unit is merging with Activision Inc (ATVI.O)."

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"an Francisco - A code analysis of popular open source software projects has revealed that the quality and security of open source software continues to improve.

In its "Scan Report on Open Source Software 2008," Coverity analyzed more than 55 million lines of code on a recurring basis from more than 250 open source projects. Detailed Tuesday, the project utilized the Coverity Prevent static source code analyzer and was done during a two-year period. Some of the projects analyzed included the Apache Web server, Linux, Firefox, and the Samba file and printer sharing system. Scripting languages such as PHP and Ruby were examined as well.

"We run the source code through our static analysis tool, which identifies certain types of software defects for them and developers can look at the result," said David Maxwell, open source strategist for Coverity.

Coverity in its analysis found that open source developers are interested in code quality and making efforts to make it better and more secure, Maxwell said.

"We can see from the statistics many developers are quite passionate about writing good code," Maxwell said."

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"NEW YORK - Google's online filing cabinet for medical records opened to the public Monday, giving users instant electronic access to their health histories while reigniting privacy concerns.

Called Google Health, the service lets users link information from a handful of pharmacies and care providers, including Quest Diagnostics labs. Google plans to add more.

Similar offerings include Microsoft Corp.'s HealthVault and Revolution Health, which is backed by AOL co-founder Steve Case.

Google Health differentiates itself from the pack through its user interface and things like the public availability of its application program interface, or API, said Marissa Mayer, the Google executive overseeing the service.

Mary Adams, 45, a Cleveland Clinic patient who participated in the Google Health pilot, said that she was initially concerned about the privacy of her medical information.

Still, she felt safe enough to enroll and has been using the service for about six months, linking it with an online health management tool from the Cleveland Clinic and adding information on prescriptions and doctors to her online profile."

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"Virtualization has moved beyond applications themselves to software that makes those applications run faster over a network.

WAN (wide-area network) acceleration vendor Certeon on Monday introduced aCelera, an application-acceleration platform that comes without hardware and is designed to run on servers virtualized with VMware and with Microsoft's upcoming Hyper-V technology.

Like other application accelerators, aCelera shortens response times for applications that have to run over networks, namely between central and branch offices. But aCelera does it without a dedicated appliance. The software is designed to run on standard x86 hardware in one or more virtual machines, so it can share resources with an enterprise's overall computing infrastructure. This allows for scaling up application acceleration as needed and also avoids requiring users to buy a specialized device for each end of a WAN connection, said Gareth Taube, vice president of marketing at Certeon.

Many large enterprises are looking to server and storage virtualization to become more efficient and keep more IT gear at central sites. Centralization helps drive the need for WAN acceleration as branch-office employees rely on far-away data centers to run their applications. Certeon, a venture-capital-backed startup in Burlington, Massachusetts, is turning that technology to its advantage and claims to be the first to do so.

Certeon claims aCelera can cut the time required for applications to respond over WANs by 95 percent. The Linux-based software is compatible with VMware ESX and ESXi."

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"SAN FRANCISCO - Just two weeks after breaking off merger talks, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. have been pulled back to the bargaining table by their fears about what might happen if they don't work out a deal.

For now, Microsoft and Yahoo are still dancing around the edges as they explore possible business arrangements without melding the two companies.

The notion of a half-baked deal didn't excite investors Monday as they got their first chance to react to Sunday's news that Microsoft and Yahoo are talking again.

Yahoo shares rose a scant 0.7 percent, or 2 cents, to close at $27.68 on Monday, while Microsoft shares fell 1.8 percent, or 53 cents, to close at $29.46.

But most analysts remain convinced the preliminary talks will culminate in Microsoft buying Yahoo for somewhere between $33 to $37 per share, a price that translates to $47.5 billion to $53 billion.

Both Microsoft and Yahoo issued statements Sunday acknowledging they haven't ruled out the possibility of a merger even though they aren't discussing one now.

Although their discussions fell apart this month in a disagreement over price, both Yahoo and Microsoft have powerful incentives to reach a compromise within the next few weeks."

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"SANTA CLARA, Calif.--As you might expect from a vice president of product marketing, Facebook's Chamath Palihapitiya can deliver a convincing sales pitch.

His sell: Facebook is the next-generation platform of the Internet that can turn any ambitious entrepreneur (with the right application) into an overnight success. He rattled off the stats to back up the argument.

The average development time, he said, for an entrepreneur to build a Facebook application is between two and 15 weeks, according to a self-reported survey of its developer community. The average number of employees to make those applications: between one and five people. And about 33 percent of Facebook application makers reported profits of up to $500,000 a month. Finally, at least one-quarter of the applications running on Facebook have 100,000 active daily users.

"The barrier to entry is lower than it's ever been," Palihapitiya said to an audience here Saturday at the TieCon conference. "When you build something social, you get immediately rewarded with distribution. You will allow your user base to be your marketers."

Palihapitiya, a former venture capitalist at the Mayfield Fund and one-time head of AOL's instant messaging application, knew his audience. TieCon is a two-day conference cut out for technology entrepreneurs; and it attracted as many as 4,000 attendees. But some attendees said that at times, the talk was too wonky (with terms like "social stack") and heavy on PowerPoint. At least one attendee said that the speech was a "good sell.""

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"Microsoft announced Sunday afternoon it has issued another proposal to Yahoo that calls for a transaction with Yahoo, but that would not involve the acquisition of all of Yahoo's assets.

The announcement comes just days after billionaire investor Carl Icahn launched a proxy fight to unseat Yahoo's current board at the Internet search pioneer's upcoming July 3 annual shareholders meeting.

Icahn, a large Yahoo stakeholder, aimed to pressure the search company to restart talks with Microsoft, after the software giant withdrew its unsolicited buyout bid of $33 a share on May 3.

While Microsoft has repeatedly said it has "moved on" after withdrawing its Yahoo bid, the software giant still faced the issue of how it would bolster its Internet business to compete against its archrival Google. And Yahoo--which, sources told News.com, considered the ball to be in Microsoft's court since it was the one to walk away from the deal--faced the ire of its major shareholders after those deal talks failed.

"Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo," Microsoft said in a statement.

"Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo or Microsoft or with other third parties," the software giant stated.

There is no guarantee, Microsoft was careful to say, that anything may come from these discussions. The company declined to comment beyond what it issued in its statement, a Microsoft spokesman said."

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"Microsoft has acknowledged that Windows Media Centers will block users from recording TV shows at the request of a broadcaster.

"Microsoft included technologies in Windows based on rules set forth by the (Federal Communications Commission)," a Microsoft spokeswoman wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "As part of these regulations, Windows Media Center fully adheres to the flags used by broadcasters and content owners to determine how their content is distributed and consumed."

The software company was responding to questions about why some users of Windows Vista Media Center were prevented from recording NBC Universal TV shows, American Gladiator and Medium on Monday night.

The "rules," in which the spokeswoman is apparently referring to are those proposed by the FCC, which would require software and hardware makers to honor "broadcast flags." The flags are code that broadcasters can insert into the data stream of TV shows that typically require restrictions on the recording of the shows. What she didn't say is that the "rules" aren't rules at all.

The courts struck down the FCC's proposal in 2005, saying the regulator lacked the authority to tell electronics makers how to interpret the signals they receive. Since then, Microsoft and other manufacturers have retained the option of whether to honor the flags."

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"Google co-founder Sergey Brin says that anti-Semitism forced his family to emigrate to the United States in 1979 when he was a child.

In an interview with the Israeli financial publication, TheMarker.com, Brin described the job discrimination which both his parents encountered in the Soviet academic field. (Here's the full interview in Hebrew, and part of it in English.)

Brin was in Israel to visit the local Google office as well as take part in a conference organized by Israel's president, Shimon Peres. The following are excerpts from the interview:

• Without a doubt the great suffering put on my parents in Russia because of anti-Semitism was the primary reason that they left Russia. And that has had a major influence on my life.

• My family had many challenges in Russia. My father wasn't able to work in his chosen field. Everything we had in Russia, we had to leave behind and start from scratch. This gave me a different perspective on life.

• You know, we learned to make do without anything. To live on nothing. And this certainly influenced me.

• When you're a Jew, you have a background of hardship, suffering, difficulties--and to turn that into success is part of the Jewish experience.

Brin was born in Moscow in 1973. His father Mikhail was prevented from realizing his ambition to become an astronomer because the Communist party, which then was in power, prevented Jews from entering the physics department. Brin's father subsequently worked as an economic planner after receiving his Ph.D. Brin's mother, Evgenya, was employed as a researcher by the Soviet gas and oil institute."

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"NEW YORK - The Internet is routinely used when making buying decisions, but its influence is small compared with offline channels such as friends and sales personnel, a new study finds.

Sunday's report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project looked at consumer behavior in purchasing music, cell phones and homes or renting apartments. It found the Internet's role to be indirect.

"The Internet helps people eliminate irrelevant alternatives," said John Horrigan, Pew's associate director. "The Internet may influence the choice modestly but has important consequences in getting better deals and in having a more focused search process along the way."

Only about 10 percent of real estate and cell phone buyers and 7 percent of music purchasers credit the Internet with having a major impact on their decision. And only a small portion -- 22 percent of the music buyers and 12 percent of cell phone purchasers -- ultimately bought their product over the Internet."

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"TROY, N.Y. - Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in "Second Life." A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world.

But Edd is different.

His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out "Second Life" is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It's also a frontier in AI research because it's a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier.

"It's a very inexpensive way to test out our technologies right now," said Selmer Bringsjord, director of the Rensselaer Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Laboratory.

Bringsjord sees Edd as a forerunner to more sophisticated creations that could interact with people inside three-dimensional projections of settings like subway stops or city streets. He said the holographic illusions could be used to train emergency workers or solve mysteries.

But first, a virtual reality check.

Edd is not running rampant through the cyber streets of "Second Life." He goes only where Bringsjord and his graduate students place him for tests. He can answer questions like "Where are you from?" but understands only English that has previously been translated into mathematical logic."

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"BEIJING - Almost nonstop, the uncensored opinions of Chinese citizens are popping up online, sent by text and instant message across a country shaken by its worst earthquake in three decades.

"Why were most of those killed in the earthquake children?" one post asked Thursday on FanFou, a microblogging site.

"How many donations will really reach the disaster area? This is doubtful," read another.

China is now home to the world's largest number of Internet and mobile phone users, and their hunger for quake news is forcing the government to let information flow in ways it hasn't before.

A fast-moving network of text messages, instant messages and blogs has been a powerful source of firsthand accounts of the disaster, as well as pleas for help and even passionate criticism of rescue efforts.

"I don't want to use the word transparent, but it's less censored, an almost free flow of discussion," said Xiao Qiang, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the China Internet Project, which monitors and translates Chinese Web sites.

China is well known for controlling the flow of information.

"We didn't know that hundreds of thousands of lives passed away during the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 until many years after the disaster took place," sociologist Zheng Yefu said in a commentary last week in the Southern Metropolis News."

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"LONDON (Reuters) - U.S. mobile navigation device company Garmin Ltd (GRMN.O) is the mystery bidder behind a takeover approach for Britain's Raymarine Plc (RAY.L), the Sunday Telegraph reported, citing sources close to the deal.

Garmin's approach could be worth as much as 200 million pounds ($389 million), it said.

Raymarine, which makes navigation equipment for the marine market, said last month it had received an approach from an unnamed party, sending its shares rocketing.

The UK company makes a range of nautical devices including satellite navigation for boats, autopilots, satellite radio and radar systems. It is seen as an attractive target for larger players as the market for satellite and mobile navigational devices consolidates.

A number of private equity companies are also thought to be eyeing Raymarine, the Sunday Telegraph said.

Officials at Raymarine were not immediately available to comment."

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"Ricoh have released a new firmware update, version 2.03, for the GR Digital II compact digital camera. Version 2.03 fixes the following bug:

Modified the following phenomenon. A camera will not recognize the recommended flash from Sigma below.
EF-530 DG ST (SA-STTL)
EF-530 DG SUPER (SA-STTL)
EF-500 DG ST (SA-STTL)
EF-500 DG SUPER (SA-STTL)

Website: Ricoh GR Digital II Firmware Update 2.03"

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"NEW YORK - A company rooted in bringing the Internet to the masses, AOL is shifting its focus toward serving niche audiences with the launch of dozens of specialty Web sites.

The latest -- ParentDish for parents -- formally launched Friday, with The Boot for country music and The Boom Box for hip hop and R&B to follow on Tuesday.

Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, branching out in hopes of doing a better job attracting crucial advertising revenue to offset its rapidly declining Internet access business, calls the niche sites "passion points."

The sites reflect a growing sophistication of Internet users, who are spending less time at portals like AOL.com and Yahoo.com. and directly seeking specialized content at more focused sites. Examples outside AOL include Boing Boing, which keeps tabs on technology and the Internet; The Sartorialist, on street style; or Mom Logic, on parenting and being a mom.

"The consumer market is clearly fragmenting," said Bill Wilson, AOL's executive vice president for vertical programming. "We wanted to give people many front doors, not just one front door to come in."

In a fourth-floor corner office at AOL's new headquarters, once home to the grand Wanamaker department store in New York's Greenwich Village, Wilson was passionate, even hurried, as he zipped through AOL's plans to diversify its offerings."

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"SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - A deadline for Take-Two Interactive Software shareholders to agree to a buyout by video game giant Electronic Arts has passed with neither firm commenting on the takeover bid's fate.

EA took its two-billion-dollar offer directly to Take-Two shareholders after the board of directors rejected the bid, saying it undervalues the company behind blockbuster video games including the hot "Grand Theft Auto" franchise.

EA set Friday as the expiration date for its offer to buy shares of Take-Two stock for 26 dollars each. Take-Two shares were priced slightly above that amount in after-hours trading.

"There is nothing going on right now," Take-Two spokeswoman Meg Maise said when asked about the status of the bid Friday afternoon. "It is in (EA's) court."

EA did not return AFP requests for comment.

Take-Two's board refused to even discuss a takeover with EA prior to the April 29 launch of "Grand Theft Auto IV: Liberty City Stories," which tallied a record-breaking 500 million dollars in sales in its first week."

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"In late 2004, the idea of city-wide Wi-Fi networks was electric. These metro-scale Wi-Fi networks would cross the chasm of the digital divide by bringing affordable broadband to low-income parts of major cities, and broadband of any kind to marginal neighborhoods, small towns, and largely rural counties. In mid-2008, the juice has drained out; yesterday, the last of the three major independent city-wide Wi-Fi network builders, MetroFi, said they're pulling the plug. EarthLink, another of the large providers, had already given notice of their exit in August 2007, and filed suit this week to remove the equipment for their flagship Philadelphia network. (Kite, a provider mostly in the Southwest, abandoned their Wi-Fi networks starting in early 2008.)

MetroFi predates the muni-Fi movement, having being founded in the early part of the century when broadband penetration via cable and DSL was still modest in many parts of the U.S., prices were high, and current and future speeds were low and expected low. Wi-Fi could compete admirably against these wired networks, it was thought, and against the weak first wave of third-generation (3G) cellular, on price, speed, and availability.The incumbents don't stand still, and Wi-Fi, designed for interiors, didn't scale well. While it turns out to be possible to build a large-scale seamless Wi-Fi network that delivers from 1 to 4 Mbps of service outdoors to a laptop, and indoors through a $100 to $200 signal booster, it also proved true that a provider needed two to three times the number of Wi-Fi nodes across a city to achieve those speeds than was estimated when networks were largely bid out in 2005 and 2006. If you budgeted for 20 to 25 nodes per square mile and need nearly 50 of these multi-thousand-dollar transceivers, it's hard to imagine how that affects the bottom line. USI Wireless, which biult Minneapolis's network, appears to be the only firm that got the numbers and engineering to add up for them so far."

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"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - For years, video games have been blamed for turning kids into idle layabouts who only venture off the couch to fill up on potato chips and soda.

Nintendo Co Ltd (7974.OS) now aims to shatter that image with a game that aims to get players off the couch and lead them to stretch, shake and sweat their way to a healthy life.

"Wii Fit," which arrives on U.S. store shelves on Monday, is expected to draw new customers to Nintendo's wildly popular Wii video game console.

It is forecast to be the industry's latest blockbuster game after last month's "Grand Theft Auto 4," the criminal action title that racked up $500 million in global sales in one week.

"They'll sell everything they can manufacture," said Signal Hill analyst Todd Greenwald. "It extends the life cycle of the Wii a little bit and gets people to go out and buy another game from Nintendo."

The Wii has proven to be the runaway hit of the video game industry, thanks to its easy-to-learn motion-sensing controller, simple games and low price.

U.S. consumers bought 714,000 Wiis in April, nearly double the sales of Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Xbox 360 and Sony Corp's (6758.T) PlayStation 3 combined."

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"PHILADELPHIA - Former satellite TV provider EchoStar Corp. on Sunday will demonstrate its first product for cable companies at the industry's trade show: a unit that can tune in television and act as a cable modem.

The SlingModem, made by Sling Media Inc., which is owned by EchoStar, will combine modem functions with its popular Slingbox, which lets users watch broadcast, cable or satellite TV shows on any Internet-connected device such as laptops or cell phones, even when they're away from home.

For instance, it lets someone who subscribes to cable catch an HBO special on his laptop while he's on a business trip in Japan.

The unit, to be sold through cable companies, at least initially, was first announced in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

EchoStar, which recently spun off satellite TV provider Dish Network Corp. to focus on its equipment sales business, plans to unveil more cable products later in the year.

It will be EchoStar's first time to exhibit at the 2008 Cable Show in New Orleans, hosted by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association."

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"PHILADEPHIA - Cable operators are riding high heading into this year's industry trade show, which kicks off this weekend.

After a dismal 2007 in which their shares took a big pounding, cable is seeing a rebound as Wall Street put more weight on their gains in high-speed Internet and digital voice rather than focusing mainly on their traditional video services.

Year-to-date, industry leader Comcast Corp.'s shares are up 21 percent after falling 57 percent in 2007. The stock rose 8.6 percent the day that the Philadelphia-based company posted a 23 percent increase in first-quarter operating profit despite losing 57,000 basic video subscribers; its new Internet, phone and digital video subscribers has made up the difference, and more.

Time Warner Cable Inc. shares are up 10 percent so far this year, recovering from a 33 percent freefall last year, while Cablevision Systems Corp.'s stock rose 2 percent after declining 14 percent in 2007.

For the most part, the slowing economy didn't seem to take much of a bite. Cable companies added more double- and triple-play customers -- people who bought two or three bundled services at lower rates than they would have paid a la carte.

"In the face of an uncertain economy, we're growing," said Kyle McSlarrow, chief executive of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, host of the 2008 Cable Show in New Orleans."

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"It's not a typical enterprise data warehouses story, but then NYSE Euronext (NYSE), the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, is not a typical enterprise. For one thing, NYSE has not one but three warehouses, each approaching 100 terabytes. Then consider NYSE's queries, some of which interrogate more than 40 terabytes of data. The extreme data volumes and extreme query complexity led to an upgrade onto data warehouse appliances.

After a period of rampant growth and mergers with two smaller exchanges, NYSE knew its large and aging Oracle data warehouses needed replacement. After exploring alternatives in 2006, the company concluded a successful 45-day proof-of-concept project on a Netezza Performance Server (NPS) appliance in early 2007. The main warehouse for the New York Stock Exchange was migrated within two and a half months and went into production in May 2007. A second device, consolidating what had been two separate warehouses for the Chicago-based Arca Equities and Options markets, went into production in July. Yet another warehouse, one housing legacy data, will be migrated onto a third Netezza NPS.

The NYSE and Arca warehouses primarily support market surveillance, monitoring trade patterns and behaviors to ensure compliance with the rules of the exchanges, and these queries can be quite complex. "It's very possible that we could hit 40 to 50 terabytes of data in a single query," explains Steve Hirsch, chief data officer."

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"The iPhone's reach is expanding. Orange, France Telecom's flagship brand, announced that it will sell Apple's phone in additional countries in Europe, as well as the Middle East and Africa.

Orange said it will sell the iPhone in Austria, Belgium, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Jordan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Switzerland and the African countries of Ivory Coast, Jordan, Cameroon, Botswana, Madagascar, Mali, Senegal, Mauritius and Reunion.

The deal expands the list of countries where Apple has agreed to operate on a nonexclusive basis. Of the countries announced in this deal, Orange will have exclusives only in Belgium and Romania.

Numerous Deals

Earlier this month, Vodafone announced it had signed a deal to provide the iPhone in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey.

Days ago, Swisscom announced it had won the right to sell the iPhone in Switzerland. "The iPhone will be available later this year," a statement on the company's Web site simply said. The fact that the firm won't sell the phone until later in the year suggests that it will sell a yet-to-be-announced 3G version.

The Swiss newspaper Le Matin reported that the Swisscom deal is for a 3G iPhone that would offer two-way chats, mobile TV and GPS navigation. The plan also calls for Swisscom to offer "attractive" incentives and a high-end plan to include mobile video and other carrier-provided services, Le Matin said."

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"SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Jerry Yang spent months fending off Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited takeover bid. Now he may only have a few weeks to persuade the software maker to revive its last offer of $47.5 billion, or risk being fired in a shareholder mutiny led by activist investor Carl Icahn.

Spurred on by outraged shareholders, Icahn notified Yahoo Thursday that he will lead a revolt to oust Yang and the rest of the Internet company's board unless they renew negotiations with Microsoft that fell apart May 3 when the two sides couldn't agree on a price.

In a response late Thursday, Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock signaled that the Sunnyvale-based company is prepared to battle the New York financier.

Bostock criticized Icahn for having a "significant misunderstanding of the facts" about Microsoft's offer and the Yahoo board's response. He also emphasized that Yahoo remains open to a sale "if it offers our stockholders full and certain value."

To pressure Yahoo, Icahn has nominated an alternate slate of directors to replace the current board in an election scheduled July 3 at Yahoo's annual meeting. If the uprising is successful, an Icahn-led board presumably would fire Yang as CEO and try to negotiate a sale to Microsoft."

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"San Francisco - In the four months since InfoWorld asked businesses and individuals to sign a petition at SaveXP.com asking Microsoft to keep Windows XP for sale beyond the planned June 30 general end-of-sales date, more than 200,000 have signed up to add their voices. As of May 15, the count was 200,805 signatures, excluding duplicates and fake signups.

"We're pleased and a little bit amazed that so many people from throughout the world have felt so passionately about the need to keep XP on the market," said Executive Editor Galen Gruman. "We had heard grumblings throughout much of 2007 about dissatisfaction with Vista's high hardware requirements, questionable interface changes, slow performance, and incompatibilities with third-party software, but no one seemed to want to say so in public. That's changed since the petition's launch on Jan. 14."

The campaign has caused a media frenzy, with stories in most major newspapers and news Web sites, as well as in blogs and radio programs. Recently, for example, Business Week noted in a recent story on increasing enterprise adoption of the Macintosh that Windows Vista was perhaps one of the biggest stumbles in tech history. A separate report noted that large companies such as General Motors and Alaska Airlines are skipping Vista and instead waiting for the next version of Windows, code-named Windows 7. And a major tech analyst firm has warned that Microsoft's many mishaps with Vista are putting the Windows franchise in jeopardy."

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"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Embattled Yahoo Inc has struck an advertising partnership deal with WPP Group that will let WPP buy ads on Yahoo's online ad exchange, the companies said late on Thursday.

Yahoo, which recently spurned a $47.5 billion unsolicited takeover bid from Microsoft Corp only to face a proxy battle led by activist investor Carl Icahn this week, said the deal would first involve WPP units GroupM and 24/7 Real Media.

In a statement, the companies said that as part of the deal, WPP advertising agencies would, through its 24/7 Real Media arm, develop a proprietary advertising media trading platform that takes advantage of Yahoo's Right Media exchange.

Yahoo acquired Right Media last year in a bid to expand sales of the online display advertisements preferred by corporate brand marketers beyond its existing base of blue-chip clients to social network sites and other sites off Yahoo.

"More and more, we see the need for agencies and media and technology companies to work together to create a new level of value," said Mark Read, director of strategy and chief executive of the London ad conglomerate's WPP Digital unit."

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"The One Laptop Per Child Project and Microsoft plan to make both Windows and Linux available on a version of the project's XO laptop, the companies said Thursday.

The parties expect to deliver a dual-boot XO system in August or September that will have both the traditional Linux-based Sugar operating system of the XO and a low-cost student version of Windows XP, according to Kyle Austin, an OLPC representative.

OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte has referred in the past to a dual-boot XO model, but this is the first official announcement of such a system. The XO was developed by OLPC for children in developing countries. The availability of Windows on the system will give customers more choice in operating systems and let them use Windows-based educational software and tools, the parties said. Customers and partners worldwide have asked for Windows on the XO, they said.

Austin said the dual-boot system will have Sugar and Microsoft's Student Innovation Suite, a US$3 software offering that Chairman Bill Gates announced last year. Gates said the suite would include a version of Windows XP, Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, Microsoft Math 3.0, Learning Essentials 2.0 for Microsoft Office and Windows Live Mail."

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"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - U.S. sales of video game hardware and software rose 47 percent from a year earlier, as Take-Two Interactive Software Inc's "Grand Theft Auto 4" and Nintendo Co Ltd's Wii console stole the show.

The popularity of "Grand Theft Auto 4," however, failed to boost sales of Microsoft Corp's Xbox 360 and Sony Corp's PlayStation 3, which both saw unit shipments fall sharply from the previous month.

U.S. consumers bought 188,000 Xbox 360s and 187,000 PS3s in April, data from market research firm NPD showed on Thursday. That was down from 262,000 units and 257,000 units in March.

"The Easter shift from April to March this year I think had an impact on sales during the month," Lazard Capital analyst Colin Sebastian said.

"I know on the hardware side it was a little light but let's see what a month of 'GTA' sales does for those platforms as well as a month without a holiday shift," Sebastian said."

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"A federal grand jury has indicted a mother on charges relating to harassment on MySpace, which preceded a 13-year-old girl's suicide.

The indictment, returned Thursday in Los Angeles, marks the first time that a social networking site user has been prosecuted on federal charges related to accessing protected computers.

Lori Drew, 49, of O'Fallon, Mo., has been charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information to inflict emotional distress on a 13-year-old girl, Megan Meier. Because of juvenile privacy rules, the victim -- who killed herself after receiving taunts on MySpace -- is referred to in the indictment only as M.T.M.

Prosecutors said Drew posed as a teenage boy who feigned romantic interest in the victim. The "boy" later told the girl during an online chat in October 2006 that the world would be a better place without her. Less than an hour later, Meier hanged herself. She died the next day."

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"Could insecticides in pet shampoos trigger autism spectrum disorders? That's the suggestion of one of the first large-scale population-based studies to look how environmental factors and their interactions with genes contribute to the condition.

Mothers of children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were twice as likely to have reported using pet shampoos containing a class of insecticide called pyrethrins as those of healthy children, according to survey results presented Thursday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in London. The risk was greatest if the shampoo was used during the second trimester of pregnancy.

Meanwhile, another study suggests that exposure to organophosphate insecticides double the risk of developmental disorders, including autism. Organophosphates have previously been linked to Gulf War syndrome.

While many chemicals have previously been blamed for triggering autism, there have been very few rigorous studies designed to investigate the link.
Neuronal damage

To remedy this, Irva Hertz-Picciotto and her colleagues at the University of California in Davis, US, studied 333 children with ASD and 198 healthy children, and their families.

They collected blood and urine samples, as well as conducting in-depth questionnaires on medical history and any possible exposure to medications, household products or metals that could have occurred around the time of conception, during pregnancy, or after birth. They also collected information on lifestyle, and whether the children were breast-fed, for example."

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"LOL, OMG and TTYL: parents and teachers worry that teenagers' use of these and other forms of online shorthand is harming their language skills. Perhaps they will take comfort from a study suggesting that instant messaging (IM) actually represents "an expansive new linguistic renaissance".
"Instant messaging represents an expansive new linguistic renaissance"

Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis at the University of Toronto, Canada, say teenagers risk the disapproval of their elders if they use slang, and the scorn of their friends if they sound too buttoned-up. But instant messaging allows them to deploy a "robust mix" of colloquial and formal language. In a paper to be published in the spring 2008 issue of American Speech, the researchers argue that far from ruining teenagers' ability to communicate, IM lets teenagers show off what they can do with language.

"IM is interactive discourse among friends that is conducive to informal language," says Denis, "but at the same time, it is a written interface which tends to be more formal than speech."

He and Tagliamonte analysed more than a million words of IM communications and a quarter of a million spoken words produced by 72 people aged between 15 and 20. They found that although IM shared some of the patterns used in speech, its vocabulary and grammar tended to be relatively conservative. For example, teenagers are more likely to use the phrase "He was like, 'What's up?'" than "He said, 'What's up?'" when speaking - but the opposite is true when they are instant-messaging. This supports the idea that IM represents a hybrid form of communication."

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"ALEXANDRIA, Va. - A one-time dot-com billionaire was convicted Thursday of stock fraud and obstruction of justice after a court finding that he deceived investors in his Las Vegas software company.

Charles E. "Junior" Johnson was chief executive of PurchasePro Inc., a software company that went bankrupt as the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.

U.S. District Judge Walter Kelley found Johnson guilty on all counts after concluding he schemed to falsely inflate his company's revenue in the first three months of 2001.

The case has been under investigation for six years and resulted in convictions of six other PurchasePro executives.

Two midlevel executives at AOL, which had a marketing partnership with PurchasePro, were acquitted at an earlier trial.

Johnson compounded his problems by trying to alter documents used at his trial, which resulted in an additional charge of obstruction of justice.

Johnson's attorney, Yale Galanter, said he found it troubling that the judge relied in his ruling on testimony from other PurchasePro executives who had acknowledged lying to investigators."

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"A server problem at the U.S. National Security Agency has knocked the secretive intelligence agency off the Internet.

The nsa.gov Web site was unresponsive at 7 a.m. Pacific time Thursday and continued to be unavailable throughout the morning for Internet users.

The Web site was unreachable because of a problem with the NSA's DNS (Domain Name System) servers, said Danny McPherson, chief research officer with Arbor Networks. DNS servers are used to translate things like the Web addresses typed into machine-readable Internet Protocol addresses that computers use to find each other on the Internet.

The agency's two authoritative DNS servers were unreachable Thursday morning, McPherson said.

Because this DNS information is sometimes cached by Internet service providers, the NSA would still be temporarily reachable by some users, but unless the problem is fixed, NSA servers will be knocked completely off-line. That means that e-mail sent to the agency will not be delivered, and in some cases, e-mail being sent by the NSA would not get through.

"We are aware of the situation and our techs are working on it," a NSA spokeswoman said at 9:45 a.m. PT. She declined to identify herself."

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"FRANKFURT, Germany - Deutsche Telekom chief executive Rene Obermann said Thursday the company has so far sold more than 100,000 of Apple Inc.'s iPhones since the device's November debut in Germany.

At Telekom's annual general meeting in Cologne, Obermann said the iPhone was the most popular multimedia device sold by the company's T-Mobile cell phone division.

IPhone customers use the Internet 30 times more on average than other mobile telephone customers and that one-third of iPhone customers bought the most expensive service plans, Obermann said.

Company spokesman Alexander von Schmettow declined to specify the sales figure beyond 100,000 or forecast future sales but said the iPhone was "meeting expectations.""

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"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Nintendo is finally bringing original downloadable games to its popular Wii video game console.

Nintendo's small white box is the smash hit of the video game industry, thanks to its easy-to-grasp controls and simple games that appeal to a broader audience.

But the Wii has lagged Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 in offering original games that can be downloaded right from the couch for as little as $5.

That has changed this week with the U.S. launch of WiiWare, a service that Nintendo says lets game makers experiment with quirky ideas that can be brought to fruition for a fraction of the cost of a regular title.

"The possibilities are great -- many of the most addictive and enjoyable games on Xbox 360 and PS3 are turning out to be the little downloads made by fledgling studios, and giving the power of the Wii controller set to these hungry, creative types will hopefully take the indie gaming movement further," video game news site IGN said earlier this year.

After debuting in Japan earlier this year, the service launched in the United States on Monday, with six new titles ranging from the familiar to the off-beat.

For example, one game is a simulation set in the familiar "Final Fantasy" franchise, while another is "LostWinds," a critically acclaimed adventure in which players use gusts of wind to explore a world and fight enemies."

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"NEW YORK - Cox Communications appears to be interfering with file-sharing by its Internet subscribers in the same manner that has landed Comcast Corp. in hot water with regulators, according to research obtained by The Associated Press.

A study based on the participation of 8,175 Internet users around the world found conclusive signs of blocked file-sharing connections only at three Internet service providers: Comcast and Cox in the U.S. and StarHub in Singapore.

Of the 788 Comcast subscribers who participated in the study, 491, or 62 percent, had their connections blocked. At Cox, 82 out of 151 subscribers, or 54 percent, were blocked, according to Krishna Gummadi at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbruecken, Germany.

Philadelphia-based Comcast is the country's second-largest ISP, with 14.1 million subscribers. Atlanta-based Cox Communications is the fourth-largest, with 3.8 million. It is part of privately held Cox Enterprises Inc.

Comcast's practice of interfering with traffic was brought to light by user reports last year and confirmed by an AP investigation in October.

Consumer advocate groups and legal scholars criticized the interference, saying that letting an ISP selectively block some connections makes it a gatekeeper to the Internet. Their complaints prompted the Federal Communications Commission to launch an investigation, which is ongoing."

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