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Issue no. 24, 2004 Published: Jul 02, 2004
Microsoft in appeals court victory
EU: Microsoft punishment on hold
Europe sees nano-electronics as 'future oil'
Pop-up program reads keystrokes, steals banking passwords
Television watching may hasten puberty
Hybrid nano-wires provide link to silicon
Entanglement breaks new record
Mobiles 'could cut male fertility'
Breakthrough boosts digital camera quality
Paper promises better e-paper
Could laptops run on spinach?
Bad driving the secret to traffic forecasts
Webcam lets users eyeball others
Gadget may help sleepers choose dreams

Microsoft in appeals court victory
Microsoft on Wednesday scored a big victory when an appeals court upheld the Justice department's landmark 2002 settlement with the company. The state of Massachusetts last year appealed the settlement, calling it an 'ineffective' remedy for preventing anti-competitive behaviour. But the Washington DC appeals court on Wednesday rejected that argument, calling the agreement within the public interest. Microsoft was found guilty in 2000 of engaging in anti-competitive practices by maintaining a monopoly in personal computer operating systems. In 2002, the court approved the remedy settlement that Microsoft agreed with nine states and the Justice department. But Massachusetts refused to join the settlement. The settlement required Microsoft to allow vendors to hide its 'middleware' products, such as internet browsers and multimedia players, and replace them with rivals' applications. But Massachusetts argued the company should remove the software code for the hidden programmes. Microsoft contested that such a demand would damage their product.
Financial Times Jul 01, 2004	back to top

EU: Microsoft punishment on hold
The European Commission has temporarily suspended an order requiring Microsoft to begin to offer a version of Windows without a media player this week. The decision gives a Luxembourg court time to sort out the case without feeling pressure to reach an immediate decision. Microsoft has filed a 100-page appeal before asking the court to annul the European Commission's €497m fine and media player requirement. The Court of First Instance, Europe's second-highest judicial body, is expected to hold a hearing on Microsoft's request within the next two months. The Commission's 24 March decision gave Microsoft 90 days to offer an operating system without the media player included and 120 days to begin sharing proprietary information with its competitors regarding its server software.
Silicon.com / CNET News Jun 28, 2004	back to top

Europe sees nano-electronics as 'future oil'
A group of Europe-based technology companies and research organisations has called on the European Commission to co-ordinate massive investment in the transition from micro to nano-scale electronics. The group, which includes representatives from Nokia, AMD, Philips, IBM and Ericsson presented the report on Thursday to Erkki Liikanen, Commissioner for Enterprise and Information Society, and his colleague Philippe Busquin, European Research Commissioner. It calls for investment of at least €6bn per year to bolster Europe's bid to lead the world in the sector it says will be 'the oil of the future economy'. The Commission already plans to launch the European Nano-electronics Initiative Advisory Council (ENIAC), which will be a public-private partnership responsible for drawing up a strategic research agenda for nano-electronics in Europe, and implementing it.
The Register Jun 30, 2004	back to top

Pop-up program reads keystrokes, steals banking passwords
A malicious program that installs itself through a pop-up can read keystrokes and steal passwords when victims visit any of nearly 50 targeted banking sites, security researchers warned on Tuesday. The targeted sites include major financial institutions, such as Citibank, Barclays Bank and Deutsche Bank, said researcher Marcus Sachs, director of the Internet Storm Center, a site that monitors network threats. Even though all financial sites use encryption built into the browser to protect log-in data, the Trojan horse program can capture the information before it gets encrypted by the browser software. Researchers at the Internet Storm Center studied the Trojan horse file, called 'img1big.gif'. They reverse-engineered the program and discovered that it targeted a long list of banks and attempted to steal the account information of those institutions' customers. Once the Trojan horse captures financial information, it encrypts the data by using a program hosted on an internet server and sends the data back to the attackers, who appear to be in South America.
ZDNet Jun 29, 2004	back to top

Television watching may hasten puberty
Girls nowadays are reaching puberty much earlier than in the 1950s. One reason is due to their average increase in weight; but another may be due to reduced levels of melatonin, researchers at the University of Florence suggest. They found that children who watch a lot of TV produce less melatonin. The hormone has been linked to timing of puberty. The researchers studied 74 children aged between six and 12 years old, who normally watched an average three hours of TV in the evening. The youngsters were encouraged to watch more TV than usual for a week preceding the study. During the subsequent seven-day experiment, the children were not allowed to watch TV and their families were also asked to reduce the use of other sources of artificial light. At the end of the week, the children's melatonin levels had risen by an average of 30 per cent. The effect was most pronounced in the youngest children.
New Scientist Jun 28, 2004	back to top

Hybrid nano-wires provide link to silicon
Nanoscale electronic components that could be plugged into conventional computer circuits have been developed for the first time by researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They have developed highly conductive nanowires by blending silicon and nickel together. The researchers coated tiny silicon wires measuring 20 nanometres in diameter with the metal nickel before heating them to 550°C to blend the two elements together. After etching away excess metal, they then tested the electronic properties of the resulting nickel silicide wires. They were found to have an extremely high conductivity, making them very promising for use as electronic components. Furthermore, by coating only part of the wire, the process could be used to make wires that were part silicon and part nickel-silicon, providing a way to interface with existing silicon electronics.
New Scientist / Nature Jun 30, 2004	back to top

Entanglement breaks new record
For the first time, physicists have succeeded in entangling five photons, which is the minimum number needed for universal error correction in quantum computation. Moreover, the same team has demonstrated a process called 'open-destination teleportation' for the first time. The results represent a major breakthrough in efforts to exploit the laws of quantum mechanics in quantum information processing. The researchers began by producing a high intensity and ultra-stable source of entangled photons. They used two entangled pairs of photons to generate a four-photon entangled state, which they then combined with a single-photon state. They were able to produce a five-photon entangled state by detecting the coincidence of five photons. To demonstrate open-destination teleportation, the researchers first teleported the unknown quantum state of a single photon onto a superposition of three photons. They were then able to read out this teleported state at any one of the three photons by performing a measurement on the other two photons.
PhysicsWeb Jun 30, 2004	back to top

Mobiles 'could cut male fertility'
Carrying a mobile phone could significantly affect a man's fertility, scientists from the University of Szeged, Hungary, have suggested. The radiation could cut the number of sperm a man has by a third, the researchers say. The research, presented to the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) meeting in Berlin, studied over 200 men. The men who had their phone on standby throughout the day had about a third less sperm than those who did not. Of the remaining sperm, high numbers were found to be swimming abnormally, reducing the chances of fertilisation. The researchers say their findings suggest that mobiles do have a 'negative effect' on male sperm and fertility. But other experts said the Hungarian study did not allow for other factors which could have affected the men's fertility.
BBC News Jun 27, 2004	back to top

Breakthrough boosts digital camera quality
A US company this week unveiled digital camera technology that it claims gives picture quality that is 'just like film'. Digital imaging firm Foveon said its F19 sensor, a 1/1.8in 4.5megapixel CMOS direct image sensor which incorporates the company's X3 stacked-pixel technology, captures colour in three layers. According to Foveon, its X3 direct image sensor captures red, green and blue light at every pixel location and is the first to make use of silicon's inherent colour separation property. The company said the X3 technology's stacked-pixel design eliminates the need for colour interpolation and blur filters. The Foveon X3 F19 direct image sensor will be included in the Polaroid x530 consumer digital camera, available this September in the US.
VNUnet UK Jun 25, 2004	back to top

Paper promises better e-paper
Researchers from Korea Electronics Technology Institute (KETI) have produced electronic paper made from ordinary paper coated with thin layers of plastic electronics. Paper has the advantage of being light, inexpensive and thermally and mechanically stable during processing. Their method could be used to make roll-up displays of all types, including electronic paper, electronic maps, and advertising displays. The researchers made the device by coating a sheet of inkjet paper with the plastic parylene to protect the paper from moisture and provide a uniform surface, then applying a second layer of parylene followed by layers of nickel, three types of organic material and a metal top layer. The top layer is semi-transparent, transmitting more than 75 per cent of the light generated beneath it to provide a maximum brightness of 417 candelas per square metre. Computer display brightness values typically range from 150 to 2,000 candelas per square metre. The prototype device has emitting areas of 10 by 2 millimetres and worked while rolled around a pen with a diameter of 8 millimetres.
Technology Research News Jun 30, 2004	back to top

Could laptops run on spinach?
Researchers at MIT have made electrical cells that are powered by plant proteins. The biologically based solar cells, which convert light into electrical energy, could one day be used to coat and power laptops, providing a portable source of green energy. The team isolated photosynthetic proteins from spinach and preserved them by mixing them with peptide surfactants. The protective molecules form a shield around the energy-producing proteins, fooling them into thinking that they are still part of the plant. The proteins were layered on to a thin gold film, attached to a sheet of transparent, electrically conducting metal, and then covered with a top layer of organic, conducting material. When light is shone on to the unlikely sandwich, the proteins spit out electrons, which pass into the lower layer in the form of an electric current. The prototype can generate current for up to 21 days. So alternatives that last longer are needed.
Nature / Nano Letters Jun 28, 2004	back to top

Bad driving the secret to traffic forecasts
A traffic simulation system is helping drivers by predicting jams on Germany's autobahn network up to an hour before they happen. When engineers model the way road traffic flows they break the traffic down into three categories: freely flowing, jammed, and an intermediate state called synchronised flow in which dense traffic moves in unison. But this synchronised flow is unstable. One car pulling into another lane and forcing the driver behind to brake hard is enough to start traffic bunching up. Failure to predict this 'pinch effect' has stymied past attempts to model traffic flow. Now researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, have developed a computer model that successfully reproduces the pinch effect. The key is to be realistic about driver behaviour - 'aggressive' or 'defensive'. And where previous models have simplified the way cars move, the new model is more sophisticated. The result is a software model that combines realistic driver behaviour with realistic physics.
New Scientist Jun 30, 2004	back to top

Webcam lets users eyeball others
Instant messaging could get a lot more interesting if webcam technology by Microsoft gets the go-ahead. i2i, in development at Microsoft Research labs, Cambridge UK, is a two-camera system which follows a person's movement. It uses specially-developed algorithms to fuse what each camera sees to create an accurate stereo 'cyclopean' image. This means it looks as if users are looking each other in the eye. Recent research has revealed that more than 18.5 million people are using webcams while they use instant messaging (IM), according to Microsoft. But the problem has always been that users appear to be looking at something other than the person they are chatting with. The biggest challenge for the researchers was working out how the visual brain works; how it sorts out colours, distances and shapes, and then creates models of what the eye sees. The stereo algorithm created by the researchers, makes it possible to reconstruct 3D geometry in real-time and accurately on a standard computer. The system can also generate background images so that users can pretend they are somewhere else.
BBC News Jun 30, 2004	back to top

Gadget may help sleepers choose dreams
Ever wished you could decide what to dream at night? Tokyo-based Takara says its 'Dream Workshop' stand can be programmed to help sleepers choose what to dream. While preparing for bed, the user mounts a photograph on the device of who should appear in the dream, selects music appropriate to the mood and records key word prompts. Placed near the bedside, the dream-maker emits a special white light, relaxing music and a fragrance to help the person nod off. Several hours later, it plays back the recorded word prompts, timed to coincide with the part of the sleep cycle when dreams most often occur. It then helps coax the sleeper gently out of sleep with more light and music so that the dreams are not forgotten. In a study conducted on a group of men and women between the ages of 20-40, the device had a success rate of 22 per cent in inducing dreams in which one of the prompt words appeared.
Silicon Valley / Yomiuri Shimbun Jun 30, 2004	back to top