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Issue no. 21, 2005 Published: Jul 01, 2005
US to retain control of internet domain names
AMD Japan seeks $55m in damages from Intel Japan
EU weighs plan to help online music market
Vodafone to link mobile phones to MSN Messenger
Norway goes open source
Quantum computing faces fundamental obstacle
HP cites progress on quantum computer
Nano-levers point to futuristic gadgets
New calculator makes solving tricky sums easy
Smart traffic forecast offers seven-day predictions
DVD+R storage boosted by 80 per cent
Plastic casts designed to seek out alien life
Smart eyewear for keen swimmers

US to retain control of internet domain names
The Bush administration announced Thursday that the US government will not hand over control of the internet to any other organisation, a surprise move that could presage an international flap. At the moment, the US government maintains control of the internet's 'root' - the master file that lists what top-level domains are authorised - but has indicated in the past that it would transfer that responsibility to the internet oversight body ICANN. The new principles say the US government will 'maintain its historic role in authorising changes or modifications to the authoritative root zone file'. In addition, the US government will continue to maintain 'oversight' over ICANN and prevent its 'focus' from straying from technical coordination. The announcement hints that the Bush administration would like to keep ICANN on a short leash. The announcement also represents an effective snub to a United Nations process that is set to culminate in a summit in Tunisia in November. One gripe of the summit participants has been that poorer nations should have more say in the way the internet is operated.
CNET News Jun 30, 2005	back to top

AMD Japan seeks $55m in damages from Intel Japan
AMD's Japan unit said Thursday that it has filed two lawsuits against Intel's Japanese unit for $55m in damages. AMD claims Intel violated Japan's antitrust laws, and says Intel's trading practices have caused damage to AMD. In March, Japan's Fair Trade Commission ruled that Intel's Japan unit was violating antitrust laws in the methods it used to sell its computer chips. The government anti-monopoly body ordered the company to stop those practices. AMD in Japan said the lawsuit is part of AMD's broader antitrust lawsuit against Intel. AMD earlier this week filed a broad antitrust suit against Intel in the US, accusing its rival of using illegal inducements and coercion to dissuade companies from buying AMD's computer chips. That lawsuit alleges that Intel has engaged in a 'relentless' global campaign to maintain a monopoly over microprocessors.
Silicon Valley / AP Jun 30, 2005	back to top

EU weighs plan to help online music market
A European Union initiative to foster EU-wide licensing of online music use and royalty collection is due in early July to help spur jobs and creativity, a source close to the situation said on Thursday. At present, anyone who wants to open an online store for music has to run it country by country by approaching the royalty collector in each member state. This complexity can put people off launching new online services because of the bureaucratic maze they must navigate. A study for the European Commission of how to create an EU-wide market for online music venues such as iTunes favours allowing organisations to offer a royalty collection service across the 25 member states, the source said. The paper also favours giving commercial users of music a one-stop shop to buy a single license that would be valid across the EU. The Commission is expected to start a public consultation later this month with a formal proposal likely in the autumn, the source added.
Reuters Jun 30, 2005	back to top

Vodafone to link mobile phones to MSN Messenger
Vodafone and Microsoft have partnered to connect Vodafone's mobile phone customers with Microsoft's instant messaging service, the companies announced Thursday. The service will bring together more than 165 million customers of Microsoft's MSN Messenger and nearly 155 million Vodafone customers who will be able to see each other online and exchange instant messages from their PCs to mobile phones and vice versa. It is slated to go live in several European markets before the end of the year. Unlike free PC-to-PC instant messaging, the PC-to-mobile phone service will have a price, which the companies have not yet disclosed. Vodafone customers will pay for the instant messaging service either through their monthly bill or prepayment, while MSN Messenger customers will be able to pay through packages available in connection with MSN Messengers.
Infoworld / IDG Jun 30, 2005	back to top

Norway goes open source
The Norwegian Minister of Modernisation, Morten Andreas Meyer, has promised that his government will stop using proprietary software and transfer to open source. Speaking at the eNorge 2009 conference Meyer outlined an initiative to digitise government relations. This includes a commitment that all public institutions will plan the introduction of open source systems by next year. He also said that every citizen would be given their own home page on the government's servers to make dealing with the state easier. 'Proprietary formats will no longer be acceptable in communication between citizens and government,' explained Meyer. While he did not mention Microsoft by name, Meyer did make references to 'the spreadsheet almost everyone uses' and commented that this would be the last time he made a presentation using the software.
VNUnet UK Jun 28, 2005	back to top

Quantum computing faces fundamental obstacle
Attempts to build quantum computers could run up against a fundamental limit on how long useful information can persist inside them. Exceed the limit and information leaks away, making computation impossible. A quantum computer manipulates stored information in qubits. Because a qubit can be in two states at the same time, and can be entangled with other qubits, a quantum computer can carry out multiple calculations simultaneously. But during a computation the qubits have to be isolated from their environment to prevent 'decoherence' and spoil the calculations. Coherence is harder to maintain in larger qubits and therefore researchers are pursuing ways of making microscopic qubits. But physicists of Leiden University in the Netherlands have proven that there is a universal decoherence rate for qubits, which means that quantum information will inevitably be lost after a certain time, even without any external disturbance. Rather than remaining in a superposition of two states, a qubit will spontaneously collapse into one state or another. Moreover, the time limit for decoherence seems to grow shorter as systems get smaller.
New Scientist / Physical Review Letters Jun 26, 2005	back to top

HP cites progress on quantum computer
Scientists at Hewlett-Packard said Thursday that they had developed a new strategy for designing a quantum computer composed of switches of light beams that could be vastly more powerful than today's digital electronic computers, which are constructed from transistors. The new strategy was outlined in an article HP researchers published in the May issue of The New Journal of Physics. On Thursday the company said it would receive $10m from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon, known as Darpa, to design a prototype of the technology described by the researchers. The company said it planned to contribute about $7.5m to the project. The researchers said their idea was a potentially important advance because it may make it possible to assemble a quantum computing system out of very large numbers of light switches. The HP paper explores the idea of using laser pulses to force the interaction of photons, which can contain quantum information.
CNET News / The New York Times Jun 30, 2005	back to top

Nano-levers point to futuristic gadgets
Researchers at Cavendish Kinetics in the Netherlands have demonstrated that miniscule mechanical switches can be used to store data using less power than existing technologies and with greater reliability. 'Nanomech memory' stores data using thousands of electro-mechanical switches that are toggled up or down to represent either a one or zero as a binary bit. Each switch is a few microns long and less than a micron wide. Introducing a miniscule voltage to an electrode below a lever causes it to bend forwards until it makes contact. Once flipped, a lever will maintain its position, even when the voltage is switched off. This can be reversed by applying voltage to an electrode on the other side of the lever. Repeating the feat across thousands of switches makes it possible to store something as complex as a computer program in Nanomech memory. Cavendish Kinetics claims Nanomech memory can read and write data using 100 times less power than existing computer memory, and works up to 1,000 times faster. It is also much more resilient to both temperature and radiation, the company claims.
New Scientist Jun 24, 2005	back to top

New calculator makes solving tricky sums easy
A novel calculator interface makes solving tricky sums easy, as users can simply write them onto a screen and then watch the answer appear. The device could easily be incorporated into stylus-controlled handheld computer and its inventors from the University of Swansea, UK, say it reduces the number of errors that users make. This is because the interface does away with the awkward syntax of conventional button-based calculators. In contrast, calculations on the new interface are written exactly as they would be on paper. The system also allows a wider range of calculations to be made in a faster and more flexible way. To do this it uses custom-built character recognition software that works out the relationships between characters and symbols by looking at their relative positions. The calculator can do more than most standard calculators. For example, it can handle complex numbers, mathematics involving both real and imaginary numbers.
New Scientist Jun 27, 2005	back to top

Smart traffic forecast offers seven-day predictions
A traffic forecasting system capable of predicting traffic conditions seven days in advance has gone live to the public in California. Alongside the weather forecast, viewers of KXTV News 10 in Sacramento can now get 3D animations of their local road network, showing not only where the gridlock is but also where it is likely to be. 'Beat-the-Traffic' is the first public traffic forecasting system that combines real-time traffic density and speed with historical trends on major routes. The level of congestion depends largely on the time of day and day of week, and often patterns are repeated through the seasons. But the system can also use past data on the effect of accidents to predict what will happen after a new one occurs. The system, developed by Triangle Software, takes real-time sensor information from major routes and junctions as its inputs. In addition it uses alerts on traffic related weather conditions, road incident alerts, road works and even some calendar events such as sporting events, in order to make its predictions.
New Scientist Jun 29, 2005	back to top

DVD+R storage boosted by 80 per cent
Maxell this week claimed to have boosted the capacity of recordable DVD discs by 80 per cent with its latest double-layer DVD+R media, which can store up to 8.5GB of data on a single side. According to the company, one of its newly developed double-layer DVD+R discs will hold up to four hours of DVD-quality video, 16 hours of VHS-quality video, one hour of high-definition video, or more than four million pages of text. Maxell said that its DVD+R is currently the largest capacity compatible DVD format available for data backup and archival storage. It relies on double-layer recording technology, known as DVD+R 9. The technology is already supported by next-generation double-layer drives from several leading hardware vendors.
VNUnet UK Jun 30, 2005	back to top

Plastic casts designed to seek out alien life
A laboratory weighing no more than a toaster is being developed by British scientists to search for life on other planets. The system aims to use resilient plastic casts that can selectively recognise different organic molecules to pinpoint traces of organic carbon. The team hope to secure a place for their device on board the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission, scheduled for launch in 2009. The Specific Molecular Identification of Life Experiment (SMILE) is being designed to search for molecules thought to indicate life (biomarkers). These range from complex hydrocarbons to amino acids and nucleic acids related to DNA. The team hopes to find such molecules using an array of patches, each a fraction of a millimetre across, which are selectively sticky for just one biomarker. These patches could be made out of plastic films with molecule-sized cavities in their surface of just the right shape to accommodate a particular biomarker. Cavities such as this can be prepared by casting a polymer around a template biomarker.
Nature Jun 24, 2005	back to top

Smart eyewear for keen swimmers
Smart goggles that help swimmers log lengths have been designed by a UK engineering student. The Inview goggles display a lap count and time elapsed on their lenses so swimmers can track their progress. The goggles use an in-built compass that orients itself when a swimmer first enters the pool. It spots when swimmers complete lengths and will let swimmers concentrate on improving their strokes rather than count laps. Many keen swimmers rely on a wristwatch or wall-mounted pace clock to keep track of lap times but both change the way that people swim. Many swimmers also find it difficult to keep track of how many lengths they had swum.
BBC News Jun 28, 2005	back to top