It said it would take the action against marketing firm USocial unless it stopped violating Facebook's rights.

It also wanted USocial to stop helping members break the site's terms and conditions, specifically letting people profit from their profile.

In response, USocial agreed to a change in its practices but would not shut down its service.

Facebook sent Cease and Desist letters to USocial claiming that the way the marketing firm operates violates its rights by sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, getting login names and by accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm.

Customers of USocial use it to boost follower and friend numbers on social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

On micro-blogging site Twitter, followers can be bought in blocks starting at £53 for 1,000. The biggest block USocial is selling is 100,000 people.

USocial defended itself against Facebook's claims, saying that it did not spam users or use web tools to gather information about profiles.

However, in response to the legal letters, USocial said it would delete the login information it had collected and broadly stop offering to sell Facebook friends. It also put a notice on its site saying it was not affiliated with Facebook.

However, it said, there was "possibility" that it would resell the service in the future. If it was to re-start the service it said it would let Facebook know beforehand.

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The e-mail system of one of the world's leading climate research units has been breached by hackers.

E-mails reportedly from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), including personal exchanges, appeared on the internet on Thursday.

A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission.

An investigation was underway and the police had been informed, he added.

"We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites," the spokesman stated.

"Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.

"This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation.

"We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved the police in this enquiry."

Researchers at CRU, one of the world's leading research bodies on natural and human-induced climate change, played a key role in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which is considered to be the most authoritative report of its kind.

'Inside information'

Graham Cluley, a computer security expert, suggested that December's key climate summit in Copenhagen, which has made headlines around the world, could have increased the university's profile as a possible target among hackers.

"There are passionate opinions on both sides of the climate debate and there will be people trying to knock down the other side," Mr Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, told BBC News.

"If they feel that they can gather inside information on what the other side is up to, then they may feel that is ammunition for their counterargument."

Mr Cluley added that universities were vulnerable to attacks by hackers because so many people required access to IT systems.

"You do need proper security in place; you need to be careful regarding communications and make sure your systems are secure.

"I trust that they will now be looking at the systems, and investigating how this happened and ensuring that something like this does not happen again."

Courtsey : BBC News

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The future of computing may depend on embracing the chaos that defines human thinking.

Kwabena Boahen’s love affair with digital computers began and ended in 1981, when he was 16.

Boahen lived outside the city of Accra in the West African nation of Ghana. His family’s sprawling block house stood in a quiet field of mango and banana trees. One afternoon Boahen’s father rolled down the driveway with a surprise in the trunk of his Peugeot: a RadioShack TRS-80—the family’s first computer—purchased in England.

Young Boahen parked the machine at a desk on the porch, where he usually dismantled radios and built air guns out of PVC pipe. He plugged the computer into a TV set to provide a screen and a cassette recorder so he could store programs on tapes, and soon he was programming it to play Ping-Pong. But as he read about the electronics that made it and all other digital computers work, he soured on the toy.

Moving the Ping-Pong ball just one pixel across the screen required thousands of 1s and 0s, generated by transistors in the computer’s processor that were switching open and shut 2.5 million times per second. Boahen had expected to find elegance at the heart of his new computer. Instead he found a Lilliputian bureaucracy of binary code. “I was totally disgusted,” he recalls. “It was so brute force.” That disillusionment inspired a dream of a better solution, a vision that would eventually guide his career.

Boahen has since crossed the Atlantic Ocean and become a prominent scientist at Stanford University in California. There he is working to create a computer that will fulfill his boyhood vision—a new kind of computer, based not on the regimented order of traditional silicon chips but on the organized chaos of the human brain. Designing this machine will mean rejecting everything that we have learned over the past 50 years about building computers. But it might be exactly what we need to keep the information revolution going for another 50.

The human brain runs on only about 20 watts of power, equal to the dim light behind the pickle jar in your refrigerator. By contrast, the computer on your desk consumes a million times as much energy per calculation. If you wanted to build a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain, it would require 10 to 20 megawatts of electricity. “Ten megawatts is a small hydroelectric plant,” Boahen says dismissively. “We should work on miniaturizing hydroelectric plants so we can put them on the backs of robots.” You would encounter similar problems if you tried to build a medical implant to replace just 1 percent of the neurons in the brain, for use in stroke patients. That implant would consume as much electricity as 200 households and dissipate as much heat as the engine in a Porsche Boxster.

“Energy efficiency isn’t just a matter of elegance. It fundamentally limits what we can do with computers,” Boahen says. Despite the amazing progress in electronics technology—today’s transistors are 1/100,000 the size that they were a half century ago, and computer chips are 10 million times faster—we still have not made meaningful progress on the energy front. And if we do not, we can forget about truly intelligent humanlike machines and all the other dreams of radically more powerful computers.

Getting there, Boahen realized years ago, will require rethinking the fundamental balance between energy, information, and noise. We encounter the trade-offs this involves every time we strain to hear someone speaking through a crackly cell phone connection. We react instinctively by barking more loudly into the phone, trying to overwhelm the static by projecting a stronger signal. Digital computers operate with almost zero noise, but operating at this level of precision consumes a huge amount of power—and therein lies the downfall of modern computing.

In the palm of his hand, Boahen flashes a tiny, iridescent square, a token of his progress in solving that problem. This silicon wafer provides the basis for a new neural supercomputer, called Neurogrid, that he has nearly finished building. The wafer is etched with millions of transistors like the ones in your PC. But beneath that veneer of familiarity hides a radical rethinking of the way engineers do business.

Traditional digital computers depend on millions of transistors opening and closing with near perfection, making an error less than once per 1 trillion times. It is impressive that our computers are so accurate—but that accuracy is a house of cards. A single transistor accidentally flipping can crash a computer or shift a decimal point in your bank account. Engineers ensure that the millions of transistors on a chip behave reliably by slamming them with high voltages—essentially, pumping up the difference between a 1 and a 0 so that random variations in voltage are less likely to make one look like the other. That is a big reason why computers are such power hogs.

Radically improving that efficiency, Boahen says, will involve trade-offs that would horrify a chip designer. Forget about infinitesimal error rates like one in a trillion; the transistors in Neurogrid will crackle with noise, misfiring at rates as high as 1 in 10. “Nobody knows how we’re going to compute with that,” Boahen admits. “The only thing that computes with this kind of crap is the brain.”

It sounds cockamamy, but it is true. Scientists have found that the brain’s 100 billion neurons are surprisingly unreliable. Their synapses fail to fire 30 percent to 90 percent of the time. Yet somehow the brain works. Some scientists even see neural noise as the key to human creativity. Boahen and a small group of scientists around the world hope to copy the brain’s noisy calculations and spawn a new era of energy-efficient, intelligent computing. Neurogrid is the test to see if this approach can succeed.

Most modern supercomputers are the size of a refrigerator and devour $100,000 to $1 million of electricity per year. Boahen’s Neurogrid will fit in a briefcase, run on the equivalent of a few D batteries, and yet, if all goes well, come close to keeping up with these Goliaths.

The problem of computing with noise first occurred to a young neuro­scientist named Simon Laughlin three decades ago. Laughlin, then at the Australian National University in Canberra, spent much of 1975 sitting in a black-walled, windowless laboratory with the lights off. The darkness allowed him to study the retinas of blowflies captured from Dumpsters around campus. In hundreds of experiments he glued a living fly to a special plastic platform under a microscope, sunk a wisp-thin electrode into its honeycombed eye, and recorded how its retina responded to beams of light. Laughlin would begin recording at noon and finish after midnight. As he sat in the gloomy lab, watching neural signals dance in green light across an oscilloscope, he noticed something strange.

Each fly neuron’s response to constant light jittered up and down from one milli­second to the next. Those fluctuations showed up at every step in the neurons’ functioning, from the unreliable absorption of light by pigment molecules to the sporadic opening of electricity-conducting proteins called ion channels on the neurons’ surfaces. “I began to realize that noise placed a fundamental limit on the ability of neurons to code information,” Laughlin says.

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You've probably heard of the concept of a space elevator, climbing a 22,000 mile long cable that's attached to a satellite in geostationary orbit over the Earth's equator. Sounds crazy, but the concept is edging ever closer toward reality.

NASA is offering a first prize of $1.1 million to anyone who can create a space elevator that climbs a kilometer at an average rate of 5 meters per second. No one's done that yet, but the second-place prize of $900,000 was just won by a company called LaserMotive, whose climber shimmied up a kilometer-long cable at 2 meters per second. It's powered by a stationary laser on the ground, pointing up to a target on the craft, providing enough power for it to lift.

There's still a long way to go, though. LaserMotive and two other teams — the Kansas City Space Pirates and the University of Saskatchewan Space Design Team — are all making progress toward winning first prize. Eventually, though, somebody has to figure out how to make a cable light enough and strong enough to span that 22,000 mile distance. Insert miracle here.

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Nokia Siemens Networks

Part of the cuts will involve a major headcount reduction of up to nine per cent of the company's 64,000 employees, roughly 5,700 workers, through a " global personnel review".

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The cuts follow the telecoms supplier's first quarterly loss since it began reporting its financial performance. The company made a profit of €1.1bn (£980m) a year ago, but has since lost €559m (£500m).

The announcement was made by Rajeev Suri, who took over the role of chief executive at the firm last month.

Nokia Siemens said that it will provide further details related to its intended actions when the review and planning process has progressed, and employee representatives have been involved. The firm added that it would avoid cutting key customer-facing positions in order to maintain stable customer relationships.

Costs will be further reduced with a new company structure. The current five business units will be realigned into three, each targeting the specific customer focus areas of Global Services, Network Systems and Business Solutions.

Costs will also be cut through real estate reduction, IT initiatives and more partnering, Nokia Siemens said.

Suri claimed that the cuts would make the company more attractive to customers and partners.

"Business models, innovation, growth and transformation are now very much front and centre when it comes to the selection of a technology partner, and our planned new structure will position us well in this changing market," he said.

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Remember those watches made out of pieces of the Titanic? Or that watch with the little moon lander on it? Well Yvan Arpa, the nutso horologist behind those treats has finally hit the a new level of crazy. Homeboy is a has a black belt and, in order to honor his fellow black belts, he’s created a watch just for black belts. It’s a watch for black belts only. And it costs about $4,000.

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Terrafugia has completed flight testing of the Transition POC (Proof of Concept). Introducing the Transition®. Simply land at the airport, fold your wings up and drive home. 

 
Fly a distance of 725 kilometers at speeds of 115 km/hour;

requires a special license to drive and fly.

The time required for the transition from plane to car takes less than 30 seconds.
Vehicle speed 185 km/hour, range is 724 km on highways 
Vehicle is fueled with gasoline, and the price of the car is expected  to be around $200,000.

The first shipment will be in 2011

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Zennstrom and Friis sold Skype to eBay for $2.6 billion and additional considerations in 2006, but they maintain that when they left the operation they kept ownership of Global index Software that is necessary for the VoIP service to operate.

Volpi has been part of the deal to re-establish Skype as a separate company that includes Index Ventures, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, private equity company Silver Lake, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Zennstrom and Friis had expressed interest in regaining at least some control over Skype, but they weren’t included in the lineup of investors. eBay said it decided to spin off Skype when it became evident it didn’t provide synergy for its main online auction business.

The Zennstrom-Friis litigation was filed this week through their Joost US and Joltid Limited businesses in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. They have requested a hearing date of Nov. 2 on the issue.

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It comes with a 3.5 inch AMOLED touchscreen display with 800 x 480 pixel resolution, 5 megapixel camera along with LED flash, 3G with7.2Mbps HSDPA, Assisted GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB 2.0, a DivX-certified media player. Powered by an ARM1176 CPU running at 800MHz, which is coupled with 192MB of RAM. It comes in a distinctive bronze color, which aims to perfectly complement a Giorgio Armani suit This touchscreen handset offers internal storage of 8GB which is expandable up to 32GB.

The Giorgio Armani-Samsung smartphone is one of the first phones available with the Windows Mobile 6.5, which includes a new start page and dashboard that simply and intuitively displays key productivity features such as e-mails, text messages, missed calls, and calendar appointments.

The Giorgio Armani-Samsung smartphone will be available in Italy, U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Russia, China and UAE and will cost €700 ($1032).
 

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Designer James Dyson says his latest invention stops the unpleasant “turbulent buffeting” of traditional desk fans, creating a smooth, constant air flow “like a breeze”.

The 62-year-old hopes the Dyson Air Multiplier, which costs from £199, could replace unhealthy and uneconomical air conditioning systems.

He said: “If only we could open a window and use a fan then we would be saving a huge amount of electricity, and stopping the emission of HFCs and also having a much healthier environment.

“I hope that it will start to replace air conditioning, which is unhealthy and very bad for the environment, because this uses one 50th of the electricity of air conditioning.”

According to Dyson, the fan delivers a “much smoother air flow” than traditional models, is so safe you can put your hand through it while it is switched on – and is easy to clean.

 
The Dyson Air Multiplier has no blades and discretely concealed vents 

The stylish fan draws air into its cylinder-shaped base and then forces the air out through an upright ring perched on top of the base.

With no blades and discretely concealed vents, the jet of cool, fresh air appears to be coming from nowhere.

“A fan with blades chops up the air and sends sort of slices of cake, blocks of air, at you so you feel a buffeting, a turbulent buffeting, when it hits you and it’s not really very pleasant,” says Dyson.

“But because there are no blades you’re getting very smooth air, like a breeze, so it’s constant and smooth so it’s very comfortable to be in front of it.

“There’s just as much air flow, and just as much speed, but it’s comfortable to be in front of it.

“And people actually say that, because it’s a constant stream, it’s much more cooling – I don’t know whether technically it’s more cooling but it feels like it, apparently.”

The fan, which spent three years in development and a year in production, also oscillates and comes with a dimmer switch to adjust power.

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