Scientists 'fingerprint' chips to make them foolproof

Counterfeiters are targeting chips and electronic components, causing losses running into billions of dollars besides putting people's lives at risk in areas where safety is paramount -- automobile and aircraft engineering.

Although anti-piracy technology provides a degree of protection, it no longer is an insurmountable obstacle for the counterfeiters.

However, researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) in Germany are set to tackle this problem.

They will be demonstrating how electronic components or chips can be made foolproof using physical unclonable functions (PUFs), according to a Fraunhofer Institute statement.

Videogame sparks controversy

A videogame that will be in the stores this March, and which invites users to drive a pickup truck full of undocumented immigrants without losing any while trying to get them across the border, has sparked a heated controversy.

"Smuggle Truck: Operation Immigration" is the creation of Boston-based Owlchemy Labs.

The company's founder, 23-year-old Alex Schwartz, and partner Yilmaz Kiymaz, said they are not trying to make fun of the immigration problem but to raise awareness about it.

"'Smuggle Truck' was inspired by the frustration our friends have experienced in trying to immigrate to the United States," Owlchemy says on its web site.

"With such a troublesome issue being largely avoided in popular media, especially videogames, we felt the best way to criticise it was with an interactive satire."

Owlchemy Labs describes as a "minefield" the procedures required to enter the US legally, and says that at a certain point the programmers mentioned that with so many difficulties, it's almost easier to try and cross the border illegally.

Twitter data privacy in dispute in WikiLeaks case

An Icelandic lawmaker and two other people associated with the website WikiLeaks are asking a federal judge not to force the social networking site Twitter to turn over data about whom they communicate with online.

The dispute cuts to the core of the question of whether WikiLeaks allies are part of a criminal conspiracy or a political discussion. It also challenges the Obama administration's argument that it can demand to see computer data and read months' worth of private messages, even if they have nothing to do with WikiLeaks.

In court documents unsealed Tuesday, the three challenged a Dec. 14 court order forcing Twitter to tell the government the names of those they talk to privately and who follow their posts.

The information would allow the government to map out their entire audience and figure out where each person was when he logged on to Twitter, attorneys said, amounting to an intrusion on the First Amendment constitutional guarantee of free speech.

The documents echo the international debate WikiLeaks sparked when it began revealing a trove of sensitive military and diplomatic documents.

Apple iPad to be thinner and lighter: Report

Apple Inc has started manufacturing a "thinner and lighter" version of its iPad tablet computer that will also have a built-in front-facing camera and faster processor.

The new version of the iPad will have a camera on the front of the device for features like video-conferencing, the Wall Street Journal quoted people familiar with the matter as saying.

"The new iPad will be thinner and lighter than the first model," the report added.

It will also have more memory and a more powerful graphics processor.

The new iPad would initially be available through carriers Verizon Wireless and AT&T Inc in the US.

"The production of the new iPad shows how Apple is moving forward in the wake of Chief Executive Steve Jobs's disclosure last month that he was taking a medical leave for an unspecified ailment," the Journal said.

The report further said the one feature in the new iPad that may "disappoint" consumers will be the lack of significant improvement in the resolution of the device's display.

"Apple has had trouble improving the display technology, in part because of the iPad screen's larger size compared with the iPhone," it quoted people familiar with the situation as saying.

Facebook opens Hong Kong office in Asia push

Facebook has opened a Hong Kong office as it looks to boost its presence in Asia, even though the social networking giant is banned in mainland China, a potentially huge market.

The opening of the sales office in Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous Chinese territory, comes after Facebook opened an office in Singapore last year, as social networking sites and Internet traffic see a marked rise in the region.

Last March the California-based group announced a new office in the southern Indian IT hub of Hyderabad to deal with advertising and customer support.

The Hong Kong opening, "following Singapore demonstrates Facebook's commitment to Asia, and in particular to Hong Kong and Taiwan, where there are active online populations and sophisticated digital marketing communities," Facebook said in a statement Tuesday.

The company, which already has a network of sales offices in North America and Europe, said more than 80 of the top 100 advertisers in the United States advertise on Facebook, adding that it is working with major brands across Asia.

"We are investing in a team to scale with the business here in the region, and will start with a handful of employees and add more as the business grows," a spokeswoman said.

Should spies spend more time on Twitter?

With unrest and chaos apparently having taken Egypt's rulers and Western states by surprise, governments and spies are increasingly looking to social media like Twitter to detect political threats in advance.

Protesters who overthrew Tunisian President Ben Ali and brought revolution to the streets of Egypt used sites such as Twitter and Facebook to coordinate action. While few credit social media with causing the uprisings, the speed of instant communication it allows is believed to have accelerated events. The same was true for British student protests late last year and a broader, rising tide of anti-austerity actions.

With so much more human interaction taking place online, and Tunisia and Egypt proving online dissent can swiftly yield real world consequences, governing authorities are interested. "In any highly fluid situation, open source information derived from social media can provide very useful insights into where things might be headed," one U.S. official familiar with intelligence matters told Reuters.

Intelligence agencies have long focused attention on extremist websites to detect crime and militancy.

But the idea of having state spies, police and other authority figures watching mainstream Twitter and Facebook feeds closely for signs of dissent might make some people rather uneasy -- particularly in countries with a record of extrajudicial killings and other human rights abuses.

"It is very transparent -- you can see who people are and who they are talking to," said Tim Hardy, a British software engineer who runs the blog "Beyond Clicktivism." "In some countries... people are effectively risking their lives -- although you might perhaps worry whether they realize that."

In Sudan, scene of some recent protests organized on Facebook, activists complain that police used the site to draw up lists of people to arrest.

But some argue that monitoring open websites is less intrusive than wiretaps, infiltration or interrogation.

New website to open agency to public: CIA

The CIA has launched a revamped website with links to YouTube and Flickr to help the public better understand the spy agency's often clandestine work, officials said.

"The idea behind these improvements is to make more information about the Agency available to more people, more easily," CIA Director Leon Panetta said in a statement yesterday.

"The CIA wants the American people and the world to understand its mission and its vital role in keeping our country safe," he said.

Although the Central Intelligence Agency's mission has always hinged on secrecy, the spy service is conscious of its public image -- partly for recruiting reasons -- and in recent years has added games and links for children on its website.

The CIA's new YouTube channel will offer "current and historical videos about the agency" and its Flickr site provides links to "copyright-free pictures from CIA.gov for easy access," the agency said.

Energy from car brakes could cut fuel consumption

Every time the brake is applied in a car, energy is generated. Though the energy is not used, new research shows that it is perfectly possible to save it for later use in the form of compressed air.

It can then provide extra power to the engine when the car is started and save fuel by avoiding idle operation when the car is at a standstill.

Air hybrids or pneumatic hybrids as they are also known, are not yet in production. Nonetheless, electric cars and electric hybrid cars already make use of the brake energy to power a generator that charges the batteries, according to a Lund University statement in Sweden.

However, according to Per Tunestål, researcher at Lund University, air hybrids would be much cheaper to manufacture. The step to commercialisation does not have to be a large one.

"The technology is fully realistic. I was recently contacted by a vehicle manufacturer in India which wanted to start making air hybrids," he says.

Art In the Age of Google: Virtual Museums

Google's Art Project is very much a work in progress, but it is already a mesmerising, world-expanding tool for selfeducation . You can spend hours exploring it, examining paintings from far off and close up, and poke around some of the world's great museums all on your computer.

On the virtual tour of the Uffizi in Florence, you can look at Botticelli's Birth of Venus almost inch by inch. It's nothing like standing before the real thing, but you can pore over the surface with an adjustable magnifying rectangle . This feels like an eerie approximation, at a clinical, digital remove, of the kind of intimacy usually granted only to the artist and his assistants, or conservators and preparators.

There are high-resolution images of more than 1,000 artworks in the Art Project (www.googleartproject.com) and virtual tours of several hundred galleries and other spaces inside the 17 participating institutions. In addition each museum has selected a single, usually canonical work—like Botticelli's Venus—for star treatment. These works have been painstakingly photographed for superhigh resolution.

The Museum of Modern Art selected Van Gogh's 'Starry Night' and you can see not only the individual colors in each stroke, but also how much of the canvas he left bare. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's star painting is Bruegel's 'Harvesters' with its sloping slab of yellow wheat and peasants lunching in the foreground.

Android Goes Dual SIM: MOTOROLA XT800

Those looking for smartphones that can hold two connections have had very few options to choose from.

This is what makes the Motorola Milestone XT800, the first dual SIM Android phone, so special. The phone lets you use a CDMA and GSM connection with dual standby mode. The package that comes with this double connectivity also makes the XT800 stand out from the crowd.

The XT800 has rounded off corners (unlike the sharpish edges of the original Milestone and the XT720) giving it an oval look. While it does have a metal band running around it, it is mainly built of plastic, although this does not detract from its looks. It fits easily into one's hands and at 137 grams, is relatively light for a device with such a large display.

Speaking of the display, it is by far the most striking feature of the phone, with the same resolution and size seen on the original Milestone and the multimediaheavy XT720 — 3.7 inches and 854x480 pixels. There are three touch buttons beneath it, for menu, home and back, and in case you are looking for a search button, well, it is right on top of the device, next to the power/standby button —a case of curious positioning that takes some getting used to.

Specs wise, the XT800 does not do too badly either. There is a 5MP camera with autofocus and dual LED flash, the option to expand memory to up to 32GB (a 2GB card comes bundled with the handset), and usual connectivity options like Wi-Fi , GPS and Bluetooth, as well as a suprise package—HDMI connectivity which lets you connect the phone to an HD display and watch video in 720p HD (the phone's camera, however, does not record HD video). The addition of an HDMI cable is a welcome bonus.