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From Wired News: Attendees at the 2006 Scientific and Technical Academy Awards ceremonies in Beverly Hills saw more pocket protectors Saturday than Harry Winston diamonds. The annual film-industry tech honors recognize devices, formulas and discoveries that change the way movies are made. The ceremony took place at the Beverly Hilton, the same ballroom where the …
From CNet News: The United States lags dangerously behind al-Qaida and other enemies in getting out information in the digital media age and must update its old-fashioned methods, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Friday. Modernization is crucial to winning the hearts and minds of Muslims worldwide who are bombarded with negative images of the …
From Wired News: Lawmakers blasted four U.S. tech giants Wednesday, accusing them of willingly helping China suppress dissent in return for access to a booming internet market. Representatives from Microsoft, Yahoo, Cisco Systems. and Google defended themselves at a House International Relations subcommittee hearing, but a Google official acknowledged that figuring out China’s internet market …
From CNN: Call it a sexual revolution of the virtual kind — young Canadians are practicing a new style of safe sex and the only touching required involves a keyboard. Of more than 2,500 university and college students polled across Canada, 87 percent of them are having sex over instant messenger, Webcams or the telephone, …
From Reuters: Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. is in advanced talks with four major music companies on starting a digital music service as early as this summer to compete with Apple, sources familiar with the matter said on Thursday. Amazon is seeking to create a viable rival to Apple Computer Inc.’s iTunes music service and its …
From the New York Times: For Internet companies doing business in China, a piece of a booming market has not come without compromises. A series of episodes showing that the companies were bending to the restrictive demands of Beijing — filtering words like “democracy” or “human rights” from Chinese versions of a blog product, or …
From CNet News: A federal judge criticized Microsoft on Tuesday for what she called “foot-dragging” in regard to the company’s compliance with an antitrust settlement. At a quarterly status conference about the compliance mandates, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly echoed the U.S. Department of Justice’s latest concerns that the software giant isn’t moving fast enough …
From Wired News: “Don’t work too hard,” wrote a colleague in an e-mail today. Was she sincere or sarcastic? I think I know (sarcastic), but I’m probably wrong. According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The …
From TBO.com: Tiny silicon chips were embedded into two workers who volunteered to help test the tagging technology at a surveillance equipment company, an official said Monday. The Mexico attorney general’s office implanted the so-called RFIDs – for radio frequency identification chips – in some employees in 2004 to restrict access to secure areas. Implanting …
From PC World: People in the U.S. use the Internet for more everyday research than any other medium, a fact proven by the 55 percent year-on-year surge in online searches in December, according to market researcher Nielsen/NetRatings. And Google remained the most popular place for Americans to search cyberspace in December. The number of online …