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Web publishers looking to capitalize on the growth in social and casual gaming just got an easier way to integrate them into their sites. HeyZap, a platform that helps syndicate social and casual games and also offers expanded features like achievements, has just launched its Social Games Bar. The bar is similar in appearance to the Meebo Bar — it sits at the bottom of the browser window and persists as you navigate through a publisher’s site. But the functionality is obviously quite different. The bar gives users access to 30,000 different social and casual games, some of which are tied to Facebook using Facebook Connect.

HeyZap cofounder Immad Akhund says that there are a few major benefits from the bar. First, it’s actually easier to integrate than HeyZap’s standard gaming widget, because publishers don’t have to worry about where they’re going to position it on their site (they just add a line of code and it appears at the bottom). And because the bar is always visible at the bottom of the page, users are more likely to click it.

He also says that all links shared through games launched by the HeyZap Bar link back to the publisher’s site, as opposed to the game’s Facebook page, which is where they often link to by default. Finally, Publishers get a rev share on any virtual goods purchased through the games (which is true of the normal HeyZap widget as well).

Source : Click Here

Earlier this week we told you guys that Windows Mobile 6.5 was going to stick around after Windows Phone 7 hits the masses. It would even take on a new name — Windows Phone Classic. With everyone sticking around and playing nice at this party, you’d think that maybe current WinMo 6.5 handsets might get a little Windows Phone 7 love. Sorry to burst your bubble.

Microsoft Mobile Communications Business Director Aaron Woodman told CNET Asia, “I don’t know if any Windows Mobile 6.5 device today meets those specifications.” It sounds like your average Microsoft move: if you want the new software, you’ll also have to get new hardware because your old junk just isn’t gonna cut it, baby.

The new handsets are getting primo parts such as Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon processor (no Tegra, sorry). WinPho 7, being a fresh OS and more intensive than its predecessors, will undoubtedly need hardware resources that most 6.5 devices just don’t have, but don’t fret. Unlike everyone staying on Windows XP when Vista came out, upgrading to WinPho 7 out of WinMo 6.5 is definitely a move in the right direction. WinMo 6.5 is going to stick around for enterprise and developing countries, so unless you’re tied to the OS for those reasons, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind ditching your current 6.5 handset for a shiny new WinPho 7 device when it comes out.

Source: MobileCrunch

Do not press play on the video. Don’t do it. It will hurt. This is some sort of circuit bent synth that can create chaotic music. While the folks at Make suggest its fun at parties, I beg to differ.

Short version: A competent, but unremarkable keyboard. If you like Microsoft keyboards, spend the extra cash for the fancier and cooler X6.

Features:

• Anti-ghosting (press as many keys at one time as you like)
• Six programmable macro keys with switchable profiles
• Backlit keys
• Media controls
• Calculator button!

Pros:

• Big and solid
• Anti-ghosting is good to have, even if you don’t notice it

Cons:

• Media keys launch Windows Media Player
• Only one color of backlight and two brightness settings
• No USB ports

What we have here is… well, a normal keyboard, basically, with some macro and media keys. The trouble is, if you’re the type of gamer who uses macros a lot, you probably want a little more keyboard than this offers. There are lots of options out there, including the unique and cool Sidewinder X6, which I liked a lot.

Functionality is as you see: some macro keys on the left there, which are useful in all the situations you’d expect, and the configuration thereof works just fine, though it’s extremely spartan. There’s a nice long list of handy commands you might want to use, something which developers often fail to include.

The media keys worked out of the box with Winamp, though irritatingly if Winamp is not open, pressing the Play/Pause button will launch Windows Media Player. You can’t disable that, unfortunately; there’s no option to select another default player. I’m not sure I dig the layout, either.

Doesn’t that seem a little weird to you? I think play should be in between previous and next track, though that may just be me. But why is mute attached to the play controls cluster? Shouldn’t it be over with volume up and down? Not a big deal, obviously, but if you could choose between a keyboard that has them laid out in an intuitive way, and one that didn’t, which would you choose? Right, me too.

Lastly, for a gaming keyboard, it sure doesn’t have any extra connectors, like USB or audio. That’s kind of an important part of a gaming keyboard, and really, I just realized that the X6 has the same problem, as well as a similar media key layout. Well, consider this criticism retroactively applied to that thing as well.

Conclusion

Like so many devices in the crowded “gaming enthusiast hardware” field, the X4 is simply outmatched by the competition, which is too close in price to warrant a downgrade. Microsoft’s own X6, for instance, can even be found for cheaper than the X4, and it certainly offers a cooler feature set. Logitech and Razer also offer compelling alternatives for similar prices. Sorry, X4, but there’s just too much good stuff out there.

Source: CrunchGear

I feel like I should come to Flash’s defense, partially because I gave it one between the ribs last night, and partially because, in the words of Sherlock Holmes, “to see justice done is every man’s business.” Now here we have Steve Jobs saying in a WSJ interview that using Flash for video would reduce battery life from 10 hours to 1 hour, and suggests H.264 as an alternative. Let’s just take a moment to evaluate these plainly inflammatory statements.

First, we may as well be clear about this part: Flash isn’t the best on OS X, and probably would end up occupying a good portion of the CPU, resulting in lower battery life. Whether it’d knock eight or nine hours off this theoretical ten-hour battery is, of course, the most tenuous of speculation.

And why, we might reasonably ask, is Flash such a dog on OS X? Well, decoding 720p YouTube video can be either GPU-intensive or CPU-intensive. On Windows, Flash has tunnels to your video card to let its hugely parallel processors burst-decode a ton of information at a time. It can’t do that on OS X, from what I understand — mainly because Apple doesn’t want them to.

Here’s the thing: Apple doesn’t like Flash. I don’t particularly care for it, but it’s one of the foundational technologies of the web and can’t be dismissed as trivially replaceable, as Jobs would have us believe. But Apple doesn’t like it. That’s the key. They’ve got a grudge against Flash and Adobe and they’re going to pursue that to the bitter end. They could call up Adobe and say “Hey guys, Flash is blowing it in our OS, why don’t we get a few guys together and work it out?” But they won’t. They’d rather they had an excuse for railing at it and excluding it from the table. Flash is getting punched in the breadbasket here for no reason other than that Apple doesn’t want to play nice.

Jobs suggests H.264 as an alternative. Okay… H.264 is a video codec, not a wrapper like Adobe’s FLV. There are plenty of H.264 FLVs. If what he meant was we should have direct access (i.e. HTML5 or otherwise) to H.264 files on the web and elsewhere, then okay, that’s good, but it’s not really achievable right now since Flash is the acknowledged standard for web video. Every web video site uses it, though some are working on moving to HTML5. Maybe a few years down the line you could suggest replacing FLV with raw unwrapped files, but that time is not here yet.

Lastly, while we’re on the topic, H.264 is just as closed, proprietary, and potentially inefficient as Flash. It’s owned, operated, and developed privately, but clearly Apple can only throw its weight behind one of them. It’s not good for users, but really, that’s not always Apple’s first priority.

Source : TechCrunch

A Georgian blogger with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and Google's Blogger and YouTube was targeted in a denial of service attack that led to the site-wide outage at Twitter and problems at the other sites on Thursday, according to a Facebook executive.

The blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," (the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia) had accounts on all of the different sites that were attacked at the same time, Max Kelly, chief security officer at Facebook, told CNET News.

"It was a simultaneous attack across a number of properties targeting him to keep his voice from being heard," Kelly said. "We're actively investigating the source of the attacks and we hope to be able to find out the individuals involved in the back end and to take action against them if we can."

Kelly declined to speculate on who was behind the attack, but said: "You have to ask who would benefit the most from doing this and think about what those people are doing and the disregard for the rest of the users and the Internet."

Twitter was down for several hours beginning early Thursday morning, and suffered periodic slowness and time-outs throughout the day.

Cyxymu's LiveJournal page wasn't accessible, but a cached version showed that it was updated on Thursday with a message about the denial of service (DOS) attacks on his accounts on the US-based sites. "Now it's obvious it's a special attack against me and Georgians," the message in Russian said.

The site also apologized for a spam e-mail attack in which the sender was spoofed and made to look like the e-mails were sent by him. Screen shots are shown. It's unclear whether or how the spam attack is related to the DOS attacks.

In the distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on the sites, computers that have been compromised by viruses or other malware are instructed by the attacker's computer to visit the specific Web sites all at the same time and repeatedly. The barrage of connection requests overwhelms the target sites, making it so that legitimate Web traffic can't get through.

Such coordinated attacks require the efforts of tens of thousands or more of hijacked computers, which together form a botnet. Spammers send e-mails with malicious attachments or URLs to millions of people to create botnets. Criminals also can lease existing botnets for specific campaigns for as little as 5 cents to 10 cents per bot.

A Facebook spokesman dismissed a theory that the attack was triggered by a spam campaign in which e-mails had links to the sites. It's unlikely that there would be enough recipients -- all clicking on the URLs at the same time -- to bring a site down, he said. There was a spam campaign that directed people to Cyxymu's accounts, but it wasn't the cause of the DOS, he said.

"The people who are coordinating this attack, the criminals, are definitely determined and using a lot of resources," Kelly said. "If they're asking our infrastructure to generate hundreds of pages a second, that's a lot of pages our users can't see."

Facebook and Google were able to minimize any impact to their sites, including Blogger, YouTube and Google Sites, a free Web site service. Facebook even managed to keep the Cyxymu account accessible to Web surfers from that region, Kelly said, although it was inaccessible to people in other geographic areas, including San Francisco.

This was the first coordinated attack on the sites, and all the companies involved were working closely on the investigation, he said. "My team and the teams that are working together at all these companies are doing a really good job very quickly and I'm proud and happy," he said.

Twitter and LiveJournal did not immediately return e-mails and calls seeking comment.

A Google spokesman offered this statement: "We are aware that a handful of non-Google sites were impacted by a DOS attack this morning, and are in contact with some affected companies to help investigate this attack. Google systems prevented substantive impact to our services."

Political conflicts between Russia and it former Republic spilled online last year with DOS attacks and Web site defacements going both directions.

For more information listen to Larry Magid's podcast interview with Elinor Mills.

If you’re looking for a USB microscope that works with Mac OS X on the cheap, look no further.

The Brando 8 USB Digital Microscope (PN: ULIFE022500) features a 1.3MP image sensor, 10 to 200x magnification and a maximum video resolution 1280×1024.

Compact USB microscopes are excellent for looking at coins, stamps and other exonumia. I’ve seen them selling for upwards of $200 at coin shows, but you can get one from Brando for only $75.

It is ideal for various applications such as science and engineering work and study, dematology (skin/scalp) exam, detailed repair, assembly and quality control (i.e. eletronics, mechanical, etc.), hobbies and collecting (coin, stamp, watch, jewelry, etc.), law enforcement (counterfeit ID, crime lab, etc.), entertainment or simply as a reading aid.

The Brando scope only comes with Windows software but I found a Mac driver from BigC (DinoScope v4.0, released 4/10/2008) that works well with 10.5.6. The Mac driver allows you to capture video (and sound) and has a funny option to “Regord Without Hogging Machine.” The DinoScope 4 driver doesn’t provide a way to capture stills but you can always use the Mac’s built-in screenshot utility (Cmd-Shift-4).

A decent flexible stand for the microscope can be can be found for around $39 but I prefer the GorillaPod original ($20, pictured) from Joby.
Lots of sample pictures are on the Brando Web site and I’ve posted a shot of the new 2009 Lincoln Log Cabin cent after the jump.

by Jason D. O'Grady

A new tool allows entire networks to be scanned efficiently for infection.

On April 1, a computer worm called Conficker, which has already infected millions of machines worldwide, is expected to do something bad, though no one knows exactly what. Some experts fear that an army of infected machines could be ordered to launch a coordinated attack or send out a barrage of spam. But a tool released today could help lessen the impact by allowing big companies and institutions to quickly weed out infected machines by scanning entire networks for signs of infection.
Analysis of the Conficker worm has previously revealed that infected computers will "phone home" on April 1 to receive a new set of instructions. It is already possible to detect the worm by scanning machines individually, but this is a relatively time-consuming process. It's also possible to detect the bug by watching for outgoing communications sent across a network, but the latest version of Conficker is designed to stay silent until April 1.
Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing for the Seattle-based security company IOActive, helped create the new scanning tool and says that it can identify an infected machine by recognizing the way it presents itself to the wider network. This makes it quick and easy to scan for the worm remotely and does not require any special access to machines. "It's like driving through a neighborhood looking for houses with big signs on their doors," Kaminsky says.
The tool was created after Tillmann Werner and Felix Leder, members of an independent research organization called the Honeynet Project, asked Kaminsky to review their research on Conficker. The pair had figured out that the worm changes the way a machine appears on a network. Kaminsky seized on this, suggesting that the researchers create a tool that uses this information to find infected machines. The researchers built such a tool and worked through the weekend to get it ready for broad distribution to suppliers of other security software. "Whatever vulnerability scanner a company is using, it should have support for this by the end of the day," Kaminsky says.
Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer at BT Counterpane, says the new tool's ability to seek out the virus remotely should be useful, since it will let people scan a huge number of machines very quickly. This is important, Schneier says, because the worm is such a nasty pest. "Conficker is an extremely well-written, extremely well-designed, extremely well-executed worm," says Schneier. "It really is an impressive piece of work, and there's someone really smart behind it." But Schneier adds that it's important for computer users and administrators to protect their machines against a variety of malware, not just a single threat.
"If you've been running a good environment, you shouldn't be worried about this," says Rich Mogull, founder of the security-consulting company Securosis, who helped connect the Honeynet researchers and Kaminsky with network-security vendors over the weekend. Mogull notes that Microsoft has already released several patches that block the vulnerability that Conficker uses to infect a machine. However, he says that companies worried about Conficker should start scanning for it right away, after checking to see if their network-security tools have been updated.
Kurt Rohloff, a scientist who studies Internet worms at the research and development company BBN Technologies, says that the tool could prove useful, though he doubts that there's time to find and neutralize every computer infected with the worm. Rohloff says that the new scanner could be used to take preventive action by identifying infected hosts and removing them from the network, though he admits that this approach is "drastic, because you're removing connectivity."
Kaminsky notes that the tool is intended for organizations with large networks. For individuals, he says, the best approach is to make sure that the latest security updates are installed and up-to-date antivirus software is running. Since Conficker blocks a computer from accessing certain security websites, users could test for the worm by trying to visit those sites, Kaminsky says. Werner and Leder plan to release a paper within the next day, describing the technical details of their discovery.

By Erica Naone

A chip developed by European scientists simulates the learning capabilities of the human brain.

An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain's ability to learn more closely than any other machine.
Although the chip has a fraction of the number of neurons or connections found in a brain, its design allows it to be scaled up, says Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany, who has coordinated the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project, or FACETS.
The hope is that recreating the structure of the brain in computer form may help to further our understanding of how to develop massively parallel, powerful new computers, says Meier.
This is not the first time someone has tried to recreate the workings of the brain. One effort called the Blue Brain project, run by Henry Markram at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, has been using vast databases of biological data recorded by neurologists to create a hugely complex and realistic simulation of the brain on an IBM supercomputer.
FACETS has been tapping into the same databases. "But rather than simulating neurons," says Karlheinz, "we are building them." Using a standard eight-inch silicon wafer, the researchers recreate the neurons and synapses as circuits of transistors and capacitors, designed to produce the same sort of electrical activity as their biological counterparts.
A neuron circuit typically consists of about 100 components, while a synapse requires only about 20. However, because there are so much more of them, the synapses take up most of the space on the wafer, says Karlheinz.
The advantage of this hardwired approach, as opposed to a simulation, Karlheinz continues, is that it allows researchers to recreate the brain-like structure in a way that is truly parallel. Getting simulations to run in real time requires huge amounts of computing power. Plus, physical models are able to run much faster and are more scalable. In fact, the current prototype can operate about 100,000 times faster than a real human brain. "We can simulate a day in a second," says Karlheinz.
While it may sound implausible, neurons are actually very slow, at least compared to computers, says Thomas Serre, a computational neuroscience researcher at MIT. "The reason why computers seem much slower is that they are serial machines, while our brains run in parallel," he says.
FACETS is not the only group taking this approach. Researchers at Stanford University have also been creating neuronal circuits and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency recently started funding a similar project.
"Where FACETS is ahead of anybody else is that they use these complex synapses," says Markram. While the neurons are quite simple, he says, the synapses are designed to use a very powerful distributed algorithm--developed by Markram--called spike-timing dependent plasticity, that allows the device to learn and adapt to new situations.
Building such complex circuits has required close collaboration with neurobiologists, says Markram. In fact, the project, whose current budget is €10.5 million (US$14.1 million), relies upon the contributions of 15 scientific groups from seven different countries. Among the challenges they face is recreating the three-dimensional structure of the brain in a 2-D piece of silicon, he says.
Despite efforts to make the chips as biologically plausible as possible, Markram admits they are still crude compared to what can be achieved in simulation. "It's not a brain. It's a more of a computer processor that has some of the accelerated parallel computing that the brain has," he says.
Because of this, Markram doubts that the hardware approach will offer much insight into how the brain works. For example, unlike Blue Brain, researchers won't be able to perform "in silico" drug testing, simulating the effects of drugs on the brain. "It's more a platform for artificial intelligence than understanding biology," he says.
The FACETS group now plans to further scale up their chips, connecting a number of wafers to create a superchip with a total of a billion neurons and 1013 synapses.

By Duncan Graham-Rowe

The X320 and X340 are the latest netbooks from MSI. For your info, the MSI X340 is priced at sub-$1000 and boasts an Intel’s SU3500 CULV processor running at 1.3Ghz with 4GB of RAM and a 1080p-capable GMA4500MHD graphics. Meanwhile, the MSI X320 retails for around $700 and has a 1.6Ghz Atom CPU, GMA500 graphics, 2GB RAM, and an optional 3G/WiMAX. Both netbooks offer a 1366 x 768 13.4-inch display, 250GB of HDD, WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, three USB 2.0 ports, VGA outputs and a 4-Cell battery. You can also choose an optional 6-Cell battery for longer battery life. The new MSI X320 and X340 netbooks will be available in May 2009.

By Johan