Crackdown continues

China's aggressive crackdown on internet smut and dissent continues - yesterday a man was sentenced to 13 years prison for renting a US server for distributing pornographic material?

The power of collaboration within unified communications

A piece up at Mashable explores how some schools and universities are finding success at integrating social gaming into their education curriculum. Various game-related programs are getting assistance these days from sources like the government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation."For the less well-to-do educator, the Federation of American Scientists has developed a first-person shooter-inspired cellular biology curriculum. Gamers explore the fully-interactive 3D world of an ill patient and assist the immune system in fighting back a bacterial infection. Dr. Melanie Ann Stegman has been evaluating the educational impacts of the game and is optimistic about her preliminary findings. 'The amount of detail about proteins, chemical signals and gene regulation that these 15-year-olds were devouring was amazing. Their questions were insightful. I felt like I was having adiscussion with scientist colleagues,' said Stegman. Perhaps more importantly, the video game excites students about science. Motivating more youngsters to adopt a science-related career track has became a major education initiative of the Obama administration. So desperate to find a solution thatmotivates students to become scientists, the government has even enlisted Darpa, the Department of Defense’s 'mad scientist' research organization, to figure out a solution."

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Deadly 'electronic gaspers' fingered, too

US federal boffins in Berkeley, California say they have discovered yet another deadly hazard associated with smoking. They also raise warnings regarding the perils associated with electronic cigarettes.?

What is your recession sales strategy?

How much for an upgrade?

Analysis As El Reg duly reported earlier today, Intel took the wraps off its long awaited and many times tweaked "Tukwila" quad-core Itanium 9300 processors for midrange and high-end servers. But let's take a look at the feeds and speeds of the chip itself and how the lineup compared to the prior Itanium 9100 series.?

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

And improve legal compliance, says OFT

Internet shoppers are more aware of their rights and more online retailers are complying with consumer protection laws than previously, according to studies by consumer protection regulator the Office of Fair Trading (OFT).?

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn't work

CWmike writes "The only smartphone Linus Torvalds doesn't hate is that much less unlikable now that Google has quietly chopped $200 off its early termination fee on the Nexus One. Customers who cancel the service had been on the hook for $550, including a $350 Google cancellation charge. Google has reduced their fee to $150 — but users are still liable for a $200 ETF from T-Mobile. Users have a 14-day grace period during which they do not have to pay either charge, although they may be hit with a restocking fee. The $350 total fee matches one of the highest in the industry, charged by Verizon. Google did not announce the change but simply altered its online terms-of-service document." The price cut could add momentum to a phone that, by one reckoning, costs only $49 unlocked.

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Big in Germany. Not so big in Blighty

A new study from German web analytics firm Webmasterpro.de shows that adoption rates of open source productivity software suites swings wildly between different countries.?

Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing

Trimmer fit

The delayed next edition of Microsoft's Visual Studio is due as a release candidate by the end of this week.?

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

An anonymous reader writes "Many games developers have been pursuing agile development, and we are now beginning to witness the debris and chaos it has caused. While there have been some successes, there have also been many casualties. As the industry at large is moving away from the phantasmagoria of Agile, Gwaredd Mountain, Technical Director at Climax Studios, looks at Post-Agile and what this might mean for the games industry."

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By Tim Conneally, Betanews

We have seen a couple of mobile broadband hotspots come to market in the last year, the Novatel MiFi on Sprint and Verizon, and the recent Sprint Overdrive from Sierra Wireless. They're pocket-sized, battery-powered devices with a 3G connection that can connect a handful of devices to the Internet wherever they're plopped down.

Today, Netgear and Ericsson announced that they have created a 3G mobile broadband-connected router like these devices, except that it's not pocketable and battery powered.

Instead, the new mobile broadband router, called the MBRN3300, is designed for fixed or semi-nomadic use. For example, it can provide a broadband connection to rural homes that don't have the appropriate infrastructure for a DSL, Cable or Fiber; or it can be set up in mobile homes, boats, automobiles and trains.

It provides an HSPA connection to the Internet and both 802.11n and Ethernet LAN for home networking. The broadbandspeeds depend, of course, upon the service providers' capabilities, but the current peak in U.S. speeds is 7.2Mbps and the average is around 4Mbps.

Though a number of companies have been pushing WiMAX as the solution to rural connectivity in North America, Southeast Asia and Africa (with 519 deployments in 146 countries), HSPA is showing strong growth across the world as well. According to the GSA's latest survey (February 4, 2010) 315 network operators in 133 countries have upgraded to HSPA.

The companies will be showing off the new wireless hotspot at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week, but carrier partnerships haven't been mentioned yet.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

Ceepie-geepie cold Fusion

While Intel is talking up its "Westmere" CPUs and their graphics co-processing, which puts a 45 nanometer graphics chip and memory controller inside the same chip package as a two-core Core processor implemented using 32 nanometer processes, rival AMD wants to change the subject to a truly integrated, single-chip CPU/GPU combination - and at the same time make you think about the future, not the present.?

Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing

Kenai reprieved

Oracle's chief Larry Ellison recently promised he'll be hiring more staff than he'll be letting go from Sun Microsystems.?

Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing

President Grant signs the law creating what will become the Weather Bureau and eventually the National Weather Service.

Dan Jones writes "As discussed here last year, IBM has made good on its promise to release the Power7 processor (and servers) in the first half of 2010. The Power7 processor adds more cores and improved multithreading capabilities to boost the performance of servers requiring high up-time, according to Big Blue. Power7 chips will run between 3.0GHz and 4.14GHz and will come with four, six, or eight cores. The chips are being made using the 45-nm process technology. New Power7 servers (up to 64 cores for now) are said to deliver twice the performance of older Power6 systems, butare four times more energy efficient. Power7 servers will run AIX and Linux." And reader shmG notes Intel's release of a new Itanium server processor after two years of delays. The Power7 specs would seem to put the new Intel chip in the shade.

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An anonymous reader writes "What I feared has come true: after buying Sun, Oracle had a look at its accessibility group and made big cuts in it by firing the most important contributors to the Linux accessibility tools. This is a very sad day for disabled people, as it means we do notreally have full-time developers any more." The coverage in OSTATIC has a few more details, including the caution: "This just shows that all too few companies are sponsoring a11y work. If one company laying off a couple of developers spells trouble for the project, then there were problems before that happened" (thanks to reader dave c-b for pointing this out).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Macworld trade show goes on without Steve Jobs. But will it live another year?

Ultrahigh-speed video reveals six lightning strokes in startling slo-mo.

bridges writes "The V3VEE project has announced the release of version 1.2 of the Palacios virtual machine monitor following the successful testing of Palacios on 4096 nodes of the Sandia Red Storm supercomputer, the 17th-fastest in the world. The added overhead of virtualization is often a show-stopper, but the researchers observed less than 5% overhead for two real, communication-intensive applications running in a virtual machine on Red Storm. Palacios 1.2 supports virtualization of both desktop x86 hardware and Cray XT supercomputers using either AMD SVM or Intel VT hardware virtualization extensions, and is an active open source OS research platform supporting projects at multiple institutions. Palacios is being jointly developed by researchers at Northwestern University, the University of New Mexico, and Sandia National Labs." The ACM's writeup has more details of the work at Sandia.

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Admits outing Intel earnings, WiMAX plans

Former Intel executive Rajiv Goel has pleaded guilty to two charges of conspiracy and securities fraud in connection with the Galleon insider trading case. Goel is the tenth person to plead guilty in the case, which the FBI and the US attorney's office in Manhattan call the largest hedge fund inside trading case in US history.?

What is your recession sales strategy?

16 months...and counting

An Adobe product manager has apologized for allowing a potentially serious bug in Flash Player to remain unfixed for more than 16 months.?

What is your recession sales strategy?