See Internet Through China’s Firewall

It’s no secret that the Chinese government censors web content, but what’s it like to actually be a citizen trapped inside the Great Firewall of China? A new FireFox plugin called China Channel can show you. It reroutes your IP through China, allowing you to look like any other digital Chinese citizen from anywhere in the world. Click on a banned site and BAM! You lose your browsing privileges for 15 minutes. But luckily, in this version, you can just reopen the browser with a newly assigned IP. To see an example clip that walks you through installation and browsing, read on.

Up Close with Crocodiles with New Attraction

It would strike terror into the hearts of most sane people but Australia’s newest tourist attraction involves coming face to face underwater with giant saltwater crocodiles.

The newly-opened attraction, Crocosaurus Cove in Darwin, offers the chance to be lowered into a tank full of crocs, among them suspected man-eaters, wearing nothing more than a mask, snorkel and swimsuit or trunks.

The ‘Cage of Death’ is said to be “perfect for serious adrenalin junkies” who have perhaps become jaded with swimming with dolphins or cage diving among great white sharks.

The cage is hexagonal-shaped to stop the crocodiles from getting a grip on it with their fearsome teeth.

It enables tourists to come within a few feet of several ’salties’ measuring more than 16ft long, some of the largest in captivity in the world.

A maximum of two tourists at a time climb into the purpose-built acrylic cage which is then lowered into one of four separate crocodile enclosures.

The cage stops just short of full immersion so that the visitors can still come up for air.

But they are free to dive down to the bottom of the 15ft-high enclosure, where the crocs are barely an arm’s length away.

The big crocs include Burt, the 15ft long star of the first Crocodile Dundee film, Chopper, who lost his front teeth in a vicious fight with a rival and Snowy, an albino crocodile which was trapped and removed from a river in the Northern Territory on suspicion of having killed and eaten a man.

Although the cage is meant to be croc-proof, visitors have to sign an indemnity form which warns of the risks of panic attacks, hyperventilation, nervous shock and even cardiac arrest which might occur on coming face to face with one of nature’s most deadly predators.

Before taking the plunge, nervous participants would do well to avoid talking to Crocosaurus Cove’s keepers, who claim that crocodiles have the most powerful bite force of any animal, stronger than lions, hyenas and great white sharks.

The jaws of a 15ft long saltie exert two tons of pressure - enough to punch through plate metal.

Crocosaurus Cove, in the centre of Darwin, is a three-storey attraction which boasts eight big adult crocs and 200 juveniles.

A large aquarium contains animals native to the waters of northern Australia, including turtles, stingrays and barramundi, a fish species popular with anglers.

Australia is home to an estimated 140,000 wild saltwater crocodiles, of which more than half are found in the Northern Territory.

This week the suspected remains of a British man, Arthur Brooker, 62, were found inside a crocodile after it was trapped by rangers in the Endeavour River of northern Queensland.

Mr Booker, who was originally from Scotland and served with Australian forces in the Vietnam War, vanished from the banks of the crocodile-infested river on the Cape York peninsula last week while checking pots used to catch crabs.Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Google’s New Satellite Released

Above you can see the first image taken by the GeoEye-1, Google’s very own satellite. They don’t own it outright - they share it with the American National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which collects and analyses geographical data for national security purposes.

It’s got a whoppingly good resolution - it can read car number plates from orbit, but reassuringly Google won’t have access to images that good. This is due to US governmental restrictions and the fact the Google is sharing the satellite.

Most low-down imagery on Google Maps is currently sourced from aerial and satellite photography - something that isn’t widely available in many areas across the globe. The new satellite will allow Google to spend less on buying up that sort of imagery, as well as increasing the resolution of more rural areas across the globe.Source:Techdigest.tv

Google Earth’s Introducing Underwater View

Google Earth will be adding a new feature - undersea landscapes. These will include the habitats of threatened species that everyone with the program will be able to look at and explore.

The new project will encompass video streams, photos and stories from marine protected areas all over the world.

Natural England has contributed information from about 43 marine sites around the UK, that offer protection to endangered species, such as the basking shark, seahorses, corals and algae.

Lundy Island will be a big feature on the new system. The island, off the North Devon Coast, is England’s only statutory marine reserve, where disturbing the marine life is banned and it is somewhere all marine life have the chance to thrive.

Dr Helen Phillips, Natural England’s chief executive, said she hoped the new Google Earth feature would bring the marine environment to life and raise awareness of the need to conserve and enhance it.

She said: “There needs to be a change in attitudes towards protecting our oceans. The diversity of marine wildlife around England’s coastline is exceptional; we have everything from whales through to microscopic phytoplankton.

“But we need an enhanced marine protection system to help conserve our undersea environment.”Source: telegraph.co.uk

Google’s $10 Million Dollar Idea Contest

Got an idea that could change the world, or at least help a lot of people? Google wants to hear from you — and they’ll pay as much as $10 million to make your idea a reality.
Google Inc. will award $10 million to solicit ideas it believes could benefit the world.

To help celebrate its 10th birthday, the ambitious Internet giant is launching an initiative to solicit, and bankroll, fresh ideas it believes could have broad and beneficial impact on people’s lives.

Called Project 10^100 (pronounced “10 to the 100th”), Google’s initiative will seek input from the public and a panel of judges in choosing up to five winning ideas, to be announced in February.

Google announced the project live on CNN on Wednesday morning.

“These ideas can be big or small, technology-driven or brilliantly simple — but they need to have impact,” said Google in a press release. “We know there are countless brilliant ideas that need funding and support to come to fruition.”

Ideas such as the Hippo Water Roller, which Google cited as the kind of concept the company would be interested in rewarding. Developed in Africa, where it is most used, the Hippo Water Roller is a barrel-shaped container, attached to a handle, that holds 24 gallons of water and can be rolled with little effort, like a wheelbarrow, making it easier for villagers on foot to transport critically needed fresh water to their homes.
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People are encouraged to submit their ideas, in any of 25 languages, on http://www.project10tothe100.com/index.html through October 20. Entrants must briefly describe their idea and answer six questions, including, “If your idea were to become a reality, who would benefit the most and how?”

Complete iPod Redesign Get Ready for the New iPod

Today in San Francisco, reporters and analysts gathered at Apple’s “Let’s Rock” event eager to hear Steve Jobs talk about the improvements to his line of iPods.

For starters today Apple is releasing a new version of iTunes. The new iTunes will have a few new features including grid browsing and the Genius function. Genius is an all new way to automatically create play lists from your library based on songs that go well together. This works with music and movies. iTunes will upload a list of your music and movies to the internet to be added to a database. This database will gather and compare information from all Genius users to develop a smart play list. The more people using Genius the smarter it will be. Kind of takes the fun out of the mix tape, but still a really cool feature. The new iTunes can be downloaded for free.

The classic iPod is being upgraded to a thinner 120GB ($249) version and the 160GB is being discontinued.

Next was the big announcement. New second gen nano iPods. The new nano’s will sport a whole new look. The nano is going back to a more vertical design like the long forgotten iPod mini. Much like the macbook air they have a new curved aluminum design with a curved glass cover for the screen. This new design will make it the thinnest iPod ever. Apple has taken the accelerometer from the touch and iPhone and it does some great things. The nano now has cover flow so you can browse your music by album cover. One of the coolest things about cover flow on the nano is you to simply shake your nano to scroll through. The integration of the accelerometer also means a larger display for watching video. Some of the other nano improvements include use of Genius play list building without iTunes, built in mic, 24 hour battery life (music playback), environmentally friendly (toxics free), and they come in a wide variety of colors. My favorite is the silver with black click wheel. The new nanos will come in 8GB ($149) and 16GB ($199) models.

The rest of the updates were nowhere near as exciting. Steve announced a new set of ear buds that have both a woofer and tweeter, on cable controls, and a built in mic. You can get a pair of these for the steep price of $79.

The iPod touch also saw a few cool updates. The new touch will be thinner even though they are cramming in more features. Taking up space on the inside of the new touch is a built-in speaker, Nike + and volume controls on the side. Steve also showed a tv spot which basically promotes the touch as a hand held gaming device. With about 700 games on the App Store, Steve boasts that the touch is the “best portable device for playing games.” Look out Nintendo… Some of the highlighted games are Need for Speed, Real Soccer 2009, and they even managed to get a version of the new hit game Spore for the iPod touch. The touch screen D-pad and A/B buttons that some of the games has as well as motion senor controlling makes the touch a pretty diverse gaming device. The new iPod touch will come in 8GB ($229), 16GB ($299), and a 32GB ($399) models.

The last updates of the event came for the iPhone. No new hardware, but there is a 2.1 firmware update that fixes a lot of bugs. “Fewer dropped calls, big battery life improvements. No crashes with Apps. Backing up is faster.” This update is free for all iPhone owners.

With the whole arsenal of iPods improved, its time to start your Christmas shopping. Oh and F.Y.I. Jobs also mentioned that 90% of US cars offer iPod integration. So if your in the market for a new mp3 player and a new car, you can truly combine them.

Source:Engadget.com

Google Chrome’s Security Problem

Security vulnerability is Google Chrome’s biggest issue. You may be asking for a hacking when downloading from the browser!

Early Security Issues Tarnish Google’s Chrome

Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service
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Wednesday, September 03, 2008 3:30 PM PDT

Security researchers have reported finding vulnerabilities in Google’s new Web browser a day after it was released in beta.

One vulnerability would allow hackers to crash the browser. Security researcher Rishi Narang described the issue on the SecuriTeam Web site and posted a proof of concept at Evilfingers. According to Narang, a hacker could build a malicious link that includes an undefined handler followed by a certain character. When a user clicks on the link, Chrome crashes.

Another, potentially more serious vulnerability could result in Chrome users downloading malicious code. The problem is due, in part, to the fact that Google uses an older version of WebKit, the open-source browser technology also used in Apple’s Safari browser, that includes the vulnerability.

Discovered by researcher Aviv Raff, the problem lies in the way Chrome downloads files and the way Windows handles the downloaded files, he said.

Chrome’s default setting downloads files into a folder. It then displays a download bar at the bottom of the browser page. Users click on the bar to open the file. If the file is an executable, Windows displays a warning, which can help users avoid inadvertently downloading malicious code.

If the file is a JAR (Java Archive), however, it isn’t treated like other executables, Raff said. When a user clicks on that download bar, instead of displaying a warning, Windows automatically runs the file.

The problem is exacerbated by the way the download bar looks, Raff said. The bar appears to be part of the Web page. In a proof of concept that Raff posted, users might think they’re clicking on a link or a button on the page, rather than opening up a downloaded file.

“This is again a sort of a ‘blended threat’,” he wrote in a blog post. “Two small issues in different products, when blended together, create a much larger problem.”

He thinks Google might face other, similar issues in the future because Chrome uses technologies from different browsers, including Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.

“Security wise, it’s very problematic,” Raff wrote. “They’ll have to track all security vulnerabilities in those features, and fix them in Chrome too. This will probably be only after those vulnerabilities were fixed by the other vendors or were publicly reported. It will put Chrome users at risk for a long time.”

Google did not directly address questions about this vulnerability or whether it plans to make any changes to Chrome to prevent any potential problems. Instead, a Google spokeswoman said in a statement that, by default, Chrome downloads files into a separate folder instead of on the user’s desktop as a way to avoid some security problems. In addition, she said that users can set the browser to ask where to save each file before downloading it.

She also did not say whether Google intends to upgrade to the more recent version of WebKit, which addresses the problem by displaying a dialog box for JAR files asking users if they want to download them.
Source:Current.com

Google Chrome Released

Are Internet Explorer and Firefox ready to do battle with Chrome?

Google announced Monday that it has been hard at work on an open-source browser known as Chrome, a beta version of which will be released in 100 countries on Tuesday.

New features will included “isolated” tabs designed to prevent browser crashes and a more powerful JavaScript engine.

“Why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web,” Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, Google engineering director, wrote in a blog post.

Google was apparently looking to keep news of Chrome under wraps until after the holiday weekend. A 38-page, online comic book that provided details about Chrome hit the blogosphere Monday morning, but Pichai and Upson said in their blog post that Google had “hit ’send’ a bit early” on the web comic.

The comic depicts various Google engineers describing Chrome’s features, including the isolated tab idea.

“By keeping each tab in an isolated ’sandbox’, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites,” Pichai and Upson wrote.

Having a number of tabs open in a single browser eats up memory. If a browser is running slow, a user’s natural inclination is to close a few tabs? In some cases, however, little bits of the closed tabs remain, which eats up space and requires the operating system to grow the browser’s address space, according to Google. With Chrome, there will be a different tab for each process, including plug-ins.

“When a tab is closed in Google Chrome, you’re ending the whole process,” according to the comic. “You can look under the hood with Google Chrome’s task mananger to see what sites are using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and abusing your CPU” so you can place “blame where blame belongs.”

Google also promised “improved speed and responsiveness across the board.”

“We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers,” Pichai and Upson wrote.

Like OpenSocial and Android, Chrome will be an open source initiative.

“We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path,” they wrote. “We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.”

The team selected Webkit because it uses memory efficiently, was easily adapated to embedded devices, and it was easy for new browser developers to learn to make the code base work, according to the web comic. “Webkit keeps it simple.”

Google recently extended its financial deal with Mozilla until 2011, according to a blog post from Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation.

Tuesday’s beta release will be available for Windows users. “We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust,” Pichai and Upson wrote.

“This is just the beginning — Google Chrome is far from done,” they wrote. “Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.”

Last week, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, which includes improved security and new browsing aids.

Earlier this summer, Mozilla released Firefox 3, which garnered 8 million downloads in 24 hours.

Google Android Leaked Pictures

Sure, we’ve seen some blurry videos and managed a few stolen glimpses when Andy Rubin demonstrated this beast, but now we’ve gotten our hands on a slew of pictures showing off a very real T-Mobile-branded Dream in all its Android-running glory. Not only does this confirm the design spied in those FCC docs as well as show off that nearly-done version of Android, but it seems to confirm the fact that this will be headed to T-Mobile, and sooner rather than later judging from the looks of the above device. Needless to say, our inner-geeks are completely geeking out right now. Hit the gallery below for a handful of other views of the phone.

Environmentally Friendly Pyramid Housing 1 Million People in Development

Timlinks, which develops environmentally safe projects, has recently published several stunning images of a giant pyramid titled Ziggurat. The company also posted the information regarding the plans to officially open the pyramid during the Cityscape Dubai exhibition which is slated to take place on October 6-9 this year. The giant pyramid will be built on 2.3 square kilometers of land and will be capable of housing up to one million people.

Timlinks said that their Ziggurat would not be dependent on the energy system due to the use of steam, wind and other natural resources. The building will also be distinctive for its highly efficient transport communication system that will operate both vertically and horizontally. In addition, the company plans to use private green zones for agricultural purposes.

Specialists of the International Environment Institute said that the technologies used at Ziggurat would make it a viable center. Timlinks has already patented the construction and the technology that were developed for the project. Several European professors will attend Cityscape Dubai to explain how an object like Ziggurat can be used in bigger projects, which probably means that the giant pyramid will not be the only construction of such kind in the world.

A ziggurat was a temple tower of the ancient Mesopotamian valley and Iran, having the form of a terraced pyramid of successively receding stories or levels. Some modern buildings with a step pyramid shape have also been termed ziggurats.

Ziggurats were important to the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians of ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest examples of the ziggurat were simple raised platforms that date from the Ubaid period during the fourth millennium BC, and the latest date from the 6th century BC. The top of the ziggurat was flat, unlike many pyramids. The step pyramid style began near the end of the Early Dynastic Period. Built in receding tiers upon a rectangular, oval, or square platform, the ziggurat was a pyramidal structure. Sun-baked bricks made up the core of the ziggurat with facings of fired bricks on the outside. The facings were often glazed in different colors and may have had astrological significance. The number of tiers ranged from two to seven, with a shrine or temple at the summit. Access to the shrine was provided by a series of ramps on one side of the ziggurat or by a spiral ramp from base to summit. Notable examples of this structure include the Great Ziggurat of Ur and Khorsabad in Mesopotamia.

The ziggurats had no internal chambers. They were almost always square or rectangular, where one side was typically more than 170 feet (50 meters) long.

The Mesopotamian ziggurats were not places for public worship or ceremonies. They were believed to be dwelling places for the gods. Through the ziggurat, the gods could be close to mankind, and each city had its own patron god. Only priests were permitted on the ziggurat or in the rooms at its base, and it was their responsibility to care for the gods and attend to their needs. The priests were very powerful members of Sumerian society.Source: Happynews.com

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