It seems like a scene from Minority report only this time it wasn’t human but a computer who predicts crimes.

Alerted to a pattern identified with the help of a computer, uniformed officers from the 3rd Precinct were keeping a close watch on South Broadway when they arrested two people accused of holding up a 25-year-old city woman.

Lt. James McLaughlin, who is working in the Technical Support Unit to help police use computers to fight crime, evaluated robberies in southwest Yonkers and told the department there would be a robbery between 8 p.m. and midnight Wednesday on South Broadway.

“He predicted it and he was right,” Police Commissioner Robert Taggart said.

Source: thejournalnews.com

Ten people have been arrested in Brazil after authorities discovered them allegedly using Google’s online community site, Orkut, to sell drugs.

The drugs ring was uncovered after police tapped phone calls and monitored online communications through Orkut.

The site, used for building online communities and making contacts, is hugely popular in Latin America.

According to media reports, more than half of the seven million community members are from Brazil.

The Brazilian authorities say that the drug dealers used the Orkut network service to link up deals to sell ecstasy and marijuana.

Source: BBC

When the search engine giant poached Kai Fu-Lee from Microsoft to open a new research and development office in China. Microsoft’s rapid response was a lawsuit, citing an agreement that Fu-Lee allegedly inked in 2000.

Now Google has retaliated, contending that Microsoft’s clause is “clearly an illegal restraint of trade” since it violates laws in California, where Google is based, giving workers the right to change jobs. “Microsoft is focused on litigation and intimidation,” Google’s attorney added. Microsoft replied it was “confident in our case and that Google’s legal maneuvers will ultimately be rejected by the court”.

Source: Forbes

Today Microsoft Corp. announced the official name of its next-generation Windows® client operating system, formerly code-named “Longhorn.�? will be called Windows Vista.

Microsoft unveiled the name in Atlanta on Thursday at the company’s internal sales event, known as the Microsoft Global Sales Briefing, or MGB.

Video of the name announcement

Microsoft’s MSN Messenger and America Online’s Instant Messenger services are being targeted by malicious messages containing links that could infect a computer with a Trojan horse or dangerous worm.

The latest threat is a Trojan called Kirvo, which arrives in the form of an instant message from someone on the user’s “friends” list. The message contains a link to a Web site, which, if clicked on, loads a copy of Kirvo onto the computer, according to an advisory from security company Symantec. Kirvo is preprogrammed to then fetch a copy of Spybot, a dangerous worm that can take advantage of software vulnerabilities to spy on the user.

Source: News.com

San Francisco (InfoWorld) - Stanford, Calif. — Sun Microsystems president and COO Jonathan Schwartz on Thursday cited the company’s plans to eventually offer all of its software for free as a way to build communities around its technologies.

“The net upside of that is we get more people engaged in our community,” Schwartz said of Sun’s plans while speaking at the AlwaysOn conference here.

Sun currently offers its Solaris operating system components freely via open source. Technologies such as Java also are downloadable at no charge.

Source: InfoWorld