FBI secretly sought information last year on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents from their banks and credit card, telephone and Internet companies without a court’s approval, the Justice Department said Friday.

It was the first time the Bush administration has publicly disclosed how often it uses the administrative subpoena known as a National Security Letter, which allows the executive branch of government to obtain records about people in terrorism and espionage investigations without a judge’s approval or a grand jury subpoena.

Friday’s disclosure was mandated as part of the renewal of the Patriot Act, the administration’s sweeping anti-terror law.

Source: AP

Mozilla Corp. developers have yanked the feature, dubbed “Places,” from the next version of their Firefox browser. The feature which was to be a rewrite of Firefox’s bookmarking system, and would have allowed users to search through both bookmarks and the browsing history log to locate sites. Places relies on SQLite, an open-source database engine, to store bookmarks and the history data.

“As we have been preparing for the FF2 [Firefox 2.0] Alpha2 on May 9 it has become increasingly clear that we do not have time to complete an implementation of Places that lives up to our standards,” wrote Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s director of engineering, in a message on a developer’s message forum.

“Rather than rush it to market, we’d prefer to spend the time it takes to get it right,” Schroepfer added.

Source: InformationWeek

A new speech recognition tool promises to let programmers write clean code without ever having to lay a finger on their keyboard.

The tool, called VoiceCode, has been developed to help programmers with repetitive strain injury (RSI). This is a common affliction for people who spend a lot of time using a keyboard or mouse and causes pain in muscles, tendons and nerves in a sufferer’s arms and back. Some estimates suggest 22% of all US computer programmers, or 100,000 people, suffer from the condition.

VoiceCode lets a programmer dictate code in a more natural way rapidly translating their utterances into awkward programming syntax. For example, in order to write “if (currRecNum < maxOffSet)" a VoiceCode user only needs to say: "if current record number is less than max offset then".

The best way to get a feel for what Voice Code can do is to view the demo movies .

Source: News Scientist

Sony dedicated much of its Game Developers Conference booth to showing off technology demos for its upcoming PS3 console. Some had been shown before (at last year’s E3), but this was the first time that these tech demos were live on a trade show floor and available for attendees to actually manipulate them.

Source: 1UP

Nikki Hemming, the chief executive of the company that owns the Kazaa file-sharing network on Friday denied hastily selling her multimillion dollar Sydney mansion and sending the proceeds to the tax haven of Vanuatu to make sure record company lawyers could not get their hands on it.

The denial capped more than four hours on the stand for Hemming at the Federal Court of Australia in Sydney. She was cross examined on two affidavits she wrote detailing her assets ahead of a possible court order for damages against Kazaa’s owners for authorizing widescale copyright breaches by users of the so-called peer-to-peer network.

Source: AP

AMD will today admit it has inadvertently allowed a number of 2.6GHz and 2.8GHz single-core Opteron x52 and x54 processors with faulty floating-point maths units to escape into the wild.

An AMD UK spokesman confirmed that a public statement is to be made on the matter later today in the US, but could not provide further details at this time.

he problem is believed to affect only a fraction - perhaps no more than 3000 individual CPUs - which managed to slip through AMD’s screening net.

Source: The Register

The most anticipated game of the year Dreamfall is due to be released on May 1st with pre-orders scheduled for 30th of April. Online store Amazon already lists the action adventure game as available for order.

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey’, winner of multiple E3 awards as the best game in its genre, is the continuation of a saga that began in the award-winning ‘The Longest Journey’, considered to be one of the finest adventure games ever made. In ‘Dreamfall’, players are taken on an epic journey of exploration and adventure as they venture through a thrilling and emotional storyline. ‘Dreamfall’ features a fully interactive world where beautiful music, stunning graphics, fascinating characters and unparalleled gameplay variety promises to bring the adventure genre into a new era.

In preparation for the game release, Fancom released recently a new web site in which you can find screenshots, concept art, music, videos, wallpapers, forum and much more.

Microsoft Corp. says it’s nearly done with its deployment of Windows Live ID, the authentication service that will replace Passport.

Windows Live ID will enable someone who has subscribed to multiple Live services to sign in to one, and be simultaneously signed in to all the others. As a result, a person can move from one service to another without repeating the sign-in process.

In the Windows Live ID blog, Trevin Chow, lead program manager, said the development team is “nearly complete with our deployment,” adding that the transition from Passport has gone mostly unnoticed by the end user.

Source: InformationWeek

A number of flaws in the software that is used to administer the Internet’s Domain Name System have been discovered by researchers at Finland’s University of Oulu.

The vulnerabilities could be exploited to “cause a variety of outcomes,” including crashing the DNS server or possibly providing attackers with a way to run unauthorized software, according to an advisory, posted today by the U.K.’s National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre.

Source: ComputerWorld

Frustrated with the poor quality of many Web sites dealing with ancient Egypt, a professor at the University of California has decided to create a massive online encyclopedia devoted solely to Egyptology.

The UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, which will go online in 2008, will be peer-reviewed and will update constantly when there are new discoveries, said Wendrich.

One version, in PDF, will be available for free to anyone using the Web while a second version, with a better search function and more graphics, will be available by subscription.

Source: Reuters

Internet telephony provider Skype announced Friday it now has more than 100 million registered users worldwide.

Skype, which was bought last year for $2.6 billion by online auctioneer eBay Inc., said it has nearly doubled in size from September 2005 when 54 million people were using the service.

Source: AP

AOL has launched a network of blogs that will offer original commentary and news about eight large publicly listed companies in its first joint effort with Weblogs Inc., which AOL purchased last year.

The network, dubbed Blogging Stocks, will initially cover Time Warner, AOL’s parent company, as well as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, Wal-Mart and General Electric. More companies will be added later.

Source: News.com