Can an ice-powered air conditioner take the edge off scorching summer electrical bills?

A young company called Ice Energy has developed an energy-storage system that uses a tank of water to cut down on the power required for air conditioning by 30 percent.

The company’s Ice Bear units, roughly the size and shape of a squat refrigerator, are an adjunct to standard centralized air-conditioning units.

Rather than run AC compressors during the hottest time of the day, the Ice Bear cools water during the night, turning it to ice. During the day, the ice cools the refrigerant as it passes through the tank, lowering the temperature inside.

This process of shifting the time that the AC unit works knocks electricity usage and costs down significantly, said Ice Energy CEO Frank Ramirez.

Source: News.com

Mozilla Corp. will update Firefox for the second time in seven days because last week’s v. 1.5.0.5 introduced a bug to the browser, the company said Monday.

According to online notes of the company’s weekly development meeting, a fix to Firefox included in last week’s 1.5.0.5 injected a new bug that stopped the Windows Media Player plug-in from working on some sites.

To fix the new flaw, Mozilla will unveil Firefox 1.5.0.6 Tuesday night “if everything goes smoothly,”

Source: InformationWeek

eEye Digital Security will release a free version of its Blink intrusion prevention product to consumers in the next few weeks, a company official said Monday.

“It’ll be the same as the enterprise product,” said Marc Maiffret, eEye’s chief hacking officer.

To be dubbed Blink Personal and available “in the next couple of weeks,” the security software will include the same protocol-based intrusion prevention, anti-spyware tools, identity theft defense, and personal firewall as the enterprise-grade version.

Source: InformationWeek

To help lessen the skills gap that exists with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, IBM has announced a trio of free tools and training resources available for developers, solution providers and consultants. Downloadable from AlphaWorks, IBM’s online outlet for emerging technologies, the tools assist with the development, testing, deployment and management of RFID solutions.

Source: VARBusiness

Alien hunters today pounded the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute here with e-mails and phone calls, following claims made this weekend that the organization has covered up the detection of signals from space.

Allegations of a SETI cover up were made last night on the fringe-friendly Coast to Coast radio show hosted by Art Bell. During the broadcast, professional SETI watcher Steven Greer, the CEO of Space Energy Access Systems, claimed that insiders told him that SETI discovered a high concentration of signals from space, and that another organization stepped in to block those signals. SETI, however, maintains that it has not seen any signals of note.

Source: TheRegister

Swiss Army knives are cool, but they’re a little 20th century. Add an MP3 player, however, and I completely take that back.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s finally here: the famed Swiss Army knife, complete with nail file and scissors, and now a 1GB MP3 player. The actual hardware comes in a sturdy aluminum case with the Swiss Army emblem on the side. The case has the blade, scissors and nail file attached to its side, and the MP3 player is removable.

Source: News.com

Sony Media Software, a leading provider of professional video and audio editing software applications, has announced the availability of Blu-print, a software solution for use in authoring DVD’s in the new Blu-ray format. The Blu-print authoring application, developed by Sony Pictures Entertainment, runs on most high-end Windows-powered workstation and enables postproduction facilities and movie production studios to utilize the advanced features of the BD-ROM format. In addition to ensuring proper encoding, users can use Blu-print to create menu navigation for their Blu-ray discs and utilize the advanced features of the format such as BDMV (Blu-ray Disc Movie) “popup” menus and BD-J (Blu-ray Disc Java) interactivity.

With the release today of ‘Training Day,’ ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ and ‘Rumor Has It…’ on Blu-ray, Warner Home Video has become the the first studio to unleash the same movie titles on both formats, following their debut on HD DVD last month.

Finally, after months of apples-to-oranges comparisons between the two formats via different discs from differing studios, a direct head-to-head analysis can now be made using identical source material. As the first Warner Blu-ray titles hit stores this week, High Def Digest rolls out the in-depth comparisons of all three discs.

Source: High Def Digest

A Mozilla Firefox exploit has been found that can hijack the Web browser and monitor submit-and-click events.

The Infostealer.Snifula, which is based on cross-platform component object models (XPCOMs) that developers use to create extensions for the Firefox browser, installs malicious Trojans that are loaded at startup. The Trojan captures contents of form submission events including passwords and forwards them to its main process where it is sent to the remote attacker.

Symantec security response engineer, Candid Wuest said the exploits, which commonly attack Internet Explorer’s browser helper objects (BHOs), began attacking Mozilla browsers in March this year with Javascript-based JS.Ffsniff by using the XPConnect Java interface that allows transparent access to XPCOM objects.

“When an infected user submits a Web form on a Web site, [JS.Ffsniff] will parse the site and steal all information that is submitted by the Web form, including passwords,” Wuest said. “The JS.Ffsniff script then sends this information to a predefined e-mail address using XPCOM objects.”

Source: computerworld

CVS Corp. on Tuesday said its new online photo center will allow customers to store images, share them and order photos and gifts, much like a service already in place at rival Walgreen Co..

CVS said Internet processing, with photos available at a CVS store within an hour, would be available at more than 4,600 of its stores, and that it plans to offer the CVS Photo Center service in more stores by the end of the year.

Source: Reuters

The US House of Representatives has voted by an overwhelming majority to ban social networking sites in schools and libraries. Critics have warned that the ban could apply to a wide variety of sites, some of them of vital educational value.

The House passed the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) by 410 votes to 15. The Act forbids publicly funded organisations, such as schools and libraries, from allowing young people to access sites that have chat rooms or “social networking” elements. Under the proposed law, adults in such institutions can ask for permission to access the sites.

Opponents argue that the definitions in the law are so vague that they could take in a vast array of existing commercial websites and damage the business potential of those sites and the research capabilities of schools and libraries.

Source: The Registe

The Nasdaq is looking into an incident that sent Google Inc.’s stock plummeting by $350 a share last week, a newspaper reported Monday.

The incident occurred Thursday after the stock market closed at 4 p.m. EST, The New York Sun reported. An unidentified person from a Nasdaq member firm apparently typed in an erroneous figure to commence a trade, causing Google shares to trade for as low as $38 between 4:10 p.m. and 4:12 p.m.

Google stock had finished the day of regular trading at $387.12 a share.

Source: InformationWeek