Paper airline tickets, once the industry standard, are on the fast track to oblivion.

If the International Air Transport Association (IATA) has its way, airlines will issue only electronic tickets by the end of 2007, sending paper tickets the way of other rapidly disappearing industry services such as in-flight meals and free pillows.

Travelers who opt for electronic tickets check in for flights using a credit card or government ID. The migration to electronic ticketing, which could save millions of dollars, has been underway for more than 10 years.

The IATA, a global trade group, said that 96 percent of tickets issued by U.S. airlines are electronic, while globally 77 percent of tickets are electronic.

Source: Reuters

Hoping to get a jump on Google and other competitors, Adobe Systems plans to release a hosted version of its popular Photoshop image-editing application within six months, the company’s chief executive said Tuesday.

The online service is part of a larger move to introduce ad-supported online services to complement its existing products and broaden the company reach into the consumer market, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen told CNET News.com.

The hosted version of Photoshop is part of a bigger company strategy to introduce Internet-delivered services that complement its shrink-wrapped applications and head off likely competition from Google.

Chizen said Adobe laid the foundation for a hosted Photoshop product with Adobe Remix, a Web-based video-editing tool it offers through the PhotoBucket media-sharing site.

Like Adobe Remix, the hosted Photoshop service is set to be free and marketed as an entry-level version of Adobe’s more sophisticated image-editing tools, including Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Chizen envisions revenue from the Photoshop service coming from online advertising.

Online application company Etelos said on Wednesday that its Web-based enterprise customer relationship management software, CRMforGoogle, is now available as an invitation-only beta release.

CRMforGoogle integrates with Google’s recently introduced business software platform, Google Apps Premier Edition. Users of Google’s Personalized Homepage, for example, can add CRMforGoogle feeds that put application information on the page. The application also features limited integration with Google Calendar and Google Spreadsheets. Further integration between Gmail and Google Docs is planned.

At the conclusion of the beta test period, CRMforGoogle will be available in three versions: Personal, Professional, and Enterprise. The Personal version will be free while the other two will require a monthly subscription fee.

Source: InformationWeek

A variant of the well-known and troublesome worm is being used in a spam attack that is luring blog, bulletin board and webmail (Internet-based e-mail) users to connect to a malicious Web site, according to Dmitri Alperovitch, a principal research scientist at Secure Computing Corp.

Alperovitch explains that there is a new component in the variant that enables it to analyze network traffic on the infected computer and dynamically insert a link to the malicious site into text — whether it’s a blog post, a bulletin board entry or an e-mail sent through a webmail system. The users’ text will contain their own content, along with the link and a note that lures readers to check out a Web site with “fun” videos or e-card.

Users who go to the malicious site have their own machines infected with this updated version of the worm, which some security vendors are referring to as a Trojan horse.

“It’s pretty dangerous because it’s using social engineering in a very successful way,” says Alperovitch. “It’s infecting Web posts that come from people who users trust and regularly discuss useful topics with. Imagine a forum where you are used to having good discussions and now they show you a link for what they seem to be saying is a fun video. Wouldn’t you click on it? A lot of people would.”

Source: InformationWeek

As you may recall, Sony got a few people excited last Friday after they announced that European PS3s would no longer be sporting an Emotion engine chip — aka, “the thing that lets you play older games on your PS3″. The community response (predictably) hovered somewhere in-between stunned incredulity and outright fury. You pay $600 for a console, you kind of expect it’s going to handle your back catalogue.

Well, it’s taken a few days for an ‘official’ response to make its way down from Sony on the Mountaintop, but lo, such a thing comes to you today via Sony’s “unofficial” threespeech blog. Since threespeech essentially represents a kind of talking muppet head for Sony’s PR department, don’t expect to see the kind of rage and hurling of blunt objects in the interviewer’s questions to which you might otherwise feel entitled — but hey, at least the article DOES refer to the lobotomized PS3s as ‘degraded models’. That’s gotta count for something.

Source: 1UP.com

An obese 26-year-old man in northeastern China died after a “marathon” online gaming session over the Lunar New Year holiday, state media said on Wednesday.

The 150-kg (330-lb) man from Jinzhou, in Liaoning province, collapsed on Saturday, the last day of the holiday, after spending “almost all” of the seven-day break playing online games, the China Daily said, citing his parents.

Xu Yan, a local teacher, said the “dull life” during the holiday prompted many people to turn to computer games for entertainment.

Source: Yahoo

The PlayStation 3 going on sale in Europe next month will play only some of the games for its predecessor video game machine - a move designed to cut costs and speed up production.

Backward compatibility with PlayStation 2 has been billed as a major feature for the PlayStation 3 that went on sale late last year in the U.S. and Japan.

But packing the machine with two expensive computer chips to play both PS2 and upgrade PS3 games has been racking up costs for the money-losing PS3, a big reason behind Sony Corp.’s flagging earnings lately.

The European PlayStation 3, set to go on sale March 23, won’t carry the chip for PlayStation 2 and will instead use special software to play PS2 games, saving costs and making mass production easier by reducing parts,

Source: AP