In an apparent attempt to one-up Nintendo’s claims that its Wii system helps fight obesity, Sony on Thursday announced that its PlayStation 3 video game consoles will engage in a new battle — against disease.

The PS3 will have the capability to connect to Stanford University’s Folding@home program, a distributed-computing project that focuses on what is called “protein folding.” Stanford University is leveraging the PlayStation 3’s Cell Broadband Engine in what could turn out to be a powerful distributed-computing network of PS3 systems helping study the causes of diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, and many cancers.

“In order to study protein folding, researchers need more than just one super computer, but the massive processing power of thousands of networked computers,” Masayuki Chatani, corporate executive and CTO Computer at Sony Computer Entertainment, said in a statement.

Mozilla is changing the way it publishes security fixes for its Firefox browser.

Over the next day, the open-source company plans to begin delivering bug fixes to a select group of beta testers who will try out the upcoming Firefox 2.0.0.3 version before it is released to all Firefox users.

The new software will be delivered to those who signed up for the Firefox 2 beta program last year. Mozilla hopes that by having a short beta release before pushing out the product it will be better able to “ensure high quality updates,” the company said in a statement.

The internet as it stands has numerous shortcomings, so researchers at Stanford University have gone back to the drawing board in an effort to design a better system of communications.

In an overview of the project, the researchers explain: “We believe that the current internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure.

“Further, we believe the internet’s shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and backward-compatible style of academic and industrial networking research. The proposed program will focus on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network’s ossification.”

By taking a clean slate approach to the problem, and looking at developing architecture for the net that would be applicable in 15 years time, the researchers aim to create the blueprint for a more secure and faster network capable of supporting improved applications. Leading suppliers such as Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, and NEC are also involved in the project.

The five main areas of research are: network architecture, applications, physical layer technologies, security, economics, and policy. These components are expected to evolve, or even change completely, as the program evolves.

David Cancel, the CTO of the web market research firm Compete Incorporated, raised eyebrows at the Open Data 2007 Conference in New York when he revealed that many Internet service providers sell the clickstream data of their users. Clickstream data includes every web site visited by each user and in which order they were clicked.

The data is not sold with accompanying user name or information, but merely as a numerical user value. However, it is still theoretically possible to tie this information to a specific ISP account. Cancel told Ars that his company licenses the data from ISPs for millions of dollars. He did not give a specific figure about what this broke down to in terms of dollars per ISP user, although someone in the audience estimated that it was in the range of 40¢ per user per month—this estimate was erroneously attributed to Cancel himself in some reports on the event. Cancel said that this clickstream data is “much more comprehensive” than data that is normally gleaned through analyzing search queries.

Forget speech-recognition software: How about typing a letter just by thinking it?

In a quiet corner of the Cebit trade show a small Austrian company is showing a “brain-computer interface,” a technology that could one day transform how we use computers, play video games and even talk to each other.

It sounds like science fiction but is a clever application of science and technology. The system does not really read thoughts; rather, it measures fluctuations in electrical voltage in the brain and translates them into commands on a computer screen.

The system consists of a cap that fits over the user’s head, with a few dozen holes through which electrodes are attached so they rest on the scalp. The electrodes are connected via thin cables to a “biosignal amplifier,” which transmits the signals from the brain to a computer.

Windows Vista can be run for at least a year without being activated, a serious end run around one of Microsoft Corp.’s key antipiracy measures, Windows expert Brian Livingston said today.

Livingston, who publishes the Windows Secrets newsletter, said that a single change to Vista’s registry lets users put off the operating system’s product activation requirement an additional eight times beyond the three disclosed last month. With more research, said Livingston, it may even be possible to find a way to postpone activation indefinitely.

“The [activation] demands that Vista puts on corporate buyers is much more than on XP,” said Livingston. “Vista developers have [apparently] programmed in back doors to get around time restrictions for Vista activation.”

A security researcher has documented malware that uses a vulnerability in Apple’s QuickTime movie player to make a computer download and run a Javascript. A MySpace account promoting a French music group is exploiting the flaw to siphon information about users visiting the page and send it to a remote server.

The perpetrators pull off the feat by embedding into their page an invisible QuickTime video that uses one Javascript to download and execute a second Javascript. It’s this second script that acts as the spyware, according to the researcher, Didier Stevens