Internet2 today announced that the first East to West Coast span on its new nationwide 100 gigabit per second network has been completed and is providing production IP and circuit services. This deployment marks another major milestone in bringing leading- edge networking resources to the research and education community in the United States.

Since beginning its aggressive network build out plans in fall 2006, Internet2 has worked with Level 3 Communications, the Global Research Network Operations Center (GRNOC) at Indiana University, and the regional network connectors to rapidly deploy the enhanced optical and packet network platform. In April 2007, Internet2 announced that the first major phase of the deployment was complete which included nodes in the Northeast and Midwest regions.

With today’s announcement, Internet2 and Level 3 have now completed deployment of important nodes across the northern span of the network including those in Washington DC, Chicago, IL, Kansas City, MO, Salt Lake City, UT, and Seattle, WA. Additionally, network rings have been completed from the Washington DC to Atlanta as well as from Kansas City to Atlanta.

EMI Group Plc., the world’s third-largest music company, is expanding its strategy to sell digital music without copy-protection software to more retail sites through a deal with PassAlong Networks.

PassAlong, a Franklin, Tennessee-based digital media company, said on Wednesday that EMI’s entire digital catalog will be available on the music stores it powers, including Trans World Entertainment’s f.y.e. online music store.

The Department of Justice and FBI today said ongoing investigations have identified over 1 million botnet crime victims. The FBI is working with industry partners, including the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, to notify the victim owners of the computers. Microsoft and the Botnet Task Force have also helped out the FBI. Through this process the FBI may uncover additional incidents in which botnets have been used to facilitate other criminal activity, the FBI said in a statement.

Ars Technica has a ‘first look’ at Safari for Windows, which is interesting because it’s written from the perspective of someone new to Safari.

It was tested against Firefox 2 and IE7 and aside from the slightly faster page loading, Ars didn’t find much to recommend it to Windows users. ‘The modest increase in rendering performance is hardly worth the deficiencies, and Safari’s user interface simply doesn’t provide the usability or flexibility of competing products.

If the folks at Apple think that providing Windows users with a taste of Mac OS X through Safari is going to entice them to buy a Mac, it’s going to take a better effort than the Safari 3 beta. Even if the final release is more polished and completely bug-free, it still won’t be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox

Toyota Motor Corp said Tuesday it has developed new technology to improve the fuel economy of gasoline-powered engines by 5-10 percent with a view to putting it to practical use in new 2-liter engine car models. The eco-friendly mechanism, named Valvematic, boosts engine output by at least 10% and enhances acceleration responsiveness, as well as helping to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the nation’s top car producer claims.

A University of Georgia scientist has developed a statistical system that can, she claims, predict the outcome of wars with an accuracy of 80 percent.

Her approach, applied retrospectively, says the US chance of victory in the first Gulf War was 93%, while the poor Soviets only had a 7% chance in Afghanistan (if only they’d known; failure maybe triggered the collapse of the USSR). As for the current Iraq conflict: the US started off with a 70% chance of a successful regime change, which was duly achieved — but extending the mission past this to support a weak government has dropped the probability of ultimate success to 26%