Hoping to encourage more games for the PlayStation 3, Sony has cut in half the price of a software development kit for the struggling console.

Sony Corp.’s gaming unit, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., said prices for the development package for the PlayStation 3 will be reduced to $10,250 in North America, 950,000 yen ($8,600) in Japan and 7,500 euros ($11,250) in Europe.

Monday’s move follows last month’s price cuts on the PS3 around the world, and Sony has said that sales have improved in the U.S., Japan and Europe. The 80-gigabyte version PS3 now sells for about $499, down from $599.

Although its predecessor the PlayStation 2 dominated the gaming market, the PS3 has struggled against the Nintendo Co.’s Wii console.

Google Inc funded 23andMe launched on Monday and began offering a DNA saliva test for $999 per person, which would help U.S. users of the online site learn about disease risk, inherited traits and their ancestry.

Eventually users, who sign up for the saliva test online and receive it by mail, will also be able to participate in research.

“The mission of 23andMe is to take the genetic revolution to a new level by offering a secure, Web-based service where individuals can explore, share and better understand their own genetic information,” said 23andMe co-founder Linda Avey.

A Pioneer-created TV service will soon enter public testing and allow consumers to download unlimited numbers of TV shows for a monthly fee.

Dubbed SyncTV, the project began inside Pioneer’s research labs, and will eventually enable users to subscribe to individual channels for between $2 (£1/€1.50) and $4 (£2/€3) per month, with the option to download episodes individually for an additional fee.

It’s not known exactly which TV channels will be available through the service yet, or how may there’ll be to choose from, but it’s expected that users will get access to every programme broadcast by each channel featured on SyncTV.

The service is currently being put through an internal testing process. But in Janaury, it’ll be launched to a select group of public beta-testers.

An Amsterdam resident has put for sale on eBay a chestnut that he says came from the tree that Anne Frank gazed upon while hiding from the Nazis, as activists fight to save the diseased tree from being felled.

“I had this idea for a few years, then I saw that the tree was in the news and I decided to put the chestnut up for auction,” said 34-year-old Charles Kuijpers, who lives next door to the garden where the tree stands.

City officials recently decided that the 27-tonne tree was so diseased that the risk that the trunk could break was too great, and said that it would be removed on Wednesday.

Bids for the chestnut have reached $700 in the auction, which is titled “Grow your own Anne Frank tree with a chestnut“.

PayPal, the payments service arm of online auction leader eBay Inc, is set to release on Tuesday a convenient way for its customers to make payments on Web sites that don’t accept PayPal directly.

The new software utility, called the PayPal Secure Card, recognizes when a user lands on an e-commerce checkout page and automatically helps the user fill out the payment form in a secure way that also offers stepped-up fraud protections.

It answers an innovation by Google Inc, which a year ago introduced Google Checkout, which stores financial details to make shopping more convenient, analysts said.

Through a partnership with credit card issuer MasterCard Inc, Secure Card generates a unique MasterCard number each time a PayPal user arrives on an e-commerce sales checkout page that does not otherwise accept its payments.

“From a merchant’s perspective this looks like any other MasterCard transaction,” said Chris George, director of financial products for PayPal. “And it’s just another PayPal purchase to the customer.”

Secure Card has been tested by 3 million PayPal customers in the past year. The plug-in will be available to U.S. customers on Tuesday, with international customers to follow.

Secure Cards work on Windows computers running either Internet Explorer or Firefox. Users of Apple’s Safari browser have only partial access to the service for now, George said.

Picture having an Olympian view of millions of photos the world’s photographers and cameraphone users have produced over the last day.

That’s what Flickr, Yahoo Inc’s online photo-sharing site, said on Sunday the company plans to offer this week, by introducing a set of mapping features that makes it easier to find photos based on their location.

Starting on Monday, Flickr will unveil a way for Web users to browse photos from tens of millions of geographically located photos loaded up to its site, http://www.flickr.com/.

The service, called “Places,” identifies on a global map the latest hot-spots for photo contributions.

Mozilla has taken another security blow with the discovery that Google user accounts can be accessed through a dangerous Firefox exploit.

The vulnerability, which is still in the wild some 10 days after its discovery on gnucitizen.org, allows hackers to access Google accounts, including Gmail, with cross-site scripting attacks.

A client or server-side exploit can be inserted into .zip files via open document formats from Microsoft Office 2007 and OpenOffice, and uploaded to a server where the Firefox JAR protocol extracts the compressed data.

According to the Web site, affected platforms range from Web mail clients, collaboration and document sharing systems and other Web 2.0 applications from large software vendors including Google and Microsoft.

A 302 redirect error in Google, discovered by bedford.org’s Morgan Lowtech aka tx, creates a domain-wide cross-site scripting attack allowing hackers to gain access and modify Google user accounts including e-mails, contact lists and online presence.

An example of the redirect error is here, while bedford.org has created a proof of concept link that reveals user Gmail contact lists.

While Mozilla has not issued a solution to the problem, application firewalls and proxy servers can be used to block Windows Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs) that contain the JAR protocol, while Web administrators can use a reverse proxy to prevent malicious content from being uploaded.