A major consumer group, insurers together with Google Inc and Microsoft Corp said on Wednesday they have agreed to standards intended to speed adoption of personal electronic health records.

The electronic medical record field remains in its infancy. While U.S. privacy laws govern actions by medical providers such as doctors, there is little in the way of other established privacy, security and data usage standards despite decades of industry efforts.

Backers, which also include some doctors and employer groups, said they hope to break a stalemate in moving medical records online, sparked by consumer fears that their personal information will be abused, or held against them.

“A policy and privacy logjam … has constricted some of the consumer uptake of these services,” said James Dempsey, deputy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy rights group that accepts some industry funding.

Principles for personal health records include an audit trail to track use of the data, a dispute resolution process for consumers who believe their personal information has been misused and a ban on using data to discriminate in employment.

Also signing on to the principles are WebMD Health Corp; Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports; seniors’ lobbying group AARP; and America’s Health Insurance Plans, representing big insurers such as Aetna Inc.

Although a large Internet service provider has backed away from technology that tracks subscribers’ Web use in order to deliver personalized advertising, two other broadband companies said Wednesday they are BurlingtonFreePress.com AP NEWS”>still considering whether to deploy it.

Phone companies Embarq Corp. and CenturyTel Inc. have both completed trials of the same tracking system, from online advertising company NebuAd Inc., and are now considering whether to proceed.

The largest U.S. Internet provider that had been actively looking at Web tracking, Charter Communications Inc., announced Tuesday that it had canceled its planned test because customers had raised concerns.

The technology gathers data on the interests of Web surfers by looking at the sites they visit. It passes the information to online advertising companies, without revealing a surfer’s identity, so they can display more relevant ads on Web sites. For instance, a surfer who visits sites about dogs might see more banner ads for dog food.

The system has been criticized by privacy advocates and legislators. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, wrote to Charter asking it to put the test on hold to give time for discussions. Markey chairs the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.

On Monday, Adobe released a security update for a serious vulnerability within Reader and Acrobat. The vulnerability described in CVE-2008-2641 is being circulated on the Internet. Adobe says if exploited the vulnerability could crash applications and could allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

The update affects Adobe Reader 8.0 through 8.1.2, Adobe Reader 7.0.9 and earlier, Adobe Acrobat Professional, 3D and Standard 8.0 through 8.1.2, Adobe Acrobat Professional, 3D and Standard 7.0.9 and earlier. It does not affect Adobe Reader 7.1.0 and Acrobat 7.1.0.

Wireless systems used by many hospitals to keep track of medical equipment can cause potentially deadly breakdowns in lifesaving devices such as breathing and dialysis machines, researchers reported Tuesday in a study that warned hospitals to conduct safety tests.

Some of the microchip-based “smart” systems are touted as improving patient safety, but a Dutch study of equipment — without the patients — suggests the systems could actually cause harm.

A U.S. patient-safety expert said the study “is of urgent significance” and said hospitals should respond immediately to the “disturbing” results.

The wireless systems send out radio waves that can interfere with equipment such as respirators, external pacemakers and kidney dialysis machines, according to the study.

Researchers discovered the problem in 123 tests they performed in an intensive-care unit at an Amsterdam hospital. Patients were not using the equipment at the time.

Electromagnetic glitches occurred in almost 30 percent of the tests when microchip devices similar to those in many types of wireless medical equipment were placed within about one foot of the lifesaving machines.

Nearly 20 percent of the cases involved hazardous malfunctions that would probably harm patients. These included breathing machines that switched off; mechanical syringe pumps that stopped delivering medication; and external pacemakers, which regulate the heart, that malfunctioned.

The wireless systems are used to tag and keep track of medical equipment like heart-testing machines, joint replacements and surgical staplers. They can help quickly locate devices that are elsewhere in the hospital and help prevent theft.

The technology also is viewed as a way to prevent drug counterfeiting, by embedding microchips in drug containers, and to prevent harmful medical errors by keeping tabs on devices used during surgery.

The results show that it’s crucial for hospitals to test their wireless items before using them around equipment essential for keeping patients alive, said Dr. Erik Jan van Lieshout, a study co-author and critical care specialist at the University of Amsterdam’s Academic Medical Center.

Japan’s Matsushita Electric Industrial Co is finalizing plans to mass-produce 37-inch organic light-emitting diode TVs in three years, aiming to overtake rivals in the next-generation flat-TV race, the Sankei Shimbun daily reported on Tuesday.

The newspaper said that Matsushita would be the first to mass-produce OLED TVs of over 30 inches, and that the company aimed to challenge Samsung Electronics for the top share in the global flat-TV market.

The paper also said Matsushita would likely start selling the OLED TVs for around 150,000 yen ($1,390).

Matsushita spokesman Akira Kadota said the company was considering the commercialization of OLED TVs in the future, but it had not decided on any details including the launch timing or size.

American Airlines says customers will be able to test in-flight Internet access on two flights beginning Wednesday, with broader service expected to begin in the following couple weeks.

Facing record high fuel prices, airlines are looking at entertainment and information services as ways to make a few more bucks per passenger.

American’s technology partner, Aircell LLC, will charge $9.95 to $12.95 for Internet service, depending on flight length. Aircell and American share the revenue, officials said.

The test will begin on one flight from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Los Angeles and one return flight, said Doug Backelin, American’s manager of in-flight technology. The test service will be free, he said.

The airline would not say on which flights it would conduct the test.

Sun Microsystems looks poised to lead the “mainstream” multi-core race for at least a couple more years. By late 2009, the server maker should deliver a third major revision of its Niagara processor which will have 16 cores and an astonishing 16 threads per core, The Register has learned.

Today, Sun sells an eight-core “Niagara” chip that can handle eight software threads per core. Customers can fit two of these UltraSPARC T2 chips, as they’re officially called, into a server, providing up to 128 threads in a 1U system. Soon enough, Sun will also sell a four-socket system code-named Botaka.

We’ve confirmed that Sun is looking to push the UltraSPARC Tx line to even greater heights with a 16-core, 16-thread per core eight-socket server. So, each socket is chewing through an insane 256 threads. And the eight-socket box will do 2,048 threads.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is getting ready to vote later this week to open up the Internet naming convention to allow more options.

On Thursday at its meeting in Paris, ICANN, the not-for-profit organization charged with overseeing the Internet’s naming scheme, will vote on a proposal that would allow companies to purchase new generic top-level domains ending in almost anything they want. So instead of being limited to .com, .org or .co.uk as the last letters of their Web addresses, companies or organizations could add their company name to the end of their URL. For example, eBay could become .ebay or Intel could be .intel. Even cities could name their Web sites .newyork or .berlin.

But the new names, which could be ready in 2009, won’t come cheap. As a result, it’s unlikely that individuals will be able to take advantage of the new naming conventions to create more personalized Web sites. The exact price to register these new names isn’t yet known, but some experts predict it could cost about $50,000 to register a new domain name.

Movie ticketing and entertainment site Fandango Inc. said Monday it has acquired Movies.com from Walt Disney Co. for an undisclosed amount.

Los Angeles-based Fandango, which is owned by Comcast Corp., sells tickets for 1,300 theaters nationwide. It said it will now handle the movie ticketing functions for Movies.com, which is mainly an entertainment Web site.

Movies.com, which previously partnered with MovieTickets.com for ticketing, was owned by the Walt Disney Internet Group. Philadelphia-based cable TV system owner Comcast said the purchase price was minimal.

Fandango said it had 6.3 million monthly unique visitors to its Web site in May compared with 1.9 million for Movies.com. Both sites were launched in 2000.

Eavesdroppers might be able to gain clues about the content of encrypted conversations even without breaking the cryptography.

VoIP services such as Skype encrypt conversations but law enforcement agencies, most notably in Germany, have complained this can hinder law enforcement investigations.

The emerging use of variable bitrate compression for VoIP transmission carries serious potential drawbacks that may play into the hands of those seeking to spy on the content of conversations, for whatever purpose. Variable bitrate compression to VoIP streams minimises the use of bandwidth without reducing audio quality.

But the technique, when applied to encrypted VoIP streams, means that larger packets of scrambled data are associated with complex sounds such as “ow” than simple consonants, such as “c”. As a result traffic analysis techniques can be applied to encrypted traffic streams.

Boffins from John Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA have found that the relative size of packets in a VoIP conversation might be used to detect whether words or phrases of interest appear in encrypted conversations. The result might yield a transcript even more unintelligible than from comedian Norman Collier’s faulty microphone routine - which might still be a useful result.

Even though the approach is not sophisticated enough to come anywhere near gaining the actual gist of conversations it is be good enough to pick out chosen phrases within encrypted data. By using machine learning techniques the researchers were able to develop systems that “inferred ‘hidden’ information from encrypted VoIP traffic streams based on observable patterns in packet size and timing of various protocols”.

Software developed by the researchers picked out words or short phrases with an average accuracy of 50 per cent, a result that climbed to 90 per cent in the case of longer phrases.

Following the announcement of Sun’s plans to make Java free and open under the General Public License (GPL) at JavaOne 2006, there have been a few struggles on the path to open source. At the time of the OpenJDK release in May last year, around five percent of the code–the portion not owned by Sun–was still closed.

Simon Phipps, the chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems, said: “We released under the GPL everything we had the rights to release under the GPL and that was last summer. There were a couple of holdouts there. One was the area to do with raster graphics and 2D graphics. That turned out to be owned by a company that didn’t want us to release that code as open source. We negotiated with them and because they’ve said ‘yes, you can open source the code’, I can tell you they’re Codec […].”

The only element that’s left now is actually a sound-related component within Java. We finally decided that the vendor that’s involved there just isn’t going to play ball and we’re rewriting the code from scratch. That’s going to be done within the next couple of months.”

Phipps says Java is expected to be completely free within the coming few months.

Only 8 percent of developers are targeting Windows Vista according to a new report from analysts Evans Data Corporation. 49 percent of developers are developing for Vista’s soon-to-be-discontinued predecessor, Windows XP, and even Linux is beating Vista, with some 13 percent of development focused on the open-source OS.

The headline finding of the report, compiled from a biannual survey of North American developers, could point at continued problems for Microsoft. More than a year after its release, Vista is still failing to make significant inroads into the enterprise, with businesses preferring to stick with the tried-and-trusted Windows XP. John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data, claims that developers are taking a “wait-and-see” approach to Vista, as “the new operating system has had more than its share of problems”; driver issues, software incompatibility, and steep hardware demands.