Microsoft Corp. is taking another step into the world of Web-based computing with a new system it’s calling Windows Azure.

Microsoft says it’s joining Amazon.com Inc. and other rivals in selling information storage space and computing power “in the cloud,” distributed across massive data centers worldwide. That will let companies build Web-based programs without having to manage their own data centers.

Microsoft’s chief software architect, Ray Ozzie, described Azure to software developers at a conference Monday in Los Angeles.

Today Google introduce Google Earth for iPhone and iPod touch. With just a swipe of your finger you can fly from Peoria to Paris to Papua New Guinea, or anywhere in between. It may be small, but it brings all the power of Google Earth to the palm of your hand, including all of the same global imagery and 3D terrain. You can even browse any of 8 million Panoramio photos or read Wikipedia articles.

With Google Earth for iPhone, you can:
• Tilt your iPhone to adjust your view to see mountainous terrain
• View the Panoramio layer and browse the millions of geo-located photos from around the world
• View geo-located Wikipedia articles
• Use the ‘Location’ feature to fly to your current location
• Search for cities, places and business around the globe with Google Local Search

It’s available today in 18 languages and 22 countries in the iTunes App Store.

Radio-frequency identification (RFID)-enabled devices, already popular for contactless payments and transit fare systems, are now being offered as options for more identity verification documents in certain parts of the United States. Government officials, various companies, and consumers are all fond of the convenience the new cards offer, but ongoing research continues to raise questions regarding the security of these these solutions.

These problems are not confined to any particular country or company. Earlier this month, a pair of Dutch security researchers published a paper detailing fundamental defects in the cryptographic cipher behind NXP Semiconductor’s MIFARE Classic technology (currently used in hundreds of mass-transit systems worldwide). Six days earlier, an unknown member of The Hacker’s Choice demonstrated how he was able to fool an airport RFID scanner with a picture of Elvis Presley and his corresponding personal data. Skip back to August, and we’ve got Dutch security researcher Jeroen van Beek discussing how he duplicated RFID passport chips after investing just $120 in hardware. And, of course, there’s the the Massachussets Bay Transit Authority’s attempt to prevent a team of students from MIT from revealing the holes they found in the MBTA’s CharlieCard system, which was built on NXP’s MIFARE Classic technology.

The unfortunate truth is that most of us don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables, which contain chemicals that protect us against cancer, cardiovascular disorders, and other degenerative diseases. For decades, the National Cancer Institute of America has been promoting a diet that contains at least five portions of fruits and vegetables, but over 75 percent of Americans ignore the advice. To help us out, food scientists are trying to modify crop plants to give us a bigger dose of helpful chemicals in those items that we do eat. Today in Nature Biotechnology, European scientists report that they have made a purple tomato that significantly extended the life span of cancer-prone mice.

The scientists were interested in anthocyanins, bioactive chemicals that are found in high concentrations in blackberries and blueberries. Many research groups have determined that these chemicals have high antioxidant activities and modulate cellular signaling pathways in ways that promote health. The researchers chose to enhance tomatoes, as they are a popular food crop and can be easily incorporated into a variety of meals. Tomatoes already contain very small amounts of flavonoids like anthocyanins, so it should be straightforward to give them a boost.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 was downloaded 3 million times in its first week, with about 80% of the downloads by Windows users, an official with the group said in a blog post last week.

The successful introduction of the open source office suite came despite the group’s download servers being temporarily overwhelmed by demand for the new software last week.

Only 221,000 downloads by Linux users were recorded, leading John McCreesh, head of marketing for OpenOffice.org, to suggest a massive undercount. McCreesh said 90% of Linux users traditionally receive OpenOffice.org updates straight from their Linux distribution’s vendor, which would explain the relatively low Linux count.

Many non-English versions of OpenOffice.org are also distributed by alternate Web sites, and OpenOffice.org is still widely distributed via free CD-ROMs in magazines, said McCreesh.

With the undercount included, OpenOffice.org 3.0 may already be installed on up to 5 million computers worldwide, McCreesh said in a blog post.

Local RPS talent prevailed when Monica Martinez, a jewelry store owner from Toronto who entered for fun, with no intention of winning, won match after match to eventually seize the title and the $10,000 grand prize.

On Saturday night, Monica battled for more than five hours with spirited “walk-ons,” seasoned RPS veterans spanning all parts of Canada and the US, and country champs and competitors from as far away as Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and Argentina.

This year, more than 700 players and spectators descended on Toronto’s Steam Whistle brewery on Saturday night for the world’s premier RPS event. It was a spirited night of sporting subculture competition featuring outrageous costumes, team jerseys, face paint, and a Street RPS competition (separate from the sanctioned main event).

“We applaud the enthusiasm and sportsmanship showed by all the competitors,” says Dave Soyka, Marketing Manager at Yahoo! Canada. “Now it’s Monica’s time to shine as the new reigning Yahoo! RPS World Champion.”

Just days after the T-Mobile G1 smartphone went on the market, a group of security researchers have found what they call a serious flaw in the Android software from Google that runs it.

One of the researchers, Charles A. Miller, notified Google of the flaw this week and said he was publicizing it now because he believed that cellphone users were not generally aware that increasingly sophisticated smartphones faced the same threats that plague Internet-connected personal computers.

Mr. Miller, a former National Security Agency computer security specialist, said the flaw could be exploited by an attacker who might trick a G1 user into visiting a booby-trapped Web site.

Sun Microsystems releases Java Standard Edition 6 Update 10, known as Java SE 6u10. The update improves the usability and performance of Sun’s Java Platform on desktop computers. Java SE 6u10 offers new features, including improved startup time for Java applications and applets.

The next update to Windows Vista will enter beta testing next week, bringing with it support for Blu-ray drives, among other enhancements.

In a blog posting on Friday, Microsoft confirmed that a beta version of Windows Vista Service Pack 2 will be released next week.

“Because we’ve adopted a single serviceability model, these improvements are integrated into a single service pack covering both Windows Vista (client) and Windows Server 2008 (server) versions,” Windows executive Mike Nash said in a blog. “This should also minimize deployment and testing complexity for our customers.”

The software maker said earlier this week that it was working on Vista SP2, but wouldn’t go into detail. A support document posted this month, however, suggested a beta version was in the offing.

In addition to Blu-ray, Vista SP2 will add support for Bluetooth 2.1 as well as include Windows Search 4.0, the latest version of Microsoft’s desktop search technology.

Germany will not participate in EU proposals for airports to use full-body scanner security checks, which have raised privacy issues, its interior ministry said on Friday.

“I can tell you in all clarity that we will not take part in this nonsense,” a spokeswoman for the interior ministry told a regular news conference.

The executive European Commission proposed last month to add body scanners to a list of security measures that can be used at airports in the 27-country bloc.

EU lawmakers criticized the scanners in a resolution on Thursday, saying they were equivalent to “a virtual strip search” and raised serious human rights concerns. The lawmakers called for a detailed study of the technology before it is used.

A computer that sits comfortably, coolly on your lap. The world s largest chipmaker expects a crush of ultrathin laptops from PC makers in 2009 and unveiled cooling technology this week to make sure these svelte air-flow constrained designs stay cool.

To date, cooling technology has focused on keeping the internal components from getting too hot but not the outside of the computer, according to Mooly Eden, general manager of Intel s Mobile Platforms Group, speaking at the Intel Developer Forum in Taipei this week. Eden s keynote was streamed from the event.
Intel uses laminar jet technology to cool a laptop s skin.

When you design a very thin system, cooling the skin is a very big challenge, said Eden. If you put a laptop on your lap, it can feel very uncomfortable. Very hot. This is one of the biggest hurdles to designing an ultrathin laptop like the MacBook Air or HP Voodoo Envy 133.

If this problem isn’t solved, laptops can t be made thinner and thinner, he said.

Eden showed an animation of a jet engine to prove his point. The inside of a jet engine can get as hot as 1,000 degrees centigrade. But the jet engine s wall must be kept cool because it is connected to the wing where the fuel is. To keep the engine heat away from the wing, laminar air flow cooling is used.

A laminar flow occurs when a fluid–or air in this case–flows in parallel layers.

Intel demonstrated a system using the same laminar air flow technology to move the heat off a laptop s skin. We are licensing it to our customers so they can keep making thinner and thinner laptops, Eden said.

On Thursday, Microsoft issued a rare out-of-cycle patch for a vulnerability in the Windows Server service that handles remote procedure calls (RPC) that allows programmers to run code either locally or remotely. In issuing MS08-067, Microsoft warns “it is possible that this vulnerability could be used in the crafting of a wormable exploit.” Entitled “Vulnerability in Server Service Could Allow Remote Code Execution (958644)” the specific vulnerability has been assigned a National Vulnerability Database designation of CVE-2008-4250.

Microsoft rates this patch as critical for Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and important for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. It also affects versions of Windows 7 pre-beta in limited release. The patch replaces MS06-040.