Investigations by the Mumbai police, including the interrogation of one nabbed terrorist, suggest that the terrorists were highly trained and used technologies such as satellite phones, and global positioning systems (GPS), according to police.

Google Earth has previously come in for criticism in India, including from the country’s former President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

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Source: PC World

Scared shoppers at the Toys ‘R’ Us store in Palm Desert, California fled the violence, but no one else was hurt.

The violence erupted on Black Friday, the traditional post-Thanksgiving start of the Christmas holiday shopping season, but authorities indicated the shooting was not related to a shopping frenzy.

Riverside County sheriff’s Sergeant Dennis Gutierrez said the fight was not over a toy. He said handguns were found by the men’s bodies, but he released little other information. He would not answer a question about whether the shooting was gang-related.

Witnesses Scott and Joan Barrick said they were shopping in the store when the fight began between two women, each with a man. The women were near the checkout area, but the Barricks did not think the women had purchases.

One woman suddenly started punching the other woman, who fought back as blood flowed from her nose, Scott Barrick, 41, said.

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Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

So far, precise details on the W3F are a bit sparse, with most of the information available coming from a speech by Berners-Lee in which he announced its creation. Seed money for the effort comes from the Knight Foundation, in the form of $1 million a year for five years. According to Berners-Lee, the Knights themselves share many of his overall goals.

Berners-Lee indicated that the W3F would focus on three general goals: advancing a single web that is open to any device and software; extending the capabilities supported by the web and ensuring they can be accessed securely; and extending the reach of the web to everyone on the planet. Some of these appear to be an extension of the W3C, which works to ensure that newly-devised technology conforms to open standards. The difference appears to be that the W3F will be a bit more proactive, and will research and promote technologies before handing them off to be standardized.

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Source: Ars Technica

With an unstable economy and the biggest holiday shopping season of the year upon us, many consumers are expected to stay at home, using their computers and wireless devices to do their holiday shopping. More people are expected to shop online this holiday season to do comparison shopping, take advantage of free shipping, and search for gifts using search engines instead of driving from store to store.

Total online shopping sales in the United States is expected to reach $44 billion this year, a 12 percent increase from last year, according to the Forrester Research Online Holiday Retail Forecast 2008 report.

Twelve percent is not a huge increase compared to previous years, but considering the economic conditions, retailers will be happy with any increase. Offline holiday shopping sales are expected to increase only 2.2 percent from 2007, according to the National Retail Federation’s September 2008 report.

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Source: News Factor

But the steady draining of consumer confidence reflected in recent government data and the latest market research reports suggest the online retail industry is bracing for a humbling first-ever year of flat or even contracting holiday sales.

Ecommerce, for reasons tied to both the global economic crash and Web-specific factors, is poised to fall harder than the much maligned retail store industry, itself struggling with recent high-profile bankruptcies and widespread signs that consumers are looking to sharply curtail their spending.

“Retail spending has not really dropped,” says Gian Fulgoni, chairman of consumer audience measurement firm comScore Inc. “It’s ecommerce growth rates that have fallen off a cliff.”

This week, comScore once again cut its forecast for U.S. holiday shopping, reporting that sales in the first 23 days of November had fallen to $8.2 billion, down 4 percent from a year earlier.

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Source: Reuters

In the top 10 searches, Spears — the most popular search term for seven of the past eight years — was followed by World Wrestling Entertainment and then by Obama, Yahoo said.

Others on Yahoo’s top 10 list among its billions of searches were, in order, television actress Miley Cyrus, online game RuneScape, actress Jessica Alba, Japanese manga cartoon series Naruto, actresses Lindsay Lohan and Angelina Jolie, and reality TV talent show American Idol.

Among special categories, the only non-presidential or vice-presidential candidate to make the top 10 politicians was California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, at No. 9.

The top 10 political searches were Obama, Sarah Palin, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, George Bush, Ron Paul, John Edwards, Mike Huckabee, Schwarzenegger and Mitt Romney.

Yahoo said the most searched news stories were on hurricanes, Caylee and Casey Anthony, election 2008, Pakistan, pregnant man, China, Iraq, Shelley Malil, Patrick Swayze and Afghanistan.

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Source: Reuters

Edna Parker of Shelbyville, Indiana, was born on April 20, 1893 — when Queen Victoria still ruled the British empire and before X-rays were even invented.

Parker was recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest person in August 2007 following the death of Japanese Yone Minagawa, who was four months her senior.

According to the research group, which maintains a list of the world’s oldest people, Parker was the 14th oldest validated supercentenarian in history.

The oldest person on its list is now Maria de Jesus of Portugal, born September 10, 1893, and currently 115 years, 78 days old.

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Source: Phys Org

A team at Microsoft studied health-related Web searches on popular search engines and surveyed 515 employees about their health-related searching.

Web searches had the potential to escalate fears - like a headache was caused by a brain tumour, for example.

Experts said people concerned about their health should see a doctor.

Microsoft conducted the study to improve its own search engine.

Roughly 2% of all the Web queries were health-related, and about 250,000 users, or a quarter of the sample, engaged in a least one medical search during the study.

The researchers found Web searches for common symptoms such as headache and chest pain were just as likely or more likely to lead people to pages describing serious conditions as benign ones, even though the serious illnesses are much more rare.

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Source: The BBC

The ‘underground economy’ refers to commercial cybercrime activity – specifically, the purchase and sale of fraudulent goods and services. Items for sale might include sold credit card data, bank account credentials, email accounts, and other data.

Services might include cashiers who can transfer funds from stolen accounts into true currency, phishing and scam page hosting, and job advertisements for roles such as scam developers or phishing partners.

The value of the total advertised goods on underground economy servers during the twelve-month period was more than US$276 million.

Information is bought and sold on IRC channels and web forums. Sometimes sellers set up shop on legitimate servers, which makes it harder for police to shut them down.

The underground economy is highly diverse. “The top ten servers control the top 11 per cent of the revenue,” said Craig Scroggie, VP and MD of Symantec Asia Pacific.

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Source: iT News

In the interests of full disclosure, FireEye is a security solutions provider, and Stuart Staniford is their chief scientist. This casts his conclusions in a somewhat different light, but Staniford makes no effort to hide his affiliations as he details the experiment he performed in his blog entry. Staniford walks through his assumptions, data sets, and procedures in some depth; I recommend consulting his full entry if you’re curious about the experiment.

The good news here is that FireEye’s own custom security software tends to detect new malware more-or-less at the same time as VirusTotal. Unfortunately, the lag time between VirusTotal learning to recognize a new MD5 hash and a majority of AV scanners being able to recognize that same bit of malware is substantial.

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Source: Ars Technica

The money will fund a “games in training” program beginning in 2010, the newspaper reported Sunday. It will watch trends in commercial video games and look for technologies that can be used in training — but it does not plan to compete with the industry.

The army’s gaming unit also plans to buy a “state-of-the-art” commercial game it can modify for use in training. Called Game After Ambush, it will replace the army’s current shooter training game, DARWARS Ambush, the newspaper said. The new game, unlike the old one, will let trainers modify terrains, scenarios and missions during play.

Video games are already widely used in recruiting and training soldiers, with the best-known example being America’s Army, a game released to the general public in 2002 to help with recruitment. Earlier this year, the army opened a 1,347-square-metre “experience centre” in a Philadelphia mall – featuring gaming stations, video installations and a replica command-and-control centre – in an attempt to give the public a glimpse of military life.

Source: The Globe and Mail

uTorrent for Windows saw its first public release in September 2005, and soon became the most widely used BitTorrent application.

In 2006, uTorrent was acquired by BitTorrent Inc., who continued to develop the application, and promised a Mac version.

The uTorrent for Mac projects started roughly two years ago. Initially it was based on libtorrent, but last year the development team decided to make the client a port of its Windows counterpart. A few months ago, an early Alpha release of the Mac version had leaked to the public, the official release, however, has some significant improvements and is much more mature.

The Mac release only runs on Leopard/Intel Macs at the moment, and is still in Beta. Simon Morris, BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management told TorrentFreak that they are working on getting the bugs in PowerPC fixed as well as back-porting to Tiger. “We’re obviously really psyched that we finally got this beta out there. This is indeed a port of the Utorrent source on top of OSX,” Simon said.

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Source: Torrent Freak

The bewildered couple contacted Guardian Money. “We were offended by the title of the film. We don’t do porn - straight or gay - and we can’t do downloads. We have to ask our son even to do an iTunes purchase.”

But this Hertfordshire couple are not alone. A large number of people have received this letter, provoking a massive outcry on web forums such as slyck.com and torrentfreak which estimate 25,000 of these letters have been sent out. If all the recipients paid up, it would net £12.5m - more than almost any porn film has made.

The lawyers also sent out similar demands for a second German gay porn film with an even more offensive title.

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Source: The Guardian

Facebook Connect, as the company’s new feature is called, allows its members to log onto other Web sites using their Facebook identification and see their friends’ activities on those sites. Like Beacon, the controversial advertising program that Facebook introduced and then withdrew last year after it raised a hullabaloo over privacy, Connect also gives members the opportunity to broadcast their actions on those sites to their friends on Facebook.

In the next few weeks, a number of prominent Web sites will weave this service into their pages, including those of the Discovery Channel and The San Francisco Chronicle, the social news site Digg, the genealogy network Geni and the online video hub Hulu.

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Source: The New York Times