D-Link, the end to end networking solutions provider for consumers and business, today announced that a new D-Link Internet Camera with 3G compatibility will be added to its award-winning line of IP surveillance products offering customers the ability to view live video streams from a 3G cell phone. The D-Link Wireless Internet Camera with 3G compatibility attaches to a home or small office network via a wired or wireless 802.11g/b connection and the live camera feed can then be pulled from the 3G cellular network by compatible cell phones with a 3GPP player. The D-Link 3G Wireless Internet Camera will offer both consumers and small businesses a flexible and convenient way to remotely monitor a home or office in real time from anywhere within the 3G service area.

D-Link Announces 3G Compatible Internet Camera Offering Mobile Monitoring From Cell Phones

Eyeballs, a severed hand, or fingers carried in ziplock bags. Back alley eye replacement surgery. These are scenarios used in recent blockbuster movies like Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report" and "Tomorrow Never Dies" to illustrate how unsavory characters in high-tech worlds beat sophisticated security and identification systems.

Sound fantastic? Maybe not. Biometrics is the science of using biological properties, such as fingerprints, an iris scan, or voice recognition, to identify individuals. And in a world of growing terrorism concerns and increasing security measures, the field of biometrics is rapidly expanding.

"Biometric systems automatically measure the unique physiological or behavioral ‘signature' of an individual, from which a decision can be made to either authenticate or determine that individual's identity," explained Stephanie C. Schuckers, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Clarkson University. "Today, biometric systems are popping up everywhere – in places like hospitals, banks, even college residence halls – to authorize or deny access to medical files, financial accounts, or restricted or private areas."

"And as with any identification or security system," Schuckers adds, "biometric devices are prone to ‘spoofing' or attacks designed to defeat them."

Clarkson University Engineer Outwits High-Tech Fingerprint Fraud

A vegetated rooftop recycling system has been developed that allows water to be used twice before it is flushed into the communal waste water system.
The Green Roof Water Recycling System (GROW) uses semi-aquatic plants to treat waste washing water, which can then be reused for activities such as flushing the toilet.
GROW is the brainchild of Chris Shirley-Smith, whose company Water Works UK is collaborating with Imperial College London and Cranfield University. The researchers are funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
So-called grey water from washbasins, baths and showers is pumped up to the GROW system, which is constructed on the roof of an office or housing block. It consists of an inclined framework of interconnected horizontal troughs. Planted in these troughs are rows of specially chosen plants that gently cleanse the grey water. Trickling through the GROW framework, the plants' roots naturally take up the dissolved pollutants, leaving 'green water'. Green water is not drinkable and will be dyed with a vegetable colour to signify this, but it can be used to flush toilets or water the garden.

GROWing the next generation of water recycling plants

The next advance in cameras is becoming a reality at the University of Rochester. Imaging chips revolutionized the photography industry, and now the chips themselves are being revolutionized. A pair of newly patented technologies may soon enable power-hungry imaging chips to use just a fraction of the energy used today and capture better images to boot—all while enabling cameras to shrink to the size of a shirt button and run for years on a single battery. Placed in a home, they could wirelessly provide images to a security company when an alarm is tripped, or even allow mapping software like Google's to zoom in to real-time images at street level. The enormous reduction in power consumption and increase in computing power can also bring cell-phone video calls closer to fruition.

Breakthrough Chip Delivers Better Digital Pictures For Less Power

"There is not a complete and optimised 4K [high quality]-workflow for the world of digital cinema, particularly for the effective and seamless handling of film data from acquisition to post-production and transmission. Data compression is the key to achieving this,” says Dr Siegfried Foessel at Fraunhofer IIS and coordinator of the IST-funded project WORLDSCREEN.
The demands for high quality digital cinema applications require huge amounts of data that cannot be effectively handled. The WORLDSCREEN consortium is addressing these challenges by using layered scheme data compression (LSC) algorithms, while at the same time preserving the highest quality possible.
“Our aim is to develop viable compression systems for digital cinema workflows and data,” Dr Foessel says. “At the same time, we are considering the economic aspects of the value chain for LSC D-Cinema, E-Cinema and rich media archives.” (E-Cinema is lower resolution and poorer quality than D-Cinema. It is primarily used for art house content, independent films at live events, streaming applications and in-cinema games and advertising. Hollywood studios demand D-Cinema, the highest quality digital cinema.)

Welcome to the new world of digital cinema

In a keynote address delivered this morning to the U.S. IPv6 Summit in Reston, Va., IEEE-USA President Gerard A. Alphonse urged participants to raise widespread adoption of the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) by Japan, China, Korea and other Asian countries as an issue in the current national policy discussion on U.S. competitiveness and innovation policy.
"Despite its importance, breadth, and all the potential services it will enable worldwide, the current high-level debate has not identified IPv6 as an innovation opportunity of national significance," Dr. Alphonse said. He added: "That's unfortunate because we know that Asian, European and other nations are working very diligently on IPv6, or are even seeking dominance in setting its standards."
While praising a recent government directive requiring federal agencies to adopt IPv6 implementation plans, the IEEE-USA president cautioned: "We shouldn't kid ourselves that the Office of Management and Budget's directive is the same as a national vision, mission and action plan for the United States, and equivalent to the plans already in place in Japan, China and Korea."

IPv6 transition should be part of national innovation debate says IEEE-USA President Gerry Alphonse

Scientists at the Technical University of Denmark have invented a technology which may be an important step towards the hydrogen economy: a hydrogen tablet that effectively stores hydrogen in an inexpensive and safe material.

With the new hydrogen tablet, it becomes much simpler to use the environmentally-friendly energy of hydrogen. Hydrogen is a non-polluting fuel, but since it is a light gas it occupies too much volume, and it is flammable. Consequently, effective and safe storage of hydrogen has challenged researchers world-wide for almost three decades. At the Technical University of Denmark, DTU, an interdisciplinary team has developed a hydrogen tablet which enables storage and transport of hydrogen in solid form.

“Should you drive a car 600 km using gaseous hydrogen at normal pressure, it would require a fuel tank with a size of nine cars. With our technology, the same amount of hydrogen can be stored in a normal gasoline tank”, says Professor Claus Hviid Christensen, Department of Chemistry at DTU.

Making society independent of fossil fuels - Danish researchers reveal new technology...

Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., has developed the world’s first clear paint that repairs scratches on painted car surfaces, including scratches from car-washing machines, off-road driving and fingernails.

“Scratch Guard Coat” contains a newly developed high elastic resin that helps prevent scratches from affecting the inner layers of a car’s painted surface. With “Scratch Guard Coat” a car’s scratched surface will return to its original state anywhere from one day to a week, depending on temperature and the depth of the scratch.

The water-repellant paint also has a higher resistance to scratches compared with conventional clear paints. A vehicle painted with “Scratch Guard Coat” will have only one-fifth the abrasions caused by a car-washing machine compared with a car covered with conventional clear paint. Scratches from car-washing machines account for the majority of scratches to painted car surfaces.

“Scratch Guard Coat” is effective for about three years.

“Scratch Guard Coat” will be applied for the first time on an SUV model that is scheduled for a partial makeover in the near future. The paint will be applied to the car’s chassis, bumpers, door mirrors, among other parts.

Nissan: Paint that Fixes Itself When Scratched

Extortionists now have a new type of victim to pick on: podcasters. U.S. podcaster Eric Marcus has fallen prey to a hijacker who has diverted his really simple syndication (RSS) feed and is allegedly demanding money to release it. Marcus, who runs the Vegan.com site and produces the Erik's Diner podcasts, is looking for legal redress.

A podcast is audio content that is distributed to listeners over the Internet through an RSS feed. According to press reports, Marcus discovered that downloads of his podcast had suddenly diminished after he had gradually won an audience of 1,500 regular listeners.
Marcus found that Yahoo has an RSS listing for his podcast on its podcasts.yahoo.com directory, but that the listing directs potential visitors to podkeyword.com rather than to vegan.com. He also discovered that Apple's iTunes online music store associates the podkeyword.com Web address with the Erik's Diner podcast.

Podcaster Falls Prey to RSS Hijacking

Beware the privateers! They whisper sweetly of fantastic new services they will provide – a faster Internet, better quality, even medical alerts for consumers….and blah-de-blah. Their unspoken agenda, however, is to convert the open Internet commons into a pay-for-performance marketplace. The companies who control the “pipes” of the Internet – i.e., the telephone and cable TV companies – are starting to make their move.
It’s imperative that we pay close attention to these plans – and register our objections to Congress and the companies themselves.

At a briefing for reporters and industry analysts yesterday, the chief technology officer of BellSouth Corp. testified that Internet service providers should be able to sell higher-quality or priority services to certain websites. We knew this battle would soon arrive, but now we can see the puffs of smoke coming from their cannons. (See Jonathan Krim’s story in the Washington Post.)

William L. Smith told a House subcommittee that BellSouth should be able to charge companies for loading their websites faster than others, or for assuring that a voice-over-Internet service has higher quality sound. If network traffic got heavy, BellSouth should be able to sell guaranteed quality of service for favored types of “data packets” – say, streaming TV – while everyone else could suffer delays or degradation in transmission.

Smith tried to make all of this sound eminently reasonable. As he put it, "If I go to the airport, I can buy a coach standby ticket or a first-class ticket. In the shipping business, I can get two-day air or six-day ground.”

But if we follow the logic of market-segmentation and price discrimination, it ends up converting this most precious open commons, the Internet, into an inequitable marketplace, with everything that that implies. It degrades the most fundamental virtue of the Internet – open access on an equal basis – and installs a top-down, seller-dominated system.

Sound familiar? Of course: It’s cable TV. It’s Prodigy and CompuServe. It’s the pop music biz. We’ve been there before, and everyone knows that it sucks.

If BellSouth were to be able to charge Google for priority speed in transmitting its search engine results, for example, then - poof! – only the Big Guys would be able to compete at the highest levels. Any newcomer with a great idea suddenly would suddenly face a huge, insuperable disadvantage. So much for the entrepreneurial revolution made possible by the Internet commons.

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BellSouth’s Secret Dream: Turn the Internet into Cable TV