Technology

Tiny silicon chips were embedded into two workers who volunteered to help test the tagging technology at a surveillance equipment company, an official said Monday.

The Mexico attorney general's office implanted the so-called RFIDs -- for radio frequency identification chips -- in some employees in 2004 to restrict access to secure areas. Implanting them in the workers at CityWatcher.com is believed to be the first use of the technology in living humans in the United States.

Sean Darks, chief executive of the company, also had one of the chips embedded.

The inventors of the incredibly popular MP3 format are now working on some prototype technology to battle piracy over peer-to-peer networks. Fraunhofer Institute researchers are applying digital watermarking technology to the audio files, which they say can automatically track pirating over these online “sharing” programs that seem to be all the rage.

The German company is promoting the watermarking technique as an alternative to troublesome and problem-ridden DRM (digital rights management) systems which Michael Kip, spokesperson for Fraunhofer, says is prone to hacking.

McAfee has become the first hardware vendor to use a new technique it claims can reliably protect companies from the lurking threat of botnet-launched distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

Unlike conventional DDoS detection systems based on the statistical analysis of traffic, the first layer of the new Advanced Botnet Protection (ABP) intrusion prevention system (IPS) uses a proxy to pass or block packet traffic dependent on whether or not it is “complete”.

Concept cars are as close as the auto industry gets to haute couture. Design and engineering teams - the same ones that churn out sensible sedans like pantsuits - build these prototypes with an eye toward starting vehicle trends, showcasing R&D efforts, and in some cases, introducing features already on the way to dealers' lots. What's big this season? British mod, Japanese pop futurism, pet care, and hospitality. It's enough to make you forget that the boring four-door you've got parked outside was once someone's big idea.

One of life's ironic oases of solitude -- the peace people find amid the roar of a New York City subway -- could soon be gone.

As New York plans to make cell phones work in subway stations, experts say Americans eventually could be connected everywhere, underground or in the air.

"It's technically feasible, both for airplanes and subways," said James Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. "It's the social aspect that's really the most intractable."

From crying babies to low-quality catering, flying is full of irritations, but these may all soon be eclipsed by the introduction of in-flight cell phones.

A new survey has found that the majority of business travelers are opposed to allowing cell phone use on board aircraft, doubtless quaking at the prospect of a red-eye ruined by ring tones and chatter.

Until now, most airlines have outlawed phone use, claiming possible interference with aircraft electronics.

Sony this week sent AIBO, its robotic dog, off to the great kennel in the sky. The announcement was slipped in to the company’s financial presentation on its results for the three months to the end of December and came as a shock to some fans of the popular canine robots.

But AIBO was not the only product to get the short end of Sony's stick. The company canned its entire robotics division, also putting an end to the humanoid robot QRIO and its range of high-end Qualia devices as the company refocuses on core businesses like music, pictures and entertainment.

For quite some time it has been possible to access the Internet using mobile phones, although the role of the phone has strictly been that of a client. Considering that the modern phones have processing power and memory on par with and even exceeding that of webservers when the web was young, there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones and why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites.

The world's first elevators controlled by magnetic levitation will debut as early as 2008, a Tokyo-based company said Tuesday.

Toshiba Elevator and Building Systems Corp. will employ so-called maglev technology -- capable of suspending objects in mid-air through the combination of magnetic attraction and repulsion -- to control the lifts, it said in a statement.

Drinking from a fire hose. Holding back the tide. Herding fish. Whatever your metaphor of choice, it's easy to get washed away amongst the thousands of gadgets at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show, or CES.

This year, beyond the ubiquitous cell phones, MP3 players and plasma TVs, we tried to find a few products that seemed unique to us.

In no particular order, here's a sampling of the shiny objects that caught our eye...