Technology

For the price of tailored advertisements, an Internet ad company is peddling free add-on features, including search capabilities, for conversations on Skype and other voice over Internet Protocol services.

Mambo's on a roll. After dancing away with two awards at the recent Linux World conference, in the process beating out industry titans like Sun, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) for top honours as the Best of Show, the popular content management was just named Best Free Software of 2004 by Linux Format magazine.

Coming on the heels of a tumultuous year that saw the development team survive the loss of its project director and a long and soul-numbing SCO-type assault, the recent accolades must be sweet music to Mambo's ears.

The national rollout of the UK police's ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) system is kicking off, with the goal of deploying a network of over 2,000 cameras on motorways, major roads and city centres. The system is claimed to be able to run database checks on 3,600 plates per hour, on vehicles travelling at speeds of up to 100 mph - but there are just a few snags.

Evolution is a powerful idea. It predicts that as an environment changes, the organism that best adapts will be the most successful. This should be warning enough to malware security software writers to stay alert — and already, the next generation of hostile software is proving more intelligent than the last.

A BATTERED shoe worn by a Hungarian tourist in Sydney has sparked an investigation into a syndicate cheating top casinos across Europe.
Two Belgian police officers will fly to Sydney later this month to study the shoe design which they suspect could be behind the multi-million dollar European fraud.

Four years ago, Sydney detectives arrested Hungarian tourist Laszlo Sendor Kovacs after he won large bets at a Star City casino roulette wheel.

L33tdawg: Yum.

There was a time when burning a blank CD-ROM in your own home sparked feelings of wonder and joy as if you were performing a minor miracle. What once seemed like a technical marvel has, like so many small wonders, become routine. Now we can also burn our own DVDs. Sprinting down to the local mega-mart for a stack of blank CDs seems like a no-brainer, and it's quickly becoming so for DVDs. But the story doesn't actually end there.

A mass market exists for the mobile Internet, but it will remain untapped until designers make simpler Web pages that can be viewed properly on handsets, the inventor of the World Wide Web said.

"(The mobile Internet) will be a huge enabler for the industry... and for big profits," Tim Berners-Lee told a seminar on Thursday on the future of the Web.

"Web designers have learned to design for the visually impaired and for other people. They will learn in a few years how to make Web sites available for people with mobile devices too," he said.

Science fiction movies took a wrong turn in 1991. Previously, sci-fi customarily warned about the dangers of allowing technology to overtake humanity. It also warned us about bogeymen who usually turned out to be "commies from outer space", but that is probably best forgotten.

Things went pear-shaped with the release of Terminator 2, in which the warnings about an apocalyptic machine-run future got lost somewhere behind lots of explosions, special effects and franchise shoot-em-up games.

LG Electronics announced they have successfully demonstrated 3.5G high-speed data transmission at CTIA Wireless 2005, taking place in New Orleans, March 14-16, using Lucent Technology’s 14-Mbps download-supportive W-CDMA system, as well as the company's own HSDPA-enabled mobile phone. According to the company, the model is the same used in a successful test run at Nortel Lab on 6 March, the first of its kind in the world.