Technology

Web sites that automatically customize themselves for each visitor so they come across as more appealing or simply less annoying can boost sales for online businesses by close to 20%, MIT research says.

These sites adapt to display information so everyone who visits sees a version best suited to their preferred style of absorbing information, say the four researchers who write about such sites in "Website Morphing", a paper being published this month in Marketing Science.

Rex Jameson bikes and swims regularly, and plays tennis and skis when time allows. But the 5-foot-11, 180-pound software engineer is lucky if he presses 200 pounds -- that is, until he steps into an "exoskeleton" of aluminum and electronics that multiplies his strength and endurance as many as 20 times.

With the outfit's claw-like metal hand extensions, he gripped a weight set's bar at a recent demonstration and knocked off hundreds of repetitions. Once, he did 500.

The good folks at this year’s HOPE conference, organized by 2600 magazine, will track the movements of attendees by using RFID, while at the same time encouraging them to find vulnerabilities in the technology. The attempt to draw attention to the widely implemented yet poorly understood (by the average person) technology should be applauded. During the conference, says the press release, “Large displays will show in real-time where people go, with whom they associate, for how long and how often.”

The video is hard to turn away from. A sobbing 16-year-old sits in her bedroom and, staring into a camera, says she has been raped.

"Hi, my name is Crystal. ... I need some help. I didn't want to do it this way, but it's the only way I know that's going to work, that someone out there in the world is gonna listen to me."

The teen, whom CNN interviewed but is not identifying by her last name, is among dozens of young people who are turning to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to talk about sexual assault.

A painstaking examination of how the RIAA goes about its business hunting down file sharers on college campuses is available online.

The Chronicle of Higher Education visited the offices of the Recording Industry Association of America and got a demonstration.

Purdue University's IT department dedicated May 5 to assembling Dell PowerEdge servers into a campus supercomputer to replace its existing research unit. It had the new machine assembled from component parts by noon, and at 1 p.m., 500 nodes were churning out results.

As the Herald reported today Sky TV will start offering internet downloads of some of its content from mid May through the company's website www.sky.co.nz.

A closer inspection of some of the technical attributes of the service suggests Sky is following the model TVNZ pursued with its TVNZ OnDemand service.

That is, the programmes will be downloadable as files playable in Windows Media Player (Windows XP and Vista)and will include Windows digital rights management software.

No one knows better than us that mini-notebooks are a hot ticket. Thanks to their irresistibly small sizes and low prices, some of us at LAPTOP have even become a bit obsessed.

But not everyone has bit the bait, which brings up the question: “Who are these for, anyway?” We pitted two of our writers with opposing views on the mini-notebook hype against each other to battle over why—and why not—these mini-notebooks are a solid choice for people seeking out a second computer.

Scientists in Germany have made a breakthrough in one of the biggest emerging markets in the battery industry: lithium-ion.

With the massive Sony battery recall last year and ever-growing concerns about lithium-ion-powered devices catching aflame, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicate Research ISC have created a solution.

"We have succeeded in replacing the inflammable organic electrolytes with a non-flammable polymer that retains its shape," said ISC team leader Kai-Christian Moller.

A new form of digital storage technology under development at IBM could deliver more than tenfold increases in both the storage capacity and battery life of handheld gadgets like Apple's iPod and iPhone, according to the company's claims.

A paper published in the current issue of Science and covered by the United Kingdom's Times Online describes the technology along the lines of NAND flash memory, only faster and with considerably longer expected lifespan.