Technology

THE NATIONAL AUDIT OFFICE (NAO) published a report saying chips incorporated in British passports only have a two year warranty even though the documents have a 10 year life.

It also warned that the government may face liabilities from intellectual property rights claims owned by contractors.

It also warned that there's insufficient evidence how effective the e-Passports will be, because the ability of readers to cope with large volumes is still largely untested.

The One Laptop Per Child project, which proposes to give every child in the developing world a computer of his own, dazzled fans with the unveiling of its little green "$100 laptop" in November 2005. Now it's impressing hard-bitten security geeks with a plan to lock down the hundreds of millions of educational machines against spyware and computer intruders.

It's the middle of the night, but the video monitor inside a Regina home is showing live images of the backyard as if it's high noon.

Brian (not his real name) checks the hand-held monitor periodically. Outside, the yard is completely dark, but the video screen clearly displays the trees, garage and other features in black and green duotone.

Rafi Yoeli has an unconventional solution to saving people from burning high-rises or rescuing soldiers trapped behind enemy lines: a flying car.

Yoeli already has gotten a rudimentary vehicle off the ground -- about three feet -- and hopes to see a marketable version of his X-Hawk flying car by 2010.

Although his dream might seem far-fetched, Textron Inc.'s Bell Helicopters is taking a serious look, teaming with Yoeli's privately held Urban Aeronautics to explore X-Hawk's potential.

Intel Corp. and IBM have announced one of the biggest advances in transistors in four decades, overcoming a frustrating obstacle by ensuring microchips can get even smaller and more powerful.

The breakthrough, achieved via separate research efforts and announced Friday, involves using an exotic new material to make transistors -- the tiny switches that are the building blocks of microchips. The technology involves a layer of material that regulates the flow of electricity through transistors.

Researchers in California said they have created the world's densest memory circuit, one that's about 100 times denser than today's standard memory circuits, while remaining as small as a human white blood cell.

Scientists from the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles, reported the development in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

The circuit has 160,000 bits of capacity, compared with previous generations of molecular circuits that were demonstrated at 64 bits.

Mobile phones are proving the saviour of the struggling music industry and could be the vital springboard needed to propel the business finally into digital sales, industry experts have said.

"I believe a lot of the new revenues for the music industry will definitely come through mobile phones," said Dominque Leguern, director of MIDEM, the premier trade fair for the world's music industry that closes its doors on Thursday.

Reports say Sony wants no blue movies on Blu-ray discs, giving HD DVD ?a leg up? on adult content in high def. But the Blu-Ray Disc Association says ?there is no specific anti-porn? mandate. What?s going on? The legendary battle between Betamax and VHS tapes were said to be decided on two things ? the first being the cheaper licensing costs for VHS technology from JVC, the second being that Sony didn?t want porn to be distributed on Betamax tapes.

Seagate has introduced what it claims is the world's fastest hard drive: a 15,000rpm, 2.5in 3Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) job designed for servers and enterprise-oriented storage systems. The company also pitched the part's low power consumption and high reliability.

The Savvio 15K has a mean time between failures (MTBF) of 1.6m hours, Seagate said, adding that means companies need 20 per cent fewer drives than they might otherwise have done with 3.5in drives. That means lower over-time costs, Seagate claimed.

Starting next month, users of Symantec Corp.'s Norton products will have a new tool to help them avoid unpatched software flaws.

Called the Symantec Online Network for Advanced Response (SONAR), the new security software will look at the behavior of programs running on the computer in order to decide whether they are malicious. This is a departure from Symantec's traditional signature-based antivirus protection techniques, which compare the program's code to a database of known malware.