Technology

I'll begin with the usual disclaimer: I'm not responsible for anything that might happen to you as a result of trying the things described in this tutorial. If you're reading this, you're probably aware of the legal issues surrounding BitTorrent (or specifically, what people download with BitTorrent,) and what you do with BitTorrent is your responsibility. Use your best judgment and don't anger your network administrators/internet service provider.

Okay, now that the lecturing is out of the way...

Malaysia's government, hoping to thwart car thieves, will embed license plates with microchips containing information about the vehicle and its owner, a news report said Saturday.

With the chips in use, officials can scan cars at roadblocks and identify stolen vehicles, the New Straits Times reported.

The "e-plate" chip system is the latest strategy to prevent car thieves from getting away with their crimes by merely changing the plates, the report said.

It said nearly 30 cars ? mostly luxury vehicles ? are stolen every day in Malaysia.

Swedish startup Polar Rose says it can search images on the Web to find pictures of people, delivering better results than today's text-based search engines.

Polar Rose, which has received $5.1 million in funding from Nordic Venture Partners, plans to make its technology available next year as a plug-in for Internet Explorer and Firefox Web browsers. The company also intends to offer online social networks, photo-sharing sites, and other large Web sites royalty-free application programming interfaces to embed the Polar Rose service.

Hackers have found their latest toy -- the "Wiimote."

The wireless, motion-sensing controller has made Nintendo's new Wii game console this holiday's gotta-have-it gadget. Wii's games let the player swing the controller like a tennis racket or fling it like a fishing pole.

WiMAX is the much-anticipated broadband wireless access mechanism for delivering high-speed connectivity over long distances, making it attractive to Internet and telecommunications service providers.

Designed by the IEEE 802.16 committee, WiMAX was developed after the security failures that plagued early IEEE 802.11 networks. Recognizing the importance of security, the 802.16 working groups designed several mechanisms to protect the service provider from theft of service, and to protect the customer from unauthorized information disclosure.

Mobile phone ownership among British children of primary-school age has soared to almost 60 percent in the past year, new data shows.

Some 57 percent of seven to 11 year olds now have a mobile phone, compared to just 43 percent 12 months ago, according to figures from Halifax. The increasing number of younger children with a mobile phone has pushed the overall ownership figure for children aged seven to 16 to 77 percent -- up from 68 percent in 2005.

Russian scientists have developed counterweapons for unauthorized entries to information systems by means of so-called hidden channels, says the head of information security department of the Institute of Fine Mechanics and Computation of Russian Academy of Sciences.

Comedian Michael Richards (Kramer of TV's Seinfeld) launches into a racist rant at a West Los Angeles comedy club. A police officer repeatedly uses a taser gun on a student in the UCLA library. A high school teacher calls a student a homophobic name. Another yells at a student for not standing during the national anthem. These events were captured on small digital cameras or cellphones with video cameras. All were posted on the Internet. And all drew national - even international - attention to events that in years past may have remained relatively contained or even hidden.

At a rate of 60,000 per day, Sony is pumping out new, larger capacity Blu-ray discs for the holiday season. These new discs hold 50GB, twice as much as the already new Blu-ray discs before them, allowing more even more space for bonus features, and better quality audio and video. Since May 2006, Sony has shipped three million Blu-ray discs to 35 suppliers.

The chess match between Garry Kasparov and IBM's Deep Blue in 1997 was the showdown of man vs. machine: the world's greatest chess player versus the world's greatest chess-playing computer.

Deep Blue, a supercomputer that could calculate more than 200 million moves a second, defeated Kasparov 2 games to 1, with three games ending in a draw.

Deep Blue's match win was the first by a chess-playing computer in a traditional format over a reigning world champion.