Logging The Cyber World

BEIJING — Carl Lewis, the American track and field star of the 1980s and 1990s, said, “The reality is, congratulations.”
Michael Phelps won his sixth gold medal of the Beijing Games on Friday, tying his Athens mark and closing in on Mark Spitz’s record. Phelps blew away the 200m IM field and set a world record.

Soviet-era gymnast Larisa Latynina, in a note, wrote to say, “You have shattered all sort of records with truly inspiring Olympic character.”

And Mark Spitz, the American swimmer whose 1972 mark of seven gold medals in one Olympics Michael Phelps broke with his eighth on Sunday, said, “When I look at Michael and I think of the lore of what he has done over the last four years — it’s more remarkable than myself.”

Complete article at nbcolympics.com

Tags: athlete, gold medal, michael phelps, olympics, swimmer

Scientists in the US say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people invisible.

Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley have developed a material that can bend light around 3D objects making them “disappear”.

The materials do not occur naturally but have been created on a nano scale, measured in billionths of a metre.

The team says the principles could one day be scaled up to make invisibility cloaks large enough to hide people.

— more on BBC News

Tags: disappear, human cloaking, invisibility, light bending, microwave, Science, scientists

Engineers John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Yonggang Huang of Northwestern University, Chicago have created an electronic eye-shaped camera that uses a new class of electronics technology that can conform to almost any shape of a human eye. The new retina-like camera sensor uses flexible photosensitive pixels.

“Using simple mechanics principles, the researchers have produced, for the first time, electronic devices on a hemispherical surface so that they can take images much like those captured by the human eye,” said Ken Chong, advisor in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Directorate, who is one of the officers overseeing the researchers’ National Science Foundation grant, in a statement.

— See more slides at CRN.com

Tags: camera, electronic eye, photosensitive pixels, Science, scientists, sensor, technology

Kaspersky Labs has detected two variants of Networm that attack MySpace and Facebook users. The worms transform victim machines into zombie computers to form botnets.

Kaspersky analysts are warning users that the worms, Win32.Koobface.a. and Networm.Win32.Koobface.b, are designed to upload additional malicious modules with other functionality via the Internet. “It is highly probable that victim machines will not only be used for spreading links via these social networking sites, but the botnets will also be used for other malicious purposes,” the analyst firm said in a statement.

Complete story @ Yahoo! News

Tags: botnets, facebook worms, koobface, myspace worms, network worms, networking sites, networms

A scientist on board the Amundsen research icebreaker near the Beaufort Sea says the ice shelf that broke apart last week is another sign that the Arctic has reached a tipping point in climate change.

Two blocks that broke away from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf near the northern coast of Ellesmere Island are simply the latest loss in the Arctic’s rapidly disappearing mass of thick, ancient ice, said Gary Stern, chief scientist on board the Amundsen Coast Guard vessel.

“When I hear what happened, I am not surprised,” Stern said by satellite telephone.

“The rate we are losing ice is phenomenal. This (climate change) is real,” he said. “I think a lot of people don’t understand how fast things are changing up here.”

Stern, a University of Manitoba professor, is leading a major research project – part of the International Polar Year – examining climate change and the loss of sea ice in the Arctic.

After spending winter months navigating freely through Arctic waters that were once impassable, he pointed to the lack of new ice freezing as another indication that warming is well underway.

— full article at thestar.com

Tags: ancient ice, ice breaks, ice shelf, northern canada, ward hunt ice

“One of these people was a Nasa photographic expert, and she said that in building eight of Johnson Space Centre they regularly airbrushed out images of UFOs from the high-resolution satellite imaging. What she said was there was there: there were folders called “filtered” and “unfiltered”, “processed” and “raw”, something like that.” - Full interview @ BBC News

Tags: aliens, government, hackers, NASA, UFO

For those of you who don’t know about this Cuil.com. “Cuil.com” is a new search engine which was launch last sunday by former Google employees. While trying this new search engine, here are some of my experiences.

1.) Need to refresh the main page to show.I tried this on three different browsers(or is it my connection?).
2.) No Page 2 and so on at the moment (high server load?).
3.) When I use keyword “xyberlog”, it shows my blogcatalog’s profile. But hey, this photo really intrigues me, where is this coming from? and what is this? I don’t even have this photo on my entire site.

My impression? Nothing Impressive.

Tags: cuil, ex-employees, google rivals, online searching, search engine

Microsoft on Friday expanded its support for the open-source community by giving money to the Apache Software Foundation, the first time it has given money to the long-standing open-source project.

Microsoft also said it is contributing code to support a PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) project and committing to offer royalty-free specifications for Windows Server and.NET Framework protocols as part of its expanded support for the open-source community. The company announced its plans at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) now being held in Portland, Oregon.

Full Story at Yahoo News

Tags: apache, funding, Microsoft, Open Source, open source projects, promoting open source

Business-Standard.com - Overtaking the US, Chinas internet-users population has reached 253 million by the end of June, reflecting the explosive growth in the web-user market in the country, data showed.

Latest government figures also showed that China also had the largest number of broadband subscribers at 214 million, more than 80 per cent of the total domestic internet population.

The number of Internet users at 253 million marked a 56.2 per cent rise from 162 million reported in 2007, the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC), a semi-official organisation, said in a report.

The US has 218 million net users till December 31, 2007 when China had 210 million users. Based on the US growth pattern, CNNIC estimated that the numbers in the US could have now reached 230 million by the end of June this year.

Tags: article, china, internet users, news, surfers

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - It seems that 4,366 theaters weren’t quite enough.
As hype for new box office champ “The Dark Knight” reached a fever pitch over the weekend, moviegoers were surfing eBay and Craigslist for tickets, sometimes paying five times face value for them.

The hottest items were tickets to Imax showings. The movie opened on 94 Imax screens, and company executives did a good job letting folks know that director Christopher Nolan shot many of the biggest action scenes with an Imax camera, making it was the best venue for viewing the film.

Read more on Yahoo News!

Tags: batman, dark knight, entertainment, Movies, the joker