OpenOffice ships 18-button mouse

OpenOffice will begin shipping an 18-button mouse in December, as the company expands its "furiously burning hatred" for Microsoft to the hardware market.

The OOMouse was developed in partnership with Warmouse and features a scroll wheel and 512k of flash memory to store up to 63 profiles for the 18 programmable buttons.

Unsurprisingly, the device comes with "default profiles for the five core OpenOffice.org applications based on 662 million datapoints compiled by the usage tracking facility incorporated into OpenOffice.org 3.1," according to the press release.

If 18 buttons wasn't dizzying enough, the mouse also features an analog controller on the left-hand side, which OpenOffice hopes will attract gamers to the mouse.

"In the three joystick-as-keyboard modes, the user can assign up to sixteen different keys or macros to the joystick, which provides for easy movement regardless of whether the user is flying through the cells of a large spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel or on the back of an epic flying mount in World of Warcraft," the statement claims.

Which begs the question why stop at eighteen buttons?

"That’s as many as we’ve determined one can effectively use without having to look at the mouse," OpenOffice explains on its blog.

"The mouse buttons really aren’t that small. If you can use a larger digit - the thumb - on a smartphone button less than one-half the size, you’re not likely to have any problem using your index, middle and ring fingers on the mouse buttons."

While some commentators have suggested that the OOMouse might offer surprise competition to Apple's recently released Magic Mouse, the organisation claims its ire is still directed Redmond's way.

"A difference in design philosophy isn’t personal, it’s just a difference in design philosophy," claims the organisation. "To be honest, we simply don’t care that much about Apple. Our furiously burning hatred is already far too occupied with Microsoft."

Author: Stuart Turton
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Videogame designs military strategies based on ants’ movements

A researcher of the University of Granada has designed a new system for the mobility of military troops within a battlefield based on the mechanisms used by ant colonies to move using a commercial videogame.

This work, developed at the department of Computer Architecture and Technology of the UGR, has designed several algorithms that permit to look for the best route path within a particular environment.

Specifically, this research work has developed a software that would allow the Army troops to define the best path within a military battle field, considering that such path will be covered by a company and this must consider the security criteria and speed.

To that end, the scientists have used the so called ‘ant colony optimisation algorithm (ACO)’, a probabilistic technique used to solve optimisation problems and inspired in the behaviours of ants to find trajectories from the colony to the food.

This work has been carried out by Antonio Miguel Mora Garcia, and supervised by professors Juan Julian Merelo Guervos and Pedro Angel Castillo Valdivieso, of the department of Computer Architecture and Technology of the UGR.

The scientists of the UGR have developed a mini-simulator in order to define the settings (battlefields), locate the unit and their enemies, execute the algorithms and see the results.

In addition, the software designed by them offers a few tools useful to analyse both the initial map and the results.

To prepare this system, Mora Garcia started from the battlefields present in the videogame Panzer General, defining later the necessary properties and restrictions to make them faithful to reality.

The research work developed at the University of Granada has also had the participation of members of the Doctrine and Training Command of the Spanish Army (MADOC), organism belonging to the Ministry of Defence, which in the long term could incorporate some of the features of the new simulator for the design of actual military strategies.

The UGR scientists point out that, apart form this application the simulator could also be useful to solve other actual problems, such as the search for the best path for a sales agent or a transporter to visit his clients optimizing fuel consumption or time, for example.

ANI
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Video game that improves intelligence

A new video game developed by an online gaming site along with scientists from University of Michigan has been found to improve intelligence.

Developed by Luminosity.com, the Dual N-Back training program improves intelligence and memory capacity by challenging users to simultaneously remember items that they see and hear.

The researchers said that training on the Dual N-Back task resulted in gains in working memory and fluid intelligence that were significantly greater than those seen in the control group.

Fluid intelligence, the ability to creatively solve novel problems, is a form of intelligence that had previously been thought to be fixed from a young age.

The study has debunked long-held belief that intelligence cannot be improved. This research also showed that the more subjects trained, the more their fluid intelligence improved.

"The online availability of the dual n-back task is a great step forward for our ongoing research and we are happy having found Lumos Labs as a competent partner," said Dr Martin Buschkuehl, at the University of Michigan.

“The online training variant will increase our throughput and speed up further research concerned with the dual n-back task as a training paradigm,” added Dr. Susanne Jaeggi, also from University of Michigan.

"This research is critically important to our understanding of how exercising the brain transfers to real-life improvements," said Michael Scanlon, Chief Science Officer at Lumos Labs.

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How to find out what Google knows about you

Search giant Google is coming clean over the amount of personal data it holds on its users.

Dubbed Google Dashboard, the service allows users to log in and find all the personal information held about them in Google's myriad applications, including Gmail, YouTube, Blogger and several more.

The Dashboard gives a highly detailed, application-by-application breakdown of what's stored in your account. Gmail, for example, includes full transcripts of archived web chats and logs of the most recent messages in key folders.

Web History, meanwhile, shows full details of searches made across all of Google's services, including images, Maps and the regular web search. It allows users to wipe their entire search history from the Dashboard screen.

Users of Google Latitude, the service that broadcasts your current position to approved contacts, are also shown the last destination logged.

Much, if not all, of this information has been made available previously through the individual applications. However, this is the first time Google has collated the data into a single screen.

Google says Dashboard is designed to offer users "greater transparency and control over their data".

"The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we're delighted to be the first internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard," the company claims on the Google blog.

You can log in to your Google Dashboard here.

Author: Barry Collins
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Mac users warned over file-munching Space Invaders

Security experts are warning Mac users over a Space Invaders-style game that deletes files from the computer while they play.

Dubbed OSX.Loosemaque, the program only works on its host website, but has the capacity to cause serious damage if it gets into the wrong hands.

“The game looks to be a throw-back to the classic Space Invaders/Galaga style of games from the early 1980s,” says security company Symantec, which discovered the threat. “However, what brings this game into the realm of malicious code is that for every alien ship you destroy, the game deletes a file from your home directory.”

Bizarrely, the author of the game explains the consequences on his site, which observers believe is a strange art project. The website carrying the game describes it as, "a game about choice and consequence, and by extension what it means to succeed or fail".

According to Symantec, although the game is not a major threat, it could be modified to create a more sinister form of malware.

“While interesting in its own right, there’s nothing stopping someone with more malicious intentions from modifying it slightly and then passing it on to unsuspecting users, causing significant damage to a computer,” the company says.

Author: Stewart Mitchell
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Internet could run out of web addresses next year

The world could well run out of Internet addresses next year, unless urgent action is taken to switch to a new generation of net addresses, the European Commission has warned.

According to the commission, businesses urgently need to upgrade to Internet protocol version six or IPv6, a new version of the Internet's addressing protocol, which will hugely increase the number of available addresses.

The IPv6 system has been ready for over a decade and is providing 340 trillion, trillion, trillion web addresses. But, not many companies are actually ready to migrate to the new platform.

In fact, a survey, conducted by the Commission, found that few companies are prepared for the switch from the current naming protocol, IPv4, to the new regime, IPv6.

The IPv4 and IPv6 protocols refer to the way in which web addresses are created and assigned. Each website has a unique IP address, represented by a string of numbers, such as 192.168.1.1, which are then given a user-friendly web address to make them easier to remember.

The IPv4 protocol uses 32-bit addresses, which enables the web to support around 4.3 billion unique addresses while IPv6 uses 128-bit web addresses, creating billions of possible new web
addresses.

The EC survey found that of the 610 government, educational and other industry organisations questioned across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, just 17 per cent have upgraded to IPv6.

The Commission has warned that the timely deployment of the protocol is vital to the growth and stability of the Internet.

Detlef Eckert, Director in Commission's information society and media directorate-general, said: "In the last 10 years, the Internet has become hugely important worldwide from a socio-economic perspective.

"Only by ensuring that all devices connected to the internet are compatible with IPv6 can we stay connected and safeguard sustainable growth of the Internet and the global digital economy, now and in the years to come."

Bureau Report
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The worm turns on online gamers

Microsoft says worms are making an unwanted comeback in its latest annual Security Intelligence Report.

Worm attacks increased by more than 100% in the second half of 2008, and are now the second biggest threat category behind Trojans.

The worm resurgence was largely down to the infamous Conficker, which wreaked havoc across the world earlier this year. However, Microsoft warns a second worm called Taterf, which targets massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, is also doing damage.

The company claims Taterf infections have risen by more than 150% since the second half of 2008, and that companies are suffering as a result. "It's a family of worms that has the target of getting your credentials," Microsoft's UK head of security, Cliff Evans. "It will spread within the enterprise - it's brought from home into work."

Evans said companies need to tighten access to file shares and removable storage volumes, such as USB thumb drives, to avoid infection.

The good news is fake security software (or scareware) is in decline, with infections sloping off by a fifth since last year. "There's less of it than there was," said Evans, who claims security companies are now better at detecting the rogue software than they were previously.

Microsoft says it will continue to pursue the peddlers of such software, many of whom use Microsoft-like symbols and icons to hoodwink their victims. "They are very convincing," Evans said. "We've seen fake blue screens, fake start-up screens and more."

"We do a tremendous amount of work with law enforcement [to apprehend scareware vendors]," Evans added.

Author: Barry Collins
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New battery can supply non-stop power for thousands of hrs

Developed a new, environmentally friendly silicon-air battery capable of supplying non-stop power for thousands of hours without needing to be replaced.

Created from oxygen and silicon, such batteries would be lightweight, have an unlimited shelf life, and have a high tolerance for both humid and extremely dry conditions.

Potential uses include medical applications (for example, powering diabetic pumps or hearing aids), sensors and microelectronics structured from silicon.

“Silicon-air batteries will be used like the ones already in use today,” said lead researcher Professor Yair Ein-Eli of the Department of Materials Engineering.

“But by using silicon – a safe, non-toxic, stable and more common material – we can create very lightweight batteries with infinite shelf life and high energy capacity,” he added.

Silicon-air batteries would provide significant savings in cost and weight because they lack the built-in cathode of conventional batteries.

The cathode in silicon-air (and metal-air) batteries is the oxygen that comes from the atmosphere through the membrane.

Prof Ein-Eli estimates that in three to four years, silicon-air batteries can be made more powerful, as well as rechargeable.

According to him, in 10 years, it may be possible to build “electric car batteries made from silicon that will turn into sand that would be recycled into silicon and then into power again.”

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Computers to read people's minds

In a key breakthrough, scientists have developed a "psychic" computer which can read people's minds by scanning their brain activity and reproducing images of what they are seeing or even remembering.

An international team has been able to convert into crude video footage the brain activity stimulated by what a person is watching or recalling -- the research shows that it is possible to "decode" signals in the brain by moving scenes.

According to the scientists, the breakthrough raises the prospect of significant benefits, such as allowing people who are unable to speak to communicate via visualisation of their thoughts; recording people's dreams; or allowing police to identify criminals by recalling the memories of a witness.

For their research, the scientists used the functional magnetic resonance imaging technology to scan the brains of two patients as they watched videos.

Subsequently, the computer, which was specially programmed, was used to search for links between configuration of shapes, colours and movements in the videos, and patterns of activity in the patients' visual cortex.

It was later fed more than 200 days' worth of YouTube Internet clips and asked to predict which areas of the brain the clips would stimulate if people were watching them.

Finally, the software was used to monitor the two patients' brains as they watched a new film and to reproduce what they were seeing based on their neural activity alone, 'The Sunday Times' reported.

Remarkably, the so-called psychic computer was able to display continuous footage of the films they were watching -- albeit with blurred images.

"Some scenes decode better than others. We can decode talking heads really well. But a camera panning quickly across a scene confuses the algorithm. You can use a device like this to do some pretty cool things.

"At the moment when you see something and want to describe it to someone you have to use words or draw it and it doesn't work very well. You could use this technology to transmit the image to someone.

"It might be useful for artists or to allow you to recover an eyewitness' memory of a crime," team leader Jack Gallant of California University said.

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