Researchers from Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) warned on Thursday that Internet calling applications like Skype may provide the ideal disguise for hacker attacks.

The Communications Research Network (CRN) of both renowned universities said no attacks had yet been recognized, but “it is only a matter of time before the technique becomes mainstream.”

It had discussed the matter with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) firms like Skype, it said in a statement.

Luxembourg-headquartered Skype, which has been downloaded on 242 million computers around the world and was acquired by eBay last year, was not immediately available to comment. Cambridge University is based in Britain and MIT in the United States.

The CRN’s working group on Internet Security said it had discovered that VoIP applications could provide excellent cover for launching denial of service attacks.

In such attacks computers are being hijacked by hackers and turned into so-called “zombies” in order to bombard a Web site or e-mail server with page requests or e-mails. The aim of the attack is that the site or entire network collapses under the pressure.

VoIP programs are popular among consumers because they allow free or ultra-cheap phone calls across the globe.

VoIP cuts a voice conversation into digital bits and hackers can use those data streams for cover, making it almost impossible to trace the source of an attack.

Internet service providers monitor instant messaging traffic which is currently used to trigger attacks.

It is more difficult to trace VoIP traffic which often uses a lot of proprietary software with secret code to make sure that Internet phone calls will not be blocked by Internet service providers or firewalls.

“The loophole could be resolved if VoIP providers were to publish their routing specifications or switch over to open standards,” the researchers said.

Internet media company Yahoo Inc. and wireless equipment maker Linksys on Thursday unveiled a new product to help consumers move digital music from computers to stereo sound systems in the home.

The Linksys Wireless-G Music Bridge is meant to complement Yahoo’s digital music download service, allowing consumers to stream music directly to a stereo from their computer for an estimated price of $99.99. Linksys is a division of networking equipment maker Cisco Systems Inc.

Streaming is done wirelessly rather than requiring additional cables to connect the stereo with a personal computer, but allows digitally downloaded music to be played on a full system of speakers.

The product represents a new step by media and technology companies competing for dominance in the home entertainment market by linking content accessed digitally via computer to more traditional vehicles such as television and stereos.

It can be used together with Yahoo’s Music Engine, which allows consumers to play and save songs, share them on an instant messaging system, or transfer them to portable devices. The Yahoo Music Engine software can be downloaded for free in conjunction with a Yahoo digital music subscription.

Yahoo and Linksys will promote the product in a marketing campaign on Internet sites, product packaging and more traditional advertising. Yahoo said it would offer a $20 rebate on the Wireless-G Music Bridge if consumers sign up for a one-year subscription to its music service.

Microsoft Corp said on Thursday that it would launch a new research laboratory aimed at developing technology for the Internet.

The Redmond, Washington-based company said the unit, called Live Labs, would be headed by Dr. Gary William Flake, a Microsoft technical fellow, and include staff from its online service MSN and its main research group.

The effort underscores the intensity of competition between Microsoft and Internet powers Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.. Research from the lab group will focus on a range of subjects, Microsoft said, including multimedia search, machine learning, distributed computing and data mining.

Three Indian American high schoolers made the list of 40 finalists in 2006 Intel Science Talent Search competition (Intel STS), America’s oldest and most prestigious pre-college science competition, often considered the “Junior Nobel Prize.”

Priyanka Agarwal, Dilip Bobby Biswal and Beeneet Kothari were selected on Wednesday from 300 semifinalists identified earlier this month by the Intel corporation in the competition designed to find the most promising aspiring scientists between the ages of 16 and 18 in the United States.

Agarwal, 17, of Fort Worth, Texas, researched cellular causes of glaucoma for her Intel Science Talent Search project in medicine. She isolated a permanent, transformed rat retinal ganglion cell (RGC) culture to study how the eyes retinal cells die.

The death of retinal ganglion cells by a process called “apoptosis” causes damage to the optic nerve and prevents connections with the brain required for sight, resulting in blindness.
Priyanka’s cell line is thought to be the first in vitro model available to researchers developing new treatments for glaucoma.

Priyanka, born in India to Neeraj and Rajnee Agarwal, has won several speaking and debating awards. She enjoys violin, flute, reading and Indian dance and plans to earn a doctorate from Stanford.

Dilip Bobby Biswal, 18 of San Ramon, California, has been selected as a finalist for his microbiology entry on cell life.

His research deals in part with chromosomes, the gene carriers of cells, and could have implications for gene therapies to reduce the deterioration of human cells and could help find cures for arthritis, Alzheimers, Parkinsons and heart diseases.

A corporate-backed Web site being launched by researchers from Harvard and Oxford universities seeks to become a clearinghouse for Internet users on spyware and other malicious software.

The site, which Google Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and Chinese computer maker Lenovo Group Ltd. are underwriting, will ultimately identify purveyors of such programs by name and provide information to help consumers decide whether a program is safe to download.

“It’s important for users to understand what risks they face and try to help them identify which software is likely to be problematic,” said Vint Cerf, Google’s chief Internet evangelist and one of the Internet’s chief inventors.

The nonprofit Consumer Reports WebWatch is serving as an unpaid adviser.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Internet users have become more cautious online because of worries about spyware and adware, which can sneak onto computers, bombard users with pop-up ads and drain processing power to the point of rendering computers unusable.

Cerf said such annoyances threaten the growth of the Internet - and of his company.

It is not entirely clear how the new effort, to be available Wednesday at StopBadware.org, will differ from resources already available through the Web sites of anti-spyware vendors and private individuals, including former Harvard fellow Ben Edelman.

John Palfrey, executive director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said researchers will post reports on applications that contain viruses and worms as well as software deemed by tests to be safe.

The first of the reports won’t appear until at least late-February, with new ones added monthly, Palfrey said.

Initially, the site will post its criteria. Software developers will be told, for example, that the site will expose as transgressors any programs that exploit a computer “for any purpose not understood and affirmatively consented to by the end user.”

According to Palfrey, the Web site will name not only the program’s developers but also its distributors - and in some cases even companies that use such platforms to run ads.

The site, he said, will also identify any free games, screensavers and other programs known to attach spyware or adware to their downloads.

Palfrey would not say how much money each company is contributing other than to describe the project as “multiyear, multimillion.”

He said the university researchers make the final calls and will be free to criticize software produced by the donor companies. The universities also assume all legal risks, he said.

One of the most popular and ubiquitous rich media plug-ins for any browser on almost any platform is the Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash player.

Thanks to efforts of the Free Software Foundation, a Free Software Flash player called GNU Gnash is now in active development. The development is apparently occurring without the help or support of Adobe in any way. An Adobe/Macromedia spokesperson was unable to comment on the development.

Flash player has always been free, but not in the Free and Open Source Software sense, as it is a proprietary application licensed under a closed source license.

GNU Gnash, in contrast, is licensed under the GNU GPL.

There are some significant license difficulties with distributing, and to some extent using, proprietary-licensed applications together with GPL-licensed applications. GNU Gnash would eliminate the difficulty with Flash.

“Gnash is GPL2′d, and the Free Software Foundation has the copyright,” GNU Gnash maintainer Rob Savoye told internetnews.com. “So the standalone player can be used by anyone, but the Flash player code can only be used by other free software projects under the terms of the GPL.”

The FSF, which is currently undertaking a review of the GPL has actually listed the development of Gnash as one of its top six high-priority projects.

Savoye said in mailing-list postings that Gnash has not reverse-engineered its code from the existing Macromedia player. He claims that he is a “clean developer” and has never, “owned any Macromedia tools, signed any license agreements, nor disassembled any Macromedia products.

“Gnash has been developed only using freely available documentation and tools, so it can be a free implementation of a closed proprietary format,” Savoye explained.

Since being formally announced earlier this month, Savoye noted that there is a sizable demand for a GPL-licensed Flash player. While Macromedia’s Flash player is available for a number of different platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris, it’s not available for others, such as FreeBSD.

“So many people are now excited to have a solution for their platforms,” Savoye said. “One of the big advantages of free software is the ability of people that have machines I don’t own can help make it truly portable.”

Presently the focus of Gnash is on Flash Player (also referred to by its file extension SWF) version 7 and not the latest version offered by Adobe/Macromedia, which is now version 8.

Savoye explained that compatibility for version 8 is on the roadmap, but the current focus is on getting the plug-in working followed by stabilizing the SWF 7 support till it’s a fully functional Flash player.

“Most Flash movies on the Net are older Flash formats, which is why that’s the current focus for the near term,” Savoye said.

GNU Gnash isn’t necessarily starting from scratch either. It is using an existing open source project call GameSWF as a base. According to its Web site, GameSWF is “an open source Public Domain library for parsing and rendering SWF movies, using 3D hardware APIs for rendering.”

There are a number of big challenges ahead for GNU Gnash, not the least of which is fear of complexity.

“The biggest problem is people realize this is a potentially huge project, as Flash is large and complex,” Savoye said. “So I think it scares some people off. Most of the other free Flash players haven’t gotten very far because of this.”

Web search leader Google Inc. said on Tuesday it was introducing a new service for China that seeks to avoid a confrontation with the government by restricting access to services to which users contribute such as e-mail, chat rooms and blogs.

The new Chinese service at http://www.google.cn will offer a censored version of Google’s popular search system that could restrict access to thousands of terms and Web sites.

Hot topics might include issues like independence for Taiwan or Tibet or outlawed spiritual group Falun Gong.

In seeking to compete more aggressively in the world’s second biggest Internet market — where Google has lost ground to a more popular home-grown search company Baidu Inc. — the company is facing the toughest challenge yet to its corporate mantra of “Don’t do evil.”

In a compromise that trades off Google’s desire to provide universal access to information in order to exist within local laws, Google will not offer its Gmail e-mail service, Web log publishing services or chat rooms — tools of self-expression that could be used for political or social protest.

Instead, it said it would initially offer four of its core services — Web site and image search, Google News and local search — while working toward introducing additional services over time.

“Other products — such as Gmail and Blogger — will be introduced only when we are comfortable that we can do so in a way that strikes a proper balance among our commitments to satisfy users’ interests, expand access to information, and respond to local conditions,” the company said in a statement.

The move in China comes less than a week after Google resisted the U.S. Justice Department’s efforts to get information about commonly used sex search terms. That government demand was met by search rivals such as Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft, spokesmen for those companies said.

“China is the most repressive censorship regime on the Internet,” said John Palfrey, one of the principal investigators on a joint university research project on global Internet censorship known as the OpenNet Initiative

(http://www.opennetinitiative.net/studies/china/)

Palfrey, director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a law professor, has ties to Google executives involved in the China project and is working on a spyware research effort that is partly funded by Google.

He estimated that through active and passive censorship tens of thousands of search terms are blocked for Web users inside China.

“It comes down to how well Google reacts to the first or the second or the hundredth clash with China,” he said of the regular negotiations and potential confrontations that are likely to be necessary between Google and Chinese authorities.

GOOGLE FACES GROWN-UP CHALLENGES

Google has long offered a full-featured Chinese language version of its Google.com service available to users worldwide and run from computers in its California headquarters.

Company officials said they expect in the coming months to begin running the Google.cn service from facilities within China in order to ensure speedier search results for users in China and to meet local laws governing domestic Web services.

Sites outside China often suffer slowdowns or are blocked under a system — nicknamed the “great firewall” — in which the Web in China is walled off from the global Internet. This allows the Chinese government to both actively censor what citizens can see, while it puts pressure on Internet service providers to self-censor an even wider range of material.

Google officials said they planned to notify users of its Google.cn service when the company has restricted access to certain search terms or the Web sites behind them.

In different political circumstances, Google also notifies users of its German, French and U.S. services when it blocks access to material such as banned Nazi sites in Europe.

“In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy,” the company said.

Aware of the trade-offs it is making, Google executives said they believe the company can play a more positive role by participating in the Chinese market, despite restrictions, than by boycotting the country in order to avoid such compromises.

“While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission,” the company stated.

The BBC accused Tehran on Tuesday of blocking its Farsi-language Web site, which it describes as one of the most influential sources of news in Iran.

The BBC says its Farsi site, BBCpersian.com, normally receives 30 million page views a month, making it the British broadcaster’s most popular foreign-language site.

An Iranian culture ministry official, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters in Tehran the Web Site had been “filtered since two days ago” but did not give a reason behind the move.

The site is read by about a third of the 7 million internet users in Iran, the broadcaster said in a statement. But it said access had dropped dramatically over the past three days since reports emerged that the Iranian government was blocking it.

“We are very concerned at this action and regret that it deprives a great number of ordinary Iranians of a trusted source of impartial and editorially independent news and information,” BBC World Service director Nigel Chapman said in the statement.

“The appetite among Iranians to know more about what’s going on — both in Iran and abroad — has never been greater,” he said.

AOL Music has launched a site called “G-Sides, Music for the GLBT Community,” which it says features “the gay and lesbian artists we love.”

But M. Tye Comer, senior programming manager for AOL Music, says G-Sides isn’t necessarily a “gay music” site.

“This site will talk about all different facets: gay artists, music that has a strong LGB fan base, and even videos that you might not think have relevance to the gay and lesbian community — but do.”

At its January 23 launch, G-Sides (http://music.aol.com/feature/gay_music) featured an interview and DJ session from Cyndi Lauper, videos of the Strokes and a duet between Antony & the Johnsons and Boy George.

A chart, “This Week’s Essential Tunes,” links to videos from artists-and presumed gay icons-such as Gwen Stefani, the cast of the Broadway hit Rent, and, of course, Madonna.

The Touareg’s high-tech gadgetry can be breathtaking and confusing at the same time, but it is all-purposeful. The four-wheel drive includes offroad gearing and up to 100 per cent of the engine’s power can be sent to either the front or rear wheels.

In the present version, the Touareg’s 240 HP, 3.2-litre V-6 engine has been replaced with a 3.6-litre V-6 one that turns out 280 HP. A 310 HP, 4.2-litre V-8 is also available, and the turbo-diesel 5.0-litre V-10, which generates 310 HP is top of the lot.

All engines team with a six-speed Tiptronic automatic transmission. A Touareg can tow up to 7,716 pounds when properly equipped.

Constructed of galvanized steel, the unibody structure makes the Touareg more carlike in appearance than many SUVs. The hood wraps down to a horizontal-bar grille that’s similar to the one on Volkswagen’s luxury Phaeton sedan.

Rounded body shoulders and sculpted wheel arches complement short overhangs. Built on a 112.4-inch wheelbase, the Touareg stands 68 inches tall.

Ground clearance can reach 11.8 inches with the available air suspension, and wading depth is 22.8 inches. The Touareg can drive at a 35-degree lateral offset angle and has a 45-degree side-tipping angle. Alloy wheels are available in 17, 18 and 19 inch diameters.