TechLuver.com

London — Mar 07, `08 — The BBC has launched a version of its iPlayer video on demand service for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch.

It is the first time the service has been available on portable devices.

The iPhone and iPod touch are able to stream shows from the iPlayer website over wi-fi networks. The iPhone cannot stream BBC video over the cell network. A BBC developer said that the corporation was currently working on other versions of the iPlayer for “many more” devices.

The software currently comes in two versions - a program which allows users to download programmes to their Windows PC and a streaming version on the web available to all users.

The version for iPhone and iPod touch users will allow streaming over a wi-fi connection. However, the EDGE mobile network used by the iPhone is too slow for streaming video. More at BBC.

Feb 04, `08 — The first big steps on the road to overhauling the Internet’s core addressing system have been taken, Reports BBC.

On Monday the master address books for the net are being updated to include records prepared in a new format known as IP version 6. Widespread use of this format will end the shortage of addresses that sites can be given. The net’s current addressing scheme is expected to exhaust the pool of unallocated addresses by 2011.

Although people use words to navigate around the web, computers use numbers. A human may type news.bbc.co.uk into a browser bar but the PC trying to reach that site will use a numerical equivalent that it gets from the net’s master address books.

On 4 February the master or root servers for the net will have a small number of records added that are written in IP version 6 (IPv6) added to them. This means for the first time that computers using IPv6, typically a PC and a server, can find each other without involving any IPv4 technology. More at the BBC.

MySpace will open its doors to software developers allowing them to create games and media-sharing applications for the popular social network, reports the BBC.

MySpace will formally launch its “Developer Platform” next Tuesday but is already allowing people to sign up. The tools have been developed with Google and will allow programmers to create programs similar to those used by millions on rival site Facebook.

Facebook opened up its site to outside developers last year. It has since had great success, with nearly 15,000 applications written for the site.

These include photo-sharing and music recommendation tools as well as games such as scrabble. However, despite its popularity, Facebook still lags behind MySpace in terms of overall users. MySpace has around 200 million registered users, compared to 63 million who use Facebook.

Last October MySpace announced that it would join OpenSocial, Google’s platform designed to allow developers to build applications that will work on any website.

Other networks such as Bebo, LinkedIn and Orkut already use the tools.

The tools, available from 5 February, will allow developers to build applications that make use of MySpace member profile information and their connections with other users.More at BBC News.

Jan 01, ` 08 — Australia is planning tough new rules to protect children from online pornography and violence, BBC News reported.

The new Labor government wants internet service providers to filter content to ensure households and schools do not receive “inappropriate” material.

Civil libertarians have condemned the plan as unnecessary, and say it will erode the freedom of the internet. But telecommunications minister Stephen Conroy said more needed to be done to protect children.

The Australian government’s aim is to ensure that children only have access to family-friendly websites. Service providers will be expected to stop the flow of pornography and other X-rated or violent content.

The government is set to compile a list of unsuitable sites, although at this stage it is unclear what will be deemed unsuitable. Australians wanting unfettered access to the web will have to contact their supplier to opt out of the new regime.

Concerns have also been raised that the government’s filters could slow down access to the net, in a country where connection speeds are often below international standards. More at BBC News.

London — BBC News reports on Experts developing a flexible surgical robot, known as the i-Snake, which they say could revolutionize keyhole surgery. It could enable surgeons to do complex procedures previously possible only through more invasive techniques.

A team at Imperial College London has been granted £2.1 million for the work.

The i-Snake, a long tube housing special motors, sensors and imaging tools, has the potential to allow complex heart and bowel operations to be carried out without making an incision.

According to the research team, the i-Snake could also be used to detect problems in the gut and bowel by acting as the surgeon’s hands and eyes in hard to reach places inside the body. The Imperial College team, which includes health minister and surgeon Lord Ara Darzi, will test the device in the laboratory first, before using it on patients.

Lord Darzi said i-Snake could be in use within five years, resulting in cheaper operations and faster recovery times for patients. The robot’s diameter will vary between that of a 5p and a 10p piece and it will contain fibre-optic cables to relay information to the surgeon.

“The unrivalled imaging and sensing capabilities coupled with the accessibility and sensitivity of i-Snake will enable more complex diagnostic and therapeutic procedures than are currently possible, BBC quoted Lord Darzi, as saying. More at BBC News.

Sixty years ago three scientists, , from Bell Laboratory in the US invented the Transistor - the tiny switches at the heart of all silicon chips - replacing vacuum tubes and mechanical relays and revolutionizing the entire electronics world. The team was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1956.

Analyst Malcolm Penn at BBC News writes an in-depth article on the history of transistor: “Following the transistor’s invention by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley at Bell Labs in 1947, no one really knew quite what to do with the invention.

Little more than a laboratory curiosity, it was not until manufacturers realized that the tiny switches would enable products to be built smaller, more reliably and with less power consumption than with conventional electronic valves that the market started to develop.

It took the technologists five years to come up with the first practical transistor application - a hearing aid in 1952.

Eight years after the transistors first laboratory demonstration, launched in December 1955, the watershed product that truly grabbed the world’s attention was the first transistor radio, pocket-sized Regency TR1.

Most of the early device manufacturers were traditional valve companies, soon to be displaced by the fledgling specialist semiconductor companies, the most famous of which being Fairchild Semiconductor in Palo Alto, California and Texas Instruments (TI) in Dallas, Texas.

A spin out from Shockley Semiconductors, Fairchild proved to be a hotbed of technology innovation throughout the whole of the 1960s, including the invention of the Planar manufacturing process - the ability to print tiny patterns on the silicon surface using photographic techniques - still the foundation for today’s mainstream technology.

It was at Fairchild in 1965 that Gordon Moore, one of the co-founders of chip-giant Intel, sketched out his prediction of the pace of silicon technology, subsequently became known as Moore’s law.” More at BBC News, Nobelprize.org.

San Francisco, Calif — Arctic sea ice shrank drastically this summer, reaching a record low, largely because warm ocean currents ate away at the base of the ice sheet, new research says. The arctic ice cap melted at an unprecedented rate in mid-2007, losing an area of ice the size of the state of Alaska, US scientists said at a conference this week.

“The average rate of loss of sea ice every summer year to year up to 2006 was equal to an area the size of West Virginia,” or about 62,800 square kilometers (24,250 square miles), said Michael Steele, the senior oceanographer at the University of Washington in Seattle.

However the decrease in ice between 2006 and 2007 “was almost equivalent to the area of Alaska,” or some 1.7 million kilometers (more than 663,000 square miles), Steele further said.

“It was a huge retreat,” said Steele, one of the researchers who discussed the subject at the annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference in San Francisco, California.

At the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco, some scientists argued yesterday that the end of the perennial ice is near.

“If this trend persists, the Arctic would be ice-free [in the summer] by 2013,” said Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. The researchers told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union that some of the observations had been astonishing.

“The further you go down this path, the harder it is to get back,” observed Don Perovich from the US Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. “Things could come back, but basically it’s the fourth quarter and we’re down two touchdowns,” he said, using an analogy from American football.

The big thin
The extent of the sea ice cover fell to a record minimum in September of 4.13 million sq km, beating the previous low mark, set in 2005, by 23%. This was well publicised at the time, but some of the other “Arctic numbers” have not been so widely reported. Scientists say they demonstrate the step changes in environmental conditions in the northern polar region.

Warmth from below
A big driver behind the melt is the current warmth of the waters in the Arctic. In the summer of 2007, Arctic Ocean surface temperatures hit new maximums.

In waters just north of the Chukchi Sea (above Alaska and Eastern Siberia), sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) were 3.5C warmer than the historical average and 1.5C warmer than the historical maximum. SSTs of 4C were recorded.

This warming was probably the result of having increasing amounts of open water that readily absorb the sun’s rays, a phenomenon known as the ice-albedo feedback: less ice means less reflection and more absorption, leading to more warming and more melting.

“Water that is now circulating just 200 meters below the main ice pack is now significantly warmer than it was just five years ago,” said John Walsh of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

New research shows that carbon dioxide, one gas that traps heat in the atmosphere, can be captured as it leaves coal-burning power plants and then permanently sequestered in rock formations thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface.

How Much Time Is Left?
When asked how long the perennial ice might last, many researchers here shrugged their shoulders.

A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in February predicts that the summer sea ice may disappear early in the next century.

More at National Snow and Ice Data Center, BBC News.

September 9, 2007, sea ice extent compared to animation of Septembers 1979 to 2006 

Dec 13, `07 — A Canadian man has been shocked to receive a mobile phone bill for nearly $85,000, BBC News reports.

The 22-year-old oil-field worker from Calgary, Piotr Staniaszek thought he could use his new phone as a modem for his computer under his $10 unlimited mobile browser plan from Bell Mobility.

He downloaded high-definition movies and other large files unaware that this incurred massive extra charges. Bell Mobility has since lowered the bill to $3,243, but Staniaszek says he intends to fight the charges anyway.

“The thing is, they’ve cut my phone off for being like $100 over,” he told CBC News. “Here, I’m $85,000 over and nobody bothered to give me a call and tell me what was going on.”

Bell Mobility said they would lower the bill to $3,243 in a “goodwill gesture” to match the best data plan available for using mobile phones as a modem, the Globe and Mail reported. More at BBC News.

Dec 05, ‘07 — Mobile phone company Orange has said 20% of customers who have bought iPhones from it in France have opted for unlocked ones, NOT the half, as earlier reported, BBC News correcting the story now.

Orange sold the popular Apple product for €399 euros ($585) with a two-year contract, or €749 euros without one. Elsewhere, mobile companies only sell iPhones to customers who take out network contracts with them.

Orange sold 30,000 iPhones in the first five days, 20% of which were unlocked so they could be used on any network. Orange says that 48% of people buying the phones were new customers for the network. More at BBC News.

Dec 05, ‘07 — Orange has said half of customers who have bought iPhones from it in France have opted for unlocked ones, BBC reports.

Orange sold the popular Apple product for €399 euros ($585) with a two-year contract, or €749 euros without one. Elsewhere, mobile companies only sell iPhones to customers who take out network contracts with them.

Orange sold 30,000 iPhones in the first five days, 52% of which were unlocked so they could be used on any network.

On Tuesday, a German court overturned an injunction that had forced T-Mobile to sell unlocked phones. In the two weeks that the injunction was in place, T-Mobile sold unlocked iPhones for €999 euros, compared with €399 euros for a phone with a two-year contract.

More at BBCNews.

Dec 03, ‘07 — Chimpanzees have an extraordinary photographic memory that is far superior to ours, research suggests. Young chimps outperformed university students in memory tests devised by Japanese scientists.

The research, published in Current Biology, suggests we may have under-estimated the intelligence of our closest living relatives. Until now, it had always been assumed that chimps could not match humans in memory and other mental skills.

“There are still many people, including many biologists, who believe that humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions,” said lead researcher  of Kyoto University.

“No one can imagine that chimpanzees - young chimpanzees at the age of 5 - have a better performance in a memory task than humans,” he said in a statement.

Matsuzawa, a pioneer in studying the mental abilities of chimps, said even he was surprised. He and colleague Sana Inoue report the results in Tuesday’s issue of the journal Current Biology.

One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps who’d been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, and a dozen human volunteers.

They saw nine numbers displayed on a computer screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares. The test was to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.

Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster. One chimp, Ayumu, did the best. Researchers included him and nine college students in a second test.

This time, five numbers flashed on the screen only briefly before they were replaced by white squares. The challenge, again, was to touch these squares in the proper sequence.

When the numbers were displayed for about seven-tenths of a second, Ayumu and the college students were both able to do this correctly about 80 percent of the time.

But when the numbers were displayed for just four-tenths or two-tenths of a second, the chimp was the champ. The briefer of those times is too short to allow a look around the screen, and in those tests Ayumu still scored about 80 percent, while humans plunged to 40 percent.

That indicates Ayumu was better at taking in the whole pattern of numbers at a glance, the researchers wrote.

Dr Lisa Parr, who works with chimps at the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University in Atlanta, US, described the research as “ground-breaking”. She said their importance of these primates for understanding the skills necessary for the evolution of modern humans was unparalleled.

“They are our closest living relatives and thus are in a unique position to inform us about our evolutionary heritage,” said Dr Parr.

“These studies tell us that elaborate short-term memory skills may have had a much more salient function in early humans than is present in modern humans, perhaps due to our increasing reliance on language-based memory skills.” More at BBC News.

Dec 03, ‘07 — Fossil hunters have uncovered the remains of a dinosaur that has much of its soft tissue still intact. Skin, muscle, tendons and other tissue that rarely survive fossilisation have all been preserved in the specimen unearthed in North Dakota, US.

The 67 million-year-old dinosaur is one of the duck-billed hadrosaur group. The preservation allowed scientists to estimate that it was more muscular than thought, perhaps giving it the ability to outrun predators like T. rex.

While they call it a mummy, the dinosaur is not really preserved like King Tut was. The dinosaur body has been fossilized into stone. Unlike the collections of bones found in museums, this hadrosaur came complete with skin, ligaments, tendons and possibly some internal organs, according to researchers.

The study is not yet complete, but scientists have concluded that Hadrosaurs were bigger - 3 1/2 tons and up to 40 feet long - and stronger than had been known, were quick and flexible and had skin with scales that may have been striped.

“Oh, the skin is wonderful,” paleontologist Phillip Manning of Manchester University in England rhapsodized, admitting to a “glazed look in my eye.”

“It’s unbelievable when you look at it for the first time,” he said in a telephone interview. “There is depth and structure to the skin. The level of detail expressed in the skin is just breathtaking.”

The fossil was found in 1999 and is now nicknamed Dakota. It is being analysed in the world’s largest CT scanner, operated by the Boeing corporation.

The machine usually is used for space shuttle engines and other large objects. Researchers hope the technology will help them learn more about the fossilised insides of the creature.

The reptile had no chest cavity, suggesting it had been partially eaten by predators before being “mummified” in unusual conditions: acidic, waterlogged sediments collected around the dinosaur, triggering the rapid deposit of minerals and trapping organic molecules before they decayed.

Dakota was discovered by Tyler Lyson, then a teenager who liked hunting for fossils on his family ranch. Lyson, who is currently working on his doctorate degree in paleontology at Yale University, founded the Marmarth Research Foundation, an organization dedicated to the excavation, preservation and study of dinosaurs. More at National Geographic, BBC News.

Khartoum, Sudan — Dec 03, ‘07 — Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir on Monday pardoned a British teacher jailed after letting her students name a teddy bear Muhammad, and officials said she would be released and would fly back to England later in the day.

Lord Nazir Ahmed and Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, met with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir Monday at his presidential palace to plead for Gillian Gibbons’ pardon.

Gibbons had been sentenced Thursday to 15 days in prison and deportation for insulting Islam because her students gave the teddy bear the same name as Islam’s revered prophet - a violation under Sudan’s Islamic Sharia law.

The jailing of Mrs Gibbons has led to an international outcry and has embarrassed the government. The case inflamed passions among many in Sudan, where demonstrators called for her to be put to death.

Lord Ahmed thanked the president for granting the pardon and said both he and Baroness Warsi were proud to have been able to help Mrs Gibbons.

“This is a case which is unfortunate, unintentional, innocent misunderstanding, and as British Muslim Parliamentarians we, Baroness Warsi and myself, we feel proud that we’ve been able to secure Gillian Gibbon’s release.”

In a written statement released by the presidential palace and read by Warsi to reporters, 54-year-old Gibbons said she was sorry if she caused any “distress.”

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown welcomed the news, saying that “common sense has prevailed.” “She will be released into the care of our embassy in Khartoum after what must have been a difficult ordeal,” Brown said in a statement released by his office.

More at BBC News.

London — Dec 02, ‘07 — Leading British firms and government agencies have been warned Chinese state organisations may be spying on them.

UK intelligence network MI5 has contacted 300 chief executives and security experts at banks and financial institutions to raise the concerns.

It is alleged that UK organisations may suffer a concerted cyber attack to gain commercially-sensitive data.

Recently, the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, said that Britain faces a threat from digital espionage.

Experts say there have been unprecedented waves of attacks on computer systems worldwide in the last year.

A number of countries have accused China of trying to hack into their systems. It is believed many major developed nations engage in very similar behaviour. China’s highly sophisticated technologies make it a world leader in computing. More at BBC News.

Dec 02, ‘07 — Two UK Muslim peers who are in Sudan to lobby for a jailed British teacher to be released will meet the president on Monday, a presidential aide has said.

Baroness Warsi and Lord Ahmed have delayed their return to the UK and Lady Warsi said they had “made progress”. But she would not confirm the aide’s announcement of a presidential meeting.

Gillian Gibbons, 54, of Liverpool, was jailed for 15 days on Thursday for insulting religion by letting her pupils name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Baroness Warsi,  a Conservative peer, travelled to Sudan with Labour’s Lord Ahmed on Saturday in the wake of Gibbons’ imprisonment for allowing her pupils to name a teddy bear Mohammad. Some Islamists considered the decision an insult as the Muslim Prophet is also called Mohammad.

In her first public comment since her arrest, Mrs Gibbons said she had been treated well and made a light-hearted comment that she been given so many apples that she “could set up my own stall”.

However despite her apparent good spirits, she is being held in secret due to fears for her safety after crowds of protesters marched in the capital Khartoum on Friday demanding a tougher sentence. Some called for the death penalty.

More at Reuters, BBC News.

“Why would a kid in the developing world need a laptop of all things, when they might not have food, they probably…in some cases don’t live beyond the age of five, they don’t have drinking water and parents earn dollar a day or less?

Good grief why should they have a laptop?

Take the word laptop and substitute the word education and no body would say that.

This ( XO Laptop ) is probably only hope. I don’t want to place too much on OLPC, but if I really have to look at … sort of … how to eliminate poverty and create peace, and work on the environment, I  think, I can’t think of a better way to do it.” Says Nicholas Negroponte.

Nov 30, ‘07 –Nicholas Negroponte, the founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) non-profit organisation, has worked to use computing as a means to bring education to the poorest regions of the world.

Since 2005 the focus of Professor Negroponte’s project has been to develop an innovative laptop that will be distributed to children across the developing world and cost about $100.

But founding pioneering initiatives is nothing new to the American computing guru. He obtained two professional architecture degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s and then set up MIT’s Architecture Machine Group in 1968.

In the 1980s he co-founded and directed the MIT Media Laboratory, where much of the technology that enabled the “digital revolution” was developed, including wireless communication, and progressive approaches to how children learn.

Professor Ken Morse, an MIT colleague, has called him: “An indefatigable leader. He has done an amazing job of recruiting incredibly busy people, including me, to help him with his crusade to bridge the digital divide”.

He has made it clear that his vision is not about the laptop itself. “It’s as if people spent all their attention focusing on Columbus’s boat and not on where he was going,” Professor Negroponte told The New York Times. “You have to remember that what this is about is education.”The latest laptop model, the XO, is now in production, and with interest from several developing nations, including Nigeria, Uruguay, and Libya, Negroponte’s vision is slowly becoming realised.

More at BBC News, LaptopGiving.org, OLPC.

Nov 29, ‘07 — BBC news is reporting on this shocking story of a British teacher being found guilty in Sudan of insulting religion after she allowed her primary school class to name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, has been sentenced to 15 days in prison and will then be deported. She had been accused on three counts of insulting religion, inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs.

The Foreign Office said it was extremely disappointed by the verdict. Her lawyer says she will now appeal. The prime minister, Sudanese embassy officials in London and UK Muslim organisations all expressed the hope that Mrs Gibbons would be released.

But Sudan’s top clerics had called for the full measure of the law to be used against Mrs Gibbons and labelled her actions part of a Western plot against Islam. She could have faced up to 40 lashes.

In September, Mrs Gibbons allowed her class of primary school pupils to name the teddy bear Muhammad as part of a study of animals and their habitats. More at BBC News. Photo Credit: BBC.

Nov 29, ‘07 — BBC News is reporting on a huge campaign to poison web searches and trick people into visiting malicious websites has been thwarted.

“The booby-trapped websites came up in search results for search terms such as “Christmas gifts” and “hospice”. Windows users falling for the trick risked having their machine hijacked and personal information plundered.

The criminals poisoned search results using thousands of domains set up to convince search index software they were serious sources of information.

While computer security researchers have seen small-scale attempts to subvert search results before now, the sheer scale of this attack dwarfed all others. “This was fairly epic,” said Alex Eckelberry, head of Sunbelt Software - one of the firms that uncovered the attack.

Eckelberry said tens of thousands of domains, many based in China and only a couple of days old, were used in the vanguard of the attack.

Websites loaded on these domains were booby-trapped with malicious software that looked for vulnerabilities in copies of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer used to browse them. “If your machine was not fully patched you were going to get hosed,” said Eckelberry.

The criminals who bought the domains convinced Google, MSN and Yahoo they were good and popular sources of information, said Mr Eckelberry, by using comment spam on blogs to push the pages up the search index rankings.

He speculated that the campaign was being waged by the Russian Business Network - a hi-tech criminal gang known to favour web-based attacks.

But, said Eckelberry, this attack was likely to be a harbinger of many more. “This is not going to go away,” he said.” More at BBCNews.

Nov 29, ‘07 — NASA has released details of its strategy for sending a human crew to Mars within the next few decades, reports BBC News.

“The space agency envisages despatching a “minimal” crew on a 30-month round trip to the Red Planet in a 400,000kg (880,000lb) spacecraft.Details of the concept were outlined at a meeting in Houston, Texas.

In January 2004, President George W Bush launched a program for returning humans to the Moon by 2020 and - at an undetermined date - to Mars. The “Mars ship” would be assembled in low-Earth orbit using three to four Ares V rockets - the new heavy-lift launch vehicle that Nasa has been developing.

Notionally despatched in February 2031, the mission’s journey from Earth to Mars would take six to seven months in a spacecraft powered by an advanced cryogenic fuel propulsion system. The details are highly subject to change, and may not represent the way NASA eventually chooses to go to the Red Planet.

However, the document says this is the agency’s current “best strategy” for landing humans on the Martian surface.

Grow your own

The cargo lander and surface habitat would be sent to Mars separately, launched before the crew in December 2028 and January 2029. According to the Nasa presentation seen by BBC News, astronauts could grow their own fruit and vegetables on the way.

Recycled water

The spacecraft itself would be equipped with so-called “closed-loop” life support systems, in which air and water would be recycled. Plants would be grown onboard to feed the crew and contribute to the “psychological health” of the astronauts.

They will also need medical equipment for the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses or injuries. NASA proposes using the Moon as a testing ground for many of these new systems.Details of the plan, which comes under Nasa’s new Constellation program, were presented at a meeting of NASA’s Lunar Exploration and Analysis Group.” More at BBCNews, NASA.

Nov 29, ‘07 — Staff at the UK’s biggest mobile phone retailer, Carphone Warehouse, have been caught misleading customers about Apple’s popular iPhone handset, undercover researchers from BBC One’s Watchdog found staff made false claims about what would happen if a phone was stolen and had not been insured.

This was in the hope customers would take out the store’s own insurance. The firm said there could be “some element of confusion among an isolated number of sales consultants”.

The findings come just a year after Carphone Warehouse was fined £245,000 by the Financial Services Authority for breaking the rules on selling insurance.

Viewers complained to Watchdog that they had been told if they lost their iPhone, they would have to buy an entirely new 18 month contract - at a minimum cost of £630, which is obviously not true.

Staff at the stores receive commission on all insurance and phones they sell. More at BBCNews.

London — Nov 27, ‘07 — The BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are to launch a joint on-demand service, which will bring together hundreds of hours of television programmes in one place, BBC News said on Tuesday.

The service is set to go live in 2008 and will offer viewers access to current shows and archive material. Plans will have to be approved by the BBC Trust and the other broadcasters’ boards, and a name for the service will be unveiled ahead of its launch.

The three broadcasters currently offer their own separate on-demand services.

The BBC’s iPlayer, ITV’s catch-up service and Channel 4oD will continue to exist along the new online “aggregator”, which will provide a complement to the established providers.

Programming from all three broadcasters will be available for free download, streaming, rental and purchase via the internet, with expansion on to other platforms planned.

John Smith, the chief executive of BBC Worldwide, said the venture was a “historic partnership” between the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

“The new service will contain some of the very best of the UK’s content for consumers to view in one place, which will be both easy to use and great fun,” he added.

The BBC and ITV’s on-demand services launched earlier this year, with the commerical broadcaster initially concentrating on soap opera catch-ups.

Channel 4’s service offers hundreds of hours of programming from current series such as Ugly Betty to classic shows including Father Ted. Other on-demand services are offered by other providers including Five, Sky, BT Vision and Tiscali.

Nov 26, ‘07 — BBC News is reporting on the first of the new Jaguar XF models being rolled off the production line.

BBCNews further reports, “The car maker is currently up for sale and it is hoped the new model, which replaces the S-Type, will help secure the future of hundreds of jobs.

It was designed and engineered in Whitley, Coventry, and is being built in Castle Bromwich, near Birmingham. The basic 3.0 litre model starts at $67, 789 (£32,925) while the most expensive 4.2 litre SV8 costs $111,026 (£53,925).

Ford has said it has had a number of bidders for Jaguar Land Rover, which it plans to sell by early 2008. Last week, the union Unite said its preferred bidder was the Indian car manufacturer Tata. More at BBCNews.

BBC News is reporting on The Information Commissioner’s Office in UK warning young people about the online footprint they leave on social networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook.

BBC News further writes, “Millions of young people could damage their future careers with the details about themselves they post on social networking websites, a watchdog warns.

The Information Commissioner’s Office found more than half of those asked made most of their information public.

Some 71% of 2,000 14 to 21-year-olds said they would not want colleges or employers to do a web search on them before they had removed some material.The commission said the young needed to be aware of their electronic footprint.

The ICO also said young people could be putting themselves at risk of identity fraud because of the material they post on social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.

ICO deputy commissioner David Smith said: “Many young people are posting content online without thinking about the electronic footprint they leave behind.

“The cost to a person’s future can be very high if something undesirable is found by the increasing number of education institutions and employers using the internet as a tool to vet potential students or employees.”

“We have to help teenagers wise up to every aspect of the internet age they’re living in. It may be fun but unfortunately it is not the safe space many think it is.”" More at BBCNews, ICO.gov.uk

A Chinese mining company has won a tender to develop one of the world’s largest copper mines in Afghanistan. The state-owned China Metallurgical group says it will invest nearly $3bn in the mine at Aynak in the province of Logar, south of Kabul.

Officials say it will be the largest foreign investment in Afghan history and will employ 10,000 people. When construction is complete the company will pay the Afghan government $400m a year.

The Afghan government wants to attract foreign companies to make mining a key sector of an economy that is on a slow recovery after three decades of war.

The Aynak copper deposits in Logar province were first explored by Soviet geologists in the 1970s. But then the Soviet invasion of 1979 and years of warfare put an end to plans to develop them. Officials say the area contains an estimated 13 million tonnes of copper, making it a world-class site.

It is also in a relatively safe area, not far from the capital. The $3bn that the China Metallurgical group is to invest in Aynak compares with a total of $4bn which the Afghan government says foreign companies have invested in the country since the overthrow of the Taleban six years ago.

Once it goes into operation in five years’ time, the mine will provide hundreds of millions of dollars of much-needed revenue for the cash-starved Afghan government. It will also provide thousands of jobs in a land where unemployment is one of the most pressing problems.

Kabul hopes to attract more foreign mining firms. The Aynak tender was hotly contested by companies from Canada, Australia and Russia, as well as China.

Experts say Afghanistan’s mountains are rich in minerals, which could become a significant base for the revival of the country’s shattered economy. Apart from copper, there is coal, iron, gas and oil.

There is also a sparkling assortment of gemstones - emeralds, tourmalines and garnets, and the lapis lazuli mines which provided jewelry for the Egyptian pharoahs three thousand years ago.

Consumer demand for bandwidth could see the internet running out of capacity as early as 2010, a new study warns. US analyst firm Nemertes Research predicted a drastic slowdown as the network struggles to cope with the amount of data being carried on it.

Such gridlock would drastically affect how people use the web and could mean the next Google or YouTube simply doesn’t get off the ground, it said. The report said billions needed to be spent upgrading broadband networks.

It put the figure at around $137bn (£66bn) globally. For users, the slowdown could see a return to the bad old days of dial-up, the report predicts. “It may take more than one attempt to confirm an online purchase or it may take longer to download the latest video from YouTube,” the report cited. But it is the knock-on effect for new services that could be the real problem, report authors think. “The next Amazon, Google or YouTube might not arise, not from a lack of user demand but because of insufficient infrastructure preventing applications and companies emerging,” the report warned.

The demand for bandwidth-intensive applications shows no sign of abating. Nearly 75% of US internet users watched an average of 158 minutes of online video and viewed more than 8.3bn video streams during May, according to research by measurement firm comScore.

The financial invested required to “bridge the gap” between demand and capacity would range from $42bn to $55bn in the US, Nemertes estimates. The report is part-funded by the Internet Innovation Alliance (IIA) which campaigns for universal broadband in the US.