Newpaper ad sales are falling of a cliff.

Newspaper ad sales during the first quarter shrank 28.3%, or $2.6 billion, from where they were during the same quarter a year ago, according to a new slew of statistics from the Newspaper Association of America. The worst decline ever… 2009 revenues will likely come in lower than $30 billion, less than they did in 1987…

• Print ad sales declined 29.7% to $5.9 billion…
• Online sales down 13.4% to $696.3 million
• Classifieds down 42.3% to $1.5 billion…
• Ad sales collapse 16.6% to $37.8 billion in 2008.
• Employment advertising shrank 67.4% to $205.4 million…
• Real Estate down 45.6% to $336.9 million
• Auto down 43.4% to $332.8 million…
• National campaigns down 25.9% to $1.1 billion…
• Retail down 23.7% to $3.3 billion…
• “Other” down 16.5% to $587.7 million

At the same time, the private world-wide community classified site Craig’s List is believed to have achieved record revenues of $100m with just 30 employees according to a new study from Classified Intelligence Report.

The Internet classified ads company, which promotes its “relatively noncommercial nature” and “service mission” on its site, is projected to bring in more than $100 million in revenue this year… That is a 23 percent jump over the revenue the firm estimated for 2008 and a huge increase since 2004, when the site was projected to bring in just $9 million… Craigslist… has just 30 employees.

Network television will follow newspapers down the drain.

E Ink Corp. said it has agreed to be acquired by Prime View International, a Taiwanese company, for $215 million. Prime View has been E Ink’s partner in making “electronic ink” displays for Amazon.com Inc. and Sony Corp. The deal will help the combined company develop color versions of its displays and mass produce them by the end of 2010… Current models show shades of gray. E Ink’s displays are used in e-book readers because they look similar to regular paper and consume very little power. However, they take a relatively long time to switch between images, making navigation slow.

More hype on the Plastic Logic e-reader coming out next year from the UK. Big build-up for a vapor device.

Semi sales have moved up month-on-month, but still down 25% yoy. Lots of people are mistaking seasonality for “green shoots”. Autos use a lot of chips.

Global chip sales rose to $15.6 billion in April, up 6.4 percent from March… still down 25 percent from April sales of $20.9 billion a year ago… PC demand is better than expected as inventory is replenished… now expected to fall 6 percent [vs] expected decline of 12 percent… Cell phone sales also aren’t as bad as expected… Cell phones and PCs account for 60 percent of chip sales.

Not sure if this is material, but it is interesting. Does it say anything that Facebook needed to go as far as Russia to get a valuation of $10bn. Do you wonder, as I do, where the $200m came from in a country reportedly in a deeper financial crisis than the USA? Is it now the case that for everything there is a price; and for Microsoft a price 50% higher? Does anyone wonder where the other $400m has gone and whether a site to share photos and gossip really costs that much to build?

A Russian investment firm, Digital Sky Technologies, has invested $200 million in the social networking company Facebook in return for a 1.96 percent stake… Digital Sky Technologies also plans to buy at least $100 million of Facebook stock from current and former employees… Founded in 2005, Digital Sky has raised and invested more than $1 billion in over 30 companies… The investment values Facebook’s preferred stock at $10 billion, a $5 billion drop from October 2007 when Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake. With the latest round of financing, Facebook has raised about $600 million since it was founded in 2004… Facebook had 307 million visitors worldwide in April, almost triple the number a year ago, and 79 percent of them are outside the United States…

Bharti Airtel of India and MTN of South Africa will merge, creating a mobile phone company with 200m subscribers, lagging only China Mobile and Vodafone. Does it say anything that two of the three largest mobile companies are based in emerging markets?

Bharti, the largest mobile phone company in India, with 100 million subscribers, would acquire 49 percent of MTN, which has an equal number of customers in Africa and the Middle East. MTN, in turn, would acquire 36 percent of Bharti Airtel. The two companies would merge completely in the future…

Cringely debunks the ‘GPS is failing’ story.

If your GPS equipment was purchased in the last couple years it probably makes use of the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS)… For WAAS-enabled GPS receivers, then, it is possible to maintain acceptable accuracy with only ONE (not three) of the regular GPS satellites in view… The chances of the GPS system going down are very remote — FAR lower than the 20 percent suggested by the GAO.

The expanding portion of the handset market is smart phones, and the race is 3-way – RIMM, Apple and Nokia with generics running Google’s Android coming up the outside. MOT, PALM, SNE are falling away.

Apple’s share of worldwide smartphone sales grew from 5.3 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to 10.8 percent in the first quarter of 2009. In terms of unit sales, Apple jumped from 1.7 million in the first quarter of 2008 to 3.9 million during the same period in 2009… Research In Motion saw its BlackBerry market share rise from 13.3 percent in first quarter of 2008 to 19.9 percent in 2009. The company’s unit sales grew from 4.3 million to 7.2 million over the same period. Nokia saw its market share drop almost 4 percent, from 45.1 percent in first quarter of 2008 to 41.2 percent in 2009… Mobile-phone sales for the first quarter of 2009 totaled 269.1 million, a drop of 9.4 percent over the same period last year… Smartphone sales for the first quarter of 2009 were 36.4 million, representing a 12.7 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008.

On my wishlist: The SPOT device is a great solution for personal safety when travelling – transmitting your GPS position and a short text message from anywhere on earth via the low-earth orbit satellite system to emergency services or friends who simply want to track your progress.

A second generation of satellites, which are about to be launched by Globalstar atop trusty old Soyuz rockets from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, will whisk data around the planet at a far more respectable speed of 250 kilobits a second. By later next year, when Globalstar has all 24 of its new satellites in orbit, high-quality voice and 3G data transmission will be possible from anywhere on the planet, except for polar latitudes. Globalstar already sells a tempting little $170 [plus an annual subscription fee] device called SPOT, which can send your GPS location to friends and family, along with a preprogrammed message and a link to Google Maps that lets them track your progress.

The PUMA prototype is designed to work much like the original Segway Personal Transporter, balancing on two wheels and stabilized (or not) by the rider’s body motion. It features electric drive and batteries, along with all-electronic acceleration, steering, and braking… The lithium ion battery-powered vehicle will also feature vehicle-to-vehicle communications, plus autonomous driving and parking capabilities… The PUMA is supposed to reach 35 miles per hour, and travel up to 35 miles between charges.

An article in the NYT tries to argue that fancier portable media devices like the Kindle can save the newspaper and magazine subscription/advertising model. No. The open alternative will always be more attractive once the hardware cost is within affordability. Still, I expect a lot of value fund managers to load up on this theme.

The NYT talks about a thriving industry in cell-phone knock-offs known as shanzhai.

Technological advances have allowed hundreds of small Chinese companies, some with as few as 10 employees, to churn out what are known here as shanzhai, or black market, cellphones, often for as little as $20 apiece… Although shanzhai phones have only been around a few years, they already account for more than 20 percent of sales in China, which is the world’s biggest mobile phone market… While the phones may look like famous brands, companies actually add special features like bigger screens, dual-mode SIM cards (which allow two phone numbers) and even a telescopic lens attachment for the phone’s camera… [In 2005] Mediatek developed a circuit board that could inexpensively integrate the functions of multiple chips, offering start-ups a platform to produce a low-cost mobile phone…

Netbooks and tablets beginning to show up with Android.

Skytone, a Chinese manufacturer, has started showing off the first netbook to run Android, an operating system developed by Google that currently runs on just a single device, the G1mobile phone… it supports 128 megabits of RAM and only up to 4 gigabytes of storage on a flash-based, solid-state disk. And importantly, its central processing unit is an ARM11 chip–the same model found inside the iPhone… it’s expected to retail for about $250

Google is attempting to pre-empt a new service from Wolfram (the developer of Mathmatica) called Wolfram|Alpha. In a somewhat contrived example, if you search google for “[unemployment rate] US” you get an interactive chart with rates by state. Wolfram’s Alpha is not actually live yet, but from the early reviews (pdf of screenshots 1.1Mb) it looks as though it will be hard to beat.

Pushback now from other distributors of text online on Google’s de facto monopoly created by the class action settlement with the Authors’ Guild.

The Justice Department has launched an investigation into whether Google is violating antitrust laws by reaching an agreement with authors and publishers to digitize millions of printed books and post the contents online… Google has defended its project, saying its goal is to improve access to books and to give the public access to millions of out-of-print books. But critics warn the settlement could result in Google having a monopoly of access to information and giving Google an exclusive license to profit from millions of books.

Youtube strikes again. Two employees of Dominos posted a video of sandwiches contaminated with snot which quickly went viral.

When two Domino’s Pizza employees filmed a prank in the restaurant’s kitchen, they decided to post it online. In a few days, thanks to the power of social media, they ended up with felony charges, more than a million disgusted viewers, and a major company facing a public relations crisis…. The two were charged with delivering prohibited foods.

IBM has tested specialized software on its Blue Gene/P supercomputer that analyzes simultaneous streams of data about financial markets. The analysis provides automated trading machines with information 21 times faster than other analysis systems, according to IBM.

Weak activity from the venture capital sector

Venture capital firms invested only $3 billion in 549 young companies in the first quarter, the lowest investment level since 1997… The amount invested was down 47 percent from the fourth quarter of 2008 and 61 percent from the first quarter last year… investment in clean-technology start-ups, which reached record highs last year, took the steepest dive… In the first quarter, only $154 million went into 33 companies, an 84 percent decline from the fourth quarter and the lowest level since 2005, just before clean technology began to take off… Software companies received $614 million, a drop of 42 percent from the fourth quarter of last year… Internet companies raised $556 million, down 31 percent… Biotechnology and medical device companies raised $989 million, a decline of 40 percent… Only 132 start-ups raised money for the first time, the lowest number in 15 years.

The most visible manifestation of this trend is the rise of the netbook, or small, low-cost laptop. Netbooks are great for browsing the web on the sofa, or tapping out a report on the plane. They will not run the latest games, and by modern standards have limited storage capacity and processing power. They are, in short, comparable to laptops from two or three years ago. But they are cheap, costing as little as £150 in Britain and $250 in America, and they are flying off the shelves… The “good enough” approach also works with software. Supplying “software as a service”, via the web, as done by Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Google, among others, usually means sacrificing the bells and whistles that are offered by conventional software. Google Docs lacks the fancy features of Microsoft Word, for example. But hardly anyone uses all those features anyway, and Google Docs is free.

The minimum I need in a device is wifi and the ability to run VNC, VLC, a flash-capable browser and basic Skype. All the remaining size and weight should be touch-screen and battery. I would pay slightly more for embedded GPS and bluetooth. An SD card slot would be nice. Something between the iPod Touch and ASUS Eee PC would be perfect. The Archos 7 is also close.

Also on the ‘less is more’ theme, the best widgets from CES 2009 were embedded web servers the size of an espresso cup for less than $100. Plug in any drive and the contents are served to your local network as well as across the net.

Start-up Cloud Engines PogoPlug and Ctera’s CloudPlug are each introducing a small box in late 1Q for $79. The box connects to any flash drive or hard drive using USB, and uses an Ethernet connection to your router to enable access to them from anywhere on the net.

Pogue gives some modern-day depression advice: unsubscribe from cable, satellite TV and movie channels in favour of internet TV, netflix, FTA HD. Move to a pre-paid cellphone contract & cut use. Eliminate your fixed line service. Buy refurbished hardware. I think video games could be the entertainment refuge like movie theatres were in the 30’s and in this environment the Wii is a runaway success.

Pew Internet & American Life Project said 53% of American adults played video games and one in five played daily. The teenage gamer figure was, as expected, much higher at 97%… Older gamers preferred PCs or laptops, while the teens favored the consoles such as the Nintendo Wii, Sony PlayStation, or Microsoft Xbox… Nintendo’s revolutionary Wii gaming console, with its motion sensing controller, sold 800,000 units during the Thanksgiving week. The figure is more than double the 350,000 units Nintendo sold for the same week in 2007… As of September 30, the company had sold more than 35 million consoles worldwide, which makes it the best selling platform for the current generation…

Three simple devices won the market’s support in 2008: the Wii, the Flip and the iPhone.

Nintendo has sold more than 30 million Wii game consoles since they were introduced two years ago… The machine is dimwittedly simple. The console itself is hardly bigger than a DVD. It lacks the deep rich graphics, the rumbling sound and any of the violent games of the Microsoft Xbox 360. But at $250, it is outselling the more expensive Xbox 360 and the Sony PlayStation 3 combined by almost 2 to 1… The $130 Flip camcorder is also simple and half to a third as expensive as camcorders made by Sony or JVC that have optical zoom, an optical viewfinder and special effects… Pure Digital says it has sold more than 1.5 million Flips since it introduced the product line in 2007… The Apple iPhone is one of the easiest-to-use devices ever created. At $300, plus a two-year contract that quickly pushes the real price to $1,800, it is hardly in the thrift class with the Wii and the Flip. But it is one of the most popular consumer electronics devices of 2008.

SIA reports semi sales are not holding up well. Intel, the engine of the industry, has cut revenue estimates by 20% lately.

Semiconductor sales dropped to $20.8 billion in November, from $23.1 billion a year earlier… Sales through the first 11 months of the year rose 0.2 percent to $232.7 billion… November sales were 7.2 percent lower than the $22.4 billion in October 2008. Excluding memory products, chip sales declined 4.8 percent to $17.3 billion. Sales in the Americas fell 19.5 percent while in Europe sales fell 13.9 percent. However, the Asia Pacific region had the smallest decline, 6.2 percent in sales.

The tenuous internet link to the Middle East was damaged again.

Parts of Asia, the Middle East, and Europe experienced Internet and telephone outages Friday when three undersea cables between Italy and Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged… The affected cable systems, which run from Alexandria in northern Egypt to Sicily in southern Italy, carry more than 75 percent of traffic between the Middle East, Europe, and the United States… The cable system that was cut is known as SMW4 cable or South East Asia- Middle East-Western Europe 4. It connects 12 countries: Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy and France… France Telecom said it plans to send a boat to fix the problem and should have service restored to normal by December 31… In January, undersea cables outside Alexandria were also damaged, disrupting about 70 percent of the communications network in India and the Middle East.

The iPhone Dev Team (not affiliated with Apple) is promising a software unlock for the iPhone 3G by the end of 2008… Unlocking and jailbreaking have lost a bit of their luster with the release of the iPhone around the world and the huge response to the App Store, but there will always be some group of users who doesn’t want Apple or their local carrier to dictate how they use their phones.

Google has found that by monitoring search terms it can predict outbreaks of flu up to two weeks faster than the traditional CDC system. Anyone can access the data.

Although bird flu cases are on the decline since 2006, it is just as deadly as ever. 38 cases and 29 fatalities in 2008 bringing the cumulative totals to 389 and 246.

MiBook is selling a $130 video player/book reader along with cookbooks and other “how-to” titles on SD chips for $20 each. Markets are cooking, DIY, travel and appears to be targetting women. 7″ LCD screen.

Unlike electronic books that focus on text alone, miBook stands out in that it combines text with video and sound, fusing the strengths of books and TV. miBook can also be used as a digital photo album and frame, allowing users to show their photos individually or as a slideshow. miBook also plays home videos, Internet videos, and MP3s.

An eBay for music – a innovative new service is providing online store-fronts to people who want to sell their old mp3 files. In response to queries about why users wouldn’t sell the same file over and over, Bopaboo says they “take a digital fingerprint through every upload that prevents a user from uploading to our service a track more than one time.” This is death to the record companies (and eventually studios), and DRM.

Sellers register and then are given an MP3 store, where they can upload the music they want to sell. No DRM-wrapped music is allowed. Bopaboo buyers can search for music in all the usual ways, and the site offers a seller rating to help shoppers learn a merchant’s reputation…

Truphone is offering an application to make VOIP calls over wifi from the iPhone and iPod Touch; of course Skype is available if you unlock the phone.

The Truphone application allows users with a Wi-Fi connection to make and receive phone calls via voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, with other iPod Touch owners, users of the Google Talk’s messaging service, and customers of Truphone’s Internet telephone service. The company said it expects to add the ability to handle landline calls.

Nokia launches it’s current answer to the iPhone: the N97.

The quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz), 3G (HSDPA 900/1900/2100MHz) Symbian-based smartphone features a music and video player, a 5-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, and a whopping 32GB of onboard memory that can be expanded with a 16GB microSD card… integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth… integrated A-GPS sensors and electronic compass… full QWERTY keyboard and a tilting 3.5-inch touch screen… The Nokia N97 is expected to ship in Europe during the first half of 2009, with an estimated price of 550 euros.

CNET hunts up some superior antivirus software from Vietnam; for only $17/yr.

Online retail spending rose 15 percent on the all-important Monday after Thanksgiving from a year earlier, and it appears set to continue to outperform offline.

This week eMarketer, a market-research firm, predicted that online-advertising spending in America, which makes up about half the global total, will increase by 8.9% in 2009, rather than the 14.5% it had forecast in August. The firm thinks search advertising will grow by 14.9% and rich-media ads by 7.5%, whereas display ads will grow by 6.6%.

Blu-Ray is struggling to gain traction, for all the reasons I outlined a year ago.

On average, Blu-ray movies account for about 6% of prerecorded disc sales. But that’s only when the top 20 Blu-ray and DVD titles are compared; when the full libraries of both are taken into account, Blu-ray’s share is a good deal less. By some reckonings, the real share is around 4%… So far, only 1.5m Blu-ray stand-alone players have been purchased in America. But Sony has also sold 5.7m PlayStation 3 game consoles, which include a Blu-ray player… And if you’ve never seen real high-definition videos (Blu-ray or HD-DVD), you’ll probably be happy with up-sampled DVDs. Besides, at the distance most people sit from their television sets, the resolution of the human eye isn’t good enough to tell the difference.

Bloggers have been at it an average of three years and are collectively creating close to one million posts every day. Blogs have representation in top-10 web site lists across all key categories, and have become integral to the media ecosystem… Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month… Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently. 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands, music, movies and books that they love (or hate).

This is a great application on the Google phone – using the camera phone as an iris scanner for bio authentication.

BioWallet uses your phone’s camera as an iris scanner to lock down sensitive information like account numbers and passwords on your phone, or even the phone itself. Handwriting-based IDs can also be implemented, all processed on external servers and sent back to your phone with a pass/fail reading.

Google is still trouncing video web competitors.

11 billion videos were viewed in July. Of that 11 billion, Google accounted for about 5 billion and its closest competitor, Fox Interactive (headlined by MySpace TV), only managed 445 million views. Microsoft rounded out the top three by serving almost 283 million videos… According to the figures, 75 percent of all Americans viewed an online video in July and the average viewer watched 235 minutes of video during the month. More importantly for Google, the average YouTube user watched 54.8 videos in July, while the average MySpace viewer watched just 7.8 during the same period.

A report by the UK government’s broadband advisory group costs out nation-wide fibre to the home.

The options examined range from fiber to the neighborhood, providing 30-100 Mbps connections for a total cost of £5.1 B ($9.3 B), up to individual fiber to the home offering 1 Gbps to each household at a cost of £28.8 B… The [group] estimates that getting fiber to the cabinets near the first 58% of households could cost about £1.9 B. The next 26% would cost about £1.4 B and the final 16% would cost £1.8 B.

In a belated attempt to be cool, Microsoft was caught using Macs for their new campaign’s graphics.

Four of the images that Microsoft made available on its PressPass site today display the designation “Adobe Photoshop C3 Macintosh” when their file properties are examined. The images appear to be frames from the television ads that Microsoft will launch later today. One of the images is of a real Microsoft engineer, identified only as “Sean,” who resembles John Hodgman, the actor who plays the PC character in Apple Inc.’s iconic ads.

Who needs to worry about foreigners and terrorists poisoning the water supply?

The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported that U.S. hospitals and long-term care facilities annually flush millions of pounds of unused pharmaceuticals down the drain, pumping contaminants into America’s drinking water. These discarded medications are expired, spoiled, over-prescribed or unneeded and could amount to 250 million pounds of pharmaceuticals and contaminated packaging. The massive amount of pharmaceuticals being flushed by the health-services industry is aggravating an emerging problem: the commonplace presence of minute concentrations of pharmaceuticals in the nation’s drinking water supplies, affecting at least 46 million Americans. Researchers are finding evidence that even extremely diluted concentrations of pharmaceutical residues harm fish, frogs and other aquatic species in the wild. Also, they say, human cells fail to grow normally in the laboratory when exposed to trace concentrations of certain drugs.

Yahoo is now allowing song play right from the search bar – 25 free songs a month.

Spore, despite being a great game, is getting a mixed reception.

Spore, designed by Sims creator Will Wright, went on sale a week ago. It is expected to sell 2 million copies in September alone, and is currently the No. 3 best-selling game on Amazon… But it also has one of the worst ratings on Amazon (2,016 out of the 2,216 ratings are one star) because of a concerted campaign by fans protesting its DRM. It has also been downloaded an estimated 500,000 times on BitTorrent, and is well on its way to becoming the most illegally downloaded game ever… And since the pirated version is DRM-free, many gamers consider it a better product than the DRMed one that Electronic Arts is trying to sell.

Cringely is saying “Batten down the hatches” in IT.

In 2008 we’re facing cuts in IT that are prompted by economic decline. Many of the IT shops I talk to are in denial about this. Many more, while not in denial, are making bad decisions… We’re very close to the point where relatively few organizations really ought to have their own data centers… This could also be a good time to embrace open source tools. Yes, there is a learning curve, but the price is right and I can argue that open source quality is substantially better… Oh, and cancel those contracts with Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc. You’ll feel better in the morning.

Richard Branson, a British businessman, is already offering a prize of $25m for a workable way of removing a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year… Broadly, these ideas fall into two categories. One is to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The other is to compensate for the climate-warming greenhouse effect this carbon dioxide and other gases cause, by reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the ground… One widely discussed idea… is to fertilise the oceans with iron… A second idea for scrubbing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere… is to plant more [genetically modified] trees… Another possibility… is recycling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into fuel, by reacting it with hydrogen… generated in a way that produces no carbon dioxide… Perhaps the most intriguing idea… is to eject carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at the Earth’s poles, using the planet’s magnetic field… To offset the rise in temperature expected by the middle of the century if things carry on as they are, the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface would have to be cut by just 1.1%… deliberately polluting the stratosphere with sulphate in order to reflect solar heat back into space… clouds might be made more reflective… [if you] spray them with seawater… Their answer is a fleet of specially designed ships. These would be wind-powered—not by sails but by Flettner rotors, which are giant, rotating cylinders that extract energy from the wind using the Magnus effect… The ships would drag turbines through the sea to provide electricity that would both drive the cylinders and power pumps that sprayed the atmosphere with seawater, suitably broken up into droplets… Such ships would weigh 300 tonnes. A fully operational system would require 1,500 of them…

It’s a seasonal attraction, but Stormpulse shows active hurricanes and tropical storms in the Atlantic. And the graphics are better than TV because you can play around with them… You can turn on layers to show projected paths and historical tracks. The severity of the storm is color coded from Tropical Depression to Category 5 Hurricane. You can see all active hurricanes at once, drag the map around, or click on a specific storm. The site also offers satellite pictures and storm news.

People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming, says the UN’s top climate scientist…

Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)… The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that direct emissions from meat production account for about 18% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions… the biggest source globally of carbon dioxide from meat production is land clearance, particularly of tropical forest, which is set to continue as long as demand for meat rises… Transport, by contrast, accounts for just 13% of humankind’s greenhouse gas footprint…

Instead of using hydrogen as a fuel, as do conventional fuel cells, microbial fuel cells use naturally occurring microbes to generate power.

Bacteria live in the anode, where they eat glucose, sewage, or other waste water, and turn that into electrons and protons. The bacteria transfer electrons to the circuit, which provides small amounts of power… Such a fuel cell can run a cheap, efficient light-emitting diode (LED) for four to five hours per evening.

The United States topped the list with 20.6 million attempted attacks originating from computers within the country and China ran second with 7.7 million attempted attacks emanating from computers within its borders. This was followed by Brazil with over 166,987 attempted attacks, South Korea with 162,289, Poland with 153,205, Japan with 142,346, Russia with 130,572, Taiwan with 124,997, Germany with 110,493, and Canada with 107,483… These findings illustrate the ineffectiveness of simply blocking incoming communications from foreign IP addresses as a way to defend your organization from cyber attacks, as many hackers hijack computers outside their borders to attack their victims.

The US government is rolling out a DNS authentication mechanism to thwart DNS poisoning attacks discovered this year.

All federal agencies are deploying DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) on the .gov top-level domain, and some expect that once that rollout is complete, banks and other businesses might be encouraged to follow suit for their sites… DNSSEC prevents hackers from hijacking Web traffic and redirecting it to bogus sites… The White House DNSSEC mandate comes just weeks after the July disclosure of one of the most serious DNS bugs ever found. The Kaminsky bug — named after security researcher Dan Kaminsky who discovered it — allows for cache poisoning attacks, where a hacker redirects traffic from a legitimate Web site to a fake Web one without the user knowing.

San Francisco is hunting for a mystery device on their city network (via Slashdot).

With costs related to a rogue network administrator’s hijacking of the city’s network now estimated at $1 million, city officials say they are searching for a mysterious networking device hidden somewhere on the network. The device, referred to as a ‘terminal server’ in court documents, appears to be a router that was installed to provide remote access to the city’s Fiber WAN network, which connects municipal computer and telecommunication systems throughout the city. City officials haven’t been able to log in to the device, however, because they do not have the username and password. In fact, the city’s Department of Telecommunications and Information Services isn’t even certain where the device is located, court filings state.

Schneier says not to hand just anyone your cell phone:

There is a new electronic capture device that has been developed primarily for law enforcement, surveillance, and intelligence operations that is also available to the public. It is called the Cellular Seizure Investigation Stick, or CSI Stick as a clever acronym. It is manufactured by a company called Paraben, and is a self-contained module about the size of a BIC lighter. It plugs directly into most Motorola and Samsung cell phones to capture all data that they contain. More phones will be added to the list, including many from Nokia, RIM, LG and others, in the next generation, to be released shortly.

Semiconductor chip sales during July increased 7.6% from last year, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. In turn, total July sales were $22.2 billion. Sales were also up from the prior month when they totaled $21.6 billion. Year-to-date, sales have totaled $148.3 billion, reflecting a 5% increase over the same period last year. Chip sales continue to benefit from healthy demand as consumers continue to buy anything from personal computers to increasingly sophisticated cell phones. However, sales of DRAM and NAND flash memory declined as a result of continuing price erosion.

Engadget summarises the Berlin IFA show — the European equivalent of CES in Vegas — with a yawn. The biggest crowd pleaser was the Wii, which is two years old now. That’s despite new 150″ HD displays and some interesting netbooks.

Netbooks seem to be a related phenomenon, offering cheap and simple pleasures in comparison to overly complicated and overly expensive laptops that consumers can find intimidating. It’s not that there’s a lot of “innovation” in the space, merely the repackaging of the previously niche, expensive ultraportable as a cheap and simple secondary computer. Similarly, Toshiba is taking a gamble that consumers would rather make their existing DVD collections look a bit better through upconversion instead of investing heavily in a whole new generation of disc media — and they could be right — but even that very upscaling can be a hard sell at times. Blu-ray is also feeling heat from downloadable content, and downloadable content is in turn feeling heat from low-fi streaming like Hulu, with its “good enough” quality and ease of access.

China is making progress in CPU chip manufacturing to compete with Intel:

The ICT group began designing a single-core CPU in 2001, and by the following year had developed Godson-1, China’s first general-purpose CPU. In 2003, 2004, and 2006, the team introduced ever faster versions of a second chip–Godson-2–based on the original design… Godson-3, a chip with four cores–processing units that work in parallel–will appear in 2009… Importantly, Godson-3 is scalable, meaning that more cores can be added to future generations without significant redesign… The four-core Godson-3 will consume 10 watts of power, and the eight-core chip will consume 20 watts… This latest chip will also be fundamentally different from those made before… engineers have added 200 additional instructions to Godson-3 to simulate an x86 chip… [Intel says that] the chip will only perform at about 80 percent of the speed of an actual x86 chip…

Google is monopolising sources of satellite imagery; signing an exclusive deal with GeoEye to complement the one with DigitalGlobe, the other major civil satellite imagery provider. (via Slashdot)

Under the deal, Google is the exclusive online mapping site that may use the imagery… in its Google Maps and Google Earth product. And as a little icing on the cake, Google’s logo is on the side of the rocket set to launch the 4,300-pound satellite in six days from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. GeoEye-1 will orbit 423 miles above Earth, but it will be able to gather imagery with details the size of 41 centimeters… Google, though, is permitted to use data only with a resolution of 50 cm because of the terms of GeoEye’s license with the US government.

The Economist writes on progress towards a solar plane.

Bertrand Piccard (of the famous family of explorers) and Andre Borschberg, at the Beijing Olympics for sponsors to help them build a solar-powered aircraft capable of circumnavigating the globe… With the wingspan of a commercial airliner, the two-man Solar Impulse (pictured above) is designed to climb on solar power to almost 30,000 feet during the day, and then gently glide on thermals, uplift and battery power down to 6,000 feet at night—repeating the procedure for several days at a time. While the plane should be able to fly more or less indefinitely, the crew will need to make numerous landings to replenish their food, water and oxygen supplies… The other interesting development was the three-and-a-half day flight by an unmanned, solar-powered plane called Zephyr. The 66-pound reconnaissance plane, built by the QinetiQ group in Britain, was guided by autopilot and satellite to an altitude of over 60,000 feet, drawing power from the sun during the day while relying on rechargeable lithium-sulphur batteries at night. That demonstration flight, made from an American army testing ground in Arizona, more than doubled the world record for unmanned flight, set by Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk in 2001… In a sense, the two solar planes in the news this past week are a validation of battery technology more than solar-cell developments.

The effect of the ‘cashback’ scheme to lure searchers to MSN lasted one month…

An important judgement that video sites are not liable if they follow take-down notices. They are allowed to transcode and store content and do not have to pre-emptively police it.

A study of the blood of older people who survived the 1918 influenza pandemic reveals that antibodies to the strain have lasted a lifetime and can perhaps be engineered to protect future generations against similar strains.

The people recruited for the study were 2 to 12 years old in 1918 and many recalled sick family members in their households, which suggests they were directly exposed to the virus, the authors report. The group found that 100% of the subjects had serum-neutralizing activity against the 1918 virus and 94% showed serologic reactivity to the 1918 hemagglutinin…

At least 197 people in a dozen states — 53 of them in Georgia — were sickened earlier this year after taking the liquid supplement Total Body Formula.

Their hair fell out in clumps, their fingernails fell off. They suffered nausea, vomiting and fatigue. Some had disabling joint pain, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health officials… several batches of Total Body Formula and Total Body Mega Formula contained hazardous amounts of the mineral selenium — up to 40,800 micrograms per serving, 200 times the amount listed on the product’s label, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Bisphenol A (BPA), a controversial chemical commonly found in can linings, baby bottles and other household products does not pose a health hazard when used in food containers, according to a draft assessment released by the Food and Drug Administration… The report stands in contrast to more than 100 studies performed by government scientists and university laboratories that have found health concerns.

The University of Michigan’s quarterly customer satisfaction index came out today, and in the Website category Google came out on top with a score of 86 out of 100 (up 10 percent from last year). Yahoo slipped 3 percent to a score of 77. MSN’s score was flat at 75, and tied with NYTimes.com and ABCNews.com. AOL came in at 69, and that is 3 percent better than last year.

Global television shipments rose 11% in Q2, year over year, and 3% sequentially, according to a report from research firm DisplaySearch.

The better-than-expected results were driven by a 28% increase in shipments in North America. Sales of LCD TVs, of course, were the top pick, up 47% year over year. LCD TVs regained share from plain-old tube TVs, says DisplaySearch, rising to 57% of the market from 52% in the prior quarter. DisplaySearch notes that 32″ TVs, in LCD form, were at their second highest level ever, up 41%, “as LCD panel supply increased on better fab utilization, causing panel prices to decline more than expected.” Surprisingly, the higher end units, 50″ to 54″ TVs, also rose more than 40%. Samsung (SSNLF.PK), as you might expect, led the pack in shipments, with 22.8%, a record, says DisplaySearch. Samsung shipments rose 52%, year over year, Sony (SNE) was second with “strong” share growth, up 49%, for a 12.5% share, and LG Electronics (LGERF.PK) was in third place with 11.5%, up 33%.

For well over a month now, I have been trying out a 3G Apple (AAPL) iPhone. And let me say right up front, it really is the best mobile device I’ve ever used. Calling it a phone does it a disservice; it’s more like a pocket Mac… At a certain level, the iPhone is simply more fun – by a wide margin – than any other phone I’ve come across. And it does a myriad of things that my aging Blackberry can’t. It plays songs and videos. It takes pictures. It can run some nifty games. It has built in GPS navigation. You can access WiFi networks. And you can surf the Web at reasonable speeds.

But I can’t quite bring myself to give up my trusty Research In Motion (RIMM) Blackberry for the iPhone, at least not yet… For starters, it simply doesn’t feel quite reliable enough as a corporate email device… I’ve also experienced highly variable and inconsistent 3G access… The one over-arching issue for me is simply battery life… I rely heavily on my mobile device to give me the ability to remotely make calls and send and receive email. But I can’t do those things on a device which is constantly in danger of running out of juice.

While corporate is not Apple’s primary target, it is one it will have to satisfy to be a player medium and long term. Otherwise it just leaves a large and profitable market to competitors from which they can fund attacks in the consumer space.