THE SERVICE: OnLive will let you “stream” popular high-end games over the Internet, using a mechanism similar to watching TV shows or listening to music online.

THE NEED: Players don’t have to own consoles such as the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3 or the latest, most powerful personal computers. The game runs on a computer elsewhere.

AVAILABILITY: Launches June 17 for $14.95 a month. Buying or renting games will cost extra, but the company did not disclose pricing. Available only in continental U.S.

THE PROPOSAL: A “.xxx” Internet suffix where porn sites can voluntarily set up shop away from the wandering eyes of children and teenagers.

THE PROS AND CONS: Backers say it would help the online porn industry clean up its act. Anti-porn groups worry it would legitimize porn sites.

THE NEXT STEPS: After an outside panel questioned the grounds for rejecting the suffix in 2007, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is taking another look.

La verdad es que Carlos Ray Norris (su nombre real) es una estrella de cine y artista marcial que en 2005 se convirtió en una contagiosa broma de internet y uno de los primeros memes de la historia (cuenta hasta con su propio sitio en Wikipedia).

Los “hechos sobre Chuck Norris” son normalmente afirmaciones absurdas sobre la actitud, virilidad, sofisticación e innegable habilidad para matar de Chuck Norris, convirtiéndolo en un sujeto hiperpoderoso.

El asunto no molestó a Norris, que respondió en un comunicado en su sitio web que hasta le causaba gracia.

Algunos son graciosos. Otros no. Siendo más un estudioso del viejo oeste que del salvaje mundo de la Internet, no estoy seguro de qué pensar sobre esto”

Estos son algunos de estos “hechos”, de los que se pueden encontrar miles más:

• De acuerdo a la teoría de la relatividad de Einstein, Chuck Norris puede darte una patada giratoria ayer.
• Chuck Norris destruyó la tabla periódica, porque él sólo reconoce el elemento sorpresa.
• Algunas personas usan pijamas de Superman. Superman usa pijamas de Chuck Norris.
• Chuck Norris no celebra su cumpleaños. El cumpleaños celebra a Chuck Norris.
• Chuck Norris puede contar hasta el infinito.
• Chuck Norris duerme con una almohada bajo su pistola.
• Google no busca a Chuck Norris, porque sabe que uno no busca a Chuck Norris. Él te encuentra.

Y por último una de las peleas que lo hizo saltar a la fama: Chuck Norris versus Bruce Lee en la película de 1972, “El camino del Dragón”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Links:
- Happy 70th birthday, Chuck Norris! (USA Today)
- Chuck Norris facts (Wikipedia)

Desafortunadamente ya no está disponible el registro para Google I/O, pero si estas en México podría interesarte el Google DevFest 2010, donde ingenieros de Google y desarrolladores compartirán sesiones técnicas sobre tecnologías Google en áreas tales como: Geo Web, Cloud Computing, desarrollo de aplicaciones móviles con Android, Social Web, extensiones a Google Wave, HTML 5, Chrome, entre otras.

Se llevará acabo el 13 de abril en el Centro Banamex (México D.F.) contando con conferencistas  como: Don Dodge, Pamela Fox, Ossama Alami, Chris Messina (cofundador de las comunidades BarCamp), Pamela Fox, Chris Ramsdale, Chris Schalk, Ernesto Delgado, Reto Meier y Alejandro Villanueva.

Link: DevFest 2010 (Google)

With its mind in the clouds and an eye on rival Microsoft, Google on Tuesday launched an online application store for third-party programs that can be integrated with its online Google Apps office suite, with a single log-in and Google’s universal navigation. The programs can sync with Gmail and Google’s calendar, and use document-sharing features.

With 25 million application users and services for two million businesses, Google clearly hopes to reduce Microsoft’s dominance in business-productivity software. Some 50 companies are offering applications in the initial Google Apps Marketplace inventory.

Early Arrivals

A random sampling on the marketplace Wednesday included EZAsset, a business asset-management tool; Manymoon for social productivity, project management, and task management; Fresh Books, a billing and bookkeeping utility; and eFax, an Internet fax service.

Google reportedly charges developers $100 for a listing, then takes 20 percent of sales.

The marketplace is intended for companies with their own domain, and Google Apps membership is required. A premier membership is $50, with an unlimited number of users per account. To lure customers away from the competition, the marketplace offers a tutorial on importing data from Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes.

Suite Deal

The Mountain View, Calif.-based Google previously had a solutions marketplace offering add-ons for programs. But Google Apps Marketplace will allow the company to generate revenue while also driving more interest in its online suite.

Google has increasingly battled for turf with Microsoft, recently introducing the Chrome operating system to challenge the dominant Windows. The software giant has taken the fight to Google’s front door with its Bing search engine, which it hopes will soon be the default search window on Apple’s iPhone.

Microsoft has announced cloud partnerships with Hewlett-Packard and Chunghwa Telecom and has other cloud projects in the works. The HP deal is a three-year, $250 million project to integrate Microsoft programs and HP hardware.

Cloud-computing services could be a $14 billion industry by 2013, according to research firm Gartner. But there is growing concern about the risks companies face.

Are Clouds Safe?

Chet Wisniewski, an analyst at the U.K.-based security firm Sophos, said the Google Apps Marketplace could be a good option for people who already trust a cloud with their information.

“Developers could offer enhanced encryption or security features requiring two-factor authentication to access sensitive documents,” Wisniewski said. “The bigger issue is, should you trust your data to be stored in the cloud in the first place? We saw how Twitter’s corporate Google Docs were hacked into last year through the use of a careless password.”

“As an organization, someone could be trying to access your data for years and you have no visibility into the inbound connections, firewalls, password guesses, etc., if it is off-premises,” he said.

In another entry in the growing online applications market, Intel has opened its AppUp Center, to be included on several netbook models, to build popularity for its Atom processor chip. The company’s goal is to eventually have the chip make its way to smartphones and other hardware, The Wall Street Journal reported.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) –
Google has not changed its decision to stop censoring its Chinese search site even if it means leaving that market, a senior executive told a U.S. Congressional panel on Wednesday.

Nicole Wong, the firm’s vice president and deputy general counsel, told the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee that Google would stop censorship and “(if) the option is that we will shutter our .cn property and leave the country, we are prepared to do that.”

(Reporting by Paul Eckert; Editing by Sandra Maler)

TORONTO (Reuters) –
Internet retailer Amazon.com has smashed up against Canadian pride in its efforts to open a distribution center in Canada, as booksellers grumble that it can’t understand the role of Canadian culture.

“Individual Canadian booksellers have traditionally played a key role in ensuring the promotion of Canadian authors and Canadian culture,” Stephen Page, president of the Canadian Booksellers’ Association, said in an angry statement that calls on the government to block the plan.

“These are values that no American dot.com retailer could ever purport to understand or promote.”

Seattle-based Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, already sells books, electronics, music and consumer goods through the Canadian website http://www.amazon.ca.

It was not available to comment on Wednesday, but it’s not clear how much would change under the distribution center plan. The retailer has said the center would allow it to pass along huge savings to its Canadian customers.

The booksellers want the government to reject the application because they say it contravenes an act that requires foreign investments in the book publishing and distribution sector to be “compatible with national cultural policies and be of net benefit to Canada and the Canadian-controlled sector.”

The government has promised to make a decision soon. But Conservative lawmaker Maxime Bernier, a keen proponent of deregulation and free trade, said on Wednesday that Canadians would end up voting with their cash.

“I think it’s good. There are people who want to have more services. The Canadians, in the end, they’re going to vote with their dollars, and if they want to buy something they will. People will decide in the end.”

Canada’s content rules call for radio and television broadcasters to air a certain percentage of content written or produced by Canadians, while booksellers must ensure that a percentage of their inventory is Canadian.

The Globe and Mail newspaper said the government, which has a strong free trade agenda, was leaning toward approving the shipping center because it would offer a “net benefit” for Canadians and the amount of Canadian content would not change.

Amazon, which forecasts sales of up to $7 billion in the first quarter, already competes with Canadian retailers, including Indigo Books and Music, Canada’s biggest bookseller.

(Additional reporting by Louise Egan in Ottawa)

($1=$1.03 Canadian)

(Reporting by Scott Anderson; editing by Janet Guttsman)

NEW YORK – Online advertising company Eyeblaster Inc. is planning an initial public offering, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Wednesday, though it did not disclose an expected size or price range.

Two years ago to the day, the New York company, which provides online campaign management software and services to advertisers, said in a regulatory filing that it planned to go public. Eyeblaster indicated at the time that the offering price could total up to $115 million, though it noted that amount was estimated solely to calculate its registration fee and could change.

The company’s profit has grown by about a third from $7.4 million in 2007 to $9.8 million in 2009, Eyeblaster said, while revenue jumped to $65.1 million from $44.7 million.

Proceeds from the IPO would be used for working capital, general corporate purposes and possible acquisitions or investments in new technologies, though none are currently planned, the company said.

Eyeblaster says its software allows its customers to manage campaigns across digital media channels, including online, mobile and in-game, and a variety of formats, including rich media, in-stream video, display and search. The company said it delivered campaigns for about 7,000 brand advertisers last year.

After bogging down in the recession, Internet advertising is regaining momentum even while advertising in print and broadcasts remain in a slump that has triggered mass layoffs, pay cuts and other upheaval.

JPMorgan Securities Inc. and Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. are serving as the lead underwriters for the deal.

Eyeblaster did not list a ticker symbol or say where it will list the stock. In its filing two years ago, the company said it planned to list its shares on the Nasdaq Global Market under the symbol “EYEB.”

Hace poco les comentamos sobre el Emotiv EPOC (US$299), una interfaz comercial cerebro-computadora de 14 electrodos, pero G-Tec se pone más serio con una matriz de electrodos y nos presenta su intendiX.

En realidad es la versión comercial de su solución llamada g.GAMMAcap, que fue diseñado para aumentar la velocidad de electroencefalografías en montajes experimentales. Las catarinas (g.LADYbird activas y pasivas) y electrodos de mariposa (g.BUTTERFLY) diseñado por g.tec se pueden insertar en posiciones individuales para un estudio completo, para ello el gorro tiene impresas etiquetas con el sistema EEG: 10-20 que ayuda a localizar la configuración de 74 electrodos en el cuero cabelludo.

El 10-20 se refiere al hecho de que la distancia real entre los electrodos adyacentes es uno con otro de 10% o 20% de la distancia total atrás-adelante o derecha-izquierda del cráneo.

Está diseñado para trabajar con personas con “Síndrome de Enclaustramiento” (Locked-in Syndrome) u otras tras discapacidades. Cuenta con una interfaz basada en una cuadrícula con símbolos y letras, que puede imprimirse en pantalla de acuerdo a la fijación cerebral de algún de sus elementos. Sólo se necesitan 10 minutos de entrenamiento para dominar el sistema y poder escribir e-mails con una velocidad de una letra por segundo, activar las alarmas, convertir texto a voz, imprimir, copiar o incluso moverte en Second Life.

Su precio es de USD$12.250 lo mantiene lejos de ser un juguete de pruebas,  pero cerca de una herramienta útil de investigación en tu meta por ganar el BCI X Prize.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Link: G-Tec Intendix brain-computer interface ready for consumers (Engadget)

Internet service providers linked to the notorious Zeus botnet have been taken down, knocking out a third of the command-and-control servers that run the network of hacked machines.

Two ISPs, named Troyak and Group 3, were home to 90 of the 249 known Zeus command-and-control servers. Zeus Tracker, a Web site that tracks the botnet, noticed the steep drop in servers on Wednesday morning.

The Troyak network was itself an upstream provider to six networks, known to host a large number of cybercrime servers, including Web sites used in drive-by attacks and phishing sites, according to Kevin Stevens, a researcher with SecureWorks. “There’s lots of Zeus and Fragus exploit kit [sites],” he said. Whoever was behind the takedown “just decided to knock out a large area of cybercirme, and this was probably one of the easiest ways to do it.”

Troyak is based in Kostanay, Kazakhstan, according to whois records. The company could not be reached immediately for comment.

The Zeus Tracker administrator, who asked not to be named, said that at first he thought that there had been some type of technical error in the Zeus code. On further investigation, he discovered that Troyak had been taken offline, which in turn knocked the networks hosting the botnet servers off the Internet.

This kind of ISP takedown has worked in the past. Just over a year ago, McColo, in San Jose, California, was taken offline by its upstream service providers, resulting in a temporary, but dramatic, drop in spam as its botnet command-and-control servers on its network were disabled.

As with the McColo takedown, Troyak’s upstream providers seem to have knocked it off the Internet, Cisco said in a statement. “The ISP was ‘De-peered,’” Cisco said. “Troyak’s upstream network providers effectively pulled the plug on Troyak’s router, refusing to transmit its traffic.”

Zeus is actually a botnet-making kit that allows cybercriminals to create their own networks of infected computers, but it has been associated with a wave of financial fraud that has caused hundreds of millions in losses to U.S. financial institutions over the past year. Organized crime groups in Eastern Europe are thought to be behind this fraud.

Wednesday’s takedown appears to have targeted one of the Zeus gangs, but it is remarkable in that whomever is responsible for the effort is asking not to be identified.

A security researcher who uses the pseudonym Jart Armin attributed Troyak and Group 3’s disconnection to “good community action” and said that there was “more being done right now involving many, to ensure the [Zeus gang] have nowhere to go.”

“Not every action is a corporate PR exercise,” he said. “And we cannot get these guys by knocking off a bunch of domains via a court in Virginia,” a reference to Microsoft’s recent court-ordered takedown of the Waledac botnet.