Drawings and computer-generated images of child sex abuse would be made illegal under proposals announced by Justice Minister Maria Eagle.
Owners of such images would face up to three years in prison under the plans.
Under the Obscene Publications Act it is illegal to possess photos of child abuse but it is legal to own drawings and computer-generated images.
Ms Eagle said the proposed move would “help close a loophole that we believe paedophiles are using”.
The plans are part of the government’s response to a public consultation exercise carried out last year.
The government has acknowledged that paedophiles may be circumventing the law by using computer technology to manipulate real photographs or videos of abuse into drawings or cartoons known as “anime”.
A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said the authorities had “noticed an increase in the existing availability of these images on the internet”.
She said: “If we do not address the issues these images raise now it is likely their availability will continue to grow.
“They are often advertised as a legitimate depiction of child sexual abuse.”
‘Unacceptable’ images
The spokeswoman said police and child welfare groups had expressed concern at the “growing increase in availability of these depictions of child sexual abuse”.
Ms Eagle said the plans were “not about criminalising art or pornographic cartoons more generally, but about targeting obscene, and often very realistic, images of child sexual abuse which have no place in our society”.
Shaun Kelly, safeguarding manager for children’s charity NCH, said the proposals were a step in the right direction.
He said: “This is a welcome announcement which makes a clear statement that drawings or computer-generated images of child abuse are as unacceptable as a photograph.
“It adds to the range of measures to help ensure the safeguarding of children and young people.”
The new design platform, based on Via's power-efficient, cool-running C7-M microprocessor, offers designers an “open approach to case-design customization and wireless connectivity flexibility,” said Vice President Richard Brown.
Fostering Innovation
OpenBook lives up to its “open” moniker by offering all the computer-assisted design (CAD) files required for turning out a finished mini-notebook product. “Making the actual raw CAD files available under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license is a brilliant first step that clearly and legally allows others to build upon Via's open innovation,” said Jon Phillips, business and community manager for Creative Commons.
Designers will be able to modify Via's CAD designs to alter their final product's overall look and feel. Even better, having access to a pre-engineered clamshell form factor should help smaller startups — and even ambitious entrepreneurs — dramatically reduce the cost of creating a stylish design.
OpenBook is based around Via's C7-M ULV processor, which features a maximum power draw of just 3.5 watts and is available in speeds of 1.0 to 1.6GHz. It also integrates three USB 2.0 ports, a VGA port, a four-in-one memory-card reader and a two megapixel dual-headed Web camera.
Via's platform supports a range of operating systems, including Windows Vista Basic, Windows XP and various Linux distributions. Moreover, the package is designed to be powered by a four-cell lithium-ion battery reportedly capable of delivering three hours of operation from a single charge.
Design Flexibility
Tipping the scales at 1kg, the final product will sport a 8.9-inch display with screen resolutions of up to 1024 x 600 pixels as well as support for high-performance 3D graphics through the company's VX800 chipset. Advanced acceleration is also on tap for a wide range of video formats, including MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV9, HDTV, VC1 and DiVX.
When it comes to wireless, OpenBook offers designers a high degree of flexibility. For example, the platform includes two internal modules that will allow mini-notebook makers to select from a variety of broadband options. The first module features Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and AGPS capabilities, while the second allows designers to select from fully supported WiMAX, HSDPA, EVDO and WCDMA options.
Via's previous NanoBook reference design, which was rolled out last year, served as the design impetus behind several mini-notebook products, including the EasyNote XS from Packard Bell. With OpenBook, the Taiwan-based company's principal goal remains essentially the same as it was last year — to give aspiring mini-notebook makers sufficient reason to employ the company's processors and chipsets at a time when Intel and Advanced Micro Devices all but control the market.
The bad news for Via is that it will have to contend with Intel's newly announced Atom processors, chipsets and design support, which are all squarely targeted at the same ultra-portable PC market niche.
Developers using Google App Engine, which lets outsiders build Web applications on the same infrastructure that runs Google's own applications, will have a free quota of 500 Megabytes of storage and enough computing power and bandwidth for about 5 million pageviews per month.
But for further usage Google said it would charge developers depending on how much storage and bandwidth they require beyond the free quota and that the pricing plans would be effective later this year after a preview period.
(Reporting by Sinead Carew; Editing by Gary Hill)
Adobe Systems released beta versions of three key applications from its upcoming Creative Suite 4 package of graphic, Web and multimedia software on Tuesday. Preview versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Southbound are available for download.
Adobe did not say when beta versions of Photoshop and Illustrator may be available. David Burkett, vice president of product management for Creative Suite, suggested Photoshop and Illustrator will not be released as beta previews like the other three applications. “Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth are the major applications we're unveiling as public betas before the next release of Creative Suite,” he said.
Current customers of CS3 can use the beta software until the final CS4 package ships. New users will only have 48 hours to try out the new programs. The final version of CS4 is expected in the last quarter of 2008 or the first quarter of 2009.
'Radical' Changes
CS4 has “radical work-flow enhancements,” Burkett said, “as we redefine how designers and developers collaborate to deliver standout digital experiences.”
The new version of Dreamweaver emphasizes integrating design and development functions, reflecting the reality that modern Web pages are dynamically built from database-stored content and features from remote servers. “Dreamweaver no longer acts like an old-style HTML editor with modern features tacked on,” a PC World reviewer said.
For instance, the new Dreamweaver features a “related files” toolbar and a code navigator that lets authors access linked CSS files, JavaScript documents and integrated XML data. A new properties panel allows users to toggle between controlling HTML tags and controlling CSS tags. “For me, this makes Dreamweaver finally usable as a day-to-day Web-site editor, because CSS is at the heart of every web page I edit,” Edward Mendelson wrote for PC World.
Soundbooth Turns Up the Volume
Another key Dreamweaver feature is called Live View Mode, which is based on the open-source rendering engine Webkit, which is the basis of Apple's Safari browser. “It enables users to see content in real-world, real-time environments without having to leave Dreamweaver to preview in a browser,” Adobe said.
The new version of Soundbooth also makes major strides forward, said a review in Macworld magazine. The beta “demonstrates that Adobe has its ears open to the needs of those who demand more from an audio editor,” Christopher Breen wrote in Macworld. The new version offers multitrack editing for the first time, as well as a slew of features, including nondestructive editing, the ability to create restore points for later editing, automatic volume matching, MP3 compression preview, and a speech-to-text feature.
“We're excited to begin formally developing within the new Creative Suite environment,” said Matias Penela, director of technology for AgencyNet. “Our day-to-day development can be more effective and we'll be further empowered to push the boundaries of creative design and technical innovation for our clients.”
I've given a lot of attention to the forthcoming Firefox 3.0 lately, but let's not forget that Microsoft has a new version of its own browser in the works, too. According to Nick MacKechnie, a senior technical account manager at Microsoft New Zealand, we can expect the next beta of Internet Explorer 8 to arrive in the third quarter of this year. And unlike the current test version, which is marked as a “developer preview,” this version will be a public beta targeted at all consumers.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about IE8 is that it will ship with maximum standards compatibility enabled by default. Developers have been clamoring for a truly browser-independent Web for a long time. But if you're among the crowd that relies on business applications specially tailored for IE7, this sudden change of focus may not be all it's cracked up to be, since strict standards compliance could break some of your existing pages. Fortunately, MacKechnie says, Microsoft has provided an easy work-around.
An article in Microsoft's Knowledge Base explains it all. For sites where every page must be rendered exactly how IE7 would do it, you can have your Web server send a special header that will instruct IE8 to fall back to the older rules. If you have just one or two pages that need special treatment, you can add a META tag to their HTML to achieve the same thing.
It's a good idea to start updating your IE7-compliant sites now, before the public beta of IE8 is released, so that you can avoid problems when the new browser starts to go mainstream. Even better than adding new IE-specific tags or headers, though, would be to try to re-code those pages so that they observe proper Web standards. That's going to be the best way to ensure that your pages are viewable across all browsers on the widest variety of platforms, which can save you time and money in the long run.
How much do your company's Web applications rely on custom features found in Internet Explorer? Have you made standards compliance a priority, or are the advantages of coding to the Windows platform simply too great to ignore? Sound off in the PC World Community Forums.
San Francisco - Ruby on Rails 2.1, a planned upgrade to the popular open-source Web framework, could be released as soon as this weekend, the creator of the framework, David Heinemeier Hansson, said on Tuesday.
Highlights of the release including caching improvements, capabilities to establish time zones in applications, and extending the platform via Gems dependencies. The goal is to release the upgrade by the end of the RailsConf conference, which is being held in Portland, Ore. Thursday through Sunday. “We're just aiming for it,” Hansson said.
Also at the conference, Hansson plans to speak about the Rails “surplus” in productivity and even tell developers to not work so hard.
With version 2.1 of Rails, which is currently in a release candidate state, caching support is to be beefed up, including closer integration with the Memcache platform.
“Caching is just important in general because it means that things you can cache you don't have to compute,” Hansson said.
Another improvement pertains to the Gems dependencies enabled in the Ruby language that forms the basis of Ruby on Rails. With RubyGems, developers can bundle improvements to the language in a piece of software called a Gem. But sometimes applications are installed on a new machine that lacks the right version of the library to handle the Gem capabilities. Version 2.1 fixes this.
“We've now codified this by making it possible to say, 'My application depends on these Gems,' ” Hansson said. For example, a developer could stipulate that an application depends on a Gem featuring capabilities for the OpenID identity system, he said.
Setting of time zones in applications is another improvement area in Rails 2.1. Accommodations are to be made to deal with this problem, which has been accentuated by Web applications being used by people all over the world in multiple time zones, Hansson said.
Rails 2.1 also will feature many small tweaks. Hansson attributes the polishing of Rails in this way to its open-source development process, which enables many developers to examine and have input into the platform.
Hansson during his own keynote presentation at the conference plans to talk about the “surplus” of productivity that he says is offered by Rails as opposed to mainstream environments. “The surplus is not going to last forever,” with other tools either catching up to Rails or Rails and similar environments becoming the mainstream choices, he said. Rails offers productivity benefits saving developers from having to work 14 hours a day, he said.
In what is sure to be an eyebrow-raising part of his presentation, Hansson plans to advise programmers to not only spend more time reading technical books but to get more sleep and not overwork themselves.
“Programmers have an unnatural and unhealthy obsession with the hero syndrome,” he said.
By giving it 110 percent all the time, developers lack the capacity to deal with a situation that might need a little extra care, said Hansson.
Commenting on Rails advantages, Hansson said Rails offers benefits over languages like Java or C# because Rails emphasizes convention over configuration. With this concept, default settings enable developers to tweak only a few settings particular to their application rather than having to configure massive XML files, for instance, he said.
Hansson acknowledged Rails has been criticized for lack of scalability but insisted this is a criticism that has been levied against all new platforms. When C and Java came around, people said they were too slow in relation to previous platforms, such as assembly language, he said. “Now it's Ruby on Rails's turn,” Hansson said.
“We've been using Ruby on Rails for five years. Tons of organizations are scaling it massively to billions of page views,” said Hansson. While some Rails sites may have scalability problems, that is not necessarily the fault of Rails, he said.
“Scaling is a matter of architecture,” not frameworks and programming languages, Hansson said.
The most recent major upgrade to Ruby on Rails was version 2.0, which was released in December and featured REST (Representational State Transfer) Web services and security enhancements.
Samsung Electronics told customers attending this month's Samsung Mobile Solutions Forum in Taipei that it has developed the world's fastest, 2.5-inch, 256GB solid-state drive (SSD) for use in laptops and other consumer electronics gear.
Based on multi-level cell (MLC) technology with the ability to store more than a single bit of information per cell, the new SSD will effectively eliminate density as a barrier to SSD adoption in laptops and other consumer products, Samsung executives say.
“With development of the 256GB SSD, the notebook PC is on the brink of a second stage of evolution,” said Samsung Semiconductor Vice President Jim Elliott. “This change is comparable to the evolution from the Sony Walkman to NAND memory-based MP3 players, representing an initial step in the shift to thinner, smaller SSD-based notebooks with significantly improved performance and more than ample storage.”
A Steep Growth Curve
Samsung has not released pricing information for its forthcoming 256GB drive as well as a smaller 1.8-inch SSD due out in the fourth quarter of this year. But Samsung Semiconductor Senior Marketing Manager Steve Weinger thinks the historic price declines for flash memory provide a good indicator.
“Price declines have been occurring at a 40 to 45 percent year-over-year clip for the last 10-plus years pretty steadily,” Weinger noted. “And now we have the first drives based on the technology leading that decline.”
One benefit of MLC is lower cost, Weinger observed. “Today at the gigabyte level, the cost of an MLC chip is less than two times that of an SLC (single-level cell) of comparable density,” he said. “Having MLC at a higher-density price point is opening up that consumer market for us.”
Samsung's forthcoming 128GB SSD will hit the density level that Weinger thinks best fits the full spectrum of business uses for the technology. “The 256GB SSD is a better mark for the consumer space, where you are dealing with much more multimedia, which you don't have in the enterprise space,” he said.
According to the latest projections from iSuppli, the SSD market is expected to grow at an annualized average of 124 percent between 2008 and 2012. Analyst Nam Kim said iSuppli's assumption is that the price per gigabyte will decline from $7.28 in 2007 to just 30 cents by 2012. Moreover, SSD unit pricing is expected to fall from a representative $244.68 in 2007 to less than $100 in 2012, he added.
Compact and Fast
Samsung executives say their latest SSD is capable of achieving sequential read and write speeds of 200MB/s and 160MB/s, respectively. This makes the new SSD about 2.4 times faster than a conventional hard-disk drive, they said.
Measuring about 100 by 70mm, the drive integrates a sophisticated data-encryption process that enterprises can use to prevent data stored on the SSD from unauthorized access — even after the SSD has been removed. Major advancements in proprietary controller technology also will allow Samsung's 256GB SSD to achieve a mean time between failures of one million hours, the company said.
The compact device, which is only 9.5mm thick, will be offered with a 3Gbit/s Serial Advanced Technology Attachment interface. And power consumption will be exceptionally low at just 0.9 watts.
Samsung said it expects to begin mass-producing the new drive by year's end, with customer samples available in September.
WASHINGTON - The set-top box, a necessary appendage for millions of cable televisions for decades, is moving toward extinction.
A leading television manufacturer, Sony Electronics Inc., and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association said Tuesday they signed an agreement that will allow viewers to rid themselves of set-top boxes, yet still receive advanced “two-way” cable services, such as pay-per-view movies.
In most cases, cable viewers also could dispose of another remote control since they could use their TV’s control rather than one tied to the set-top box.
The agreement marks a significant meeting of the minds between cable companies and one of the world’s dominant makers of consumer electronics. The two industries have been feuding for a decade about how best to deliver cable service to customers while allowing them to buy equipment of their own choosing.
Sony agreed to use the cable industry’s technology in its sets as soon as possible but could not say when the first such televisions might be appear in stores.
The agreement is between Sony and the nation’s six largest cable companies: Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cox Communications Inc., Charter Communications Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp. and Bright House Networks. The six companies serve more than 82 percent of cable subscribers.
Cable subscribers are generally locked into renting a set-top box from their provider if they want more than the most basic cable TV service.
More than a decade ago, Congress ordered the cable industry to allow outside electronics makers to compete for the boxes. The industry developed the cable cards, which are inserted into televisions and add-on devices equipped to handle them.
The cards have been the source of frequent customer complaints and never proved popular. In addition, sets can only receive signals from their cable company, not vice versa. Subscribers were unable to enjoy “two-way” features such as video on demand, on-screen channel guides and cable company-provided digital video recorders.
Customers will still be able to attach their own devices — like TiVo digital video recorders, according to the NCTA.
Under the new system, customers will still need to get a cable card from their provider, but the agreement means, hopefully, technical glitches will be eliminated, “two-way” services will be available and there will be no need for the clunky boxes.
The cable association said it was hopeful other electronics manufacturers will also agree to use the same technology.
The industry hopes to head off action by the Federal Communications Commission to impose a two-way standard on the industry. The FCC declined to comment on the agreement Tuesday.
Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit against YouTube could mean the end of social networking as we know it, Google has told a U.S. court.
Google, which owns YouTube, said making carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications “threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression.”
Viacom, the entertainment titan that owns Paramount Pictures, Dreamworks, and other entertainment properties, is suing YouTube for the posting of some 160,000 unauthorized video clips.
A Digital-Age Boxing Match
In a statement in conjunction with filing its $1 billion federal copyright lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Viacom called YouTube a “significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others' creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google.”
Viacom has taken the gloves off in a digital-age boxing match between two technology champions. While YouTube has made deals with other broadcasters, Viacom is not backing down.
Google's response to Viacom's copyright-infringement lawsuit is stirring a debate about Internet freedom. If Google successfully defends itself against Viacom's claims that YouTube does not qualify for safe-harbor protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), it could have a dramatic impact on the way information is consumed online.
“The whole lawsuit is cutting edge in the sense that the DMCA, which is what Google and YouTube are relying upon as a defense, provides safe harbor for ISPs and Web-site operators like YouTube. The problem comes when the ISP or the Web operator makes money on infringing content,” said Melvin Avanzado, a partner at the law firm of Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro.
A Stalemate
Google maintains that it respects intellectual-property rights and goes “above and beyond” the law's mandates. Viacom says YouTube knows about infringing material on its site and is profiting from it. The two behemoths essentially have reached a stalemate that could lead to a long court battle.
“The underlying problem here is how do you link their advertising revenues to whatever infringement Viacom is claiming?” Avanzado asked. “It's an issue that's not been decided. The DMCA is not particularly precise about that point. So there's a lot at stake.”
As Avanzado sees it, Viacom has a legitimate claim that Web sites like YouTube profit from infringing works that have led to their popularity and accessibility to advertisers. Such sites might not necessarily be driven to stop infringing content, he said. By the same token, Google has a story to tell with the risk to social media.
“Is Viacom's claim, if successful, going to shut down the Internet? I seriously doubt that. But is it going to make it more difficult for user-uploaded content to be permissible if Viacom is successful in its claim?” Avanzado asked. “That's a valid concern.”
Microsoft expects its Windows Mobile software to grow by at least 50 percent worldwide in this and the next fiscal years. According to a report by Reuters news service, Eddie Wu, Microsoft's managing director of OEM embedded devices in Asia, projected the software giant will sell 20 million units with Windows Mobile in the fiscal year ending in June. In the last fiscal year, it sold more than 11 million units.
'Not Out of the Question'
He added that growth of Windows Mobile devices is greatest in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Brazil, Russia and India. Windows Mobile is featured on a wide array of devices from Samsung, Motorola, High Tech Computer, Asus and others. Its main competitors include Symbian-based operating systems, such as those on devices by LG Electronics, as well as mobile operating systems on Apple, Research in Motion (RIM), and Palm products.
In a recent quarterly report, Microsoft said its Windows Mobile sales are due to increased market demand for “phone-enabled devices and Windows-embedded operating systems.”
Avi Greengart, an analyst with industry research firm Current Analysis, called the sales projection “bold, but not out of the question.”
He noted that Windows Mobile is being used by an increasing numbers of licensees, and in an increasing number of form factors. It's also being featured in new product lines, such as the Xperia line from Sony Ericsson.
In “classic productivity” devices, Greengart said, Windows Mobile is very strong, adding that we're also seeing Windows Mobile devices in high-end multimedia smartphones.
'Explosion' of Entry-Level Smartphones
He pointed out that a key driver in the growth of Windows Mobile is the “explosion” in entry-level smartphones, especially in the U.S., but abroad as well. Customers are finding that, for a somewhat higher price than what they were expecting to pay, they can get a smartphone to track e-mail and do other tasks.
Worldwide, smartphone sales totaled nearly 12 million units last year, representing a growth of more than 50 percent over the previous year.
As it competes with the trend-setting iPhone from Apple, Microsoft said it will be offering full Web-browsing capabilities later this year. Earlier this year, the company showed a new version of its Internet Explorer Mobile browser. It said the new IE Mobile supports Flash and allows users to see full-screen Web pages and multimedia comparable to a desktop experience. Apple has not yet found a version of Adobe's Flash that it likes enough to include in the iPhone.
Windows Mobile's competition with RIM's BlackBerry has led to an emphasis on productivity tools, such as mobile versions of its desktop-dominating Office suite. And Microsoft has been increasing the operating system's flexibility and ease of use — for example, allowing music to be played from a device's home screen or making it easier to set up for Bluetooth connectivity.