Swiss scientists demonstrate mind-controlled robot

LAUSANNE: Swiss scientists have demonstrated how a partially paralysed person can control a robot by thought alone, a step they hope will one day allow immobile people to interact with their surroundings through so-called avatars.

Similar experiments have taken place in the United States and Germany, but they involved either able-bodied patients or invasive brain implants.

On Tuesday, a team at Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne used only a simple head cap to record the brain signals of Mark-Andre Duc, who was at a hospital in the southern Swiss town of Sion 100 kilometers away.

Duc’s thoughts or rather, the electrical signals emitted by his brain when he imagined lifting his paralysed fingers were decoded almost instantly by a laptop at the hospital. The resulting instructions left or right were then transmitted to a foot tall robot scooting around the Lausanne lab.

Duc lost control of his legs and fingers in a fall and is now considered partially quadriplegic. He said controlling the robot wasn’t hard on a good day.

”But when I’m in pain it becomes more difficult,” he told The Associated Press through a video link screen on a second laptop attached to the robot.

Background noise caused by pain or even a wandering mind has emerged as a major challenge in the research of so-called brain-computer interfaces since they first began to be tested on humans more than a decade ago, said Jose Millan, who led the Swiss team.

While the human brain is perfectly capable of performing several tasks at once, a paralysed person would have to focus the entire time they are directing the device.

”Sooner or later your attention will drop and this will degrade the signal,” Millan said.

To get around this problem, his team decided to program the computer that decodes the signal so that it works in a similar way to the brain’s subconscious.

Once a command such as ‘walk forward’ has been sent, the computer will execute it until it receives a command to stop or the robot encounters an obstacle.

The robot itself is an advance on a previous project that let patients control an electric wheelchair. By using a robot complete with a camera and screen, users can extend their virtual presence to places that are arduous to reach with a wheelchair, such as an art gallery or a wedding abroad.

Rajesh Rao, an associate professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, who has tested similar systems with able-bodied subjects, said the Lausanne team’s research appeared to mark an advance in the field.

”Especially if the system can be used by the paraplegic person outside the laboratory,” he said in an email.

Millan said that although the device has already been tested at patients’ homes, it isn’t as easy to use as some commercially available gadgets that employ brain signals to control simple toys, such Mattel’s popular MindFlex headset.

”But this will come in a matter of years,” Millan said.

Facebook lets users take more data home

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook on Thursday began letting members of the world's leading online community take more of their pictures, posts, messages and other data home with them.

Facebook expanded the types of information its approximately 845 million members could download from their personal account histories to include data such as friend requests and IP addresses of computers used to log-in.

"This feature will be rolling out gradually to all users and more categories of information will be available for download in the future," Facebook said in a message at its Public Policy Europe page.

The move comes as the California-based Internet star works to reassure regulators, members and advocacy groups concerned about how much privacy and control of personal information people have at Facebook.

The "Download Your Information" tool was launched in 2010 to allow Facebook members to keep copies of what they share with friends at the social network.

Facebook is expected to make a much-anticipated debut next month on the technology-heavy NASDAQ exchange. Facebook in February filed to go public and could raise as much as $10 billion in the largest flotation ever by an Internet company on Wall Street.

Facebook, which is shifting operations to a former Sun Microsystems campus in the California city of Menlo Park, had a reported net income of $668 million last year.

Revenue nearly doubled to $3.7 billion in 2011, with most of it coming from targeted advertising gleaned from personal information shared by the platform's hundreds of millions of users.

Facebook's value has been estimated at between $75 billion and $100 billion. (AFP)

New Call of Duty reveal coming May 1

Activision is gearing up for a new Call of Duty game announcement. The publisher's official Call of Duty site has changed overnight to reveal a new splash page detailing a forthcoming announcement on May 1.

On the page, the headline "World Reveal" is displayed beneath the Call of Duty logo, and is accompanied by a countdown timer. The tagline reveals the announcement will be made on May 1 during the NBA playoffs on TNT.

Zooming out of the splash page, the site reveals 14 smaller windows, currently all blacked out with the word "Classified" over the top. However, clicking on each window reveals that different windows will be "unlocked" at different times over the coming week leading up to the May 1 announcement.

Last week, a marketing poster from a retail source surfaced, hinting at an upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 reveal. The game has already been spotted on French and Spanish retailer websites, and an employee at a contract art studio listed work for Black Ops 2 on his resume.

Call of Duty: Black Ops remains the most successful Call of Duty game to date. It has sold more than 25 million copies through August 2011 and became the best-selling game of all time in the US by the March following its debut.

Last year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 initially sold at a faster pace than its predecessor, but failed to make the NPD Group's Top 10 list in March, its fifth month of release.

Charge your phone up anytime,anywhere

This clever Solar Device features an internal battery
that stores charge and when needed charges up the
end device. Each kit comes boxed with 7 charger
attachments (which fit all main brand mobile phones)
wire connectors, mains and USB charger. We can also
supply free of charge a charger attachment if there's
not one with your order that will fit your phone/device.
The solar device also charges digital cameras, iPods,
MP3 & MP4 players. 

BeoSound 5 Encore

The Danish company Bang & Olufsen has always been known for creating beautiful looking products. And the new BeoSound 5 Encore is no exception. That the company was founded in 1925 doesn’t mean they’re old fashion. The BeoSound 5 has a beautiful 10.4 inch display and loads of ways to connect your music to the device, whether it’s via an external harddrive, usb stick, bluetooth or streaming over the internet. The BeoSound wil play your tunes and make them look pretty. $3500,- is a steep price but.. look how pretty is it! More details information in the video:

Flexible screen phone concept

Not too long ago we reported on flexible transparent touch screens developed by 3M. But 3M is not the only company active in this game. Samsung is also working on prototypes of flexible AMOLED displays that areapparently already in a far phase of development.

Now, development of a new technology is one thing. It gets really interesting when people start thinking of how they can apply this new technology in actually products. 3M showed us a video of potential uses and now Heyon You also came up with a rather cool concept: a flexible phone. 

Just like with the 3M concepts; don’t feel too bummed out that it’s just a concept. The technology is now there, so it’s only up to the imagination of the manufacturers to really start putting products like these in production!

Hundreds of thousands may lose Internet

Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world. In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be shut down.

The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, http://www.dcwg.org , that will inform them whether they're infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won't be able to connect to the Internet.

Most victims don't even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.

Last November, the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers.

"We started to realize that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because ... if we just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service," said Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent. "The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get 'page not found' and think the Internet is broken."

On the night of the arrests, the agency brought in Paul Vixie, chairman and founder of Internet Systems Consortium, to install two Internet servers to take the place of the truckload of impounded rogue servers that infected computers were using. Federal officials planned to keep their servers online until March, giving everyone opportunity to clean their computers. But it wasn't enough time. A federal judge in New York extended the deadline until July.

Now, said Grasso, "the full court press is on to get people to address this problem." And it's up to computer users to check their PCs.

This is what happened:

Hackers infected a network of probably more than 570,000 computers worldwide. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software on the victim computers. This turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet's domain name system.

The DNS system is a network of servers that translates a web address - such as www.ap.org - into the numerical addresses that computers use. Victim computers were reprogrammed to use rogue DNS servers owned by the attackers. This allowed the attackers to redirect computers to fraudulent versions of any website.

The hackers earned profits from advertisements that appeared on websites that victims were tricked into visiting. The scam netted the hackers at least $14 million, according to the FBI. It also made thousands of computers reliant on the rogue servers for their Internet browsing.

When the FBI and others arrested six Estonians last November, the agency replaced the rogue servers with Vixie's clean ones. Installing and running the two substitute servers for eight months is costing the federal government about $87,000.

The number of victims is hard to pinpoint, but the FBI believes that on the day of the arrests, at least 568,000 unique Internet addresses were using the rogue servers. Five months later, FBI estimates that the number is down to at least 360,000. The U.S. has the most, about 85,000, federal authorities said. Other countries with more than 20,000 each include Italy, India, England and Germany. Smaller numbers are online in Spain, France, Canada, China and Mexico.

Vixie said most of the victims are probably individual home users, rather than corporations that have technology staffs who routinely check the computers.

FBI officials said they organized an unusual system to avoid any appearance of government intrusion into the Internet or private computers. And while this is the first time the FBI used it, it won't be the last.

"This is the future of what we will be doing," said Eric Strom, a unit chief in the FBI's Cyber Division. "Until there is a change in legal system, both inside and outside the United States, to get up to speed with the cyber problem, we will have to go down these paths, trail-blazing if you will, on these types of investigations."

Now, he said, every time the agency gets near the end of a cyber case, "we get to the point where we say, how are we going to do this, how are we going to clean the system" without creating a bigger mess than before. (AP)