Head of Sony’s console division, Kaz Hirai claims Playstation 3 will help Sony reclaim its position as the leading games console maker.

Mr Hirai said the machine will overhaul rivals Nintendo and Microsoft within its 10-year lifecycle.

PS3 sales have been excellent in Europe, outstripping those of Microsoft Xbox 360 but the company is struggling in North America. The Nintendo’s Wii Console rank’s as the number one console globally. Sony is engaged in a “marathon” race with Nintendo and Microsoft, said Hirai.

By the end of 2007 more than 10.5 million Playstation 3 consoles were sold worldwide. In Europe alone the figure reaches more than five million. Nintendo has shipped out more than 25 million Wii’s worldwide by April this year, while Microsoft reported 19 million 360s shipped by the same period. Both firms have however suffered from production supply problems in the past year.

Mr Hirai said: “We’ve only really begun to scratch the surface with PlayStation 3 but I am confident that given the long life-cycle we have planned for the machine we are going to have a very good install base in all of the major territories.

“I am very confident that after the 10-year lifecycle we will have the install base that we are looking for and that is obviously to be in the leadership position.”

As ever, with Sony, they remain tight lipped on any new developments.

“It’s very difficult to say at this point in time.

“We need to take a look at advances in technology in various areas, such as semiconductors, graphics chips, output devices, mainly TV and monitors, to see where we would like to benchmark our next generation product.”

Mr Hirai added that Sony’s investment in future console hardware technology remained important.

“And you can make the investments, for example, to the tune of the investments we made with previous consoles, because we look at this business as a 10-year lifecycle. We don’t let our consoles go by the wayside after five years.”

Mr Hirai said the company has begun an investigation in to pure network gaming, without the need for a dedicated console.

“It’s something we would look at. We have had a lot of discussion internally about where the road map will take us.

“[With network gaming] we’re also dependent on the network infrastructure available in all the territories we do business in.

“Some have faster broadband access than others. When you consider that content that plays on PlayStation 3 can go as high as 50GB it’s going to be very difficult to deliver 50GB to consumers in some parts of the world in a timely fashion.”

Because of the limitations, he said Blu-ray discs remained the “best and most efficient way to deliver content”.

He said sales of the PS3 would continue to be driven by the line-up of titles this year.

“If you look at line-up coming out this year - Metal Gear Solid 4, Resistance 2, Motorstorm: Pacific Rift , Little Big Planet, there is a whole raft of titles between now and the end of the year which will really help fuel growth of the install base.”

The software line-up is looking good for this year and certainly for the holiday period.”

He said the technology inside the PlayStation 3 had been a steep learning curve for developers.

“I think they are beginning to embrace the technology and are able to express their creativity on the platform certainly more than they were able to at launch.”

TorrentSpy, the illegal file sharing site has been ordered to pay $110m in damages to the Motion Picture Association of America for copyright infringement.

The ruling from a US court comes just a few weeks after the site was shut down. The MPAA first began legal action against the torrent site in February 2006.

 The four-page ruling form Judge Florence-Marie Cooper said that TorrentSpy had to pay $30,000 for “each of the 3,699 infringements shown.” The judgment is one of the largest fines ever for piracy.

 Dan Glickman, chairman of the MPAA said, “This substantial money judgment sends a strong message about the illegality of these sites…the demise of TorrentSpy is a clear victory for the studios.”

 TorrentSpy utilized a legitimate file sharing technology called Bit Torrent to allow users to exchange large files over the internet without the need for a central server. We can’t help but wonder how long it will be before the rest of the file sharing site’s on the web get shut down.

The page on their web site reads;

TorrentSpy’s parent company Valence Media was owned by Justin Bunnell and Wes Park. Both of whom have filed for bankruptcy.

Internet adware pushers have found a new way of tricking you in to downloading their irritating products.

McAfee, the internet security group have reported that its seen a huge spike in MP3 files spreading in peer-to-peer networks. Although the files have names that make then look like audio files, they actually contain Trojan horse programs that attempt to install adware on your computer.

Craig Schmugar, a researcher with McAfee said, “Once you run it, there is no content. You’re taken to this site to install this player which you don’t really need.”The fake file names include: preview-t-3535425-changing times earth wind.mp3 and t-3545425-just got lucky.mp3.

Users are first asked to OK and end-user license agreement before the Trojan installs two programs, Mirar and NetNucleus, on their PC’s. The mirar software trick’s user’s by having a window that say’s the program does not have any pop-up’s and there is actually a pop-up right behind it.

Schmugar has said that McAfee have seen this kind of software in the past but nothing on quite this scale. Over the past 24 hours, nearly a third of McAfee customers who reported data back to the company have detected these files.

McAfee has spotted the files on more than 360,000 users’ desktops in the past few days.

Yahoo and McAfee have joined forces to warn users of potentially dangerous Web sites along side results generated at Yahoo.com

The new feature will start on Tuesday and couldn’t be easier to understand. After a completed search query users will see a red exclamation point and a warning next to the link that McAfee have found to contain dangerous downloads or using visitors e-mail addresses to send out spam. Yahoo and McAfee hope the move will stop users worrying about clicking a malicious link.

Director of product management for Yahoo’s search division Priyank Garg said, “Yahoo users have clearly told us that among the most important concerns for them are all these lurking threats on the Internet… They know the damage they can do but they don’t know how to protect themselves.”

If McAfee identifies a site as one that tries to automatically install malicious code on visitor’s computers or attempt “drive-by downloads”, Yahoo users won’t see the link at all.

“When a user gets a set of search results, there’s really no indication of who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy,” said Tim Dowling, vice president of McAfee’s Web Security Group. “You’re really leaping off a platform of faith that you’re clicking on a site that’s safe and not one that’s bad. And the bad guys really try hard to look good.”

The technology being used on Yahoo’s site is a stripped-down version of McAfee’s full SiteAdvisor technology which is free directly from McAfee. It uses red, yellow and green icons to label safe and harmful sites. A premium version adds other features.

Yahoo’s Garg said the company was doing experiments to identify malicious sites and bar them from search results.

But he said “security is not Yahoo’s forte” and McAfee’s technology gives Yahoo the breadth and depth “many orders of magnitude greater than what we had before.”

Yahoo is the worlds second most popular search engine among U.S. users with a 21 percent share of the market with Google holding 60 percent.

They brought us one of the best map services on the internet – for free – and now they are looking to make that journey from A to B even simpler with the introduction of street photographs to show you exactly where you need to go to. So how will it work?

Using the current Google Map system it is very easy to request a route planner, just enter your starting point and your finishing point and Google will do the rest. The text and map based directions are very useful and millions of people are using them on a regular basis, but would you actually like to see the area that you are passing by? The turn offs that you need to take?

Google are currently building up a major database of street photographs in the UK, and while it will take some time to complete, the end product should be amazing. Not only will you be able to receive detailed text and map directions to the destination of your choice but you will also be able to see a photograph of each street as you check out the route.

While Google are not the first company to offer this service, they will be the first to offer the service free of charge. This new service has the potential to have a major impact on others in the industry who do not have the firepower of Google to make the service available free of charge. However, it does open up the chance of future partnership deals for Google – something which will see them cement their growing position in yet another market place!

Is no market safe from the gaze of Google? What next for the might search engine giant?

Nobody quite knows what to expect next with Google, but the journey from day one to where we are now has been anything but boring!

We are hearing some wild claims from the US with regards to the re-growth of parts of the body which have either been cut off or died. Lee Spievak from the US has come forward with an amazing claim that using a special “pixie dust” he was able to prompt his body to re-grow the lost part of his middle finger, which was cut of three years ago by a model airplane propeller. So what is this all about?

Using a substance which was created from pig’s bladder, Mr Spievak’s brother was able to create a powder which he applied over the large wound that had been created on his finger tip. He claims that within 10 days the finger had grown back to its previous size and he had full feeling of the finger and the “new” tip.

As mad as this may sound, the process was originally created by Dr Badylak who created a powder which he hoped would kick start the bodies healing process simply by over-riding the urge for the body to scar and cut off a wound, and instead encourage the body to repair the wound. While the process has still to be verified by the medial authorities, if it does work and it is correct, the potential is mind boggling.

It is believed that the heavy presence of collagen in the pig’s bladder feeds protein and elasticity to the skin, and other elements of the potion allow the body’s natural urge to seal the wound to be ignored. However, at this moment in time even the doctor who created the potion is not exactly sure how it works!

More tests are planned and if they prove to be correct and the powder does work, then Dr Badylak is set to be a very wealthy man. The large drug companies will may millions if not billions for access to this type of data, so interesting times may wait ahead for the doctor.

While the Microsoft / Yahoo! bid story seems to have been rolling for months it seems that we may actually be approaching the business end of the story. The Microsoft board met yesterday to agree their options and strategy for the future and while there was no announcement yesterday, many analysts on Wall Street are expecting news by the end of this week.

So what are the options? What will happen?

There are a number of options for both Microsoft and Yahoo! but it is Microsoft who has to decide their future strategy as soon as possible. The options are :-

Go Hostile

It is possible that Microsoft may decide to go hostile and take their bid straight to the shareholders of Yahoo! if the Yahoo! board decide not to recommend the offer. The current offer is $31 a share and while the management of Yahoo! are looking for between $35 and $37 per share, it seems unlikely that Microsoft will increase their offer to the higher end of the range.

Increase The Offer For A Board Recommendation

The most favourable course of action would be to agree a bid with the board of Yahoo! who would then be able to recommend this to shareholders as offering fair value for the group. This route would also allow Microsoft to retain as many of the Yahoo! directors as they wanted without any fallout from an aggressive bid.

Walk Away

While walking away is still an option for Microsoft, this seems highly unlikely now that they have shown their hand. If they were to walk away this would not only open the door to someone else taking over Yahoo!, but it would possible bring into question the future of certain parts of the Microsoft empire.

Even though there is still a long way to go in this fight it seems unlikely that either party will let the other walk away without agreeing an offer. In order to fight the mighty Google there is no real option other than a merged group.

While it has long been suspected that ISP were able to spy on their customers and collect data about their internet usage, it seems that a number of surfers around the world have actually caught their ISPs in the act. So what are the regulations?

The regulations for internet usage are very much stacked in favour of the ISPs and the companies whom they sell your data on to. So long as the data is not able to identify the person or persons using the system then many in the industry claim that this does not break any regulations or any laws. However, there is a growing ground swell of opinion which suggests that the surfing information which the ISPs collect from you can actually be traced directly back to you, and they can see who you are.

Not only is this deemed illegal in many countries of the world, but it opens up internet surfers to fraud and blackmail. There is also the chance that the Police may well decide to use the ISP option in the future in order to track suspects – whether they are guilty of crimes or not.

While there is no person in their right mind who would argue against using the internet to find those who commit a range of heinous crimes, we are slowly seeing our privacy eroded and left open to abuse. Just lately we have seen local councils in the UK charged with using laws which were designed to protect us from terrorists, to follow and monitor people accused of “crimes” such as dropping litter via CCTV cameras.

If the local councils of the UK are happy to “piggyback” the use of CCTV cameras for “other “ uses, then what is to stop them hacking into your computer and checking your surfing habits without your knowledge?

In a move which should eventually see all trial cases online going back to 1674, a group of universities have got together to set up a new online Old Bailey service using official documentation. Sheffield, Hertfordshire and the Open University have joined forces in a ground breaking move which will save time and expense for the raft of historians in the UK.

Until this service was made available the only way to investigate the Old Bailey hearings (going back to 1674) was via microfiche, a process which took researchers literally days and months to get the information they were after. However things have changed now and we see that 200,000 cases are covered on the site, which holds 120 million words and 110,000 pages, bringing the cases at the famous Old Bailey up to 1913.

While the majority of the information so far is a mixture of digital images of the actual court documents, those who have used the site are very impressed by the quality. As you might expect, the service hit the headlines in a blaze of glory and crashed the website!

There are many ways in which this excellent service will help historians and researchers of today, but there is also the potential for schools and universities with students now able to compare court life from nearly 400 years ago to that of today. On the surface the traditions many be the same and the look may be the same, criminal trends and sentences have changed radically over the years. Perhaps those days of years gone by may not have been as peaceful and safe as we often assume!

There are plans to continue adding court data to the site and bring it as up to date as possible, with may suggesting that it will become a mainstay for education and research buffs. The internet and the 17th century Old Bailey coming together, now who would have thought that!

Over the last 20 years we have heard government after government complain that the young of today were spending too much time on their computers. Research showed that people were becoming fatter and fatter and family time around the table has all but disappeared. It seems that everything from the desktop to the internet to the games consoles was to blame. Each and every attempt to get kids off their games consoles failed, so now it looks like the “If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them” theory is back in town!

Recently we have seen the introduction of a number of brain games to consoles such as the Wii, but it is the Wii Fit package which is catching the eye of the consumer. The package comes with a vast number of exercises and a Wii Balance Board on which to carry out your tasks. The “game” is fun yet it has also been shown to have a very beneficial affect on the overall health and fitness of players. The Fit package has not just been thrown together, it is a carefully crafted plan of different exercises which can be “played” by all of the family.

Are Games Consoles The Future?

It seems sensible that with so many homes in possession of games consoles, that some kind of exercise package would catch on. The news that the Wii Fit package has sold out in many places before pre-orders have even been despatched will not go unnoticed by competitors of the Wii.

The Games Console market tends to work in fashion trends and the latest fashion seems to be fitness programs, allowing you to have fun and exercise at the same time. It will be interesting to see the direction of future fitness programs, as the Wii Fit is only the first of many we can expect to hit the market over the coming months and years.