Chutneytech | UK Technology News

Google’s new “Chrome” browser has only been out a couple of days, but its already facing up to a backlash from users who feel their privacy and data are under scrutiny from the search giant.

The company already got users backs up with the end user licence agreement, and now users are questioning the browsers “Omnibox”, and exactly how much Google monitors what’s typed in it.

Chrome was given a loud ‘hurrah’ from users after its beta release on Tuesday. The browser boasts fast speed and performance capabilities in addition to a number of innovative user options.

The first issue was with the initial draft of the end user licence agreement. The original draft stated that Google has “perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute” any content moving through the service. Google changed this to you “retain copyright and any other rights you already hold.”

Google has already claimed the initial language came from its overall terms of service and was removed over concerns were raised. However, that hasn’t eased the feeling behind the scenes.

“It was astonishing, to say the least, that Google attempted to usher through such broad and overreaching language in its initial user agreement,” Ryan Jacobson, an attorney and cochair of the Entertainment Media and Privacy Law Group at Chicago-based SmithAmundsen, said.

“In essence, the user was forced into relinquishing serious privacy and copyright interests in exchange for access to the browser. While an influx of criticism may have prompted Google to amend its language, the mere notion that each query one makes through the browser is saved, tracked and linked to a particular browser should be a cause for concern,” he suggested.

As for the Omibox – the ‘intelligent’ location bar at the top of the browser that allows you, not only to type in URLs, but also search terms, data collection is already taking place.

“Anything typed into the box - even if the enter key isn’t struck - could potentially be logged with the user’s Internet protocol address,” Google spokesperson Carolyn Penner said.

Not to worry though, as apparently only 2 percent of entries are collected, and users can turn this function off by using the “Incognito” private/filth browsing mode, or by turning off Chromes “suggest” feature. Also changing the default search engine will prevent another type of data collection form happening – one that is specific only to search querys carried out via Omnibox.

“If Google is set as [the] default search engine, any entry into the Google Chrome Omnibox that returns search results after hitting enter is considered a search query by the browser, sent to Google, and … stored in our search logs,” Penner explained.

“However, most entries of URLs into the Omnibox will be recognized by the browser as URLs and will return a Web page with that URL. In that case, nothing is stored,” she added.

Sony is to launch the new version of its handheld console, the PSP-3000, in October this year in Japan the company announced yesterday.

The new handheld features a new high contrast LCD screen, a built in microphone, boasts improved graphics and offers 4GB of memory - twice as much as previous models. The device will be shipped in three different colours; “piano black”, “pearl white” and “mystic silver”, and will cost Japanese customers 19,800 yen (£103).

A device bundled with “Mobile Suit Gundam Gundam vs. Gundam” will launch on November 20th, priced at 24,840 yen (£129). There are other bundles including “Patapon 2 Donchaka”, and another with “Dissida Final Fantasy”, which will sell at roughly £5 more.

But, is the new PSP-3000 any better?

Michael Goodman, an independent gaming and digital media analyst seems to think so: “There definitely are some improvements. Improving the display and continuing to improve the graphics on it can’t hurt - especially in Japan, which is such a high-def society so far in front of the U.S.”

“It comes with a larger memory stick; the old one was 2 gigs. So, they are clearly evolving the PSP as a handheld media platform, and it’s a memory stick - but that storage is absolutely critical,” Goodman added.

The look of the device has not changed much, and the functionality is the same, however the company is raving about its new microphone addition, which will allow gamers to make phone calls using Skype. The microphone will also be used in certain games and for other communication purposes.

However, this new voice functionality is not the PSP-3000’s most notable feature, said Stephanie Ethier, an In-Stat analyst.

“I think the strongest … selling point of the Sony PSP Slim - and the new PSP 3000 - is not the voice capability, but the fact that transferring content from the PS3 to the PSP is an easier process, making the PSP a truly compelling portable multimedia device,” she said

“My guess is the voice feature is more of a spin to market the Sony PSP as a viable competitor to the iPhone,” Ethier continued.

“In the end, the PSP is still primarily a gaming device, but the increased amount of compelling video content - and the ease with which PS3 owners can transfer that content - is the true selling point of the PSP.”

Michael Gartenberg, vice president of mobile strategy at Jupitermedia, argues that the new 4.3-inch wide screen is the devices best feature.

“The screen is the best thing. Sony’s attempt to cast the PSP-3000 as a phone is a little bit overly optimistic. It’s a stretch as a communication tool,” he told said.

“It’s about games, first and foremost. This isn’t a secondary feature - it’s like your phone of last resort. When you’re not near a computer, you’re not near a telephone, you’re not near a cell phone, and you have to reach someone, then use your PSP,” he continued.

The PSP-3000 will face stiff competition in Japan, where DS is king, but Goodman believes PSP has the edge with DS having been around a while now.

“The PSP has done better in Japan in recent months. Part of it is because the DS is getting a little long in the tooth and the PSP is able to make up ground. They have something fresher with the PSP 3000,” he explained.

The quality of games is Sony PSP-3000’s biggest issue, said Gartenberg.

“It’s a very different experience,” he remarked. “The PSP is focused on bringing this mini-console version down to the handheld, where the DS is focused on providing a very different experience. Sony seems to be trying to emphasize these other features, but they have to remember at the end of the day, it’s not about those things. It’s about the game.”

Research into why people receive differing amounts of spam in their inboxes has found that if your email address begins with an A, M, S, R or P, you are likely to receive 40 percent more junk mail.

In contrast, email addresses that start with the letters Q, Z and Y, receive less than a fifth of their mail as spam.

Richard Clayton, a computer scientist a Cambridge University carried out the study. He said that he believed the difference could be explained by the first set of letter being more likely to appear at the start of names than the second set.

This is because the people behind junk emails carry out so-called “dictionary” attacks, in which they attempt to guess new addresses by taking the prefix of an existing address and placing it in front of alternative domain names, such as hotmail.com or yahoo.co.uk.

The research studied 550 million email messages sent to customers of the Demon Internet service between February 1st and March 27th this year.

Dr Clayton presented his findings at a conference on email and anti-spam in Mountain View, California last month. He said: “Measuring incoming email has shown that the first letter of email addresses makes a difference to the proportion of incoming spam.”

He believes results could help further the development of anti-spam measures.

With PC’s at rock-bottom prices now-a-days, and laptops being practically thrown at you from mobile phone companies, it can be difficult to choose the right solution for you. There are good and bad reasons for both PC’s and laptops, this handy little guide should put you on the right path, and offer a little advice about PC Repairs and Laptop Repairs.

Price

When buying brand new, you are more likely to pay more for a laptop of comparable specifications to a PC. Smaller components are generally more expensive, and that is reflected in the price. If your family uses the computer mainly for word processing and internet use, a laptop could be more beneficial, however if you are more into gaming, video editing and publishing, then it will cost far more for a PC, but you’ll see the benefit.

Portability

This one’s a bit of a no-brainer. Laptops are much more portable, so the real question is: do you need it to be? If you love sitting watching television, with the laptop on your knees, then you don’t need any more advice! If you have a home office however, a PC may be more suitable, in helping to separate work from play.

PC Repairs, Laptop Repairs and Upgrading

Although, you can have parts replaced or upgraded in a laptop, this is far easier to do in a desktop PC. If you are unsure of how to upgrade or install new hardware or software, then it’s advisable to head to your local PC Repairs or Laptop Repairs centre to get it fixed for you.

Ergonomics

This means how the computer rates in ease of use. If you have a desktop PC, you will have to sit a chair for extended periods of timje, o you need to invest in a good quality chair, with back support. If you have a laptop, you don’t need the extra expense of a chair, but you must bear in mind the strain on your neck, and the risk of RSI (repetitive strain injury).

Space

Desktops are becoming smaller, but with a workstation crowed with a monitor, PC and all its peripherals, if you have a small house then it might be easier to go for a laptop.

There is no one right answer. However, using this guide will help you think through the lifestyle of your family and help you come to a solid decision.

Photoshop gives you the option of choosing how compressed you want the image to be and Adobe Image Ready will allow you to resize the image until you have found a size that holds the colour and doesn’t loose any image quality or become highly distorted. PNG – Portable Network Graphics, is a format that has only recently been developed and is most popular for web Design use. The PNG file format compresses files differently than a JPEG does and the end result is it leaves better photographs because it has the ability to maintain millions of colours a photograph may hold including transparent layers but the file size still stays small. The only downfall of this file type is if you are using a PC the Internet explorer doesn’t support it.

Another popular format used for web design UK is a GIF – Graphics Interchange Format, this type of file isn’t good for photographs due to the colour limitation but is usually used for Illustrations and Graphics or web design England logos with solid areas of colour because this format loads the object quickly and it can be animated and can hold transparent colour. GIF files can contain one or more images with 256 colors or less. The images using a GIF are compressed using LZW compression, reducing the file size by 30-50% or more. Interlaced GIF’s are formats that load gradually, the interlaced GIF file allows the user to see parts of the image building up while it’s loading but interlaced files will take longer to decompress, and this means that they may take more time to download, although the user may think its downloading faster because they have something to look at or watch, it usually isn’t worth the decompression time for small files. GIFs can also have transparent backgrounds and this means you can also see the underlying background image or colour.

My personal opinion of the JPEG vs. GIF argument is that although they are usually confused as the same file they are actually very different and if used correctly create very different results, if they are used for the wrong content then the result will not be effective, generally I would say use a JPEG for photographs only as there is no limitation with colour so no colour will be lost or replaced, and use a GIF on original artwork that only holds a few colours like Graphics, Logos, Animations or Illustrations, as using a JPEG for work like this would distort edges where there needs to be a sharp contrast in colour.

Georgia Tech researchers have developed a tongue-powered system that could transform a disabled person’s mouth in to a virtual computer that uses teeth as a keyboard.

“You could have full control over your environment by just being able to move your tongue,” said Maysam Ghovanloo, a Georgia Tech assistant professor who leads the team’s research.

The aptly named, Tongue Drive System, turns the users tongue in to a joystick, allowing the disabled to manipulate wheelchairs, manage daily house work tasks and to control computers. It’s still in the early stages of development, but things are moving forward.

It’s not the first ever system that uses facial movements to control electronics, but testers of the system believe it could be a break through.

“This could give you an almost infinite number of switches and options for communication,” said Mike Jones, a vice president of research and technology at the Shepherd Centre, an Atlanta rehabilitation hospital. “It’s easy, and somebody could learn an entirely different language.”

This is a significant step up from the handful of systems available to disabled people. The “sip and puff” technique, which lets people issue commands by inhaling and exhaling into a tube, is among the most popular. However, this is limited to just four commands.

Rather than putting a physical keyboard in someone’s mouth, the researchers have developed a virtual keyboard instead. A magnet about 3 millimetres wide is placed under the tip of the tongue, and then the magnet’s movement is tracked by sensors on the side of each cheek, which sends data to a receiver atop a rather bulky set of headgear. It is then processed by software that converts the movement into commands for a wheelchair or other electronics.

When the system is booted up, users are required to establish six commands: Left, right, forward, back, click, and double click.

Ghovanloo he hopes he could one day add dozens more commands that turn teeth into keyboards and cheeks into computer consoles. For example, “Left-up could be turning lights on, right-down could be turning off the TV,” Ghovanloo said.

So far the research has landed the team over $200,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation and the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. The next step is to make the system more user friendly. This will involve re-sizing the headset – it currently looks like something from Frankenstein – and to improve battery life, and the size of the individual components.

Photoshop is capable of adjusting to numerous ‘types’ of formats and its tools if used to their full capacity can create some amazing results including even the smallest detailing, It also uses many different formats and there are advantages and disadvantages to which format you choose to save your work in. Photoshop can also open and save several kinds of files and the more you further your knowledge as to why these files exist you can apply the correct files to the correct image type and in web design. When choosing your file format there are three main things you should consider which will help you to determine how to save your file – web use, layering and image quality.

Image quality begins when you first take a photograph with your camera, you should use the highest pixel setting that your camera contains because the higher the level of pixilation the better the quality of the final image, but this also means that the higher the quality of the image the bigger the overall file size will be. Your camera will give you the option of how high or low you want the pixilation to be, so change this in accordance to what the final image is going to be used for. Photographs are best taken as a raw image to begin with as you will have the option to convert them into a smaller file once you have imported them onto your computer, and the larger the image is to begin with I have found, the easier it will be to manipulate using Photoshop’s tools. Photographs can be imported as JPEG’s or as a raw image but if you save as a JPEG you will lose some of the quality of the image from the start.

Layering begins once the image is stored on your computer, the image will usually open itself in the default programme so you will have to open Photoshop and then find the image you want to open using file – open – and then where the image is stored. This is when you will do all your manipulation, layering and resizing using Photoshop itself. Once you have completed this you will then save your changes, if you save the images straight into Photoshop it will save them as a PSD, PDD or EPS file.

If your image is saved in these particular formats your file will stay large and hold the quality whilst preserving all layers, this is the best file format to use if you are going to be reworking the image. Other choices of formats for your file are TIFF – which will keep the quality but are large files and best used in design for print, BMP or bitmap is a windows file that creates good photos but creates large files and a PDF is a adobe acrobat file which locks texts and images so they cannot be further manipulated, usually used as a file for sending information or important documents.

File formats that are going to be used for web design UK use need to be small size files, which means using a format that highly compresses the file. But compressing a file highly using takes out some of the range of colours, the vibrancy and the sharpness of the photograph. JPEG – Joint Photographic Experts Group, is the most used web design England form file, this is because the JPEG compresses the file to a small size but it still holds the quality and displays millions of colours unlike most compressing files.

Japan?s Ministry of Economy has issued a warning to users of the portable music player, the iPod Nano, after at least two recent incidents of the popular device overheating and causing minor fires.

So far there have been 14 such incidents in the country, according to reports, including one that occurred in March. The latest incident prompted the Ministry to order Apple to investigate the device?s safety and report its findings within a week.

Well the verdict is in, and Apple has blamed the malfunctions on the batteries that were in Nano?s sold between September 2005 and December 2006, are to blame.

The company received very few reports of such incidents ? less than 0.001 percent of first-generation iPod Nano units, they claim, and all incidents have been traced back to a single battery supplier.

Too this point the defect has not caused any injures of property damage, the company maintained, and no similar problems have been reported in connection with any other iPod Nano model. Apple has advised owners of first-generation Nano?s to contact AppleCare for a replacement if the battery should overheat.

There has been case?s in which Apple laptops have caught on fire, and usually the source of the problem was the lithium battery powering the machine. The batteries were short-circuiting and bursting in to flames when microscopic metal particles came into contact with other parts.

After a right pounding from Sony?s Blu-ray DVD format in the high-definition war that ended in early 2008, Toshiba has set up shop in the standard definition DVD market. The company has launched a new up-scaling DVD player, the XD-E500, which promises to deliver as near to HD-DVD as you can get, without it actually being HD.

Toshiba?s new US$150 XD-E500 features Toshiba?s new eXtended Detail Enhancement (XDE) technology, which increases up-conversion from 480i/p to 1080p, and also offers three user-selectable picture enhancement modes ? Sharp, Colour, and contrast - to help refine the video quality, according to Toshiba.

Sharp Mode offers improved detail enhancement, taking it one step closer to HD, Toshiba boasts. Edges are sharper and details in movies are more visible. As opposed to traditional sharpness control, XDE technology analyses the whole picture and adds edge enhancement exactly where it?s needed.

Colour Mode ensures the colours stand out with improved richness, with blues and greens appearing more lifelike, according to Toshiba. Colour Mode combines the improvement in colour with the detail enhancement of Sharp Mode and is perfect for outdoor scenes.

Contrast Mode is designed to make darker scenes or foregrounds more clearly, without the typical ?washing out2 that can occur with traditional contrast adjustment.

In addition to XDE, the XD-E500 incorporates key features found on most up-converting standard DVD players, such as HDMI-CEC, DivX certification, JPEG capability, and MP3 and WMA playback.

“XDE offers consumers a simple solution to add on to their HDTV purchase. XDE works with existing DVDs to deliver a near HD experience with enhanced detail and richer colours. Toshiba is delivering to consumers what they want — a high quality experience at an affordable price,” noted Louis Masses, Toshiba director of product planning.

Toshiba will be hoping to capitalise on the customers who are still reeling from HD disc battle with Blu-ray, as most consumers haven’t jumped up to more expensive format yet.

“It’s an interesting time for the market,” Ben Bajarin, director of the consumer technology practice for Creative Strategies, said.

“After [Toshiba's] HD DVD finally phased itself out and we noted that Blu-ray was the clear winner, we saw a lot of consumers who were saying, ‘When’s the right time for me to buy … and if so, what’s the right price?’” he added.

Bajarin doesn’t believe an HD up-converting device is going to be a long-term solution.

“We’re at 1080p now, and that’s going to continue to go up. With educated consumers, one of the main reasons the Sony PS3 Blu-ray player is so interesting is that it can be updated with software - so as new standards come out, they’ll be able to update their PS3 Blu-ray player with software so that it’s consistent with what’s available on the market at the highest levels,” he explained.

“Consumers already know Blu-ray is the winner, so I find it hard to believe that consumers will go out in larger numbers and buy a device that’s not Blu-ray,” Bajarin said.

This tutorial will teach you how to add colour onto an old photograph that may of lost colour through fading or an image that is originally black and white or greyscale, sometimes this can take a lot of time but the more time spent the better the final result will be, and looks great if used for Web Design.

• Open up the image that you want to use and ensure that the image mode is set to RGB, you can do this by going into Image > Mode and then check its set to RGB.
• Press Q to go into quick mask mode and make sure that the quick mask option that is on the main toolbar are set to selected areas. Using the Paintbrush fill in the area that you would like to colourize, this area will then appear in red.
• Press Q again and this will send you back into standard mode and a selection will appear around the area you filled with the Paintbrush, when completing the next step your selections will be saved as Layer Masks which you will be able to restore later but you could also save your selections by going to Select > Save Selection and then name the selection after the area which you have just outlined in the image you are using.
• Click on Create New Adjustment Layer icon which is at the bottom of the layers palette and choose the option of colour balance from the menu, you will be given a option of highlights, mid-tones and shadows and adjust the sliders for these until you find the colour that you think looks the best, this choice isn?t final you will have the option of going back and editing using your layers palette by double clicking on the adjustment layer icon for the layer that you want to edit. Web Design England.
• Repeat this process over again for the other parts of the photo that you need to colourize, when this is al done and you have got colour using your colour balance adjustment layer you can also make further additional adjustment layers to adjust each colour layer more, you will be given a selection of options including Contrast, Shadows, Brightness, Saturation, Hue? Just load the particular selection by clicking CTRL and then clicking onto the adjustment layer, and repeat the process of adding a new adjustment layer.
• Web Design UK, Once you have completed a few images you can begin to explore the other effects you can get from where you allow the sliders to sit and which effects work best which certain original images.