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Cindy is Smart Even though she’s just 5 years old, Cindy Smart speaks five languages. She’s a good reader. She can tell time and do simple math, including multiplication and division. She’s not a prodigy. She’s just good programming. Wired.com reports that Cindy looks like an average doll - 18˝ inches of blond hair, baby-blue eyes and a button nose. But loaded with a digital camera, microprocessor, and voice recognition software, Cindy is the first doll that can see, think and do as she’s told. That makes her both surprisingly precocious ... and a little creepy. When introduced by Toy Quest at conventions around the nation earlier this year, the doll spooked viewers as she read and counted out loud. The eagle-eyed Cindy follows in the path of other breakthrough toys like Chatty Cathy, whose pull-string statements shook up the doll market 40 years ago, or Sony’s barking Aibo robot, which was the first to popularise voice command in the late nineties. Computer charges phone Sounding suspiciously like a high-technology version of robbing Peter to pay Paul, a new accessory cord allows you to recharge a mobile phone using power from your computer, Times of India reports. The cord, made by American Power Conversion and other manufacturers, plugs into the USB port of a desktop PC or a battery-powered laptop. Once the computer is switched on, the port yields 5 volts of power, more than the 3.6 to 4.5 volts needed to charge most phones. It’s a much smaller, lighter solution than carrying your mobile phone charger. The cords have been available in Australia and New Zealand since last year. Before American Power Conversion released a commercial version here, some North American hobbyists were making their own. Various versions are available at roughly $20 to $25 for some Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola phones. The power sharing does not cause a noticeable drop in the battery power of notebook computers, as some early users have reported. Changing words Hundreds of Websites have been found to contain bizarre new words thanks to an e-mail security filter used by US Internet company, Yahoo! New Scientist reports. The company’s security filter automatically deletes Web code that could be used by hackers and replaces it with innocuous words. For example, "eval" is converted to "review," "mocha" is changed into "espresso" and "expression" replaced with "statement." The substitutions are made even if the phrase appears within a word. The phrases are blacklisted because they could be used to embed potentially dangerous code into an e-mail message written in HTML. This code could trick a target computer into handing over files that might include sensitive information such as usernames and passwords. Hiding code in e-mail written in HTML or a Web page is called cross-site scripting and was first identified in 1997. Couple sentenced An Egyptian court has
jailed a man and his wife for six months for posting pornographic photos
and films of themselves on the Internet, security sources told Reuters.
The man, an engineer in his forties and his wife, in her twenties, were
arrested after a special police vice-squad traced the site on the
Internet, the source said. Egyptian police have stepped up surveillance
in recent years with a special unit that specialises in Internet crime.
In May, Cairo police arrested another man and his wife on suspicion they
had posted naked photos of the woman on the Internet. |
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