How Close is Google's 'Autonomous Driver-less Car' From Reality

Perhaps Google is one of many high-status companies investing large lumps of money on the idea of ‘autonomous driverless cars’ which can drive themselves. If you look up Google, several other major automakers and U.S. government agencies like DARPA and the U.S. Army have been effectively running related research projects. But it is Google who has brought some reality to the idea and is now putting  all-hands-on-deck on its project.

This Tuesday, September 25, 2012, California became the third state of the U.S., following Nevada and Florida, to sign a legislation which legally gives permission to Google for testing it driverless cars on the state's roads. Nevada has already granted an official permission in June 2011, whereas Florida did so in April, 2012. Similar legislations are soon expected to be drawn up in Hawaii and Oklahoma as well.

Before all this in March 2011, the Google engineer who led the research which brought this advancement to light today, Sebastian Thrun, gave an aspiring highlight of his project in a TED presentation which is worth watching. He mentioned his primary purpose was to save the lives of those millions of people from all over the world who have faded due to numerous traffic accidents, also the case of his friends when he was 18.

US Officials state 'deep concerned' regarding Syria's Internet cut

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It was officially declared on Saturday, by the officials of the United States government, that it is highly concerned and keeping a sharp eye on the Internet shutdown activates in Syria. The secretary of State, Hillary Clinton passed a threatening statement against the government trying to hush the protesters; she stated that the government "cannot prevent the transition currently taking place." She declared that "we are deeply concerned by reports that Internet service has been shut down across much of Syria, as have some mobile communication networks." The U.S. has been always debating for freedom of speech, hence indirectly supporting all the deadly anti-government protests rage across the Middle Eastern nations, Hillary added that "we condemn any effort to suppress the Syrian people's exercise of their rights to free expression, assembly, and association."

According to the collected information from local sources, the Internet lines were non-functional in Damascus and the coastal city of Latakia on Friday. Whereas it was estimated by a US-based Internet monitoring firm that almost around two-third of the whole country did not had access to internet due to the outage of network. Clinton pointed out that the government of Syria, under the command of President Bashar al-Assad, "has a history of restricting the Internet in an attempt to prevent the Syrian people from accessing and sharing information.” One of the elite U.S. diplomat claimed that “The Syrian government must understand that attempting to silence its population cannot prevent the transition currently taking place. We believe that even in the face of significant obstacles, the Syrian people will, and should, find a way to make their voices heard.”

China Claims the hacking Allegations to Be “Unacceptable” And Promotes the Idea of International Conference

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The defense minister of China, Liang Guanglie, clearly refuted all the allegations made against China blaming it to be responsible for the Internet attacks on several foreign targets. Moreover, he also seconded the call of US and Britain to hold international talks to tighten the international cyber-security. He stated that "It is hard to attribute the real source of attacks and we need to work together to make sure that this security problem won't be a problem." He was speaking in a security forum in Singapore, when he declared that "actually in China we have also suffered quite a wide range and frequency of cyber-attacks." He added that "the Chinese government attaches importance also to cyber-security and stands firmly against all kinds of cyber-crimes."

China is being accused largely by the United States, Canada and several other nations, who allege that the Chinese government is backing these online hack attacks on their government agencies and companies. Just last week, Google Inc. allegedly exposed a cyber-spying attack supposedly initiated from somewhere in China, aimed to spy on the Gmail accounts of senior US officials, military personnel, journalists and Chinese political activists. Even the U.S. government stated on Friday that it is concerned regarding the Google's accusations towards Beijing, though the Chinese government still asserts that all the allegations, blaming it, are completely "unacceptable".

China Asserts US Is Culprit in Raising a Global 'Internet War'

Finally the Chinese military has responded to the on-going accusations made against it, it rather blamed U.S. on Friday, alleging that the U.S. is attempting to launch a worldwide "Internet war." China asserted that this internet war is aimed to target the Arab and other governments, and it is just framing China to be responsible for these Western hack attacks just to provide cover for its own actions. This declaration was made by the Chinese military academy scholars on Friday, as they pleaded to have an even tougher policing of Internet. These actions are a result of an accusation made by Google Inc., regarding hack attacks on its emailing system being originated from within China, aimed to acquired personal information by hacking the accounts of government officials, military personnel and political activists of the U.S.

Precisely Google stated that it has traced the hack attacks to be originated from the city of Jinan, which is actually also housing a military vocational school. China immediately denied the all the allegations, imposing that it was not responsibility for either of the two alleged attacks. It was written in one of the Communist Party-controlled China newspapers, Youth Daily: "Of late, an Internet tornado has swept across the world ... massively impacting and shocking the globe. Behind all this lays the shadow of America." This article was signed by both Ye Zheng and Zhao Baoxian, identified scholars at the Academy of Military Sciences, also mentioning that "Faced with this warmup for an Internet war, every nation and military can't be passive but is making preparations to fight the Internet war."

A "Payment Processor" In the Online Poker Case Confesses In Front Of U.S. Court

A resident of Illinois confessed on Monday, in front of the federal court, accepting his help in allowing the large online poker websites to duck the U.S. gambling laws. He was processing millions of dollars through bank payments from his home, in Illinois, to Costa Rica while he deceived the banks regarding the nature of these transactions. The person involved in this crime, nicknamed "payment processor," is actually 41-year-old Bradley Franzen, who pled guilty in New York. He has confessed the criminal charges he was charged with i.e. conspiracy to commit bank fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering and being part of operating an illegal gambling business. Experts have calculated that, regardless of his confession, he will be most probably imprisoned for at least 30 years time.

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Franzen is only one of the total eleven individuals indicted by the federal prosecutors in New York last month; the authorities immediately apprehended all the involved Internet domain names as a reaction, including Absolute Poker, Full Tilt Poker and PokerStars. Online gambling has been kept illegal in the United States since 2006. Overall the charges indicted by the prosecutors accuses the companies for appointing people to help them avoid the regulatory authorities and banks, while the processed $3 billion worth of payments illegally out of the country.

Franzen who was currently residing in Illinois also owns a home in Costa Rica, he confessed in front of the court informing that he was contacted by an Internet poker company back in 2009. He declared that "I was aware that most U.S. banks did not process the payments ... and I understood U.S. law prohibits it." Upon the inquiry by the U.S. Magistrate Judge, Kevin Nathaniel Fox, regarding the amount of money involved, Franzen added "I do understand in general terms that it was millions of dollars, but I don't know how much." He also told the court that he carried out majority of his work from his residence in Costa Rica.

Visa Announces To Soon Launch Its Digital Wallet for U.S. Banks

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The world’s largest payment system, Visa Inc., is now announcing its new venture as it discloses that it will soon be launching a digital wallet, which will immensely facilitate the users will making online payments. Moreover it will also make it very easier for the cellphone users to make payments, rather than using their traditional cards. It was announced on Wednesday that Visa Inc. will be collaborating with sever major banks of not only the U.S. but also international banks in this new project. Some of the initial partners, already on board with this digital wallet project, are named to be US Bancorp, PNC Financial Services, Regions Financial, BB&T Corp, Toronto Dominion's TD Bank and the U.S. arm of Barclays PLC.

This "digital wallet" will have the facility to store the credit and debit card account information of the customers of any bank, both for Visa cards and other cards. Visa said that the users can then use this wallet for making payments in online stores or on other stores too. Further, it will be adviced to all merchants to have a "one-click" button on their websites for the potential customers to use the Visa digital wallets easily and make the transactions quickly. It said that users will be able to buy things after just that one-click rather than entering all the sophisticated information manually each time they make an online purchase.

HP Offers 3G Mobile Broadband Service with Its New Upcoming Elitebook Series of Business Laptops

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It was announced by Hewlett-Packard, this Monday that it is going to offer pay-as-you-go 3G mobile broadband services with its latest upcoming business laptops. HP has been considering many offers and service to attach with their PCs, and make it more like a package deal. The broadband service will be of DataPass, and be sold as a package with its new 3G-enabled Elitebook business laptops, which were also announced on the same time. It was added that the service will give access to 3G data networks anywhere in the U.S., and the user will not even have to even sign any kind of, monthly or yearly, contract with a wireless carrier directly.

The DataPass service will be automatically purchased along with the laptop, as the user will not be required to even pay a penny, not even for any activation fee, declared the HP spokesman, Mike Hockey. He said that this service will come in handy for a quick access to the Internet, especially in places where it is relatively expensive otherwise, like airports or hotels. Additionally, he said, the users can separately buy a US$5 data plan accounting for 75MB of data over 5 hours, or the $10 package with 150MB of data over 3 days. Furthermore the US$20 package offers 450MB of data over 14 days, and the maximum $30 package allows 1GB of data over 30 days.

The News of Osama Bin Ladin’s Death Gave another Internet Surge, but It Was Still Well Responding the despite Boosted Traffic

The news of Osama bin Laden's death was another very significant back-to-back for internet age today, relating to the recent royal wedding. The internet traffic was observed to have been jumped dramatically, for almost all the trendy U.S. news websites. And considering such great number of internet traffic, the outages and slowdowns were observed to be extremely less severe related to the traffic and situations at the time of other such previous news events in the past. This means that despite the extra-ordinary internet traffic, there were very few people which actually had to see any kind of error message.

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Keynote Systems Inc. is company located in San Mateo, California which has been monitoring the trends of Internet traffic from a longtime now. The manager of company, Dave Karow, said reported that the first reason for such scenario are smartphones, as it was seen to be very helpful to spread the message of Osama’s death. This consequently means that more people attempted to scroll through the same news sites from their smart phones. Despite all these attempts were simultaneous, the web pages for smartphones are always displayed with slimmer version of the actual Web page, and this in turns reduces the load on the particular websites to a considerate degree.