Google’s Hong Kong Back Door

Overnight in China, Google started redirecting users of its mainland Chinese search engine Google.cn to the uncensored, Hong Kong-based Google.com.hk, presenting a challenge to China’s control of the Internet.

Google’s latest move to offer unfiltered results to Chinese users represents the most prominent challenge to Chinese authorities in recent memory, particularly for a company that says it still wants to do business in China. The redirection of users to the Hong Kong site could be seen as compounding the offense since it is clearly based on the wider freedoms available in Hong Kong under the “one country, two systems” policy.
The former British colony of Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997, maintains a separate legal system and has a free press. Google’s Hong Kong office is registered as a separate legal entity from its mainland China offices.

Google.hk offers many of the same services as Google.cn, as well as a simplified Chinese-language option (Hong Kong uses traditional Chinese characters). On the simplified Chinese home page of Google.hk, users are greeted with a message that reads: “Welcome to the new home of Google Search in China.” Users can also access Google’s free Chinese music download service through the Hong Kong site.
The Hong Kong government said Tuesday it doesn’t censor the content of Web sites and fully respects freedom of information. “There are no restrictions on access to Web sites, including Hong Kong-based Web sites, from China,” the government said in an e-mailed statement.
The question now is how long China will allow Google to continue to exploit the loophole offered by “one country, two systems.” Mainland authorities could easily revoke Google’s right to use the Google.cn domain name (as well as the related g.cn domain) and/or block access to the Hong Kong site, but beyond that, Google’s activities in Hong Kong are largely beyond their reach. This has made the city a haven for media outlets that take a critical stance toward the Chinese government, such as Jimmy Lai’s Next Media (publisher of Apple Daily) and the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Asia, as well as human rights groups and NGOs that focus on issues in China.
China’s response so far doesn’t offer much comfort. This morning, Xinhua news agency cited an official from the Internet bureau of the State Council Information Office slamming the U.S. Internet giant’s actions.
“Google has violated its written promise it made when entering the Chinese market by stopping filtering its searching service and blaming China in insinuation for alleged hacker attacks,” the unnamed official was quoted as saying. “This is totally wrong. We’re uncompromisingly opposed to the politicization of commercial issues, and express our discontent and indignation to Google for its unreasonable accusations and conducts.”

:blogs.wsj.com

InVisage aims to remake camera sensor market

"With a tiny smartphone 3-megapixel sensor, we could make that a 12-megapixel sensor," said Chief Executive Jess Lee. "Or we could quadruple its sensitivity and ISO. That's the net benefit here." Higher sensitivity means photos that aren't as afflicted with the flecks of color that mean the sensor is capturing noise instead of what a person wants to photograph.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-based company is set to demonstrate its products at the Demo conference in Palm Springs, Calif., on Monday, coming out of stealth mode in the process. Specifically, it'll show images produced by a sensor whose pixels measure only 1.1 microns, or millionths of a meter, on edge.
Essentially, the technology works by adding a new finely tuned light-sensitive layer on top of the silicon chip, Lee said. That layer is more efficient at converting incoming light into electrical signals, and the light isn't partially blocked by a microprocessor's metallic layers, either.

Those who make camera sensors, including Panasonic, Sony, Canon, Micron Technologies spinoff Aptina Imaging, and OmniVision Technologies, have been working to snatch as many photons as possible that come through the camera lens. Among other things, they've reduced the size of circuitry that gets in the way of capturing light, thereby increasing the "fill factor" of each pixel; they've flipped the sensor design around so the circuitry doesn't get in the way of the silicon in an approach called back-side illumination; they've come up with "gapless" microlenses that gather light from one edge of the pixel to the other and focus it on the light-gathering area.

And those sensor makers have made steady progress. In particular, SLR cameras can shoot at ISO sensitivity settings as high as 102,400 in a couple cases. But SLRs use large, expensive sensors that don't fit in a mobile phone camera's physical housing or price constraints, and smaller sensors require some combination of fewer megapixels and smaller pixels with lower sensitivity.

InVisage believes its approach offers a much larger leap in improvement than the existing industry has come up with so far, and though it's aiming initially for high-end mobile phones, the technology will work on ordinary digital cameras, security cameras, and military night-vision systems as well, Lee said.

The company has ambitions to remake the image sensor market, but doing so isn't easy. Foveon, another Silicon Valley image sensor start-up, has had only niche success, for example. And it's going up against major chipmaking experts with established businesses.

Competitor OmniVision has 1.1-micron pixels, too, with its own partnership with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), and said the process will work with sub-micron pixels as well.
InVisage has backing in the form of more than $30 million raised from RockPort Capital, Charles River Ventures, InterWest Partners, and OnPoint Technologies. It's got 30 employees to date and a manufacturing partnership with TSMC, as well.

And Lee argues InVisage has an advantage over incumbent powers: its technology doesn't require as advanced manufacturing equipment to make. OmniVision's 1.1-micron pixel sensor requires manufacturing equipment that can make features as small as 65 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, but InVisage's requires only 110-nanometer equipment, Lee said.

InVisage Executives include Lee, who previously was a vice president of OmniVision and also worked at Altera, Silicon Graphics, and Creative Labs; nanotechnology researcher and Chief Technology Officer Ted Sargent; and Marketing Director Michael Hepp, who worked at OmniVision as in product marketing and program management and also worked at National Semiconductor.

InVisage is starting with smartphones first because it's an established, high-volume market. "We're working with two top-tier handset manufacturers already," Lee said, declining to mention them by name.
The company will begin producing samples of its chips by the end of the year. With mass production typically taking six to nine months after that, people could start seeing them in products by mid-2011, Lee said.

:news.cnet.com

Viacom, Google air dirty laundry in court docs

Court filings released on Thursday in the bitter $1 billion copyright fight between Viacom and Google's YouTube show just how far apart the companies remain, as the 3-year-old case winds through federal court.
Viacom, in 108 pages of court documents, portrays YouTube's founders as reckless copyright violators who were far more concerned with increasing traffic to their site than obeying the law. Even executives at Google, which acquired YouTube for $1.7 billion in October 2006, questioned the ethics of building a site through questionable copyright practices, according to the Viacom filings.

But in the 100-page document filed by Google, perhaps not surprisingly, the search engine tells a different story. Viacom is painted as a media giant trying to play it both ways: demanding that YouTube take down videos even while third parties were uploading Viacom content on the entertainment giant's behalf. More intriguingly, the parent company of MTV and Paramount Pictures was at one point interested in acquiring the video-sharing site, according to the documents.
"We believe YouTube would make a transformative acquisition for MTV Networks/Viacom that would immediately make us the leading deliverer of video online, globally," according to an internal Viacom slide that Google filed with the court.
Interesting as the documents may be, it's not clear which side will benefit most from the disclosures. Google argues that it is protected by the safe-harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which says, in short, that if a Web site acts in good faith to take down copyrighted content as soon as it learns of it, and it has not benefited financially through advertising or other means, it is protected from a lawsuit. Viacom is attempting to pierce that protection by proving that YouTube employees, at the very least, knew of rampant copyright violations on their site and did little about it.
:news.cnet.com

Chrome Extension : Amazon Rocket

Amazon Rocket is access to popular products and Product cheap prices. Simple and fast as possible

download amazon rocket click

HTC Legend in April with Vodafone UK

The month of April seems to be a time of promise for the world Android in Europe, following news that the Nexus One will be marketed in April in England (and also in Italy), now check the news that the 'HTC Legend arrives on the shelves of United Kingdom in the same month.

The price in UK will be £ 399 from 12 April, probably in Italy will cost around € and 499. We recall that the 'HTC Legend is based on the Android operating system 2.1 Eclair, interface Sense of HTC, an optical joystick (instead of the trackball), a 5 megapixel camera and 3.2-inch AMOLED screen HVGA capacitive type.
Street: AndroidWorld.