by Saleem Khan, CBC News online

Palm Americas International president Michael Moskowitz was showing me the Foleo wireless e-mail, documents and web browsing smartphone companion yesterday prior to its launch and mentioned that he often uses the device at home - a little odd for a gadget designed for people on-the-go.

Click through the link below to pierce Palm's security secret.

by Saleem Khan, CBC News online

Richard Edelman, the global CEO of the Edelman public relations organization, wrapped up his conversation with Stuart MacDonald on stage at the Mesh conference here in Toronto a few minutes ago, where he was talking about the future of PR. He's one of the first top executives to write his own blog.

"The word spin has no place in our company," Edelman said. "It is the single thing most undermining our industry."

Click through the link below for honest talk in a spin- free zone.

by Saleem Khan, CBC News online

I just spoke with University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, so naturally we ended up talking about copyright and the internet.

I asked what's grabbing his attention these days and he said he's blogged about and is particularly interested in the case of a fellow who had uploaded clips of sessions of Parliament to YouTube as part of a parody. No problem - government proceedings on the public record are in the public domain and parody is protected speech, right? Wrong.

Click the link below to read who owns the copyright.

by Saleem Khan, CBC News Online

Austin Hill just announced that he is launching a technological effort to save energy, cut greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the need for coal-burning electricity plants by saving power on desktop PCs.

Click the link below to read more of this post.

by Saleem Khan, CBC News Online

I'm sitting in a session at the Mesh conference in Toronto listening to Austin Hill (Zero Knowledge - now Radialpoint - and now Akoha) and Tom Williams (Give Meaning). They're talking about what motivated them to start philanthropic social media sites after years as traditional tech entrepreneurs.

Click the link below to read more of this post.

by Saleem Khan, CBC News Online

Shadowrun, Microsoft's marriage of PC and console video games – an industry first – hits store shelves today and the developers are marking the occasion by matching their magical and military skills against the public.

Teleport through the link below for more.

by Saleem Khan, CBC News Online

Microsoft Corp. is delaying shipping science fiction action game Halo 2 for WindowsVista PCs after nudity was found in part of the software.

Shoot through the link below to reveal all.

by Paul Jay, CBC News Online

British prosecutors said they would not press charges against chatroom users who watched 42-year-old Kevin Whitrick apparently commit suicide in March, the BBC reported Monday.

Click here to read more.

by Saleem Khan, CBC News Online

Robots, space (both real and in science fiction), the spin on Windows Vista and the surprising things people will click on while surfing the internet were all among the subjects that have caught our attention lately. Here's the list:

• Trekkie versus Wookies
• Tasmanian devil falls prey to motorists
• Surfers click on the darndest things
• Going hands-free: Hitachi's brain-machine interface
• Theatre ads 2.0 get interactive
• Star Trek's Data joins Robot Hall of Fame
• Vista sells 40 million units
• Can they dig it? Robots fail to move enough moon rock

by Paul Jay, CBC News online

Festivities are under way to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, which some consider to be an all-time science-fiction classic and others decry as the beginning of a bloated marketing exercise.

But Star Wars has tended to fall short is the science part of science fiction. While Star Trek has inspired future technology like Triquarters or matter-antimatter fuel, Star Wars has given us...what, Wookie crossbows?

by Paul Jay, CBC News online

To a generation of North Americans who grew up watching Bugs Bunny, the Tasmanian devil was an indestructable whirlwind of destruction. But the eponymous marsupial upon which the character is based is far more vulnerable, according to the Australian province's government.

The latest threat to the vulnerable species? According to a story on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation website, 1,700 Tasmanian devils die each year on the state's roads.

by Paul Jay, CBC news online

Last month Google was forced to cancel paid advertisements after it was discovered phishers were using them to redirect users to sites containing malicious software.

The ads were paid for using Adwords, Google's service that lets advertisers pay to have keywords attached to their name and appear on the right-hand side of Google's search page as "Featured Advertisers."

Curious to understand the mind of the internet surfer, Finnish computer specialist Didier Stevens placed his own ad through adwords. And unlike spammers, Stevens didn't hide his intent: The ad said "Is Your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!"

Amazingly, 409 people did.

by Ian Johnson, CBC news online

If you're one of those people who HAS to have the latest and greatest computer gadget, Hitachi has just the thing: A portable brain-machine interface. That is, as long as you've got around $840,000 U.S. burning a hole in your pocket.

Click below (or just think about clicking if you already have a brain-machine interface installed) to read more of this post.

by Paul Jay, CBC News online

Filmgoers have to time their entrance into the theatre carefully for the latest summer blockbuster. If they want to get a good seat they might choose to come early, but there's a drawback: a seemingly endless loop of advertisements and trailers.

Viewers in the United States, however, are getting to experiment with a new interactive game that turns the audience into human joysticks.

by Paul Jay, CBC News Online

Real-life robots outnumbered their science fiction counterparts for the first time among the inductees to Carnegie Mellon University's Robot Hall of Fame, announced on Tuesday.

Star Trek's Lt. Cmdr. Data was the lone fictional robot among four inductees announced at the fourth annual RoboBusiness Conference and Exposition in Boston this week. Click the link below to read about the other three.

by Saleem Khan, CBC News Online

Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates announced today the company has sold 40 million copies of the Vista version of its Windows operating system in the first 100 days it was available worldwide. Sounds impressive.

Click through the link below to find out why it's not.

by Paul Jay, CBC News online

In the spirit of DARPA's Grand Challenge robot road race, NASA sponsored a contest on Saturday inviting teams to build a machine capable of digging mock moon dirt.

And like the first year of the road race, none of the four teams were up to the mammoth task.

Click the link below to see how close the robots came to completing the goal.

by Saleem Khan, CBC News Online

This week, the future of science, technology and Islam; journalism and the Apple vs. PC debate, NASA and Trekkies' flights of fancy, identity and privacy, and the most anticipated game of the year — Halo 3 — all had us pondering this week. Here's the list:

Dubai: Hub of Islamic scientific renaissance?
PC World runs article at centre of resignation controversy
Trekkies steer NASA mission toward Vulcan hunt
Reporters cover Pasadena...from India
PC World editor back in charge
I, Google
Halo 3 first impressions

by Saleem Khan

As most video game fans – and even a fair number of non-gamers – know, Microsoft Corp.'s science fiction action/adventure game Halo 3 is to launch in the fall exclusively on the company's Xbox 360 video game console. It's been difficult to avoid the cinematic trailer Microsoft vice-president Peter Moore debuted at the E3 interactive entertainment software conference in Los Angeles a year ago, especially after they began playing in movie theatres.

Earlier tonight I got a hands-on look at what may well be the most anticipated game of the year – the multiplayer component, anyway.

Blast the link below for more, Master Chief.

by Saleem Khan, CBC News Online

If you ego surf Google and get no results, do you exist? Or worse, what if you're mistaken for someone else with an undesirable online profile? Those are the questions the Wall Street Journal's Kevin J. Delaney explored this week in a feature that highlighted the problems posed by the increasingly digital age in which we live.

Click the link below to find answers you may or may not expect.

by Paul Jay, CBC News online

In a reversal of fortune, Harry McCracken has returned to PC World as editor-in-chief of the magazine and Colin Crawford, the CEO, has been moved to a new position within the organization at IDG (owner of the publication).

As we wrote earlier this week, McCracken reportedly left the magazine after 12 years over an article entitled "Ten Things We Hate About Apple", which the magazine eventually published.

The news that Crawford is out at PC World makes a discovery of ours make a whole lot more sense. As we pointed out on Tuesday, Crawford's response concerning McCracken's departure on his personal blog appeared to have been removed, though it is cached here.

Mystery solved, and score one for editorial control. Though, as many have pointed out, the actual article at the heart of the controversy was fairly lame.

by Paul Jay, CBC News online

The practice of outsourcing jobs from North America to lower-wage countries has already had an impact on the manufacturing, customer service and technical support industries. Next up ... local journalism?

An editor of a California news site has hired reporters based in India to cover local news, arguing he can hire two good reporters for an annual cost of just $20,800 US.

by Saleem Khan, CBC News Online

We were surprised today at news from NASA: "Mission could seek out Spock's home planet." That's right, Trekkies – I mean, astronomers – think NASA's upcoming planet-finding mission might be able to "detect an earth-like planet around the star 40 Eridani" – a three-star solar system that dedicated Star Trek fan(atic)s know as the location of Mr. Spock's homeworld, Vulcan.

Click through the link below for more nerdy news.

by Paul Jay, CBC News online

A week ago the tech world was abuzz after Wired reported Harry McCracken had quit his job as editor-in-chief of PC World magazine, allegedly because the company's CEO tried to kill a story critical about Apple Inc.

The article, entitled "Ten Things We Hate About Apple" was allegedly spiked while still in draft form by CEO Colin Crawford, the former CEO of MacWorld. McCracken — who had been the editor of PC World for 12 years and had worked at publisher International Data Group for 16 years — told CNet he left over disagreements with management but declined to discuss the reasons.

Now, in an odd turn-around, it appears PC World has decided to run the piece after all.

by Saleem Khan, CBC News Online

With daily headlines from what we commonly refer to as the Muslim world often dominated by reports of violence and strife, it's easy to forget that the technology-infused lifestyle we lead today exists in no small part to the preservation and advancement of math, engineering, medicine, astronomy and other knowledge during the Golden Age of Islam, which roughly parallelled what we in the West commonly refer to as the Dark Ages.

Now, it appears that long tradition of enlightened learning is extending roots in a way that could soon begin to reshape our perceptions of where scientific and technological advancement can flourish.

Click the link below to learn more.

by Saleem Khan, CBC News Online

The internet, video games and snot – that's right, snot – grabbed our attention over the last week. Here's the list:

Artificial 'snot' helps electronic nose
Picture this: Security flaw found in Photoshop
God of War II rules Canada
Disney tries social networking
Google still tops internet traffic

by Saleem Khan, CBC News Online

With everything that Google does, it raises two questions: "How did we ever live our lives before Google?" (particularly relevant to anyone born in the late 1980s or later) and "How is Google and its competition faring?"

Click through the link below to find the answers.

by Saleem Khan, CBC News Online

Business professionals have LinkedIn; high school and university students and adults in general have Facebook, and anyone with attention-deficit disorder or a longing for the early days of the World Wide Web has MySpace. Now the Walt Disney company is borrowing a (web) page from the popular social networking sites with its new offering, Disney XD.

Click through the link below for more.