America is poised to loosen its control over cyberspace
FORTY years ago this month American academics sent the first message over the ARPANET, a military network that was the precursor of today’s internet. A legacy of those efforts is that the American government continues to control the internet’s underlying technology—notably the system of allocating addresses. This is about to change, albeit slightly.
For the past decade America has delegated some of its authority over the internet to a non-profit organisation called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)—an arrangement other …

The internet giant seeks new ways to foster innovation
FEW companies are as creative as Google, which serves up innovations almost as fast as its popular search-engine serves up results. This week the firm unveiled a new version of its Chrome web browser and launched Fast Flip, which lets users scroll through the contents of an online newspaper in much the same way that they leaf through its pages in print. On September 30th the company will roll out another fledgling product, Google Wave, for a test involving some 100,000 people. …

How a Taiwanese firm became one of the world’s fastest-growing chipmakers
MOST technology firms fall into one of two brackets: those that sell individual components, such as Intel, a chip giant, and those that offer finished products, such as Apple of iPhone fame. MediaTek sits somewhere in between: it sells most of the innards of mobile phones in a single package, but not the phones themselves—a strategy that has made it one of the world’s fastest-growing chipmakers. On August 4th it said its second-quarter profits were 80% higher than a year …

Two novel approaches to making electricity from sunlight
ISRAEL is a country with plenty of sunshine, lots of sand and quite a few clever physicists and chemists. Put these together—having first extracted the oxygen from the sand, to leave pure silicon—and you have the ingredients for an innovative solar-power industry. Shining sunlight onto silicon is the most direct way of turning it into electricity (the light knocks electrons free from the silicon atoms), but it is also the most expensive. The scientists are what you need to make the process cheaper. …

(WIRED) — The Obama Administration will lend Tesla Motors $465 million to build an electric sedan and the battery packs needed to propel it. It’s one of three loans totaling almost $8 billion that the Department of Energy awarded Tuesday to spur the development of fuel-efficient vehicles.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that the Department of Energy is also lending $5.9 billion to Ford to retool factories in five states. Nissan will receive $1.6 billion to refurbish a factory in Tennessee to produce electric cars.
The loans are the first awarded under …

Netbooks and the New Open Source Movement Converts
Saad Sarwar Muhammad
The Open Source Movement (OSM) has come a long way since the inception of the concept by computer geeks and programmers as an alternative to proprietary software where intellectual property rights are not impugned with the use and free distribution of the software. The virtual monopolization of system software by Microsoft led these revolutionaries to alter the market space through the introduction of Linux, an Open Source system software. The software also proved more reliable as compared to Microsoft Windows with …

Open-source software has won the argument. Now a new threat to openness looms
“FIRST they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Mahatma Gandhi probably never said these words, despite claims to the contrary, but they perfectly describe the progress of open-source software over the past 15 years or so. Such software, the underlying recipe for which is created by volunteers and distributed free online, was initially dismissed as the plaything of nerdy hobbyists. Big software firms derided the idea that anyone would put …

Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems is a surprise, but fits an industry trend
Illustration by David Simonds
“I AM very surprised. I have to think about it.” That was the initial reaction of Steve Ballmer, the boss of Microsoft, the world’s largest software firm. It was also the response of many in the computer industry to the news on April 20th that Oracle, another software giant, was paying $7.4 billion to buy Sun Microsystems, an embattled computer-maker and Oracle’s neighbour in Silicon Valley.
It was no secret that Sun, which never really recovered …

Chipmakers were suffering even before the global economic downturn. Recession is heightening the pain and highlighting changes in structure and ownership
MOST tourists come to Dresden to view the city’s architectural wonders. Beautifully rebuilt, the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), for instance, reveals no hint that its huge cupola once crumbled after a rain of British bombs. But the capital of the German state of Saxony also has more contemporary attractions—at least for technically inclined travellers. It is the hub of one of Europe’s biggest technology clusters. Silicon Saxony, as the …

By Jeremy Bradley
(CNN) — At Imperial College London, medical students navigate a full-service hospital where they see patients, order X-rays, consult with colleagues and make diagnoses.
It’s an interactive, hands-on learning experience — and none of it is real.
These prospective doctors are treating virtual patients in Second Life, the Internet world where users interact through online alter egos called avatars. The third-year med students are taking part in a pilot program for game-based learning, which educators believe can be a stimulating change from lectures and textbooks.
“The aim is to develop a …