Japan Welcomed Decision By Delegates At A UN Wildlife Trade Meeting

DOHA : Japan welcomed on Friday a decision by delegates at a UN wildlife trade meeting to reject a ban on cross-border commerce in rapidly declining Atlantic bluefin tuna, a sushi mainstay.

Backers of a ban, the European Commission and the United States both regretted the result, with the Commission warning the consequences could be catastrophic for the future of the species.

After aggressive lobbying by the Japanese, the controversial proposal was crushed at a meeting in Doha of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

The proposal, which had been put forward by Monaco with the backing of the United States and European Union, had needed the support of two thirds of the nations present.

In the end, there were 68 votes against the measure, 20 in favour and 30 abstentions.

“We welcome the rejection” of a ban on cross-border trade of bluefin caught in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic as well as an amendment to allow a moratorium on the ban, a Japanese foreign ministry statement said.

“We will continue our efforts to get understanding of our country’s position” so that the rejection will be adopted at a general meeting on March 24-25, it added.

US Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Tom Strickland lamented the vote as “a setback for the Atlantic bluefin tuna,” but vowed to “keep fighting” for the sustainable management of the fishery.

The European Commission warned that rejecting the ban threatened the species with extinction.

Environmental groups and experts also slammed the result.

“The abject failure of governments here to protect Atlantic bluefin tuna spells disaster for its future and sets the species on a pathway to extinction,” said Oliver Knowles of Greenpeace International.

Last November, ICCAT agreed to cut its catch for bluefin tuna in the Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean regions by 40 percent, from 22,000 tonnes in 2009 to 13,500 in 2010.

Industrial-scale harvesting on the high seas has caused bluefin stocks to plummet by up to 80 percent in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, the two regions which would have been affected by the ban.

A single 220-kilo (485-pound) fish can fetch 160,000 dollars (120,000 euros) at auction in Japan, which consumes three quarters of all bluefin caught in the world, mainly as sushi and sashimi.

Meanwhile, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) warned that another expensive delicacy, caviar, had pushed sturgeon into the most threatened creature on the planet.

“Four species are now possibly extinct,” it said in a report on the conference sidelines.

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Japan Welcomed Decision By Delegates At A UN Wildlife Trade Meeting was first posted on March 19, 2010 at 3:18 pm.
Copyright @ A Pakistan News

Russian spacecraft lands in Kazakhstan

A Soyuz TMA-16 spaceship carrying two astronauts from the International Space Station (ISS) has successfully landed in Kazakhstan, the Russian space agency’s mission control center outside Moscow said Thursday.

After more than three hours of automatic flight, the spacecraft’s reentry vehicle landed as scheduled at around 2:25pm Moscow time (1125 GMT) near the Kazak town of Arkalyk.
The spaceship undocked from the station at 11:03 Moscow time (0803 GMT), with Russian cosmonaut Maxim Surayev and US astronaut Jeff Williams on aboard.

Surayev and Williams parachuted to the designated landing site in the reentry vehicle, said the NAST website. After preliminary medical examinations, they are to fly to Moscow to meet coworkers and families.
It was the first time in almost ten years for a landing capsule to bring back only two astronauts rather than three. The third vacancy seat has taken some additional cargoes from the ISS.
The two astronauts, who have been on a space mission for about 169 days, received two U.S. space shuttles and two Russian cargo spaceships. Surayev also performed one space walk together with his Russian colleagues.

Russian Oleg Kotov, Japanese Soichi Noguchi and American Timothy Creamer will continue to work in orbit, until a Soyuz TMA-18 spacecraft delivers three more astronauts to the ISS on April 2.

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Russian spacecraft lands in Kazakhstan was first posted on March 19, 2010 at 11:43 am.
Copyright @ A Pakistan News

FBI To Monitor Criminals On Facebook, MySpace, And Twitter

US intelligence agency FBI has turned its guns towards social networking sites for monioring individuals. It appears that law enforcement officials may use the social networking site as a new source of surveillance. The US Department of Justice sent out a PDF that confirmed that they plan to use Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter as a new way to monitor individuals.

While it is not clear exactly how the government will track criminals on the social networking sites, many believe that they will use fake friend requests to gain information about their targets. Also, in the PDF that was released, the Department of Justice revealed that Facebook is quite open with the government when it comes to releasing information. On the other hand, Twitter has more of a reputation for only releasing information when an individual is facing legal proceedings.

This is obviously not the first attempt by the government to use the internet to follow criminals. In the past, the FBI has followed sexual predators online.

Tracker:Facebook beats Google for visitors

SAN FRANCISCO : Social-networking star Facebook surpassed Google to become the most visited website in the United States for the first time last week, industry analysts showed.

Facebook’s homepage finished the week ending March 13 as the most visited site in the country, according to industry tracker Hitwise.

The “important milestone,” as described by Hitwise director of research

Heather Dougherty, came as Facebook enjoyed a massive 185 percent increase in visits in the same period, compared to the same week in 2009.

By comparison, visits to search engine home Google.com increased only nine percent in the same time — although the tracker does not include Google property sites such as the popular Gmail email service, YouTube and Google Maps.

Taken together, Facebook.com and Google.com amounted to 14 percent of the entire US Internet visits last week, Dougherty said.

Google has been positioning challenges in recent months to Facebook and the micro-blogging site Twitter by adding the social-networking feature Buzz to its Gmail service.

In what could signal an escalating battle between Facebook and Google, the leading social-networking service celebrated its sixth birthday earlier this year with changes including a new message inbox that echoes Gmail’s format.

Facebook boasts some 400 million users while Gmail had 176 million unique visitors in December, according to tracking firm comScore.

Dell Accuse Sharp, Hitachi, Toshiba Over LCD Price Fixing

Dell has accused five Asian firms that make liquid crystal display panels of illegally colluding on prices.

The world’s third largest PC maker filed a complaint against Hitachi, Sharp, Toshiba, HannStar, and Seiko in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Friday, according to a Reuters report. Damages sought by Dell have not yet been determined.

Dell is only the latest major buyer of LCD panels to allege price-fixing by several of the industry’s largest suppliers. In October, AT&T, which purchases LCD panels for its cell phones, accused LG, Samsung, and AU Optronics of price fixing, and in December Nokia filed suit claiming the same thing.

For Sharp and Hitachi, this is also familiar territory. Early last year, Hitachi Displays, LG, Sharp, and Chunghwa Picture Tubes plead guilty and paid $585 million for their roles in an LCD price-fixing scheme related to displays sold to Dell, Apple, Motorola, and others. Executives from Chunghwa, Hitachi, and LG executives were sentenced to jail and fined.

Amazing New Technology Allows Blind People To See

Craig Lundberg is the first British soldier to trial the revolutionary BrainPort system that allows his tongue to do what his eyes cannot. Now, acting as a guinea pig for the latest virtual eyesight system, Craig has regained some semblance of sight.
It just gives me a sensation on me tongue to identify objects, he says. So the best way to sort of explain is, someone drawing a very detailed 2D picture on me hand and I get the object of someone drawing on me hand. The BrainPort vision system consists of a postage-stamp-size electrode array for the top surface of the tongue, a base unit, a digital video camera, and a hand-held controller for zoom and contrast inversion. Signals from the camera are sent to the flat lollipop-shaped sensor in the mouth that stimulates the tongue in the shape of the image picked up by the camera. It can even distinguish between different shades of light, reflecting them with varying strengths of pulse. Lundberg lost his sight in a rocket-propelled grenade attack in Basra, southern Iraq, in 2007.

Happy Silver Jubilee ‘.COM’

Internet celebrates the 25th birthday of the dotcom domain name today.
On 15 March 1985, the first company to add dotcom to its name was a computer maker named Symbolics. Today, 100,000 dotcom sites are registered every day and there are nearly 86m active sites. And the man behind the company looking after the dotcom domain is predicting changes in the way the internet is being used.
In 1985, a total of six dotcom domain names were registered. Now, as well as the millions of active sites currently operational, there have been another 113m that have come and gone over the last quarter of a century. Today, people go online to dotcom sites to shop, connect with people, engage with government, be entertained, learn new things, exchange ideas and plan holidays.

Exploit code released,Microsoft Races To Plug IE Hole

Microsoft said on Friday it is testing a patch to fix a new hole in Internet Explorer 6 and IE 7 following the release of exploit code on the Internet.

With the announcement it seems increasingly likely that the company will be issuing a patch for the hole before the next Patch Tuesday in about four weeks, if the testing of the patch goes quickly.

Microsoft warned about the hole, which it said was being targeted in attacks and could allow an attacker to take control of a computer, in an advisory on Tuesday. The next day, Israeli researcher Moshe Ben Abu released exploit code for the vulnerability after using clues in a McAfee blog post to find existing exploit code and pinpointing the weakness from there.

“We have seen speculation that Microsoft might release an update for this issue out of band. I can tell you that we are working hard to produce an update which is now in testing,” Jerry Bryant, senior security communications manager lead at Microsoft, wrote in a post on the Microsoft Security Response Center blog.
“This is a critical and time-intensive step of the process as the update must be tested against all affected versions of Internet Explorer on all supported versions of Windows. Additionally, each supported language version needs to be tested as well as testing against thousands of third party applications,” he wrote. “We never rule out the possibility of an out-of-band update. When the update is ready for broad distribution, we will make that decision based on customer needs.”

Microsoft included workaround information in its initial advisory on the hole, which does not affect IE 8, and on Friday updated Security Advisory 981374 to add more information on workarounds following Ben Abu’s work.

“With today’s update, we have added a Microsoft Fix It to automate this workaround for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 customers,” Bryant said. “As always, customers should test this thoroughly before deploying as certain functionality that depends on the peer factory class, such as printing from Internet Explorer and the use of Web folders, may be affected.”

China Warns Google To Obey Laws

Chinese Minister of Industry and Information Technology Li Yizhong warned that Google will ‘pay the consequences’ if it continues to go against Chinese law. Google announced in January that it would no longer comply with China’s internet censorship laws.
“We need to preserve our nation’s interest, our people’s interest, we cannot be relaxed with any information that will cause harm to the stability of our society, to our system, and to the health of our under-age young people,” he said.
Google began operations in China in 2006 to widespread criticism.
Relations between China and Google cooled in January after what Google described as a sophisticated cyber attack in which the webmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists were targeted.
Since then, the firm has been in talks with Chinese officials about how to provide an unfiltered service but still remain within the law. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said this week that he hoped the results of those consultations would be revealed soon.

Exploit code released, Microsoft races to plug IE hole

Microsoft said on Friday it is testing a patch to fix a new hole in Internet Explorer 6 and IE 7 following the release of exploit code on the Internet.

With the announcement it seems increasingly likely that the company will be issuing a patch for the hole before the next Patch Tuesday in about four weeks, if the testing of the patch goes quickly.

Microsoft warned about the hole, which it said was being targeted in attacks and could allow an attacker to take control of a computer, in an advisory on Tuesday. The next day, Israeli researcher Moshe Ben Abu released exploit code for the vulnerability after using clues in a McAfee blog post to find existing exploit code and pinpointing the weakness from there.

“We have seen speculation that Microsoft might release an update for this issue out of band. I can tell you that we are working hard to produce an update which is now in testing,” Jerry Bryant, senior security communications manager lead at Microsoft, wrote in a post on the Microsoft Security Response Center blog.
“This is a critical and time-intensive step of the process as the update must be tested against all affected versions of Internet Explorer on all supported versions of Windows. Additionally, each supported language version needs to be tested as well as testing against thousands of third party applications,” he wrote. “We never rule out the possibility of an out-of-band update. When the update is ready for broad distribution, we will make that decision based on customer needs.”

Microsoft included workaround information in its initial advisory on the hole, which does not affect IE 8, and on Friday updated Security Advisory 981374 to add more information on workarounds following Ben Abu’s work.

“With today’s update, we have added a Microsoft Fix It to automate this workaround for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 customers,” Bryant said. “As always, customers should test this thoroughly before deploying as certain functionality that depends on the peer factory class, such as printing from Internet Explorer and the use of Web folders, may be affected.”

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