Philips announces variable lens technology

Philips has announced a new display technology developed in its Research division: a variable-focus lens system that has no mechanical moving parts. Furthermore, the company claims that the technology lends itself to high volume manufacturing, which puts lower-cost imaging systems within sight. Dubbed 'FluidFocus', the system mimics the action of the human eye in that a fluid lens alters its focal length by changing its shape. ...more

Pentagon throws out trackable Internet

A Pentagon research agency has rejected an idea to rebuild the Internet so that data would be tagged with identifying information, making anonymous surfing impossible. Exactly why the eDNA plan was withdrawn is unclear, but the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of which was funding the project, will no longer continue to do so, it was revealed. Part of the proposal for the system read: 'All network and client resources will maintain traces of the user eDNA so that the user can be uniquely identified as having visited a Web site, having started a process or having sent a packet. ...more

A LAN in the hand...

Wireless network connectivity for handhelds is provided by Intel's new SpringPort Wireless Ethernet module for Handspring Visors. The new module, giving IEEE 802.11b access to WLANs (Wireless Local Area Networks), simply plugs into the Handspring extension port. ...more

Yahoo! to add Wiki power under new agreement

Yahoo! has announced it will help support the Wikipedia project, providing the open source encyclopaedia initiative with servers and bandwidth. In return, presumably, it will be on the inside track to index and search the Wikipedia content. The user contributed online encyclopaedia consists of 195 language editions and contains approximately 1. ...more

UK PTO workshop divides lawyers and engineers over patents

The extent of the division between attorneys and software engineers over software patents was crystallised at a series of workshops run by the UK Patent Office. Delegates comprised a mix of patent attorneys and software engineers and were tasked with testing a number of patent applications against different definitions of the 'technical contribution' criteria. It is this test that determines the approval of software patents in current law and within the formative CII directive on the issue at the EU. ...more