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Lawl Mart’s Duck Hunt, an iPhone and iPod touch game that has been available at the App Store, can’t be found any more. The developer says that the game came down at the request of Nintendo, which alleges copyright infringement. Released in January, Duck Hunt made it through Apple’s App Store vetting process and was available for purchase for 99 cents. The game mirrors a title that Nintendo originally released for the original Nintendo Entertainment System, its 1980s-era video game console, and one of the first to support Nintendo’s Zapper, a light gun peripheral.

The game featured a cartoon hunting dog who would flush out cartoon ducks from rushes; your job was to shoot the ducks as the flew away, before they reached the edge of the screen and out of your range. If you ran out of time or missed three shots, the dog would make fun of you and the game would be over.

Lawl Mart stayed true to the formula, using a graphics motif, sound and music that mirrored the original Nintendo game. And it was this that seemed to run afoul of Nintendo’s legal department, which ordered Apple to take the game down.

Lucas Mansfield, the developer behind the game, confirmed to Macworld in an e-mail that the game had been removed from the App Store at Nintendo’s behest. “It’s an unfortunate situation, but I do understand Nintendo’s position,” he said.

Mansfield indicated that the Duck Hunt game for the iPhone would be reworked and updated to remove the offending graphics and sound, while still trying to take “as much inspiration from the original as possible.”

Three conditions often linked to obesity have also been tied independently to sleep apnea, new studies show.Insulin resistance, the progression of liver disease, and living a less-than-active life were all found to be associated with the common breathing disorder, regardless of people’s weight, according to reports published in the February issue of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.

A John Hopkins University study found a strong tie between insulin resistance — the body’s inability to metabolize glucose — and sleep-disordered breathing (SDB), pauses or other abnormalities in breathing while sleeping.

“What our research tells us is that SDB is characterized by multiple physiological deficits that increase the predisposition for type 2 diabetes mellitus,” study leader Dr. Naresh Punjabi, an associate professor of medicine and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in an American Thoracic Society news release.

Another Hopkins study found that obese people with chronic intermittent hypoxia, the lack of oxygen that occurs during obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), showed liver issues in proportion to the severity of the sleep disorder.

“We hypothesize that severe obesity, per se, acts as a first hit in the progression of liver disease, inducing hepatic steatosis, whereas the presence of the chronic intermittent hypoxemia that often characterizes OSA acts as a second hit,” lead researcher Dr. Vsevolod Y. Polotsky, of the Johns Hopkins Asthma and Allergy Center, said in the same news release. “The hypoxic stress of OSA may induce oxidative stress in the livers of patients with severe obesity, leading to further inflammation.”

Enzyme levels and other findings, though, suggest that obesity and sleep apnea are not completely tied to each other, he said, meaning that each condition must be dealt with separately to also address the complications of both.

“Our data suggest that patients with OSA and severe nocturnal hypoxemia should be screened for liver disease, and, conversely, patients with liver disease should be screened for OSA,” Polotsky said.

The third study found that excessive sitting or standing during the day causes a fluid shift in the legs during sleep that may have a role in the development of sleep apnea.

When people lie down to sleep, fluid that has been retained in the legs during the day gets redistributed to the upper body, Dr. T. Douglas Bradley, professor of medicine and director of the Centre for Sleep Medicine and Circadian Biology at the University of Toronto, explained in the news release. “It is, therefore, plausible that some of the displaced fluid might reach the neck and predispose one to upper airway constriction,” he said.

The researchers found these changes in people who were sedentary but not obese and who they suspected had obstructive sleep apnea — a discovery that might help explain why 40 percent of people with the breathing disorder are not obese and why exercise without weight loss appears to reduce sleep apnea issues in some people.

“An important implication of our observations is that sedentary living may predispose to OSA, not only by promoting obesity but also by causing dependent fluid accumulation in the legs, which can shift rostrally to the neck overnight,” Bradley said.

Apple’s Safari, released for the Windows platform in June 2007, is the second newest browser on Windows, behind Google’s Chrome. (Naturally, Apple’s browser also runs on OS X, and on iPhone and iPod Touch devices in a mobile edition.) Safari leads the pack in anti-phishing filtering and pop-up blocking, but it also has many security weaknesses.Safari can be freely downloaded from Apple’s Web site, and it is offered as a default option through Apple’s Software Update program, which is installed with other Apple software, including iTunes and QuickTime. Although the default Safari install is easy for end-users to unselect from Software Update, many critics assail Apple for installing potentially unwanted software during a process they believe should be used exclusively for patches and upgrades. Other observers counter that Apple’s automatically pushing an opt-out product is a perfectly legitimate way to offer a free browser alternative.

[ See also the security reviews of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Opera. For more on browser security and protection against Web-borne threats, see the Security Adviser blog and "Test Center: Browser security tools versus the evil Web." ]

The Safari installer also installs a service called Bonjour, which allows Apple programs to advertise themselves and discover other Bonjour-compatible programs on the local network. Bonjour is used to automatically configure printers, hunt for file sharing opportunities, and find instant messaging peers, and it allows Safari to discover additional Web pages on the local network. In general, most security experts are wary of auto-discovery programs like Bonjour, and Bonjour itself has been involved in at least three known exploits. Bonjour is not essential to Safari’s functionality and can be disabled.

Windows Safari
The Safari executable is not User Account Control (UAC)-aware on Windows Vista computers, but Vista automatically elevates permissions for the install because the word “setup” is in the name; this could pose a problem if Vista’s heuristics detection functionality is disabled. On Windows Vista, Safari runs as a single process (Safari.exe) with DEP (Data Execution Prevention) disabled, a security negative shared only by Opera; ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) enabled; and file system and registry virtualization enabled, all with a MIC (Mandatory Integrity Control) level of Medium. In comparison, the rendering processes of both Internet Explorer and Google Chrome run with the more secure MIC setting of Low. Apple’s Software Update checks for Safari patches once a week using a Task Scheduler job.

Safari is a full-featured browser, with common security features, including pop-up blocking, private session browsing, and an anti-phishing filter. The pop-up blocking is among the best, and the anti-phishing filter is the most accurate among the browsers I tested (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera). Java, JavaScript, and plug-ins can be turned off on a global basis. As with most other browsers apart from IE, Safari provides no security zones in which to place Web sites of varying degrees of trustworthiness, or to enable or disable functionality on a per-site basis.

Safari always automatically prompts for approval before downloading files, and in doing so, it prevents some high-risk files from being executed before downloading. Safari also has good default cookie control. It is the only browser among those I tested to prevent all third-party cookie writes by default, which is a nice privacy bonus.

On Mac OS X systems, Safari’s passwords are protected by Apple’s Keychain password management system. But even on Windows, Safari’s locally stored passwords are well protected. As in Internet Explorer, stored Web site passwords are never displayed. However, Safari takes last place in remote password handling, passing only 2 of 21 tests on the Password Manager Evaluator Web site.

Settings and ciphers
An optional menu called Develop (which replaces the previous Debug menu option) can be added to the menu bar to speed up Web page development testing, but it also has significant global security impacts. The Develop menu allows the user to quickly open a current Web page in another installed Web browser or to change User Agent strings on the fly (to see how the change affects Web page rendering). Installed plug-ins can be viewed — but not managed — via an option under Safari’s Help menu.

You can also disable local caching of downloaded content, thereby forcing all content to be re-downloaded when revisiting a Web page; disable images; disable CSS (which have been involved in more than a few exploits); and globally disable JavaScript. Disabling JavaScript prevents many malicious Web sites from functioning, but it’s no panacea. Even with JavaScript disabled, one of the most obnoxious malicious Web sites I tried still managed to kick-start more than 40 instances of Safari in a few seconds, resulting in a de facto DoS attack on the test machine.

Safari is weaker than its competitors in several areas regarding digital certificates and SSL/TLS (Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security) traffic. Initially, in SSL/TLS negotiations, TLS with RSA and weak 128-bit RC4 keys are offered first and second in the cipher order. Worse, ECC (Elliptical Curve Cryptography), AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), and 256-bit keys are never offered as potential cipher choices; further, MD5 is offered first and more frequently than SHA-1, when it should be the other way around. It would seem that Apple hasn’t been paying attention to crypto developments over the last few years.

Safari does warn of invalid digital certificates, but it isn’t nearly as “in your face” as the other top browsers. It warns only once with a small pop-up message, whereas competitors alter the entire Web page with red or multicolored warnings. Come to think of it, maybe Safari has it right: better to display one warning than many for a single problem. But then Safari, unlike all its competitors, fails to point out Extended Validation (EV) certificates or, as Internet Explorer and IE do, to highlight the true domain name, making it more difficult to tell phishing sites from the real thing.

Hunting and phishing
Safari passed all of my browser and JavaScript security exams, negotiating my predefined lab trials, test suites on the Internet (including scanit and Jason’s Toolbox), and real-world exposure to known-malicious Web sites without allowing any malware to be automatically installed (Safari’s competitors fared just as well). The most malicious DoS Web site locked up Safari and the host machine, just as it did the other browsers, but Safari succumbed more quickly than the rest. Safari also fails to stop malicious URL moniker launches, used by attackers to automatically start helper applications they hope to exploit.

When Safari was first released, Apple touted the new browser as a secure alternative to Internet Explorer. As with all Internet Explorer alternatives, Safari’s lack of native support for ActiveX controls does provide users with some protection. Safari’s strong anti-phishing filters are also a plus.

But security is not Safari’s strong point. Unfortunately, 26 separate vulnerabilities have been announced since March 2008, one-third of which would allow complete system access. Plus, there simply isn’t a lot of security granularity to Safari. Security-minded users will have to decide if Safari’s poor cipher support, lack of security zones, and absence of enterprise features for mass deployment and control can be overcome by its aesthetic benefits.

Oil prices rose in Asian trade on Wednesday ahead of the US Department of Energy’s weekly stockpiles report.

New York’s main futures contract, light sweet crude for delivery in March, rose 67 cents to USD 42.25 a barrel.

Brent North Sea crude for March rose 45 cents to USD 44.18.

The bounce in prices came because Asian traders were “not as pessimistic” as their Western counterparts about the report on crude and other energy product inventories, said Dave Ernsberger, Asia senior editorial director for global energy information provider Platts.

The report was to be released later on Wednesday.

Stockpiles were expected to increase but not as much as traders in the United States expected, Ernsberger said.

New York oil prices plunged by more than four dollars on Tuesday in what an analyst said may have been a reaction to the forecast rise in crude inventories.

“We think that the expectation of further growth in crude inventories will weigh on prices at least through Wednesday,” MF Global’s Mike Fitzpatrick said.

The price drop also coincided with an unexpected fall in US consumer confidence, which fell to an all-time low in January in a further troubling sign for the world’s biggest energy consumer.

The closely-watched private research firm, the Conference Board, said its consumer confidence index tumbled to 37.7 in January, eclipsing the prior record low of 38.6 in December.

Oil prices have plunged since striking record peaks above USD 147 per barrel in July, as a deteriorating global economy dents demand for energy.

A new study suggests that scientists trying to increase the speed of supercomputers merely by increasing the number of processor cores on individual chips may unexpectedly be slowing the computing performance for many complex applications.The suggestion is based on the observations made by researchers associated with a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

A Sandia team simulated key algorithms for deriving knowledge from large data sets.

The researchers observed that the simulations showed a significant increase in speed going from two to four multicores, but an insignificant increase from four to eight multicores.

According to them, exceeding eight multicores causes a decrease in speed.

The team add that 16 multicores perform barely as well as two, and after that, a steep decline is registered as more cores are added.

The problem is the lack of memory bandwidth as well as contention between processors over the memory bus available to each processor-the set of wires used to carry memory addresses and data to and from the system RAM.

The researchers explained the problem with the example of a supermarket analogy, saying that where two clerks at the same checkout counter are processing one’s food instead of one, the checkout process should go faster.

However, where each clerk does not have access to the groceries, he or she does not necessarily help the process, and may get in each other’s way.

Similarly, according to the researchers, if one core is fast, two would be faster, four still faster, and so on.

However, say Sandia’s Richard Murphy, Arun Rodrigues and former student Megan Vance, that the lack of immediate access to individualized memory caches - the “food” of each processor - would slow the process down instead of speeding it up once the number of cores exceeds eight.

“To some extent, it is pointing out the obvious - many of our applications have been memory-bandwidth-limited even on a single core. However, it is not an issue to which industry has a known solution, and the problem is often ignored,” says Rodrigues.

“The difficulty is contention among modules. The cores are all asking for memory through the same pipe. It’s like having one, two, four, or eight people all talking to you at the same time, saying, ‘I want this information.’ Then they have to wait until the answer to their request comes back. This causes delays,” says James Peery, director of Sandia’s Computations, Computers, Information and Mathematics Center.

“The original AMD processors in Red Storm were chosen because they had better memory performance than other processors, including other Opteron processors. One of the main reasons that AMD processors are popular in high-performance computing is that they have an integrated memory controller that, until very recently, Intel processors didn’t have, ” says Ron Brightwell.

Multicore technologies are considered a possible savior of Moore’s Law, the prediction that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit will double approximately every two years.

“Multicore gives chip manufacturers something to do with the extra transistors successfully predicted by Moore’s Law. The bottleneck now is getting the data off the chip to or from memory or the network,” Rodrigues says.

Businesses worldwide are under attack from a highly infectious computer worm that has infected almost 9 million PCs, according to antivirus company F-Secure. That number has more than tripled over the last four days alone, says F-Secure, leaping from 2.4 million to 8.9 million infected PCs. Once a machine is infected, the worm can download and install additional malware from attacker-controlled Web sites, according to the company. Since that could mean anything from a password stealer to remote control software, a Conflicker-infected PC is essentially under the complete control of the attackers.

According to the Internet Storm Center, which tracks virus infections and Internet attacks, Conficker can spread in three ways.

First, it attacks a vulnerability in the Microsoft Server service. Computers without the October patch can be remotely attacked and taken over.

Second, Conficker can attempt to guess or ‘brute force‘ Administrator passwords used by local networks and spread through network shares.

And third, the worm infects removable devices and network shares with an autorun file that executes as soon as a USB drive or other infected device is connected to a victim PC.

Conficker and other worms are typically of most concern to businesses that don’t regularly update the desktops and servers in their networks. Once one computer in a network is infected, it often has ready access to other vulnerable computers in that network and can spread rapidly.

Home computers, on the other hand, are usually protected by a firewall and are less at risk. However, a home network can suffer as well. For example, a laptop might pick up the worm from a company network and launch attacks at home.

The most critical and obvious protection is to make sure the Microsoft patch is applied. Network administrators can also use a blocklist provided by F-Secure to try and stop the worm’s attempts to connect to Web sites.

And finally, you can disable Autorun so that a PC won’t suffer automatic attack from an infected USB drive or other removable media when it’s connected. The Internet Storm Center links to one method for doing so at http://nick.brown.free.fr/blog/2007/10/memory-stick-worms.html, but the instructions involve changing the Windows registry and should only be attempted by adminstrators or tech experts. Comments under those instructions also list other potential methods for disabling autorun.

You are going to need legal help to handle an accident. You will need a large insurance settlement to handle the high costs of the recovery. You won’t just have this handed to you on a silver platter though. You are going to have to earn it. This means that you’ll need the aid of personal injury lawyers Los Angeles. Good legal aid can make all of the difference.

You should understand just what you are gaining though. Legal aid can streamline the whole process, as the insurance company will be forced to handle it privately with your lawyer for the most part. If you are alone in the struggle, then they will often try to get you to hurt your own case. This could be in fairly friendly ways too. A simple recorded phone conversation might accidentally do grievous harm to your case. Misleading paperwork is also a popular way to limit their future settlement. If you have injury attorneys Los Angeles on your side, then they will be able to review anything that the insurance company wants you to do. It will save you a lot of trouble in the beginning.

The biggest help will come in the end though. Neither you nor the insurance company will want to go to court. Court costs are very expensive and usually unnecessary. Most cases end in a negotiated settlement. Having a car accident attorney in Los Angeles on the case at the start will usually result in early negotiations and larger settlements. What more could you want?

Taiwan researchers are developing a bicycle that would tell the riders when to change the gear.They are designing a computer for pedal cyclists that tells them when to change gear to optimise the power they develop while maintaining comfort.

While riding a bicycle, few people know how to adjust the gears to get the most power out of their pedalling without becoming uncomfortable either through having to pedal too fast in a low gear on level roads or straining when going up hill or to maintain a high speed.

Researchers from National Defense University, Tashi, Taiwan, ROC have developed a computerised system that would tell exactly when to change gear.

They have devised a computer algorithm that gives a cyclist a gearshift strategy to cope with almost any cycling conditions and maintain this optimal state without reducing comfort.

The tests have shown that by simulation of a 12-speed bicycle provides a gear-shifting sequence with minimal power losses and gear shifts.

“By following the sequence, riders can operate the derailleur system more easily,” said the researchers.

“Riders will also feel comfortable because all gear-ratios can be used, and gear-shifting actions will be smoother,” they added.

The computer will automatically adjust to riding conditions, satisfying the human element.

After being introduced as the ‘King of Bollywood’ at the recently held ‘Golden Globe Awards’, Shah Rukh’s joy seems to have no bounds. The actor is not just ecstatic about AR Rahman’s victory but also charged up about the fact that India’s finally getting noticed abroad.

SRK, who graced the Golden Globe red carpet on Sunday, said in an interview to a news portal, “I am very honoured and at the same time I accept with full humility that I was not called because of who I am, but it was because Indian cinema is being looked upon with importance by the Western world now.”

When asked why he was chosen to represent Bollywood, the actor gushed humbly “I just happen to be one of the faces of Bollywood and so they chose me.”

According to him, Indian cinema has finally arrived and the way a film made entirely in India has been received by the western audience, it won’t be an exaggeration to say that the Golden Globe win is just a stepping stone for Indian cinema.

Guess it is time for Indian filmmakers to take a cue from meaningful cinema like ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ and make hay while the sun is shining bright on India!

Open plan offices are making people sick, leading to high levels of stress and lower productivity, according to an Australian study.

A global review into the effect of modern office design led to the conclusion that working in an open-plan had a negative impact with high levels of stress, conflict, high blood pressure, and a high staff turnover.

“The evidence we found was absolutely shocking,”” News.com.au quoted Dr Vinesh Oommen from the Queensland University of Technology’’s Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation as saying.

“In 90 per cent of the research, the outcome of working in an open-plan office was seen as negative, with open-plan offices causing high levels of stress, conflict, high blood pressure, and a high staff turnover.

“The high level of noise causes employees to lose concentration, leading to low productivity, there are privacy issues because everyone can see what you are doing on the computer or hear what you are saying on the phone, and there is a feeling of insecurity,’’ he added.

There are increased odds of workplace conflict by “sitting so close to someone that each time their phone rings you can get irritated””.

“I think most of us, including myself, can relate to that,”” said Oommen.

Moreover, large, open spaces could lead to an increased risk of illnesses. For instance, influenza virus are passed on more swiftly.

“Based on these findings, I think employers around the country need to rethink the open-plan environment in their offices,”” he said.

“The research found that the traditional design was better - small, private closed offices,” he added