Media

The Capital Development Authority (CDA) gets reluctant to take action against cell phone towers on rooftops posing threat to human lives or installed without prior permission and security measures.

Earlier, the Authority had planned to launch drive against unauthorised cell phone towers. “We have pointed out around 65 Base Transceiver Stations (BTS) towers and the authority decided to take action against them as they were not conforming to the CDA by-laws,” said a senior CDA official on Sunday.

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Users of the Nokia N96 are to be among the first with the ability to run the BBC’s iPlayer on their mobile phones.

From 1 October a purpose-built application will be available to download via the BBC website and will also be pre-loaded on some handsets.

The BBC iPlayer allows UK audiences to download and stream BBC TV and Radio programming from the past seven days.

A Nokia spokesman said the service would be 3G and wireless compatible and that Nokia would not charge to use it.

Erik Huggers, BBC Director of Future Media and Technology, said the deal was “critical” to reach out to as many people as possible.

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XDE, or extended detail enhancement, raises the level of standard-definition DVDs to a full high-definition resolution of 1,920 by 1,080 pixels.

Toshiba, which this year lost the high-definition format war with Sony , on Monday introduced technology that enhances the picture quality of DVDs.XDE, or extended detail enhancement, will be in Toshiba’s new XD-E500 DVD player, which will ship this month. The player will be priced at $150, about twice as much as regular “up-converting” players.

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Intel has released a draft specification revision 0.9 for the Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI). The revision, released Wednesday, comes in support of USB 3.0 architecture, also known as SuperSpeed USB. The draft specification provides a standard method for USB 3.0 host controllers to communicate with the USB 3.0 software stack.

One important factor in adopting SuperSpeed USB products is interoperability between multiple devices from different manufacturers. The xHCI draft specification revision 0.9 aims to make interoperability easier to implement, while also making it easier for developers to create software support for the market.

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Hitachi unveiled a new three format “hybrid” Blu-ray Disc camcorder which will let you record onto BD media. It is called the DZ-BD10HA and it will cost you around $1000 when it surfaces in September.

As a three format camcorder, you can also record to other media besides Blu-ray Discs with this product. Hitachi has integrated a 30 GB hard drive, which reportedly will let you store up to 4 hours, 20 minutes of 1920 x 1080 video or 8 hours, 40 minutes of 1440 x 1080 video on it. There’s also a SDHC card slot for even more storage options when recording.

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The beta version of the SlingPlayer 2.0 software is now available for Windows users as a free download from Sling Media’s Web site. The software, which allows owners of the company’s Slingbox products to access their TV programming via any broadband-connected PC, includes several notable upgrades from the previous version:
Live video buffer: Whether or not your Slingbox is connected to a DVR, you now have the ability to pause, rewind, and fast-forward up to an hour’s worth of programming.

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Mozilla has asked internet users everywhere to get involved designing the next generation of browsers. So far it has three ideas on the table: a next generation browser dubbed Aurora, better ways to visualise bookmarks and browsing history and a new mobile version of Firefox. It has posted videos showing early versions of the Aurora browser, designed by Adaptive Path.

“Today we’re calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web,” said the organization.

“You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program. Everyone is welcome to participate.”

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LG Electronics will introduce today the first networked Blu-ray Disc player with the integrated ability to access and play back Netflix instant-streaming video content.

The LG model BD300 will be only the second set-top device compatible with the Netflix instant-streaming offering. The first was a dedicated $99 Roku player introduced earlier in the year. Microsoft’s Xbox 360 will also add the capability this fall.

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The size of Pakistan’s Information Technology & IT-enabled Services industry stands at two billion dollar annually with a 50 per cent growth rate. IT Exports stand at one billion dollar according to a Research Study commissioned by Pakistan Software Houses Association (PASHA)

This was stated by Jehan Ara, President PASHA, while talking to the Media during a one-day Career Expo for IT students and professionals organised by PASHA in a local hotel. However, she said that, Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) claimed a higher figure with 2.8 billion dollar industry size and 1.8 billion-dollar exports.

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Revision3, the Internet television network behind popular shows like Diggnation, experienced a serious network failure over Memorial Day weekend. CEO Jim Louderback revealed today that the outage was caused by a massive denial of service attack that he says was perpetrated by MediaDefender, a file-sharing mitigation firm that gets paid by Big Content to disrupt peer-to-peer networks.

A SYN flood aimed at Revision3’s BitTorrent tracker clogged the company’s tubes and brought down all of its web services. The traffic logs indicated that the network was getting slammed by over 8,000 packets every second. Revision3 tracked the source of the packets and discovered that the attack originated from MediaDefender, at which point Louderback confronted the company’s executives. ArtistDirect CEO Dimitri Villard and MediaDefender vice president Ben Grodsky admitted to Louderback that they had been exploiting the lax security configuration of Revision3’s BitTorrent tracker and using it to conduct decoying operations, but they disavowed knowledge of the denial of service attack and claimed that their servers were only pinging Revision3 once every three hours.

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Flamboyant Bollywood actor John Abraham was Friday roped in as brand ambassador for the UEFA European Football Championship 2008, to be held next month in Switzerland and Austria.

Announcing this, Managing Director of ESPN Software India R C Venkateish, unveiled a detailed promotional campaign ‘Bach Ke Kahan Jaoge’ for the tournament, which is to be kicked off on June 7.

“India today consumes more international soccers than ever before. We expect impressive ratings for UEFA Euro 2008 as it is one of the most prestigious and recognised sporting events in the world,” Venkateish said in New Delhi.

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