Some People Benefited From the Skype Outage
Alexa stats up to August 17 show a massive rise in traffic to Skype competitor Gizmo Project and a more modest rise for Grand Central at the peak of this weeks 36 hour Skype outage. The SIPphone owned Gizmo Project offers a nearly identical package to Skype, but with added features including built in recording, and cross platform compatibility. Gizmo’s traffic tripled in the space of three days and rose to a rank of 8,561 in Alexa from a 3 month average of 19,102. The Google owned Grand Central offers a one number everywhere telephone service. Whilst the service doesn’t compete with Skype in the softphone market, the service does provide functionality that competes with Skype services such as Skype In. According to Alexa, Grand Central hit a 4 week high on Friday with a 33% increase in rank over its 3 month average.

American Airlines Sues Google For Tying Ads to Trademarks
AMR Corp.'s American Airlines is suing Google Inc. over the Internet company's sale of keyword ads for rivals triggered by American's own trademarks. American filed a lawsuit Thursday in U.S. District Court in Fort Worth seeking unspecified damages. Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A Google visitor who enters certain words or phrases that American trademarked, such as Aadvantage, will get links to American's Web site but also its rivals under "sponsored links," which are targeted ads that appear alongside the regular search results. Google makes most of its money from such keyword ads. The results could confuse consumers and divert customers away from American's own site. The unit of Fort Worth-based AMR tried to negotiate a settlement with Google before going to court. Similar lawsuits against Google are fairly common, although they tend to involve smaller companies.

Internet set to return on planes
After Internet on planes disappeared during the past year, much has been done to return the service to world of flying. Since businessmen and other travellers cannot use cellphones on planes, travelling turned from a rather painful experience to a scorching one, with commuters often having to endure several hours extra thanks to all the delays. With delays being a significant pain in the posterior, plenty of commuters were turning to alternate modes of transport. However, things seem to be moving into the right direction. We have already reported that Panasonic.Aero, the US-based division of Matsushita Corporation, is working hard on developing internet access inside planes that would not eat space and fuel that the old Connexion was quaffing. Unlike the pricey Connexion service from Boeing, AA plans to charge $10 per flight which is less than half of what the Internet service used to be. Testing is set for early 2008, with a swift introduction as soon as tests are complete. American Airlines will be joined by Singapore and a plethora of other airlines which want to return Internet to the skies. So there's hope just yet.

AT&T kills GPS in Blackberry
Insiders at AT&T claim that the outfit has killed off the GPS functionality in its upcoming BlackBerry 8820 to prop up its Iphone sales. AT&T wants to make sure that the only functioning 3rd party software which can run on the hardware will be TeleNav. An AT&T informent told, that the carrier didn’t want to launch a cheaper device that would be superior to the more expensive Iphone. AT&T executives were a little nervous when they realised that they would be selling a cheaper GPS/Wi-Fi’d device with push email and no touch screen. The new Blackberry was being targeted at the Corporate market, one that Apple would dearly love to enter, but says it has no plans to do so at the moment. One would think that RIM would be suing someone into a coma for anti-trust activities. According to the rummor, RIM is incandescent with rage over the move but AT&T told them that it would have to live with it or the telco will not buy any more Blackberries. Since AT&T is RIMS biggest customer the company backed down.

Girls best boys in tech A-Levels
Female students are outperforming their male counterparts in technology subjects, according to the A-Level results released last week. When it comes to ICT, 12.9% of girls scored a grade A in the subject, compared with 7.5% of boys, while 17.7% of girls achieved the top grade in the computing A-Level, against 15.4% of boys. But, despite their successes, far fewer girls are studying technology subjects. The computing A-Level was sat by just 575 girls, compared with 5,035 boys. The ratio for ICT was a little less extreme: 4,986 girls to 8,374 boys. The British Computer Society believes there is a crisis in technology education. It points to falling total student numbers: 600 fewer students studying computing at A-Level and 1,000 fewer students studying ICT compared with 2006. Industry association Intellect accepts there is an issue with education but says that to focus purely on technology disciplines is to miss the point.

Windows has 'fewer flaws' than Linux
Data collected by a Microsoft security researcher suggests that the company had to patch far fewer software vulnerabilities than competing vendors in 2007. A vulnerability report claimz that Windows XP, Vista and Server operating systems required patches for some 20-45 vulnerabilities each. During the same period, vendors such as Red Hat, Apple and Novell have had to patch hundreds of vulnerabilities, according to Microsoft. The latest report does not give exact figures, only graphs, but the data appears to be accurate. A tally of this year's security bulletins by vnunet.com found 43 flaws in Windows XP that had been patched. In contrast, Apple's last security update alone patched 45 flaws in OS X. Applications not installed by default, such as Microsoft Office, were not counted. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Workstation and Ubuntu Linux topped the list with roughly 170 and 150 vulnerabilities patched r espectively. Red Hat's Enterprise Linux Desktop 5 received around 130 vulnerability fixes. Jones's enterprise figures painted a similar picture, showing fewer than 40 fixes for Windows Server 2003, while Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 Server had more than 100 vulnerabilities patched and Novell's SuSE Linux Enterprise server had roughly 70. The study only takes into account vulnerabilities patched by the vendor, and does not record such things as current zero-day flaws. The report also does not mention vulnerabilities that were or are currently being actively exploited, an area where Microsoft continues to be far more prone than its competitors.

Now playing at the movies: Videogames
Audiences across the pond are testing what could be the next in-theater blockbuster: videogames played from the comfort of your stadium seat. Canadian company TimePlay Entertainment has turned the Odeon Huddersfield cinema in England into a high-tech bingo hall. For $8 per half-hour, audience members use 10-inch color touch-screens to play a single multiplayer game -- tug-of-war, bingo, trivia contest -- competing to win as much as $20,000. Questions and results appear on the 30 foot screen. Plans install the first TimePlay system in the United States by 2008. A TimePlay installation costs $75,000. (A similar system in Spain, CineGames, costs nearly $400,000 to install; it features high-end PCs and plays games like Electronic Arts's Battlefield 2142.) The system is expected to be deployed on more than 100 screens by the end of 2008 and is investing $9 million in software development. Already green-lit: big-screen games based on SpongeBobSquarePants and the game show Deal or No Deal. Still at the idea stage: a gladiator-style battle with 100 avatars on the big screen, each one controlled by a member of the audience.

Facebook costs Aussies billions
Bosses should be in a big old huff about workers spending all day on popular friend-blagging social networking website Facebook, according to a recent analysis by an internet security firm. SurfControl kept a close eye on internet-enabled workers down-undah in Aussie land and found that the millions who wile away the time chatting to their buddies on facebook could be costing employers a total of A$5 billion a year, reports Yahoo. Facebook, for the few of you not happily clicking away on it right this moment, lets users post photos and leave comments and all of that e-Friend stuff that can get so addictive. The findings were based on a typical Facebook user earning an average Aussie wage spending one hour a day online - he then figured out the price a company would be paying if just one person in every group were to spend an hour on Facebook instead of working. The figure's A$5 billion, he said. That's around $4 billion US dollar.

Scientist get their own Youtube
A "YouTube for Scientists" has been launched by the National Science Foundation, Public Library of Science and the San Diego Supercomputing Center. SciVee allows Scientists to upload their research papers, accompanied by a video where they describe the work in the form of a short lecture. According to the web site, SciVee hopes that it will make the more or less incomprehensible world of scientific reports easier to understand. Scientists using the site to make a presentation will make their own research papers a little more clearer to their peers and the great unwashed. Alternatively Scientists will just use it for lip-sync karaoke of them singing the periodic table, funny videos pictures of their pet cats after they swallowed helium, or "jokes" which they translated from the original ancient Egyptian. Those Scientists are such kidders.

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