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Frustrated by long airport-security lines? Certain those screeners aren’t paying attention? Wondering why your grandma always gets frisked? The federal government wants to hear — or at least read — your gripes at the “Evolution of Security” blog the Transportation Security Administration introduced Wednesday. And it promises those complaints and suggestions won’t vanish into thin air.

The blog, at http://www.tsa.gov/blog, is getting a rather “blah” response from aviation analysts and passengers advocates who say it will do little to improve process or perception.

“This will just make it easier for them to receive complaints for them to ignore in the name of national security,” said David Stempler, president of the Air Travelers Association.

In the blog’s initial post, TSA Administrator Kip Hawley said the goal is to provide a forum for the agency to explain why travelers must go through certain steps at checkpoints since interaction at airports is often harried and halted, resulting in “feedback and venting … circulating among passengers with no real opportunity for us to learn from you or vice versa.”

“We will incorporate what we learn in this forum in our checkpoint process evolution,” Hawley wrote. “Our postings from the public will be reviewed to remove the destructive, but not touch the critical or cranky.”

Terry Trippler, a Minneapolis-based airline expert, applauded the idea but said TSA “was in the right church, just not the right pew yet.”

And that church could become anything but sacred. Trippler said he envisions the blog quickly degenerating into an online vacuum where a handful of habitual complainers force TSA officials to respond to them, while other self-appointed security “experts” pontificate on the best ways to improve the process.

Even worse, he said some travelers will avoid the blog for fear of retribution from the government.

The TSA already is fighting an uphill battle in the court…

It is the government’s idea of a really bad day: Washington’s Metro subway trains shut down. Seaport computers in New York go dark. Bloggers reveal locations of railcars with hazardous materials. Airport control towers are disrupted in Philadelphia and Chicago. Overseas, a mysterious liquid is found in the Tube, London’s subway.

And that was just for starters.

The fictitious international calamities were among dozens of detailed, mock disasters confronting officials in rapid succession in the U.S. government’s biggest-ever “Cyber Storm” war game, according to hundreds of pages of heavily censored files obtained by The Associated Press. The Homeland Security Department ran the exercise to test the America’s hacker defenses, with help from the State, Defense and Justice departments, the CIA, the National Security Agency and others.

The laundry list of fictional catastrophes, which include hundreds of people on “No Fly” lists arriving suddenly at U.S. airport ticket counters, is significant because it suggests what kind of real-world trouble keeps people in the White House awake at night.

Imagined villains include hackers, bloggers, even reporters. After mock electronic attacks overwhelmed computers at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, an unspecified “major news network” airing reports about the attackers refused to reveal its sources to the government. Other simulated reporters were duped into spreading “believable but misleading” information that worsened fallout by confusing the public and financial markets, according to the government’s files.

The $3 million, the invitation-only war game simulated what the United States described as plausible attacks over five days in February 2006 against the technology industry, transportation lines and energy utilities by anti-globalization hackers. The government is organizing another multimillion-dollar wargame, Cyber Storm 2, to take place in early March.

“They point out where your expectations of your capabilities may be overstated,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the AP. “They may…

On Wednesday, Garmin International unveiled the nuvifone, a slim, all-touch-screen device that combines a 3.5G phone, a Web browser and a personal navigator with an appearance similar to Apple’s iPhone.

“The nuvifone is an all-in-one device offering unmatched integration of utility and function in a single mobile device,” said Cliff Pemble, Garmin’s president and COO. “This is the breakthrough product that cell-phone and GPS users around the world have been longing for — a single device that does it all.”

Personal-Navigation Features

When powered on, the 3.5-inch screen displays three primary icons — Call, Search and View Map. Users initiate a call by tapping the Call button and selecting a name from the contact list or using the on-screen keypad.

When the nuvifone is docked onto its vehicle mount, it automatically turns on the GPS, activates the navigation menu, and enables hands-free calling so the user can begin routing to a destination.

The nuvifone’s personal-navigation features include preloaded maps of North America, Eastern and Western Europe, or both, and allows drivers to find a specific street address, an establishment’s name or search for a destination by category using the nuvifone’s built-in database with millions of points of interest.

Turn-by-turn, voice-prompted directions guide the user to a destination. If the user misses a turn along the route, nuvifone automatically recalculates a route and gets the user back on track, speaking the names of streets along the way.

The nuvifone includes Google local search capability. Nuvifone users can search for locations like “coffee shops” and Google will sort the results based on the user’s current location and relevance. The nuvifone also provides e-mail along with text and instant messaging.

Where Am I?

A “Where am I?” feature lets users touch the screen at any time to display the exact latitude and longitude coordinates, the nearest address and intersection, and…

One of Big Media’s most controversial executives is back after a
period of quasi-forced retirement.

Stephen Chao was fired from a top position at News Corp. after,
in separate incidents, he hired a male stripper to disrobe at a
company meeting and nearly drowned Rupert Murdoch’s dog at a party.

Now he is forming a Web video company that he hopes to build into
an educational alternative to YouTube.

The site, WonderHowTo.com, aggregates how-to videos, from the
mundane, (like “how to tie a tie” and “how to market your lawn-care
business in the winter”) to the strange (”how to do Criss Angel’s
vanishing toothpick trick”) and the off-color (”how to train your
cat to use the toilet”) and beyond.

Chao says the business melds his two primary interests: a
fascination with the bizarre — he worked as a National Enquirer
reporter after graduating from Harvard — and the media frontier.

“I’m a video freak and I love turning over rocks and finding
stuff,” he said by telephone in advance of a formal announcement
Wednesday. “What I started to notice is that there is a lot of how-
to information out there that is fabulous but kind of hard to find.
We set out to make it easy.”

Chao’s resume includes his high-profile stint at the News Corp.,
where he helped create “America’s Most Wanted” and “Cops” for Fox,
as well as time at media companies run by Barry Diller. But Chao,
52, is perhaps best known for one of corporate America’s most
spectacular flame-outs.

In 1992, Murdoch fired Chao, considered a gifted but quirky
executive, after Chao engaged a man to remove all of his clothes
during a speech being delivered at a company management retreat.

The purpose was to drive home a point about decency, but Murdoch,
seated in the audience next to Dick Cheney, then the U.S. secretary
of defense, was not amused.

Now, after spending the better part of the last decade doing
consulting work and surfing near…

Sit down, plug yourself in, look at the screen. The virtual
doctor will see you now.

The future face of healthcare was unveiled yesterday, a virtual-
reality doctor’s office in a box — a dramatic breakthrough in
telemedicine, currently being trialled in a Scottish hospital, which
is set to revolutionize the delivery of healthcare.

Within the next few years the diagnostic booth could be fully
functioning and serving Scotland’s remotest communities,
transforming the way that patients in the country’s most isolated
areas can be assessed by both doctors and specialist consultants
without ever seeing each other face to face.

Using the latest advances in computer and medical technology,
doctors will be able to examine and diagnose the conditions of
patients living hundreds of miles away — monitoring a patient’s
heartbeat, their temperature, blood pressure, and carrying out a
number of detailed medical examinations without having to leave
their surgeries.

And eventually it is hoped that the virtual-reality surgeries
could be housed in dedicated booths available for use by the public
in community hospitals, community centers, and even supermarkets -
improving the triage assessments currently being made by the out-of-
hours NHS 24 service.

The system, known as “Health Presence”, has been developed by the
leading American technology company Cisco and is being assessed in a
series of world-first patient trials at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary in
partnership with the Scottish Center for Telehealth and NHS
Scotland.

Currently the system is being tested in a small room within the
accident and emergency center at the Royal Infirmary with the
“virtual-reality” doctor in a separate room only a few yards away.

The first fully fitted booth is expected to go on trial at a more
remote location later this year — probably within a dedicated
medical facility in Aberdeen — but eventually it is hoped that
hundreds of virtual-reality GP pods could be used to cover
the country .

Mr James Ferguson, an emergency consultant and a leading
specialist in telehealth,…

Gateway has two new quad-core computers — and one of them features a dual HD/Blu-ray optical drive and a terabyte drive.

The GM5664 and GT5662 will bring AMD’s Phenom processor, as well as DirectX 10 Technology, to the company’s GM and GT series. Just as the high-definition DVD format war may be winding down, the GM5664 offers what the company calls a Hybrid-SuperMulti drive so users can enjoy either Blu-ray or high-definition (HD) DVDs. It also can write any kind of DVD or CD.

Entertainment Hubs

Glenn Jystad, Gateway’s senior manager for consumer desktops, said the new quad-core machines marry “high-performance with affordability.” The new models are designed as entertainment hubs for watching live TV and offer heightened realism for video games. Both machines feature the ATI Radeon HD 2400XT graphics card with HDMI high-definition output, and both ship with the Windows Vista Home Premium operating system.

The GM5664 is being touted by Gateway as an entertainment powerhouse for extreme gaming, digital photo and video editing, watching TV or movies, and storing media assets. Sporting an AMD Phenom 9600 Processor at 2.3 GHz, 3GB of memory and a 2MB L3 cache, it also contains an integrated TV tuner with remote control and HD capability. It can act as a TV or digital video recorder with viewing, pausing and recording.

A standard one-terabyte hard drive gives even the biggest collector a lot of space to fill up, and a SmartCopy button enables easy photo filing and transfers.

Commonplace Terabyte Drives?

The GT5662 isn’t exactly a slouch, either. It has an AMD Phenom 9500 at 2.2 GHz, 3GB of memory a 2 MB L3 cache and a half-terabyte SATA II hard drive running at 7200 RPM. Both Phenom processors are part of the AMD LIVE series designed for entertainment.

With the GT5662 retailing at about $750 and the…

Gateway has two new quad-core computers — and one of them features a dual HD/Blu-ray optical drive and a terabyte drive.

The GM5664 and GT5662 will bring AMD’s Phenom processor, as well as DirectX 10 Technology, to the company’s GM and GT series. Just as the high-definition DVD format war may be winding down, the GM5664 offers what the company calls a Hybrid-SuperMulti drive so users can enjoy either Blu-ray or high-definition (HD) DVDs. It also can write any kind of DVD or CD.

Entertainment Hubs

Glenn Jystad, Gateway’s senior manager for consumer desktops, said the new quad-core machines marry “high-performance with affordability.” The new models are designed as entertainment hubs for watching live TV and offer heightened realism for video games. Both machines feature the ATI Radeon HD 2400XT graphics card with HDMI high-definition output, and both ship with the Windows Vista Home Premium operating system.

The GM5664 is being touted by Gateway as an entertainment powerhouse for extreme gaming, digital photo and video editing, watching TV or movies, and storing media assets. Sporting an AMD Phenom 9600 Processor at 2.3 GHz, 3GB of memory and a 2MB L3 cache, it also contains an integrated TV tuner with remote control and HD capability. It can act as a TV or digital video recorder with viewing, pausing and recording.

A standard one-terabyte hard drive gives even the biggest collector a lot of space to fill up, and a SmartCopy button enables easy photo filing and transfers.

Commonplace Terabyte Drives?

The GT5662 isn’t exactly a slouch, either. It has an AMD Phenom 9500 at 2.2 GHz, 3GB of memory a 2 MB L3 cache and a half-terabyte SATA II hard drive running at 7200 RPM. Both Phenom processors are part of the AMD LIVE series designed for entertainment.

With the GT5662 retailing at about $750 and the…

Jim Ambras tried to keep his expectations reasonable. Ambras, a veteran of Web companies including search engine AltaVista, was preparing to unveil a company called NotchUp at the DEMO conference in Palm Desert, Calif. His goal was to have 1,000 people signed up in time for his Jan. 29 presentation at the annual showcase for new products and services. NotchUp takes a novel approach to online job search, matching potential employees who are willing to be paid for a job interview with companies willing to pay.

A week before taking the DEMO stage, NotchUp had attracted a meager 200 users. Pressure to add to those ranks was high in the runup to DEMO, the storied launchpad of such tech legends as the original PalmPilot and Salesforce.com. It didn’t help that the company was only just emerging from so-called stealth mode, the phase when startups try to stay off the radar screen of potential copycats. The site is password protected, and the only way to join NotchUp was to get invited by a member. “Our goal was obviously too high,” Ambras says.

So NotchUp came up with a quick, seemingly easy, way to boost its membership: enabling users to instantly recruit contacts from business social network LinkedIn. The membership drive underscores the benefits and pitfalls of doing business in an online arena where, with a few mouse clicks, a Web surfer can instantly share information, some of it unwanted, with scores of fellow Netizens. Fallout from the move has generated media buzz and lured investors’ interest — but it could also tarnish the company’s reputation and incite a row with LinkedIn.

The Snowball Effect

NotchUp had its membership “Aha” moment after a former colleague of Ambras’ joined, then proceeded to invite 100 of his own friends. The new member complained at having to type in…

On Thursday, Amazon.com said it inked a deal to acquire Audible, the leading online digital audio bookstore.

Amazon.com will purchase all of Audible’s outstanding shares for $11.50 per share and assume Audible.com’s outstanding stock-based awards. That values the deal at $300 million.

“Audible.com offers the best customer experience, the widest content selection and the broadest device compatibility in the industry,” said Steve Kessel, Amazon.com’s senior vice president for worldwide digital media. “Working together, we can introduce more innovations and bring this format to an even wider audience.”

Audible’s Audio Assets

Audible has made a name for itself in the digital world by peddling digital audio editions of books, newspapers and magazines, television and radio programs and original programming. Its Web site, Audible.com offers more than 80,000 programs, including audiobooks from well-known authors such as Stephen King, Thomas Friedman and Jane Austen.

The company also offers spoken-word audio content from sources including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Fresh Air and Charlie Rose. Audible is a major provider of spoken-word audio products for Apple’s iTunes Store. Content from Audible is downloaded and played on personal computers, CDs or AudibleReady computer-based and wireless mobile devices.

“Audible has done a good job. Audible has got some good licenses. The company is trusted by the publishers to avoid situations that would result in piracy of the content,” said Phil Leigh, a senior analyst at Inside Digital Media. “But the problem is Audible is a small part of what people have on their iPods. Most people really want music.”

The Kindle Factor

Amazon.com’s recently introduced Kindle, a wireless portable reader that provides instant wireless downloads of more than 90,000 books, blogs, magazines and newspapers to a high-resolution electronic display, could be the difference maker for Audible.

“Amazon already sells Audible content, but now Amazon can be more aggressive about integrating the…

On Thursday, Amazon.com said it inked a deal to acquire Audible, the leading online digital audio bookstore.

Amazon.com will purchase all of Audible’s outstanding shares for $11.50 per share and assume Audible.com’s outstanding stock-based awards. That values the deal at $300 million.

“Audible.com offers the best customer experience, the widest content selection and the broadest device compatibility in the industry,” said Steve Kessel, Amazon.com’s senior vice president for worldwide digital media. “Working together, we can introduce more innovations and bring this format to an even wider audience.”

Audible’s Audio Assets

Audible has made a name for itself in the digital world by peddling digital audio editions of books, newspapers and magazines, television and radio programs and original programming. Its Web site, Audible.com offers more than 80,000 programs, including audiobooks from well-known authors such as Stephen King, Thomas Friedman and Jane Austen.

The company also offers spoken-word audio content from sources including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Fresh Air and Charlie Rose. Audible is a major provider of spoken-word audio products for Apple’s iTunes Store. Content from Audible is downloaded and played on personal computers, CDs or AudibleReady computer-based and wireless mobile devices.

“Audible has done a good job. Audible has got some good licenses. The company is trusted by the publishers to avoid situations that would result in piracy of the content,” said Phil Leigh, a senior analyst at Inside Digital Media. “But the problem is Audible is a small part of what people have on their iPods. Most people really want music.”

The Kindle Factor

Amazon.com’s recently introduced Kindle, a wireless portable reader that provides instant wireless downloads of more than 90,000 books, blogs, magazines and newspapers to a high-resolution electronic display, could be the difference maker for Audible.

“Amazon already sells Audible content, but now Amazon can be more aggressive about integrating the…

Fallout spread Thursday from a cut in two undersea Internet cables off Egypt’s coast, with India waking up to half of its bandwidth disrupted and widespread outages still hampering a wide swathe of the Mideast.

Officials said it could take a week or more to fix the cables, in part because of bad weather. Officials in several countries were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables through Asia.

In all, users in India, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain were affected. Israel was unaffected by the outages because its Internet traffic is connected to Europe through a different undersea cable, and Lebanon and Iraq were also operating normally.

The biggest impact to the rest of the world could come from the outages across India — where many U.S. companies outsource back-office operations including customer service call centers.

The outage also raised questions about the system’s vulnerability. A Gulf analyst called it a “wake-up call” while an analyst in London cautioned that no one, including the West, was immune to such disruptions.

They could have a “massive impact on businesses,” said Alex Burmaster, from Nielsen Online in London, and ordinary people “probably couldn’t imagine” a life without the Internet.

Large-scale disruptions are rare but not unknown. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in December 2006. That repair operation also was hampered by bad weather.

So far, most governments in the region appeared to be operating normally, apparently because they had switched to backup satellite systems. However, the outages had caused slowdown in traffic on Dubai’s stock exchange Wednesday.

In India, major outsourcing firms, such as Infosys and Wipro, and U.S. companies with significant back-office and research and development operations in India, such as IBM and Intel, said…

Yahoo said it will cut 1,000 jobs in February as it announced profits fell 23 percent in its fiscal fourth quarter.

It said Tuesday that net income for the quarter ended Dec. 31 fell to $206 million, or 15 cents a share, from $269 million, or 19 cents a share, for the year-ago period. Stock-based compensation and other expenses contributed to the decline. Operating income for the quarter fell 38 percent to $191 million from $308 million a year ago.

Revenues climbed 8 percent to $1.8 billion from $1.7 billion a year ago. Marketing services, which includes online advertising revenue, climbed 7 percent to $1.6 billion from $1.5 billion. And revenue from Web sites owned by Yahoo grew 23 percent as sales on affiliate sites rose 13 percent.

Yang Points to Future

Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang said this is a pivotal time for the business, and the company has an opportunity to make investments that will help it capture a significant piece of the growing ad market and create long-term value for its shareholders.

“We are executing aggressively against Yahoo’s three big strategic priorities and that hard work is starting to bear fruit, as evidenced by the 20 percent year-over-year growth in O&O marketing services we achieved in the fourth quarter,” Yang said. “While we will continue to face headwinds this year, we believe that the moves we are making will help us exit 2008 stronger and more competitive and return to higher levels of operating cash flow growth in 2009.”

Yahoo President Sue Drucker said the steps Yahoo has taken over the the past year represent fundamental changes to virtually every aspect of Yahoo’s business. She expressed confidence that they will drive Yahoo’s growth.

“Even as we increase investment in key areas of our business, we’re making tough but necessary decisions to streamline…

While a University of Maryland study reports eBay saved buyers $19 billion in 2007, the online auctioneer’s PowerSellers want more savings.

EBay announced this week it would lower fees for listing items, raise minimum selling standards and offer its best sellers incentives and discounts.

On the heels of eBay CEO Meg Whitman’s retirement announcement, John Donahoe, president and CEO-elect, announced the changes during his keynote address at the company’s third annual eCommerce Forum.

“Consumers have more choices than ever, and they expect more when they shop online today,” Donahoe said. “We’re serious about making eBay easier and safer to shop.”

Improving the Seller Experience

EBay is making changes in three major seller areas: fee structure, seller incentives and standards, and feedback. The fee changes, which vary by country, aim to encourage sellers to list more items and use more pictures. Starting Feb. 20 in the U.S., eBay is reducing its fees to list items by 25 to 50 percent.

EBay is balancing that change by increasing the fees it charges when an item is sold. Sellers prefer this structure, eBay said, because it lowers their risk if an item doesn’t sell. Donahoe said, “Put simply, we will make more of our money when sellers are successful.”

The company is also eliminating fees in the U.S. for its Gallery option, which it expects will spur sellers to include more photos of the item for sale.

Raising the PowerSeller Bar

Coupled with the fee changes, eBay is shifting the way it works with sellers. The company said it is making its minimum standards more stringent for sellers, primarily to discourage behavior that causes buyer dissatisfaction, such as excessive shipping fees or not describing items accurately.

To this end, eBay will begin decreasing search exposure for the listings of sellers who have high rates of customer dissatisfaction. The company also…

My problem with touch screens is they’re not like buttons. They are, of course, much better looking than buttons, especially on cramped devices such as cell phones, but when I’m typing, be it on a computer keyboard or a handheld, I like the sensation of pressing something solid. Without that tactile feedback, I just don’t feel my device and I are communicating.

LG Electronics seems to understand. The designers behind LG’s Voyager VX10000 clearly took pains to make this touch-screen phone not only beautiful, but delightfully user-friendly. At $300 with a two-year Verizon contract, the Voyager is fairly pricey compared with most cell phones. But it’s also more wallet-friendly than many BlackBerrys, Treos, and iPhones — devices with higher-end features the Voyager also offers.

When you press Voyager’s external touch screen, which measures nearly 3 in. diagonally, it vibrates slightly beneath your finger. This reaction from LG’s VibeTouch technology lets you know the device has registered your tap in the same way you’ve been conditioned to expect from any keyboard or keypad — by feel. It’s a little thing. But for high-end phones, it’s the little things that matter.

It’s Simpler To Use the Keys

Voyager has plenty of features that make it easy for push-button people to join the minimalist, mobile future. In particular, this device opens like a clam to reveal a pearl of a keyboard. This full QWERTY board’s keys are big and not jammed together. There’s also a mini-mouse for scrolling and clicking on the large inner screen’s commands and links.

The keyboard is particularly important in this device because the touch screen has some frustrating failings. For starters, it doesn’t share the multi-touch capability of Apple’s iPhone, which lets you swipe a finger across the screen to see the other side of a Web page or the lower half of…

Two new computer worms are making their way through cyberspace,
using Valentine’s Day messages to infiltrate the systems of
unwitting users. The self-replicating worms, dubbed Nuwar.OL and
Valentin.E, send copies of themselves to other computers and
drastically slow operating systems.

“Year after year, we see the appearance of several malware
strains that use Valentine’s Day as bait to attract users,” said
Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs Security, based in
Glendale. “This indicates that cyber-crooks are still reaping the
benefits of this technique and many people still fall into the
trap.”

Nuwar.OL reaches computers by e-mail with subjects like “I Love
You Soo Much” or “Inside My Heart,” according to PandaLabs. The text
of the e-mail includes a link to a Web site that downloads the
malicious software.

Valentin.E is similar, with subject lines like “Searching for
True Love” and an attached file called “friends4u.”

If the targeted user opens the file, a copy of the worm will be
downloaded. The malicious code installs on the computer as a file
with the .scr extension. If the user runs it, Valentin.E shows a new
desktop background to trick the user, while it makes several copies
of itself on the computer. Finally, the worm sends out e-mails with
copies of itself from the infected computer to spread and infect
more users.

Corrons warned users not to open e-mails from unknown sources or
click to links included in e-mail messages, even from reliable
sources. Instead, type them in the address bar.

PandaLabs Security offers several free tools for scanning
computers for malware. You can use them from www.infectedornot.com.