All systems go for Beijing Olympics

As the Beijing Games kick off today, the 4 000-strong IT team will be working to communicate competition results to the rest of the world within 0.3 seconds, says Computing.co.uk.

Atos Origin, worldwide IT partner of the Olympic Games, has announced that the team is now fully operational, following four years of design, building and testing in Beijing.

All systems across the 75 Olympic venues will be monitored 24/7 from the Technology Operations Centre.

Three rogue journalists were ejected from the Black Hat security conference after being accused of connecting monitoring tools to the press room computer network and sniffing reporters' passwords, reports The Register.

The reporters worked for French-based Global Security Magazine, a Black Hat media sponsor. According to screenshots posted here, the men intercepted passwords of journalists working for CNET News and eWeek, although CNET News says the username and password displayed were inaccurate.

The wireless networks at Black Hat, and Defcon, its sister conference, are widely considered hostile. It's expected that attendees will come armed with new exploits and test them on fellow participants.

Insights from artificial life could soon help run BT's networks, says The BBC. The telecommunications firm wants to give its networks life-like abilities so they can self-regulate, recover from injury and respond to changing demands.

BT is keen to use these techniques to make wireless networks more reliable and adaptable, and help distribute Net-based services.

It unveiled its research at the Artificial Life XI conference, in Winchester, this week.

Google said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that its $1 billion investment for a 5% stake in Time Warner's Web unit "may be impaired" and that it may have to take a charge in the future, reports CNet.

The December 2005 deal secured a renewal of Google's search advertising deal with AOL, preventing its largest ad partner from defecting to Microsoft. The deal gave AOL a valuation of $20 billion at the time.

Google didn't estimate in its filing what AOL might be worth today, but observers have suggested a figure closer to $10 billion.