Microsoft tempts new users with money

Microsoft raked in tens of billions of dollars selling software last year and is now giving away a sliver of that, $100 000 plus prizes, to entice people to try a new, free programme, says The Associated Press.

Office Live Workspace, a Web hub for document sharing, was first announced as a limited test late last year. Starting this week, anyone can sign up to store word processing documents, spreadsheets and other files in a Live Workspace of his or her own. Users can share access to the files with friends, who can use a Web browser to read them and make comments.

Microsoft has added a few bells and whistles since the early test was announced, but didn't budge on critics' key sticking point: Users can't actually create or edit Office documents using the service. To do that, people still need to buy Office.

A Swiss bank on Wednesday moved to withdraw a lawsuit that it had filed against a Web site that it claimed had displayed stolen documents revealing confidential information about the accounts of the bank's clients, reports The New York Times.

Lawyers involved in the case said the move by Bank Julius Baer most likely ends its battle against Wikileaks, a Web site that allows people to post documents anonymously "to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behaviour in their governments and corporations."

The bank last month obtained an order from US District Judge Jeffrey White, in San Francisco, that obstructed, but did not absolutely prevent, access to material posted on Wikileaks by turning off the domain name wikileaks.org.

Scientists have developed a computer model that predicts the brain patterns elicited by looking at different images, a possible first step on the path to mind reading, says Wired.

That's the promise of a decoding system unveiled this week in Nature by neuroscientists from the University of California, at Berkeley.

The scientists used a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, a real-time brain scanner, to record the mental activity of a person looking at thousands of random pictures: people, animals, landscapes, objects, the stuff of everyday visual life. With those recordings, the researchers built a computational model for predicting the mental patterns elicited by looking at any other photograph.

A recent report from the Urban Institute, a DC think tank, suggests that a recent spike in robberies can be explained by the recent ubiquity of iPods and other portable media devices, says Arstechnica.

The authors seek to explain a puzzling trend: after a decade of falling steadily, the rate of robberies rose strongly in 2005 and 2006, but other property crimes did not rise.

The study, by John Roman and Aaron Chalfin, notes that iPods have several characteristics that make them attractive targets. They not only have a significant cash value, but they have also become status symbols, encouraging young people to steal them and keep them for their own use.

Researchers are honing a system that could allow people to feel textures and shapes of 3-D designs created on computers, without awkward mechanical gear, reports Information Week.

The university announced Tuesday that it could soon be possible to feel objects created on computers through a touch-based, or haptic, interface, without using gloves, similar equipment, or force feedback. One lightweight moving part floats on magnetic fields and simulates various sensations people experience when they touch real objects.

"We believe this device provides the most realistic sense of touch of any haptic interface in the world today," Ralph Hollis, a research professor in Carnegie Mellon's robotics institute, said in a news announcement.