Obama says Senate near health care passage

President Barack Obama, center, makes a statement on health care reform after meeting with Senators, Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2009, at the White House in Washington, From left are, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.; Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.; the president; and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nev.

US, Russia begin talks on cyberspace security

The United States, Russia and the UN arms control committee are holding talks about strengthening Internet security, reining in the growing threat of cyber warfare and limiting the military use of cyberspace. The effort is a virtual version of the ongoing negotiations of nuclear arms talks between the two nations.

The United States has begun talks with Russia and a U.N. arms control committee about strengthening Internet security and limiting the military use of cyberspace, The New York Times reported.

The effort was a virtual version of the nuclear arms talks being held between the two nations in Geneva – but rather than focusing on bombs and missiles, the discussions are aimed at curbing the increasing level of online attacks.

The Kremlin said President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev discussed ongoing negotiations for a successor to an expired nuclear weapons treaty Saturday, adding that the two sides are making "substantial progress" on the matter.

The United States has begun talks with Russia and a U.N. arms control committee about strengthening Internet security and limiting the military use of cyberspace, The New York Times reported.

The effort was a virtual version of the nuclear arms talks being held between the two nations in Geneva – but rather than focusing on bombs and missiles, the discussions are aimed at curbing the increasing level of online attacks.

The Kremlin said President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev discussed ongoing negotiations for a successor to an expired nuclear weapons treaty Saturday, adding that the two sides are making "substantial progress" on the matter.

Microsoft to offer downloadable Windows 7 Touch Pack

It would seem that Redmond has plans to offer a downloadable copy of the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7. First introduced in May, the Windows 7 Touch Pack includes several applications and games that are compatible with touch-enabled displays.

It was initially only intended to be packaged with OEM systems, but the official page suggests that has now changed: "The Touch Pack comes preinstalled on some multitouch PCs running Windows 7, and will soon be available for download." For further confirmation, Neowin received word from a Microsoft spokesperson who said, "Microsoft is planning to make it available via download soon but has not confirmed/committed to a timeline."

The software bundle features programs like Microsoft Surface Globe, a multi-touch 3D globe with information about regions, 3D cities and more. Other applications include Microsoft Surface Collage, Microsoft Surface Lagoon, Microsoft Blackboard, Microsoft Rebound, and Microsoft Garden Pond. Neowin has detailed the Windows 7 Touch Pack if you're interested.

It's also worth noting that the Touch Pack can be downloaded from countless unofficial sources if you don't want to wait for Microsoft.

Obama and Nobel

President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo Thursday, but his speech mentioned little about peace and focused more on the fact that he is a war-time President, and needs to defend his nation.

"Perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of a nation in the midst of two wars. One of these wars is winding down," Obama told an audience of approximately 900 people gathered at Oslo City Hall, the traditional location for the Nobel Ceremony.

"The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by forty three other countries -- including Norway -- in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks," Obama continued to the audience who warmly applauded the President but hardly gave him the rock-star appreciation he has become used to seeing in his overseas travel.

The theme of Afghanistan already colored the trip of Obama, having just made clear his intentions to send 30,000 troops to that country, and the President could not escape skepticism that his call for surge troops sent to Afghanistan should be withdrawn by July 2011.

Behind the scenes at the sceptics' conference

The Copenhagen Climate Challenge was signposted by a hand-written piece of paper and a small picture of a happy-looking person in a sun hat declaring: “Global warming: Hurrah!”

But do not be fooled by the amateurish approach, these are serious people with a very important message: “Global warming is not man made and in fact may not be happening at all.”

Virgin Galactic Unveils First Tourist Spaceship

Aspiring space tourists got a first look at their future ride late Monday, when Virgin Galactic unveiled the first of its long-awaited SpaceShipTwo planes (pictured with wings folded upward, suspended from the middle of its twin-fuselage launch vehicle).

After years of teases, the world's only commercial spacecraft rolled out onto the tarmac at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. There, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson christened the Virgin Galactic craft with the customary smashing of champagne bottles.

Virgin Galactic leader Sir Richard Branson's daughter, Holly, announced the first SpaceShipTwo plane's name: V.S.S. Enterprise, short for Virgin Space Ship Enterprise, said Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn.

Virgin Galactic chose "Enterprise" for its long tradition in maritime and aviation history, he said.

"It was the name of the first space shuttle, and it has dominated science fiction as a kind of watchword for human spaceflight in the future," Whitehorn said.

Google Strives to Make Public DNS Secure

In an effort to enhance the Web experience and speed things up for users, Google is getting into the DNS business. DNS has privacy and security implications, though, that Google has to take into consideration in providing this service.

Privacy is a concern with virtually everything Google touches. The very nature of many of Google's core offerings is based on cataloging and indexing every possible detail about everything. To provide the best search results, it has to create the most comprehensive site index. To provide the most detailed maps, it has to painstakingly catalog every street in the world. Sometimes the goal of providing information oversteps the privacy boundary.

The privacy concern with Google Public DNS though is more about the Big Brother status that Google achieves by acting as the DNS resolver to the world. With recent purchases like AdMob and Teracent, Google is aggressively expanding its advertising footprint. The ability to monitor and capture detailed Web data from the DNS traffic could be a goldmine for Google.

David Ulevitch, founder of OpenDNS, challenges Google's altruism in his blog post: "Google claims that this service is better because it has no ads or redirection. But you have to remember they are also the largest advertising and redirection company on the Internet. To think that Google's DNS service is for the benefit of the Internet would be naive."

Privacy issues aside, DNS also comes with some inherent security concerns. The Google Code Blog acknowledged the security implications of DNS in the post announcing Google Public DNS. "DNS is vulnerable to spoofing attacks that can poison the cache of a nameserver and can route all its users to a malicious website."

There have been a number of issues discovered with DNS and attacks that exploit weaknesses in DNS in recent years. It was designed in a Utopian era before Internet or Web security were issues. DNSSEC has been developed as a next-generation, more secure implementation of DNS, but it is not yet part of the mainstream.

Google is aware of the security flaws with DNS though and has taken steps to protect against them. "Until new protocols like DNSSEC get widely adopted, resolvers need to take additional measures to keep their caches secure. Google Public DNS makes it more difficult for attackers to spoof valid responses by randomizing the case of query names and including additional data in its DNS messages."

Intel hopes 48-core chip will solve new challenges

The 1.3-billion transistor processor, called Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC) is successor generation to the 80-core "Polaris" processor that Intel's Tera-scale research project produced in 2007. Unlike that precursor, though, the second-generation model is able to run the standard software of Intel's x86 chips such as its Pentium and Core models.

The cores themselves aren't terribly powerful--more like lower-end Atom processors than Intel's flagship Nehalem models, Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner said at a press event here. But collectively they pack a lot of power, he said, and Intel has ambitious goals in mind for the overall project.

"The machine will be capable of understanding the world around them much as humans do," Rattner said. "They will see and hear and probably speak and do a number of other things that resemble human-like capabilities, and will demand as a result very (powerful) computing capability."

EA CEO Claims Digital Market Will Surpass Consoles Next Year

if you're looking for a hint as to where EA thinks the global videogame market is headed, look no further than their recent acquisition of Facebook all-stars Playfish. The company is convinced that not only will their investments in the digital market pay off in 2010, but that online games will soon surpass the packaged goods side of the industry.

Speaking with Reuters, EA CEO John Riccitiello talked up the digital games business:

"When people think of games, they traditionally think, in the U.S., of what sells on the Xbox, the PlayStation, and the Wii, and they forget about all these online services that are out there subscription, microtransactions, games they find on Facebook, or if they go to Pogo, or if they play Warhammer Online, or they download games, or they get them by way of their mobile phone or their iPhone. And if you add all that stuff up, it's almost half the industry now. It's about 40 to 45 percent. Next year it's likely to be the larger share of the total industry and it'll be bigger than the console games all put together."

Astronaut Thirsk back on Earth

Record-breaking Canadian astronaut Bob Thirsk has returned to Earth after spending six months aboard the International Space Station. A Russian spacecraft carrying Thirsk and two other astronauts landed in Kazakhstan, in central Asia, after deploying parachutes to slow its descent.

The Soyuz module landed upright about 80 kilometres northeast of the town of Arkalyk in northern Kazakhstan at 10:15 a.m. Moscow time or 2:15 a.m. ET.

Braving icy weather, Russian recovery crews extracted cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, Thirsk, and finally Belgian space station commander Frank De Winne from the module.

"The landing was very soft; we were lucky not to have any wind," Romanenko said after leaving the capsule. "Everything went quite nicely; there were no problems whatsoever."

As is the custom with space travellers returning on Soyuz vehicles, all three were carried on stretchers to a nearby all-terrain vehicle. The cold weather grounded the helicopters normally used to recover landing astronauts. This was the first December landing of a Soyuz capsule since 1990.

The three astronauts were driven to Arkalyk and were expected to be flown to Star City in Moscow later Tuesday.