Internet poker giants indicted in U.S. crackdown

Several founders of the three largest Internet poker companies doing business in the U.S. have been arrested as part of an indictment that includes charges of bank fraud, money laundering, and other online gambling-related offenses, the U.S. Attorney's office said today.
The three offshore companies--PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker, and Absolute Poker--are accused of circumventing a 2006 U.S. law that prohibits financial institutions from handling transactions for online gambling sites. Prosecutors say they allegedly tricked U.S. banks and credit card issuers into processing billions of dollars in transactions that appeared to be legitimate sales on hundreds of fake online retail sites purportedly selling jewelry and golf balls.
One-third of the money allegedly went directly to the poker companies as revenue through a fee charged to players on each poker hand played, according to the indictment, which was unsealed today in U.S. District Court in New York.After U.S. banks and financial institutions detected fraudulent bank accounts and shut them down, the defendants allegedly paid a few small, financially troubled banks money as investments in return for processing the payments, according to the indictment. The deals allegedly included a $10 million investment in a private Utah bank that gave the poker companies more than a 30 percent ownership stake, prosecutors said.

Google denies Panda hit on rival

Google has defended recent changes to its search system that reduced the prominence of some popular websites. One of the worst hit by the "Panda" update was Ciao.co.uk, a Microsoft-owned company. Its web visibility fell by 94% according to analysis by Searchmetrics.
Google's head of search evaluation, Scott Huffman, said it was "almost absurd" to suggest that the results were rigged. Such updates are often done to weed out "content farms" - websites that copy material from other sites in order to get hits. Where a keyword search may previously have returned their site on Google's first page, afterwards it may be relegated to further down the rankings. Shopping and price comparison sites such as Ciao.co.uk sometimes suffer when Google algorithms change because they carry comments and reviews replicated elsewhere on the internet.

Laser Guns

The US navy have shot a laser gun from one of their ships for the first time recently. They used a high energy laser (HEL) to set fire to a boats engine rendering it disabled on the coast of California. The US navy have been experimenting with laser since the retro ages (1970s) and found that moist sea air reduced lasers power which was a major obstacle.
The original concept for these ship mounted laser was to exploded hostile missile whilst they were air born thus cause littlest damage possible.
This technology is restricted to military ships but merchant vessels are also interested in the tech. Other laser weapons being developed include a laser gun that can temporarily blind pirates to allow the attacked ship to escape.

Minority Report Ads a Reality?

Back when the Minority Report was first released in 2002, a lot of its contents set imagination racing. Back then it was just that, imagination.
In the film Tom Crusie's character walks through a shopping center when suddenly the seemingly normal advertising boards started to call him by name claiming he needed a Guiness to try to entice him to buy one. Adverts around the room did the same thing.
Whilst we are not yet in the age of minority report which was set in 2054 or something like that, we are close to encountering these personalised ads.
The report - commissioned by 3MGTG foresees the first step to be advertisements that adapt to our moods.
The tech has been dubbed 'Gladverts' by the report's authors.
They envision a world where emotion recognition software (ERS) can tell if you are happy or sad and then serve up an advert based on how you feel.
In Japan, technology company NEC has already developed a system which can work out a person's gender, estimate their age, and serve up adverts suited to that demographic.
In a world where we are advertised to constantly, whether we know it or not, these type of ads offer up some interactivity for us. But how the adverts know our details, interests, moods, likes and dislikes is scary stuff. If these ads know this information whats stopping them emailing or writing us directly.
Will the ads know if the start to annoy a target and will they stop if they do? These questions needs to be answered and a secure system that works well needs to be developed if I was to want these types of ads shouting at me when I walk through a shopping center.
For the meantime I see this type of advertising being somewhat annoying or even unwanted, no one really asked for this. But with time and proper development maybe they can work well and blend into to the shopping environment which I believe should prompt a calm relaxed atmosphere rather than one of being bombarded with ads as you walk for shop to shop.