Microsoft To Provide Free Anti-Virus

The software giant Microsoft has been criticised in the past for failing to include free security software with Windows.

Its first security package, Windows Live OneCare, failed to attract many customers and will be discontinued.

Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) promises to provide people with basic protection against viruses, trojans, rootkits and spyware.Microsoft is hoping that MSE, available as a free download from its site, will prove more popular. It has said it will automatically update it for users.

However, rival security vendors have questioned whether Microsoft can compete with more established anti-virus players.security firms like Symantec,AVG have had their fare share of criticism regarding the effectiveness of the free anti-virus provided by Microsoft.

A trial version of Microsoft's free anti-virus software has been launched in the US, China, Brazil, and Israel.Initially 75,000 trial versions of MSE, codenamed Morro, will be available in the US, Brazil, China and Israel.

The software will be rolled out in other countries later this year.

Researchers Identify "Gangsta Gene"

Scientists say that its possible to predict whether a person is a gangster or not through DNA tests.Males with a particular form of gene called MAOA are twice as likely to join a gang, compared to those with other forms, finds a new study of more than 2000 US teens. What's more, gang members with these mutations are far more likely to use a weapon than other members.

According to Kevin Beaver, a biosocial criminologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee, who led the study.The relatively common mutations result in reduced levels of a protein, called monoamine oxidase A, which recycles several of the chemicals that foster neuron connections. Low MAOA activity has been linked previously to antisocial behaviour in people who experienced child abuse. While two brain regions involved in perceiving and controlling emotions are shrunken in people with no history of criminality or abuse who have the mutation.

To determine whether an environment besides an abusive childhood could elicit MAOA's connection to violence, Beaver's team looked at the genotypes of 1155 females and 1041 males who participated in a long-term study of adolescent health that covered the period 1994 to 2002.

During two rounds of interviews, participants indicated whether they had been in a gang in the past year and whether they had ever used a weapon in a fight.Overall, 42 per cent of males possessed the low activity form of MAOA, and about 5 per cent of all males said they had joined a gang. However males with the low activity form were twice as likely to join a gang as those with the high activity form.

Similarly, males with the low activity form were about twice as likely to have used a weapon as other teens. While male gang members with the same mutations were four times as likely as other members to wield a weapon.

"This gene is predicting gang membership, but it's really predicting it for the very violent gang members," Beaver says.

Nonetheless, he cautions against over-interpreting his team's results. "It doesn't mean that everyone with this particular allele is going to be violent and is going to become a gang member – or vice versa," he says.

Rather, in communities where gangs are common, people with low MAOA activity could be slightly more likely to join a gang than others, Beaver says.

However, given the high prevalence of these mutations and low rates of gang membership, genetic counselling to identify youth at an increased risk of joining gangs would be unfeasible.

PhonePoint Pen LetsYou Write On Thin Air !

The phrase"writing on thin air",atleast up till now has referred to something that gets vanished quickly.Researchers at Duke University have created what they are calling a "PhonePoint Pen" that uses a modern cell phone's built-in accelerometer to detect writing in thin air, and then automatically send a note to a designated e-mail account. There are still some bugs to work out, but the researchers believe they've proven that the idea really works.

"We are convinced that this is feasible and this will become something that people will use," Romit Roy Choudhury, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke.

"The existing technology wasn't all that great," he added. "And the idea struck me that maybe it's possible that I could have a pen with an accelerometer and I could just write in the air with the pen."

The accelerometer would detect the movement of the pen, and "then and I could press a button or something and the writing would get e-mailed to my mailbox. But getting a pen with an accelerometer was hard."

As an assistant professor, Roy Choudhury had a gaggle of creative students at his disposal, and he suggested they try to figure out how to use a cell phone as the magic pen he had wanted in college.

One cell phone manufacturer, Nokia, donated "a bunch" of phones, and the students found that if they held the phone like a pen, grasped between the thumb and the forefinger, they could control it's movements well enough for it to recognize letters of the alphabet.

They had to be pretty big letters, about six inches tall, and the user had to learn how to write with no frame of reference other than an imaginary blackboard, but it worked well enough to jot down a phone number, or an address, or where the car was parked at the airport.

That's progress, but it's not good enough. The researchers now say they've figured out how to make the phone recognize script, and translate that into text before sending it to a designated e-mail account.

"The phone can track what you are writing," Roy Choudhury said, and even if your penmanship isn't perfect it should be able to figure out which letter of the alphabet you are trying to write. Meanwhile, the accelerometer will track other movements as well. It should be possible to "write" yourself a note while driving your car.

"There are a lot of signals that the accelerometer captures," he added. "From all those signals, we can pluck out the part that comes from the moving vehicle, because there is a particular signature from a car's movements, and we can subtract that. "

A moving hand, for example, can change direction much more frequently and more quickly, than a vehicle. So the car can be taken out of the equation.

That may not sound too safe, but it could be a lot better than trying to text-message yourself on a keyboard that just seems to get smaller and smaller.

The device would also be able to clean up the signal while the user is walking, or doing just about anything else, he added.

The Duke researchers are also working on an idea that has intrigued many other scientists since the advent of cell phones with accelerometers. Theoretically, it should be possible for cell phones to provide real-time alerts on traffic congestion.