Gillian Shaw
Sun

Disney Netpal, Asus, from $350 US

Everyone else has a netbook, why not kids? This one comes with 40 parental control options, an 8.9-inch LCD screen, Wi-Fi, Windows XP Home and cute little Disney characters. Disney Magic comes to the desktop with a gadget tray that offers Disney-themed e-mail (parents can choose who they want their kids to correspond with) and a Disney-themed browser. Geared for kids ages six to 12, the Netpal comes out in late July in two versions. The Disney themes range from ones for the younger set, like Club Penguin and Toy Story and to Hannah Montana. www.disneyconsumerproducts.com

Olympus E-P1

Olympus, from $850 Cdn

Small is big when it comes to Olympus‘ newly launched E-P1, the world’s smallest 12.3 megapixel camera with an interchangeable lens system. It combines ultra portability with the features and photo quality of a digital single lens reflex camera. It also has HD video and stereo audio, making it a one-camera-fits-all for those times when you can’t lug around a large case. It’s a compact 12 cm wide by 7 cm high by 3.6 centimetres deep and it weighs in at 334 grams. Available in July, the body-only price for the E-P1 is $850; with ED 14-42mm f3.5/5.6 Zuiko Digital Zoom Lens, it’s $900 and with an ED 17mm f2.8 with optical viewfinder, $1,000. www.olympusamerica.com

DualFit Sport Armband iPhone 3G and 3G S

Belkin, $30Cdn

Now that you’ve picked up your new iPhone 3G S, you’ll want to protect it while you out on that marathon run or bike ride. Belkin has a whole new line of cases for the iPhone 3G and 3G S with the armband a useful accessory for iPhoners on the go. Find that, and other cases, at www.belkin.com/ipod

Mini Surge Protector, Belkin, $25

Also from Belkin, a handy gadget to throw in your laptop or netbook case, the mini travel surge protector. Also useful for conferences where you find yourself crowding around a single power outlet with other notebook users who are losing power fast. Pull one of these from your case and you’ll be the most popular computer user there. www.belkin.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Other

You’re wise to install anti-theft software on the laptops. They’re particularly attractive targets for thieves.

There are plenty of paid programs to protect laptops. For example, there’s Lojack and Computrace. But the yearly fees can be high.

There is LocatePC. It is designed to run undetected. There will be no pop-ups, icons or saved e-mail. That way, a thief won’t know that the program is running. Further, the process name is obscure. This makes it more difficult to detect in Task Manager.

By default, LocatePC sends an e-mail to the owner daily. The e-mail declares the IP address it is using. It also sends an e-mail when it changes Internet Protocol addresses. (The IP address is a unique number used on the Internet.) So your kids can expect plenty of e-mail.

When a laptop is stolen, the e-mail keeps coming. Hopefully, the police can track it with the IP address.

http://www.iconico.com/download.aspx?app=LocatePC

Next up: LocateMyLaptop. Again, it is free.  

LocateMyLaptop offers many of the same features as LocatePC. But it also lets you view information online. That means you can track it from anywhere. When it goes missing, the program will send a stealth message. This goes to LocateMyLaptop. It will then provide you information to help you recover it.

LocateMyLaptop also offers a premium version. The features are beefed up. It also offers another handy tool. You can remotely delete the laptop data. But, you’ll pay $3 monthly for the privilege.

http://www.locatemylaptop.com/

Gillian Shaw
Sun

Calling 911 from your cellphone will soon alert emergency responders to your location, under a new enhanced 911 service being implemented at Vancouver‘s regional emergency communications centre E-Comm.

Vancouver‘s centre will be the first in Canada to have the technology. The trial is going on now, with the service expected to be fully implemented here by November, ahead of the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

It will then be rolled out across the country.

The enhanced 911 service will take advantage of GPS (global positioning system) on GPS-enabled cellphones to zero in on a caller’s location.

Now, 911 centres in Canada can locate only the cell tower the call is transmitting from, information that could cover kilometres, making it difficult to pinpoint a location in the case of calls from people who can’t communicate that to the 911 operators.

E-Comm president Ken Shymanski said the search area could be narrowed to 10 to 300 metres.

“This will be of enormous benefit to the 911 personnel and first responders trying to help.”

Shawn Hall, spokesman for Telus, a partner in the initiative, said the move puts Canada in the forefront of enhanced 911 services.

“We are going to be bringing in the most advanced wireless location technology in the world,” he said. “It is advanced technology so there will be bugs to work out of the system and this trial is going to allow us to do that before we implement enhanced 911 across Canada.”

The 911 service will rely on a range of technology options every time a call comes in.

For callers with GPS-enabled phones, the service will be able to pinpoint their location as long as they are within range of GPS satellites.

In cases where the satellite signal is blocked or phones are not GPS-enabled, the system would use cell tower triangulation to narrow down a location.

The second system isn’t as accurate but is still better than the original and final resort — the single cell tower from which the call is transmitting.

“The system will automatically flip through all technologies and within a few seconds it should be able to pass that information along to the 911 operating centre,” said Hall.

Hall said privacy issues were part of the discussions ahead of the CRTC mandating the service.

“That was definitely a concern,” he said. “You have to weigh all of that but in the end when people are calling 911 they want help and they want it right now.”

Hall said the GPS locating service only kicks in when people call 911.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Gillian Shaw
Sun

Eee PC 1008HA Seashell, Asus $430 US.

The latest netbook from the folks who started the craze to smaller, lighter mini notebooks is winning rave reviews for its slim and sleek design. Weighing in at about a kilogram, it has a 10.1-inch screen, a multi-touch touchpad, and it runs up to six hours between battery charges. WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity and a 1.3-megapixel camera built-in. www.eeepcseashell.com

3M Privacy Filters, from $10 for mobile devices, from $100 for desktops and notebooks.

Encryption may keep your computer transmissions from prying eyes, but what about the shoulder surfer who is nosing into everything on your screen? To safeguard your privacy from those snoops, 3M’s privacy filters black out viewing for everyone but the computer user. They also help reduce screen glare and add another layer of protection for the screen. They come in various sizes and widths to fit desktop and notebook computers, and they are also now available in smaller sizes for mobile devices like the BlackBerry and smartphones. www.3mprivacyfilters.ca

Micro-Flip tabletop projection screens, Elite Screens, from $69 US.

For road warriors, a new Micro-Flip series from Elite Screens. In sizes ranging from 15 inches to 20 inches (38 cm to 51 cm), the Micro-Flip screens weigh about a pound (0.45 kg) and have the portability of a slim notebook computer. A great combo with LED pocket projectors, they can help on-the-go presenters to be prepared in any setting, regardless of the availability of regular screens. It folds up to carry in a briefcase. www.elitescreens.com

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Test drive of the new features was worth the wait: They raise the bar for smartphones

Gillian Shaw
Sun

The door had barely closed on the courier delivering Apple’s new iPhone 3G S for me to demo when I had it out of the box and plugged into my laptop.

A few seconds later it was activated and ready to go.

Like any kid with a new toy, I ignored the more serious features aimed at improving knowledge and productivity and went straight to the fun stuff.

– Video: The missing feature that had many groaning when the earlier iPhones launched: video recording. As someone who’d like to be ready at all times to immediately share interesting events — whether it’s the dog doing tricks or, say, a plane landing in the Hudson River — I applaud Apple’s decision to finally add a camcorder. This alone would be enough to make me upgrade from my 3G to the new 3G S.

– Show and Tell: Even better, the iPhone 3G S lets you do an (albeit rough) edit right on the phone and post your videos to YouTube, or share them via e-mail or MMS (multi-media messaging service). You can also publish it to your MobileMe gallery, a feature — among others — that may make me reconsider my decision to cancel MobileMe, a synchronizing and storage service from Apple that costs $99 US, or $149 for the family plan.

– Smile, you’re on a 3.0-megapixel camera: So it’s no match for your digital SLR, but focus has improved over the earlier iPhone model, and tapping on the iPhone screen lets you selectively focus on anything in the frame. I tried taking photos of my dog in low light — pretty much impossible to distinguish features with my old iPhone, but better with the new. Considering that it is only one of the iPhone’s many functions, we’ll give it a passing grade.

– Speak to me iPhone: Hold down the home button (that’s the one at the button of your iPhone) and the screen will switch to voice control. The disembodied voice is very accommodating: Who do you want to call? What music do you want to listen to? Or, if you have trouble keeping up with your playlist, she’ll even tell you what you’re listening to.

– Yoo Hoo: Now where did I leave that iPhone? Another case for MobileMe, which you need to access this feature, you can zoom in on the GPS location of your phone on a map, and if it has fallen into the wrong hands, remotely wipe all the data from it.

– Wait up: This wouldn’t be enough to make me pay for an upgrade over the 3G, but the new iPhone is certainly speedier. Up to two times faster, according to its billing. For gamers this could be a real selling point. Perhaps the most notable was when I added a Twitter application to both phones, giving the 3G a considerable head start over the 3G S.

The app was ready to go on the new phone, while my old one was still cranking its way through the download.

– Where am I? I don’t know whether I’ll be able to give up a handheld GPS for geocaching, but the on-board compass on the iPhone could be handy if you start heading in the wrong direction on the Grouse Grind. Plus, it shows your latitude and longitude so if you’re given to skiing out of bounds at least you can give rescuers an idea where to look.

– 50,000 and climbing: Applications, that is. Okay, so the apps are available for all iPhones, but if you don’t have one yet, you’re missing out on everything from cool games to playing while you pretend to be taking notes at a meeting, to an app from Stanley (the tool company) that turns your iPhone into a level.

Some of the features of the new iPhone are ones that you get if you upgrade your older phone to the new 3.0 operating system.

All told, the combination of the new OS and the latest hardware is stepping up the competition for the BlackBerry and other smartphones.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

JEN LEO
Sun

Online advocates say high costs could bankrupt small service providers

Jorge Barrera
Sun

Government legislation introduced in Parliament on Thursday will help authorities catch up to the “bad guys” who’ve had the run of cyberspace for too long, said Justice Minister Rob Nicholson.

The two pieces of legislation would allow police to remotely trigger existing tracking devices on cellphones and cars, and force Internet providers to cough up information on their subscribers to police, said Nicholson.

“Law enforcement has not been able to keep up with new technologies to investigate crimes,” Nicholson told reporters. “Twenty-first-century technology calls for 21st-century tools.”

The legislation would also force Internet service providers to install interception technology on their systems that would allow warrant-carrying police to monitor Internet communication — including text, voice or video messages — as they happen.

Police currently face a patchwork of responses from Internet providers, as some comply immediately, others delay, and some demand a warrant before releasing the information. Others simply do not have the capabilities allowing for cyber wiretapping.

A three-year exemption was included for small providers with fewer than 100,000 subscribers, and the federal government may partially reimburse some companies for the added costs.

In addition, the legislation would allow police to issue a preservation order to temporarily “quick-freeze” a service provider’s data related to specific communications or a subscriber’s information until authorities return with a warrant to obtain the data. Service providers keep subscriber data — including log-in and log-out times and e-mail messages — for various, mostly business reasons, but the data is often not held in perpetuity.

If passed, the legislation would also make it illegal to possess a computer virus for the purpose of infecting other computers. It would also make it a crime for someone to make arrangements for another person to engage in the sexual abuse of a child — a change that would help undercover child-pornography operations.

The new legislation was praised by police chiefs who attended Thursday’s announcement. “There should not be any safe haven for organized crime and child predators,” said Halifax chief Frank Beazley.

But some Internet-policy experts said they were concerned about clauses requiring Internet service providers to provide information on their subscribers — including names, telephone numbers and Internet protocol addresses — to police and intelligence authorities without a warrant.

“The government has gone 180 degrees in the wrong direction,” said David Fewer, acting director of the University of Ottawa‘s Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic. “They should need a warrant to get this.”

An IP address is a key piece of identification that acts as a print left on the cyber landscape.

“When you surf the Internet, it’s like leaving tracks in the snow,” said Fewer. “You can’t tell by the footprint who it is, but you may be able to tell where it comes from. The [service provider] can match up your IP with your name.”

Tom Copeland, president of Internet service provider eagle.ca, has a different concern. The costs associated with installing interception technology on service-provider systems may force some smaller players out of business.

“The margins aren’t in it for them,” said Copeland, who is also the chairman of the Canadian Association of Internet Providers. “Some of them would be looking at selling their businesses and closing their doors.”

A Bell Canada spokeswoman said, “The costs of policing should not be downloaded on to one particular industrial sector. Other funding mechanisms must be found.”

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Public appetite for the wireless devices insatiable, firm’s CEO says

Jamie Sturgeon
Sun

Rogers Communications Inc. plans to recast the definition of the Internet and how it is used as more Canadians transition toward smart-phones.

“The notion of Internet at home [or] Internet at the office is changing to: your Internet, wherever you are,” said Rogers chief executive Nadir Mohamed during the keynote address at the Canadian Telecom Summit on Monday in Toronto. “It’s very powerful.”

Canadians’ appetite to communicate, access information and entertainment, and even make transactions through their wireless device is becoming “insatiable,” the CEO said.

He added that Toronto-based Rogers, the largest wireless carrier in the country, is moving quickly to bring mobile Internet to the masses.

Mohamed estimated, by 2014, more than three million Canadians will be users of smart-phones, such as Apple Inc.’s iPhone and Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry, which surf the Web and provide e-mail.

The 53-year-old telecom veteran, who became Rogers‘ chief executive in March, said the adoption rate of such devices was accelerating.

The address comes days before Rogers will introduce the iPhone 3G S, Apple’s latest device, which is at least twice as fast as its predecessor.

The new model also boasts a powerful new operating system and access to a growing array of applications, an area which is rapidly growing in importance, Mohamed said.

He noted the 50,000 applications, which range from video games to communication programs, that can be downloaded to a user’s phones found on Apple’s virtual App Store, and the thousands more developers are designing for other handsets.

“It’s huge. We tend to take these things for granted,” he told a crowd of several hundred.

“We think of these things as consumer applications, but the same thing is happening on the business side.”

He said Rogers was looking at becoming a seller of apps, for not at least the next 12 months.

The chief executive also said Rogers was working on a new wireless pricing strategy.

“You need a network, you need devices, you need applications, and you need pricing to be right to actually foster customers embracing it,” he said.

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Nearly six million users sign up for new naming convention on social media site

Gillian Shaw
Sun

Gordon Campbell has one. Carole James doesn’t. Both Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff have them. And so does Britney Spears.

Vanoc has the Olympics, but Terry Johnson in Japan has laid claim to VancouverOlympics.

At least that was the case in a check Monday on the status of the latest digital rights rush as Facebook users flocked to grab their Facebook’s version of vanity plates — website addresses that stake out a Facebook identity.

The vanity URLs (the web address you type into your browser to reach a website) replace Facebook’s randomly assigned numbers. Under the new naming system, you could be www.facebook.com/yournamehere.

(Actually, forget that example. You can’t be www.facebook.com/yournamehere because that was already snapped up by one James Kaminski.)

Previously, addresses had strings of letters and numbers. The change is intended to make it easier to find Facebook members through search engines such as Google.

With social media climbing on the corporate and individual agenda, the latest digital rights rush saw members grabbing names at a rate of more than 550 per second starting at midnight eastern time on Friday, when it was opened to all Facebook users.

Within 15 minutes, 500,000 users had claimed names. By Monday afternoon, about 5.75 million users worldwide had claimed their personalized addresses.

Digital dawdlers may find their names are already taken. While Facebook did take measures to prevent cyber-squatters from snapping up names — such as preventing people from creating new Facebook accounts just to claim web addresses for corporate and celebrity names — for the general Facebook population, it was a first-come, first-served scramble.

While domain name registration created a boon for copyright and trademark lawyers (and some are predicting the Facebook free-for-all could result in similar disputes), Michael Geist, Canada research chair of Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, said the Facebook situation is different.

“I am not convinced this is going to be a big issue,” he said. “There was a lot of uproar and a lot of dire warnings from lawyers, but Facebook controls the environment and that is somewhat different from domain disputes.

“It puts Facebook in control.”

The company has protected many names, including those of well-known celebrities, teams, politicians and brands. You won’t find anything at www.facebook.com/angelinajolie for example, but if you check availability for that name, you’ll get a message saying it’s not available.

Not so for B.C. NDP leader Carole James. That name was still available as of this writing, as was BC NDP. Gordon Campbell and the B.C. Liberals were firmly ensconced on their particular piece of Facebook cyberturf at www.facebook.com/GordonCampbell and www.facebook.com/BCLiberals.

There also appeared to be two local men who had signed up for names associated with The Vancouver Sun and The Province newspapers, and users are being redirected to their personal Facebook pages.

Facebook has provisions for individuals and corporations who feel their intellectual property rights have been infringed.

And the company says users can’t transfer their names to other accounts. The company will also allow users to claim a name only if they had an account before the feature was announced June 9. This will prevent people from creating new accounts just to grab their addresses, Facebook said. That restriction lifts on June 28.

However, Geist points out that name conflicts may not necessarily have a clearcut answer, and Facebook is operating in a global environment while most rights are limited to a particular class and country.

“In some ways, Facebook has to be careful before it steps into some of these disputes,” he said. “One person’s trademark infringement is another person’s free speech.”

© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Trike takes images of hiking, biking trails

Jefferson Graham
Province

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Meet the Google trike.

It’s the sequel, of sorts, to the Google Maps-mobile, a specially rigged car with an antenna, GPS and camera that snaps 360-degree images of neighbourhoods for display in the Street View section of Google Maps.

Now Google Maps is expanding to biking and hiking trails. A Google employee on a tricycle rides around to snap the same wide-area views.

“Much of the world is inaccessible to the car,” says Daniel Ratner, a Google senior engineer who designed the trike. “We want to get access to places people find important.” Starting out with one trail in Monterey The project just got under way. So far, only a bike trail in Monterey, Calif., is up and running. Google has cyclists out now in California, Italy and the United Kingdom. The company says to look for hiking and biking images from those locations over the summer — along with shots from U.S. theme parks. Google won’t say which ones.

Google Maps is the top online map program, with 149 million visitors worldwide in April, up 49 per cent from the prior April, according to web tracker ComScore Media Metrix.

To access Google’s Street View, you click on the icon of the little yellow man at the top of the Maps screen, and drag it to the location you want to see.

The U.S. audience has mostly embraced Street View, currently offered in nine countries. But Google hopes to find a better reaction to the trike project than it met with Street View’s recent expansion into Europe and Asia. Officials and citizens in Greece, the United Kingdom and Japan complained loudly about invasion of privacy over the project.

Stephen Chau, a product manager for Google Maps, says that what the Google cars picked up photographically was no different from what any tourist would see on vacation. Chau says the complaints about the product are minimal considering its usage, and many people just have an initial misunderstanding. “We have tools to automatically blur faces, if they show up, and license plates.” Additionally, homeowners who object to their homes being shown can contact Google and request removal.

Lowering the camera in Japan In Japan, Google received so many complaints that it was forced to scrap its initial crop of pictures, because the camera ended up seeing over fences into private areas.

In rural England, residents near the small village of Milton Keynes blockaded entry to prevent the Google-mobile from entering and getting pictures.

“What I care about is usage,” Chau says. “Since we’ve launched Street View, it’s gotten tremendous positive feedback. We’re spreading to more countries, because the feedback is so strong.”

© Copyright (c) The Province