Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s prostitute scandal is still big news in New York. In February earlier this year, the former Governor was caught in a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel.

The story quickly swept the tabloids, all of who soaked up Spitzer’s downfall with little mention of how and why his crimes actually came to light.

Spitzer was originally flagged when a series of Suspicious Activity Reports - reports that banks must to file with the Treasury to assist in investigating anything from money laundering to terrorist activity – were submitted.

The prostitution ring that counted Spitzer as a customer had been responsible for shady bank accounts, checks and wire transfers of up to $400,000, they soon became under-investigation.

According to the FBI’s complaint:

“In or about October 2007, the FBI and the United States Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigative Division (”IRS-CID”) began an investigation focusing on an organization suspected of conducting prostitution and money-laundering crimes in the United States and Europe.”

The investigation began with a suspicious activity report on Spitzer. According to the Wall Street Journal, Spitzer’s transactions were regular and always kept under $10,000. A pattern that the Feds class as suspicious.

“There has been a massive federal crackdown on money laundering in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and banks have been extremely diligent in filing such reports. Those reports often include details of transactions done by innocent people.”

According to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) there have been 4.7 million SARs filed as of June 30, 2007.

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For the last 18 months Google has been working to develop their personal health records solution. So far we haven’t been given much insight into what the product will be like, however there is promise that it will be comprehensive and user-friendly.

As of last month Google received a large endorsement from the Cleveland Clinic to help in the development of the technology.

The big medical center has now started a pilot project to begin linking the health information for some of its patients with Google’s personal health records.

Cleveland Clinic currently employs a sophisticated IT system to store their 100,000+ patient’s personal health records.

But a sizeable portion of those patients are retirees that may spend four or more months elsewhere, typically in Florida or Arizona. When these patients travel, their electronic health records don’t follow them explains Dr. C. Martin Harris, the clinic’s chief information officer.

“It forces the patient to become his or her own medical historian,

“Google personal health record is a solution to that problem”

Using Google’s technology, a person can approve the transfer of their medical records from the clinics computers to series of secure Web pages.

The pilot project is scheduled to last six to eight weeks, and will involve approx 10,000 patients.

Marissa Mayer, a vice president, who took over management of the health team six months ago said, “The project with Cleveland Clinic is “a milestone” for Google”.

Google’s personal health records is still in development, and it will be introduced publicly and made widely available, after the pilot project is concluded, Ms. Mayer said.

With Cleveland Clinic being at the forefront of health information technology, the recent endorsement is more promise that Google’s Personal Health Records will provide a one-stop solution for all health records.

Although we may not know much until the release of the product, what we do know is that Google will offer a fresh new user-interface as well as automated data links, so the patient does not have to type in personal data, as is required with some personal health records.

The recent endorsement from the Cleveland Clinic has also prompted other medical centers to sign up.

“This is truly a patient-controlled health record, and that’s a very significant step in the drive toward a more consumer-oriented system of health care,” said Dr. John D. Halamka, chief information officer of the Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Halamka is also chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, which plans to link its electronic patient records with Google personal health pages.

Stumble Upon is a collaborative web search tool that utilizes a growing Stumble Upon community to help you cut down on Googling and get better directed to what you are looking for.

Developed by Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance, and Eric Boyd,“StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences.”

This web search tool comes in the form of a browser add-on which can be found for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera.

Click Here To Download StumbleUpon

How StumbleUpon Works

StumbleUpon finds a new site every time you click the ‘stumble!’ button; once you find a page that you like, you can rate the page by giving it a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down.’

The pages which StumbleUpon send your way are based on your ratings of previous pages, as well as ratings from your friends and other users with similar interests. In this way, websites with great content get recommend for the next user by real people – not heartless machines.

The StumbleUpon community is extremely large and continuing to grow. In July 2006 StumbleUpon had around 1 million users and as of December 2007, the community had grown to over 4 million. The rising number of the stumble upon community was something that eBay noticed back in May 07 when they acquired StumbleUpon for a whopping $75,000,000 (75 million) USD.

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Point based motion capture has become the industry standard procedure to capture the movements of the human body and convert the data for use in 3D animations. Reflective markers are placed at many points of the body, as the person moves around the data is recorded and can then be transferred to the animation. Both movies and games use this technology to give characters lifelike movements and actions.

However when it comes to realistic facial work, even setups that use of hundreds of reflective dots leave the developers with rough blocky data the requires a lot of post processing.

Enter motion capture company Mova. Mova’s Contour Reality Capture System uses multiple cameras that create 100,000 polygon facial models that are accurate to within one tenth of a millimeter.

Mova founder, also the man behind Apple’s QuickTime and Microsoft’s WebTV, Steve Perlman said,

“This pushes Unreal Engine 3 to its very limit … it’s about as photo-real as you can get in real time.”

Check out the video of the Unreal Engine 3 running real time on a dual NVIDIA 8800 GTXs with SLI.

Perlman says the company has been working privately with developers for some time to adapt the system for video game use.

“People have never had this kind of data available before in a game context … their heads are spinning,” he said. “What you’re seeing right there is the result of, having time to wrap our heads around this thing and see how we’re going to use it, and yes, we can in fact get a face that looks almost photo-real — you know, not quite, but almost photo-real — running in a game engine today.”

“You can see the difference then between what’s achievable in cinema and what’s achievable right now in video games…….But next generation game machines, they’ll be able to essentially show in real time what we can do currently in non-real-time using renderers. … Next generation, you’re going to have interactive sequences where people think there’s a live person in the game.”

The Unreal Engines abilities doesn’t stop there, the contour system can also create even more detailed animations if real time processing is not necessary. Below is another video of how reality capture data can look when pre-rendered.

Perlman says that the cost of a Contour motion-capture session isn’t much higher than traditional marker-based capture session, somewhere in the region of a few thousand to a few hundred thousand depending on the length and complexity of the shot.

The real savings come in post production, Perlman explains,

“Unlike marker-based capture, which has a big manual clean-up process before you see results, with contour it’s purely computational….
“We’ve talked to people and one of the reasons when they announce delays for complex games is because they’re fighting to try and make the faces look good. With Contour, you send the guy in, he does a shoot, and we send you a face that looks nearly perfect. It’s no longer one of the risk issues for your schedule.”

The Contour system generates so much data, Perlman says, that the full value of the rendering won’t be apparent until hardware speeds improve.

“With markers, you kind of get the resolution of what those markers are and that’s it……
“When a next-generation game system comes out, or they decide they want to do something for a feature film, you can’t really use the data. With Contour, it’s actually capturing the data at much higher resolutions than any system in the world, even for feature films, can currently use. What we do is we store that data away … and when a next generation video game machine comes out and they want the data at higher resolution, they can.”

Perlman wouldn’t reveal which companies are currently using this technology, but said he expects the first games with Contour captures could come out in 2008, depending on developer schedules. He hopes the system will be in wide use by 2009.

Tired of getting out of the lazy boy to change games in your PS2? Well now you might not have to……A new firmware update for Memor32 – the PS2 modchip on a memory card – promises to allow your none chipped Playstation to play an entire library of games direct from the comforts of your own USB hard drive.

A group of Russian hackers named Memento are responsible for the firmware handiwork. The memory card chip mod couldn’t be simpler to use, now all that’s left is to get our hands on one to see how well it actually performs.

For those of you who own an older PS2 (the bulky version), there is another equally simple hack. HD Loader comes in the form of a DVD and can also hack your Playstation without the need for a chip mod. Using the PS2’s 3.5″ IDE slot and a network adapter, simply hook up your hard drive and run HD Loader in PS2.The HD loader has been around for some two years now but it may not have gained great popularity due to reports of compatibility issues; let’s hope the new update from the Russians will run a little smoother.

Defragmentation of your hard disk is a necessary task that should be done regularly to ensure the efficiency of your PC.

It is extremely common and almost certain that over time your PC will slow down. This is caused by the way files are stored on a hard disk and is directly related to the amount of files you manage.When you save data on your hard drive the file is split up and stored in sections which are adjacent to each other. Small files are easy to store because they can be placed efficiently next to each other.

As you continue to use your computer performing tasks such as editing, adding and deleting files, changes occur in these sections of data and some areas will become empty pockets. These areas are referred to as fragmentation.

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Staying up to date with the latest software and applications can be expensive. Professional applications like Photoshop and Microsoft Office certainly don’t come cheap, even the Windows operating system required to run your PC is costly.

Many are unaware of expensive applications’ free open source and online alternatives.

Click To See The Battle Plan of The Software Wars

Open source products comprise the work of many collaborators. Each person works on small portions of a project, and anyone is welcome to contribute. The finished product is available freely for anyone to download or even modify.

After the jump is a list of fourteen free open source applications.

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Most computer users quickly get to grips with the software and applications that are used on a regular basis. However there is one application included in every version Windows that many people over look, the Task Manager.

The Task Manager’s purpose in life is to provide computer performance information along with details about currently running programs and processes. It also provides the ability to monitor your network traffic if you are connected to a network.

Savvy computer users will know that a couple of quick short cuts can take you to the task manager; Ctrl + Alt + Delete and Ctrl + Shift + ESC. The task manager can usually be accessed even when other programs have crashed, enabling the user to quit an application or process, or shutdown the PC.

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Google is a name synonymous with bettering someone else’s idea. But we should certainly not be the ones complaining, as they steam roll the competition they continue provide us with more user-friendly and lets not forget ‘free’ services and applications.

A new Google service, dubbed “Knol,” is set to compete with the Web’s largest data base of reference work, Wikipedia. The firm revealed that the new website project will invite individuals to write “authoritative articles” on their areas of expertise.Google hopes that Knol (the name derived from “knowledge”) articles will cover “all topics, from scientific concepts … to entertainment.”Significantly, the project will see Google help generate new editorial content, a process its executive have previously said it is “philosophically opposed to.”In a Google blog posted last month, Udi Manber, Vice President of Engineering wrote,

“The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content”

As on Wikipedia, the content will be free to access. However, one major difference is that Knol’s authors will be able to attach advertising to their work and take a share of revenues.

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Google are always up to something, and we could dedicate a whole blog to them if we simply had the time on our hands! In what seems to be their never ending quest to take over the Information Technology World they have announced yet another FREE application, language translations for the Google Talk chat client.

Using the same technology as, the translation application is delivered as a series of chat bots. These tools can quickly translate a phrase or paragraph for you, and they can also be added to group chats to act as real-time translators.Google lists out about 30 total language bots with which are all logically named according to their translation duty, such as en2ko@bot.talk.google.com, signifying English to Korean translation. English is the dominant language across the translations; however there are some non-English bots available such as fr2de.

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Photoshop has clearly become the industry standard software for graphic design and digital photography. Those of you who are Photoshop savvy will know that plug-ins and filters can extend Photoshop capabilities by providing new functions and effects. For those of you who aren’t, perhaps its time to explore Photoshop’s expandable features.

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Many are still hesitant to upgrade to the new Windows Vista, perhaps the negative buzz and the massive system requirements have made Vista less desirable than Microsoft had hoped. Vista promised to integrate not only a 3D-interface or other exciting technologies but also a new file system, called WinFS, as well as the communication subsystem Indigo. Unfortunately the release of the WinFS File system has been postponed and Indigo is now available for Windows XP, so some may be asking why they would want to upgrade to Vista at all? Well, Microsoft has promised that there will be huge steps toward a secure environment which is virtually impossible to integrate into today’s Windows XP.

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This 360-degree ultra-high-definition military simulator allows you to drive a Humvee and fire real weapons including machine guns and rocket launchers, anywhere you want, with absolute precision.

The 10-projector system achieves a seamless panorama thanks to Mersive’s Sol system; a calibration, warping and sub-pixel image blending technology that may soon be adapted from military sims to your living room gaming.

Watch The Video and check the Halo 3-like scenario

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Hackers are getting assistance from a female stripper by the name of Mellisa. She is a digital girl that is helping spammer hack a security measure that has helped slow the spamming community.

To help solve the mystery and security behind Captcha text images, the spammers enlisted the help of Mellisa. By inserting and deciphering the text, users get to see explicit images. Seems like a fair enough trade-off. In the past many viruses have tricked people into opening booby-trapped attachments with the false promise of seeing explicit images, but this was one of the first to actually show people more images if people respond.

This software by Trend Micro and Panda Security that is helping to defeat the anti-spam security check is a Windows game that arrives on machines that are already infected with malicious software. The program comes to life when the Internet Explorer browser is used on infected machines. The Captcha-busting program can run on Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, and Server 2003. You win (getting to see the explicit image) by correctly typing the text shown in an accompanying image. This seems like an easy enough game with great rewards. The creators of the game in turn take the deciphered text that stop spam robots from automatically signing up to create accounts that can be put to illegal use. By getting people to type in the text the spammers can are also able to take over the accounts and use them to send junk mail.

This online anti-spam security measure of using a image of text is known as Captchas or “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. Typically they feature a disfigured word or one overlaid with static that make it difficult for anyone but a human to decipher.

Since its fist arrival, many spammers and hackers have been vigorously working to defeat the system and regaining acess to net-based resources, such as e-mail accounts or blogging tools, they are designed to protect. Although this game seems like a bunch of fun and gaining popularity, it is likely to increase the annoyance of spam and weaken our hold in the War on Spam.

Quickly gaining popularity and taking back the web, Firefox is lighting up the internet with personalize browsing that is safer, faster and more powerful. When Firefox first emerged not many expected much since there were already other browsers, like Netscape, Opera, and Eudora, that had been out for a long time already and were no where near being as popular as Internet Explorer. This has caused Microsoft to start paying attention and listening to the users - but still falling short in keeping users loyal. Microsoft is synonymous with closed-code with only Microsoft add-ons at Microsoft prices.

For those of you who are not familiar with Firefox, prepared to be awaken to the revolution taking place on the web and quickly become converted to a Mozilla Firefox user.

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