Manned spaceship design unveiled

By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News

Russian firm RKK Energia has spent two years designing the vehicle Enlarge Image

The first official image of a Russian-European manned spacecraft has been unveiled.

It is designed to replace the Soyuz vehicle currently in use by Russia and will allow Europe to participate directly in crew transportation.

The reusable ship was conceived to carry four people towards the Moon, rivalling the US Ares/Orion system.

Unlike previous crewed vehicles, it will use thrusters to make a soft landing when it returns to Earth.

Russian aerospace writer and graphic designer Anatoly Zak has produced artist's renderings of the new craft based on a design released by Russian manufacturer RKK Energia at the Farnborough Air Show in the UK last week.

I think the main roadmap is the agreement between the European and Russian space agencies. That is their Plan A Anatoly Zak

In some respects, the capsule resembles America's next-generation spacecraft Orion. The 18-to-20-tonne Russian-European vehicle is designed to carry six crew into low-Earth orbit and four on missions to lunar orbit.

One of the most unusual features about the capsule appear to be the thrusters and landing gear on its underside. Mr Zak said it would use these engines to soften its landing on Earth after the fiery re-entry through our atmosphere.

The European Space Agency (Esa) has been talking to its Russian counterpart Roscosmos about collaborating on the Crew Space Transportation System (CSTS) since 2006.

Launcher decision

"If Esa and the Russian Space Agency reach agreement, Europe will supply the service module of that co-operative spacecraft," Mr Zak told BBC News.

This service module will use technology - such as the propulsion systems - developed for Europe's Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), an unmanned freighter recently sent to re-supply the International Space Station (ISS).

Russia may provide the launcher for the new manned spacecraft. This might be an entirely new vehicle, or a modification of an existing rocket.

Thrusters would cushion the spacecraft's landing Enlarge Image

Mr Zak said Russia was insisting in its negotiations with Europe that all future manned projects be based in Vostochny, the new cosmodrome being developed in Russia's eastern Amur region. The Russian government wants to host its first manned launch from that site in 2018.

At the moment, all manned Soyuz launches take place from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Alternatively, the space agencies could opt to "man-rate" Europe's Ariane 5 launcher, which lifts off from Kourou in French Guiana. This would allow the rocket to carry humans into space.

This would involve making major modifications to Kourou spaceport, including the development of infrastructure to support a crew escape system in the event of an emergency.

It is quite possible that both launch sites would play a role in any collaborative programme, which would necessitate the lofting of cargo as well as human crew.

However, if this collaboration falls apart, Europe has another option for direct manned access to space.

BY-BBC NEWS

'Spying' requests exceed 500,000

More than 500,000 official "spying" requests for private communications data such as telephone records were made last year, a report says.

Police, security services and other public bodies made requests for billing details and other information.

Interception of Communications Commissioner Sir Paul Kennedy said 1,707 of these had been from councils.

A separate report criticises local authorities for using powers to target minor offences such as fly-tipping.

Itemised bills

Figures show public bodies made 519,260 requests to "communications providers" such as phone and internet firms for information in 2007.

Under available powers, they can see details such as itemised phone bills and website records. But they are not allowed to monitor conversations.

The total number of requests for last year - amounting to more than 1,400 a day - compared with an average of fewer than 350,000 a year in the previous two years.

In his report, Sir Paul said he believed "local authorities could make much more use of communications data as a powerful tool to investigate crime".

'Proportionality'

But a separate report, by Chief Surveillance Commissioner Sir Christopher Rose, criticises the techniques employed by local authorities to deal with minor offences such as fly-tipping or avoiding council tax.

He said some councils had a "tendency to expose lack of understanding of the legislation" and displayed a "serious misunderstanding of the concept of proportionality".

Some authorising officers were inexperienced and suffered "poor oversight", he added.

He called on town halls to invest in properly trained intelligence officers who could operate covertly.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said: "The commissioners' reports offer valuable oversight and provide reassurance that these powers are being used appropriately.

"These powers can make a real difference in delivering safer communities and protecting the public - whether enabling us to gain that vital intelligence that will prevent a terrorist attack, working to tackle antisocial behaviour or ensuring that rogue traders do not defraud the public."

BY-BBC NEWS

DIY schemes for super-fast net

By Jane Wakefield
Technology reporter, BBC News

Fibre doesn't have to be expensive

In early July BT announced that it was going to invest £1.5bn in fibre optic cables, bringing access to faster broadband to up to 10 million UK homes.

But there will be large swathes of the country untouched by super-fast broadband and, for some, the answer is a more DIY, community-based approach to fibre.

Fibre might be some way off being rolled out on a national scale in the UK but individual community projects promise to have networks up and running, possibly by the end of 2008.

The community-based approach to net connectivity is nothing new. While BT prevaricated about how far it was going to roll out broadband at the beginning of the millennium, local communities took the bull by the horns and rolled out their own - often powered by wi-fi.

Impatient for speed

What will deliver next-generation broadband?

One of the first of these was CyberMoor, a co-operative which brought wireless broadband to remote parts of Cumbria.

Now the head of the project, Daniel Heery, is looking at how to bring fibre to Alston in Cumbria.

Regulator Ofcom has questioned whether the UK needs super-fast broadband and what applications will drive such networks.

Mr Heery thinks there is a huge market in e-health and e-learning projects, providing remote patient care and streaming lessons to kids.

"I think people are impatient for more speed and are fed up of hearing from the big companies that we can't do it," he said.

"For example it costs £500 per night to keep someone in hospital so tele-medicine has great cost-saving benefits."

The telemedicine project, which is run in conjunction with the local health authority, aims to use video links to aid nurses in the diagnosis of minor injuries, as well as provide set-top boxes which will allow people to book GP appointments and arrange repeat prescriptions via their TVs, and equipment that will enable users to have their chronic diseases monitored from home.

BY -BBC NEWS

Rivals embracing wireless hi-def video

NEW YORK (AP) -- Sony, Samsung and other consumer-electronics heavyweights are uniting to support a technology that could send high-definition video signals wirelessly from a single set-top box to screens around the home.

Soon you may be able to send hi-def video signals to multiple TVs in your home -- without messy cables.

The consortium due to be announced Wednesday is an important development in the race to create a definitive way to replace tangles of video cables, but doesn't end it -- both Sony and Samsung also are supporting a competing technology.

In the new consortium, Sony Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co., along with Motorola Inc., Sharp Corp. and Hitachi Ltd., will develop an industry standard around technology from Amimon Ltd. of Israel called WHDI, for Wireless Home Digital Interface.

"If you have a TV in the home, that TV will be able to access any source in the home, whether it's a set-top box in the living room, or the PlayStation in the bedroom, or a DVD player in another bedroom. That's the message of WHDI," said Noam Geri, co-founder of Amimon.

Amimon is already selling chips that fulfill part of that promise, but the creation of a broad industry group makes it more likely that consumers will be able to buy WHDI-enabled devices from different manufacturers and have them all work together.

Geri expects TVs with Amimon's chips to reach stores next year, costing about $100 more than equivalent, non-wireless TVs.

Wireless streaming of high-definition video is a relatively tricky engineering problem that many companies are trying to tackle. It can be done with the fastest versions of Wi-Fi, a technology already in many homes, but that requires "compression," or reduction of the data rate, with picture quality degrading as a result. There's also a delay in transmission as chips on both ends of the link work to compress, then decompress the image.

That's prompted much research into radio technologies that are faster, requiring less compression. A leading contender is WirelessHD, centered on technology from SiBEAM Inc. of Sunnyvale, California. It uses an open portion of the radio band, at 60 gigahertz, for ultrafast transmission of uncompressed video, but it could be years away from commercialization. Its range is limited, meaning that it would be used for in-room links rather than whole-house networking, like WHDI.

Sony is part of the WirelessHD group as well, and is supporting WHDI to have "wider options," the company said in a statement.

Samsung, on the other hand, looks at WHDI as a stopgap technology until the higher-picture-quality WirelessHD takes over. JaeMoon Jo, Samsung's vice president of TV research, said the company believes WirelessHD will be the "ultimate solution in the long run."

Still another contending wireless technology is ultra-wideband, or UWB. It requires less compression than Wi-Fi, but its range is more limited, generally to in-room networking. Monster Cable Products Inc. plans to introduce a kit that produces a wireless video link using UWB.

WHDI is less exotic than either WirelessHD or UWB. It uses a radio band at 5 gigahertz that's used by some Wi-Fi devices, which means it can take advantage of research in that field. To get around the limitations of the limited bandwidth, Amimon uses a clever trick instead of compression.

Before transmission, Amimon's chips separate the important components of the video signal, the ones that really make a difference to the viewer, from the less important ones, like tiny variations in color over a small area. It then gives priority to the important parts, while putting less effort into getting the fine nuances to the receiver.

That means the transmission works over relatively long distances, albeit with lower image quality as the distance increases.

Motorola has looked at competing technologies, but WHDI is the only group it's joined because of Amimon's "extremely unique" approach, said Paul Moroney, a Motorola research fellow who works with WHDI.

Motorola plans to build the technology into its set-top boxes, which are used by many cable providers around the U.S. But the first product will likely be a pair of adapters that talk wirelessly to one another. One could be attached to a set-top box, the other to a TV set, Moroney said.

Belkin International Inc. already sells a pair of adapters based on Amimon's chips for $1,000, and Sony has announced a similar set for its TVs. Moroney said Motorola hopes to sell a kit for significantly less than Belkin's price next year, as the technology matures.

Kurt Scherf, an analyst at Parks Associates, noted that wireless video technologies have been talked up for years, but haven't lived up to their promises so far. Professional audio-video installers surveyed by his firm aren't excited about wireless, because they're afraid of reliability problems.

Still, he said, WHDI's range should give it an edge, since it allows the technology to do more than just replace a cable in the entertainment center.

New service helps callers avoid awkward cell-phone moments

NEW YORK (AP) -- The old song had it right: Breaking up is hard to do. But a free new phone service called Slydial might make it easier to get through that and other awkward moments -- without actually having to talk to anyone.

A new service lets you leave a cell-phone voice message without -- horrors! -- actually talking to someone.

Slydial lets you connect directly with another person's cell phone voice mail, bypassing the traditional ringing process that often results, sometimes disastrously, with someone picking up on the other end.

Users call (267) SLY-DIAL from either a cell phone or a landline and are prompted to enter another person's cell phone number.

After playing a short advertisement -- unless users pay a subscription fee or 15 cents per call to skip ads -- Slydial puts callers directly into their target's voice mail.

Recipients should then get a voice mail notification, and sometimes they will see a caller's number show up as a missed call, too.

Gavin Macomber, co-founder of MobileSphere Ltd., the Boston-based communications company behind Slydial, thinks it can be useful not only in the dating scene but in the hectic business world.

"Everybody has gone through the scenario where they've called somebody and just hoped they got voice mail so they didn't have to have a conversation," he said.

Indeed, Nora Rubinoff, 45, who runs an administrative support company, At Your Service Cincinnati Ltd., has found Slydial helpful for both business and personal situations. She has left reminder messages for people one of her clients intends to interview.

And when her husband travels to a different time zone for work, she can leave him a Slydial message without disturbing him at an odd time of day, she said.

"It's been really handy," she said.

Macomber said the idea for Slydial came while MobileSphere developed the voice mail routing component of a service meant to lower the cost of international roaming on cell phones.

The company rolled out a private test phase of Slydial in March and has added about 5,000 users since then. The service opened to the general public in a "beta" testing phase Monday.

The ability to call straight into someone's voice mail is not new. Most major cell phone carriers offer subscribers the option of sending voice messages to other people, but usually only to customers of the same wireless company. What's different here is that Slydial makes it possible to do it with any major wireless carrier's customer.

There are constraints to this service. It can be used only in the U.S. right now, and generally won't work with prepaid cell phones. Also, sly dialers must have the caller ID feature activated on their phones, which Macomber said is meant in part to prevent people from using it to harass people undetected.

It's also not always super sly. Several test calls between cell phones made the recipient's phone emit an abbreviated ring before leading to voice mail. That might make people think the person on the other end really wanted to speak -- and could result in a quick call back. Horror of horrors: A real conversation might ensue after all.

MySpace to join rivals in sharing log-ins

NEW YORK (AP) -- The online hangout MySpace took another step Tuesday in cooperating with rival Internet services, joining a coalition that allows people to use the same accounts and passwords across the Web.

Online hangout MySpace joined a coalition that allows people to use the same accounts across the Web.

The OpenID coalition now includes Time Warner Inc.'s AOL, Google Inc.'s Blogger, Yahoo Inc. and blogging services Vox, WordPress and LiveJournal.

Users with a supported account can activate it for use at other sites accepting OpenID; this way they won't have to keep creating new accounts and remembering passwords.

Because MySpace users now log on with their e-mail addresses, MySpace users wishing to log on at another OpenID site will use their unique Web address -- either an assigned number or a name chosen by the user.

MySpace did not say whether it will be accepting OpenID accounts from elsewhere in lieu of its normal registration.

Facebook, the No. 2 online hangout behind News Corp.'s MySpace, has yet to announce OpenID support. Typically, Facebook has favored developing its own systems, while MySpace has been apt to join coalitions.

MySpace also is a member of OpenSocial, a Google-initiated platform for sharing applications across the Web.

MySpace also said Tuesday its users will be able to quickly share profile data with two additional partners, Flixster and Eventful.

Yahoo Inc. and eBay Inc. are among the partners in the Data Availability program, which lets other sites incorporate MySpace profile information, averting the need for users to constantly create new profiles at each site.