Tech brief
On Tech Brief today: Google Games gets going and how to save water with a soccer pitch.
• Rare is the student who has any cash to spare. Especially when they are called Joel Tenenbaum. The graduate student was ordered to pay $675,000 in damages for illegally sharing 30 songs. He appealed and the judge in the case reviewed it and agreed the total was ""unconstitutionally excessive". . Mr Tenenbaum responds:
"Obviously, it's better news than it could have been. But it's basically equally unpayable to me."
• When Google turned the logo it sucked up hundreds of hours of productivity as folk spent time eating dots and . Now, , social games giant Zynga has been the recipient of a $200m investment by the search firm.
"Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year, say multiple sources. Not only will Zynga's games give Google Games a solid base of social games to build on, but it will also give Google the beginning of a true social graph as users log into Google to play the games."
• Robots can build cars, clean your floors and now educate your children. , how to keep things tidy and, in the case of a robot called RUBI, languages. The upside is the robot's endless patience and delight in repetition. But it's not all good.
"Like any new kid in class, RUBI took some time to find a niche. Children swarmed the robot when it first joined the classroom: instant popularity. But by the end of the day, a couple of boys had yanked off its arms."
• The NSA is watching. The National Security Agency handles many of the secret cyber activities of the US government. .
"Perfect Citizen will look at large, typically older computer control systems that were often designed without Internet connectivity or security in mind. Many of those systems--which run everything from subway systems to air-traffic control networks--have since been linked to the internet, making them more efficient but also exposing them to cyber attack."
• The success of water pumps disguised as roundabouts has been well documented. Now Atopia Research is taking the idea further by producing .
"The field and stands are permeable and allow water to collect right below the surface into cisterns kept at ground level to be easily accessible to the local community. The football field's bleachers can also be used to house schools, health clinics and local stores. It can be built using local materials that are readily available such as abandoned shipping containers for cisterns to make it an extremely cost-effective model."
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