Thursday, October 18, 2007

Dr Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor














BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (AP) -- A crew that includes Malaysia's first astronaut and an American who will become the first woman to command the international space station prepared Monday for blastoff later this week.

The Soyuz-FG rocket is scheduled to blast off from the Central Asian steppe on Wednesday night to take Malaysia's Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, Peggy Whitson of Beaconsfield, Iowa, and Russian Yuri Malenchenko into orbit.

During his 12-day space trip, Shukor is to study of the effects of microgravity and space radiation on cells and microbes, as well as experiments with proteins for a potential HIV vaccine.

The rocket -- adorned with a Malaysian flag and coat of arms and carrying a Soyuz TMA-11 spacecraft -- was moved Monday to the launch pad from its assembly site at the Baikonur cosmodrome, which Russia rents from Kazakhstan.

"It's too exciting to be cold," said Shankini Dovaisingam, a Malaysian aerospace engineer observing the final preparations. "It's amazing to see the Malaysian flag on a Soyuz spaceship."

The mission coincides with the last days of Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims fast from dawn until sundown, but Malaysian clerics decreed that Shukor will be excused from fasting while in space.

Shukor's religion also requires that he face Mecca for prayer but clerics decided that the exact location matters only for the beginning of the prayer ritual.

Shukor, 35, will bring a "symbolic" load of Malaysian food to the space station, said Zulkeffeli Mat Jusoh, a program director for the Malaysian space program.

The $25 million agreement for a Malaysian astronaut to fly to space was negotiated in 2003 along with a $900 million deal for Malaysia to buy 18 Russian fighter jets.

Shukor is to return to Earth on October 21 with two Russian members of the current space station crew.

Whitson and Malenchenko will stay on as the station's new crew, and will be joined in October by U.S. astronaut Daniel Tani, who is arriving with the shuttle Discovery. Tani will replace fellow American Clayton Anderson, who has been at the station since June.

Source : CNN

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Google Testing YouTube Antipiracy System

Google Inc. has unveiled a test version of a much-awaited antipiracy system for its wildly popular yet controversial YouTube video-sharing site.

The system, called Video Identification, has been far from a secret. Google executives have been mentioning its development since the company acquired YouTube in November of last year.

YouTube, which lets people upload and share clips, is the most popular video site, but some angry video owners have taken the company to court alleging copyright infringement.

The best-known plaintiff is global media conglomerate Viacom, which sued Google in March for US$1 billion over the unauthorized uploading of video clips from its TV shows and movies. In its complaint, Viacom alleged that, as of March, almost 160,000 of its video clips had been uploaded to YouTube without permission and had been viewed over 1.5 billion times.

The antipiracy system became news in July, when an attorney representing Google in the Viacom case said during a routine hearing that Video Identification would be ready by September.

When describing the system, Google has consistently stressed that it will not block videos from being uploaded, but rather take action, if necessary, after they have been added to the YouTube site.

In other words, Google has never planned to place uploaded videos in a holding queue while it checks whether they can be made available on YouTube.

Instead, Google will match uploaded clips against a repository of legitimate videos provided by their owners using digital fingerprinting technology and will take whatever action the copyright owner has requested, such as removing the clip or leaving it up on YouTube.

In designing the system in this manner, Google has maintained that its policies exceed the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as long as it removes from YouTube, upon request, illegally copied videos that owners don't want uploaded without their permission.

That story didn't change on Monday, when Google described Video Identification in a blog posting and in a YouTube page.

"Video Identification goes above and beyond our legal responsibilities. It will help copyright holders identify their works on YouTube, and choose what they want done with their videos: whether to block, promote, or even -- if a copyright holder chooses to license their content to appear on the site -- monetize their videos," David King, YouTube Product Manager, wrote in the blog post.

For now, video owners interested in participating in the beta testing of the system need to submit a request to Google, but the company expects to make it broadly available as the testing progresses.

"As we scale and refine our system, YouTube Video Identification will be available to all kinds of copyright holders all over the world, whether they want their content to appear on YouTube or not," the YouTube information page reads.

It remains to be seen whether this highly anticipated system will help to appease those video content owners who argue that YouTube doesn't do enough to prevent and combat piracy on its site and that instead it profits from the unauthorized and illegal uploading of copyright clips.

Source : PCWORLD