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Google has begun scanning microfilm from some newspapers’ historic archives to make them searchable online, first through Google News and eventually on the papers’ own Web sites, the company said Monday.

The new program expands a two-year-old service that allows Google News users to search the archives of some major newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time, that were already available in digital form. Readers will be able to search the archives using keywords and view articles as they appeared originally in the print pages of newspapers.

Under the expanded program, Google will shoulder the cost of digitizing newspaper archives, much as the company does with its book-scanning project. Google angered some book publishers because it had failed to seek permission to scan books that were protected by copyrights. It will obtain permission from newspaper publishers before scanning their archives.

Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., will place advertisements alongside search results, and share the revenue from those ads with newspaper publishers.

Initially, the archives will be available through Google News, but the company plans to give newspapers a way to make their archives available on their own sites.

“This is really good for newspapers because we are going to be bringing online an old generation of contributions from journalists, as well as widening the reader base of news archives,” said Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and user experience at Google.

Read more @ NyTimes.com

Scientists hope to fire the first beam of protons around a 17-mile tunnel on Wednesday in science’s next great step to understand the makeup of the universe.

The Large Hadron Collider — built since 2003 at a cost of $3.8 billion — will provide scientists with much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms in a bid to see how they are made.

The startup — eagerly awaited by 9,000 physicists around the world who will conduct experiments here — comes over the objections of some skeptics who fear the collisions of protons could eventually imperil the earth.

The skeptics theorize that a byproduct of the collisions could be micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars.

"It’s nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, the host European Organization for Nuclear Research.

CERN is backed by leading scientists like Britain’s Stephen Hawking in dismissing the fears and declaring the experiments to be absolutely safe.

Gillies told the AP that the most dangerous thing that could happen would be if a beam at full power were to go out of control, and that would only damage the accelerator itself and burrow into the rock around the tunnel deep below the Swiss-French border.

Read more @ AP

AMD has announced three new triple-core processors and improved support for Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualisation technology. The new chips include the Phenom X3 8750 Black Edition, with a Clock Multiplier Control and tuneable performance, and the energy-efficient Phenom X3 8450e and Phenom X3 8250e.
AMD is aiming the new chips at digital content creators and the high-end gaming market. Meanwhile, the company has also announced that it is working more closely with Microsoft on virtualisation technology.

View: The full story @ vnunet

Despite reports earlier this month which suggested otherwise, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs appeared during the highly anticipated "Let’s Rock" presentation today, thin but jaunty, where he introduced new iPod nano and Touch music players. The thinner 8GB iPod nano, hailed as the thinnest iPod ever made, will go for $149, and includes a new "shake to shuffle" feature to change song play. The company also announced that that television broadcaster NBC had rejoined online video and music store iTunes.
"I would call it a series of both expected and unexpected announcements. Clearly the new iPod nano in the flesh is certainly more appealing than it’s been. It was expected but I think it will sell well in the holiday season," said Michael Abramsky, analyst with RBC Capital Markets. "NBC is important content for Apple to have on iTunes, especially with the direction it’s taking, which is for iPods to handle more video. Having robust iTunes video is key to their success," said Shannon Cross, analyst with Cross Research.

View: Full Story at Reuters

One of the oft cited concerns towards search engine giant Google is the fact that it has access to mountains upon mountains of potentially confidential user data. From email to documents to even web browsing, Google potentially has its arms in every part of person’s digital life. Today, the company announced on their blog a new measure to protect its users’ privacy: Google has cut its old 18 month IP address retention policy to only 9 months, after which it will anonymize the IP addresses on the server logs. The move comes after several months of discussions with both US and EU privacy regulators.

Peter Fleischer, Global Privacy Counsel for Google, wrote on the company blog: "While we’re glad that this will bring some additional improvement in privacy, we’re also concerned about the potential loss of security, quality, and innovation that may result from having less data. As the period prior to anonymization gets shorter, the added privacy benefits are less significant and the utility lost from the data grows."