A recent study conducted by the University of Rochester and published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, concludes that playing shooter-type video games is a great tool for improving one’s eyesight. That means all of that violence, guts and gore could quite possibly be contributing to healthier eyes.

This is not the first time that the University of Rochester has discovered action based video games can help eyesight. In 2007, subjects in a a study reported improvement in general eyesight by twenty percent after playing action packed video games.

The study concludes that playing video games packed with action improved the contrast sensitivity function (CSF) in individuals who were tested. One of the most common and easily damaged functions of the human eye is contrast sensitivity. Individuals who suffer from low contrast sensitivity have a harder time seeing at night, can’t always pick up on facial expressions, and also have trouble seeing stains and spots on clothing.
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Apple iPhone and BlackBerry owners can breathe easier: Skype plans to announce an application for the smartphones at the CTIA Wireless convention on Tuesday.

Internet phone company Skype announced the availability of their Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony service for Apple’s iPhone and the BlackBerry, a smartphone manufactured by Research in Motion (RIM), Reuters reports. The application, which is available on Tuesday for the iPhone and Wi-Fi enabled iPod touch and comes to BlackBerry devices in May.
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You might have followed the NVIDIA/Intel licensing drama, so here’s the second round. Context: Intel and NVIDIA entered an agreement in which NVIDIA could make motherboard chipsets compatible with Intel’s Front Side Bus (FSB, the piece that connects the processor with the rest of the system). In return for the license, NVIDIA granted Intel accesses to its patent portfolio. Recently, Intel said that this agreement does not cover Intel’s new Core i7 CPU.

NVIDIA’s argument is that if it is not entitled to build chipsets for Intel’s future CPUs, Intel should not be allowed to continue to use NVIDIA’s intellectual property in their products. As we said before, we’re not lawyers and we have no idea how this will be interpreted by a judge, but NVIDIA’s counter-argument is interesting and could be a strong leverage, especially if it has short-term repercussion on Intel’s integrated graphics, a key feature in the popular low-cost segment. Without knowing the implementation details of Intel’s graphics chips, so it’s hard to tell how bad it would hurt if the court sided with NVIDIA’s. However, it is fair to think that if Intel granted the FSB license (they resisted for a while), Intel probably needed the patents.

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The final version of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) does contain the vulnerability used to hack a preview of the browser at last week’s Pwn2Own, the contest’s sponsor confirmed today.

But the exploit used by the computer science student to break the release candidate of IE8 — and walk away with a Sony laptop and $5,000 in cash — won’t work on the final version of IE8 as long as it’s running in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 or Windows 7, said Terri Forslof, manager of security response at 3Com Corp.’s TippingPoint unit.

Questions had arisen about the exploitability of IE8 almost immediately after the Pwn2Own hack because Nils, the German student who gave only his first name, hacked IE8 Release Candidate 1 (RC1), while Microsoft released the final code less than 24 hours later.
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Ben Heck is at it again with the Xbox 360 Controller Monitor being his latest brainchild this time round. This project requires one to modify a wireless Xbox 360 controller and a display board, where the board will rely on LEDs to show which are the buttons on the controller that are being pressed, in addition to analog stick movement.
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Microsoft Corp., tacitly acknowledging the continued popularity of Windows XP, said yesterday that it was updating the operating system’s antipiracy technology to detect illegal copies installed with newlystolen or faked product keys, or with new activation cracks.

In an entry to a company blog, Alex Kochis, director of Microsoft’s Genuine Windows group, spelled out the update to WGA Notifications. That’s the antipiracy component that provides the messages and other on-screen prompts when the other half of WGA, dubbed Validations, detects an illegal copy of the operating system.

“This update includes the latest validation information, including recently stolen or misused product keys and other information,” said Kochis, who elsewhere in the blog noted that the “other” category included “attempts to circumvent product activation.” Such circumvention methods, called “cracks,” are popular downloads on file-sharing sites that also feature pirated software.
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If you aren’t following changes in search technology, you could have almost missed today’s announcement from Google – which seems to be insignificant at first, but at a closer look a dramatic improvement that effectively rings in Google 3.0.

The original Google was good enough to fend of rivals until 2007, when the company announced its first major improvement called Universal Search. Back then, the company combined its search silos - text, images, videos, shopping and others – but already hinted at a future feature called contextual search. Contextual search, commonly referred to as semantic search, links related topics to better predict what users may be looking for.
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