Tech Award winners include fortified rice and fuel cell

Projects that turn slaughterhouse waste into energy and fertilizer, and zinc oxide from fuel cells into fertilizer, as well as programs to fortify rice with nutrients, feed Indian children, and boost wages for artisans were honored Thursday night at the Tech Awards for technology benefiting humanity.

Established in 2001, the Tech Awards recognize 15 laureates in the categories of education, equality, environment, biosciences economic development, and health. One laureate in each category receives a US$50,000 cash prize. The winners were announced at a ceremony at which Al Gore, former U.S. vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, received a humanitarian award.

The Intel Environment Award went to the Cows to Kilowatts project, which Dr. Joseph Adelgan conceived of after realizing that people in his hometown of Ibadan, Nigeria, were being exposed to high levels of Salmonella, E.coli and other disease-causing microorganisms from waste runoff from the local slaughterhouse that ended up in surface water and groundwater.
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iPhone gets Cisco security app

Cisco is offering a free iPhone app that will allow people to get customized alerts on new security threats and other information for safe Web browsing.

The app, which is available in the Apple iTunes store, provides information about new malware signatures, bulletins for how to mitigate against threats, ways to see if particular Web sites are compromised, as well as links to podcasts and videos.
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PhoneSnoop app on BlackBerry lets others eavesdrop on conversations

The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team warned BlackBerry users on Tuesday about a new program called PhoneSnoop that allows someone to remotely eavesdrop on phone conversations.

The PhoneSnoop application must be installed on the phone by someone who has physical access to it or by tricking the user into downloading it, the CERT advisory said.

The author of the app, Sheran Gunasekera, director of security for Hermis Consulting in Jakarta, Indonesia, says it wasn't written to do any actual harm, but rather to warn of the dangers that still exist with the BlackBerry.

The application can be used by anyone to spy on any BlackBerry user's phone. However, Gunasekera says it is not hidden on the device after it's installed, so users should be able to easily see it.
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Windows 7 default user account control worries experts

Corporate IT departments should be pleased with new security measures in Windows 7, but consumers are still at risk of getting hit by malware despite changes in the User Account Control (UAC) feature designed to help people be smarter when using applications, security experts say.

Probably the most talked about security change in Windows 7 are modifications to the UAC, which was introduced in Vista. The UAC was designed to prevent unauthorized execution of code by displaying a pop-up warning every time a change was being made to the system, whether by the operating system or a third-party application.

Vista users complained that they were bombarded with the warnings and security experts speculated that as a result, many people were just ignoring them or turning them off.

With Windows 7, users can choose how often they want to be notified and the default is set to notify only when a third-party application is making a change, as well as when a change is being made to the UAC itself.
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Neil Gaiman's audio book based on tweets

Twitter may not be making money but at least it's providing a forum for some innovative artistic collaboration.

Take, for instance, science fiction writer and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman. He's going to create an audio book based on tweets provided by Twitter users.

You might remember the game of Exquisite Corpse where a group of people create a poem or story together by writing down sentences in succession that no one else can see until everyone has contributed. Read as a whole, the mish-mash can be entertaining, at least to slightly inebriated English literature students bored on a Friday night.
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