Internet TV underway

The duo behind the blockbuster Internet applications Skype and Kazaa think they have the secret to online video: Make it more like TV.

Joost (pronounced "juiced") seeks to merge the best features of Internet file-sharing technology — such as its ability to deliver content efficiently — with a television-like viewing experience. Industry insiders who have seen an early version of the Internet television service extol the full-screen video quality and the simple interface, which is more of an electronic channel guide than the lists of videos on popular sites such as YouTube.

"Joost offers a very Mac-like experience," said Adam Ware, head of business development for United Talent Agency, who has been testing the service that was developed by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis and unveiled Tuesday.

There's no shortage of ways to watch TV shows delivered via the Internet. Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store sells 350 shows for download; YouTube offers short comedy bits from CBS' "Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson" along with its trademark user-created videos; and networks stream top shows for free online after they air, including ABC's "Ugly Betty."

Joost isn't about offering clips or downloads but creating a lineup of varied programming for high-speed Internet connections — a computer equivalent to cable or satellite television service. It is working with media partners, such as Warner Music Group and "Bridezillas" producer September Films, to make their programming available.

"It's not about finding a clip, it's about finding a channel that you like and watching it," said Joost Chief Executive Fredrik de Wahl. "This is where the traditional TV model is powerful. You can flip between channels and find something that interests you."

De Wahl said Joost had taken steps to thwart piracy. The video is encrypted, and individual users will not be able to contribute clips because of the difficulties of monitoring such user-generated content for copyright violations.

Michael Nash, Warner Music's senior vice president of digital strategy, said Joost shared the label's concerns about piracy. Warner has begun experimenting with Joost to create a Red Hot Chili Peppers channel, which includes a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the band's "Dani California" music video.

"This is a genius blend of Internet and television," Nash said. "People have been talking about this kind of convergence for a while. From my perspective, thinking about the user experience, it's a great blend of ondemand selection of linear programming mixed with interactive features and community features, like chat."

As with broadcast TV, the shows will be provided free to the viewer — with commercial ad support — when Joost becomes widely available later this year. Viewers will be able to take advantage of community features, rating the videos or chatting online with others using the community's chat channel.

Anton Denissov, a media and entertainment analyst for Yankee Group, said Zennstrom and Friis had a knack for innovating just as a technology reaches the mainstream — as they did with online file-sharing and Internet phone calls. Viewers ages 18 to 34 are spending more hours a day on the Internet than in front of a television, Denissov said. And on-demand Internet video is growing more accessible; 53% of American households have high-speed access.

Nonetheless, Denissov said Joost faced obstacles. It still needs content, an audience, revenue and a path to the living room TV. Getting high-quality video that will attract viewers is expensive — it's hard to afford without a healthy income, he said. But the needed advertising revenue won't come until the audience arrives.

"The Comcasts, the Verizons and the AT&Ts of the world are better positioned to handle the market. They have the audience, they've got positive profit, they've got a path to the living room," Denissov said. "Their weakness lies in their slowness to innovate. They might just open a hole small enough for guys like Joost to enter."

Adobe Updates Flash for Linux

Adobe Systems has released Flash Player 9 for Linux, allowing users of the open-source operating system to create or use multimedia applications with the latest version of Flash.

The launch comes six months after the Adobe released versions for Windows and Mac OS X.

Updated Features

Version 9 of the Flash Player runs scripts up to ten times faster than previous versions, and also allows programmers to write portable applications exploiting more of the capabilities of Adobe's Flex 2 development platform, the company said Wednesday.

The player's arrival on the Linux platform will mean Web site developers exploiting the latest Flash features can be sure of reaching the small percentage of Web surfers running Linux on their desktop.

It will also give site developers using Linux access to more of the potential of Adobe's rich Internet application development environment, Flex 2, the company said.

With Flex, Adobe allows developers to build rich graphical applications that obtain data from a server and process it for presentation on the client or that can run in stand-alone mode on the desktop. The Flex platform includes server components for extracting data from business applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and, on the client side, integrates with the more recent versions of the Flash player.

Flash Player 9 for Linux can be downloaded for free from Adobe's Web site.

Adobe Likes Linux

Red Hat and Novell plan to bundle the new player with their distributions of Linux later this year, Adobe said.

Adobe recently contributed some of the code for its ActionScript Virtual Machine 2, the engine that interprets the scripts stored in Flash files, to a project hosted by the Mozilla Foundation. That project, Tamarin, aims to develop an open-source, standards-based, multiplatform engine for interpreting JavaScript, Adobe's ActionScript or other languages based on the ECMAscript standard, making it easier for browser developers to include support for rich scripting applications.

Alps at the peak of global warming

As global warming takes hold we take a look at the impact around Europe. A recent study by the economic research group, the OECD, says climate change poses a serious risk to winter tourism in the Alpine region. It says recent warming there has been roughly three times the global average.

Elsewhere, unseasonable temperatures in the Russian city of St Petersberg are disrupting the hibernation of bears in the local zoo. Lev Karlin of St Petersberg's Meteorology University says it is a disturbing sight: "The latest figures prove that it's getting warm really quickly and that does allow us to think man himself is not without blame."

There is a similar tale in Greece, where temperatures topping 20 degrees have been recorded this January. Last month there was 20 times less rain than normal. Trees in bloom in mid-winter are further evidence the planet is heating up. Cristos Zerefos, President of the Athens National Observatory says maritime ecosystems are also affected: "There are changes that we see in general not only in water but in living species, we see changes that are remarkable in hydrotopes." Certain species of fish that would normally be found in Aegian waters this time of year have not arrived. The reproduction cycle of others has been interrupted.

On the other side of the Atlantic there has been extreme weather of another kind. The United States has been lashed by a cold snap that has brought freezing temperatures to parts of the continent that rarely see them. A state of emergency has been declared in California where orange crops have been devastated.

Despite what appears to be mounting evidence there is still debate about global warming in the scientific community. But there is a consensus is that effective action to counter climate change needs to be taken now

Russia sees red over Estonian war memorial

Russia's relations with Estonia have taken a turn for the worse. The state parliament, the Duma, wants Moscow to take "decisive steps" if Tallin begins to dismantle a monument to the 50,000 Soviet soldiers who died fighting the Germans in World War II. Economic sanctions have not been ruled out. Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was unequivocal.

"As far as we are concerned, this is akin to blasphemy," he said. "We are convinced that it was dictated by motives that have nothing in common with the necessity to learn lessons from the past and build a unified Europe without any borders, and to be guided, while building that Europe, by the interests of the people living in it and by today's interests."

Tallin says the monument, dating from 1947, has become a focus for public discontent and demonstrations. For many Estonians it is a reminder of their loss of independence after the Russian occupation of 1940. The authorities say they want to move it to a more secure site.

Former VW boss admits corruption

Volkswagen's former personnel chief Peter Hartz has admitted making illegal payments to union officials.

The confession, made through his lawyers, came at the start of his corruption trial in Germany.

A one-time advisor to former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Mr Hartz faces 44 charges of breach of trust.

His confession means he is now likely to receive just a suspended sentence and a fine. He could have faced up to five years in jail.

Cash and perks

After meeting prosecutors and defence lawyers at the start of the trial, Judge Gerstin Dreyer said "we came to the result that an arrangement on the sentence is possible".

Mr Hartz, who left VW in 2005, is accused of showering key union bosses at the carmaker with cash and other perks such as holidays.

He was also initially accused of using company funds to pay for prostitutes, but prosecutors have dropped that charge.

The opinion of union leaders is important to German firms because under German law union bosses sit on a company's board of directors, and must be consulted on major new initiatives.

Mr Hartz' lawyer, Egon Mueller said that no-one else on the VW board knew of Mr Hartz's payments.

Mr Mueller said Mr Hartz admitted that he had illegally paid 1.9m euros ($2.5m; £1.2m) to Klaus Volkert, the former head of VW's powerful employee council.

Mr Volkert was arrested in November, but was subsequently released in December and no formal charges have been brought against him.

So far, the other main person to be charged in relation to the case is Hans-Juergen Uhl - now an MP for the centre-left Social Democrats.

A former member of VW's works council, he has been charged with two counts of being an accessory to breach of trust, and five counts of making false statements while under oath.

Although federal lawmakers have voted to lift his parliamentary immunity so he can be prosecuted, he currently remains in parliament and has denied any wrongdoing.

The verdict against Mr Hartz is due to be announced next week.

Six hostages released in Nigeria

Five Chinese workers kidnapped in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta region have been freed, the Chinese foreign ministry said.

Unidentified gunmen seized the group of telecommunications engineers near the city of Port Harcourt on 5 January.

"Following efforts, the hostages were all safely rescued," the ministry said in a statement.

Earlier, the Italian authorities confirmed that an Italian oil worker seized in December had been released.

The Niger Delta region has been hit by attacks and kidnappings in recent months.

Militants seeking a greater share of the region's oil wealth have targeted foreign oil facilities and their workers since early 2006.

Rising violence

The Chinese workers were released on Wednesday, China's Xinhua news agency reported.

"The Chinese government appreciates support and assistance of relevant parties in Nigeria," the foreign ministry statement said.

The kidnapped men had been in the region to install telephone lines, Nigerian officials said at the time of their abduction.

Earlier, militants turned over Roberto Dieghi, an Italian oil worker seized last month, to a Bayelsa state government delegation.

The militants, a group called the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend), said it had released him as a goodwill gesture.

But three of Mr Dieghi's colleagues seized at the same time as him - two Italians and a Lebanese man, all employed by Italian oil firm Agip - remain in captivity.

No discussions were going on concerning the remaining men, who would be held "indefinitely", a statement from Mend said.

In recent months attacks by the militants have escalated, causing oil multinationals to evacuate thousands of workers from the western side of the region.

On Tuesday, two oil workers - a Nigerian and a Dutch national - were killed when gunmen attacked a vessel near an oil export complex.

The instability in the region has reduced Nigeria's oil production, costing the country some $4.4bn (£2.2bn) last year, according to the government.

Climate resets 'Doomsday Clock'

Experts assessing the dangers posed to civilisation have added climate change to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as the greatest threats to humankind.

As a result, the group has moved the minute hand on its famous "Doomsday Clock" two minutes closer to midnight.

The concept timepiece, devised by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, now stands at five minutes to the hour.

The clock was first featured by the magazine 60 years ago, shortly after the US dropped its A-bombs on Japan.

Not since the darkest days of the Cold War has the Bulletin, which covers global security issues, felt the need to place the minute hand so close to midnight.

'Perilous choices'

The decision to move it came after BAS directors and affiliated scientists held discussions to reassess the idea of doomsday and what posed the most grievous threats to civilisation.

Growing global nuclear instability has led humanity to the brink of a "Second Nuclear Age," the group concluded, and the threat posed by climate change is second only to that posed by nuclear weapons.

"When we think about what technologies besides nuclear weapons could produce such devastation to the planet, we quickly came to carbon-emitting technologies," said Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Chicago-based BAS.

The announcement was made at simultaneous events held by the magazine in London and in Washington DC that included remarks from the English Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, and physicist Stephen Hawking.

"Humankind's collective impacts on the biosphere, climate and oceans are unprecedented," said Sir Martin.

"These environmentally driven threats - 'threats without enemies' - should loom as large in the political perspective as did the East/West political divide during the Cold War era."

A number of alarming nuclear trends led to a statement by the Bulletin that "the world has not faced such perilous choices" since the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The worries include Iran's nuclear ambitions, North Korea's detonation of an atomic bomb, the presence of 26,000 launch-ready weapons by America and Russia, and the inability to secure and halt the international trafficking of nuclear materials such as highly enriched uranium and plutonium.

Ice evidence

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, founded by former Manhattan Project physicists, has campaigned for nuclear disarmament since 1947.

Its board periodically reviews issues of global security and challenges to humanity, not solely those posed by nuclear technology, although most have had a technological component.

This is the first time it has included climate change as an explicit threat to the future of civilisation.

A less immediate threat, but included in the assessment, is the one posed by emerging life science technologies, such as synthetic biology and genetic modification.

While the harm done to the planet by carbon-emitting manufacturing technologies and automobiles was more gradual than a nuclear explosion, nonetheless, it could also be catastrophic to life as we know it and "irremediable", the board said.

It cited in support the conclusions of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Its broad assessment is that the warning over the last few decades is attributable to human activities, and that its consequences are observable in such events as the melting of Arctic ice.

In the years ahead, rising sea levels, heat waves, desertification, along with new disease outbreaks and wars over arable land and water, would mean climate change could bring widespread destruction, the board said.

It also warned against the use of nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels.

'Optimistic' view

While the technology had the potential to alleviate the climate warming effects of burning coal, its development raised the spectre that nuclear materials would be available for nefarious ends as well, the board argued.

Some scientists - even climate scientists - may not support the comparison of global warming to the catastrophe that would follow a nuclear engagement.

"Whether it's a threat of the same magnitude or slightly less or greater is beside the point," said Michael Oppenheimer, a geoscientist from Princeton University, US.

"The important point is that this organisation, which for 60 years has been monitoring and warning us about the nuclear threat, now recognises climate change as a threat that deserves the same level of attention," he said.

Both the nuclear menace and a runaway greenhouse effect were the result of technology whose control had slipped from humans' grasp, the BAS directors said. But it was also within our power to pull them back under control, they added.

"We haven't figured out how to do that yet, but the potential is within our institutions and our imaginations," said Dr Benedict.

Dr Oppenheimer agrees that people should not despair. After all, he said, for a long time the world took the nuclear threat seriously and reduced the numbers of weapons.

"I'm optimistic that we can address climate change," he said. "We've dealt with such problems before, and we can do it again."

Over the past 60 years, the Doomsday clock has now moved backwards and forwards 18 times. It advanced to two minutes before midnight - its closest proximity to doom - in 1953 after the United States and the Soviet Union detonated hydrogen bombs.

Its keepers last moved the clock's hand in 2002 after the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and amid alarm about the acquisition of nuclear weapons and materials by terrorists.