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Using a novel technology that adds multiple innovations to a very high-performance crystalline silicon solar cell platform, a consortium led by the University of Delaware (UD) has achieved a record-breaking combined solar cell efficiency of 42.8 percent. The current record of 40.7 percent was attained in December 2006 by Boeing's Spectrolab, Inc. Honsberg said the previous best of 40.7 percent efficiency was achieved with a high concentration device that requires sophisticated tracking optics and features a concentrating lens the size of a table and more than 30 centimeters, or about 1 foot, thick. The UD consortium's devices are potentially far thinner at less than 1 centimeter.

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Safari's security model prevents JavaScript in remote web pages from modifying pages outside of their domain. A race condition in page updating combined with HTTP redirection may allow JavaScript from one page to modify a redirected page. This could allow cookies and pages to be read or arbitrarily modified. This update addresses the issue by correcting access control to window properties. Credit to Lawrence Lai, Stan Switzer, and Ed Rowe of Adobe Systems, Inc. for reporting this issue.

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A larger conference means not one but two keynote addresses. One is from Richard Clarke, President Bush's former special adviser on cyberspace security. Clarke, whose 2002 Black Hat keynote speech stated that software vendors and Internet providers must share the blame for malicious software, is now with Good Harbor Security. This year, he will talk about those "who seek truth through science, even when the powerful try to suppress it." The other keynote speaker will be Tony Sager, vulnerability chief of the National Security Agency, who will talk about creating government security standards while working with commercial vendors. Unlike last year, when Microsoft hosted an entire series of sessions focusing on the yet-to-be released Windows Vista platform, there will be no similar tracks offered this year. Returning tracks include sessions on voice services security, forensics, hardware, zero-day attacks and zero-day defenses. New tracks include operating system kernels, application security, reverse engineering, fuzzing and the testing of application security. But it's the individual sessions that could get heated.

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AT&T's second explanation was that Apple's 270,000 iPhones included sales of iPhones through Apple's online store, which obviously couldn't have been activated the first weekend since Apple is quoting two- to four-week lead times for iPhones ordered online. But Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer specifically said on the conference call that the 270,000 units reflected only iPhones that were sold to AT&T for distribution through its network of retail stores and iPhones sold through Apple's retail stores. No iPhones sold through Apple's online store were included as part of that 270,000 unit figure, the company later confirmed.

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Now, KHTML won't be deleted right away since there are features in it that need to be ported into Webkit. For example, KHTML (in KDE 4) implements portions of the definition of the CSS3 standard, which will need to be adopted into Webkit and so forth. But the big deal is that the coders that invented the underlying layers that power Konqueror, some Nokia browsers, Abrowse, Safari, Adobe's Air, and now Epiphany and a few other projects that are in the works, are now back in the fold. Additionally, Trolltech has announced that they are including Webkit in their upcoming Qt 4.4 release which means that a major, cross-platform toolkit now permits anyone to use the Webkit rendering engine where ever they need to render some HTML. In open source terms, this may be as big of a deal as the gcc and egcs merger of yonder days. KHTML and Webkit are definitely coming of age. The KDE developers, responsible for the original creation of KHTML, are dedicated to seeing this unforking happen and are taking a leading role in that effort.

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Scientists are working on a new type of nanogenerator that could draw the necessary energy from flowing blood in the human body, by using the beating heart and pulsating blood vessels. Once completed, this new cellular engine could find various applications, even beyond medicine. Zhong Lin Wang and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology hope to be able to incorporate the new nanogenerator into biosensors, environmental monitoring devices and even personal electronics that will require no fuel source, internal or external. It will produce its own electricity while immersed in biological fluids or other liquids, using ultrasonic waves as the energy source. So far, they achieved the nanogenerator effect in an array of nanowires that could produce as much as 4 watts/cubic centimeter.

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Copyright groups may not be able to demand that telecom companies hand over the names and addresses of people suspected of swapping music illegally online, a senior legal adviser to the EU's highest court said. Advocate General Juliane Kokott, advising the European Court of Justice, said Wednesday that EU law directs governments to resist the disclosure of personal data on Internet traffic in civil cases - unlike criminal cases, where compliance would be required.