The otherworldly wide web is born

The internet could soon conquer space, according to Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet. He said that he was working with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California to set up a galactic web.

“The internet can take us where no network has gone before,” he said.

“Eventually we will accumulate an interplanetary backbone to assist robotic and manned missions with robust communication.”

jpl.nasa.gov

Buzzing bidet

Already famed for their beanbags and bright colours, the Google offices let slip details of another perk this week: a robotic bidet. Times Online’s technology blog revealed details of the Korean-made facility, which has a vibrating seat.

“I think it aids productivity,” one company employee said. “You come out of there ready to face work, clean as the day God made ya.”

timesonline.co.uk/mousetrap
google.com

Cool idea

Computers left running unnecessarily waste 30 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity every year – equivalent to 14 billion gallons of oil – according to LocalCooling.com. The website encourages people to download free software that optimises PC power consumption.

“Our goal is to introduce 100 million PC users into the Local Cooling community,” the organisers say. So far, 175,000 people have signed up, saving 1.6 million kilowatt-hours of power between them.

localcooling.com

Phone or sex?

Britons aged 18 to 24 would rather give up sex than their mobile phones, according to research by Link, the network of cash machines. Other results suggest that they may not be given the luxury of a choice: respondents said that they would choose phones over deodorant and clean underwear when packing an overnight bag.

link.co.uk

Dodgy characters

The web became a little more worldwide this week as testing began on addresses that use nonRoman characters. Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Cyrillic, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Hebrew, Japanese and Tamil characters are all being tested.

Although some of these scripts are already in use in web addresses, the final portion of the link – the .com or .org suffix – has always had to use the Roman alphabet. Icann, the registry that controls web addresses, says that intensive tests will ensure that the changes do not disrupt the internet. “Everyone in the world will essentially be invited to try to break the new system,” a spokeswoman said.

icann.org

Online most read

1 Black people are less intelligent, scientist claims
2 Women’s secret sect raided
3 Ellen DeGeneres dog drama
4 Male infertility alert
5 Legal threat over toxic iPhone
6 Obama’s wife attacks Hillary
7 UK house market may crash
8 ‘Persecution’ of Kate McCann
9 Maddy McCann – new search
10 Kate Middleton

Source: Times Online, October 12-18, worldwide users of site