The Technology Blog

The chief executive of AT&T Inc said that the company was looking to examine traffic on its Internet lines in order to counter against illegal sharing of copyright material.

The company CEO MR Stephenson told a conference at the World Economic Forum that the company was looking to monitor peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, believed to be one of the largest drivers of online traffic.

Since last summer AT&T has talked about such plans. Stephenson said he still sees the value in peer-to-peer networks despite problems. The network is mainly used to legally distribute files like movie trailers and others.

Comcast Corp., the second largest U.S. Internet provider after AT&T, has come up with another way to tackle the congestion caused by file-sharers, by hampering some peer-to-peer traffic regardless of whether the content is legal or not.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said this month that it would investigate from consumer groups that Comcast’s practice violates the open access principles of the Internet.

The European Commission has planned to offer translation software developers a free access to almost one million sentences translated to 22 of the European Union’s 23 official languages. With this, the EU is hoping that the data will improve the quality of variety of language tools such as grammar and spelling, online dictionaries and so on.

The sentences are mostly drawn from the “Acquis Communautaire,” which is the body of law that should be implemented by all new E.U. member states

The translations cover topics such as IT, labor law, agriculture, fishing and others.

This kind of matching has made the sentences useful for developers of statistical machine translation software. Until now, developers have typically resorted to looking the Web for texts translated into several languages.

The Commission is not being entirely selfish while the release of the data will benefit software developers. The commission hopes that the availability of better automated translation software should help speakers of the E.U.’s minority languages by giving them access to online information.

U.S. rabbis plan to launch an on-line dating service with a view to help Jews marry Jews.

In the U.S marrying a different faith has always been an issue. Jewish community who are concerned about family tensions and the pressures on children pulled the issue in different directions.

An online network www.jdate.com dedicated towards Jewish singles has started offering subscriptions to their assembly. But there is a growing controversy in U.S about Jews marrying outside faith. Reports say about half of the Jews in U.S come under this category.

Rabbi Donald Weber of Marlboro, New Jersey said “Judaism has been wrestling for a long time with the question of intermarriage,”.

He said the issue was to be taken seriously as some parents “disowned” their children if they married outside faith. Rabbi Ken Emert of New Jersey said that JDate was a useful approach to hook up young Jewish professionals who had little time for a social life.

“People are working very long hours … It is very difficult with the hours they are putting in for single Jewish people to meet,” he said.

Others in the community advocate different approaches.

Paul Golin, associate executive director of the Jewish Outreach Institute. “Our answer is outreach to the already intermarried — to encourage them to raise Jewish children,”

According to the National Jewish Population Survey estimated “intermarriage rate” stands at 47 percent. Reports also came in that the U.S. Jewish population had fell for the first time in American history from 5.5 million in 1990 to 5.2 million in 2000/01.

But other recent estimates have put the U.S. Jewish population at closer to six million.

Nintendo topped the year 2007 video sales with retail sales hitting almost $18 billion according to the NDP group. The sales figure has been the highest in US than in any other year.

According to market research, total video game sales have gone up 43 percent, seeing a rise from $12.53 billion in 2006. In December, Americans spent almost $5 billion on video games thereby seeing a growth of 28 percent compares to the year earlier.

Even Hardware sales saw a good rise. It jumped 54 percent up to $7.04 billion in 2007, while software’s climbed up 34 percent to $8.64 billion. NPD analyst Anita Frazier said in an e-mail “I think the industry has become much more generally accepted as a mainstream form of entertainment over the last couple of years, and that sets it up well for future expansion,”

The growing acceptance has been attributed to the Wii, when it was launched in the year 2006 for its motion-sensitive controller which lets players impersonate movements for bowling, tennis and more.

Even Nintendo DS rocked the market sales around 8.5 million units sold, 2.5 million of them in December alone.

Nintendo American President Reggie Fils-Aime said that the company expected to sell more Wiis later this year compared to 2007.

The year’s best-selling game was Microsoft Corp.’s first-person shooter game “Halo 3,” which helped 4.6 million Xbox 360s got sold in 2007.

Microsoft spokesman David Dennis said that there was shortage of Xbox 360’s across U.S.

Sony’s PlayStation 3 was the only gaming system that didn’t sell more than a million units in December. Still Sony looked bright with sales jumping after it slashed the console’s price by $10. About 2.6 million PS3’s got sold in 2007.

Activision Inc.’s “Guitar Hero” games still remains the industry’s best-selling franchise.

Dennis and Fils-Aime said that inspite of the U.S. economic slowdownvideo gaming industry did not see a downtrend, as the industry has generally been insulated from broader downturns.

“Gaming is about having fun, spending time with friends — you want to do it whether the economy is good or bad,” Dennis said.