Today’s Tech News - Mar. 1, 2007

Electronic Arts Brings the SimCity Series to Nintendo DS - Playfuls.com
The fastest selling gaming system in the world, the Nintendo DS, is getting the best selling game in the world, the Sims series.

AMD releases first ATI graphics integrated chipset - DigiTimes
AMD has released its 690 series chipset, the company’s first chipset to bring together the combination of the AMD CPU platform and the graphics capabilities of the ATI Radeon X1250 GPU.

Sony Responds to PS3 Backwards-Compatibility Critics - PC Magazine
As you may recall, Sony got a few people excited last Friday after they announced that European PS3s would no longer be sporting an Emotion engine chip — aka, “the thing that lets you play older games on your PS3″.

Symantec Vista White Paper Links to PatchGuard Crack - BetaNews
In a curious decision on the part of a security software company, a white paper released today on the Web site of Symantec

Details on Sony’s $600 Blu-ray Player - PC World
At Sony’s Open House event today in Las Vegas, the company showed its second-generation Blu-ray Disc player, the BDP-S300, due out this summer.

RIAA Opposes ‘Fair Use’ Bill - PC World
A new bill in the US Congress aimed at protecting the fair use rights for consumers of copyright material would “legalize hacking,” the Recording Industry Association of America said.

Corel’s WordPerfect Lightning beta thunders across the web - iTWire
The latest entrant into the word processing world is a bolt out of the blue, offering 200Mb of free online storage, collaboration tools, a file and ideas organizer, a PDF viewer and more

World’s first robot-controlled bird - People’s Daily Online
The Robot Research Center at Shandong University of Science and Technology recently developed a robot-controlled pigeon that “understands” and follows human-directed computer commands.

Google Adds Security to Hosted Applications - PC World
Google’s enterprise collaboration suite unveiled last week includes security options that let companies tie it into their existing corporate directories and extend single sign-on to the online provider’s hosted applications .

Ning is Neat - PC World
Until last week, I was only vaguely aware of the Web service known as Ning–and the main thing I knew was that it had been co-founded by Marc Andreessen, the man without whom the Web as we know it might not exist.

BitTorrent’s Big Play - Red Herring
BitTorrent had to work hard to convince movie and television executives that it could shed its image as a tool for pirates and become a legitimate online video-downloading destination.

Americans Still Lagging Behind Europeans in Mobile Web - Playfuls.com
A new study shows that 34% of all American internet users have accessed the Web using wireless connections, like Wi-Fi or 3G broadband.

IBM Links Google Gadgets to WebSphere Portal - eWeek
Google gained a major new ally in its campaign to extend its applications and information services deeper into the enterprise with IBM’s Feb. 28 announcement that it has integrated Google Gadgets with its WebSphere Portal.

HID denies RFID demo threat, hackers worry - ZDNet
Black Hat Diary: IOActive’s decision to cancel its RFID hacking demo is the main topic of conversation here as white hat hackers ponder the ramifications of a vendor using patent infringement claims to thwart legitimate security research.

It’s only an atom thick, a film that defies the laws of physics - Times Online
Scientists have created the thinnest material in the world and predict that it will revolutionise computing and medical research. A layer of carbon has been manufactured in an independent film so thin that it is only one atom thick and defies the laws …

Will iPhone halt a drop in NAND flash pricing? - DigiTimes
There is a chance that the persistent drop in NAND flash contract pricing may ease, as the leading two players