Pop in a new CD and you might notice that the quality of the music itself–maybe something as simple as a snare drum hit–just doesn’t sound as crisp and as clear as you’re used to. Why is that?

It’s part of the music industry’s quest to make music louder and louder. The result is that, sure, the soft parts of a song are nice and loud, but big noises like drum beats become muffled and fuzzy. But consumers often subconsciously equate loudness with quality, and thus, record producers pump up the volume. Anything to make a buck.

Mexens Technology announced the availability of Navizon for any Wi-Fi or Bluetooth enabled computer. Navizon is a positioning system that works by triangulating signals from Wi-Fi and/or Cellular towers. It is based on a community of users mapping the wireless landscape in their area and collecting Wi-Fi and Cell towers locations all around the world. Once the data collected is shared with the rest of the network, everyone can benefit from Navizon’s virtual GPS, even on devices that do not include a GPS chip.

Microsoft announced an improved version of Microsoft Robotics Studio, just months after the December 2006 introduction of its robotics application development toolkit. The new Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.5 adds support for Windows Embedded CE 6.0 and Windows Mobile 6, which allows developers to more easily deploy advanced scenarios and software applications on embedded platforms of a wider variety and lower cost.

Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.5 includes improvements to its visual programming language and 3-D real-world-physics-based visual simulation environment, built on the AGEIA Technologies-based PhysX engine. New services have also been added, including support for vision and speech recognition, expanded documentation and a new editor that makes it easier to configure and target software services for robotics platforms.

Sony is slashing the price of its PlayStation 3 games console by 17% or $100 in the US to boost sales. As a result the PS3 will now cost $500, between $100 and $200 more than versions of the Microsoft Xbox 360 and twice as much as the Nintendo Wii.

The Xbox 360 and Wii have been significantly outselling the PS3 in the US market.

Palm and Pelephone Communications, an Israel-based cellular communications provider, announced the availability of the Treo 700wx smartphone for Pelephone’s CDMA/EV-DO network in Israel. The Treo 700wx smartphone is available now at Pelephone stores and authorized dealers.

The touch-screen enabled Treo 700wx smartphone combines broadband-like speeds on Pelephone’s high-speed network with wireless email and rich media capabilities all in one device–bringing Palm’s world-class ease of use to the Windows Mobile 5.0 platform. The Treo 700wx smartphone incorporates a full QWERTY keyboard for easy messaging, a 1.3-megapixel camera, a bright 240×240 touch screen and support for Bluetooth stereo headsets. The built-in 64MB of RAM allows the use of a more robust set of applications, while storage can be enhanced by using the SD slot to add memory cards of up to 2GB, which are great for storing data, photos, music and video.

Those airplane power adapters you can buy for your gadgets are useless without an actual power outlet for your seat–and unless you’re in first or business class, you probably won’t get one. Enter Inflight Power and its clever new adapter, which lets you draw juice from the headphone jack on your armrest.

Simply plug the cord into your seat’s audio jack, turn the dial to an in-flight channel with consistently loud sound (rock music works nicely, according to Inflight Power), crank the volume, and plug in your MP3 player or handheld (adapters are available for iPods, BlackBerrys, Motorola phones, or most any pocket device with a mini USB port for charging). It doesn’t look like the Inflight Power adapters will work for laptops, though.

Exploding from the other end of the field, a silver robot glinted under the light of the cameras and burst toward the lone defender standing between it and the goal. But suddenly, the robot stopped dead in its tracks, hopelessly mired as if it were stuck on superglue.

A metal arm appeared to rescue the wayward robot, but it was no crane–it was an acupuncture needle. And the field it plucked the robot from was hardly the size of a grain of rice. What do you expect when the robot is six times smaller than an amoeba and weighs no more than a few hundred nanograms?

Robots of all sizes have descended on the campus of Georgia Tech for the RoboCup, an international contest that pits robotic creations against one another in a range of technical challenges. But perhaps the most intriguing event was Saturday’s Nano Cup, a competition hailed by organizers as the world’s first nanoscale soccer game.

Held by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, its organizers hope to show the potential for building tiny devices that can be used in manufacturing, biotechnology and other industries. They also hope to develop manufacturing standards for the untapped field.

VITO Technology gladly presents VITO VoiceReminder v 2.0–a talking alarm-clock capable of playing back your voice messages at a set time. The new polished user interface is intuitive and allows for creating new reminders in a second.

Apart from completely new user interface VITO VoiceReminder v 2.0 features several skins for full screen clock, so that you can pick the most suitable. The new version of VITO VoiceReminder allows you to disable full screen clock from popping up every time you turn on your device. Time announcement can be turned off as well.

Mobile-gadget makers are starting to take advantage of software-defined radio, a new technology allowing a single device to receive signals from multiple sources, including television stations and cell phone networks.

But a new federal rule could mean that radios built on “open-source elements” may encounter a more sluggish path to market–or, in the worst case scenario, be shut out altogether. U.S. regulators, it seems, believe the inherently public nature of open-source code makes it more vulnerable to hackers, leaving “a high burden to demonstrate that it is sufficiently secure.”

Blacklists have their place for detecting and identifying malicious content and activity, with the whole signature-based malware detection industry effectively being built around the concept that blacklists are reliable mechanisms. The only problem is that they aren’t.

They certainly are an important element of security models, but the last couple of decades of security research has shown that they quickly become ineffective in the face of a rapidly evolving threat.

Blacklists of known spam-generating IPs and malware-serving sites, we start to see significant problems emerge with this particular approach to protection.

Many mail server administrators will have encountered at least one period where they have found their IP on an RBL (Real Time Block List) alongside IPs that have seen to be spewing spam across networks (or they could have just had AOL mailing list subscribers who find it easier to report as spam than unsubscribe from something they manually subscribed to). With the use of dynamic IP addresses and virtual hosts, many have found that if they have a bad network neighbor, they can be hit with the same blocking (we’ve had it happen a few times) from indiscriminate RBL maintainers.

Even important registries are not immune from arbitrary blockage and ongoing annoyance from poorly developed RBLs.