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Hold your breath to hide from surveillance robot

If you want to creep past this new security bot, you'd better be good at holding your breath.

TiaLinx's new Cougar20-H is a lightweight, remote-controlled surveillance robot that can detect human breathing and scan through concrete walls with its ultra-wideband radio frequency sensor array.

The Cougar20-H moves around on tracks and can roll up to a building, extend its arm, and start scanning through the wall with its RF array, developed with funding from the U.S. Army.

Operated from a laptop that can be more than 300 feet away, the robot can scan through reinforced concrete by detecting reflected radio waves. It can find people who are moving or even keeping still, so the operator can see them in real time. … Read more

Microsoft tries undoing Chrome's H.264 omission

Weeks after Google announced it would drop support for H.264-encoded video from Chrome, Microsoft announced it's adding support back in through a browser extension for Windows 7 users.

"Today, as part of the interoperability bridges work we do on this team, we are making available the Windows Media Player HTML5 Extension for Chrome, which is an extension for Google Chrome to enable Windows 7 customers who use Chrome to continue to play H.264 video," said Claudio Caldato, principal program manager on Microsoft's Interoperability Strategy Team, in a blog post. The software can be downloaded from Microsoft's Web site. … Read more

Back to pop-ups

Links from Friday's episode of Loaded:

The Internet goes nearly silent in Egypt during widespread violent political protests

News Corp. announces plans to launch The Daily, its iPad-only publication

Gmail offers a new feature to give you a pop-up every time you get an e-mail or an instant message

The new version of Skype for Mac has a group chatting option

Hulu may be planning to rebrand itself as the Internet's cable channel

Apple may be prepping to launch a new lineup of MacBook Pros

LinkedIn has filed for an IPO

2011 Samsung monitor preview: Samsung leads with LED

Welcome back to our final day of coverage of Samsung's monitor preview for early 2011. On Monday and Tuesday, respectively, we took a long look at the company's new 3D offerings and its new Central Station. Today we take a look at its LED monitor refresh.

At CES this year, Samsung announced two new LED-based monitors as follow-ups to its PX2370 model from 2010.

The 550 and 350 will come in a variety of screen sizes as well as both a normal monitor configuration and a monitor/HDTV combo.… Read more

Google documents VP8 at standards group IETF

The VP8 encoding technology at the heart of Google's effort to spread royalty-free video across the computing industry now has a home at the Internet Engineering Task Force--but not so Google can standardize it.

VP8 is a Google codec used to convert video into a more compact form for tasks such as streaming across the Internet, broadcast over the airwaves, or storage on a camera. VP8 and the Vorbis audio codec are the basis for WebM, an open-source and royalty-free technology that Google hopes will lower barriers for using video on the Net and elsewhere. Although WebM's open-source, royalty-free nature … Read more

Google answers critics on HTML5 Web video move

Google responded to critics of its decision to drop support for a popular HTML5 video codec by declaring that a royalty-supported standard for Web video will hold the Web hostage.

Much has been made this week of Google's decision to end support for the widely used H.264 video codec as it implements a key portion of the collection of technologies known as HTML5 in its Chrome browser. Mike Jazayeri, a product manager for Google, wrote a blog post today responding to some of the more common critiques of its plan to support only the WebM video codec standard … Read more

Microsoft mocks Google's Web video decision

A Microsoft evangelist has mocked Google's decision to remove H.264 video support from Chrome, implying that Google is trying to impose an edict on an industry that's already made up its mind to the contrary.

In a blog post, Tim Sneath, who runs Windows and Web evangelism for Microsoft, likens Google's WebM video codec to the utopian but unsuccessful Esperanto language. The blog post rewrites Google's original announcement that the company is removing support for the widely used H.264 codec to advance its own WebM.

Both technologies can be used with the nascent HTML5 … Read more

The backlash over Google's HTML5 video bet

Choosing strategies based on what you believe to be long-term benefits is generally a good idea when running a business, but if you manage to alienate the world in the process, the long term may become irrelevant.

It was hard to miss the response that accompanied Google's announcement earlier this week that it no longer planned to support the H.264 codec for the HTML5 video tag in its Chrome browser in order to focus on the WebM technology. Depending on what you read, Google is either evil, brilliant, hypocritical, cunning, principled, or confused in dropping support for H.264, … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 1385: It's so hard to good-bye to H.264 (podcast)

We dissect Google's decision to drop H.264 support from Chrome and go with WebM, we mop up a little bit of the Verizon iPhone news, and more importantly, we eventually get this show on the road after yet another tech disaster. Also, and this is very important, people, the next version of Android will not be called Ice Cream. It's Ice Cream Sandwich, people. Keep up. --Molly

Google yanking H.264 video out of Chrome

Google just fired a broadside in the Web's codec wars.

With its alternative WebM video-encoding technology now entering the marketplace, Google announced plans today to remove built-in Chrome support for a widely used rival codec called H.264 favored by Apple and Microsoft. The move places Google instead firmly in the camp of browser makers Mozilla and Opera, who ardently desire basic Web technologies to be unencumbered by patent restrictions.

"Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed … Read more