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The Register amongst many others is carrying a piece on new satellite imagery that might point to the remains of the lost city of Atlantis.

The satellite images, pictures of a salt marsh near Cadiz, show two features that if you squint at them a bit, look sort of rectangular, and something that could be part of a ring running around the structures, if you were not being fussy about it being especially circular.

But the picture is a really good match for the description. Honest. Plato describes an island, or nesos, five stades (an ancient unit of measurement, thought to be around a tenth of a mile) in diameter that was surrounded by concentric rings, and an circular outer wall 100 stades in diameter.

You've got to love skeptical reporting ;)

ISRO has signed a USD 10 million contract with the ESA to launch an Italian satellite next year.

ISRO chairman G. Madhavan Nair told reporters here Saturday the space organisation had signed the $10-million contract with the European Space Agency to launch the Italian satellite on behalf of the European Union.

"It will be the first time ISRO will be launching a separate foreign payload on board the PSLV from the Satish Dhawan Space Center at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh. The deal signals the agency's foray into the space market in a big way," Nair stated.

Silicon India has the story.

Microsoft's new policy for licensing its patents has supporters of open-source software worried that the company will use a broken government system for protecting intellectual property to beat back gains Linux and other competing software have made in the marketplace.

“We are very worried,” said Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative, a nonprofit group that certifies open-source licenses. “This is aimed directly at us. It's a classic Microsoft attempt to crush the competition.”

Large Linux distributors, such as IBM, have the legal resources to handle patent disputes, Ravicher said, but far smaller organizations building open-source applications wouldn't have the money to fight Microsoft in court.

“I don't think IBM is worried, but the Apache Software Foundation and the Free Software Foundation are,” Ravicher said, naming the latter two organizations as examples.

Techweb has this article.

The Mars Rover Opportunity will most likely make an attempt at descending into the Endurance crater next week.

The rover will first go to the edge of the crater to check its steepness. If scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, determine that Opportunity can make it down the slope, they will give the command for it to descend.

"The analysis just completed by the rover team shows likelihood that Opportunity will be able to drive to a diagnostic rock exposure, examine it and then drive out of the crater," Weiler said. "However, there's no guarantee of getting out again."

Linux Insider is carrying this story.

The Supreme Court Of India has overruled a Delhi high court ruling allowing Siffynet Solutions Pvt Ltd, a marketing and referral (*cough*) company, to carry on its business with domain names like www.siffynet.com.

Holding that “Internet domain names are subject to the legal norms applicable to other intellectual properties such as trademarks”, the bench said Satyam was the prior user and has the right to debar Siffynet Solutions from eating into the goodwill it has built up in connection with www.sify.com.

A bench comprising Justice Ruma Pal and Justice P V Reddi said Siffynet Solutions can continue its business by changing its domain name.

The fact that they are being allowed to continue using Siffynet as a business name defies common sense :S The Financial Express has this story.

IT education giant, NIIT, fresh from its success in China is all set to make its presence felt in the American and European markets as well.

Chief Operating Officer P Rajendran told reporters here the company would initially focus on higher education solutions, hosting of websites of universities and application software product solutions segments in the US and Europe.

The Economic Times has this article.

Forbes has published a report on Microsoft's latest patent - double-clicking. While the patent only covers hand-held computers, the wording of the patent is causing a furore due to its overly broad and vague terminology.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on April 27 granted a patent for a "time based hardware button for application launch" in which a click of a button can start different programs if it is clicked once, twice or held down for several seconds.

Mouse-wielding computer users need not worry, as the patent only applies to handheld computers that run Microsoft's PocketPC software -- specifically the method of bringing up different features depending on how many times a button is pressed.

The article can be seen here.

CIOL is carrying a report stating that Macromedia is planning on setting up a research and development facility in Bangalore. The facility, which is likely to come up by September this year, is the first R&D facility outside the US for Macromedia.

The full story can be read here.

Wired has an interesting story on the rising popularity of sprite comics - comics that use artwork from videogames, rather than original work.

Video-game characters in a comic strip were not unheard of, but the remarkable thing about Anez's comic was that rather than using drawings of the characters, he used the actual video-game character art -- "sprites" in programming jargon -- along with some simple backgrounds and word balloons. The effect re-created the feel of the game with a minimum of artistic effort.

Anez eventually got his scanner and twice attempted to launch the "real" Bob and George -- a hand-drawn comic about superheroes in college -- but both times he abandoned the strip and went back to the Mega Man characters.

"Eventually I realized that I can't draw and that the hand-drawn comic idea was dead in the water," said Anez. "So I stuck with the sprites."

The full story is available here.

The Economic Times is carrying a story on the increasing number of foreign embassies in India which are outsourcing all visa processing to Indian companies. A related BPO story can be seen here.