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In what is being touted as a world first, a British Scientist says he has been infected with a computer virus.

The scientist, Mark Gasson, claims to have been infected with the virus after he contaminated an electronic chip which was inserted into his hand.

Gasson, of the University of Reading, said the device was programmed with a virus which could transfer itself to other electronic systems it came in contact with, the BBC News website reported on Wednesday.

Any other chips that interacted with the infected systems would also contract the virus, he said, raising the possibility that in the future, advanced medical devices such as pacemakers could become vulnerable to cyber attacks.

Gasson’s computer chip, a refined version of the ID chips used to track animals, has been programmed to open security doors for him and to unlock his mobile phone automatically.

The chip in Gasson’s hand is high-end radio frequency identification chip, a sophisticated version of the technology used n shop security tags and for identifying pets. The device, the size of the grain of rice, allowed him secure access to University buildings and his mobile phone.

Once infected with the virus, the microchip contaminated the system that was used to communicate with it. It would also have infected any other devices it was connected to.

Gasson deliberately introduced a computer virus into an electronic chip that had been implanted into his left hand last year, in order to study its effects.

The results allegedly prove the principle that in future, human implants like this could contaminate increasingly complex medical devices such as pacemakers and cochlear implants.

“With the benefits of this type of technology come risks. We may improve ourselves in some way but much like the improvements with other technologies, mobile phones for example, they become vulnerable to risks, such as security problems and computer viruses,” Gasson was quoted by BBC News as saying.

Implanted technology has become increasingly common in the United States, where medical alert bracelets can be scanned to bring up a patient’s medical history.

Professor Rafael Capurro, of the Steinbeis-Transfer-Institute of Information Ethics in Germany, added: “If someone can get online access to your implant it could be serious.

“From an ethical point of view, the surveillance of implants can be both positive and negative. Surveillance can be part of medical care, but if someone wants to do harm to you, it could be a problem.”

Gasson, however, said technology with surveillance capabilities could in future become widely used for non-medical purposes. “If we can find a way of enhancing someone’s memory or their IQ then there’s real possibility that people will choose to have this kind of invasive procedure,” he said in the BBC interview.

Egypt’s communications ministry said on Thursday that it had launched the first internet domain name “.misr”-using Arabic letters to try to boost e-services and the number of people online in the most populous Arab nation.

“Introducing Arabic domain names is milestone in internet history,” communications minister Tarek Kamel said in a statement. “This great step will open up new horizons for e-services in Egypt. It will enable internet services to penetrate new market segments by eliminating language barriers.”

With the addition of non-Latin suffixes, web users with little or no knowledge of English would no longer have to type Latin characters to access web pages targeting Chinese, Arabic and other speakers.

Since their creation in the 1980s, domain names have been limited to 37 characters: the 10 numerals, the hyphen and the 26 letters in the Latin alphabet. In January, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, paved the way for an entire domain name to appear in Cyrillic for Russia and Arabic for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Internet major Google, which recently pulled out of China due to censorship issues, has ranked India third in a list of countries from which it receives requests for censoring information.

For the first time, Google has published a country-wise list of the number of requests received from governments, seeking either removal of information or more details. The list of based on requests made to Google between July 1,2009 and December 31, 2009.

As per the list, Google received maximum removal requests from Brazil(291),followed by Germany(188) and India(142).The number of  requests for removal of information from India was higher than that from the US(123).

“For Brazil and India, requests for content removal are high relative to other countries in part because of the popularity our social networking website, Orkut.The majority of the Brazilian and Indian requests for removal of content from Orkut relate to alleged impersonation or defamation,” Google said in a statement on Tuesday.