Buried in a site devoted to early robots is my dream man, Electron. Russian, born in 1967, he has 4ft-wide shoulders, waltzes, plays chess, and while he only understands 112 commands, his steely gaze is reassuringly paternal. [ CyberneticZoo via BotJunkie ]

While not widely touted, Nokia’s Ovi Music store is on track to make Nokia’s music catalog DRM-free globally. This was first mentioned in December at Nokia’s Capital Market Days event. Keep in mind that we’re talking about Nokia’s a la carte music download service, not its all you can eat Comes with Music offering that lets you keep all the tracks you can download in the first year but locks them to a single Nokia handset and PC for life. Russia’s Ovi Music store was the first to go DRM-free back in November while adding single sign-on with other Ovi services during the revamp process.

Kaspersky Labs , a cybersecurity group based in Russia, was recently awarded the patent for a hardware antivirus device that aims to keep your computer secure by attaching directly to the disk drive, below rootkit access. Software can always be compromised, and solution proposed by the mad geniuses at Kaspersky is to put an antivirus system deeper in your computer than your infected software can reach. Here’s the device, as explained the abstract for the patent: An anti-virus (AV) system based on a hardware-implemented AV module for curing infected computer systems and a method for updating AV databases for effective curing of the computer system. The hardware-based AV system is located between a PC and a disk device. The hardware-based AV system can be implemented as a separate device or it can be integrated into a disk controller

Nevermind the war against viruses—they’ll kill each other before we even update AVG. A Russian Trojan horse program, known as Spy Eye , has stolen data from its competitor Zeus, and replaced PC infections with its own botnet-badness. It’s still a lose-lose situation for anyone with an infected computer, with one botnet being replaced with another, but it’s pretty unheard of for one to take on another like this. Spy Eye’s campaign against the bigger, badder Zeus is called “Kill Zeus,” and while it doesn’t feature Uma Thurman in a slinky yellow jumpsuit, it will be sold to online crims who access your online bank details and any money it can find in your accounts, with Spy Eye going for around $500 to each person.

Russia’s been testing its new T-50 “Sukhhoi” stealth fighter jets and so far they’re a success. This video shows the first test flight and is supposedly also the very first time the public is getting to see the bird. With the T-50’s “basic specs” including “greater agility, sustained supersonic-flight capability in non-afterburning mode, low radar visibility, low heat signature, as well as enhanced take-off and landing performance,” I wonder what the upgrade options are. Either way, this successful test flight makes Russia the only country aside from the United States to have fifth-generation fighters. [ Ria Novosti ]

In today’s Remainders: The Old World. We visit Michael Dell in Switzerland, showing off the Dell Mini 5. We swing by Germany, to see one baaaaad reaction to the iPad and 10,000 watts of homemade light-porn. Last stop: Russia! It’ll Be Out In a Couple Months TechCrunch caught up with Michael Dell at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, where Dell was sporting fingerless gloves (as well as the forthcoming Dell Mini 5). We’ve already seen the Android-powered Mini 5 and got to play with it a bit, so there’s not too much to get excited about in this clip.

In today’s Remainders: The Old World. We visit Michael Dell in Switzerland, showing off the Dell Mini 5. We swing by Germany, to see one baaaaad reaction to the iPad and 10,000 watts of homemade light-porn. Last stop: Russia! It’ll Be Out In a Couple Months TechCrunch caught up with Michael Dell at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, where Dell was sporting fingerless gloves (as well as the forthcoming Dell Mini 5). We’ve already seen the Android-powered Mini 5 and got to play with it a bit, so there’s not too much to get excited about in this clip. But it does present us with some small pleasures.

What you see here says a lot about you: A man, contemplating his failures? A construction worker enjoying his lunch? A lucky bastard, about to launch down the most amazing zipline on the planet? The answer is E.) A photographer, trying repeatedly to make us sick to our stomachs. The Moscow bridge ’s pylons are only about 500 feet high, which is lower than the Golden Gate Bridge’s, and less than half the height of France’s Millau Viaduct, the world’s tallest suspension bridge

I mean, not really , but still! These wonderfully idiosyncratic illustrations , from 1989’s Hello, I’m Robot! by Stanislav Zigunenko, render our robot future in a way that conveys big ideas to children, and pure poetry to the rest of us. Perhaps what makes these illustrations work is that they trust their young audience with difficult questions: Are our brains simply computers? Are our bodies mere machines? What is work, without agency? What is pleasure, without feeling?

Oh, will those pesky aliens never stop? First they show off in the Norwegian skies , and now they’re hovering over Russia, too? Did they not consult history books before coming here? Russia, winters, and invasions just don’t mix, ET.