Technologies

I spy your PC: Researchers find new ways to steal data

2008-06-01T08:19:00.000+05:30

Researchers have developed two new techniques for stealing data from computers that use some unlikely hacking tools: cameras and telescopes.

In two separate pieces of research, teams at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Saarland University in Saarbrucken, Germany, describe attacks that seem ripped from the pages of spy novels. In Saarbrucken, the researchers have read computer screens from their tiny reflections on everyday objects such as glasses, teapots and even the human eye. The Santa Barbara team has worked out a way to analyze a video of hands typing on a keyboard in order to guess what was being written.

Computer security research tends to focus on the software and hardware inside the PC, but this kind of "side-channel" research, which dates back at least 45 years, looks at the physical environment. Side-channel work in the U.S. was kicked off in 1962 when the National Security Agency discovered strange surveillance equipment in the concrete ceiling of a U.S. Department of State communications room in Japan and began studying how radiation emitted by communication components could be intercepted.

Much of this work has been top secret, such as the NSA's Tempest program. But side-channel hacking has been in the public eye too.

In fact, if you've seen the movie Sneakers, then the University of California's work will have a familiar ring. That's because a minor plot point in this 1992 Robert Redford film about a group of security geeks was the inspiration for their work.

In the movie, Redford's character, Marty Bishop, tries to steal a password by watching video of his victim, mathematician Gunter Janek, as he enters his password into a computer. "Oh, this is good," Redford says, "He's going to type in his password, and we're going to get a clear shot"
Redford's character never does get his password, but the UC researchers' Clear Shot tool may give others a fighting chance, according to Marco Cova, a graduate student at the school.

Clear Shot can analyze video of hand movements on a computer keyboard and transcribe them into text. It's far from perfect -- Cova says the software is accurate about 40% of the time -- but it's good enough for someone to get the gist of what was being typed.

The software also suggests alternative words that may have been typed, and more often than not, the real word is in the top five suggestions provided by Clear Shot, Cova said.

Clear Shot works with an everyday webcam, but the Saarland University team has taken thing up a notch, training telescopes on a variety of targets that just might happen to catch a computer monitor's reflection: teapots, glasses, bottles, spoons and even the human eye.

The researchers came up with this idea during a lunchtime walk about nine months ago, said Michael Backes, a professor at Saarland's computer science department. Noticing that there were a lot of computers to be seen in campus windows, the researchers got to thinking. "It started as a fun project," he said. "We thought it would be kind of cute if we could look at what these people are working on."

It turned out that they could get some amazingly clear pictures. All it took was a $500 telescope trained on a reflective object in front of the monitor. For example, a teapot yielded readable images of 12-point Word documents from a distance of 5 meters (16 feet). From 10 meters, the researchers were able to read 18-point fonts. With a $27,500 Dobson telescope, they could get the same quality of images at 30 meters.

Backes said he has already demonstrated his work for a government agency, one that he declined to name. "It was convincing to these people," he said.

That's because even though the reflections are tiny, the images are much clearer than people expect. Often, first-time viewers think they're looking at the computer screen itself rather than a reflection, Backes said.

One of his favorite targets is a round teapot. Looking at a spoon or a pair of glasses, you might not get a good view of the monitor, but a spherical teapot makes a perfect target. "If you place a sphere close by, you will always see the monitor," he said. "This helps; you don't have to be lucky."

The Saarland researchers are now working out new image-analysis algorithms and training astronomical cameras on their subjects in hopes of getting better images from even more difficult surfaces such as the human eye. They've even aimed their telescopes and cameras at a white wall and have picked up readable reflections from a monitor 2 meters from the wall.

Does Backes think that we should really be concerned about this kind of high-tech snooping? Maybe, just because it's so cheap and easy to do. He said he could see some people shelling out the $500 for a telescope just to try it out on their neighbors.

So how to protect yourself from the telescopic snooper? Easy. "Closing your curtains is maybe the best thing you can do," he said.

Mass SQL injection attack hits Chinese Web sites

2008-06-01T08:17:00.000+05:30

The attack has implanted malware on thousands of Web sites

Web sites across China and Taiwan are being hit by a mass SQL injection attack that has implanted malware in thousands of Web sites, according to a security company in Taiwan.

First detected on May 13, the attack is coming from a server farm inside China, which has made no effort to hide its IP addresses, said Wayne Huang, CEO of Armorize Technologies Inc. in Taipei.

"The attack is ongoing," Huang said. "Even if they can't successfully insert malware, they're killing lots of Web sites right now, because they're just brute-forcing every attack surface with SQL injection, and hence causing lots of permanent changes to the victim Web sites."

In a SQL injection attack, an attacker attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in custom Web applications by entering SQL code in an entry field, such as a log-in. If successful, such an attack can give the attacker access to data on the database used by the application and the ability to run malicious code on the Web site.

A screenshot of a Web site belonging to the Mackay Memorial Hospital in Hsinchu, Taiwan, showed that the rendering of the site had been affected and displayed the SQL string injected by the attack, Huang said.

Thousands of Web sites have been hit by the attack, he said, noting that 10,000 servers alone were infected by malware on Friday. Most of the affected servers are in China, while some are located in Taiwan, Huang said. The attackers appear to be using automated queries to Google Inc.'s search engine to identify Web sites vulnerable to the attack, he said.

Among the sites hit by the attack on Friday were SouFun.com, a real estate Web site, and Mycar168.com, a site for automobile enthusiasts. Mass SQL injection attacks have increasingly become a security threat. In January, tens of thousands of PCs were infected by an automated SQL injection attack. That attack exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server.

The attackers in the more recent outbreak aren't targeting a specific vulnerability. Instead, they are using an automated SQL injection attack engine that is tailored to attack Web sites using SQL Server, Huang said. The attack uses SQL injection to infect targeted Web sites with malware, which in turn exploits vulnerabilities in the browsers of those who visit the Web sites, he said, calling the attack "very well designed."

The malware injected by the attack comes from 1,000 different servers and targets 10 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer and related plug-ins that are popular in Asia, Huang said.

The vulnerabilities are MS06-014 (CVE-2006-0003), MS07-017 (CVE-2007-1765), RealPlayer IERPCtl.IERPCtl.1 (CVE-2007-5601), GLCHAT.GLChatCtrl.1 (CVE-2007-5722), MPS.StormPlayer.1 (CVE-2007-4816), QvodInsert.QvodCtrl.1, DPClient.Vod (CVE-2007-6144), BaiduBar.Tool.1 (CVE-2007-4105), VML Exploit (CVE-2006-4868) and PPStream (CVE-2007-4748).

New attack trend pushes POS encryption to the fore

2008-06-01T08:15:00.002+05:30

Vendors offer new tools to try to help retailers stop data-in-transit thefts

The relatively scant attention that retailers have paid to securing their point-of-sale systems over the past few years is making the POS setups increasingly attractive targets for cybercrooks who are looking to steal payment card data.

Hoping to help merchants address that situation are a handful of vendors who have begun offering new products aimed at making POS environments a lot harder to crack.

The biggest of those vendors is VeriFone Holdings Inc., which last month released a security tool designed to let merchants encrypt credit and debit card data from the moment a card is swiped at a merchant's PIN entry device all the way to the systems of the company's external payment processor.

VeriFone's VeriShield Protect software is based on patented technology from Semtek Innovative Solutions Corp., which makes appliances for securely decrypting data. VeriFone said that Semtek's technology, called the Hidden Triple Data Encryption Standard, can be used to encrypt personal account numbers and the so-called Track 2 data stored on the magnetic stripe located on the back of payment cards. That information includes card numbers and their expiration dates.

A key feature in VeriShield Protect is that it encrypts payment card data in such a way that the information will still be recognizable as valid card data by other POS applications, said Jeff Wakefield, vice president of marketing at VeriFone. As a result, merchants won't need to tweak or modify their POS systems in any way to accommodate the encryption technology, he claimed. But at the same time, encrypting the card data will render it totally useless to anyone who steals the information, Wakefield said.

A separate device — which could be installed by either a retailer or its payment processor — then would be used to decrypt the data before transactions are processed.Merchants using newer models of VeriFone's PIN entry devices can have the encryption function "injected" into them for less than $50 per device in license and service fees, Wakefield said. He added that the vendor doesn't have a published list price for new PIN devices that support the technology, because per-device prices can vary depending on the individual installation.

Meanwhile, the decryption appliances, which are made by Semtek and sold by VeriFone, can cost from $50,000 to upward of a million dollars for high-throughput, fully redundant systems. Larger retailers that want to exercise direct control over all aspects of their payment card transaction process might invest in such systems themselves, Wakefield said. But, he added, most small and midsize merchants will likely look to their payment processors to handle the decryption component.

Another company targeting the POS security market is Merchant Warehouse, a credit card processing firm that provides services to about 50,000 retailers, most of them small or midsize. The company offers a product called MerchantWare, which like VeriFone's technology is designed to enable merchants to encrypt card data from the beginning to the end of the sales and payment process.

Although VeriShield Protect is focused on the PIN pad devices that are used by customers themselves to swipe their cards, Merchant Warehouse CEO Henry Helgson said that MerchantWare is aimed more at POS systems in which cards need to be handed over to a cashier.MerchantWare is based on technology from MagTek Inc., a rival of Semtek. Like VeriShield Protect, MagTek's product also encrypts data at the card reader. But integrating the technology into existing environments does require "minimal" updates to a company's POS software, Helgson said.

With MerchantWare, merchants never have to store any payment card data on their systems, according to Helgson. Instead, a retailer that needs to access payment transaction data to handle issues such as chargebacks or payment disputes would log into a MerchantWare payment gateway to get at the information.Helgson said that the recent disclosures of several data-in-transit thefts are helping to generate interest in technologies such as MerchantWare. "This is our way of getting new customers," he said. "We expect huge demand for this.

Also offering capabilities similar to MerchantWare is payment processor Element Payment Service Inc., which is using MagTek's technology to provide bundled encryption services to retailers, said Gartner Inc. analyst Avivah Litan. It's surprising, she added, that more vendors haven't already come out with similar products that can help retailers encrypt payment card data while it is inside their networks.

Currently, under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard mandated by the major credit card companies, merchants are required only to ensure that any payment card data being transmitted over a public network is encrypted. The lack of a rule requiring that data be encrypted while it is transmitted internally has been exploited in at least three major data breaches disclosed in the past few months.

The biggest of the breaches took place at Hannaford Bros. Co., a supermarket chain based in Scarborough, Maine. In March, Hannaford said that malware planted on the POS servers at nearly 300 grocery stores had been used to steal unencrypted payment card data on more than 4 million customers. Last month, Hannaford officials said that the grocer planned to spend "millions" of dollars on IT security upgrades in the wake of the breach.

Similar incidents have also been reported by Okemo Mountain Resort, a ski area in Ludlow, Vt., and by Dallas-based restaurant chain Dave & Buster's Inc., which said last week that credit and debit card numbers were stolen from 11 of its restaurants during 2007 by hackers who allegedly gained remote access to POS servers and then installed packet-sniffing software on them.
Such breaches highlight the need for companies to pay more attention to encrypting payment card data within their own network boundaries, Litan said. But thus far, she added, adoption of the available encryption technologies has been slow because many retailers appear unconvinced that encryption can be introduced at the POS level without requiring major changes. For instance, one concern is that encrypting data will make it harder for retailers to handle issues such as chargebacks.

"Most merchants are passive about this because their systems rely on card numbers for chargebacks," Litan said. "They need to be convinced that their systems need to change." In addition, many retailers have spent a lot of money, time and effort complying with the existing PCI requirements and are reluctant to implement even more security controls, she said.

10 essential (and free!) security downloads for Windows

2008-06-01T07:32:00.007+05:30

Stay safe from prying eyes and bad guys

To use an Internet-connected computer is to be insecure and place your privacy in danger. Spyware, viruses, Trojans and assorted malware are everywhere on the Net, trying to hop onto your PC and cause damage. Snoopers want to get at your personal information for nefarious purposes, such as identity theft.

Operating systems of all kinds are under assault, but the prime target is Windows, because the vast majority of PCs worldwide use that operating system. If you use Windows, hackers have you in their cross hairs.

Luckily, there's plenty of free software for Windows that can help protect your privacy and security. I'm not talking about anemic, underpowered applications. I'm talking about industrial-strength tools that can do everything that expensive security software does.With all the free stuff out there, which software should you choose? I've selected 10 of my favorite programs that can protect your privacy and security. Download and install them, and you'll be far safer against all the nastiness out there.

1.Secunia Personal Software Inspector
Some of the biggest security holes in your PC aren't directly related to Windows — instead, they're in the applications you run. As often as not, that's how hackers and crackers can get into your PC. For example, in the recent "Pwn to Own" hacker challenge, it was application vulnerabilities, not Windows Vista itself, that allowed hackers to crack Vista.

The best way to protect yourself from this problem is to keep your applications updated with vendor-issued patches. But you don't want to spend your life cruising the Web, looking for updates for every app you use.

Instead, get this freebie that does it for you. As a security vendor, Secunia keeps track of software vulnerabilities and available patches. The company's Personal Software Inspector (PSI) scans your PC, downloads a current vulnerabilities file, and alerts you to any software on your machine that is missing security patches. It also warns you if any software is out of date and no longer supported by the vendor. Out-of-date software no longer gets security patches, and so may be more vulnerable to hackers.When you get a list of insecure software, you can get more details about each piece of software, open the folder where the software resides, or download a patch. Click the + sign next to the software, and you'll get even more details about it, often including links to any tools for uninstalling the software. You also have the choice of having Secunia constantly monitor your software use and notify you when patches are available.

Secunia says that some programs require tedious or confusing patching procedures, so by default it starts in a mode that shows you only "easy-to-patch" programs. It's a much better bet to have Personal Software Inspector tell you about all applications that need patches, not just ones that are easy to patch. To make the change, select Settings and uncheck the box next to "Show only 'Easy-to-Patch' programs."

Note that Secunia PSI is free for home use, but requires payment for business use.

2.SendShield (beta)
Microsoft Office documents often include data that can compromise your privacy or that you don't want others to see, such as hidden text or cells, document revision history, names of document authors and reviewers, and so on. When you send someone a document, they can easily see that information by viewing the version history and the document's properties, and in other ways.It can be time-consuming and impractical to remember to review every document you send out via e-mail to make sure it doesn't contain privacy-compromising information. Instead, get Unedged Software's SendShield.

Whenever you send PowerPoint, Excel or Word documents via Outlook, it examines them to see if they have any of private information. It then details what it finds and lets you remove the information with a single click. It deletes the information only from the copy of the file you send via e-mail, not the original on your hard disk. You can also have the documents turned into PDFs and sent that way instead of as Office documents.

SendShield is in beta, and for now is free. However, when it gets out of beta, there is a chance that it will become for-pay software. (The company provided no details on timing or pricing.)

3.Avast Antivirus
Many for-pay antivirus programs, such as Symantec's Norton AntiVirus, are system hogs, taking up far too much RAM and system resources, which slows down your PC unnecessarily. Not only that, but you have to pay an annual fee for using them.

There's a better way: Get the Avast Antivirus software from ALWIL Software. It's lightweight and takes up barely any RAM or system resources, it's simple to use, and it'll do everything you need by providing live, resident protection as well as scanning.The software uses a shield metaphor for its multiple types of protection. There's an antivirus shield, one that protects against Web-based threats, another for e-mail protection and so on. You can customize the sensitivity of each shield.

Avast includes automated updates of virus definitions. The independent testing site AV-comparatives.org rates its effectiveness as Advanced+, the top level. I've been using the program for well over a year and a half, and it's caught every threat that's come my way.
Note that Avast is free for home use, but requires payment for business use.

4.HijackThis
Everybody should be using spyware-detection tools such as Lavasoft Ad-Aware or Spybot Search & Destroy — preferably both. But some malware is so nasty that it escapes detection from any spyware scanners — and can't be removed by them, either.
So what can you do if your PC is acting strange and you suspect that you've been victimized by malware? Try downloading and using Trend Micro's HijackThis, and with the help of experts, you may be able to track down the source of the problem and then fix it.

The program examines your settings and the Windows registry, particularly those sections that are most likely to be vulnerable, and then saves all those settings in a log file. Those settings are the key to finding out if you've been infected. Experts can analyze the log, and from what they find, determine whether there's a spyware infection.

Where do you find the experts? The program lets you upload your log file to the HijackThis Web site, where others will examine it, let you know if there are any likely infections and tell you how to rid yourself of them. There are plenty of other discussion areas on the Internet that will do the same; a Google search will turn up plenty of them.

The software will also delete suspicious items, and it includes other useful tools, such as one that will generate a log of all programs that run on start-up. Keep in mind that if you're not an expert, you shouldn't try to use this program on your own. Think of it as a last resort when standard anti-malware tools fail.

5.SpywareBlaster
Of course, the best way to protect yourself against spyware is to make sure that it doesn't install in the first place. That's where SpywareBlaster from Javacool Software comes in. It stops the installation of ActiveX-based spyware, browser hijackers and other malware, and can also block spyware cookies. It includes extras as well, such as disabling Flash running in Internet Explorer. And it also lets you create a system snapshot, so that if at some later point you get infected with spyware, you can always revert to a clean system.Note that if you don't use Internet Explorer, there's no need to install this software, because Firefox, Opera and Safari don't use ActiveX.

6.F-Secure BlackLight Rootkit Eliminator
Rootkits are the most nefarious of all malware, giving hackers access to your entire PC without your knowledge. They use special techniques to hide themselves from many antivirus and anti-malware programs, which makes detecting and killing them exceedingly difficult. Because of that, just using antivirus software isn't enough. Instead, you need a specialized rootkit detector and killer.

That's exactly what F-Secure's BlackLight Rootkit Eliminator does. It scans your PC for hidden processes, folders and files, then reports on what it finds. If your PC is clean, it will tell you so. If it finds anything hidden, it tells you that as well and lets you clean it up. Double-click any entry, and you'll get more information about it, such as the file location, a description and company information. To kill a rootkit you've discovered, you have a choice of renaming or deleting the file using BlackLight's built-in tools. It's a good idea to first rename suspicious files, which gives them a .ren extension and prevents them from executing. Next, do a Google search for the file names to see whether they really are malware. Rootkits often hide legitimate files and processes, such as Explorer.exe, so make sure not to get rid of any legitimate ones. If you confirm that files are malware, then delete them.

Warning: Only very experienced users should attempt to clean their PC with this software, because if you rename or delete valid files, you can cause serious problems. If you're at all unsure about what you're doing, you might want to try a different free anti-rootkit tool called RootAlyzer, from the same folks who bring you Spybot Search & Destroy. It checks your PC for rootkits but doesn't offer tools for deleting them. (Note that RootAlyzer is still in the preview stage.)

7.NoScript
JavaScript, Java, plug-ins and other code found on Web pages can do serious damage to your PC. They can deliver interactivity and other useful features, but they can also be used to wreak a great deal of havoc. To keep yourself safe on unfamiliar Web sites, you'll want to turn them off, but doing so means that you'll lose some of the nifty features on some of your favorite Web sites.

The answer? A great Firefox extension called NoScript, which not only blocks scripts, plug-ins and various types of code, but also protects against cross-site scripting attacks. It lets you block scripts, plug-ins, and code on a site-by-site basis. You can control it to an exceptional degree, including whether to block scripts on sites on a one-time basis or permanently.

8.Comodo Firewall Pro
The firewall that ships with Windows XP or Vista simply isn't good enough to keep you safe — you need better protection. There are plenty of free firewalls out there, but my favorite is Comodo Firewall Pro, which provides top-notch protection from both inbound and outbound threats. It offers other types of protection as well, including what it calls Defense+, which keeps you safe in several ways, including locking down certain files and folders so that they can't be altered.Note that this firewall is more aggressive than many in asking whether you should allow connections. So when you first run it, expect to see a good many pop-ups asking whether you want to let through a particular application. To help cut down on the pop-ups, run its Clean PC mode, which lets you scan your PC for applications and then register them as safe so that you're not inundated with quite so many pop-ups. In addition, there's an "install mode" that disables certain types of pop-ups for 15 minutes, allowing you to easily install new software.

Another very good free firewall is Online Armor. Computerworld editor in chief Scot Finnie prefers its paid version to any other firewall. The free version is excellent as well, with one shortcoming: To install a new version, you first have to uninstall the old version, then install the new one.

9.McAfee SiteAdvisor
The Web is filled with sites that harbor adware, spyware or worse. It can be almost impossible to know ahead of time whether you've visiting such a site. Making matters worse is that many of these sites also have legitimate information and software for download.

McAfee SiteAdvisor is a great way to make sure you steer away from those sites. When you do a search in Google or Yahoo, it places a small icon to the right of each search result, indicating whether the site is safe, questionable or known to be harmful. A red X indicates danger, a green check indicates the site is safe, and a yellow exclamation mark indicates that it's questionable. If McAfee hasn't assessed a particular site, it displays a question mark.

Move your mouse over the icon, and you'll get a pop-up with details about the dangers, including whether it has dangerous downloads, whether it links to other dangerous sites, and whether it will send spam if you register at the site.

Click More Info from the pop-up, and you'll get much more information, including a list of the dangerous downloads and malware or adware that infects it, what sites the site links to and more. It even tells you the site's "annoyances," such as what third-party cookies it installs.
The SiteAdvisor software works even when you don't do a search. As you browse the Web, a small icon sits at the bottom of the screen and tells you whether the site is dangerous or not.

10.CCleaner
CCleaner does double duty: Not only does it help protect your privacy, but it also keeps your system clean and running well. To protect your privacy, it removes traces of your Internet history, such as your temporary Internet files, browsing history, autocomplete form history, and cookies. In addition, it cleans Windows' Recent History list. It's great at cleaning your system as well. CCleaner gets rid of many different kinds of unneeded files, such as temporary files, Windows log files, chkdsk file fragments and a lot more. It can also check your Registry and clean it of bad or broken entries and help you stop programs from running on start-up. For anyone who wants to keep their browsing life private — and keep their system clean and running smoothly — this is a must-have download.

Opinion: Top 10 Google flubs, flops and failures

2008-06-01T07:00:00.005+05:30

Among all the success stories of the huge and unorthodox Internet company are some that are, uh, not so much

Google Inc. is arguably the most successful Internet company today. But Google didn't get to where it is without takings risks -- some of which have failed spectacularly.

For example, remember the Google Accelerator, which was supposed to speed up Web surfing? (A dubious claim, but least it was free.) But you had to pay to get a Google Answer, and eventually people stopped asking. Google Video did so well that the company finally gave up and shelled out big bucks to buy YouTube LLC. If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em.

Some Google flops lasted no more than a day and then vanished without a trace. Other Google efforts have been left to languish like a neglected orphan inside Google's labyrinth of Web services. Still other dogs were released as betas nearly five years ago and are still trapped in Google Labs with apparently little hope of escaping the test tube.

A Google X-File: Google X
One of the most mysterious of Google's flops was its Google X site, a redesigned Google search home page that was styled after the Mac OS Dock user interface on OS X. On the bottom of the page was written "Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you." The site, which launched in 2005, lasted one day before being shuttered by Google for no public reason. Google X may have been pulled because of worries that Apple's copyright lawyers might not appreciate the "homage." But Google X has lived on with many Internet users cloning the interface for anyone to use.

Google Catalog: Ready for recycling
Interested in seeing what the latest prices for USB flash-based drives are? Google Catalog's top search result links you to a 2001 Micro Warehouse catalog where a 256MB Trek ThumbDrive Pro will run you $595. Google Catalog has been in a perpetual state of beta since 2002, and currently its most recent catalog offering for a search on "laptops" delivers a Cyberguys Spring 2006 catalog. Google Catalog now works more like the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine than like a place to browse and see before you buy.

Google Video Player is off the air
At one time, Google thought we needed yet another application to download and play videos on our computers. Married to the company's online service Google Video, the Google Video Player's chief advantage was that it could play back video encoded using Google Video File (yet another video file format that Google thought we needed). But it supported video playlists, and it allowed you to skip ahead in a Google Video even if that portion hadn't downloaded yet. It turned out that the Web was already being well served with video players. Critics dinged the Google player for poor organization of video clips, paid content that varied too much in price and its inability to transfer video content to portable devices. In August 2007, Google yanked the player from the Google Video Web site.

Google Web Accelerator: Time saver or waste of time?
Google's Web Accelerator is a combination of something you don't really need and something that may compromise your privacy. The software is still offered by Google and promises to speed up page load times of Web pages by as much as a less-than-stunning 20%.

Reviewers said that the target audience for Google Web Accelerator, broadband users, already can retrieve Web sites fast enough. And from the start, privacy activists such as Richard Smith accused Google of using Web Accelerator as a market research tool. Smith said, "They'll be looking at what people are doing on the Internet, what they're reading, what they're buying? There's potentially a lot of information just from the click-stream of the URLs people visit."

Question: What happened to Google Answers? Answer: It flopped
For five years, Google Answers allowed anyone to post a question along with a bid price they were willing to pay for a researched answer. A prescreened group of Google Answer researchers would accept the fee (or not) and if they did accept the offer, answer the question.

Along with well-heeled high school and college students, I was a big fan of the site. Answers were usually complete, well researched and well written. But quality isn't always rewarded on the Internet. Google just couldn't compete with Yahoo Answers, a free service that relied not on paying customers, but on a mammoth and loyal Yahoo community. Google's official Google Answers response to the question "What has happened to Answers?" is "There is no answer at this time." Google may not be accepting your questions, but you can still search the database of answers.

Google Coupons: Expires 2006
It almost seems as if Google Coupons is Google's equivalent to a white rhino -- they both exist but few have seen one. Google Coupons is a feature within the Google Local Business Center service that allows companies to create Web-based coupons and display them within Google Maps.

The idea behind Google Coupons is that when you are searching for a local business using Google Maps, a local company can deliver a coupon enticing you to do business with it. The coupon would be displayed next to the Google Map and could be printed out and redeemed.
It's a nifty idea, but as an avid user of Google Maps, in the two years Google Coupons has been available, I've never come across one when using a map. Have you?

Google hangs up on Google Voice Search
From the Google department of way-before-its time came Google Voice Search. The service, which was originally an experiment within Google Labs, was launched in 2003 and worked like this. First, visit the Google Voice Search site. Next, call the phone number on the screen and speak your keyword search query. Then go back to your browser, click on the link on the Google Voice Search site, and bingo, a window with the search results appears.

No wonder this service got nixed. Searching the Web like this is comparable to calling up your brother-in-law to drive across town and brush your teeth for you before you go to bed. On the other hand, this cool technology experiment was a precursor to mobile phone services of today such as ChaCha and Google's own, very handy Google 411 service.

Google Viewer: I'm not seeing it
The idea behind the Google Viewer software program was that you could type in a query, press submit, and then sit back and watch as it loaded actual Web pages that it found. Next, Google Viewer displayed the results to you as a slide show. The program, which PC World reported on in 2002, was eventually abandoned.

The idea of sneaking a peak at a Web page before clicking on the link eventually came to fruition -- it just didn't require a software download to do it. Today, you can preview pages in search results delivered by Ask.com, Powerset and Yahoo, no application required.

eBay users check in, but they don't (Google) Checkout
In June 2007, thousands of eBay loyalists descended on Boston for eBay's annual sellers convention. And in hopes of promoting its new Google Checkout payment system -- which would be competing directly with eBay's PayPal subsidiary -- Google organized a party to be held during the eBay show, inviting eBay sellers to attend. In addition, the Google party was supposed to be a protest against eBay for barring merchants from using Google Checkout.

When eBay got wind of Google's plan, it promptly canceled all of its U.S. ads running on the search engine for more than a week. At the time, eBay was the single largest buyer of search ads on Google.

Google canceled its Boston tea party.

Orkut: The Hoff of social networks
Actor David Hasselhoff is worshipped in Germany, but his talents are less appreciated here in the U.S. The same might be said of the domestically underappreciated Google Orkut. Introduced in 2004, the social networking site is a big hit in Brazil, but in the U.S., Orkut has lagged in popularity behind Facebook and MySpace.

Google Orkut's lack of popularity in the U.S. has been attributed not only to strong competition from the other services, but also to such factors as its early "invite only" policy, a lack of support for blogging tools and an absence of video features.

Failure will you get you everywhere
All employees at Google are supposed to spend 20% of their time working on personal projects of interest. Google says that the policy encourages creativity. And without Google's willingness to take risks and not be afraid of tripping, stumbling and sometimes falling flat on its face, the company might not be what it is today. Perhaps Google's greatness can be measured by its failures as well as its successes.

Infosys set to join TCS in 1,00,000-employee club

2008-05-25T08:48:00.001+05:30

A key milestone is just weeks away. The country's showpiece software giant, Infosys, is set to cross the one-lakh-employee mark, catching up with industry leader Tata Consultancy Services.

While the twosome together would be within kissing distance of worldwide headcounts at IBM or Accenture, the two global leaders are also putting pressure at home with their own aggressive hiring. Infosys now has 82,000 employees on its rolls, but clearly sights 100,000 after job offers made in 1,050 engineering colleges across India.

"We have given 18,000 offers. This shows our confidence in the business.
We will soon employ in excess of one lakh people in India," TV Mohandas Pai, director, human resources, Infosys told reporters in Mumbai. IT and business process firms together employ 20 lakh workers in India.

While IBM has 3.68 lakh employees and Accenture has 1.
72 lakh people on its rolls spread worldwide, TCS and Infosys have most of their employees based in India. Thanks to lower costs in India, IBM and Accenture have been expanding in India, prompting a war for talent that is yielding fruits for employees and mid-level managers.

Infosys is overhauling its manpower strategies to battle attrition. Under the new performance-linked pay structure, the difference in compensation between average and top performers would be 35 to 40 per cent.

This difference earlier was 15-20 per cent. "Our attrition is 13.
4 per cent and we want to get it in single digits," says Nandita Gurjar, group head, HR, Infosys. The company is planning to go for stringent employee assessment standards.

"We are tightening our assessment of top performers. We would also introduce variable pays for middle and senior-level management," said Pai.

Infosys has embarked on a hiring spree when there have been retrenchments in the IT sector due to a slowdown in the US economy (which contributes 70 per cent of Indian IT companies' revenues). "Headcount addition is in line with their guidance and shows the business confidence despite question marks over the US economy" said Apurva Shah, an IT analyst with Mumbai-based brokerage Prabhudas Lilladher.

Opinion: A new kind of Web — don't miss these 11 sites

2008-05-25T07:51:00.006+05:30

Check out these examples of how the Web is evolving to present information in new ways

Call them Web 2.0 sites or mashups — or come up with your own trendy term. Whatever you call them, there are sites popping up all over the Web that process information in new ways rather than just present it.

Some of them work with information you supply, letting you manipulate, track and share data, such as your schedule or your to-do list. Others, so-called mashups, draw data from different sites and reassemble it to make something new. They're all part of how the Web is evolving beyond just a bunch of point sources for information. Here are 11 examples that show what the new Web can do, from helping you organize your life to adding some personalized fun to it.

Personal assistants
GrandCentral

You can use GrandCentral to sort and filter incoming calls and direct them to ring some or all (or none) of your phones.Click to view larger image.
Ever wish you could exercise the same control over incoming phone calls as you do over e-mail? GrandCentral — now a Google operation — gives you a new phone number and forwards incoming calls to any other number or numbers you specify.
Depending on who the call is from, you can have it ring through to your work phone, home phone, cell or all at once. You can also direct some calls right to voice mail — with different greetings for different callers — and retrieve your voice mail via any browser. Perhaps best of all, you can permanently block calls from anyone you don't want to hear from ever again.

Highrise

Highrise keeps track of your relationship with your customers, providing a place to track and share their contact information, background notes and records of interactions.Click to view larger image.
Highrise is an online CRM tool. Basically, it's an easy-to-use database for contacts, reminders and notes. Because it's online, you can share it across your company or team anywhere there is access to a browser.
Highrise offers a free account for up to two users that can store 250 contacts, a Max account at $149 per month for unlimited users and 50,000 contacts, and several levels in between. You can even forward e-mails to a drop box associated with your account, and Highrise adds it as a note on the sender's or recipient's contact page, along with any attached files.

Jott

Use your mobile phone to call in a reminder — for instance, that you need to pick somebody up after school — and Jott will send you an e-mail reminder, plus display it on your Jott home page.Click to view larger image.
Jott is for those times when you're away from your computer — but not from your phone — and you think of something you need to do the next day or want to be reminded of next week. You just call Jott and dictate your message. Jott translates your message to text and e-mails it to you or anyone else whose name and address you've registered.
If the event is in the future, you can tell Jott to send you an e-mail or text message as a reminder. You can also use Jott to post to your blog or to Twitter, or to add tasks to your to-do lists on Remember the Milk (see below) and other such sites.

Remember the Milk
Remember the Milk keeps your to-do list organized and sends you reminders in your choice of formats.Click to view larger image.
Remember the Milk is an online to-do list manager with a clean, straightforward interface that raises it above some of its competitors.
As with any desktop calendar program, you create a list of tasks and set due dates — which you can do with natural-language modifiers such as "tomorrow" or "in two weeks" — and, if you want, set them to repeat according to a regular schedule. You can add tasks by entering them in your browser or by e-mailing them to Remember the Milk.
Where Remember the Milk beats most desktop programs is its ability to send you a reminder via e-mail, SMS or instant messenger. You can also share your lists with family or team members and let them add tasks too, something impossible with a desktop program outside a server environment.

Information visualizers
Pageflakes
You know those portal pages that you can customize with different information sources, such as a Yahoo start page or iGoogle? Pageflakes is the most customizable portal page you can imagine.
The "flakes" on your page can contain almost anything, from the familiar news, weather and sports sites to RSS feeds and blogs, to podcasts, to a Facebook notifier — there are more than 200,000 available flakes at the moment.
You can also load special-interest pages created by other users and publish as Pagecasts, such as the one set up for tracking the recent March Madness basketball tournament.
With Pageflakes, you can customize a personal Web page to follow the news, find new recipes, keep track of your Facebook Pokes and lots more.Click to view larger image.
The fact that there's no user-controlled way to delete your account will be a deal-breaker for some, and understandably so. Hopefully, the developers will take note of what happened to Facebook and build that capability in. But if you like the idea of a personal Web start page, Pageflakes is the best way to get one.

Liveplasma

Pick a band or a movie, and Liveplasma displays related artists. Did you know Herman's Hermits were only two degrees of separation from Donna Summer?Click to view larger image.
Opening a Liveplasma map is like entering a solar system of related musical acts or movies. After you enter the name of a band, for example, Liveplasma generates a field of spheres with your band in the center and other similar bands sprinkled around it.
The size of the sphere relates to the popularity of the artist, and its color conveys how similar it is to your target band. Lines connecting the spheres let you track the connections.
The sorting process is a little opaque, and the database has some holes — entering "Lily Allen" got me a map based on Woody Allen, for example. But it's an amusing way to explore similarities between artists and a visually stunning example of a new way to display information.

WeatherBonk
WeatherBonk will tell you everything you need to know about the weather in Pittsburgh — or anywhere else — including pictures.Click to view larger image.
WeatherBonk, on the other hand, is far from visually stunning, but it'll satisfy anyone who really wants to know what's going on weatherwise.
WeatherBonk pulls data from national weather services such as Weather Underground and the National Weather Service, as well as from numerous personal weather stations run from homes and schools. It displays a screen showing the current forecast, a Google map with temperature data and streams from webcams in your target region. You can even overlay radar and cloud information and animate it. The result ain't pretty, but measured by information per square inch, it's a winner.

Maps mashups
CommunityWalk
You know those little tabs you see when you search in Google Maps for something like "pizza near 90210"? CommunityWalk lets you make your own map with tabs you set by entering addresses or by just clicking on the map.
You can also enter a label and notes for each location. I've used it to make a map of where the members of a local Internet forum live and to plot the locations of a bunch of open houses I wanted to hit one weekend. You can categorize the locations and choose a different icon — basic or silly — for each category. And you can make the map Private; Shared, so that anyone you send the URL to can see it; or Public, which lists it on the site and makes it available to search engines.
With CommunityWalk, you can create your own custom Google map and, if you want, share it with the world. Here jpiehowski shows us where they're biting in Minnesota.Click to view larger image.

Gmaps Pedometer
Want to know how far that walk you took today was? Curious about the distance of your regular morning run? Just go to this site, bring up the Google map of where you do your perambulating and start clicking to place points along your route.
Trace out the route of your morning jog on a Google map, and the Gmaps Pedometer will tell you how much ground you covered and how many calories you burned.Click to view larger image.
The Gmaps Pedometer will calculate the total distance and, if you enter your weight, even give you an estimation of the number of calories you've burned. That's what it's for, but you can use it to measure any distance. I compared the length of the northern and southern borders of Wyoming (they're not the same, you know) by "walking" the length of them on the map.

HousingMaps
HousingMaps combines Craigslist For Rent data with Google maps to help you find a place to live in the perfect neighborhood.Click to view larger image.
So where are all those apartments on Craigslist, anyway? Go to housingmaps.com, choose a city served by Craigslist from the drop-down menu, enter a price range, number of bedrooms and other sorting criteria that Craigslist offers, and you've got a map showing where all the matching listings are located.
You also get a list of all the postings along the side of the map. Click on the icon next to any post to get a pop-up on the map showing title and address, or click on the listing title to go right to Craigslist. It's helpful if you're planning to move to a new house or apartment, but it's also a great way to pass the time dreaming about moving to a whole new city.

Just for fun

Goggles

Fly your little biplane over Nôtre Dame de Paris — or any of several other scenic locations — with the Google Maps plus Flash mashup Goggles.Click to view larger image.
Load the map of your hometown or someplace you just feel like visiting and fly your little Flash-animated biplane around to your heart's content. You can even strafe old workplaces or other locations you have a grudge against.
If you get lost, just dive until you crash into the ground and start over. Goggles opens with a list of 22 locations to start from, including New York and Los Angeles; Helsinki, Finland; Heraklion, Crete; and Mars and the Moon (though I couldn't get maps for the latter two.) There's also a way to set your own start location, though it's a complicated, multistep process. But if you can't find the location you want, just fly there.

Will Microsoft deliver Windows 7 next year?

2008-05-21T13:54:00.000+05:30

Recent statements hint at possible arrival of next OS in 2009

Microsoft Corp. has dropped two strong hints in the past two days that the next version of its Windows operating system will arrive in 2009, shaving up to a year off previous expectations.
It could also be a signal that Microsoft intends to cut its losses with Windows Vista, which has been poorly received or shunned by customers, especially large companies.

Microsoft has long said it wants to release Windows 7 about three years after Vista, which was released to manufacturing in November 2006 but not officially launched until January 2007. Given Microsoft's recent track record - Vista arrived more than five years after XP -- most outsiders had pegged sometime in 2010 as a safe bet for Windows 7's arrival.

But News.com reported today that Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates answered a question at a business meeting in Miami about Windows Vista by saying "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version."

And during its announcement yesterday that it would extend the availability of Windows XP Home for low-cost laptops, Microsoft said it would retire the operating system only after June 30, 2010, or one year after the release of Windows 7, whichever comes later.

That implies that Microsoft is targeting the middle of next year for some sort of release milestone for Windows 7 -- the only codename known at the moment -- though whether that would be a final release to consumers or an RTM, which allows businesses and resellers to start installing it, is unknown.

A Microsoft spokeswoman, in an e-mail, said the company "is in the planning stages for Windows 7 and development is scoped to three years from Windows Vista Consumer GA." She said the company was providing early builds of the new operating system to gain user feedback, but otherwise was not providing further information.

Gates also said that he was "super-enthused about what [Windows 7] will do in lots of ways" but didn't elaborate.

What could those be? Microsoft has divulged a few things. Responding to criticism that Windows has become unnecessarily bloated, the company has 200 engineers developing a slimmed-down kernel called MinWin that uses 100 files and 25MB, compared to Vista's 5,000 files and 4GB core and is so small it lacks a graphical subsystem.

Microsoft has also confirmed that the operating system will come in consumer and business versions and in 32-bit and 64-bit editions

Screenshots of early betas of Windows 7 are also appearing. Blogger Paul Thurrott yesterday put up screenshots from Build 6519 of Windows 7 released in December, which he said looks like "a slightly enhanced version of Windows Vista."

To prepare its millions of reselling partners, Microsoft needs to start generating excitement about its software months or years in advance.

But if it talks up Windows 7 too much, it runs the risk that large companies -- Microsoft's most profitable customer segment -- will hold onto their Windows XP machines and skip Vista entirely in favor of Windows 7.

That appears to be happening. A recent enterprise survey by Forrester Research Inc. showed that only 6.3% of enterprises were running Vista at the end of December, with most of the upgrades coming at the expense of aging machines running Windows 2000, not XP. The vast majority of the 100 million copies of Vista that Microsoft has sold so far have gone to individuals and small businesses purchasing new PCs.

The least-loved version of Windows has long been Windows Millennium Edition, a buggy minor upgrade that was superseded by XP within a year of its release. Despite its far greater -- some would say, too great -- technical ambition, Vista may end up lumped together with ME as one of the blips on Windows' long-term road map.

Six steps to a faster broadband connection

2008-05-16T14:11:00.008+05:30

How to test your speed, troubleshoot any problems and tweak your system for optimum performance

If you're serious about the Internet, chances are you spend anywhere from $30 to $99 per month for a broadband Internet connection. But regardless of how much you pay, are you getting all the speed that your ISP promised you? And does your connection persist reliably without dropping out frequently or requiring modem reboots? With our quick guide, you can squeeze every last kilobit-per-second (kbit/sec.) of throughput out of your broadband modem and keep your connection running smoothly.

1. Test Your Connection Speed
Before you start tweaking, get a baseline reading of your downstream and upstream connection speeds at Speedtest.net. If possible, measure the speeds at different times of day, especially during the hours when you use the connection most frequently, and at least once after midnight or 1:00 a.m. (when competition for bandwidth is likely to be at its lowest level).

2. Update Your Firmware or Get a New Modem
If your cable or DSL modem is more than a couple of years old, ask your Internet service provider for a new one. The exchange will probably be free; and if there is a fee, you can usually waive it by agreeing to a new one-year contract. The latest cable modems meet the DOCSIS 2.0 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) standard. If you have a 1.1 modem and a high-throughput plan, you'll likely experience a large speed increase just by swapping modems.
Even with a brand-new modem, make sure that you have the latest firmware installed. I upgraded my two-year-old Efficient Networks 5100b DSL modem from firmware version 1.0.0.39 to 1.0.0.53, and immediately saw my Speedtest throughput increase from 5.3 mbit/sec. to 5.9 mbit/sec., just a hair below the 6 mbit/sec. that I'm paying for. Cable providers such as Comcast usually push new firmware to modems, so there's no need for most cable modem users to perform upgrades themselves.

To update your DSL modem, you'll have to connect to its Web interface, which means that you'll need to know the IP address of the modem on your local network. This information should be in your user manual; alternatively, you can find default settings for most modems on the Internet. The address will probably look something like 192.168.100.1 or 192.168.0.1. Enter this character string into your browser, and the Web interface should come up. You'll likely have to sign in, using either a security code printed on the bottom of the modem or a default username and password (unless you previously changed it). Write down the log-in information for future reference.

Once you've logged in, check the firmware number on the status page, and see whether a newer version of the firmware is available on the manufacturer's site. If it is, download this more recent firmware to your PC, and then find and run the firmware update procedure from the modem's browser utility. Reboot, rerun Speedtest, and see whether your data is traveling faster. Besides boosting transfer speeds, using a new modem or updated firmware can solve a host of nagging connection issues, such as intermittent dropouts.

3. Check Your Modem Parameters

While you're updating the firmware, check some key parameters. First, the maximum allowed speeds (both downstream and up) should match your service plan. If they don't, your ISP didn't set your service up properly. Give your ISP a call and ask it to fix the setup remotely.
Second, look for signal-to-noise ratio (or SN margin) and line attenuation, both measured in decibels (dB). The lower the signal-to-noise ratio, the more interference you have, and the greater the number of packets that will need to be re-sent because they didn't come through the first time. For this reason, a noisy line can dramatically cut throughput. Line attenuation measures the drop in voltage that comes with splitting the signal (especially for cable modems) and with long runs of cable or older wiring. Excessive signal loss will cause a drop in throughput.
For DSL modems, anything above about 50 dB for line attenuation is poor, and 20 to 30 dB is excellent. For signal-to-noise ratio, 7 to 10 dB is marginal, and 20 to 28 dB is excellent. My modem's SN margin registered at 12.5 dB, barely reaching the good range, and its line attenuation reading was 30.5 dB, which rates as very good. Note that acceptable ranges may vary depending on your service level and modem type (faster connections need to be cleaner), so check with your cable or DSL provider to see what numbers you should look for.

4. Troubleshooting Line Quality
If your off-peak Speedtest numbers didn't measure up to your plan's specifications, and if you found poor signal-to-noise or line attenuation numbers, it's time to troubleshoot your wiring. Excessive noise may cause intermittent dropouts, too.

Your first task is to determine whether the signal is already degraded when it reaches your house or whether your own wiring is at fault. To test this, move your cable modem as close as you can to where the wire first splits. If possible, take a laptop and power cord for your modem outside to the junction where it connects to the house. Retest and see if things improve. If they don't, call your cable company. If your own wiring looks to be at fault, reduce the number of splits that occur before the wiring reaches your modem, and/or replace the wire itself, which may be faulty. The ultimate solution for cable modems is to create a split directly after the junction box, and then run a clean new cable directly to your modem, using the other split for all of your TVs (which are less affected by noise).

For DSL modems, noisy inside wiring tends to be due to the other phone equipment on your line. This interference is supposed to be controlled by the filters placed between the wall jack and each device. Make sure that they are all in place. If you still have too much noise, the best solution is to install a "DSL/POTS splitter" immediately after the phone box, where the wiring comes into the house, and then run a dedicated "homerun" wire straight to the modem. This arrangement will completely isolate your modem from the regular phone wiring--and the new wire should help too. If you don't want to do this job yourself, you can ask your cable or phone company to perform both tasks for a fee.

Finally, improper grounding can be a source of noise, especially on cable. Make sure that all of your TV equipment is plugged into properly grounded outlets, with polarized plugs oriented in the right direction, and without any three-prong-to-two-prong adapters. If you have an electric outlet tester, use it to check for excess voltage on your cable wiring. An electrician can find and fix any grounding problems, which are safety concerns as well.

5. Optimize Software Settings

Now that your cable or DSL line is as clean as you can make it, you're ready to tweak your system and applications for maximum performance, too. For optimizing network performance parameters in Windows XP or Vista, we like TotalIdea Software's Tweak-XP Pro Premium and TweakVI Premium. Both programs simplify optimization without requiring you to understand Registry editing or hidden Windows settings. Both packages include dozens of tweaks in addition to network and browser adjustments. The Pro version of Network Magic, an excellent network monitoring utility, includes optimization capabilities as well.

System-level optimization is less important in Vista than in XP, since Vista tunes your TCP stack dynamically. In fact, Vista users can probably get away with just optimizing specific applications, especially their browsers. To speed up Firefox page displays, try Firetune or Fasterfox. Both are free and one-click easy. Fasterfox adds a few more customization options for expert users. Both tweak low-level Firefox settings such as cache memory capacity, maximum simultaneous connections, and "pipelining" (performing multiple data requests simultaneously)

6. Accelerate Your Downloads

Frequent downloaders can save huge amounts of time by using a download manager like our favorite, FlashGet. FlashGet creates multiple simultaneous download links, and then puts the file together afterward. All you do is click or drag download links to the FlashGet window; the program does the rest. It integrates with Internet Explorer and Firefox using a companion utility called FlashGot.

10 broken technology ideas -- and how to fix them

2008-05-15T13:02:00.007+05:30

Here are 10 high-tech ideas that sound good but don't work out so well in practice

Sometimes a technology idea is too good to be true. A flexible keyboard, Internet voting and watching feature films on your smart phone are examples. Today, these concepts are still evolving, but they're broken right now. I'll tell you why and what could be done to fix them once and for all.

1. Ultracompact PCs

Call them whatever you want: ultramobile PCs (UMPC), mobile information devices (MID) or subnotebooks. I call them small PCs, and they are almost indistinguishable from a good smart phone. For example, the BlackBerry 8820, with its built-in GPS capability and excellent e-mail client, is a better device than the Samsung Q1 Ultra, described by the company as an "ultramobile personal computer." The only real difference is that you squint less with the Q1. But most people don't use a Q1 for gaming or writing long business documents. As Jon Stewart pointed out at the Oscars, small-screen video is not fun on a device such as the iPhone.The Apple iPhone is a smarter, sexier, more useable computer than just about any MID, such as the new Toshiba prototype. Meanwhile, there's more power in the OQO, than a regular UMPC, but the screen is just as tiny. I figure that in less than three years, Apple will release a successor to the iPhone that works more like a Mac and will become the first company to make a true pocket computer -- one that runs any Mac OS X application natively, with a mini-DVI port.

2. Satellite Internet
My main problem with satellite Internet providers is their fair use policies, which penalize users who download too much by throttling their speed back to almost nothing, and then slowly adding more speed over a 24 hour period. Both WildBlue and HughesNet do this, and they claim it helps all users. However, the Internet is not just for e-mail and simple browsing anymore, it's a pipeline for television, network back-ups, remote access and a myriad of other activities -- not to mention Web apps and streaming media. Other ISPs -- such as Charter Communications and Qwest-- don't throttle your speed at all. Others, such as Comcast, may use "network management" techniques such as throttling BitTorrent traffic, but they aren't as aggressive as the satellite providers.

Another issue is that the stationary modem that you need for satellite Internet is a bulky device and uses coaxial cable that most people need a technician to install. Also, the required antenna is bigger than a wheel rim, but there's no reason it couldn't be reduced to a size that works with your laptop. Yet I like the satellite concept because it could make the Internet much more ubiquitous across large swathes of the U.S. Satellite Internet has slowly increased in speed, starting out at only 512Kbit/sec. and currently at about 1.5Mbit/sec. If the technology and speed improve, it could be a solid option.

3. Contact managers

I'd like to retrieve the lost hours spent building up a contacts database. Not long ago, I stopped meticulously entering names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mails and now rely on other methods. For example, I search Gmail.com for names and addresses. When I want to send a new e-mail, I just type a portion of a name to get the full address, type the message, and send.
For names not in my Gmail archive, I use an online address book such as YellowPages.com or LinkedIn.com. However, a good contact manager could work like the iPhone: It would see phone number in an e-mail and allow me to right-click and add the name and phone number to a database automatically within Gmail. The database would be smart enough to know if a phone number already matches an existing name, and it would weed out duplicates automatically. I'd never have to type in contacts, because this "auto-database" would work as easily as a mobile phone, support any e-mail client and work in the background. Some contact managers come close -- such as Now Up-to-Date & Contact -- but it still involves a manual process.

4. Digital streaming adapters

They have names like Apple TV, Netgear Digital Entertainer and Sonos, but they all do the same thing: move music, video and photos from your PC in the office to the HDTV in your family room. They are supposed to solve a persistent dilemma: a PC just doesn't work with a television. A keyboard and mouse are meant for a desk, not a sofa. These adapters add another appliance to an overcrowded entertainment center bulging with DVRs and game consoles. Putting the digital media adapter in the TV, like this MediaSmart TV, makes sense -- less clutter in your entertainment room.

The fix? Put them right into the television itself. Hewlett-Packard Co. started this with the MediaSmart TV, but I'd like to see it as a standard feature that is more open -- not just based on Windows Media Extender, but supporting any media format over Wi-Fi.

5. Video on a phone

A phone screen is too small for video, and even the iPod Touch can cause eye strain when you watch a two-hour feature film. I'm convinced that anything you only do once or twice in dealing with new technology and find it hard to do -- like load a smart phone with video clips or swap contacts with your laptop over Bluetooth -- is just a novelty and often not worth the effort. I will likely never do it again; it's not worth the time. Even the iPhone is a poor movie viewer unless you are desperate for a Jason Bourne flick on the bus. But solid-state memory is finally getting cheaper, and it makes sense to load up a mobile device with movies.

What I'd like to see is Bluetooth built into HDTVs so that I can beam a high-resolution movie from my phone or projector in the phone (like the Pico technology being developed by Texas Instruments Inc.) or a mini-DVI port.

6. Web 2.0
For the past two years, the promise of the Semantic Web -- a concept where the Web is smarter and lets you tag information for better searchability -- has reached a crescendo that is finally coming down to earth. I believe there is no clear definition of Web 2.0 or any sites that fit easily into that box. Instead, Web 1.0 is in a constant state of evolution. Imagine Amazon.com in its infancy -- over the past 10 years, it has been updated with hundreds of new features as Web technology has steadily advanced. Web aggregators like Pageflakes point to a day when HTML may be replaced by something much more powerful.

What I'm hoping for is a whole new framework for the Web: a wholesale HTML replacement, something like AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) that's faster and more reliable. Or, I'd like to see sites like Pageflakes expand even more so that Web 2.0 dies altogether and gives way to Internet widgets running on a true Internet operating system.

7. Electronic books

A promising technology, or a snake-oil sales pitch? E-books like the Amazon Kindle and Sony eReader could eventually reduce our reliance on paper books. I must admit the crisp 120DPI screens look remarkably like printed material. In some ways, the Web is a gigantic e-book with an endless amount of information -- even if some of it is unreliable (see Wikipedia.org). Yet, nothing beats a printed book: you can find your place instantly with a dog-ear, it's practically disposable, you can loan it to anyone, and it causes very little eye strain. Yes, you can load one of 90,000 books on the Kindle and check your e-mail in between chapters of the latest Stephen King novel. But before an e-book reader becomes a major hit with consumers, it must cost about the same as a real book. I'd like a throwaway e-book that's a plastic sheet with electronic ink (like the newspapers in Minority Report) and costs about $30.

8. Internet voting

I like the idea of Internet voting because the easier you make the process, the more people who will vote. Right now, the concept is in a preliminary stage because fingerprint readers or some other form of biometrics hasn't become ubiquitous or foolproof. I have noticed that just about every enterprise laptop has a fingerprint reader. In the same way that Hollywood studios don't trust the Internet for delivering movies unless they are crippled with digital rights management, voting also needs some extra precautions to ward off fraud. The idea will finally work once all displays are multitouch (which might be sooner than we think), facial recognition is common and secure, and there is some way of encrypting the connection to assuage any doubts.

9. Video blogs

My main issue with video blogs is that they don't seem well suited for the Web. I'd watch "Rocketboom", "Mahalo Daily" and "WebbAlert" every day if I had the time. Often, with WebbAlert, I scan through the links -- it usually has a really good summary of the previous day and posts in my RSS reader before just about anyone else -- instead of watching the video blog. The Web is made for instant information (see Facebook, Wikipedia, etc.), and I have a hard time discerning how a video blog is really that different from a 2-minute update on G4 or CNN. Yes, there's the idea that a video blog has a "long tail" -- there can be a video blog for just about any taste, how to do underwater yoga, stuff that would never make it on a mainstream channel -- suited for any taste, but the farther you go out on the tail, the lower its quality seems to be. Where is this all going? I'd like to see satellite television providers like Dish Network and DirecTV offer more-flexible plans. I'd watch a video blog station for 10 minutes if it could hold my attention over breakfast and The Wall Street Journal.

10. Flexible keyboards

Flexible, foldable keyboards like the Brando or the Eleksen ElekTex sound like a good replacement for a standard keyboard and could help mobile users type faster when traveling with smart phones. Sure, they are mobile and new, but typing on a fabric keyboard like this Eleksen model is a real pain. In practice, it's almost impossible to type fast on these roll-away models. Is there a way to improve on a standard keyboard? Microsoft and Logitech International keep trying, adding extra buttons and features. (I have settled on the Microsoft Wireless Laser Keyboard 6000 V2 with its slight key curvature.)

I doubt we will be typing on multitouch screens any faster, judging by my speed on the iPhone. Speech recognition, even if it understood every word perfectly, still makes it hard to edit your mistakes. The Laser Keyboard is hinting at a true evolution: Eventually, all keyboards will become more tactile, with more responsive keys, a more ergonomic feel -- and someone may figure out how to make them fold up. Have I missed any technologies, or do you disagree with any of my choices? Let me know in the comments section at the end of this article.

The 10 most important technologies you never think about

2008-05-15T12:45:00.004+05:30

You couldn't get through your day without them

The late science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously said that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

We certainly live in a magical world. We're surrounded by technology, yet we seldom stop to consider the amazing advances that we've come to rely on every day. Whether we're surfing the Web, making a call on our mobile phones or watching a DVD movie on our big-screen TVs, we take our modern conveniences for granted.

Here, then, is a peek inside the magician's hat at 10 technologies that are keys to our digital age. Without realizing it, you've probably used at least one -- if not all -- of them already today. But whether you're aware of them or not, without these technologies our world would be a very different place.

Unicode

We use computers for every kind of communication, from instant messaging to e-mail to writing the great American novel. The trouble is, computers don't speak our language. They're all digital; before they can store or process text, every letter, symbol and punctuation mark must first be translated into numbers. So which numbers do we use? Early PCs relied on a code called ASCII, which took care of most of the characters used in Western European languages. But that's not enough in the era of the World Wide Web. What about Cyrillic, Hindi or Thai?

Enter Unicode, the Rosetta Stone of computing. The Unicode standard defines a unique number for every letter, symbol or glyph in more than 30 written languages, and it's still growing. At nearly 1,500 pages and counting, it's incredibly complex, but it's been gaining traction ever since Microsoft Corp. adopted it as the internal encoding for the Windows NT family of operating systems.

Most of us will never need to know which characters map to which Unicode numbers, but modern computing could scarcely do without Unicode. In fact, it's what's letting you read this article in your Web browser, right now.

Digital signal processing

Digital music, digital photos, digital videos -- it's easy to forget that we live in a fundamentally analog world. Computers can cope with all that we see and hear only through the application of highly complex mathematics, a field known as digital signal processing (DSP). Wherever you find digital media, DSP is at work, facilitated by a whole subcategory of specialized chips and circuits. DSP algorithms correct for errors while your optical drive reads the music off a CD. They're at work again as you compress the audio into an MP3 file, and again when you play it back through your surround-sound speakers.

DSP is to digital media as gears and springs are to a pocket watch. It works its magic below the surface: invisible, yet totally essential. It's safe to say that without it, virtually none of the digital technologies that we take for granted today -- from DVDs to mobile phones, ink-jet printers to DSL broadband -- would be possible.

Managed code

Programming is a lot more complicated than it used to be. Modern operating systems are like onions, with layers upon layers of subsystems to interconnect and manage. Worse, bugs and unnoticed security flaws, even ones that may have once seemed trivial, can be serious threats in the Net-connected era.For a growing number of developers, the solution is to use platforms designed to relieve some of the burden. Programs written for such managed-code environments as Java and Microsoft's .Net don't run on the bare hardware the way traditional programs do. Instead, a virtual machine acts as an intermediary between the software and the system. It's like a robot nanny for computer programs, silently taking care of memory management and other housekeeping drudgery while keeping an eye out for potential security violations before they happen.

To an end user, a managed-code program may seem no different than a traditional one, but software that runs in a virtual machine makes for a more reliable, stable and secure computing experience. And with .Net rapidly becoming the preferred platform for Windows development, managed code may soon be the norm, rather than the exception.

Transistors

Later this year, Intel Corp. plans to unveil the world's first integrated circuit to contain 2 billion transistors. Moore's Law says that the number of transistors we can put into integrated circuits will double approximately every two years. That's a lot of transistors -- but what do they all do?Simply put, the transistor may well be the greatest invention of the 20th century. It's really nothing more than a voltage-controlled switch, but that humble description hides incredible power. Linked together in various ways, transistors can form circuits that are the basis of every type of digital logic, right up to the CPUs that power our modern PCs and servers.

What makes today's chips so powerful is the industry's ability to cram components ever closer together. The transistors on the processor inside your PC might be only about 100 atoms across, and improvements in manufacturing technology will keep them shrinking -- at least, for the time being. Someday, optical chips or even quantum processors may replace current chip designs and outperform them many times over. For now, we'll have to content ourselves with continuing to improve upon an oft-ignored technology that has served us for 50 years and counting.

XML

Though you may never have encountered it directly, XML is everywhere. Now in its tenth year, it has become virtually the lingua franca of data exchange. XML stands for "extensible markup language" -- extensible because developers can add to it to suit the needs of particular applications. But what makes it really valuable is the fact that it's a language, much like HTML. Unlike some data formats, XML files aren't just streams of incomprehensible numbers. XML is designed to be read by humans as well as machines. A developer who "speaks XML" can look at a document written in an unfamiliar XML dialect and still understand what it's trying to say.

This powerful combination of features makes XML incredibly useful for all kinds of applications. But perhaps its biggest coup was Microsoft's decision to switch to XML-based file formats for Office 2007. As it turns out, you actually may have XML documents sitting on your desktop right now, without realizing it.

Nonvolatile RAM

Isn't it strange? Your pockets stay the same size, yet you can carry more and more in them every year. In 1956, IBM's first hard drives used disks that were 2 feet wide. It's hard to believe that today's microscale drives use essentially the same technology. Incremental advances, such as the discovery of giant magnetoresistance and the invention of perpendicular recording heads, have produced staggering results. Between 1990 and 2005, magnetic hard drives increased their storage capacity a thousandfold, putting even Moore's Law to shame.

But even with those astounding improvements, hard drives hit a wall when it came to portable devices. They were still too big and too fragile for many gadgets. Enter solid-state drives based on nonvolatile RAM. The technology has been used for storage since the 1970s, but it remained phenomenally expensive until manufacturing processes caught up with the demand. Now it is everywhere -- in MP3 players like the newest Creative Zen and in digital cameras, cell phones and even some laptops.

Manufacturers aren't sitting still; cutting-edge technologies such as "racetrack memory" could lead to solid-state storage that is smaller, faster and more reliable than ever.

Lithium-ion batteries

When we were kids, our toys came "batteries not included." With our grown-up, high-tech toys, on the other hand, the battery is often one of the most important features. As essential as mobility has become to how we use technology, it simply wouldn't be possible if our choices were still limited to D, C and AA. The invention of lithium-ion batteries was the key. The earliest rechargeables were made with lead -- hardly a prescription for portability. But because lithium is the lightest metal, lithium-based batteries can store more energy at a given weight than any other variety. Lighter batteries mean smaller, lighter devices; beginning in the 1990s, you could actually put a phone in your pocket.

Running time remains an ongoing challenge, but researchers have no shortage of solutions. In addition to improved lithium-ion batteries that use nanotechnology, a number of battery alternatives are slowly coming to market, including ultracapacitors and fuel cells. In fact, pardon me for saying that battery technology is poised for its next big explosion -- and personal technology is sure to advance because of it.

Voice over IP

You've made a few Skype calls, and you've looked into digital phone service from your broadband provider, but that's as close as you've gotten to voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology. Or so you think. In truth, VoIP is revolutionizing the telecommunications industry, blurring the lines between voice calls and digital networks. Those prepaid calling cards that offer rock-bottom international rates? VoIP makes them possible. Similarly, a growing number of businesses use VoIP behind the scenes to eliminate long-distance charges between branch offices.

Routing calls over the Internet circumvents traditional telephone company charges, and fewer fees and taxes mean lower prices. Digital calls are easier to direct and manage, which makes them attractive even to traditional telephone companies. Don't be surprised if soon the land line you've lived with forever is replaced by an all-digital alternative -- though you'll likely be none the wiser.

Graphics acceleration

Thought your fancy video card was only good for gaming? Think again. Its graphics processing unit (GPU) is really like a second, highly specialized CPU. When it comes to certain kinds of complex math, its performance puts your desktop CPU to shame. Until recently, all that power went to waste when you weren't chalking up frags. But computer scientists are finding novel ways to use GPU acceleration to speed up applications off-screen, as well. For example, a Stanford University project -- which uses many PCs around the world acting together as a supercomputer to assist protein-folding-related disease research -- can offload calculations to the GPU to multiply its performance many times.

Because the kind of calculations used to draw 3-D graphics are also applicable to many other problems, GPU acceleration is potentially useful for a wide variety of applications, from math-intensive science and engineering to complex database queries. Newer, even more complex chips -- such as nVidia Corp.'s Aegia physics engine -- can do even more. No wonder nVidia has begun working on chips for the workstation market.

Increasingly, your PC's performance won't depend on the speed of any single chip. As Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel get into the game, expect future desktop CPUs to incorporate CPU and GPU capabilities into a single, multicore package, bringing the best of both worlds to gamers and nongamers alike.

High-speed Net access

Where would we be without fast Internet access? It's easy to forget that just 10 years ago, most of us were still using ordinary modems. The broadband revolution ushered in streaming video, MP3 downloads, Internet phone calls and multiplayer online gaming. And we owe it all to TV. In the 1980s, cable companies were promising 500 channels of round-the-clock programming. Cable was poised to become the most important wire into the house, but the telephone companies had an ace up their sleeve. A new technology could push high-frequency signals over ordinary phone lines, which previously had been good only for low-bandwidth voice calls. The telephone companies saw this as an opportunity to offer video on demand and to compete with the cable companies at their own game.

Or so they thought. The plans of the telcos for video on demand dried up by the mid-1990s, but the technology remained. Now called Digital Subscriber Line, it had morphed into a high-speed household on-ramp to the Internet. The cable companies followed suit with a comparable technology, and the broadband speed race -- for both DSL and cable -- began in earnest. Both cable and DSL still use traditional frequency signaling over copper wires, but new breakthroughs are poised to go mainstream. Fiber to the premises (FTTP) promises lightning-fast network speeds, and WiMax will push broadband into territories that wires can't reach today. As for what applications this next broadband revolution will bring -- well, we have only begun to imagine.

RIM's BlackBerry Bold beats Apple to the 3G punch

2008-05-15T12:33:00.004+05:30

Bold supports 3G, Wi-Fi and GPS

May 12, 2008 ,Amid swirling rumors about the impending announcement of a 3G iPhone, Research In Motion Ltd. today introduced its slickest, speediest, most powerful and most connected BlackBerry to date: the BlackBerry Bold 9000.

Equipped with support for tri-band HSDPA and quad-band EDGE (which means that it will support the highest-speed GSM-family data networks wherever they are available worldwide), 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi, stereo Bluetooth, and both assisted and autonomous GPS, the Bold could prove a formidable challenger to Apple Inc.'s next-generation iPhone on connectivity alone.

It even looks a bit iPhone-esque, with its glassy display area, generally flat profile and rounded corners. Still, the Bold comes configured with a hardware QWERTY keyboard, and it retains the general dimensions of its predecessors, so it's much shorter and somewhat thicker than the iPhone.

The Bold's removable back is covered in black leatherette, and you'll be able to personalize the device by buying replacement backs in different colors: blue, brown, green, gray and red. The redesigned keyboard has guitar-inspired frets -- thin metal strips -- between each row. The keys themselves are sculpted to help users avoid fingertip slippage. The device also carries a 2-megapixel camera capable of up to 5x digital zoom.

Fast CPU, high-res display

The Bold's 624-MHz StrongARM processor with full MMX (multimedia extensions) is the most powerful CPU on a handheld to date. Tthe BlackBerry Curve, in contrast, uses a 312-MHz chip without MMX. The Bold's extra power enables the device to handle full-motion video on its 480-by-320-pixel, 65,000-plus-color display (that resolution is double the Curve's at basically the same screen size). In a demo at PC World's offices last week, video clips on the Bold looked smooth and exceptionally sharp.

Of course, little commercial video content is available as yet for non-Apple media players. Further, the Bold's screen is diminutive compared with the current iPhone's roomy 3.5-in. display, and it isn't a touch screen. (RIM President and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis simply smiled when we asked about reports that the company is working on a touch-screen BlackBerry).
But since the Bold's smaller display holds the same number of pixels as the current iPhone's, images look much higher-resolution on it than on its competitor.

The Bold's 1GB of on-board secure memory (on top of its 128MB of flash) will appeal to BlackBerry's core enterprise community, providing storage for items that companies would rather not make available for transport on a micro SD card. But users who want to carry their music and video libraries on their handsets will be able to do so via micro SD.

Carriers will determine pricing, and RIM had no details on which U.S. carrier will introduce the Bold (though AT&T, with the largest HSDPA network in the U.S., seems a likelier candidate than T-Mobile, which has just begun to roll out 3G service stateside). RIM said that it expects the Bold to be shipping worldwide this summer.

The future of antivirus

2008-05-15T12:25:00.001+05:30

Is there a way out of the arms race?

Antivirus software makes Greg Shipley so mad he has to laugh. "The relationship between signature-based antivirus companies and the virus writers is almost comical. One releases something and then the other reacts, and they go back and forth. It's a silly little arms race that has no end."

Shipley, chief technology officer at Neohapsis, a security consultancy in Chicago, says the worst part is that the arms race isn't helpful either to him or his clients. "I want to get off of signature-based antivirus as rapidly as possible. I think it's a broken model, and I think it's an incredible CPU hog."

The question is, where should he go? Antivirus as an industry has modeled itself on the human immune system, which slaps a label on things like viruses so it knows to attack them when it sees that same label, or signature, again. Signature-based antivirus has moved well beyond that simple type of signature usage (though at the beginning, it did look for specific lines of code). In its current, more sophisticated form, it dominates the market for security software, despite some obvious limitations: You don't use it to stop data leakage, for instance, though many kinds of malware are designed to siphon data out of companies. The number of malware signatures tracked by security software company F-Secure doubled in 2007, and while you might cynically expect such a company to say there's more malware out there, 2007's total doubled the number of signatures F-Secure had built up over the previous 20 years.

Even before 2007, there were plenty of people besides Shipley arguing that antivirus was an industry in trouble. In fact, in 2006, Robin Bloor, an analyst at Hurwitz & Associates, penned a report titled "Anti-virus is dead." He argued that malware exists only because antivirus software exists, and said that antivirus software was doomed to be replaced by new forms of software, which he calls application control, or software authentication tools. Such tools whitelist the software we use and won't run anything else without the user's explicit permission.
Antivirus firms think their death is greatly exaggerated, thank you very much -- even those that aren't overly reliant on signatures, like BitDefender, which says that signature-based techniques account for only 20% of the malware it catches.

"Signatures aren't dead -- you need them," says Bogdan Dumitru, CTO at the Romanian firm, which uses behavioral targeting techniques to stop the remainder of attacks. Its main research focus is to develop an "undo" feature that will let users hit by malware reverse its effects. BitDefender hopes to release this feature in 2008.

Meanwhile, Bit9, the application whitelisting company highlighted in Bloor's report, uses antivirus software to help build its database -- 22 kinds of antivirus software, in fact. In November 2007, it announced a deal to give access to this database to security software maker Kaspersky Labs. Bit9 officials said that the database will help Kaspersky check new signatures to limit false positives.

It's also true that antivirus makers continue to sell billions of dollars worth of software, despite Bloor's proclamation. Bloor, though, says that "the technique of protecting PCs using virus signatures is now on the wane," and he rattles off a list of whitelisting companies offering software authentication tools -- not just Bit9, but also companies such as Lumension (formerly SecureWave), Savant Protection, Computer Associates and AppSense. And he noted the Kaspersky deal and Apple's use of whitelisting to protect the iPhone.

Not just whitelisting

Antivirus software has its uses. If a system is actually infected by malware, it "may be the least painful way of removing it," says David Harley, administrator of Avien, the antivirus information exchange network, adding, "Whitelisting does seem to be advocated currently as the panacea du jour. I think this relentless search for The Answer, discarding one partially successful solution set for something else in the hope that it will eliminate the problem, is actually unprofessional."
Harley makes that argument because he doubts that any single technology approach will be a 100% solution when it comes to security. He wrote that whitelisting thus is likely a supplemental technology for fighting malware, making it one of a host of newer technologies that have been adopted, including heuristics, sandboxing and behavior monitoring.

Corporate CISOs certainly don't expect to find one answer to their problems. "If you rely on signatures for security, you're pretty much dead in the water," says Ken Pfeil, head of information security for the Americas region of WestLB, a German bank. Pfeil thinks signatures are useful and his firm uses them. But when new malware appears, he often finds it faster to try to break it down himself to understand its potential effects, rather than wait for his vendor to give him an update. His firm has also adopted tools that use heuristics techniques and anomaly testing, to add oomph to its antivirus approach.

That kind of layered approach to software fits with where Natalie Lambert, an analyst at Forrester Research, thinks the market is going. She says that signature-based antivirus is "table stakes" for security software, and techniques like heuristic information processing systems, or HIPS, which look for suspicious actions by software, like an application opening itself from the Temp folder.

Lambert says McAfee is probably furthest along in using HIPS among the big antivirus makers, having had more time than its rivals to new features added via corporate acquisitions.
The downside to these technologies is that none are as simple and alluring as the old signature-based antivirus, which she called a "set it and forget it" technology. She notes that HIPS technologies are difficult to manage and will never be as simple as the old model, though she expects they will get easier over time.

Neohapsis's Shipley says none of these techniques are really new -- he notes that it's been more than four years since McAfee purchased Entercept, for instance. But "what role does it play, and what percentage of things does it stop? I have no visibility into that." Shipley says he plans to bring in Bit9 to look at whether it could really replace his current antivirus software.

Antivirus firms agree that they are becoming something different.

Sophos, for instance, uses several additions to signature-based AV. Sophos examines program behavior -- the modifications a program makes to things like system configuration and files as the program runs. The company has also built in a pre-execution algorithm, a kind of crystal ball to simulate what unfamiliar code looks likely to do.

Richard Wang, manager of Sophos Labs in the U.S., says that while signatures are easy to create, things like pre-execution code are harder and thus take more time. But the payoff is that it can work against multiple strains of malicious software. He said that for the Storm worm, Sophos generated only one signature but has been able to recognize all the variants. Wang describes this type of technique as "almost like a broad-spectrum antibiotic."

Child's play?Interestingly, the OLPC XO (from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation) is another place to look at new AV techniques. The XO uses the Bitfrost specification, developed expressly for this simple computer. OLPC claims that the system "is both drastically more secure and provides drastically more usable security than any mainstream system currently on the market."

The OLPC XO ships in a default mode that is basically locked down but simple for the user to open up. The Bitfrost specification uses a series of built-in protections, including sandboxes or program jails for applications and system-level protections that prevent alterations from code that could do something harmful.

Whether Bitfrost would work in a corporate environment or will be commercialized outside the OLPC project is unclear. But Avien's Harley, for one, thinks that there are psychological reasons why antivirus software is unlikely to go away.

"The idea of a solution that stops real threats and doesn't hamper nonmalicious objects and processes is very attractive. People (at any rate, those who aren't security specialists) like the idea of threat-specific software, as long it catches all incoming malware and doesn't generate any false positives, because then they can just install it and forget about it. Unfortunately, that's an unattainable ideal."

Malicious microprocessor opens new doors for attack

2008-05-15T12:21:00.003+05:30

A lot of work to execute... for the moment

For years, hackers have focused on finding bugs in computer software that give them unauthorized access to computer systems, but now there's another way to break in: Hack the microprocessor. On Tuesday, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign demonstrated how they altered a computer chip to grant attackers back-door access to a computer. It would take a lot of work to make this attack succeed in the real world, but it would be virtually undetectable.

To launch its attack, the team used a special programmable processor running the Linux operating system. The chip was programmed to inject malicious firmware into the chip's memory, which then allows an attacker to log into the machine as if he were a legitimate user. To reprogram the chip, researchers needed to alter only a tiny fraction of the processor circuits. They changed 1,341 logic gates on a chip that has more than 1 million of these gates in total, said Samuel King, an assistant professor in the university's computer science department.

"This is like the ultimate back door," said King. "There were no software bugs exploited."
King demonstrated the attack on Tuesday at the Usenix Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats, a conference for security researchers held in San Francisco.
His team was able to add the back door by reprogramming a small number of the circuits on a LEON processor running the Linux operating system. These programmable chips are based on the same Sparc design that is used in Sun Microsystems' midrange and high-end servers. They are not widely used, but have been deployed in systems used by the International Space Station.

In order to hack into the system, King first sent it a specially crafted network packet that instructed the processor to launch the malicious firmware. Then, using a special login password, King was able to gain access to the Linux system. "From the software's perspective, the packet gets dropped... and yet I have full and complete access to this underlying system that I just compromised," King said.

The researchers are now working on tools that could help detect such a malicious processor, but there's a big problem facing criminals who would try to reproduce this type of attack in the real world. How do you get a malicious CPU onto someone's machine?

This would not be easy, King said, but there are a few possible scenarios. For example, a "mole" developer could add the code while working on the chip's design, or someone at a computer assembly plant could be paid off to install malicious chips instead of legitimate processors. Finally, an attacker could create a counterfeit version of a PC or a router that contained the malicious chip.

"This is not a script kiddie attack," he said. "It's going to require an entity with resources."
Though such a scenario may seem far-fetched, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is taking the issue seriously. In a February 2005 report (download PDF), the DoD's Defense Science Board warned of the very attack that the University of Illinois researchers have developed, saying that a shift toward offshore integrated circuit manufacturing could present a security problem.

There are already several examples of products that have shipped with malicious software installed. In late 2006, for example, Apple shipped Video iPods that contained the RavMonE.exe virus.

"We're seeing examples of the overall supply chain being compromised," King said. "Whether or not people will modify the overall processor designs remains to be seen."

IT's hiring time! Infy wants 31,000, Accenture 60,000

2008-04-14T17:48:00.000+05:30

Dell: 8,800 jobs. Chrysler: 12,000 jobs. Bristol-Myers: 4,300 jobs

Companies are slashing payrolls left and right. But over at Accenture, an international consulting, technology and outsourcing company, managers plan to hire 60,000 new employees this year. That's a 34% increase in its staff. The outlook is similar at the Indian technology services company Infosys, which is looking for 31,000 employees internationally, a 35% growth in its workforce.

When an employer brings in so many new hires--Infosys welcomed 1,000 people one day in June 2006--getting them integrated into the company and its culture is a massive operation. It's especially important for global companies, since operations should be the same if you're in Bangalore or London.

The first problem: Finding that many qualified people. Infosys received 1.3 million rÃ©sumÃ©s last year. "In peak seasons we receive around 6,000-10,000 resumes in a day," says Nandita Gurjar, vice president of human resources development at Infosys.

Despite that magnitude, managers say the percentage of qualified candidates is disappointing. The story is the same at German software company SAP, which needs to find 4,000 new employees for positions in programming, development, solution management, engineering and sales.

"In the last 16 quarters we reported double-digit growth and, as a result, we need to hire," says Claus Heinrich, SAP's head of global human resources. "But it's a challenge to find qualified people".

Infosys took matters into its own hands. The company created Campus Connect, a partnership with top Indian engineering schools to educate students according to company standards. "We needed to meet our growing demand for 'industry-ready' professionals," says Infosys' Gurjar. Infosys trains professors to teach industry-specific courses, offers seminars taught by Infosys employees, and sponsors events at tech competitions.

In developing countries, human resources is a hot field, since growth is occurring so rapidly. But the supply of candidates isn't keeping up with demand. So Accenture started HR Academy to boost the candidate pool. The company partnered with XLRI, a prominent Indian business school, to create classes that will produce a quality talent pool, which will then work for Accenture. The company is looking to replicate the program in other countries.

For applicants not in the Infosys program, the way in is daunting. Every recent college graduate who makes it past the first round of interviews undergoes a logical thinking test that can include analytical thinking, arithmetic, reasoning and written communication skills. Applicants also need to show that they can thrive in a variety of cultures.

To speed up the selection process many employers now have candidates take an online test or fill out a questionnaire to weed out completely unqualified applicants. In order for Steve Wynn's latest resort, Encore, to open in Las Vegas in December, the company needs to hire about 5,500 new employees. If it's anything like the chain's opening in Macau, China, 50,000 applications are expected.

To speed up the process, candidates fill out an application at Wynnjobs.com. Wynn then does "e-screening" to evaluate applicants' experience levels. Those without experience or the necessary licensing (for dealers) are tossed. Wynn also designed a series of online questions designed to knock out people who don't share the company's values. The next level of questions determines candidates' likelihood of success on the job.

"Making sure they stay here is really important," says Peter Early, Wynn's senior vice president of human resources. "More than anything though, it's important that we get the people who can uphold the high service standards here."

Once the initial pool is culled, candidates go to an audition, which is what the job interview is called. Since hotel and casino employees have so much interaction with customers, managers want people who deal well under pressure, interact positively with customers and can demonstrate that they can do the tasks their jobs require.

Hiring managers use software to rate candidates on their performance during a series of scenarios. For instance, a roulette dealer must go through several rolls of the dice while the hiring manager acts as the customer.

Infosys recently rolled out an online culling process of candidates. And while it might make HR's job easier, it takes half a day for job candidates.

Despite the technology, it's still a long process. That's why hiring managers want those selected to stay for the long term. The question is, how does an employer make thousands of new hires feel like part of a cohesive team?

Infosys and Accenture both have massive training facilities, and their programs are partly technical schools, partly team building exercises.

At Accenture, newly-hired consultants from all over the globe descend on St. Charles, Ill., for two weeks at the Q Center, a former women's college that was turned into a training facility. First, though, all employees are schooled in the Accenture way of doing things at the company's home office--everything from using the computer system to navigating the company.

Accenture's CEO William Green recently joked that lots of studying goes on at the Q Center during the day but that at night the real bonding begins with trips to the local bars.

Wynn's way of showing new hires its culture is through a program called Storytellers. In the employment office there will be photos of employees along with examples of their work that went above and beyond.

Early says the best example of this at the original Wynn Hotel is the staff of the restaurant Bartolotta. When they learned one of the diners recently returned from serving in Iraq, the entire staff chipped in to pay for the couple's dinner. Throughout the evening, each staff member, including the chef, stopped by the couple's table and thanked the serviceman for his efforts. They also baked a cake that said "Thank you."

"That's how we try to connect them to the aura and feeling of the place," says Early. "What gives the company its soul is the people who work here."

When roses won't do, e-mail a fragrance

2008-04-13T07:44:00.000+05:30

April 8, 2008. After satisfying the senses of sight and sound through video streams and music downloads, NTT Communications aims to tap into the sense of smell with a new system that allows users to send fragrances from their cell phones.

A trial of the service will take place later this month during which users will be able to select and send certain fragrance recipes to an in-home unit that is responsible for concocting and releasing the various fragrances. Each holds 16 cartridges of base fragrances or essences that are mixed to produce the various scents in a similar way that a printer mixes inks to produce other colors.

Transforming the mood of a room with a new scent is quite easy with this technology.

The first step is to choose a scent from the multitude of fragrance recipes available through a site accessible by cell phone. Once chosen, the instructions on how to make the scent are then transmitted to the fragrance device through infrared from the phone, and from there the scent is quickly mixed and emitted.

If distance is an issue, the other option is to send the instructions to the device via an e-mail message. The message is intercepted by a home gateway unit that is connected to the home's broadband connection and sends the instructions to the fragrance device at home. Using this method, users can set the time and date of fragrance emission, so one can come home to the relaxing scent of lavender, for example.

There's even room for creating customized scents, which can be shared with other users through the fragrance "playlist" on the Web site.

The technology is not only limited to creating a pleasant-smelling workplace or home. NTT also sees it as a way to enhance multimedia content. For example, instead of just sending an image of a bouquet of roses to a friend, one can boost the experience by sending the fragrance as well.

NTT said it hopes the fragrance emitter will cost about 20,000 yen ($195 U.S.) when eventually launched commercially. Cartridge refills should cost about 1,600 yen, it said.

NTT Communications believes that fragrance is the next important medium for telecommunications, as more value is placed on high sensory information. Through a company sponsored Internet survey, NTT found that 56% of people polled use aromatherapy or believe that it has positive benefits.

"Aromatherapy can reduce stress and help you relax, and to be able to control smell implies one has the power to manipulate feelings as well," said Akira Sakaino of NTT Communications' net business division.

NTT has been developing this technology, which it calls "kaori tsushin," since 2004, and has collaborated with various outfits to test the service.

Applications have ranged from fragrance rooms in hotels in Tokyo and Osaka to aroma advertising through digital signage, where fragrances were made to match audiovisual content, located in pubs, parking lots and railway stations around Tokyo.

The fragrance communication mobile service test will take place from April 10 to 20 and involves 20 monitors who are tasked to give feedback on the service.

World's fastest internet connection 'used to dry laundry'

2008-04-04T09:54:00.001+05:30

Last summer a 75-year-old woman from Karlstad became the envy of internet users worldwide.

Swedish firm offers legal alternative to internet piracy (12 Sep 07)
Sigbritt, 75, has world's fastest broadband (12 Jul 07)
Swedes 'most connected in Europe' (13 Nov 06)
With her blistering 40 gigabits per second connection, Sigbritt Löthberg had the world's fastest internet connection - many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user had experienced such a high speed.

So, after nine months with the ability to download a full high definition DVD in just two seconds or access 1,500 high definition HDTV channels simultaneously, how has Sigbritt's life changed?

Not much, according to Hafsteinn Jonsson, who is heading up the fibre network operation for Karlstad Stadsnät.

"She mostly used it to dry her laundry," he told The Local.

"It was a big bit of gear and it got pretty warm."

Sigbritt's son, Swedish internet legend Peter Löthberg, was behind the project, which was intended to demonstrate how a low price, high capacity fibre line could be built over long distances. Löthberg has now taken the equipment up to Luleå, in the north of Sweden, for further testing.

"The project was a huge success," said Hafsteinn Jonsson, who explained that his department now measures its history in terms of 'Before Sigbritt and After Sigbritt'.

"Apart from the death of Ingmar Bergman, this was the biggest story to come out of Sweden in 2007. We used to get all these detailed questions about what we're working on - now we just mention Sigbritt and everybody understands."

The secret behind the ultra-fast connection is a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometres apart, with no intermediary transponders.

According to Karlstad Stadsnät the distance is, in theory, unlimited - there is no data loss as long as the fibre is in place.

Sigbritt may have been denied her world-beating internet link but she still has an admirable 10 gigabits per second connection. And there may be another surprise in store for her.

"We're considering giving her a 100 gigabits per second connection in the summer," said Hafsteinn Jonsson.

"Then she'll be able to dry all her neighbours' laundry too."

'World Wide Web of cancer research' exploits human genome map

2008-04-03T19:13:00.002+05:30

In June 2000, President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair unveiled what amounted to a "rough draft" of the deciphered human genome, a milestone in the effort to crack the complex genetic code that shapes human development.
The work of the mapping of the human genome, whose completion was announced in April 2003, was heavily dependent on advanced computing for the data-intensive task of mapping the sequence of 3 billion base gene pairs.
Ironically, getting that genetic data into the hands of biomedical researchers has created another major computer quandary: the need for even more advanced systems that can keep up with an increasing number of disease subcategories being discovered through genetic research.

The National Cancer Institute took on that issue in 2003 by launching what it called the largest IT project in the history of biomedical research. The NCI created what is, in essence, a World Wide Web of cancer research.

The Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid, or caBIG, promises to help researchers, physicians and patients across the country to better share more-detailed information about diseases and thus speed the development of new drugs and treatments for them.

The government-funded effort costs about $20 million a year, the NCI said.
To date, 42 of the institute's 63 national cancer centers are either linked to the caBIG grid or are installing the necessary infrastructure to participate. Many are already building applications that can be shared by members of the grid.

The need for wider data sharing became obvious as genetics research found more subcategories of cancers that would require specific treatment methods.

Traditionally, cancer researchers focused on studying a relatively small number of disease categories, such as lung cancer, breast cancer or colon cancer. But as the genome work expanded, many disease subtypes were discovered within those categories, and each may require a different treatment.

Cancer researchers quickly saw the need to assemble as much information as possible to help in the development of new disease-specific treatment options. So, to broaden the number of data sources, the NCI has begun expanding the grid to include the community hospitals and physicians that treat 80% of U.S. cancer patients.

Interoperability

Project backers said that researchers decided early on to focus on improving interoperability rather than forcing research organizations to standardize on expensive new IT systems and software.

To accomplish that, the developers used the Globus Toolkit, a set of open-source tools for building grid systems and applications that run on top of Web services that are open for anyone with a node on the system. The Globus tools are distributed by the Globus Alliance.
Developers also created a collection of tools that serve up semantic descriptions of vocabulary and data so that both humans and machines can interpret data from dissimilar systems. And a common security model was built to allow research centers to run caBIG as a distributed infrastructure that lets each participant create individual policies to determine who can author or access data.
In addition, Ken Beutow, director of NCI's Center for Bioinformatics, said the NCI has set up "workspaces" -- groups of people that meet regularly to discuss specific domains of work, such as tissue banks and pathology tools. The workspace groups provided input on building the common vocabularies and data elements, he noted.
Robert Annechiarico, director of cancer center information systems at Duke University, which has already helped build applications for the grid, said that creating the common data elements is particularly important for academic researchers. "Academic medical centers are a community of fiefdoms bound together by a common parking problem," he explained

Researchers at Duke contributed to the development of two caBIG applications, the Cancer Central Clinical Database and the Cancer Central Clinical Participant Registry.
The latter application, a Web-based tool for managing clinical trial data across multiple cancer centers, can provide researchers with access to records about patients suffering from one of the new subcategories of cancer.
"Where I might see five patients a year with a particular disease, now I can see 50," Annechiarico said.
Duke is using the former application in a $6.8 million research project, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense's Breast Cancer Research Program, to study how genomic profiling can be used to guide treatment plans for women with newly diagnosed breast cancer, he added.
In addition to expanding access to specific data sets, caBIG can increase the safety of clinical trials for patients, noted Warren Kibbe, director of bioinformatics at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern University in Evanston Ill.
For example, he said, development of a caBIG clinical trial management application would allow researchers to determine the adverse effects of a single medication used in multiple clinical trials. "That is one example of how caBIG is starting to touch patients in a way that hasn't been possible," Kibbe added.
The open-source Patient Study Calendar application now in development at the center will be used for patients in clinical trials, he noted. Among other things, the application will be able to tell patients how much medication to take and when.
The single application could define patient management parameters, eliminating some of the problems that result when doctors with different types of training -- a surgeon versus an oncologist, for example -- interpret rules differently, Kibbe said.
Implementing caBIG has not been without challenges, according to an NCI-commissioned review of the project that was released late last year.
The report found that over the life of the effort -- from 2003-2007 -- developers have not focused enough on the needs of end users and have too often released buggy products.
Beutow said the report prompted the NCI to "redouble" its efforts to provide better technical support to users. The agency now sends updates on the program to user e-mail lists, has created Web sites with caBIG information and launched a telephone help line to provide technical support to users.

Long Road Ahead

At the same time, the caBIG program is in the midst of an expansion to add links to the grid and its 40-plus applications to community health care providers. To date, 1 have signed up to join the program.
And national cancer centers in the U.K. are in the process of building an infrastructure to become "caBIG-enabled," Beutow added.
He urged that health care organizations use caBIG and other IT resources to further extend biomedical research, following the lead of the financial services industry and the Department of Defense.
Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, noted that projects like caBIG are critical to science but still have a long way to go.
"We haven't even begun to scratch the surface of how we can cooperate and share data," Lichtenfeld said. Taking advantage of the "explosion of information" generated by genomic research is going to take a tremendous amount of infrastructure development -- and time, he added.

"I am 61 years old, [and] I would hope we are able to see some of this connectivity before I am gone from this earth," he noted. "It is going to take us another generation until we see the type of applications where we can put it directly into affecting patient care."
Nonetheless, the NCI's parent organization, the National Institutes of Health, is already holding up caBIG as a model for sharing research and treatment data associated with other illnesses, such as cardiovascular disease.
"This change in medicine is revolutionary," said NCI's Beutow. "We have the capacity now to look and see how an individual might respond to a particular therapeutic approach."
David Steffen, director of the Bioinformatics Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, noted that his organization is now working under caBIG's auspices to find a way to use the grid to share cardiovascular disease research data.
Steffen said he envisions a time where this type of technology could evolve to support some of the genetic advances shown in the 1997 science fiction film Gattaca, in which DNA analysis at birth could predict the likelihood of disease.
"The goal is to look at this [genetic] sequence and say, 'Aha, you have this combination of genes which predisposes you to heart disease,'" Steffen noted. "It won't be much longer before we'll be able to routinely do that at birth. [The caBIG grid] is going to have complete, unexpected and very dramatic impacts on the pace of medical research."
CaBIG is also has working with President George W. Bush's Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, which oversees the development of electronic health records, to ensure that the EHRs can include details about a person's genetic makeup.

Comcast, BitTorrent to work together on network management

2008-04-03T19:09:00.000+05:30

March 27, 2008 ,Comcast Corp., which has been under fire for slowing some BitTorrent Inc. traffic, will work with the peer-to-peer (P2P) vendor to come up with better ways to address media downloads and network management, the companies announced Thursday.
Several consumer and digital rights groups have used Comcast's network-throttling actions to argue for the need for U.S. Net neutrality regulations. The Associated Press reported in October that Comcast was blocking some BitTorrent traffic, and the cable-modem service provider has defended its practice of sometimes slowing P2P traffic during peak network use.

Comcast, the largest cable-modem service provider in the U.S., also said it will migrate to a network management technique that is protocol-agnostic by the end of the year.
Comcast will reconfigure network management ச்ய்ச்டேம்ஸ்

"This means that we will have to rapidly reconfigure our network management systems, but the outcome will be a traffic management technique that is more appropriate for today's emerging Internet trends," Tony Werner, Comcast's chief technology officer, said in a statement. "We have been discussing this migration and its effects with leaders in the Internet community for the last several months, and we will refine, adjust and publish the technique based upon feedback and initial trial results."

But BitTorrent also acknowledged that Internet service providers may need to manage their networks, especially during peak traffic. "While we think there were other management techniques that could have been deployed, we understand why Comcast and other ISPs adopted the approach that they did initially," Eric Klinker, BitTorrent's chief technology officer, said in a statement. "Recognizing that the Web is richer and more bandwidth-intensive than it has been historically, we are pleased that Comcast understands these changing traffic patterns and wants to collaborate with us to migrate to techniques that the Internet community will find to be more transparent."

Comcast and BitTorrent have been talking with each other, but they will also work with the broader Internet community to address traffic management issues, the companies said in a news release. The companies said they will work with the Internet Engineering Task Force on a new distribution architecture for delivering high-bandwidth media. BitTorrent also said it will work to optimize its software for the new architecture.

Kevin Martin, chairman of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, has called for an investigation into Comcast's network management practices. But the companies said there's no need for government intervention.

The two companies "can serve consumers best by working together, along with the broader ISP and Internet community," Doug Walker, CEO of BitTorrent, said in a statement.
Free Press still says FCC needs to take அச்டின்

Free Press, a media reform group that has been critical of Comcast's network management, said the agreement doesn't change "the urgent need for the FCC to take action."

"This deal is the direct result of public pressure -- and the threat of FCC action -- against Comcast," Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press, said in an e-mail. "But with Comcast's history of broken promises and record of deception, we can't just take their word that the Internet is now in safe hands. The issue of Net neutrality is bigger than Comcast and BitTorrent."

The agreement doesn't protect other P2P companies or other "innovative" applications and services, and it doesn't prevent other ISPs from blocking or slowing Internet traffic, Ammori said.

Mozilla fixes 10 Firefox flaws, half seen as 'critical'

2008-04-02T06:21:00.000+05:30

But Thunderbird patches are delayed for 'several weeks'

March 26,2008 Mozilla Corp. yesterday patched 10 vulnerabilities, half of them marked "critical," in its open-source browser as it updated Firefox to Version 2.0.0.13. The new Mozilla Messaging Inc. spin-off, however, was not able to provide a matching update to its Thunderbird e-mail client, which shares five of the Firefox flaws that were fixed.
Mozilla's six advisories spelled out five Firefox bugs marked "critical," three tagged "high" and one each "moderate" and "low."

"There's a little bit here to interest most everyone," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc. "The bulletins claim no favor in the many types of vulnerabilities typically associated with browsers."

Among the critical flaws were a pair that could be exploited to crash the browser or its JavaScript engine, and perhaps do more. "Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances, and we presume that with enough effort, at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code," Mozilla wrote in Advisory 2008-15.
Mozilla also patched potential identity leaks, spoofing bugs and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in 2.0.0.13. But the fix that caught Storms' eye was detailed by 2008-18, a fix for LiveConnect, a feature that harks back to Firefox's predecessor, Netscape Navigator. LiveConnect lets Java applets call a Web page's embedded JavaScript, or JavaScript access the Java runtime libraries, and it is used by both Firefox and Apple Inc.'s Safari 3 browser.
"Sun has updated the Java Runtime Environment with a fix for this problem. Mozilla has also added a fix to LiveConnect to protect users who don't have the latest version of Java," Mozilla said in the advisory.

"Here we have Firefox putting out a mitigation step for a bug in Java," said Storms. "It's a welcome addition when one vendor can help out another."

All 10 vulnerabilities were also patched by the SeaMonkey Project, a separate open-source initiative that develops a multifunction browser suite.

The Thunderbird e-mail client, meanwhile, is affected by the five critical flaws listed in 2008-14 and 2008-15. "Thunderbird shares the browser engine with Firefox and could be vulnerable if JavaScript were to be enabled in mail," read the first of the two bulletins. "This is not the default setting, and we strongly discourage users from running JavaScript in mail."

A release date for Thunderbird 2.0.0.13 to fix the flaws has not been set. According to David Ascher, the head of Mozilla Messaging, the e-mailer's update will follow Firefox's by "several weeks."

In a post to his blog last week, Ascher cited several reasons why a simultaneous release of Thunderbird and Firefox updates was impossible. "Some of those resource contentions are due to not enough automation for the Thunderbird release process, and some of it is the consequence of not enough people with the right training," he said.

Ascher defended the lag by noting that while JavaScript is turned on by default in Firefox, it is not in Thunderbird. "We could delay releasing Firefox until Thunderbird was ready, in the interest of mitigating the risk of someone using knowledge from the Firefox release to try and attack Thunderbird users," said Ascher. "But that would mean leaving over 150 million users vulnerable. So, applying the correct math, we release Firefox security updates as soon as possible, and Thunderbird security updates as soon as possible."

How to set up an intruder alarm on your email account

2008-03-27T10:23:00.000+05:30

This may or may not come as a shocker, but according to a recent FTC survey on identity theft, 16 percent of the victims said their information was stolen by people they knew, which included friends, relatives, neighbors, and coworkers. This is very important because it serves as a reminder that we need to take extra precautions whether we're at home or at work. It's probably a good idea to disable cookies, so you don't save login and password information of your accounts, and you should never keep sensitive information where thieves can easily find it.

I've gotten several emails from readers asking me how they can find out if someone has accessed their personal email account, so I thought I'd point you to an excellent post written by PCWorld's Erik Larkin on how to set a hacker alarm on your web mail box. This is a good way to find out if anyone besides you is logging into your email account.

Here's the gist:

1. Open an account with OneStatFree.com, and use a disposable e-mail address to complete the registration process.

2. You'll receive an email from OneStat with an attached file. Save the file, note the account number, and then delete the email.

3. Rename the file with a name that would catch a hacker's eye like "AccountPasswords." Save the .txt file as an .htm file so it opens up in a web browser.

4. Send an email with the .htm file to the account you want to monitor. Use a subject title that is eye catching.

5. Wait for the hacker to take the bait. If the attachment is opened by anyone else but you, the hit counter will record their IP address.

Hackers are very clever, so you want to change your password frequently to something that's a little harder to crack.

Windows XP: Going, going ... gone?

2008-03-25T16:39:00.003+05:30

The approaching death of Windows XP may upset you, but it shouldn't come as a surprise. Microsoft Corp.'s product life-cycle guidelines have foretold the fate of XP since 2001. In fact, Microsoft has been killing off one version of a product as it is replaced with another for years now. But this time around, the approaching demise of XP is getting more attention than, say, the final passing of Windows 2000.

Why? For a couple of reasons: XP is the most widely used operating system on the planet, and its long-delayed successor, Windows Vista, is not proving to be universally popular. The companies that make up the enterprise market for Windows are dragging their feet about upgrading, and on the consumer side there are signs of a rebellion against Vista.

Microsoft has already made changes in its timetables. Last year, the company extended the sales life cycle -- the time during which PC manufacturers and system builders could sell computers with XP installed -- to June 30, 2008. It will stop selling XP altogether on Jan. 31, 2009. And it extended the mainstream support period for XP to April 14, 2009, in an effort to reassure customers made nervous by the long delays in shipping Vista.

The result of all this tweaking is that Microsoft will stop selling XP long before it stops supporting it. You may be able to run XP for as long as you want, but before too long you may not be able to buy a legitimate copy of XP to run.

So will there be any way to get a copy of XP after June 30? If you want to continue using XP, what problems will you face? If you buy a PC with Vista installed and decide you want XP instead, what are your options?

The product life-cycle guidelines

Microsoft's product life-cycle guidelines grew out of two sets of needs: Microsoft's need to make a profit, and its customers' (particularly enterprise customers) needs for some certainty about the products they were committing to.

The policy was an attempt at transparency, a promise that new products would be supported for a definite period and that as they aged Microsoft wouldn't just abandon them. Instead, the company would withdraw support in a series of scheduled steps that corresponded to the pace of technological change, allowing customers time to transition to newer products. (The guidelines apply to all Microsoft products, not just operating systems.)

The problem is that what sounds like a promise to some (particularly enterprise customers) can sound like a threat to others -- particularly consumers. And they're not taking it well.

This incipient consumer rebellion is a relatively new phenomenon, even in the short history of PCs. For most of the '90s, Microsoft couldn't bring out new products fast enough to satisfy customers. Computing technology was exploding, and Windows exploded along with it, from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 to Windows 98 to Windows 98 Second Edition to Windows Millennium Edition. PC sales boomed and Windows users raced to upgrade to the latest version.

But that binge left Microsoft with a huge hangover. As the new decade started, it was supporting a tangle of versions and upgrades. Then the Internet bubble burst and PC sales slowed. New products like Windows ME weren't as well received as the older ones. Microsoft needed to reduce its support liabilities and create a profit plan. The product life-cycle guidelines were the solution.

The three phases of support

First laid out in 2001 and revised in 2002 and 2004, the guidelines defined a three-phase life span and created a division between business desktop software and consumer desktop software. (In the beginning, it was easier to distinguish between business products based on the NT kernel -- like Windows NT and Windows 2000 -- and consumer products that ran on top of DOS, like Windows 98 and ME.)

Mainstream phase: In the prime of a product's life, Microsoft provides both free and paid live support, support for warranty claims and online self-help support information. Software support and maintenance is extensive and free, with downloadable fixes and updates, service packs and freely available support for problem incidents, as well as requests for design changes and new features. Business customers may pay for additional support.
Extended phase: Free live support and warranty support end, and free maintenance of consumer products is limited to security fixes. Self-help support information remains available online. Pay-per-incident live support remains available. Software patches and updates continue for business desktop software.
End of life: Online support information is removed. Patches and updates cease. The product is history.

These phases were set in a schedule with definite dates and durations. Business products would be supported for 10 years -- mainstream support for five years, extended support for another five. Consumer products would get five years of mainstream support, but no extended support.

But there are two other factors in a product's life cycle -- service packs and the availability of a new version of the product:

Service packs have a life cycle of their own. Support for each service pack ends 24 months after the next service pack release (support for Windows XP Home SP1 support, for example, ended in 2006, two years after the release of SP2 in 2004) or at the end of the product's support life cycle, whichever comes first.
When it looked like mainstream support for Windows XP might run out before the next version of Windows made it to market, Microsoft amended the support life cycle policy to promise that mainstream support would last for either five years or for two years after a successor version is released, whichever period is longer.

While the product life-cycle guidelines set very definite limits on product life spans, Microsoft has shown a willingness to move the goal posts when it gets enough pressure. When Windows XP shipped in December 2001, it was slated to be in mainstream support until December 2006. Microsoft's internal problems with getting Vista out the door finally forced the company to extend the mainstream period for XP out to April 2009, and to make some other accommodations, like eliminating the distinction between business and consumer versions, so that XP Home will have an extended support phase just like XP Pro.

The result is that next year, on April 14, 2009, Microsoft will end mainstream support for XP, and five years later, on April 8, 2014, it will stop supporting XP at all.

The other life cycle

But even before that, XP faces a major event in an entirely different life cycle, one that Microsoft has said very little about -- the sales life cycle.

The key dates for sales come much sooner than 2009 or 2014. In fact, in only a few weeks, on June 30, 2008, Microsoft will stop selling XP through its retail and reseller channels (the resellers are big manufacturers like Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. that sell PCs with Windows preinstalled).

System builders, the "white box" retailers who build PCs to order, will be given another seven months, but on Jan. 31, 2009, a couple of months before XP exits mainstream support, Microsoft will stop selling XP altogether (except for a version sold in some less-developed countries and a special arrangement for XP Home in China).

At least that's the current information. It could change. It has before

In the past, the company has generally kept the previous version of Windows on the market for two years or so, past the introduction of a new version. That was apparently the plan for XP. When Vista finally shipped to enterprise customers in late 2006, the on-sale dates for XP were reset to January 2009.

But the new operating system didn't capture the popular imagination quite the way Microsoft had planned. Vista's heavy demands for hardware, its rocky support for applications and peripherals, and its draconian security features have left consumers less than enthusiastic. (InfoWorld.com, for example, has collected more than 100,000 signatures on a Save Windows XP petition.)

Enterprise customers have also been slower to move to Vista than to previous versions of Windows. A Microsoft reseller, CDW Corp., reported this January the results of a poll that found that a year after its release, fewer than half of businesses were using or evaluating Vista.

Big resellers, the PC manufacturers who preinstall Windows on their products, initially switched from XP to Vista when the consumer versions of the operating systems shipped in January 2007. But by April, Dell, Lenovo, and HP were once again selling machines with XP installed. An April 4 post on Dell's Web site announced the company's intention to sell XP on certain systems "until later this summer." Nearly a year later, the company is still selling XP systems.

In September 2007, Microsoft agreed to a six-month extension of XP's on-sale dates, along with license provisions for Vista's business editions that grant buyers the right to downgrade to XP.

All this leaves Microsoft in an unfamiliar position. Its major customers -- the resellers, system builders and enterprise licensees -- and a vocal part of the Windows user base all appear to be reluctant users of Vista. None of this means that Microsoft is likely to grant XP another stay of execution. But it does mean we're going to be in for an interesting few weeks leading up to June 30.

What happens after June 30?

XP won't suddenly disappear, though. It will take some time for PCs loaded with XP to move from factories to warehouses to sellers to buyers. Shrink-wrapped FPP versions of the various editions of XP will also remain on sale until supplies are exhausted. And even after June 30, there will still be two ways to obtain XP until Jan. 31, 2009.

The easiest way will be to buy a new PC with XP installed from a white box system builder. It will, of course, be a reseller's version of the operating system (white box builders tend to use the same reseller versions as the larger vendors), which is tied to the PC it's installed on and can't be transferred to another computer.

Or you can buy a new PC with a reseller version of Vista Business or Vista Ultimate installed and downgrade to XP Pro (download PDF). There are enough pain points in this process that you won't want to undertake it lightly. Although you may have the right to downgrade, the maker of your PC isn't obliged to supply an XP install disk. If it's important to you, check before you buy. And although you can reinstall Vista later on, you have to do it from the installation files or media you got with the machine, so don't wipe those out by accident.

You won't be able to activate your new XP install with its previously used product key across the Internet, either. A query to Microsoft on this last point produced the following clarification:

"A customer who wishes to downgrade to XP should be able to do so using their original XP disc and original XP product key. That customer may have to call [Microsoft customer service] to get an override in case their hardware changed and their hardware ID went out of tolerance. Activation is governed by the RIT/ROT count. 'RIT' equals the number of activations on the single machine. 'ROT' equals the number of activations [of that product key] on different machines. So if the customer activated the key more than the RIT limit or if he changed the hardware, only then would they have to call a Product Activation call center."

Does that make everything clearer?

Support goes on

Although the sales life cycle starts to wind down on June 30, you can keep on using XP for as long as you want to. You might want to run XP until the next version of Windows (currently called Windows 7) comes out; it's expected in 2010. Or you might want to give some other operating system a little more time to mature. Perhaps you think that Ubuntu Linux is just a couple of versions away from real usability.

In both these cases, time is on your side. There won't be any changes in XP support until April 14, 2009, when Windows XP Service Pack 2 moves from mainstream support to extended support. Extended support's security fixes should certainly keep you going safely until April 8, 2014, or until Windows 7 actually does ship, whichever comes first.

The problem is, there's support and then there's support. The last time Microsoft ended mainstream support for a version of Windows was in June 2005, when it stopped supporting Windows 2000. By the end of 2006, major software vendors had also ended their support for the operating system. New products didn't support Windows 2000, and upgrades of existing Win2K products to new versions weren't available.

This lack of upgrades to run on defunct operating systems is a natural result of market forces. Application software makers, just like Microsoft, want to minimize their support costs by supporting their products on as few operating system versions as economically possible, so when an operating system version's percentage of the installed base falls below its potential to contribute to the bottom line, the vendor will cut its support -- and deflect complaints by pointing at Microsoft.

XP is certainly much more widely used than Win2K, and it will probably be supported by application vendors for a lot longer as a result. But if you really want to stay with XP, you should be prepared to stay with your current applications as well. There may not be any upgrades.

Finally, there is one more factor that might stretch out the life of XP a bit. Benjamin Gray, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., predicted last fall that Service Pack 3 for XP, which will ship later this year, may play a part. Big corporate customers are still looking forward to XP SP3, and Gray said he wouldn't be surprised to see Microsoft extend mainstream support for this updated version of the operating system past April 2009 in response to pressure from the enterprise market.

If you're clinging to XP because you're waiting for that stability and compatibility, whether in Vista or in the next version of Windows, or just because you're entirely happy with XP and see no reason to change, then the product life-cycle guidelines are your friend. The combination of mainstream and extended support will give you several years of protection.

And even if you find in a couple of years that you can't get an XP version of some upgraded application, extended support means that your XP machine still has some life expectancy; you won't have to junk it just because it's become a malware magnet.

But if you're holding onto XP because you're just purely mad at Microsoft, or your PC won't run Vista anyway, then you're only buying time. Sooner or later, it's inevitable. Whether you love Vista or hate it, merely tolerate XP or won't give it up until it's pried from your cold, dead fingers, it will be gone. The product life-cycle guidelines say so.

Samsung is first to ship 500GB laptop drive

2008-03-06T18:42:00.002+05:30

Priced at $299, the hard drive will ship to PC makers and retail stores later this month

To meet the growing storage needs of laptop users, Samsung Electronics on Tuesday introduced a 500GB hard drive that could provide a notebook PC with as much as 1TB of storage.

The Spinpoint M6, a 2.5-in. hard drive, fits into the chassis of commercial and multimedia notebooks, said Andy Higginbotham, director of hard drive sales at Samsung Semiconductor. Two drives can be combined for 1TB of storage, he said.

The company was able to fit three 167GB platters in a small frame to achieve 500GB of storage in one drive, Higginbotham said. The hard drive spins at 5,400 rpm.

Priced at $299, the hard drive will ship to PC makers and retail stores later this month. A company spokeswoman declined to comment on which PC makers will be using the drive.
This is not the first attempt to put 1TB of storage in a laptop. At the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, Asus announced the M70S laptop, which combined two 500GB drives from Hitachi.

Samsung also announced the Spinpoint MP2 hard drive, a 2.5-in. drive with 250GB of storage. Aimed at desktop replacement notebooks, workstations and blade servers, it provides quicker read and write speeds than the M6. The hard drive spins at 7,200 rpm.

With the MP2, the company also provides an optional chip that protects a hard drive from vibrations caused by other hardware components.

The Spinpoint MP2 is priced at $299 and will be available through retailers. An 80GB version of the hard drive is also available, according to the company.

Both drives come with an optional free-fall sensor, which parks the head and turns the hard drive off in the event of a fall, protecting the data on it.

Microsoft unveils IE8 Beta 1

2008-03-06T18:22:00.001+05:30

March 5, 2008 - Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), and posted links to what the company called "Beta 1 for developers." Anyone, however, can download and install the preview.

"I am pleased to announce that Beta 1 for developers is available now," said Dean Hachamovitch, the IE group's general manager, in a presentation from Mix08, a Microsoft Web development conference that opened today in Las Vegas.

According to the download page published early Wednesday, IE8 Beta 1 will be available in separate versions for Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

Although Hachamovitch pegged Beta 1 as fit for developers, there's nothing to stop the general public from downloading and installing the browser. "This beta release is available to everyone," Microsoft's download notes read, "but is primarily for Web developers and designers to test the new tools, layout engine and programming enhancements."

Among the new features Microsoft touted in other sections of the subsite dubbed "Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit," were tools called "WebSlices" and "Activities." The former somewhat resembles the "Web Clip" feature introduced in Apple Inc.'s Safari Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard," and the latter appears to be a small-scale mashup tool. Both will be developer-created, not user-created.

WebSlices and Web Clip let users designate content within a page -- dynamically-updated stock prices, for example -- and then monitor changes to that content. But while Safari's Web Clip lets users create desktop widgets for easier access, IE8's WebSlices allows users to add them only to the Favorites bar or to a new row below the browser's address bar. In other words, IE8 users must still click to see the content after they're notified that changes have occurred.

Activities, meanwhile, are predesigned mashups that Microsoft and third-party sites and services will offer free of charge. A dedicated Activities page currently lists a dozen samples, ranging from one that helps users find and preview items on eBay Inc.'s auction site to another that maps addresses on Windows Live Maps.

"Activities are how developers can integrate the content of their sites with the Web," said Hachamovitch.

Other enhancements and additions to IE8 include a revamped Favorites bar, automatic crash recovery and an improved antiphishing filter. By comparison, Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox and Apple Inc.'s Safari both currently offer crash recovery of one sort or another, while Firefox also sports antiphishing protection.

Earlier this week, Microsoft's IE development team announced that IE8 would support a new "super standards" mode by default, rather than optionally, to stress Web standards over backward compatibility.

"The Web gets better when developers spend less time on interoperability [problems] and more time on innovating," said Hachamovitch. "Long term, this is the right thing to do for the Web."
Although Hachamovitch pegged Beta 1 as fit for developers -- "Please try it out," he urged the Mix08 audience at the end of his presentation -- anyone can grab it. The client-side 32-bit downloads weigh in at 14.4MB for the Windows XP version, and 11MB for the Windows Vista edition.

"We're only partway done with IE8," said Hachamovitch. "But you can see where we're focused."

Different Types of MP3 Players?

2008-03-04T12:00:00.000+05:30

MP3 players are pocket-sized electronic devices that have the ability to not only store, but play music and other sound files. Although MP3 players are sophisticated devices and there are many verities, they can be placed into one of three broad categories. These categories include hard drive based players, micro hard drive based players, and flash based players.

Hard drive based MP3 players are typically larger and heavier than their competitors due to the fact that they contain a large capacity hard drive inside. This however, may be one of its only weaknesses. These MP3 players provide the largest capacity, ten gigabytes or more, out of the different types of MP3 players. Due to the fact that ten gigabytes equates to roughly 2,900 MP3 files, most consumers buy these players because they accommodate their entire MP3 collection. However, if you are looking for a player to bring with you on a jog or to use at the gym, you may choose to shy away from these players. Any sudden physical movement may cause the internal mechanical hard drive to skip.

Micro hard drive based MP3 players are similar to their big brothers, the hard drive based players, except that they are a bit smaller, both in physical size and internal storage capacity. These MP3 players hold up to six gigabytes of MP3 files, which equals roughly 1,700 songs. Still boasting a respectable capacity, these players have won over many consumers due to their light-weight, compact size. However, these players are also susceptible to skipping if subjected to intense physical movement. Additionally, both hard drive and micro hard drive based players commonly contain rechargeable batteries that can not be replaced for a new battery, but only recharged. If it's small size and moderate capacity that you are in search of this type of player may be just right.

If neither of these players piques your interest, flash based MP3 players may fit your needs. These ultra compact, low capacity players contain no moving parts and consequently, never skip. Another advantage of these players is that their size and lack of moving parts allow them to use minimal power, causing your batteries to last longer. Also, these players almost always use replaceable, disposable batteries, allowing you to put in a new battery if your player should die in the middle of use. However, flash based MP3 players commonly range in capacity from 32 megabytes (roughly 10 songs) to two gigabytes (roughly 570 songs) at most. Therefore, most consumers with a large music collection tend to shy away from this type of MP3 player while athletes can appreciate the sturdy nature of these devices.

Some of the different types of MP3 players include additional features as well. A few of the hard drive players include a small screen that can display pictures and video that is stored on the internal drive. Other players allow for digital voice recording for future playback.

DUPLICATE DRUGS IN INDIA

2008-03-04T11:35:00.005+05:30

India has become a dumping ground for banned drugs; also the business for production of banned drugs is booming. Please make sure that u buy drugs only if prescribed by a doctor Also, ask which company manufactures it, this would help to ensure that u get what is prescribed at the Drug Store) and that also from a reputed drug store. Not many people know about these banned drugs and consume them causing a lot of damage to themselves.

DANGEROUS DRUGS HAVE BEEN GLOBALLY DISCARDED BUT ARE AVAILABLE IN INDIA .
The most common ones are action 500 & Nimulid.

PHENYLPROPANOLAMINE : cold and cough.
Reason for ban : stroke.
Brand name : Vicks Action-500
____________ _________ _________ ____________ _________

ANALGIN: This is a pain-killer.
Reason for ban: Bone marrow depression.
Brand name: Novalgin
____________ _________ _________ ____________ _________

CISAPRIDE: Acidity, constipation.
Reason for ban : irregular heartbeat
Brand name : Ciza, Syspride
____________ _________ _________ ____________ _________

DROPERIDOL: Anti-depressant.
Reason for ban : Irregular heartbeat.
Brand name : Droperol
____________ _________ _________ ____________ _________

FURAZOLIDONE: Antidiarrhoeal.
Reason for ban : Cancer.
Brand name : Furoxone, Lomofen
____________ _________ _________ ____________ _________

NIMESULIDE: Painkiller, fever.
Reason for ban : Liver failure.
Brand name : Nise, Nimulid
____________ _________ _________ ____________ _________

NITROFURAZONE: Antibacterial cream..
Reason for ban : Cancer.
Brand name : Furacin
____________ _________ _________ ____________ _________

PHENOLPHTHALEIN: Laxative.
Reason for ban : Cancer.
Brand name : Agarol
____________ _________ _________ ____________ _________

OXYPHENBUTAZONE: Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug.
Reason for ban : Bone marrow depression.
Brand name : Sioril
____________ _________ _________ ____________ _________

PIPERAZINE: Anti-worms.
Reason for ban : Nerve damage.
Brand name : Piperazine
____________ _________ _________ ____________ _________

QUINIODOCHLOR: Anti-diarrhoeal.
Reason for ban : Damage to sight.
Brand name: Enteroquinol

IT, ITeS Sector To Get Rs.16.8 Billion In 2008-09

2008-03-01T17:21:00.000+05:30

The Indian IT and ITeS sector has been allocated Rs.16.8 billion in 2008-09 from Rs.15 billion in the current fiscal, Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said while presenting the national budget.
“Government’s forward looking policy is driving the growth of information technology and information technology enabled services. I propose to enhance the allocation to the Department of Information Technology from Rs.1,500 crore (Rs.15 billion) in 2007-08 to Rs.1,680 crore (Rs.16.80 billion) in 2008-09,” said Chidambaram.
He also highlighted that the scheme for establishing 100,000 broadband Internet-enabled common service centres in rural areas and the scheme for establishing state wide area networks (SWAN) with the help of the government were under implementation.
“A new scheme for state data centres has also been approved. I propose to provide Rs.75 crore (Rs.750 million) for the common service centres, Rs.450 crore (Rs.4.5 billion) for SWAN and Rs.275 crore (Rs.2.75 billion) for the state data centres,” he said.

Devon IT To Launch In India

2008-03-01T17:20:00.001+05:30

Devon IT, an alternative desktop solution company and a provider of thin client solutions, announced its plans to launch Devon IT India during a three-city joint-roadshow with IBM. The roadshow will run from March 3-8, commencing in Bangalore, India, and continuing through Mumbai and Delhi.
Devon IT and IBM will meet with resellers, customers, and partners at various office locations to outline the companies’ various alternative desktop solutions and components, including virtual hosted clients, Devon IT thin clients and connection broker software, and IBM Workstation Blades.
“Devon IT is ecstatic to be launching offices and operations in India, one of the world’s cornerstones for information technology, and to be working with our business partner IBM in this region,” says Joe Makoid, President, Devon IT. “This expansion speaks to our growth as a leader in alternative desktop computing. Our ability to provide, with our partners, business of any size and in any vertical with affordable, secure, and high-powered hosted client solutions has been key to our success, and we hope to continue our momentum as we tackle the Indian market.”
“There’s no longer a question concerning the adoption of thin clients and server-hosted desktop solutions, as more and more customers are deploying these solutions worldwide and across all major market verticals. Significant cost and energy savings, greater security and ease of management are among the benefits driving this adoption,” said Dr. Tom Bradicich, IBM Fellow and vice president IBM Rack, Blade and x86 Servers. “IBM has a significant presence in India and the Asia Pacific regions, and we’re happy to work with Devon IT to bring our customers the benefits of server-hosted desktop solutions.”

10 Emerging Technologies

2008-02-19T15:56:00.007+05:30

Peering into Video's Future
The Internet is about to drown in digital video. Hui Zhang thinks peer-to-peer networks could come to the rescue.

Ted Stevens, the 83-year-old senior senator from Alaska, described the Internet as "a series of tubes." Yet clumsy as his metaphor may have been, Stevens was struggling to make a reasonable point: the tubes can get clogged. Read More













Nanocharging Solar

: Arthur Nozik believes quantum-dot solar power could boost output in cheap photovoltaics.

Invisible Revolution

: Artificially structured metamaterials could transform telecommunications, data storage, and even solar energy, says David R. Smith.

Personalized Medical Monitors

: John Guttag says using computers to automate some diagnostics could make medicine more personal.

Single-Cell Analysis

: Norman Dovichi believes that detecting minute differences between individual cells could improve medical tests and treatments.

A New Focus for Light

Kenneth Crozier and Federico Capasso have created light-focusing optical antennas that could lead to DVDs that hold hundreds of movies.

Neuron Control

Karl Deisseroth's genetically engineered "light switch," which lets scientists turn selected parts of the brain on and off, may help improve treatments for depression and other disorders.









Nanohealing

: Tiny fibers will save lives by stopping bleeding and aiding recovery from brain injury, says Rutledge Ellis-Behnke.

Digital Imaging, Reimagined

: Richard Baraniuk and Kevin Kelly believe compressive sensing could help devices such as cameras and medical scanners capture images more efficiently.

Augmented Reality

: Markus Kähäri wants to superimpose digital information on the real world.

Augmented Reality

2008-02-19T15:48:00.001+05:30

Finding your way around a new city can be exasperating: juggling maps and guidebooks, trying to figure out where you are on roads with no street signs, talking with locals who give directions by referring to unfamiliar landmarks. If you're driving, a car with a GPS navigation system can make things easier, but it still won't help you decide, say, which restaurant suits both your palate and your budget. Engineers at the Nokia Research Center in Helsinki, Finland, hope that a project called Mobile Augmented Reality Applications will help you get where you're going--and decide what to do once you're there.

Last October, a team led by Markus Kähäri unveiled a prototype of the system at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. The team added a GPS sensor, a compass, and accelerometers to a Nokia smart phone. Using data from these sensors, the phone can calculate the location of just about any object its camera is aimed at. Each time the phone changes location, it retrieves the names and geographical coördinates of nearby landmarks from an external database. The user can then download additional information about a chosen location from the Web--say, the names of businesses in the Empire State Building, the cost of visiting the building's observatories, or hours and menus for its five eateries.

The Nokia project builds on more than a decade of academic research into mobile augmented reality. Steven Feiner, the director of Columbia University's Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Laboratory, undertook some of the earliest research in the field and finds the Nokia project heartening. "The big missing link when I started was a small computer," he says. "Those small computers are now cell phones."

Despite the availability and fairly low cost of the sensors the Nokia team used, some engineers believe that they introduce too much complexity for a commercial application. "In my opinion, this is very exotic hardware to provide," says Valentin Lefevre, chief technology officer and cofounder of Total Immersion, an augmented-reality company in Suresnes, France. "That's why we think picture analysis is the solution." Relying on software alone, Total Immersion's system begins with a single still image of whatever object the camera is aimed at, plus a rough digital model of that object; image-recognition algorithms then determine what data should be superimposed on the image. The company is already marketing a mobile version of its system to cell-phone operators in Asia and Europe and expects the system's first applications to be in gaming and advertising.

Nokia researchers have begun working on real-time image-recognition algorithms as well; they hope the algorithms will eliminate the need for location sensors and improve their system's accuracy and reliability. "Methods that don't rely on those components can be more robust," says Kari Pulli, a research fellow at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, CA.

All parties agree, though, that mobile augmented reality is nearly ready for the market. "For mobile-phone applications, the technology is here," says Feiner. One challenge is convincing carriers such as Sprint or Verizon that customers would pay for augmented-reality services. "If some big operator in the U.S. would launch this, it could fly today," Pulli says.

Digital Imaging, Reimagined

2008-02-19T15:46:00.001+05:30

Richard Baraniuk and Kevin Kelly have a new vision for digital imaging: they believe an overhaul of both hardware and software could make cameras smaller and faster and let them take incredibly high-resolution pictures.

Today's digital cameras closely mimic film cameras, which makes them grossly inefficient. When a standard four-megapixel digital camera snaps a shot, each of its four million image sensors characterizes the light striking it with a single number; together, the numbers describe a picture. Then the camera's onboard computer compresses the picture, throwing out most of those numbers. This process needlessly chews through the camera's battery.

Baraniuk and Kelly, both professors of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, have developed a camera that doesn't need to compress images. Instead, it uses a single image sensor to collect just enough information to let a novel algorithm reconstruct a high-resolution image.

At the heart of this camera is a new technique called compressive sensing. A camera using the technique needs only a small percentage of the data that today's digital cameras must collect in order to build a comparable picture. Baraniuk and Kelly's algorithm turns visual data into a handful of numbers that it randomly inserts into a giant grid. There are just enough numbers to enable the algorithm to fill in the blanks, as we do when we solve a Sudoku puzzle. When the computer solves this puzzle, it has effectively re-created the complete picture from incomplete information.

Compressive sensing began as a mathematical theory whose first proofs were published in 2004; the Rice group has produced an advanced demonstration in a relatively short time, says Dave Brady of Duke University. "They've really pushed the applications of the theory," he says.

Kelly suspects that we could see the first practical applications of compressive sensing within two years, in MRI systems that capture images up to 10 times as quickly as today's scanners do. In five to ten years, he says, the technology could find its way into consumer products, allowing tiny mobile-phone cameras to produce high-quality, poster-size images. As our world becomes increasingly digital, compressive sensing is set to improve virtually any imaging system, providing an efficient and elegant way to get the picture.

Nanohealing

2008-02-19T15:45:00.001+05:30

In the break room near his lab in MIT's brand-new neuroscience building, research scientist Rutledge Ellis-Behnke provides impromptu narration for a video of himself performing surgery. In the video, Ellis-Behnke makes a deep cut in the liver of a rat, intentionally slicing through a main artery. As the liver pulses from the pressure of the rat's beating heart, blood spills from the wound. Then Ellis-Behnke covers the wound with a clear liquid, and the bleeding stops almost at once. Untreated, the wound would have proved fatal, but the rat lived on.

The liquid Ellis-Behnke used is a novel material made of nanoscale protein fragments, or peptides. Its ability to stop bleeding almost instantly could be invaluable in surgery, at accident sites, or on the battlefield. Under conditions like those inside the body, the peptides self-assemble into a fibrous mesh that to the naked eye appears to be a transparent gel. Even more remarkably, the material creates an environment that may accelerate healing of damaged brain and spinal tissue.

Ellis-Behnke stumbled on the material's capacity to stanch bleeding by chance, during experiments designed to help restore vision to brain-damaged hamsters. And his discovery was itself made possible by earlier serendipitous events. In the early 1990s, Shuguang Zhang, now a biomedical engineer at MIT, was working in the lab of MIT biologist Alexander Rich. Zhang had been studying a repeating DNA sequence that coded for a peptide. He and a colleague inadvertently found that under certain conditions, copies of the peptide would combine into fibers. Zhang and his colleagues began to reëngineer the peptides to exhibit specific responses to electric charges and water. They ended up with a 16-amino-acid peptide that looks like a comb, with water-loving teeth projecting from a water-repelling spine. In a salty, aqueous environment--such as that inside the body--the spines spontaneously cluster together to avoid the water, forming long, thin fibers that self-assemble into curved ribbons. The process transforms a liquid peptide solution into a clear gel.

Originally, Ellis-Behnke intended to use the material to promote the healing of brain and spinal-cord injuries. In young animals, neurons are surrounded by materials that help them grow; Ellis-Behnke thought that the peptide gel could create a similar environment and prevent the formation of scar tissue, which obstructs the regrowth of severed neurons. "It's like if you're walking through a field of wheat, you can walk easily because the wheat moves out of the way," he says. "If you're walking through a briar patch, you get stuck." In the hamster experiments, the researchers found that the gel allowed neurons in a vision-related tract of the brain to grow across a lesion and reëstablish connections with neurons on the other side, restoring the hamster's sight.

It was during these experiments that Ellis-Behnke discovered the gel's ability to stanch bleeding. Incisions had been made in the hamsters' brains, but when the researchers applied the new material, all residual bleeding suddenly stopped. At first, Ellis-Behnke says, "we thought that we'd actually killed the animals. But the heart was still going." Indeed, the rodents survived for months, apparently free of negative side effects.

The material has several advantages over current methods for stopping bleeding. It's faster and easier than cauterization and does not damage tissue. It could protect wounds from the air and supply amino-acid building blocks to growing cells, thereby accelerating healing. Also, within a few weeks the body completely breaks the peptides down, so they need not be removed from the wound, unlike some other blood-stanching agents. The synthetic material also has a long shelf life, which could make it particularly useful in first-aid kits.

The material's first application will probably come in the operating room. Not only would it stop the bleeding caused by surgical incisions, but it could also form a protective layer over wounds. And since the new material is transparent, surgeons should be able to apply a layer of it and then operate through it. "When you perform surgery, you are constantly suctioning and cleaning the site to be able to see it," says Ram Chuttani, a gastroenterologist and professor at Harvard Medical School. "But if you can seal it, you can continue to perform the surgery with much clearer vision." The hope is that surgeons will be able to operate faster, thus reducing complications. The material may also make it possible to perform more procedures in a minimally invasive way by allowing a surgeon to quickly stop bleeding at the end of an endoscope.

Chuttani, who was not involved with the research, cautions that the work is still "very preliminary," with no tests yet on large animals or humans. But if such tests go well, Ellis-Behnke estimates, the material could be approved for use in humans in three to five years. "I don't know what the impact is going to be," he says. "But if we can stop bleeding, we can save a lot of people." Ellis-Behnke and his colleagues are also continuing to explore the material's nerve regeneration capabilities. They're looking for ways to increase the rate of neuronal growth so that doctors can treat larger brain injuries, such as those that can result from stroke. But such a treatment will take at least five to ten years to reach humans, Ellis-Behnke says.

Even without regenerating nerves, the material could save countless lives in surgery or at accident sites. And already, the material's performance is encouraging research by demonstrating how engineering nanostructures to self-assemble in the body could profoundly improve medicine.

Neuron Control

2008-02-19T15:43:00.001+05:30

In his psychiatry practice at the Stanford Medical Center, Karl Deisseroth sometimes treats patients who are so severely depressed that they can't walk, talk, or eat. Intensive treatments, such as electroconvulsive therapy, can literally save such patients' lives, but often at the cost of memory loss, headaches, and other serious side effects. Deisseroth, who is both a physician and a bioengineer, thinks he has a better way: an elegant new method for controlling neural cells with flashes of light. The technology could one day lead to precisely targeted treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders; that precision could mean greater effectiveness and fewer side effects.

While scientists know something about the chemical imbalances underlying depression, it's still unclear exactly which cells, or networks of cells, are responsible for it. In order to identify the circuits involved in such diseases, scientists must be able to turn neurons on and off. Standard methods, such as electrodes that activate neurons with jolts of electricity, are not precise enough for this task, so Deisseroth, postdoc Ed Boyden (now an assistant professor at MIT; see "Engineering the Brain"), and graduate student Feng Zhang developed a neural controller that can activate specific sets of neurons.

They adapted a protein from a green alga to act as an "on switch" that neurons can be genetically engineered to produce (see "Artificially Firing Neurons," TR35, September/October 2006). When the neuron is exposed to light, the protein triggers electrical activity within the cell that spreads to the next neuron in the circuit. Researchers can thus use light to activate certain neurons and look for specific responses--a twitch of a muscle, increased energy, or a wave of activity in a different part of the brain.

Deisseroth is using this genetic light switch to study the biological basis of depression. Working with a group of rats that show symptoms similar to those seen in depressed humans, researchers in his lab have inserted the switch into neurons in different brain areas implicated in depression. They then use an optical fiber to shine light onto those cells, looking for activity patterns that alleviate the symptoms. Deisseroth says the findings should help scientists develop better antidepressants: if they know exactly which cells to target, they can look for molecules or delivery systems that affect only those cells. "Prozac goes to all the circuits in the brain, rather than just the relevant ones," he says. "That's part of the reason it has so many side effects."

In the last year, Deisseroth has sent his switch to more than 100 research labs. "Folks are applying it to all kinds of animals, including mice, worms, flies, and zebrafish," he says. Scientists are using this and similar switches to study everything from movement to addiction to appetite. "These technologies allow us to advance from observation to active intervention and control," says Gero Miesenböck, a neuroscientist at Yale University. By evoking sensations or movements directly, he says, "you can forge a much stronger connection between mental activity and behavior."

Deisseroth hopes his technology will one day become not just a research tool but a treatment in itself, used alongside therapies that electrically stimulate large areas of the brain to treat depression or Parkinson's disease. By activating only specific neurons, a specially engineered light switch could limit those therapies' side effects. Of course, the researchers will need to solve some problems first: they'll need to find safe gene-therapy methods for delivering the switch to the target cells, as well as a way to shine light deep into the brain. "It's a long way off," says Deisseroth. "But the obstacles aren't insurmountable." In the meantime, neuroscientists have the use of a powerful new tool in their quest to uncover the secrets of the brain.

A New Focus for Light

2008-02-19T15:41:00.001+05:30

Researchers trying to make high-capacity DVDs, as well as more-powerful computer chips and higher-resolution optical microscopes, have for years run up against the "diffraction limit." The laws of physics dictate that the lenses used to direct light beams cannot focus them onto a spot whose diameter is less than half the light's wavelength. Physicists have been able to get around the diffraction limit in the lab--but the systems they've devised have been too fragile and complicated for practical use. Now Harvard University electrical engineers led by Kenneth Crozier and Federico Capasso have discovered a simple process that could bring the benefits of tightly focused light beams to commercial applications. By adding nanoscale "optical antennas" to a commercially available laser, Crozier and Capasso have focused infrared light onto a spot just 40 nanometers wide--one-twentieth the light's wavelength. Such optical antennas could one day make possible DVD-like discs that store 3.6 terabytes of data--the equivalent of more than 750 of today's 4.7-gigabyte recordable DVDs.

Crozier and Capasso build their device by first depositing an insulating layer onto the light-emitting edge of the laser. Then they add a layer of gold. They carve away most of the gold, leaving two rectangles of only 130 by 50 nanometers, with a 30-nanometer gap between them. These form an antenna. When light from the laser strikes the rectangles, the antenna has what Capasso calls a "lightning-rod effect": an intense electrical field forms in the gap, concentrating the laser's light onto a spot the same width as the gap.

"The antenna doesn't impose design constraints on the laser," Capasso says, because it can be added to off-the-shelf semiconductor lasers, commonly used in CD drives. The team has already demonstrated the antennas with several types of lasers, each producing a different wavelength of light. The researchers have discussed the technology with storage-device companies Seagate and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

Another application could be in photolithography, says Gordon Kino, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at Stanford University. This is the method typically used to make silicon chips, but the lasers that carve out ever-smaller features on silicon are also constrained by the diffraction limit. Electron-beam lithography, the technique that currently allows for the smallest chip features, requires a large machine that costs millions of dollars and is too slow to be used in mass production. "This is a hell of a lot simpler," says Kino of Crozier and Capasso's technique, which relies on a laser that costs about $50.

But before the antennas can be used for lithography, the engineers will need to make them even smaller: the size of the antennas must be tailored to the wavelength of the light they focus. Crozier and Capasso's experiments have used infrared lasers, and photolithography relies on shorter-wavelength ultraviolet light. In order to inscribe circuitry on microchips, the researchers must create antennas just 50 nanometers long.

Capasso and Crozier's optical antennas could have far-reaching and unpredictable implications, from superdense optical storage to superhigh-resolution optical microscopes. Enabling engineers to simply and cheaply break the diffraction limit has made the many applications that rely on light shine that much brighter.

Single-Cell Analysis

2008-02-19T15:36:00.001+05:30

We all know that focusing on the characteristics of a group can obscure the differences between the individuals in it. Yet when it comes to biological cells, scientists typically derive information about their behavior, status, and health from the collective activity of thousands or millions of them. A more precise understanding of differences between individual cells could lead to better treatments for cancer and diabetes, just for starters.

The past few decades have seen the advent of methods that allow astonishingly detailed views of single cells--each of which can produce thousands of different proteins, lipids, hormones, and metabolites. But most of those methods have a stark limitation: they rely on "affinity reagents," such as antibodies that attach to specific proteins. As a result, researchers can use them to study only what's known to exist. "The unexpected is invisible," says Norman Dovichi, an analytical chemist at the University of Washington, Seattle. And most every cell is stuffed with mysterious components. So Dovichi has helped pioneer ultrasensitive techniques to isolate cells and reveal molecules inside them that no one even knew were there.

Dovichi's lab--one of a rapidly growing number of groups that focus on single cells--has had particular success at identifying differences in the amounts of dozens of distinct proteins produced by individual cancer cells. "Ten years ago, I would have thought it would have been almost impossible to do that," says Robert Kennedy, an analytical chemist at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, who analyzes insulin secretion from single cells to uncover the causes of the most common type of diabetes.

And Dovichi has a provocative hypothesis: he thinks that as a cancer progresses, cells of the same type diverge more and more widely in their protein content. If this proves true, then vast dissimilarities between cells would indicate a disease that is more likely to spread. Dovichi is working with clinicians to develop better prognostics for esophageal and breast cancer based on this idea. Ultimately, such tests could let doctors quickly decide on proper treatment, a key to defeating many cancers.

A yellow, diamond-shaped sign in Dovichi's office warns that a "laser jock" is present. Dovichi helped develop the laser-based DNA sequencers that became the foundation of the Human Genome Project, and his new analyzers rely on much of the same technology to probe single cells for components that are much harder to detect than DNA: proteins, lipids, and carbohydrates.

For proteins, the machines mix reagents with a single cell inside an ultrathin capillary tube. A chemical reaction causes lysine, an amino acid recurring frequently in proteins, to fluoresce. The proteins, prodded by an electric charge, migrate out of the tube at different rates, depending on their size. Finally, a laser detector records the intensity of the fluorescence. This leads to a graphic that displays the various amounts of the different-sized proteins inside the cell.

Although the technique reveals differences between cells, it does not identify the specific proteins. Still, the analyzer has an unprecedented sensitivity and makes visible potentially critical differences. "For our cancer prognosis projects, we don't need to know the identity of the components," Dovichi says.

Dovichi is both excited about the possibilities of single-cell biology and sober about its limitations. Right now, he says, analyses take too much time and effort. "This is way early-stage," says Dovichi. "But hopefully, in 10, 20, or 30 years, people will look back and say those were interesting baby steps."

Personalized Medical Monitors

2008-02-19T15:32:00.001+05:30

In late spring 2000, John Guttag came home from surgery. It had been a simple procedure to repair a torn ligament in his knee, and he had no plans to revisit the hospital anytime soon. But that same day his son, then a junior in high school, complained of chest pains. Guttag's wife promptly got back in the car and returned to the hospital, where their son was diagnosed with a collapsed lung and immediately admitted. Over the next year, Guttag and his wife spent weeks at a time in and out of the hospital with their son, who underwent multiple surgeries and treatments for a series of recurrences.

During that time, Guttag witnessed what became a familiar scenario. "The doctors would come in, take a stethoscope, listen to his lungs, and make a pronouncement like ‘He's 10 percent better than yesterday,' and I wanted to say, ‘I don't believe that,'" he says. "You can't possibly sit there and listen with your ears and tell me you can hear a 10 percent difference. Surely there's a way to do this more precisely."

It was an observation that any concerned parent might make, but for Guttag, who was then head of MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, it was a personal challenge. "Health care just seemed like an area that was tremendously in need of our expertise," he says.

The ripest challenge, Guttag says, is analyzing the huge amounts of data generated by medical tests. Today's physicians are bombarded with physiological information--temperature and blood pressure readings, MRI scans, electrocardiogram (EKG) readouts, and x-rays, to name a few. Wading through a single patient's record to determine signs of, say, a heart attack or stroke can be difficult and time consuming. Guttag believes computers can help doctors efficiently interpret these ever-growing masses of data. By quickly perceiving patterns that might otherwise be buried, he says, software may provide the key to more precise and personalized medicine. "People aren't good at spotting trends unless they're very obvious," says Guttag. "It dawned on me that doctors were doing things that a computer could do better."

For instance, making sense of the body's electrical signals seemed, to Guttag, to be a natural fit for computer science. Some of his earlier work on computer networks caught the attention of physicians at Children's Hospital Boston. The doctors and the engineer set out to improve the detection of epileptic seizures; ultimately, Guttag and graduate student Ali Shoeb designed personalized seizure detectors. In 2004, the team examined recordings of the brain waves of more than 30 children with epilepsy, before, during, and after seizures. They used the data to train a "classification algorithm" to distinguish between seizure and nonseizure waveforms. With the help of the algorithm, the researchers identified seizure patterns specific to each patient.

The team is now working on a way to make that type of information useful to people with epilepsy. Today, many patients can control their seizures with an implant that stimulates the vagus nerve. The implant typically works in one of two ways: either it turns on every few minutes, regardless of a patient's brain activity, or patients sweep a magnet over it, activating it when they sense a seizure coming on. Both methods have their drawbacks, so Guttag is designing a noninvasive, software-driven sensor programmed to measure the wearer's brain waves and determine what patterns--specific to him or her--signify the onset of a seizure. Once those patterns are detected, a device can automatically activate an implant, stopping the seizure in its tracks.

Guttag plans to test the sensor, essentially a bathing cap of electrodes that fits over the scalp, on a handful of patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center this spring. Down the line, such a sensor could also help people without implants, simply warning them to sit down, pull over, or get to a safe place before a seizure begins. "Just a warning could be enormously life changing," says Guttag. "It's all the collateral damage that people really fear."

Now he's turned his attention to patterns of the heart. Like the brain, cardiac activity is governed by electrical signals, so moving into cardiology is a natural transition for Guttag.

He began by looking for areas where large-scale cardiac-data analysis was needed. Today, many patients who have suffered heart attacks go home with Holter monitors that record heart activity. After a day or so, a cardiologist reviews the monitor's readings for worrisome signs. But it can be easy to miss an abnormal pattern in thousands of minutes of dense waveforms.

That's where Guttag hopes computers can step in. Working with Collin Stultz, a cardiologist and assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, and graduate student Zeeshan Syed, Guttag is devising algorithms to analyze EKG readings for statistically meaningful patterns. In the coming months, the team will compare EKG records from hundreds of heart attack patients, some of whose attacks were fatal. The immediate goal is to pick out key similarities and differences between those who survived and those who didn't. There are known "danger patterns" that physicians can spot on an EKG readout, but the Guttag group is leaving it up to the computer to find significant patterns, rather than telling it what to look for. If the computer's search isn't influenced by existing medical knowledge, Guttag reasons, it may uncover unexpected relationships.

Joseph Kannry, director of the Center for Medical Informatics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, calls Guttag's work a solid step toward developing more accurate automated medical readings. "It's promising. The challenge is going to be in convincing a clinician to use it," says Kannry.

Still, Guttag feels he is well on his way toward integrating computing into medical diagnostics. "People have very different reactions when you tell them computers are going to make decisions for you," he says. "But we've gotten to the point where computers fly our airplanes for us, so there's every reason to be optimistic."

Invisible Revolution

2008-02-19T15:29:00.001+05:30

Artificially structured metamaterials could transform telecommunications, data storage, and even solar energy, says David R. Smith

The announcement last November of an "invisibility shield," created by David R. Smith of Duke University and colleagues, inevitably set the media buzzing with talk of H. G. Wells's invisible man and Star Trek's Romulans. Using rings of printed circuit boards, the researchers managed to divert microwaves around a kind of "hole in space"; even when a metal cylinder was placed at the center of the hole, the microwaves behaved as though nothing were there.

It was arguably the most dramatic demonstration so far of what can be achieved with metamaterials, composites made up of precisely arranged patterns of two or more distinct materials. These structures can manipulate electromagnetic radiation, including light, in ways not readily observed in nature. For example, photonic crystals--arrays of identical microscopic blocks separated by voids--can reflect or even inhibit the propagation of certain wavelengths of light; assemblies of small wire circuits, like those Smith used in his invisibility shield, can bend light in strange ways.

But can we really use such materials to make objects seem to vanish? Philip Ball spoke with Smith, who explains why metamaterials are literally changing the way we view the world.

Technology Review: How do metamaterials let you make things invisible?

David R. Smith: It's a somewhat complicated procedure but can be very simple to visualize. Picture a fabric formed from interwoven threads, in which light is constrained to travel along the threads. Well, if you now take a pin and push it through the fabric, the threads are distorted, making a hole in the fabric. Light, forced to follow the threads, is routed around the hole. John Pendry at Imperial College in London calculated what would be required of a metamaterial that would accomplish exactly this. The waves are transmitted around the hole and combined on the other side. So you can put an object in the hole, and the waves won't "see" it--it's as if they'd crossed a region of empty space.

TR: And then you made it?

DRS: Yes--once we had the prescription, we set about using the techniques we'd developed over the past few years to make the material. We did the experiment at microwave frequencies because the techniques are very well established there and we knew we would be able to produce a demonstration quickly. We printed millimeter-scale metal wires and split rings, shaped like the letter C, onto fiberglass circuit boards. The shield consisted of about 10 concentric cylinders made up of these split-ring building blocks, each with a slightly different pattern.

TR: So an object inside the shield is actually invisible?

DRS: More or less, but when we talk about invisibility in these structures, it's not about making things vanish before our eyes--at least, not yet. We can hide them from microwaves, but the shield is plain enough to see. This isn't like stealth shielding on military aircraft, where you just try to eliminate reflection--the microwaves seem literally to pass through the object inside the shield. If this could work with visible light, then you really would see the object vanish.

TR: Could you hide a large object, like an airplane, from radar by covering its surface with the right metamaterial?

DRS: I'm not sure we can do that. If you look at stealth technology today, it's generally interested in hiding objects from detection over a large radar bandwidth. But the invisibility bandwidth is inherently limited in our approach. The same is true for hiding objects from all wavelengths of visible light--that would certainly be a stretch.

TR: How else might we use metamaterials?

DRS: Well, this is really an entirely new approach to optics. There's a huge amount of freedom for design, and as is usual with new technology, the best uses probably haven't been thought of yet.

One of the most provocative and controversial predictions came from John Pendry, who predicted that a material with a negative refractive index could focus light more finely than any conventional lens material. The refractive index measures how much light bends when it passes through a material--that's what makes a pole dipped in water look as though it bends. A negative refractive index means the material bends light the "wrong" way. So far, we and others have been working not with visible light but with microwaves, which are also electromagnetic radiation, but with a longer wavelength. This means the components of the metamaterial must be correspondingly bigger, and so they're much easier to make. Pendry's suggestion was confirmed in 2005 by a group from the University of California, Berkeley, who made a negative-refractive-index metamaterial for microwaves.

Making a negative-index material that works for visible light is more difficult, because the building blocks have to be much smaller--no bigger than 10 to 20 nanometers. That's now very possible to achieve, however, and several groups are working on it. If it can be done, these metamaterials could be used to increase the amount of information stored on CDs and DVDs or to speed up transmission and reduce power consumption in fiber-optic telecommunications.

We can also concentrate electromagnetic fields--the exact opposite of what the cloak does--which might be valuable in energy-harvesting applications. With a suitable metamaterial, we could concentrate light coming from any direction--you wouldn't need direct sunlight. Right now we're trying to design structures like this. If we could achieve that for visible light, it could make solar power more efficient.

Nanocharging Solar

2008-02-19T15:24:00.001+05:30

No renewable power source has as much theoretical potential as solar energy. But the promise of cheap and abundant solar power remains unmet, largely because today's solar cells are so costly to make.

Photovoltaic cells use semiconductors to convert light energy into electrical current. The workhorse photovoltaic material, silicon, performs this conversion fairly efficiently, but silicon cells are relatively expensive to manufacture. Some other semiconductors, which can be deposited as thin films, have reached market, but although they're cheaper, their efficiency doesn't compare to that of silicon. A new solution may be in the offing: some chemists think that quantum dots--tiny crystals of semiconductors just a few nanometers wide--could at last make solar power cost-competitive with electricity from fossil fuels.

By dint of their size, quantum dots have unique abilities to interact with light. In silicon, one photon of light frees one electron from its atomic orbit. In the late 1990s, Arthur Nozik, a senior research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO, postulated that quantum dots of certain semiconductor materials could release two or more electrons when struck by high-energy photons, such as those found toward the blue and ultraviolet end of the spectrum.

In 2004, Victor Klimov of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico provided the first experimental proof that Nozik was right; last year he showed that quantum dots of lead selenide could produce up to seven electrons per photon when exposed to high-energy ultraviolet light. Nozik's team soon demonstrated the effect in dots made of other semiconductors, such as lead sulfide and lead telluride.

These experiments have not yet produced a material suitable for commercialization, but they do suggest that quantum dots could someday increase the efficiency of converting sunlight into electricity. And since quantum dots can be made using simple chemical reactions, they could also make solar cells far less expensive. Researchers in Nozik's lab, whose results have not been published, recently demonstrated the extra-electron effect in quantum dots made of silicon; these dots would be far less costly to incorporate into solar cells than the large crystalline sheets of silicon used today.

To date, the extra-electron effect has been seen only in isolated quantum dots; it was not evident in the first prototype photovoltaic devices to use the dots. The trouble is that in a working solar cell, electrons must travel out of the semiconductor and into an external electrical circuit. Some of the electrons freed in any photovoltaic cell are inevitably "lost," recaptured by positive "holes" in the semiconductor. In quantum dots, this recapture happens far faster than it does in larger pieces of a semiconductor; many of the freed electrons are immediately swallowed up.

The Nozik team's best quantum-dot solar cells have managed only about 2 percent efficiency, far less than is needed for a practical device. However, the group hopes to boost the efficiency by modifying the surfaces of the quantum dots or improving electron transport between dots.

The project is a gamble, and Nozik readily admits that it might not pay off. Still, the enormous potential of the nanocrystals keeps him going. Nozik calculates that a photovoltaic device based on quantum dots could have a maximum efficiency of 42 percent, far better than silicon's maximum efficiency of 31 percent. The quantum dots themselves would be cheap to manufacture, and they could do their work in combination with materials like conducting polymers that could also be produced inexpensively. A working quantum dot-polymer cell could eventually place solar electricity on a nearly even economic footing with electricity from coal. "If you could [do this], you would be in Stockholm--it would be revolutionary," says Nozik.

A commercial quantum-dot solar cell is many years away, assuming it's even possible. But if it is, it could help put our fossil-fuel days behind us.

Peering into Video's Future

2008-02-19T15:00:00.001+05:30

Ted Stevens, the 83-year-old senior senator from Alaska, was widely ridiculed last year for a speech in which he described the Internet as "a series of tubes." Yet clumsy as his metaphor may have been, Stevens was struggling to make a reasonable point: the tubes can get clogged. And that may happen sooner than expected, thanks to the exploding popularity of digital video.

TV shows, YouTube clips, animations, and other video applications already account for more than 60 percent of Internet traffic, says CacheLogic, a Cambridge, England, company that sells media delivery systems to content owners and Internet service providers (ISPs). "I imagine that within two years it will be 98 percent," adds Hui Zhang, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. And that will mean slower downloads for everyone.

Zhang believes help could come from an unexpected quarter: peer-to-peer (P2P) file distribution technology. Of course, there's no better playground for piracy, and millions have used P2P networks such as Gnutella, Kazaa, and BitTorrent to help themselves to copyrighted content. But Zhang thinks this black-sheep technology can be reformed and put to work helping legitimate content owners and Internet-backbone operators deliver more video without overloading the network.

For Zhang and other P2P proponents, it's all a question of architecture. Conventionally, video and other Web content gets to consumers along paths that resemble trees, with the content owners' central servers as the trunks, multiple "content distribution servers" as the branches, and consumers' PCs as the leaves. Tree architectures work well enough, but they have three key weaknesses: If one branch is cut off, all its leaves go with it. Data flows in only one direction, so the leaves'--the PCs'--capacity to upload data goes untapped. And perhaps most important, adding new PCs to the network merely increases its congestion--and the demands placed on the servers.

In P2P networks, by contrast, there are no central servers: each user's PC exchanges data with many others in an ever-shifting mesh. This means that servers and their overtaxed network connections bear less of a burden; data is instead provided by peers, saving bandwidth in the Internet's core. If one user leaves the mesh, others can easily fill the gap. And adding users actually increases a P2P network's power.

There are just two big snags keeping content distributors and their ISPs from warming to mesh architectures. First, to balance the load on individual PCs, the most advanced P2P networks, such as BitTorrent, break big files into blocks, which are scattered across many machines. To reassemble those blocks, a computer on the network must use precious bandwidth to broadcast "metadata" describing which blocks it needs and which it already has.

Second, ISPs are loath to carry P2P traffic, because it's a big money-loser. For conventional one-way transfers, ISPs can charge content owners such as Google or NBC.com according to the amount of bandwidth they consume. But P2P traffic is generated by subscribers themselves, who usually pay a flat monthly fee regardless of how much data they download or upload.

Zhang and others believe they're close to solving both problems. At Cornell University, computer scientist Paul Francis is testing a P2P system called Chunkyspread that combines the best features of trees and meshes. Members' PCs are arranged in a classic tree, but they can also connect to one another, reducing the burden on the branches.

Just as important, Chunkyspread reassembles files in "slices" rather than blocks. A slice consists of the nth bit of every block--for example, the fifth bit in every block of 20 bits. Alice's PC might obtain a commitment from Bob's PC to send bit five from every block it possesses, from Carol's PC to send bit six, and so forth. Once these commitments are made, no more metadata need change hands, saving bandwidth. In simulations, Francis says, Chunkyspread far outperforms simple tree-based multicast methods.

Zhang thinks new technology can also make carrying P2P traffic more palatable for ISPs. Right now, operators have little idea what kind of data flows through their networks. At his Pittsburgh-based stealth startup, Rinera Networks, Zhang is developing software that will identify P2P data, let ISPs decide how much of it they're willing to carry, at what volume and price, and then deliver it as reliably as server-based content distribution systems do--all while tracking everything for accounting purposes. "We want to build an ecosystem such that service providers will actually benefit from P2P traffic," Zhang explains. Heavy P2P users might end up paying extra fees--but in the end, content owners and consumers won't gripe, he argues, since better accounting should make the Internet function more effectively for everyone.

If this smells like a violation of the Internet's tradition of network neutrality--
the principle that ISPs should treat all bits equally, regardless of their origin--then it's because the tradition needs to be updated for an era of very large file transfers, Zhang believes. "It's all about volume," he says. "Of course, we don't want the service providers to dictate what they will carry on their infrastructure. On the other hand, if P2P users benefit from transmitting and receiving more bits, the guys who are actually transporting those bits should be able to share in that."

Networking and hardware companies have their eyes on technologies emerging from places like Rinera and Francis's Cornell lab, even as they build devices designed to help consumers download video and other files over P2P networks. Manufacturers Asus, Planex, and QNAP, for example, are working with BitTorrent to embed the company's P2P software in their home routers, media servers, and storage devices. With luck, Senator Stevens's tubes may stay unblocked a little longer.