the alpha and omega

PGP founder unveils secure Internet phone

Mahalanobis — 2005-07-30T04:14:38Z

Reuters: A leading cryptographer unveiled a technology on Friday that he said could make it impossible for malicious hackers or government investigators to eavesdrop on Internet phone calls. PGP Inc. founder Phil Zimmermann said his new encryption software would for the first time make phone calls placed over the Internet private.

"To move all of our precious phone calls to the crime-ridden slum that is the Internet I think would be unwise without protecting them with encryption," he said in a presentation at the Defcon hackers' conference.

Voice Over Internet Protocol, or VOIP, has exploded in popularity in recent years as a cheaper alternative to traditional phone service. But VOIP users are vulnerable to the security concerns that plague other Internet users, including eavesdroppers and attacks that can disrupt service. Click here to read the story.

Eurocentric Skypeworld

Mahalanobis — 2005-06-24T23:04:07Z

Data courtesy of James Enck who blogs at EuroTelcoblog

The 2020 vision of robotic assistants unveiled

Mahalanobis — 2005-05-26T01:52:53Z

New Scientist: A futuristic world, complete with autonomous household companions, android medics and even robot entertainers, will greet visitors to the Prototype Robot Exhibition in Japan from 9 June, 2005. The exhibition forms part of the World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan, which runs from 25 May to 25 September.

Several utility robots, including autonomous garbage collectors, vacuum cleaners and security guards, are already patrolling the wider Expo. But the Prototype Robot Exhibition gives academics and commercial researchers a chance to showcase a more distant vision of robot utopia. Click here to continue reading.

via Weird Events

Grpuabybtvpny Cebterff: Pelcgbtencul

Mahalanobis — 2005-04-24T15:47:48Z

Gur Gryrtencu: Are you the sort of person who gets impatient when your PGP-encrypted e-mail takes more than 4 nanoseconds to cross the Atlantic?

Be glad you werent born in ancient Greece.

The Greeks would shave a messengers head, write a secret message on his scalp, and let the hair grow back before sending him, said Bryan Higgs, whose fascination with codes and history led him to this unusual tidbit. It makes you think: OK, time wasnt quite as critical for them. [Source]

Sony Patents Matrix-Like Game Technology

Mahalanobis — 2005-04-07T18:01:37Z

Slashdot: "Reuters is reporting that Sony has been granted 2 patents, both describing 'Method and system for generating sensory data onto the human neural cortex'. These are patents 6,729,337 and 6,536,440. The patents go on to 'describe a technique for aiming ultrasonic pulses at specific areas of the brain to induce sensory experiences such as smells, sounds and images'. The story was first broken by New Scientist magazine."

Hannibal @ Ars Technica writes:

Sony hasn't yet built a device that works based on the ideas presented in the patent, so this is all theoretical. In fact, according to the New Scientist, Sony hasn't even conducted any experiments to see if this works. <> At any rate, I expect that the budget for an a game that takes advantage of this technology, smells and all, will be more than the GDP of a decent-sized country. I'm sure at least one game company that I can think of will start taking preorders for such a game sometime next year.

Students Tracked Via RFID Tags

Mahalanobis — 2005-02-12T03:37:11Z

San Francisco Chronicle: Angry parents, saying their children's privacy rights are being violated, have asked the board of the tiny Brittan School District to rescind a requirement that all students wear badges that monitor their whereabouts on campus using radio signals. Located between the massive silos of Sutter Rice Co. and the Sutter Buttes, this small town has 587 kindergarten through eighth-graders who are the first public school kids in the country to be tracked on campus by such a system, which is designed to ease attendance taking and increase campus security. ]Full Story[ || via Slashdot

Machine learns games 'like a human'

Mahalanobis — 2005-01-25T12:29:24Z

New Scientist: A computer that learns to play a 'scissors, paper, stone' by observing and mimicking human players could lead to machines that automatically learn how to spot an intruder or perform vital maintenance work, say UK researchers.

CogVis, developed by scientists at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire, UK, teaches itself how to play the children's game by searching for patterns in video and audio of human players and then building its own "hypotheses" about the game's rules.

In contrast to older artificial intelligence (AI) programs that mimic human behaviour using hard-coded rules, CogVis takes a more human approach, learning through observation and mimicry, the researchers say. Click here to continue reading. Discussion over at Slashdot.

Robot makers say World Cup will be theirs by 2050

Mahalanobis — 2005-01-12T19:48:37Z

The Scotsman: THE footballers of tomorrow will have the midfield guile of Zinedine Zidane, the finishing ability of Andriy Shevchenko and the staying power of Roy Keane.

A Japanese consortium of robotics experts has thrown down the gauntlet to future players of the beautiful game by claiming their engineered humans will play mankind off the park within 45 years.

"By 2050, our aim is to beat the winners of footballs World Cup and we are very confident that we will be able to do that," said Shu Ishiguro, who heads Robot Laboratory in Osaka. "When we have accomplished that, we will have a society in which humans and artificial intelligence are completely in harmony."

Mr Ishiguro and his team are placing their faith in the offspring of VisiON. VisiON has already perfected the victory pose. Reminiscent of Eric Cantona in his pomp, it leans slightly to one side, hands on hips and with the ball - and the world - at its feet.

related items:
Why ever more women watch soccer games.

Encyclopedia Googlactica

Mahalanobis — 2004-12-19T01:31:13Z

LiveScience: Finally. After many years of reading about the universal dictionary (Robert Heinlein), the city fathers (James Blish), the house records (Frank Herbert), and the hitchhiker's guide (Douglas Adams), to name just a few, Google has finally decided to put all there is of human knowledge online.

All right, not quite all of it. But Google is working with the University of Michigan, Harvard and several other libraries to put millions (that's millions!) of books online. Scanned, spidered, and ready to read. Google has already started scanning some books; full details on what the program will entail are not yet available. Let's face it; given their past history with new programs, Google will probably still have this in beta with a couple million books scanned.

"Even before we started Google, we dreamed of making the incredible breadth of information that librarians so lovingly organize searchable online," said Larry Page, Google co-founder and president of Products. "Today we're pleased to announce this program to digitize the collections of these amazing libraries so that every Google user can search them instantly.

"Our work with libraries further enhances the existing Google Print (TM) program, which enables users to find matches within the full text of books, while publishers and authors monetize that information," Page added. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information, and we're excited to be working with libraries to help make this mission a reality."

Google print lets you look at whole pages for free books and excerpts from copyrighted works. Revenue possibilities exist for ads delivered with content, buy-this-book links, and so forth. But I'm hoping that most of it will be free for the taking.

Read more at Google Print and Google Blog.

Quantum cryptography wins Descartes prize

Mahalanobis — 2004-12-02T19:09:56Z

PhysicsWeb: A collaboration that involves physicists from six European countries and the US has been awarded part of the European Union's Descartes prize for research for their work on quantum cryptography. They share the €1m prize with life scientists studying mitochondrial DNA. The IST-QuComm collaboration is made up of research groups in Sweden, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria and the UK, plus a team at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US. Quantum cryptography allows two parties to share a secret "key" that could make communications between them much more secure than existing cryptographic techniques by encoding the key with single photons. Any attempts by a third party to eavesdrop on the communications can be readily detected. Quantum cryptography could have applications in electronic communications, e-banking and e-voting.

Progress in quantum cryptography and related areas - such as entanglement and teleportation - has been rapid in recent years. Last year, for instance, physicists at the University of Vienna succeeded in sending entangled photons 600 metres across the river Danube, while a group at the University of Geneva recently demonstrated quantum teleportation at telecom wavelengths through a 4-kilometre optical fibre cable. The IST-QuComm consortium also performed the first ever quantum cryptographic bank transfer over a 6-kilometre fibre link in Vienna this summer.

The prizes were awarded in Prague today by Janez Potocnik, EU commissioner for science and research.

Google news site hit by access problems in China

Mahalanobis — 2004-12-01T16:27:42Z

FT.com: An online news service recently launched by Google, the worlds leading internet search company, has been hit by serious access problems in China that are blamed by some experts on government blocking. An effort by Beijing authorities to bar access to the Chinese Google News website would be a considerable setback for the US internet search company, which is seeking to expand its profile in the fast-growing but highly competitive Chinese market. >continue reading<

related items:
The plight of the Bo Ke (blogger) in China. New Scientist has an interesting story about the struggles of bloggers in China and the "Great Firewall" of government censorship there. via Boing Boing

Attack Spam Websites! (~DDoS)

Mahalanobis — 2004-11-30T11:28:56Z

BBC: Net users are getting the chance to fight back against spam websites. Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.

Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out. The net firm estimates that if enough people sign up and download the tool, spammers could end up paying to send out terabytes of data. Click here to continue reading.

Google Scholar

Mahalanobis — 2004-11-26T17:08:49Z

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

When invention turns to innovation

Mahalanobis — 2004-11-10T15:43:13Z

BBC News: It is unlikely that future technological inventions are going to have the same kind of transformative impact that they did in the past.

[C]hange and innovation in technology that people will see affecting their daily lives, he says, will come about slowly, subtlety, and in ways that will no longer be "in your face". It will creep in pervasively. >more< My take: ;-D

Flying taxi vision for commuters

Mahalanobis — 2004-11-09T18:30:50Z

BBC: Commuters could soon be taking flying taxis to work instead of waiting in line for a street cab, experts suggest.

British developers Avcen say Jetpods would enable quick, quiet and cheap travel to and from major cities. The futuristic machines will undergo proof-of-concept flight tests in 2006 and could be ready for action by 2010. As well as taxis, which would use a network of specially-built mini runways, there are military, medical and personal jet versions as well.

London-based Avcen say Jetpods would be able to travel the 24 miles from Woking, Surrey, to central London in just four minutes. And because it could make so many trips, fares for a journey from Heathrow to central London could cost about £40 [57, $74] or £50 [72, $93] . Click here to continue reading.

Investors should contact Avcen as early as possible.