Monday, August 29, 2005

Wisconsin Lab Works on Post-Bar Code Tech

Alfonso Gutierrez smiles as boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese tagged with tiny chips zip around a conveyor belt and pass under a reader that instantly displays information about the product.

"It's going fast," said Gutierrez, who heads a new university research lab dedicated to helping businesses deploy the technology that could one day replace the bar code.

Gutierrez was referring to the speed of the conveyor belt — 600 feet per minute, the speed Wal-Mart uses in its warehouses — but he could have been talking about the rapid acceptance of radio frequency identification, a technology that can revolutionize business but also erode privacy.

RFID uses a computer chip the size of a grain of rice to store data, which are transmitted wirelessly by a tiny antenna to a receiver. The chips, embedded in tags, now track pallets in warehouses and let drivers pass toll booths without stopping, but its potential is almost limitless.

To accelerate deployment, the University of Wisconsin-Madison formally opened a lab this month to study how to make RFID work better, leaving to others to debate the broader issues such as implementation and privacy.

"RFID technology and applications are revolutionizing supply-chain management and are enabling companies to obtain an enormous amount of data in a short period of time," said Paul Peercy, dean of UW's College of Engineering. "It's only in its infancy state, but it's going to affect nearly all industries."

More than 40 companies, including 3M Co., Kraft Foods Inc. and S.C. Johnson & Son Inc., are contributing $500,000 combined to start the lab, and the university is kicking in another $62,000. Other companies can pay for individual research projects, giving them access to top-notch scientists without having to fund their own lab.

In 2003, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and the Department of Defense ordered their top suppliers to start using RFID technology by this year. The goal was to track products without human interaction, resulting in fewer misplaced shipments and the ability to restock store shelves as soon as a product runs out.

Wal-Mart spokeswoman Christi Gallagher said the retailer is on track to have the technology at 13 distribution centers and up to 600 stores by October, but she said many suppliers have had difficulties finding tags that fit their products or figuring out how to place them in such a way that they can be read without outside interference.

About a dozen of Wal-Mart suppliers are among the chief funders of the Wisconsin lab, which will be dedicated to finding solutions for such challenges, including interference from metal products in warehouses and metal doors on loading docks.

The conveyor belt that Gutierrez oversaw allows companies to test different tags and determine which work best and where they should be placed.

The lab comprises of a few rooms spread out on three floors of an engineering building on campus. It has an echo-free chamber that allows researchers to test the strength of signals from different antennas. Two floors below, a portal-dock station simulates goods passing beneath a reader in a warehouse or at a loading dock.

Researchers are looking at ways to embed the chips in the packaging rather than simply adding them as labels to the outside, allowing companies to lower costs and position tags correctly.

The lab also is testing whether permits that hang on the rearview mirrors of cars can carry tags reliable enough to lift parking lot gates and whether tags on wristbands can track patients in hospitals.

Patrick Sweeney, chief executive of ODIN technologies and author of "RFID for Dummies," said the lab will serve as a trusted source for information at a time the technology is beset by technical problems and fears of privacy abuses.

The technology, around since World War II, got a boost through research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The four-year effort, sponsored by Wal-Mart, Gillette Co. and other major corporations, ended in 2003.

Other universities, including the University of Florida and the University of Arkansas, also have RFID labs as do dozens of other corporations.

What makes UW-Madison's lab unique is its collaboration with industry and its focus on the physics and engineering behind the technology, said Sweeney, who has visited other RFID labs elsewhere.

Critics worry, however, that UW-Madison is contributing to technology that could ultimately track humans.

One such fear involves the use of tags in clothing and shoes. If the chips aren't deactivated at the time of sale, unsuspecting consumers might essentially be carrying around information about their buying habits, allowing stores to target them with intrusive marketing pitches the next time they visit.

"When I see the move of RFID into universities, it concerns me," said Katherine Albrecht, a privacy advocate who specializes in RFID technology and shoppers. "It is sending a message that not only do we not have to worry about privacy but you can profit from it by a career perspective."

UW researchers acknowledge the potential for abuse, but insist their work is more about enabling mechanisms to ultimately make humans safer.

RFID could be programmed to detect bacteria and recall tainted food, prevent errors in blood transfusions and ensure that drugs are not counterfeit, they say.

Already, the tags help parents track children at amusement parks and help hospital personnel prevent unauthorized people from kidnapping newborns, said Raj Veeramani, director of a UW consortium of businesses involved in the lab.

And former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, recently named to the board of a company that makes chips to implant into humans, says he may put one into his arm so that doctors can know his medical history. Federal regulators approved that use of the technology earlier this year, though few hospitals are equipped to read the chips.

"It's wrong to blame the technology. It's the people that develop applications for it," Veeramani said. "We are still trying to figure out what role RFID will play in the larger scheme of things."


source:http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050828/ap_on_sc/rfid_research&printer=1


Coffee found to be high in health-giving antioxidants

Coffee might soon be considered a health drink following a study showing it is a surprisingly rich source of anti-cancer agents.

A study has found that coffee contributes more antioxidants - which have been linked with fighting heart disease and cancer - to the diet than cranberries, apples or tomatoes.

Fruit and vegetables have long been known to be a good source of antioxidants, but the new findings are surprising because it is the first time that coffee has been shown to be such a rich source of the agents.

Professor Joe Vinson of the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania warned, however, that the study did not prove that coffee was good for you because high levels of antioxidants in food did not necessarily translate into higher levels absorbed by the body.

Nevertheless, the research - which was funded by the American Cocoa Research Institute - indicates that at least where coffee is consumed in high amounts, the beverage could be responsible for relatively high levels of antioxidants in the diet.

"Americans get more of their antioxidants from coffee than any other dietary source. Nothing else comes close," said Professor Vinson, whose study was described at the weekend to the American Chemical Society in Washington.

The study found that both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee appeared to provide similar levels of antioxidants.

The American findings are probably reflected in Britain, where people drink about 70 million cups of coffee each day despite the country's reputation as a tea-drinking nation. More than half of the American population are daily coffee drinkers. Although coffee consumption may be lower in the United Kingdom, nearly half of the British population regularly drinks instant or ground coffee, the market analysts Mintel say.

Antioxidants help to rid the body of harmful free radicals, destructive molecules that damage cells and DNA. They have been linked to a number of health benefits, including protection against heart disease and cancer. Studies have associated coffee drinking with a reduced risk of liver and colon cancer, type two diabetes, and Parkinson's disease.

But Professor Vinson urged moderation, recommending that people should drink only one or two cups of coffee per day. He added that it was important not to ignore the benefits offered by fresh fruit and vegetables. "Unfortunately, consumers are still not eating enough fruits and vegetables, which are better for you from an overall nutritional point of view to their higher content of vitamins, minerals and fibre," he said.

The research showed that, compared with other foods, dates were the richest source of antioxidants. But since so few dates are eaten by Americans, they only contributed a small amount of antioxidants to the average person's diet. Cranberries and red grapes also contain high levels of antioxidants.

A spokesman for the British Coffee Association said: "This study reconfirms the fact that moderate coffee consumption of four to five cups a day not only is perfectly safe but may confer health benefits."

The pros and cons of coffee

* BENEFITS

Can increase alertness and improve short-term recall.

May reduce the risk of cirrhosis of the liver among heavy drinkers.

May postpone muscle fatigue.

Contains caffeine-related compounds (theophylline) that can alleviate the symptoms of asthma in some cases.

* RISKS

Increases blood pressure among people who already suffer from high blood pressure.

Causes insomnia, anxiety, and irritability.

May worsen symptoms of PMS in some women.

Can reduce fertility in women trying to conceive.

Can cause heartburn and indigestion.

source:http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article308784.ece


Open Office 2.0 Kicks MS Office Around the Block

MAJOR UPDATE: By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

We asked our contributing writer David Johnston to do a full review of OpenOffice 2.0. He has been a longtime user of the product (and in fact an earlier version lost some of his important data.) In the meantime, we pointed to a review that PC Magazine did which is also comprehensive (see below), but for RealTechNews readers, please take a look at what David has to report, because this is no try it for a few days and write something up review. This is a complete hands-on review from someone who has used the product religiously for years. And I think you’ll see why OpenOffice 2.0 truly Kicks MS Office around the block.
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Open Office 2.0
By David Johnston
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
I’ve always been a fan of Open Source software, but I have to admit that frequently the quality of free and Open Source software leaves something to be desired when compared to their commercial counterparts. That said, nothing can beat these applications where price is concerned. I first tried OpenOffice years ago when it was still prior to version 1.0. I noticed immediately that the suite had a lot of potential. Up until then, I had been primarily using the Lotus suite at home because it came with our computer. In fact, I felt so comfortable using it that it quickly became my first choice of office applications. I never bought MS Office after Office XP ,and I rarely ever used that.

My primary use for OpenOffice has always been as a word processor and I believe this is an area where it excels (so to speak!). For anyone used to MS Office, the difference in the two interfaces is minimal. In fact, I find it easier to use OpenOffice’s interface than MS Office’s for various things such as inserting a header and footer. To create or change a header and footer in MS Office XP, you must go to the “view” menu. I’m not sure why something like a header or footer would be placed in the “view” menu before it is actually part of a document. OpenOffice placed these options in their “insert” menu—a placement that I believe makes much more intuitive sense. The OpenOffice word processor also has all of the font and text options one would expect placed in their own tool bars. OpenOffice also supports all of the major features of MS Office (and a few of its own) except for the grammar check. I’m personally fine with not having a grammar checker since it has given me the opportunity to actually learn the English language instead of relying on my word processor to make my sentences coherent.


Features and Benefits
One of OpenOffice’s great traits is its ability to work with many other office suite file formats. You can save your documents as MS Word (or many other) documents and they will open up just as you intended in Word. One nifty feature of OpenOffice that I’ve found myself using repeatedly in college has been the “Export Directly as PDF” button. Located next to the print button on the toolbar, this button acts just like a normal save button, but it saves your document as an Adobe PDF file. This comes in very handy for making sure that your professor and classmates are going to be seeing your work exactly as you want them to, no matter what operating system or office suite they use. That brings me to another nice feature of OpenOffice; it’s cross-platform compatible. This means that you can use OpenOffice on practically any computer running any OS. The list of supported OS’s includes Windows, OS X, Linux, and even Solaris and BSD. Microsoft Office can’t match OpenOffice for cross-platform compatibility.

Another nice thing about OpenOffice is that it is actually a complete office suite. You’re not just getting a word processor. OpenOffice includes a its own equivalents to Powerpoint and Excel in 1.1.4. In the 2.0 Beta, OpenOffice has added a program to compete with Access called Base as well as a few others like Math which allows you to write out mathematical equations in a word processor-like environment and Draw which is a drawing program. I’ve personally never used these new programs seriously, but from the looks of it they could all be useful except for Draw. I haven’t yet been able to discern what exactly you’re supposed to be able to do with it that warrants its existence.

PowerPoint Wins

My experiences with OpenOffice’s Impress (equivalent to PowerPoint) and Calc (equivalent to Excel) are more limited and more mixed. I don’t usually make PowerPoint presentations, but when I have been required to make them for school, I’ve always just used PowerPoint instead of OpenOffice. Up until recently with the 2.0 Beta release of OpenOffice, PowerPoint’s user interface has been superior to OpenOffice’s for throwing together a presentation. Additionally, the backgrounds and clip art selection have made the choice a no-brainer. Powerpoint won, hands down. However, with the recent 2.0 beta, Impress has improved dramatically (due in large part to copying PowerPoint’s interface). One problem I have noticed is that presentations created with version 1.1.4 and saved as a PowerPoint file become hard to edit with the new 2.0 version. Luckily, however, this doesn’t exist with files originally created in PowerPoint.

Compatibility

As far as compatibility goes otherwise, I haven’t noticed any difference in the look of my slides as I switch between PowerPoint and Impress. The only thing that is keeping the new 2.0 version of Impress from matching PowerPoint is the lack of slide backgrounds and clip art that really are essential to making a good presentation. Background designs and clip art used to make a PowerPoint slideshow do, however, open in Impress without problems. That said, I still prefer PowerPoint for making professional-looking presentations because of all the predefined design backgrounds and clip art.

Calc
Calc is the other OpenOffice program that I’ve gotten mixed results with. It works perfectly by itself, but I’ve had multiple problems in the past with compatibility between it and Excel that have led me to generally stay away from it. The main compatibility problems I’ve encountered with Calc lie in Excel graphs and charts. They have a tendency to be moved where they aren’t supposed to be or become garbled in the conversion. That said, as long as you don’t have to move back and forth between Excel and Calc you shouldn’t have any problems with it.

Bottom Line:
Overall, I’ve found OpenOffice to be a fine MS Office replacement for my needs. OpenOffice’s word processor is more than ready for prime time. As for the other components, I generally wouldn’t recommend using them in an environment where it was important to maintain compatibility with Microsoft products. Granted, most of my experience with OpenOffice’s compatibility is from 1.0-1.1.4, it has shaken me enough to be wary of relying on it for any serious work with Excel. Impress is the one place where OpenOffice could use the most improvement. I would highly recommend you stick with Excel unless you don’t need MS’s built-in clip art or their well-made design backgrounds. When it comes down to it, OpenOffice is worth looking at. If most of what you do is word processing, I think you’ll be very pleasantly surprised and you can’t beat the price. OpenOffice is the ideal office suite for students like me on a tight budget. My school even offers students copies of MS Office for $25 and I never bothered to get one since, for me, it would just be a waste of $25. Note: This review was written using OpenOffice.

Alice Adds: For those bashing David, let’s keep in mind he is not saying this is an enterprise solution. I think he went over the pros and cons for all audiences, but for the average PC buyer - especially as we had into back to school sales and promotions, trying OpenOffice may be a better use of your $400 or so instead of springing for MS Office.

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PC Mag’s verdict:
“If you can remember the name of OpenOffice.org, you can remember where to download it for no charge. If you tried the previous 1.1.4 version, the 2.0 beta version currently available will be a pleasant surprise. Unlike the slow, ugly, and underpowered earlier version, 2.0 is swift, smooth, and highly compatible with Office documents. Even better, it has plenty of features that you can’t find in MS Office itself.

Read more »

Arctic could see ice-free summers in 100 years

Ice-free summers--a phenomenon that hasn't occurred in the Arctic in a million years--could become a reality in a century because of warming trends, researchers said.

Looking at data on the rate of ice melt in the Arctic, researchers from the University of Arizona and other universities concluded that the rate is accelerating and that no foreseeable natural forces will counteract that acceleration. As a result, ice-free summers loom.

The situation will have worldwide ecological impact, the researchers said. The progressive melt will cause sea levels worldwide to rise, flooding coastal areas, where a substantial portion of the world's population lives. Huge sections of Bangladesh, for example, consist of river delta at sea level. The melt could also thaw permafrost, which could lead to an increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The increasing rate of ice melt is already having some impact on people and animals in the Arctic. Other researchers have speculated that the progressing ice melt around Siberia may lead to a summer Northeast passage connecting Japan to Europe in a decade or so.

Some researchers have also speculated that sea levels may rise nearly a foot in 100 years.

Rising sea levels, and global warming in general, are, however, issues that are passionately debated in scientific and political circles.

The climate of the Arctic region has veered from deep ice ages where glaciers covered huge swaths of North America and Europe to somewhat warmer periods. By studying ice cores and marine sediment, scientists have put together a picture of the natural climate envelope for the region for the past million years.

Arctic climate is largely determined by the interplay of three different feedback loops: the interaction between sea and land ice; ocean circulation in the North Atlantic; and precipitation and evaporation. Shifts in the balance of these factors lead inexorably to larger changes.

For example, the white surface of sea ice reflects radiation from the sun. However, as sea ice melts, more solar radiation is absorbed by the dark ocean, which heats up and results in yet more sea ice melting.

While some of these factors could cause the rate of the melt to slow, none appear strong enough to reverse the current situation, the researchers said.

"I think probably the biggest surprise of the meeting was that no one could envision any interaction between the components that would act naturally to stop the trajectory to the new system," said Jonathan Overpeck, a geoscientist at the University of Arizona and the lead author on the paper.

The report was published in the Aug. 23 edition of Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union.

source:http://news.com.com/Arctic+could+see+ice-free+summers+in+100+years/2100-7337_3-5842814.html


Xtreme Defense

Lightning guns, heat rays, weapons that can make you hear the voice of God. This is what happens when the war on terror meets the entrepreneurial spirit

By Sharon Weinberger
Sunday, August 28, 2005; W18

"This is very clandestine," Pete Bitar whispered, as his red Dodge Caravan idled in the parking lot of a Burger King near Fort Belvoir. "They called last week, and they wanted delivery this week."

It did feel a little clandestine, if a bit unlikely. Yet there, in the Burger King parking lot, a small transaction in America's war on terror was about to take place. In the minivan were Bitar, the president and founder of Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems (XADS), Edward Fry, the company's research coordinator, and George Gibbs, of Marine Corps Systems Command, who two years ago plucked Bitar's obscure company out of its paper existence and provided it with more than half a million dollars in Pentagon funding.

They were waiting for Superman.

Bitar had battled start-up disappointments and even ridicule -- not to mention January cold and Beltway rush-hour traffic -- to seal his first Pentagon deal. The procurement order had gone through so quickly that the Indiana-based Bitar, who was in town for a conference, agreed to make his final delivery at the Burger King to avoid the hassle of getting onto the Virginia Army base.

Bitar flipped open a case containing his first sale: the "dazzler," one in a line of about a half-dozen "nonlethal" weapons that XADS is marketing to the military. It looked like an executive pen: slick, green and flecked with gold. But the pen was really a green laser designed to disorient and temporarily blind an enemy. Sale price: $1,100 apiece.

It looked, to use one of Bitar's favorite phrases, really cool.

Bitar glanced up. "There's Superman."

Sure enough, a broad-shouldered man materialized in front of the Caravan. He was wearing a leather jacket embroidered with the familiar "S" emblem and a matching tie.

Superman stuck out his hand and introduced himself: Shane Gilmore. Pentagon folks seem especially fond of quirky nicknames and are not above cultivating that mystique. Asked about the Kryptonian symbols, he'd say only, "I'm Superman." But today he wasn't saving the world, just trying to protect it as part of an Army task force buying equipment for troops in Iraq. They had placed an order for 13 of Bitar's dazzlers. Supercharged versions of commercial laser pointers, dazzlers are the lowest-tech of Bitar's weapons, and they're not what initially caught the Pentagon's eye. Rather, it was his concept for a gun that could shoot bolts of artificial lightning to paralyze, but not kill, an enemy, like a "Star Trek" phaser set on stun.

After handing over the goods, Bitar explained his unusual entry into the high-tech weapons market as he headed into Arlington for dinner. The lightning gun began, literally, as a daydream when Bitar was running a Styrofoam recycling business in the early 1990s. Watching the machinery that cut up the used material, he noticed sparks shooting into the air. He began to wonder, at first idly and then more intensely, if there was a way to extend the sparks' range.

But he had no engineering or technical expertise, and his speculation went nowhere.

A decade later, Bitar was no closer to becoming an experimental weapons entrepreneur. But he did have a new business, founded largely to fund an "extreme" hobby of his, powered paragliding. The idea was to turn enthusiasts of the sport -- who strap motors to their backs, take off running, then yank open a parachute -- into flying billboards. He called it XADS -- for "Xtreme Ads," as in advertising.

Undeterred by his lack of engineering qualifications, he began to apply for Department of Defense research and development contracts set aside for small businesses. Bitar started out pitching an idea related to his paragliding business involving a parachute design. But no one at the Pentagon was biting. Then one day, Bitar learned that the Pentagon was seeking ideas for a taser gun. It was like being struck by lightning. He dusted off his decade-old idea and, in 2002, was granted a contract to develop his lightning gun. Suddenly, he needed a new name for his company. "Xtreme Advertising" would sound pretty silly at defense trade shows. Fortuitously, XADS had a handy "D" for Defense.

Now his company consists of two full-time employees, himself and Fry, but he hires physicists and engineers as consultants to design and build the parts for his weapons that aren't commercially available. His job is to be the visionary. "I call myself the glue -- I kind of had the idea and vision of what it could be," Bitar said.

Back in his lab in Anderson, Ind., Bitar has a large apparatus -- 11 feet high -- that shoots sparks about 16 feet. It's too large and cumbersome to be a portable weapon; he thinks it could be used for securing U.S. embassies. He also produces smaller units -- dubbed "StunStrike" -- that he says shoot four-foot bolts of lightning.

His prototype for a rifle weighs about 25 pounds and can shoot electricity about 12 feet, he says.

Gibbs, the Marine Corps official who first funded Bitar, has a fondness for edgy ideas. A chemical engineer and longtime proponent of nonlethal weaponry, Gibbs funds other offbeat projects, such as Medusa, an attempt to develop a weapon that uses low-power microwaves -- believed to cause an audible buzzing in subjects' heads -- to make people think God is speaking to them. Another such weapon would use beams of energy to make people dizzy and lose their balance.

Gibbs acknowledges that electrical engineers in his office said that Bitar's lightning gun would never fly because of a variety of technical hurdles. But, he says, he figured "it was minimal risk to the Marine Corps to try it." He gave XADS the initial $100,000 (that's "minimal risk" in Pentagonese). Bitar was able to prove, by the end of the nine-month contract, that he could generate a one-foot spark with some degree of control, which led to more funding.

Striding into a Lebanese restaurant at Pentagon Row, Bitar greeted the servers in fluent Arabic. "Pete, you never cease to amaze me," Gibbs said to Bitar, as the group was guided to a quiet booth in the back.

Bitar traces his interest in nonlethal weapons to his heritage as a Christian Arab. His father was born in Syria, his mother in Lebanon and he in Michigan. "We're sitting in an Arabic restaurant, speaking Arabic. Honestly, it gives me a little bit of an ad-vantage," he said. "I can think the way a Middle Eastern mind thinks. I understand where they're coming from. So, we can design tactical solutions that deal with that."

Lightning, for example, is a very big fear for Arabs, Bitar contends. Peter Bechtold, the head of Near East studies at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, was dubious that Arabs would be more frightened than anyone else by lightning guns. "It sounds strange," Bechtold said, when presented with Bitar's idea. But ideas are what Bitar overflows with. His latest is to use ultrasonic waves in the dazzler not to just blind enemies, but also to convey messages into their heads, similar to Gibbs's Medusa project. Hearing voices from God is a "big thing" in Arab culture, according to Bitar. "We flash-blind them. And, while their eyes are shut, you could send a recorded message or deep guttural voice that echoes in the inside of their head. They're looking around, 'Hey, did you hear that?'''

Bitar laughed. "That's the psych warfare side of this thing."

Suddenly serious, he leaned back. "You know, I'm a Christian, and I just believe in preserving life," he said. "Yet, preserving it in the context of order, law and force, if needed."

Gibbs interrupted Bitar's soliloquy as dinner arrived. "What if I say grace before we eat?" he asked.

With soft Arabic music playing in the background, Bitar and Fry lowered their heads as Gibbs began: "Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this marvelous meal. We thank you for this opportunity we have to share with each other and do great stuff for our country."

After grace, Bitar resumed with his vision of bloodless warfare. Hostage situations would be as easy as hosing down a whole group of people with the lightning gun, and "then you could separate them out: hostages and non-hostages," he said.

"Um, just the capability to employ force, achieve American objectives and protect ourselves and yet not kill," he said.

"I mean, this whole war on terror, that's exactly what we have to do. We have to be able to minimize our collateral damage because, frankly, we can't afford for the whole world to hate us for very long."

"They always will," Gibbs interrupted again.

Over the past year, Bitar has received almost $1 million to develop his weapons. That includes money from the Marine Corps, a contract from the Navy and a smaller amount of matching funds from the state of Indiana. Of all the products Bitar is developing, he describes a handheld lightning gun as the "Holy Grail." But there is at least one barrier he hasn't even approached.

"We haven't done human testing," Bitar said.

"We haven't done animal testing," Gibbs added.

"Yeah, not officially," Bitar said with a sly smile. He would not elaborate on any unofficial testing.

Anyone happening upon the Quantico Marine Base in April might have thought someone was staging a county fair. Brightly striped canopies crowded the grounds, and concessionary booths advertised snow cones, nachos and ice-cold sodas, as visitors milled about and long lines formed for barbecue and hot dogs.

This was the Force Protection Equipment Demonstration, or FPED, the world's largest trade show for counterterrorism technology. Instead of local crafts and game booths, vendors offered the opportunity to check out the latest in bomb containment devices, among other things. Booth after booth of space-age decontamination suits, newfangled barriers, advanced sensors, X-ray machines, weapons and data destruction devices clamored for people's attention, even as a discordant mix of Bond music and reveille drowned out conversation.

One booth allowed visitors the chance to shoot high-powered pepper balls at dummies. Taser International, the country's largest manufacturer of stun guns, was demonstrating its weapon on any willing takers, provided they'd sign a liability release form. Taser's stun gun (which delivers an electric charge through wires attached to two darts) works by disrupting the body's nervous system, immobilizing its victim. By mid-morning, Taser had more than a dozen volunteers, including Sergio, a dark-haired young man whose friends cheered and laughed as he sat in a chair to be zapped, one leg flying up straight in front of him as the jolt hit his body.

The expo is a testament to the entrepreneurial spirit of America, but it's also a vision of its future: a nation mired in barriers and locks, fitted out with all-seeing sensors and closed-circuit television, where terrorism, as one company's slogan goes, "is reduced to a minor inconvenience."

Even among military trade shows, FPED is unique. With only five major companies left in the U.S. weapons market, most of today's military expos feature an orderly array of brightly colored PowerPoint briefings displayed next to plastic mockups of weapons. With so few companies, the jockeying of a typical trade show is absent.

FPED, in contrast, harks back to a different era: the 1980s and the Cold War, when an imminent threat of annihilation fueled a market full of companies competing for a slice of the Pentagon's budget. What started off after the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia as a show for a few dozen specialized companies has today grown to more than 500 vendors crowding two massive aircraft hangars and an entire airfield.

The counterterrorism business is booming. And for those who want to break into the market, FPED is the place. The expo was closed to the public, but representatives of law enforcement and military agencies crowded the grounds, shopping for the latest technology. Traffic into the huge base was backed up for more than two miles on the first day of the three-day show.

XADS's 10-by-10 booth was set up at the back of the first hangar; a table in front displayed an assortment of the company's latest products, including its full line of laser dazzlers. XADS had also added a new acoustic weapon called Screech, which true to its name emits an ear-piercing shriek designed to disperse crowds and cause headaches, Bitar said.

The most striking feature of the XADS booth, at first glance, was a framed poster, mounted on a pedestal, that Bitar called concept art. On it, dark, vaguely Middle Eastern-looking men attack a U.S. Embassy, only to writhe in pain as giant bolts of XADS lightning hit them. A graphic artist who draws for GI Joe and Spider-Man comics designed the poster.

But the star attraction was a simple black briefcase that Bitar promised would shoot lightning bolts. He and Fry placed the briefcase (innocuous-looking, if you ignored the pointed needle a few inches long sticking out the side) on top of a carpeted podium, plugged it into a wall socket and flipped a switch. Then they stood back.

Iridescent streaks of purple lightning snaked out of the briefcase, accompanied by the deafening rattle of what sounded like an M-16, and even in the noisy hangar, conversations momentarily ceased.

"It looks like something out of a 1950s movie," one onlooker commented.

Bitar's technology is based on a technique pioneered more than 100 years ago by the eccentric Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla. The StunStrike uses an electrical charge to break down the air in front of the weapon to create a path for sparks generated by a "resonant transformer," better known as a Tesla coil. Unlike a typical Tesla coil, however, Bitar's invention uses electronics to tune and direct the spark stream. It goes about four feet.

"We can tune it all the way down so it feels like broom bristles, and all the way up to knock you down," Bitar informed a group of gawkers.

Electricity that shoots out even a few feet is enough to grab people's attention. A small, wiry man wearing a CIA badge and a lanyard emblazoned with "In-Q-Tel," the agency's venture capital arm, stopped at the booth. He paused to look at the lightning, nodded approvingly and picked up a business card before moving on.

Many of the vendors at the expo were strikingly similar to Bitar: men with ambitious ideas who entered the counterterrorism market as a second career. George Cairnes, a former pilot, is now selling full-body restraining cuffs. The elaborate bondage gear was developed for police as an alternative to "hog-tying," and is being used by the military, according to Cairnes. He said he had an order for 200 going to Guantanamo Bay. Joe Villa, a mechanical engineer, founded US Bunkers, a Florida-based company specializing in flying saucer-shaped mini-fortresses that can fit in your back yard. Villa conceived the idea after 1992's Hurricane Andrew as a way to protect people and property from violent storms, but he, too, is expanding into the counterterrorism market: Imagine a safe room to be used after a biochemical attack; the company points out it could also double as a sauna. A promotional poster depicts a family grilling next to a bunker.

With so many vendors, drawing visitors to individual displays -- particularly visitors with money -- is cutthroat competition. Charles Smith, a former Nokia salesman, persuaded a childhood friend from Texas, an attractive blonde, to stand with him at his booth. His strategy appeared to work, as a crowd assembled to look at the blonde, and Smith's product, a desktop machine designed to drill holes through computer drives, destroying sensitive data.

Hesco Bastion, the world's largest manufacturer of sand-filled barricades (ubiquitous in Iraq and Afghanistan to shield against attacks), took a similar route: It hired midriff-baring models to serve soft drinks from a bar made of its sandbags. The show's organizers wouldn't let them serve beer.

Some vendors go negative. Grant Haber, a former police officer and now a distributor of bomb-proof trash cans designed for subways and other public places, hung out by the press trailer, trying to entice a reporter to examine his file of allegations against a rival manufacturer "They've been fraudulent," he said, clutching the folder. "I have proof of falsified test reports."

Back at Bitar's booth, the draw was StunStrike. When the crowd would thin, all Bitar had to do was flip the switch, and people would flock to the booth.

At noon on the second day, XADS captured the attention of a VIP. Marine Corps Col. David Karcher, who heads the Pentagon's Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate, stopped to watch the demonstration, and promised to return.

The vendors' eyes followed Karcher, a man who controls $55 million in annual funding, as he walked slowly past the exhibits, explaining his role: He pays firms to develop nonlethal technology and to test it against strict Pentagon and international standards. For example, his office helped develop the Active Denial System, a weapon that uses millimeter waves -- a supercharged version of microwaves -- to heat up the skin's nerve endings, creating a burning sensation similar to touching a 100-watt light bulb. Except the beam, while painful, does not actually burn the skin.

The weapon was only recently declassified, and the Pentagon still won't divulge how far the beam goes, but Karcher says it could be used to control crowds at feeding stations in countries like Somalia and Iraq. "Often you see the people pushing their way to the front of the crowd are young men," he said. "They'll push women and children out of the way."

Karcher pointed to a demo of the system set up at Raytheon's booth. No required release forms here; Raytheon took a more direct approach: self-infliction. "We can't do it to you, but if you want to do it to yourself," the vendor said, handing over a control switch.

When a reporter hesitated, Karcher quickly offered up his own hand. "Press the button," he instructed. The invisible beam clicked on.

"I put my hand there, it starts to hurt, I take my hand way," Karcher explained calmly as he slowly slid his arm away from the beam. The point, he continued, is not to hurt someone, but simply to force a particular action, or to condition a response.

"Sort of like Pavlov's dogs," interrupted the enthusiastic Raytheon vendor.

Comparing humans to dogs who salivate on command didn't seem to sit well with Karcher, who winced. The Pentagon's nonlethal work, particularly that which relies on pain, is under intense public scrutiny and subject to international legal conventions. But the main problem with the Active Denial System, and similar directed energy weapons, is size, according to Karcher. Now the weapon goes on a Humvee, but the military is finding that troops in Iraq want smaller, handheld devices -- phasers.

But it's precisely those goals -- small and long-range weapons -- that place phaser technology, at least for now, in the realm of science fiction. The largest lightning guns in the XADS lab are too big to be mobile weapons, and while the rifle has generated sparks of up to 12 feet, Bitar says, the system has blown out repeatedly and isn't stable beyond four feet.

The military would like something that can go 30 to 100 feet. "We can fire a taser and be very effective at 15 feet," Karcher said. But 15 feet is almost "knife fight" range, he added, and in that case, troops may want a more lethal option, like a rifle.

But for every naysaying expert, there always seems to be a Pentagon official who believes the risk is worthwhile. Franz Gayl, one of the officials who contacted Bitar after hearing about XADS from news accounts, agrees there are barriers to a lighting gun, but he argues for helping nascent companies. The concept of a lightning gun, though risky, offers a potential payoff, according to Gayl. He noted a military officer who built a Tesla coil weapon, claiming to have tested it by shooting it "into the grille of an annoying rude driver in a traffic jam."

Back at the show, Bitar looked bitterly across the way at Raytheon, which was handing out customized jars of spicy hot fajita powder to promote its "burning" nonlethal weapon. Other experienced venders dished out logo-inscribed chocolate and pens. XADS had only postcard- size brochures and business cards.

It was the end of the third day, and still no sales. A man who introduced himself as a buyer for the Turkish military asked if he could get a free sample of Bitar's lasers, or barring that, could he borrow one and return it if the Turkish military wasn't interested. Bitar said that wasn't likely.

"We're not going to do that," Bitar chuckled. "We're not Wal-Mart."

But Bitar noticed that foreign militaries were the most interested in his weapons, and officials from Asia, the Middle East and Europe had all visited his booth. "It's kind of weird, especially because when it comes to weapons, you'd rather arm your own country than someone else," he said.

But he shrugged and added, "A customer is a customer."

Toward the end of the expo, Bitar was demonstrating the lightning gun when he suddenly recoiled in pain. "It bit him," Fry said with a note of concern. One of the electric tentacles had reached around and grabbed Bitar. He rubbed his shoulder. Since electricity seeks the quickest route to complete its circuit, it will reach out and touch the first thing that's grounded, such as a person holding the gun.

Bitar appeared unusually downbeat. He'd been standing for three days straight at the booth, and he was worried about how to keep his business going. Even with $1 million total in start-up funds, he'd have to close shop in about six months if he didn't get orders. "I didn't sleep well last night," he acknowledged. "Busy thinking about things, like how to get through to the Joint Nonlethal Directorate, so they take us a little more seriously."

At dinner the night before, Bitar's confidence -- shaken by the competition at the show-- seemed to ebb. He would be turning 40 soon. The initial success of XADS allowed his wife to stay home with their young son. His bravado momentarily gone, he talked about his previous businesses, which, while not failures, had not really been successes either. The Styrofoam recycling company sold at break even, and his parachute logo business barely made a profit.

Back at the show, Bitar sighed. "You get all this stuff going against us."

But a few minutes later, he was uptempo again.

"I just think we're only limited by our funding," Bitar said, pausing to pack up the cartoon poster of their weapons. "We could do so much more than the big companies." He pointed to the Raytheon booth. "These guys are burning your hand at 10 feet away with $50 million worth of research."

He gestured to the StunStrike. "We've got $10,000 worth of research in that thing, and we can do the exact same thing."

Pausing, he added, "Okay, we haven't been through all the studies and testing because we haven't had all the money to put into it."

Bitar's concerns are not just about big companies like Raytheon, but also about his nemesis Ionatron, a start-up backed partly by investment from the CIA venture capital fund. Ionatron, whose weapons are based on a similar concept for channeling lightning, was founded in 2002, and its stock is now worth more than half a billion dollars on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Unlike Bitar, who won his early contracts through a competitive process, Ionatron's most significant contract, for $12.6 million, came through a congressional line item, which typically requires high-level lobbying. Another difference from XADS: Ionatron would like the nonlethal lightning guns to be, if necessary, lethal.

But both companies face an age-old problem with harnessing lightning: It is notoriously difficult to control. Making it go straight and far requires breaking down the air, like drilling a path through wood for a nail. Creating this path for any more than a few feet presents a formidable challenge.

Bitar's idea for doing this, like Ionatron's, is to use pulsed lasers to create a conductive path ahead of the lightning. A pioneer in this method is a New Mexico-based physicist named Jean-Claude Diels. The Belgian-born scientist says he started his research not to build "zap guns," as he calls them, but to prevent deaths from lightning, which kills on average 67 people a year in the United States, according to the National Weather Service. But the military was never terribly interested in his work, he said, and nonmilitary funding for research is hard to come by these days.

Now caught in a bind, Diels takes money from Ionatron. He doubts it would be possible to shrink the weapon down to the size of a pistol, although he believes a portable system, such as one mounted on a car, is possible.

"It's taking a disturbing turn," Diels said with a sigh. "I feel a little bit like the German scientists of the Third Reich, who have no option but to do this research because that's what the government funds."

What's wrong with the idea of a stun gun? "This nonlethal technology, I mean, aimed at electrocuting a crowd of protesters?" he said. "That's not really appetizing, I must say."

As the spectators at FPED thinned out, Bitar started to pack up, and Fry went to get the car. They'd be back in town the next week for another show, but Fry needed to return home for an exam: He's getting a master's degree in theology and peace studies. On the way out, Fry looked back at the weapons bazaar and shook his head.

Toward the front, a banner for Hawaiian Shaved Ice had fallen askew.

Perhaps what makes U.S. military trade shows seem so incongruous is that they treat their market -- war and terrorism -- as if it were plastics, medical supplies or textiles. And Bitar is just another entrepreneur. Despite his lack of big orders, back in Indiana a couple months later, he enthused over his company's progress. Field reports from Iraq on his dazzlers were "stellar," he said, and several Pentagon offices had placed small trial orders. A European television crew wanted to follow him around for six months.

The Pentagon also is preparing for the first time to buy large numbers of commercial dazzlers from several manufacturers and give them to troops in Iraq. Gayl, the Pentagon official who has supported Bitar's work, cautions now that he is concerned that some companies, including XADS, are making lasers so intense that they would permanently blind the people they target. The XADS lasers "are way out of line," Gayl said recently.

Bitar adamantly disagrees that his lasers will cause permanent blindness, saying they are eye-safe, if used properly. It's a key point for his company, since the StunStrike weapon has slipped to the back burner, and the dazzlers' time appears to have arrived. Bitar said he was negotiating with what he called a major supplier for the military and law enforcement on a new version of XADS's dazzler. The PD/G-105 is a souped-up laser that would be twice as powerful as the ones Bitar sold at the Burger King back in January.

The supplier, Bitar said, was looking at orders in the tens of thousands.

"It'll totally kick butt," he said.

Sharon Weinberger is writing a book about the Pentagon and fringe science, to be published by Nation Books next year.

source:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/23/AR2005082301227_pf.html


Adobe, Macromedia Shareholders Give Merger High Five

Adobe and Macromedia say they now have the shareholder votes needed to complete their proposed $3.4 billion merger.

The deal, announced in early April, is slated to close this fall pending government approval. On Thursday, the companies said nearly 99 percent of the outstanding Adobe and Macromedia shares voted were cast in favor of the deal.

Adobe's powerful PDF franchise and Macromedia's ubiquitous Flash presence on PCs, Macs and other devices could make the combined company a prodigious counterweight even to Microsoft, several observers said.

Macromedia has said that the penetration of its Flash media player on nearly every PC, portable and cell phone makes it even more common than Windows -- a claim that few analysts dispute. Most people who Web surf have Flash on their machines without perhaps knowing it.

While the companies have remained mum on product plans, observers say there are clues to future directions. Macromedia is already dropping Freehand, for example, from its new Macromedia Studio 8 toolset.

"There are two applications, one in each company's product line, that could be considered superfluous after a deal -- Adobe GoLive and Macromedia Freehand," said Sandee Cohen, a New York-based author and expert on graphical tools from both companies.

"GoLive has never had anywhere near the market share that [Macromedia] Dreamweaver has, so it would be silly for Adobe to continue spending resources on GoLive," she said, noting that Adoble is more likely to put GoLive in maintenance mode.

But while Adobe Illustrator dominates the professional graphics market, Freehand poses a more difficult problem since there are still pockets of heavy use around the world, she added. "My personal view is that Freehand will be dropped or sold," said Cohen. "When Macromedia became a Web-focused company, it let Freehand languish."

That paring down could be a bonus for VARs and third-party developers, she said. "In vector graphics, writing for both Illustrator and Freehand is a massive undertaking. Now maybe they can write for just one."

James Burke, president of Mind's Eye, a Boston-based developer of Web-based applications, and a Macromedia partner is bullish on the merger. "From a partner perspective, we rely heavily on [Macromedia] Cold Fusion [and] Flex -- the server products. And from what we've heard so far, it looks positive. They're keeping those products alive and healthy. Now we'll have additional opportunities to talk to some Adobe customers," he said.

source:http://www.crn.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CKLTCFYF0JQW2QSNDBGCKHSCJUMEKJVN?articleID=170100800


Google Seeks to Develop Parallel Internet?

"As reported on On the Media and Business 2.0, Google appears to be purchasing dark (unused) fiber optic cable across the United States with the intention of building its own alternative parallel internet that would presumably be called GoogleNet. Possessing such a thing could allow Google to offer internet access in the form of free wifi or other means and create a powerful captive marketing audience which Google could monopolize. Outside of these marketing opportunities, such a development in infrastructure could help reduce Google's long-term content delivery costs were it to take on more bandwidth-intensive activities in the future."

source:http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/28/2156233&tid=217&tid=230&tid=193

The Invasion of the Chinese Cyberspies (And the Man Who Tried to Stop Them)

"Time Magazine has an article up entitled 'The Invasion Of The Chinese Cyberspies and the Man Who Tried to Stop Them', which outlines how Chinese PRC is cracking DOD networks and downloading massive sets of files detailing every aspect of military planning and practice." From the article: "The hackers he was stalking, part of a cyberespionage ring that federal investigators code-named Titan Rain, first caught Carpenter's eye a year earlier when he helped investigate a network break-in at Lockheed Martin in September 2003. A strikingly similar attack hit Sandia several months later, but it wasn't until Carpenter compared notes with a counterpart in Army cyberintelligence that he suspected the scope of the threat. Methodical and voracious, these hackers wanted all the files they could find, and they were getting them by penetrating secure computer networks at the country's most sensitive military bases, defense contractors and aerospace companies."

source:http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/28/1745245&tid=172&tid=123&tid=219

Plasma Displays: An Overview

Since the day television was invented, TV technology has certainly been refined quite a bit, but the core concept has remained the same. Even today most of the televisions are built on the age old Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) technology which no doubt has been modified to make bigger, better screens to give a larger crisper picture and subsequently, a much better viewing experience. There are limitations to CRT that are being felt increasingly as the need for higher resolution televisions increase each day. For instance, consider that even the lowest resolution that you can get on the computer monitor you are viewing is 640x480 whereas the best resolution that the finest analog TV can give you is a maximum of 480 horizontal lines. Compare this to at least 1024x768 resolution that we are used to seeing on our desktops and you can see why there is such a hue and cry about finding a whole new system for televisions.

The search and the subsequent research has led to quite a lot of technologies and standards being spewed out of labs, and of course add to that the conundrum of interlaced, progressive, high-definition and other such standards. Needless to say, you have nice soup that no one is sure consists of what exactly. At CoolTechZone.com, we have been doing a technology series to bring to you the various options that are available, and one of the strongest contenders is Plasma Display. The most amazing aspect of plasma TVs, apart from the new attractive technology they use instead of the mundane CRT, is that they are the same size or larger than the largest CRTs with their width averaging approximately four inches.

Principle:

If you have any idea as to how a television works, you will know that RGB or Red, Green and Blue are the three basic colors that combine in various amounts to give you all the colors in the spectrum. The core concept in plasmas is the same: manipulation of the RGB elements to display an image on the screen.

So, what exactly is plasma? Plasma by definition is one of the four states of matter (apart from solid, liquid and gas) and consists of positively and negatively charged particles, which are added in roughly the same quantity. This obviously makes the gas more or less inert but ensures that the charged particles are free to conduct electricity. Plasma can be produced if a gas is energized enough to split the molecules into positive and negatively charged ions. Mostly, the plasma displays use a mixture of noble gases like Neon and Xenon.

Imagine you have plasma inside a covered vessel (this is not entirely possibly but just for the sake of an example, imagine…). When electricity is passed into the plasma, the electrons from the current (free electrons moving around is basically how current travels) collide with the inert atoms and result in the ionization (ionization signifies that the atom no longer consists equal number of positively and negatively charged particles but one or the other has the upper hand) of the atom.

The negatively charged ions are attracted towards the positive electrode of the battery while the positively charged ions are attracted towards the negative electrode of the battery. While the particles are moving towards the appropriate battery terminal, they may or may not collide with each other. If they do collide, then it leads to the dropping of electrons from one state of energy to another, which results in releasing light photons in the process (If you have read our Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) Technology: An Overview, you already know how the LED lights produce light photons. The concept is pretty similar here.).

Now the problem in plasma (unlike OLED) is that the light photons thus released belong to the Ultraviolet band and are therefore invisible to human eyes. This was where researchers got hitched until someone came up and suggested that they use these UV photons to incite visible light photons. Now to better understand this concept, lets look at how a normal plasma display is constructed.

Construction:

The plasma televisions of today use Xenon and Neon gases inside. There are two sheets of glass that sandwich between them, thousands and thousands of tiny little cells filled with a mixture of Xenon and Neon. Each of these cells can be considered a pixel and is further divided into three sub-pixels or cells, each making up one of the three colors (Red, Green or Blue). Along the glass plates, these cells are surrounded by electrodes on both sides; the electrodes along the glass plate at the rear are called address electrodes. The electrodes in the front are of course made of transparent material (to facilitate seeing the emitted photons, of course) and are covered in insulating material to prevent conduction of electricity outside the display, which would otherwise give users a disturbing shock.

Both electrode sets, in conjunction with each other, span the entire screen creating a grid similar to active matrix displays. In order to ionize the gas in any cell, electric current is passed through the electrodes forming the cell a few thousand times within a second. Each time a different colored cell is charged, this charges the atoms and converts them to ions and facilitates the release of UV photons due to the ionic collision.

The inside wall of the cell is meted with a special treatment of a phosphor coating. This is done to exploit the phosphors property of giving out light when it comes in contact with other light.

Since the UV photons are released inside the cell, they hit this phosphor and one of the phosphor’s electrons gets an energy boost and heats up, thus jumping to a higher energy state. Since the hit from the photon is not a continuous process, in the sense that once it has hit an electron, that electron will not get additional energy, the electron comes back to its original state and gives up some of the energy it has which is of course released in the form of a light photon, only this time, they are in the visible spectrum.

The concept of RGB is attained by coating three sub-cells (remember how each cell in the matrix was sub divided into three smaller cells?) with red, green and blue coatings respectively, so whichever color is required, that sub cell is charged. Of course, if you need more colors, you’ll need to mix and match the RGB cells to give the final color to the pixel. This process is repeated cell after cell and pixel after pixel to give you the final brilliantly bright picture that you see on a plasma TV.

This in essence is how plasma TV displays images. An interesting offshoot of this technology is the great viewing angle. This is because each pixel is lit up individually from within, which ensures that we are able to view it from most angles.

The main advantage apart from the great viewing angle is the fact that the displays are amazingly slim and have the most awesome flaunt value in your living or TV room, however, the style comes at a pretty steep price with a 42-inch screen costing you between $1500 to $2000.

Plasma technology definitely holds great promise for the future but as with all "emerging" technologies, prices need to come down for mass acceptance, which is required for mass production, faster market adoption rate and overall product costs. However, until prices are somewhat lower than they are currently, hopefully manufacturers will refine and advance Plasma TVs to make them a desirable option.

source:http://www.cooltechzone.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1733&Itemid=0&limit=1&limitstart=2


Yet Another Method Of Achieving Nuclear Fusion

"Recent research has seen the use of the pyroelectric effect, the compression of bubbles using ultrasound and gas jet irradiation for producing nuclear fusion on small tabletop-scales. Yet another method can now be added to the list which uses ultraintense laser irradiation striking a borated plastic target to heat a plasma to billion kelvin temperatures and achieves aneutronic (clean) proton-boron fusion. (The PRL paper can be read online.) Though, like the other recently discovered exotic methods of attaining fusion, it does not look like a method which can be scaled up to ignition or even anywhere near break even, it still may have important use in the laboratory for the examination of such incredibly high temperature plasmas."

source:http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/28/057209&tid=14

Tracking Down a Cell Phone Thief

Last Saturday, MoDaCo (the world's largest smartphone community) held a get-together for their forum members. Unfortunately the positive community spirit was soured by an individual who decided to steal one of the charity raffle prizes - an Orange C550 mobile phone.

On Monday, Paul O'Brien (MoDaCo founder) contacted me with information on the stolen phone's IMEI number. I operate the SPV-Developers community which offers the free online SPV-Services unlock tool for this type of phone. It seemed likely that the thief would attempt to remove the SIMLock using this service in order to switch the phone to a non-UK network - bypassing the UK's IMEI blacklist which renders stolen phones useless.

Initially it seemed like there was little I could do to help. The SPV-Services server was not programmed to log the IMEI numbers of it's users. It seemed like a dead end, until I remembered something. When a user unlocks their phone, our server keeps a backup of the phone's first flash block (kept for a few days, in case the changes need to be reversed). This block contains 64kB of RSA-encrypted data such as the phone's SIMLock state, Carrier ID, and other concealed information - it seemed likely the IMEI would be buried within it. Shortly my suspicion was confirmed - after decrypting the block, the IMEI can be found inside (albeit scrambled with a simple transposition).

I started writing a short script - which would check each backup in turn to see if it originated from the stolen phone. After 30 minutes of writing, testing, and running the script - we had a match! The stolen phone had been unlocked. The creation timestamp on the backup file gave us an exact time - August 21, 2005, 10:18:32 PM.

The next step was cross-referencing this information with our web server logs. When a user uses our software to unlock their phone the software uploads the encrypted block to our server, which sends back a list of modifications which need to be made in order to remove the SIMLock. As we knew the exact time when this happened, we could find the corresponding web server entry :

2005-08-21 22:18:32 POST /services/simlock_2.php - 82.163.137.156
Bingo! I passed this IP address back to Paul who cross-referenced it with Modaco's database. From this, he was able to identify the guilty member. A quick lookup confirmed that the IP was used by the account "Cocky" - a member which had attended the get-together. The event registrations contained the name of our thief, and his mobile number. The next day, Cocky (AKA K. P.) received a short phone call:
Paul: Hi, this is Paul from MoDaCo.
Cocky: Er, Hi.
Paul: You have something of mine, and I want it back.
Not surprisingly, Paul could hear the faint sound of the guy crapping himself at the other end of the line. The phone was returned, via special delivery, the following day. Moral of the story - even if you're enough of a cunt to steal from a charity raffle, don't be fucktarded enough to steal a phone from a community of phone experts.

Related Link: MoDaCo Thread
Other Coverage: NeoWin, Slashdot


source:http://zone-mr.net/?act=entry&id=36

Everyone Is A Hacker In Training

"Michal Zalewski was recently interviewed by O'Reilly's Onlamp. During the interview, he stated a belief that hacking is a state of mind. From the article: 'I don't think that (good) hackers have any special, hardwired mental abilities or specific personality traits, and I do believe you can easily learn to think like a hacker, even when you come from a different background.'" The interview goes on to discuss the overall need for better security in protocols and communications.

source:http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/27/1845200&tid=95&tid=166&tid=172&tid=11

Has Google Peaked?

The Biggest Threat to Microsoft Might Not Be Those G-men at All, but Apple

By Robert X. Cringely

Standing in line at the bank not long ago, I was behind a young man who insisted on maintaining a distance from the person in front of him of about 10 feet. The queue was perhaps 20 feet long and right in the middle was this 10-foot gap. I was in no hurry, I thought. That gap was not going to cause me to get to the teller more than a second or so later than I might if the gap was closed. No problem.

Only it WAS a problem. As the minutes passed that gap started to drive me insane. Finally I asked the kid to move forward.

"It was making you crazy, right?" he asked, clearly enjoying the moment.

Which brings me to Google.

What the heck Google is up to is a favorite topic of conversation this week in high tech circles. What's driving this is a combination of things including the new Google Toolbar, Gtalk, but most especially the company's announcement that it will shortly sell another $4 billion in shares. What does Google plan to do with all that money, people are wondering?

Nothing at all.

It's just a hunch of mine, but with more than $2.5 billion in cash already on-hand, I don't think Google has any plans at all for that extra $4 billion. The company just knows that this is the time when it can probably get the most money for the least stock EVER, so selling a few million extra shares now is just a cheap insurance policy against some later day when Wall Street might not be so enamored of the giant search company.

Yes, Google could buy Skype with that kind of money, but Google won't buy Skype. Google prefers to build rather than buy. And when they do buy, what they are buying is market position, and generally at a fairly low price. I don't expect any multi-billion-dollar acquisitions by Google, whether for cash or stock. Larry and Sergey know too well the story of Yahoo's boneheaded purchase of Broadcast.com, making Mark Cuban an instant billionaire and an affliction on both reality TV and the NBA. I blame Yahoo for that, and Google is working hard to learn from Yahoo's mistakes.

What Google WILL do is roll-out incremental products at a blinding pace. Not long ago, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin explained to me that rapid development is an important key to market dominance.

"What you want to do," he said, "is listen to your customers and bring out every two weeks improved versions that would each take your competitor two months to complete. That's when you are on a rocket -- they can't keep up so they can't compete. They lose hope and pretty soon you have the market pretty much to yourself."

That pace of technical development, which probably isn't sustainable for long at any company, isn't POSSIBLE at all at more mature companies like AOL, Yahoo, and especially Microsoft. That adolescent energy is the mojo that makes a startup scarier to Bill Gates than a mature competitor. He knows that if Microsoft ever takes a big dive, it will be because of a Google, not a Yahoo, and certainly not an AOL.

Google plays on its technical reputation even though, if you look closely, it isn't always deserved. Many Google products haven't been revved since they were introduced. And while some Google products are excellent, some aren't, too.

Google likes to play the Black Box game. What are they DOING in all those buildings with all those PhDs? I'm sure they are doing a lot that will change the world, but just as much that will never even be seen by the world. For the moment, though, it doesn't matter because Google can play the spoiler. They offered a gigabyte of e-mail storage, for example, at a time when they had perhaps one percent the number of e-mail users as a Hotmail or Yahoo. And by limiting the Gmail beta, they avoided the suffering of both those other companies when they, too, had to increase their storage allocations, but for tens of millions of real users.

Now Google will do something similar for chat and VoIP with Gtalk, pushing the others toward an interoperability that undermines the hold each company thinks it has on its users.

Google likes being a mystery, too. They are famously paranoid, sure, but they'd be a lot less paranoid if it didn't make them famous. Google, like Microsoft, is a brand built at least partially on envy, which you know is a sin. But at Google, at least, they seem to get a lot of pleasure from that sin.

So are they really buying-up all the dark fiber in an effort to build their own Internet? Are they really going to build a data center in Oregon that uses so much power it needs to be next to a hydroelectric dam? Who knows? Who cares? Google needs ever more bandwidth, sure, so dark fiber makes sense to buy when it is probably as cheap as it is ever going to get. And those 30 acres on the Columbia River don't ever have to become anything since they've already paid for themselves by driving Microsoft and the others a little crazy with wondering.

Google is like that kid ahead of me at the bank, driving others mildly insane and enjoying every minute.

Microsoft is totally obsessed with Google because Bill Gates is obsessed with Google. In a way, Bill needs a bogeycompany like Google to motivate the troops, since they are no longer being wowed by Microsoft's stock performance. Not long ago, I spoke with someone from MSN who said the mood there was so tight that his co-workers were acting like "mad dogs."

Bow-wow.

But what if everyone is mainly wrong? What if search and PageRank and AdSense are Google's corporate apex. Most companies would be content with that, but Google isn't supposed to be like most companies. But what if they are? I hear a lot of talk about Google doing deals for video and music distribution, but where are those deals? So far it is all just talk.

I hope Google does pull off a couple more spectacular product feats, but I won't be all that surprised if they don't. It will take the company another five years just to mature the businesses they already have.

So it could be that Google isn't the Microsoft-killer many people -- including Gates and Ballmer -- fear the company is. Going a step further, it is even possible that Gates's conviction that he'll eventually be taken down by a startup is wrong, too.

Here's where I go out on a limb, but I think Microsoft's clearest threat still comes from Apple, though not the way most people expect. Yes, Apple is about to take Microsoft to the woodshed when it comes to Internet movie distribution. Yes, Apple already super-dominates the music player market where Microsoft doesn't even really exist. But the real jewel is one Microsoft has to lose, not gain -- the PC platform, itself.

What could Apple do to take down Windows, with or without the help of Intel?

What seems to me to be the answer came to me this week from a reader who had a disruptive idea that I gleefully embellished.

Here are the clues. Microsoft is woefully late with its next Windows upgrade, while Apple is far ahead with even the current version of OS X. Apple is moving to Intel processors and hackers have already shown that OS X can run fine on non-Apple hardware. But Apple doesn't want to give up its profitable hardware business to compete head-to-head with Microsoft. And remember, Apple totally dominates the portable music player market and will probably sell 25 million iPods or more this year.

Every one of those iPods is a bootable drive. What if Apple introduces OS 10.5, its next super-duper operating system release, and at the same time starts loading FOR FREE the current operating system version -- OS 10.4 -- on every new iPod in a version that runs on generic Intel boxes? What if they also make 10.4 a free download through the iTunes Music Store?

It wouldn't kill Microsoft, but it would hurt the company, both emotionally and materially. And it wouldn't hurt Apple at all. Apple hardware sales would be driven by OS 10.5 and all giving away 10.4 would do is help sell more iPods and attract more customers to Apple's store.

Like that kid in line at the bank, it would drive Bill Gates crazy.

source:http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050825.html


Comparison of Java and .NET security

"The Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia has published a comparative study of security in Java and .NET in Portable Document Format. DevMktg blog on MSDN summarizes the findings saying that due to careful design process, .NET presents security advantages over Java platform in several areas." From the article: "Where Java evolved from an initial platform with limited security capabilities, .NET incorporated more security capability into its original design. With age and new features, much of the legacy code of Java still remains for backwards compatibility including the possibility of a null SecurityManager, and the absolute trust of classes on the bootclasspath. Hence, in several areas .NET has security advantages over Java because of its simpler and cleaner design."

source:http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/27/0633233&tid=108&tid=172&tid=8

Scientists probe anti-ageing gene

Scientists in the United States have discovered a gene that can keep mice alive for 30% longer than normal.

They say the gene has a key role to play in many of the processes related to ageing.

Because humans have a very similar version of the gene, the hope is that it will show a way to improve our declining years.

The gene studied in the new research is called Klotho, named after a minor Greek goddess who spins life's thread.

The gene certainly seems to do that. Mice - and people - with defective forms of the gene appear to age prematurely.

Now researchers have shown that by boosting the activity of the gene, they can extend the natural lives of male mice from two to three years.

The effect is not quite so strong in female mice.

Downsides

"It could be one of the significant steps for developing anti-ageing therapy," Dr Makoto Kuro-o, assistant professor of pathology at the University of Texas' Southwestern Medical Center and senior author of the study, told Science magazine.

Klotho seems to delay many of the effects of old age, like the weakening of bones, clogging of the arteries and loss of muscle fitness.

This is important for those researching the causes of ageing, whose intention is not so much to prolong life as to improve the quality of our final years.

But there may be downsides with Klotho. The long-lived mice in the new experiments tend to be less fertile.

And the gene may also predispose people to diabetes.

The trick for researchers will be to find ways of getting the life-enhancing results of Klotho while avoiding the drawbacks.

source:http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4186324.stm


Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids

Robots, androids, and bionic people pervade popular culture, from classics like Frankenstein and R.U.R. to modern tales such as The Six Million Dollar Man, The Terminator, and A.I. Our fascination is obvious and the technology is quickly moving from books and films to real life.

In a lab at MIT, scientists and technicians have created an artificial being named COG. To watch COG interact with the environment to recognize that this machine has actual body language is to experience a hair-raising, gut-level reaction. Because just as we connect to artificial people in fiction, the merest hint of human-like action or appearance invariably engages us.

Digital People examines the ways in which technology is inexorably driving us to a new and different level of humanity. As scientists draw on nanotechnology, molecular biology, artificial intelligence, and materials science, they are learning how to create beings that move, think, and look like people. Others are routinely using sophisticated surgical techniques to implant computer chips and drug-dispensing devices into our bodies, designing fully functional man-made body parts, and linking human brains with computers to make people healthier, smarter, and stronger.

In short, we are going beyond what was once only science fiction to create bionic people with fully integrated artificial components and it will not be long before we reach the ultimate goal of constructing a completely synthetic human-like being.

It seems quintessentially human to look beyond our natural limitations. Science has long been the lens through which we squint to discern our future. Although we are rightfully fearful about manipulating the boundaries between animate and inanimate, the benefits are too great to ignore. This thoughtful and provocative book shows us just where technology is taking us, in directions both wonderful and terrible, to ponder what it means to be human.

source:http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10738.html


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