Friday, April 28, 2006
Phishers try a phone hook
In a new twist on phishing, fraudsters are sending out e-mail that attempt to trick people into sharing personal information over the phone.
Cloudmark, a San Francisco-based e-mail security company, said it has seen two separate attacks this week. In both cases, the spammed message warns of a problem with a bank account and instructs the recipient to dial a phone number to resolve it, the company said in a statement published Wednesday.
The caller is connected to a voice response system that is made to sound exactly like the bank's own system, Cloudmark said.
"The phone system identifies itself to the target as the financial institution and prompts them to enter account number and PIN," Cloudmark said.
"The result can be personally financially devastating," Adam O'Donnell, the senior research scientist at Cloudmark, said in the statement.
Phishing scams are prevalent and continue to proliferate. In traditional scams, miscreants try to pilfer personal information by sending spam e-mail with links to a malicious Web site, crafted to look like a site belonging to a trusted service provider. The phone scams are a new twist, made possible by cheap Internet-based telephone services, Cloudmark said.
Antispam technology can block the e-mail scams, Cloudmark said. The company urged people who do receive the messages to notify their service providers immediately. As a precaution, people should not dial phone numbers received in an e-mail message and should double-check and dial the numbers printed on ATM and credit cards instead, it advised.
source:http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/security/0,39044215,39355262,00.htm
Insect eye inspires future vision
 Bees eyes are made of thousands of lenses |
The dimpled eye contains over 8,500 hexagonal lenses packed into an area the size of a pinhead.
The dome-shaped structure, described in the journal Science, is similar to a bee's eye.
The researchers, from the University of California, Berkeley, say the work may also shed light on how insects developed such complex visual systems.
"Even though insects start with just a single cell, they grow and create this beautiful optical system by themselves," said Professor Luke Lee, one of the authors on the paper.
"I wanted to understand how nature can create layer upon layer of perfectly ordered structures without expensive fabrication technology," he said.
As a result, the team of bioengineers came up with a relatively cheap and easy method for creating the artificial eyes that may in part mimic natural processes.
Image mosaic
Insect eyes, known as compound eyes, usually consist of hundreds of tiny lens-capped optical units, known as ommatidia. For example, a dragonfly has 30,000 of the structures in each eye.
Individual ommatidia guide light through a lens and cone into a channel, known as a rhabdom, which contains light-sensitive cells. These are connected to optical, nerve cells to produce the image.
The ommatidia are crammed side by side into bulges that create a wide field of view for the insect.
As each unit is orientated in a slightly different direction, the honeycombed eye creates a mosaic image which, although low in resolution, is excellent at detecting movement.
The team created the artificial eye by first creating a tiny, reusable mould with 8,700 indentations.
The pock-marked hemisphere was then filled with an epoxy resin that reacts when exposed to ultraviolet light to create a harder material with different chemical properties.
After being baked at a low temperature to set the material it can be extracted from the mould.
The result is a pin head sized dome with 8,700 raised humps arranged in a honeycomb pattern across its surface.
Each raised hump acts like a lens, focusing any light into the material below.
Perfect alignment
Over time the concentrated light reacts with the resin to form a cone that guides the light deeper into the structure.
As the light continues to burn a path through the resin it creates a tiny channel, called a wave-guide, which is similar to the rhabdom in an insect's eye.
The reaction of the polymer with the light changes the optical properties of the material meaning that all light that enters the wave-guide is channelled along its length.
Enlarge ImageThe result is a tiny resin dome, covered in lenses and pierced by perfectly aligned wave-guides that channel light through the centre of the dome.
As the channels are created as a direct result of light falling on the lens, the researchers believe they could gain insights into the order in which these structures originally formed in insect's eyes.
"To me it makes more sense to have a lens first," said Professor Lee. "I don't think that you formed the visual nervous system first and then it fanned out."
At the moment, the artificial eye is not connected to any kind of imaging device.
'Wonderful images'
However, it could be attached to an image sensor, similar to those used in a digital camera, to complete the setup.
This would allow the eye to be used in tiny, omni-directional surveillance devices, ultra thin cameras or for high-speed motion sensors.
America's military research group, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), is interested in the eye and funded some of the research.
Professor Lee also thinks it may have medical applications such as imaging the gut.
"You would swallow this tiny system that also has wireless communication capability," he told the BBC News website.
"So while you are getting these wonderful images inside the body they can be transmitted back outside."
Even further down the line, Professor Lee believes that the work could help develop artificial retinas for the blind.
"This is our future goal" he said.
source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4946452.stm
Software lets programmers code hands-free
A new speech recognition tool promises to let programmers write clean code without ever having to lay a finger on their keyboard.
The tool, called VoiceCode, has been developed to help programmers with repetitive strain injury (RSI). This is a common affliction for people who spend a lot of time using a keyboard or mouse and causes pain in muscles, tendons and nerves in a sufferer's arms and back. Some estimates suggest 22% of all US computer programmers, or 100,000 people, suffer from the condition.
Standard speech recognition software can be used to control a computer but is usually of little help to programmers, says Alain Désilets of the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, one of the creators of VoiceCode. This is because each symbol and function and every syntactic peculiarity must be carefully spelled out.
VoiceCode lets a programmer dictate code in a more natural way, Désilets says, rapidly translating their utterances into awkward programming syntax. For example, in order to write "if (currRecNum <>
Chat not quit
VoiceCode currently works with the programming language Python but could be adapted to support others, Désilets claims. Although not as fast as using a regular mouse and keyboard, he believes it should help many programmers with RSI get back to work.
"Often people just quit," says Quintijn Hoogenboom, a programmer from the Netherlands who develops specialised speech recognition software.
Hoogenboom notes that other speech recognition programs let users create their own shortcuts but believes VoiceCode is unique in its ability to automatically recognise spoken syntax and turn it into correct code.
Désilets began working on VoiceCode when he himself developed RSI a decade ago. He now wants to release the software so that other programmers can evaluate it. But he admits that it needs to be easier to install. "It typically takes the better part of a day to get all the pieces installed and working properly," he says. "For someone who has trouble typing, that may seem insurmountable."
Désilets presented the project at the annual Computer and Human Interaction (CHI2006) conference in Montreal on Monday. The work was carried out with David Fox from Harvard University and Stuart Norton from the University of California, Berkeley.
source:http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9066
