may the force be with you

Businesses and individuals may soon have to release their encryption keys to the police or face imprisonment, when Part 3 of the RIP Act comes into effect

The UK Government is preparing to give the police the authority to force organisations and individuals to disclose encryption keys, a move which has outraged some security and civil rights experts.

The powers are contained within Part 3 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). RIPA was introduced in 2000, but the government has held back from bringing Part 3 into effect. Now, more than five years after the original act was passed, the Home Office is seeking to exercise the powers within Part Three of RIPA.

Some security experts are concerned that the plan could criminalise innocent people and drive businesses out of the UK. But the Home Office, which has just launched a consultation process, says the powers contained in Part 3 are needed to combat an increased use of encryption by criminals, paedophiles, and terrorists.

"The use of encryption is... proliferating," Liam Byrne, Home Office minister of state told Parliament last week. "Encryption products are more widely available and are integrated as security features in standard operating systems, so the Government has concluded that it is now right to implement the provisions of Part 3 of RIPA... which is not presently in force."

Part 3 of RIPA gives the police powers to order the disclosure of encryption keys, or force suspects to decrypt encrypted data.

Anyone who refuses to hand over a key to the police would face up to two years' imprisonment. Under current anti-terrorism legislation, terrorist suspects now face up to five years for withholding keys.

If Part 3 is passed, financial institutions could be compelled to give up the encryption keys they use for banking transactions, experts have warned.

"The controversy here [lies in] seizing keys, not in forcing people to decrypt. The power to seize encryption keys is spooking big business," Cambridge University security expert Richard Clayton told ZDNet UK on Wednesday.

"The notion that international bankers would be wary of bringing master keys into UK if they could be seized as part of legitimate police operations, or by a corrupt chief constable, has quite a lot of traction," Clayton added. "With the appropriate paperwork, keys can be seized. If you're an international banker you'll plonk your headquarters in Zurich."

Opponents of the RIP Act have argued that the police could struggle to enforce Part 3, as people can argue that they don't possess the key to unlock encrypted data in their possession.

"It is, as ever, almost impossible to prove 'beyond a reasonable doubt' that some random-looking data is in fact ciphertext, and then prove that the accused actually has the key for it, and that he has refused a proper order to divulge it," pointed out encryption expert Peter Fairbrother on ukcrypto, a public email discussion list.

Clayton backed up this point. "The police can say 'We think he's a terrorist' or 'We think he's trading in kiddie porn', and the suspect can say, 'No, they're love letters, sorry, I've lost the key'. How much evidence do you need [to convict]? If you can't decrypt [the data], then by definition you don't know what it is," said Clayton.

The Home Office on Wednesday told ZDNet UK that it would not reach a decision about whether Part 3 will be amended until the consultation process has been completed.

"We are in consultation, and [are] looking into proposals on amendments to RIPA," said a Home Office spokeswoman. "The Home Office is waiting for the results of the consultation" before making any decisions, she said.

The Home Office said last week that the focus on key disclosure and forced decryption was necessary due to "the threat to public safety posed by terrorist use of encryption technology".

Clayton, on the other hand, argues that terrorist cells do not use master keys in the same way as governments and businesses.

"Terrorist cells use master keys on a one-to-one basis, rather than using them to generate pass keys for a series of communications. With a one-to-one key, you may as well just force the terrorist suspect to decrypt that communication, or use other methods of decryption," said Clayton.

"My suggestion is to turn on all of Part 3, except the part about trying to seize keys. That won't create such a furore in financial circles," he said.

source:http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39269746,00.htm

Boston scientists released a provocative report yesterday that challenges the timeline of human evolution and suggests that human ancestors bred with chimpanzee ancestors long after they had initially separated into two species.

The researchers, working at the Cambridge-based Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, used a wealth of newly available genetic data to estimate the time when the first human ancestors split from the chimpanzees. The team arrived at an answer that is at least 1 million years later than paleontologists had believed, based on fossils of early, humanlike creatures.

The lead scientist said that this jarring conflict with the fossil record, combined with a number of other strange genetic patterns the team uncovered, led him to a startling explanation: that human ancestors evolved apart from the chimpanzees for hundreds of thousands of years, and then started breeding with them again before a final break.

''Something very unusual happened," said David Reich, one of the report's authors and a geneticist at the Broad and Harvard Medical School.

The suggestion of interbreeding was met with skepticism by paleontologists, who said they had trouble imagining a successful breeding between early human ancestors, which walked upright, and the chimpanzee ancestors, which walked on all fours. But other scientists said the work is impressive and will probably force a reappraisal of the story of human origins. And one leading paleontologist said he welcomed the research as a sign that new genetic information will yield more clues to our deep history than once thought.

''I find this terrifically exciting and important work," said David Pilbeam, a Harvard paleontologist who was not part of the Broad team.

Pilbeam helped discover an early human ancestor known as Toumai, which walked on two legs and is thought to have lived in present-day Chad 6.5 million to 7.4 million years ago. The new report, published in today's issue of the journal Nature, estimates that final break between the human and chimpanzee species did not come until 6.3 million years ago at the earliest, and probably less than 5.4 million years ago.

This contradiction could be resolved, Reich said, if early creatures like Toumai then interbred with chimpanzee ancestors, leaving a population of hybrids that developed into today's humans. (In this scenario, the line of Toumai creatures then went extinct.) But it is also possible, he said, that the dating of the early human fossils is wrong, or that the dating of other, older fossils used in his calculations is wrong, which would partially undercut the interbreeding theory. Scientists said that the report will probably bring intense scrutiny, as researchers look for potential flaws in the work or other explanations for its findings.

The work will also probably inspire biologists to devote more attention to hybrids, the term for offspring with parents of different species, and the role that they may play in fueling evolution. Biologists have long known about hybrids -- a half-grizzly bear, half-polar bear was recently discovered in Canada -- but it has been assumed that these were generally lone animals that had had little impact on the story of evolution. The Nature paper joins a wave of work showing that the lines between species are hazy, according to James Mallet, a biologist who studies hybrids at University College London.

As two species evolve, they can develop new abilities. Some hybrids could combine the best of both species, Mallet said, though the biological barriers to the creation of hybrids increase the longer the species are apart. It is thought that human ancestors were adapting to life on the savannah instead of the forest, where chimpanzees still live today. It is not known why human ancestors would have begun mating with chimpanzee ancestors again, or why they would have stopped.

To understand how long ago humans split from chimpanzees, Reich and his colleagues did a close study of DNA from the two. This technique rests on the idea that once the populations separate, the DNA will slowly drift apart as natural mutations accumulate. If they can count the number of changes, and determine how quickly the changes happened, then they can calculate how long the two populations have been separate, according to Nick Patterson, a scientist who was part of the Broad team.

Previous studies have used this idea and found that the two species split between about 5 million and 8 million years ago.

The Broad team sought to get a more precise answer by looking at how different the DNA of chimps and humans is at many locations, instead of calculating an average difference. The DNA of humans and chimpanzees is quite similar, meaning that scientists can readily identify many segments of DNA that are so similar they must have been handed down by a common ancestor, deep in the past. Scientists can then use a computer to put the segments of human and chimp DNA into alignment, placing side by side the segments that are very similar.

For each pair of segments, they then calculated how long it would have taken to accumulate all the differences. The team used sophisticated statistical techniques to calculate these ''divergence times."

This analysis brought surprises that the team could explain only by suggesting human ancestors and chimpanzee ancestors interbred. First, they found that the divergence times varied widely. Some parts of the DNA seemed to indicate the human and chimpanzee species had been apart much longer than others, by millions of years. If humans split from chimps and then interbred before splitting again, the more divergent DNA sequences could date to before the first split, while the less divergent sequences could date to just before the second split.

The other surprise was that sequences from the X chromosome, one of two chromosomes that determine gender, gave consistently more recent divergence times, instead of the range seen on other chromosomes. This, too, would be explained by the idea of interbreeding, according to the report. The X chromosome is thought to be the focus of fertility problems in hybrids, and population models suggest that all of the X chromosomes in a hybrid population would quickly come to match those of one of the parent species. This would explain why the human and chimpanzee X chromosomes are so similar.

Although the idea is controversial, there will soon be a wealth of more information to test it. Part of the Broad team's analysis relied on using DNA sequences from the gorilla and other primates as a kind of baseline to interpret their results. Only a relatively small amount of DNA has been sequenced from gorillas, limiting the amount of data the team could use. By the end of 2007, there should be a full sequence of the gorilla, allowing the scientists to do a much fuller analysis, Reich said.

The team also plans on looking at genetic data for other groups of closely related species to try to determine whether those species split apart fairly abruptly, or whether there is evidence that hybridization is a common part of evolution, bringing together the best of two species.

source:http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2006/05/18/humans_chimps_may_have_bred_after_split/?page=2

Samsung may soon be tapping a new power source for its cell phones. The South Korean handset maker on May 18 is announcing plans for building prototype mobile phones powered by fuel cells. It's one of the biggest publicly disclosed commitments to the technology by a major manufacturer in years.

Samsung, the world's No. 3 maker of wireless phones, behind Finland's Nokia (NOK) and U.S.-based Motorola (MOT), says it has signed an exclusive deal to use technology from MTI MicroFuel Cells of Albany, N.Y., a unit of Mechanical Technology (MKTY). The joint development deal will last about 18 months, and neither company will work with any other to develop fuel cells for use in wireless phones. Samsung is committing $1 million to the effort.

That may be small potatoes in terms of Samsung's research and development budget, but it marks a big step forward for a fledging fuel-cell industry that aims to supplant the batteries typically used in notebook PCs, wireless phones, PDAs, and digital cameras.

VOTE OF CONFIDENCE. As those devices incorporate brighter screens, more powerful wireless networking features, and other cutting-edge capabilities, it's getting harder to keep them running with conventional batteries, typically based on lithium ion and lithium polymer technology.

The deal also marks a huge vote of confidence in a little-known company. MTI Micro, which had sales of $8 million in 2005, is one of a handful of outfits seeking to bring hydrogen-based fuel-cell technology into more common use. Its Mobion fuel cells have already appeared in industrial handhelds from companies like Intermec, a unit of Unova (UNA), and have drawn the attention of military contractors developing devices that soldiers will use in the field.

Under the deal, which lasts through the end of the second quarter of 2007, the two companies will jointly research the use of methanol-based fuel-cell technologies for use in cell phones. Any patents that come as the result of the research will be assigned to MTI.

BASIC CHEMISTRY. MTI's technology harnesses a chemical process that combines water with methanol, a type of alcohol also known as methyl alcohol, to produce electricity. It's really just basic chemistry, but not always easy to set in motion. Often the presence of water requires a complicated set of micro-pumps and pipes to move the water to where it needs to be. MTI has developed a way to do it without the need for a pump, and without the need to carry water in the first place.

The relationship got its start with a device MTI engineers stitched together more than a year ago -- a Samsung PDA powered by a prototype Mobion fuel cell. "That caught Samsung's attention," says Alan Soucy, MTI Micro's chief corporate strategist. "Since then they've come here and done a deep dive with our technology, and obviously they see potential."

What Soucy and MTI CEO Peng Lim envision is a world where instead of recharging your phone's battery, you'll buy disposable fuel cells that last longer than the batteries that come with cell phones today and are more eco-friendly. Exactly how much longer they'll last the company won't say yet. "We've promised to demonstrate a fuel cell that is better than a lithium ion battery by the third quarter of this year, and we're on track to do that," Lim says.

GOING GREEN. And in general, fuel cells have chemistry on their side, says Frost & Sullivan analyst Sara Bradford. "The batteries we have are starting to reach their theoretical limits," she says. "Plus, with the fuel cells there's the added benefit that there's no acids or heavy metals involved," she says. "The green factor is important."

Bradford reckons that by 2012, consumers may buy as many as 80 million fuel-cell cartridges like MTI's Mobion. Initially, she says, they'll cost more than lithium ion and lithium polymer batteries common today. "That's normal," she says. "When lithium ion batteries first came on the scene they cost more, too." And in some cases the fuel cells could be used to recharge and not replace the battery.

The alliance with MTI could be a sign that Samsung's own efforts to develop fuel cell technology are falling short, says Bradford at Frost & Sullivan. "Samsung went looking for partners, and this clearly doesn't say anything positive about their opinion of their own technology."

Samsung is only the latest large corporation to show interest in MTI Micro. Gillette (G), which owns the Duracell brand of batteries, is helping MTI Micro create a retail and distribution business for a market in disposable fuel cells. Flextronics International (FLEX) the Singapore-based contract electronics manufacturer, has signed on to build the fuel cells.

source:http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2006/tc20060518_300608.htm

Sources say project was shelved in part because of bureaucratic infighting

The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project -- not because it failed to work -- but because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency's surveillance powers, according to several intelligence officials.

The agency opted instead to adopt only one component of the program, which produced a far less capable and rigorous program. It remains the backbone of the NSA's warrantless surveillance efforts, tracking domestic and overseas communications from a vast databank of information, and monitoring selected calls.

Four intelligence officials knowledgeable about the program agreed to discuss it with The Sun only if granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

The program the NSA rejected, called ThinThread, was developed to handle greater volumes of information, partly in expectation of threats surrounding the millennium celebrations. Sources say it bundled together four cutting-edge surveillance tools. ThinThread would have:

* Used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.

* Identified U.S. phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy.

* Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency.

* Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records.

An agency spokesman declined to discuss NSA operations.

"Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to discuss actual or alleged operational issues as it would give those wishing to do harm to the U.S. insight and potentially place Americans in danger," said NSA spokesman Don Weber in a statement to The Sun

"However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities very seriously and operates within the law."

In what intelligence experts describe as rigorous testing of ThinThread in 1998, the project succeeded at each task with high marks. For example, its ability to sort through massive amounts of data to find threat-related communications far surpassed the existing system, sources said. It also was able to rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy.

But the NSA, then headed by Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, opted against both of those tools, as well as the feature that monitored potential abuse of the records. Only the data analysis facet of the program survived and became the basis for the warrantless surveillance program.

The decision, which one official attributed to "turf protection and empire building," has undermined the agency's ability to zero in on potential threats, sources say. In the wake of revelations about the agency's wide gathering of U.S. phone records, they add, ThinThread could have provided a simple solution to privacy concerns.

A number of independent studies, including a classified 2004 report from the Pentagon's inspector-general, in addition to the successful pilot tests, found that the program provided "superior processing, filtering and protection of U.S. citizens, and discovery of important and previously unknown targets," said an intelligence official familiar with the program who described the reports to The Sun. The Pentagon report concluded that ThinThread's ability to sort through data in 2001 was far superior to that of another NSA system in place in 2004, and that the program should be launched and enhanced.

Hayden, the president's nominee to lead the CIA, is to appear Thursday before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and is expected to face tough questioning about the warrantless surveillance program, the collection of domestic phone records and other NSA programs.

While the furor over warrantless surveillance, particularly collection of domestic phone records, has raised questions about the legality of the program, there has been little or no discussion about how it might be altered to eliminate such concerns.

ThinThread was designed to address two key challenges: The NSA had more information than it could digest, and, increasingly, its targets were in contact with people in the United States whose calls the agency was prohibited from monitoring.

With the explosion of digital communications, especially phone calls over the Internet and the use of devices such as BlackBerries, the NSA was struggling to sort key nuggets of information from the huge volume of data it took in.

By 1999, as some NSA officials grew increasingly concerned about millennium-related security, ThinThread seemed in position to become an important tool with which the NSA could prevent terrorist attacks. But it was never launched. Neither was it put into effect after the attacks in 2001. Despite its success in tests, ThinThread's information-sorting system was viewed by some in the agency as a competitor to Trailblazer, a $1.2 billion program that was being developed with similar goals. The NSA was committed to Trailblazer, which later ran into trouble and has been essentially abandoned.

Both programs aimed to better sort through the sea of data to find key tips to the next terrorist attack, but Trailblazer had more political support internally because it was initiated by Hayden when he first arrived at the NSA, sources said.

NSA managers did not want to adopt the data-sifting component of ThinThread out of fear that the Trailblazer program would be outperformed and "humiliated," an intelligence official said.

Without ThinThread's data-sifting assets, the warrantless surveillance program was left with a sub-par tool for sniffing out information, and that has diminished the quality of its analysis, according to intelligence officials.

Sources say the NSA's existing system for data-sorting has produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information.

The mass collection of relatively unsorted data, combined with system flaws that sources say erroneously flag people as suspect, has produced numerous false leads, draining analyst resources, according to two intelligence officials. FBI agents have complained in published reports in The New York Times that NSA leads have resulted in numerous dead ends.

The privacy protections offered by ThinThread were also abandoned in the post-Sept. 11 push by the president for a faster response to terrorism.

Once President Bush gave the go-ahead for the NSA to secretly gather and analyze domestic phone records -- an authorization that carried no stipulations about identity protection -- agency officials regarded the encryption as an unnecessary step and rejected it, according to two intelligence officials knowledgeable about ThinThread and the warrantless surveillance programs.

"They basically just disabled the [privacy] safeguards," said one intelligence official.

Another, a former top intelligence official, said that without a privacy requirement, "there was no reason to go back to something that was perhaps more difficult to implement."

However two officials familiar with the program said the encryption feature would have been simple to implement. One said the time required would have involved minutes, not hours.

Encryption would have required analysts to be more disciplined in their investigations, however, by forcing them to gather what a court would consider sufficient information to indicate possible terrorist activity before decryption could be authorized.

While it is unclear why the agency dropped the component that monitored for abuse of records, one intelligence official noted that the feature was not popular with analysts. It not only tracked the use of the database, but hunted for the most effective analysis techniques, and some analysts thought it would be used to judge their performance.

Within the NSA, the primary advocate for the ThinThread program was Richard Taylor, who headed the agency's operations division. Taylor who has retired from the NSA, did not return calls seeking comment.

Officials say that after the successful tests of ThinThread in 1998, Taylor argued that the NSA should implement the full program. He later told the 9/11 Commission that ThinThread could have identified the hijackers had it been in place before the attacks, according to an intelligence expert close to the commission.

But at the time, NSA lawyers viewed the program as too aggressive. At that point, the NSA's authority was limited strictly to overseas communications, with the FBI responsible for analyzing domestic calls. The lawyers feared that expanding NSA data collection to include communications in the United States could violate civil liberties, even with the encryption function.

Taylor had an intense meeting with Hayden and NSA lawyers. "It was a very emotional debate," recalled a former intelligence official. "Eventually it was rejected by [NSA] lawyers."

After the 2001 attacks, the NSA lawyers who had blocked the program reversed their position and approved the use of the program without the enhanced technology to sift out terrorist communications and without the encryption protections.

The NSA's new legal analysis was based on the commander in chief's powers during war, said former officials familiar with the program. The Bush administration's defense has rested largely on that argument since the warrantless surveillance program became public in December.

The strength of ThinThread's approach is that by encrypting information on Americans, it is legal regardless of whether the country is at war, according to one intelligence official.

Officials familiar with Thin Thread say some within NSA were stunned by the legal flip-flop. ThinThread "was designed very carefully from a legal point of view, so that even in non-wartime, you could have done it legitimately," the official said.

In a speech in January, Hayden said the warrantless surveillance program was not only limited to al-Qaida communications, but carefully implemented with an eye toward preserving the Constitution and rights of Americans.

"As the director, I was the one responsible to ensure that this program was limited in its scope and disciplined in its application," he said.

source:http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-nsa517,0,5970724.story?page=2&coll=bal-home-headlines

The political debate in Washington over the concept known as Net neutrality just became a lot more complicated.

Some of the largest hardware makers in the world, including 3M, Cisco Systems, Corning and Qualcomm, sent a letter to Congress on Wednesday firmly opposing new laws mandating Net neutrality--the concept that broadband providers must never favor some Web sites or Internet services over others.

That view directly conflicts with what many software and Internet companies have been saying for the last few months. Led by Amazon.com, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, those companies have been spending millions of dollars to lobby for stiff new laws prohibiting broadband providers from rolling out two-tier networks.

"It is premature to attempt to enact some sort of network neutrality principles into law now," says the letter, which was signed by 34 companies and sent to House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. "Legislating in the absence of real understanding of the issue risks both solving the wrong problem and hobbling the rapidly developing new technologies and business models of the Internet with rigid, potentially stultifying rules."

The letter even goes so far as to applaud a committee vote in the House of Representatives on April 26, in which Net neutrality proponents--largely Democrats--lost by a wide margin. "We are pleased that the committee rejected attempts to add so-called 'network neutrality' provisions to the bill," it says.

Even though many of the letter's signers are suppliers to telecommunications companies, it still is likely to help stall efforts to advance Net neutrality--which a Democratic senator said last week would be debated in the Senate.

Net neutrality proponents say the legislation approved by the House committee doesn't go far enough to target possible errant behavior by AT&T, Verizon Communications and other broadband providers, and could try to add amendments during a floor vote. A "Save the Internet" coalition has even been created and boasts members such as the left-leaning Moveon.org, the American Library Association and the libertarian-conservative group Gun Owners of America.

The groups say the Federal Communications Commission must be given power to regulate broadband providers that might want to do things like charging content providers extra for the privilege of faster delivery or other preferential treatment.

For their part, major broadband providers have repeatedly pledged not to block traffic or censor Web sites. Instead, they say, it will only be economically feasible to invest in higher-speed links if some bandwidth can be reserved for paid content. Also, they argue, the FCC has already taken action against violations of Net neutrality, so no new laws are necessary.

source:http://news.com.com/Hardware+firms+oppose+Net+neutrality+laws/2100-1028_3-6073629.html?tag=nefd.top

SmartCatch digital technology to be rolled out in Helsinki airport to flag security threats and alert staff to dangers

Finland's Vantaa airport serving Helsinki is to roll out smart CCTV technology in an attempt to improve security and make travelling easier for passengers.

SmartCatch technology from digital surveillance specialist Vidient automatically monitors CCTV footage and can recognise potential security threats. It also flags up operational issues such as building queues and bottlenecks of human traffic through customs and security.

Jyri Vikstrom, head of corporate security at airport authority Finavia, said Helsinki airport has 500 CCTV cameras. Effectively monitoring all of those feeds 24 hours per day with humans is a task of logistical near-impossibility.

Vikstrom said in a statement: "That's why we were very keen to find a solution that reduces the burden of work falling to our security personnel so that they have enough time to focus on genuinely serious security breaches."

The system can alert staff to events which may need further investigation without the need for every camera to be observed by staff. For example, suspect packages or vehicles left unattended will be flagged up and staff alerted.

Similarly if the system detects queues growing beyond a pre-defined length in the security zone staff will be alerted of the need to open another lane, speeding time through check-in and reducing congestion in one of the airport's most secure areas.

In April, silicon.com became the first publication to see Vidient's SmartCatch system at work inside San Francisco International Airport. For the full story and photos, click here.

source:http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/may2006/gb20060516_487630.htm

LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have reached a landmark point in one of the world's most important scientific projects by sequencing the last chromosome in the Human Genome, the so-called "book of life".

Chromosome 1 contains nearly twice as many genes as the average chromosome and makes up eight percent of the human genetic code.

It is packed with 3,141 genes and linked to 350 illnesses including cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

"This achievement effectively closes the book on an important volume of the Human Genome Project," said Dr Simon Gregory who headed the sequencing project at the Sanger Institute in England.

The project was started in 1990 to identify the genes and DNA sequences that provide a blueprint for human beings.

Chromosome 1 is the biggest and contains, per chromosome, the greatest number of genes.

"Therefore it is the region of the genome to which the greatest number of diseases have been localized," added Gregory, from Duke University in the United States.

The sequence of chromosome 1, which is published online by the journal Nature, took a team of 150 British and American scientists 10 years to complete.

Researchers around the world will be able to mine the data to improve diagnostics and treatments for cancers, autism, mental disorders and other illnesses.

FINAL CHAPTER

Chromosomes, which are found in the nucleus of a cell, are thread-like structures that contain genes which determine the characteristics of an individual.

The human genome has an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 genes. The sequencing of chromosome 1 has led to the identification of more than 1,000 new genes.

"We are moving into the next phase which will be working out what the genes do and how they interact," Gregory told Reuters.

The genetic map of chromosome 1 has already been used to identify a gene for a common form of cleft lip and palate. It will also improve understanding of what processes lead to genetic diversity in populations, according to Gregory.

Each chromosome is made up of a molecule of DNA in the shape of a double helix which is composed of four chemical bases represented by the letters A (adenine), T (thymine), G (guanine) and C (cytosine). The arrangement, or sequence, of the letters determines the cell's genetic code.

The scientists also identified 4,500 new SNPs -- single nucleotide polymorphisms -- which are the variations in human DNA that make people unique.

SNPs contain clues about why some people are susceptible to diseases like cancer or malaria, the best way to diagnose and treat them and how they will respond to drugs.

source:http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2006-05-17T175734Z_01_L16646847_RTRUKOC_0_US-SCIENCE-CHROMOSOME.xml

New Device Driver Process Improves Hardware Support for Partners and Customers, Making It Easier to Integrate Hardware and Software With Linux

The equipment that technician Mark Klein learned was installed in the National Security Agency's "secret room" inside AT&T's San Francisco switching office isn't some sinister Big Brother box designed solely to help governments eavesdrop on citizens' internet communications.

Rather, it's a powerful commercial network-analysis product with all sorts of valuable uses for network operators. It just happens to be capable of doing things that make it one of the best internet spy tools around.

"Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record," says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls."

Narus' product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system. It's renowned within certain circles for its ability to inspect traffic in real time on high-bandwidth pipes, identifying packets of interest as they race by at up to 10 Gbps.

Internet companies can install the analyzers at every entrance and exit point of their networks, at their "cores" or centers, or both. The analyzers communicate with centralized "logic servers" running specialized applications. The combination can keep track of, analyze and record nearly every form of internet communication, whether e-mail, instant message, video streams or VOIP phone calls that cross the network.

Brasil Telecom and several other Brazilian phone companies are using Narus products to charge each other for VOIP calls they send over one another's IP networks. Internet companies in China and the Middle East use them to block VOIP calls altogether.

But even before the product's alleged role in the NSA's operations emerged, its potential as a surveillance tool was not lost on corporate America.

In December, VeriSign, also of Mountain View, chose Narus' product as the backbone of its lawful-intercept-outsourcing service, which helps network operators comply with court-authorized surveillance orders from law enforcement agencies. A special Narus lawful-intercept application does this spying with ease, sorting through torrents of IP traffic to pick out specific messages based on a targeted e-mail address, IP address or, in the case of VOIP, phone number.

"We needed their fast packet-detection and inspection capability," says VeriSign Vice President Raj Puri. "They do it with specialized software that can isolate packets for a specific target."

Narus has little control over how its products are used after they're sold. For example, although its lawful-intercept application has a sophisticated system for making sure the surveillance complies with the terms of a warrant, it's up to the operator whether to type those terms into the system, says Bannerman.

That legal eavesdropping application was launched in February 2005, well after whistle-blower Klein allegedly learned that AT&T was installing Narus boxes in secure, NSA-controlled rooms in switching centers around the country. But that doesn't mean the government couldn't write its own code to do the dirty work. Narus even offers software-development kits to customers.

"Our product is designed to comply (with) all of the laws in all of the countries we ship to," says Bannerman. "Many of our customers have built their own applications. We have no idea what they do."

source:http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70914-0.html?tw=rss.index

Wi-Fi and memory card adaptors on the way

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Sony has dismissed rumours that the 20GB PS3 will not be compatible with wireless controllers, and that consumers will not have the option to upgrade the hard drive.

"Both queries to my knowledge are completely false," a spokesperson told GI.biz.

"Both configurations will support bluetooth PS3 controllers. The only non-upgradeable feature of the 20GB configuration will be the HDMI output."

This confirms comments made by Sony's Phil Harrison in a recent interview with GI.biz, where he stated: "You can upgrade to whatever size of drive you like. You can put in any drive that you like - it is a computer, after all."

The spokesperson went on to reveal that Sony plans to release a Wi-Fi adaptor for the 20GB PlayStation 3. Consumers will also have the option to purchase a separate adaptor that will allow the use of memory sticks, SD cards and compact flash cards with the machine.

However, there's still no word as to whether the 20GB PlayStation 3 will make it to the UK at all.

source:http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=17035

At JavaOne, both sides say they really like each other -- suggesting a role for Ubuntu's upcoming "Dapper Drake" operating system on Sun Microsystems' servers.

Ubuntu Linux got a ringing endorsement from Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz on Tuesday in San Francisco. In turn, Ubuntu project founder Mark Shuttleworth appeared on stage during Schwartz's opening keynote at JavaOne to endorse Java.

"Ubuntu is gaining a ton of momentum," Schwartz said in a meeting with reporters after his keynote presentation. "It is arguably one of the most important, if not the most important Linux distro out there." That's a poke in the eye for RedHat and Novell, the other two major Linux distributors.

Ubuntu hopes to make a splash in the enterprise space with the Dapper Drake release of its operating system, slated for June 1. The new version will run on 32-bit and 64-bit Intel compatible systems, PowerPC systems and a fourth, yet-to-be-announced, architecture, Shuttleworth said. Could this be Sun's Sparc?

While Sun and Shuttleworth declined to disclose their plans, it was overly clear that there is a love affair between the two. On stage, Shuttleworth asked the JavaOne audience members if they would like to see Ubuntu run on Niagara, Sun's multicore and multithread Sparc processor. The crowd responded with applause.

"The odds are quite good that we will be aggressively supporting the work that Ubuntu is doing," Schwartz told reporters. "In the hardware we ship, I don't want to be Solaris only, because then I will just define my market to be smaller than the opportunity…I think you should expect to see more of the relationship, and stay tuned."

Shuttleworth flirted back: "I absolutely believe that our June 1 release will meet the quality and support standards of Sun customers." He also added that he is optimistic that at least one server maker will commit to selling the new Ubuntu version with its hardware, he said.

Ubuntu is an offshoot of Debian and seeks to target RedHat's position in the enterprise. Dapper Drake is the first version that will have longer term support commitments, three years for the desktop version and five years for the server, compared with 18 months for the current "Breezy Badger" release.

source:http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Sun_flirts_with_Ubuntu/0,2000061733,39256815,00.htm