may the force be with you

As the DVD format welcomes two potential heirs to its kingship as the commercial video medium of choice, there are mounting concerns that these new heirs are nothing but pretenders. Blu-ray and HD DVD—the two competing "standards" for the next-generation of video discs—are both shackled with technologically-forged chains, but those chains may be broken by a consumer electronics industry wary of how their existence could hamper sales.

One of the most controversial aspects of these next-generation products is something called the Image Constraint Token (ICT), a security "feature" that allows studios to force-downgrade video quality on players that lack a special video output that was designed to thwart piracy. This "HDMI" connector standard is part of a "protected pathway" for video that was meant to combat piracy by making it impossible for pirates to tap into high-definition video output and press "Record," as it were. Many fear, however, that the only success HDMI will have is in making honest users miserable, inasmuch as consumers could be left with a product that plays at low quality or not at all if HDMI is not present on one's player or TV.

The conundrum isn't apparently lost on the consumer electronics industry or Hollywood. According to German-language Spiegel Online, there is reportedly a behind-the-scenes, unofficial agreement between Hollywood and some consumer electronics manufacturers, including Microsoft and Sony, not to use ICT until 2010, or possibly even 2012. Without providing more details, the report suggests that Hollywood isn't exactly happy with the situation, and could very well renege on the agreement, such that it is. But the agreement is there nonetheless, presumably to help the industry transition to HDMI. This could explain why the very same studios that pushed for HDMI and ICT have recently announced that they would not use it for the time being.

The report's claims could also shed some light on two of the more baffling consumer electronics moves as of late. Sony stunned onlookers when it announced that the low-end PlayStation 3, which will retail for US$499, will not have HDMI. This put Sony in the awkward position of downplaying HDMI as a "must have" feature for a next-generation optical disc player. Kaz Hirai, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America, sidestepped the lack of HDMI by painting it as a high-end standard that wouldn't be aesthetically appreciated by many consumers.

"The only difference is HDMI – and at this point, I don't think many people's TV's have that. The ultimate result, to my eyes anyway, is there's not a discernible difference between what you get between HDMI and other forms of high definition," he said.

On one level, he's correct. Few consumers will appreciate the difference between 1080i on a component cable (analog) and 1080p on HDMI. What he ignored is the real trade-off: without HDMI, that 1920x1080 (1080i/p) or 1280 x 720 (720p) picture, analog or not, could be rendered at a less impressive 960x540 (540p) if the ICT was present and obeyed. While 540p is indeed better than today's DVD standard, few consumers would spend $500-$1000 on a new player and as much as $10 more per movie to get it. If part of Sony's big pitch for the PS3 is "hey, this thing is also futureproof because it does Blu-ray!," then ditching support for HDMI doesn't make sense in a world where the absence of HDMI could negate much of the promise of Blu-ray.

Then there's Microsoft. The company launched the Xbox 360 last November sans HD DVD drive, which turned out to be a wise thing to do, as both HD DVD and Blu-ray were delayed by setbacks with the new AACS security system. Microsoft nevertheless intends to support HD DVD on the Xbox 360 by shipping an external HD DVD player for the console in time for the 2006 holiday season. The add-on drive will connect to the Xbox via a USB 2.0 cable, but the console currently lacks an HDMI connector, just like the low-end PS3. Microsoft has not announced support for HDMI for the Xbox 360, though speculation is ripe that the company will release a dongle for the console after Lik-Sang posted a product page for it. For that dongle to do the trick, however, Microsoft would need to be able to add HDMI support via a firmware update, and their current proprietary output connector would need to meet HDMI standards. It is not yet clear if HDMI can be added to the Xbox 360 without a hardware revision, but that question may be seen as "moot" if in fact HDMI won't be a barrier to true 720 or 1080i/p until 4 to 6 years from now.

If indeed there is an "agreement" of sorts between companies like Microsoft and Sony and the studios (including Sony's own entertainment interests), this could certainly help to explain why these consoles are shipping today without HDMI support. But such unofficial agreements are gentlemanly in nature: at any time, all bets could be off. In the meantime, it appears as though Hollywood is playing it safe, hoping to keep the boogeyman of HDMI at bay while consumers weigh their options. Whether or not the strategy is ultimately about keeping users happy or lulling them into a false sense of security remains to be seen, but we're fairly certain that ICT was designed to be used, and used it will be.

source:http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060521-6880.html

# posted by dark master : 5/24/2006 12:04:00 PM  0 comments

hree years after Ticketmaster introduced ticketFast, its online print-at-home ticketing service, consumers have so embraced it that the company now sells a half-million home-printed tickets for sporting and entertainment events each month in North America. Where ticketFast is available, 30 percent of tickets sold are now printed at home, said the company, which is by far the nation's largest ticket agency.

But consumers � many of whom have complained for years about climbing ticket prices and Ticketmaster service charges � may be less eager for the next phase of Ticketmaster's Internet evolution.

Late this year the company plans to begin auctioning the best seats to concerts through ticketmaster.com.

With no official price ceiling on such tickets, Ticketmaster will be able to compete with brokers and scalpers for the highest price a market will bear.

"The tickets are worth what they're worth," said John Pleasants, Ticketmaster's president and chief executive. "If somebody wants to charge $50 for a ticket, but it's actually worth $1,000 on eBay, the ticket's worth $1,000. I think more and more, our clients � the promoters, the clients in the buildings and the bands themselves � are saying to themselves, `Maybe that money should be coming to me instead of Bob the Broker.' "

EBay has long been a busy marketplace for tickets auctioned by brokers and others. Late last week, for example, it had more than 22,000 listings for ticket sales.

Venue operators, promoters and performers will decide whether to participate in the Ticketmaster auctions, Mr. Pleasants said. In June, the company tested the system for the Lennox Lewis-Vitali Klitschko boxing match at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The minimum bid for the package � two ringside seats, a boxing glove autographed by Mr. Lewis and access to workouts, among other features � was $3,000, and the top payer spent about $7,000, a Staples Center spokesman, Michael Roth, said.

Once the auction service goes live, Ticketmaster will receive flat fees or a percentage of the winning bids, to be decided with the operators of each event, said Sean Moriarty, Ticketmaster's executive vice president for products, technology and operations.

Along with home printing, auctions are central to "a new age of the ticket," Mr. Pleasants said. In the second quarter of this year, tickets sold online, with or without home printing, represented 51 percent of Ticketmaster's ticket sales. The rest were sold by phone or at walk-up locations.

Ticket Forwarding allows season ticket holders for several sports teams (including the New York Knicks, Rangers and Giants) to e-mail extra tickets to other users, with Ticketmaster charging the sender $1.95 per transaction.

TicketExchange provides a forum for season ticket holders to auction tickets online. The seller and buyer pay Ticketmaster 5 percent to 10 percent of the resale price, a fee the company splits with the team.

In the case of the ticketFast home-printing service, buyers pay an additional $1.75 to $2.50 per order, with the fee set by the event operator. Home printing has won converts among people who want tickets immediately, instead of receiving them by mail or a delivery service or having to stand in line at a will-call window.

One satisfied customer is Brian Resnik, 29, of Tampa, Fla., who says the home-printing fee is a bargain compared with the $19.50 that Ticketmaster charges for two-day shipping through United Parcel Service.

But some other users, who praised the convenience of home printing, objected to being charged an extra fee.

"It's kind of mind-boggling to me," said Joe Guckin, 41, of Philadelphia, who used ticketFast to buy tickets for a Baltimore Orioles home game last season. "You're printing up the ticket, on your printer at home, your paper, your ink, etc. � and you have to pay for that?"

The company replies that home-printing consumers are helping to pay for the technology that makes the service possible.

Ticketmaster has spent $15 million to $20 million to outfit almost 700 stadiums, arenas, theaters and concert halls in this country and Canada with bar-code scanners that read and authenticate the tickets and computers that capture information such as which seats are filled and which doors have the most traffic, Mr. Moriarty said. In 2003, the company has sold 400,000 to 600,000 ticketFast tickets each month.

Some ticketFast customers, like Diane DeRooy, 52, of Seattle, complain that Ticketmaster assesses a lot of fees even before levying the print-at-home charge. A ticket to see Crosby, Stills & Nash on Friday at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, N.J., for example, carries $13.80 in venue, processing and convenience fees, plus a $2.50 charge for the home-printing option. Without the fees, a ticket costs $30.25 to $70.25.

Many of those customers are skeptical about Ticketmaster's plans to auction the best seats to concerts.

"The band's biggest fans ought to have the best seats, not the band's richest fans," said Tim Todd, 47, of Kansas City, Mo., who used ticketFast recently to buy tickets for a concert by the rock group Phish. Ticketmaster would be, in essence, official scalpers, Mr. Guckin said, voicing a sentiment expressed by some other customers.

Industry watchers agree that auctions will affect all concertgoers. Prime seats are undervalued in the marketplace, said Alan B. Krueger, a professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, who has studied ticket prices. He predicts that once auctions begin revealing a ticket's market value, prices as a whole will climb faster.

Gary Bongiovanni, editor of the concert industry trade magazine, Pollstar, predicted that all ticket prices would become more fluid. After a promoter assesses initial sales from an auction, remaining ticket prices could be raised or lowered to meet goals.

The notion of ticket auctions is annoying, Mr. Resnik said, but he is resigned to them.

"I guess the capitalist inside me would say, `Hey, if that's what they can get for tickets, I guess that's just something I can't afford, like a yacht and a Learjet.' "

source:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/01/technology/01TICK.html?ei=5007&en=6c7bd8e0e69ad367&ex=1377748800&adxnnl=1&partner=USERLAND&adxnnlx=1148497240-m+NGk/6OVtgNcFZMp2rhCA

# posted by dark master : 5/24/2006 12:02:00 PM  0 comments

The Investor Relations Web Report calls it "the new plagiarism". Dan Zarella from Puritan City call those who engage in it "the best plagiarists". Others simply call them bloggers or, as Zarella also put it, "Human Aggregators".

They’re a new breed of content users that walk a gray area between that which is clearly fair use and what is obviously content theft. Their blogs are marked with large swaths of block quotes and heavy content reuse, but also proper attribution and at least some original content.

These sites, as they’ve grown in number, have created a great deal of controversy among bloggers who are left to wonder if they are nothing more than content thieves in disguise.

Block quotes by the Dozen

These sites, which for this article I’ll simply call "gray", are generally identified by a large number of very short posts, with much of it in block quotes or otherwise directly lifted content. Though they meticulously credit their sources, bowing to more traditional rules for blog attribution, and work to add at least some original content, usually over half of their material comes from other sources.

This has caused many bloggers to worry that these grey blogs might be trying to get away with content theft under the guise of legitimate attribution. The idea being that they can create a much larger volume of content if they only have to write a small portion of it. Users will simply visit the gray blogs since they are able to provide so much more information and, due to the use of liberal quoting, the user will then have no reason to visit the original source. After all, they already have most of the critical information.

While certainly grey blogs don’t pose the same threat or raise the same concerns as spam blogs and other content scrapers, the cause for concern is clear. Even though blogging is about sharing and reusing information, excessive sharing threatens the authors penning the original content. The tale of the goose laying the golden egg springs to mind as, quite simply, greed can be the blogging world’s biggest enemy.

A Separation of Degrees

What makes this issue so difficult to address, and so difficult to write about, is that it’s not so much about gray blogs, but rather, various shades of grey blogs. The difference between someone simply quoting blogs and someone trying to tweak the system is not a clear cut matter, but a separation of degrees.

Quoting, even liberal quoting, is expected by blogs. It’s a part of researching a story and covering ongoing stories as well as sharing information. If done properly, it can not only be used to create a new work, but also drive valuable traffic to the original site. In the blogging world, being the source is often a badge of honor.

However, basing your entire site, or even a larger percentage of it, on quoted content is viewed differently. Being a source in a larger article is one thing, but having your content be the majority of the article on another site another. What distinguishes one from the other is unclear at best. There are no math formulas or systems for determining what is right or what is too much.

More confusing still, everyone has a different idea of what constitutes content theft. With Creative Commons Licenses being very common, it’s obvious some feel that copying an entire work is acceptable so long as attribution is affixed. Others would place the boundary well within what is usually considered fair use.

The challenge becomes to strike a balance and set some kind of guideline that is compatible with copyright law, acceptable under the current code of blogging ethics but also able to appease the concerns many bloggers share over grey sites.

A Proposed Solution

When I first looked at the problem, I was tempted to set guidelines by which a blogger should not get more than X percent of their overall content from other sites or use more than Y lines from another entry. All ideas along those lines, however, quickly fell through.

First, some sites like Engadget, gets a majority of their information from other sources and, correctly, have never been accused of content theft. (Correction: Engadget does write their own copy but reuses many photographs. I apologize for the misunderstanding.). Second, given the varied lengths of posts and methods of reuse available, almost any guideline system would quickly run afoul of fair use and, in other cases, would permit reuse that would almost certainly be questionable. Any attempt to work around these factors would complicate a rule that, supposedly, had the sole benefit of being simple.

In lieu of a hard and fast rule, much like the fair use provision itself, we begin to seek out a framework for determining if a reuse is ethical or not. This framework would contain the following elements, many of which are found in the standard fair use provision:

1. The amount of reused content compared to the amount of original content.
2. The amount of reused content in relation to the original work.
3. The frequency with which large blocks of text are used.
4. What is gained by the original author.
5. Whether permission was granted in advance, either through a CC license or direct permission.
6. Whether attribution was provided or not.
7. Other indications as to the intent of the one reusing the work, including excessive advertisements, links to one’s own sites and other forms of profiteering or over the top promotion.

(Note: As with everything I do like this, these elements are a draft and are open to both comment and revision.)

Such a system, while not perfect or easy, would provide guidelines both for pursuing content theft and reusing others works. Though it might be subjective in many respects, it does give people pause to think about what they are doing beforehand and at least some standard of conduct to follow.

Conclusion

With file sharing, blogging and content trading are more popular than ever, copyright has become something of a dirty word. Many people are obsessed not with how to best disperse information and participate in this sharing revolution, but with how much they can get away with legally and ethically.

In a parallel to the famous John F. Kennedy quote, we need to stop asking what others can do for us, and ask what we can do for them. Rather than simply wondering what we can get away with or how we can get the most for the least amount of work, we need to figure out how we can best participate in this world-wide discussion.

If the ethics of the blogging world are constantly abused to promote the gain of others, high quality writers will have little motivation to post their works on-line and, as the well slowly dries up, there will be less and less work available for either reuse or for simply reading.

It’s not enough to share, we have to support and reward good content creators. It’s the only way to keep the revolution alive.

*****UPDATE*****

Since this article made its appearance on Slashdot, many people have criticized me for allegedly mixing up the terms plagiarism and copyright infringement. This is coming from confusion in dealing with both the title and the first paragraph of this piece, which were both intended to be hat tips to the articles that inspired me to write about this issue.

The quote is attributed in the very first sentence of the piece. I chose to put quotes around the word "New" instead of the entire title because this kind of content reuse has been going on for some time. There really is little "new" about it. I have modified the title to make it more clear.

Throughout the work I use the terms copyright infringement, reuse and content theft, but never the word plagiarism after the first paragraph. I understand the difference between the terms well and need no lectures.

My hope is that this piece and the attention drawn to it will spark real discussion on a very complicated and intricate issue. Instead, I fear that confusion and misinterpretation may prevent a much-needed debate.

I hope that bloggers, in their haste to chop down the work, will look past the poorly-worded intro and into the issue behind the work, the reason it was pushed in the first place.

source:http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/?p=238

# posted by dark master : 5/24/2006 12:01:00 PM  0 comments

Nuclear fusion could become a more viable energy solution with the discovery of way to prevent super-hot gases from causing damage within reactors.

The potential solution, tested at an experimental reactor in San Diego, US, could make the next generation of fusion reactors more efficient, saving hundreds of millions of euros a year. It could be incorporated into the latest prototype fusion station – the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER) – which is to be built in Cadarache, France, from 2008 at cost of €10 billion.

Fusion reactors generate power by heating hydrogen plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius. This causes hydrogen isotopes to fuse together and release energy. But the blistering plasma has to be contained within a vessel using a donut-shaped magnetic field, created using several powerful superconducting magnets.

Over time, the reactor's plasma-containing vessel will inevitably be damaged by instabilities known as "edge-localised modes" (ELMs) that occur when hot plasma bursts out of the magnetic field. Unless these ELMs can be controlled, expensive components need to be replaced regularly.

Small currents

Researchers at General Atomics, a company based in San Diego, California, US, discovered a simple way to prevent ELMs from occurring. By using a separate magnetic coil to induce small perturbations in the reactor's main magnetic field, they found they could bleed off enough of the plasma particles to prevent the ELMs from bursting out. The solution was tested at an experimental reactor based in San Diego called the DIII-D National Fusion Facility.

"We were very pleased to find out that we can actually use fairly small currents in these coils to completely prevent ELMs," says Todd Evans, a plasma physicist with the company. "We can eliminate them completely."

Evans says uncontrolled ELMs could be expected to damage a part of the ITER reactor called the diverter, which collects and removes helium (a by-product of the fusion reaction). This would have to be replaced every six months to a year, he says, at a potential cost of hundreds of millions of Euros.

Calculated results

Curiously, however, Evans notes that the theory behind the effect does not precisely match the results. According to their calculations, the perturbations should have released both particles and heat from the plasma. Instead, the heat was not bled off with the plasma but remained mostly contained within the magnetic field.

"I think it's a very interesting solution to a very important problem," says William Dorland, a plasma physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park, US. But he warns it will be difficult to apply the solution to functional reactors until the theory behind the technique is well understood.

Any changes to the ITER must go before an advisory group, notes Bill Spears, a spokesman for the project in Garching, Germany. He adds that there is no consensus on the amount of damage ELMs will cause. Currently, the plan is to only replace the reactor's diverter every two-to-three years, he says.

source:http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9202-nuclear-fusion-plasma-problem-tackled.html

# posted by dark master : 5/24/2006 12:00:00 PM  0 comments

Physicists in the US have created a new type of tuneable liquid-crystal lens, whose focus can be changed by varying the voltage applied to it. The new device is better than traditional liquid-crystal lenses because it only has small astigmatism and does not scatter light. It could be used for zoom lenses and other microphotonic devices (Appl. Phys. Lett. 88 191116).

Figure 1

Most liquid-crystal lenses exploit the fact that liquid-crystal molecules, which are shaped like tiny rods, can change the way they point in an electric field. In particular, if the field is big enough, they all line up in the direction of the field. This alters the refractive index -- and hence the focusing power -- of the material.

The new lens, which has been built by Shin-Tson Wu and colleagues at the University of Central Florida, allows the focus to be changed in a new way. The device consists of a mixture of liquid-crystal molecules and smaller N-vinylpyrrollidone monomers placed between two glass substrates, each of which is coated with a thin transparent layer of conducting indium tin oxide (figure 1). They then placed a concave glass lens with a flat base on top of one of the substrates.

Figure 2

Without any voltage, the liquid-crystal/monomer mixture was uniformly distributed throughout the gap between the substrates. But when the researchers applied a voltage across the two substrates, the liquid-crystal molecules clumped together at either end of the gap, where the electric field was higher, while the monomers moved towards the middle of the gap, where the field was lower (figure 2).

Figure 3

As a result of this concentration gradient, the refractive index varied across the device, being highest at the ends and lowest in the middle. The device therefore functioned as a lens, which the researchers proved by firing a helium-neon laser through it and focusing the light on a CCD camera. The researchers were able to increase the lens's focal length simply by turning up the voltage across the device (figure 3).

Moreover, since no molecular reorientation is involved, the new lens overcomes some of the problems associated with conventional liquid-crystal lenses, such as strong astigmatism (when the lens cannot focus properly), distortion or light scattering during focus change.

The only snag with the new device is its long focusing time of about three minutes. This is because the lens is relatively large (9 mm), which means that molecular diffusion across it is slow. However, this should not be problem in micro-sized lenses in which the estimated response time is around 1 second at room temperature. The technique could also be used to make other adaptive microdevices such as prism arrays and phase gratings, say the researchers.

source:http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/5/12/1

# posted by dark master : 5/24/2006 11:58:00 AM  0 comments

As scientists and engineers build devices at smaller and smaller scales, grasping the dynamics of how materials behave when they are subjected to electrical signals, sound and other manipulations has proven to be beyond the reach of standard scientific techniques.

But now a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers has found a way to time such effects at the nanometer scale, in essence clocking the movements of atoms as they are manipulated using electric fields.

The accomplishment, reported in the most recent edition (May 12, 2006) of the journal Physical Review Letters, is important because it gives scientists a way to probe another dimension of a material's structure at the scale of nanometers. Adding the dimension of time to their view of the nanoworld promises to enhance the ability to develop materials for improved memory applications in microelectronics of all kinds, among other things.

"Now we have a tool to look inside a device and see how it works at the spatial scale of nanometers and the time scale of nanoseconds," says Alexei Grigoriev, a UW-Madison postdoctoral fellow and the lead author of the Physical Review Letters paper.

With the advent of nanotechnology, the ability to make devices and products on a scale measured in atoms has mushroomed. Already, products with elements fabricated at the nanoscale are on the market, and scientists continue to hone the technology, which has potential applications in areas ranging from digital electronics to toothpaste.

The traditional tools of nanotechnology - the atomic force microscope and the scanning tunneling microscope - enable scientists to see atoms, but not their response to events, which at that scale occur on the order of a billionth of a second or less.

The ability to time events that occur in materials used in nanofabrication means that scientists can now view dynamic events at the atomic scale in key materials as they unfold. That ability, in turn, promises a more detailed understanding - and potential manipulation - of the properties of those materials.

The Wisconsin work was accomplished using Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source, a synchrotron light source capable of generating very tightly focused beams of X-rays. The Wisconsin researchers, in a group led by materials science and engineering Professor Paul Evans, focused a beam of X-rays on a thin film of a ferroelectric material grown by another Wisconsin group led by materials science and engineering Professor Chang-Beom Eom.

The X-rays, according to Grigoriev, are delivered to the sample in fast pulses over an area no larger than hundreds of nanometers, one ten-millionth of a meter.

Ferroelectric materials respond to electric fields by expanding or contracting their crystal lattice structures. Ferroelectric materials also exhibit the property of remnant polarization, where atoms are rearranged in response to electrical signals. This property allows tiny ferroelectric crystals to be used as elements of digital memories.

"Physically, the atoms switch position," Grigoriev explains. "And as devices are pushed to smaller sizes, they must switch in extremely short times. It requires new tools to see those dynamics."

Using the X-rays from the Advanced Photon Source and measuring how the X-rays were reflected as the atoms in the material switched positions, the Wisconsin researchers were able to clock the event.

As a material is subjected to the X-rays and the electrical signals, "you can see in time how the crystal structure (of the material) changes as the switching polarization propagates through the lattice," Grigoriev explains.

The technique developed by Evans, Grigoriev and their colleagues is a combination of two existing techniques, making the technology easily accessible to science. It might also be applied to studies of phenomena such as magnetism and heat dissipation in microelectronic structures.

In addition to Evans, Eom, and Grigoriev, authors of the Physical Review Letters paper include Dal-Hyun Do and Dong Min Kim of UW-Madison; and Bernhard Adams and Eric M. Dufresne of Argonne National Laboratory.

# posted by dark master : 5/24/2006 11:52:00 AM  0 comments

A powerful new telescope that will image the entire sky every three nights will be located in Chile, officials have announced. If it receives the required funding, the telescope is expected to begin operating in 2012.

The 8.4-metre Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be located on Cerro Pachón, a 2700-metre-high peak in northern Chile, which is already home to the 8-metre Gemini South telescope.

But the LSST will be unlike any other observatory. Most large telescopes use one giant mirror and several small mirrors to collect and focus the light they collect. But the LSST will use three relatively large mirrors – an 8.4-metre primary, a 3.4-metre secondary, and a 5.0-metre tertiary.

This means that its field of view will span 4° – equivalent to eight full moons – compared with the 0.1° seen by other large telescopes. "Its three large mirrors are required so we don't get weird effects on the edges of the field," explains project manager Donald Sweeney.

Making movies

The telescope will use a digital camera with 3 billion pixels to image the entire sky across three nights, producing an expected 30 terabytes of data per night. This will allow astronomers to detect objects that quickly change their position, such as near-Earth asteroids, or their brightness, such as supernovae.

"It surveys a larger area than ever surveyed before, and it does it repeatedly," Sweeney told New Scientist. "So it has an opportunity to get movies where the frames are a few days apart."

This should help astronomers discover dim objects as they glide through the outer solar system. It should be able to detect Earth-sized planets more than 10 times farther from the Sun than Pluto is, testing controversial theories that predict a dozen or so Earth-sized worlds were scattered out to such distances during the solar system's youth.

Perfect alignment

With its large mirror, it will also be able to peer at distant galaxies to see how much their light has been bent by intervening dark matter, and to measure how dark energy has affected how easily galaxies group together in clusters. As yet the nature of both of these dark phenomena remains mysterious.

But the telescope will be a challenge to build. Work on its 8.4-metre mirror is expected to begin this year by the Mirror Lab at Steward Observatory in Arizona, US. Glass will be melted and cast in a honeycomb mould that spins seven times per minute. But a hole must be left at the centre of the mirror to allow room for the 5-metre tertiary mirror, and all three mirrors must be put in absolutely perfect alignment.

Funding is another hurdle. The telescope will cost an estimated $300 million, but so far telescope officials have only raised $30 million from private donors. "We would like the rest of the money to come from the federal government," says Sweeney. The telescope team will soon submit proposals for funding to the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. And the US Congress will need to approve the funding.

source:http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=dn9200&feedId=online-news_rss20

# posted by dark master : 5/24/2006 11:51:00 AM  0 comments

Can we predict how animals and plants evolve in response to changes in the environment? Maybe, according to preliminary research from Rice University.

Associate professor Yousif Shamoo and two students recently conducted experiments on a microbe, G. stearothermophilus, to see how it adapted to different environmental circumstances. In the experiment, the dominant strains of separate generations of the microbe ended up developing the same mutant gene in response to the same environmental hazards.

Conceivably, if scientists can predict how the microbes will adapt to changes in their environment, they can develop antibiotics that won't be rapidly rendered ineffective by stronger, successive generations. In other words, if researchers can figure out what gene might evolve in response to a medicine, they can figure out a way around that response.

In the experiment, the team created a mutant strain of the microbe that was unable to live in high-temperature environments. Typically, the bacteria can continue to thrive when the temperature hits 73 degrees Celsius (163 degrees Fahrenheit). The experimental strain of bacteria contained a mutated version of a gene that, in the naturally occurring strain of the microbe, produces a protein that made existence possible.

They then put these mutant strains in environments where the temperature rose slowly but steadily, and studied how different generations coped with the changing temperature.

In the breeding that followed, millions of new mutations of the gene in question were produced, but only about 700 of those variants replicated some of the functionality of the naturally occurring gene.

One variant, called Q199R, appeared almost immediately, and the bacteria that contained it became the dominant strain of bacteria through 500 generations of breeding. The gene, however, couldn't provide protection after 62 degrees Celsius.

At that point, five new strains of bacteria, all with slightly different versions of Q199R, appeared. Three of the five new strains were driven to extinction in a few days, while the remaining two fought it out for three weeks longer.

The group then conducted the experiment again, and the same mutations developed. Thus, the experiment suggests that evolutionary development can be predicted, the researchers said.

"The duplicate study suggests that the pathways of molecular adaptation are reproducible and not highly variable under identical conditions," Shamoo said in a statement. "One of our most surprising findings is that an estimated 20 million point mutations gave rise to just six populations that were capable of vying for dominance. This suggests that very few molecular pathways are available for a specific molecular response."

source:http://news.com.com/Is+evolution+predictable/2100-11395_3-6074543.html

# posted by dark master : 5/24/2006 11:50:00 AM  0 comments

A new research project at MIT's Media Lab aims to turn every cell phone or PDA carrying member of the public into a podcaster, and every mobile device into a virtual podcasting studio.

The first reportedly working prototype was built on a Motorola A1000 cell phone, and is currently being tested in Spain as part of the Electronic Lens project. A live demo of the new project, which has been dubbed "RadioActive," should be available soon.

According to Judith Donath, director of the Sociable Media Group at MIT, the inspiration arose out of a complaint from one of her students.

"She received [a lot of] phone calls from people who didn't really have anything to say, but were bored," Donath said. "They were walking or driving, so they took out their phone and called their friends looking for entertainment."

By and large, more people are turning to their mobile devices for entertainment, says Donath, but rather than call, and potentially annoy, a friend, it would be ideal to "conveniently drop into an [ongoing] discussion and drop out when you're done."

The RadioActive project, which Donath created with student Aaron Zinman, defines a large-scale asynchronous audio messaging system, or mobile audio forum. In this system, voice messages, which are short audio sound bytes, are exchanged between groups of users via mobile devices, like cell phones or PDAs, as a method of "discussion-on-demand."

The messages are then collected in threads similar to how a common Internet discussion forum, like discuss.pcmag.com or even Slashdot, organizes text posts. Each message contains a subject, body, and author, as well as other metadata, and can range the spectrum from quick blurbs to full-length podcasts.

Since it can be time consuming to listen to long threads of voice messages as compared to scanning text in a discussion forum, community moderation has been incorporated into the system. "If lots of people say [a message] is not interesting, it's important that it fade into the background," Donath explained.

Just like an email application or an RSS reader, RadioActive supplies its users with an inbox, which displays the first message of discussion threads that have been subscribed to or are contextually relevant. For instance, location may be one factor the system takes into account when determining contextual relevance. In this scenario, threads relating to New York City restaurants may appear in the inbox as the user walks around Manhattan.

The user can then navigate through messages in an active manner, by using the graphical interface (GUI) with a keyboard or voice command, or in a passive manner, in the so-called "Radio" mode. In the GUI, visual cues are displayed that allow the user to quickly determine interest level, size, age, and whether or not the message has been heard. The user can then play messages in a specific thread or jump between threads. In Radio mode, the system plays messages sequentially so that the user can concentrate on other tasks, like driving.

source:http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0%2C1895%2C1964680%2C00.asp

# posted by dark master : 5/24/2006 11:44:00 AM  0 comments

Symantec's DeepSight Threat Analyst Team has escalated its ThreatCon level after confirming the unpatched vulnerability is being used "against select targets."

The exploit arrives as an ordinary Microsoft Word document attachment to an e-mail. However, when the document is launched by the user the vulnerability is triggered to drop a backdoor with rootkit features to mask itself from anti-virus scanners.

The SANS ISC (Internet Storm Center) said in a diary entry that it received reports of the exploit from an unnamed organization that was targeted. "The e-mail was written to look like an internal e-mail, including signature. It was addressed by name to the intended victim and not detected by the anti-virus software," said Chris Carboni, an ISC incident handler tracking the attack.

When the .doc attachment is opened, it exploits a previously unknown vulnerability in Microsoft Word and infects a fully patched Windows system. The exploit functioned as a dropper, extracting and launching a Trojan that immediately overwrites the original Word document with a "clean," uninfected copy.

"As a result of the exploit, Word crashes, informs the user of a problem, and offers to attempt to re-open the file. If the user agrees, the new 'clean' file is opened without incident," the ISC explained.

Microsoft has been notified and is working with security researchers to investigate the bug.

Roger Thompson, chief technical officer at Atlanta-based Exploit Prevention Labs, said the attack "feels like espionage, perhaps industrial."

After looking at a sample of the malware code, Thompson said the backdoor is programmed to call back to a server in China to report information about what the infected system looks like.

In addition to providing reconnaissance, the backdoor can connect to specified addresses to receive commands from the malicious attacker.

Finnish anti-virus vendor F-Secure said a successful exploit allows the attacker to create, read, write, delete and search for files and directories; access and modify the Registry; manipulate services; start and kill processes; take screenshots; enumerate open windows; create its own application window; and lock, restart or shut down Windows.

The ISC said the attack was traced to the Far East, with domains and IP addresses associated with the Trojan registered in China and Taiwan. "The [attack] e-mails received originated from a server in that region. The attackers appear to be aware that they have been 'outed,' and have been routinely changing the IP address associated with the URL above," the Storm Center said.

Symantec's DeepSight team said the exploit successfully executes shellcode when it is processed by Microsoft Word 2003. The malicious file caused Microsoft Word 2000 to crash, but shellcode execution did not occur.

As a temporary mitigation method, Symantec is recommending that Microsoft Word document e-mail attachments be blocked at the network perimeter. "Furthermore, extreme caution should be exercised while processing Microsoft Word attachments received as an unexpected e-mail Attachment," company officials said.

source:http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1965042,00.asp

# posted by dark master : 5/24/2006 11:43:00 AM  0 comments