may the force be with you

"A BBC article about an agreement which will begin construction on the second most expensive scientific collaboration, after the ISS : the world's first large-scale fusion reactor. From the article: "The seven-party consortium, which includes the European Union, the US, Japan, China, Russia and others, agreed last year to build Iter in Cadarache, in the southern French region of Provence ... He said that the participants would aim to ratify their agreement before the end of the year so construction on the facility could start in 2007. Officials said the experimental reactor would take about eight years to build. The EU is to foot about 50% of the cost to build the experimental reactor. If all goes well with the experimental reactor, officials hope to set up a demonstration power plant at Cadarache by 2040. "

source:http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/25/1235210

Creating quality software products means knowing when to fix bugs and when to leave well alone, writes Eric Sink

The world's six billion people can be divided into two groups: group one, who know why every good software company ships products with known bugs; and group two, who don't. Those in group 1 tend to forget what life was like before our youthful optimism was spoiled by reality. Sometimes we encounter a person in group two, a new hire on the team or a customer, who is shocked that any software company would ship a product before every last bug is fixed.

Every time Microsoft releases a version of Windows, stories are written about how the open bug count is a five-digit number. People in group two find that interesting. But if you are a software developer, you need to get into group one, where I am. Why would an independent software vendor - like SourceGear - release a product with known bugs? There are several reasons:

· We care about quality so deeply that we know how to decide which bugs are acceptable and which ones are not.

· It is better to ship a product with a known quality level than to ship a product full of surprises.

· The alternative is to fix them and risk introducing worse bugs.

All the reasons are tied up in one truth: every time you fix a bug, you risk introducing another. Don't we all start out with the belief that software only gets better as we work on it? Nobody on our team intentionally creates new bugs. Yet we have done accidentally.

Risky changes

Every code change is a risk. If you don't recognise this you will never create a shippable product. At some point, you have to decide which bugs aren't going to be fixed.

Think about what we want to say to ourselves just after our product is released. The people in group two want to say: "Our bug database has zero open items. We didn't defer a single bug."

The group 1 person wants to say: "Our bug database has lots of open items. We have reviewed every one and consider each to be acceptable. We are not ashamed of this list. On the contrary, we draw confidence because we are shipping a product with a quality that is well known. We admit our product would be even better if all these items were 'fixed', but fixing them would risk introducing new bugs."

I'm not suggesting anybody should ship products of low quality. But decisions about software quality can be tough and subtle.

There are four questions to ask about every bug. The first two are customer ones, and the next two are developer ones.

1) How bad is its impact? (Severity)

2) How often does it happen? (Frequency)

3) How much effort is required to fix it? (Cost)

4) What is the risk of fixing it? (Risk)

I like to visualise the first two plotted on a 2D graph, with severity on the vertical axis. The top of the graph is a bug with extreme impact ("the user's computer bursts into flames") and the bottom one has very low impact ("one splash screen pixel is the wrong shade of grey").

The horizontal axis is frequency: on the right side is a bug that happens very often ("the user sees this each day") and on the left, one that seldom happens.

Broadly speaking, stuff gets more important as you move up or to the right of the graph. A bug in the upper right should be fixed. A bug in the lower left should not. Sometimes I draw this graph on a whiteboard when arguing for or against a bug.

Questions three and four are about the tradeoffs involved in fixing the bug. The answers can only ever make the priority of a bug go down - never up. If, after answering questions one and two, a bug does not deserve attention, skip the other two. A common mistake is to use question three to justify fixing a bug that isn't important. We never make unimportant code changes just because they're easy.

Every code change has a cost and a risk. Bad decisions happen when people make code changes ignoring these two issues.

For instance, our product, Vault, stores all data using Microsoft SQL Server. Some people don't like this. We've been asked to port the back end to Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Firebird. This issue is in our bug database as item 6740. The four questions would look like this:

· Severity: People who refuse to use SQL Server can't use Vault.

· Frequency: This "bug" affects none of our users; it merely prevents a group of people from using our product.

· Cost: Very high. Vault's backend makes extensive use of features specific to Microsoft SQL Server. Contrary to popular belief, SQL isn't portable. Adapting the backend for any other database would take months, and the maintenance costs of two back ends would be quite high.

· Risk: The primary risk lies in any code changes made to the server to enable it to speak to different backend implementations of the underlying SQL store.

Obviously, this is more of a feature request than a bug.

Example: Item 10016. Linux and MacOS users have problems over how end-of-line terminators show up. Last October, we tried to fix this and accidentally introduced a nastier bug that prevented users creating new versions of a project. So the four questions for 10016 would look like this:

· Severity: For a certain class of users, this bug is a showstopper. It does not threaten data integrity, but makes Vault unusable.

· Frequency: This bug only affects users on non-Windows platforms, a rather small percentage of our user base.

· Cost: The code change is small and appears simple.

· Risk: We thought - wrongly - that the risk was low.

If testing had told us that the risk was higher than we thought, we would have revisited the four questions. Because the frequency is relatively low, we might have decided to defer this fix until we figured out how to do it without breaking things. In fact, that's what we ended up doing: we "undid" the fix for Bug 10016 in a minor update to Vault, so it's now open again.

Contextual understanding

Not only do you have to answer the four questions, you have to answer them with a good understanding of the context in which you are doing business. You need to understand the quality expectations of your market segment and what the market window is for your product. We can ship products with "bugs" because there are some that customers will accept.

I know what you want, and I want it too: a way to make these decisions easy. I want an algorithm with simple inputs to tell me which bugs I should fix and in what order.

I want to implement this algorithm as a feature in our bug-tracking product. Wouldn't it be a killer feature? In the Project Settings dialog, the user would enter a numeric value for "Market Quality Expectations" and a schedule for the closing of the "Market Window". For every bug, the user would enter numeric values for severity, frequency, cost and risk. The Priority field for each bug would be automatically calculated. Sort the list on Priority descending and you see the order in which bugs should be fixed. The ones near the bottom should not be fixed at all.

I'd probably even patent this algorithm even though, in principle, I believe software patents are fundamentally evil.

Alas, this ethical quandary is not going to happen, as "Eric's Magic Bug Priority Algorithm" will never exist. There is no shortcut. Understand your context, ask all four questions and use your judgment.

Experienced developers can usually make these decisions quickly. It only takes a few seconds mentally to process the four questions. In tougher cases, gather two co-workers near a whiteboard and the right answer will probably show up soon.

· Eric Sink is a software developer at SourceGear. A longer version of this article appeared on his website: see http://software.ericsink.com/

source:http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1781895,00.html

They can steal your smartcard, lift your passport, jack your car, even clone the chip in your arm. And you won't feel a thing. 5 tales from the RFID-hacking underground.

James Van Bokkelen is about to be robbed. A wealthy software entrepreneur, Van Bokkelen will be the latest victim of some punk with a laptop. But this won't be an email scam or bank account hack. A skinny 23-year-old named Jonathan Westhues plans to use a cheap, homemade USB device to swipe the office key out of Van Bokkelen's back pocket.

"I just need to bump into James and get my hand within a few inches of him," Westhues says. We're shivering in the early spring air outside the offices of Sandstorm, the Internet security company Van Bokkelen runs north of Boston. As Van Bokkelen approaches from the parking lot, Westhues brushes past him. A coil of copper wire flashes briefly in Westhues' palm, then disappears.

Van Bokkelen enters the building, and Westhues returns to me. "Let's see if I've got his keys," he says, meaning the signal from Van Bokkelen's smartcard badge. The card contains an RFID sensor chip, which emits a short burst of radio waves when activated by the reader next to Sandstorm's door. If the signal translates into an authorized ID number, the door unlocks.

The coil in Westhues' hand is the antenna for the wallet-sized device he calls a cloner, which is currently shoved up his sleeve. The cloner can elicit, record, and mimic signals from smartcard RFID chips. Westhues takes out the device and, using a USB cable, connects it to his laptop and downloads the data from Van Bokkelen's card for processing. Then, satisfied that he has retrieved the code, Westhues switches the cloner from Record mode to Emit. We head to the locked door.

"Want me to let you in?" Westhues asks. I nod.

He waves the cloner's antenna in front of a black box attached to the wall. The single red LED blinks green. The lock clicks. We walk in and find Van Bokkelen waiting.

"See? I just broke into your office!" Westhues says gleefully. "It's so simple." Van Bokkelen, who arranged the robbery "just to see how it works," stares at the antenna in Westhues' hand. He knows that Westhues could have performed his wireless pickpocket maneuver and then returned with the cloner after hours. Westhues could have walked off with tens of thousands of dollars' worth of computer equipment - and possibly source code worth even more. Van Bokkelen mutters, "I always thought this might be a lousy security system."

RFID chips are everywhere - companies and labs use them as access keys, Prius owners use them to start their cars, and retail giants like Wal-Mart have deployed them as inventory tracking devices. Drug manufacturers like Pfizer rely on chips to track pharmaceuticals. The tags are also about to get a lot more personal: Next-gen US passports and credit cards will contain RFIDs, and the medical industry is exploring the use of implantable chips to manage patients. According to the RFID market analysis firm IDTechEx, the push for digital inventory tracking and personal ID systems will expand the current annual market for RFIDs from $2.7 billion to as much as $26 billion by 2016.

RFID technology dates back to World War II, when the British put radio transponders in Allied aircraft to help early radar system crews detect good guys from bad guys. The first chips were developed in research labs in the 1960s, and by the next decade the US government was using tags to electronically authorize trucks coming into Los Alamos National Laboratory and other secure facilities. Commercialized chips became widely available in the '80s, and RFID tags were being used to track difficult-to-manage property like farm animals and railroad cars. But over the last few years, the market for RFIDs has exploded, driven by advances in computer databases and declining chip prices. Now dozens of companies, from Motorola to Philips to Texas Instruments, manufacture the chips.

The tags work by broadcasting a few bits of information to specialized electronic readers. Most commercial RFID chips are passive emitters, which means they have no onboard battery: They send a signal only when a reader powers them with a squirt of electrons. Once juiced, these chips broadcast their signal indiscriminately within a certain range, usually a few inches to a few feet. Active emitter chips with internal power can send signals hundreds of feet; these are used in the automatic toll-paying devices (with names like FasTrak and E-ZPass) that sit on car dashboards, pinging tollgates as autos whiz through.

For protection, RFID signals can be encrypted. The chips that will go into US passports, for example, will likely be coded to make it difficult for unauthorized readers to retrieve their onboard information (which will include a person's name, age, nationality, and photo). But most commercial RFID tags don't include security, which is expensive: A typical passive RFID chip costs about a quarter, whereas one with encryption capabilities runs about $5. It's just not cost-effective for your average office building to invest in secure chips.

This leaves most RFIDs vulnerable to cloning or - if the chip has a writable memory area, as many do - data tampering. Chips that track product shipments or expensive equipment, for example, often contain pricing and item information. These writable areas can be locked, but often they aren't, because the companies using RFIDs don't know how the chips work or because the data fields need to be updated frequently. Either way, these chips are open to hacking.

"The world of RFID is like the Internet in its early stages," says Ari Juels, research manager at the high tech security firm RSA Labs. "Nobody thought about building security features into the Internet in advance, and now we're paying for it in viruses and other attacks. We're likely to see the same thing with RFIDs."

David Molnar is a soft-spoken computer science graduate student who studies commercial uses for RFIDs at UC Berkeley. I meet him in a quiet branch of the Oakland Public Library, which, like many modern libraries, tracks most of its inventory with RFID tags glued inside the covers of its books. These tags, made by Libramation, contain several writable memory "pages" that store the books' barcodes and loan status.

Brushing a thatch of dark hair out of his eyes, Molnar explains that about a year ago he discovered he could destroy the data on the books' passive-emitting RFID tags by wandering the aisles with an off-the-shelf RFID reader-writer and his laptop. "I would never actually do something like that, of course," Molnar reassures me in a furtive whisper, as a nonbookish security guard watches us.

Our RFID-enabled checkout is indeed quite convenient. As we leave the library, we stop at a desk equipped with a monitor and arrange our selections, one at a time, face up on a metal plate. The titles instantly appear onscreen. We borrow four books in less than a minute without bothering the librarian, who is busy helping some kids with their homework.

Molnar takes the books to his office, where he uses a commercially available reader about the size and heft of a box of Altoids to scan the data from their RFID tags. The reader feeds the data to his computer, which is running software that Molnar ordered from RFID-maker Tagsys. As he waves the reader over a book's spine, ID numbers pop up on his monitor.

"I can definitely overwrite these tags," Molnar says. He finds an empty page in the RFID's memory and types "AB." When he scans the book again, we see the barcode with the letters "AB" next to it. (Molnar hastily erases the "AB," saying that he despises library vandalism.) He fumes at the Oakland library's failure to lock the writable area. "I could erase the barcodes and then lock the tags. The library would have to replace them all."

Frank Mussche, Libramation's president, acknowledges that the library's tags were left unlocked. "That's the recommended implementation of our tags," he says. "It makes it easier for libraries to change the data."

For the Oakland Public Library, vulnerability is just one more problem in a buggy system. "This was mostly a pilot program, and it was implemented poorly," says administrative librarian Jerry Garzon. "We've decided to move ahead without Libramation and RFIDs."

But hundreds of libraries have deployed the tags. According to Mussche, Libramation has sold 5 million RFID tags in a "convenient" unlocked state.

While it may be hard to imagine why someone other than a determined vandal would take the trouble to change library tags, there are other instances where the small hassle could be worth big bucks. Take the Future Store. Located in Rheinberg, Germany, the Future Store is the world's preeminent test bed of RFID-based retail shopping. All the items in this high tech supermarket have RFID price tags, which allow the store and individual product manufacturers - Gillette, Kraft, Procter & Gamble - to gather instant feedback on what's being bought. Meanwhile, shoppers can check out with a single flash of a reader. In July 2004, Wired hailed the store as the "supermarket of the future." A few months later, German security expert Lukas Grunwald hacked the chips.

Grunwald cowrote a program called RFDump, which let him access and alter price chips using a PDA (with an RFID reader) and a PC card antenna. With the store's permission, he and his colleagues strolled the aisles, downloading information from hundreds of sensors. They then showed how easily they could upload one chip's data onto another. "I could download the price of a cheap wine into RFDump," Grunwald says, "then cut and paste it onto the tag of an expensive bottle." The price-switching stunt drew media attention, but the Future Store still didn't lock its price tags. "What we do in the Future Store is purely a test," says the Future Store spokesperson Albrecht von Truchsess. "We don't expect that retailers will use RFID like this at the product level for at least 10 or 15 years." By then, Truchsess thinks, security will be worked out.

Today, Grunwald continues to pull even more-elaborate pranks with chips from the Future Store. "I was at a hotel that used smartcards, so I copied one and put the data into my computer," Grunwald says. "Then I used RFDump to upload the room key card data to the price chip on a box of cream cheese from the Future Store. And I opened my hotel room with the cream cheese!"

Aside from pranks, vandalism, and thievery, Grunwald has recently discovered another use for RFID chips: espionage. He programmed RFDump with the ability to place cookies on RFID tags the same way Web sites put cookies on browsers to track returning customers. With this, a stalker could, say, place a cookie on his target's E-ZPass, then return to it a few days later to see which toll plazas the car had crossed (and when). Private citizens and the government could likewise place cookies on library books to monitor who's checking them out.

In 1997, ExxonMobil equipped thousands of service stations with SpeedPass, which lets customers wave a small RFID device attached to a key chain in front of a pump to pay for gas. Seven years later, three graduate students - Steve Bono, Matthew Green, and Adam Stubblefield - ripped off a station in Baltimore. Using a laptop and a simple RFID broadcasting device, they tricked the system into letting them fill up for free.

The theft was concocted by Avi Rubin's computer science lab at Johns Hopkins University. Rubin's lab is best known for having found massive, hackable flaws in the code running on Diebold's widely adopted electronic voting machines in 2004. Working with RSA Labs manager Juels, the group figured out how to crack the RFID chip in ExxonMobil's SpeedPass.

Hacking the tag, which is made by Texas Instruments, is not as simple as breaking into Van Bokkelen's Sandstorm offices with a cloner. The radio signals in these chips, dubbed DST tags, are protected by an encryption cipher that only the chip and the reader can decode. Unfortunately, says Juels, "Texas Instruments used an untested cipher." The Johns Hopkins lab found that the code could be broken with what security geeks call a "brute-force attack," in which a special computer known as a cracker is used to try thousands of password combinations per second until it hits on the right one. Using a home-brewed cracker that cost a few hundred dollars, Juels and the Johns Hopkins team successfully performed a brute-force attack on TI's cipher in only 30 minutes. Compare that to the hundreds of years experts estimate it would take for today's computers to break the publicly available encryption tool SHA-1, which is used to secure credit card transactions on the Internet.

ExxonMobil isn't the only company that uses the Texas Instruments tags. The chips are also commonly used in vehicle security systems. If the reader in the car doesn't detect the chip embedded in the rubbery end of the key handle, the engine won't turn over. But disable the chip and the car can be hot-wired like any other.

Bill Allen, director of strategic alliances at Texas Instruments RFID Systems, says he met with the Johns Hopkins team and he isn't worried. "This research was purely academic," Allen says. Nevertheless, he adds, the chips the Johns Hopkins lab tested have already been phased out and replaced with ones that use 128-bit keys, along with stronger public encryption tools, such as SHA-1 and Triple DES.

Juels is now looking into the security of the new US passports, the first of which were issued to diplomats this March. Frank Moss, deputy assistant secretary of state for passport services, claims they are virtually hack-proof. "We've added to the cover an anti-skimming device that prevents anyone from reading the chip unless the passport is open," he says. Data on the chip is encrypted and can't be unlocked without a key printed in machine-readable text on the passport itself.

But Juels still sees problems. While he hasn't been able to work with an actual passport yet, he has studied the government's proposals carefully. "We believe the new US passport is probably vulnerable to a brute-force attack," he says. "The encryption keys in them will depend on passport numbers and birth dates. Because these have a certain degree of structure and guessability, we estimate that the effective key length is at most 52 bits. A special key-cracking machine could probably break a passport key of this length in 10 minutes."

I'm lying facedown on an examination table at UCLA Medical Center, my right arm extended at 90 degrees. Allan Pantuck, a young surgeon wearing running shoes with his lab coat, is inspecting an anesthetized area on the back of my upper arm. He holds up something that looks like a toy gun with a fat silver needle instead of a barrel.

I've decided to personally test-drive what is undoubtedly the most controversial use of RFIDs today - an implantable tag. VeriChip, the only company making FDA-approved tags, boasts on its Web site that "this 'always there' identification can't be lost, stolen, or duplicated." It sells the chips to hospitals as implantable medical ID tags and is starting to promote them as secure-access keys.

Pantuck pierces my skin with the gun, delivering a microchip and antenna combo the size of a grain of long rice. For the rest of my life, a small region on my right arm will emit binary signals that can be converted into a 16-digit number. When Pantuck scans my arm with the VeriChip reader - it looks sort of like the wand clerks use to read barcodes in checkout lines - I hear a quiet beep, and its tiny red LED display shows my ID number.

Three weeks later, I meet the smartcard-intercepting Westhues at a greasy spoon a few blocks from the MIT campus. He's sitting in the corner with a half-finished plate of onion rings, his long blond hair hanging in his face as he hunches over the cloner attached to his computer.

Because the VeriChip uses a frequency close to that of many smartcards, Westhues is pretty sure the cloner will work on my tag. Westhues waves his antenna over my arm and gets some weird readings. Then he presses it lightly against my skin, the way a digital-age pickpocket could in an elevator full of people. He stares at the green waveforms that appear on his computer screen. "Yes, that looks like we got a good reading," he says.

After a few seconds of fiddling, Westhues switches the cloner to Emit and aims its antenna at the reader. Beep! My ID number pops up on its screen. So much for implantable IDs being immune to theft. The whole process took 10 minutes. "If you extended the range of this cloner by boosting its power, you could strap it to your leg, and somebody passing the VeriChip reader over your arm would pick up the ID," Westhues says. "They'd never know they hadn't read it from your arm." Using a clone of my tag, as it were, Westhues could access anything the chip was linked to, such as my office door or my medical records.

John Proctor, VeriChip's director of communications, dismisses this problem. "VeriChip is an excellent security system, but it shouldn't be used as a stand-alone," he says. His recommendation: Have someone also check paper IDs.

But isn't the point of an implantable chip that authentication is automatic? "People should know what level of security they're getting when they inject something into their arm," he says with a half smile.

They should - but they don't. A few weeks after Westhues clones my chip, Cincinnati-based surveillance company CityWatcher announces a plan to implant employees with VeriChips. Sean Darks, the company's CEO, touts the chips as "just like a key card." Indeed.

source:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.05/rfid.html?pg=3&topic=rfid&topic_set=

"Nintendo has revealed to Famitsu.com, at the company's recent press conference unveiling its financial results, that Wii would arrive in Japanese stores with a maximum price tag of 25,000 yen. After taking in account various factors, the conversion to other currencies comes down to a launch price of: 225 dollars, 225 euros, and 150 pounds." Update: 05/25 13:45 GMT by Z : GamesIndustry.biz points out they hope to ship 6 million units by next March, and an Opera exec has said you can browse the internets with the wiimote.

source:http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/25/1314204

"Much of the talk at the 2006 World Wide Web conference has been about the technologies behind the so-called semantic web. The idea is to make the web intelligent by storing data such that it can be analyzed better by our machines, instead of the user having to sort and analyze the data from search engines. From the article: 'Big business, whose motto has always been time is money, is looking forward to the day when multiple sources of financial information can be cross-referenced to show market patterns almost instantly.' However, concern is also growing about the misuses of this intelligent web as an affront to privacy and security."

Nasa would have to find hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the TPF mission

Earth-like planets around distant stars may be too far away to be reached by spacecraft but scientists could still investigate whether they harbour life.

Telescope technologies are being developed that will probe the very faint light from these objects for tell-tale signs of biology.

These are the same "life markers" known to be present in light reflected off the Earth - so-called "earthshine".

They include signatures for water, and gases such as oxygen and methane.

"This gives you some information on habitability," said Wesley Traub, chief scientist on the US space agency's (Nasa) Navigator Program which specialises in the search for far-off worlds.

"These are only signs of life; they are only indicators. You can't actually detect the life itself crawling or sliming around on the surface of the planet," he told the American Geophysical Union Joint Assembly here in Baltimore, US.

In the glare

Traub is hopeful Nasa will approve the funds necessary to launch a Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission some time in the next decade.

It will comprise two space-borne observatories which will hunt down and study Earth-sized planets orbiting stars at distances where liquid water could exist and sustain life.

Europe has a similar, ambitious mission under consideration known as Darwin.

Sunlight is reflected off the Earth, hits the Moon and bounces back to Earth Earthshine is seen in the faint glow our world gives to dark areas of the Moon The light carries information about Earth's atmosphere and surface properties Scientists see details in the light that betray different gases, even vegetation The knowledge can be applied to the search for distant worlds

Essential to these observatories' success will be a new generation of instrumentation capable of seeing past the blinding glare of the parent star to pick out only the faint light reflected off the distant world's surface.

It is a hard task - the parent star is likely to be a billion to 10 billion times brighter than its tiny companion - but recent experiments at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggest the technologies are getting close to the sensitivities required.

The "template" for the information that a TPF or Darwin mission would target is based around what we know about the Earth's reflected light.

As the Sun's rays hit our world much of it bounces back out into space. We can see this light in the faint illumination it gives to the dark segment of a crescent moon.

Scientists have long established that this light carries information about the Earth's atmosphere and surface properties.

Pilar Montanes-Rodriguez, from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, reported to the meeting how she had been able to see in this earthshine a clear marker for chlorophyll, the pigment in plants that plays a critical role in photosynthesis.

Ancient planets

Clearly, to be able to detect such a signature in the light from a world tens of light-years away would be astonishing; but Montanes-Rodriguez cautioned: "For a typical day the signal of the vegetation is very weak for the Earth because it is obscured by the bright clouds.

"We used models and satellite cloud data to simulate the Earth reflectance for a whole year. We then applied what we'd learnt from Earth to an extrasolar planet.

Current techniques are finding more and more distant worlds

"As this planet revolves around a parent star, there will be times when the signal will be prominent and can be unambiguously detected. Unfortunately, at these times the angle of distance between the planet and the star will be small and it will be difficult to rule out the light of the star."

She warned the instrumentation required might require a level of precision beyond what had previously been thought necessary.

Traub's own modelling has tried to work out what the Earth's planet shine would have looked like at various stages in geologic history - to get a set of "profiles" planet hunters could use to gauge what stage in the evolution of life a newly discovered world might have reached.

"If you look at the [current] earthshine spectrum and you calculate what that would have looked like at a point before any life arose on Earth, you see a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane," he informed the meeting.

"You wouldn't see any oxygen and you wouldn't see any ozone line, because the ozone comes from oxygen. As an Earth evolves, you would see the CO2 disappearing, you would see the oxygen increasing and at some late point you see the [infrared] of vegetation coming on."

source:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5010936.stm

"After 12 years in business, Trolltech, the company whose founders created KDE, has filed an application for listing on the Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE). From the article: 'The OSE reports receiving the application the following day, and says Trolltech is now subject to disclosure of information requirements. IPO rumors sprang up around Trolltech last Fall, when the company hired Juha Christensen and Tod Nielsen in September, and then added Benoit Schillings and Dr. Karsten Homann in October. The company said in January that it doubled its design wins, among other significant 2005 achievements', particularly in the arena of using Linux as OS to power mobile phones."

source:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/24/1745209

A story claiming that Sony is preparing to stop the potential sale of pre-owned PlayStation 3 games is being met with some skepticism by industry insiders.

According to a UK news source, citing retail contacts, Sony is preparing to make it illegal for consumers to sell used PS3 games. The plan would involve Sony adopting a licensing system whereby gamers would agree that they are purchasing a license to play a game, rather than the game itself. Sony says the story is "just speculation".

Such a move would be a massive boost for publishers and developers which do not profit from the lucrative and damaging retail trade in used games. In fact, many publishers are furious that they have to spend support money on consumers who have not actually contributed a dime to the company's coffers.

In turn, it would be a catastrophe for retailers, which make a significant proportion of margin from used games. Consumers would likely be less than overjoyed.

Sony does have a patent on technology which would tie a piece of software to an individual piece of hardware. But technology and desire are not the only parts of the puzzle. Whether the company would be prepared to take on retail, consumer goodwill and, most likely, the U.S courts, is another matter.

One expert in retail law told Next-Gen.Biz, "Sony can theoretically sell a license to play the game, but the user would have to acknowledge acceptance of the license. You've seen this when you install software on a PC. I'm not sure that the license agreement is enforceable if the licensee doesn't agree to it.

"Also, even if the agreement is enforceable, it's hard to preclude subsequent sale of the disc. The consumer could theoretically agree that he doesn't own the right to transfer his license, but why couldn't he sell the medium that held the license (the disc)? Sony can't enforce the agreement against a third party, as it lacks privity with the third party.

"Stated differently, I don't believe Sony can keep someone from selling a disc, even if they create a license agreement. The only way that this can truly be effected is to require registration of the disc with a specific PS3 console. Sony has a patent on such a technology, and could render a disc unplayable once registered. That would accomplish their goal (if they really have such a goal). In summary, I don't believe this is real."

A senior games publishing source told us, "Sony and the rest of us would love to put an end to this damaging trade, but actually making it happen looks like a fight that's beyond even Sony. I can't see it happening, but i hope I'm wrong."

Another senior manager at a third party publisher said, "I know that Sony is very upset about the used games market. But this story seems a bit far-fetched."

A leading analyst said. "These stories crop up from time to time, and I'm not convinced this is on the mark."

source:http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3086&Itemid=2

Lessons learned in Iraq may show up in future household ‘avatars’

SAN DIEGO - U.S. soldiers in Iraq are giving nicknames and forming emotional bonds with bomb-defusing robots they have come to regard as teammates, according to the founder of the company that invented the machines.

IRobot Chief Executive Colin Angle said one group of soldiers even named its robot “Scooby Doo” and grieved when it was blown up after completing 35 successful missions defusing improvised explosive devices.

“Please fix Scooby Doo because he saved my life,” a soldier told repair technicians, according to Angle’s account at last week’s Future in Review technology conference.

The company, which is best known for Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner, and Scooba, the floor-mopping robot, envisions a machine that would instill similar feelings in civilians.

Someday, Angle believes, these robots — which he calls ”physical avatars” — will help care for children and the elderly, giving parents and caregivers greater peace of mind as well as relief from mundane tasks.

But iRobot got its start as a military contractor, and its future also looks firmly wedded to the armed services.

Military contracts continue
The company was formed in 1990 and completed its initial public offering last November.

“There were no venture capitalists interested in funding robotics 15 years ago,” said Neena Buck, a Strategic Analytics vice president who specializes in emerging technologies. ”IRobot was funded by a lot military contracts and research grants that allowed them to do parallel research on consumer projects.”

Scooby Doo was one of about 300 PackBot Tactical Mobile Robots deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan to open doors in urban combat, lay fiber-optic cable, defuse bombs and perform other hazardous duties previously done by humans alone.

In March, iRobot won a $26 million U.S. Navy contract to provide an additional 213 PackBots for bomb-defusing duty, bringing the total value of Navy orders of its robots to more than $43 million.

The company has won another contract to supply its next-generation robots to the U.S. Army’s Future Combat Systems. IRobot is working with Boston University on a sniper detection robot that could sense where a bullet came from.

The Boeing Co., with employee-owned Science Applications International Inc., is the primary contractor for the $125 billion future combat program that will use advanced communications to link troops with a family of 18 manned and unmanned air and ground vehicles.

Civilian robots
IRobot has sold about 2 million Roombas, the company announced on Monday. It doubled its first-quarter revenue to $38.2 million from a year earlier.

But investors have punished the stock, driving its price to about $21 from the mid-$30s in recent months as the company failed to turn a profit due to a near tripling of marketing costs.

“I think they are in the early innings of this market opportunity,” said Jonathan Dorsheimer, director of research at capital management firm Canaccord Adams.

IRobot will use the defense market to develop technology that it can then use as the basis for lower-cost consumer applications, he said. For example, he suggested the company might develop a robotic lawn mower in this fashion.

And then there’s the avatar. Angle said a human being would remotely control this futuristic robot, which would be capable of carrying out complex tasks such as cooking meals and ensuring people take the prescribed dosages of medicines.

“The physical avatar has a screen, sound, and the ability to manipulate objects,” he said. “It provides a physical presence in a remote location.”

An iRobot partner has already produced an avatar that Angle says allows doctors to complete hospital rounds remotely. Angle’s goal is to make the commercial-grade avatar, which he says costs in the tens of thousands of dollars, cheap enough for consumers.

Leaner, meaner robots
While he does not know when these types of machines will be available in typical households, Angle is more immediately focused on the robots in Iraq, which are going out on 600 to 700 missions a day. IRobot employees who have been in Iraq have returned with ideas to improve weight, battery operation and other product requirements.

Angle did not hesitate when asked if he thinks the bond soldiers have formed with his robots is normal.

“I think it’s very rational,” he said. “(Scooby Doo) was someone, something, that was doing a great service for them and thus when they brought it back, it was viewed not just as a loss of a machine gun or a piece of body armor or a helmet. It was a loss of a contributing member of the team.”

source:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12939612

"BBC News is reporting on some amazing effects of a drug called Zolpidem on patients suffering from persistent vegetative state. Apparently the drug, usually used to treat insomnia, activates dormant areas of the brain that can make patients aware of their surroundings and even hold conversations. This raises several interesting points including the diagnosis of PVS and the attendant ethics of the associated life support, as well as the way the brain responds to injury and damage."

source: http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/24/0253242

"Microsoft has launched its first-ever shared source programming contest. With several XBox 360's and an HDTV on the line, hackers will download 120-day trial versions of Windows CE and associated tools, and create 'cool, real-world' apps using designated shared source components. Judging criteria include originality, real-world practicality, feature-extension of the Shared Source components, project documentation, and a short video that demonstrates the successful operation of the project. The Grand Prize is a complete Xbox 360 dream setup consisting of the Xbox 360 console, a 34-inch HDTV, games, and accessories. Three other winners will be awarded Xbox 360 game consoles."

source:http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/24/036230

A GECKO-like robot with sticky feet could soon be scampering up a wall near you. See a video of the robot in action here (24MB mov file).

Geckos can climb up walls and across ceilings thanks to the millions of tiny hairs, or setae, on the surface of their feet. Each of these hairs is attracted to the wall by an intermolecular force called the van der Waals force, and this allows the gecko's feet to adhere.

Stickybot, developed by Mark Cutkosky and his team at Stanford University in California, has feet with synthetic setae made of an elastomer. These tiny polymer pads ensure a large area of contact between the feet and the wall, maximising the van der Waals stickiness.

The Pentagon is interested in developing gecko-inspired climbing gloves and shoes. Cutkosky says a Stickybot-type robot would also make an adept planetary rover or rescue bot.

source:http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/mg19025526.500.html

One company has applied to the FCC for 20 MHz of spectrum in return for providing 95 percent of U.S. customers free coverage (after CPE purchase).

"M2Z's goal is … provide free high speed connections to 95 percent of U.S. consumers without any recurring fees. This is a grand undertaking."
—M2Z FCC request

Kleiner Perkins, history's most successful venture capital firm, is backing John Muleta and Milo Medin's offer to unwire the entire United States. 384/128 will be free while they'll sell higher speeds, ads, voice and much else. In return for 20 megahertz of spectrum, M2Z will pay a 5 percent royalty to the U.S. We give 19 megahertz to a TV network that mostly plays infomercials, so this is a no-brainer. "Affordable broadband for all Americans," anyone.

This very unconventional proposal makes so much sense Kevin Martin should find a way to say yes, after reviewing other proposals. Add another RFP: 10 megahertz in return for selling mobile telephony for $15 a month and history will acclaim Martin as a great Chairman. After 1996, the world looked to the U.S. as a model; since around 2002, they've been laughing at us. This kind of innovation is what we (and many other countries) need.

I have perhaps the first interview with an AT&T/Microsoft IPTV customer below, far happier than the swirling rumors I've been hearing. He doesn't have HD, more than 6/1 DSL or TV from anyone other than SBC, but you can't have everything, can you. Half a million take telcoTV at PCCW in Hong Kong and hundreds of thousands at smaller U.S. carriers, so AT&T joining in is not really big news. Still AT&T is the Microsoft flagship and many will welcome the news it's working.

Loads more news breaking: Taiwan and New Zealand are promoting competition, Germany throttling it. BT is jumping into higher quality voice, cable rushing out 50 Mbps DOCSIS 2.0a, and more to come next issue.

It's good to be back.

M2Z: 384/128 free to 95 percent of America
Public safety makes this irresistible
Google and EarthLink are unwiring San Francisco at no charge, and now KP, the richest venture capitalists on Earth, are ready to fund a similar deal across the country. Besides the free consumer service, they are offering free carriage for police, fire, and emergency services, a potentially invaluable lifeline, as Katrina proved. In return, M2Z wants 20 megahertz of spectrum, 2155-2175 MHz. That band is essentially unused, with no plans announced to make it available for years.

Consumers would buy a transceiver, which M2Z would certify but not sell directly. They project a cost of $250 at first for the consumer unit, dropping rapidly as vendors reach volume. For public safety, they are pairing with PacketHop for a more reliable mesh.

No details in the proposal on VoIP, but I assume you could just use Skype, AOL, Vonage, or a service from M2Z. The 20 megahertz is enough to add video in many areas as well, but that wasn't mentioned in the plan. M2Z intends to wholesale the 3 meg service through independent ISPs, revitalizing an industry that's dying.

Milo Medin built the @Home cable network, ready to serve millions at 10 Mbps. John Muleta was FCC Wireless Bureau Chief, so presumably knows how to work Washington. He was close to Robert Pepper, so don't be surprised to see Cisco involved. Kleiner Perkins' deals include Amazon, AOL, Compaq, Genentech, Netscape, Sun, and 20 percent of Google; they can afford the risk, and have added Charles River and Redpoint. Jeremy Pelofsky at Reuters broke the story.

Wireless is ready to play a major role, and not just in the U.S. I held over a provocative article considering Shelly Palmer's belief that DSL and cable will die in the wireless era, and am looking closely at Clearwire. Lots of potential and lots of issues. The M2Z filing is at http://www.dslprime.com/a/M2Z.pdf.

It has not escaped my notice that this deployment immediately suggests a profound issues for existing carriers, including mobile phones.

source:http://www.isp-planet.com/cplanet/tech/2006/prime_letter_060522.html