Archive for May, 2009
Pentagon Preps Telepathy for Soldiers
May 14th, 2009. Published under My Recent Reads. No Comments.
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Darpa would like soldiers of the future to communicate on the battlefield by reading minds. The agency’s new budget includes $4 million to launch Silent Talk, which (if it works) would enable “neural-signal” communication — no need to talk.
Nokia, Intel dial up open source telephony project oFono
May 13th, 2009. Published under My Recent Reads. No Comments.
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Nokia and Intel have launched a joint project called oFono which aims to build an open source telephony framework for the Linux platform. It will serve as an abstraction layer, providing a rich high-level API for application developers and a plugin API for snapping in cell modem software.
Nokia and Intel are two of the most prominent companies in the mobile Linux platform space. Nokia is the driving force behind the Linux-based Maemo platform, which is used on the company’s Internet Tablet devices. Intel has created the Moblin Linux platform, which is designed for Atom-based netbooks and MIDs. Maemo and Moblin are very similar in design and use many of the same underlying technologies.
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Better Place Unveils An Electric Car Battery Swap Station
May 13th, 2009. Published under My Recent Reads. No Comments.
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Better Place unveils a battery swap system and says the $500,000 gadget can replace a dead battery and get you back on the road in less time than it takes to fill your gas tank. The prototype, revealed in Japan, is the first of what the Silicon Valley startup promises will be countless automated battery exchange stations that will one day dot our cities.
Jesus Phone Can’t Have Jesus App, Apple Preaches
May 12th, 2009. Published under My Recent Reads. No Comments.
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Apple has rejected an iPhone app which let anyone plaster their face on a picture of Jesus. Apparently is contains “objectionable material” — your face? — though the only thing we think is objectionable about it is the name: “Me So Holy.”
Fourth Movie-Plot Threat Contest Winner
May 12th, 2009. Published under My Recent Reads. No Comments.
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For this contest, the goal was to: …to find an existing event somewhere in the industrialized world—Third World events are just too easy—and provide a conspiracy theory to explain how the terrorists were really responsible. I thought it was straightforward enough but, honestly, I wasn't very impressed with the submissions. Nothing surprised me with its cleverness. There were scary entries…
Canada’s Top 25 Political Blogs
May 8th, 2009. Published under My Recent Reads. No Comments.
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I've been remiss in thanking Robert Jago for his monthly compilation of Canada's top 25 Political Blogs. This blog has been ranked at the top for the past few months but the entire list provides ample evidence that there is a wide range of informed commentary from all sides of the Canadian political spectrum.
Marc Rotenberg on Security vs. Privacy
May 8th, 2009. Published under My Recent Reads. No Comments.
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Nice essay: In the modern era, the right of privacy represents a vast array of rights that include clear legal standards, government accountability, judicial oversight, the design of techniques that are minimally intrusive and the respect for the dignity and autonomy of individuals. The choice that we are being asked to make is not simply whether to reduce our expectation…
Pirate Party 3rd Largest Political Party in Sweden
May 6th, 2009. Published under My Recent Reads. No Comments.
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Support for the Swedish Pirate Party surged following the Pirate Bay verdict and today it became the third largest political party in the country. When they are elected for the European Parliament next month, the party hopes to end the abuse of copyright by multi-billion dollar corporations.
Wolfram Alpha – Search Engine With Artificial Intelligence
May 4th, 2009. Published under My Recent Reads. No Comments.
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Via The Independent (UK) -
The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before.
The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.
Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers.
Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet. Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. “It is really impressive and significant,” he wrote. “In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.
Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: “What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organising internet? Possibly… I think this could be big.”
Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as “how high is Mount Everest?”, but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.
The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out “on the fly”, according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in “10 flips for four heads” and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.
Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is “curated”, meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths.
“I’ve wanted to make the knowledge we’ve accumulated in our civilisation computable,” he said last week. “I was not sure it was possible. I’m a little surprised it worked out so well.”
Dr Wolfram, 49, who was educated at Eton and had completed his PhD in particle physics by the time he was 20, added that the launch of Wolfram Alpha later this month would be just the beginning of the project.
“It will understand what you are talking about,” he said. “We are just at the beginning. I think we’ve got a reasonable start on 90 per cent of the shelves in a typical reference library.”
The engine, which will be free to use, works by drawing on the knowledge on the internet, as well as private databases. Dr Wolfram said he expected that about 1,000 people would be needed to keep its databases updated with the latest discoveries and information.
He also added that he would not go down the road of storing information on ordinary people, although he was aware that others might use the technology to do so.
Wolfram Alpha has been designed with professionals and academics in mind, so its grasp of popular culture is, at the moment, comparatively poor. The term “50 Cent” caused “absolute horror” in tests, for example, because it confused a discussion on currency with the American rap artist. For this reason alone it is unlikely to provide an immediate threat to Google, which is working on a similar type of search engine, a version of which it launched last week.
“We have a certain amount of popular culture information,” Dr Wolfram said. “In some senses popular culture information is much more shallowly computable, so we can find out who’s related to who and how tall people are. I fully expect we will have lots of popular culture information. There are linguistic horrors because if you put in books and music a lot of the names clash with other concepts.”
He added that to help with that Wolfram Alpha would be using Wikipedia’s popularity index to decide what users were likely to be interested in.
With Google now one of the world’s top brands, worth $100bn, Wolfram Alpha has the potential to become one of the biggest names on the planet.
Dr Wolfram, however, did not rule out working with Google in the future, as well as Wikipedia. “We’re working to partner with all possible organisations that make sense,” he said. “Search, narrative, news are complementary to what we have. Hopefully there will be some great synergies.”
Microsoft Distributing a Secure Operating System…Selectively
May 1st, 2009. Published under My Recent Reads. No Comments.
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According to this article over at Wired, it appears as though Microsoft has provided a secure distribution of Windows XP to the United States Air Force — but no one else. From the article:
It’s the most secure distribution version of Windows XP ever produced by Microsoft: More than 600 settings are locked down tight, and critical security patches can be installed in an average of 72 hours instead of 57 days.
The article also explains how the Air Force persuaded Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, presumably with threats of coordinated F-22 air strikes to his summer cottage, to provide it with a secure Windows configuration. Allan Paller, research director of the Sans Institute, spoke at a congressional hearing earlier this week on cybersecurity. At the hearing he explained that this secured operating system could be a template for how the government “could use its massive purchasing power to get companies to produce more secure products.” Alan also believes that this model could lead to other security products trickling down to the rest of us.
I’d like to think that this model does eventually trickle-down but I fear that it will be a very slow roll out – if at all.
The full article can be found here: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/04/air-force-windows/