Techno-News Blog

October 31, 2011

Massively Parallel Computer Built From Single Layer of Molecules

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by KFC, Technology Review

Modern computer chips handle data at the mind-blowing rate of some 10^13 bits per second. Neurons, by comparison, fire at a rate of around 100 times per second or so. And yet the brain outperforms the best computers in numerous tasks. One reason for this is way computations take place. In computers, calculations occur in strict pipelines, one at a time. In the brain, however, many calculations take place at once. Each neuron communicates with up to 1000 other neurons at any one time. And since the brain consists of billions neurons, the potential for parallel calculating is clearly huge. Computer scientists are well aware of this difference and have tried in many ways to mimic the brain’s massively parallel capabilities. But success has been hard to come by. Today, Anirban Bandyopadhyay at National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, unveil a promising new approach.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/27291/?p1=blogs

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New Mac Trojan Proves There’s No Such Thing as a Malware-Proof Platform

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By: Wayne Rash, eWeek

We’ve been hearing the stories for years about how Apple’s Macintosh is immune to malware. For years I’ve heard the smug claims from Mac owners about how it’s too bad that Windows users have to load their computers with antivirus software to be safe, but Mac owners don’t. For years I’ve known it was only a matter of time. So let’s say it right now. There’s no such thing as a malware-proof platform, especially if that platform is somehow connected to the outside world.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/New-Mac-Trojan-Proves-Theres-No-Such-Thing-as-a-Malware-Proof-Platform-180787/?kc=rss

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Facebook’s cyber-security system checks 650,000 actions every SECOND

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by Jon Russell, the Next Web

Facebook’s cyber-security system processes and checks 650,000 actions every second to keep its users safe from spam and cyber-attacks on the social network. This fact is one of a number of details that the company has released about the system, called The Facebook Immunity System (FIS). Results have shown that it is highly efficient too, with just 1% of users reporting issues around spam. FIS was developed over a three year period and is robust enough to handle the estimated 25 billion actions that are made by the social networks 800 million plus users every day. According to Facebook, the system has seen spam drop to account for less than 4 per cent of its total messages affecting less than 0.5 percent of its users.

http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/10/27/facebooks-cyber-security-system-checks-650000-actions-every-second/

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October 30, 2011

iPad, Social Networking Driving Tablet Adoption: Pew

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By: Nathan Eddy, eWeek

Eighteen months after the introduction of the Apple iPad, 11 percent of U.S. adults now own a tablet computer of some kind, according to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in collaboration with The Economist Group. The study found that the vast majority of tablet owners—fully 77 percent—use their tablet every day, spending an average of about 90 minutes on them. Sending and receiving email (54 percent email daily on their tablet) was a popular reason for owning a tablet device, along with social networking (39 percent), gaming (30 percent), reading books (17 percent), or watching movies and videos (13 percent). Outside of consuming news, the only activity people said they were more likely to do on their tablet computer daily is browse the Web generally (67 percent).

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/iPad-Social-Networking-Driving-Tablet-Adoption-Pew-325433/

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Android Market App Downloads Jump Over iOS: ABI

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By: Clint Boulton, eWeek

Google’s Android operating system vaulted over Apple’s iOS platform in market share downloads by a count of 44 percent to 31 percent, according to research released by ABI Research Oct. 24. The statistic may be surprising at first blush, considering that Apple has more than 500,000 applications in its vaunted iTunes App Store, compared to more than 300,000 for Google’s Android Market. However, Google with Android is practicing a death-by-1,000-tiny-cuts scenario versus Apple. As Google CEO Larry Page noted on the company’s third-quarter conference call Oct. 13, more than 190 million Android smartphones and tablets have been activated worldwide.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Android-Market-App-Downloads-Jump-Over-iOS-ABI-249241/

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Hackers Release DoS Attack Tool Targeting SSL Servers

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By: Fahmida Y. Rashid, eWeek

A hacker group has released a proof-of-concept tool that exploits how encryption keys can be renegotiated to launch a distributed denial of service attack against Secure Sockets Layer servers. A tool designed to launch denial of service attacks can bring down Secure Sockets Layer servers using just a laptop computer and a standard DSL connection. Developed by a German group called The Hacker’s Choice, THC-SSL-DOS tool is intended to be a proof-of-concept to disclose “fishy security” in the SSL protocol, the group wrote on The Hacker’s Choice blog Oct. 24.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Hackers-Release-DoS-Attack-Tool-Targeting-SSL-Servers-868830/

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October 29, 2011

The Man Behind Cloud Valley

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By Christina Larson, Technology Review

In a suburb of Beijing, 800 workers arrive each day to a glass-and-masonry office block and a shared mission: to create China’s version of the Internet cloud. Known as Cloud Valley, the 7,000-square-meter technology campus is the creation of Edward Tian, a 48-year old entrepreneur credited with bringing broadband Internet to China in the 1990s. On the campus, millions in investments from Tian’s enterprises now fund engineers to wire-up servers into refrigerated shipping containers and all-night coding sessions by young programmers. These are components of what Tian hopes will become a complete supply chain for cloud computing—all of it Made in China. China is home to the world’s largest population of Internet users, some 485 million, as well as its most-used micro-blogging service, the freewheeling and often-controversial Sina Weibo.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/38726/

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Scan Anything and Let Your Phone Do The Rest

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By Ian E. Muller, Technology Review

A new app lets users capture visual and audio input with a smart phone and search for related information. Many people rely on their smart phones to search for things online. At the movies, users might try to identify an actor from a film trailer. At a concert, they might hear a song and check which album it was on. When shopping, they might try to find the best deal on a product by searching nearby stores. Apps that identify songs, images, and video, or that read barcodes, make it easier to do this. Now Digimarc, based in Beaverton, Oregon, has combined these functions into Discover, a single app designed to identify input from a person’s environment and pull up related information.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38935/?p1=A1

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How IT Costs More Jobs than It Creates

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By David Talbot, Technology Review

A new book challenges the standard view that technological advances are always good for employment. Recent advances in information technologies may be driving people out of work and enriching the already rich, a new book argues. The book challenges the long-held view that new technology displaces workers in the short term but always creates more jobs in the long term. Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Center for Digital Business at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, and Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the center, cowrote the new e-book, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, which is released today.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38971/?p1=A2

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October 28, 2011

Google Reader Preparing for Google+ Integration

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By: Clint Boulton, eWeek

Google is removing social features of its Google Reader application in preparation of the RSS feed reader’s imminent integration with the Google+ social network, the company said Oct. 20. Google Reader lets users subscribe to receive links to content from some of their favorite news sources, including blogs and traditional publications. One the darlings of Internet geeks, RSS readers have been cast aside by more forward-looking digerati for Twitter and other real-time services, including Facebook and Google+. To that end, Google will retire friending, following and shared links to blogs in Reader, which like Google Search, Gmail and Maps before it, is also getting a brand-new design. That redesign will include tight integration with Google+, which the search engine provider is making the focal point of its social software tools.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and-Collaboration/Google-Reader-Preparing-for-Google-Integration-209676/

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HTML5 vs. Flash: Choosing the Right Tool

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By Darryl K. Taft, eWeek

Adobe Systems recently revealed some of its strategy for taking its flagship Flash platform forward while also enabling developers to build rich applications using HTML5. Adobe officials wanted to make one thing clear: The company is not abandoning Flash for HTML5, nor is it putting one ahead of the other. Indeed, during the second-day keynote at the Adobe MAX 2011 developer conference in Los Angeles, the company laid out several instances of how Adobe Flash technology and HTML work together to deliver highly expressive experiences in the browser and as apps. Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager of Platform at Adobe, spoke of how Flash and HTML5 development go hand-in-hand at Adobe. He also indicated that Flash 11, the latest version of the technology, along with Adobe AIR 3, will bring even more power and better experiences to users and developers.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/HTML-5-vs-Flash-Choosing-the-Right-Tool-451764/

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The Mind’s Eye

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By Martin Gayford, Technology Review

One of your basic contentions, I say to the British artist David Hockney, is that there is always more to be seen, everywhere, all the time. “Yes,” he replies emphatically. “There’s a lot more to be seen.” We are sitting in his spacious house in the quiet Yorkshire seaside town of Bridlington. In front of us is a novel medium, a fresh variety of moving image—a completely new way of looking at the world—that Hockney has been working on for the last couple of years. We are watching 18 screens showing high-definition images captured by nine cameras. Each camera was set at a different angle, and many were set at different exposures. In some cases, the images were filmed a few seconds apart, so the viewer is looking, simultaneously, at two different points in time. The result is a moving collage, a sight that has never quite been seen before.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38393/?p1=Mag_story0

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October 27, 2011

Play It Down for iPhone lets you test your hearing and helps preserve it

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by Aayush Arya, The Next Web

Spontaneous discovery is one of the best things about the App Store. Sometimes you are just idly checking out some apps and you hit upon a gem that you just have to share with the world. Play It Down is one such app. Among other things, it lets you test your hearing to make sure that it is functioning as expected, so you can take corrective steps if it isn’t. To start with, the app is gorgeously designed. Right from the icon to the four screens it contains, each is wonderfully crafted, which makes it a pleasure to use the app. One thing we appreciated about its design is that, though it goes down the skeuomorphic route, it never overdoes its imitation of real-world objects. It has knobs and switches but they don’t require fiddling with in the way that their physical counterparts do. Overall, the design is a winner.

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/10/21/play-it-down-for-iphone-lets-you-test-your-hearing-and-helps-preserve-it/

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Get Ready for a New Human Species

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By Emily Singer, Technology Review

The ability to engineer life is going to spark a revolution that will dwarf the industrial and digital revolutions, says Juan Enriquez, a writer, investor, and managing director of Excel Venture Management. Thanks to new genomics technologies, scientists have not only been able to read organisms’ genomes faster than ever before, they can also write increasingly complex changes into those genomes, creating organisms with new capabilities. Enriquez, who spoke at Technology Review’s EmTech conference on Tuesday, says our newfound ability to write the code of life will profoundly change the world as we know it. Because we can engineer our environment and ourselves, humanity is moving beyond the constraints of Darwinian evolution. The result, he says, may be an entirely new species.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/38932/?p1=A4

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The number of registered .com domain names will soon hit 100 million

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by The Next Web

The internet is approaching a significant milestone as it bears down on 100 million .com domain names, according to Pingdom. To mark the impending occasion, the company has pulled together two charts which demonstrate just how popular .com domains are, and how their registration numbers have accelerated massively in recent times.

http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/10/21/the-number-of-registered-com-domain-names-will-soon-hit-100-million/

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October 26, 2011

Does IT Cost More Jobs than It Creates?

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by David Talbot, Technology Review

An academic says the past decade has brought mixed blessings. The traditional view holds that, overall, new technology generates at least as many jobs (and whole industries) as it displaces. But yesterday, Andrew McAfee, principal researcher at MIT’s Center for Digital Business, invoked the ongoing national protests while suggesting this may no longer be the case. At least, McAfee reported, the phenomena has not been in evidence over the past decade. McAfee is co-author, with his colleague Erik Brynjolfsson, of the forthcoming e-book Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/27268/?p1=blogs

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New Malware Brings Cyberwar One Step Closer

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By David Talbot, Technology Review

Stuxnet-like code found on industrial machines in Europe may have performed reconnaissance in preparation for attack. A newly discovered piece of malicious code dubbed Duqu is closely related to the notorious Stuxnet worm that damaged Iran’s nuclear-enrichment centrifuges last year. Although it has no known target or author, it sets the stage for more industrial and cyberwar attacks, experts say. “This is definitely a troubling development on a number of levels,” says Ronald Deibert, director of Citizen Lab, an Internet think-tank at the University of Toronto who leads research on cyberwarfare, censorship, and espionage. “In the context of the militarization of cyberspace, policymakers around the world should be concerned.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38955/?p1=A1

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Four Startups Bill Joy Says Could Change the World

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by Kevin Bullis, Technology Review

Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems and partner at the venerable venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, is talking up a handful of companies he’s invested in that make use of abundant materials—in some cases materials that get thrown away or burned up—to make valuable commodities and reduce carbon emissions and replace petroleum. He described the new companies today at the Emtech Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Solidia: The company, based on technology developed at Rutgers, is using carbon dioxide to make building materials that have the strength of concrete, but that rather than emitting one ton of carbon dioxide per ton of concrete, Joy says, it actually uses carbon dioxide as a building material.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/energy/27273/?p1=blogs

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October 25, 2011

Future computers could rewire themselves

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By Katia Moskvitch, BBC News

Researchers from Northwestern University in the US have developed a material that can radically change its electronic properties. A resistor made from it could become a transistor or a diode, according to the report in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The discovery could lead to cheaper, smaller and more powerful computers. As electronics advance and demands for portability increase, one of the main challenges has been decreasing the size of elementary components. Technology firms have attempted to address this with a number of innovations, including new ways of building circuit tracks so signals do not suffer damaging interference at ultra small sizes.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15351071

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Apple iPhone 4S Cost $188 to Assemble 16GB Version: IHS Teardown

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By: Nicholas Kolakowski, eWeek

Apple’s 16GB iPhone 4S cost $188 to put together, excluding $8 in manufacturing expenses, according to a new teardown by analysis firm IHS. Moreover, while the smartphone greatly resembles the previous iPhone 4 in its exterior details, the inside apparently offers a host of new hardware. Based on the teardown, the bill of materials for the iPhone 4S’ 32GB version totals $207, and the 64GB version $245.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Apple-iPhone-4S-Cost-188-to-Assemble-16GB-Version-IHS-Teardown-735615/?kc=rss

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Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich Boasts NFC Sharing, Facial Recognition

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By Clint Boulton, eWeek

For all its speed, power and that big, honking, 4.65-inch high-definition Super active-matrix organic LED display, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is most notable for its operating system. That would be Google’s Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” platform, the one that merges some of the Android 3.x Honeycomb branch tablet capabilities with the traditional smartphone build. The Galaxy Nexus is the first handset to get ICS and it should be a hot seller when it becomes available next month. Google engineers claimed to aim for beauty when designing ICS. Maybe it is. There are new multitasking and notification features, as well as software navigation buttons usually reserved for tablets. But don’t take our word for it.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Android-40-Ice-Cream-Sandwich-Boasts-NFC-Sharing-Facial-Recognition-327073/?kc=rss

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