Techno-News Blog

By Erica Naone, Technology Review

Handing sensitive data over to a cloud computing provider makes many companies skittish. But new software, called HomeAlone, could help them come to terms with using such services. Cloud computing can save companies money by providing inexpensive, flexible storage and processing resources that are managed for them. All the same, many companies remain hesitant to turn their data over to a third party. Cloud computing platforms provide a single point of entry for large amounts of company data, and providers often host customers’ data in virtual environments that span many different machines. Researchers say this architecture could be exploited to gain access to private data.

http://technologyreview.com/computing/35074/?p1=MstRcnt

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

A new search tool developed by researchers at Microsoft indexes medical images of the human body, rather than the Web. On CT scans, it automatically finds organs and other structures, to help doctors navigate in and work with 3-D medical imagery. CT scans use X-rays to capture many slices through the body that can be combined to create a 3-D representation. This is a powerful tool for diagnosis, but it’s far from easy to navigate, says Antonio Criminisi, who leads a group at Microsoft Research Cambridge, U.K., that is attempting to change that. “It is very difficult even for someone very trained to get to the place they need to be to examine the source of a problem,” he says.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/35076/?p1=A7

By Katherine Bourzac, Technology Review

A rival to flash memory that requires one percent as much power could improve battery life in mobile devices. A new type of nonvolatile memory based on carbon nanotubes has dramatically lower power requirements than current technology. It uses the nanotubes to read and write data to small islands of phase-change materials, which store information. With further development, the new technology could extend battery life in mobile devices and also make desktop computers more efficient.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/35083/?p1=A2

by Edward Moyer, CNet news.com

This week, New Yorkers are enjoying even more than their usual outsized share of art, with something in the neighborhood of 10 different fine-art marketplaces happening simultaneously in the city. And artsy YouTube rival Vimeo is taking advantage of the situation to burnish its brand, promote some of the artists who use its site, and spice up people’s elevator rides. In concert with the art- and tech-minded PR firm Culture Shock Marketing, Vimeo is serving up “Projection,” a program of short films–including some dazzling digital animations–as part of Volta N.Y. The international art fair for collectors and the casually curious began midweek and runs through the weekend, with attendees treated to the Vimeo-CSM film fest as they ride to the event on shuttle buses and climb to the realm of high art by way of the elevators at the Volta venue.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20039534-93.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

by the New York Times

Computers mimic human reasoning by building on simple rules and statistical averages. Test your strategy against the computer in this rock-paper-scissors game illustrating basic artificial intelligence. Choose from two different modes: novice, where the computer learns to play from scratch, and veteran, where the computer pits over 200,000 rounds of previous experience against you.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/rock-paper-scissors.html

by Brooke Crothers, CNet News.com

Market researcher Gartner released a research note Thursday claiming that laptops are not meeting the demands of the social-networking era. So, will mobile PCs become more like the Xoom and the iPad, which are, in turn, larger versions of the smartphone? In a word, yes. This theory–or fact, depending on how you look at it–can also be restated as the post-PC era, which is the Apple marketing-spin corollary to the Gartner argument. But let’s stick to Gartner’s analysis about the unsuitability of laptops in the social-networking era.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20039551-64.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

By: Chris Preimesberger, eWeek

At last, the White House is seeing some actual movement from U.S. federal government agencies on bringing cost- and energy-saving cloud-based services to its legion IT departments. Of course, getting the federal government to move on anything as embedded and as siloed as legacy IT would take even a united Congress a long time to accomplish. And, as is well-known, Congress isn’t too united on anything right now.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Government-IT/Federal-Government-Departments-Finally-Making-Moves-To-Cloud-752202/?kc=rss

By: Michelle Maisto, eWeek

Apple’s March 2 introduction of the iPad 2 is sending Samsung executives back to the drawing board. “We will have to improve the parts that are inadequate,” Samsung Executive Vice President Lee Don-Joo told the Yonhap news agency, according to Physorg.com, reflecting on how Samsung’s contribution to a market spurred by the original iPad now holds up to Apple’s next-generation tablet. “Apple made it very thin.” The iPad 2 weighs 1.35 pounds (versus the iPad’s 1.5 pounds) and measures 0.34 inches thin—making it a third thinner than the original iPad and thinner even than the iPhone 4. It features a dual-core processor that Apple calls the A5 and says makes the iPad 2 twice as fast as its predecessor. The iPad 2’s graphics are also nine times faster, and the device can achieve 10 hours of battery life and includes a built-in gyroscope and front and back cameras for video calling.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Apple-iPad-2-Prompts-Samsung-to-Rethink-Galaxy-Tab-101-Choices-876440/?kc=rss

By: Fahmida Y. Rashid, eWeek

Trojan-based attacks continue to be the biggest malware threat in February, but PDF exploits aren’t far behind, according to several security reports. About 1 in 290 e-mails in February were malicious, making the month one of the most prolific periods for the threats, according to Symantec’s February 2011 MessageLabs Intelligence Report. The global ratio of spam in e-mail traffic was 81.3 percent, an increase of 2.7 percent since January, the report found. The recent decline in spam appears to have reversed for the time being, according to the report.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/Botnet-Trojan-Activity-Increased-in-February-553094/?kc=rss

by the BBC

A German minister has resigned after copying huge chunks of his doctoral thesis, while the London School of Economics is probing whether Colonel Gaddafi’s son lifted chunks and used a ghost writer for his own. So is plagiarism out of control? It’s been a bad week for honest educational endeavour. The German defence minister has stepped down after being stripped of his 2006 university doctorate thesis for copying large parts of it. The University of Bayreuth had decided Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg had lifted whole sections without attribution. And the LSE is looking into allegations that Colonel Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam plagiarised his PhD thesis. These are very high-profile cases, but in the worlds of academia and publishing, the issue of plagiarism has been a problem for many years.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12613617

By Fiona Graham, BBC

Sitting at your office desk, squinting in the direction of the distant window as you work through the post-lunch slump, do you dream of starting your own business and being your own boss? But then you think of the cost of starting your own business – the cost of office space, IT infrastructure, staff, and realise you just can’t afford it. Running a business from home is nothing new. But technology such as the internet and cloud computing is increasingly providing easily-shared lower-cost software options for start-up firms. Cheap internet telephony services let you stay in touch with people half a world away.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12622771

 by the BBC

Cebit is the biggest event in the digital industry’s calendar, with everything from the newest gadgets to the latest research in science, where the people in white coats brush up against the consumer market. David Reid goes to Hanover in Germany to take a look around.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/9414802.stm

By Timothy Carmody, Technology Review

Last month, the Libyan government temporarily cut off access to the Internet within the nation’s borders. The goal was to control the flow of information to the public and disrupt coordination among the demonstrators. The shutdown failed to do either, but for a while it threatened to have an odd side effect: impairing the functioning of websites using Libya’s “.ly” domains, including the popular service bit.ly, which millions use to turn long Web links into short ones that can be sent out on Twitter.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/32431/?p1=A5

By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

Eye-tracking cameras offer a new way to control your computer. A camera over the screen is a standard feature for laptops. But only Lenovo’s new model has a pair of cameras below its display to track the movements of a user’s eyes. The prototype laptop can be controlled with eye motions, reducing the need to use the mouse and making it faster to navigate through information such as maps or menus. The laptop can notice when its user has read to near the bottom of a page and can automatically scroll down to reveal more text.

http://technologyreview.com/computing/32878/?p1=MstRcnt

By Erica Naone, Technology Review

A new crop of location-based services for mobile devices will encourage users to interact more. Such popular location-based services as Foursquare and Gowalla invite people to “check in” at locations using their mobile phones, let their friends know where they are, and collect rewards from businesses in the process. But these apps don’t do enough to get people interacting with each other, according to the creators of new location-based services that aim to be much more social—and at least as lucrative. Though the first-generation services encourage you to connect with friends, you often still end up interacting with the service as an individual, little affected by others’ actions, says Dave Bisceglia, cofounder and CEO of The Tap Lab, which plans to show its iPhone game, TapCity, next week at South by Southwest Interactive.

http://technologyreview.com/communications/32879/?p1=MstRcnt

by Jefferey Rayport, Technology Review

Since the dawn of managerial capitalism, collaboration and work have almost always been synonymous. People need other people to realize their greatest impact, and innovation, perhaps the most valuable activity in business, depends critically on the kind of cross-pollination of ideas that collaboration enables. But technology has changed how we collaborate, especially since the communications revolution began 150 years ago with the telegraph and the telephone. This wave of change continued with the commercialization of the fax machine in the 1970s and of e-mail in the 1980s. The last 20 years have brought a convergence of communications and computing technologies that has expanded the possibilities for technology-enabled collaboration, whether synchronous or asynchronous, proximal or distant.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/32444/?p1=BI

By Kurt Kleiner, Technology Review

A prototype sensor consumes just a few nanowatts and could someday take pressure readings from the eye. A new wireless computer sensor just a cubic millimeter in size could eventually be implanted in the eyes of people with glaucoma, taking pressure readings 24 hours a day and transmitting the data to doctors. The new device packs a processor, memory, a pressure sensor, a solar cell, a thin-film lithium battery, and a transmitter into a tiny glass rectangle. University of Michigan researchers reported on the device earlier this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/32439/?p1=A4&a=f

By Jonathan Zittrain and Molly Sauter, Technology Review

Proposed legislation won’t let the government kill the Internet—but it has other problems. In the past few weeks, we’ve seen two countries try to “turn off” the Internet. On January 27, Egypt, which had previously known few restrictions on Internet access, stopped delivering bits to the subscribers to nearly all its ISPs, even though data passing through Egypt kept flowing normally. Since February 19, Libya has experienced irregular nationwide outages lasting anywhere from a few minutes to seven hours.

http://technologyreview.com/web/32451/?p1=MstRcnt

by Chris Matyszczyk, CNet news.com

Please don’t tell Google, but its Street View cars haven’t been up my street yet. I don’t know why. Perhaps my rather forceful neighbor from Tennessee scared them off. However, Google has today revealed a huge raft of images of many places around the world that it could only reach by tricycle. In a blog post on the Google site, software engineer (what else?) Jeremy Pack explained that the trikes have been successful in breaching the ramparts of places hitherto unscalable by car.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20037570-71.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

by Jessica Dolcourt, CNet news.com

Evernote’s popular note-taking app for iPhone and iPod Touch will have more than a few new features and enhancements. The design is cleaner in Evernote 4 as a whole, and changes include everything from a revamped home screen and note-taking screen to new capabilities–like removing attachments you no longer want or need and adding multiple images at a time to a note. Notes now appear in snippet form to provide greater context for text-based or mixed-media notes. More photo real estate is also visible for picture notes as the thumbnail view gives way to a full-width slice

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19512_7-20037487-233.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

By: Clint Boulton, eWeek

Microsoft’s Bing search engine upgraded its Travel Price Predictors feature with an autosuggest capability for airline travel fares, a capability Google might love to offer if it succeeds in acquiring ITA Software. Bing’s travel Website–which sifts through more than a billion airfares a day to surface cheap airline tickets for traveling searchers–has added “Autosuggest Flight Prices.”

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Bing-Taunts-Google-with-Price-Predictors-Travel-Feature-443345/?kc=rss