Scientists are cleared of misuse of data

An inquiry by a federal watchdog agency found no evidence that scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration manipulated climate data to buttress the evidence in support of global warming, officials said on Thursday.

The inquiry, by the Commerce Department’s inspector general, focused on e-mail messages between climate scientists that were stolen and circulated on the Internet in late 2009 (NOAA is part of the Commerce Department). Some of the e-mails involved scientists from NOAA.

Climate change skeptics contended that the correspondence showed that scientists were manipulating or withholding information to advance the theory that the earth is warming as a result of human activity.

In a report dated Feb. 18 and circulated by the Obama administration on Thursday, the inspector general said, “We did not find any evidence that NOAA inappropriately manipulated data.”

Nor did the report fault Jane Lubchenco, NOAA’s top official, for testifying to Congress that the correspondence did not undermine climate science.

The finding comes at a critical moment for NOAA as some newly empowered Republican House members seek to rein in the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, often contending that the science underpinning global warming is flawed. NOAA is the federal agency tasked with monitoring climate data.

The inquiry into NOAA’s conduct was requested last May by Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who has challenged the science underlying human-induced climate change. Mr. Inhofe was acting in response to the controversy over the e-mail messages, which were stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, a major hub of climate research.

Mr. Inhofe asked the inspector general of the Commerce Department to investigate how NOAA scientists responded internally to the leaked e-mails. Of 1,073 messages, 289 were exchanges with NOAA scientists.

The inspector general reviewed the 1,073 e-mails, and interviewed Dr. Lubchenco and staff members about their exchanges. The report did not find scientific misconduct; it did however, challenge the agency over its handling of some Freedom of Information Act requests in 2007. And it noted the inappropriateness of e-mailing a collage cartoon depicting Senator Inhofe and five other climate skeptics marooned on a melting iceberg that passed between two NOAA scientists.

The report was not a review of the climate data itself. It joins a series of investigations by the British House of Commons, Pennsylvania State University, the InterAcademy Council and the National Research Council into the leaked e-mails that have exonerated the scientists involved of scientific wrongdoing.

NOAA welcomed the report, saying that it emphasized the soundness of its scientific procedures and the peer review process. “None of the investigations have found any evidence to question the ethics of our scientists or raise doubts about NOAA’s understanding of climate change science,” Mary Glackin, the agency’s deputy undersecretary for operations, said in a statement.

via nytimes

Virus hacks 1,50,000 cellphones in China

A mobile phone virus has infected 150,000 people in China allowing hackers to remotely monitor calls, according to the Beijing Times.

Named 'X Undercover', the virus takes advantage of existing vulnerabilities in smartphones by forcing the three-way calling service to secretly open.

It allows conversations and text messages to be monitored and copied after the virus breaks into the calling sequence, said Zou Shihong, a security expert with NetQin Mobile Inc.

The virus can also secretly video the phone's owner, retrieve call and text records as well as pinpoint the user's latest GPS position, reports the China Daily .

The software is marketed towards discovering a spouse's betrayal, a cheating employee or simply to monitor your child.

In China, it's against the law to bug and monitor personal information, according to mobile security experts who advise people to be cautious when clicking attachments in multimedia messages or allowing others to use their phone.

via timesofindia

Scientists create plastic that conducts electricity

Plastics are well known as poor conductors of electricity and find many applications in industries and households as insulators. But now scientists have claimed that they have prepared a new class of plastic material that conducts electricity similar to metals.

Scientists placed a thin film of metal on a plastic sheet. They mixed it with polymer surface using an ion beam. In this experiment, researchers found that the material well conducted electricity. Research was done by an international team of scientists.

Scientists found that this method can be used to produce cheaper, stronger, flexible and above all, conducting plastic films. Prof Paul Meredith of University of Queensland said about the research, "What the team has been able to do here is use an ion beam to tune the properties of a plastic film so that it conducts electricity like the metals used in the electrical wires themselves, and even to act as a superconductor and pass electric current without resistance if cooled to low enough temperature."

Read also : US Scientists unveils Hummingbird Robot

When this newly created material is tested in industry standards and all claims of research team proved valid. In order to verify conductivity, team created electrical resistance thermometers of industrial standard. Then team created another platinum resistance thermometer of industrial standard. When tested thoroughly, this material gave even better results, with comparable accuracy.

A team member, Prof Adam Micolich of University of New South Wales explained the excellency of this material. Micolich said this material has an advantage that it can adopt all desirable properties of polymers like flexibility, robustness and easy availability with additional feature of conducting electricity. Conventional metals which are used as electricity conductors usually do not possess all above described properties, making this new material more valuable. Adams said this discovery will begin a new era of plastic electronics.

Read also : US Scientists Invent World's First 'Anti-Laser'

Researchers said their material opens a wide scope in electrical conductivity. Scientists are capable of manipulating conductivity levels in the thin film from zero to that of metals, making it highly usable while designing electricity based products.

via topnews

Google Releases Full Android 3.0 Honeycomb

Google on Tuesday announced that the full SDK for Android 3.0 is now available to developers.

"The APIs are final, and you can now develop apps targeting this new platform and publish them to Android Market," Xavier Ducrohet, Android SDK tech lead, wrote in a blog post.

Along with the new platform, Google said it is releasing updates to its SDK Tools (r10) and ADT Plugin for Eclipse (10.0.0). In the ADT Plugin, Google had added: new palette with categories and rendering previews; more accurate rendering of layouts that will more faithfully reflect how layouts look on devices; selection-sensitive action bars to manipulate View properties; zoom improvements, including fit to view, persistent scale, and keyboard access; and improved support for "merge" layouts and layouts with gesture overlays.

Google also added Traceview integration for easier profiling from ADT and tools for using the Renderscript graphics engine. More details are available on the Android 3.0 Platform Highlights page.

via pcmag

Inkjet printers inspire scientists to make skin

Ink-jet printing technology has inspired researchers to develop a new method of repairing damaged skin, by applying layers that are effectively used as a direct graft onto burns and other injuries.

A project at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine is being funded by the US Department of Defense, with the hope that it could one day be utilised on the battlefield. By utilising a portable bioprinter, the process would involve scanning the injury, sampling cells from the patient and printing a section of compatible skin.

Another similar technique currently being developed uses a three-dimensional printer combining donor cells, biofriendly gel and other materials to build cartilage.

Scientists from the Wake Forest Institute, Cornell University and the Medical University of South Carolina presented findings at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Washington.

Dr Anthony Atal, director of the Wake Forest Institute, in North Carolina, said: "Once we make those new cells, the next step is to put the cells in the printer, on a cartridge, and print on the patient."

Once the new cells have been applied, which can take just a few minutes, they mature and form new skin. Researchers have suggested the technique could also be used to replace damaged organs and remove signs of ageing.

"Just imagine -- if you could take cells from a donor, culture them, put them into an ink and recreate an implant that is alive and made of the original cells from the donor -- how useful that would be in terms of avoiding rejection," commented Hod Lipson of Cornell University.

So far, experiments using cartilage have worked most effectively as it is resilient to the printing process. The basic technology uses a modified ink-jet style printer which can print in three dimensions, using cell cultures. Although the advances are certainly still in the early stages, with much greater research required before they can be practically deployed, demonstrations so far have shown great promise. Scientists have estimated that it will take more than five years before the research is complete.

via publicservice

Scientists claim: New satellites to be able to predict earthquakes

A team of British and Russian scientists have launched a project that could predict when and where earthquakes will occur, and thus save thousands of lives.

An agreement to work together on the project, that was signed in Moscow, says the TwinSat project involves the launch of two satellites - one is about the size of a TV set and the other smaller than a shoebox - which will orbit the earth a few hundred kilometres apart, The Independent reported.

Data from the satellites will be collated with data from the ground as the scientists try to understand what natural warnings are given prior to earthquakes.

Read also : US Scientists unveils Hummingbird Robot

"As stress builds up in the Earth prior to an earthquake, subtle electromagnetic signals are released that can be read from the upper atmosphere," said Alan Smith, director of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at the University College, London.

"We want to try to work out how these signals differ from all the other things that are present at any given time."

The two linked satellites will monitor zones with high seismic and volcanic activity, such as Iceland and the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russia's far east.

Vitaly Chmyrev, of the Institute of Physics of the Earth, in Moscow, one of the Russian partners, said the possibilities for progress in earthquake research were extremely exciting.

Read also : US Scientists Invent World's First 'Anti-Laser'

Chmyrev said that in the days leading up to the devastating earthquake in Haiti last year, satellites picked up electromagnetic signals from the area, but they were only analysed afterwards.

This project could be a huge step towards understanding how to read the signals.

"Just imagine if we could have accurately predicted the Haiti earthquake a few weeks before," said Chmyrev.

"Or if we had predicted the Icelandic volcano eruption that paralysed transport routes for weeks. The potential human and economic benefits are enormous."

Peter Sammonds, professor of Geophysics at UCL and another member of the project team, said that because the satellites were so small, the technology was relatively cheap.

Read also : Scientists Building Largest Antimatter Trap Ever

"These satellites are absolutely incredible, you can almost hold them in the palm of your hand," he said.

"If the project progresses as we want it to, we'll be able to send up several more of them to increase coverage."

The first satellite launch is planned for 2015.

via hindustantimes

Scientists Building Largest Antimatter Trap Ever

Creating matter's strange cousin antimatter is tricky, but holding onto it is even trickier. Now scientists are working on a new device that may be able to trap antimatter long enough to study it.

Antimatter is like a mirror image of matter. For every matter particle (say an electron, for example), a matching antimatter particle is thought to exist (in this case, a positron) with the same mass, but an opposite charge.

The problem is that whenever antimatter comes into contact with regular matter, the two annihilate. So any container or bottle made of matter that attempts to capture antimatter inside would be instantly destroyed, along with the precious antimatter sample one tried to put inside the bottle.

Physicist Clifford Surko of the University of California, San Diego is hard at work to overcome that issue. He and his colleagues are building what they call the world's largest trap for low-energy positrons – a device they say will be able to store more than a trillion antimatter particles at once.

The key is using magnetic and electric fields, instead of matter, to construct the walls of an antimatter "bottle."

"We are now working to accumulate trillions of positrons or more in a novel 'multicell' trap – an array of magnetic bottles akin to a hotel with many rooms, with each room containing tens of billions of antiparticles," Surko said in a statement.

Read full    Go to Home

US Scientists unveils Hummingbird Robot

Pentagon researchers have taken robots for a science fiction spin, building a robotic hummingbird that's ideal for covert surveillance.

A year and a half ago, we saw our first look at the hummingbird drone from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a teeny robotic spyplane inspired by the mid-air dexterity of the hummingbird. But now we've got a video of the drone in action, much more capable and with the ability to do its acrobatics for much longer.

The drone, built by AeroVironment with funding from DARPA, is able to fly forwards, backwards, and sideways, as well as rotate clockwise and counterclockwise. Not only does the 'bot resemble its avian inspiration in size (it's only slightly larger than a hummingbird, with a 6.5-inch wingspan and a weight of 19 grams), it also looks impressively like a hummingbird in flight.

Read full    Go to Home

US Scientists Invent World's First 'Anti-Laser'

Instead of having chips with transistors and silicon, these new computers will use both light and electrical energy

The laser - a 50-year-old invention now used in everything from CDs to laser pointers - has met its match in the "antilaser," the first device capable of trapping and canceling out laser beams.

While such a device would seem most fitting in a science fiction movie, its real-world application will likely be in next-generation, optical computers, which will be powered by light in addition to electrons, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.

"It's a device which basically works like running a laser backwards," A. Douglas Stone of Yale University, who published his findings in the journal Science, said in a telephone interview.

While a laser takes in electrical energy and emits light in a very narrow frequency range, Stone said, his antilaser takes in laser light and transforms it into heat energy.

But it could be easily converted into electrical energy, he said.

Conventional lasers, which were invented in 1960, use a so-called "gain medium," such as a semiconductor material, to produce a focused beam of light waves.

Stone's device uses silicon as an absorbent "loss-medium" that traps light waves, which bounce around until they are converted into heat.

And while the technology seems cool, his antilaser would never be used as a potential laser shield.

"This is something that absorbs lasers. If a ray gun was intended to kill you, it's going to kill you," Stone said.

Read full     Home

Google starts up Newspaper Subscription Service to rival Apple's

Google has launched a digital newspaper and magazine subscription service less than a day after rival Apple.

Eric Schmidt, chief executive of the web search giant, yesterday said Google would take 10pc of the cash collected via its One Touch digital newsagent service, with 90pc going to publishers.

Apple's system will see it take a 30pc cut from subscriptions bought through iPad and iPhone apps.

Google will also provide publishers with the names and email addresses of readers, while Apple has refused to share customers' details.

"You've got a very publisher-friendly approach; we basically don't make any money on this," Mr Schmidt said during a speech in Berlin yesterday. "The most important thing is to get the money to people who are producing high-quality content."

Mr Schmidt said Google would not profit from the service, and explained that the company's 10pc cut was to cover costs.

The service is available now in the UK, the US, Canada, France, Spain, and Germany. It will be expanded to other countries soon. It is available via tablet devices, smartphones and PCs.

Google said publishers can charge readers as much or as little as they like and offer single issue purchases to long subscriptions. The company has been working on the project for some time, but is understood to have brought the launch forward following Apple's demand yesterday for a 30pc cut of in-app subscriptions.

 source  Go to Home

Google Launches Chrome Site Blocking Extension

Following up on action taken in January to bolster faith in its search results, Google is allowing users to block spam-filled domains.

Dogged by recent complaints about Web spam polluting its search results and the proliferation of low-quality content from so-called "content farms," Google on Monday released a tool that allows Chrome users to filter undesirable Web sites from their search results.

Personal Blocklist adds a "Block" link to Google search results. Clicking on this link prevents the blocked domain from appearing in future searches, until the block is removed by the user.

The software is not merely sweeping spam under the rug on the client side of things. It's also reporting what users block back to Google, which means it may affect sites' actual Google Web ranking.

"If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results," explains Matt Cutts, who runs Google's Web spam team, in a blog post.

read full @ informationweek 

Facebook photos get a new viewer

Facebook is rolling out a new photo viewer to all of its users over the next few weeks.

Unlike the older version of the viewer, the user stays on the same page while viewing a photo from his/her wall or elsewhere on Facebook. The images get displayed in a pop-up with a lightbox-like effect. Comments viewing and sharing has also been made easier.

According to Facebook, over 100 million photos are uploaded to the site every day and they believe that the re-designed photo viewer will increase photo views by 5 per cent. This would calculate to about an additional billion photo views every day.

The new viewer was also necessitated because the older viewer was "supported by some of the oldest code in the system and was in dire need of an upgrade."

Users can easily browse through photos either by clicking on the icons or by using simple keyboard shortcuts: Press Escape key to close the viewer; click the right or left arrow keys to move to the previous or next images in the album.

Facebook had first announced its plans about revamping its photo viewer back in September 2010, when it had began support for high-resolution images.

source 

The Wonderful Tech Gifts For Your Sweetheart This Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day is this Monday! And there's a good chance you're going on a date sooner than.


You bought your special-something something special, right?

Uh oh ... you forgot, didn't you?

Don't worry, you still have time and we've got your back.

We've rounded up ten cool gadgets that might make a great gift for your special someone on February 14.

read full @ businessinsider 

Wireless advances could mean no more Cell Towers

As cell phones have spread, so have large cell towers — those unsightly stalks of steel topped by transmitters and other electronics that sprouted across the country over the last decade.

Now the wireless industry is planning a future without them, or at least without many more of them. Instead, it's looking at much smaller antennas, some tiny enough to hold in a hand. These could be placed on lampposts, utility poles and buildings — virtually anywhere with electrical and network connections.

If the technology overcomes some hurdles, it could upend the wireless industry and offer seamless service, with fewer dead spots and faster data speeds.

Some big names in the wireless world are set to demonstrate "small cell" technologies at the Mobile World Congress, the world's largest cell phone trade show, which starts Monday in Barcelona, Spain.

"We see more and more towers that become bigger and bigger, with more and bigger antennas that come to obstruct our view and clutter our landscape and are simply ugly," said Wim Sweldens, president of the wireless division of Alcatel-Lucent, the French-U.S. maker of telecommunications equipment.

"What we have realized is that we, as one of the major mobile equipment vendors, are partially if not mostly to blame for this."

read full @ google
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Google Introduces Two Step Gmail Security

 Last year, Google made Gmail access via HTTPS protocol default for all account holders to add a security layer. Now, Google has introduced another security layer upgrade with an advanced opt-in feature dubbed 2-Step Verification. This 2-Step Verification feature requires using a specific code to sign in to the Gmail account. Google either calls you (only if you are in U.S., I suppose) to give that code or sends the code via SMS or generates it via a mobile app for Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device. Gmail finally gets a bank account like security feature for sign-in.

Gmail's 2-Step Verification advanced sign-in feature is optional and would be visible to all Google account holders at Manage Account page soon. This new security feature makes your Google account more secure and most importantly Gmail out of all Google services.

The 2-Step Verification stands for its name since it requires two major credentials: your Google account password and a six digit pass code obtained using phone. This requires the user to set up the opt-in 2-Step Verification feature from the Manage Account page. During the set-up process, you'll be required to enter your phone number and also create certain backup pass codes just in case you lose your phone or it gets stolen. After completing the 2-Step Verification setup, you ll land on to an additional page once you log into your Google account using your login ID and password.

To prevent third-party sign-in or someone sneaking into your account, make the best of 2-Step Verification. Yes, it does involve an additional extra step but it certainly secures your account. Google had been testing this feature with Google apps users and it would be available to all Google account holders over a period of time.

read more @ techtree

HP TouchPad with WebOS 3.0 Unveiled

HP Palm has officially introduced the new TouchPad tablet running HP webOS 3.0 at the Think Beyond event in San Francisco, U.S. Flaunting a 9.7-inch display XGA capacitive display, the TouchPad supports the same resolution as that of the Apple iPad - 1024x768. Under the hood, HP TouchPad houses a dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and offers 16GB or 32GB storage options. HP also showed off Palm's webOS 3.0 which is now called HP webOS.

HP Palm's Topaz tablet was already teased and much talked about by those who had crude details and rumor mongers.

New HP TouchPad has 9.7-inch XGA capacitive display with 18-bit color depth is exactly the same size as in the Apple iPad. In terms of internal hardware, it houses dual-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8060 processor which is fast enough to make the upcoming webOS 3.0 for the tablet fly like a hummingbird.

Oddly, the TouchPad has a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video calls and no camera on the back panel. The webOS 3.0 running tablet will have Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, microUSB port for charging and for connecting the tablet to a PC.

HP has also packed an accelerometer and gyroscope to aid developers in developing various games as well as apps. Take a look at the specifications below.

- HP webOS 3.0
- Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-CPU APQ8060 1.2-GHz processor
- 9.7-inch diagonal XGA capacitive, multitouch screen with a vibrant, 18-bit color, 1,024 x 768 resolution display
- The option of either 16 GB or 32 GB of internal storage
- High-performance browser with full access to the web, including support for Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta for access to rich, Flash-based web content
- Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n with WPA, WPA2, WEP, 802.1X authentication
- A-GPS (3G only)
- Bluetooth wireless technology 2.1 + EDR with A2DP stereo Bluetooth support
- Multimedia options, including music, photos, video recording and playback, and a 3.5 mm headset/headphone/microphone jack
- Internal stereo speakers and Beats Audio
- Front-facing 1.3-megapixel webcam for live video calling
- Email, including EAS (for access to corporate Microsoft Exchange servers) and personal email support (Google Gmail push, Yahoo!, POP3, IMAP)
- Robust messaging support
- Light sensor, accelerometer, compass (magnetometer) and gyroscope
- Rechargeable 6,300 mAh (typical) battery
- Micro-USB (Charging and PC Connect) with USB 2.0 Hi-Speed
- Built-in HP Touchstone technology for easy charging (HP Touchstone for TouchPad sold separately) and HP touch-to-share to share web addresses between TouchPad and compatible webOS phones
- Dimensions: 190 mm x 242 mm x 13.7 mm (7.48 inches x 9.53 inches x 0.54 inches)
- Weight: approximately 740 g (1.6 pounds)

read more @ techtree

Google to Microsoft: You're stealing our search results!

Google has accused Microsoft of copying its search results, after running a "sting operation" that indicates Redmond's Internet Explorer software is tracking what searchers find on Google and using this data to tweak results on Bing.

Microsoft indicates this is indeed happening – but on a small scale.

Google first made the accusation in a story it fed to Search Engine Land, and it's rather peeved about the situation. “I’ve spent my career in pursuit of a good search engine,” Google Fellow Amit Singhal told Search Engine Land. “I’ve got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book.”

In a statement sent to The Register, however, Singhal – who oversees Google's search algorithm – was a bit more measured. "At Google, we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality," he said. "We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there, from Bing and others – algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results copied from a competitor."

There's some irony at play here. Android, you might argue, was fashioned after a certain Apple handset, and Google's multibillion-dollar ad business is built atop copied content. This is the company that spent years copying entire book libraries without the approval of authors and publishers. But there's an equally enjoyable irony on Microsoft's side. And even if there weren't, the very idea of Microsoft directly pilfering Google's search results is wonderfully amusing.

When we asked Microsoft about Google's claims, it didn't deny them. And it seemed to imply that the Bing toolbar – an optional browser install – was directly tweaking Bing results in the way Google describes. "We use multiple signals and approaches in ranking search results," said Bing director Stefan Weitz. "The overarching goal is to do a better job determining the intent of the search so we can provide the most relevant answer to a given query. Opt-in programs like the toolbar help us with clickstream data, one of many input signals we and other search engines use to help rank sites."

In a blog post, Microsoft Bing vice president Harry Shum said much the same thing. Then he made light of Google's "sting".

"What we saw in today’s story was a spy-novelesque stunt to generate extreme outliers in tail query ranking," he said. "It was a creative tactic by a competitor, and we’ll take it as a back-handed compliment. But it doesn’t accurately portray how we use opt-in customer data as one of many inputs to help improve our user experience."

According to Search Engine Land, Google first suspected that Microsoft was copying its results last May when it noticed that Bing was becoming particularly adept at returning results when users misspelled their queries. Then in October, Mountain View data indicated that across Bing, Microsoft's first page of results was looking much more like Google's page, and that the two search engines were much more likely to return the same top result.

Guessing that Internet Explorer was somehow lifting Google data from users and sending it back to Bing, Mountain View launched its "sting operation". The company set up 100 faux search results pages for queries that most users were unlikely to try. Initially, these results were completely different from Microsoft's results for the same queries.

Mountain View engineers then ran these queries on Google's search engine using Internet Explorer, with Microsoft's Suggested Sites tool and the Bing Toolbar turned on, and they were instructed to always click on the top result. The test began in mid-December, and by the end of the month, Microsoft's results for those same queries had changed – at least a little. Changes appeared on less than 10 of Google's 100 manual queries.

The privacy policies for Internet Explorer, the Suggested Sites, and the Bing toolbar clearly state that Microsoft may collect your search and browsing data. But this is hardly unusual. Chrome and Google toolbar collect similar data. The Google toolbar, for instance, collects urls used to calculate Mountain View's famous PageRank.

Speaking with Search Engine Land, Singhal makes a point of saying that Microsoft is doing something Google would never do. "The PageRank feature [on the Google toolbar] sends back URLs, but we’ve never used those URLs or data to put any results on Google’s results page," he said. "We do not do that, and we will not do that".
via theregister 

Top 10 uncracked codes

Although the internet has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry in creating and cracking codes, crypologists have yet to solve some of the oldest riddles.

Below are ten of the most notable:

1. The Phaistos Disk is considered the most important example of hieroglyphic inscription from Crete. Discovered in 1903, both sides of the clay disc are covered with hieroglyphs arranged in a spiral zone, impressed on the clay when it was damp. Forty five different types of signs have been distinguished, of which a few can be identified with the hieroglyphs in use in the Proto- palatial period.

2. Linear A is one of two linear scripts used in ancient Crete discovered and named by Arthur Evans. Linear B was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris and was used to write Mycenaean Greek. Linear A is partially understood but parts of it produce works unrelated to any known language.

3. Kryptos is a sculpture by the American artist James Sanborn, located on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia. Since its dedication in 1990, there has been much speculation about the meaning of the encrypted messages it bears.

4. Chinese Gold Bar Cipher. In 1933, seven gold bars allegedly issued to a General Wang in Shanghai, China. These gold bars, which contain pictures, Chinese writing, some form of script writing, and cryptograms in Latin letters, appear to represent metal certificates related to a bank deposit with a U.S. Bank and the Chinese writing has been translated, and discusses a transaction in excess of $300,000,000.

5. Beale Ciphers are said to be three encrypted messages which pinpoint where a man named Beale buried two wagons-full of treasure at a secret location in Bedford County in the 1820s. It is claimed one of the messages has been solved, which detailed the tons of gold, silver and jewels that were buried, along with a general location. The still unsolved messages supposedly give exact directions, and a list of who the treasure belongs to.

6. Voynich Manuscript is at least 400 years old and is a 232-page illuminated manuscript entirely written in a secret script. It is filled with copious drawings of unidentified plants, herbal recipes of some sort, astrological diagrams, and many small human figures in strange plumbing-like contraptions. In 2004 there were some compelling arguments which described a technique that would seemingly prove that the manuscript was a hoax, but to date, none of the described techniques have been able to replicate a single section of the Manuscript, so speculations continue.

7. The Dorabella Cipher was written by the composer Elgar in 1897. He sent a letter to a young friend, Miss Dora Penny, the 22 year-old daughter of the Rev. Alfred Penny, Rector of St Peter’s, Wolverhampton, and with it a cipher which to this day has remained unsolved.

8. Chaocipher. John F. Byrne invented Chaocipher in 1918 and tried unsuccessfully for almost 40 years to interest the U.S. government in his cipher system. He offered a reward to anyone who could break his cipher but the reward was never claimed. It has latterly been re-examined by members of his family to determine whether there is any commercial value in it.

9. The D’Agapeyeff cipher is an as-yet unbroken cipher that appears in the first edition of Codes and Ciphers, an elementary book on cryptography published by the Russian-born English cartographer Alexander D’Agapeyeff in 1939. Offered as a “challenge cipher” at the end of the book, it was not included in later editions, and D’Agapeyeff is said to have admitted later to having forgotten how he had encrypted it. It has been argued that the failure of all attempts at decryption is due to D’Agapeyeff incorrectly encrypting the original text. However, it has been argued that the cipher may still be successfully attacked using computational methods such as genetic algorithms.

10. Taman Shud. An unidentified male body was found on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia in 1948 wearing a sweater and coat despite the hot day, carrying no identification. There were no clues as to his identity and dental records and fingerprints matched no living person. An autopsy discovered bizarre congestion, blood in the stomach and enlarged organs but no foreign substances. A suitcase found at the train station that may have belonged to the man contained a pair of trousers with a secret hidden pocket, which held a piece of paper torn from a book imprinted with the words “Taman Shud”. The paper was matched to a very rare copy of Omar Khayyam’s ‘The Rubaiyat’ that was found in the backseat of an unlocked vehicle and on the back of the book was scrawled five lines of capital letters that seem to be a code. To this day, the entire case remains one of Australia’s most bizarre mysteries.

via telegraph 

Microsoft discovers disposable email

Microsoft is introducing throwaway email addresses for Hotmail users.

You might have thought that Hotmail was already for chuckaway email addresses, but the software giant will now make it easier to redirect mail to your existing primary address.

Hotmail subscribers can already use a +sign and add a word to the first part of their email address to create a sub-address. But doing this means you still give away part of your address.

Under the new rules you can add up to five new email addresses per year. Messages will be sent to a folder within your primary email.

Windows Live director Dharmesh Mehta used the Windows Live blog to explain the changes: "Let’s say you’re in the market for a new car. There are a bunch of websites that will email you price quotes, sales alerts, etc. During your car search, these messages are helpful, but once you’re done, they become clutter that can be difficult to stop. By using an alias on these websites instead of your main email address, you can avoid this."

Microsoft reckons the average person has three email addresses for different parts of their lives, or spam. The software giant points out that maintaining three accounts, presumably with three different passwords, is a pain.

via theregister 

Social Networking Apps More Popular than Game Apps

Smartphones have become an important part of our lives. With phones that can do much more than just calling and SMSing, entertainment as well as management of our everyday affairs have become the top functions of mobile phones today. As we all know, these can be performed using a plethora of applications (apps as we call them) that have been created for various platforms. Our phones are a home to many Games, News Feeds, Music, Social Networks and loads of other apps these days. Ever wondered what kind of apps are the most popular?

According to a global study by Nokia, social networking apps are the most popular in India. They are followed by music, business, utilities and games apps. This might have come as a surprise a few years back when social networks were not as popular as they are today. I mean, with one out of six people in the world being on Facebook, what did you expect? The survey further goes on to say that women (43 percent) are more active on social networks than men (38 percent), in India. A majority of 18-24 year-olds download and use social networking apps, the survey states.

What came as a shock was that 77 per cent of people in India have up to 30 apps on their smartphones, with men more likely to download an app (93 percent) than women (87 percent). According to the survey, most smartphone users frequently rely on apps throughout the day (48 percent) while a further 22 percent log on and use them two or three times a week. Also, 17 percent of Indians only download the free apps available for their phone via app stores.
While social network apps top the list of apps actually used by Indians, music and social networks apps top the list of apps downloaded by users. With our love for Bollywood and Bhangra, this doesn't surprise me.

Talking about global stats, Brazilians showed their appreciation for a party with 42 percent downloading music related apps including ringtones, track recognition, and music mags. Germans found functional apps such as alarm clocks and flashlight (29 percent) the most appealing, while Indians prefer business-focused apps like email and expense managers.

Nokia, along with Professor Trevor Pinch, Cornell University's sociologist and professor of science and technology studies, analyzed more than 5,200 smartphone users in 10 countries - India, Singapore, China, South Africa, Brazil, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, and U.S. The study was aimed at gathering insights into the smartphone behavior of consumers in these countries.

via techtree 

IPv4 Address Depletion Won`t Cause Stampede to IPv6

News Analysis: Despite the depletion of IPv4 address blocks, you don’t have to worry about running out of new addresses just yet. But you should start planning to make sure your computer systems are IPv6-capable.

When the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) issued the last blocks of IPv4 addresses to the Regional Internet Registrars, it wasn’t the end of the world, or even the end of the Internet. In fact, it’s not even the end of the world for IPv4 addresses. Chances are, you’ll still be able to use IPv4 addresses for a long time, probably for years.

What’s actually exhausted is the supply of new IPv4 addresses that the IANA can issue to the five regional Internet registries around the world. Those regions can still issue addresses to organizations that need them, and will continue to do so for the next few months.

In fact, the vast number of users of all types on the Internet will likely not notice any changes in their addressing. The major Internet providers all have IPv4 address pools which they can issue as needed and most of them are using private addressing pools and may never need to change. But there are some networks that will see the effects eventually. They include large businesses and other major organizations that act as their own ISPs and have their own pool of addresses. When those run out, they’ll need to find a way to react.

But right now, there’s no reason to rush madly into IPv6. For one thing, there’s virtually no place on the public Internet that is using IPv6, so you will have few choices of destinations. One estimate I saw recently puts the number of IPv6 sites on the global Internet as less than two tenths of a percent. While there are a few Web sites that do allow connectivity using IPv6, those also allow IPv4 connections.

So what’s all the fuss about? Eventually, large organizations are going to burn through their pools of IPv4 addresses, and will need to start moving to private networks that use NAT (network address translation) or they’ll need to start using IPv6 where they can. As demand for IPv4 addresses continues to grow and supply dwindles IPv6 networking will become more useful. Likely, businesses will find that some types of communications, such as between data centers, or between data centers and cloud providers or even within the data center, that are able to use IPv6 with little or no disruption to other activities.

A move to IPv6 will free up IPv4 addresses for end-users, for devices that can’t use IPv6 and for network infrastructure that isn’t or can’t be enabled for IPv6. Eventually, portions of the public Internet will start supporting IPv6, but it’s not going to happen overnight. And even when it does start to happen, the change won’t be all at once.

credit eweek

Engadget: Sony Ericsson, Xperia Play – Playstation Phone Previewed

We expect each and every one of you to watch the Engadget Show's initial live stream and to download / re-watch it when we post up the official HD files -- and that expectation goes double for episodes featuring Steve Wozniak. So when we tell you about this awesome breakout clip of Nilay and Josh playing with Sony's top secret Xperia Play / PlayStation phone prototype -- the one Richard Lai previewed last week -- it's not because we suspect it's the first time you've seen the footage.

read full on engadget

WikiLeaks Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by a Norwegian politician.

A Norwegian lawmaker has nominated WikiLeaks for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, stating that the secret-spilling website is one of the most important contributors to freedom of speech in the 21st century.

Lawmaker Snorre Valen said that by disclosing information about corruption, human rights abuses and war crimes, WikiLeaks is a "natural contender" for the peace prize.

WikiLeaks, founded by Australian Julian Assange, has released hundreds of thousands of classified documents leaked to the website. The documents have included thousands of classified U.S. diplomatic cables, as well as confidential material on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Members of parliament from all nations, political science and law professors, and previous winners may all submit nominations to the Nobel Peace Prize.

Assange is currently free on bail in Britain, while he fights extradition to Sweden for questioning on charges of sexual misconduct.

via voanews 

Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code

Mohan Srivastava, a geological statistician living in Toronto, was working in his office in June 2003, waiting for some files to download onto his computer, when he discovered a couple of old lottery tickets buried under some paper on his desk. The tickets were cheap scratchers—a gag gift from his squash partner—and Srivastava found himself wondering if any of them were winners. He fished a coin out of a drawer and began scratching off the latex coating. “The first was a loser, and I felt pretty smug,” Srivastava says. “I thought, ‘This is exactly why I never play these dumb games.’”

The second ticket was a tic-tac-toe game. Its design was straightforward: On the right were eight tic-tac-toe boards, dense with different numbers. On the left was a box headlined “Your Numbers,” covered with a scratchable latex coating. The goal was to scrape off the latex and compare the numbers under it to the digits on the boards. If three of “Your Numbers” appeared on a board in a straight line, you’d won. Srivastava matched up each of his numbers with the digits on the boards, and much to his surprise, the ticket had a tic-tac-toe. Srivastava had won $3. “This is the smallest amount you can win, but I can’t tell you how excited it made me,” he says. “I felt like the king of the world.”

Delighted, he decided to take a lunchtime walk to the gas station to cash in his ticket. “On my way, I start looking at the tic-tac-toe game, and I begin to wonder how they make these things,” Srivastava says. “The tickets are clearly mass-produced, which means there must be some computer program that lays down the numbers. Of course, it would be really nice if the computer could just spit out random digits. But that’s not possible, since the lottery corporation needs to control the number of winning tickets. The game can’t be truly random. Instead, it has to generate the illusion of randomness while actually being carefully determined.”

Srivastava speaks quietly, with a slight stammer. He has a neatly trimmed beard and a messy office. When he talks about a subject he’s interested in—and he’s interested in many things, from military encryption to freshwater fossils—his words start to run into each other.

As a trained statistician with degrees from MIT and Stanford University, Srivastava was intrigued by the technical problem posed by the lottery ticket. In fact, it reminded him a lot of his day job, which involves consulting for mining and oil companies. A typical assignment for Srivastava goes like this: A mining company has multiple samples from a potential gold mine. Each sample gives a different estimate of the amount of mineral underground. “My job is to make sense of those results,” he says. “The numbers might seem random, as if the gold has just been scattered, but they’re actually not random at all. There are fundamental geologic forces that created those numbers. If I know the forces, I can decipher the samples. I can figure out how much gold is underground.”

Srivastava realized that the same logic could be applied to the lottery. The apparent randomness of the scratch ticket was just a facade, a mathematical lie. And this meant that the lottery system might actually be solvable, just like those mining samples. “At the time, I had no intention of cracking the tickets,” he says. He was just curious about the algorithm that produced the numbers. Walking back from the gas station with the chips and coffee he’d bought with his winnings, he turned the problem over in his mind. By the time he reached the office, he was confident that he knew how the software might work, how it could precisely control the number of winners while still appearing random. “It wasn’t that hard,” Srivastava says. “I do the same kind of math all day long.”

That afternoon, he went back to work. The thrill of winning had worn off; he forgot about his lunchtime adventure. But then, as he walked by the gas station later that evening, something strange happened. “I swear I’m not the kind of guy who hears voices,” Srivastava says. “But that night, as I passed the station, I heard a little voice coming from the back of my head. I’ll never forget what it said: ‘If you do it that way, if you use that algorithm, there will be a flaw. The game will be flawed. You will be able to crack the ticket. You will be able to plunder the lottery.’”

The North American lottery system is a $70 billion-a-year business, an industry bigger than movie tickets, music, and porn combined. These tickets have a grand history: Lotteries were used to fund the American colonies and helped bankroll the young nation. In the 18th and 19th centuries, lotteries funded the expansion of Harvard and Yale and allowed the construction of railroads across the continent. Since 1964, when New Hampshire introduced the first modern state lottery, governments have come to rely on gaming revenue. (Forty-three states and every Canadian province currently run lotteries.) In some states, the lottery accounts for more than 5 percent of education funding.

While approximately half of Americans buy at least one lottery ticket at some point, the vast majority of tickets are purchased by about 20 percent of the population. These high-frequency players tend to be poor and uneducated, which is why critics refer to lotteries as a regressive tax. (In a 2006 survey, 30 percent of people without a high school degree said that playing the lottery was a wealth-building strategy.) On average, households that make less than $12,400 a year spend 5 percent of their income on lotteries—a source of hope for just a few bucks a throw.

read more @ wired 

Facebook is Planning to Launch Third-Party Commenting System

Facebook is planning to launch a third-party commenting system in a matter of weeks, according to multiple sources familiar with the new product. This new technology could see Facebook as the engine behind the comments system on many high-profile blogs and other digital publications very soon.

The company is actively seeking major media companies and blogs to partner with it for its launch, part of a bigger media industry move spearheaded in part by the recent hires of Nick Grudin and Andy Mitchell, media business development executives with respective track records at Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

Facebook, of course, is already very present in blog comments. Currently, a digital publishing outlet--say, a blog or a newspaper's Web site--can integrate Facebook's developer API and allow users to "connect" to their Facebook accounts, or can build in "Social Comments" in a widget of related messages. Often, users can post alerts on their Facebook walls announcing that they've commented, or can have a "Social Comment" turned into a status message.

The new commenting product is a significantly deeper expansion of this, according to sources. Facebook will be able to power the entire commenting system--handling the log-in and publishing, cross-promoting comments on individuals' Facebook walls, and possibly even promoting them as well on media outlets' own "fan" pages. Undoubtedly, the Facebook "like" button will be deeply integrated as well.

CNET has not seen mockups, but it's conceivable that the whole thing could look quite a bit like TimesPeople, a commenting and social news system that The New York Times launched several years ago for its own publication.

One source hinted that the Facebook commenting product may also permit users to log in with Google, Yahoo, or Twitter IDs if a publisher chooses to incorporate them. That's a surprising move considering Facebook's curious relationship with the developer arms of both Google and Twitter--Facebook blocked a Google data-portability product called Friend Connect several years ago, and last summer it blocked a Twitter friend-finder that trawled Facebook contact lists.

On People.com, only Facebook users can comment. Is this what the broader Facebook commenting platform will look like? (The news story in question is about Justin Bieber going on a date to an R-rated movie with Selena Gomez, by the way.)

It's also not clear how--if at all--Facebook commenting will deal with the tension between Facebook's insistence that members use their real identities, and the fact that much of the commenting that takes place on blogs and other media outlets is still done behind a veil of anonymity.

Whatever the specifics are, this new comments product could have serious reverberations in the start-up community. One source who has seen the new Facebook commenting technology remarked that it's an obvious and direct competitor to start-ups that provide commenting technology, like Disqus and Echo. With Facebook Places adopting much of the "check-in" methodology that smaller competitors Foursquare and Loopt offer, and Facebook Questions operating in the same space as Quora (though Facebook has insisted it's not trying to "kill" it), the social network has shown that it's very willing to move into spaces dominated by start-ups and instantly give them a huge new competitor.

But considering the frequency with which Facebook launches new features, it's inevitable. In the past six months, Facebook has launched the Places geolocation service, a revamped Facebook Messages, and new upgrades to Facebook Photos and Groups--to name a few.

via cnet

Girls who play video games behave better

Girls who play video games behave better, feel more connected to families and have stronger mental health.

Researchers from Brigham Young University focused on girls aged between 11 and 16 years who played video games with a parent.

"The surprising part about this for me is that girls don't play video games as much as boys," said Professor Sarah Coyne of Brigham Young University who led the study.

"But they did spend about the same amount of time co-playing with a parent as boys did," he added, reports the Journal of Adolescent Health.

The study involved 287 families with an adolescent child.

Mario Kart, Mario Brothers, Wii Sports, Rock Band and Guitar Hero topped the list of games played most often by girls. Call of Duty, Wii Sports and Halo ranked 1, 2 and 3 among boys.

For boys, playing with a parent was not a statistically significant factor for any of the outcomes the researchers measured (positive behaviour, aggression, family connection, mental health), according to a Brigham Young statement.

Coyne and co-author Laura Padilla-Walker offer two possible explanations for what's behind the gender differences.

"We're guessing it's a daddy-daughter thing, because not a lot of moms said yes when we asked them if they played video games," Padilla-Walker said.

via indiatimes 

Google Helps Egyptians Bypass Twitter Ban

Sets up dedicated phone lines to translate voicemail to tweets for Egyptians deprived of Internet connectivity

We have been covering the Egyptian unrest against President Hosni Mubarak 30 year regime that has taken a near-totalitarian turn in the last few weeks. Aware of the journalistic role of social networking websites like Twitter played to bypass the media blackout imposed by the Iranian regime, Egyptian government pre-emptively blocked access to Internet throughout the country. Although this couldn't daunt the technologically savvy Egyptians, the vast majority found their voices quelled by the Internet blackout.

Google has collaborated with Twitter engineers to introduce a service that allows people leave voicemail using a telephone, which is machine translated into an audio file and posted to the hashtag #egypt. This way, even those without Internet connection can report latest developments and have their say in the Egypt stream on Twitter. The service can be accessed by leaving a voicemail on the following international phone numbers: +16504194196, +390662207294, +97316199855. The same numbers can also be used to listen to the voice messages, while those with Internet connections can check the #egypt stream or visit twitter.com/speak2tweet.

After being criticised for its privacy violations, big brotherly approach, and many-a-conspiracy theories of world domination, it's great to see Google reaching out and employ one of its recent acquisitions for the good of humanity. Looks like this service will go a long way in letting a majority of Egyptian citizens express their voices and report fresh developments from the veil of censorship imposed by the government. Let's hope President Mubarak doesn't kill the phone lines.

via techtree 

Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc gets UK release date

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc is set to get a UK release date in April.

As spotted on the Smartphonegurus message board, O2 has stuck up a holding page for the phone.

That page suggests the April launch date for the handset, which fits nicely with the earlier release dates mooted for the Xperia Arc through online resellers.

And lest we forget: the Arc is tipped to be as powerful as the forthcoming PSP Phone, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play.

Interest

The Xperia Arc has already garnered much interest, with its impressive specs including an 8.1MP camera and Android 2.3.

The beating heart of the Arc is a 1Ghz next-gen Snapdragon processor, potentially making it a real player as manufacturers ramp up their Android offerings.

"The style and performance we saw in this early hands on was enough to fill us with hope," suggested our hands on: Sony Ericsson Xpera Arc review.

via techradar