科技新聞

2003/01/02

(AP) -- Year's end traditionally brings a mood of reflection to journalists. It may be the melancholy of short days and long nights.

But it could also be the need to fill the space when nothing much is happening.

That said, herewith the annual CompuBug Dubious Achievement in Personal Computing awards.

• The DLAPAPA (Designed Like A Picasso And Priced Accordingly) award goes to Apple Computer for the design of its latest iMac, the one that looks like half a round melon impaled with a bent easel. You have to shell out $1,499 to get one with a CD-RW drive, chugging along on a 700-megahertz processor.

• The FPF (Fine Print Finesse) award goes to Compaq, now in the belly of HP, for offering a $399, 1.8 gigahertz minitower PC, where adding a monitor is listed under the "Customize" button on the company's Web site. There must be first-time buyer elitists who like to "customize" their PCs with a monitor, but the rest can certainly take advantage of a good price if they happened to be born with a video socket in the back of their head. (Yeah, it's not a bad deal if you're looking to upgrade an existing system, but why not say so?)

• Microsoft is awarded a LUGLY trophy (Lawyers Universally Gotta Love You), for its never-ending saga of suing and being sued, the latest effort coming Christmas week as a British mobile phone corporation filed suit in federal court over intellectual property issues. That award is tied with the ...

• WIP (Work In Progress) award for Windows XP, which if it doesn't whine about automatic updates available every three days or so, must be only because the software developers are so busy testifying that they didn't have time to patch the gaping holes in their code that have popped up over the last year. As this is written, our computer is refusing to hibernate, because, it says, the keyboard drivers may have problems. That the keyboard is a Microsoft product does not swell the heart with holiday cheer.

• The ASAIS (Anything, So Long As It Sells) award goes to those publishers of PC and video console games who drench each adventure in gore, rape and mayhem. Or who feature anatomically improbably heroines whose outfits cover five yards on a hundred-yard field.

• Not to be entirely negative, the DIW! Award (Doggone, It Works!) goes to those DSL and cable modem providers, Verizon and Comcast among them, who have actually delivered on the promise of easy broadband connectivity over ordinary phone lines. We don't appreciate this enough. Ten years ago, an engineer told that we could deliver 10 megabits-per-second over an ordinary twisted-pair phone line would have summoned the guys with the wraparound white-sleeve sportscoats. Twenty years ago, the Associated Press trumpeted its new, hot stock service that delivered at 9600-baud -- around 10,000 words a minute. Today, thanks to these pioneers, that's so antique it's painful (especially if you've been around long enough to remember it).

• Finally, as always, the TAL (Thanks A Lot) award to the armies of publicists, entrepreneurs, readers and critics (and, perhaps, even, maybe, editors) who devote great amounts of time and attention to make us seem brighter and more knowledgeable than God intended.

Happy New Year to all!

2003/01/07

MELBOURNE, Australia (CNN) -- The quest for viable solar energy sources could be about to reach new heights -- literally.

A 1,000 meter (3,300 feet) "tower of power," capable of being able to produce enough energy to supply 200,000 homes, is being planned for the Australian Outback.

The project, if it goes ahead, would see a structure almost twice the height of the world's current tallest building built near the remote town of Mildura.

The tower is designed by structural engineer Professor J顤g Schlaich and would use German-designed advanced lightweight construction techniques to achieve its remarkable height.

The tower would sit in the center of a seven kilometer (4 miles) radius circular glass building.

Air under the glass would be warmed by the sun. As the warm air rises it would be drawn through turbines at the base of the tower thus generating renewable electricity.

A working prototype of the tower has already been built in Spain and the design was judged one of Time magazine's 2002 inventions of the year.

Australian listed company EnviroMission Ltd has now signed a heads of agreement with international engineering firm Leighton Contractors to determine the viability of the project.

EnviroMission Communications Manager Kim Forte told CNN Monday that most aspects of the project were at a very advanced stage and the concept was well supported by all levels of government in Australia.

An environmental impact study still needs to be completed on the project but EnviroMission did not foresee any "show stoppers" in that process, Forte said.

"It's looking damn good," she said.

Can be built

Leightons are currently conducting feasibility studies and due diligence activities on the project which is estimated to cost about $560 million (Aust. $1 billion) if it proceeds.

A completion date of 2006 is envisaged.

EnvironMission Chief Executive Officer Roger Davey told Reuters last week that the construction of the tower was not a matter of "if it can be built" but "when".

"We have proved that it does work and that it can be built, but what we have got to get a handle on is the cost and we are working very strongly through that now," he told Reuters.

The world's tallest free-standing structure is the Canadian National Tower in Toronto at 553 meters (1,815 feet).

2003/01/10

OSLO, Norway -- A Norwegian teenager has been cleared of DVD piracy charges in a landmark trial brought by major Hollywood studios.

The Oslo court said Jon Johansen, known in Norway as "DVD Jon," had not broken the law when he helped unlock a code and distribute a computer program enabling DVD films to be copied.

"Johansen is found not guilty," Judge Irene Sogn told the court. She said prosecutors could appeal against the unanimous verdict.

Johansen said after the ruling that he would celebrate by "watching DVD films on unlicensed players."

Prosecutors had asked for a 90-day suspended jail term for Johansen, 19, who developed the program when he was 15.

The teenager has become a symbol for hackers worldwide who say making software such as Johansen's -- called DeCSS -- is an act of intellectual freedom rather than theft.

DeCSS defeats the copyright protection system known as Contents Scramble System (CSS), which the entertainment industry uses to protect films distributed on DVDs.

Johansen created and published DeCSS so that he would be able to view DVDs on his Linux computer. He said the program meant the film industry no longer had a monopoly on making DVD players.

The prosecution was brought after a complaint was filed by the Motion Picture Association (MPA), which represents the major Hollywood studios.

The studios argued unauthorised copying was copyright theft and undermined a market for DVDs and videos worth $20 billion a year in North America alone.

But Johansen argued his code was necessary to watch movies he already owned, on his Linux-based computer, for which DVD software had not yet been written.

He said since he owned the DVDs, he should be able to view them as he liked, preferably on his own computer. The court, citing consumer laws which protect consumers' fair use of their own property, agreed.

The court ruled there was "no evidence" that Johansen or others used the decryption code called DeCSS for illegal purposes. Nor was there any evidence that Johansen intended to contribute to illegal copying.

The court also ruled that it is not illegal to use the DeCSS code to watch DVD films obtained by legal means.

In the United States, Johansen's case raised concerns among Internet users of what they see as a constitutional right to freedom of expression. A battle is raging in the U.S. over a 1998 copyright law that bans software like DeCSS.

Even though Johansen's software is now outdated, it was the first to give the so-called source codes, or instructions, for how to decipher DVD codes.

-- CNN Norge's Morten Overbye contributed to this report

2003/01/15

SOMERVILLE, Massachusetts (AP) -- In future wars, robots may drop from the sky by the hundreds from unmanned aircraft, swarming like giant insects over battlefields in coordinated, terrifying assaults.

But that is a decades-away scenario.

For now, military planners and robot designers are simply trying to improve devices -- some of which could see action soon in Iraq -- by incorporating lessons from Afghanistan, where robots saw their first significant military action.

You'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the military who says robots will one day replace soldiers.

Navigating tough terrain

Yet the newest robots being developed by companies including iRobot range farther from their "masters" than did their forebears in Afghanistan. They can navigate terrain and obstacles more deftly, lay down a cover of smoke, test for chemical weapons and extend a "neck" that can peer around corners.

The machines are also learning how to right themselves if they flip over as well as how to follow their tracks back home if they lose contact with their base.

The Pentagon has no doubts robots can save lives.

"I don't have any problem writing to iRobot, saying 'I'm sorry your robot died, can we get another?"' said Colonel Bruce Jette, the Army's point man on robot deployment, who accompanied the first, $45,000 iRobot "PackBots" into the field in Afghanistan. "That's a lot easier letter to write than to a father or mother."

Prior to Afghanistan, the military was using robots for search-and-rescue and ordnance disposal, but mostly viewed them as long-term research. Airborne drones had proved easier to build than effective land robots.

Robots reporting for duty

But the new conflict persuaded the military to move faster. At the time, the state-of-the-art means for clearing a cave was to tie a rope around the waist of an infantryman, who would crawl in and toss ahead a grappling hook to probe for mines or booby traps.

The Pentagon asked iRobot, a startup that emerged out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's artificial intelligence program, to rig up its latest prototypes of the 42-pound, remote-controlled PackBot.

Able to ride on tracks like a small tank, climb stairs and work under 3 meters of water or force of up to 400 times gravity, Packbots made their debut just six weeks later at a cave complex outside the village of Nazaraht, near the Pakistani border.

The robots sent video back to the troops, sparing them the risk of being dispatched by booby trap or enemy combatant.

"Their first reaction was, 'Where have you been?"' Jette said.

Conforming to working conditions

Later, they offered advice, complaining that the signal wasn't penetrating the walls of deep caves. So Tom Frost, an iRobot engineer at the scene, built a makeshift network of radio repeaters by scavenging old Soviet trucks that littered Bagram Air Base.

And when soldiers asked Frost if PackBot could work with the computers integrated into their clothing, he downloaded the necessary code over a satellite.

The soldiers also scribbled a drawing of their idea for an extendable neck. The company was already working on that, but made it a top priority.

Now, in the comparative comfort of its lab back home, iRobot is fine-tuning all those adjustments.

Another lesson from Afghanistan: One size does not fit all.

Sometimes, Jette said, soldiers wanted an 80-pound workhorse like a model built by Foster-Miller of Waltham, which was also tested in Afghanistan. Sometimes, the PackBot was just the right size.

And sometimes, especially in towns, what the soldiers really wanted was a "throw bot" they could toss over a wall or through a window.

"The question is, can you get three-quarters of the capability of those robots at one-tenth the weight," said Robert Larsen, a program manager at Draper Labs, an MIT spinoff that is developing a military robot that resembles the PackBot but weighs less than 5 pounds.

Draper's device, though unlikely to be ready in time for Iraq, is cheap, too. Because it's controlled by an off-the-shelf device, Larsen said, it could cost as little as a few hundred dollars.

The small size has its disadvantages, however.

"When you get small, everything becomes an obstacle," Larsen said, struggling to drive the device over a reporter's crumpled coat at a recent trade show.

No widespread action

The Afghan experience doesn't necessarily mean robots will see widespread action in Iraq.

There are only a handful to go around, and so far U.S. soldiers gathering in Kuwait are not training with them, said John Spiller, a civilian who works with Jette.

"The best I can say at this point is the Army in general is aggressively looking at applying robots in all future operations," said Jette. "I think it would be useful in an open battle."

Planners continue to put a number of robots through their paces at the Army's Military Operations in Urban Terrain center at Fort Benning, Georgia, where soldiers train to fight in a mock city.

And the kind of urban warfare -- peering around corners, clearing buildings -- that would likely happen in Iraq is precisely what robots have been designed for.

Robots will someday master many of the complex, individual tasks required in combat, experts insist. Then, something even more powerful will follow: robots that work together.

'10 robots coming at you'

It's a prospective weapon whose effectiveness would derive at least partly from the sheer terror it could impose on an enemy.

"When you see one robot coming down, it's interesting and even if it has a weapon on it, maybe it's a little scary and you give it a little respect," said Arniss Mangolds, vice president of Foster-Miller's robot division. "But if you're standing somewhere and see 10 robots coming at you, it's scary."

Jette says robots will never fully replace soldiers.

"None of them," he says, "are as powerful as the 2.5-pound gray blob inside your head."

2003/02/03

TOWNSVILLE, Australia -- Australian medical scientists believe they may have found a cure for the deadly sting of a tiny jellyfish that has killed at least two swimmers in the past year.

The treatment, using a safe and inexpensive magnesium infusion, has been successfully tested on two patients stung by the thumbnail-sized irukandji jellyfish, the Australian Associated Press reported Friday.

Queensland Health Minister Wendy Edmond said the initial results from tests at Townsville hospital were outstanding, resulting in pain relief within 30 minutes.

Little is known about the irukandji jellyfish, other than that its sting can cause massive pain -- some have compared the sensation to the pain suffered in childbirth -- and sometimes death.

Northern Queensland, home to the Great Barrier Reef, is annually hit by a plague of box jellyfish in what is known as "stinger season."

Tiny killer

However, the tiny size of the irukandji jellyfish and the potency of its sting has threatened to scare away tourists and harm the region's economy.

Last year two overseas visitors died after receiving irukandji stings and more than 120 others were hospitalized.

Aside from the anxiety caused by searing abdominal pains, the sting can cause a potentially fatal rise in blood pressure.

Announcing the discovery, Edmond said the treatment "has the potential to significantly improve the recovery of the scores of people affected by irukandji syndrome across the north each year."

Scientists now hope to develop an oral version of the treatment to administer in the crucial first minutes of exposure to the sting before patients can be transported to hospital.

2003/03/11

HAIFA, Israel (Reuters) -- For a fleeting moment, Mohamed Atta appeared on an airport security camera minutes before he boarded one of the planes which crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Was there any way the camera or its operator would have been able to identify Atta as a suspect before he hijacked and flew the first of two planes into the twin towers?

Israelis Michael and Alex Bronstein think they have the answer.

The computer whiz-kids -- 22-year-old identical twins almost impossible to tell apart -- have applied a new technology to recognizing faces in a way that may yet revolutionize international security.

"I said it to them as a joke: if you succeed in building a system that can distinguish between the two of you, you'll get (a grade of) 100," said the twins' professor, Ron Kimmel of the Technion Institute in Haifa.

"They succeeded and got 100. They are brilliant."

The technology scans and maps the human face as a three-dimensional surface, providing a far more accurate reference for identifying a person than current systems, most of which rely on two-dimensional images, Kimmel said.

The product can potentially meet a wide range of security needs in a world shaken by the September 11 attacks and a series of bombings blamed on Osama Bin Laden's al Qaeda network, of which Atta was a suspected member.

Kimmel and one of his former pupils, Assi Elad, had already developed the algorithms used as building-blocks for the face-recognition system. The Bronstein twins constructed a 3-D scanner, together with engineer Eyal Gordon, and applied the ideas to face recognition.

The twins and Kimmel say they want to turn the technology -- registered for a patent in the United States -- into a commercial product, with applications ranging from airports and border crossings to security zones and teller machines.

"We have a prototype and we saw the idea works," Michael Bronstein said. "There is a hope that this will become a commercial product and allow all of us to feel more secure."

Unique facial signature

The technology records the surface of a person's face by scanning it with a series of light patterns and stores the data as a three-dimensional image in a computer.

Employing mathematical algorithms similar to those used in Internet searches, the computer measures the distances between a number of sample points on the facial surface.

The distances are then reconfigured as straight lines in a three-dimensional space, creating a new and abstracted image, or signature, of a human face built on precise mathematical calculations.

Kimmel and the Bronsteins say that this signature is more or less unique to a particular person.

The advantage of the system is its ability to compare facial structures as they appear in different poses or light conditions, variables which could distort a face seen as a two-dimensional image.

"One of my students calls it sculpting in numbers," said Kimmel. "This kind of mapping makes it all invariant, or it is not influenced by our expressions. If we smile a little bit or we change our face a little, it will still be mapped into the same signature, the same kind of surface."

The system could be employed at airports or border crossings where a 3-D security camera could scan passengers' faces and compare them with a database of three-dimensional pictures of suspected criminals or terrorists, the twins said.

The technology would not work with existing two-dimensional images of suspects.

Facial signatures could also be embedded in credit cards or entry permits. People withdrawing money from an automated teller machine or seeking access to a secure compound could have their identity verified by an on-site camera.

A facial signature would be effective as a means of identification for more or less for the same number of years as a passport photograph.

Ageing, cosmetic surgery, significant changes to facial surfaces such as growing or removing a beard could disrupt the matching process.

Twin phenomenon

The Bronstein twins know first hand the importance of face recognition. During a recent interview, even Kimmel confused the young men, who share the same lanky build, wispy brown hair and steel-rimmed glasses.

The twins immigrated to Israel from Russia in 1991 and say they have always shared the same interests. As adults, Alex and Michael frequently complete each other's sentences and begin statements with "we" even when speaking on their own.

"We always studied the same things and it was always connected to science, if sometimes indirectly," said Alex.

Michael added: "We started working on explosives at a very young age, when we were about eight years old, and it lasted until we were about 13 when we built a bomb that was so powerful, we were scared of it ourselves.

"So we swore that we would stop that and as a reward, Mom and Dad bought us an aquarium with fish."

The face-recognition project was assigned in a computer science course the twins took with Kimmel at the Technion, where they are studying for a masters' degree in electrical engineering.

Asked if there was any way to distinguish between them, except for Michael's shorter haircut, Alex said: "I must say that I've got a girlfriend." Michael chimed in: "We don't share those."

2003/04/01

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The U.S. government said Friday it will begin testing a system using handheld personal digital assistants, or PDAs, to deliver urgent messages to doctors, nurses and other health-care workers in the event of a biological attack.

The three-month test will evaluate how often health-care workers download the information to their handheld devices and whether they find the system useful, the Department of Health and Human Services said.

The project will be tested with health-care workers who use a system created by ePocrates, a privately held company based in San Mateo, California, that sends alerts to more than 700,000 health-care workers, including more than 250,000 doctors, an HHS statement said.

A test messages will contain a memo about particular biological agents and Web links to information about diagnosing and treating related conditions, the health agency said. Health-care workers will be able to save the information to their PDAs for future reference.

2003/04/02

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (Reuters) -- Sweden has overtaken the United States as the Web-savviest nation on the planet, a survey showed on Tuesday.

One other European country, Denmark, was also more aggressive in taking advantage of the Internet than the United States, according to research carried out by IBM and the intelligence unit of British magazine The Economist.

Of the 60 countries surveyed, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan were at the bottom of the list with 2.37 and 2.52 points respectively out of a possible 10.

Sweden scored 8.67, up from 8.32 a year ago. The United States was little changed at number three with 8.43 points, on par with the Netherlands and Britain.

The differences were small between the top 14, all scoring more than eight points as a result of plentiful cheap Internet connections, software and technical support, legal and government frameworks and populations which think it is cool to spend time on the Net.

"Northwest Europe, North America and Australia are at virtually similar levels," said Peter Korsten, European executive director at IBM's Institute for Business Value.

Absent from the top 15 were France and Italy, which were clearly second league in "connectivity" and "consumer and business adoption." "They're laggards and that's a bit scary," he said.

South Korea jumped from 21nd to 16th place, overtaking France, Italy, Taiwan, New Zealand and Belgium, as it boasts the world's highest percentage of high-speed Web households.

2003/04/10

TOKYO, Japan (AP) -- After seven decades, reality is catching up to Dick Tracy's wristwatch phone -- Japan's cell phone giant NTT DoCoMo will soon start selling a mobile phone that's worn around the wrist and snaps off to become a regular handset.

"We are targeting young businessmen in their 20s and 30s as the device looks a bit rugged," DoCoMo spokesman Takuya Kono said.

Dubbed the "Wristomo," the watch opens up to become a phone, and users can talk while wearing it like Dick Tracy, the comic-book hero who debuted in the 1930's.

The Wristomo, manufactured by Seiko Instruments, weighs 4 ounces including batteries. It also hooks up to DoCoMo's hit "i-mode" Web-surfing service.

The company plans to sell 5,000 Wristomo phones for between $250 and $330 each, Kono said. The new phone will only be usable in Japan.

A competitor, Samsung Electronics of South Korea, plans to launch its wristwatch phone late this year.

2003/04/30

A vast preponderance of the world's problems today can be traced to the fundamental economic disparity of having a very small layer of rich people (that's us in the developed countries) living on the same planet as a vastly larger group of desperately poor people. What those people, many of them so alienated and angry, need most is the ability to raise their standard of living quickly to something more closely resembling ours. Despite all the suffering, war, distress, chaos, and fear in our world, the ongoing unstoppable trajectory of progress, particularly technological progress, continues to give me confidence that change will come.

War or no war, technology is increasingly the way the world's problems will be addressed. The Internet makes the world a smaller place. And it is growing up in its capabilities. We are on the cusp of a new era of cheap and effective technology, an era in which many capabilities of networked software and hardware begin to come together in new ways. Much of the progress has been hard to discern in the face of the dotcom and Wall Street crashes, and September 11 and its aftermath. But this coming together will benefit companies, and it will benefit the world.

Look at the biggest tech trends:

Standardization

An ever-widening array of technology tools are available in inexpensive, standardized form. The price of computers, storage, and bandwidth, among other things, continues to drop per unit of performance. Dell Computer is the ultimate apostle of this trend, but Dell only succeeds because of the work of Intel, Microsoft, the Linux community, and others.

Open source

Software that costs essentially nothing can do more and more tasks. I wrote the other day about the mySQL database. Meanwhile, Linux continues to astound. It makes available to anyone, inexpensively, the kind of robust software provided by the traditional proprietary Unix vendors. Linux also allows Wal-Mart to sell a $200 PC.

Wireless

The cost of deploying a broadband network is plunging because it can now be done wirelessly. This suits our public spaces, workplaces, schools, and homes. We can thank not the telecommunications industry but those in the computer industry who developed the standards-based unregulated Wi-Fi technology.

'Data Comes Alive'

This was the theme of Esther Dyson's recent industry conference, and aptly summarizes a panoply of emerging new technologies that hold the promise of dramatically increasing what software can do. Among them: Web services, which allow applications to seamlessly communicate with each other; the so-called "semantic Web," a richer version of the Web we use today that allows software to communicate more efficiently without human intervention; and a variety of new enterprise applications that will bring the benefits of automation to many intractably uncomputerized business processes.

Selling software as a service

I've written in this column about the phenomenal growth of Salesforce.com's per-user-per-month sales automation software. Salesforce is just one of several new companies that allow anyone to automate parts of their operations without buying hardware, networks, and expensive enterprise software. All you need is a browser and you can get work done. If you apply this concept to your entire computing and software infrastructure, you have what IBM calls "on demand" computing, or Hewlett-Packard refers to as "adaptive infrastructure." It's all about getting more efficient use of technology resources, whether you own them or not.

Take these trends together and it is clear that a dramatic new set of inexpensive but powerful capabilities is emerging. With the growth of the Internet, we're starting to see a much more supple technology fabric available to any enterprise, organization, or indeed, country. These new tools will be as usable in Peru as they are in Peoria.

The Internet will be the great leveler. The new interconnected network and today's technologies give the little guy access to tools of unprecedented power -- whether that little guy is a small competitor to a big corporation or a small poor country struggling to compete with the U.S. and Europe. Cheap machines, inexpensive bandwidth, easy-to-deploy networks, and rapidly improving yet affordable software all add up to a gift to the world. Let's make the most of this gift in the hope that things from here on get better, not worse.