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科技新聞

第四季

2004/10/29

LAS VEGAS, Nevada (CNN) -- Whether it's a casual tourist putting a few dollars in a slot machine, or a high-roller risking tens of thousands at the poker table, most Las Vegas gamblers have one thing in common: They believe they can win.

Dean Heller, Nevada's secretary of state, wants to instill that same degree of confidence in the state's electronic voting machines. So he asked the state experts who test slot machines for fairness and reliability to weigh in on the voting variety.

"Gambling is a billion-dollar industry, they can't afford to make a mistake, they can't afford to have these machines manipulated," he says. "So I said, 'I know this isn't within your responsibility, but could you determine, in your best estimation, which are the most secure machines available today to use electronically?' "

It was an unusual request but an interesting challenge for the engineers who spend their time testing, dismantling, and figuring out how a cheater might compromise any of the thousands of loud, dizzying, dazzling slot machines licensed in the state.

The lab where these engineers and computer scientists work has dozens of slot machines, with music and video displays ranging from "Wheel of Fortune" to "Wayne's World" to "The Platypus Game."

"Once it gets down to the real heart of the matter, a processor is a processor, it is only the interface that makes a difference," said Marc McDermott, chief of the electronic services division of the Nevada Gaming Control Board. "On a slot machine the interface is the spinning reels or the video display, on a voting machine you have different buttons."

While he could not actually take apart any e-voting systems, McDermott reviewed tests and literature available on several electronic voting systems. The state eventually decided to put its money on touchscreen machines from Sequoia Voting Systems.

One key to the selection: A voter-verified paper trail installed on the machines.

"Without a paper trail attached to a voting machine today, I think any election would be suspect," Heller says.

For this year's general election, Nevada is the only state where virtually every voting machine has a paper backup that could aid in a machine malfunction, an audit or a recount.

"If you want to talk about security, I would say right now the electronic voting devices in Nevada are the most secure devices in the country right now," Heller says.

Voters receptive

While many jurisdictions changed or updated their voting technologies after the punch-card problems in Florida in 2000, some experts say e-voting technology, especially systems without paper trails, still cannot be trusted completely.

"The design of the [electronic voting] machines is not up to the standards of say, gambling machines," says Stanford University computer scientist David Dill. "The certification processes are not up to the certification processes that exist for software in airplanes, or something like that. The companies that inspect the voting machines at the federal level are private entities, supervised by private organizations. It's very much NOT an open process."

Nevada voters have been using the Sequoia touchscreen machines with the paper trail in Clark County -- which includes Las Vegas -- during early voting that began October 16.

How are voters reacting?

"They enjoy it, just the idea that it can be so simple, as opposed to some of the problems other places have had," says poll worker Jim Stinger, working at a busy voting location inside Meadows Mall.

Delores Wagar was using this technology for the first time.

"It was nice. If I made a mistake I could correct it," she says.

Summer Reese, who says she is pretty adept with technology, said the process was a breeze.

"They're simple enough that anyone can use it. You pretty much just touch what you want, and hit 'next.' "

Heller
Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller consulted experts at the state gaming control.

Election officials say it's not just security and accuracy that are important, but every individual's perception of that fairness.

"I know how much we test the programming and the machines, and I know they are accurate," says Larry Lomax, registrar of voters in Clark County. "It's important that all the voters are confident in the outcome of the election, and I don't have any doubt that whether it's a paper trail or some other technical solution to this issue, it's the way of the future."

While he's familiar with critics who say there's been too quick a move to new technologies, Nevada's Heller is a lot more concerned about precincts that have done little or nothing to improve voting methods.

"Seventy-five percent of the people in this country are going to vote on the same machines that they voted on four years ago," says Heller. "Now there's a sad message in that. If this is the pace of change in this country, we're talking 16 years before we have any substantive changes from the 2000 debacle we had in Florida."

 

2004/11/10

CNN) -- Microsoft's dominance of the Web browser market faces a fresh challenge on Tuesday with the release of the final version of Mozilla's Firefox browser.

The Mozilla Foundation, a California-based non-profit organization dedicated to developing open source software, hopes Firefox 1.0 will attract millions of users away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Last month more than eight million people downloaded the preview edition of the browser, contributing to its final development.

Like other open source software, such as the operating system Linux, Firefox's code is freely available for any programmer to examine and improve.

"We are delighted to be announcing this major milestone for the Mozilla Foundation and for the Firefox browser, which has been made possible thanks to the tireless effort of hundreds of community volunteers and developers around the world," said Mozilla president Mitchell Baker.

"Now millions more will be able to enjoy a better web experience."

Although development editions of Firefox have existed for several years, 1.0 is the first version intended for a full release.

Its developers claim it is more stable than previous editions and more secure than Explorer, which has become a popular target for hackers because of its near-ubiquitous presence on PCs.

Firefox features a pop-up ad blocker, online fraud protection and the ability to display several web pages in a single window, using "tabbed browsing."

"Open source projects have a much higher standard," Mozilla director of engineering Chris Hofmann told Reuters. "It's the engineers that actually build the software that label when it's done."

Mozilla has already made inroads into Explorer's share of the browser market. According to the Web usage tracker WebSideStory, Microsoft's share has slipped to 92.9 percent from 95.5 percent since June. In the same period Mozilla's share increased from 3.5 percent to six percent.

Explorer, which is packaged with Microsoft's Windows operating system, hasn't been seriously challenged since usurping Netscape, the browser instrumental in the development of the Internet, in the late 1990s.

Mozilla was set-up to complete a project set-up by Netscape, which stopped development last year, to make the code of its browser publicly available.

Explorer's critics argue that Microsoft stopped making developments once it had achieved market dominance. Microsoft says a new version with enhanced security features will be ready for the next edition of Windows, currently scheduled for release in 2006.

 

2004/11/11

NEW YORK (AP) -- The Twentieth Century Fox studio, a veteran of the big screen and the TV screen, is about to break into an entirely new realm: the really little screen, the kind that comes on a cell phone.

In what appeared to be the first arrangement of its kind, Twentieth Century Fox said Wednesday it would create a unique series of one-minute dramas based on its hit show "24" exclusively for a new high-speed wireless service being offered by Vodafone PLC, the world's biggest cell phone company.

Vodafone will begin offering the one-minute episodes in January in the United Kingdom, coinciding with the start of the fourth season of the show on a satellite TV service.

The "mobisodes," as they're being called, will be introduced later in 2005 in up to 23 more countries where Vodafone operates, mainly in Europe, as well as in the United States through the company's Verizon Wireless joint venture.

The deal is part of a broader agreement between Fox Entertainment Group and London-based Vodafone under which Fox, the entertainment unit of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, will develop other programming to be viewed on the phones.

In March, the new Vodafone service, to be called Vodafone live! with 3G, will also offer trailers and clips of movies under a "Movie of the Month" service, the first one being "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason."

Cell phone operators have invested heavily to roll out high-speed wireless services, intent on driving new revenues from Internet browsing, streaming video and audio, and other forms of media.

The announcement came on the same day that Vodafone announced the launch of its long-delayed high-speed wireless services across much of Europe.

The launch ended a wait of several years since Vodafone spent billions to acquire licenses to use more of the public airwaves to deliver the new services, which are known as "3G" in the wireless industry.

The one-minute dramas and movie trailers from Fox were one of several services being unveiled for Vodafone's service, which will also offer news, sports, music and games.

The cellular version of the "24" series will be based on characters from the television show. Twenty four of them will be shown in all.

Teri Everett, a spokeswoman for Fox Entertainment Group, said Fox's deal with Vodafone represented the first time a Hollywood studio had agreed to make a TV series expressly for distribution on cell phones.

 

2004/12/01

Log on to be a satellite spy

TORONTO, Ontario (Reuters) -- A Canadian inventor has created Internet-based technology that could soon see regular computer users acting as armchair spies.

Vincent Tao, an engineer at Toronto's York University, has invented a mapping and surveillance tool called Same (See Anywhere, Map Anywhere), which produces images so sharp that geographic co-ordinates typed into a Web site can reveal the make of a car parked on the street.

The tool works by taking satellite images of the Earth and combining them with real-time remote sensors that monitor traffic and weather.

The information is reformatted on a searchable Web site that can capture ground-level images of the Earth with little or no time delay.

The resolution is 60cm (two feet) -- fine enough to determine the make of a car, though not the details of a human face, said Tao.

"This is real-time streaming technology. It's like (the online directory) MapQuest or the navigation system in your car, but three-dimensional," he said.

"You'll see a globe, like a virtual Earth, and then you can fly in from outer space and zoom all the way in to a city and even to street level, which will be updated by very nice, high-resolution imagery."

Tao said the potential applications were broad, including defense, emergency response and environmental monitoring. He added that the technology could become widely available as early as next year.

But the technology also poses concerns, said Veera Rastogi, a lawyer specializing in privacy issues with Canadian law firm Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP.

"Any surveillance-based technology like this gives rise to the potential for abuse," she said.

"Right now it's a tool used by the Red Cross and defense, but, down the road, in whose hands would this technology fall and for what purpose? Bottom line is, it's a case where, these days, the technology seems to be outrunning the law," Rastogi said.

Cindy Cowan, the director of a Toronto shelter for battered women, echoed Rastogi's concerns, saying the technology could put women at greater risk of abuse.

"Already the Internet has become a place where women are stalked, so to give another tool to abusive men motivated to find and track and stalk -- it frightens me," she said.

 

2004/12/10

Report: Mobile phone users double since 2000

GENEVA, Switzerland (Reuters) -- Mobile phone subscribers around the globe totalled nearly 1.5 billion by the middle of this year, about one quarter of the world's population, the International Telecommunication Union said on Thursday.

The figure reflected a sharp surge in the mobile telephony business, especially in developing countries, over the first half of the decade, with subscribers doubling since 2000, according to the United Nations agency's annual report.

The ITU said the growth in mobile phone subscribers had outpaced that for fixed lines, who totalled some 1.85 billion today against one billion at the start of the century, and was also outstripping the rate of increase in Internet users.

Driving the mobile phone phenomenon, according to the report, was a rapid rise in subscriber numbers in three of the world's most populous nations -- China, India and Russia.

And by the middle of the year developing countries as a whole had overtaken rich nations to account for 56 percent of all mobile subscribers, while accounting for 79 percent of growth in the market since 2000.

By July this year, China was reporting 310 million users -- about one-quarter of its total population and more than the entire population of the United States, the ITU said.

India, with a much smaller current subscriber base, was beginning to experience exponential growth, seeing an increase of 11 million, or 25 percent, so far this year to reach a total of 44.5 million subscribers.

In Russia, according to the report, mobile phone subscriber numbers jumped from 36.5 million a year ago to 60 million by September of this year.

The value of global mobile business reached $414 billion in revenues in 2003, a tenfold increase in the decade since 1993, while over the same period the overall telecommunications sector grew by an average of 8.8 per cent to reach $1.1 trillion.

In the fixed-line sector, the mainstay of public telecommunications since the late 19th century, growth had been sluggish and had even declined since 2001 -- partly because of declining revenues for international telephone traffic.

This was largely due to increased routing of calls though computer networks and to cut-price competition as global trade rules managed by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) brought new low-cost service providers into the market.

By the end of this year, the report said, global revenues from mobile networks were likely to exceed those from fixed-line networks for the first time.

The ITU said the number of Internet users -- around 400 million in the year 2000 -- had grown to nearly 700 million by the middle of this year, slowing down after the rapid surge in the second half of the 1990s.

But the Internet subscriber rate could be boosted if high-speed access to mobile phones or portable computers through wireless technology was made more widely available in developing countries where fixed lines were scarce, the ITU said.

 

2004/12/20

Spammers ordered to pay $1 billion

DAVENPORT, Iowa (AP) -- A federal judge has awarded an Internet service provider more than $1 billion in what is believed to be the largest judgment ever against spammers.

Robert Kramer, whose company provides e-mail service for about 5,000 subscribers in eastern Iowa, filed suit against 300 spammers after his inbound mail servers received up to 10 million spam e-mails a day in 2000, according to court documents.

U.S. District Judge Charles R. Wolle filed default judgments Friday against three of the defendants under the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and the Iowa Ongoing Criminal Conduct Act.

AMP Dollar Savings Inc. of Mesa, Arizona, was ordered to pay $720 million and Cash Link Systems Inc. of Miami, Florida, was ordered to pay $360 million. The third company, Florida-based TEI Marketing Group, was ordered to pay $140,000.

"It's definitely a victory for all of us that open up our e-mail and find lewd and malicious and fraudulent e-mail in our boxes every day," Kramer said after the ruling.

Kramer's attorney, Kelly Wallace, said he is unlikely to ever collect the judgment, which was made possible by an Iowa law that allows plaintiffs to claim damages of $10 per spam message. The judgments were then tripled under RICO.

"We hope to recover at least his costs," Wallace said.

There were no telephone listings in Arizona and Florida for the any of the three companies. An e-mail sent Saturday to Cash Link Systems went unanswered.

According to court documents, no attorneys for the defendants were present during a bench trial in November. The lawsuit continues against other named defendants.

Laura Atkins, president of SpamCon Foundation, an anti-spamming organization based in Palo Alto, California, said she believed it was the largest judgment ever in an anti-spam lawsuit.

"This is just incredible," she said. "I'm not aware of anything that's been over $100 million."

2004/12/31

Silicon chip 'most influential invention'

LONDON, England (CNN) -- The silicon chip is the most significant invention developed during the past 50 years, according to a poll of CNN.com users.

More than 119,000 CNN.com users voted in the three-month online survey, part of the Explorers special report, looking at technology of the past, present and future.

Twenty four percent -- or 28,500 people -- of those who voted believed the silicon chip was the most important of the 24 inventions listed.

Number two was the World Wide Web, taking 20 percent (23,600) of the votes, and third was the Personal Computer, with 17 percent (20,700) of the votes.

The invention that attracted the least number of votes was the Walkman, barely managing to register a percentage, with just 140 votes.

The silicon chip was invented in 1961 by two American electrical engineers, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce.

Their creation revolutionized and miniaturized technology and paved the way for the development of the modern computer.

Until the chip was invented, most electrical devices were constructed using bulky, power-hungry vacuum tube technology.

The development of transistors partially solved the problem but these still had to be wired to circuit boards.

Kilby and Noyce hit on the solution almost simultaneously, combining separate components in an integrated circuit made of a semi-conductor material.

Intel founder Noyce, working in Palo Alto, California, favored silicon and can thus be credited as the man who put the silicon in "Silicon Valley."

CNN's Explorers special report also featured high-profile figures from a variety of sectors and asked them about the technology or invention that had most influenced their lives.

British Olympic athlete Kelly Holmes and Former U.S. tennis ace Jim Courier both talked about the importance of air travel had on their sporting careers.

"If there was no air travel, I wouldn't be able to race overseas and I wouldn't have an international career. I simply wouldn't be able to do what I do," Holmes said.

British entrepreneur Richard Branson revealed that the one invention he would not be without was his mobile phone.

"I love the freedom of movement that my phone gives me. That has definitely transformed my life," Branson told CNN.

Designer of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, James Dyson, shared his thoughts on his passion for the Mini car and praised it for being a "fun" invention.

As part of the Explorers project, CNN also asked users to write in with their inventions, and got Trevor Baylis, who created the clockwork radio, to comment on some of the more creative ones.

His favorite of these was a Canadian user's suggestion for a voice-activated talking stove for people who are visually impaired.

"This is a jolly good idea -- this type of device could be used in many circumstances. Full marks for this invention," Baylis said.

He told CNN that the Explorers Web site had encouraged people to share their ideas for inventions.

"I believe there is an invention in all of us. If you can solve a problem in a way no-one else thinks of, you are already on your way to being an inventor."

Baylis considered the jet engine full story to be the most important invention of the past 50 years, but told CNN that the wireless radio had also been a marvelous invention.

The radio was invented in 1901 by Guglielmo Marconi.

Baylis used the tsunami disaster as an example of the wireless radio's ability to give people valuable information during times of crisis.

He said that it should be noted that those who voted in the Explorers poll largely represented developing countries, because they were more likely to have access to computers, and that had to be considered when analyzing the results.

He said the World Wide Web was probably the modern day equivalent of the radio but Personal Computers were not as accessible or as small as transistor radios.

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