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Issue no. 45, 2003 Published: Dec 05, 2003
DVD format war on the horizon
'Anonymous' file-traders arrested
Spammers attack critics
Office gossip drives storage spending
Eye implant may reverse blindness
Virtual autopsies might replace scalpels
Software paraphrases sentences
Largest prime number ever is found
Biochip puts it all together
Electronic back-seat driver tells gadgets to shut up
Internet mapping project weaves colourful web
Bell 'did not invent telephone'

DVD format war on the horizon
As the DVD Forum embraces their technology, Toshiba and NEC have won a round in the fight for standardising the format for DVDs. Last year, the two companies pitched their version of a blue-laser DVD player against that of a consortium of the world's biggest electronics makers, including Sony, Matsushita and Royal Philips Electronics. Blue-laser DVD players are set to replace the current generation of red-laser DVD players in a few years. A blue-laser disc can store about five times more information than can red-laser discs - up to three hours of high-definition video. The electronics industry expects that over the next few years, high-definition TV will reach a critical mass, which in its turn will push the need for higher quality DVDs. The DVD Forum said it will endorse only one technology. By backing the so-called HD DVD standard from Toshiba and NEC, a new format war is looming. The DVD Forum did not approve the DVD+RW recordable technology of Sony and Philips - yet this technology has a significant chunk of the market. Its inventors even claim that it is the dominant standard.
ZDNet / Reuters Dec 01, 2003	back to top

'Anonymous' file-traders arrested
Japanese police have arrested two people suspected of distributing pirated films and computer games through a supposedly anonymous file-sharing network. Police also raided the home of the programmer who created the software used to connect to the network, called 'Winny'. Interest in anonymous file sharing networks has grown rapidly since the US music industry began taking legal action against individual users as part of a controversial attempt to stamp out illicit online music trading. This is the first time anyone has been arrested in relation to use of this type of secretive trading network. The most popular file-sharing networks provide little or no secrecy for users who can easily be traced through their computer's IP address. Winny is reportedly based on probably the best-known anonymous file-sharing application Freenet. This network provides anonymous untraceable sharing by dividing up files and distributing them across different computers. The network is also cryptographically secured.
New Scientist Dec 01, 2003	back to top

Spammers attack critics
Anti-spam organisations are the target of a new internet worm outbreak that tries to knock them offline with a crippling data barrage, computer security experts said Tuesday. Virus experts believe the worm, W32/Mimail-L, is the work of a vengeful spam e-mail peddler bent on paralysing organisations that try to deal with spam. The Mimail-L program comes as an attachment to an e-mail purporting to be from a woman named Wendy who details an erotic encounter and then offers naked photographs. Clicking on the attachment activates the virus, which forwards itself to other e-mail users. The worm can also turn the affected PC into a 'zombie', which can then be remotely commanded and used for dos-attacks on anti-spam organisations. In a new twist, a follow-up e-mail is sent to the infected user stating that an order for a CD containing images of child pornography will be delivered to their postal address. To stop the order they should respond an email address, which is actually an address for one of the targets.
CNN / Reuters Dec 02, 2003	back to top

Office gossip drives storage spending
E-mails filled with office gossip or forwarded jokes may be costing firms more than just minutes of employees' time - storing the electronic missives is draining companies' cash too, according to research. With analyst house IDC predicting that e-mail traffic will reach 35 million messages a day by 2005, and data retention legislation such as the United States' Sarbanes Oxley Act making storage a business priority, the costs of keeping e-mails is set keep rising. A survey of IT directors has found that e-mail storage now makes up around 40 per cent of data retention costs in businesses in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, with IT heads reckoning that 20 per cent of all the e-mails they have to keep are personal or non-work-related messages. Out of the 630 IT directors questioned by Hitachi Data Systems, ten per cent thought that e-mails were making up 40 per cent of their total storage capacity, with another quarter believing that e-mails are adding up to 20 per cent of their entire storage.
ZDNet / Silicon.com Dec 04, 2003	back to top

Eye implant may reverse blindness
Scientists at Stanford University in California have described their first complete design of an implant that will take the place of light-sensitive cells in the retina of a damaged eye. Current implants use chips that convert light into electrical impulses that are fed to the brain via the optic nerve. The new device will work differently. The implant releases neurotransmitters just as the retina does naturally. The researchers want light to strike the chip, causing it to release a small amount of neurotransmitter fluid that will stimulate retinal nerve cells. The implant is to be made of a soft polymer material that will conform to the curvature of the back of the eye. A key component will be retinal nerve cells that have been persuaded to grow behind the chip so that they can be stimulated effectively. The back of the implant will be coated with proteins designed to attract filaments that grow out of retinal cells. It is hoped they will connect the implant to the optic nerve, so that signals can be sent to the brain.
BBC News Dec 04, 2003	back to top

Virtual autopsies might replace scalpels
In the not-too-distant future, autopsies might be performed using computerised scanning rather than scalpels. The 'virtual autopsy' as developed by researchers at the University of Bern's Institute of Forensic Medicine offers advantages in criminal cases since bodies are not cut up and juries view simulations rather than photos of cadavers. Technicians use advanced computed tomography - CT scans - to get an overview of the body, then follow that up with magnetic resonance imaging for details of organs, muscles and soft tissue. Three- dimensional surface scanning provides a picture of the outside of the body. All the images can then be merged on the computer, giving investigators a picture of the entire body. The researchers have used the techniques for three years and 100 cases of crime victims. First they conducted a virtual autopsy, then a standard one. The results showed that the virtual autopsy is as accurate as traditional autopsies.
Yahoo / AP Dec 04, 2003	back to top

Software paraphrases sentences
Researchers at Cornell University are using online journalism and computational biology to automatically paraphrase whole sentences. The method could eventually allow computers to more easily process natural language, produce paraphrases that could be used in machine translation, and help people who have trouble reading certain types of sentences. Key to the technique is comparing news sources that cover the same events but employ slightly different styles. The researchers' system uses word-based clustering methods to identify sets of text that have a high degree of overlapping words. They then employed computational biology techniques to identify sentence templates, or lattices. The technique allowed the researchers to identify common templates that journalists use to describe similar events. Given a sentence, the system finds the closest match among one set of lattices, then uses the matching lattice from the second source to fill in the argument values of the original sentence to create paraphrases. The sentence can perhaps be paraphrased in as many as 20 ways.
Technology Research News Dec 03, 2003	back to top

Largest prime number ever is found
A 26-year-old graduate student in the US has made mathematical history by discovering the largest known prime number. The new number is 6,320,430 digits long. It took just over two years to find using a distributed network of more than 200,000 computers. Michael Shafer, a chemical engineering student at Michigan State University used his office computer to contribute spare processing power to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). The project has more than 60,000 volunteers from all over the world taking part. Prime numbers are positive integers that can only be divided by themselves and one. Mersenne primes are an especially rare type of prime that take the form 2 p-1, where p is also a prime number. The new number can be represented as 220,996,011-1. It is only the 40th Mersenne prime to have ever been found. Primes have practical uses too, for example by providing a way of exchanging the cryptographic keys that keep internet communications secure from eavesdropping.
New Scientist Dec 02, 2003	back to top

Biochip puts it all together
It is not easy cramming all the hallmarks of labs - the chambers and channels that hold and guide fluids, the pumps and valves that shunt fluids around, and the heaters, mixers and sensors that carry out experiments - onto a self-contained chip that works automatically. Researchers from Arizona State University have taken a large step in that direction, however, with a plastic biochip that packs simple versions of these elements in a 12- by 6- centimetre, 2-millimetre-thick inexpensive package. The device could eventually be used to carry out genetic analysis, environmental testing and biological warfare agent detection. The chip performs all the work needed to test from a raw sample like whole blood, including target cell capture using immunomagnetic beads, cell preconcentration, purification and lysis, and DNA multiplication and detection. The researchers' prototype detected a disease-causing E. coli bacteria in a sample of rabbit whole blood in 3.5 hours.
Technology Research News Dec 01, 2003	back to top

Electronic back-seat driver tells gadgets to shut up
Engineers are developing an electronic back-seat driver to try to ensure motorists pay attention to the road. The system is designed to stop drivers being put off by the increasing number of gadgets in cars, including mobile phones. The research being conducted by engineers at BMW and Bosch is partly funded by the German government. By monitoring road, traffic and driving conditions, it will decide when a situation is too dangerous for the person behind the wheel to be distracted. Phone calls will then be diverted to voice-mail, arriving emails hidden, and the controls of the satellite navigation system and CD player locked. A variety of sensors are used to detect other traffic, the road layout, and the driver's actions. The system then applies the information to work out what sort of situation the driver is heading for. Each situation is allocated a complexity rating. If this exceeds a certain threshold, a divert function is activated until the complexity level drops.
Ananova Dec 03, 2003	back to top

Internet mapping project weaves colourful web
A project to create a comprehensive graphical representation of the internet in just one day and using only a single computer has already produced some eye-catching images. Networking engineer Barrett Lyon thought he could 'map' every node on the internet in far less time than that taken by other projects. Some efforts to produce images of the internet have taken months to complete. Lyon reckoned he could quickly provide a simple picture of all the networks linking internet nodes using a standard networking program and began his mapping project, called Opte. Lyon's software streamlines the process by only mapping larger 'class C' networks. By performing 194 traceroute searches per second, it should be possible to scan the whole internet in a day, Lyon says. He has developed a distributed version of the software that would use more starting points and therefore create a more comprehensive map of all the links between network addresses.
New Scientist Nov 28, 2003	back to top

Bell 'did not invent telephone'
Claims that a German scientist invented the telephone 15 years before Alexander Graham Bell are supported by evidence from newly surfaced archive papers. Successful tests on a German device manufactured in 1863 were covered up to maintain the Scot's reputation, the documents show. A series of experiments in 1947 on the 'Telephon', developed by German scientist Philipp Reis, found that it could work as well as Bell's design when amplified. Using a modern receiver, the engineers found the German's device could transmit speech and that Reis's receiver would also 'reproduce speech of good quality but of low efficiency'. It is alleged UK businessman Sir Frank Gill was behind the cover-up. The evidence is contained in files from the archives of the Science Museum in London. Gill was chairman of Standard Telephones and Cables (STC), the company that conducted the tests on Reis's device. The company was at the time bidding for a contract from the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which evolved from the Bell Company. Gill thought the test results would scupper STC's chances of winning the contract.
BBC News / Sunday Herald Dec 01, 2003	back to top