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Issue no. 15, 2004 Published: Apr 23, 2004
US leads internet piracy raids
EU threatens court action over 'unfair' Intel-only tenders
Hackable bug found in net's heart
Hard disk 'speed limit' discovered
Entangled photons secure money transfer
Photons teleported over six kilometres
Credit card only works when spoken to
New internet speed record set
New optical disc made from paper
New software would let Windows programs run on Linux
Israeli site unveils its own gigabyte mail plans
Survey: Denmark is web-savviest nation
Curiosity fuels anger at mobile chat

US leads internet piracy raids
Police in the US and 10 other countries have seized 200 computers in raids against organised online piracy of films, music, games and software. Some 30 servers used for storage and distribution were seized, with one said to have contained 65,000 titles. News of the raid was welcomed by the entertainment and software industries. They have long been pushing for law enforcement agencies to take a tough stance against internet piracy. They say that without copyright protection and enforcement, the artists and distributors behind the work could lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Operation Fastlink, as the investigation is known, targeted senior members of international piracy organisations that distribute films, music and games, often before they are released to the public. The FBI and agents from other countries carried out 120 synchronised searches in 27 US states, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore and Sweden.
BBC News Apr 23, 2004	back to top

EU threatens court action over 'unfair' Intel-only tenders
The European Commission has slammed member states for breaking the law by offering IT hardware contracts that explicitly demanded the use of Intel-made chips. The Commission warned that EU governments will have to open tenders to include hardware based on other chip makers' products. The Commission has sent formal notices to the Italian and German governments, who have until the end of May to confirm that they have removed such limitations from future IT contracts. By insisting on Intel-based hardware, national governments and local authorities have limited competition, in violation of European procurement regulations and the free movement of goods, the Commission says. If the governments fail to satisfy the EC's requirements, they will be served with a written warning and potentially a date in the European Court of Justice. The Commission is also looking into contracts offered for tender in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Austria and Finland.
The Register Apr 22, 2004	back to top

Hackable bug found in net's heart
One of the net's central technologies has a serious security vulnerability warn UK and US infrastructure protection agencies. Anyone exploiting the loophole could cause widespread disruption by subverting the way the internet ensures data reaches its intended destination. The UK's National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre issued an alert about the vulnerability on Tuesday and was swiftly followed by the US Department of Homeland Security. The vulnerability was found in the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that underpins the working of the internet. It emerges because of the way that the net passes data around. Security researcher Paul Watson has found a way to quickly discover the code numbers used to preserve streams of data travelling, for example, from a particular website to your net browser. By crafting TCP data packets with the correct numbers and injecting them into the right traffic flow it becomes possible to end that datastream prematurely. Widespread abuse of the bug could mean parts of the web are cut off.
BBC News Apr 21, 2004	back to top

Hard disk 'speed limit' discovered
The maximum speed at which data can be recorded onto a magnetic medium is at least a 1,000 times slower than previously believed, physicists in the US and Russia discovered. Magnetic recording relies on using an applied magnetic field to reverse the magnetisation of a piece of magnetic material. The recording speed depends on how quickly the applied field can reverse the magnetisation of a grain of the material. The researchers used the magnetic field associated with ultrashort bunches of high-energy electrons from a two-mile long linear accelerator to study how quickly the magnetisation of a grain can be reversed. The pulses have a magnetic field strength of about 10 Tesla and last for just 2 picoseconds. The researchers found that some grains had switched and others had not, concluding that 2 picoseconds is not long enough to allow a bit to be recorded reliably. The team says such behaviour was only expected to appear with femtosecond (10^-15 seconds) pulses.
PhysicsWeb Apr 21, 2004	back to top

Entangled photons secure money transfer
An electronic money transaction has been carried out between Vienna City Hall and Bank Austria Creditanstalt on Wednesday using entangled photons to create an unbreakable communications code. The cryptographic system was developed by researchers from the University of Vienna and the Austrian company ARC Seibersdorf Research. Quantum entanglement ensures the security of communications because any attempt to intercept the photons in transit to determine the key would be immediately obvious to those monitoring the state of the other photons in each pair. And because the resulting key is random it can be used to provide completely secure link even over an unprotected communications channel, provided a new key is used each time. The photon-encrypted money transfer was made over a distance of 1.5 kilometres. In principle it should be possible to extend this link to 20 kilometres. Beyond this distance it becomes difficult to transmit single photons reliably.
New Scientist Apr 22, 2004	back to top

Photons teleported over six kilometres
Researchers from the University of Geneva have managed to teleport qubits - photons whose properties can represent a 1 or a 0 - over six kilometres of optical fibre. The light pulses that transport information over today's long distance optical fibres are each made up of billions of photons and the signals are able to travel long distances only because the pulses are periodically refreshed. Quantum cryptography signals, however, cannot be refreshed because copying them would destroy the information they carry. Teleportation is akin to a fax machine for quantum particles. A pair of photons are entangled, so that their properties remain in lockstep, and one of the pair is sent to the receiver. The particle to be transported is brought into contact with the sender's half of the pair, which destroys the original particle but in the process turns the receiver's half of the pair into an exact replica.
Technology Review / TRN Apr 16, 2004	back to top

Credit card only works when spoken to
A credit card that will not work unless it hears its owner's voice could become an important weapon in the fight against fraud. The card requires users to give a spoken password that it authenticates using a built-in voice-recognition chip, preventing thieves using a stolen card or fraudsters using someone else's credit card details to buy goods online. A prototype built by engineers at Beepcard in Santa Monica, California, represents the first attempt to pack a microphone, a loudspeaker, a battery and a voice-recognition chip into a standard-sized credit card. The card is still about three times as thick as a normal card, but the company plans to use smaller chips to slim it down to normal thickness. After the card has verified the user's spoken password, the built-in loudspeaker 'squawks' an acoustic ID signal via the card's microphone to an online server. By verifying that the signal matches the card details, the server can establish that the user is not simply keying in a number but actually has the card to hand. The ID code changes each time the card is used in a pre-ordained sequence that only the server knows.
New Scientist Apr 21, 2004	back to top

New internet speed record set
Researchers on Tuesday have set a data transmission record over the Internet2's high-speed backbone. The record was for transmitting data over nearly 11,000 kilometres at an average speed of 6.25 gigabits per second. The network link used to set the record reaches from Los Angeles to Geneva, Switzerland. Internet2 is a consortium of more than 200 universities working with industry and government to develop next-generation internet technology. The internet2's contest, which began in 2000, is open and ongoing, and it tests researchers' ability to build the highest-bandwidth, end-to-end IP network. The new record used IPv4, the current system for Internet addressing, and was set by members from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Geneva-based CERN. The same team had previously set a new mark of 4 gigabits per second over the same distance using IPv6, the next generation of internet protocols.
ZDNet / CNET News Apr 20, 2004	back to top

New optical disc made from paper
Japanese electronics conglomerate Sony and Toppan Printing have developed a new optical disc, made mostly from paper, that they say will be compatible with next-generation DVD technology. The new disc comprises 51 per cent of paper, enabling lower production costs. Moreover, the disk can store up to five times more information than current discs, because it is based on blue-laser DVD technology. Blue-laser DVD players are expected to replace the current generation of red-laser DVD players in a few years' time. The paper disc is based on a version of a blue-laser DVD technology, called Blu-Ray, that is supported by a consortium of electronics makers including Sony, Matsushita Electric Industrial and Dutch firm Philips Toppan, the world's leading maker of colour filters for liquid crystal displays, said the new discs could be more secure, since disposal of used discs can be done easily.
CNN / Reuters Apr 21, 2004	back to top

New software would let Windows programs run on Linux
A Philippine-based company unveiled software Thursday that would allow Windows-based programs to run on computers using the Linux operating system. SpecOps Labs said its software will help millions of users migrate from Windows to the free and open-source Linux platform. Several other companies have developed software that combines Linux's underpinnings with a Windows-like interface, but they generally cannot run programs written for Windows. Previous attempts to run Windows word processors, spreadsheets, and other applications smoothly on Linux machines have been largely unsuccessful and cumbersome. SpecOps said the 80MB program will be available commercially by the end of the year at a still-undetermined price. It said it expects to sell more than 30,000 copies of the program and generate about $1 million in gross revenues in the first year.
InformationWeek / AP Apr 22, 2004	back to top

Israeli site unveils its own gigabyte mail plans
Israeli web portal Walla plans to launch a free e-mail service that gives each user one gigabyte of memory, which it said could affect the revenue models of other service providers. Walla said it hoped to be the first company in the world to provide e-mail with such a large capacity, when it makes the service available in two months. The Walla announcement comes after Google said it would soon launch a free email service with one gigabyte of storage capacity, called Gmail. Walla gave no details about investment in the project. It said the expanded e-mail boxes would not generate revenue primarily through advertising. Its service will also include anti-spam and anti-virus protection,. Walla said it had a customer base of 750,000 users. Its 2003 revenues reached 33m shekels (€6.1m), up 43 per cent from 2002.
MSNBC / Reuters Apr 21, 2004	back to top

Survey: Denmark is web-savviest nation
Denmark was more aggressive than any other country in taking advantage of the internet, according to research carried out by IBM and British magazine The Economist. Denmark snatched Sweden's pole position after establishing a government web portal which pulls together five ministries and 24 other organisations where companies can access services. The differences were small among the top eight, which all scored more than eight points as a result of plentiful, cheap internet connections, software and technical support, legal and government frameworks and populations keen to spend time on the net. Britain ranked second, Sweden dropped to third place, while Norway and Finland ended fourth and fifth, respectively. The US dropped to sixth place from a shared third place. Singapore ranked seventh and the Netherlands eighth. Of the 64 countries surveyed, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan remained at the bottom of the list with just 2.43 and 2.60 points respectively out of a possible 10. The full report is available at: http://www-5.ibm.com/services/uk/pdf/eiu_ereadiness_19april04.pdf
CNET News / Reuters Apr 19, 2004	back to top

Curiosity fuels anger at mobile chat
The reason people find mobile phone conversations so irritating could be down to human curiosity, say researchers at the University of York, UK. The volume of the call and what is being discussed play a part in making people see red, the team found. But in many cases it is simply the fact that we are only hearing half a conversation that drives people mad. In the study, 64 members of the public were exposed to the same staged conversation, either while waiting for a bus or travelling on a train. Half of the conversations were on mobile phones and half were face-to-face conversations. The conversation was conducted both at normal speaking level and very loud. Afterwards, participants rated the annoyance value of the conversation and how much they had noticed it. Those conducted on a mobile phone in both categories were significantly more annoying and noticeable to the group than face to face ones. The findings could contain some interesting lessons for mobile phone manufacturers. The research predicts that mobile phones with speaker phones might actually be less annoying.
BBC News Apr 21, 2004	back to top