Researchers to Create Next Gen Discs
Swinburne University of Technology (Australia) (05/21/09) Ladiges, Crystal
Nanotechnology can be used to create discs that offer 2,000 times the storage capacity of current DVDs, according to researchers from Australia's Swinburne University of Technology. A team from Swinburne's Center for Micro-Photonics has used nanoscopic particles to create five-dimensional discs, compared with current discs that have three spatial dimensions. The researchers inserted gold nanorods onto the disc's surface, and the nanoparticles' reaction to light allowed them to record information in a range of different color wavelengths on the same physical disc location. Current DVDs are recorded in a single color wavelength using a laser. Aside from the new spectral dimension, the researchers created a polarization dimension by projecting light waves onto the disc, with the electric field aligned with the gold nanorods enabling them to record different layers of information at different angles. "We were able to show how nanostructured material can be incorporated onto a disc in order to increase data capacity, without increasing the physical size of the disc," says Swinburne professor Min Gu. Although the researchers still need to address issues such as the speed at which the discs can be written on, they believe the discs will be commercially available within the next five to 10 years.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Blog: Researchers to Create Next Gen Discs; recording in 5 dimensions; light based spectral and ploarization dimensions added
Blog: Mozilla launches Jetpack; Will add-ons be Firefox's secret sauce?
Mozilla has unveiled Jetpack, a project to make Firefox add-ons easier to code and deploy.
The general idea for Jetpack, which is in an early stage, is to develop browser add-ons with common technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Jetpack is Mozilla's attempt to take its 8,000 developers—and 12,000 add-ons they have produced—to another level. Mozilla said that Jetpack will enable add-ons to be created in as little as a dozen lines of code.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Blog: ACM Group Honors Researchers Who Discovered Zig-Zag Graph That Improves Design of Robust Computer Networks
AScribe Newswire (05/19/09)
ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computing Theory (SIGACT) and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science have awarded the Godel Prize to Omer Reingold, Salil Vadhan, and Avi Wigderson for developing a new type of graph that enables the construction of large expander graphs, which are important in designing robust computer networks and constructing theories of error-correcting computer codes. The new zig-zag graph was able to help solve the problem of detecting a path from one node to another in very small storage for undirected graphs. In their paper, "Entropy Waves, the Zig-Zag Graph Product and New Constant Degree Expanders," Reingold, Vadhan, and Wigderson discussed their research on a family of expander graphs, which are used for critical computer theory applications. The sparse but highly connected expander graphs were constructed using the zig-zag graph method, which enables the construction of large expanders from smaller expanders while preserving degree and connectivity. In a second paper, "Undirected Connectivity in Log-Space," Reingold proved that connectivity in undirected graphs can be solved in logarithmic storage, and that any connected graph is a very weak expander, but applying the zig-zag method makes it possible to turn the graph into an expander of only moderately large size. Omer Reingold is a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Salil Vadhan is a professor of computer science and applied mathematics at Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Avi Wigderson is a professor at the School of Mathematics, Institute for Advanced Study. The Godel Prize, which includes an award of $5,000, is named after Kurt Godel in recognition of his major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of computer science.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Blog: Are Your 'Secret Questions' Too Easily Answered?
Are Your 'Secret Questions' Too Easily Answered?
Technology Review (05/18/09) Lemos, Robert
The "secret questions" that protect online accounts and passwords may be far less secure than commonly believed, largely because their answers are often far too simple, researchers say. Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft researchers will present research at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, which highlights the vulnerabilities of the secret question systems used to secure the password-reset functions to numerous Web sites. In a study involving 130 people, the researchers found that 28 percent of the people who knew and were trusted by the study's participants could guess the correct answers to the participant's secret questions, and even people not trusted by the participant had a 17 percent chance of guessing the correct answer. "Secret questions alone are not as secure as we would like our backup authentication to be," says Microsoft researcher Stuart Schechter. "Nor are they reliable enough that their use alone is sufficient to ensure users can recover their accounts when they forget their passwords." The least-secure questions are simple ones that can be guessed with no existing knowledge of the subject. Schechter says backup-authentication schemes should be reliable and allow only legitimate users to regain access to their accounts. They also should be secure, preventing unauthorized users from gaining access. The study found that secret questions fail on both accounts. "We would eventually like to see these questions go away," Schechter says. "Unfortunately, since we didn't find many questions that were conclusively good, it's hard to recommend simply changing questions."
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Blog: Robert Kahn: A Different Kind of Internet; using Digital Object Architecture for managing information
Robert Kahn: A Different Kind of Internet
Government Computer News (05/14/09) Kash, Wyatt
Robert E. Kahn of the nonprofit Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) envisions an Internet that manages information rather than just moves it around. He says this can be facilitated by Digital Object Architecture, whose core element is a digital objector, or structured information that incorporates a unique identifier, and which can be parsed by any machine aware of the structure of digital objects. Areas where Digital Object Architecture applications have potential include archiving, with Kahn pointing out that CNRI has experimented with some archival capabilities on the Internet with the goal of fulfilling long-term archival storage needs. "My hope is that we can make the digital object technology, which operated in the Internet environment, available as we did with the original Internet technology, and get a lot of people in the public and private sectors to understand its power and the capability," Kahn says. "Because it's an open architecture, it has the potential to grow organically as did the nascent Internet." Kahn sees medical informatics as another potential application area for Digital Object Architecture. He says the architecture intrinsically incorporates public key infrastructure to ensure user identity authentication. "The government's role in things infrastructural is absolutely essential," Kahn says. "It really is very difficult--I would say almost impossible--to create national infrastructure without at least the imprimatur of the government."
Blog: A Blueprint to Stop Browser Attacks; defending against cross-site scripting attacks
A Blueprint to Stop Browser Attacks
Technology Review (05/14/09) Naone, Erica
University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) researchers will present a new way of defending against cross-site scripting attacks at the upcoming IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The new defense enables a Web site to control how user-generated content is transmitted to a Web browser, neutralizing cross-site scripting attacks before they reach the end user. White Hat Security founder Jeremiah Grossman says cross-site scripting is the most prevalent threat on the Internet, and although newer Web sites are better equipped to defend against these attacks, there are still millions of vulnerabilities on the Internet. The UIC solution involves a layer of software called Blueprint that can be inserted between user-generated pages and the browser. Blueprint is stored on a Web site's servers, reads user-generated HTML, and checks it against a white list of trusted code, removing any potentially harmful scripts and deciding how content should appear in a browser. The software then reformats the information and transmits it to the browser. For example, Blueprint eliminates characters and symbols that are sometimes used to send unauthorized scripting signals to a user's browser. The solution was tested against 94 types of cross-site scripting attacks and successfully prevented every attack. "What we want to do is to take away the ability for the browser's parser to make any script-identification decisions on the untrusted content that is supplied by the Web application," says UIC professor V. N. Venkatakrishnan.
Blog: Constantinos Daskalakis Wins ACM Award for Advances in Analyzing Behavior in Conflict Situations; "The Complexity of Nash Equilibria"
Constantinos Daskalakis Wins ACM Award for Advances in Analyzing Behavior in Conflict Situations
Association for Computing Machinery (05/14/09) Gold, Virginia
ACM has awarded Constantinos Daskalakis the 2008 Doctoral Dissertation Award for advancing the understanding of behavior in complex networks of interacting individuals, such as those created by the Internet. Daskalakis's dissertation, "The Complexity of Nash Equilibria," provides a novel, algorithmic perspective on Game Theory and the Nash equilibrium. Daskalakis, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England, was nominated by the University of California, Berkeley, and will receive the award at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on June 27 in San Diego. Daskalakis's dissertation explores whether rational, self-interested individuals can arrive, through their interactions, at a state in which no single one of them would be better off switching strategies unless others switched as well. This state is called a Nash equilibrium, and is traditionally used in Game Theory as a way of predicting the behavior of people in conflict situations. Daskalakis demonstrated that in complex systems the Nash equilibrium is computationally unachievable in some cases, suggesting the Nash equilibrium may not be an accurate prediction of behavior in all situations and emphasizing the need for new, computationally meaningful methods for modeling strategic behavior in complex systems, such as those found in financial markets, online systems, and social networks.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Blog: The A-Z of Programming Languages: Tcl; a powerful command language
The A-Z of Programming Languages: Tcl
Computerworld Australia (05/08/09) Edwards, Kathryn
John Ousterhout is the creator of the Tcl programming language. He says that its creation came about to meet the challenge of producing and deploying a powerful command language as a library package that can be embedded within diverse applications to form the core of the applications' command languages. Ousterhout says that his realization that he could construct a toolkit as an extension to Tcl led to the creation of the Tk framework. Ousterhout splits the Tcl ecosystem into two camps. "On the one hand are the Tk enthusiasts who believe that the Tcl/Tk's main contribution is its powerful cross-platform [graphical user interface] tools; they think of Tcl/Tk as a standalone programming platform, and are constantly pushing for more Tk features," he says. "On the other hand are the Tcl purists who believe the most unique thing about Tcl is that it can be embedded into applications." Ousterhout says the scope of activities encompassed by Tcl, rather than any single flagship application, has been the programming language's biggest advantage. He says the use of Tcl to build large programs took him by surprise, as he only anticipated that very short programs would be built with the language because it was originally designed as a command-line tool. Ousterhout thinks the migration of coding to scripting languages makes sense, as "scripting languages make it substantially easier to build and maintain certain classes of applications, such as those that do a lot of string processing and those that must integrate a variety of different components and services."