Dowbrigade

This
story was first broken last night by Wikinews! We have a
feeling we’ll be hearing a lot more out of Chinese computer scientists
(and Wikinews) in the
next
few
years…

Security experts are warning that a security flaw has been found
in a powerful
data encryption
algorithm,
dubbed SHA-1,
by
a team
of scientists
from Shandong University in China. The three scientists are circulating
a paper within the cryptographic research community that describes
successful tests of a technique that could greatly reduce the speed with
which SHA-1
could be compromised.

SHA-1 is used to create signatures by most of the popular security protocols
on the Internet, including SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and PGP (Profile,
Products, Articles) (Pretty Good Privacy), he said.

A research team of three scientists: Xiaoyun Wang, Yiqun Lisa Yin, and Hongbo
Yu, is circulating a paper called "Collision Search Attacks on SHA-1" that
describes methods for creating so-called "collisions" with the SHA-1
algorithm 2,000 times more quickly than had been possible before.

from Infoworld

Why shouldn’t every word in every document online
be a hotlink to dictionary, Wikipedia, image and  Google search
results for itself, and any other database or information source you desire? Technically, while this ideal presents problems,
they are not insurmountable. A Scandanavian university workgroup named Liquid
Information has
a prototype up and running, where you can test drive the next generation
of hypertext. 

Take, for example, an article that appeared at the CNN Web site on Jan.
26 about the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State. The
first sentence after the boldface type says: "The final vote of the
full Senate was 85-13 in favor of the nomination."
Let your cursor linger on the first word, "the," and up pops what Mr.
Hegland calls a hyperwords menu. Here are the choices: You can highlight "the" throughout
the article, you can read only paragraphs containing "the," you can
Google "the," or you can get various dictionary definitions of "the." (Eventually,
you will be able to add your own commands to the menu, Mr. Hegland said in an
e-mail interview.)

If you Google "the," you might find that "The Onion," the
spoofing newspaper, pops up before The White House. Gee. Better find out why.
At The Onion, after watching a "premercial" for Bud Lite, you read
the lead article, "U.S. Children Still Traumatized One Year After Seeing
Janet Jackson’s Partially Exposed Breast on TV."

If you haven’t seen that particular exposed breast for a while, you might take
a moment to watch it on a free video site. Fifteen seconds of pixilated titillation
later, you return to the text about Secretary of State Rice. You’re still on
the word "the."

Choose the dictionary option and 26 dictionaries beckon, beginning with Merriam-Webster’s
online dictionary, where you can’t begin to concentrate on the definition of "the" because
a team of animated basketball players is begging you to shoot hoops. Scroll down
to the end of the dictionary list and you will find the site stands4.com. Did
you know that "T.H.E." stands for "three hours extra" and "thermometer"?

article from the New
York Times

Demo using Dowbrigade News

Once again the Hubble telescope is in dire straits.  It needs adjusting
and unfortunately they put it out where it costs a cool BILLION dollars
to get anywhere near the thing, to polish the mirror or adjust the antenna
e….

On Monday, NASA is expected to present a budget to Congress that does
not include any money to fix the aging Hubble space telescope. Unless
Congress sets aside $1 billion or more for a robotic mission or commits
to a space-shuttle trip to upgrade the telescope, it could stop sending
its jaw-dropping pictures of the universe as soon as 2007.

Excuse us if this is an idiotic question, but don’t we also have
a multi-billion dollar manned space station up there we are looking
for
excuses to keep supplying. Couldn’t they have planned to put the telescope
SOMEWHERE in the vicinity of the only human outpost anywhere above
the surface of the planet? Something wrong
with the neighborhood?

We are sure the Astro and Cosmo nauts in the station have better things
to do, but one would think they could float over for a look see once
or twice a year, were it nearby.  Enough to kick the tires, and
check the fluids. Or replace a fuse if something blows.  Since we
have to send supplies up to the space station all the time anyway, wouldn’t
it be a less expensive way to get the parts and servicing the telescope
needs up as well?

We are sure there is a logical, scientific explanation having
to do with differences in optimum orbit per ogee and ambient light leak.
It seems like such a simple idea there must be something wrong with it.

from the Boston Globe

Most Shared Shows: Number of files shared during the week ending Jan.
16. Source: Big Champagne

The New York Times has a timely article about the increasing popularity
of recording, swapping and downloading TV shows. Apparently, this activity
is illegal. Who knew? Much of the article deals with BitTorrent, which seems to be some kind
of hacker’s Napster…

Created
by Bram Cohen, a 29-year-old programmer in Bellevue, Wash., BitTorrent
breaks files hundreds or thousands of times
bigger than a song file into small pieces to speed its path to the Internet
and then to your computer. On the kind of peer-to-peer site that gave
the music industry night sweats, an episode of "Desperate Housewives" that
some fan copied and posted on the Internet can take hours to download;
on BitTorrent, it arrives in minutes. BitTorrent may sound like some
obscure techno-trickery, but more than 20 million people have already
downloaded the application. Each week dozens of shows are shared by hundreds
of thousands of people. "The Simpsons," "Family Guy" and "Friends" top
the most-popular list, but even "SpongeBob SquarePants," "Trading
Spaces" and "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" landed in
the Top 20 for the week ending Jan. 16, according to Big Champagne, which
measures file-sharing activity.

Strange, it took US 12 hours to download the latest
episode of "Desperate Housewives," which we just got through watching
on the laptop snuggled under the down comforter with Norma Yvonne, who
has become a big fan, of Desperate Housewives and the down comforter.
Maybe we need to update our software our upgrade our internet connection.
Of course, we are only previewing the program for inclusion in our American
Culture class at BU. Each week, we have been snipping a few scenes, and
writing exercises exploring the language and cultural themes, like attitudes
towards infidelity, suburban morality between Red States and Blue States
(where does the story take place, anyway?), socioeconomic
stratification on Wisteria Lane, teenage slang and dating habits, pharmacalogical
treatment of psychological disorders, the list goes one and on. Of course,
some weeks we get caught up in a half-hour discussion of "Can anybody
really be as dumb as Susan?" The students love it, and we feel it really
does capture the cultural pulse of the nation in a way NPR can only dream
about.

from the New York Times

Academia
is all atwitter over the provocative comments by Harvard President Lawrence
Summers who merely suggested that
innate differences between the sexes might be one factor deserving of
more research as our society tries to understand and rectify the paucity
of women in the upper echelons of hard science. According to the New
York Times:

When Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, suggested this
month that one factor in women’s lagging progress in science and
mathematics
might be innate differences between the sexes, he slapped a bit of
brimstone into a debate that has simmered for decades. And though his comments
elicited so many fierce reactions that he quickly apologized, many
were
left to wonder: Did he have a point?

We certainly think so. Our understanding
of the scientific method is that it encourages the postulation of every
conceivable hypothesis,
even those one finds personally odious, in an effort to disprove and
discard as much as to prove or approve. In fact, we wrote a very thorough
paper on this very topic 30 years ago at Harvard, and although the science
has filled in a lot of the blanks in the intervening decades, our conclusions
were pretty much the same as the current scientific consensus, as described
by this
article.

Has science found compelling evidence of inherent sex disparities
in the relevant skills, or perhaps in the drive to succeed at all costs,
that could help account for the persistent paucity of women in science
generally, and at the upper tiers of the profession in particular?

Talk about asking the wrong question! Just by inserting
the phrase "or perhaps in the drive to succeed at all costs" the Times reporter is
injecting his own spin and interpretation on this issue. Succeed
at what? And how is success measured? And if "at all cost" includes
the neglect of family and children, shouldn’t we be trying to insert
a little balance in the driven MALE researcher’s lives rather than
trying to get women to emulate them?

"We can’t get anywhere denying that there are neurological
and hormonal differences between males and females, because there clearly
are," said Virginia Valian, a psychology professor at Hunter College
who wrote the 1998 book "Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women." "The
trouble we have as scientists is in assessing their significance to
real-life performance."

Our conclusions were remarkably similar. The physical,
neurological and chemical differences are demonstrable and indisputable,
but it is impossible to scientifically demonstrate how much of the observed
performance differential is due to innate differences and how much is
due to cultural and personality factors. We suspected then, and continue
to suspect today, that if the more of the researchers in this topic were
women they would uncover a long list of cognitive and performance areas
in which women are measurably better than men, and we are not talking
about cooking and gardening.

from the New York Times

People using wireless high-speed net (wi-fi) are being warned about
fake hotspots, or access points.

The latest threat, nicknamed evil twins, pose as real hotspots but are
actually unauthorised base stations, say Cranfield University experts.

Once logged onto an Evil Twin, sensitive data can be intercepted.

But how do you tell which is the evil one?

from the BBC

To
the consternation of some of the smartest engineers on the planet, as
well as billions of electronic consumers the world over,
battery technology has not been advancing nearly as rapidly as the development
of faster, more powerful devices.

The latest issue of MacAddict contained a review of something called
the "Solar
SeV Finetex Shell," which seems to be a $474 high-tech jacket,
with 30 dedicated pockets for everything from your hand warmers to a
light saber.  However,
the main distinguishing features are the solar panels on the back and
the built-in battery which can be used to recharge all of the marvelous
devices you have stored in the various pockets. In theory.

The drawbacks, unfortunately, are equally impressive. The stored energy is
available only via USB, meaning only devices which can charge up via
their USB connections can by recharged. This means no iPods, a deal breaker
in itself.  It also eliminates most digital cameras. In  addition,
the battery takes 3 to 4 hours in direct sunlight to charge up via the solar panels (detachable,
at least) and this is the ONLY way to charge it up. Finally, fully charging
a device from the battery can take three to five hours.

As usual, the egregious shortcomings set our mind to work thinking of
what a product like this COULD offer.  Battery technology being
what it is, having an effective 48-72 hour portable energy supply means
carrying around 8-12 pounds of extra weight.  What better way to
easily and comfortably distribute that weight than weave it into a stylish
outerwear garment, like this jacket, or better yet a Matrixian leather
trench coat. 6 or 8 individual cells could be distributed throughout
the fabric and connected in a smart storage and discharge system.

Now,
in order to be practical, the built-in battery needs to be rechargeable
via multiple modes. Solar power is groovy, but impractical in the real
world unless you are hiking the Andes during the dry season or crossing
the Kalahari. At the very least, the jack needs to be rechargeable via
wall socket (85-225 volts) and cigarette lighters. We have tons of unmetered
and unused energy in our environment – let’s use it!

On the output side, it shouldn’t be too hard to at least add Firewire
charging, which would include ‘Pods and cameras. Stain resistant and
waterproof would be nice.

Veering more into sci-fi territory an anti-theft instantaneous total discharge would be fun but probably unduly dangerous given the possibility of self-shocking.

How much would people pay for technicolor coat like this? If it had
the features we mentioned and could really keep all our devices running
for a day or two, quite a bit. Any high-tech haberdashers out there?

Solar SeV homepage

A US physicist is lobbying for people to adopt his novel calendar in which
every date falls on the same day of the week each year.

The current calendar, which runs for 365 days, was instituted by Pope
Gregory in 1582 to bring the length of the year in line with the seasons.
But because
the Earth actually orbits the Sun every 365.24 days, a 366-day "leap
year" must be added every four years to account for the extra fraction
of a day. In this Gregorian system, a given date (such as New Year’s
Day) falls on different days of the week in different years because 365
is not
evenly divisible by seven.

That means new calendars must be printed every year, and the dates for
recurring events constantly recalculated. "For many years, I’ve had
to make up a new schedule to tell my class when homework is due," says
Dick Henry, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland,
US. "Here I am putting all this totally unnecessary work in and
I decided I better do something about it."

That means we won’t need a new calendar every year. What’ll happen
to the cheesecake calendar industry?

from New Scientist