- Email: [email protected]
Security upgrade for ‘anonymity network’
Technology
A LACK of internet freedom in India, China and Thailand has sparked a revamp of an online anonymity network. The Tor system masks a user’s IP address by routing data packets through three servers chosen at random from a dedicated group of 1000. Although the packets cannot be traced, governments can find the dedicated servers, since they are publicly listed on the internet, and shut them down. At a hackers’ conference last week, Tor co-founder Roger Dingledine outlined software that can turn any home computer into a Tor server. Under the new set-up, data is routed through any three of these unlisted home computers, but officials looking online will only find the IP addresses of the three nearest them, making it near impossible to tell whose servers are routing the “dissident” data.
43 per cent: the efficiency of the latest recordbreaking solar cell, developed by DuPont and the University of Delaware
–Bit rusty, but a quick learner–
Why text won’t kill off speech
SOURCE: UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
Closing in on total anonymity
HRP-2 can faithfully reproduce any upper-body movement a human can make, its footwork is far from nimble: it can perform no step more advanced than simply lifting one foot off the floor. But as Aizu-Bandaisan is primarily a dance of the upper body, these constraints don’t stop HRP-2 looking a natural on the dance floor (see it at tinyurl.com/2wprxg). Others need more convincing. Joe Healey is an English folk dancer. “If no one was prepared to continue and our dance troupe were to go extinct tomorrow, we’d have a problem,” he says. But he thinks that videos might provide a better archive than a dancing robot. “My impression is that there would still be a human element lacking. The robot would still look, for the want of a better word, robotic.”
The US government no longer needs a warrant to snoop on international calls and emails
NO 227
YOU need driving directions. Do you pick up the phone or shoot your buddies an email? Amid an increasing range of text-based options such as email and text messaging, Herbert Clark and colleagues at Stanford University in California wondered if there were still times when people prefer good old-fashioned talk. They presented 69 university
students with two scenarios – giving a pal driving directions and revising a paper with two other people – and asked which mode of communication they would use. With directions, 62 per cent said speech, because it’s important to be able to answer questions from the driver, which can cost time and money using text. But for discussion of a paper, 63 per cent chose text because of its unbeatable clarity. The results were presented at a cognitive science meeting last week.
GIZMO
WIRETAP AT WILL
183
How the US House of Representatives voted 4 August
Using a digital camera’s screen can be difficult if you are not directly behind it because LCDs look dim from many angles. Having the screen follow the user is the answer, say Taiwanese researchers. They are developing displays that have a built-in camera which tracks the position of the user’s head. Software then tweaks backlight brightness and liquid-crystal orientations to give great pictures from all angles. SOURCE: US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Humanoid robots could one day serve as prancing libraries of long-forgotten dance routines – able to reproduce them for curious audiences without a moment’s rehearsal. It’s the latest approach to preserving traditional folk dances as the people skilled in performing them gradually die off. The idea comes from Shin’ichiro Nakaoka and his colleagues at the University of Tokyo, Japan. They used video motion-capture systems to record the movement of a dancer performing a Japanese folk routine called the AizuBandaisan. They turned this data into a limb-motion sequence for a humanoid robot, the HRP-2, made by Japan’s Kawada Industries (Journal of Robotics Research, vol 26, p 829). The robot’s biggest weakness as a dancer is keeping its balance. While
YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/GETTY
ROBOTS REVIVE DYING DANCES
Expect Google to start offering timelines of historical events that you search for. The company has filed a US patent (2007/0179952) on a way of automatically creating a timeline from data that is either spread between multiple websites or presented on the same site. Even if dates of, say, second-world-war battles, are not listed in a structured manner, Google’s software would identify dates and list events in order.
“I’m sad to say we have been the target of homophobic hackers” Flynn De Marco, owner of the website Gaygamer.net, which provides news and reviews for gay gamers. The site fell victim to a spate of denial-of-service attacks last Wednesday. It was later forced offline when its chatrooms were flooded with anti-gay posts and death threats (www.bit-tech.net, 6 August)
www.newscientist.com
11 August 2007 | NewScientist | 23
A LACK of internet freedom in India, China and Thailand has sparked a revamp of an online anonymity network. The Tor system masks a user’s IP address by routing data packets through three servers chosen at random from a dedicated group of 1000. Although the packets cannot be traced, governments can find the dedicated servers, since they are publicly listed on the internet, and shut them down. At a hackers’ conference last week, Tor co-founder Roger Dingledine outlined software that can turn any home computer into a Tor server. Under the new set-up, data is routed through any three of these unlisted home computers, but officials looking online will only find the IP addresses of the three nearest them, making it near impossible to tell whose servers are routing the “dissident” data.
43 per cent: the efficiency of the latest recordbreaking solar cell, developed by DuPont and the University of Delaware
–Bit rusty, but a quick learner–
Why text won’t kill off speech
SOURCE: UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
Closing in on total anonymity
HRP-2 can faithfully reproduce any upper-body movement a human can make, its footwork is far from nimble: it can perform no step more advanced than simply lifting one foot off the floor. But as Aizu-Bandaisan is primarily a dance of the upper body, these constraints don’t stop HRP-2 looking a natural on the dance floor (see it at tinyurl.com/2wprxg). Others need more convincing. Joe Healey is an English folk dancer. “If no one was prepared to continue and our dance troupe were to go extinct tomorrow, we’d have a problem,” he says. But he thinks that videos might provide a better archive than a dancing robot. “My impression is that there would still be a human element lacking. The robot would still look, for the want of a better word, robotic.”
The US government no longer needs a warrant to snoop on international calls and emails
NO 227
YOU need driving directions. Do you pick up the phone or shoot your buddies an email? Amid an increasing range of text-based options such as email and text messaging, Herbert Clark and colleagues at Stanford University in California wondered if there were still times when people prefer good old-fashioned talk. They presented 69 university
students with two scenarios – giving a pal driving directions and revising a paper with two other people – and asked which mode of communication they would use. With directions, 62 per cent said speech, because it’s important to be able to answer questions from the driver, which can cost time and money using text. But for discussion of a paper, 63 per cent chose text because of its unbeatable clarity. The results were presented at a cognitive science meeting last week.
GIZMO
WIRETAP AT WILL
183
How the US House of Representatives voted 4 August
Using a digital camera’s screen can be difficult if you are not directly behind it because LCDs look dim from many angles. Having the screen follow the user is the answer, say Taiwanese researchers. They are developing displays that have a built-in camera which tracks the position of the user’s head. Software then tweaks backlight brightness and liquid-crystal orientations to give great pictures from all angles. SOURCE: US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Humanoid robots could one day serve as prancing libraries of long-forgotten dance routines – able to reproduce them for curious audiences without a moment’s rehearsal. It’s the latest approach to preserving traditional folk dances as the people skilled in performing them gradually die off. The idea comes from Shin’ichiro Nakaoka and his colleagues at the University of Tokyo, Japan. They used video motion-capture systems to record the movement of a dancer performing a Japanese folk routine called the AizuBandaisan. They turned this data into a limb-motion sequence for a humanoid robot, the HRP-2, made by Japan’s Kawada Industries (Journal of Robotics Research, vol 26, p 829). The robot’s biggest weakness as a dancer is keeping its balance. While
YOSHIKAZU TSUNO/AFP/GETTY
ROBOTS REVIVE DYING DANCES
Expect Google to start offering timelines of historical events that you search for. The company has filed a US patent (2007/0179952) on a way of automatically creating a timeline from data that is either spread between multiple websites or presented on the same site. Even if dates of, say, second-world-war battles, are not listed in a structured manner, Google’s software would identify dates and list events in order.
“I’m sad to say we have been the target of homophobic hackers” Flynn De Marco, owner of the website Gaygamer.net, which provides news and reviews for gay gamers. The site fell victim to a spate of denial-of-service attacks last Wednesday. It was later forced offline when its chatrooms were flooded with anti-gay posts and death threats (www.bit-tech.net, 6 August)
www.newscientist.com
11 August 2007 | NewScientist | 23