Twitter security flawed

Twitter security flawed

For daily technology stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/technology LEON NEAL/AFP/GETTY TECHNOLOGY Make your own mood music DOES the brain naturall...

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For daily technology stories, visit www.NewScientist.com/technology

LEON NEAL/AFP/GETTY

TECHNOLOGY

Make your own mood music DOES the brain naturally compose melodies to rival those of Mozart and Chopin? Researchers at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) think so, and suggest that piano renditions of these melodies could help keep emergency crews alert. The researchers plan to record the brain’s activity during periods of calm or alertness. Human Bionics, a company in Purcellville, Virginia, specialising in neurofeedback techniques, will convert this signal into an audible melody, which will then be played back to the people whose brains generated it to see if this promotes a similar state of mind. The idea builds on decades of research into brain-reading. In 2004, Fumiko Maeda and colleagues at Stanford University in California showed that recording brain activity using a functional MRI scanner and

then playing it back to volunteers helped them control pain. Ulman Lindenberger, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, is sceptical of the technique. Converting the brain waves to an audible melody would

“Brain scan signals will be converted into music to be played to the people whose brains generated it” likely strip the signal of its individual signature, leaving the listener unaware that the music is their own, he says. The music might impact mood, but it’s “highly questionable whether the effects would be any different if it was [from] the same person’s brain or some other brain”, says Lindenberger.

–It’ll keep you alert–

Tweeters should beware of worms

Bloggers behind the quote curve

TWITTER, the microblogging service, has major holes in its security, a London conference will be warned this week. Graham Cluley of antivirus firm Sophos says the Twitter website is vulnerable to viruses written in the Javascript webprogramming language. These viruses can then send out short messages or “tweets” in the user’s name, perhaps sending their friends to phishing sites. “A couple of hours after Twitter says it has [a virus] under control a new worm appears using the same attack,” Cluley says. Another problem he identifies is that deleting an embarrassing or incriminating tweet you have mistakenly sent does not remove it from the Twitter site, where it remains forever searchable. “I think deleted should mean deleted,” he says.

POLITICIANS know that quotes can take on a life of their own. Now a method for tracking utterances as they cycle through online media has been developed by a group of computer scientists. It turns out that bloggers are rarely the first to publish a catchy quote, but instead lag behind traditional news media such as newspapers, with a typical quote being picked up by bloggers an average of 2.5 hours later. Diffusion in the opposite direction is rare: just 3.5 per cent of quotes originated from blogs. Jon Kleinberg of Cornell

500

gigabytes. The predicted data capacity of a disc using microholographic storage technology, equal to 100 DVDs

University in Ithaca, New York, and colleagues, developed an algorithm that groups blog posts and news stories that mention the same quote, even when it appears in slightly different forms. They applied the algorithm to 90 million articles published in the three months leading up to the US presidential election last year. Barack Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” comment attracted the most attention. Other high-ranking quotes include Palin’s statement that “trade missions” between Russia and her home state, Alaska, constituted foreign-policy experience. The researchers will present their findings in June at the Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining conference in Paris.

“Both rudders were lightly scraped” Virgin Galactic’s spaceship builder Scaled Composites describes the damage after a mis-set engine caused their rocket carrier, White Knight Two, to roll to the left during take-off in a flight test on 20 April (www.scaled.com, 23 April)

2 May 2009 | NewScientist | 17