Cody Taylor

narramissic writes “In a paper set to be delivered at an upcoming security conference, University of Texas at Austin researchers showed how they were able to identify people who were on public social networks such as Twitter and Flickr by mapping out the connections surrounding their network of friends. From the ITworld article: ‘Web site operators often share data about users with partners and advertisers after stripping it of any personally identifiable information such as names, addresses or birth dates. Arvind Narayanan and fellow researcher Vitaly Shmatikov found that by analyzing these ‘anonymized’ data sets, they could identify Flickr users who were also on Twitter about two-thirds of the time, depending on how much information they have to work with.'”

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audiovideodisco writes “Every year the Loebner Prize goes to the chatbot (and the corresponding human companion) that fares best on a Turing test administered by a panel of judges. Discover talked to Kevin Warwick, the professor who runs the competition, to get pointers on how one would go about detecting a bot. While there are some general approaches you can use, nothing is foolproof — and asking about Sarah Palin can be downright deceptive. One judge concluded an interlocutor was a bot because it didn’t recognize Palin’s name … but it turned out the chatter was a French librarian who’d simply never heard of her.” The chat transcripts show how difficult picking bot from non-bot is getting.

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CharlotteShma writes “Some old writer once said that in order to keep going, he needed to hear the scratch of the pen on the page. Some self-proclaimed keyboard aficionados would make the same argument for computer keyboards. Is it possible that the old ‘clicky’ keyboards are making a comeback? Now that we’ve replaced the old buckling springs with rubber domes, our keyboards are only getting quieter and quieter. According to the people at Unicomp Inc., all keyboards made since the early 1990s are, frankly, no good. They still use and produce vintage IBM Model M keyboards in their small factory in Lexington, Kentucky. The IBM Model M keyboards are ugly, built like tanks, and, most importantly, have a spring under each key which clicks when you press it.” Not sure what’s ugly about them — most other keyboards are ugly, when you shut your eyes.

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Legislation may by 2016 restrict the paint color options for California residents looking for a new car. Black and all dark hues are currently on the banned list. The California Air Resources Board says that the climate control systems of dark-colored cars need to work harder than their lighter siblings — especially after sitting in the sun for a few hours.

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Death Metal writes “Chief Security Engineer Andrea Barisani and hardware hacker Daniele Bianco used handmade laser microphone device and a photo diode to measure the vibrations, software for analyzing the spectrograms of frequencies from different keystrokes, as well as technology to apply the data to a dictionary to try to guess the words. They used a technique called dynamic time warping that’s typically used for speech recognition applications, to measure the similarity of signals. Line-of-sight on the laptop is needed, but it works through a glass window, they said. Using an infrared laser would prevent a victim from knowing they were being spied on.” (This is the same team that was able to pick up the electromagnetic signals emitted by PS/2 keyboards.)

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An IBM-Sun merger is a tantalyzing possibility; snydeq writes “Fatal Exception’s Neil McAllister suggests that an IBM/Sun merger could crown Big Blue king of enterprise software development. ‘Acquiring Sun would make IBM the clear leader in Java, as it would become the caretaker of the open source reference implementation of the JRE,’ which, along with GlassFish, would become entry-level gateways to IBM’s WebSphere stack. Moreover, MySQL would give IBM’s database division a significant entry-level hook, and NetBeans/Eclipse would unify IBM’s front against Visual Studio. ‘All in all, this move would solidify IBM’s role as “the developer company,”‘ McAllister writes. ‘In other words, if this merger goes through and you’re an enterprise developer and you’re not an IBM customer now, get ready — because you soon will be. Better bring your wallet.'” And blackbearnh writes with a short interview with Brian Aker (who came to Sun as MySQL’s director of architecture, and is now the lead for MySQL fork Drizzle) about what life would be like under Big Blue’s control.

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alphadogg writes “Google engineers say it was not expensive and required only a small team of developers to enable all of the company’s applications to support IPv6, a long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol. ‘We can provide all Google services over IPv6,’ said Google network engineer Lorenzo Colitti during a panel discussion held in San Francisco Tuesday at a meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Colitti said a ‘small, core team’ spent 18 months enabling IPv6, from the initial network architecture and software engineering work, through a pilot phase, until Google over IPv6 was made publicly available. Google engineers worked on the IPv6 effort as a 20% project — meaning it was in addition to their regular work — from July 2007 until January 2009.”

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ericatcw writes “Do you love the smooth, silky performance of a multi-core PC loaded to the gills with the fastest RAM? Take a look at Dell’s new Precision T7500 desktop. According to Computerworld, the T7500 will come with 12 memory slots that can accommodate 16 GB of PC-106000 (1333 MHz) DDR3 RAM for a total of 192 GB. Dell’s not the only one — Lenovo, Cisco (with blade servers reportedly up to 384 GB in memory) and Apple are all bringing out computers that leverage Intel’s new Nehalem architecture to enable unprecedented amounts of RAM. But beware! Despite the depressed DRAM market, loading up on memory could see the cost of RAM eclipse the cost of the rest of your PC by 20-fold or more.”

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CWmike writes “As the tech community gears up to celebrate Unix’s 40th birthday this summer, one thing is clear: People do love operating systems. They rely on them, get exasperated by them and live with their little foibles. So now that we’re more than 30 years into the era of the personal computer, Computerworld writers and editors, like all technology aficionados, find ourselves with lots of memories and reactions to the OSes of yesteryear (pics galore). We have said goodbye to some of them with regret. (So long, AmigaOS!) Some of them we tossed carelessly aside. (Adios, Windows Me!) Some, we threw out with great force. (Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, MS-DOS 4.0!) Today we honor a handful of the most memorable operating systems and interfaces that have graced our desktops over the years. Plus: We take a look back at 40 years since Unix was introduced.”

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Death Metal writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: “If there were any doubt that open access publishing was setting off a bit of a power struggle, a decision made last week by the MIT faculty should put it to rest. Although most commercial academic publishers require that the authors of the works they publish sign all copyrights over to the journal, Congress recently mandated that all researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health retain the right to freely distribute their works one year after publication (several foundations have similar requirements). Since then, some publishers started fighting the trend, and a few members of Congress are reconsidering the mandate. Now, in a move that will undoubtedly redraw the battle lines, the faculty of MIT have unanimously voted to make any publications they produce open access.”

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