Tech Talk

Earlier this month, the United States and Canada issued a final report by the U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force on the causes of the August 2003 North American blackout and on recommendations for the prevention of future such events. The task force makes numerous recommendations to both governments to minimize the likelihood of future blackouts, reduce the scope of those that do occur, and improve the security of the North American power grid.

The 14 August 2003 blackout was the largest power outage in North American history, plunging some 50 million citizens of Ontario, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey into darkness. The report notes that, while the origin of the blackout may have started in a power system in Ohio, the ultimate impact of the source failure was compounded by "long-standing institutional failures and weaknesses that need to be understood and corrected in order to maintain reliability."

The 221-page report states at the very beginning that: '[T]he blackout could have been prevented and that immediate actions must be taken in both the United States and Canada to ensure that our electric system is more reliable. First and foremost, compliance with reliability rules must be made mandatory with substantial penalties for non-compliance.' To this end, the task force emphasizes that 'significant accomplishments' in the last three years have been achieved.

An accompanying announcement from U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman and Minister of Natural Resources for Canada Gary Lunn states: 'Mandatory reliability standards are being implemented in the United States and in jurisdictions across Canada. The North American Electric Reliability Council is submitting 118 new standards to the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and appropriate authorities in Canada for review and approval. Additional standards are also being developed.'

Bodman writes: "I appreciate the hard work and diligence that went into this important report. It demonstrates that while improvements are being made to enhance grid reliability, we still have a very complex system that is subject to possible mechanical and human failures. We must remain vigilant."

Lunn adds: "The Task Force has been an outstanding example of close cooperation between the governments of Canada and United States, and we have established a Bilateral Electric Reliability Oversight Group for collaboration between authorities in both countries on issues of common concern."

Additional documentation on the response to the blackout is available at the Department of Energy's August 2003 Blackout Web site.

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Today, Associate Editor Samuel K. Moore offers a mea culpa to a small tech firm that has confounded his doubts by waging a patent fight against some of the microprocessor giants—and winning.

Samuel K. Moore

Back in 2003, when I first read a press release from Patriot Scientific, of San Diego, I must admit I laughed out loud. This troubled, profitless speck of a company said it was suing five of the biggest consumer electronics makers in Japan for infringing patents it held that described technology used in just about every microprocessor made since the early 1990s. That's a lot of processors. To top off this brazen claim, the company started filing suits on Christmas Eve. I didn't think Patriot had a chance.

Perhaps I should not have been so dismissive. After years of legal hardball, the company has made good on its claims, to the tune of US $35.9 million in revenue for the fiscal year ending 31 May. Patriot's annual report, filed on 13 October, gives the first comprehensive glimpse of how well the company has convinced major electronics makers to knuckle under. In the first nine months of 2006, the company's jointly owned licensing company, Phoenix Digital Solutions, hooked nine big fish: Casio, Fujitsu, HP, Seiko Epson, Sony, Nikon, PENTAX, Olympus, and Kenwood. AMD and Intel gave in last year. From 1 June to 3 October Phoenix brought in $32.7 million from some of these deals; Patriot should see a little less than half of that. As you'd expect, Patriot doesn't disclose how much each one paid. In conversation last year, a lawyer involved in the licensing indicated that Patriot wanted to attract customers by cutting the first few licensees a cheap deal. I don't know if any of the cheap licenses are left, but clearly the strategy has worked.

The issue concerns the so-called Moore Microprocessor Patents (MMP), named for Charles Moore, the inventor of the Forth programming language. A good example of an affected technology involves clocks, the drumbeaters that keep all a circuit's soldiers marching in step. In the old days, microprocessors ran off the same clock signal as the rest of the computer, and that was no problem at speeds below around 120 MHz. The trouble is that the computer's clock signal has to follow many centimeters of copper wiring all over the computer, leading to delays. Charles Moore and Russell Fish dreamed up the solution of letting the processor clock run as fast as you want while synchronizing it to the computer's much slower clock, enabling speeds in the gigahertz range. And that's the way things have worked for the past decade or so.

How a seeming pipsqueak like Patriot wound up with the keys to the microprocessor kingdom is a complicated tale, but here goes.

Fish and Moore came up with their technology while developing the SH-Boom microprocessor in the late 1980s. Sometime before the patents issued, Fish transferred his interest in SH-Boom to a family trust, which sold it to a company called Nanotronics, which sold it to Patriot in 1995. Patriot apparently didn't realize the value of the patents until the early 2000s, a time of stock taking for many holders of intellectual property. (Remember when British Telecom briefly thought it owned hypertext linking?)

Patriot saw it had been leaving money on the table and embarked on its Christmas quest for cash, but it quickly got stuck (unless all owners of a patent sue, a court case will get nowhere), and Moore wouldn't go along with Patriot's plan. His Silicon Valley licensing firm, Technology Properties, Ltd. (TPL), began a legal battle for full ownership, and Patriot's dreams of riches seemed to recede.

But the big technology companies apparently feared infringing on the patents and rushed to cut a deal no matter what the legal niceties. At one point, AMD took a $1.7-million license from Patriot, and Intel took a license from Moore. (AMD put both oars in, paying additional cash for Patriot's original product, the processor that succeeded Moore and Fish's SH-boom processor.)

The promise of vast sums of money can make even bitter rivals kiss and make up; and in 2005, TPL, Moore, and Patriot set aside their suits and formed Phoenix Digital, a 50-50 joint venture for licensing the patents.

Patriot and its shareholders are enjoying their first profitable year ever, and Moore has moved on to found a fabless multicore processor firm, Intelasys. But the tale of the patents may not be over. Russell Fish and his family trust sued Patriot seeking a piece of the action. The Fish family and Patriot have been in mediation since 11 September. Stay tuned.

Luck plays a role in any technology project, but critics rarely give it due credit, preferring instead to blame failures on design. This tendency was on display last week, when pundits called North Korea's nuclear test a failure because it had the unusually low yield of about half a kiloton. Even the comedians got in their licks.

"The blast was so small that many scientists are saying it was a dud," said late-night television host Conan O'Brian. "Apparently, the nuclear bomb didn't work well because it was made in Korea."

No strategist ever went right by bad-mouthing an adversary, and so we welcome the corrective supplied by Richard L. Garwin, a distinguished physicist who helped design the first hydrogen bomb and has advised the U.S. government ever since. In a Q&A with Spectrum's William Sweet, Garwin agrees that the North Koreans must have wanted a bigger bang and thus may indeed have miscalculated. But he maintains that a chance occurrence could have caused a perfectly fine bomb to fizzle.

The chance occurrence, called predetonation, happens when stray neutrons trigger a tiny chain reaction before enough plutonium can be crammed into a small enough volume for a long enough time. Energy released in that reaction blows the plutonium apart before much of it has reacted.

Garwin points out that the possibility troubled the sleep of the original bomb-makers in Los Alamos, N.M., during World War II. "Oppenheimer said there was a 2 or 3 percent chance of a fizzle," he says, "and that there might be a substantial reduction in yield—but that it could never go lower than 5 or 10 percent of the expected yield." The North Koreans may thus have expected 5 to 10 kilotons. [The post originally said megatons, a rather large error, and we thank Dinesh Bansal for pointing it out to us in his comment, below.]

If so, then the designers may not need to make changes; they can just try again, and hope for better luck. "I'd expect another test within a few months that's likely to be a successful 4- or 5-kiloton device," Garwin says.

If current assessments of the North Korean plutonium stockpile are correct, such a "destructive test" would still leave enough material for another five bombs. That's one for each neighboring country and Uncle Sam besides.

>With nationwide elections in the United States now only two weeks away, many are increasingly focusing renewed attention on the hardware and software that will enable about 80 percent of Americans to cast their votes for political candidates. A federal law known as the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) requires election officials throughout the country to replace paper-based voting machines with controversial electronic equipment. It has led to quite a few reports that the new machines have flaws that could lead to vote tampering. Moreover, a subsequent provision of the law mandates that the states must build databases of registered voters and use these to check on the eligibility of individuals to cast ballots. In this month's news analysis "The Next Voting Debacle?", Senior Associate Editor Steven Cherry reviews the use of the databases that will guard the nation's polling booths on 7 November—and his findings are cause for concern.

Cherry writes that HAVA gives states wide latitude in reacting to database mismatches. If a voter's registration information and the data in other government databases differ, the act does not require that a state keep registrants off the rolls; but it also doesn't forbid the states to do so. State officials have therefore set up their own rules, which have resulted in mass purges of registrants in California, Iowa, South Dakota, Texas, and Washington. If you're a U.S. citizen interested in the technology used in elections, this item is must reading.

Cherry goes further into the topic on Spectrum Radio. In "Electronic Voting: Computerized Voter Rolls Pose Problems, Too", currently our top story (available as a podcast), he speaks with Wendy Weiser, deputy director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, in New York City. She notes that, among other suspect practices, some states are using the databases as a barrier to voting, for the most trivial of mismatches.

Of course, database problems are not the most controversial issue with electronic voting. That remains the province of the new polling machines. Recently, a group studying e-voting at Princeton University demonstrated how a malicious hacker could access a supposedly secure machine and, within a minute or so, download software that would cause it to tabulate false results—and even infect other units. (We blogged about this topic last month in "Worst Machine Ever?".) In this streaming video presentation by Edward Felten, director of the Center for Information Technology Policy, you can see for yourself just how easy this form of election fraud can be committed.

Expect even more scrutiny of the role of computers in e-voting after 2 November when HBO airs a documentary called "Hacking Democracy", in which the producers note that, "[C]oncerns over the integrity of electronic voting are growing by the day. And if the voting process is not secure, neither is America's democracy." (They point out, for example, that in the 2000 presidential race an e-voting machine recorded negative 16 022 votes for Al Gore in Volusia County, Fla.)

With the future direction of the United States riding on its national elections, Americans should be doing all they can to require officials to tighten the security of the new machines and systems that enable them to exercise their franchise and count their votes accurately as intended. It's the cornerstone of democracy. If it fails, democracy will fail with it.

In what could be one of the great milestones of the horizontal integration of technology, IBM Corp. will collaborate with Heineken N.V. to electronically track the shipment of beer from Europe to the United States. The project will explore the possibility of using sophisticated software and hardware to wirelessly expedite international trade. Shipping giant Safmarine has signed on to carry out the experiment; the University of Amsterdam will serve as research coordinator; and the customs services of The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States will participate in the effort. The undertaking will be known as the Beer Living Lab.

According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, more than 30 different documents are needed for a single cargo container crossing a border, which amounts to about five billion passes annually for shippers. In the beer-cargo experiment, Safmarine will ship ten sensor-equipped containers of Heineken beer from locations, in both Holland and England, through their customs authorities, to the Heineken distribution center in the U.S., IBM said last week.

The project will use IBM's Secure Trade Lane system to provide real-time visibility through an advanced wireless sensor platform that uses data from satellite and cellular tracking technology. An IBM services oriented architecture (SOA) called Shipment Information Services leverages globally accepted Electronic Product Code (EPC) standards, so instead of building a big central database, distributed data is linked, allowing it to be shared in real time between Heineken, Safmarine, and the various customs authorities.

"The Beer Living Lab is setting a roadmap for the next generation e-customs solutions," said Yao-Hua Tan, professor of electronic business at the University of Amsterdam. "We test innovative solutions, based on IBM's Tamper Resistant Embedded Controller and SOA developed by IBM that could revolutionize customs. Companies using these solutions could benefit greatly due to less physical inspections by customs; thus these e-customs solutions greatly facilitate international trade."

The findings of the project could provide an alternative to manufacturers, shippers, retailers, and customs officials as they look to move to a paperless trade environment. Upon wide adoption, such a system would support initiatives such as the GreenLane Cargo Security Act, which aims to create a more efficient and secure inspections process, among other benefits for shippers and governments alike.

"Because efficient collaboration is a paramount requirement to making this work, IBM built the Shipment Information Services to address interoperability," said Stefan Reidy, manager of IBM's Secure Trade Lane initiative. "If governments around the world are serious about electronic customs and paperless trade, they need to encourage each country to adopt open standards environments to enable collaboration and data sharing throughout the trade lane. The Beer Living Lab project is the first step in building the Intranet of Trade, which will help to substantially improve efficiency and security in the global supply chain."

We anticipate the project will be met with enthusiasm from the international community. If there's one thing people around the world can agree upon in launching a new technology system, it's beer.

The U.S. space agency said today it will send a space shuttle crew to repair the malfunctioning Hubble Space Telescope. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin this morning told agency employees at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md., that astronauts will make one final house call to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope as part of a mission to extend and improve the observatory's capabilities through 2013.

"We have conducted a detailed analysis of the performance and procedures necessary to carry out a successful Hubble repair mission over the course of the last three shuttle missions," Griffin said. "What we have learned has convinced us that we are able to conduct a safe and effective servicing mission to Hubble. While there is an inherent risk in all spaceflight activities, the desire to preserve a truly international asset like the Hubble Space Telescope makes doing this mission the right course of action."

He also announced the team selected to accomplish the repair mission. They are: Scott D. Altman, commander; Capt. Gregory C. Johnson (USN-Ret.), pilot; and John M. Grunsfeld, Michael J. Massimino, Andrew J. Feustel, Michael T. Good, and K. Megan McArthur, mission specialists.

The fifth, and final, mission to Hubble should take place in mid-2008, the agency said in a statement. It said that mission planners are working to determine which shuttle to use for the mission, while minimizing impact to the ongoing assembly of the International Space Station. The Hubble has been suffering from a faulty gyroscopic sensor that prevents it from properly orienting its position in space. Plans call for the repair crew to install a refurbished Fine Guidance Sensor to replace the degraded unit, one of the three already onboard. They will also attempt to fix the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which failed two years ago. It is used for high resolution studies in visible and ultraviolet light of both nearby star systems and distant galaxies.

In addition, the astronauts will carry upgrade components to the Hubble. According to NASA, the two new instruments are the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). The COS is the most sensitive ultraviolet spectrograph ever flown in space. It will probe the cosmic web, the large-scale structure of the universe whose form is determined by the gravity of dark matter and is traced by the spatial distribution of galaxies and intergalactic gas. The WFC3 is a new camera sensitive across a wide range of wavelengths, including infrared, visible, and ultraviolet light. It will extend the "vision" of the orbiting telescope to the early and distant galaxies beyond Hubble's current reach.

"Hubble has been rewriting astronomy text books for more than 15 years, and all of us are looking forward to the new chapters that will be added with future discoveries and insights about our universe," said Mary Cleave, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate.

>Blake Ross appears on our cover this month. He's the wunderkind who helped to create the immensely popular Mozilla Firefox browser from the ashes of Netscape Communications Corp.'s doomed product—after it was crushed by Microsoft Corp. in the late Nineties. In "The Firefox Kid", contributing editor David Kushner profiles Ross and lets us in on his most-recent project.

Ross told Kushner that, after working on Firefox, he wanted to explore the essential question: What's bad about today's software? The answer, he and his programming partner, Joe Hewitt (one of the original Firefox engineers) decided, resided in the gap between the desktop and the Web. "Right now, people want to shuffle around content, but the world's fused together by a collection of hacks," Ross noted. "Something that should be simple, say, getting photos from a digital camera onto the Web, is a Sisyphean task for most people. Step back and ask, 'What's wrong with this picture?'".

Kushner writes:

The problem, according to Ross, is there's no simple, cohesive tool to help people store and share their creations online. Currently, the steps involved depend on the medium. If you want to upload photos, for example, you have to dump your images into one folder, then transfer them to an image-sharing site such as Flickr. The process for moving videos to YouTube or a similar site is completely different. If you want to make a personal Web page within an online community, you have to join a social network, say, MySpace or Friendster. If you intend to rant about politics or movies, you launch a blog and link up to it from your other pages. The mess of the Web, in other words, leaves you trapped in one big tangle of actions, service providers, and applications.

Ross and Hewitt work now on an effort called Parakey, a "Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do. Parakey is designed to exist on the Web and on the desktop at the same time," according to its creators. "[Parakey] is launching with profit in mind," Kushner writes. "While many of the details remain under wraps, the idea is to roll out initially with a single application, such as the photo system, which will demonstrate how the platform can be exploited. Once all the infrastructure is in place and scalable, they'll make a more concerted play to involve outside developers, probably around January."

Their project has its doubters, but it's hard to argue with the work these young men have done to date. Skeptics should be wary. Anyone who has taken on the Redmond giant has paid in the past. These remarkable young men—with a lot of help—have not been, thus far, victimized. We wish them well in their efforts, without bias.

The crew of the International Space Station (ISS) yesterday repaired one of its principal oxygen production units with new parts delivered over the weekend by an unmanned Progress supply ship. The failure of the onboard Elektron electrolysis machine in mid-September had prompted the American space agency to issue the first Spacecraft Emergency in the eight-year history of the ISS. In this month's news analysis article "Breathing Easy in Space Is Never Easy", our contributing editor on space technology, James Oberg, offers an insightful backgrounder on the nature of the emergency and the implications it posed to both the space station and the space shuttle program.

"The crew has replaced several parts of Elektron and put it back to work," Russian Federal Space Agency spokesman Valery Lyndin told the Associated Press. "Elektron has been working smoothly since Tuesday." The Elektron is the main producer of oxygen on the ISS. It uses electrolysis to turn surplus water into oxygen, dumping the useless hydrogen into space. It was shut down on 18 September after a visit by the crew of Space Shuttle Atlantis (see "The Popular ISS Motel"). When the crew reactivated the system the next day, just prior to the docking of a Soyuz transport carrying replacement crew members and an American space tourist, they smelled a noxious odor and turned it off again.

According to Oberg, they were smelling gas, potassium hydroxide, from the overheating of the chemicals used in the purification process the Elektron uses, which caused the system's rubber seals to begin melting, as well. Initially, the gases were interpreted by ground controllers to indicate a fire was occurring. Onboard inspection, however, confirmed a subsequent analysis of an overheating problem. Oberg writes:

The re-supply ship brought new sensors and a new valve—the old one is believed to have a burned-out solenoid, probably as a result of the overheating—and on Monday the crew members put them in, but to no avail. [A cosmonaut] told Moscow Mission Control that the unit appeared jammed with free-floating air bubbles much larger than desired, a problem encountered often in the past. He will spend the rest of the week trying to remedy it, and then he will activate the unit, coaxing it along as gently as possible. Success will be achieved not when the unit starts up, but when it continues to run for more than a few hours before its control system shuts it down.

Oberg notes that the overarching problem with the oxygen generators for NASA is its impact on future space shuttle flights. If the new crew—Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin, American astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria, and German astronaut Thomas Reiter—can not sustain operation of the Elektron, then the resumption of shuttle flights will either have to be postponed from its scheduled start in December or the "safe-haven rule"—which dictates that that the ISS must be able to support a crew of as many as ten for up to a month in the event of potentially catastrophic damage to a shuttle requiring a complicated rescue scenario—will have to be adapted. Oberg explains that there are various other units onboard the ISS that could be hooked up, including the U.S. Oxygen Generation System delivered on a shuttle flight last summer, which still needs its water supply lines to be delivered. He observes:

The Catch-22 is that only a shuttle flight can reliably restore enough oxygen capacity for the station to host a stranded shuttle crew, yet without that capacity, no shuttle can safely fly.

For the time being, though, according to Moscow, the problem of keeping the oxygen flowing routinely is beginning to be addressed. We'll see, in the next few days, whether repair work on the vital unit will result in reliably sustainable operation. As Oberg writes, "Success will be achieved not when the unit starts up, but when it continues to run for more than a few hours before its control system shuts it down."