Tech Talk

It’s easy to infiltrate a semiconductor chip supply chain with counterfeits. The path from the original manufacturer to the final use is notoriously weak, especially for older chip models, which are often needed for military applications. There are different types of counterfeits: they can be falsely labeled, used, broken, actual fakes, or, as we are told this week, hacked to a specific purpose by the mob.

In a blog post Tuesday, two executives from IOActive, a computer and information security company, posited that the mob could easily enter the realm of chip counterfeiting and sell insidiously hacked chips with devastating results.

It’s not a new concern, but IOActive gives it a new twist with the gangster angle. They’re not wrong about the threat, but the company’s blog post smells a little like fear mongering.

Indoor navigation—the use of sensors and various local radio signals to help smart phones figure out where they are inside a mall, hotel, museum, or other large building—started getting very interesting last year, when a number of consumer electronics and communications companies joined forces to start working on an indoor navigation standard. Apple was not part of that group; in the fall the company launched its own general navigation software that didn’t include an indoor component. Probably a good thing, given all the other bugs in that software that Apple had to deal with.

At the time, some analysts suggested that Apple might be shopping around for a little indoor navigation startup to acquire. This week, Apple apparently found what it was looking for, acquiring Palo Alto’s WiFiSLAM, an alumni of Stanford’s StartX incubator, for $20 million. WiFiSLAM, started by a group of recent Stanford graduates and Google alumni, is just two years old; it uses existing Wi-Fi signals in a building and supplements those with what it calls trajectories. Trajectories are paths that it calculates from the existing sensors on phones as a user walks around a building, particularly, accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers. It saves these paths anonymously, and combines them, using pattern recognition techniques, to create maps of buildings. WiFiSLAM’s technology makes app users mapmakers, with their contributions used to make maps more accurate.

Meanwhile, Samsung is including pressure sensors in its Galaxy S4 form, according to business analytics company IHS. This means that phones will be able to tell how high they are in a building, not just in which direction a user is walking. Samsung is a bit ahead of the curve, IHS projects that Apple will add pressure sensors to its phones sometime next year.

Apple, it turns out, wasn’t the only established company to go shopping in Palo Alto in the past week or two. On 15 March Palo Alto startup Orchestra, another two-year-old company, was picked up by Dropbox for a rumored $100 million in cash and stock. Orchestra makes Mailbox, an app that simplifies email management on smart phones. And on 22 March, Trip Advisor announced that it had acquired Tiny Post, a company that makes an app used to add text to photos. Tiny Post’s app went viral when users began creating clever posters and sharing them on Facebook. No word yet on how much Trip Advisor spent for Tiny Post, also about two years old.

Video below: WiFiSLAM cofounder Joseph Huang explains the technology.

Spring is in the air. Here in Silicon Valley, it seems like just about everything is in blossom—daffodils, wildflowers, trees, and, it turns out, technologies. Last week a number of technologies that were, at best, tiny buds a few months ago have started to flower.

Qbotix. I first wrote about robotics company Qbotix last fall, intrigued by its approach to positioning solar panels to make the most efficient use of the sun. Instead of attaching each panel to a complicated motorized tracking assembly, Qbotix has built a robot, the SolBot, that runs on a track through a field of solar panels on simple stands; the robot figures out the best angle for each panel and turns it appropriately. Until now, the only SolBot in action was at Qbotix’ Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, but last week the first commercial project went live—a 48 kw power plant at the Alameda County Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, Calif. The facility is using single Qbotix SolBot to position 32 panels, which are expected to generate approximately 120,000 kw hours of electricity per year.

Nanocoatings. At the past two International Consumer Electronics Shows (CES), startup companies wowed attendees by demonstrating nanocoatings that waterproofed personal electronics, invisibly making smartphones and pad computers impervious to at least a short dunk in a swimming pool. Last week I heard from a company called Semblant, that aims to take this kind of waterproofing technology into the industrial world, sealing electronics boards, solar panels, and entire cars (something all those folks who faced major damage to their cars’ electrical systems during Hurricane Sandy sure would have liked to have.)

4K Television. Remember those 4K TVs that several consumer electronics manufacturers were talking up at the CES this past January? The good news is that they really are going to be available this year, at least Samsung’s is, and you can preorder yours today. The bad news? The price. Back in January when I talked to manufacturers about possible pricing, no official information was available, but manufacturers were tossing around the $20,000 figure. Samsung this week announced pricing for its first 4K TV, an 85-inch model--$40,000.

Three years ago, an international team of scientists, led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany published the first draft of the Neanderthal genome. Now the German group says they have computed a much higher quality genome.

The first draft was decoded using DNA fragments collected from three different bone pieces. The researchers have generated the new version from one toe bone, so it represents the genome of a single Neanderthal individual. They plan to publish a scientific paper later this year, but have already made the entire sequence freely available online for other scientists.

Computing the DNA blueprint of an extinct species is no easy task. Sophisticated DNA sequencing and computing techniques helped the team put together the first draft of the roughly 3.2-billion base-pair long genome (about the size of a modern human genome).

One challenge is that DNA fragments from fossil bones are typically only about 50 bases long; once these fragments are sequenced, assembly algorithms sort through the short sequences and string them together into longer and longer sections. During sequencing, though, some base positions get sequenced multiple times and others are missed completely. In the 2010 draft version, each position was determined once on average. New sequencing techniques the group has developed over the past two years have allowed them to sequence every position in the genome 50 times on average.

“Seeing each position that often dramatically reduces the chance that we make an error in the sequence,” says Janet Kelso, a bioinformatics researcher at the Max Planck Institute. “This 50-fold coverage Neanderthal genome is as good as, or better than the genomes that have been sequenced for many present-day humans.”

Here’s the caveat: when genomes are sequenced with next-generation sequencing technologies, some regions, typically those composed of highly repetitive sequences, simply cannot be confidently reconstructed, says Kelso. So these regions are generally not included in the final sequence.  

That’s why this ARS Technica article boldly, and rightly, says that the Neanderthal genome is not complete even though it’s about as good as we can probably get with prehistoric genomes.

But as Kelso points out, the problem exists for all genomes, be they old or new. “In this sense, I would argue that there is no complete human genome—modern or ancient!”

Photo: Nikola Solic/Reuters

Today the U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposed to tighten its regulation of publicly displayed machines used to shock a stopped heart back to life. Such automatic external defibrillators, or AEDs, have become common in malls, gyms, schools and other public spaces, but they haven't always worked properly in a pinch.

Between 2005 and 2012 the FDA received reports of 45,000 problems with AEDs, many having to do with defects in design and fabrication or in components obtained from suppliers. The agency's proposed rules would require manufacturers to provide clinical results before going to market, submit to an on-site inspection of manufacturing processes and then pass annual reviews of each product's track record.

"The FDA realizes that this is a lot to ask—clinical trials, studies, possibly animal trials, manufacturing approval and so forth all take time to conduct," says Mark Harris, the Seattle-based journalist whose sweeping exposé of the problem, "A Shocking Truth," appeared in IEEE Spectrum in March 2012. However, he adds, manufacturers "have had plenty of time to acquire data and should have been doing so, especially considering the many problems AEDs have experienced." 

Ten days ago the article won the Grand Neal Award, one of the highest awards in business journalism. 

Two years ago, when Gavin Andresen, the lead developer of the Bitcoin software was invited by the CIA to present his thoughts on the experimental cryptocurrency, it was the first indication that federal agencies were beginning to take interest. But in the two years since he made the trip, it's been unclear whether the financial arms of the government were as hip to the technology as their friends over at Langley.

Well, now we know. The U.S. Department of Treasury has been watching not only Bitcoin, but all virtual currencies. And this week, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) published a list of guidelines intended to help money transmitters who deal in virtual currencies to comply with the Bank Secrecy Act.

Many in the Bitcoin community suspected that some kind of regulation was fast approaching. The currency has had a few significant growth spurts of late, attracting new users from the Kim Dot Com's empire of filesharing followers and from the folks at Reddit. And, in fact, most didn't think the news would be as good as it is. 

Despite rather vague guidelines for compliance, the document makes one crucial thing very clear: Bitcoin is money. The document takes this point for granted as it describes a system exactly like Bitcoin:

"A final type of convertible virtual currency activity involves a de-centralized convertible virtual currency (1) that has no central repository and no single administrator, and (2) that persons may obtain by their own computing or manufacturing effort."

"We're glad Bitcoins are considered money," says Anthony Gallippi, the chief executive officer of BitPay, a Bitcoin payment processor. "Because we consider them money and we're glad they agree with us."

This week Tesla dominated the news in Silicon Valley, but other ideas for more efficient or cleaner ways of using or producing energy keep on coming.

Tesla loan repayment is ahead of schedule. First, Tesla announced that it is on track to repay its $456 million loan from the Department of Energy five years early, that is, in 2017, thanks to the success of the Model S (despite controversial reviews).

Those waiting for a Tesla SUV will have to wait a little longer. The demand for Model S sedans also means that Tesla won’t be putting its sport utility vehicle, the Model X, into production as soon as it had intended, pushing that off until late 2014.

Could ship movements on water generate electricity on land? Tesla seems like such an established company these days, it’s hard to remember that it wasn’t so long ago that Elon Musk’s venture seemed more than a little crazy. But crazy ideas sometimes work out. One of those kind of crazy ideas launched this week as an Indiegogo project. Indiegogo, like Kickstarter, is a crowd funding website. Nautical Torque, a company founded by Cahill Maloney in 2008. Cahill Maloney died in late 2012; the company is now being run by his son, Galen Maloney. It proposes using the movement of ships in harbors, as they rise and fall with the tides, to generate electricity (see pitch video, below). The idea is that the water lifts the mass of a ship, which, when it falls back down again, spins a turbine on the dock. Cahill Maloney calculated that 20 ships properly equipped could power half the city of San Francisco. The company has tagged its technology “Lunar Energy,” and is trying to raise $16,000 to build a prototype. Crazy? Maybe, but a $25 investment will get you a T-shirt.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an ambitious US $1.4-billion telescope capable of peering back into the early universe, made its official debut this week with an inauguration ceremony on Wednesday.

ALMA’s inauguration date is somewhat arbitrary: The array’s first dishes have been making observations since September 2011 and, although all of ALMA’s antennas have now been built, the full complement of 66 likely won’t be in place until the end of the year. Indeed, ALMA, which has been in the works since the 1990s, seems almost an old friend already. You may have noticed that another piece of ALMA news made headlines this week: A study published in Nature found that starburst galaxies—hyperactive dust-shrouded galaxies that churn out stars at hundreds of times the rate of galaxies like the Milky Way—were active a good billion times earlier than previously thought. Those observations were made with just 16 of the array's first antennas.

But it’s as good a time as any to celebrate the project and the spirit of international cooperation made necessary by the scale of today’s astronomy projects. ALMA’s telescopes are owned by three primary partners: the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and the European Southern Observatory.

Built atop the 16 400-foot Chajnantor Plateau in Chile’s Atacama Desert, ALMA is designed to be sensitive to millimeter and submillimeter light, a region of the spectrum that extends beyond the infrared into the radio. Light hitting the array’s 12-meter and 7-meter wide dishes is combined to create a virtual telescope that effectively spans the size of the array, using a computationally-intensive strategy called interferometry. Like the Very Large Array in New Mexico, ALMA’s dishes can be moved to alter the “synthetic aperture.” In this case, special-designed transporter trucks are used. A more widely-spaced array allows researchers to make high-resolution observations of small patches of sky, while a tight arrangement allows the telescopes a wider field of view.

One of the best treatments of the ALMA this week comes from an aptly titled feature called “The Patchwork Array” by Eric Hand at Nature. Hand dives into not only the technology behind the telescope and what’s been learned so far, but also the cultural and political challenges of pulling the array together. He quotes Ethan Schreier, the president of NRAO’s operator, the Associated Universities Incorporated (AUI), as saying “I think it's the largest science project ever where nobody was in charge.”

One of the more sobering things he notes is how oversubscribed the facility already is. “Almost every data-taking moment has been allocated,” Hand says, and ALMA is already receiving six proposals for each slot. That leaves little space for ambitious departures like the deep-field surveys performed by the Hubble Space Telescope. That first deep field image—a 10-day exposure of a small patch of sky—was a lark. It was performed in 1995 on time allotted to the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute on what was supposed to be a relatively empty region of the sky. Instead, Hubble found thousands of distant galaxies, a watershed moment for many astronomers. Let's hope ALMA can do similarly great things.

Image: Xinhua/eyevine/Redux

Boeing has gotten permission from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to test a solution to the battery problem that grounded its worldwide fleet of 787 Dreamliners in January. Tests in two planes could begin in a matter of days, ABC news reported this morning.

Whether it's a solution for the ages or a mere Band-aid is a matter of judgment, or of taste. What is clear, though, is that the solution aims not to prevent battery fires but to live with them. It uses the same lithium-ion cells as before but inserts insulating barriers, which should make it harder for a thermal runaway reaction in one cell from propagating to neighboring cells. The containment vessel will also be strengthened and fitted with a smoke-venting system.

Boeing’s solution reflects some but not all of the suggestions made last month by Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors. That company's pioneering all-electric Tesla Roadster uses lithium-ion batteries based, like Boeing's, on a cobalt-oxide chemistry, perhaps the best on offer in the mid-2000s, when both companies made their key design decisions. No Roadster has had a battery fire, but even so, newer, safer lithium-ion chemistries have pretty much taken over the electric-car industry.

Tesla’s design is safe, Musk contends, because it uses a large number of small cells and separates them properly, with an air gap. Boeing’s solution uses the same eight comparatively large cells as before, though with added insulation.

“When thermal runaway occurs with a big cell, a proportionately larger amount of energy is released and it is very difficult to prevent that energy from then heating up the neighboring cells and causing a domino effect that results in the entire pack catching fire," Musk told Flightglobal back in February.

Airbus, Boeing’s archrival, had also planned to use lithium-ion batteries in its upcoming A350 airliner, but last month it announced that it would revert to the old-fashioned nickel-cadmium battery. That move ensures that the  market debut of the plane will not be delayed much. It would be much harder for Boeing to undertake such a fundamental redesign. For one thing, it would have to retrofit all the planes it has already delivered.

Both manufacturers originally wanted lithium-ion not so much because they were lighter than nickel cadmium—a difference that here amounts to about the weight a single, burly passenger—but because they're supposed to be quicker to charge and easier to maintain. It’s fair to say that the latter claim has already been debunked.

Bitcoin went into crisis mode early this morning. This time, the threat wasn't from hackers tampering with poorly secured virtual wallets. It was Bitcoin's own code that was causing the trouble.

A compatibility issue between the two most recent versions of the cryptocurrency's core software has resulted in a split in the Bitcoin blockchain, causing the currency to grow in two different directions at once. What does this mean? The biggest problem that two competing Bitcoin chains could breed is someone trying to spend the same coins on each chain. Bitcoin was explicitly designed to resolve such an occurrence—called "double spending"—and the mere possibility has thrown the validity of some recent Bitcoin transactions into question.

While, no one is at risk of losing any coins that they owned before the problem occurred, fixing it will require that many of the most recently generated coins (an estimated 600 of them) be abandoned.

Mt Gox, the largest online Bitcoin exchange, suspended Bitcoin deposits late last night after the problem was announced on an online Bitcoin forum. The exchange rate dropped 23 percent shortly after the news, but rebounded slightly and is now trading at US $43, only six dollars shy of the all time high reached last week.

The problem now seems to be under control, and Mt. Gox has resumed taking Bitcoin deposits. But it will take a while to fully correct the situation and there will be some lasting effects. Moreover, it's a reminder of just how experimental Bitcoin is in nature—a reminder that some of the developers say they didn't really need.

"This sort of thing illustrates the dangers of Bitcoin and is perhaps one reason the developers tend to be more conservative about it than others," says Mike Hearn, one of the developers who have been working on the Bitcoin software and tending to its growth. "We know this sort of thing can happen."