Tech Talk

In the movie Dr. Strangelove, Soviet ambassador de Sadesky warns that renegade U.S. Air Force general Ripper has put the whole world in peril. The reason, the ambassador explains, is because his countrymen have deployed a doomsday device—50 nuclear bombs spiked with “Cobalt-Thorium G.” These bombs were rigged to go off if the Soviet Union were to suffer a nuclear strike, thus serving as the ultimate deterrent. Unfortunately, the Soviets failed to announce the existence of this system, and as the Dr. Strangelove character scolds de Sadesky, “The whole point of the doomsday machine . . . is lost if you keep it a secret!”

North Korea’s underground test of a nuclear bomb yesterday wasn’t any secret. It wouldn’t serve that nation’s aims if it were. But it is nevertheless interesting to explore how such nuclear tests are detected from afar and whether North Korea could hide such activity if it wanted to.

Four distinct technical systems have been established to detect clandestine nuclear explosions: incorporating seismic, hydro-acoustic, infrasound, and radionuclide sensors. These systems were put in place to support the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1996 and which 159 nations have so far ratified (not yet including the United States).

UPDATE 13 FEB, 2013: 

It appears that the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous failed to disrupt U.S. President Obama's State of the Union Speech. From my vantage point, a couch in suburban New Jersey, the webcast was undisturbed.

This commenter on the Anonrelations.net web site summed things up well:

A web site that claims to represent the Anonymous said the group is aggrieved by the re-introduction of the controversial CISPA cybersecurity legislation as well as reports that President Obama will issue an executive order concerning cybersecurity today. The web site says the "Internet is a sovereign territory, and does not fall under the jurisdiction of any nation state... Our determination is that President Obama is acting in direct contravention of this principle."

As we pointed out yesterday, the State of the Union webcast was a pretty risky target for Anonymous. If it had succeeded it would have incited the ire of the FBI. In failing, Anonymous appears to be a spent force.

-Samuel K. Moore

It seems that Washington D.C. isn't the only place where preparations are being made for the annual Presidential address to the U.S. Congress, scheduled for tonight at 9 pm Eastern Time. A web site that claims to represent the hacker political activist group Anonymous—reputed to have been behind several high-profile leaks and cyberattacks, has declared that it will attempt to block the live Internet feed of the State of Union address.

According to the web site, Anonymous is aggrieved by the re-introduction of the controversial CISPA cybersecurity legislation as well as reports that President Obama will issue an executive order concerning cybersecurity tomorrow. The web site says "the Internet is a sovereign territory, and does not fall under the jurisdiction of any nation state... Our determination is that President Obama is acting in direct contravention of this principle." Only the live broadcast is being targeted: "So as not to infringe upon the President’s free speech, subsequent broadcasts will be allowed to pass unhindered."

Blocking the live video would be a feat in itself. Doing so after giving an advance warning would certainly demonstrate a significant cyberwarfare strike capability—a demonstration which would, ironically enough, probably provide political cover for far reaching online security measures. Will Anonymous really make the attempt? Could they actually pull it off? We'll find out in a few hours.

Risk Factor's own Robert N. Charette thinks the move is risky whether Anonymous succeeds or fails. If it succeeds it'll provoked the ire of the FBI and underscore the President's need for the executive order. If it fails it could show that Anonymous is a spent force.

Almost as soon as the first organism developed the ability to change its position, answering the question “Where am I?” became a matter of life and death. Over a billion years of evolution, animals have developed multiple redundant systems for navigating among the landscape’s carrots and sticks, following cues of light, polarization, odor, taste, sound, pressure, electrical charge, magnetic charge, and almost any other parameter that changes over space. Despite the universality of animal navigation, some of the most effective long-range systems remain half-veiled mysteries.

Two groups of researchers have recently delved into historical datasets to illuminate the tools used by two prodigies of long-range navigation, Pacific salmon and homing pigeons.

Pacific salmon choose a route

Recent research revealed a candidate magnetoreceptor that is found distributed (albeit thinly) throughout the key sensory tissues of one salmonid fish, the trout—in the olfactory bulb, inner ear, lateral line, and cornea.

Nathan Putman and David Noakes—part of a team from Oregon State University and the Universities of North Carolina, Washington, and California—analyzed a 56-year set of fisheries data tracking the return of the Fraser River sockeye salmon to their home river. The Fraser River flows out of British Columbia into the Strait of Georgia behind Vancouver Island.  The homing fish must detour around the 290-mile-long island, entering either from the north, via the Queen Charlotte Strait, or from the south, via the Juan de Fuca Strait. The researchers call the percentage of fish opting for the northern route the “diversion rate.”  It varies widely, from 85 percent in some years down to 2 percent in others; most of the time, naturally, the diversion rate falls somewhere in between.

The fisheries scientists tabulated data on which route the salmon took, year-by-year, and correlated it with two environmental variables: transient drift in the Earth’s magnetic field and water temperature (salmon are cold-water creatures and will generally pick the chillier of two evils). The geomagnetic field fluctuates predictably. The researchers used the established Geomagnetic Reference Field model (GRF-11) to calculate the field strength at the mouth of the Fraser River in the year the salmon left the river, and the field strengths at the river mouth and each strait entrance when they returned two years later.

U.K. Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts, announced a £25 million investment to expand the country’s national standards institute. The investment, Willetts said, will be used to build a new Advanced Metrology Laboratory, “a state of the art laboratory for cutting edge measurement research. The creation of advanced facilities at the National Standards Laboratory in Teddington will allow scientists there to undertake leading edge research in key nano and quantum metrology programmes.”

The measure is intended to boost Britain’s national competitiveness in manufacturing, process control, communications, and transportation, and to move the country into the forefront of development in key technologies, including high-accuracy optical clocks and frequency measurement, graphene-based electronics, quantum detection, surface and nanoanalysis, and advanced materials.

The new facility at NPL will mean 20 new laboratories with workspace for about 40 metrologists, with stringent temperature and humidity controls and isolation to reduce interference from acoustic, electrical, and magnetic sources.

The investment builds on an earlier announcement that NPL would strike partnerships with academic and applied-science organizations to develop new technologies and create a new NPL postgraduate research institute.

The Advanced Metrology Laboratory expansion was part of a £600 million (roughly US $900 million) technology-development package that includes £189 million for big data and energy efficient computing, £35 million for center of excellence in robotics and autonomous systems, and £30 million to for R&D on grid scale energy storage technologies. 

Image: UK National Physical Laboratory

The world has embraced the cloud. What’s not to like? Startups can grow rapidly without investing in racks of computers, companies can back up data easily, consumers can travel light and still have access to their huge photo libraries and other personal files.

Back in October, however, real clouds clashed with metaphorical clouds when Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath took down some key data centers in New York and New Jersey; a serious problem for businesses who had their main servers in New York and their backup servers in nearby New Jersey. Commercial cloud service providers, for the most part, did pretty well; perhaps because some of the largest data centers, like Amazon’s northern Virginia server farm, were not in the disaster zone. But Sandy certainly reminded cloud service providers that redundant files have to be separated by more than a couple of racks, or even a couple of miles.

Startup Symform thinks it can provide better disaster resilience than even data centers hundreds of miles apart. And, says Bassam Tabbara, Symform cofounder and Chief Technical Officer, it can do that in a way that’s extremely cheap—and in some cases free—to its customers.

Tabbara describes Symform’s approach as a “decentralized, distributed, virtual, and crowd-sourced” cloud. Living in the San Francisco Bay area, I can visualize that kind of cloud, however, we don’t call it a cloud here, we call it fog. (I thought I had invented the term Fog Computing, but a quick search proved me wrong.)

Here’s how it works. Most of Symform’s customers act as hosts as well as customers, that is, they allocate some amount of their on-site storage for use by Symform. Pricing depends on just how much storage they make available; if they allow twice as much data to be stored as they are uploading into the Symform fog, then their fog storage is free. (Otherwise, pricing is 15 cents per gigabyte per month.) This approach is similar to the SETI@home effort in which volunteers donate idle computer cycles to analyze radio data as part of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence; Symform asks customers to provide idle storage.

Amazon announced this week that come May its customers will be able to buy Kindle Fire apps and some other goodies with a new virtual currency called Amazon Coins. And to jumpstart the program, they will give away millions of dollars worth of coins.

The giveaway is a great way to get started, but it points to a problem with using the word "currency" to describe what Amazon has created. Calling Amazon Coins a virtual currency suggests that it will be a widely accepted, independent store of value that you can easily convert to another currency. But from the few details Amazon has given, there's no reason to think this will be anything other than yet another in-house system of credits. If Amazon Coins are currency then so is the card I use to get on the subway in New York, because it works the same way—you load money onto an account. But once its there, the subway system is the only place you can use it. At least you can use the cards throughout the subway system (and eventually, maybe as part of a system that includes Metro North trains and PATH). When Amazon dumps "tens of millions of dollars worth of Coins" on their customers, will these coins be redeemable throughout all of the Amazon marketplace? No. They will only buy Kindle Fire apps, games, and in-app items.

And we've seen this a million times before. Microsoft Points. Nintendo points. Even the gang from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia tried beefing up business at their bar by printing Paddy's Dollars. It's the kind of scheme where it works the best for the company when it works the least for the customer, trapping people in with inflexible policies that force them to buy more credits than they immediately use.

It seems that Amazon is at least trying to avoid some of the most offensive mistakes of its predecessors. For example, one of the biggest complaints with Microsoft Points is that they are not matched exactly to the U.S. dollar. Instead, one dollar equals 80 points and in order to use them you have to do some wacky conversion in your head. People really didn't like this and many thought it was designed to obfuscate the actual price of things. Amazon has chosen a one to one ratio where each coin will equal a penny.

The instrument-maker’s quest for smaller, faster, more sensitive, more flexible sensors is never-ending. The hunt drives them to smaller and smaller scales, where novel phenomena offer new ways of thinking about—and measuring—nature. There may be Faustian bargains along the way, though: at very small scales, they sometimes lose the ability to capture data that is easily available at larger scales.

In the present instance, extraordinary optical transmission (EOT) is a highly efficient light transmission through arrays of nanoholes. It’s an order of magnitude more efficient than conventional transmission through apertures of equivalent size, thanks to (in the words of its discoverers) "the coupling of light with plasmons—electronic excitations—on the surface of the periodically patterned metal film.” But EOT is only possible with perforations on the order of tens of nanometers in diameter, arrayed in a grid whose period is significantly shorter than one wavelength of the light to be studied.

Diffraction gratings—the workhorses of spectrometry for centuries—only work if the slits are significantly farther than one wavelength apart.

Now, though, researchers at the University of Alabama at Huntsville have devised at least one way of having their cake and eating it too, via a “super nanograting.” Haisheng Leong and Junpeng Guo, members of Huntsville’s electrical and computer engineering department, have built a surface plasmon resonance spectrometer (SPRS): a 300-micrometer-square silicon chip coated with a 50 nm of gold and then electron-beam etched with about half a million 140-nm-diameter holes distributed in a 420 nm grid. The duo converted this straightforward EOT sieve into a novel dual-scale grating by the simple expedient of omitting every fifth row from the grid.  The result is equivalent to a diffraction grating with a 2100 nm pitch…but with the order-of-magnitude-better light-transmission and plasmon-sensitivity characteristics of a nanoarray.

Go to your local Best Buy store and look at the computers. What’s the most attractive offering? Surely it’s the Chromebooks, at $249 for Samsung's and $199 for Acer’s. And that—more than razor-thin margins due to no-name competitors; more than a PC market share that has slipped by a third in the past six years; more than the uncertain success of Windows 8; more than carrying $15 billion in debt—is the challenge faced by Dell Computer, the one-time leader in PCs, now a distant third, as it leaves NASDAQ for the comfy confines of private equity.

In Wall Street’s largest leveraged buyout in six years, Dell Computer is going private. According to the New York Times, Michael Dell, who has put up a healthy chunk of his personal fortune, and his partners at private equity firm Silver Lake are sanguine about taking on an additional $15 billion because “Dell’s cash from operations has held steady for four of the last five years, coming in at $5.5 billion for the most recent fiscal year.” Me, I would be looking over my shoulder at those Chromebooks and worrying about how long the milk will flow.

The market for Dell’s PCs and laptops was already hollowing. Apple owns the high-value (and high-margin) end of the market—even five years ago, Apple was the manufacturer of two of every three computers costing more than $1000. iPads and its Android ilk are now directly eating into the commodity PC market—in the fourth quarter of 2012, tablet sales were up 75 percent, while PC sales declined by 6.4 percent, according to IDC. Just last week, Bloomberg reported that at Acer, Chromebooks are already outselling Windows 8 PCs. And the Chromebook threat isn't just the hardware. Google is, after all, a software company.

In the past few years, Google has turned Google Docs into a viable competitor to Microsoft Windows. And when I say viable, I mean in terms of features, usability, and reliability. In terms of price—Google Docs is free to individuals—it blows Office out of the water. (Personally, I’m coming to agree with Charles Cooper over at CNet when he says “it's time to move on.” Have you used it lately? It has a better word processor than Word.) With the browser handling almost everything else, including e-mail, what more do you need? Oh, how about your favorite Android apps? As it happens, James Kendrick over at ZDNet posed the question just last week, “Are Android apps for Chromebooks on the way?”

The recent death of Andre Cassagnes, the electrical technician who came up with the idea of using the response of aluminum powder to an electrostatic charge to create a drawing machine, has kicked off a wave of Etch A Sketch nostalgia.

For me, Etch A Sketch wasn’t a drawing tablet—I had drawing tablets (that is, paper and ink), that were a lot less frustrating for an eight year old. Instead, it was my first game machine. I spent hours and hours twiddling the knobs to create complex labyrinths. Then, I would challenge myself or a friend to navigate the stylus through the labyrinth without hitting the sides. I always included a nasty section of tight hairpin turns designed to trip the player up.

When first introduced to a “real” video game, Pong, I was pretty good at twirling the knobs, thanks, I’m sure, to those hours with my fingers on my Etch A Sketch. (Like the creators of Pong, the manufacturers of Etch A Sketch went with dials for controls, though Cassagnes original version used a joystick.)

By the time my kids were ready for Etch A Sketch, the toy was available in a miniature version that came with transparent overlays that turned the gadget into, yes, a video game. Guess I wasn’t the only one who had discovered Etch A Sketch gaming. I had been holding back on introducing my kids to electronic games,and was quite happy to hand over a shiny new Etch A Sketch at the beginning of a long plane ride instead of a Game Boy.

So thanks, M. Cassagnes. And this weekend I’ll see if I can dig up an old Etch A Sketch and challenge my kids to a maze game. I bet I can still beat them.

Follow me on Twitter @TeklaPerry.

Photos: The Ohio Art Company, the Pong Museum, Klutz

Just a few years ago, 3-D television was the next big thing in home entertainment, and sports was the next big thing in 3-D. Now, 3-D is a minor feature in television sets, kind of like automatic dimming or a memory card slot. And 3D sports broadcasts, while catching on in some countries, aren’t common place in the United States. Today’s Super Bowl will not be televised in 3-D; the broadcaster, CBS, is not currently producing any original 3-D programming.

Keeping the Super Bowl a 2-D event makes a certain amount of sense. The Super Bowl is typically viewed in large groups—I’m going to a Super Bowl party today, you may be too. And it can be tough to find the decent 3-D viewing angles for a crowd in a typical living room, though 3-D broadcasts in pubs in the U.K. have worked out just fine.

Just because it's going to be done in 2-D doesn't mean the Super Bowl is a simple broadcast to produce. A regular season game has cameras at fewer than 30 different positions, for today's broadcast CBS will more than double that number, to 62, says Howard Postley, CTO of 3ality Technica, who wrote about the challenges of producing sports broadcasts in 3-D in the November issue of Spectrum.

Meanwhile, true 3-D sports broadcasts on traditional networks seem to be fading away in the United States. ESPN, the network that had pioneered some of the early 3-D sports broadcasts in the U.S., has moved on to what they call 5-D TV. It sounds great, but it’s more like two-and-a-half D; the 3-D camera rigs are used to capture both a 2-D image and a 3-D image, meaning the broadcast cannot necessarily be optimized for 3-D.

“I think 3D channels are destined to go Over the Top,” Postley says, that is, delivered via the Internet instead of through traditional broadcast channels.

Photo: Randy Sagar/ESPN