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April 12, 2003
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Congress Takes Another Look at Spam
Congress is taking another stab this year at controlling the growing volume of spam that is clogging the nation's e-mail boxes. Thursday, Sens. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., reintroduced the CAN-SPAM bill, which won the support of the Senate Commerce Committee last year but did not make it to a vote on the Senate floor.
The legislation, which is backed by large ISPs (Internet service providers), including Yahoo! Inc. and America Online Inc., would require that all unsolicited marketing e-mail contain a valid return address. Senders would be banned from sending further messages once a consumer asked them to stop.
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Digital radio 'shuns' the blind
Digital broadcasters are ignoring the people who are among the heaviest consumers of radio, the blind and visually impaired, argues broadcast professional Ian Macrae.
Digits matter a lot to visually impaired people. The ones attached to our hands, as well as those which carry crystal clear radio to our ears.
Some of us use them for reading. Many of us use them for exploring what's around us.
Even more of us, perhaps even enough of us to make the stereotype valid, use our digits for twiddling radio dials.
But when it comes to the other sort, or rather to the people who design and manufacture the equipment for receiving DAB, (Digital Audio Broadcasting), they seem to have forgotten that the stereotype of the visually impaired radio fanatic even exists.
They have come very close to designing something which is unusable, or at least very difficult for us, perhaps the most avid, hungry and, let's face it, needy group of radio listeners.
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Microsoft limits XML in Office 2003
A distinction that Microsoft is making between professional and standard versions of Office 2003 means that many customers may not get all the features they've been expecting, including broad support for Web services.
For more than a year, Microsoft has touted Office 2003's support for Extensible Markup Language (XML), a highly anticipated new feature of the productivity suite. But Microsoft now plans to fully deliver the feature only in the two high-end versions of the product, one of which will be available only to businesses subscribing to Microsoft's volume-licensing program.
Two other features also are similarly restricted: the document protection technology Windows Rights Management Services (RMS), and Excel List, a feature for improving analysis of data lists. Microsoft plans to deliver the three features only in the Enterprise and Professional versions of Office 2003, the company confirmed late Thursday.
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Commit to non-genetically modified food, councils told
Environmental groups have urged councils to commit to non-genetically modified food in the run-up to the elections on May 1.
Friends of the Earth has asked councils to pledge not to use GM foods in schools and to call on the government to prevent GM crops being grown in their areas.
The group said councils needed to act before the government and European Commission decide later this year whether to allow the widespread growing of GM crops in Europe.
If given the go-ahead, GM crops risk contaminating local food, farmland and wildlife and threaten the viability of organic food, Friends of the Earth claims.
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Skinny Galaxy Has Supermassive Black Hole At Core
Scientists have uncovered a supermassive black hole at the core of a svelte, spiral galaxy, a finding that questions a recently devised rule of thumb in which only galaxies with bulging cores have such black holes.
Dr. Alex Filippenko, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Luis Ho, an astronomer at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, in Pasadena, discuss these results in the May 1, 2003, issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The scientists determined that galaxy NGC 4395, a flat "pure-disk" galaxy with no central bulge, has a central black hole approximately 10,000 to 100,000 times the mass of our sun. This suggests that other pure-disk galaxies, thought to be devoid of supermassive black holes, may indeed have one lurking within -- quite possibly the featherweights of the supermassive black hole club.
"The supermassive black hole in NGC 4395 is the smallest one yet found in the center of a galaxy," said Filippenko. "This would be consistent with the galaxy having a small bulge. However, the bulge is not just small, it seems to be nonexistent."
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Russia may boost space station role
Russia has indicated that it may expand its role at the International Space Station, following the loss of the US space shuttle Columbia earlier this year.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said he recognised the responsibility which Russia bears in light of Nasa's decision to suspend all flights to the space station because of the shuttle disaster.
Mr Putin was speaking via a video link to the station's current three-man crew on Cosmonauts Day, which marks the first manned flight into space on 12 April 1961.
He told the crew that they had dealt brilliantly with the difficult task of continuing operations at the space station in the weeks following the loss of Columbia and the seven astronauts on board.
"Today, as shuttle flights are temporarily grounded, it is important to keep the ISS in working order," Itar-Tass news agency quoted Mr Putin as saying.
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Fake Voice Recordings Easy To Make, Hard To Detect
Are the audiotapes periodically released by Osama bin Laden real or fake? Their poor audio quality and the increasing availability of reliable voice transformation technologies certainly means there is a chance they're fake, said an Oregon scientist.
"Many places in the world are developing technologies that can quickly and easily transform voices," said Jan van Santen, Ph.D., a mathematical psychologist at Oregon Health & Science University's OGI School of Science & Engineering, based in Hillsboro, Ore. "Because voice transformation technologies are increasingly available, it is becoming harder to detect whether a voice has been faked. The only way to decide whether a recording is authentic is by looking for special cues that are left behind, depending on which transformation method is used."
At the OGI School's Center for Spoken Language Understanding, a new method for voice transformation was developed by one of van Santen's researchers, Alexander Kain, Ph.D. The method mimics the fine acoustic detail that reflects the unique characteristics of an individual's oral cavity and vocal cords.
"The important point isn?t that we know how to do this, but that many scientists already have similar transformation methods and that these methods are simple to implement and readily available to anyone in the literature and on the Internet," noted van Santen.
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UCLA Biologists Elucidate Fertilization Process
UCLA graduate student Jeffrey Riffell and UCLA biology professor Richard Zimmer report the first experimental test on the role of small-scale physics as it influences the interactions between sperm and egg, and the consequences for fertilization, at the annual conference of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences in Sarasota, Fla., April 10.
"The physics of fluid motion has a profound consequence on the ability of sperm to navigate and find an egg, and therefore on fertilization," Zimmer said.
Riffell and Zimmer conducted their research on abalone, but their work applies to other species as well. While a theory has been postulated on what should happen to chemicals in the presence of small-scale turbulence, no scientist had tested the theory before.
"There is an optimum amount of fluid motion where fertilization is significantly enhanced," said Zimmer, whose research is federally funded by the National Science Foundation.
Riffell and Zimmer have been able to simulate important aspects of fluid motion as abalone experience it in their natural habitats, and to assign under what conditions the chemical communication process is optimized, and fertilization is therefore maximized. Similar physical mechanisms operate whether in the turbulent ocean environment or within a mammalian reproductive tract, including humans, Zimmer said.
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Human cloning may never be possible because of a quirk of biology.
Scientists in the United States say hundreds of attempts to clone monkeys have ended in failure.
They think the biological make-up of the eggs of primates, including humans, makes cloning almost impossible.
Cloning has been successful in several mammals, including sheep, mice and cattle, but there is increasing evidence that it does not work in all species.
The research, reported in the journal Science, casts further doubt on efforts by a handful of mavericks to clone humans.
Clonaid, a company created by a UFO cult known as the Raelians, claims to have already cloned several babies. It has produced no evidence to substantiate these claims.
Meanwhile, controversial reproductive scientist Panayiotis Zavos has published a picture of what he claims is "the first human cloned embryo for reproductive purposes".
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Honeypots get stickier for hackers
If Lance Spitzner has his way, network defenders will get sweeter on the "honeypot"--a traditional method of detecting online intruders.
Spitzner and two dozen members of the Honeynet Project hope new changes to the group's open-source honeypot technology will help the method become much more popular among security companies and others. The technology is designed to help users forge their own honeypots--faked computers and networks that serve as decoys for discovering online miscreants.
The changes, to be outlined in a paper that will be published online Monday, were described in a speech Spitzner gave here at the CanSecWest security show. The new features will help honeypots become harder for intruders to detect and easier to deploy for companies and even home users.
"It's an arms race," said Spitzner, founder of the Honeynet Project. "We are coming up with new stuff, and the bad guys will look at it. We are staying ahead of 99 percent of the crowd."
Honeypots solve a major problem of intrusion-detection systems, which frequently flag innocuous network traffic as a potential attack. These "false positives," as they're called, make the systems difficult to manage. They also create a "crying wolf" situation, in which genuine threats can be overlooked.
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Amazon CEO skips raise, bonus
Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos passed up a pay raise and bonus for a fifth straight year, but he managed to cash in on millions of dollars in options, according to the company's proxy filed Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Bezos, along with other company founders such as Apple Computer's Steve Jobs, often hold large stakes in their companies and, as a result, decline traditional salary increases, bonuses or both. But over the years, Bezos has seen his ownership stake fall. For example, it was 27.6 percent last year, down from 41 percent in 1998.
As with other chief executives, a large percentage of Bezos' compensation comes from exercising options. Bezos exercised $7.3 million in options last year, according to Friday's filing. And at the end of the year, he had $5.3 million in options he could have exercised and $13.2 million in options that have yet to vest.
Executive stock option grants are among the hot issues for shareholders these days, not only in the tech sector but also across a range of other industries.
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Swedish institute goes Itanium
Hewlett-Packard has sold 90 dual-processor Itanium 2 machines to the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden's largest engineering school, for use in a wide variety of intense calculation tasks.
The institute purchased 74 rx2600 dual-processor servers and 16 zx6000 dual-processor workstations, HP said Friday. They will be used at the ParallelDatorCentrum, a computing center funded chiefly by the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing, to tackle problems in areas ranging from life sciences to astrophysics. The institute did not release how much it paid for the machines, but calculations show that they would cost at least $1.3 million on the market.
The 90-computer cluster is expected to be running by this summer, but within a year, the institute expects to triple its computing capacity with additional HP computers. In addition, the cluster will be linked into Sweden's national "grid" for scientific computing, one of many networks of shared computers that collectively tackle even larger computing problems.
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Anti-fraud credit cards on trial
The first public trial of new-style Pin credit and debit cards, which are aimed at tackling soaring card fraud, will start in May.
About 80,000 people living in Northampton will be taking part in the trial - and it will eventually be rolled out to the rest of the UK by 2005.
The £1.1bn initiative is aimed at beating the growing cost of credit card fraud, which new figures reveal cost £424.6m last year.
The new-style cards will add a layer of security which will benefit both banks and consumers, as purchases will need to be verified by keying in a four-digit Personal Identification Number (Pin), rather than signing receipts.
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