Computers, Viruses, etc.
Future extremely powerful Silicon, Optical, Quantum, DNA Computers, which may have self-replicating, mutating, robotics, and nanotechnolgy.
The year 2005 through 2010


• 11/12/2006 - Push is on to build a Web that reasons for you by John Markoff, The New York Times.
      San Francisco - From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of startup companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.    Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide - and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion.
      Referred to as Web 3.0, the artificial-intelligence effort is in its infancy.    But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents.    Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.
      But in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance.
      Currently, the Web might connect a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.
      In contrast, developers want to build a Web that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple request like: "Give me a warm place to vacation.    I have a budget of $3,000 and an 11-year-old child."
      Today, a Web user might have to sift for hours through lists of flights, hotels and car rentals - with options often at odds with one another.    Under Web 3.0 the search would ideally call up a vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a travel agent.
      It would be like a world wide database.    Underscoring the potential of mining human knowledge is an extraordinarily profitable example: The basic technology that made Google possible, known as "Page Rank," exploits human knowledge and decisions about what is significant to order search results.    (It interprets a link from one page to another as a "vote," but votes cast by pages considered popular are weighted more heavily.)
      Today, researchers are pushing further.    Nova Pivack's company Radar Networks, is one of several working to exploit the content of social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.
      Radar's technology is based on a next-generation database system that stores associations, such as one person's relationship to another (colleague, friend), rather than specific items like text or numbers.
      One example that hints at the potential of such systems is KnowItAll, a project by University of Washington faculty members and students with Google financing.    One sample system created using the technology is Opine, which is designed to extract and aggregate user-posted information from product and review sites.
      One demonstration project focusing on hotels "understands" concepts like room temperature, bed comfort and hotel price, and can distinguish between concepts like "great," "almost great" and "mostly OK" to provide useful answers.
      Whereas today's travel recommendation sites force people to weed through long lists of comments and observations left by others, the Web 3.0 system would weigh and rank all of the comments and find, by cognitive deduction, just the right hotel for a particular user.
  
  
• 1/8/2007 - Computer attacks a growing threat - Botnets cause surge in Internet crimes by John Markoff, The New York Times.
      The bad guys are honing their weapons in a quest to breach the Internet's defenses.    They are taking advantage of programs that secretly install themselves on thousands and even millions of personal computers and use them to commit Internet crimes.
      These systems, called botnets, are being blamed for a huge spike in spam that has bedeviled the Internet in recent months, as well as fraud and theft.    Botnets automate and amplify the effects of viruses and other malicious programs, allowing it to scan for specific information to drain money from online bank accounts and stock brokerages.    It has been estimated that botnet programs are present on about 11 percent of the more than 650 million computers attached to the Internet.    Many of these botnet programs are often created by a small group of code writers in Eastern Europe and elsewhere and usually distributed through e-mail attachments.    Eighty percent of all spam now originates from botnets, even using a Internet Service Provider to generate more than 1 billion spam messages in a 24-hour period.
• 1/21/2007 - HP researchers tout nanotech in PC chips by AP.
      Hewlett-Packard researchers say their integration of nanotechnology with traditional circuitry designs in computer chips could help reduce energy use and produce ever-smaller devices.
      Scientists believe it could eventually help companies build vastly smaller products that can be reprogrammed and upgraded at any time.    HP would use it to add more memory at a lower cost to the tiny chips inside the nozzles of inkjet cartridges.    Computer chip makers may shrink the size of the electronics on their chips and get higher processing output and lower energy consumption.    It will allow them to pack transistors tighter together on the chip, rather than shrinking the transistors to fit more onto a single piece of silicon.
• 2/7/2007 - Hackers attack key computer pipelines by AP.
      Washington - Hackers briefly overwhelmed at least three of the 13 computers that help manage global computer traffic in one of the most significant attacks against the Internet since 2002.
      Experts said the unusually powerful attacks lasted as long as 12 hours but passed largely unnoticed by most computer users, a testament to the resiliency of the Internet.    Behind the scenes, computer scientists worldwide raced to cope with enormous volumes of data that threatened to saturate some of the Internet's most vital pipelines.    The motive for the attacks was unclear.
• 2/18/2007 - New computer chips have it all - Makers balance speed, efficiency by Jordan Robertson, AP.
      San Jose, Calif. - Intel has designed a computer chip that promises to perform about a trillion calculations per second or 1.01 teraflops as quickly as an entire data center - while consuming as much energy as a light bulb (62 watts), and running at a frequency of 3.16 gigahertz.    In comparison the 1996 super computers took up 2,000 square feet, used 10,000 Pentium Pro processors, and consumed more than 500 kilowatts of electricity.
      Intel's latest chip has 100 million transistors on it and is still in the research phase, and our present Operating systems may not be intelligent enough to control it.
• 3/11/2007 - Data explosion keeps growing - Without deletions there'd be no room by Brian Bergstein, AP.
      Boston - A technology research firm IDC sought to account for all the ones and zeros that make up photos, videos, e-mails, Web pages, instant messages, phone calls and other digital content and if each file gets replicated three times would generate 161 billion gigabytes - 161 exabytes of digital information last year.    That is equal to 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun (3 million times the information in all the books ever written).    The supply of data technically outstrips the supply of places to put it which they estimate is 185 exabytes of storage available.    They have estimated by 2010 it will jump to 988 exabytes.
  
  
• 2/1/2008 - Undersea Internet cables break in Mideast by Matthew Rosenberg, AP.
      New Delhi - At least for awhile the World Wide Web wasn't worldwide.    Two cables that carry Internet traffic deep under the Mediterranean Sea snapped, disrupting service across much of Asia and the Mideast.    India took one of the biggest hits, and the damage from its slowdowns and outages rippled to some U.S. and European companies that rely on India's flourishing outsourcing industry to handle customer-service calls and other tasks.
      Although disruptions of larger U.S. firms were not widespread, the outage raised questions about the vulnerability of the Internet infrastructure.    It is a wake-up call that no one was immune.
      They believed a ship anchor may have snapped the two cables, the size that of a human thumb, north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria.    Engineers scrambled to reroute traffic to satellites and other cables, and it affected Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain.
• 2/6/2008 - Microsoft's big appetite by AP.
      If Microsoft wins control of Yahoo, the combined entity will pose a greater challenge to Google.    Google controls 62 percent of the global search market; Microsoft-Yahoo would control 16 percent.
• 2/17/2008 - Video downloads strain providers by Peter Svensson, AP.
      New York - In 1995, the first warning was raised: The throng swarming to the Internet would overwhelm the system as soon as 1996, which has been proved untrue to date.    Until right about now, as the growing popularity of video on the Net has driven traffic increase that's putting strains on service providers, particularly cable companies.    To deal with it, they have had to change the way they convey Internet data.
      They've done this in secret, raising concerns - by Web companies, consumer groups and the FCC chairman - that the nature of the Internet is being altered in ways that are difficult to divine.    As traffic grows, there are signs that these subtle and secret controls are insufficient, and will give way to more overt measures.    For instance, we could wind up paying not just for the connection speed, but for how much we download.    Already, some ISPs are hindering file-sharing traffic, and AT&T is talking about blocking pirated content.
      The issue is comming to a head this year, as the FCC investigates complaints from consumer groups and legal scholars that Comcast, the largest U.S. cable ISP, secretly hampered subscriber file sharing, which allows download of movies, music and software.    This violates the Internet's unwritten tradition of "net neutrality" - the principle that traffic be treated equally.
      The FCC has adopted a broad policy that ISPs can't block specific applications, but is unclear, and Comcast says they are doing reasonable traffic management.    The ISPs are slowing down less time-sensitive traffic, like file sharing, to keep Web surfing snappy, and of course keeping that secret so competitors can not attack that in their marketing.
      Bandwidth buildup: Peer-to-peer file sharing is expected to account for 42.9 percent of global internet traffic by 2011: where Video and voice communication at 1.7 percent; Gaming 3.1 percent; Web and e-mail transfer 22.4 percent; Video to PC 19.0 percent; Video to TV 10.9 percent.
• 2/24/2008 - Good vibrations, electric result by Brian Bergstein, AP.
      Boston - Someday your shirt might be able to power your iPod -- just doing the normal stuff expected of a shirt.    Scientists have developed a way to generate electricity by jostling fabric with unbelievably tiny wires woven inside, raising the prospect of textiles that produce power simply by being stretched, rustled or ruffled by a breeze.    They have combined the precision of ultrasmall nanotechnology with the elegant principle known as the piezoelectric effect, in which electricity is generated when pressure is applied to certain materials.    In this time of looking for alternative power sources, a Japanese railway has experimented with mats, placed under turnstiles, that translate the pressure from thousands of commuters' footfalls into usable power.    French scientists have proposed capturing energy from raindrops hitting a structure with piezoelectric properties.
      Zhong Lin Wang and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology covered individual fibers of fabric with nanowires made of zinc oxide.    These wires are only 50 nanometers in diameter, and then the alternating fibers are coated with gold, and as one strand of fabric is stretched against another, resulting in tension and pressure to generate a piezoelectric charge that is captured by the gold and can be fed into a circuit.    Any kind of movement of the shirt will generate usable electricity.
      Wang has coaxed the wires to grow around strands of yarn in a few square millimeters of fabric, but has not made sizable pieces yet.    He estimates one square meter of nanowire-infused fabric would produce around 80 milliwatts, enough to recharge portable music players.    Another drawback is the material is not washable, so they will have to find a way to coat the nanowires.
• 5/5/2008 - Memory milestone by Jordan Robertson, AP.
      San Jose, Calif. - For nearly 40 years, scientists have speculated that basic electrical circuits have a natural ability to "remember" things, even when the power is switched off.    Now researchers at Hewlett-Packard Co. have proved them right, with a discovery they hope will lead to memory chips that store more data but consume far less power.    The newly discovered circuit element -- called a memristor -- could let cell phones go weeks without a charge, PCs start up instantly, and laptops retain your session information long after the battery dies.
      The new memristor could challenge flash memory, and chips of it would be faster, use less power and take up far less space than today's flash possibly 100 to 1000 times better.    HP labs built a meristor with a layer of titanium dioxide sandwiched between two metal electrodes, and discovered that the amount of resistance it exerts depends on how much electric charge had previously passed through it.    Thus the memristor had an innate ability to remember the amount of charge that has flowed through it long after the power to it is turned off.    The commercical viability of this product is at least a few years away.
• 6/15/2008 - U.S. scientists develop fastest supercomputer AP.
      Scientists have unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, a $100 million machine that for the first time has performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise.    This was done by engineers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and IBM on a computer to be used primarily on nuclear weapons work, including simulating nuclear explosions.    The computer, named Roadrunner, is twice as fast as IBM's Blue Gene system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is three times faster than the world's other supercomputers.
      The scientists took the basic chip design (of a PlayStation) and advanced its capability and will be used in civilian engineering, medicine and science, developing biofuels and more fuel-efficient cars, finding drug thearapies and providing services to the financial industry.
• 8/18/2008 - Perfect 'nanonet' technology by Dan Hogan, ScienceDaily.
      Researchers have overcome a major obstacle in producing transistors from networks of carbon nanotubes, a technology that could make it possible to print circuits on plastic sheets for applications, including flexible displays and an electronic skin to cover an entire aircraft to monitor the formation of structure cracks.
      The so-called "nanonet" technology -- circuits made of numerous carbon nanotubes randomly overlapping in a fish-net-like structure - has been plagued by a critical flaw: The network is contaminated with metallic nanotubes that cause short circuits, but this discovery solved that problem by cutting the nanonet into strips.    The key advantage of the nanonet technology is that it can be produced at low temperature, enabling the transistors to be placed on flexible sheets that would melt under the high temperatures required to manufacture silicon-based transistors.    They created a flexible circuit containing more than 100 transistors, the largest nanonet ever produced and the first demonstration of a working nanonet circuit.    Therefore we our now capable of making circuits with 10,000 or more transistors at a low cost, shock-resistant, lightweight, and flexible.
      The flexible displays could be integrated into automative windshields for driver information; electronic paper displaying text and images, solar cells printed on plastic sheets; and TV screens capable of being rolled up for transport and storage.
  
  
• 4/1/2009 - Internet worm set to change today by Jordan Robertson, AP.
      San Francisco - The conficker computer worm that has infected at least 3 million PCs is set to spring to life in a new way today -- April Fools' Day.    That's when many poisoned machines will get more aggressive about "phoning home" to the worm's creators over the Internet.    When that happens, the bad guys will be able to trigger the program to send spam, spread more infections, clog networks with traffic, or try and bring down Web sites.
      Technically, this could cause havoc, from massive network outages to the creation of a cyberweapon of mass destruction that attacks government computers.
      The army of Conficker-infected machines, known as a "botnet," could be one of the greatest cyber-crime tools ever assembled, if their authors can figure out a way to reliably communicate with it.    Infected PCs need commands to come alive, by connecting to Web sites controlled by the bad guys.    Even legitimate sites can be co-opted for this purpose, if hackers break in.
      So far, Conficker-infected machines have been trying to connect each day to 250 Internet domains -- the spots where Web sites are parked.    The bad guys need to get just one of those sites under their control to send their commands to the botnet.    Computer security companies have been able to work with domain name registrars, which administer Web site addresses, to block the botnet from dialing in.    But today, many infected machines will generate a list of 50,000 new domains a day that they could try.
• 4/10/2009 - Everyone's vulnerable as cyber spying grows by Paul Haven, AP.
      Ghost hackers infiltrating the computers of Tibetan exiles and the U.S. electric grid have pulled back the curtain on 21st-centrury espionage as nefarious as anything from the Cold War -- and far more difficult to stop.
      Today, a hacker with a high-speed Internet connection, knowledge of computer security and some luck can pilfer information thought to be safely ensconced in a digital locker.    And the threat is growing, with countries -- including the U.S. -- pointing fingers at each other even as they ramp up their own cyber espionage.    The Pentagon this week said it paid more than $100 million in the last six months responding to damage from cyber attacks and other network problems, and the White House is reviewing how to use technology to protect the nation's electric grid and stock markets to tax data and nuclear launch codes.
      In 2008, there were 5,499 known breaches of U.S. government computers (DOD, Homeland Security, and NASA) with malicious software.    A skilled cyber attacker can remotely turn on the camera on your home computer, convert your cell phone into a listening device.    By infiltrating the Dalai Lama group's e-mail system in Tibet, cyber invaders saw nearly everything his monks did.    And the Chinese hackers went even further, infiltrating 1,295 computers in 103 countries.
• 4/19/2009 - Hackers sought to help protect U.S. computers by Lolita C. Baldor, AP.
      Washington - Wanted: Computer hackers.    Federal authorities aren't looking to prosecute them, but to pay them to secure the nation's networks.    The applicants must understand hackers tools and tactics and be able to analyze Internet traffic and identify vulnerabilities in the federal systems for 250 new jobs by 2011.
• 7/9/2009 - Google to take on Microsoft Windows by AP.
      Sun Valley, Idaho - Google is hoping to gain greater control over how personal computers work by developing a free operating system that will attack Microsoft's golden goose -- its dominant Windows franchise.    The new operating system will be based on Google's 9-month-old Web browser, Chrome.    Google intends to rely on help from the community of open-source programmers to develop the Chrome operating system, which is expected to begin running computers in the second half of 2010.    Early versions of the OS will be geared for netbooks as a challenge to Microsoft's Window 7 is also as well as PC's.    Unless Google can show a significant improvement that dominance may not change.    In Google's case it is all about selling more Internet ads, and at present only about 30 million people are using Chrome, a fraction of surfers who rely on Internet Explorer.
• 7/9/2009 - Massive cyber attack targeted U.S. agencies by Lolita C. Baldor, AP.
      Washington - An Internet attack that overwhelmed computers at U.S. and South Korean government agencies for days was even broader than initially realized, pestering the White House, the Pentagon and the New York Stock Exchange and shutting down other official Web sites.    Targets were the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post.    South Korean intelligence officials believe the attacks were carried out by North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces, but it is too early to know where it originated.    The attacks have been occurring since July 5th and has been aimed at agencies public sites, which were saturated with as many as a million hits per second, amounting to 4 billion Internet hits at once.    Most sites are capable of handling a level of about 25,000 users.    The attack suggest the involvement of between 30,000 to 60,000 computers.
      I was affected by this, in that for a week my website traffic to www.mazzaroth.com dropped from 5500 visitors per day to 900-1100, and since then I have weeks where it is only half of what it should be.
• 7/10/2009 - Cyber sleuths hunt attacker by AP.
      Washington - U.S. authorities trying to unravel the widespread cyber attacks against government Web sites this week may never identify a culprit or trace it to its source.    The assault involved more than 100,000 zombie computers linked together in a network known as a "botnet."    Most of those computers were in South Korea, but others were in Japan, China, the U.S. and possibly other countries.    Even the U.S. could launch such attacks ranging from a passive intrusion such as listening in on a foe's communications to an attack that cripples an enemy's air defense systems to clear the way for a bomber attack.
• 8/7/2009 - Hacker barrage quiets Twitter, also Facebook by AP.
      A hacker attack thursday shut down the fast-growing messaging service Twitter for hours, while Facebook experienced intermittent access problems.    Twitter said it suffered a denial-of-service attack.
• 8/16/2009 - Strikes targeting blogger affect Twitter by AP.
      The denial-of-service attacks that shut down Twitter globally for a few hours and disrupted Facebook and LiveJournal recently were intended to be surgical strikes against a small-time blogger espousing anti-Russian sentiments, tech security researchers say.    This highlighted the fragility of social networks that aggregate large blocks of user accounts in systems built for speed.    On Aug. 6 an attacker set out to bombard the Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal accounts of a blogger who calls himself Cyxymu, from Tbilisi, Georgia.    At the time, he had 46 followers on Twitter, and frequently expressed objections to the Russian invasion of Georgia, determined by a security firm.    This attacker directed a comparatively small number of bots to disrupt the computer servers routing traffic to the blogger from Georgia -- and to millions of other Twitterers.    It would take at least 100,000 bots to shut down Twitter's servers.    It would cost about $5,000 to rent bots for such an attack, he said.
• 10/11/2009 - "Augmented reality' coming to cell phones by AP.
      You're walking down the street looking for a good place to eat.    You hold up your cell phone and use it like a viewfinder on a camera, so the screen shows what's in front of you.    But it also shows things you couldn't see before: Brightly colored markers indicating nearby restaurants and bars.
      New phone applications take advantage of the phones' global positioning system and compass features and access to high-speed wireless networks to mesh superlocal Web content with the world that surrounds you.
      The first phones with Google's Android operating system, which enables augmented reality, have come out in the past year.    The iPhone became augmented-reality-friendly with the compass that made its debut in June on iPhone 3GS.    Apple also recently joined Google in making it possible for software developers to overlay images on the phone's camera view.
      A company Amsterdam-based Layar, which recently released an augmented reality browser by the same name for Android phones.    Layar lets you search for things on Google, but delivers the results based on your location, which it determines from the GPS readout.    So you can search for a bike shop or a pet store close to where you happen to be.    This can also be automated if you are to lazy to search for certain kinds of information.    The augmented-reality program, known as Monocle, was built for Yelp, a web site with business reviews written by customers, and in now a formal feature that combines the iPhone's camera view with tiny tags indicating what is in the area.
• 10/25/2009 - 'Cloud computing' incidents raise concerns by David Sarno, Los Angeles Times.
      Over the past year, the technology world has been enamored of the possibilities of moving into the cloud.    This trend enables consumers to forget about storing their software and data on local hard drives and let the major companies worry about keeping it safe on a network of remote servers.    But a series of incidents has poked holes in the hype bubble about the cloud's dependability and whether it is ready for use by a broader group.    This month, a computer failure cut off many users of the Sidekick mobile device from large amounts of personal data that were stored on Microsoft servers or its subsidiary, and also the backup server failed too.    Last month, Google weathered a pair of outages of its cloud-based e-mail system, one which lasted for nearly two hours, after the company made an error upgrading its own systems.    And as mentioned above in August Twitter was offline for hours, which took days to recover fully.
      Google's Gmail and Microsoft's Hotmail started as free products, but are now pitching their online services to governments, universities and big buisnesses, which would be enterprise dollars and would build reliability and security.    At present their systems are vulnerable to damage or interruption from earthquakes, terrorist attacks, floods, fires, power loss, telecommunications failures, computer viruses, computer denial of service attacks, as well as sabotage and vandalism.
  
• 12/27/09 - The future is closer than you think by Jessica Mintz, AP.
      Seattle - Ten years ago, we would have been blown away by a cell phone with far more computing power and memory than the average personal computer had in 1999, along with a built-in camera and programs to manage every aspect of our lives.    Ten years from now, the iPhone and its ilk will be antiques.
      Over the next decade, the evolution of computing and the Internet will produce faster, increasingly intelligent devices.    More of our possessions will contain sensors and computers that log our activities, building digital dossiers that augment our memories, help us make decisions and tame information overload.
      Since 2000 we have increased the ways we could stay connected through cell phones, camera phones, smart phones and the iPhone, laptops with internet connections almost everywhere.    Personal homepages were replaced by blogs that could be set up in seconds, which gave anyone with a computer and Web access the potential to reach a larger audience than many newspapers.
      First-generation social networks, little more than online address books, gave way to sites such as Facebook and Twitter, where we add our words, photos, links and video posts to a collective stream of consciousness.
      All these changes unfolded because of an explosion in computing power and connectivity that only figures to accelerate in the next decade.    We also have access to more data about the world around us, dwarfing the real-time stock quotes, government statistics, scientific databases and other information stores available today, which in the next decade will be available instantaneously, anywhere.    The software will remember everything we buy, read online and watch on tv, using this information to suggest recommendations for items you might be interested in or just to keep up with everyone else.    It will be possible for computers to respond to speech, gestures and handwriting, solve specific problems based on you input, even translation in seconds, and all this from speedy connections to "the cloud," powerful network computers that perform services remotely.
  
  
• 1/3/10 - 'Augmented reality' about to reach mainstream by Wallin Wong, Chicago Tribune.
      Chicago - "Augmented reality" may sound like technobabble, but the concept behind this technology is familiar to anyone who has seen any of the "Terminator" movies.    A cyborg is able to scan its surrounding area and superimpose data on what it sees, now a technology coming to consumers, who can expect to see it in their everyday lives in 2010.    The technology overlays computer data on the real world when viewed through a live video feed, on entertainment, interactive shopping experiences, magazines and even mobile phone applications.    The next wave of new programs will be for smart phones, platforms for Apple's iPhone system and Google's Android allowing for developers who can experiment with augmented reality.    On the iPhone 3GS an app called Monocle allows a user to hold a phone's camera to view a street, information about nearby businesses pops up on the screen.    It is still in its infancy and will mature on interactivity as time goes by.
  
• 1/13/10 - Google threatens to leave China by AP.
      Google will stop censoring its search results in China and may pull out of the country after discovering that computer hackers had tricked human-rights activists into opening their e-mail accounts to outsiders.    This was a major shift for Google, who said they would obey Chinese laws that require some politically and socially sensitive issues to be blocked from search results that are available in other countries.    Google claimed it detected a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China."    The hacker's primary goal was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.    So Google is no longer willing to continue censoring our results on its Chinese search engine, as the government requires.
  
• 1/24/10 - A (catlike) step toward 'thinking' - Machines behave more like brains by Jordan Robertson, AP.
      San Francisco - Scientists say they've made a breakthrough in their pursuit of computers that "think" like a living thing's brain - an effort that tests the limits of technology.    Even the world's most powerful supercomputers can't replicate basic aspects of the human mind.    A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near.    But researchers from IBM are reporting that they've simulated a cat's cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer.    The computer has 147,456 processors and 144 terabytes of main memory.    The scientists had previously simulated 40 percent of a mouse's brain in 2006, a rat's full brain in 2007, and 1 percent of a human's cerebral cortex this year, using progressively bigger supercomputers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.    Dharmendra Modha, manager of cognitive computing for IBM Research and senior author of the paper, and researchers at Stanford University, are trying to get a computer to rely less on structured data and more on recognizing images, using senses like sight, touch and hearing into their decisions.
  
• 1/24/10 - Ethics spur Google's China move by Michael Liedtke, AP.
      San Francisco - Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have always put their principles before profit, even to the point of using their control of the company to take a stand such as leaving China's rapidly growing Internet market in defense of free speech and its users' privacy rights.    Both own 58 percent of voting power among shareholders, and in 2006 when they created a Chinese version of its search engine, at Google.cn to be in a better position to profit from China's booming economy breaking a promise to critics of not doing any evil but good things for the world.    But Eric Schmidt the companies chief executive wants them to stay in China to protect its franchise as Chinese becomes the Internet's predominate language - a transition that Schmidt thinks could occur within five years.    China has not been a big moneymaker for Google yet because it's a distant second to the homegrown Baidu.com in the country's Internet search market.
  
• 2/7/10 - Zero-day black market thrives by Jordan Robertson, AP.
      San Francisco - The recent hacking attack that prompted Google's threat to leave China is underscoring the dangers of undisclosed computer security flaws and selling them in the black market.    Because no fix was available made it a sure thing for hackers with a key to the back door, called a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Corporation Internet Explorer browser.    Microsoft rushed out a fix after learning of the attack.    The IE flaw required tricking people into visiting a malicious Web site that installed harmful software on victims' computers.    Microsoft knew about the flaw since September but had not planned to fix it until February since they had not seen it used in attacks yet and had others to work on first.    The hackers did their attack in December just before they thought Microsft was going to fix it.
• 2/13/10 - Microsoft needs a big smart-phone move by Sharon Pian Chan, The Seattle Times.
      Seattle - The last three years have felt like a pit of quicksand for Microsoft's mobile-phone business.    Caught flat-footed when Apple came out with the iPhone in 2007, Microsoft has failed to even catch up to newcomers such as Google's smart phones.    So they have released Windows Mobile 7.0, a new version of its operating system for smart phones in hope of catching up.
  
• 2/14/10 - Cyberattacks from China threaten world's businesses - Few firms admit they are targets by Joe McDonald, AP.
      Beijing - Google's accusation that its e-mail accounts were hacked from China landed like a bombshell because it cast light on a problem that few companies will discuss: the pervasive threat from China-based cyberattacks.    There is a growing concern that China is a center for a global explosion of Internet crimes, part of a rash of attacks aimed at a wide array of targets, from a British military contractor to banks and chemical companies to a California software maker.    The government denies it is involved, as China's foreign minister claims they are also victim of pirate attacks and the international community must fight the phenomenon together.
      But experts say the highly skilled attacks suggest the Chinese military, which is a leader in cyberwarfare research, or other government agencies might be breaking into computers to steal technology and trade secrets to help state companies.    Oficials in the U.S., Germany and Britain say hackers linked to China's military have broken into government and defense systems.    But attacks on commercial systems receive less attention because the victims rarely come forward in fear it might erode trust in their businesses.    Google was the exeption to come forth and pulled out if the government does not loosen restrictions.    Two other companies disclosed they were targets: software maker Adobe Systems Inc. and Rackspace Inc, a Web hosting service.    A Finnish security software maker F-Secure Corp., said they detected about two dozen attacks originating from China each month since 2005.    China has a strategic goal of becoming the world-dominant economic power within this century, and one way to do that is to steal industrial secrets and antivirus supplier McAfee Inc. says intellectual property worth an estimated $1 trillion was stolen worldwide through the Internet in 2008.    China states that any suggestion that the government is involved in any Internet attack is groundless and aims to discredit China.    China has the world's largest population of Web users at more than 384 million.
  
• 2/18/10 - Tablets and smartbooks aim to fill PC-phone gap - Wireless firms tout devices in Spain by Peter Svensson, AP.
      Barcelona, Spain - Wireless carriers are betting that consumers will by devices that are bigger than a telephone but smaller than a laptop.    Apple's iPad which comes out next month as will many others crowding the niche.    Some are making keyboard-less "tablet" computers like the iPad, while others small laptop-like "smartbooks" that will sell for a few hundred dollars.    These devices are not running on Microsoft's Windows software, the smartbook runs Android, which Google created for mobile devices and gives away.    And rather than using a computer processor from Intel or AMD, they use a chip from Qualcomm that has cell-phone heritage.    They are ready to use when you open them just like a cell-phone and receives your e-mail.    The Qualcomm chip uses less power than a PC chip so it can be used for 12 hours between charging.    Also wireless carriers will sell them, and AT&T will provide wireless broadband service for the iPad.    Smartbooks will have built-in modems for Internet access on cellular networks, which will come with a monthly service fee and a purchase price in $200-to-$400 range.
• 3/7/10 - Microsoft adapts Office for the Web - Process also must guard profit margin by Dina Bass, Bloomberg News.
      Seattle - Microsoft's Stephen Elop is preparing for the biggest shake-up to the $19 billion Office business in a decade as the company races Google to sell Internet-based programs.    He says cloud computing and social-networking sites have created a "constructive disruption" that could be more of an opportunity that a threat.    Office 2010, due by June, will include a free Web-based version for the first time matching similar software from Google.    Elop's dilemma is to protect his unit's 64 percent profit margin.    Under the cloud-computing model, Microsoft would store Office programs on its own servers and deliver them to customers online, which cost the company more than supplying software installed on computers.    Elop says this will mean buisnesses actually end up spending more money with Microsoft because they are doing your networking, your hardware and operations and customer support.
  
• 3/7/10 - Cybersecurity - U.S. needs twin strategies of deterrence and pre-emption by Mike McConnell, The Washington Post.
      The U.S. is fighting a cyberwar today, and we are losing.    Its that simple.    As the most wired nation on Earth, we offer the most targets of significance, yet our cyber defenses are woefully lacking.    We lack a cohesive strategy to meet this challenge.    If an enemy disrupted our financial and accounting transactions, our equities and bond markets or our retail commerce - or created confusion about the legitimacy of those transactions - chaos would result.    Our power grids, air and ground transportation, telecommunications and water-filtration systems are in jeopardy as well.
      So as to cyber-war we need to use deterrence and pre-emption on the nature of the threat.
  
• 3/21/10 - Scientists create invisibility cloak - Device works on very small scale by Randolph E. Schmid, AP.
      Washington - From Grimm's fairy tales to Harry Potter, the cloak of invisiblity has played a major role in fiction.    Now scientists have taken a small but important step toward making it reality.    Researchers at Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology report they were able to cloak a tiny bump in a layer of gold, preventing its detection at nearly visible infrared frequencies.    Their cloaking device also worked in three dimensions, while previously developed cloaks worked in two dimensions, lead researcher Tolga Ergin said.
      The cloak is a structure of crystals with air spaces in between, sort of like a woodpile, that bends light, hiding the bump in the gold layer underneath.    The bump was tiny, a mere 0.00004 inch high and 0.0005 inch across, so that a magnifying lens was needed to see it.    "In principle, the cloak design is completely scalable; there is no limit to it," Ergin said.    They will have to learn more in the field of transformation optics and new applications to arise out of the field.    The two dimensional cloak used microwaves which bounce off objects, Ergin used infrared waves which are close to the spectrum of visible light.
  
• 3/23/10 - Google stops censoring search results in China - Some operations leave mainland by AP.
      Google has stopped censoring search results on its site in China and redirected users to an unfiltered search based in Hong Kong.    China stated that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement, and visitors to Google.cn are being redirected to the Chinese-language service based in Hong Kong, where Google does not censor the search results.
  
• 3/28/10 - 'Smart' meters vulnerable to hacking - Power grid faces security questions by Jordan Robertson, AP.
      San Francisco - Computer-security researchers say new "smart" meters designed to help deliver electricity more efficiently also have flaws that could let hackers tamper with the power grid in previously impossible ways.    Hackers could jack up your power bills and turn your power off and on, by simply reprogramming them, them wirelessly hack the meter from a laptopIn the U.S. alone, more than 8 million smart meters have been deployed by electric utilities and nearly 60 million should be in place by 2020.
  
• 5/9/10 - Flaw leaves Internet at risk - Hackers use outages to spy, attack sites by Peter Svensson, AP.
      In 1998, a hacker told Congress that he could bring down the Internet in 30 minutes by exploiting a flaw that sometimes caused online outages by misdirecting data.    In 2003, the Bush administration concluded that fixing this flaw was in the nation's vital interest.    Fast forward to 2010, and very little has happened to improve the situation, as the flaw still causes outages every year.    These outages are a problem borne out of the open nature of the Internet, which is a quality that also has stimulated the Net's dazzling growth.    Highjacking information is as simple as reprogramming a router to redirect traffic at a small ISP, on a routing system that has been unreformed for more than a decade, and most just call it the price to be paid for the Internet's open, flexible structure.
  
• 5/16/10 - Who'll win tomorrow's tech race? by John Swartz, USA Today.
      San Francisco - The major tech giants are celebrating a landmark birthday these days.    Microsft (35), Cisco Systems (25) and Yahoo (15), IBM (99) and Apple (35).    But this ever-changing landscape, Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.com have grown stronger, and Cisco, Oracle, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Intel forge ahead, according to numerous tech analysts, executives and venture capitalists.    Meanwhile, the fortunes of Yahoo, AOL, MySpace and eBay are less clear, a consequence of missed marketing opportunities, lack of innovation or something else.    The debate rages over Microsoft, good or bad.
      The pace of today's market - accelerated by explosive growth in the mobile, social-media and so-called cloud computing segments - presents as many risks as opportunities.    So who is best positioned to adapt and prosper.    At present it is the ones that innovate, revamp business plans every few months or acquire key technologies.    Tech is in the midst of its fifth major cycle, mainframe computers dominated the 1950s and '60s, mini-computers the '70s, desktop PCs the '80s and the Internet the '90s.    The current cycle is the mobile Internet, and some predict within the next five years most will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs.    Smart phones, e-book readers, connected in-car electronics and wireless home appliances such as gaming consoles will top 10 billion unit sales by 2020 - 10 times more devices that there are desktop PCs.    Apple, Facebook, Amazon.com and Google will become the mobile Internet innovation pace setters.
• 6/16/10 - Fighting cyber attacks discussed - Agencies, Congress consider actions by Lolita C. Baldor, AP.
      Washington - The government may have to take "extraordinary measures" in responding to a cyber attack that affects critical public or privately run computer networks, a senior Homeland Security official said.    National Cyber Security Center director Phil Reitinger said Congress should work with the administration to determine if new presidential emergency powers are needed to govern how key industries such as power plants, the electrical grid and vital financial systems respond during a cyber crisis.    The Senate said those powers could include the ability to require companies to install a computer patch or block particular Internet traffic.    So how big a role should the government play and which federal agency should be in charge.    Or should private companies who can probably do a better job than the federal government in protecting their systems with qualified staff?
  
• 8/1/10 - Smart gadgets to anticipate our needs - Expect gizmos with very personal touch by Steve Johnson, San Jose Mercuty News.
      Don't be surprised if one day your refrigerator nags you to lose weight, your phone blocks calls it figures you're too stressed to handle and your wisecracking car entertains you with pun-filled oneliners.    Within a decade or two, researchers at Silicon Valley companies and elswhere predict, consumer gadgets will be functioning like hyper-attentive butlers, anticipating and fulfilling people's needs without having to be told.    Life would not only be more convenient, it might even last longer: Devices could monitor people's health and step in when needed to halp them get better.    Artificial intelligence specialist at Menlo Park, Calif., think tank, SRI International, which has been studying the concept for the military claim that some of these gadgets already are being developed, which will be coming soon.    This technology would be a new generation of personal assistants with a combination of sophisticated sensors and carefully tailored conputer software.    The machines would adjust their own actions to the preference s and needs of the individual, by analyzing data on the person's past actions and monitoring current behavior with cameras, audio recorders and other sensors.    Intel believes one day soon the gadgets will have the ability to read their owner's emotions, by way of heart monitors and galvanic skin-resonse sensors, and could detect mood swings.
  
• 8/30/10 - U.S. considers strikes at enemy's computers by Ellen Nakashima, The Washington Post.
      Washington - The Pentagon is contemplating an aggressive approach to defending its computer systems that include pre-emptive actions such as knocking out parts of an adversary's computer network overseas - but it is wrestling with how to pursue the startegy legally.    So can the Pentagon take such action without violating international law or other countries' sovereignty?    Most experts believe traditional defensive steps such as updating firewalls and protecting computer ports or an active defense of military computers, network defense is the way to go.    They want to shut down somebody trying to attack us according to General Keith Alexander, the head of the Pentagon's new Cyber Command, which is made up of 1,000 elite hackers and spies, to become slated and fully operational Oct. 1.    The military's dismantling in 2008 of a Saudi website that U.S. officials suspected of facilitating suicide bombers in Iraq also inadvertently disrupted more that 300 servers in Saudi Arabia, Germany and Texas.    The Obama adminstration put a moratorium on such network warfare actions until clear rules could be established.
  
• 9/27/10 - Expert: 'Worm' is work of well-funded hackers by Lolita C. Baldor, AP.
      Washington - A powerful computer code attacking industrial facilities around the world, but mainly in Iran, probably was created by experts working for a country or a well-funded private group, according to an analysis by a leading computer security company.    The malicious code, called Stuxnet, was designed to go after several "high-value targets," said a manager at Symantec Corp.    This malware has infected as many as 45,000 computer systems around the world.    U.S. officials said that Stuxnet was the first malicious computer code created to take over systems that contol the inner workings of industrial plants.    60 percent of the computers infected with Stuxnet are in Iran, and an additional 18 percent are in Indonesia, less than 2 percent are in the U.S.
  
• 9/28/10 - U.S. plans to track new communication - Internet services getting attention by Ellen Nakashima, The Washington Post.
      Washington - Federal officials are planning to seek legislation that would require social networking companies and voice-over-Internet service providers to adapt their technology so law enforcement can monitor user's communications to catch suspected terrorists and other criminals since it has outpaced the laws means to monitor it with a court order.    A 1994 law required telephone and broadband companies to build intercepotion capabilities into their networks.
  
• 11/17/10 - Microsoft deflects idea of breaking itself up by Dow Jones Newswires.
      San Francisco - Microsoft once under government pressure to break up, now faces similar questions from its stockholders who see a slumping share price.    Chief Executive of Microsoft Steve Ballmer claims it would reduce value by making it more difficult for the company to deal with competitors and still believes they are at the top of the rank for all tech companies.
  
• 11/18/10 - Computer worm may pose threat to industry by Lolita C. Baldor, AP.
      Washington - A malicious computer attack that appears to target Iran's nuclear plants can be modified to wreak havoc on industrial control systems worldwide, and represents the most dire cyberthreat known to industry, government officials and experts said.    The complex code is not only able to infiltrate and take over systems that control manufacturing and other critical operations, it can silently steal sensitive intellectuial property data.    It even concerns Symantec.    Iran believes Stuxnet is part of a Western plot to sabotage its nuclear program, but experts see few signs of major damage there.    The Homeland Security director is concerned that the worm could affect the production of everything from chemicals to baby formula.    This code can automatically enter the system, steal the formula for the product being manufactured, alter the ingredients being mixed and indicate to the operator and your antivirus software that everything is functioning as expected.
  
• 12/6/10 - Websites exploit browsers to secretly track online habits by Jordan Robertson, AP.
      San Francisco - Dozens of websites have been secretly harvesting lists of places that their users previously visited online, everything from news articles to bank sites to pornography, a team of computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego found.    The information could then be used for con artist to learn more about their targets and send them personalized attacks.    It also allows e-commerce companies to adjust ads or prices.    Therefore they are creating profiles on their users.    The technique is called 'history sniffing" which has been going on for more than a decade.
  

This file created on November 15, 2006, and updated on August 17, 2007, January 31, 2009, January 1, 2010, August 11, 2011, and October 8, 2011.