Brin shaped Google's China stand

* The Wall Street Journal

* TECHNOLOGY
* MARCH 12, 2010

Soviet-Born Brin Has Shaped Google's Stand on China

By BEN WORTHEN

As a boy growing up in the Soviet Union, Sergey Brin witnessed the consequences of censorship. Now the Google Inc. co-founder is drawing on that experience in shaping the company's showdown with the Chinese government.

Mr. Brin has long been Google's moral compass on China-related issues, say people familiar with the matter. He expressed the greatest concern among decision makers, they say, about the compromises Google made when it launched its Chinese-language search engine, Google.cn, in 2006. He is now the guiding force behind Google's decision to stop filtering search results in China, say people familiar with the decision.

Google acknowledged that the call to stop filtering—which was announced in January and set off negotiations with Beijing—could lead to its withdrawal from the fast-growing market.

The move is the clearest manifestation yet of a tension that has always existed at Google.

The Internet company, on one hand, is analytical: It built its core search business on algorithms that determine the relevance of Web sites and has tried to apply quantitative analysis to traditionally subjective parts of a business, such as hiring decisions. On the other hand, Mr. Brin and co-founder Larry Page have passionately touted Google's ability to spread democracy through access to information, and adopted the unofficial and now-famous motto, "Don't Be Evil."

"At its best, Google is data-driven with an ethical trump card," said Larry Brilliant, who headed up the company's philanthropic efforts until 2009. Always it was the founders, Messrs. Brin and Page, who could play that card, he added.

Google declined to make Mr. Brin or any other executives available for an interview.

Mr. Brin was born in Moscow in 1973. He emigrated to the United States with his family in 1979, he has said, in part because of anti-Semitism there before the fall of the Soviet Union. He has said in past interviews that the move and its circumstances had a profound impact on his life.

Mr. Brin was asked about the compromises necessary to do business in China during a 2004 interview with Playboy magazine. "There are difficult questions, difficult challenges," he said. "One thing we know is that people can make better decisions with better information," he said, adding that he was aware of cases where finding information through Google's search engine had saved people's lives.

When Google launched its Chinese site, it agreed to filter out results that the Chinese government found objectionable, including some political speech and pornography.

Mr. Brin wasn't completely comfortable with that decision and would sometimes say Google should never have agreed to Beijing's conditions, a person familiar with his thinking said. But his objections were never enough to reverse Google's policy.

"I actually feel like things really improved" in the first years after Google entered China, Mr. Brin said at a technology conference in February. "We were actually able to censor less and less, and our local competitors there also censored less and less."

But following the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, he said, "there's been a lot more blocking going on."

In December, Google detected cyber attacks that it traced to computers in China. It said some of its intellectual property was stolen, adding that it had evidence that attackers were trying to access the accounts of Chinese human-rights activists on Gmail, Google's email service.

Mr. Brin personally supervised Google's subsequent investigation, even moving his office into the building where Google's security team was operating, said a person familiar with the investigation.

The Wall Street Journal reported in January that in debates over how to respond, Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive, argued the company could do more good by keeping its search engine in China. Mr. Brin said Google had already taken that approach. and that it could no longer justify giving in to China's requirements to censor search results.

A Silicon Valley executive who knows Mr. Brin said his Soviet upbringing made him particularly opposed to state use of technology to spy on citizens. This person suspects that the apparent attempts to spy on Gmail users may have been as important in Google's reaction as the issue of censorship. "That tripped Sergey," this person said.

IBM Researchers: chip design advance

Project Seeks to Replace Copper Wires With Lasers and Tiny Silicon Circuits; Intel and Universities Have Similar Efforts
By PAUL GLADER And DON CLARK


Researchers at International Business Machines Corp. are claiming an important advance that could change the way computer chips communicate, sharply boosting speed while lowering energy consumption. The goal is to use pulses of light rather than copper wires to exchange information between chips—and to build the needed components out of silicon rather than costly, esoteric materials.


IBM's advance involves a key component called an avalanche photodetector, which converts light into electricity. The researchers say they used silicon and the element germanium to create a photodetector that is among the fastest and least power-hungry of its kind. They are publishing their findings in the scientific journal Nature. IBM isn't alone in the pursuit. Researchers at universities and companies including Intel Corp. and start-up Luxtera Inc., have also been working on improving chip performance using silicon-based optical components.


"This is the next wave of computing," said Richard Doherty, an analyst at market-research firm Envisioneering Group and a patent holder in optical communications. "By 2020, it may be the dominant way Google, governments, banks and other large users are doing their computing." Optical communications involve encoding information on streams of light particles generated by lasers. The technology uses thin glass fibers rather than bulky cables, yet creates connections that allow more data to flow at higher speed.

Such benefits are the reason long-distance phone wires were replaced with fiber-optic cables, a technology developed in the 1970s. Companies like Luxtera already sell silicon-based optical devices for linking up computers. Researchers are racing to miniaturize optical components so they can be built into microprocessors.


Intel has built a series of optical components from silicon and related materials, including a prototype avalanche photodetector it announced in December 2008. IBM says its version can detect 40 gigabits of data a second—four times the speed of Intel's—and operates at 1.5 volts rather than 30 volts. "That can save a huge amount of power," said Yurii Vlasov, the lead scientist on the IBM research. He said IBM's photodetector can detect weak pulses and amplify them without adding unwanted noise, a previous problem with the technology.


Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's photonics technology lab, called IBM's advance another sign of progress in the field. "As a scientist, I think this is all great," he said. "It just drives more competition."


Mr. Vlasov said it could be five years until the technology makes its way into chips for high-end server systems. It could take another five years before it is used in consumer products such as cellphones, he said.

* TECHNOLOGY
* MARCH 4, 2010

IBM: IBM scientists Fengnian Xia, Yurii Vlasov and Solomon Assefa were part of the team behind the research.

As impressive as the chip is, I love this picture: a Chinese, a Russian, and  an Ethiopian; that the US at its best.

U.S. Scientists Given Access to Cloud Computing

February 5, 2010
U.S. Scientists Given Access to Cloud Computing
By JOHN MARKOFF


The National Science Foundation and the Microsoft Corporation have agreed to offer American scientific researchers free access to the company’s new cloud computing service.


A goal of the three-year project is to give scientists the computing power to cope with exploding amounts of research data. It uses Microsoft’s Windows Azure computing system, which the company recently introduced to compete with cloud computing services from companies like Amazon, Google, I.B.M. and Yahoo. These cloud computing systems allow organizations and individuals to run computing tasks and Internet services remotely in relatively low-cost data centers.


The new program was announced on Thursday at a news conference in Washington.


Neither Microsoft nor the foundation was willing to place a dollar amount on the agreement, but Dan Reed, the corporate vice president for technology strategy and policy at Microsoft, said that the company was prepared to invest millions of dollars in the service and that it could support thousands of scientific research programs.


Access to the service will come in grants from the foundation to new and continuing scientific research. Microsoft executives said they planned eventually to make the new service global.


The government has traditionally supported a group of scientific computing centers at universities and laboratories around the country. These centers have typically housed supercomputers capable of solving scientific and engineering problems quickly. In recent years, however, increasing emphasis has been placed on computing systems capable of storing and analyzing vast amounts of data.


“It’s all about data,” said Jeannette M. Wing, assistant director of computer and information science and engineering directorate at the science foundation. “We are generating streams and rivers of data.”


Genetic sequencing systems are capable of generating as much as a terabyte, 1,000 gigabytes, of information a minute, Dr. Wing said.


Microsoft made its commitment to scientific computing two years after a similar service was introduced by Google and I.B.M. Several scientists familiar with the Microsoft project said the software company was hoping to differentiate the new service by offering scientists a set of custom applications that simplified access to Azure and the use of older software applications like Microsoft Excel.


“We’re trying to figure out how to engage the majority of scientists,” said Dr. Reed, who directed several of the nation’s scientific computing centers before joining Microsoft.


Simplicity of use is one Microsoft goal. Programming modern cloud systems for full efficiency has been difficult. The company is trying to overcome this difficulty in creating a variety of software tools for scientists, said Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer scientist who works with the Microsoft researchers.


Dr. Lazowska said the explosion of data being collected by scientists had transformed the staffing needs of the typical scientific research program on campus from a half-time graduate student one day a week to a full-time employee dedicated to managing the data. He said such exponential growth in cost was increasingly hampering scientific research.

Israeli robots remake battlefield

Israel is developing an army of robotic fighting machines that offers a window onto the potential future of warfare.

Sixty years of near-constant war, a low tolerance for enduring casualties in conflict, and its high-tech industry have long made Israel one of the world's leading innovators of military robotics.

A tiny country is one of the world's leading high-tech hubs.


Over 40 countries have military-robotics programs today. The U.S. and much of the rest of the world is betting big on the role of aerial drones: Even Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite guerrilla force in Lebanon, flew four Iranian-made drones against Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War.




One shudders to think of Hezbollah using drones.


When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, it had just a handful of drones. Today, U.S. forces have around 7,000 unmanned vehicles in the air and an additional 12,000 on the ground, used for tasks including reconnaissance, airstrikes and bomb disposal.

7,000 aerial drones produce an overwhelming volume of data.

In 10 to 15 years, one-third of Israel's military machines will be unmanned, predicts Giora Katz, vice president of Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd., one of Israel's leading weapons manufacturers.


"The Israelis do it differently, not because they're more clever than we are, but because they live in a tough neighborhood and need to respond fast to operational issues," says Thomas Tate, a former U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who now oversees defense cooperation between the U.S. and Israel.

 Their needs are too great to allow them to get bogged down. Every Israeli knows that the nation's security depends on getting things done.

Among the recently deployed technologies that set Israel ahead of the curve is the Guardium unmanned ground vehicle, which now drives itself along the Gaza and Lebanese borders. The Guardium was deployed to patrol for infiltrators in the wake of the abduction of soldiers doing thesame job in 2006. The Guardium, developed by G-nius Ltd., is essentially an armored off-road golf cart with a suite of optical sensors and surveillance gear. It was put into the field for the first time 10 months ago.

A fascinating website of a company with some innovative products. Rafael, too, is a fascinating website.

After bomb-laden fishing boats tried to take out an Israeli Navy frigate off the coast off Gaza in 2002, Rafael designed the Protector SV, an unmanned, heavily armed speedboat that today makes up a growing part of the Israeli naval fleet. The Singapore Navy has also purchased the boat and is using it in patrols in the Persian Gulf.


That is the Protector.


Military analysts say unmanned fighting vehicles could have a far-reaching strategic impact on the sort of asymmetrical conflicts the U.S. is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and that Israel faces against enemies such as Hezbollah and Hamas. In such conflicts, robotic vehicles will allow modern conventional armies to minimize the advantages guerrilla opponents gain by their increased willingness to sacrifice their lives in order to inflict casualties on the enemy.





Suicide bombers could be partially neutralized with such technology.

However, there are also fears that when countries no longer fear losing soldiers' lives in combat thanks to the ability to wage war with unmanned vehicles, they may prove more willing to initiate conflict.


A legitimate concern.


In coming years, engineers say unmanned air, sea and ground vehicles will increasingly work together without any human involvement. Israel and the U.S. have already faced backlash over civilian deaths caused by drone-fired missiles in Gaza, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those ethical dilemmas could increase as robots become more independent of their human masters.


Independence?

Military Is awash in data from drones

Master Sgt. Demetrius Lester/U.S. Air Force, via EPA - An MQ-1 Predator drone returned from a mission to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan in 2008.

In Body of Lies, both the book and the movie, drones appear.


As the military rushes to place more spy drones over Afghanistan, the remote-controlled planes are producing so much video intelligence that analysts are finding it more and more difficult to keep up. Air Force drones collected nearly three times as much video over Afghanistan and Iraq last year as in 2007 — about 24 years’ worth if watched continuously. That volume is expected to multiply in the coming years as drones are added to the fleet and as some start using multiple cameras to shoot in many directions.

A group of young analysts already watches every second of the footage live as it is streamed to Langley Air Force Base here and to other intelligence centers, and they quickly pass warnings about insurgents and roadside bombs to troops in the field. But military officials also see much potential in using the archives of video collected by the drones for later analysis, like searching for patterns of insurgent activity over time. To date, only a small fraction of the stored video has been retrieved for such intelligence purposes.


Col. Daniel R. Johnson, right, in the intelligence center at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va., where analysts watch every second of drones’ video footage live as it is streamed there.

There is too much data, and not enough analysis, as has been made clear. If one knows what one wants to look for, then there is a marker; but if one is conducting an open search, there are no markers, and it has to be exceedingly difficult to make sense of the available data.


Mindful of those lapses, the Air Force and other military units are trying to prevent an overload of video collected by the drones, and they are turning to the television industry to learn how to quickly share video clips and display a mix of data in ways that make analysis faster and easier.

Watching the film, I wondered where the line between truth and fiction really lies.

$26 software hacks drones

This is an amazing story. SOmeone in the Pentagon should be thinking of resigning over it: using software that costs 26 bucks, available off the shelf, U.S. drones have been hacked. The Journal's subheading includes the phrase Iranian backing suspected, but it should say 650 billion dollar military thwarted by 26 buck software major embarrassment.

Music cloud

With its deal this month to buy the Web music service Lala, Apple may be pointing the way to the future of music. In this future, the digital music files on people’s computers could join vinyl records, cassette tapes and CDs in the dusty vault of fading music formats.

I have all three formats.

Instead, music fans will use their always-online computers and smartphones to visit a vast Internet jukebox, where Gregorian chants, Lady Gaga tracks and the several centuries of music in between are instantly available.

For a fee.

The idea of a limitless jukebox in the sky — or in tech-speak, “in the cloud” — has been around for some time, but it is consuming music executives who now associate the word “funk” with more than just a musical genre. The recording industry, which had $40 billion in annual sales a decade ago, is now bringing in half that. More ominously, the growth of revenue from digital downloads, still only a fifth of the total sales pie, is slowing.

New business model to capture greater revenues.

With an estimated $2 billion in annual revenue from iTunes, Apple is in a good position to guide consumers through the process of storing their music collections on Web servers and listening to them in new ways. It can also tightly integrate such a music service into the iPhone, the iPod Touch and all other existing and future Apple gadgets that connect to the Internet.

And all the music that has been downloaded? Such is progress.

David Pakman, a partner at the venture capital firm Venrock and the former chief executive of the download service eMusic, said that Apple “could accelerate the move to media in the cloud more quickly than any other company can.” The acquisition of Lala, he said, “tells us they’re doing it.”

Meanwhile, MySpace, owned by the News Corporation, has acquired two cloud music services in the last month, iLike and Imeem. People briefed on discussions inside MySpace say it is developing a subscription music service to complement its free, ad-supported MySpace Music, a joint venture with the four major music labels.

Google Unveils Free Phone GPS

GPS navigation devices were the latest must-have tech toys just two years ago, and shares of device makers like Garmin and TomTom were soaring.

That didn’t last long. In a turnabout that has been remarkably swift even for the fast-moving technology business, those companies have suffered as competition has pulled down prices — and as more people have turned to their cellphones for directions.

In the latest blow to the business, Google announced a free navigation service for mobile phones on Wednesday that will offer turn-by-turn directions, live traffic updates and the ability to recognize voice commands. The service will initially be available on only one phone, the new Motorola Droid, but will be expanded to more phones soon.

In a briefing on Tuesday in advance of its announcement, Google said that the service might be supported by advertisements in the future. That would make driving directions the latest form of information to shift from being a paid service to one that is ad-supported.

Disney Touts: Ditch the DVD

Walt Disney Co. is close to unveiling technology that it says will enable entertainment companies to adapt their business models to a new reality in which consumers increasingly rely on computers and cell phones in place of DVD players and TVs.

Not only cellphones as a viewing platform, I hope.

The technology, code-named Keychest, could contribute to a shift in what it means for a consumer to own a movie or a TV show, by redefining ownership as access rights, not physical possession.

The technology would allow consumers to pay a single price for permanent access to a movie or TV show across multiple digital platforms and devices—from the Web, to mobile gadgets like iPhones and cable services that allow on-demand viewing. It could also facilitate other services such as online movie subscriptions.

No more scratched discs, cracked cases, or forgotten items. But server capacity and broadband throughput will have to be quite robust.

Keychest aims to address two of the biggest hurdles blocking widespread consumer adoption of movie downloads: the difficulty of playing a movie back on devices other than a PC or laptop, and limited storage space on those computers' hard drives. As such, Keychest could put Disney on a collision course with an initiative, known as the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, or DECE, that has similar goals.

Keychest uses the same "cloud computing" logic that underlies Web-based applications, such as Google Docs, permitting users to store files and photographs on remote Internet servers and access them from anywhere, rather than keeping them on their own computers.

I use Google apps, and like the ubiquitous accessibility.

As an aside, I looked up the word ubiquitous, and saw this term: Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. In the course of ordinary activities, someone "using" ubiquitous computing engages many computational devices and systems simultaneously, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so. This model is usually considered an advancement from the desktop paradigm.

The rollout of the new technology comes at a critical juncture for the movie industry. DVD sales, once a financial mainstay for Hollywood, have fallen as much as 25% at some studios. The decline in DVD revenue has undermined the business model Hollywood has relied on for more than a decade.

DVDs can be awful, but I imagine that mobile computing has had a very significant impact on DVD sales.

Bob Chapek, president of home entertainment at Disney Studios, says the company doesn't expect Keychest to deliver tangible financial results for five years. But he predicts that in combination with Blu-ray, digital distribution "should bring our category back up to a healthy state where we can expect growth in the future." The company declined to name other companies that may have agreed to participate. Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs is Disney's largest shareholder, and people in the entertainment industry say it would be reasonable to infer that Apple would cooperate with such an initiative.

Aside from controlling Apple, Jobs is also Disney's largest shareholder, courtesy of his sale of Pixar to Disney some years ago.

Keychest and DECE are competing for the same market; DECE is accepted by 5 major studios, as well as Comcast and Intel. Interesting idea; tiome will tell.

5 possible technologies

Fascinating look at the future of energy. Article appeared in today's Journal; the online version does not have the illustrations, so I searched them out.

It's a tall order: Over the next few decades, the world will need to wean itself from dependence on fossil fuels and drastically reduce greenhouse gases. Current technology will take us only so far; major breakthroughs are required.

Even WSJ admits the reduction of greenhouse gases will need to be drastically reduced.

SPACE-BASED SOLAR POWER

For more than three decades, visionaries have imagined tapping solar power where the sun always shines—in space. If we could place giant solar panels in orbit around the Earth, and beam even a fraction of the available energy back to Earth, they could deliver nonstop electricity to any place on the planet.

Found graphic in website of National Space Society. This next one is from New Scientist, the source for the WSJ article.

The technology may sound like science fiction, but it's simple: Solar panels in orbit about 22,000 miles up beam energy in the form of microwaves to earth, where it's turned into electricity and plugged into the grid. (The low-powered beams are considered safe.) A ground receiving station a mile in diameter could deliver about 1,000 megawatts—enough to power on average about 1,000 U.S. homes.
The cost of sending solar collectors into space is the biggest obstacle, so it's necessary to design a system lightweight enough to require only a few launches. A handful of countries and companies aim to deliver space-based power as early as a decade from now.





ADVANCED CAR BATTERIES

Electrifying vehicles could slash petroleum use and help clean the air (if electric power shifts to low-carbon fuels like wind or nuclear). But it's going to take better batteries.

Lithium-ion batteries, common in laptops, are favored for next-generation plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles. They're more powerful than other auto batteries, but they're expensive and still don't go far on a charge; the Chevy Volt, a plug-in hybrid coming next year, can run about 40 miles on batteries alone. Ideally, electric cars will get closer to 400 miles on a charge. While improvements are possible, lithium-ion's potential is limited.



One alternative, lithium-air, promises 10 times the performance of lithium-ion batteries and could deliver about the same amount of energy, pound for pound, as gasoline. A lithium-air battery pulls oxygen from the air for its charge, so the device can be smaller and more lightweight. A handful of labs are working on the technology, but scientists think that without a breakthrough they could be a decade away from commercialization.

UTILITY STORAGE

Everybody's rooting for wind and solar power. How could you not? But wind and solar are use-it-or-lose-it resources. To make any kind of difference, they need better storage. Scientists are attacking the problem from a host of angles—all of which are still problematic. One, for instance, uses power produced when the wind is blowing to compress air in underground chambers; the air is fed into gas-fired turbines to make them run more efficiently. One of the obstacles: finding big, usable, underground caverns. Similarly, giant batteries can absorb wind energy for later use, but some existing technologies are expensive, and others aren't very efficient. While researchers are looking at new materials to improve performance, giant technical leaps aren't likely.

American Electric Power images
Lithium-ion technology may hold the greatest promise for grid storage, where it doesn't have as many limitations as for autos. As performance improves and prices come down, utilities could distribute small, powerful lithium-ion batteries around the edge of the grid, closer to customers. There, they could store excess power from renewables and help smooth small fluctuations in power, making the grid more efficient and reducing the need for backup fossil-fuel plants. And utilities can piggy-back on research efforts for vehicle batteries.

CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE

Keeping coal as an abundant source of power means slashing the amount of carbon dioxide it produces. That could mean new, more efficient power plants. But trapping CO2 from existing plants—about two billion tons a year—would be the real game-changer.
Techniques for modest-scale CO2 capture exist, but applying them to big power plants would reduce the plants' output by a third and double the cost of producing power. So scientists are looking into experimental technologies that could cut emissions by 90% while limiting cost increases. Image from Vattenfall, a Swedish company.

Nearly all are in the early stages, and it's too early to tell which method will win out. One promising technique burns coal and purified oxygen in the form of a metal oxide, rather than air; this produces an easier-to-capture concentrated stream of CO2 with little loss of plant efficiency. The technology has been demonstrated in small-scale pilots, and will be tried in a one-megawatt test plant next year. But it might not be ready for commercial use until 2020.

NEXT-GENERATION BIOFUELS

One way to wean ourselves from oil is to come up with renewable sources of transportation fuel. That means a new generation of biofuels made from nonfood crops.

Researchers are devising ways to turn lumber and crop wastes, garbage and inedible perennials like switchgrass into competitively priced fuels. But the most promising next-generation biofuel comes from algae.

Algae grow fast, consume carbon dioxide and can generate more than 5,000 gallons a year per acre of biofuel, compared with 350 gallons a year for corn-based ethanol. Algae-based fuel can be added directly into existing refining and distribution systems; in theory, the U.S. could produce enough of it to meet all of the nation's transportation needs.

But it's early. Dozens of companies have begun pilot projects and small-scale production. But producing algae biofuels in quantity means finding reliable sources of inexpensive nutrients and water, managing pathogens that could reduce yield, and developing and cultivating the most productive algae strains.

Today's Google homepage has this graphic, commemorating the invention of the bar code (should that be barcode?).

Whither digital evidence

For decades, investigators have known that if they enter a suspect's home with a search warrant to look for illegal guns and find sacks of cocaine lying on the coffee table, they can seize the drugs even though the warrant only gave them permission to look for the guns. That is because courts have said authorities can act on evidence of a second crime that was in their "plain view."

But how does the concept of plain view apply to the modern technology of a computer, which might have thousands of files that are easily scrolled, or a cellphone, which can contain all manner of incriminating pictures?

A recent ruling by the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals addressed this question, and the decision could reshape what government investigators can -- and can't -- do when searching digital devices for evidence of crime.

The case involved the Justice Department's high-profile probe of a Northern California company suspected of supplying illegal steroids to professional athletes, including some baseball players.

Federal investigators obtained a warrant to search the computer records of a laboratory that in 2003 had tested hundreds of Major League Baseball players for steroid use. The warrant authorized obtaining the records of 10 players, whose identities haven't been disclosed.

But in the course of searching computer records for the 10 players, government investigators came across evidence of illegal drug use by others and argued they had a right to seize those records as well. The government said this evidence was in plain view once investigators started searching through the computer files.

That argument was "too clever by half," the Ninth Circuit ruled in August, in a 9-2 vote.

If every file on the computer has to be opened to find the specific evidence being sought under the search warrant, then every file would at some point be in "plain view," wrote Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, in the majority opinion.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, pictured in 2003, wrote the Ninth Circuit opinion that sets out guidelines on searching for digital evidence.


But unlike walking into a room, searching a computer requires specific action -- opening directories and files. To allow investigators to search through every file, and act on any evidence of illegality they find there, "creates a serious risk that every warrant for electronic information will become, in effect, a general warrant, rendering the Fourth Amendment irrelevant," the court said.

The Fourth Amendment requires that to obtain a search warrant, government investigators must show a judge probable cause of a crime and "particularly" describe the place to be searched and the items to be sought. Legal scholars say this "particularity" requirement was aimed to prevent the wide-ranging, general searches of personal property that British authorities had power to conduct during the colonial period.

The Ninth Circuit, in its opinion, set out guidelines on how the government and lower courts should proceed. Magistrate judges, when issuing a search warrant, should insist that prosecutors waive the plain-view doctrine in cases of digital evidence. Sorting through digital evidence should be done by parties other than the case agents, who should only be given material covered by the search warrant. Any evidence not covered by the search warrant would have to be returned to the owner or -- if it was illegal material, such as files of child pornography -- destroyed.

The Circuit Court makes policy. Didn't a recent Supreme Court nomineee have something to say about that?

PC Cultivate Buyers in Rural China

Though difficult to penetrate, China's countryside is "probably still the world's most promising market" in terms of the number of people "who've never owned a PC before, who would like to own a PC and who have that capability," says David Wolf, CEO of Wolf Group Asia, a Beijing-based marketing strategy firm.

Gong Xiangnan, a 24-year-old migrant worker from Mengyin county in Shandong province, says she used the rural subsidy to recently buy her first PC, a Lenovo desktop for 3,000 yuan ($439).

Ms. Gong says many residents in her town took advantage of the subsidy, buying motorcycles, televisions, and other home appliances. "In our home, we already have refrigerator, TV, a washing machine," she says.

Lenovo, which is targeting rural customers with lower-cost computers and 700 new retail stores, has begun marketing computers as high-status betrothal gifts, which by tradition should appear as generous as possible.

Beijing-based Lenovo, which sold 28% of PCs in China in the first half according to IDC, is also using slogans such as, "Buy a Lenovo PC, Be a Happy Bride."

"They like to give desktop PCs because the boxes are large," says Li Zhong, director of Lenovo's consumer business in the Beijing and Hebei region. "They deliver the computers to brides' families on trucks, which everyone can see. In these cases the bigger the box, the better."

Curious difference: while some of us are obsessed with minituarization, they are obsessed with quite the opposite.

What is a car?

Is a three-wheeled vehicle an automobile? That question is at the center of a vigorous lobbying effort in Washington. The vehicle in question is the Aptera 2e, a machine that looks like a cross between a Cessna plane and a tricycle. It's the brainchild of Aptera Motors Inc., a three-year-old, closely held car company in Vista, Calif.

Interesting visual simile: a single-engine plane and a tricycle.

Aptera wants to borrow $75 million from a Department of Energy program created by Congress in 2007 to speed development of fuel-efficient cars. Aptera's backers include some big-money donors to the Democratic Party, and its quest for help has received a boost from a group of mostly California lawmakers who want to help a home-state enterprise. Allies of Detroit's big auto makers are lined up against them.

Detroit versus California.

Aptera's quest for federal help raises a bigger question about Washington's effort to subsidize fuel-efficient vehicles: How much of the money should go to traditional companies with the most customers, versus start-ups with unorthodox ideas?

Snooping on Web Traffic Gains Favor

An Internet-monitoring technology known as deep packet inspection is gaining favor as a tool to combat viruses and make networks run more efficiently, despite concerns that the technology allows improper snooping on private Web traffic by governments and other prying eyes.

The technology created a political firestorm when the administration of former President George W. Bush used it to monitor international communications as part of counterterrorism efforts. Iran's apparent use of deep packet inspection, or DPI, during a crackdown on protesters last month gave the technology another black eye.

But use of DPI, which examines Web traffic at a much more detailed level than previous technologies could, is still growing globally. "I don't see it shrinking at all," says Al Gidari, a Seattle lawyer who focuses on the communications industry. "Its complexity is increasing, and I don't doubt this field will become even more lucrative."

Citizen Identity Card

Crearán nueva Cédula de Identidad Ciudadana
El documento contará con identidad biométrica de cada mexicano y será garantía de identidad legal y jurídica para cada ciudadano del país

A new Citizen Identity Card will be created
The document will include biometric identity of each of Mexican and will be a guarantee of legal identity and legal status for each citizen of the nation

Sergio Javier Jiménez y Alberto Morales
El Universal - Ciudad de México Martes 28 de julio de 2009


El presidente Felipe Calderón anunció la creación de la nueva Cédula de Identidad Ciudadana la cual contará con la identidad biométrica de cada mexicano. Este documento será garantía de identidad legal y jurídica para cada ciudadano del país.

President Calderón announced the creation of the new Citizen Identity Card which will contain biometric information for each Mexican.

El mandatario federal dio a conocer la creación de este nuevo documento de identidad durante la ceremonia del 150 aniversario de la promulgación de las Leyes de Reforma en el Recinto Parlamentario del Palacio Nacional.

Ahí, ante los representantes del Poder Legislativo y del Poder Judicial el mandatario señaló:

"Anuncio que en cumplimiento de las facultades constitucionales el gobierno a mi cargo expedirá la primera Cédula de Identidad Ciudadana con el propósito de expedirse en el transcurso de esta administración y completarla al final de la misma".

Esta Cédula de Identidad Ciudadana contará con identidad biométrica de cada mexicano y, añadió, será garantía legal y práctica de la identidad y personalidad jurídica consagrada en la Ley Liberal y Registro Civil instaurada por Benito Juárez.

Con este documento, añadió Calderón, se permitirá a cada mexicano tener garantía de la unicidad y distinción plena que cada persona tiene respecto de las demás.

En la ceremonia estuvieron presentes los presidentes del Senado, Gustavo Madero; de la Cámara de Diputados, César Horacio Duarte y en nombre de la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación, habló el ministro Sergio Valls.

Cable makes big promises for African Internet

I have long been interested in the economicpotential of Africa. This is a big step forward.

Cable makes big promises for African Internet

CNN

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (CNN) -- A undersea cable plugging East Africa into high speed Internet access went live Thursday providing an alternative to expensive satellite connections.

SEACOM, the cable provider company, opened up its 17000 kilometer submarine cable, capable of 1.28 terabytes per second, allowing the region true connectivity.

Most Africans rely on expensive and slow satellite connections, which make the use of applications such as YouTube and Facebook extremely trying.

"This is going to reduce the cost of doing business in Africa, within Africa and with international parties" said Suveer Ramdhani, SEACOM spokesman in South Africa.

"The cable is as thin as a hair strand and in one second it can download the same amount of data that 160 people use in a month."

SEACOM, privately funded and 75 % African owned, will provide retail carriers with open source access to inexpensive bandwidth.

It has taken less than three years to complete the mammoth project, providing landing stations at South Africa, Kenya, Madagascar and other points along the east coast of Africa.

But telecoms analyst James Hodge said that some of the more ambitious hopes for the system -- such as impacting the continent's socio-economic problems -- will be long-term, and that initially it will be those already connected who will see the benefits.

The launch was delayed by a month because of increased activity by pirates along parts of the African coast.

Security teams were beefed up to protect the slow moving cable layers.

Neotel, a South African communications network operator is the largest shareholder in SEACOM.

It is also the anchor tenant and the South African landing partner, providing both the coastal landing station and Johannesburg data center for the submarine cable.

Neotel managing director Jay Pandey is excited about the opportunities for growth presented by the SEACOM cable.

"With this cable coming in, the pipe size opens up, so more and more people are able to get faster and better connectivity, hopefully at a lower price. It can't be more expensive than what it is today."

SEACOM chief executive officer Brian Herlihy added: "Turning the switch 'on' creates a huge anticipation but ultimately, SEACOM will be judged on the changes that take place on the continent over the coming years."

South Africa has been hobbled by high costs and extremely slow bandwidth, effectively keeping the country on an information back road rather then the superhighway.

There is much anticipation and hope that the cable will ensure Africa keeps up with the developed world in Internet connectivity, providing greater speed, flexibility and, potentially, a complete socio-economic transformation.
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Tanzanian President Josiah Kikwete said in his opening address: "It's the ultimate embodiment of modernity."

His speech was beamed via SEACOM from a launch in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to the simultaneous launch in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Axis of evil hackers

North Korean hackers blamed for sweeping cyber attack on US networks - A series of attacks on computer networks in South Korea and the US was apparently the work of North Korean hackers, several news agencies are reporting today.

They're that good?

Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code

Robert Patterson

For more than 200 years, buried deep within Thomas Jefferson's correspondence and papers, there lay a mysterious cipher -- a coded message that appears to have remained unsolved. Until now.

The cryptic message was sent to President Jefferson in December 1801 by his friend and frequent correspondent, Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Jefferson and Mr. Patterson were both officials at the American Philosophical Society -- a group that promoted scholarly research in the sciences and humanities -- and were enthusiasts of ciphers and other codes, regularly exchanging letters about them.

The 1801 letter from Robert Patterson to Thomas Jefferson

To Mr. Patterson's view, a perfect code had four properties: It should be adaptable to all languages; it should be simple to learn and memorize; it should be easy to write and to read; and most important of all, "it should be absolutely inscrutable to all unacquainted with the particular key or secret for decyphering."

Mr. Patterson then included in the letter an example of a message in his cipher, one that would be so difficult to decode that it would "defy the united ingenuity of the whole human race," he wrote.



The cipher finally met its match in Lawren Smithline, a 36-year-old mathematician. Dr. Smithline has a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works professionally with cryptology, or code-breaking, at the Center for Communications Research in Princeton, N.J., a division of the Institute for Defense Analyses.



The code, Mr. Patterson made clear in his letter, was not a simple substitution cipher. That's when you replace one letter of the alphabet with another. The problem with substitution ciphers is that they can be cracked by using what's termed frequency analysis, or studying the number of times that a particular letter occurs in a message. For instance, the letter "e" is the most common letter in English, so if a code is sufficiently long, whatever letter appears most often is likely a substitute for "e." Because frequency analysis was already well known in the 19th century, cryptographers of the time turned to other techniques. One was called the nomenclator: a catalog of numbers, each standing for a word, syllable, phrase or letter.

But Mr. Patterson had a few more tricks up his sleeve. He wrote the message text vertically, in columns from left to right, using no capital letters or spaces. The writing formed a grid, in this case of about 40 lines of some 60 letters each.

Then, Mr. Patterson broke the grid into sections of up to nine lines, numbering each line in the section from one to nine. In the next step, Mr. Patterson transcribed each numbered line to form a new grid, scrambling the order of the numbered lines within each section. Every section, however, repeated the same jumbled order of lines.

The trick to solving the puzzle, as Mr. Patterson explained in his letter, meant knowing the following: the number of lines in each section, the order in which those lines were transcribed and the number of random letters added to each line.

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The key to the code consisted of a series of two-digit pairs. The first digit indicated the line number within a section, while the second was the number of letters added to the beginning of that row. For instance, if the key was 58, 71, 33, that meant that Mr. Patterson moved row five to the first line of a section and added eight random letters; then moved row seven to the second line and added one letter, and then moved row three to the third line and added three random letters. Mr. Patterson estimated that the potential combinations to solve the puzzle was "upwards of ninety millions of millions."

Undaunted, Dr. Smithline decided to tackle the cipher by analyzing the probability of digraphs, or pairs of letters. Certain pairs of letters, such as "dx," don't exist in English, while some letters almost always appear next to a certain other letter, such as "u" after "q".

To get a sense of language patterns of the era, Dr. Smithline studied the 80,000 letter-characters contained in Jefferson's State of the Union addresses, and counted the frequency of occurrences of "aa," "ab," "ac," through "zz."

Dr. Smithline then made a series of educated guesses, such as the number of rows per section, which two rows belong next to each other, and the number of random letters inserted into a line.

To help vet his guesses, he turned to a tool not available during the 19th century: a computer algorithm. He used what's called "dynamic programming," which solves large problems by breaking puzzles down into smaller pieces and linking together the solutions.

The overall calculations necessary to solve the puzzle were fewer than 100,000, which Dr. Smithline says would be "tedious in the 19th century, but doable."

After about a week of working on the puzzle, the numerical key to Mr. Patterson's cipher emerged -- 13, 34, 57, 65, 22, 78, 49. Using that digital key, he was able to unfurl the cipher's text:

"In Congress, July Fourth, one thousand seven hundred and seventy six. A declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled. When in the course of human events..."

That, of course, is the beginning -- with a few liberties taken -- to the Declaration of Independence, written at least in part by Jefferson himself. "Patterson played this little joke on Thomas Jefferson," says Dr. Smithline. "And nobody knew until now."

The Doctor Will Text You Now

This year, 39% of doctors said they’d communicated with patients online, up from just 16% five years earlier, according to health-information firm Manhattan Research, a unit of Decision Resources Inc. So far, the most common digital doctor services are the simplest ones, like paying bills, sending lab results and scheduling appointments.





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