Technology

According to the lede in a recent New Scientist article: Spammers’ own trickery has been used to develop an “effectively perfect” method for blocking the most common kind of spam, a team of computer scientists claims. The team turned one of their computers into a zombie, but, well, not quite: they were still in control of it, even while it was part of its botnet. And while it followed the orders of the botnet controller, the researchers recorded and analyzed what was going on. In particular, they looked at the variations in the messages, and used that to form a profile of the spam the botnet…

Recently, the New York Times came out with yet another article about how people consistently pick bad passwords. It’s a hackneyed subject by now, but I shouldn’t complain: I cover this sort of old ground repeatedly, myself. But what makes this article remarkable — or, at least, what makes me want to remark on it — is their attempt to explain why. One technologist tries to explain it as an innate aspect of people: “I guess it’s just a genetic flaw in humans,” said Amichai Shulman, the chief technology officer at Imperva, which makes software for blocking hackers. “We’ve been following the…

A palm-sized device invented at Cornell that uses water surface tension as an adhesive bond just might make walking on walls possible for humans. The rapid adhesion mechanism could lead to such applications as shoes or gloves that stick and unstick to walls, or Post-it-like notes that can bear loads, researchers say. The device is the result of inspiration drawn from a beetle native to Florida, which can adhere to a leaf with a force 100 times its own weight, yet also instantly unstick itself. Research behind the device is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The…

My latest online project: Hackademe! Hack: A clever use of technology, software, or modified items to solve a problem or increase efficiency. Academe: The community of scholars and students engaged in higher education and research; also known as academia or acadème. Hackademe: A website devoted to sharing clever uses of technology, software, or modified items to solve problems related to information overload, time management, organization, productivity, and other challenges faced by academics on a daily basis.

In a recent post on my personal blog, I talked about television content delivery and pricing. What I didn’t mention in that post, particularly when I talked about the lack of choice, is that there is another option for content delivery (besides cable/fiber and satellite): one can get the content online, through a service such as Hulu or Apple TV. For now, not everything is available through these services, and the limitations on available content might deter some potential users. On the other hand, for people who’re specifically looking in this direction because they don’t want the overblown…

Newsday.com : Paywall Ain't Working The internet is a very powerful tool for education and for research.  At a click of a mouse button I can escape my parochial world-view and embark on a fascinating journey of discovery that knows no boundaries.  Except for paywalls. In theory, the payment of a fee to view web content will generate revenues for web sites such as those set up by the news media.  In practice, that theory is badly flawed.  There are no news-story reporting police: anyone can report news.  Well, in any country that has any pretentions of being a…

New technology developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Sankt Augustin, Germany may soon help consumers save energy by allowing them to track which devices in their homes are using the most energy. The basis for the technology is the "Hydra" middleware,which is extended by an energy protocol. A middleware reduces the workload of programmers: in Hydra's case, by administering the communication between devices. Each device in the home is given a power plogg, which is a small adapter located between the power plug and the power outlet. It reports the power consumption at any given…

'Invisibility' has long been a staple of science fiction.  The ability to go unseen has benefits, mostly involving mischief, but there are some ways where being invisible need not involve the optical realm - it could involve the physical.   In a poor country like Haiti, where it would be impossible to retrofit all of the buildings to withstand an earthquake, it may soon be possible to make earthquakes simply pass them by.   Metamaterials have been the darling of materials science in the last decade.   Initially metamaterials could achieve a certain amount of invisibility…

To start off 2010, we're invited to join a new “Hot Topics” feature, which will periodically focus the bloggers on a particular topic. The first Hot Topic is this: The Upcoming Decade in Science What will the new decade bring in the world of science? What will happen by 2020 in your field? Making predictions is always a dicey thing, and perhaps most so in the field of computer science. The good thing about knowing that is that one can pretty much “wing it”. If one gets it right, it’s cool. If not, well, no one really expected one to. So let’s put on some wings, and see whither we fly. A…

I’ve been critical of patents that seem to have been issued for ideas that don’t represent much innovation (most recently, this one, and see more discussion here), extending existing “prior art” only a little, or not at all. Many patents, particularly for computer software, describe things that are neither novel nor non-obvious. Contrast that with this product (pointed out on BoingBoing recently), which really seems to be a neat, original, useful, idea that is a significant step beyond the prior art. Of course, you know that’s got to be patented. And, indeed, a quick search at the US PTO came…