Technology

DHS Begins Test of Biometric Exit Procedures at Two U.S. Airports, the next step toward deploying biometric exit procedures for international travelers. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today began collecting biometrics - digital fingerprints - from non-U.S. citizens departing the United States as part of a pilot program at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport. Since 2004, biometrics have helped DHS prevent the use of fraudulent documents, protect visitors from identity theft and stop thousands of criminals and…

Biomedical engineers at Boston University have taught bacteria how to count.  The researchers have wired a new sequence of genes that allow the microbes to count discrete events, opening the door for a host of potential applications, which could include drug delivery and sensing environmental hazards.  The young but burgeoning field of synthetic biology addresses biological research questions with an engineering approach. Researchers design and build networks of genes, splicing them into bacterial genomes to run specific tasks or manufacture desired molecules – a process akin to…

Last year, ICANN announced an “open season” on top-level domains, to start some time in 2010. This will dramatically expand the namespace for Internet domain names, and will allow cities, industries, and companies to register specific top-level domains for themselves. What effect will that have on the companies involved, and on the Internet users? I wrote this column for the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of IEEE Internet Computing magazine, and this is the version that appeared there, with minor edits. I’m posting this here in part to spur discussion — some will, of course, disagree with what I say.…

Far from being geeky and exotic, virtual reality could be the key to a new range of innovative products. European researchers and industrialists have come together to build a world-leading community ready to exploit that promise. Made famous by the ‘holodeck’ in Star Trek: The Next Generation, virtual reality (VR) has long had the reputation of being slightly frivolous. Yet Europe’s VR industry is emerging as a world leader thanks to new efforts to coordinate developments on a continental scale. “Virtual reality looks exotic to the general public,” says Angelos Amditis of the Institute of…

A new robot house will be launched at the University of Hertfordshire tomorrow, Wednesday 27 Mayth. Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn and her team at the University’s School of Computer Science have taken their robots out of their laboratory and have them “living” in a house in Hatfield, so that the academics can develop them as personal companions.  The academics will open the robot house to the media tomorrow, before launching it to the public in early June. At the event, the academics will showcase the work they are doing to advance the relationship between robots and humans as part of the…

Some UCSB researchers managed to infiltrate the command-and-control system of a botnet, and got lots of information out of it, which they wrote up in a paper. Their results are interesting to read. But, really, I’m not at all surprised that lots of people continue to get their computers infected, that so many use bad passwords, or that so many use the same password on many web sites. It’s always nice to get specific data on all that, but it’s something we’re well aware of. What I find especially troubling is this part: Interestingly, a large number of the financial institutions that had…

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Today’s children are coming of age immersed in a world video games, instant messaging and 3-D avatars  of themselves. Many have cell phones, laptops, and hand-held video games.  Heck, even robot pets are being raised in virtual worlds. What impact does this technology have on children? The journal Children, Youth and Environments (CYE) this month published a special issue titled “Children in Technological Environments.” The issue examines the increasing prevalence of technology from various perspectives, including knowledge and education, social and moral development, culture and…

If you own a computer you have probably gotten a 'virus' but there have been no major outbreaks of mobile phone viral infection despite the fact that over 80 percent of Americans now use these devices. A team headed by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, director of the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University, set out to explain why this is true. The researchers used calling and mobility data from over six million anonymous mobile phone users to create a comprehensive picture of the threat mobile phone viruses pose to users. The results of this study, published in the May 22 issue…

Finishing my series of comments on the New Scientist magazine series “Eight things you didn’t know about the internet”, we have question 8, “Could we shut the net down?”, by Michael Brooks. It’s not clear to me what the question really means, and why it’s being “asked”. Mr Brooks answers it as though the real question is, “Could one party (to a first approximation of ‘one party’) unilaterally shut the Internet down?”, whether that might be done officially, maliciously, or otherwise. To that question, the answer is certainly “No.” One interesting thing about Mr Brooks’s answer here is that it…