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Download today’s show. ~~~~~~~SDR2008-09-10~~~~~~~ This is SDR News for September 10, 2008. My name is Andy McCaskey, and this is a summary of recent news highlights from Slashdot, Digg, and Reddit. Here's what's new on SDR News.
Human Genetics is Now a Viable Hobby 23andMe has cut its price to $399. The cheapest one was until tonight was available for just under a thousand dollars. The biotech industry has its own Moore's Law, and it moves even more swiftly than the one that causes the cost of computer chips to drop as their capabilities swiftly increase. From the beginning, she has suggested that the cost of the whole genome scan would drop as microarrays become cheaper and more sophisticated.
In spite of the massive amount of information gathered by those chips, some people are convinced that they do not paint a detailed enough picture of our genetic makeup. Even the much celebrated and very expensive mapping of the human genome involved guesswork. Measured, short sequence fragments were "puzzled" together in computers by heuristic algorithms, resulting in a 'probably' correct whole sequence. 23and me responds that they make over 650,000 measurements, and that should be enough to see the big picture -- or even reconstruct the whole genome with some very educated guesses.
Google To Digitize Millions of Old Newspaper Pages They plan to digitize millions of newspaper pages with articles, photographs, and headlines intact so they can be accessed and searched online. Google will run its AdSense advertising service as part of the newspaper initiative and plans to share revenues with publisher partners. In their blog, they estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. Already able to access old content from such newspapers as the Saint Petersburg Times and Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the application is to be expanded to include content from more newspapers. For its new effort, Google has partnered with the likes of ProQuest and Heritage, two of the companies responsible for all of that microfilm you find at the library.
The Electronic Newspaper From Science Fiction Is Coming Soon In science fiction, it's a large portable screen that is constantly updated with the latest news, has been a prop in science fiction for ages. A new company called Plastic Logic will introduce a lightweight plastic screen that mimics the look of paper. while offering a screen size that is 2.5 times larger than the Kindle, weighs just two ounces more and is about one-third the Kindle’s thickness. Company reps told the audience at the Demo Fall 08 conference in San Diego that the upcoming reader will have the same size, weight and thinness as a pad of paper.
The size of a piece of copier paper, it can be continually updated via a wireless link, and can store and display hundreds of pages of newspapers, books and documents. Most electronic reading devices use E Ink’s technology to create an image. Unlike liquid-crystal display, electronic paper technology does not need a backlight, remains displayed even when the power source runs down, and looks brighter, not dimmer, in strong light. Newspaper companies have watched the technology closely for years. The ideal format, a flexible display that could be rolled or folded like a newspaper. That's years away, but the company E-Ink foresees color displays with moving images and interactive clickable advertising coming in only a few more years. In fact, by 2010, we will have a production version of a display that offers newspaperlike color.
Papers face a tough competitor: their own Web sites, where the information is free. And they have trained a generation of new readers to expect free news. A number of newspapers, including The New York Times, offer electronic versions through the Kindle device. For example, the Times on the Kindle costs $14 a month.
Mars Phoenix Will Twitter until its last electronic breath The Mars Phoenix Lander has been twittering away its mission details since landing on Mars in May. But lately, you can see a sense of impending doom starting to creep in, slowly. Tweets like "Seasons are longer here...I'll be surrounded by ice & don't expect to survive til Spring." If its solar panels collect enough juice come springtime, the first auto-function will be to contact the Mars Orbiter above with the good news of its reincarnation. It's called the 'Lazarus mode' so it'll call up to the Mars orbiters if it reawakens in the spring.
Speculation On Large-Scale Phone Location Snooping Chris Soghoian up on CNet has an interesting theory and no way to prove it. He makes a convincing case that the NSA could be using loopholes in the law to gather real-time location information on the mobile phones of millions of people. There is no hard evidence that this is happening, but the blog post sheds light on the dense undergrowth of companies populating the wireless space, and speculates they could be easy pickings for a National Security Letter with a gag order attached. These household names of the telecom industry certainly helped the government to illegally snoop on their customers, statements by a number of legal experts suggest that collaboration with the NSA may run far deeper into the wireless phone industry. With over 3,000 wireless companies operating in the United States, the majority of industry-aided snooping likely occurs under the radar, with the dirty work being handled by companies that most consumers have never heard of.
An article in the London Review of Books revealed that a number of private companies now sell off-the-shelf data-mining solutions to government spies interested in analyzing mobile-phone calling records and real-time location information. Networks are more and more disaggregated and outsourced, from customer service call centers overseas with full viewing access to data to key infrastructure components and processing. A single communication is handled by many more parties than the named provider today. Moreover, interoperability protocols include network identifiers--send a message from company A to company B and the acknowledgment of delivery may include location and other information. That's just the way the system is designed--location was about billing in the early years and no one bothered to undo the existing protocols when business models changed
Apple rocks out, announces new iPods, iTunes 8 Getting primed for the holiday shopping season, iTunes 8 features something called the Genius. When you're listening to a song, for example, pressing this button will generate a new playlist based on similar music you already have in your library. Sort of like a Pandora radio that is restricted to the iTunes songs that you already own.
The new iPod touch (first hands-on review on Infinite Loop) has the same 3.5" display but gets thinner with a tapered, stainless steel back (probably to differentiate it from the iPhone). The iPod touch will gain the iPhone's integrated volume controls on its side, and gains a built-in speaker. The much-anticipated announcement of iPhone OS 2.1, the software and firmware that runs both the iPhone and iPod touch. The major update should "significantly" improve battery life, problems with dropped calls, fix a lot of bugs, and backup to iTunes should be "dramatically" faster.
Video Shows Easy Hacking of E-Voting Machines These types of attacks are indeed feasible and not just a conspiracy theory. In the summer of 2007, the Security Group of UCSB participated in what was known as the Top-To-Bottom Review (TTBR) of the electronic voting systems used in California. This was a first-of-its-kind review, where the evaluators had unprecedented access to the systems' source code, hardware, and associated documentation. Long term listeners know that this is one of my personal topics, and that I am astounded that we do not have open source voting machines that are monitored by experts from both parties - as they do in Australia and NZ. Our team focused on the security analysis of the Sequoia voting system.
Developed a virus-like software that can spread across the voting system, modifying the firmware of the voting machines. The modified firmware is able to steal votes even in the presence of a Voter-Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT). They use a simple USB key to infect the laptop used to prepare the cards that initialize the various voting devices. As a result, the cards are loaded with a malicious software component. When a card is inserted in a voting terminal, the malicious software exploits a vulnerability in the terminal loading procedure and installs a modified firmware, effectively "brainwashing" the terminal. Later, when the terminal is used by the voters to cast their votes, the firmware uses a number of different techniques to modify the contents of the ballots being cast. The videos, part 1 and 2 are at the Video Pick tab at SDRNews.com.
_______SDR2008-09-10_______
That's this episode of SDR News. My name is Andy McCaskey. I have no relationship to Slashdot, Digg, or Reddit other than a regular reader. You can check out show links and additional comments on today's news at Slashdotreview.com. Mobile distribution by Stitcher at Stitcher.com . Comments and suggestions to
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. SDRNews is a proud member of the Tech Podcast Network. SDRNEWS is also available through Blubrry at Blubrry.com Thanks for listening -- see you tomorrow.
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