May 6, 2008
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Hp Discovers Fourth Type Of Circuit

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CHICAGO (Reuters) - It took about 40 years to find it, but scientists at Hewlett-Packard said on Wednesday they discovered a fourth basic type of electrical circuit that could lead to a computer you never have to boot up.

The finding proves what until now had only been theory—but could save millions from the tedium of waiting for a computer to find its "place," the researchers said.

Basic electronics theory teaches that there are three fundamental elements of a passive circuit—resistors, capacitors and inductors.

But in the 1970s, Leon Chua of the University of California at Berkeley, theorized there should be a fourth called a memory resistor, or memristor, for short, and he worked out the mathematical equations to prove it.

Now, a team at Hewlett-Packard led by Stanley Williams has proven that 'memristance' exists. They developed a mathematical model and a physical example of a memristor, which they describe in the journal Nature.

"It's very different from any other electrical device," Williams said of his memristor in a telephone interview. "No combination of resistor, capacitor or inductor will give you that property."

Williams likens the property to water flowing through a garden hose. In a regular circuit, the water flows from more than one direction.

But in a memory resistor, the hose remembers what direction the water (or current) is flowing from, and it expands in that direction to improve the flow. If water or current flows from the other direction, the hose shrinks.

"It remembers both the direction and the amount of charge that flows through it. ... That is the memory," Williams said.

The discovery is more than an academic pursuit for Williams, who said the finding could lead a new kind of computer memory that would never need booting up.

Conventional computers use dynamic random access memory or DRAM, which is lost when the power is turned off, and must be accessed from the hard drive when the computer goes back on.

But a computer that incorporates this new kind of memory circuit would never lose it place, even when the power is turned off.

"If you turn on your computer it will come up instantly where it was when you turned it off. That is a very interesting potential application, and one that is very realistic," Williams said.

But he said understanding this new circuit element could be critical as companies attempt to build ever smaller devices.

"It's essential that people understand this to be able to go further into the world of nanoelectronics," referring to electronics on the nano scale—objects tens of thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair.

"It turns out that memristance, this property, gets more important as the device gets smaller. That is another major reason it took so long to find," Williams said.

Posted by: XGhozt

May 6, 2008
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Bbc Reports Facebook Vulnerability

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The BBC is reporting that they have discovered a flaw in the Facebook social networking site that could compromise user privacy.

The problem, reported on the BBC technology program Click, appears to be in the site's application model. Facebook allows users to write applications, but Click found that these applications could gather personal profile information on users or their friends.

This data includes some of the information you provide to Facebook as part of your personal profile. The BBC was unclear on what profile elements could and could not be obtained, but they indicate that it's more than is proper.

At first glance it's not clear how much of a scandal there is here. When you add an application in Facebook you are asked to approve certain capabilities for the application, among them that it "Know who I am and access my information". Further explanation for this option states:

Granting access to information is required to add applications. If you are not willing to grant access to your information, do not add this application.

Not much room to maneuver here. You want the application, you give the information.

So the point of the BBC report is that this is built into the Facebook model and that users may not appreciate that they are giving up as many details as they think.

Facebook deals with this on the one hand by warning users to be careful about adding applications, which is useless boilerplate because there are no real guidelines for how they might exercise such caution. On the other hand, their terms of service prohibit abuse of others' personal information. To make matters worse, applications may be running in part on 3rd party servers, making the enforcement of Facebook's terms even sketchier.

The BBC says that Facebook "... also advises users to use the same precautions while downloading software from Facebook applications that they use when downloading software on their desktop." This exposes the emptiness of the whole endeavor. If Facebook applications are to be considered as potentially dangerous as desktop applications then they need more security facilities.

Posted by: XGhozt

May 6, 2008
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Visa Officially Says Stores Cannot Deny

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Merchants may not refuse to honor a Visa card simply because the cardholder refuses a request for supplementary information. The only exception is when a Visa card is unsigned when presented. However, "See ID" is not considered a valid signature. In these situations, a merchant must obtain authorization, review additional identification, and require the cardholder to sign the card before completing a transaction.

To report any merchant practices that you feel are inappropriate, please notify the disputes area at the financial institution that issued your card account. Your card issuing bank has access to the appropriate Visa rules and regulations as well as to the Notification of Customer Complaint forms which should be used by your bank to document and file merchant complaints.

As an alternative, you may contact the Global Customer Care Services to report merchant practices that you feel are inappropriate. Please contact the Global Customer Care Services at 1-800-VISA-911 (1-800-847-2911). Please advise them that you were referred to file a complaint. The staff will be able to initiate a complaint form over the phone.

Posted by: XGhozt

May 6, 2008
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Apple Breaks Iphone Carrier Exclusivity

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LONDON/AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Telecoms companies Vodafone and Telecom Italia will both sell Apple Inc's iPhone in Italy, in an apparent break from previous exclusive carrier deals.

So far, Apple has struck exclusive deals with carriers to sell the phone, such as with AT&T in the United States, Telefonica's O2 in Britain and Deutsche Telekom in Germany.

Neither Vodafone nor Telecom Italia provided many details.

"Telecom Italia announced today it has signed a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Italy later this year," was all that the Italian group had to say on Tuesday.

Vodafone said it would sell the iPhone—a touch-screen device which combines Apple's popular iPod music player, a video player and Web browser—in 10 countries.

"Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network," the British-based firm said in a statement without giving any more details.

Vodafone, the world's largest mobile phone company by revenue, has been competing with operators and retailers to secure the right to sell the phone.

O2 has described the device as a star performer which draws increased numbers of customers into its stores.

Customers using the phone have also driven up data revenues by surfing the Internet and sending emails, a key attraction to operators as the cost of making calls decreases.

"We have long held the view that iPhone deals have been over-hyped and are not a reason to rush to change one's earnings estimates," said Mark James, analyst at Collins Stewart.

"If the product begins to be sold by multiple operators, the main winners are likely to be the vendor, distributors and consumers."

(Reporting by Mark Potter in London and Niclas Mika in Amsterdam; Editing by Stephen Weeks)

Posted by: XGhozt

May 6, 2008
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Google Audio Captcha Cracked

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So much attention is paid to cracking graphical CAPTCHAs, and a lot of progress has been made in that field.

Now Wintercore has come up with a smart breakthrough: analysis and automated cracking of audio CAPTCHAs.

From early on it was noticed that graphical CAPTCHAs present a problem for the sight-impaired (what we would have called "blind" a few years ago). Out of common decency and perhaps to avoid legal problems for their products and services being inaccessible to the disabled, many CAPTCHA implementers started adding an audio option.

In the case of the GMail signup page, for example, there is a small graphic of the universal disabled symbol of a character in a wheelchair next to the text field for the user to type. The title of the graphic, which would be spoken to a user with accessibility software, is "Listen and type the numbers you hear".

Try it on GMail and listen to the sample. There is a woman's voice speaking numerals with a lot of creepy nonsense voice between the numerals. The nonsense sounds like backwards talking, reminiscent of The Exorcist or I Am The Walrus. Once spoken, the voice says "once again" and the numerals and nonsense repeat. The nonsense is disturbing enough that I suspect many people would have trouble hearing the numerals, but I suppose Google figured they had to do something to impede simple automated analysis.

They didn't do enough. Wintercore did waveform analysis on the audio and noticed that the numeral portions were easily distinguishable from the nonsense parts. The rest is simple pattern recognition. Wintercore wrote a tool which they show a video of on the blog, demonstrating that the audio CAPTCHAs can be cracked with very high reliability, much better than what has been demonstrated with graphical ones.

You'll note that the Wintercore blog is about 2 months old. It didn't get widespread notice until just recently when 0x000000.com, the hacker webzine, picked up on it.

Wintercore ends with advice to Google by pointing out the biggest weaknesses in the CAPTCHA. I wonder whether the device is all that useful, because it sounds to me as if addressing them will make the CAPTCHA even more difficult for a human to understand. The current weak one is not easy.

Posted by: XGhozt