Bing: The new search engine from Microsoft

Today, I used for the first time Bing, the new Microsoft search engine. I liked it from the beginning. According to Microsoft, Bing is not just a search engine which simply shows a list of web links. Bing is a decision engine. It provides the tools to organize and categorize the results. Based on that, you can make more informed decisions by adding structure to results and thus minimize the wasted clicks. In my opinion, Bing is a nice alternative to Google. I wanted for long to be able to categorize the results and not browse for hours to find the information I was seeking. For example, Bing categorize the search results based on the authority of the information provider. The best way to decide on the usability of a search engine is to actually use it.
The official worldwide opening is on Wed. June, 3, 2009. Happy searching!

Breakthrough in quantum cryptography

(Source: PhysOrg.com) A team from Austria's Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) managed to send entangled photons 144 kilometres (90 miles) between the Spanish islands of Las Palmas and the Balearics using satellites
Quantum cryptography is possible over a modern glass fibre net, but because of the high rate of transmission loss, this is limited to around 100 km. To realise future quantum communication networks on a global scale, satellite based systems must be developed and photons transmitted over optical free space distant from the ground.

More information:
http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nphys1255.html

Microsoft Security Intelligence Report Shows Rogue Security Software a Top Threat to Internet Users

The No. 1 reason for data breaches is lost and stolen computer equipment and not computer hacking according to the sixth volume of Microsoft’s Security Intelligence Report. This latest report covers the second half of 2008.

Rogue security software takes advantage of users’ desire to keep their computers protected. The rogue software tricks them into paying for protection that is actually malware offering little or no real protection, and is often designed to steal personal information. For example, two rogue families, Win32/FakeXPA and Win32/FakeSecSen, were detected on more than 1.5 million computers by Microsoft software, catapulting them into the top 10 threats in the second half of the year.

“We continue to see an increase in the number of threats and complexity of those threats designed to implement crime at a variety of levels online,” said Vinny Gullotto, general manager of the Microsoft Malware Protection Center. “But as Microsoft and the industry continue to improve the security of our products and people become more concerned about their online safety and privacy, we see cybercriminals increasingly going after vulnerabilities in human nature rather than software. By working with others across the industry, Microsoft is helping combat the next generation of online threats through a community-based defense resulting from broad industry cooperation with law enforcement and the public.”

The proactive steps Microsoft recommends for individuals and businesses include these:

• Configure computers to use Microsoft Update instead of Windows Update
• Make sure that updates also are enabled when possible for third-party applications.
• Use an anti-malware product from a known, trusted source, and keep it updated.
• Avoid opening attachments or clicking on links to documents in e-mail or instant messages that are received unexpectedly or from an unknown source.
• Enterprises may use the Microsoft Security Assessment Tool (MSAT) to help assess weaknesses in their IT security environment and build a plan to address the risks.

Brain Computer Interface

Brain computer interface (BCI) can provide a way to help many people suffering from serious illnesses or injuries. In my previous post I mentioned some of the potential dangers of using BCI to monitor brain activity and reveal thoughts. This post adds to the positive aspect of BCI. It is a video from Stanford’s Neural Prosthetic Systems Laboratory. Krishna Shenoy explains how to create a BCI that will enable paralyzed patients to control prosthetic arms and computer cursors. In the video, Shenoy describes how his team of Stanford researchers has built a system that achieves typing at 15 words-per-minute, just by "thinking about it". In the experiments are using monkeys because their brains are similar to humans.
I am sure that in the near future we will see more BCI devices that will greatly enhance the life of those that have serious kinetic or communication problems.

College lectures for free

UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Yale and many other schools have partnered with YouTube to make an official channel under the banner YouTube EDU.

There is interesting content from classrooms or lecture halls with subject from almost all the fields of science. It is a great opportunity for learning or reviewing material of high quality.

As I mentioned in a previous post, MIT has launched the MIT OpenCourseWare. Many of the school courses are available free online.
Berkeley also has launched a site with video and audio webcasts of classes.

If you have some free time to spend then free higher learning is a great investment.

Brain waves and Software Engineering

Brain is one of the last frontiers standing. Only recently scientists have the technology to begin recording and documenting brain activity accurately. Brain Computer Interface (BCI) is a field that has great to offer in mankind if treated with caution. In my opinion there are many implications involving the ability to “read” and interpret brainwaves. We humans have many thoughts but not all of them will become actions. We must respect and protect our final private place, our brain.

This may sound like science fiction but the tools already exist to monitor and interpret brain activity. As stated by Alois Schlogl and Clemens Brunner in their article at October 2008 issue of Computer magazine, BCI’s purpose is to identify the user’s intention by analyzing only brain activity. In the article is presented the BIOSIG library which is a free and open source library of biomedical processing tools.

Recent research has revealed that Brain wave patterns can predict blunders. Neuroscientist Ole Jensen, Ali Mazaheri and colleagues Institute at the University of California, Davis, in collaboration with the Donders Institute in the Netherlands, has found a distinct electric signature in the brain which predicts that an error is about to be made.
By analyzing the recorded magnetoencephalography (MEG) data, the research team found that about a second an error were committed, brain waves in two regions were stronger than when the subjects correctly refrained from hitting the button. In the back of the head (the occipital region), alpha wave activity was about 25 percent stronger, and in the middle region, the sensorimotor cortex, there was a corresponding increase in the brain's mu wave activity.

"The alpha and mu rhythms are what happen when the brain runs on idle," Mazaheri explained. "Say you're sitting in a room and you close your eyes. That causes a huge alpha rhythm to rev up in the back of your head. But the second you open your eyes, it drops dramatically, because now you're looking at things and your neurons have visual input to process."

Wireless EKG can help identify errors before they happen. If the technology is limited on these areas then it is used for something serving the common good. If the technology is used to monitor brain activity and spot “deviant” activity then we are not far from a thought police as described by George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In my opinion is in our hands to produce a manifest that will clearly state that Computer professionals and Software engineers should not consent into the use of this technology in general population but only on specific beneficial situations. (Air traffic control)

Physicists Invent a Chip That Stores a Photon's Quantum State

Nicolas Gisin, physicists, of the University of Geneva, Switzerland reported in Nature that they have made a solid-state device capable of storing protons for as long as 1 microsecond. The quantum-cryptography networks have currently a limited range to a few dozen kilometers because of a lack of a suitable way to store the quantum state of photons. This invention will help in the development of light-based quantum-cryptography networks.
“Photons are very fragile,” Gisin says. “We are now able to play with a photon, put it in a quantum fridge, and retrieve it a bit later.”
Raymond Laflamme, director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, in Canada, called the Swiss work “an important stepping stone for quantum communication, a critical building block on which to build quantum repeaters, the missing link to make quantum communication global and pervasive.”
Read more on IEEE Spectrum

McEliece Crypto Cracked.

Tanja Lange, Christiane Peters, and Daniel Bernstein researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology claim to have cracked the McEliece encryption system, which has been considered a strong security candidate for handling Internet traffic as we move into quantum computing. The researchers claimed on their paper that they have successfully developed and tested a way to speed up attacks on McEliece encryption system.
McEliece, an asymmetric key algorithm developed in 1978 by Robert McEliece, is based on algebraic coding theory and uses a class of error-correcting codes, known as Goppa codes. The idea of the encryption is to create Goppa code as the private key and present it as linear code, which is the public key. Knowledge of the private key is necessary in order to decode the public key (linear code).
For information on the McEliece public-key encryption, see the Handbook of Applied Cryptography by Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot, and Scott A. Vanstone.

Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform

Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie unveiled at PDC 2008 a new set of platform technologies, Windows Azure. The Azure Services Platform combines the growing power of the Web-based “cloud” and today’s computers and devices with a suite of services designed to help developers deliver compelling new experiences across the PC, Web and mobile phone or PDA. The new platform extends to developers the ability to rapidly develop and deploy new applications into the cloud, without having to worry about how they will scale up. It gives businesses a new set of choices for how they deploy IT. And consumers benefit through new abilities to see their growing array of digital devices linked together in new and exciting ways.
Windows Azure is not software that companies will run on their own servers. It's something new: a service that runs in Microsoft's growing network of datacenters and provides the platform that helps companies respond to the realities of today's business environment, and tomorrow's. Windows Azure technologies are already finding their way into products such as Windows Server 2008 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager, enabling organizations and Microsoft partners to create their own cloud infrastructure.
Key components of Azure Services Platform include the following:
-- Windows Azure, for service hosting and management and low-level scalable storage, computation, and networking.
-- Microsoft SQL Services, for database services and reporting.
-- Microsoft .Net Services, which are service-based implementations of .Net Framework concepts such as workflow. .Net Services previously was called BizTalk Services. "The services themselves, we found, were actually more identifiable to the .Net community than BizTalk," said Steve Martin, Microsoft senior product management director in the company’s Connected Systems Division.
-- Live Services, for sharing, storing, and synchronizing documents, photos, and files across PCs, phones, PC applications, and Web sites.
-- Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services for business content, collaboration, and solution development in the cloud.

The Azure Services Platform has two distinct layers. The base layer - Windows Azure - provides computation and storage foundational services on which the remaining components of Microsoft’s Services offering will reside over time. The second layer is a collection of additional infrastructure services including Microsoft .NET Services and Microsoft SQL Services, as well as services extensions to Live offerings, SharePoint, and Microsoft Dynamics. These services can be used in conjunction with applications developed on Windows Azure or to extend existing applications that run on-premises or in other hosted environments.