Archive - May, 2004

Mathematicians improve epilepsy treatment’s success

May 25, 2004 in mathematics with 0 Comments

Mathematicians from the Johannes Kepler Univerity at Linz, Austria and the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany have found a way to compute the location of braincells responsible for epilepsy in five hours. Before this, it would take weeks or even months to perform this task increasing the chance of failure in a surgical operation.

Here are some references to this research:

Home made HERF guns

May 24, 2004 in amusements with 0 Comments

A blog article reflecting on HERF guns has just been published on John Robbs’ Global Guerrillas web log.

For those of you who don’t know what a HERF gun is here I reproduce an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry:

HERF or High Energy Radio Frequency weapons, also known as HPRF or High Power Radio Frequency weapons are weapons designed to use high intensity radio waves to disrupt electronics. They operate in a similar way to EMP devices, by inducing destructive voltage within the electronic wiring. They are usually directional and can be focused on a specific target.

One of the links from previous posts on this matter leads to an example of a home made HERF gun. The video clips demonstrating the use of the gun against a PC from a distance of 4.5 meters are specially entertaining.

New tool for collaborative filtering

May 20, 2004 in uncategorized with 0 Comments

A new collaborative filtering tool aimed at rating news from RSS feeds has arrived: AmphetaRate.

AmphetaRate is a centralized ratings/recommendation service that provides personalized news and blog recommendations through a news aggregator interface. Using compatible aggregators, you can rate articles found in your subscribed feeds to discover unread articles that suit your taste, thus filling your news addiction.

They provide an API and I hope Bloglines implements this functionality soon.

Citizens as reporters

May 16, 2004 in uncategorized with 3 Comments

Today I read (via www.smartmobs.com) this article commenting on how blogging is helping people bypass traditional news sources:

The next step is “Vblogging,” for video blogs, with images derived from digital cameras, webcames, mobile phones and palmtop computers, which are becoming ever more versatile and cheap.

“Those with a desire and a little technology [will have] the chance to write, shoot, edit and distribute video journalism on their own, even from the field,” says Forbes.com, the website of Forbes magazine.

So the challenge to traditional journalism as the determinant of what is news and how news should be filtered will only intensify.

I can’t remember a single time I’ve been a witness to an incident and my point of view matched the one journalists gave afterwards in the news. Considering that, I can only perceive the trend towards news decentralization as a very good thing.

Python code coverage and reverse engineering

May 15, 2004 in programming with 1 Comment

I just found this Python coding style guidelines and I want to comment on the following paragraph regarding changing a function/method’s behaviour:

Even with unit testing, it’s really hard to track dependencies like this. We would need code coverage tools and exhaustive tests, neither of which we had.

I also find it hard to track dependencies in Python code and I’m aware of, at least, one code coverage tool for Python useful for improving test suites (but try to avoid some common pitfalls).

Keyboard eavesdropping

May 13, 2004 in security with 0 Comments

Funny thing. A technique for eavesdropping keyboards based on the sound they produce has been published:

Each key on computer keyboards, telephones and even ATM machines makes a unique sound as each key is depressed and released, according to a paper entitled “Keyboard Acoustic Emanations” presented Monday by IBM research scientist Dmitri Asonov. All that is needed is about $200 worth of microphones and sound processing and PC neural networking software. Today’s keyboard, telephone keypads, ATM machines and even door locks have a rubber membrane underneath the keys. “This membrane acts like a drum, and each key hits the drum in a different location and produces a unique frequency or sound that the neural networking software can decipher,” said Asonov.

Adi Shamir’s three laws of security

May 11, 2004 in security with 0 Comments

Computerworld informs about the on-line availability of the lectures given by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman when they received the 2002 ACM Turing Award.

I want to highlight Shamir’s three laws of security:

  • Absolutely secure systems do not exist
  • To halve your vulnerability, you have to double your expenditure
  • Cryptography is typically bypassed, not penetrated

The first two points show the importance of effective risk assessment while the third one emphasizes the fact that implementation flaws (opposed to algorithm design flaws) are usually the reason why systems using cryptography are subject to security breaches.

Computational linguistics help uncover government secrets

May 11, 2004 in security with 0 Comments

This article from yesterday’s news talks about a program for revealing blacked-out words in documents. They used it against a memorandum from the USA Dept. of Defense yielding interesting results:

They said that although the name of a country had been blacked out in that memorandum, their software showed that it was highly likely the document named South Korea as having helped the Iraqis.

Parsing incorrect HTML

May 10, 2004 in programming with 0 Comments

TidyLib provides a command-line tool and a library to turn badly formed HTML/XHTML pages into standards compliant ones.

Aside from the point of view of the webmaster who wants to make sure his website is well-formed this package is also useful for web client developers who want to sanitize invalid HTML before feeding it to their parsers.

There’s even a Python interface called uTidyLib.

Decentralizing news

May 7, 2004 in uncategorized with 0 Comments

I’m happy to see that some efforts to decentralize news reporting are already taking shape. Today I read about Internet Newsgathering:

We call (Public) Internet Newsgathering the fundamental process of bringing facts from the news scene to the broadcast media via a chain of “open” elements: the public Internet, ubiquitous broadband access (fixed and mobile), open publishing sites (a.k.a. weblogs) RSS syndication and open and neutral exchanges like Lulop.com.

Together with initiatives like Freeporter, which brings trust metrics into the framework, it will hopefully enable people to collaboratively build independent news sites effectively taking back power from the commercial aggregators (newspapers, TV channels, etc.).