"This website is dedicated to solving cyber crimes and create awareness about it. All you need to do is to post your complaints on the website which will be analysed by a team of ethical hackers, mostly city-based engineering students. The team will issue a list of suggestions for police on how the case can be solved effectively," said Vaghela.

These kinds of feats are nothing new for Vaghela, who at the age of 18 exposed loopholes like SMS and Call Forging in Mobile Networks. The technology that allowed to send SMS or Make Call to any International Number from any number of your choice. At 19, Vaghela found loopholes like "Session Hijacking" and "Cross Site Scripting" in popular social networking site Orkut.

Vaghela has mastered the art of cracking codes and extracting information from servers based in different locations. He gave the exact time and locations to the police department helping them in solving several cyber criminal cases. His biggest success was tracing the origin of the terror email sent by Indian Mujahideen minutes before the Ahmedabad serial blasts on July 26, 2008 and played a vital role in investigation of the same. In a bid to prepare a force of ethical hackers to expose the web fraudsters, Vaghela has imparted training in 10 engineering colleges of the city.

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Most of the world’s eyes are fixed upon the leaders who will congregate at Copenhagen, Denmark from next week onwards with regard to the climate and its change, but while the world leaders are busy discussing on a macro level on methods to save the earth from dying due to over-population and pollution, the working class (that’s us!) need not sit back and do nothing. No sir, we can do our part by spreading the word on various ways to keep the earth green, or if you’re more ambitious, learn more about a real-life project that is currently underway which will utilize renewable wind energy to power electric vehicles. This is currently happening on the small Danish island of Bornholm, where government, academia and industry are working hand-in-hand on an innovative pilot program known as the EDISON Project. The EDISON Project could offer unique technical insights which will go some ways in addressing the challenges of combining renewable energy with EVs.

Copenhagen utility DONG Energy is currently collaborating with regional energy company of Oestkraft, the Technical University of Denmark, Siemens, Eurisco and the Danish Energy Association, and IBM to develop the system. Depending on how far consumers allow them to go, current electric vehicles could rely on the system created to charge their exhausted batteries whenever the wind generates excess power. Needless to say, vehicle charging will be slowed or delayed whenever the wind stops, resulting in reduction of energy production. The main goal behind this is not to save the world in the blink of an eye, but to use this as a model for deploying an estimated 200,000 wind-powered EVs nationwide by 2020. Denmark is certainly on the right track as they’re currently a leader in wind power, churning over 20% of the country’s electric power, with the current goal of doubling that amount. Apart from that, they’re not short on expertise as around half the wind turbines produced worldwide hail from Danish manufacturers.

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You wouldn’t fly on a commercial jet plane unless you were confident that the pilot had logged some serious time in a flight simulator, preparing for every eventuality. Someday it may be just as inconceivable to undergo delicate surgery without assurances that your doctor has taken a few practice runs on a three-dimensional, interactive simulation of your own anatomy. Researchers at Stanford University are hastening that day by developing a training technology that allows doctors to rehearse surgical procedures before the patient reaches the operating room.

The demonstration project, called the Stanford Rhino­logical Virtual Surgical Environment (VSE), uses a haptic interface—mechanical feedback that simulates the sense of touch—developed by SensAble Technologies of Woburn, Massachusetts. The VSE system combines that interface with a set of detailed CT scans, taken before the operation, to create a digital “body double” of the patient. Using the patient’s own scans in the simulation could greatly assist doctors performing surgery near critical parts such as the optic nerve and carotid artery, where damage could cause permanent debilitation or death. In such operations, knowing the precise quirks of an individual’s anatomy is crucial to a successful outcome.

Kenneth Salisbury, a professor in Stanford’s departments of computer science and surgery, says that tactile feedback combined with the personalized information gives the VSE system a big advantage over current medical training simulations that use virtual surgery. “Existing systems allow you to move surrogate instruments around, watch how they look on the screen, and learn to make movements in the correct direction,” he says, adding, “It starts to get more interesting when you add the feeling and the reaction of tissue.”

The Stanford team has developed an enhanced haptic interface that can re-create essentially all of the physical challenges a surgeon would encounter in a procedure. From a clinical point of view, though, plastic training mannequins will probably always be useful. “It’s the same with an airplane,” Salisbury says. “You want a simulated plane that looks and feels like the one you’ll be flying.” Clinical trials of the VSE system are slated to take place over the next couple years.

——————————————————————————–

HOW IT WORKS

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Rendering of a surgeon’s work station for rehearsing sinus surgery with the assistance of haptic training technology.

A haptic-feedback device (A) operates in a way analogous to the graphics card in your computer monitor, but instead of creating an image, it renders the feeling of a physical object—in this case bone, cartilage, or a tumor. “Rather than controlling red, green, and blue pixels that are visible to the eye, the device controls the three-dimensional forces felt by the hand,” says Daniel Chen, chief technology officer at SensAble Technologies.

To create models of patients’ sinuses, multiple two-dimensional scans were taken of their sinus cavities to create a composite 3-D display (B) that is viewable on a standard PC. From the same data, physical mass, friction, and compliance properties are assigned to the anatomical parts within the sinus. The virtual sinus is then engaged by the haptics device, an armlike series of joints containing lightweight motors connected to an endoscope-tipped stylus (C). The device contains optical encoders that link the stylus’s movements with the image on the screen.

When the encoders sense that you have “bumped” into something, they signal the device to engage its motors so they respond with appropriate force. When a surgeon grazes the wall of the virtual nose, he or she will feel soft resistance; if the surgeon presses harder, the resistance will increase to mimic the feel of the underlying cartilage or bone.

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It said it would take the action against marketing firm USocial unless it stopped violating Facebook's rights.

It also wanted USocial to stop helping members break the site's terms and conditions, specifically letting people profit from their profile.

In response, USocial agreed to a change in its practices but would not shut down its service.

Facebook sent Cease and Desist letters to USocial claiming that the way the marketing firm operates violates its rights by sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, getting login names and by accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm.

Customers of USocial use it to boost follower and friend numbers on social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

On micro-blogging site Twitter, followers can be bought in blocks starting at £53 for 1,000. The biggest block USocial is selling is 100,000 people.

USocial defended itself against Facebook's claims, saying that it did not spam users or use web tools to gather information about profiles.

However, in response to the legal letters, USocial said it would delete the login information it had collected and broadly stop offering to sell Facebook friends. It also put a notice on its site saying it was not affiliated with Facebook.

However, it said, there was "possibility" that it would resell the service in the future. If it was to re-start the service it said it would let Facebook know beforehand.

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The e-mail system of one of the world's leading climate research units has been breached by hackers.

E-mails reportedly from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), including personal exchanges, appeared on the internet on Thursday.

A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission.

An investigation was underway and the police had been informed, he added.

"We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites," the spokesman stated.

"Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.

"This information has been obtained and published without our permission and we took immediate action to remove the server in question from operation.

"We are undertaking a thorough internal investigation and we have involved the police in this enquiry."

Researchers at CRU, one of the world's leading research bodies on natural and human-induced climate change, played a key role in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which is considered to be the most authoritative report of its kind.

'Inside information'

Graham Cluley, a computer security expert, suggested that December's key climate summit in Copenhagen, which has made headlines around the world, could have increased the university's profile as a possible target among hackers.

"There are passionate opinions on both sides of the climate debate and there will be people trying to knock down the other side," Mr Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, told BBC News.

"If they feel that they can gather inside information on what the other side is up to, then they may feel that is ammunition for their counterargument."

Mr Cluley added that universities were vulnerable to attacks by hackers because so many people required access to IT systems.

"You do need proper security in place; you need to be careful regarding communications and make sure your systems are secure.

"I trust that they will now be looking at the systems, and investigating how this happened and ensuring that something like this does not happen again."

Courtsey : BBC News

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Think you are hard on your mobile phone? Nokia’s 3720 is built to take it. Engineers incorporated stainless steel into the phone’s casing, locked the battery compartment with a screw, and sealed the case to protect against water and contaminants. During stress tests, the 3720 was pounded with weights and dropped from various heights to ensure it could stand up to the dunks, bumps, and crashes a phone endures in harsh environments like a beach or even a dusty construction site. Despite the tough exterior, ?there is room inside for a 2-megapixel camera, an LED flashlight, and a 1-gigabyte microSD card. The battery is built for endurance too: Talk time reaches 7 hours, 18 days standby. No price has been set yet for the U.S. version of the 3720, but it is selling in Europe for 125 euros (about $180).

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If you keep finding your phone’s charge running low during important calls, Energizer’s $70 XP4001 Power Pack could become a valued travel companion. Rechargeable 500 times, it has dual USB inputs to power two devices at once. When charging them separately, the Power Pack can add 25 hours of talk time for your phone or 136 hours for a Bluetooth headset.

LOGIC BOLT V 1.5 PROJECTOR CELL PHONE 

Logic Wireless’s cell phone/LCOS projector turns any wall into your personal display. The $500 unit projects a 640 x 480 resolution image onto a surface, creating a 34- to 64-inch picture—with adjustable focus to boot. Operating time is 2 to 3 hours in phone mode and 2 hours as a projector.

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The future of computing may depend on embracing the chaos that defines human thinking.

Kwabena Boahen’s love affair with digital computers began and ended in 1981, when he was 16.

Boahen lived outside the city of Accra in the West African nation of Ghana. His family’s sprawling block house stood in a quiet field of mango and banana trees. One afternoon Boahen’s father rolled down the driveway with a surprise in the trunk of his Peugeot: a RadioShack TRS-80—the family’s first computer—purchased in England.

Young Boahen parked the machine at a desk on the porch, where he usually dismantled radios and built air guns out of PVC pipe. He plugged the computer into a TV set to provide a screen and a cassette recorder so he could store programs on tapes, and soon he was programming it to play Ping-Pong. But as he read about the electronics that made it and all other digital computers work, he soured on the toy.

Moving the Ping-Pong ball just one pixel across the screen required thousands of 1s and 0s, generated by transistors in the computer’s processor that were switching open and shut 2.5 million times per second. Boahen had expected to find elegance at the heart of his new computer. Instead he found a Lilliputian bureaucracy of binary code. “I was totally disgusted,” he recalls. “It was so brute force.” That disillusionment inspired a dream of a better solution, a vision that would eventually guide his career.

Boahen has since crossed the Atlantic Ocean and become a prominent scientist at Stanford University in California. There he is working to create a computer that will fulfill his boyhood vision—a new kind of computer, based not on the regimented order of traditional silicon chips but on the organized chaos of the human brain. Designing this machine will mean rejecting everything that we have learned over the past 50 years about building computers. But it might be exactly what we need to keep the information revolution going for another 50.

The human brain runs on only about 20 watts of power, equal to the dim light behind the pickle jar in your refrigerator. By contrast, the computer on your desk consumes a million times as much energy per calculation. If you wanted to build a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain, it would require 10 to 20 megawatts of electricity. “Ten megawatts is a small hydroelectric plant,” Boahen says dismissively. “We should work on miniaturizing hydroelectric plants so we can put them on the backs of robots.” You would encounter similar problems if you tried to build a medical implant to replace just 1 percent of the neurons in the brain, for use in stroke patients. That implant would consume as much electricity as 200 households and dissipate as much heat as the engine in a Porsche Boxster.

“Energy efficiency isn’t just a matter of elegance. It fundamentally limits what we can do with computers,” Boahen says. Despite the amazing progress in electronics technology—today’s transistors are 1/100,000 the size that they were a half century ago, and computer chips are 10 million times faster—we still have not made meaningful progress on the energy front. And if we do not, we can forget about truly intelligent humanlike machines and all the other dreams of radically more powerful computers.

Getting there, Boahen realized years ago, will require rethinking the fundamental balance between energy, information, and noise. We encounter the trade-offs this involves every time we strain to hear someone speaking through a crackly cell phone connection. We react instinctively by barking more loudly into the phone, trying to overwhelm the static by projecting a stronger signal. Digital computers operate with almost zero noise, but operating at this level of precision consumes a huge amount of power—and therein lies the downfall of modern computing.

In the palm of his hand, Boahen flashes a tiny, iridescent square, a token of his progress in solving that problem. This silicon wafer provides the basis for a new neural supercomputer, called Neurogrid, that he has nearly finished building. The wafer is etched with millions of transistors like the ones in your PC. But beneath that veneer of familiarity hides a radical rethinking of the way engineers do business.

Traditional digital computers depend on millions of transistors opening and closing with near perfection, making an error less than once per 1 trillion times. It is impressive that our computers are so accurate—but that accuracy is a house of cards. A single transistor accidentally flipping can crash a computer or shift a decimal point in your bank account. Engineers ensure that the millions of transistors on a chip behave reliably by slamming them with high voltages—essentially, pumping up the difference between a 1 and a 0 so that random variations in voltage are less likely to make one look like the other. That is a big reason why computers are such power hogs.

Radically improving that efficiency, Boahen says, will involve trade-offs that would horrify a chip designer. Forget about infinitesimal error rates like one in a trillion; the transistors in Neurogrid will crackle with noise, misfiring at rates as high as 1 in 10. “Nobody knows how we’re going to compute with that,” Boahen admits. “The only thing that computes with this kind of crap is the brain.”

It sounds cockamamy, but it is true. Scientists have found that the brain’s 100 billion neurons are surprisingly unreliable. Their synapses fail to fire 30 percent to 90 percent of the time. Yet somehow the brain works. Some scientists even see neural noise as the key to human creativity. Boahen and a small group of scientists around the world hope to copy the brain’s noisy calculations and spawn a new era of energy-efficient, intelligent computing. Neurogrid is the test to see if this approach can succeed.

Most modern supercomputers are the size of a refrigerator and devour $100,000 to $1 million of electricity per year. Boahen’s Neurogrid will fit in a briefcase, run on the equivalent of a few D batteries, and yet, if all goes well, come close to keeping up with these Goliaths.

The problem of computing with noise first occurred to a young neuro­scientist named Simon Laughlin three decades ago. Laughlin, then at the Australian National University in Canberra, spent much of 1975 sitting in a black-walled, windowless laboratory with the lights off. The darkness allowed him to study the retinas of blowflies captured from Dumpsters around campus. In hundreds of experiments he glued a living fly to a special plastic platform under a microscope, sunk a wisp-thin electrode into its honeycombed eye, and recorded how its retina responded to beams of light. Laughlin would begin recording at noon and finish after midnight. As he sat in the gloomy lab, watching neural signals dance in green light across an oscilloscope, he noticed something strange.

Each fly neuron’s response to constant light jittered up and down from one milli­second to the next. Those fluctuations showed up at every step in the neurons’ functioning, from the unreliable absorption of light by pigment molecules to the sporadic opening of electricity-conducting proteins called ion channels on the neurons’ surfaces. “I began to realize that noise placed a fundamental limit on the ability of neurons to code information,” Laughlin says.

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Intel just held a press conference in which the company spoke about its next-generation server processor, currently code-named Nehalem-EX. As its name suggests, the Nehalem-EX is based on the Nehalem microarchitecture which debuted with the Xeon 5500 and Core i7 series processors. The Nehalem-EX series however, will be decidedly more high-end in terms of specifications and performance. Whereas current Xeon 5500 series processors feature four execution cores per CPU with support for up to eight threads through the use of Hyper-Threading, the Nehalem-EX series will be outfitted with up to eight execution cores per chip with support for up to sixteen threads, and 24MB of cache. In addition, Nehalem-EX will also sport some features carried over from the Itanium line, like Machine Check Architecture (MCA) Recovery. 

Intel Nehalem-EX Microarchitecture – Image courtesy:  Intel Corp. 

According to Intel, the Nehalem-EX will offer up to nine times the memory bandwidth of the previous-generation Intel Xeon 7400 platform with up to double the memory capacity through the use of 16 memory slots per processor socket. The processors will also offer four high-bandwidth QuickPath Interconnect links per CPU to provide significant scalability, from large-memory two-socket systems through eight-socket systems capable of processing 128 threads simultaneously.  Scalability beyond eight sockets, up to 32-socket implementations can be achieved.

In the video, Intel's Kennedy Brown and IBM's Kevin Powell show off an 8 socket, 64 core, 128 thread IBM server based on Intel's Nehalem-EX processor churning though a workload that pegs all cores at 100% utilization. 

8-Socket Nehalem-EX Platform Architecture – 64 Cores, 128-Threads, Scalable to 32-Socket

Nehalem-EX Architecture Enhancements Vs. Previous Gen.

A summary of the Nehalem-EX features and benefits includes:

•Intel Nehalem Architecture built on Intel’s unique 45nm high-k metal gate technology process 

•Up to 8 cores per processor 

•Up to 16 threads per processor with Intel Hyper-threading 

•Scalability up to eight sockets via Quick Path Interconnects and greater with third-party node controllers 

•QuickPath Architecture with four high-bandwidth links 

•24MB of shared cache 

•Integrated memory controllers 

•Intel Turbo Boost Technology 

•Intel scalable memory buffer and scalable memory interconnects 

•Up to 9x the memory bandwidth of previous generation 

•Support for up to 16 memory slots per processor socket 

•Advanced RAS capabilities including MCA Recovery 

•2.3 billion transistors

The Intel Nehalem-EX is scheduled for production in the second half of 2009, with systems coming from Intel's usual partners in the high-end server space. Intel has not commented on clock frequencies just yet, but if they can come close to existing products, the Nehalem-EX platform could have a major impact on the HPC space, as well as the high-end server market.

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The world’s largest wind turbine is now the Enercon E-126. This turbine has a rotor diameter of 126 meters (413 feet). The E-126 is a more sophisticated version of the E-112, formerly the world’s largest wind turbine and rated at 6 megawatts. This new turbine is officially rated at 6 megawatts too, but will most likely produce 7+ megawatts (or 20 million kilowatt hours per year). That’s enough to power about 5,000 households of four in Europe. A quick US calculation would be 938 kwh per home per month, 12 months, that’s 11,256 kwh per year per house. That’s 1776 American homes on one wind turbine.

The turbine being installed in Emden, Germany by Enercon. They will be testing several types of storage systems in combination with the multi-megawatt wind turbines.

These turbines are equipped with a number of new features: an optimized blade design with a spoiler extending down to the hub, and a pre-cast concrete base. Due to the elevated hub height and the new blade profile, the performance of the E-126 is expected to by far surpass that of the E-112.

WiredForStereo of The Way explains the operation of these new turbines:

[The E-126]… has no gearbox attaching the turbine blades to the generator, in fact, the generator is housed just at the widest part of the nose cone, it takes up the entire width of the nacelle to generate power more efficiently, and provide longer service life with less wear.

Also like small turbines, these have inverters instead of synchronous generators, that is to say, a separate controller that converts the wild AC generated into something the grid can use. This means the rotor can run at more optimum and varied speeds.

Again like small turbines, this one does not shut right off at a predetermined speed due to gusts or just very high wind speeds. It simply throttles down by turning the blades slightly away from the wind so as to continue to generate power though at a lower production rate. Then the instant the wind is more favorable, it starts back up again. Many smaller wind turbines do something similar except have no blade pitch control, they use a technique called something like “side furling” where the whole machine, excepting the tail, turns “sideways” to catch less wind but continue operating.

Money, why else? Big things are cheaper per unit production. If you have 3 2 MW generators, you have to have three (at least) cranes to put them up, build three foundations, have to maintain three machines, and have three times the parts to fail. If you have one, it is larger and more expensive in itself to move, but not as expensive as having to move three smaller ones.

I don’t understand how people can be so concerned about birds becoming mush with modern wind turbines, especially ones this big. It only turns at 12 rpms. That means it takes five seconds to complete one revolution. That is slow but this is much bigger and easy to see compared to the whirring blades of old. The Altamont Pass turbines gave wind turbines such a bad name because they were built in the middle of the natural habitat of rare birds, the turbines were the small fast spinning type, and they were built using lattice towers, the kind birds love to nest in. These are slowly being replaced and all of the new ones are of the slower rotating kind. In the end, it comes down to this. Stationary buildings and moving cars kill literally millions of times more birds than wind turbines. And things like the Exxon Valdez spill kill millions of everything. So let’s go with the best option.

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At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data — including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop".

In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he'll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.\

Source : Times of India

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