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One Per Cent: A New Scientist Blog

May 2011 archive

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

Read more: "The future of money in a webbed-up world"


(Image: Google)

Commuters are the people that will determine the success or failure of Google's nascent mobile wallet technology for cellphones.

That's the conclusion of a researcher who has examined the role that mobile phone-based payment systems played in the uptake of 3G connectivity in Japan: he found that delivering a technology that works quickly enough to make a real difference to the utter drudgery of commuting was the key factor in determining the success of the m-wallet.

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

The mystery surrounding the crash of Air France flight 447 in June 2009 deepened today when a preliminary report from air crash investigators revealed a double failure of the plane's speed sensors - critical for fly-by-wire computer-assisted flight - followed by the flight crew inexplicably failing to maintain airspeed and deal with the stall that resulted.  

The BEA says the plane hit turbulence at cruise altitude and then suffered temporary failures of two speed sensors - possibly due to high altitude icing. Because this meant an agreed speed reading could not be calculated - and speed is critical for maintaining aerodynamic lift - the flight computer switched off the autopilot and handed control to the pilots.

The nonflying pilot was heard confirming this disengagement had happened on the cockpit voice recorder saying: "so, we've lost the speeds," and then "alternate law". Fly-by-wire flight, where the plane is kept straight and level and at a safe lift-producing speed by a computer program (which has four backups) is managing flight in what is called "normal law". This also ensures the plane can only bite into the airflow at a low, lift-producing "angle of attack". 

When the pilots are in charge the plane is said to be obeying "alternate law" - but here the angle of attack is not computer managed.

As control was handed over the stall warning sounded, yet the pilot flying the plane decided to climb. A stall usually requires the nose to be dipped downward to gain airspeed and regain the missing lift. Yet AF447 climbed inexorably to its ceiling of 38,000 feet at a very high angle of attack of more than 35 degrees. With the stall warning sounding, the nose remained tipped upward. The plane stalled, losing altitude at 11,000 feet per minute. It fell for 3 minutes 30 seconds when it hit the water nose up 16-degrees and belly first - just as the BEA had predicted from their analysis of floating wreckage. 

This is the second time in recent memory that a flight has suffered from a nose up situation in a stall. Colgan Air lost an aircraft near Buffalo, New York, in February 2009 when drag caused by thick icing slowed a commuter flight so much it stalled. The pilot in that case also adopted a nose up attitude. It is not what pilots are trained to do.

Contributors to the online Professional Pilot's Rumour Network - Pprune - are astonished that the AF447 pilots maintained a nose-up attitude. You can read their comments on (and either side of) this thread page. Some wonder if cockpits are being over-computerised leaving pilots baffled when it comes to manual flight in an emergency.

Others are worried about crew workload, coping with a blizzard of alarms in a thunderstorm in the dead of night. Mostly, they are so surprised the pilot kept the nose up in a stall - and for so long - that they think there has to be more to it: did other instruments fail?

The investigation continues.

Peter Aldhous, San Francisco bureau chief

Ever wondered how events in the real world affect the collective consciousness of web users? If so, you're going to have fun with Google Correlate, the latest tool to emerge from the search giant's research labs. It allows you to upload data on actual events, and determine search terms typed into Google that correlate with those numbers over time.

Given recent severe weather in the US, I uploaded numbers on Americans injured by tornadoes, derived from the same National Weather Service dataset that New Scientist used to make these interactive graphics.

The results were pretty impressive: all of the top ten search strings were related to tornadoes, with the top return  "tornado news"  having a respectably strong correlation coefficient of 0.7923 (where 1 indicates a perfect correlation, and zero is no relationship at all).

Jacob Aron, technology reporter





Jacob Aron, technology reporter

Efforts to make the web more accessible have unwittingly made it less secure, according to computer scientists who have developed software to crack the audio CAPTCHAs used by websites as part of their sign-up process.

You're probably familiar with traditional CAPTCHAs, the obscured words used to verify that a new user is a person rather than a bot, but the image-based security measure is difficult for visually impaired people to use. To help such users websites also offer audio CAPTCHAs, in which a computerised voice reads out letters or digits distorted by noise, but their security hadn't been as extensively studied as the visual versions.

Now, researchers have used software called Decaptcha to crack commercial audio CAPTCHAs used by eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo and others, with success rates from 41 to 89 per cent. The system known as reCAPTCHA - developed by the original inventors of the CAPTCHA and now owned by Google - was more resilient to attack, with only 1.5 per cent of CAPTCHAs broken. Even such a low success rate renders audio CAPTCHAs useless, as an attacker in control of a large botnet of infected computers can easily afford to make 100 attempts for every successfully created account.

Jacob Aron, technology reporter




Pop goes the smartphone (Image: © Nokia 2011)


Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

Arriving a quarter hour early for a central London technology briefing this morning I decided to sit in leafy St James's Square, near Piccadilly, to scan the latest tweets. But before I could do so I spotted a man on a street corner staring intently at an iPad 2 he had trained on the gates to the square. He showed me what he was watching: onscreen, Marilyn Monroe was apparently dancing in a bright yellow summer dress in the morning sunshine on the edge of the square before us. The guy was beaming at the sheer quality of the augmented reality imagery.

As you may have guessed, this iPad 2 user was the technology entrepreneur I had come to meet: Mike Lynch, co-founder and chief executive of Autonomy, the British software house. I wanted to hear about the augmented reality app his firm has just developed - in part because I couldn't fathom the link between AR and the firm's claim to fame to date: predictive software.

Autonomy has gone from nothing in 1996 to a firm worth £7 billion today by leveraging the theories of an 18th-century English mathematician and cleric called the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who worked out how to calculate the probability that certain variables are associated, whether they are words, behaviours or images. Lynch and his colleagues built their business on a pattern recognition engine called the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (Idol) that uses algorithms based on Bayes' ideas. 

On the London tube network, Autonomy's Bayesian algorithms analyse human behaviours captured in CCTV images to calculate the likelihood someone will try to commit suicide by jumping under a train - allowing the track current to be turned off and help sought. If you follow Formula 1, Ross Brawn's Mercedes F1 team - which is steadily improving - identifies the potential source of every advantage gained by rival teams by training Autonomy algorithms on post-race video. To prevent fraud or noncompliance with the financial laws, workplace emails are analysed to infer risk. And police can use Idol to seek hidden patterns in crime reports.

But that's in the PC world. Now, says Lynch, they want to exploit the awesome and growing power of smartphones like Android and iPhone/iPad. To do this they have written an app they've called Aurasma that allows anybody to recognise real world items or places and call up associated online content, which they liken to an aura - hence the name.

"We won't be creating the content but we will be providing the infrastructure - including a 10,000-computer server farm - that allows it to be delivered to the real world," says Lynch.

The idea is that media companies can use Aurasma to recognise printed matter - street posters, newspapers, magazines - to call up compelling video and online content they have made themselves or from TV stations and movie studios. Such use will require payments to Autonomy if they result in click-through sales. But for the rest of us, the service will be free: you can create your own content you'd like to relate to a GPS location, a building or a park, say. And a social network will be built around this, too, allowing users to follow people whose environmental multimedia content they like.

"This is a platform we're providing and what people do with it is beyond us. It's making the world browseable," says Lynch.

"Restaurants could bring their menus to life while food packaging calls up nutrition information. One kid is leaving 3D video copies of himself all over London. Another idea is what London would like 100 years after everyone died in a plague." Better still, he says, flatpack furniture instructions will become animated in the device and show you what to do.

Jacob Aron, technology reporter

Wheelchair2.jpg(Image: Luleå University of Technology)

Researchers at the Luleå University of Technology in Sweden have developed an electric wheelchair that lets visually impaired users "see" their surroundings.

The vehicle uses a laser to scan its environment and create a 3D map of potential obstacles such as nearby people or open doors. It alerts the wheelchair driver to these hazards via vibrating touch feedback, which lets them feel when they need to move out of the way using the wheelchair's joystick.

Jacob Aron, technology reporter

Post.jpgData delivery (Image: Belinda Images/SuperStock)

Cloud computing services let users offload their number-crunching problems to powerful servers elsewhere, but uploading vast quantities of data can take longer than you think - in fact, it can sometimes be quicker and cheaper to copy your files to a hard drive and stick it in the post.

That's why two computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are developing a system to calculate the most cost-efficient way to transfer data, using a mixture of the internet and postal services.

The system, called Pandora, aims to minimise data transfer times for a given budget. Imagine you've got 1.2 terabytes (TB) of data at one location and 0.8TB at another - two business address at opposite ends of the country for example -  and you want to upload both sets of data to Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service. You could just upload them to the Amazon's server over the internet, but Amazon charges $100 per TB, so the total cost would be $200. Uploading that much data also takes a while - it could be weeks, depending on your available bandwidth.

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

Technology companies operating in countries run by dictators should not get out of the country or take sides when the going gets tough - but they should do their utmost to provide the tools and infrastructure that let the people in such countries collaborate. That was the key message today from Wael Ghonim, the Egyptian internet activist whose Facebook page sparked the revolution that ousted President Mubarak in February.

photo.JPGWael Ghonim (left) with Google's MC, C4 news anchor Jon Snow.  (Image: Paul Marks)

Ghonim took to the stage today at a one-day conference staged by Google to tackle the privacy and censorship issues of tech-mediated information dissemination - particularly with regard to how they affected the ongoing "Arab Spring" revolutions. Ghonim is a Google marketing manager and was jailed for two weeks by Mubarak as the uprising kicked off.

"The role of technology companies in such situations ought to be to remain neutral. Don't get involved in the politics so much but do provide the tools that can help people collaborate," Ghonim says. That way, he suggests, people can connect and organise.

"You can reach millions of people with a Facebook message or an email. Our revolution was sparked online - it definitely facilitated the reach." Give people the means to expose the "evil" ways of a regime and they will do so, he says.

Jacob Aron, technology reporter

Android users risk exposing their Google calendars, contacts and other personal details when logging on to unencrypted Wi-Fi networks, say researchers at the University of Ulm in Germany. A weakness in ClientLogin, the authentication system used to access Google services, means that 99.7 per cent of Android smartphones could be attacked.

ClientLogin is designed to increase security by using authentication tokens rather than your username and password. Apps like Google Calendar send your login details to Google's servers and receive a token authorising them to connect, which remains valid for a maximum of two weeks.

Theoretically this means your account is more secure, because your login details aren't constantly being sent over the network, but the researchers found that tokens are being sent over unencrypted connections, allowing an attacker to copy them and use them themselves.

Niall Firth, technology editor

PNAS.jpg(Image: Xi Chen)

When you're rich, you turn on the lights.

It might seem a crude observation at face value, but researchers have discovered that a brightly lit country at night can help indicate how wealthy it really is.

Using familiar birds-eye satellite images of cities at night, researchers from Yale and Quinnipiac Universities in the US analysed US Department of Defense imagery from 1992 until 2008.

The team divided the world up into cells and measured each cell's "luminosity" - how bright each cell was. Even this process was mired in technical difficulties as obstacles such as automatic correction for glare, cloud cover and distortions caused by water vapour have to be removed. A figure was attributed to the brightness of each country's grid cells and these figures were combined and then aggregated over a year to give an annual luminosity value.

Official GDP figures from the World Bank were matched with each year to see if there was any correlation. A series of statistical calculations were then run to see whether an increase in light over time matched an increase in economic output - where it was known.

The results were far from conclusive. What the team found was that the figures were close but not quite precise enough to be useful for large, wealthy countries such as the US or Australia. This was because the margin of error in analysing the luminosity value was far larger than that in the official GDP figures.

However they found that when they turned their gaze on poorer and developing nations the match between actual economic output and night time luminosity provided rather more insight. In some countries like Cambodia, Somalia or North Korea - where there is very little economic data and there hadn't been a recent population census - analysis of the cells helped trace how well a nation was faring.

And in some areas, particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo, the luminosity counts helped track the country's economic health over time, where it had been difficult to do so before because of instability or violence.

The research is not the first to assume that lights at night are analogous with prosperity but is the first to compare actual economic figures with luminosity in this way.


Jim Giles, consultant


The idea is not as outlandish as it might seem. Last year, Johan Bollen, a computer scientist at Indiana University Bloomington, showed that the emotion expressed in tweets correlates with stock market movements. When Twitter users display high levels of anxiety, the Dow Jones Industrial Average tends to fall a few days later.

Bollen did not say why this connection exists, but in some sense it does not matter. If the predictive power is real, investors can use Twitter to shape their investments decisions. The why can come later.

That's the thinking at London-based Derwent Capital Markets, which today launched what may be the first Twitter-based hedge fund. Manager Paul Hawtin says he has raised £25 million, mainly from individual investors.

Jacob Aron, technology reporter

Hackers used Amazon's cloud computing service to attack Sony's PlayStation network, according to a Bloomberg report. An anonymous source says that the attackers used stolen credit card information to rent Amazon Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) servers and breach Sony's network, stealing millions of customer's details and thousands of credit cards in the process. The account has now been shut down, the source says.

The PlayStation network was relaunched over the weekend after nearly a month-long outage, though the system still remains offline in Japan due to government concerns over the security of the network. Sony must first detail the preventative measures it is putting in place and explain how it hopes to regain consumer confidence, said Kazushige Nobutani, director of the Media and Content Industry department at the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Amazon has not responded to New Scientist's request for clarification on the allegations reported by Bloomberg, but if true they suggest that criminals now see the cloud as a perfect staging ground for online attacks. Watch out for our upcoming investigation into the potential risks of cloud crime and what cloud providers like Amazon can do to prevent it.

Jacob Aron, technology reporter

It's unlike any ballet you've ever seen - a swarm of swirling particles gradually form the shape of a dancer and transform into a lifelike model before they explode into digital bits for the grand finale.

This performance, dubbed Dancing Atoms, is the result of a collaboration between ballet dancer Roberto Bolle and a team lead by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Bolle's body was digitally replicated with a 3D laser scanner, producing a computer model that the team could manipulate at will. He then danced in a black suit with 42 reflective markers attached at key points, such as the joints, while 12 motion-capture cameras recorded his every move in 3D space. The team combined Bolle's body scan and motion-capture data to create a digital avatar that can be displayed in a number of ways, from just a few particles to the full-resolution image of his body.

"The markers define the motion of the body, then the surface is put on the body from the 3D scan," explains Pat Healey, a professor of human interaction at Queen Mary University of London, who was in charge of motion capture for the project. "Motion-capture technologies make it possible, for the first time, to analyse human movements in full 3D at very high resolutions.

"This unprecedented level of detail can help us understand what affects people's perceptions of grace and beauty."

Jacob Aron, technology reporter

Forget cycling to work - how about a human-powered helicopter? Engineering students at the University of Maryland have successfully tested Gamera, a massive pedal-powered chopper.

Gamera has four 13-metre wide rotors, one at each end of its 18-metre wide cross-shaped carbon-fibre frame, but weighs less than 100kg - including the human pilot, Judy Wexler, who sits in the middle and provides power through both hand and foot peddling. Wexler successfully lifted off after two days of testing, managing to get several inches off the floor for about four seconds. "We're ecstatic," says Brandon Bush, Gamera team leader.

Though the team of more than 50 students were pleased to finally get airborne, they failed to achieve their ultimate goal of claiming the American Helicopter Society's Sikorsky Prize. The prize, worth $250,000, requires a human-powered helicopter to hover for a full minute while remaining within a 10-metre square. It must also fly higher than three metres at one point.

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

The couriers who led US troops to Osama bin Laden's bolthole in Abbottabad, Pakistan, also provided him with a remotely facilitated internet connection, says the CIA. In addition to ferrying his propaganda tapes to his favoured broadcasters, the couriers carried emails he had written and saved on USB sticks to distant cybercafés - and then sent the messages for him.

So there was no IP address linking the sender to the Abbottabad area. In what must have been a slow process, the couriers also ferried replies back to bin Laden, too.

At least, that's what two CIA and counterterrorism operatives told the Associated Press in a briefing yesterday on some of the early intelligence that's coming out of the "motherlode" of data found in bin Laden's den after he was shot. It is not clear if bin Laden saved ciphertext on the memory sticks that the couriers then cut and pasted into emails, or if it was all plain text.

Jacob Aron, technology reporter

Doctors in Japan used Twitter to coordinate medical assistance in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that hit the country in March this year.

In a letter to The Lancet this week, Yuichi Tamura and Keiichi Fukuda of the Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo say the social networking service played a significant role in triumphing over the disaster.

The pair explain the earthquake made it difficult to ensure a continuous supply of drugs for their patients suffering chronic diseases such as pulmonary hypertension. With phone lines unreliable but internet connections still working, they turned to Twitter to help inform people where to get their medicine.

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

Fed up with the light quality and/or extended warm-up time in eco-friendly compact fluorescent light bulbs? Or just worried about the mercury inside them? Help is at hand. An LED-based light bulb that produces the same light intensity as a 100-watt incandescent bulb could soon be a realistic replacement.

Early protoytypes of the LED light sources will be previewed to the lighting trade at this week's LightFair exhibition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - and are expected to hit the market in about a year, says the Associated Press. What's spurred the move is next year's ban on 100-watt incandescent bulbs in the US.

The challenge that's been met by Osram of Germany, Lighting Sciences Group of the US and Philips of the Netherlands was to build an LED bulb that emits light in all directions and which work in a standard domestic light fitting without extra power supplies being required. Some of the prototypes on show use "microscopic devices" that fan the LED to keep it cool, says the AP.

Each bulb is expected to cost around $50 so they are unlikely to take the mass market by storm initially. So far, LED bulbs have been limited to units equivalent to 60-watt incandescents but they are still quite inefficient and expensive.

Jim Giles, contributor, Vancouver, Canada

Touch screens were a marvel just a few years back - now they seem commonplace. But this week I got to play with a touch-sensitive device that felt genuinely new. It's the work of researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver.

Their screen comes with built-in "programmable friction" - a technique for adjusting the stickiness of the screen. I was skeptical about this adding much to the user experience, but it turns out to make touch-screen interactions a lot more interesting.


Wendy Zukerman, Asia-Pacific reporter

100414_Looking-At-North.jpg(Image: CK Designworks)


Every sixth floor of the 35-storey building will have gardens capable of growing trees up to 10 metres tall and the entire building will be boasting the very latest in green technology.



Jim Giles, contributor, Vancouver, Canada

Picture the scene: your boss phones to say he is working from home. A calm descends over the office. Workers lean back in their chairs. Feet go up on desks - this shift is going to be pretty chilled.

Suddenly, a super-sized video feed of your boss, projected onto to the front of a helium-filled balloon equipped with a loudspeaker, floats silently into the room and starts issuing orders from above your head. Not such a good day.

This blimp-based boss, which brings to mind the all-seeing Big Brother of George Orwell's 1984, is the creation of Tobita Hiroaki and colleagues at Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Tokyo. Its eerie quality hasn't escaped Hiroaki - he says that his colleagues described the experience of talking to a metre-wide floating image of a co-worker as "very strange".

The project does have some non-sinister applications. It's part of a wider movement aimed at making "telepresence" possible. Imagine a medical specialist who can't make it to a regional hospital, but needs to consult with a patient there. Or an academic expert who wants to deliver a lecture remotely. Telepresence researchers are working on technology that can get a representation of these people into the room. To put it another way: telepresence lets you be in two places at the same time.

Anybots, based in Mountain View, California, is already marketing a wheeled robot that can be operated over the internet. It features a head-height screen that displays video of the person controlling the device. It's "your personal avatar", according to the company's marketing spiel.

The Anybot is impressive, but it suffers from what might be called the "Dalek problem": it can't handle stairs. Hiroaki's blimp, which can be steered by small propellers mounted on a gondola below the balloon, can glide up stairs and float over desks. "There's huge potential here," he says.

The project is still an early stage, adds Hiroaki, who discussed his work yesterday at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. He and colleague have built a blimp and shown that it can be operated remotely. Now they have to do user studies - experiments that examine what it's like to interact with the device. A blimp with a projection the size of a regular head might make the experience more enjoyable, notes Hiroaki.

Follow Jim Giles at
Jim Giles, contributor, Vancouver, Canada

A cheap way to turn a screen of any size into a touch-sensitive device. An ultra-precise game controller. A new way to manipulate images. These are just some of the possible uses for ZeroTouch, an interface unveiled this week at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing by researchers from Texas A&M University in College Station.

ZeroTouch senses an object's position using a series of infrared LEDs and sensors mounted on the outside of what looks like an empty picture frame. The LEDs create a grid of invisible beams that crisscross the space inside the frame. A finger or other object that enters the frame blocks some of the beams, allowing the software monitoring the beams to track the movement of the object in real time.

The system can be used to turn any screen, including supersized televisions, into a touchscreen. Combined with a traditional touchscreen, ZeroTouch can also be used to increase the range of commands that a system can understand.

The Texas team demonstrated a ZeroTouch frame overlaid on a touchscreen that was controlled by a handheld stylus. Users could issue commands by tapping the stylus on the screen or by dragging and pinching with their fingers as they would on an iPhone. The team demonstrated how the combination of stylus and touch let users smoothly control a complex strategy game.

Team leader Andruid Kerne says he would like to rig up a series of ZeroTouch frames that would be big enough for someone to walk through. The system would be able to detect movements in three-dimensional space, which would have applications in game control. Current 3D controllers, like Microsoft's Kinect, beam infrared light from a single point, which limits the accuracy of the tracking as well as the area over which users can be tracked.

Follow Jim Giles at

MacGregor Campbell, consultant

For music fans, one word described the weather in San Francisco Tuesday: cloudy. Tech giant Google launched their long-anticipated cloud music service Tuesday at their annual developer conference. This is the second major cloud music service announced in the last few months and further illustrates that cloud-streamed music may soon finally be a reality in the US, after having been available for some time now in Europe.

"Google Music" will initially be a digital locker, similar to the cloud service launched by Amazon in March. Users can upload up to 20,000 MP3s of songs they already store on their local hard drives, to be accessed by any device running the Android operating system and with a connection to the Internet. The service will also locally cache songs to which a person has recently listened, along with specified playlists, to be accessible when there's no data connection around.

Ferris Jabr, reporter

Yasmina, a student at the University of Rochester in New York, is in the mood for some soup.

She opens her cupboard where she knows the coconut milk she needs is sitting on the shelf amongst other canned goods. Instead of reaching for the right can, she hesitates. Yasmina is blind. She holds her iPhone to the open cupboard, snaps a picture of the cans, makes an audio recording of her question - "which one is the coconut milk?" - and double taps to send off her query.

Approximately 45 seconds later her iPhone replies in an electronic timbre: "The answer is the one on the right." "Great," Yasmina says, feeling for the rightmost can, "that's awesome."

Yasmina just used VizWiz, a new mobile phone application that provides the visually impaired with nearly real-time solutions to everyday problems. VizWiz can, for example, help the blind read their mail, coordinate their outfits, understand menus in restaurants, check expiration dates and interpret street signs. The app owes its swiftness and accuracy to a marriage of computer chips and good old-fashioned human brainpower.

Designing a computer program that can reliably recognize text and distinguish objects in the real world has proven to be a massive challenge for artificial intelligence researchers. To get around this, the researchers behind VizWiz - a team consisting of computer scientists from several universities, including the University of Rochester - decided to outsource the task of problem-solving to people: specifically, to Amazon Mechanical Turk's masses of online workers.

Jacob Aron, technology reporter



Jim Giles, contributor, Vancouver, Canada

What would it feel like to ride on a roller-coaster that reacts to your emotional state? Visitors to amusement parks may soon be able to find out.

A team from the University of Nottingham, UK, have used "bio-feedback" to adjust the function of a bucking bronco ride and other amusement-park experiences. They say that ride designers are already expressing an interest in their findings.

Riders who tried the bronco were hooked up to an adapted medical sensor that monitored their breathing. The readings from the monitor were fed back to the bronco controls; as the breathing became less regular, the bronco began to speed up. It made for a tough challenge, as the jerky motion of the bronco is hardly calming. "At some point your breathing speeds up, you lose control and fall off the ride," says Joe Marshall, part of the Nottingham team.

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

Expect a rash of robot news this week as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) kicks off in Shanghai, China. While the hot topic at ICRA will be the critical role that robots are currently playing the other side of the East China Sea - exploring and clearing the wrecked reactor buildings at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan - the convention will see details on a fascinating crop of robots revealed, from levitating medical camera bots to droids that can burrow underground on Mars.


A Packbot robot at work inside the Fukushima nuclear plant (Image: Tepco)

The use of iRobot's bomb-defusing Packbots at Fukushima will be of overarching interest to delegates in an emergency workshop that's been called for Wednesday - particularly as the robots' onboard computers are not hardened against radiation damage, as some had suspected.

Jim Giles, contributor, Vancouver, Canada

Researchers at Microsoft are working on a control system that could allow every surface and every room in a house to be used as control panels for computer games.

Unlike Microsoft's new Kinect controller, which includes a sophisticated depth-sensing camera, the new system uses surprisingly simple technology. Practically every home is bathed in an electromagnetic field created by electronic appliances and nearby power wires. The researchers have developed a technique for recognising simple gestures by monitoring a person's position relative to this field.

Controller.jpg(Image: Microsoft Research/University of Washington)

The monitoring happens with a sensor which can be worn on the neck or wrist. The Microsoft team wrote software that tracks around a thousand different frequencies of voltage picked up by the sensor. In a proof-of-principle experiment, the software was able to recognise the characteristic signature, or set of frequencies, associated with specific poses, such as laying a hand on a particular wall.

In the future, the researchers plan to connect the software to household electronics, so that the person wearing the sensor could use gestures to adjust lighting conditions or the thermostat. They are also interested in developing a sensor that could be incorporated into mobile phones rather than worn on the body.

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

Microsoft today agreed to pay $8.5 billion for Skype, the peer-to-peer voice-over-internet-protocol (VOIP) phone network with 170 million users worldwide. But despite some surprise in the blogosphere, VOIP is not a new field of endeavour for Microsoft: its patent filings show the Redmond, Washington firm has been developing VOIP technology since July 2003 - a month before Skype first launched in beta in August 2003.

Microsoft's Xbox Live network and Kinect motion sensing gaming systems are amongst those expected to harness Skype's real-time communications tech. However Microsoft will probably want to forget its first VOIP patent: for a fax-over-internet protocol (FOIP) system.

Mike Fitzpatrick, contributor







Jim Giles, contributor, in Vancouver, Canada

Is it possible to build a computer in which the processing units are human brains rather than silicon chips?

That was the big picture behind the Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation, held yesterday here as part of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

The thinking goes something like this: Outsourcing platforms like Mechanical Turk have made it easy to tap into an online workforce. These platforms have interfaces that allow computers to post jobs and collect the results. So why not write software that uses online workers to perform specific tasks?

Niall Firth, technology editor

You swoop over the countryside like a bird in flight, the buildings and fields passing in a blur as you flick back in time between one month and the next.

But this isn't just another upgrade to Google Earth. You created this yourself just 30 minutes ago using a small, cheap drone that took a series of simple photos while airborne. This is the idea behind Pix4D, a new spin-off from EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, which is stitching together thousands of 2D photos to create complex 3D models that are navigable over time.

The process starts by flying a simple aerial drone over the area that is to be mapped, taking hundreds of photos as it passes. The GPS location for each photo is stored, as is the angle at which it was taken. An algorithm then detects points of interest - such as areas of high contrast between pixels - in each photo and uses these to stitch the photos into a single image, much as you'd piece together a jigsaw.

Jacob Aron, technology reporter

The seizure of Osama bin Laden's hard drives left many wondering what the US might discover - "the mother lode of intelligence", or impossible-to-crack encrypted data? It turns out that while the encryption used may be mathematically impenetrable, the human factor can provide a way in to the data, even after bin Laden's death.

One crude method is to decrypt the data would involve a "dictionary attack" - simply trying permutations of words in the dictionary in an attempt to guess the encryption password. Depending on the password's length and complexity, the process could take decades. An alternative and hopefully quicker approach is to use known facts about bin Laden and previously seized al Qaeda data to narrow down the options.

Jacob Aron, technology reporter

Software problems hampered MI5's investigation into the perpetrators of the 7/7 London bombings, according to a report published today.

Heather Hallett, the coroner in charge of the inquest into the 52 deaths resulting from the 2005 terrorist attack, questioned MI5 about the computer systems used to monitor Mohammad Siddique Khan and his associates. Khan appeared in footage taken at a terrorist training camp in 2001 and was monitored on four separate occasions in 2004, but this only came to light after the bombings.

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has become the latest news outfit to launch a website where people can leak documents, Wikileaks style. It's certainly an interesting move for a publishing firm currently under legal and regulatory scrutiny for allowing journalists at its weekly tabloid, The News Of The World, to intercept the voicemails of celebrities and politicians.

But the WSJ's nascent SafeHouse leaksite appears to suffer from the same kind of problems as one recently launched by Arab newscaster Al Jazeera: its terms of use place onerous - if not absurd - demands on the would-be leaker. And experts checking out SafeHouse last night found a raft of security risks.

If the plight of alleged leaker Bradley Manning has thrown anything into sharp relief, it's the utter peril that leakers of sensitive information can find themselves in. So the organisations jumping on the leakserver bandwagon with sites of their own really ought to be shoring up the security of their offerings and the terms under which they can be used.

As we detailed in January, Al Jazeera launched its Transparency Unit website, with a button allowing people to leak "documents, emails, photos, audio and video". But the site's terms of use turn leaking into an exercise in copyright law: leakers must assure Al Jazeera that the owner of the leaked documents (etc) have assigned all rights to the leaker and that they in turn grant such rights to Al Jazeera. WTF? as they say on Twitter.

Niall Firth, technology editor

It's being dubbed the world's first bendy smartphone.

PaperPhone, as the name suggests, is a flexible cellphone prototype that can store music, e-books and make calls just like any other smartphone. Where it differs from its sturdier rivals is that it has a 9.5-centimetre e-Ink display and all of its functions can be controlled by bending and twisting.

That's right: bending. Have a look at the video above for an illustration of how it works, but a tweak of the corner here or a bend there is used to navigate pages in ebooks, control your music or navigate through the menus.

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent


(Image: Reuters)

The US Navy's special forces certainly got their man when they raided Osama bin Laden's hideout at the weekend, but the alleged loss of one of their stealth helicopters in the process could prove a problem in the long term - especially if some of its stealthy secrets reach China, which has an aggressive stealth aircraft manufacturing programme.

When one of the helicopters failed on the ground, it was set ablaze by the US troops, per protocol, presumably after high security systems like encrypted radios were removed. The problem? Large chunks of the chopper's superstructure survived the inferno - including a large part of the tail, the horizontal stabilisers and the tail rotor.

These pieces have an unusual construction which suggests they may be both acoustically and electromagnetically stealthy. The engine shroud has angled edges reminiscent of Gulf War I's Lockheed Martin F-117 Stealth Fighter, whose edges famously deflect, rather than reflect, radar signals. And a dish-shaped cover over the tail rotor's axle - where the propellor blades join and create drag - looks designed to quell noise.

It all figures: many news sources quote Abbottabad locals saying that they didn't hear the choppers until they were directly overhead. And the Pakistani air force did not intercept the incoming US aircraft, suggesting a stealthy approach.

Jacob Aron, technology reporter

Password.jpg(Image: Rex Features)

Another day, another data leak - but this one has the potential to put all of your passwords in danger. LastPass, a browser plugin that allows users to store their passwords on a remote server and access them from any computer or smartphone, has warned users that their master passwords may be at risk.

The service, which has over one million users, encrypts a user's passwords on their own computer with a master password. This encrypted file is then synchronised to the LastPass servers, where they can be accessed from any other browser by entering the master password.

LastPass says it discovered a "network traffic anomaly" on Tuesday morning, and after further investigation discovered that data had been transferred out of its servers. It says the amount of data leaked is big enough to have transferred users' email addresses along with an encrypted version of their master password.

David Hambling, contributor



Jacob Aron, technology reporter

Compound.jpgWhat secrets lie inside? (Image: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA/Rex Features)

The US Navy SEAL team that found and killed Osama bin Laden on Sunday have recovered a number of computer drives and disks, dubbed "the mother lode of intelligence" by one US official speaking to Intelligence operatives are now apparently sorting through the digital haul, but what might they find?

It all depends on whether or not bin Laden's data is encrypted, as modern encryption techniques are mathematically uncrackable if used correctly. Data encoded using the AES-256 encryption scheme would take longer than the age of the universe to crack, which is why the US National Security Agency (NSA) endorses it for protecting documents classified "Top Secret".

We don't know whether bin Laden or other al-Qaeda members used AES-256, but it's certainly possible. Last year the organisation supposedly published a magazine called Inspire that contained an article on using a piece of encryption software known as Asrar al-Mujahideen 2.0, which uses AES-256 along with other encryption methods.

Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent


(Image: BEA/ECPAD)

The decision taken by Air France and Airbus to hire three of the world's smartest robotic submarines to find the wreckage of a crashed airliner in mid-Atlantic looks vindicated today.

At the weekend, the aircraft's flight data recorder (FDR) memory unit was found and recovered from the ocean floor debris field identified by the subs - and today the plane's cockpit voice recorder (CVR) was also located and brought to the surface.

All concerned will be praying that the immense water pressure at the 4000-metre depth where the wreckage was found has not ruined the memory chips inside the FDR and CVR, which will be examined at the headquarters of the French aircrash investigator, the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses in ten days time.

Jacob Aron, technology reporter

Sony has discovered that hackers compromised another of its online gaming networks in the attack that occurred last week - and this time confirmed that customer credit card details were stolen.

The Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) network is used by PC gamers and is separate from the PlayStation Network (PSN). In a statement on the SOE website, Sony admitted it had lost the details of 24.6 million more customers. This brings the total data lost up to 100 million customers, though this number may be lower as many gamers will have both a SOE and PSN account.

It seems the SOE leak took place at the same time as the PSN attack, but Sony only yesterday realised that further details had been compromised. "While the two systems are distinct and operated separately, given that they are both under the SONY umbrella, there is some degree of architecture that overlaps," the company told gaming blog Joystiq.

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