Technology

Over at Multipolarity Memes there’s a post about a short (though large), 3D-rendered, animation of a hypothetical nanofactory. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no expert at this stuff, but I did take some intermediate chemistry and physics classes in college, so the animation immediately raises a number of questions in my mind; viz.: At that size, can they realistically assume that the envisioned structures will be as rigid as they make them out to be? What about Brownian motion? What about transfer of heat—especially given that there are, presumably, chemical reactions taking place, and these reactions will involve energy transfers? What type of bonding is happening at the transfer points? Chemical reactions don’t happen magically—and they don’t happen without some energy input or energy release—neither of which are being obviously represented in the video. It’s a pretty fantasy, but how realistic is it, really? ...

Ed Felten writes about a new paper that discusses the possibility of RFID tags being used to exploit flaws in RFID reader software to propagate a virus. The paper, authored by Melanie Rieback, Bruno Crispo, and Andy Tanenbaum of Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, includes a description of a proof-of-concept the authors developed. By including a SQL injection flaw in the reader software they wrote, and RFID tag containing appropriate malicious code, the reader then propagated the malicious code by writing it to new RFID tags. If such a flaw exists in real reader code, the potential exists for a virus to be transmitted from reader to reader via RFID tags, with each infected reader writing the virus out to additional tags. BTW, this is the same Andy Tanenbaum who wrote the classic textbook Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and developed Minix, which inspired Linus Torvalds to create Linux. Rieback gave a talk at last year’s “What the Hack” hacker conference in Amsterdam on “Fun and Mayhem with Radio Frequency Identification.”

It appears that Amazon.com has removed all customer reviews from their website, and has introduced a new beta feature called “Customer Discussions” for each product. There are still customer rankings (the “Rate it” feature) and editorial reviews, but all the customer reviews are gone, the reviewer ranking is gone, and the helpful/unhelpful votes are gone. A pity, as I was hoping to someday make the ranks of the top 1000 reviewers–my best rank was 2,171 in late February of this year. This move seems to be really poor judgment on Amazon.com’s part. I heavily relied upon customer reviews when making purchasing decisions, and I considered the reliability of individual’s reviews by comparing them to other reviews by the same person. Now, that feature of Amazon.com is unavailable, as the huge existing database of commentary has been removed. Perhaps the “Customer Discussions” will replace it, but if the purpose is for people to go back-and-forth debating specifics of the content, rather than giving an overview and opinion of the work as a whole, it won’t be the same. It was also rather rude of Amazon.com to delete, without notice, the substantial contributions of its top reviewers. I was ranked only 2,171, but I reviewed 113 books to get there–and there were several million Amazon.com reviewers. Top reviewers reviewed thousands of books. That’s an enormous amount of customer contribution to just throw away without notice or acknowledgment. UPDATE (12:35 p.m. MST Sunday): As cowmix pointed out, the reviews are back. I spoke with a friend who works at Amazon.com, and he said that it is common for Amazon.com to make changes like this which are only visible to a test population of users, for a short period of time that’s long enough to obtain information about how it affects customer behavior. ...

Last week Global Crossing, my employer, unveiled a corporate blog site. The current bloggers there are David Siegel, writing on the future of the Internet (and most recently on the IPTV World Forum), Adam Uzelac, writing on VOIP technology, Norm Schilacci, writing to clarify new technologies and concepts for the layman, and Paul Kouroupas, writing on public policy issues and regulatory matters (most recently on net neutrality, in which he recommends an excellent paper by Blair Levin, Rebecca Arbogast, and David Kaut of Stifel/Nicolaus, “Net Neutrality: Value Chain Tug of War”). In conjunction with this blog site, Global Crossing has defined a fairly open blogging policy for employees to comment publicly about the company. The policy contains most of the core and common policies described at the CorporateBlogging Blog. I’ve tended (with a few exceptions) to avoid blogging specifically about my employer here, and this is the first time I’ve specifically named the company on my blog. That’s a tendency I plan to continue here, though I expect to comment from time to time on the company blog site. (You can find a couple comments of mine in the DRM thread on Siegel’s blog.) Lest there be any doubt, any opinions I express on this blog (or on the company blog) are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.

Back on March 4, the story broke from an American traveling in Canada that something had gone wrong at Citibank, causing it to shut off access from the ATM networks of Canada, Russia, and the UK. Bruce Schneier picked it up on March 6, and now it’s hit the mainstream media with more details, with some attributing the problem to OfficeMax. The symptoms from a bank customer’s perspective are debit cards being replaced by the banks (which Citibank, Bank of America, and Washington Mutual have been doing since at least last month) and an inability to make withdrawals with current cards from ATMs in Canada, Russia, or the UK. At least some of the banks have now admitted to ATM fraud occurring, with Citibank admitting to “several hundred transactions” in three countries, while some western Massachusetts institutions have seen fraud in Spain, Pakistan, and Romania. The attribution to OfficeMax comes from investigations in Massachusetts. Tech Web News’ report is the most detailed to date: The unfolding debit card scam that rocked Citibank this week is far from over, an analyst said Thursday as she called this first-time-ever mass theft of PINs “the worst consumer scam to date.” Wednesday, Citibank confirmed that an ongoing fraud had forced it to reissue debit cards and block PIN-based transactions for users in Canada, Russia, and the U.K. ...

This one, a six-legged robot from Carnegie Mellon University, climbs trees and walls using claws, micro-claws, or sticky material, as appropriate for the surface. Again, there’s video. (Again, via jwz’s blog.) Previous robot, “Big Dog” the robotic pack mule, here.

Google plans to hire about 600 people in the Phoenix area, and they’ve chosen Tempe for a temporary facility of about 100,000 square feet. It looks like their permanent facility will either be in Tempe or South Scottsdale (at ASU’s “SkySong” business park, which used to be the site of Los Arcos mall). Historical Comments Einzige (2006-12-09): I just might apply!

Boston Dynamics is building this four-legged robot for the U.S. military (DARPA): A nimble, four-legged robot is so surefooted it can recover its balance even after being given a hefty kick. The machine, which moves like a cross between a goat and a pantomime horse, is being developed as a robotic pack mule for the US military.In this amusing or perhaps creepy video (28MB Windows media file), the robot walks over different types of terrain–including mud, rocky ground, and snow–and is given a few kicks to show how it stabilizes itself. Unlike the photo at left, in the video it looks like a pantomime horse with both people facing each other–sort of the opposite of a pushmipullyu. (Via jwz’s blog.) ...

John Markoff has a story in the New York Times about AT&T’s “Daytona” database, which has a record of 1.9 trillion calls from over the last several decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has filed a lawsuit against AT&T for cooperating with the NSA’s warrantless interception program, asserts that this database has been used by the NSA for data mining. “Checking every phone call ever made is an example of old think,” he said. ...

Bruce Schneier reports on the technical details of how about 100 Greek politicians and offices, including the U.S. Embassy in Athens and the Greek prime minister, were illictly tapped. What was originally referred to as “malicious code” turned out to be eavesdropping code in Vodafone’s mobile phone software that was present for law enforcement interception. The same kind of code is present in U.S. phone switches as required by CALEA. As Schneier points out, “when you build surveillance mechanisms into communication systems, you invite the bad guys to use those mechanisms for their own purposes.”