Monday, November 17. 2008Minority Report becomes reality
Oblong Industries is the company behind the prototype. They believe that their interfaces ‘brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984.’ Oblong states that ‘g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles.’ But although it looks really interesting, it also seems to require a very active attitude of the user. Large arm (beyond hand) gestures are needed and very ‘enthusiastic’ interactions with a large environment. I wonder if this is what people like in everyday life… Isn’t subtlety a better direction? Small subtle gestures, needing a small environment. See the VIDEO DEMO of the working interface on Video. ---- Personal comment: Cela ressemble a du gros "finger, hand & gesture" tracking. Ceci dit, cette référence constante faite à Minority Report par beaucoup d'ingénieurs (et de designers d'interaction) commence à devenir fatigante. Comme si il s'agissait là d'un objectif à atteindre ou d'une "milestone" culturelle... ExitReality - Le vieux "rêve" du web en 3dUne autre version /produit du web en 3d, ici avec construction automatique de mondes/chambres à partir de pages web (le fonctionnement est assez similaire à Knowscape (! même très!): une page dédiée d'où on load les pages). Les liens fonctionnent et le système additionne en plus tout le reste de l'attirail des mondes en 3d (chambres, avatars, îles désertes, import d'objets, etc...), les design étant assez horrible et prévisible. ExitReality: http://www.exitreality.com - Ex. sur le site de fabric | ch. Friday, November 14. 2008The Coming Wireless RevolutionGadgets that operate over television frequencies promise to transform the wireless landscape.
By Kate Greene
The FCC announcement essentially lets wireless take advantage of unused frequencies in between channels used by broadcast television, so-called white spaces. "The announcement that the FCC will allow white-space devices has a lot of people feeling like this is a beginning of a wireless revolution," says Anant Sahai, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. For years, researchers have been toying with radios that are smart enough to hop from one frequency to another, leaving occupied channels undisturbed--an approach known as cognitive radio. But until the FCC made its announcement, cognitive-radio research was a purely academic pursuit. "You could do all the research you wanted on it," Sahai says, "but it was still illegal." With the FCC decision, however, researchers and companies finally have the opportunity to turn prototypes into products, knowing that the gadgets could hit the market in the next couple of years. Companies including Motorola, Phillips, and Microsoft have all tested prototypes with mixed results and hope to have robust white-space devices soon. Motorola is one of the first companies to have developed a white-space radio device that meets the basic requirements of the FCC. The device is smart enough to find and operate on free frequencies in its vicinity while controlling the strength of signals to keep them from interfering with those from other devices using nearby frequencies. There are still lingering concerns over interference, however. This is one of the main reasons why white spaces have been off limits until now. Broadcast companies, which fund a huge lobby in Washington, were not keen on sharing their airwaves, and musicians were concerned that future white-space devices would interfere with performances using wireless microphones. Motorola's radio finds occupied frequencies by accessing a database of registered television stations and wireless devices within its vicinity, which it determines by using GPS. Steve Sharkey, Motorola's policy director, notes that the device has a secondary way of finding free signals that involves just "listening" to the airwaves and scoping out free space. Sharkey believes that combining both methods will provide the best results. Motorola's early tests show that there's still work to be done. During an FCC trial in October, Motorola's device, which is about the size of a suitcase and can currently only receive signals, was able to find some but not all of the allocated frequencies in its vicinity. "These aren't ready to go," admits Sharkey. "They are more developmental devices, and the idea of the test is to demonstrate the basic technologies and help the FCC understand all the interactions [between transmissions]." While eventually it may be possible to shrink down a white-space radio to the size of a cell phone, Sharkey says that Motorola is more focused on bypassing wired Internet technology by providing broadband to rural areas and providing point-to-point wireless antennas. Other companies are more reticent to talk about their white-space plans, but Jake Ward, spokesperson for the Wireless Innovation Alliance, a consortium of companies that helped convince the FCC to open up white spaces, says that these companies have a wide range of motives. For example, computer manufacturers such as Dell may want to build broadband wireless Internet cards that are faster and have more range than existing ones do. Software companies like Microsoft could be interested in building software and applications for new devices. And an Internet giant like Google may simply want to push Internet coverage to increase the number of people who see Google ads. "Each company has its own interests," Ward says, "but the underlying principle is that higher connectivity is better for everybody." Ward describes one white-space application as "mind blowing": sending high-definition television signals from one room to another within a house. "You have a TiVo, a DVD player, a cable box, and three high-definition TVs," he says. "Using a white-space device, you could beam those signals anywhere, to any TV." Of course, technical and policy challenges still remain. "Right now, a device capable of moving around to different frequencies at will is very expensive," notes UC Berkeley's Sahai. But he suspects that economies of scale will lead to affordable devices within the next couple of years. Additionally, he says, regulations need to be established to ensure that devices consistently avoid causing interference. Ultimately, however, Sahai sees no shortage of demand for the wireless spectrum. "If you build it better and faster and easy to deploy, then the applications will come," he says. Copyright Technology Review 2008. ----- Le spam mondial décapité par un journalisteBaisse du spam enregistrée par Spamcop au moment de la fermeture de McColo Corp - Source Security Fix Mardi, le nombre de spams circulant par email sur le net a baissé d’un coup. Selon IronPort, une entreprise spécialisée dans la messagerie électronique, la baisse était de 66 % environ. SpamCop, qui se focalise uniquement sur le spam, indique même une baisse de 75 % dans le monde. Derrière cette baisse subite, on trouve tout simplement la mise hors réseau d’une seule entreprise, McColo Corp, un hébergeur de sites basé à San Jose, en Californie. Mardi, Brian Kerbs, journaliste au Washington Post, où il tient un blog spécialisé dans les questions de sécurité informatique, contacte les deux fournisseurs en bande-passante de McColo, et leur fournit le dossier qu’il a constitué sur l’entreprise. Cela fait en effet plusieurs semaines que des rapports d’experts en sécurité informatique désignent McColo comme l’hébergeur de différents « botnets », des réseaux de PC dirigés à leur insu par un virus. McColo hébergeait les machines dirigeants les botnets Mega-D, Srizbi, Pushdo, Rustock et Warezov, au moins. Lesquels envoyaient sur le net des millions d’emails publicitaires ainsi que, selon le Washington Post, des emails pédophiles. Malgré tout, McColo n’était jusqu’à présent visiblement pas inquiété au niveau légal. Quand ses fournisseurs ont pris connaissance de ce qu’hébergeait McColo, ils ont vite décidé de déconnecter l’entreprise du réseau. Résultant en une baisse immédiate du spam dans le monde... « Nous les avons fait fermer, raconte Benny Ng, responsable marketing de Hurricane Electric, l’un des deux fournisseurs de McColo, cité par le Washington Post. Nous avons pris conscience de la taille du problème. [...] En une heure, nous avions coupé toutes leurs connexions chez nous. » La baisse du spam ne devrait hélas être que temporaire, le temps que les spammeurs se réorganisent. « Nous voyons déjà une remontée lente, explique Nilesh Bhandari, chez IronPort. Nous nous attendons à ce que le spam reviennent à son niveau précédent dans quelques jours, et à ce que le spam atteigne des records durant cette fin d’année. »
Baisse du spam enregistrée par Spamcop au moment de la fermeture de McColo Corp - Source Security Fix ----- Via Libération
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Thursday, November 13. 2008NanoRadioAlex Zettl's tiny radios, built from nanotubes, could improve everything from cell phones to medical diagnostics By Robert F. Service
If you own a sleek iPod Nano, you've got nothing on Alex Zettl. The physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have come up with a nanoscale radio, in which the key circuitry consists of a single carbon nanotube. Any wireless device, from cell phones to environmental sensors, could benefit from nanoradios. Smaller electronic components, such as tuners, would reduce power consumption and extend battery life. Nanoradios could also steer wireless communications into entirely new realms, including tiny devices that navigate the bloodstream to release drugs on command. Miniaturizing radios has been a goal ever since RCA began marketing its pocket-sized transistor radios in 1955. More recently, electronics manufacturers have made microscale radios, creating new products such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. About five years ago, Zettl's group decided to try to make radios even smaller, working at the molecular scale as part of an effort to create cheap wireless environmental sensors. Zettl's team set out to miniaturize individual components of a radio receiver, such as the antenna and the tuner, which selects one frequency to convert into a stream of electrical pulses that get sent to a speaker. But integrating separate nanoscale components proved difficult. About a year ago, however, Zettl and his students had a eureka moment. "We realized that, by golly, one nanotube can do it all," Zettl says. "Within a matter of days, we had a functioning radio." The first two transmissions it received were "Layla" by Derek and the Dominos and "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys song was an apt choice. Zettl's nano receiver works by translating the electromagnetic oscillations of a radio wave into the mechanical vibrations of a nanotube, which are in turn converted into a stream of electrical pulses that reproduce the original radio signal. Zettl's team anchored a nanotube to a metal electrode, which is wired to a battery. Just beyond the nanotube's free end is a second metal electrode. When a voltage is applied between the electrodes, electrons flow from the battery through the first electrode and the nanotube and then jump from the nanotube's tip across the tiny gap to the second electrode. The nanotube--now negatively charged--is able to "feel" the oscillations of a passing radio wave, which (like all electromagnetic waves) has both an electrical and a magnetic component. Those oscillations successively attract and repel the tip of the tube, making the tube vibrate in sync with the radio wave. As the tube is vibrating, electrons continue to spray out of its tip. When the tip is farther from the second electrode, as when the tube bends to one side, fewer electrons make the jump across the gap. The fluctuating electrical signal that results reproduces the audio information encoded onto the radio wave, and it can be sent to a speaker. The next step for Zettl and his colleagues is to make their nanoradios send out information in addition to receiving it. But Zettl says that won't be hard, since a transmitter is essentially a receiver run in reverse. Nano transmitters could open the door to other applications as well. For instance, Zettl suggests that nanoradios attached to tiny chemical sensors could be implanted in the blood vessels of patients with diabetes or other diseases. If the sensors detect an abnormal level of insulin or some other target compound, the transmitter could then relay the information to a detector, or perhaps even to an implanted drug reservoir that could release insulin or another therapeutic on cue. In fact, Zettl says that since his paper on the nanotube radio came out in the journal Nano Letters, he's received several calls from researchers working on radio-based drug delivery vehicles. "It's not just fantasy," he says. "It's active research going on right now." Tiny Tunes See All 10 Emerging Technologies 2008 Copyright Technology Review 2008. Personal comment: Cela ressemble furieusement à la première pierre pour les objets communiquants et autres capteurs à l'intérieur du corps humain. En route vers la transparence complète...
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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