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10 Emerging Technologies of 2008

Each year, Technology Review publishes its list of 10 emerging technologies that its editors believe will be particularly important over the next few years. This is work ready to emerge from the lab, in a broad range of areas: energy, computer hardware and software, biological imaging, and more. Two of the technologies--cellulolytic enzymes and atomic magnetometers--are efforts by leading scientists to solve critical problems, while five--surprise modeling, connectomics, probabilistic CMOS, reality mining, and offline Web applications--represent whole new ways of looking at problems. And three--graphene transistors, nanoradio, and wireless power--are amazing feats of engineering that have created something entirely new.

Details Here: www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20249/

first published week of:   02/18/2008

10 most annoying programs on the Internet

The Internet has brought us many joys. It's rewritten the rules of business and pleasure.

And pain. For it allows what may have seemed like bright ideas at the time ('let's use it to make sure our customers have the latest software', for example) to turn into a stinking pit of misery — usually, but by no means always, after marketing gets its fangs in.

Here are just ten of the guilty parties who try to do the impossible: to make us hate the internet and wish it had never been invented — and who very nearly succeed.

Details Here: content.zdnet.com/2346-9595_22-202392.html

first published week of:   05/26/2008

100 GB memory chip coming in 2009

Bytes, not bits. Oh, and it’s fast, too. Nanochip, a Silicon Valley-based fabless semiconductor firm, just received $14 million in funding to complete work on a 100 GB storage chip. Intel Capital, who should know something about chips, is an investor. The goal: “. . . allow Nanochip to complete development of its first prototypes later this year . . . .”

The Nanochip design is a Micro-Electro-Mechanical System, or MEMS, device. A descendent of IBM’s Millipede device, it uses polarization instead of Millepede’s heat to store data.

An array of tiny probes - looking like phonograph needles, if any of you have ever seen one - less than 25 um in diameter, changes the state of the recording medium. The probes are movable - similar to the mirrors on DLP chips - so they can write more than one location. Since there are many thousands of probes, they have a lot of bandwidth.

Details Here: blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=281&tag=nl.e539

first published week of:   01/21/2008

3-D Design for the Masses

Recent years have seen an explosion in user-generated content of all types on the Web, but the explosion has been most intense where the content is relatively easy to produce. While users are welcome to design flora and artifacts for virtual worlds such as Second Life, modeling 3-D content is still fairly difficult for the inexperienced. A new technique called collaborative design-space exploration, developed by the Virtual Worlds Group at Stanford University, aims to make it easy for anyone to create 3-D designs for virtual worlds. The group has prototyped its interface in a program called Dryad, which allows users to design trees, and plans to extend it for use with other types of objects.

Vladlen Koltun, an assistant professor at Stanford who heads the group, says that he hopes design programs like Dryad will one day make it easy for anyone to create compelling content for virtual worlds, without having to learn a scripting language, or how to use a sophisticated 3-D modeling tool. He particularly hopes to make it easier for academics without computer-science expertise, for whom "content creation is one of the bottlenecks," to put together virtual worlds for educational or experimental purposes.

Details Here: www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20080/?a=f

first published week of:   01/14/2008

Alarming Open-Source Security Holes

How a programming error introduced profound security vulnerabilities in millions of computer systems.

Back in May 2006, a few programmers working on an open-source security project made a whopper of a mistake. Last week, the full impact of that mistake was just beginning to dawn on security professionals around the world.

In technical terms, a programming error reduced the amount of entropy used to create the cryptographic keys in a piece of code called the OpenSSL library, which is used by programs like the Apache Web server, the SSH remote access program, the IPsec Virtual Private Network (VPN), secure e-mail programs, some software used for anonymously accessing the Internet, and so on.

In plainer language: after a week of analysis, we now know that two changed lines of code have created profound security vulnerabilities in at least four different open-source operating systems, 25 different application programs, and millions of individual computer systems on the Internet. And even though the vulnerability was discovered on May 13 and a patch has been distributed, installing the patch doesn’t repair the damage to the compromised systems. What’s even more alarming is that some computers may be compromised even though they aren’t running the suspect code

Details Here: www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20801/?a=f

first published week of:   05/26/2008

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