General Technology Release from newsscience.com

I will post cool things from that site when i can.

Computer chips give new spin on saving energy

* 21 November 2008 by Jessica Griggs
* Magazine issue 2683. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
* For similar stories, visit the Energy and Fuels Topic Guide

MICROCHIPS that process information without moving electrons could lead to a new generation of ultra-low-power computers. That is the promise behind a processor that uses waves rather than current to crunch digital data.

In conventional computer chips, information is processed in the form of electric charges and transmitted by physically moving electrons from one place to another. This approach has been hugely successful, with engineers packing ever-increasing numbers of transistors onto a single chip.

But Moore's law, as this trend is called, is set to come up against a barrier. As transistors become smaller, tiny variations in the structure of the materials they are made from can influence the electron flow. This makes it hard to guarantee that neighbouring transistors are identical.

Physicists have been studying another way to process data that may overcome this problem. In addition to their charge, electrons have a property called spin, analogous to the spin of a basketball, that can also carry information. Electron spin can be made to represent a 0 or a 1 of digital code by aligning it with or against a magnetic field.

Instead of physically moving the electrons, the information can be sent in the form of a "spin wave" that travels through the sea of electrons in a conductor like a ripple moving across a pond. The snag so far has been to find a suitable way of processing the data carried by the spin waves.

Now a team led by Kang Wang at the University of California, Los Angeles, has built the first logic gate a few micrometres long that can process the data carried by spin waves. To generate the waves, electrons are zapped with a magnetic field. The waves then flow along transmission lines buried in the chip and are processed by making them interfere, says Wang.

Wang's logic gates have the potential to work on a much smaller scale than conventional transistors because they do not rely on a flow of electrons. Also, as no electrons actually move in this device, less energy should be lost as heat, says Wang. This could help when it comes to packing large numbers of these devices onto a microchip, resulting in ultra-low-power computers.

Cybercrime toll threatens new financial crisis

* 14:50 20 November 2008 by New Scientist staff and Reuters

International regulation must be improved to avoid internet crime causing global catastrophe, some of the world's top crime experts have warned.

Damage caused by cybercrime is estimated at $100 billion annually, said Kilian Strauss, of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

"These criminals, they outsmart us 10, or a hundred to one," said Strauss.

Such online criminal organisations operate in a regulatory vacuum, committing crimes such as espionage, money laundering, and theft of personal information, experts told the European Economic Crime conference in Frankfurt.

"We need multilateral understanding, account and oversight to avoid, in the years to come, a cyber crisis equivalent to the current financial crisis," said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
Growing sophistication

The conference also heard warnings that internet crime is a threat to national security. After apparently politically motivated cyber attacks on Georgia and Estonia, foreign policy chiefs are concerned cybercriminals can now wield power on the international stage.

Calls for greater government oversight of the internet come at a time when strengthened regulation is more attractive than ever to policymakers who once preferred more laissez-faire strategies.

As well as financial watchdogs getting more powerful as the global economic crisis continues, regulators in areas outside finance are expected to get more powerful too.

The president of Interpol, Khoo Boon Hui, said tech-savvy gangs from China, India, Eastern Europe and Africa were coming up with ever more sophisticated ways of swindling money from vulnerable people.

The developing world is seen as one of the most important fronts for tougher oversight. As poor countries become more technologically connected, they become an ever-richer source of computers to hijack and cheap cybercrime labour.

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THIS IS A GOOD ONE

How technology shaped the US election

obama blog 300.jpgThe puppet masters of the New Media, including the Republican Party's online campaign director, revealed trade secrets at MIT last night on how technology shaped the 2008 presidential election, and how politics as we know it will never be the same.

The two things that struck me about the long, two-hour forum was how technology is engaging young voters like never before, and how the data mining and decentralisation of this year's campaigns are only a taste of what's to come.

Ian Rowe of MTV noted how in each of the last two US presidential elections, an additional 4 million 18- to 29-year-olds came out to vote - an achievement for which he claimed partial credit.

In fact, MTV ran an interesting experiment in decentralised reporting. The broadcast company armed young, amateur reporters nationwide with camcorders and video-enabled-cell-phones to cover the election in mediums more likely to engage their peers.

"We've crossed a line, we can't unscramble the egg," says Rowe. See more of what he had to say by clicking on the video below.

Cyrus Krohn, director of the Republican National Committee's e-campaign and co-founder of Slate Magazine says what we saw in this election is just a taste of what's to come.

One of the first steps the Republican Party has taken to retool for the next campaign can be found on RepublicanForAReason.com, where party faithfuls have already submitted 20,000 texts and videos on how they would reshape their party's platform.

"They're not waiting for governors in Florida to tell them what to do," says Krohn of this week's Republican governors' convention. See more of what he had to say below:

According to those gathered last night, Obama's first act after winning the 2008 US presidential election wasn't the acceptance speech seen on TV, but an email of thanks that he sent to some 10 million online supporters. So it seems that new media are going to change not only elections, but also governance.

im only copieng and pasting cool stuff.....

GOOGLE BROKE SOME APPLE RULES!!!

Google admits breaking App Store rules

Google acknowledged breaking the official rules of Apple's iPhone software development kit when it created the latest version of the Google Mobile application for the iPhone, but denied a more serious charge.

A Google spokesman confirmed Tuesday that Google Mobile uses undocumented APIs (application programming interfaces) in order to use the iPhone's proximity sensor to prompt a verbal search. iPhone developers were only supposed to use the APIs that Apple published in its SDK when they create their applications under the terms of that agreement.

Google has denied, however, a more serious charge that it was linking to private or dynamic frameworks in the Google Mobile application. That's considered a big no-no in the development community.