of a lithium-ion battery.The new virus-produced batteries have the same energy capacity and power performance as state-of-the-art rechargeable batteries being considered to power plug-in hybrid cars, and they could also be used to power a range of personal electronic devices, said Angela Belcher, the MIT materials scientist who led the research team.
The new batteries, described in the April 2 online edition of Science, could be manufactured with a cheap and environmentally benign process: The synthesis takes place at and below room temperature and requires no harmful organic solvents, and the materials that go into the battery are non-toxic.
In a traditional lithium-ion battery, lithium ions flow between a negatively charged anode, usually graphite, and the positively charged cathode, usually cobalt oxide or lithium iron phosphate. Three years ago, an MIT team led by Belcher reported that it had engineered viruses that could build an anode by coating themselves with cobalt oxide and gold and self-assembling to form a nanowire.
In the latest work, the team focused on building a highly powerful cathode to pair up with the anode, said Belcher, the Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering. Cathodes are more difficult to build than anodes because they must be highly conducting to be a fast electrode, however, most candidate materials for cathodes are highly insulating (non-conductive).
To achieve that, the researchers, including MIT Professor Gerbrand Ceder of materials science and Associate Professor Michael Strano of chemical engineering, genetically engineered viruses that first coat themselves with iron phosphate, then grab hold of carbon nanotubes to create a network of highly conductive material.
Because the viruses recognize and bind specifically to certain materials (carbon nanotubes in this case), each iron phosphate nanowire can be electrically "wired" to conducting carbon nanotube networks. Electrons can travel along the carbon nanotube networks, percolating throughout the electrodes to the iron phosphate and transferring energy in a very short time.
The viruses are a common bacteriophage, which infect bacteria but are harmless to humans.
The team found that incorporating carbon nanotubes increases the cathode's conductivity without adding too much weight to the battery. In lab tests, batteries with the new cathode material could be charged and discharged at least 100 times without losing any capacitance. That is fewer charge cycles than currently available lithium-ion batteries, but "we expect them to be able to go much longer," Belcher said.
The prototype is packaged as a typical coin cell battery, but the technology allows for the assembly of very lightweight, flexible and conformable batteries that can take the shape of their container.
Last week, MIT President Susan Hockfield took the prototype battery to a press briefing at the White House where she and U.S. President Barack Obama spoke about the need for federal funding to advance new clean-energy technologies.
Now that the researchers have demonstrated they can wire virus batteries at the nanoscale, they intend to pursue even better batteries using materials with higher voltage and capacitance, such as manganese phosphate and nickel phosphate, said Belcher. Once that next generation is ready, the technology could go into commercial production, she said.
Lead authors of the Science paper are Yun Jung Lee and Hyunjung Yi, graduate students in materials science and engineering. Other authors are Woo-Jae Kim, postdoctoral fellow in chemical engineering; Kisuk Kang, recent MIT PhD recipient in materials science and engineering; and Dong Soo Yun, research engineer in materials science and engineering.
The research was funded by the Army Research Office Institute of the Institute of Collaborative Technologies, and the National Science Foundation through the Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers program.
Computer's Nobel Prize Announced !!!!!!!
ACM has named Barbara Liskov the recipient of the 2008 ACM A.M. Turing Award for her contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing.
Liskov revolutionized the programming field with groundbreaking research that underpins virtually every modern computer application for both consumers and businesses. Her achievements in programming language design have made software more reliable and easier to maintain. They are now the basis of every important programming language since 1975, including Ada, C++, Java, and C#.
Liskov heads the Programming Methodology Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, where she has conducted research and has been a professor since 1972.
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is ACM's most prestigious technical award. It recognizes contributions of lasting and major technical importance, and honors individuals whose work has advanced the field of computing. First presented in 1966, and named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, the Turing Award is widely considered to be the "Nobel Prize in Computing." It carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc.
Seven years ago, Sandeep Nijsure left his home in Mumbai to study computer science at the University of North Texas. Master's degree in hand, he went to work for Microsoft. He valued his education and enjoyed the job, but he worried about his aging parents. He missed watching cricket, celebrating Hindu festivals and following the twists of Indian politics. His wife was homesick, too, and her visa didn't allow her to work.
Not long ago, Sandeep would have faced a tough choice: either go home and give up opportunities for wealth and U.S. citizenship, or stay and bide his time until his application for a green card goes through. But last year, Sandeep returned to India and landed a software development position with Amazon.com in Hyderabad. He and his wife live a few blocks from their families in a spacious, air-conditioned house. No longer at the mercy of the American employer sponsoring his visa, Sandeep can more easily determine the course of his career. "We are very happy with our move," he told me in an e-mail.
The United States has always been the country to which the world's best and brightest -- people like Sandeep -- have flocked in pursuit of education and to seek their fortunes. Over the past four decades, India and China suffered a major "brain drain" as tens of thousands of talented people made their way here, dreaming the American dream.
But burgeoning new economies abroad and flagging prospects in the United States have changed everything. And as opportunities pull immigrants home, the lumbering U.S. immigration bureaucracy helps push them away.
When I started teaching at Duke University in 2005, almost all the international students graduating from our Master of Engineering Management program said that they planned to stay in the United States for at least a few years. In the class of 2009, most of our 80 international students are buying one-way tickets home. It's the same at Harvard. Senior economics major Meijie Tang, from China, isn't even bothering to look for a job in the United States. After hearing from other students that it's "impossible" to get an H-1B visa -- the kind given to highly-skilled workers in fields such as engineering and science -- she teamed up with a classmate to start a technology company in Shanghai. Investors in China offered to put up millions even before 23-year-old Meijie and her 21-year-old colleague completed their business plan.
When smart young foreigners leave these shores, they take with them the seeds of tomorrow's innovation. Almost 25 percent of all international patent applications filed from the United States in 2006 named foreign nationals as inventors. Immigrants founded a quarter of all U.S. engineering and technology companies started between 1995 and 2005, including half of those in Silicon Valley. In 2005 alone, immigrants' businesses generated $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers.
Yet rather than welcome these entrepreneurs, the U.S. government is confining many of them to a painful purgatory. As of Sept. 30, 2006, more than a million people were waiting for the 120,000 permanent-resident visas granted each year to skilled workers and their family members. No nation may claim more than 7 percent, so years may pass before immigrants from populous countries such as India and China are even considered.
Like many Indians, Girija Subramaniam is fed up. After earning a master's in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia in 1998, she joined Texas Instruments as a test engineer. She wanted to stay in the United States, applied for permanent residency in 2002 and has been trapped in immigration limbo ever since. If she so much as accepts a promotion or, heaven forbid, starts her own company, she will lose her place in line. Frustrated, she has applied for fast-track Canadian permanent residency and expects to move north of the border by the end of the year.
For the Kaufmann Foundation, I recently surveyed 1,200 Indians and Chinese who worked or studied in the United States and then returned home. Most were in their 30s, and 80 percent held master's degrees or doctorates in management, technology or science -- precisely the kind of people who could make the greatest contribution to the U.S. economy. A sizable number said that they had advanced significantly in their careers since leaving the United States. They were more optimistic about opportunities for entrepreneurship, and more than half planned to start their own businesses, if they had not done so already. Only a quarter said that they were likely to return to the United States.
Why does all this matter? Because just as the United States has relied on foreigners to underwrite its deficit, it has also depended on smart immigrants to staff its laboratories, engineering design studios and tech firms. An analysis of the 2000 Census showed that although immigrants accounted for only 12 percent of the U.S. workforce, they made up 47 percent of all scientists and engineers with doctorates. What's more, 67 percent of all those who entered the fields of science and engineering between 1995 and 2006 were immigrants. What will happen to America's competitive edge when these people go home?
Immigrants who leave the United States will launch companies, file patents and fill the intellectual coffers of other countries. Their talents will benefit nations such as India, China and Canada, not the United States. America's loss will be the world's gain.
In a rare instance of collaboration among otherwise fierce rivals, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft said Thursday that they would support a new Web standard that will allow millions of Web publishers to remove duplicate pages from their Web sites. As a result of the effort, search engines should be able to find and index more Web pages, making their search results more comprehensive.
“There is a lot of clutter on the Web and with this, publishers will be able to clean up a lot of junk,” said Matt Cutts, an engineer who heads Google’s spam fighting efforts. “I think it is going to gain traction pretty quickly.”
The problem is the following: Many Web publishers, especially those that have voluminous sites, like e-commerce companies, have multiple URLs that all point to the same page. This confuses search engines, sometimes causing them to index the same page multiple times. As much as 20 percent of URLs on the Web may be duplicates, according to some estimates.
Engineers at Google came up with a simple way for Web publishers to indicate when a URL is a duplicate, and if so, which is the principal, or “canonical,” URL that search engines should be indexing. Yahoo and Microsoft, the No. 2 and No. 3 search engines, have agreed to support the same standard.
“We are happy that everyone is going to support the same implementation,” said Nathan Buggia, a lead program manager at Microsoft. “This is a clear benefit for publishers as it gives them an opportunity to get more exposure through search engines.”
All search engines have developed technologies to detect duplicates that are more or less effective. The so-called Canonical Link Tag, as the standard is known, should make it easier for both publishers and search engines to address the problem. “It is an important step because all the search engines are coming out with it,” said Priyank Garg, director of product management for Web search at Yahoo.Bad enough that there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and privacy have become so maddeningly elusive that the only way to fix the problem is to start over.
What a new Internet might look like is still widely debated, but one alternative would, in effect, create a “gated community” where users would give up their anonymity and certain freedoms in return for safety. Today that is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users. As a new and more secure network becomes widely adopted, the current Internet might end up as the bad neighborhood of cyberspace. You would enter at your own risk and keep an eye over your shoulder while you were there.
“Unless we’re willing to rethink today’s Internet,” says Nick McKeown, a Stanford engineer involved in building a new Internet, “we’re just waiting for a series of public catastrophes.”
That was driven home late last year, when a malicious software program thought to have been unleashed by a criminal gang in Eastern Europe suddenly appeared after easily sidestepping the world’s best cyberdefenses. Known as Conficker, it quickly infected more than 12 million computers, ravaging everything from the computer system at a surgical ward in England to the computer networks of the French military.
Conficker remains a ticking time bomb. It now has the power to lash together those infected computers into a vast supercomputer called a botnet that can be controlled clandestinely by its creators. What comes next remains a puzzle. Conficker could be used as the world’s most powerful spam engine, perhaps to distribute software programs to trick computer users into purchasing fake antivirus protection. Or much worse. It might also be used to shut off entire sections of the Internet. But whatever happens, Conficker has demonstrated that the Internet remains highly vulnerable to a concerted attack.
“If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships streaming toward us on the horizon,” Rick Wesson, the chief executive of Support Intelligence, a computer consulting firm, said recently.
The Internet’s original designers never foresaw that the academic and military research network they created would one day bear the burden of carrying all the world’s communications and commerce. There was no one central control point and its designers wanted to make it possible for every network to exchange data with every other network. Little attention was given to security. Since then, there have been immense efforts to bolt on security, to little effect.
“In many respects we are probably worse off than we were 20 years ago,” said Eugene Spafford, the executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University and a pioneering Internet security researcher, “because all of the money has been devoted to patching the current problem rather than investing in the redesign of our infrastructure.”
In fact, many computer security researchers view the nearly two decades of efforts to patch the existing network as a Maginot Line approach to defense, a reference to France’s series of fortifications that proved ineffective during World War II. The shortcoming in focusing on such sturdy digital walls is that once they are evaded, the attacker has access to all the protected data behind them. “Hard on the outside, with a soft chewy center,” is the way many veteran computer security researchers think of such strategies.
Despite a thriving global computer security industry that is projected to reach $79 billion in revenues next year, and the fact that in 2002 Microsoft itself began an intense corporatewide effort to improve the security of its software, Internet security has continued to deteriorate globally.Even the most heavily garrisoned military networks have proved vulnerable. Last November, the United States military command in charge of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars discovered that its computer networks had been purposely infected with software that may have permitted a devastating espionage attack.
That is why the scientists armed with federal research dollars and working in collaboration with the industry are trying to figure out the best way to start over. At Stanford, where the software protocols for original Internet were designed, researchers are creating a system to make it possible to slide a more advanced network quietly underneath today’s Internet. By the end of the summer it will be running on eight campus networks around the country.
The idea is to build a new Internet with improved security and the capabilities to support a new generation of not-yet-invented Internet applications, as well as to do some things the current Internet does poorly — such as supporting mobile users.
The Stanford Clean Slate project won’t by itself solve all the main security issues of the Internet, but it will equip software and hardware designers with a toolkit to make security features a more integral part of the network and ultimately give law enforcement officials more effective ways of tracking criminals through cyberspace. That alone may provide a deterrent.
This is not the first time a replacement has been proposed for the current Internet. For example, modern Windows and Macintosh computers already come equipped to support a new Internet protocol known as IPv6 that would fix many of the shortcomings of the current IPv4 version. However, because of cost, performance and compatibility questions it has languished.
That has not discouraged the Stanford engineers who say they are on a mission to “reinvent the Internet.” They argue that their new strategy is intended to allow new ideas to emerge in an evolutionary fashion, making it possible to move data traffic seamlessly to a new networking world. Like the existing Internet, the new network will almost certainly have no one central point of control and no one organization will run it. It is most likely to emerge as new hardware and software are built in to the router computers that run today’s network and are adopted as Internet standards.
For all those efforts, though, the real limits to computer security may lie in human nature.
The Internet’s current design virtually guarantees anonymity to its users. (As a New Yorker cartoon noted some years ago, “On the Internet, nobody knows that you’re a dog.”) But that anonymity is now the most vexing challenge for law enforcement. An Internet attacker can route a connection through many countries to hide his location, which may be from an account in an Internet cafe purchased with a stolen credit card.
“As soon as you start dealing with the public Internet, the whole notion of trust becomes a quagmire,” said Stefan Savage, an expert on computer security at the University of California, San Diego.
A more secure network is one that would almost certainly offer less anonymity and privacy. That is likely to be the great tradeoff for the designers of the next Internet. One idea, for example, would be to require the equivalent of drivers’ licenses to permit someone to connect to a public computer network. But that runs against the deeply held libertarian ethos of the Internet.
Proving identity is likely to remain remarkably difficult in a world where it is trivial to take over someone’s computer from half a world away and operate it as your own. As long as that remains true, building a completely trustable system will remain virtually impossible.While companies are indeed decreasing expenses, most can't afford to make drastic cuts in technology. Since the last economic downturn, firms have become more convinced of the importance of technology to their business success. According to Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report, 12% of the more than 1,400 CIOs polled planned to hire employees during the first quarter of 2009, and only 4% anticipated personnel reductions. The majority planned to maintain their current staffing levels.
What's behind current tech hiring? Companies are still pursuing critical IT initiatives -- for example, embracing the virtualization of servers and storage, and using Microsoft's .Net Framework to build a wide range of applications. CIOs expect to continue to invest in information security in an effort to protect data and intellectual property from vulnerabilities.
IT executives are also increasing their investments in wireless applications as they realize the value of mobile technologies. As a result, their organizations are charged with supporting devices such as cell phones, smartphones, PDAs and BlackBerries, leading to high demand for professionals with related skills.
According to the Robert Half Technology 2009 Salary Guide, skilled IT professionals are still in demand by many employers. Companies are finding that while there might be plenty of IT workers available, the ones with the the skills and experience they really want are in short supply. Talent needs persist in a number of IT specialties, including help desk and desktop support, networking, applications and Web development, network engineering, and systems and data security. Demand is stronger for certain skills, such as .Net, SharePoint, Java and SQL Server development.
For job candidates willing to look beyond their customary environment, our research also points out industries and geographical areas that promise continued IT growth. CIOs in the professional services and business services industries are projecting greater IT hiring activity, for example. Other industry sectors with positive outlooks include health care, nonprofit and education. CIOs in the Mountain region and in the New England states are the most optimistic about hiring.
Employers are indeed cautious about making costly hiring mistakes, and most companies are extending offers only to the most highly skilled, experienced candidates. Many are interested in hiring IT professionals on a project-to-hire basis, allowing them to ensure a good fit before making a full-time commitment. A staffing firm specializing in IT can provide you with access to such opportunities.
While training in a thriving specialty or considering a change in geography or industry can indeed broaden your opportunities, chances are you're most concerned with leveraging your current skills and experience. That means honing your resume and your interview skills, especially in an uncertain economic climate.
As businesses tighten their belts, a documented history of contributing to business success becomes more important for job candidates. Technical certifications in in-demand specialties may work in your favor, but firms want to see how you have benefited previous organizations' bottom lines. Make sure your cover letter and resume emphasize your quantitative contributions.
Faced with daunting economic challenges, employers are more interested than ever in professionals who can quickly start helping to solve problems and meet business objectives. As you prepare for an interview, take a thoughtful look at the employer's unique challenges and identify specific ways you can contribute. In today's climate, that outlook will benefit both the employer and your career.
Exclusive Photo with Dr. Kiran Panesar(Green T-Shirt,In middle),A Google R&D Employee ,who leads the team which maintains Orkut India. “Revenues from software and services exports are likely to reach $47 billion in 2008-09 against the earlier estimates of $50 billion, while the total IT-BPO industry, which accounts for 5.8 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product, is expected to touch $71.7 billion in 2008-09,” Nasscom Chairman Ganesh Natarajan said here while releasing the performance and future trends of the IT industry in the current fiscal.
Nasscom report says that the domestic BPO market would grow by over 40 per cent, while BPO exports are estimated to register a growth of 17.5 per cent to reach $12.8 billion. Similarly, IT services exports are estimated to grow by 16.5 per cent to $26.9 billion, while software products and engineering services would grow by 14.4 per cent to $7.3 billion.
Stating that exports to Europe registered the highest growth, while the U.S. remains the dominant market, Nasscom President Som Mittal said that uncertain economic environment would prevail in 2009 and the Indian IT industry was likely to grow by 15 per cent annually till 2010-11.
Exports were likely to reach $60-62 billion by 2010-11.
“Due to strong fundamentals and other derivatives of value to customers, the industry will continue to grow despite global slowdown. The BPO industry will see sustainable growth over the next two years, Mr. Mittal added. The IT and BPO industry would generate new jobs, giving 22.3 lakh direct and 80 lakh indirect jobs.
Meanwhile, a high-level Nasscom team will be on a five-day visit to the U.S. next month to hold talks with the new administration there, top politicians, thinks-tanks and corporates to convince them of the benefits of outsourcing and immigration issues. Nasscom will also raise the ‘totalisation’ issue to avoid double taxation on income in the U.S. Indians with H1B or L1 visas contribute significantly to the US social security schemes every year, but do not the get benefits since India and the U.S. does not have a ‘totalisation’ agreement.
Dr. Shushil Kumar Prasad (Professor,Georgia State University) [ left to me in above Picture] has lot of research grants by NSF for WSNs "With markets reeling, businesses and investors are relying on the public sector more than ever to set the priorities to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship that will lead to an economic recovery," says Mareca Hatler, ON World's research director. "By providing needed solutions for energy, the environment, and healthcare, WSN continues to be a one of the fastest growing research and development areas."
Growth Markets:
In the United States energy management is the number one driver for R&D investment on WSN technology. While smart metering initiatives have received most of the media's attention, there are several other related growth markets such as in-home energy management and renewable power generation that have the potential to save billions of dollars over the next decade. The National Science Foundation has doubled its funding on WSN related research over the past five years and today, there are nearly 400 active WSN projects reports ON World.
The EU's funding on WSN related research and development has increased by 700% over the last five years. Most of the impetus for this growth is the drive to develop technology solutions for remote patient monitoring and elderly home care. The EU plans to spend more than $1 billion over the next five years in this area.
1975
Microsoft (then spelled “Micro Soft”) is founded by William “Bill” Gates, a 20-year-old Harvard dropout, and Paul Allen, his 22-year-old school chum. They begin selling its first product, a BASIC programming language interpreter.
1980
Microsoft signs an agreement to build the operating system that became known as MS-DOS for IBM’s new personal computer, which was launched in 1981. Microsoft was allowed to license the operating system to others, spawning an industry of “IBM-compatible” machines dependent on Microsoft software.
1983
February: Paul Allen, ill with Hodgkin’s disease, resigns from active management of the company but remains on the board of directors.
1986
March 13: Microsoft’s stock goes public with an initial price of $21 a share, closing the first day of trading at $28. Revenue for its previous fiscal year (which ended June 1985) $140.4 million.
1989
August: Microsoft introduces earliest version of its “Office” software suite, which includes the popular word processing program “Word”. Today, the company says it has more than 500 million users.
June: The U.S. Federal Trade Commission begins a secret probe focusing on possible collusion between Microsoft and IBM. Microsoft remains under the microscope of regulators for another 18 years.
1992
January: Gates, 32, is named the richest American, with more than $6.5 billion, thanks to his one-third stake in Microsoft.
1993
June: A federal judge rules in favor of Microsoft, ending 63 months of litigation by Apple Computer Inc., which charged that Windows copied the look and feel of its Macintosh computers.
August: After the FTC deadlocks twice on the issue, the Justice Department announces it has taken over the Microsoft investigation, which now focuses on its business practices.
1995
January: Microsoft unveil one of it more celebrated flops, a software companion called “Bob”.
July: Gates is named the world’s wealthiest
August: Microsoft launches Windows 95 with a marketing blitz five times bigger than any of its previous efforts. Experts say the system offers no technological breakthrough but adds features enjoyed for years by users of the rival Apple system.
1999
Microsoft added to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Its revenue for the fiscal year ending in June reaches $19.75 billion.
2000
January: Steve Ballmer named to succeed Gates as CEO. Gates remains Chairman.
June: At an event with university students in Tokyo, Gates is asked what more he wanted in life. He promptly replies, “privacy.”
2001
November: Microsoft jumps into the interactive game business with the launch of the Xbox , taking on rivals such as Sony and Nintendo. Its most important day-of-release game, “Halo: Combat Evolved”, is a huge hit, helping to drive Xbox sales, and eventually sells more than 5 million copies
2003
February: Microsoft shares split for the 9th time. One original share is now equal to 288 shares.
June: Gates says he will transition out of a day-to-day role in the company in July 2008. Steve Ballmer is the companies top decision maker; Ray Ozzie steps up to be Chief Software Architect.
2007
January: Microsoft launches “Vista” , the latest version of its ubiquitous Windows operating system software, in 70 countries, and expects it to be installed on over 100 million PCs worldwide. Influential Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg, in his review of Vista, called it a “worthy, but largely unexciting, product.”
2008
January: Ballmer makes a $44.6 billion takeover offer to Yahoo’s board. Yahoo later rejects the offer, setting off a lengthy battle over the future of Yahoo.
March: While still wealthier than many nations, Gates falls to third on the list of Earth’s richest man, behind famed investor Warren Buffet and telecoms tycoon Carlos Slim. Forbes magazine estimates Gates wealth at $58 billion.
June 27: Bill Gates steps down out of a day-to-day role in the company, to focus on philanthropy. He still holds nearly a 9 percent stake in Microsoft, and remains its biggest shareholder. Since 2000, Microsoft’s stock has fallen 52 percent.
2009
Microsoft announces job cuts of 5,000, which are expected to help in reducing fiscal year 2009 capital expenditures by $700 million. They represent the largest cuts ever by the company.
(From Reuters, Microsoft.com, Flickr, Google Finance)
Google just keeps on truckin’. The Internet powerhouse posted results yesterday that show advertisers haven’t completely cut their spending — at least not on search.
Excluding one-time charges, profit was $5.10 a share, beating the average analyst forecast of $4.95 according to Reuters Estimates.
Revenue rose 18 percent to $5.7 billion — a shadow of the 50 percent growth levels that Google used to enjoy, but considered by analysts to be a robust performance given the weak economy and corporate cutbacks in advertising spending.
But CEO Eric Schmidt also took pains to keep investors, analysts and the press realistic about the world today: “Now clearly we’re in a worldwide recession as everybody knows, rising unemployment, foreclosures, that sort of thing,” he said on a conference call. “But we don’t know how long this period will last. We obviously hope it will be short.”
Shares of Google were up more than 4 percent in early trade, and analysts offered mostly upbeat responses to the earnings despite Schmidt’s caution.
“We would be buyers of Google shares coming out of 4Q earnings. Macro risks remain, but we think Google grows high-single digits in ‘09 & is among the best-positioned companies to weather the storm,” wrote Barclays analyst Douglas Anmuth, who reiterated an “overweight” rating on the company and set a price target of $460.
You just know this sort of talk drives Steve Ballmer bonkers.
Keep an eye on:
Recent work carried out at Wroclaw University of Technology shows that a fair level of security can be achieved for wireless sensor networks without heavy cryptographic technology.
Wireless sensor networks processing sensitive data are facing the risks of data manipulation, data fraud and sensor destruction or replacement. This concerns applications such as the gathering of data on environmental pollution around industrial installations, or sensor systems replacing traditional video monitoring. Large-scale deployment in practice is conditioned by solving these kinds of security problem and reducing the risks due to limited physical protection of the devices and openness of the wireless communication channel. While modern cryptography and computer security offer many ways of solving these problems, they are focused on solutions for high-performance devices, and not for computationally weak sensors with limited communication bandwidth. New 'lightweight' solutions tailored for the special needs of wireless sensor networks have to be designed. This is one of the focal points of the EU project FRONTS (Foundations of Adaptive Networked Societies of Tiny Artefacts). Fortunately, some recent developments have shown that without heavy cryptographic technology it is still possible to achieve a fair level of security in a practical sense. This report indicates a few ideas of this kind.
Due to the energy required for transmission over long distances, it is often a good idea to route data along a sensor network by making many hops over small distances instead of a direct transmission from a sensor to the sink node. However, such a solution has the disadvantage that an adversary can attack the network by gaining control over intermediate sensor nodes. The cryptography used by such devices is usually weak and can provide opportunities to reveal information sent or to manipulate them.
The following idea may be applied in order to make it much more difficult to carry out attacks. Instead of a single information path, each message is sent over a double path. This means that instead of a single ith node Ni we have two nodes: Pi and Ri. The encryption scheme has the following basic properties when processing a message M:
The encryption scheme guarantees that corrupting either Pi or Ri reveals no information about M. Also, combining the shares from different stages of message processing gives no information about M as long as the adversary has only one share from each level of the path.
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