Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered that addressing spam at the network level could be a more effective solution for Internet service providers than today's message content filters.

They've also developed algorithms that can detect when a computer is a member of a botnet, and also a technique for enforcing the security.

"Content filters are fighting a losing battle because it's easier for spammers to simply change their content than for us to build spam filters", explains Nick Feamster, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech College. "We need another set of properties, not based on content. So what about network-level properties? It's harder for spammers to change network-level properties."

The research has been introduced a few days ago at the ACM SIGCOMM conference, in Pisa in Italy. The researchers spent one year and half collecting Internet routing and spam data from only one domain. They found that they can identify which Internet service providers are transmitting spam, as well as the narrow ranges of IP address that are only producing spam.

Spammers exploit vulnerabilities in Internet routing protocols, succeeding to assign their machines any IP address within that range. They then send spam from those machines and promptly withdraw the route. The IP address is no longer reachable, so the receiver cannot identify it.

Feamster hopes that his research will allow to make those protocols more secured and to improve the spam filtering.


Source: Georgia Research Tech News, two weeks ago.

For those who do not know:
Botnet is a jargon term for a collection of software robots, or bots, which run autonomously. This can also refer to the network of computers using distributed computing software. The word is generally used to refer to a collection of compromised machines running programs, usually referred to as worms, Trojan horses, or backdoors, under a common command and control infrastructure.

Researchers at the Australian research agency CSIRO decided to spend the next 4 years developing software tools that will allow animators to create more realistic movement of water for movies and video games.

Something quite complicated for the moment, since you have to know exactly the movement of the liquid, the behaviour of foam, bubbles, splashes, waves, eddies, and whirlpools.

Foam and bubbles? Yes, we told you that those researchers were australian. Belgian researchers would do the same: first, they will simulate the pouring of beer in a glass.

They hope finishing this before the end of this year.
Before that, they simulated the sinking of the Titanic as an example of animated motion of water: complicated mathematical algorithms to calculate the behavior of flowing water, which was then rendered in software for simulating the motion of different objects.

Resolution is a big concern because if it's too poor, the animated fluid would resemble flowing ice. The researchers solved this problem by using Computational Fluid Dynamics, which gave animators control of every particle in the fluid.
Here is a video about that.


Source: The Age, two weeks ago.
For those who do not know: The Titanic is a too long movie of James Cameron.

In a bid to end the long high-definition DVD format war, three engineers from Warner Bros. have invented a disk that can play all three : the "Multilayer Dual Optical Disk" has one layer of data in the standard CD or DVD format, a second layer able to play Blu-Ray and another one for HD-DVD.

The patent was filed by Wayne Smith, Alan Bell and Lewis Ostrover. It works by storing the information at different depths depending on the technology. Blu-ray discs store information only 0.1 millimetre from the surface while HD-DVD discs store it at 0.6 millimetres.

Concretely, it means that consumers can pick which one they want without worrying about what will survive the second generation DVD war. It also means that the studios do not have to pick one technology and can provide the content in both formats.


Source: Yahoo UK, yesterday.

For those who do not know:

The name Blu-ray disk is derived from the blue-violet laser it uses to read and write to the chalcogenide disc. A Blu-ray Disc can store substantially more data than a DVD, because of the shorter wavelength (405 nm) of the blue-violet laser (DVDs use a 650-nm-wavelength red laser and CDs an infrared 780 nm laser), which allows more information to be stored digitally in the same amount of space. In comparison to HD DVD, which also uses a blue laser, Blu-ray has more information capacity per layer (starting from 25GB with test media currently at 100 gigabytes instead of 15). In August 2006, TDK developed a Blu-ray disk with a 200 gigabytes capacity.

The HD DVD name is derived from its origination as a high-definition extension of the DVD optical disc format. A HD DVD disc can store substantially more data than a standard DVD, because of the shorter wavelength (405 nm) of the blue-violet laser (DVDs use a 650-nm-wavelength red laser and CDs an infrared 780 nm laser), which allows more information to be stored digitally in the same amount of physical space. In comparison to Blu-ray, which also uses a blue laser, HD DVD has less information capacity per layer (15 gigabytes instead of 25), though HD DVD is easier and cheaper to manufacture than a Blu-ray pre-recorded disc due to its sharing the same basic disc structure as a standard DVD: back-to-back bonding of two 120 mm diameter substrates, each 0.6 mm thick. The 30 GB dual-sided HD DVDs have been used on nearly every movie released in this format. On the other hand, Blu-ray has only released movies on 25 GB single layer discs.

Researchers at the University of Bournemouth in the U.K. have created a set of tools to make the skin and muscles of animated figures move more realistically.

Traditionally, animators start creating characters by drawing their external appearance, adding details such as how muscles look when flexed on the basic design. Animators prefer this skin-based approach because it's the most intuitive and because adding muscle details to a form that you already drawn is quite simple.

But it's less realistic, the character can look "fake" if the skin does not correspond exactly to the muscle behind.

Building the muscles first and then layering the skin on top of them creates more natural-looking characters, though it requires an advanced knowledge of human anatomy (even if the character is not human, our eye is used to that).

Jian Zhang and his colleagues have developed an algorithm that begins a design with the muscles under the skin while the animator focus on the external appearance, while writing the rules on the structure of major muscles.

When a body part is flexed, the animation algorithm makes the muscle expand or contract and the skin react accurately using information about the muscle's shape underneath the skin.

Zhang began by looking at the muscle groups that most often cause skin to move, including the shoulder, neck, arms, thighs, and calves. Then he analyzed the muscles' shapes and simplified them into ellipses. This simplification enable the animators to make realistic movements without having a deep knowledge of anatomy, as well as conserving the computational power required by the process.


In the figure on the right, the major muscles on the left half of its body have been extracted using the researchers’ technique. The muscles are used to deform the skin surface when the character is animated.

At the recent Hot Chips conference at Stanford University, people arrived to the conclusion that the chip makers just don't care about the heat problem.

During this conference, Bernie Meyerson of IBM declared that it was stupid for the industry to keep pursuing the highest performance for chips at the cost of power efficiency. He pretends that since the 80s, he has seen chip designers go off the power cliff twice.

He pointed out that now, chips give off more heat per square inch than a steam iron!

We expect that Calor releases an iron using a Pentium4 running Windows Vista.
Soon Internet Explorer 7 to surf while smoothing your shirts...


Source: MercuryNews, more than a week.

Researchers of the NICTA, the National ICT Australia, are developing sophisticated surveillance applications such as an algorithm that monitors inappropriate behavior in public places.

The team that works on this stuff makes me scary, maybe because of the name (SAFE, Smart Applications For Emergencies) or maybe just because of the idea.

The team already proposed a specification for a warning language that can discern and communicate threat levels. The goal of the project is to provide maximum information to decision makers.

"Identifying a particular person is one thing but we are looking at unusual behavior in an open environment," said Chris Scott, the scary boss.

The project uses data from the 6,000 surveillance cameras on the network of Queensland Transport and Queensland Rail, expecting to move away from the dependence on humans looking at monitors.


Source: ComputerWorld, this friday.