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2011-06-06T20:37:00.001-07:00

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2011-06-06T20:27:00.000-07:00

Welcome To tech news (technology news articles), we will provide you with more information about technology news.
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technology is the making, usage and knowledge of tools, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or serve some purpose. The word technology comes from Greek τεχνολογία (technología); from τέχνη (téchnē), meaning "art, skill, craft", and -λογία (-logía), meaning "study of-".^[1] The term can either be applied generally or to specific areas: examples include construction technology, medical technology, and information technology.

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Kalian tahu apa itu teknologi?
Teknologi adalah membuat, menggunakan dan mengetahui tentang perangkat, teknik, kerajinan, sistem atau metode dari suatu organisasi yang di gunakan untuk menyelesaikan suatu masalah. teknologi berasal dari kata Greek τεχνολογία (technologia); from τέχνη (téchnē), yang artinya "seni, kemampuan, kerajinan", dan -λογία (-logía), yang artinya "pembelajaran (belajar). teknologi terbagi menjadi beberapa kategori antara lain : teknologi konstruksi, teknologi medis (kesehatan), dan teknologi informasi.

See-saw logic gates make DNA computing easier

2011-06-06T18:38:00.000-07:00

Computers built from DNA will benefit from a design breakthrough that helps them perform complex calculations, and could also lead to biological sensors for detecting diseases.

Until now, DNA computers – which use strands of DNA molecules to store and process data – were essentially constructed manually, with their designers choosing the exact DNA structures needed to make the logical circuits necessary for computation. Now, Lulu Qian and Erik Winfree at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have developed new "see-saw" logic gates that let them automate the process, making it possible to build much larger circuits.

The pair used these gates to build a circuit that calculates the square roots of 0, 1, 4 and 9. It is made from 130 DNA strands, the largest ever built in a single test tube. "This in itself isn't the achievement – rather it is a kind of confirmation of the principles our designs are based on," says Winfree. "If one can get a circuit to do something so arbitrary and alien to chemistry as computing the discrete square root, then probably one can get DNA circuits to do anything."

Out of the machine code age

Their approach mimics the development of conventional silicon-based computers, which were originally programmed in machine code, a low-level set of instructions so detailed that it is almost impossible for humans to read. Modern software engineers use high-level programming languages and run them through a piece of software called a compiler, which converts their commands into lower-level instructions. DNA programmers will now be able to do the same, designing their circuits in high-level logic without worrying about the underlying molecules. "Essentially we have a rudimentary compiler for molecular circuits," says Winfree.

Qian and Winfree's see-saw gates were the key to developing their compiler. They act as switches, turning one DNA signal into another; a pair can perform the logical operations AND or OR. Combining these operations in a particular way, known as dual-rail logic, effectively lets you compute anything with a DNA circuit.

There are some limitations though – signals can't travel backwards along the circuit, making it impossible to create memory for storing values. Winfree says that because of this and other limitations, many DNA circuits will still be built "by hand" for now, allowing non-see-saw components to be included in the design.

"In a sense, they are opening the door to programmable matter," says Martyn Amos, a DNA computing expert at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. He says that DNA computers based on the new method are unlikely to rival their silicon counterparts, but they could prove much better at analysing biological materials. "You can imagine throwing a sample into a tube, shaking it up and leaving it for a few hours. That's far preferable to sending it off to a lab and sticking it in a machine."

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1200520

Other Keyword : Computers, komputer, software,hardware, software komputer, hardware komputer, kampus, universitas, DNA, mesin, materi, ilmu pengetahuan, pengetahuan.

The defenders: Inside an online siege

2011-06-06T18:32:00.000-07:00

In a quiet, windowless auditorium in Bristol, in the west of England, Lucy Robson and her team hunch over their laptops as the seconds on a giant clock above begin to count down. In a few moments, the enemy will begin the attack – but these villains won't be coming in through the doors.

Robson is competing in the finals of the UK Cyber Security Challenge, held at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Bristol. The participants, largely teenagers and amateur programmers, have been plucked from outside the cybersecurity industry. The hunt is on to find a new generation of people with the skills to battle the darkest elements of the online realm – the hackers who seize government secrets, anonymous activists bent on causing mayhem, and criminals stealing credit cards.

The industry needs fresh blood because the nature of the threat has changed. "Five to ten years ago, you'd be protecting against a clever kid who wants to deface a website," says Martin Sadler of HP Labs. That kind of unsophisticated attack was once relatively easy to thwart. But those days are over. Take the hackers who broke into the Sony PlayStation Network earlier this year. They breezed past the security measures of one the world's biggest electronics companies to steal the names, addresses and possibly credit card numbers of over 100 million people. Sony had barely recovered when a different part of the company came under attack last week.

Hackers are no longer motivated by mischief alone but by big money. Cybercrime alone – including stolen credit card numbers and industrial espionage – now costs the UK £27 billion a year, according to the government's Office of Cyber Security and Information Assurance. The story is no different in other parts of the world.

At the same time, new forms of illegal online activism have grown up, with a collective called Anonymous at the vanguard, crippling websites and gleefully exposing secrets. "Anonymous is not a specific group that you can go and arrest," one of the competition judges explains. The label masks an ever-shifting informal membership who might be active for a year, or for 3 hours. "It's a bank manager who wants to be a bad guy for the day," he says. "You can't punch someone in the face on the street, but you can on the web."

While the diversity, motivation and acumen of the bad guys may have grown exponentially, the defenders are struggling to keep up. Pure technical acumen doesn't cut it any more. The current crop of cybersecurity professionals badly need to up their game. The Cyber Security Challenge, if not an act of desperation, is certainly one of necessity.

Last year about 4000 people entered the competition hoping to be crowned ultimate cybersecurity champion. Today, after a series of gruelling heats, only 30 remain. To the winners will go expensive training courses and internships. But the real beneficiaries might be the sponsors. They include security firm Sophos, defence contractor Qinetiq, and the UK government's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, and they are treating this contest as a scouting operation.

Earlier, the contenders got their orders from the fake CEO and board members of a fake manufacturing firm called the Metal Box Company. Today's task, they were told, was to secure the firm's website and network. Then the finalists were split into teams with names like Enigma, Turing and Bombe.

They are about to start the first of the day's trials that will test their technical abilities, interpersonal skills and teamwork. Later on, judges will award two prizes: one to the winning team, the other to the best individual player. Entrants vying for the title include a professional actor, a geeky kid with hair down to his shoulders, a postman from northern England and, competing in Team Enigma, 17-year-old Robson, the contest's only girl.

Robson taught herself network security by reading Wikipedia and textbooks she bought with money she earned from a part-time supermarket job. "If it affects me, I want to know how it works," she says. She lives in Cromer, a small town on the east coast of England, with her dad, a carpet fitter and her mum, a certified chartered accountant. "Make sure you get the 'certified chartered' bit, it's important," Robson instructs. She speaks as if she's processing every word before it emerges. Her cropped dark hair rests on the collar of a grey suit and a fashionable scarf. The other entrants wear T-shirts and jeans.

Robson entered the competition with two friends she met at a computer summer school. In the run-up to the finals, their team shone, sussing out well-disguised flaws in a home computer. "We got here because of Lucy," says her friend Stuart Rennie. "She was amazing." But today, Rennie has been placed on Team Bombe, competing against Robson.

It's 11 am, and the attack is about to start. The task is to identify and fend off waves of invaders who want to break into the Metal Box Company's computer network. The teams are clustered in one corner of the auditorium, isolated from each other by barriers. The wires trailing from their laptops disappear into a tangled clump under a nearby table, where the action is coordinated by the games masters, led by Andrew Laird of Bristol-based security firm Cassidian. The exercise is being staged on a Cassidian-built software simulator called Hotsim (for "Hands on Training Simulator"), which is robust enough to manage the cybersecurity training of the Brazilian and Finnish militaries. Hotsim reproduces all the day-to-day traffic you'd expect in a big company network, such as employees browsing the internet, instant messaging and exchanging emails, so the teams' laptop screens mirror what an IT security team in a real company would be looking at.

The competing teams monitor this virtual traffic for signs of intrusion, using standard programs that display employee activity, a breach detection system and a firewall to keep out threats. A skilful cyberdefender knows how to program these tools to spot and block threats. If the contenders can successfully juggle all three, they can prevent the invasion.

Team Enigma, though, start badly. It's only a few minutes before the first sign of trouble: a "port scan" conducted by the enemy. Ports are the way into the network. Think of an arterial road system into a city that provides hundreds or thousands of routes for different types of vehicles and destinations. Similarly, a network has many thousands of specific routes along which traffic travels, called ports. By convention, internet browser traffic on a server comes in through port 80. Email tends to go out of port 25. Potential intruders will scan thousands of these ports in an attempt to discover weaknesses in the network's security. That's what is happening now, but in their initial scramble to secure the perimeter neither Robson nor the rest of Team Enigma have noticed.

The person in charge of monitoring the traffic zipping around on the network router is Tony Shannon, a stocky, confident 28-year-old with a pierced eyebrow. After a few years in the IT industry, he's back studying computer security at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Shannon's style is nothing like Robson's. He has decided that the way to impress the judges is to mount ostentatious vocal displays. "Oh yeah, we're FUBAR," he declares, as thing start to come unstuck. "We're folding like a cheap deckchair." And the team really is folding in the face of the attacks. For all his earlier bravado, Shannon hasn't found much to contribute so far. There's anxiety in his voice.

08:00 06 June 2011 by Richard Fisher
Magazine issue 2816. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the Computer crime Topic Guide

Other Keyword : Defender, pertahanan, teknologi pertahanan, teknologi ilmiah, penguatan, dasar teknologi, sejarah teknologi,teknologi internet.

On a diet? Try mind over milkshake

2011-06-06T18:27:00.000-07:00

IF YOU want to lose weight, convince yourself that everything you eat is highly calorific. It could lower your levels of a hunger hormone, potentially suppressing your appetite.

Alia Crum at Yale University and her colleagues gave 46 healthy volunteers the same 380-calorie milkshake but were told it was either a sensible, low-calorie choice or an indulgent, high-calorie one. The team also measured levels of ghrelin - a hormone released by the stomach when we are hungry - before and after participants drank the shake.

Ghrelin levels have been shown to spike half an hour before mealtimes and return to normal after eating.

Volunteers who thought they had indulged showed significantly greater drops in ghrelin levels than those who thought they had consumed less. The authors suggest that merely thinking that one has eaten something unhealthy can quell hunger pangs and perhaps help curb overeating (Health Psychology, DOI: 10.1037/a0023467).

The study shows that food labels can affect consumption in unexpected ways, says David Cummings, an endocrinologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

05 June 2011
Magazine issue 2815. Subscribe and save
For similar stories, visit the Food and Drink Topic Guide

Other Keyword : Diet, diet, pengurusan, penyehatan badan, cara menyehatkan, cara sehat, hidup sehat, health,badan langsing, badan kurus, pola makan, makanan sehat, udara segar.

AI programs do battle in Ms Pac-Man

2011-06-06T18:10:00.000-07:00

Everyone loves a few rounds of a classic video game, but why should humans have all the fun? The Ms Pac-Man vs Ghost Team Competition serves to redress the balance by putting AI controllers in charge of video game characters in an effort to see which plays the game best.

Competitors could submit AI controllers for either the titular Ms Pac-Man or the team of four ghosts and each entrant faced off against the rest to determine a winner. The Ms Pac-Man AI had to maximise its score, while the ghost AI had to prevent Ms Pac-Man from scoring. The competition was organised by Philipp Rohlfshagen and Simon Lucas, two computer scientists at the University of Essex, with the results announced today at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation in New Orleans.

How did the AI controllers do? Compared to a human, not great - the highest scoring Ms Pac-Man controller was 69,240, while the world record stands at more than 900,000 points. "I would assume that 'professional' human Ms Pac-Man players will be better than any AI controller at this stage," says Rohlfshagen, though he added that the ghost teams were also much harder to play against than those found in the original game: "The original ghost team was developed to engage and entertain the human player whereas the ghost teams submitted in the competition were designed to eat Ms Pac-Man as efficiently as possible."

Developing an AI to play video games for us isn't really the aim though, and there is some serious research behind the competition. "Games are usually seen as a valuable test-bed for new technologies in computational intelligence as they are well defined yet very challenging," explains Rohlfshagen. He says the multi-agent algorithms behind the ghost controllers could be used for transport or military applications, or even modelling biological predator-prey dynamics.

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Erase entangled memory to cool a computer

2011-06-06T18:05:00.000-07:00

Imagine cooling a supercomputer not with fans or freezers, but by deleting some of its memory. New calculations show that this is possible, provided some of the bits that make up the computer's memory are "entangled"– a spooky property that can link two quantum systems, no matter how far apart they sit in physical space.

The notion of cooling by erasure seemingly violates a principle articulated by physicist Rolf Landauer in 1961. He showed that erasing information is akin to a decrease in entropy or disorder. As entropy overall must always increase, the deletion of bits must therefore be accompanied by an increase in the entropy of the surroundings, which manifests itself as heat.

The heat produced by a computer today is mainly due to processing inefficiencies, and while these can be reduced, Landauer's insight implies a fundamental limit on how much you can reduce the heat generated by computing.

Now, Lídia del Rio of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and colleagues have shown that quantum entanglement provides a way to sneak around Landauer's law.

Entropy dip

To understand how this might work, consider two people who are each trying to erase a string of bits in computer memory, which can exist either as 1s or 0s. One of the pair has no knowledge of the stored bits, so to ensure they get erased, he or she must always reset them to "0", regardless of their original content. The second person, however, knows the content of the string and so need only reset those bits that are 1s.

In this situation, the first person has to do more work on average to erase the string than the second. As a result, the "conditional entropy" of the memory is said to be lower for the first person than the second.

Now imagine that the memory bits to be erased are entangled with other objects. In such a system, observing or determining the state of one part immediately fixes the state of the other. So an observer who has access to the entangled objects could know even more about the memory than would be possible otherwise, causing the conditional entropy of the system to dip and become negative when the memory is erased.

Weirdness at work

Del Rio and colleagues have shown mathematically that this negative conditional entropy is the equivalent of extracting heat from the surroundings, or cooling.

The team envisages future computers containing entangled systems of this kind. Deletion of some of a computer's memory should lead to cooling. "If you go to this entangled level of operations, then you will be at the limit of what physics allows you to do," says team member Vlatko Vedral of the University of Oxford.

This does not violate the laws of thermodynamics: there is still an overall increase in entropy because energy is needed to create the entangled system initially.

At the moment, entangled states are not easy to work with: they require extreme cooling and are notoriously fragile. Still, Robert Prevedel of the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, who was not involved in the work, is impressed by the idea. "This demonstrates that the weird features of the quantum world are not only useful as an informational resource, but can actually be used to generate some real, physical work," he says.

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature10123

Other Keyword : Teknologi,teknologi industri,teknologi bisnis,teknologi pemasaran,teknologi komputer,teknologi maju,teknologi moderen,perkembangan teknoligi.