Latest Technology

Tevatron accelerator yields hints of new particle

2011-04-08T04:48:00.001+06:00

By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News
A particle accelerator in the US has shown compelling hints of a never-before-seen particle, researchers say.
The find must be more fully confirmed, but researchers at the Tevatron are racing to work through existing data.
If proved, it will be a completely new, unanticipated particle; researchers say it cannot be the much sought-after Higgs boson.
It could also signal a new fundamental force of nature, and the most radical change in physics for decades.
Researchers at the Tevatron formally announced the find on the collaboration's website, after posting an as-yet unreviewed account of the research on the Arxiv repository.
The team was analysing data from collisions between protons and their anti-matter counterparts antiprotons. In these collisions, particles known as W bosons are produced, along with a pair of "jets" of other particles.
It was in these jets that the unexpected "bump" in the team's data came to light, potentially representing a particle that the current understanding of the zoo of subatomic particles - the Standard Model - does not include.
"When you look at the data it's not some disagreement with the Standard Model, it's a nicely formed bump in the distribution that looks really like the kind of bump you'd get if a new particle was being exchanged in this process," said Dan Hooper, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab who was not involved in the research.

Net giants challenge French data law

2011-04-08T04:44:00.001+06:00

Google and Facebook are among a group of net heavyweights taking the French government to court this week.

The legal challenge has been brought by The French Association of Internet Community Services (ASIC) and relates to government plans to keep web users' personal data for a year.

The case will be heard by the State Council, France's highest judicial body.

More than 20 firms are involved, including eBay and Dailymotion.

The law obliges a range of e-commerce sites, video and music services and webmail providers to keep a host of data on customers.

This includes users' full names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and passwords. The data must be handed over to the authorities if demanded.

Police, the fraud office, customs, tax and social security bodies will all have the right of access.

ASIC head Benoit Tabaka believes that the data law is unnecessarily draconian. "Several elements are problematic," he said.

"For instance, there was no consultation with the European Commission. Our companies are based in several European countries.

"Our activities target many national markets, so it is clear that we need a common approach," said Mr Tabaka.

ASIC also thinks that passwords should not be collected and warned that retaining them could have security implications.

"This is a shocking measure," added Mr Tabaka.

The main aim of the legal challenge, which will be launched later this week, is to see the law cancelled.

Privacy record

Both Facebook and Google have run into privacy-related problems in the past.

Facebook was forced to overhaul its privacy settings following criticism that they were too complex.

Google was criticised for lack of privacy in its Buzz social network, which it linked to Gmail accounts without seeking prior permission from users.

The search giant eventually agreed to submit to annual privacy audits as part of a settlement reached over the controversy.

France took tough action against Google when it accidentally collected personal data during the setting up of its Street View service.

The French privacy watchdog, CNIL, was one of the only bodies to fine the company. The £87,000 fine was the largest ever handed out by CNIL.

Google goes shopping for patents

2011-04-08T04:40:00.001+06:00

Google has made a $900m bid for the patent portfolio of Nortel Networks, the bankrupt Canadian telecom equipment maker.

The patents could help arm it against potential lawsuits aimed at its Chrome browser and Android mobile operating system.

Patents are becoming highly prized pieces of intellectual property.

Experts told the BBC they believe the final price could go well over $1bn and may be as high as $2bn.

The amount of money being put up illustrates how fierce the patent wars have become as companies like Apple, Google, Nokia and HTC become embroiled in lawsuits.

Google is not convinced that all the litigation is justified.

"The patent system should reward those who create the most useful innovations for society, not those who stake bogus claims or file dubious lawsuits," said Kent Walker general counsel for Google in the firm's blog.

'If successful, we hope this portfolio will not only create a disincentive for others to sue Google, but also help us, our partners and the open source community - which is integrally involved in projects like Android and Chrome - continue to innovate," he added in a blog post.

Google's $900m bid is a "stalking horse asset sale agreement" which means other companies interested in the 6,000 patents on offer have to put more money on the table.

The sale will include patents and patent applications for wired, wireless and digital communications technology.

"This is an unprecedented opportunity to acquire one of the most extensive and compelling patent portfolios to ever come on the market," said George Riedel, Nortel's chief strategy officer.

Sites hit in massive web attack

2011-04-08T04:32:00.000+06:00

Patrik Runald, senior manager for security research at Websense told the BBC's Katty Kay that the scale of the attack was "worrying"

Hundreds of thousands of websites appear to have been compromised by a massive cyber attack.

The hi-tech criminals used a well-known attack vector that exploits security loopholes on other sites to insert a link to their website.

Those visiting the criminals' webpage were told that their machines were infected with many different viruses.

Swift action by security researchers has managed to get the sites offering the sham software shut down.

Code control

Security firm Websense has been tracking the attack since it started on 29 March. The initial count of compromised sites was 28,000 sites but this has grown to encompass many times this number as the attack has rolled on.

Websense dubbed it the Lizamoon attack because that was the name of the first domain to which victims were re-directed. The fake software is called the Windows Stability Center.

The re-directions were carried out by what is known as an SQL injection attack. This succeeded because many servers keeping websites running do not filter the text being sent to them by web applications.

The fake security software warns about non-existent viruses on victims' PCs

By formatting the text correctly it is possible to conceal instructions in it that are then injected into the databases these servers are running. In this case the injection meant a particular domain appeared as a re-direction link on webpages served up to visitors.

Early reports suggested that the attackers were hitting sites using Microsoft SQL Server 2003 and 2005 and it is thought that weaknesses in associated web application software are proving vulnerable.

Ongoing analysis of the attack reveals that the attackers managed to inject code to display links to 21 separate domains. The exact numbers of sites hit by the attack is hard to judge but a Google search for the attackers' domains shows more than three million weblinks are displaying them.

Security experts say it is the most successful SQL injection attack ever seen.

Generally, the sites being hit are small businesses, community groups, sports teams and many other mid-tier organisations.

Currently the re-directs are not working because the sites peddling the bogus software have been shut down.

Also hit were some web links connected with Apple's iTunes service. However, wrote Websense security researcher Patrick Runald on the firm's blog, this did not mean people were being redirected to the bogus software sites.

"The good thing is that iTunes encodes the script tags, which means that the script doesn't execute on the user's computer," he wrote.

Quantum trickery could lead to stealth radar

2011-04-07T10:21:00.000+06:00

STEALTHY radar systems and the ability to transmit large amounts of data over long distances are a step closer thanks to a technique that could improve the efficiency of modern optics by a factor of 1000.

Traditional methods of transmitting data, such as fibre optics or laser-based radar, require roughly 100 photons to transmit a single bit of data. Now a team led by Saikat Guha at Raytheon BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, say they can transmit 10 bits on a single photon - a 1000-fold improvement.

To do this, the researchers exploit a phenomenon known as entanglement, in which the quantum state of one photon is linked to that of another, regardless of how far apart they are. Once created, each entangled pair of photons is separated by passing a laser beam made up of them through a filter made from a non-linear crystal. This splits the beam in two so that each exiting beam contains one photon of an entangled pair.

The team are now developing transmitters that will release one of the beams at a target, while keeping the other near the transmitter. When a photon hits the target, it bounces back towards the transmitter in a process that alters the photon. When it returns to the detector, the altered photon is no longer strictly entangled with its pair, but Guha says his team has shown "there is still some remnant memory that remains between the two photons".

The researchers hope to discern information about the target such as its distance, size and velocity based on changes to the properties of the recaptured photon - such as polarisation, frequency and momentum - compared to its former partner.

The team has shown in laboratory experiments that this method can be used to glean more data from each photon than conventional methods. This means significantly less light is needed to get the same imaging quality as conventional laser radar.

"If you do it with less [light] energy, the object you are interrogating will never know you are probing it," says Alexander Sergienko of Boston University, who was not involved in the research. "That is why DARPA is interested." Raytheon received $2.1 million in August 2010 from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop the technology.

The technology could also be used to transmit data at greater rates than conventional light or radio transmissions. But developing transmitters and receivers for both applications will be difficult, Sergienko says. "The science is known but in practice it's very difficult to do," he says.

Green Machine: Electric charging, fast as petrol

2011-04-07T10:19:00.000+06:00

Helen Knight, technology reporter

The humble hairbrush could hold the answer to building fast-charging electric car batteries.

Existing batteries used to power electric cars take up to eight hours to charge, compared to the few minutes it takes to fill a tank with petrol. While fast-charging units that can fill up a car in around 30 minutes are available, Amy Prieto and colleagues at Colorado State University in Fort Collins have now built a prototype battery with hairbrush-like electrodes that can be charged in just a few minutes.

Lithium-ion batteries are the most popular devices for powering electric cars and portable electronic gadgets thanks to their high energy density and low weight. The batteries consist of a graphite anode and lithium cathode, with an electrolyte sandwiched between them. Lithium ions travel through the electrolyte from the anode to the cathode and back again during discharging and recharging. But this design limits the speed at which batteries can re-charge.

Prieto's battery contains nanowire anodes made of copper antimonide. The large surface area of the nanowires means they can store twice as many lithium ions as the same amount of graphite, says Prieto. The nanowires are bunched together like the bristles of a hair brush, coated in electrolyte, and finally surrounded with a lithium cathode.

The team have built a prototype the size of a cellphone, which takes 12 minutes to recharge, compared to two hours for a conventional battery of the same size, Prieto announced at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim, California this week. She has founded a company, Prieto Battery, to commercialise the technology.

Kinect hacks: Make your own touchscreen

2011-04-07T10:06:00.000+06:00

Wish you could use smartphone-style multi-touch controls on your desktop? Now you can, thanks to a Kinect hack by Robert Walter, a computer engineering student at the Berlin Institute of Technology. His algorithm trains the sensor to detect a fixed surface, then looks for "touch pixels" in Kinect's depth image that are very close to the surface, while only identifying a finger as actually touching the surface once the algorithm has found a certain number of touch pixels. He then uses open-source multi-touch software called TUIO to control applications on the computer.

Walter has a number of plans to extend the hack, such as using a projector to overlay a keyboard on your desk. He's also experimenting with 3D surfaces, which would let you control your computer with any object close to hand. "You could build a tangible user interface out of everyday physical objects," he says. "Think of turning up the volume of your stereo by rotating your cup on the table."

Remember last month when we highlighted Sony's efforts to encourage people to hack their own motion controller, the Move? We're yet to see any exciting uses, and they may never emerge as you can now use Kinect on your PlayStation 3. Programmer Shantanu Goel achieved the cross-platform hack by feeding Kinect data in to a PC running a PlayStation controller emulator, which then sends inputs to the PS3 via Bluetooth. Goel uses his hack to control the PS3 menu interface and even play games.