Toshiba Thrive tablet with Android 3.1 ships in July, starting at $430

The Toshiba Thrive tablet will reportedly be up for pre-order beginning June 13, 2011 at Best Buy, along with the usual "office superstores" and "e-commerce players." It will have a mid-July ship date (Engadget says it will be July 10, 2011).

More importantly, the Toshiba Thrive will be shipping with Android 3.1 (codenamed Honeycomb) out-of-the-box, meaning you won't have to deal with the hassle of upgrading the OS yourself. The company may be abandoning its Windows 7 tablet and Chromebook plans, so if you're a Toshiba fan, this looks like your best bet.

The 10.1-inch tablet (1,280 x 800 resolution) is available with three internal storage capacities in Wi-Fi only configurations: the 8GB model is $430, the 16GB model is $480, and the 32GB model is $580. They'll all come with a dual core 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, 2MP and 5MP front and rear cameras, Bluetooth 3.0+ connectivity, an SD memory card reader, HDMI and USB 2.0 support. A rather unique feature Toshiba is touting is the ability to swap batteries, unlike most other tablets. The back cover will also be removable and replaceable with other covers that Toshiba will sell in a variety of colors.

The Thrive also has a button to lock the screen orientation, a Toshiba-branded file manager, and Swype pre-installed (you can switch to the stock Android keyboard if you'd like). Toshiba is bundling its Resolution Plus software, which it uses to clean up and upscale video in its TVs and laptops. Most importantly, Toshiba claims the battery is rated up to seven hours of continuous HD video playback, and promises to recharge up to 90 percent in an hour and a half.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44070-toshiba-thrive-tablet-with-android-31-ships-in-july-starting-at-430.html

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Computex 2011 Predictions

Computex is one of the most important times of the year for PC hardware ? whether you?re a manufacturer or enthusiastic follower, the Taiwanese tech show is the place to be to see the best and brightest.

After all, Computex is where the netbook craze took off after Asus showed its EeePC 701 back in 2007, and it?s typically where we first see all the tech that?ll we be buying in the September rush and that?ll appear in our Christmas stockings.

We?ve already seen some news from Taiwan, but we thought we?d put together a few predictions before the show starts in earnest and see how they come out. We?ve only listed the companies that we?re fairly sure will announce something note-worthy or interesting here, but feel free to add your own predictions about your favourite (or least favourite) manufacturers in the comments thread.

AMD
All the major motherboard manufacturers will have Socket AM3+ boards, whether they?re based around the new 990FX chipset or the older 890FX one. Socket AM3+ boards are compatible with Socket AM3 CPUs and the forthcoming Socket AM3+ CPUs, but not any new APUs from AMD ? the integrated graphics unit of an APU will require a completely new type of socket.

We expect the graphics front to be calm from both sides, as TSMC is still working on the desired 28nm manufacturing process. As the Radeon HD 7000-series is rumoured for production in May we might see something GPU-shaped, but we doubt we?ll be able to share that if we do.

Intel
There?s a slight chance we might see some more of LGA2011, the successor to LGA1366. Intel has form in this area, with the Intel booth at previous Computex shows featuring a wall?o?motherboards with a few next-gen examples. Typically we?ll ask a booth attendant what these previously unseen boards, only to be told that he or she didn?t know and couldn?t possibly say, but that we?re welcome to take pictures and speculate. The teases.

Nvidia
With the all-quiet on the graphics front, we expect Nvidia to be pushing Tegra 2. We saw the First Tegra 2 smartphone at CES earlier this year, and we might see a Tegra 3 quad-core device, but it?ll be a demo unit or a concept.

Asus
We?re expecting a pretty strong show from Asus, who is holding an entire press conference for its Republic of Gamer sub-brand. Stay tuned for revelations from that one. Asus typically has some mental-looking motherboards and graphics cards at tech shows, plus some funky concept designs for devices ? most of which wouldn?t look out of place in a high-budget sci-fi film ? and some sleek laptops and netbooks.

What won't happen
We don't expect to see any news on GDDR6 - next-gen graphics cards will have a similar amount of memory bandwidth to this generation. We also don't expect to hear anything about DDR4 (or another new type of desktop memory), though Intel might surprise us on that front with LGA2011.

We also don't expect to see much news from Indilinx, despite OCZ buying it - the next round of the SSD fight will be between Marvell and SandForce.

While Intel might well show LGA2011, we doubt Ivy Bridge will present - those looking for a 3D Tri-gate transistor teaser will have to be patient.

Do you think we've called it right? Let us know in the forum!

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IE losing share, Firefox gains a bit, Chrome used by 1 in 8

With IE9, Firefox 4, and Chrome 11 all out, the second browser war is only getting fiercer. Let's take a look at the market share numbers for last month.

Between April and May, Internet Explorer dropped 0.84 percentage points, just a tad more than the previous month. Firefox, meanwhile, gained 0.08 percentage points, less than what it lost last month. Chrome gained 0.58 percentage points, making it last month's biggest winner. Safari was up 0.13 percentage points. Opera lost 0.11 percentage points.

At 54.27 percent, Internet Explorer has once again hit a new low. IE9, the latest and greatest from Microsoft, last month captured 4.19 percent of the market (up by 1.78 percent percentage points). IE8 lost 1.78 percentage points, but it's still the world's most popular browser. IE7 fell 0.31 percentage points and IE6 fell 0.49 percentage points. We're hoping that IE6 will fall below the 10 percent mark next month.

At 21.71 percent, Firefox is still below the peak it reached last year (24.72 percent). It appears that Firefox 4 is still not helping Mozilla regain overall market share. This is despite the fact that Firefox 4 last month captured a whopping 10.08 percent of the market (up by 4.65 percentage points). Firefox 3.6 lost 4.88 percentage points and Firefox 3.5 lost 0.20 percentage points.

At 12.52 percent, Chrome has hit a new high and is now being used by 1 in 8 of all Internet citizens. The browser's built-in updating system is working wonders for Google. Chrome 11 managed to capture 9.73 percent (up by 9.23 percentage points). Chrome 10 meanwhile fell 8.71 percentage points and Chrome 9 fell 0.06 percentage points.

The data is courtesy of Net Applications, which looks at 160 million visitors per month. As you can see above, the situation at TechSpot is slightly different: Firefox is first, IE is second, Chrome is third, Safari is fourth, and Opera is fifth. The only browser to gain share at TechSpot between April and May was Chrome.

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Making the Case for Security

Major corporations have made serious mistakes with information security recently, resulting in spectacular failures to protect business and customer records. After years of warnings, why do so many businesses still fail to deal properly with this issue? Eugene H. Spafford, a professor of computer science at Purdue University who frequently advises government, law enforcement, and big companies, has some ideas. He spoke with technology journalist Brian Krebs for Technology Review.

TR: You recently testified to Congress about the Sony breach, which appears to have happened after the company ignored warning signs about holes in its PlayStation network. How does an organization as big and as technologically advanced as Sony fail so massively on security?

Spafford: Some business management organizations simply do not have a proper IT security organization, and often that function is still kept under the company's chief information officer. When that happens, the people who deal with security are way down the line, and they don't have [access to] the CEO or the company's board. So the security function of that organization isn't funded and doesn't have the authority at a high enough level to really operate the way it should. Many IT organizations have grown up from the level of system administrators who started at the bottom of the organizational hierarchy. These typically are people with computer science and technical training, but they don't speak business. They don't always understand risk or cost-benefit analyses. As a result, they are not able to present the business case for security and privacy issues. We learned recently that Sony didn't have a chief information security officer [CISO] prior to the attacks that exposed personal and financial data of more than 100 million customers.

But is there any evidence that Sony's lack of a CISO contributed to the breach? In other words, is the answer to these types of breaches really just to spend more money on security and add additional layers of organizational bureaucracy?

Well, CISOs aren't exactly duplicating someone else's job. For one thing, there is a bit of a conflict by design between the CIO and the CISO. The CIO's job is to make information available, and the CISO's job is to make sure that certain information is not available?limiting where information goes, setting rules for those who should have access to it, and then setting rules and consequences for when those rules are violated.

To your second question, there are many things that companies need to do and spend resources on that have no obvious return on the bottom line, including maintenance of their buildings and grounds, or equal-opportunity and antidiscrimination training. It's the same thing with security policies: if you don't spend enough on them and keep at them, at some point something bad is going to happen and you're going to end up paying an awful lot more than you would have if you'd gone about it more proactively. It's the responsibility of informed parties within an organization to understand the risks and appropriately plan the investment up front to build defenses against the most expensive risks, and to make plans about how to cope with what's left when they occur. That has to be part of overall business planning, but someone at a high enough level in the organization has to understand that.

Sony's case doesn't appear to be an anomaly. It seems almost daily now that we're hearing about breaches that expose huge caches of consumer information. Why do you think that is?

It's a whole set of things that have come together, and not any one factor. We have more systems and data available on the Net than ever before. There are more people who are on the Internet and who are Internet-savvy, so there are a greater set of targets and greater sets of people who want to exploit those targets. And these crimes are occurring faster than the increase in law enforcement resources and our ability to deal with them. The crimes also are being masked better, and as a result the criminals are able to be bolder and there is less deterrent value. So many of them are going after much bigger targets.

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=4ba0092e0d6be5a06baca85cc5079275

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Computex 2011 Predictions

Computex is one of the most important times of the year for PC hardware ? whether you?re a manufacturer or enthusiastic follower, the Taiwanese tech show is the place to be to see the best and brightest.

After all, Computex is where the netbook craze took off after Asus showed its EeePC 701 back in 2007, and it?s typically where we first see all the tech that?ll we be buying in the September rush and that?ll appear in our Christmas stockings.

We?ve already seen some news from Taiwan, but we thought we?d put together a few predictions before the show starts in earnest and see how they come out. We?ve only listed the companies that we?re fairly sure will announce something note-worthy or interesting here, but feel free to add your own predictions about your favourite (or least favourite) manufacturers in the comments thread.

AMD
All the major motherboard manufacturers will have Socket AM3+ boards, whether they?re based around the new 990FX chipset or the older 890FX one. Socket AM3+ boards are compatible with Socket AM3 CPUs and the forthcoming Socket AM3+ CPUs, but not any new APUs from AMD ? the integrated graphics unit of an APU will require a completely new type of socket.

We expect the graphics front to be calm from both sides, as TSMC is still working on the desired 28nm manufacturing process. As the Radeon HD 7000-series is rumoured for production in May we might see something GPU-shaped, but we doubt we?ll be able to share that if we do.

Intel
There?s a slight chance we might see some more of LGA2011, the successor to LGA1366. Intel has form in this area, with the Intel booth at previous Computex shows featuring a wall?o?motherboards with a few next-gen examples. Typically we?ll ask a booth attendant what these previously unseen boards, only to be told that he or she didn?t know and couldn?t possibly say, but that we?re welcome to take pictures and speculate. The teases.

Nvidia
With the all-quiet on the graphics front, we expect Nvidia to be pushing Tegra 2. We saw the First Tegra 2 smartphone at CES earlier this year, and we might see a Tegra 3 quad-core device, but it?ll be a demo unit or a concept.

Asus
We?re expecting a pretty strong show from Asus, who is holding an entire press conference for its Republic of Gamer sub-brand. Stay tuned for revelations from that one. Asus typically has some mental-looking motherboards and graphics cards at tech shows, plus some funky concept designs for devices ? most of which wouldn?t look out of place in a high-budget sci-fi film ? and some sleek laptops and netbooks.

What won't happen
We don't expect to see any news on GDDR6 - next-gen graphics cards will have a similar amount of memory bandwidth to this generation. We also don't expect to hear anything about DDR4 (or another new type of desktop memory), though Intel might surprise us on that front with LGA2011.

We also don't expect to see much news from Indilinx, despite OCZ buying it - the next round of the SSD fight will be between Marvell and SandForce.

While Intel might well show LGA2011, we doubt Ivy Bridge will present - those looking for a 3D Tri-gate transistor teaser will have to be patient.

Do you think we've called it right? Let us know in the forum!

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/bit-tech/blog/~3/2JYAkl0fj_I/

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Making the Case for Security

Major corporations have made serious mistakes with information security recently, resulting in spectacular failures to protect business and customer records. After years of warnings, why do so many businesses still fail to deal properly with this issue? Eugene H. Spafford, a professor of computer science at Purdue University who frequently advises government, law enforcement, and big companies, has some ideas. He spoke with technology journalist Brian Krebs for Technology Review.

TR: You recently testified to Congress about the Sony breach, which happened after the company ignored ominous warning signs about holes in its PlayStation network. How does an organization as big and as technologically advanced as Sony fail so massively on security?

Spafford: Some business management organizations simply do not have a proper IT security organization, and often that function is still kept under the company's chief information officer. When that happens, the people who deal with security are way down the line, and they don't have [access to] the CEO or the company's board. So the security function of that organization isn't funded and doesn't have the authority at a high enough level to really operate the way it should. Many IT organizations have grown up from the level of system administrators who started at the bottom of the organizational hierarchy. These typically are people with computer science and technical training, but they don't speak business. They don't always understand risk or cost-benefit analyses. As a result, they are not able to present the business case for security and privacy issues. We learned recently that Sony didn't have a chief information security officer [CISO] prior to the attacks that exposed personal and financial data of more than 100 million customers.

But is there any evidence that Sony's lack of a CISO contributed to the breach? In other words, is the answer to these types of breaches really just to spend more money on security and add additional layers of organizational bureaucracy?

Well, CISOs aren't exactly duplicating someone else's job. For one thing, there is a bit of a conflict by design between the CIO and the CISO. The CIO's job is to make information available, and the CISO's job is to make sure that certain information is not available?limiting where information goes, setting rules for those who should have access to it, and then setting rules and consequences for when those rules are violated.

To your second question, there are many things that companies need to do and spend resources on that have no obvious return on the bottom line, including maintenance of their buildings and grounds, or equal-opportunity and antidiscrimination training. It's the same thing with security policies: if you don't spend enough on them and keep at them, at some point something bad is going to happen and you're going to end up paying an awful lot more than you would have if you'd gone about it more proactively. It's the responsibility of informed parties within an organization to understand the risks and appropriately plan the investment up front to build defenses against the most expensive risks, and to make plans about how to cope with what's left when they occur. That has to be part of overall business planning, but someone at a high enough level in the organization has to understand that.

Sony's case doesn't appear to be an anomaly. It seems almost daily now that we're hearing about breaches that expose huge caches of consumer information. Why do you think that is?

It's a whole set of things that have come together, and not any one factor. We have more systems and data available on the Net than ever before. There are more people who are on the Internet and who are Internet-savvy, so there are a greater set of targets and greater sets of people who want to exploit those targets. And these crimes are occurring faster than the increase in law enforcement resources and our ability to deal with them. The crimes also are being masked better, and as a result the criminals are able to be bolder and there is less deterrent value. So many of them are going after much bigger targets.

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=4ba0092e0d6be5a06baca85cc5079275

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Economic Memo: Employment Data May Be the Key to the President?s Job

Seventeen months before the next election, it is increasingly clear that President Obama must defy that trend to keep his job.

Roughly 9 percent of Americans who want to go to work cannot find an employer. Companies are firing fewer people, but hiring remains anemic. And the vast majority of economic forecasters, including the president?s own advisers, predict only modest progress by November 2012.

The latest job numbers, due Friday, are expected to provide new cause for concern. Other indicators suggest the pace of growth is flagging. Weak manufacturing data, a gloomy reading on jobs in advance of Friday?s report and a drop in auto sales led the markets to their worst close since August, and those declines carried over into Asia Thursday.

But the grim reality of widespread unemployment is drawing little response from Washington. The Federal Reserve says it is all but tapped out. There is even less reason to expect Congressional action. Both Democrats and Republicans see clear steps to create jobs, but they are trying to walk in opposite directions and are making little progress.

Republicans have set the terms of debate by pressing for large cuts in federal spending, which they say will encourage private investment. Democrats have found themselves battling to minimize and postpone such cuts, which they fear will cause new job losses.

House Republicans told the president that they would not support new spending to spur growth during a meeting at the White House on Wednesday.

?The discussion really focused on the philosophical difference on whether Washington should continue to pump money into the economy or should we provide an incentive for entrepreneurs and small businesses to grow,? said Eric Cantor, the majority leader. ?The president talked about a need for us to continue to quote-unquote invest from Washington?s standpoint, and for a lot of us that?s code for more Washington spending, something that we can?t afford right now.?

The White House, its possibilities constrained by the gridlock, has offered no new grand plans. After agreeing to extend the Bush-era tax cuts and reducing the payroll tax last December, the administration has focused on smaller ideas, like streamlining corporate taxation and increasing American exports to Asia and Latin America.

?It?s a very tough predicament,? said Jared Bernstein, who until April was economic policy adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. ?Is there any political appetite for something that would resemble another large Keynesian stimulus? Obviously no. You can say that?s what we should do and you?d probably be right, but that?s pretty academic.?

More than 13.7 million Americans were unable to find work in April; most had been seeking jobs for months. Millions more have stopped trying. Their inability to earn money is a personal catastrophe; studies show that the chance of finding new work slips away with time. It is also a strain on their families, charities and public support programs.

The Federal Reserve, the nation?s central bank, has the means and the mandate to reduce unemployment by pumping money into the economy.

As financial markets nearly collapsed in 2008, the Fed unleashed a series of unprecedented programs, first to arrest the crisis and then to promote recovery, investing more than $2 trillion. The final installment, a $600 billion bond-buying program, ends in June.

Now, however, the leaders of the central bank say they are reluctant to do more. The Fed?s chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said in April that more money might not increase growth, but there was a growing risk that it would accelerate inflation.

Congress charged the Fed in 1978 with minimizing unemployment and inflation. Those goals, however, are often in conflict, and the Fed has made clear that inflation is its priority. Fed officials argue in part that maintaining slow, steady inflation forms a basis for enduring economic expansion.

Eric S. Rosengren, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, said in a recent interview that the Fed had reached the limits of responsible policy.

Jackie Calmes contributed reporting.

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Neowin: Interview with PS3 hacker KaKaRoTo

As you may have read on our previous report, a hacker and homebrew developer known as KaKaRoTo is petitioning Sony by releasing a bunch of homebrew titles for the PS3 (as well as other platforms) for free. He calls this the Humble Homebrew Collection and it?s certainly a unique way to petition a company. So unique, in fact, that we jumped at the opportunity to sit down with him and have a chat.

What exactly makes such a person ?tick?? Read on and you might just find out.

Neowin: So KaKaRoTo, tell us a little bit about yourself.

KaKaRoTo: "I'm Youness Alaoui, I'm a Moroccan and I'm living in Canada. I've been working on open source software for the past 10 years, first with aMSN, then professionally for Collabora where I've touched on many open source projects."

Neowin: How did you end up getting involved in the PS3 ?Hacking? scene?

KaKaRoTo: "Well, I never planned/wanted to...but I was browsing some forum and I saw a usb dump of the PS Jailbreak dongle. My curiosity got the best of me and I wondered 'what does all that stuff mean?', so I researched the usb protocol specification and then I saw my N900 phone on my desk and thought 'I bet it would be easy to reproduce that with my phone', so I started tinkering. One thing led to another and PSFreedom was born. 

It got a lot of attention, more than I imagined (I was just expecting a "cool, the N900 is awesome" kind of response), Android porting started (by other developers) and eventually, I extracted the payload into PL3. I've always been pro-open source and open development, and seeing how the scene is or was, I thought I could help by trying to create a good foundation for future devs. I was thinking of how Dark Alex left the PSP scene and M33 was never heard of again (correct me if I'm wrong). and I thought if only the PSP scene was 100% open, anyone could have picked it up where he left it."

Read the rest of the review.
This article is brought to you in partnership with Neowin.net

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44059-neowin-interview-with-ps3-hacker-kakaroto.html

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Obama Urged to Act Quickly on Budget Agreement

In a meeting with reporters after a White House session between House Republicans and the president, Mr. Boehner said a budget deal well in advance of the Treasury Department?s Aug. 2 deadline for raising the debt ceiling could avoid the prospect of adverse market reactions.

?This really needs to be done over the next month if we are serious about no brinksmanship and no rattling investors,? Mr. Boehner said.

?The president could engage himself,? he added. ?I?m willing. I?m ready. It is time to have the conversation. It is time to play large ball, not small ball.?

A bipartisan team of lawmakers from the House and Senate has been meeting with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to fashion a budget agreement that could clear the way for a vote to raise the $14.3 trillion debt limit, a step Mr. Boehner and other Republicans say they will not take without corresponding spending cuts. The speaker said the group was making marginal progress but at its current pace would brush up against the August deadline.

Mr. Boehner said he had had no discussions with the White House about involving the president in the negotiations.

As the Biden negotiations have been unfolding, it was considered likely that Mr. Boehner would have to agree on any package negotiated by lawmakers who included Representative Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican and majority leader. Aides said Mr. Boehner?s comments were not meant to be critical of the Biden talks.

Mr. Boehner?s comments came after stock markets closed down 2 percent, with the Dow Jones industrial average falling 280 points, the biggest slide in a year. While the sell-off came amid new, disappointing economic data on manufacturing and jobs, Democrats had warned Tuesday that Republicans were risking a market reaction by staging a House vote that evening overwhelmingly rejecting an increase in the debt limit, which they did to pressure the White House to agree to spending cuts.

The White House meeting on Wednesday was expected to focus on the debt limit fight, but instead got caught up in the dispute over Medicare.

Following the session, Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the Budget Committee, said he asked Mr. Obama to not engage in demagogy about the Republicans? Medicare plan, which was under fierce attack from Democrats as essentially being a voucher program for older Americans.

?We simply described to him precisely what it is we?ve been proposing, so that he hears from us how our proposal works, so that in the future, he won?t mischaracterize it,? Mr. Ryan said.

Jay Carney, a spokesman for the president, disputed the notion that Mr. Obama had ever misconstrued the proposal, which would essentially subsidize those now younger than 55 in private insurance plans rather than have the federal government serve as the insurer of older Americans as it now does.

  ?It is a voucher plan,? Mr. Carney said. ?If you?re basically giving a subsidy of a set dollar figure that?s limited in terms of its growth and that won?t stay up with the growth in medical costs, I mean, that?s ? you?re basically getting a certain amount of money to put towards buying insurance.?

According to an administration official in the meeting, when Mr. Ryan told Mr. Obama that he had mischaracterized the House plan, Mr. Obama replied: ?Paul, I?ve read your plan. I do my homework.? And after Mr. Ryan made the point that he proposed not a voucher but ?premium support? for seniors to buy insurance, the president said that Mr. Ryan was shifting more costs to states and to older Americans, whereas his new health care law seeks savings from changes in how health care is delivered.

The official described the entire exchange as ?respectful? on both sides; when another Republican leader raised the complaint early in the meeting that Mr. Obama had attacked them and their budget plan, Mr. Obama lightly noted that since he had taken office he had been called a job-killing socialist who created death panels and was not born in America. 

In a coincidence that reinforced the stakes in the Medicare fight, Kathy Hochul was sworn in on Wednesday as the newest member of the House. Last week?s victory by Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, in a Republican district in upstate New York was largely attributed to her campaign against the Republican plan for Medicare.

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Researchers Crack Audio Security System

A team of computer scientists with expertise in artificial intelligence, audio processing, and computer security has come up with a way to automatically defeat the systems that prevent spammers from creating new accounts on sites like Yahoo, Microsoft's Hotmail, and Twitter.

Many websites require users to correctly transcribe a string of distorted characters?a puzzle known as a CAPTCHA?to gain access. These tests are relatively easy for people, but very hard for computers. Most sites also make CAPTCHAs available in audio form, for vision-impaired users, and the researchers found that their algorithm could solve many of these audio CAPTCHAs. Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated the vulnerability of audio CAPTCHAs before, in 2008, but the new work targets newer, more secure versions.

The ability to automatically defeat CAPTCHAs could make it cheaper for spammers to churn out spam. Right now, spammers pay humans sweatshop wages to solve CAPTCHAs, but this can cost up to one cent apiece.

Team leader Elie Bursztein, of Stanford University, says the team's algorithm, called deCAPTCHA, was able to defeat audio CAPTCHAs from Microsoft and Yahoo in almost half of all cases. Microsoft has since switched to another type of CAPTCHA, which the algorithm is still able to defeat in 1.5 percent of cases.

"[In defeating security measures,] if you cross the 1 percent threshold, you are in a lot of trouble," says Burzstein. "It's almost a free pass."

Luis Von Ahn, who invented the CAPTCHA, says that, in reality, companies can control the rate at which audio CAPTCHAS are compromised by limiting the number of them that can be solved per day, or by limiting the number that can be solved by a single IP address. But, says independent security expert Markus Jakobsson, "it's very important to understand how we can break things before the bad guys do."

An audio CAPTCHA reads aloud a string of letters or numbers with added audio distortion. The Stanford team created a learning algorithm to "process the sound in a way that was as close as possible to the way that we think the human ear is made," says Bursztein. This meant focusing on lower-frequency sounds, which humans are especially good at processing, and eliminating as much of the noise from audio CAPTCHAs as possible.

Bursztein's team is also working to crack several new types of audio CAPTCHA. One type plays two voices reading different strings of letters or words at the same time. Humans are especially good at picking out one voice when surrounded by many competing conversations in a crowded room, but computers are terrible at this task. A second type combines words with music.

Even if many existing CAPTCHAs are vulnerable to attack, says Jakobsson, their failure isn't as severe as the compromise of a password system. "[CAPTCHA defeat] is a gradual decay of security. You don't have to keep everybody out to feel like you have security?some failure is tolerable."

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