Administration to Seek Balance in Airport Screening

With the Thanksgiving travel crush imminent, the chief of the Transportation Security Administration, John S. Pistole, said in a statement that his agency would try to make screening methods ?as minimally invasive as possible.? But he gave no indication that the agency would reverse its move to full-body scanners, now deployed in 70 of 450 airports in the United States, and physical pat-downs for passengers who object to the scans.

?This has always been viewed as an evolving program that will be adapted as conditions warrant, and we greatly appreciate the cooperation and understanding of the American people,? Mr. Pistole said.

Security officials said the new procedures were the only way to detect explosives hidden under clothing. ?We cannot forget that less than one year ago a suicide bomber with explosives in his underwear tried to bring down a plane over Detroit,? Mr. Pistole said.

The debate over the proper balance of security and privacy was unfolding as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist group responsible for the Detroit airliner bomb last Christmas and for placing explosive devices aboard cargo planes last month, threatened similar plots to sow fear, disrupt travel and transport, and impose huge costs on the United States.

?This strategy of attacking the enemy with smaller but more frequent operations is what some may refer to as the strategy of a thousand cuts,? the Yemen-based group said in a new issue of its English-language magazine, Inspire, which resembles a glossy publication but is available for download on militant Web sites. ?The aim is to bleed the enemy to death.?

The T.S.A., which screens about two million air passengers a day, began testing the full-body scanners in 2007, installed them more widely starting last year and accelerated their use after the failed plot last Christmas. If a screener spots something suspicious on a scan, which shows an outline of the unclothed body, or if a passenger prefers to skip the scan, the passenger must undergo a physical search that many passengers have found intrusive.

The furor began after Nov. 1, when the agency introduced the more aggressive pat-down procedure. Despite the storm of criticism from passengers, pilots and members of Congress, agency officials point to opinion polls showing that about 80 percent of the public supports the use of body scanners. About 1 percent of passengers have opted out of the scanner and undergone pat-downs so far this month, officials said.

Congressional leaders have promised to hold hearings on the issue.

Still, the administration has appeared to be caught off guard by the outrage of some passengers. Mr. Pistole agreed on Saturday to demands from pilots that they be exempted from the searches, after critics noted that a pilot who wants to destroy a plane hardly needs explosives to do so.

On Saturday in Lisbon, President Obama acknowledged public complaints but said he had been told by T.S.A. and counterterrorism advisers that ?at this point? the measures ?are the only ones right now that they consider to be effective against the kind of threat that we saw in the Christmas Day bombing.?

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said on NBC?s ?Meet the Press? on Sunday that she did not want to ?second guess? security officials, but added that ?everyone, including our security experts, are looking for ways to diminish the impact on the traveling public.?

On another Sunday talk show, CBS?s ?Face the Nation,? Mrs. Clinton said she would not like to go through a security pat-down.

?Not if I could avoid it,? she said. ?No. I mean, who would??

On CNN?s ?State of the Union? on Sunday, Mr. Pistole, a 26-year F.B.I. veteran who took over at the T.S.A. in June, described the scanners and pat-downs as the last line of defense against terrorists who evade no-fly lists and the ?behavior detection officers? looking out for suspicious conduct at airports.

?If they do opt out, we just want to make sure, for example, on Christmas Day,? Mr. Pistole said, in a clear reference to the underwear bomber, that ?they receive a thorough pat-down so they don?t pose a risk to that plane.?

In a sense, the strategy trumpeted by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in the new issue of Inspire represents a victory for Western counterterrorism. The group acknowledged that Sept. 11-style attacks may be impossible to organize without being detected by the expanded intelligence dragnet.

?Really, it?s a good marketing spin on a pretty desperate strategy,? said James Carafano, a security specialist at the Heritage Foundation.

But the magazine showed that Qaeda planners have an increasing awareness that smaller-scale attacks, including those focused on air cargo, can cause enormous economic damage and public anxiety.

?It has a particular impact, coming as it does at a time when we?re arguing about how to prevent the kind of attack the same group tried at Christmas,? said Bruce Hoffman, an expert on terrorism at Georgetown University.

Both Mr. Carafano and Mr. Hoffman said they would advise the administration to revise the screening procedures. Mr. Carafano said limiting the body scans and pat-downs to secondary screening, for travelers who raise suspicions, would be more sensible than expanding the costly scanners to all travelers.

Mr. Hoffman said the administration should move away from adding more layers of security for every passenger in response to every new plot and consider an Israeli-style approach to identify passengers who pose a particular risk, based on advance intelligence, questioning travelers and watching their behavior.

?We?ve had nine years of just grafting security measures one on another,? Mr. Hoffman said. ?Maybe it?s time to step back, take a hard look and look for a new approach.?

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Who Cares What Everyone Else Thinks?

Few products today launch without a social media strategy?a way of creating online buzz around whatever's being sold. The widespread belief is that people influence other people to buy products. A new study from MIT researchers, to be published in PloS One, suggests that this influence has its limits.

"We don't know what we mean when we say 'social influence,' " says Coco Krumme, one of the researchers involved with the work. She suggests that it's important to get a more specific idea of what kinds of social cues actually affect others' behavior.

By studying a body of information about music-downloading behavior, Krumme and colleagues Galen Pickard and Manuel Cebrian found that social cues could influence people to listen to samples of songs, but not necessarily to download them. They also suggested that the influence of social factors on a song's popularity diminishes over time, meaning that songs that rise to the top of download lists do that because they're better than ones that don't.

The researchers worked with a body of data from the MusicLab, a study several years ago that examined how social cues influenced the popularity of songs. In the MusicLab study, about 14,000 people were presented with 48 songs. They could sample the tracks, and if they liked the music, they could take the additional step of downloading them. The original researchers divided the people into groups and experimented with different ways of giving people information about what others were doing with the same songs.

Which songs became most popular varied a great deal, depending on the social interactions around them, explains Matthew Salganik, an assistant professor in the department of sociology at Princeton University, who was involved with the original study. Salganik says that luck played an enormous role in the success of songs. Those that became popular right away had a huge advantage over the others, and the social factors in the study tended to make the rich (the most popular tracks) get richer.

Salganik believes that people look to others for cues because of the overload of choices available. "You could listen to music nonstop for the rest of your life without getting through it all," he says. "The simplest shortcut is to listen to what other people are listening to."

But the MIT group took another look at the MusicLab's data and tried to explain more specifically how people were influenced. They found that social cues did increase the probability that someone would give a song a chance. However, the main factor in whether someone downloaded a song was whether the person had listened to it. A social recommendation didn't increase the chance that a person would give the song deeper attention. In other words, a social recommendation could make you try something. But once you try it, you aren't any more likely to buy it than if you had originally tried it on your own, without a recommendation.

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Chinese Government ?harmonises? tech. firms? feud. [TNW Asia]

In an uncharacteristically popular move, the Chinese Government has intervened in the bitter feud between Tencent, makers of the popular QQ instant messaging platform and Qihoo 360 a free anti-virus provider.

The dispute between the two companies over alleged privacy infringements and blocking of each other?s products has been running for over a month and has been widely reported in the mainstream and tech. press world wide.  According to Tencent, quoted on 10th November, it was affecting at least five million instant messaging users.

Matters came to a head on Sunday when the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology ordered both firms to end their dispute and publicly apologise to their users.  Both companies subsequently issued letters of apology on Sunday evening.

?We extend our sincere apologies to all our affected users! To the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other government departments, we humbly accept your reprimand and will earnestly implement the relevant requirements in accordance with the follow-up. In this process, through all our comments and criticisms, we will carefully listen and learn?. ? extract from Tencent QQ apology (machine translation).

The Chinese authorities are normally associated with more negative harmonisations, for once, they seem to have stepped in with actions that will be welcomed by the majority of Chinese netizens.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/asia/2010/11/22/chinese-government-harmonises-tech-firms-feud/

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Facebook CEO: I've made every mistake you could think of

Facebook had a big announcement this week regarding a new messaging platform but separate to that, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke for over an hour at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. In the in-depth interview with Tim O'Reilly and Federated Media's John Battelle, Zuckerberg was surprisingly laid back (compared to his other previous interviews) and it quickly became clear that he, while eloquently avoiding some questions, was being as open as possible. In fact, he was particularly honest with one particular enquiry.

"I think I've just made so many mistakes in running the company so far," Zuckerberg said. "Basically, any mistake you think you can make I've probably made or will make in the next few years. If anything, the Facebook story is a great story example of how if you are building a product that people love, you can make a lot of mistakes. I just think the lesson to other folks from that is focus on building something that people really like and that's really valuable." He says that at minute 41, during the Q&A session, but we think the whole interview is worth watching:

In the interview, Zuckerberg touched on many different areas, including what it's like to run the third-highest valued Internet company in the US, revealing how more than 50 percent of Facebook's users are active on the site at least once a day, increasing competition with Google, ongoing privacy issues, and his approach to partnering with other companies. He also explained how he motivates the various teams within Facebook, including how taking big risks and failing is encouraged.

Zuckerberg underlined how the gaming industry has changed thanks to Facebook, and social networking in general. He declared that over the next five years, most industries will be rethought to be more social, and will be thus largely disrupted.

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Chinese Government ?harmonises? tech. firms? feud. [TNW Asia]

In an uncharacteristically popular move, the Chinese Government has intervened in the bitter feud between Tencent, makers of the popular QQ instant messaging platform and Qihoo 360 a free anti-virus provider.

The dispute between the two companies over alleged privacy infringements and blocking of each other?s products has been running for over a month and has been widely reported in the mainstream and tech. press world wide.  According to Tencent, quoted on 10th November, it was affecting at least five million instant messaging users.

Matters came to a head on Sunday when the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology ordered both firms to end their dispute and publicly apologise to their users.  Both companies subsequently issued letters of apology on Sunday evening.

?We extend our sincere apologies to all our affected users! To the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and other government departments, we humbly accept your reprimand and will earnestly implement the relevant requirements in accordance with the follow-up. In this process, through all our comments and criticisms, we will carefully listen and learn?. ? extract from Tencent QQ apology (machine translation).

The Chinese authorities are normally associated with more negative harmonisations, for once, they seem to have stepped in with actions that will be welcomed by the majority of Chinese netizens.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/asia/2010/11/22/chinese-government-harmonises-tech-firms-feud/

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Weekend tech reading: World's first touchscreen made of ice

World's first ice touchscreen virtually burns It brings a whole new meaning to freeze frame. A team at Nokia in Finland has created one of the unlikeliest computer displays yet - the world's first ice touchscreen. It is not a practical device, of course, but the screen is being seen as a step towards an era in which the surfaces around us gain computing capabilities... NewScientist

Priority access deals could result in "slow suicide" for ISPs As Ars readers know, of late there's been a huge amount of debate about the impact that priority access deals would have on the 'Net. ISPs say they've got to have this option to finance their networks. They've gone so far as to insist that they have the First Amendment right to charge content providers more for better (or not inferior) access to their subscribers. Ars Technica

The "router" in your heada bottleneck of processing Pop quiz: What is 357 times 289? No pencils allowed. No calculators. Just use your brain. Got an answer yet? Got it now? How about now? Chances are you still don't. As you solved the problem one step at a time, you lost track of the numbers. Maybe you tried to start over, lost track again, and eventually gave up in frustration... Discover

Frontier: Replace that too fast fiber connection with DSL! It's been somewhat entertaining watching Frontier Communications lately, given they've been working overtime to downplay the fact that the vast majority of the company's customers still reside on frequently expensive, last-generation 1.5-3 Mbps DSL and dying POTs. DSLReports

Wiseguy scalpers bought tickets with CAPTCHA-busting botnet Three California men have pleaded guilty charges they built a network of CAPTCHA-solving computers that flooded online ticket vendors and snatched up the very best seats for Bruce Springsteen concerts, Broadway productions and even TV tapings of Dancing with the Stars. NetworkWorld

Apple Developing CDMA-GSM 'World iPad'? Here's an interesting bit of speculation from Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair, whose recent Qualcomm channel checks may reveal something about Apple's next-generation iPad. According to Blair, Apple is developing a "World iPad" based on one of Qualcomm's multimode CDMA-GSM chips. AllThingsD

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Thinking Outside the In-box

Search the Internet, and you'll find hundreds of applications designed to help you collaborate with other people more effectively. But examine your own habits, and you'll most likely find that you use just one piece of software for that purpose: an e-mail client.

You're not alone. A recent Forrester Research study found that 83 percent of business users typically send e-mail attachments to colleagues rather than using collaboration software. According to a recent survey by technology consulting company People-OnTheGo, the average information worker spends 3.3 hours a day dealing with e-mail, and 65 percent of such workers have their e-mail client open all the time.

Even Facebook, which once seemed like a likely replacement for e-mail, at least for the young and plugged-in, has acknowledged that e-mail isn't going anywhere. On Monday, the company announced a new messaging service that integrates external e-mail with its own internal messaging system?an admission of the staying power of e-mail, and an attempt to enhance its functionality.

Other software makers seem to have accepted that they'll never pull people's attention away from their e-mail in-boxes. Instead, they're looking to add new collaborative and social capabilities to e-mail.

"It's clear that e-mail is being used and even abused," says Yaacov Cohen, CEO of Mainsoft, a company based in Tel Aviv, Israel, that sells a plug-in called Harmon.ie. The plug-in links an e-mail application to a collaboration platform such as Google Docs, and to a person's social networking profiles, calendar applications, voice over Internet protocol software, and so on. To share a document using Harmon.ie, a user drags it from a sidebar to the body of a message, where it becomes a link. When the recipient clicks on the link, she is taken to the document stored in the chosen collaboration software. Using e-mail alone for collaboration creates confusion and overloads in-boxes, Cohen says.

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Silicon's Long Good-bye

Sometime in the coming decades, chipmakers will no longer be able to make silicon chips faster by packing smaller transistors onto a chip. That's because silicon transistors will simply be too leaky and expensive to make any smaller.

People working on materials that could succeed silicon have to overcome many challenges. Now researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a way past one such hurdle: they've developed a reliable way to make fast, low-power, nanoscopic transistors out of a compound semiconductor material. Their method is simpler, and promises to be less expensive, than existing ones.

Compound semiconductors have better electrical properties than silicon, which means that transistors made from them require less power to operate at faster speeds. These materials are already in some expensive niche applications such as military telecommunications equipment, which gives them a leg up over more exotic potential silicon replacements like graphene and carbon nanotubes.

But wafers of compound semiconductor materials are also very fragile and expensive, "which is only okay where cost doesn't matter," says Ali Javey, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Compound semiconductors are on the market in expensive communications chips for the military, for example.

Researchers believe they can overcome this fragility and expense by growing compound-semiconductor transistors on top of a supportive silicon wafer?a trick that should be compatible with existing manufacturing infrastructure.

However, compound semiconductors cannot be grown on silicon?there's a mismatch between the crystalline structures of the two materials that makes this difficult to do well. The Berkeley group has now shown that transistors made from compound semiconductors can be grown on another surface and then transferred to a silicon wafer. "That's a plausible path for dealing with the fact that compound semiconductors are difficult to grow," says Jesús del Alamo, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT who was not involved with Javey's work.

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Happy Birthday: Windows turns 25 today

Today, on November 20, 2010, Microsoft Windows turns 25 years old. On November, 20 1985, Microsoft released Windows 1.0, a 16-bit graphic user environment that was considered to be state-of-the-art at the time. In the two and a half decades that followed, Microsoft became one of the wealthiest companies in the world as Windows turned into the de facto operating system installed on over 90 percent of computers worldwide.

Windows 1.0 fit on just two double-sided floppy disks and needed 256K of RAM (512K if you wanted to run more than one program at a time). It wasn't until Windows 3.0 that the operating system really started to take off, but this is where it all began:

Here's a timeline for the releases of Microsoft Windows operating systems:

  • Windows 1.0: November 20, 1985
  • Windows 2.0: December 9, 1987
  • Windows 2.10: May 27, 1988
  • Windows 2.11: March 13, 1989
  • Windows 3.0: May 22, 1990
  • Windows 3.1: April 6, 1992
  • Windows for Workgroups 3.1: October 27, 1992
  • Windows NT 3.1: July 27, 1993
  • Windows for Workgroups 3.11: November 8, 1993
  • Windows NT 3.5: September 21, 1994
  • Windows NT 3.51: May 30, 1995
  • Windows 95: August 24, 1995
  • Windows NT 4.0: August 24, 1996
  • Windows 98: June 25, 1998
  • Windows 98 SE: May 5, 1999
  • Windows 2000: February 17, 2000
  • Windows Me: September 14, 2000
  • Windows 2000 Advanced/Datacenter Server Limited Edition: August 29, 2001
  • Windows XP: October 25, 2001
  • Windows XP Media Center Edition: October 31, 2002
  • Windows Server 2003: April 24, 2003
  • Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004: September 30, 2003
  • Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005: October 12, 2004
  • Windows XP Professional x64 Edition: April 25, 2005
  • Windows Fundamentals (for Legacy PCs): July 8, 2006
  • Windows Vista (for Business use): November 30, 2006
  • Windows Vista (for Home use): January 30, 2007
  • Windows Home Server: November 7, 2007
  • Windows Server 2008: February 27, 2008
  • Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2: October 22, 2009

The software giant has managed to sell 240 million copies of the latest version of its client operating system, Windows 7. The company is just starting to push its new mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7, but the sales are nowhere near the same level.

Let us end by saying a "Happy Birthday!" to Microsoft. May the next 25 years of computing be just as exciting as the world goes mobile.

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As Officials Face Charges, a City Tries to Move On

But just to the right of those portraits is a gaping space where one council member?s image used to be. He was arrested in September, along with nearly all of the city?s top officials, charged with using the city?s coffers as their own, giving themselves top salaries and illicit low-interest loans.

Many of those officials have stepped down, including Robert Rizzo, the former chief administrator who was paid nearly $800,000, along with generous benefits, to run this small working-class suburb southeast of Los Angeles. So did Councilman Luis Artiga, who was paid roughly $100,000 for the part-time position. Last month, Mr. Artiga said that while he had served ?with pride and honor,? he thought it was in the ?best interest? of the city for him to resign.

Other city officials who were charged with malfeasance apparently disagree. Mayor Oscar Hernandez and two other council members who were arrested maintain their innocence and are still in office, although they face a recall election in March.

Now, in many ways, Bell is in limbo. How can it regain the trust of residents after investigations showed that officials bilked more than $5.5 million? And just who should try to earn that trust?

?We all know all this money has been mismanaged,? said Nora Saenz, 32, who, like many, had never paid much attention to politics until the scandal erupted this summer after The Los Angeles Times published the salaries of Mr. Rizzo and other officials, the first of many reports detailing their exploits. ?What can we do to stop this, that?s what we want to know. Our money is still being abused, and who can do anything about it??

For the most part, life goes on as it always has. The streets are still littered, but no more than usual; the police still respond to petty crimes and quickly arrived at the scene of a gang-related shooting this month. But it is difficult to go anywhere without hearing chatter about the latest developments as the cases against the city officials wind their way through the courts.

Recently, residents began receiving refund checks after being overcharged for city taxes for the past several years. At a recent meeting to air concerns about the city, one resident said he ?did a little victory dance? when his check arrived in the mail.

?It?s something, but it?s not enough,? Ms. Saenz said, echoing the sentiment of many. (One city official said privately that without those refunds, ?people would have torched this place.?)

Red-and-white recall signs dot lawns and windows all over the city. The county clerk just began accepting applications for those who want to replace the council members, but so far many potential candidates seem reluctant to embrace the prospect of picking up the pieces of whatever is left of the local government.

?How does this happen ? that?s what everyone asks over and over again,? said Cristina Garcia, a lead organizer of Basta (Spanish for enough), a group that organized petitions to recall the mayor and the City Council. ?I don?t know what you do to put it together again. Good luck with that.?

For now, the day-to-day work is falling to Pedro Carrillo, who had been a consultant in Bell and other cities for several years. After Mr. Rizzo stepped down in July, the City Council appointed Mr. Carrillo as the interim administrative officer.

Mr. Carrillo quickly came under fire as residents questioned how he could be independent if he was appointed by the very council members who were being investigated. Late last week, another audit from the state controller found that Mr. Carrillo?s consulting firm was paid more than $200,000 by the city in the past two years. Now, Mr. Carrillo is under pressure to resign.

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