Tired of your old search engine and looking for something different?  It may not be Wolfram Alpha...

Released earlier this week, www.wolframalpha.com takes firm aim at being a new kind of search engine - although perhaps not a 'google-killer'.

The product is the latest offering from Wolfram Research, the company founded and named after the math and computing genius, Stephen Wolfram - best known for the software 'Mathematica'. 

Wolfram Alpha isn't a search engine as such.  Self described as a 'computational knowledge engine', it doesn't respond to a user's search text by displaying a list of relevant web page.  Rather, Wolfram Alpha relies upon it's own database of facts and figures - quantitative data which is 'computable.'

So, how does it all work out?

Typing the words "Apple, IBM" into Wolfram Alpha is interpreted by the software as a request for information on the two companies - resulting in a comparison between both organisations - just the facts. The same text input to Google returns a page of web links - at the time of publication of this new article the top result was a page on Apple Inc.'s website regarding their partnership with IBM.

Wolfram Alpha aspires to 'collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.'  So, Alpha sounds brilliant if you're working with stats, equations, formulas and other types of raw data - but if you need to order a pizza, or find an opinion on the latest film showing at your local cinema then Google looks still firmly rooted as being the search engine of choice.

Social networking and micro-blogging: not just for giggles and gossip anymore...

Student anger in Moldova boiled over this week following a national election in which victory was declared by the currently ruling Communist Party led by President Vladimir Voronin.

Amidst widespread allegations of vote-fixing, the social networking and micro-blogging service Twitter (alongside Facebook and SMS text messaging) was used to organise protests of an estimated 15,000 students in Chisinau, the capital earlier this week.  Students trashed the Moldovan parliament and other government buildings prior to police moving in to restore order.

Critics assert that Twitter is simply publishing by the self-obsessed

While some not insignificant portion of Twitter content content is undoubtedly trivial and banal it cannot be denied that the social network has the potential to have a powerful political effect - as events in Moldova have demonstrated.

In the past social networking has been used to break news and inform users during the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Barack Obama's US presidential campaign, and implemented by the Los Angeles Fire Department as a source of public information during the 2007 California wildfires.

For the chic-geek - or those paranoid about identity theft....

It looks great.  Feels silky.  Resists stains and moisture.

But best of all - especially if you feel vulnerable to identity theft - it protects your RFID enabled cards from being hacked by nearby techno-criminals.

Many credit cards, ID cards, and some passports, contain a form of Radio Frequency Identification chip, which can be read at distances ranging up to around a metre according to manufacturers.  Hackers, however, claim they have pulled data from chips at distances of 5 metres or more.

Designed and marketed by New York brothers Paul and Theo Stewart-Stand, the wallet is made from finely spun and woven stainless steel threads.  This sheath of conductive metal essentially insulates whatever is contained within from electrical charges - in this case our precious credit and ID cards. 

An electric charge (or radio wave) encountering a 'box' around an object will only affect the surface of the box, the contents remain electrically unchanged.  This concept is called a 'Faraday Cage' and is named after Michael Faraday who first observed the effect in 1836.

Attacks on Tibetan computers seem to be coming from China...

Two recent reports link China to recent malicious activity on computers operated by news media, embassies and other government organisations - as well as within the offices of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader in exile.

According to the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC), the IP addresses from which the attacks originated are not only within China - but as well, are located within a region in which police and intelligence units are based who are directly involved in suppressing Tibetan independence movements.

One of the reports was produced at the UK University of Cambridge Computer Lab and was entitled 'The snooping dragon: social-malware surveillance of the Tibetan movement.'  The authors, Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson claim that the California based mail-server of the Offices of His Holiness the Dalai Lama (OHHDL) were compromised by replacing .doc and .pdf attachments within genuine emails with versions of themselves that installed rootkits on the machines of monks who opened the docs.  

The second report was produced as a co-operative effort between two Canadian organisations, the SecDev Group an Ottawa based secuirty consultancy and the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies.  Entitled, 'Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network', the report reveals an extensive network 'of over 1,295 infected hosts in 103 countries.'

iPhone software 3.0 gets 'cut, copy and paste'... (finally!)...

Apple Corportion announced earlier today that the new version (3.0) of the iPhone operating system - available to consumers this summer - will finally have 'cut, copy and paste'.

Many users who purchased the Apple iPhone were shocked to find that the device didn't have a 'cut copy and paste' feature - preventing users from doing things like copying bits of text from emails for example - and pasting them into another document or application window.  Windows Mobile has always had this capability.

Apple maintained that the function was not built into the iPhone due to an in-house technical prohibition preventing more than one application from running at the same time: the reason being to not have many apps running in memory and slowing down or disturbing the user experience.  Many critics pointed out that apps were clearly running simultaneous with others such as iPhone Mail, which notified users of new messages as they came in.

In addition to 'cut, copy and paste' Apple claims that iPhone OS 3.0 will have around a hundred new features.  However, we can't help but notice that support for the Adobe Flash player is not one of them....

Potentially a big help in the fight against malaria...

It may sound quite a bit like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut; but the latest idea to employ lasers to toast mosquitoes may have some merit.

The sound frequency of the mosquitoes beating wings is detected and then a laser blasts the bug to a cinder. 

Some heavy-hitters have been conscripted to work on the concept, including Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist who worked on the hydrogen bomb project in the 1950's.  In the 1980's Wood was the chief architect of Ronald Reagan's ballistic missile defense project - dubbed 'Star Wars.'

As well, Dr. Jordin Kare, a scientist who had previously worked at the (in)famous Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - a US gov weapons research facility -has been involved in the building of the prototype mosquito-laser, from parts bought on eBay.  Kare claims that the computer controlled targeting of mosquitoes will be able to '...toast millions of mosquitoes in a few minutes.'

The mosquito-zapper, if proven effective, will be welcomed by those living in regions of the planet where mosquito borne malaria and other diseases are massive public health problems.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, there are between 350-500 million cases of malaria each year, resulting in over one million deaths.

The research has been comissioned by Intellectual Ventures, a US based company founded by Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft executive.

The book is dead! (Well, maybe not...)

About a year ago, the folks at Amazon, the mega-huge online retailer, launched the first version of Kindle, an e-book reader. Pundits and hacks sniffed curiously at the device but most didn't rush to declare the death of books printed on pulped trees.

Today, Amazon announced that they were taking pre-orders for the Kindle 2, due to ship on February 24th - and while journos who sling copy for gadget zines have responded by firing off a quick opinion, the prevailing opinion is that inky paper remains quite alive and well.

The new device is substantially slimmer than it's first incarnation - 0.9 cm as opposed to 1.8 cm. It's claimed to have 25% more battery life - and some of the hardware user interface elements have been refined to be more user-friendly and eliminate the accidental 'page turning' which many complained marred the Kindle 1.

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Starts off cute - and quickly evolves to irritating

There are some good things to say - but not many.  It appears that Spore Creatures for the Nintendo DS is simply a segment lifted out of the full PC desktop Spore game experience.    Undoubtedly the DS offering has been crippled by the machine's small screen size and poor graphics capabilities. 

While the game does have some charm in a low-fi sort of way, the initial cuteness of the characters and situations doesn't last.  Despite the game claiming that players can create and evolve creatures, this ability is rather thin and linear.  Actual game play is structured in an explore levels / kill bosses to advance model.  Sadly, Spore Creatures offers very little which is new and certainly nothing innovative. 

Save your cash - buy Spore for your desktop.

W32.Gammima.AG worm makes it to orbit

Gammima.AG was found on laptops brought by astronauts to the International Space Station.

NASA says that it's not the first virus to be found on it's flown equipment.

In this case, W32.Gammima.AG wasn't harmful to any control systems aboard the International Space Station.  However, it shows that computer security could be tighter as in principle a much more harmful virus could make it's way onto the station.

According to information provided by computer security specialists Symantec, W32.Gammima.AG is spread by copying itself to removable media.  It then makes its way to the new system and lurks there, searching for passwords to a number of online games and sending these back to a central server.

Links:

US Computer Emergency Readiness Team

Do you have an alibi for last weekend?  Don't say that you stayed in and yacked on the phone....

The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) might be looking for you if you made some very specific calls last weekend... Using their phones....  To the Middle East...

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No.  It's not a book which shows people how to hack.  Rather, Jon Erickson has written a tome for security professionals to help them to understand how we might avoid getting hacked.

Includes sections on programming, networking and cryptography.

The game to begin and end all games?

It's been talked about and hyped-up for years  and serious game-heads have held their breath, turned blue, fallen over and died while waiting.   It was announced today that Spore will be available on September 4th 2008.