MOTODEV Studio for Android

Motorola has available for free their MOTODEV Studio for Android Runs on XP and on Mac OS X 10.5. This is a very proffesional looking Java Programming studio. and it is free. The IBM Developement package Eclipse is the heart of MOTODEV. MOTODEV provides extentions and a database of Motorola phones to test and develop on.

posted by Ray L. @ 3:27 AM 0 Comments Links to this post.

NSA to participate in U.S. cybersecurity

The Obama administration has given the National Security Agency powers to screen private Internet traffic going to and from government sites, and will use AT&T telecommunications as a likely test site. The Obama administration remains firm in this decision, which was put forth during the Bush administration.

The agency defends military networks with a classified system named Tutelag, which decides how to handle malware intrusions (for example, whether to block them or to investigate more closely). "We absolutely intend to use the technical resources, the substantial ones, that NSA has," said Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS's intrusion detection program, Einstein version 3, is in development as version 2 is being deployed. The program defends all U.S. government agencies and departments.

DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said, "We are moving forward in a way that protects privacy and civil liberties."

AT&T, the chosen test site under Bush, sought assurance from the Obama administration to determine what elements of Einstein 3 to preserve. AT&T officials declined to comment.

In 2006 the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed the class action lawsuit Hepting v. AT&T—currently awaiting decision—against AT&T, which under the Bush administration permitted the NSA to look at domestic communications without a warrant. NSA's intelligence gathering is limited only to foreign communications.

"We came away saying they have a lot of work in front of them to get this done right," Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) said. "We're looking forward to their next steps."

Schwartz authored a letter on Einstein to the Office of Management and Budget in December 2008 on behalf of the Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board.

NSA director Keith B. Alexander said in April 2009 that the NSA will help, but does not want to take charge. Several people—including Rod Beckstrom, who resigned over the issue as head of the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC); Bruce Schneier of BT Counterpane; Leslie Harris, president and CEO of CDT—and not Dennis Blair, Director of National Intelligence—have urged the Obama administration to keep the Department of Homeland Security in charge despite its low scores, because, they claim, the NSA is a spy agency.

posted by RGonzales @ 9:34 AM 1 Comments Links to this post.

Google Operating System

Google announced today that they are developing Google Chrome OS. The operating system, announced on their official blog, will be based on their Chrome browser, which is now nine months old.

Google said that at first it will be targeted toward netbooks, but in the future, will eventualy expand. The company said that it will continue to be developed alongside Android, their operating system currently being used on mobile devices.

The system will run in a windowing system atop a Linux kernel and will be fully open source. It is planned to be released in 2010. On their blog, Google said, "Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds," said the blog post written by Sundar Pichai, Vice President Product Management, and Google's engineering director, Linus Upson.

Both men said that "the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web" and that the new OS is "our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be".

posted by RGonzales @ 8:14 AM 1 Comments Links to this post.

Developing Wave

Google announced its newest product at the Google I/O conference in California this week, Google Wave. Wave is a new collaberative media concept and program. It is intended to be an all encompasing email, chat and social networking scheme. What strikes me as interesting is the process of creating this new product and how the Google corporate atmosphere effects how the product is developed. The idea for wave was originated not by corporate nor was it even customer driven. Rather it is the brainchild of two brothers who asked the question. "What would email look like it it were developed today?"

"Back in early 2004, Google took an interest in a tiny mapping startup called Where 2 Tech, founded by my brother Jens and me. We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps. As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point; I was immediately sold," explains Lars Rasmussen.

So it seems that Lars and Jen Rasmussen came up with the idea, and sold it to their bosses at Google. These guys do have a track record, these are the guys that developed Google Maps. It seems to me a remarkable show of faith that American based Google would let this remote team in Australia run with this. Then again this is Google and they do things differently

When Lars Rasmussen first floated the idea, Google co-founder Sergey Brin wasn't impressed. "He came to me and he said 'This may sound kinda crazy, but we're going to reinvent communication and we just need a bunch of engineers to go of to Australia for a while and we'll get back to you after a couple of years,'" Brin remembers. "It was not a very compelling proposal."

But Brin greenlighted the project anyway. After Google acquired their Where 2 Tech startup in 2004, Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens had spearheaded the Google Maps project, and in an extreme case of Google's much-lauded commitment to creative freedom, Brin gave the pair just what they asked for.

"Lars and Jens had previously redefined what mapping was like - they already had a success under their belt - and communications was one of those trigger topics," Brin told reporters yesterday afternoon at Google's I/O developer conference in downtown San Francisco. "We decided to give them the benefit of the doubt. It was also an interesting experiment. It was one of the most autonomous development groups we've had at Google."

The way Brin tells it, the decision allowed the Chocolate Factory to "innovate how we run things." But by all accounts, this amounted to letting the Rasmussens do whatever they wanted. The result - after two years of development - is Google Wave, the new-age communication and collaboration tool the company unveiled on Thursday to a standing ovation from hundreds of gathered developers.

Not only did they get a green light to go with a project that wasn't a "corporate" idea. No one seems to have given much thought to a marketing plan. The thought sems to be if the product is good enough someone will figure out a way for it to pay the bills.

As Vic Gundotra, Google's VP of engineering put it, "One of the luxuries about working at Google is that we get to focus on building the technology and making users happy, and once we've achieved a certain amount of success in terms of user happiness, only then do we start working about how to make money from it."

With engineering projects such as Wave, Gundotra later added, "We don't think about what competitors are doing... We believe that you build for the user and the rest will follow. Part of the excitement is rethinking the problem and coming up with a fresh approach."

When one reporter questioned whether he was telling the whole truth, Gundotra quickly repeated himself. And judging from Google's track record, we're inclined to believe him. At least for the moment, the company's top-secret search money machine is pulling in more than enough dough to fund such idealism.

No one can doubt that Google can make money, even in the days of a reccession. While the idiea of turning the designers and engineers loose, Worry about marketing and sales plan later. And turn the code and APIs to the open source world, seems contridictory, There can be no doubt that Google will make it work.

posted by Ray L. @ 7:12 AM 0 Comments Links to this post.

Robot Biologist

Adam is a robot developed by Welsh Aberystwyth University researchers which combines artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and automation to independently conduct and analyse biological laboratory research.

"What's new and exciting about Adam is [it is] the first time we've managed to show that a computer can not only think up new scientific ideas, but experimentally test them and decide whether they're true," said Ross King, a computer science professor and lead researcher at Aberystwyth University, "Adam makes up its own mind what to do. It decides what experiments to do, what to test." He says that for other lab experiments the hardware is already in place, the only step needed is to change the software.

The artificial intelligence alone spans three computers which holds the databases and analytical software to enable Adam to think. For the yeast experiment, Adam was loaded with databases which hold known information relating to yeasts and organisms. Adam compared all fields in the database to find the areas of missing information from which he devised 20 hypotheses.

Adam's AI is connected to robotic arms, sensors, incubators and cameras which enable Adam to start over 1,000 individual experiments every day and follow their progress over a week.

A part of the process is that Adam's AI can cycle and analyze the results of the experiments as well doing routine repetitious lab work. Following Adam's testing, King's team manually tested three of Adam's hypotheses and found that the robot's conclusions were correct, and each was a breakthrough to the scientific community.

Adam has spawned discussion amongst researchers. William Melek, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Ontario's University of Waterloo, has noted that to set up the AI needed for subsequent experiments involving new biological variables and criteria, the human expertise would be time consuming to customize it. The usefulness would be limited therefore to the allotment of human input needed to set up Adam.

David Waltz of Columbia University and Bruce Buchanan of the University of Pittsburgh say that "For the foreseeable future, the prospect of using automated systems as assistants holds vast promise as these assistants are becoming not only faster but much broader in their capabilities -- more knowledgeable, more creative, and more self-reflective," They note the potential of such lab assistants which may more efficiently process the research data.

It was reported that Adam cost about $1million in production costs and this was weighed against the costs of hiring lab techs. King said, We made many mistakes and learned from Adam. Eve is a much cleaner design."

Eve is the second AI computer under development by Professor King's research team. Eve's artificial intelligence will be enhanced to analyze compounds needed for medicinal drugs which may treat killer diseases such as malaria.

posted by RGonzales @ 2:30 PM 0 Comments Links to this post.

Mindreading Robots

At its headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, Honda Motor Company demonstrated on Tuesday technology which links a person's thoughts with robots.

The operator wears a helmet which scans for electric currents stimulated by brain activity, but also uses infrared sensors to detect changes in blood flows in the head. The information is sent to a computer, which can then execute robotic movements such as opening the trunk of the vehicle or turning on the car's air conditioning. The commands usually take just seconds to reach the robot.

Honda also released a video where a humanoid robot named Asimo was operated by a person wearing the helmet. The employee was stated to be thinking about raising his right hand, after which Asimo moved its right arm.

Honda states that it could be quite some time before the technology is ready to go live due to difficulties such as the human brain's liability to become distracted, creating mixed thought patterns. A related problem is the amount of focus required by the operator.

"Practical uses are still way into the future." said Honda Research Institute Japan Co executive, Yasuhisa Arai. "I'm [just] talking about dreams today."

posted by RGonzales @ 7:54 AM 0 Comments Links to this post.

North Korea At It Again

In what has been interpreted as a thinly veiled threat, the North Korean government in Pyongyang has issued a statement saying that it could not guarantee the safety of airliners transiting its airspace.

The warning has led to Korean Air, Asiana Airlines and international carriers Air Canada and Singapore Airlines to reroute services that normally pass through North Korean airspace.

The statement has been widely condemned, with South Korean spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon saying "Threatening civilian airliners' normal operations under international aviation regulations is not only against the international rules but is an act against humanity..."

The latest interchange of words comes on the eve of two events. The first a launch of a North Korean satellite seen by the United States, Japan and South Korea as a test launch of North Korea's Taepodong-2 ballistic missile.

This satellite launch coincides with an annual joint United States, South Korean military exercise, which the North has condemned in the past as a dress rehearsal for an invasion. An expansion of this year's exercises in length and scale is being seen by Pyongyang as cover for preparations to shoot down its launch vehicle.

Pyongyang has threatened both Japan and the United States, the two nations in the region capable of shooting down its satellite with "...merciless retaliatory blows" and has placed its 1.2 million strong army on alert.

posted by RGonzales @ 1:39 PM 0 Comments Links to this post.