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Does YouTube experience internal errors? Wait. Does this mean other Google online apps could also crash in spectacular fashion unexpectedly? To err is indeed human.

I’m a big fan of the Wonder wheel and Timeline options. Good stuff!

Did you see “her” face expressions? What about the bipedal motion? I know we’ve had Asimo for a while now. Nonetheless, I still think machines using two legs for walking are uber cool.

We’re almost there, guys. Make no mistake. Robots WILL conquer us all. There’s a positive take away though. If nothing else, robots will now be able to convey the right facial expression while crushing us like insignificant bugs.

Hail the new overlords!

The Obama presidency promises to be a tech- and science-focused one. Since the early days of his campaign, Barack Obama indicated he’d like nothing more than fostering science and engineering in all schools and colleges throughout the United States. With his much celebrated win, Obama has made the outlook of returning the US to its dominant position as the world’s science and technology powerhouse seem more likely. That is, of course, if the new president happens to follow through.

The economy could prove to be Obama’s plans ultimate deterrent. Fortunately, with a little bit more than a month in office, the president and his cabinet have managed to force the approval of a stimulus package that would eventually resuscitate the precarious US economy. The much-promised change, though, won’t happen overnight. Unemployment rates are incredibly high. Start-ups in Silicon Valley, and pretty much everywhere else, are taking a hit as more and more investors take less chances with their money. Most companies have reduced, if not halted altogether, hiring and other expanding efforts. Confidence in the financial markets has plummeted worldwide. The following trite remark encapsulates our current reality: “Things will only get worse before they get better”. This, too, applies to the highly resilient tech industry.

Nevertheless, the long term prospect is thankfully less gloomy. If Obama succeeds in restoring science and engineering in America, it will only be a matter of time before the tech industry is directly benefited from the rich ecosystem that will plausibly arise when qualified students, innovators and investors meet in a revived marketplace. It certainly won’t happen tomorrow. But, if the president’s drive is an indicator, good times await the tech industry in the United States.

“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.” — Václav Havel

The Internet’s original designers never foresaw that the academic and military research network they created would one day bear the burden of carrying all the world’s communications and commerce. There was no one central control point and its designers wanted to make it possible for every network to exchange data with every other network. Little attention was given to security. Since then, there have been immense efforts to bolt on security, to little effect.

“In many respects we are probably worse off than we were 20 years ago,” said Eugene Spafford, the executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University and a pioneering Internet security researcher, “because all of the money has been devoted to patching the current problem rather than investing in the redesign of our infrastructure.”

The answer, however, is not a straightforward “Yes” or “No”. The reality is we desperately need a secure Internet. Nevertheless, a massive overhaul or rewrite of everything the Internet represents would conceivably entail a significant financial investment. Interestingly, Mr Markoff also informs us about a possible solution already in the works:

At Stanford, where the software protocols for original Internet were designed, researchers are creating a system to make it possible to slide a more advanced network quietly underneath today’s Internet. By the end of the summer it will be running on eight campus networks around the country.

The idea is to build a new Internet with improved security and the capabilities to support a new generation of not-yet-invented Internet applications, as well as to do some things the current Internet does poorly — such as supporting mobile users.

The Stanford Clean Slate project won’t by itself solve all the main security issues of the Internet, but it will equip software and hardware designers with a toolkit to make security features a more integral part of the network and ultimately give law enforcement officials more effective ways of tracking criminals through cyberspace. That alone may provide a deterrent.

Standford’s Clean Slate project seems to be a good fit. Their à-la-OSI approach could precisely be what the doctor prescribed. The program’s goals are markedly ambitious:

We believe that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure. Further, we believe the Internet’s shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and ‘backward-compatible’ style of academic and industrial networking research. The proposed program will focus on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network’s ossification. To this end, the research program can be characterized by two research questions: “With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?”, and “How should the Internet look in 15 years?”

Evidently, an expeditious, economic solution is required. I just hope we get it sooner rather than later. Or, just as our little fellow below, we’ll all have to take matters into our own hands.

Got online protection?

Source: Mikael Albrecht

With such an innovative formula, who needs encryption anymore?