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Because here’s another extremely interesting article on the use of an acoustic superlens to do kind of the same thing, only for ships and subs.  Only this will be able to do the opposite as well – pinpointing ones that are trying to hide.  Here’s a great explanation of what an acoustic superlens can do, found in the article:

“Acoustic lenses can be made to focus sound much as the lens in a microscope focuses light. But physicists’ ability to work with both types of waves is limited by scattering effects called diffraction. Using conventional lenses, it’s not possible to focus light waves or sound waves to a spot size smaller than half the wavelength of the light. To get around these limitations, a lens must refract, or literally bend light backward. No naturally occurring materials have a negative index of refraction, but some materials carefully designed in the lab, called metamaterials, do. The same tools used to make materials that can focus light or sound waves beyond the diffraction limit, enabling high-resolution imaging, can also be used to make materials that accomplish the opposite, cloaking an object by directing light or sound around it.”

Here’s what the resonant plate looks like:

Fascinating, isn’t it!

Here’s an extremely innovative approach to cloaking… This time they’re using tapered optical waveguides to get the job done, a technology that’s been around for a while but used in other light transmission technologies.  Not only will this be cheaper to produce because it’s using existing tech, but it’ll cover the entire visible spectrum and can cover much larger objects than before.

This is a theoretical mock-up of the optical waveguide that Purdue is developing

It’s an intellectual property lawyer’s worst musical nightmare…  I kind of like it for a lot of different reasons, and not the least of which is the technical ability it takes to edit something like this.

If anyone were to ask me what I like about Bruce Scheiner’s writing, my answer over the past few years would surely have been a consistent one.  It’s not the fact that that he’s forgotten more about security than me, you, or anyone you know, has learned in the first place.  It’s that when he writes about a topic, he illuminates the subject matter.  He has a brilliant security mind on top of being an excellent writer.

Here’s an excellent post by Mr Scheiner from March ’08.

Bruce really needs to run the Department of Homeland Security.

One of my favorite topics has always been the history of cryptography – I don’t know why it fascinates me so. Cryptonomicon is my favorite novel for this very reason. So you can imagine how happy I was to read that the NSA has finally declassified the history of the TEMPEST project. Here’s a link to the story in the Threat Level column over at Wired. As if reading about the fact that we discovered readable electromag emissions from digital hardware a full ten years prior to when everyone thought we really did isn’t enough – it ends by dropping a hint about SEISMIC… which apparently is a project that allows signal interception thorugh seismic sensors. [GRIN]

For some background, see the previous rant I posted about biometric security. Taking that into account, there’s this story that just posted over on Dark Reading.

If there’s one thing that should worry you in that story, it’s this line:

“many biometric systems don’t encrypt biometric data during the authentication process”

Simply amazing/scary that this is gaining traction in the market and more people aren’t questioning it.

This little post almost got me going as much as building the submersible camera bot did last summer. Wondering what the heck it is? Basically:

1) The bot navigates around, collects some data, and avoids obstacles, until it
2) Finds something “worth playing on” (a single isolated object or a wide flat surface that it can find an angle onto)
3) Snakes into place
4) Plays some beats on what it have found, and samples this, checking it has a “good sound”
5) Based on data collected in the area, and sample just made, then compose a little rhythm, and plays this along with the sample

Now, if you don’t think that’s cool – even just a little bit – then there’s absolutely nothing I can do for you. Walk away from the computer now.

My only gripe is that the video clips on the above link only are playable if you use IE to view the URL. GRRR… Another wonderful Internet experience marred by IE bias. Still not nearly enough for me to ever consider switching from Opera!

How about a nuclear reactor that is totally safe, fits in your garage or basement, costs half of what grid power will set you back, and lasts for 40 years?

Meet the Toshiba Micro Reactor.

It’s a shame that this is needed, but here’s an extremely interesting little app – it that analyzes the EULA that most of us just click through when installing something:

I find it mildly ironic that it’s coded in java, which only until early this year was subject to it’s own EULA issues that resulted from it not being fully licensed under the GPL. Well, for that matter it’s still not 100% open source afaik.

This was so funny I LOL’d my pants.

Hit the “Dialectize!” button and enjoy the dawgoned science!

Just when you’re sitting back looking at all of your fine quantum computing work, feeling pretty smug about the progress of humanity’s understanding of our surroundings… along comes this and all of a sudden you realize there’s just an immense amount of things we have no clue about.

Anyone care to take a shot at explaining how the interaction of water and a DC electric field can create a water bridge?

Yeah, that’s what I thought. We don’t know squat.

Until I saw this clip, I never really considered the art of image manipulation all that big of a deal.

My first thought when I saw IRT was this – if the expanding function increased the pixels by inserting an average of the two on either side, what would the image look like after doing an accordion type movement where you successively reduce and enlarge multiple times? If it preserves the image – or could be made to – then I see a huge application for this in cryptology. If the removal algorithm can be subjected to some kind of key exchange, then you’d effectively be able to completely remove sections of an image – or certainly some text – just by typing in a password and then sizing it out of the media.

If you have some basic Photoshop skills, you’ll really appreciate continuous resizing where “images are resized in a non-uniform manner”. Seeing continuous resizing and specifically the weighted energy protection/removal algorithms explained in action is just wicked.

I saw this the other day and said to myself, “Now THERE’S a good alternative to biometrics for high security applications!”.

And here we go. Security rant on.

If you go to a grocery store that is trying to make you think that paying for your milk and peanut butter by placing your thumb on a reader is a good thing, please keep reading. The problem with these biometric security mechanisms isn’t that they’re insecure. The also problem is not what Hollywood would have us believe – that retinal scans can be compromised by cutting someones eye out and holding it in front of the sensor (ridiculous). The problem is a personal one. The problem actually lies in how good the security of these devices really are. If I’m getting off on a tangent, let me bring it back a little. Your fingerprint or retinal pattern is indeed capable of identifying you, and only you, out of the six billion other people on the planet. The problem is that the information *representing* your fingerprint or retina is probably stored as an algorithm somewhere. Stored as 0′s and 1′s, just like any other data file. Encrypted or not, it doesn’t matter. Now here’s the point of my rant… stored data can be compromised. Compromised and stolen. Stolen and decrypted. So now there’s a theif out there that has something *way* better than a credit card number that can be cancelled. They’ve got YOU. They have something that indelibly represents you and only you. Something that cannot be cancelled or re-ordered. Your most precious representation of your individualism has been compromised.

Security rant off.

If this line of discussion interests you, I highly suggest you head over to Bruce Schneier’s site and start reading. Bruce has written some of the most prolific dissertations on modern security that are in print today. Highly recommended and encouraged reading.

So the reason I thought that this was such a good idea, is because it’s:

A) not a hard coded security algorithm like your fingerprint or retina are, and

B) common methods of compromise – like looking over someone’s shoulder while they type – won’t work.

Only the most exotic methods of compromise – like van Eck phreaking or TEMPEST – would remain viable… and that is a good thing, as most people don’t know how to build an eckbox.

So anyway, just remember not to let anyone scan your retina or thumbprint into a database, please… it’s bad for all of us.

One of the most common misunderstandings regarding cosmology is that people think of the universe as being extremely large and empty, with intermittent pockets of matter in the form of galaxies. Not true at all, and actually the exact opposite is closer to the truth.

From what we’ve been able to tell, the universe is actually *packed* with matter in the form of galaxies, dust clouds, and dark matter (the quantity of dark matter being a relatively recent discovery). So it was quite a suprise when NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite was running it’s study on the cosmic microwave background, and came up with a region nearly a BILLION light years across that was emitting almost no microwave heat – which means that simply nothing’s there.

I’m not sure yet what to make of this, but I’m sure there will be several thesis papers written on this topic in the coming year. Here’s the story from Dailytech.

Aww, forget it…

Check it out. A testament to the power of adolescent hormones. Not sure what’s up with the Austrailian government trying something this foolish in the first place though.