We're a little miffed to not be on the 600-strong invite list to Larry Page's wedding, which is going down this weekend on Sir Richard Branson's private Caribbean island (he's got to have a Dr. No-ish clandestine research lab there, right?) What with all the love we give to the exploits of Google and Sir Richard, you'd think they'd be in a position to reciprocate.
Page, who along with co-founder Sergey Brin is worth in the neighborhood of $18.5 billion, will be flying his star studded guest list—Bill & HIllary, Bono (of course)—out to Skull Island Sir Richard's place on private jets. Where they will certainly proceed to get wasted, stuff themselves w/ endangered species, pull pranks on the android butlers, swim with dolphins...no, no, I'm sure it will be quite a lovely and dignified weekend. Nothing against these guys and we wish them all the best. We're just a little jealous. —John Mahoney
(Image: Joe DeVito)
 This doesn't look like the work of a company that has its stock trading at more than $600 a share. Google had a decorate-your-cube contest, and the work of the two winning departments shows that the company clearly isn't short of creative folk. Most workers would probably just arrange their used, discarded coffee cups in a new way.
But Google's Data team turned their space into a real-life version of the pixelated but charming world of Super Mario Brothers, and the Analytics department went with a Jumanji theme. Apparently that group had a motion sensor box that set off a tiger's roar when someone walked past. This is what comes out of your data and analytics departments? Wow.—Gregory Mone
Via 1up
 Entranced by the giant pink bunny and Badlands Guardian? If you haven't yet tired of the strange-images-in-Google Earth meme, check out Map of Strange. The site charts weird images, collecting and tagging them for your viewing pleasure. Though selections are occasionally downright lame ("The angle of this makes it look like this Ferry is falling over!"), embedded voting lets users nix the worst, and the gems (like the icebreaker at left, or Cheney's pixelated house) make it a more-than-worthy procrastination tool.—Abby Seiff
Via: MUG
 The CIA might be watching everyone else, but self-described mad scientist and disruptive technologist Virgil Griffith is monitoring the organization's behavior, too. He's also watching the Vatican, the Turkish Treasury, the BBC, Reuters, and countless companies, politicians and individuals. Griffith developed a program called the Wikiscanner that can track the origins of suspicious edits within Wikipedia, the popular online, community-compiled encyclopedia.
The program has traced 297 edits of entries covering subjects ranging from Iran's president to the Argentine navy to CIA computers. It discovered that a Vatican computer removed a reference to the involvement of Irish political leader Gerry Adams in a double murder. And the little political digs it turns up—Democrats subly ripping Rush limbaugh, for example—are pure entertainment. Griffith says his technology specializes in "creating minor public relations disasters, one company at a time." For a sample of some of his best coups, check out Wikiscanner here. —Gregory Mone
Humor's an integral part of social interaction; knock-knock jokes, well they're a start. As robotics has grown more complex over the years, a number of researchers have begun tackling the sociability part of the equation: No small matter if robots and humans are to someday regularly interact with one another. Most recently, engineers at the University of Cincinnati developed a software program that "gets" jokes. Lame jokes, to be sure, but a nevertheless impressive step for artificial intelligence. By giving the program a basic level of English and training it to recognize homonyms, the developers created a 'bot that could search through its knowledge database and recognize something meant to be funny.
So, what does the robot like?
Knock, Knock
Who is there?
Dismay
Dismay who?
Dismay not be a funny joke
Could 'bots someday replace comedians? Seems unlikely, though frankly this one's already funnier than Gallagher—Abby Seiff
Read more here.
 Hard to make, and even harder to contain, antimatter has been accepted as yet another of the universe's many strange features for a while now, but scientists would still like to confirm that the stuff really is the exact opposite of the particles that comprise our world. Unfortunately, keeping it around long enough to observe its properties requires large, expensive facilities. Otherwise the antimatter crashes into normal matter, and the two opposites annihilate each other after a trillionth of a second.
But now Japanese physicist Masaki Hori is trying to contain these shy particles in a box the size of an office trash bin. The key is that Hori plans to use radiofrequency waves instead of magnetic fields, which require serious equipment to generate. His name for the device - superconducting radiofrequency quadrupole trap - probably won't enter the vernacular, but the chance to inexpensively study these strange particles could lead to some truly wild findings. Hori is essentially trying to prove the idea - predicted by a common physics theorem - that a Bizzaro universe constructed entirely of antimatter would be indistinguishable from our own. Naturally, though, he's starting small. He hopes to mash a collection of antimatter particles together to create new atoms. A mirror universe wouldn't quite fit in that box.—Gregory Mone
Via ScienceDaily
The Segway Enthusiasts Group of America announced today that it will disband after a period of inactivity and an absence of candidates for its board of directors. Apparently the dorky-looking “human-transporter,” which travels at a heart-thumping max speed of 12 mph and costs upward of $5,000, isn’t garnering a whole lot of enthusiasm anymore. Ya think?
The glut of joke possibilities here just blew the fuses in my brain for a second.
Segway spokeswoman Carla Vallone told reporters that the group’s demise is not an indicator that the company itself is failing—in fact, she says sales have grown 50 percent annually since 2002. That’s pretty massive growth, right? So where are these hordes of Segway riders, and why don’t they want to join the Segway fan club? Are they so nerdy they can’t even manage social interactions with each other? Or are they all sequestered in some secret, underground, Mountain View-based programmer lair? I’m imagining a buzzing rabbit-warren of corridors, built just wide enough for two Segways to pass concurrently, silent but for the clacking of keyboards and the hum of human-transporter traffic… —Megan Miller
 Don’t get your spurs and six-shooter ready for a visit to the Old West, but scientists at the Technion Institute in Israel have made some theoretical headway towards a time machine. Physicist Amos Ori has been in the time travel business for a few years now – we published a primer on his ideas here – but now he says that he’s developed a theoretical model showing that future generations could one day travel to the past.
He hasn’t actually designed a machine, and stresses that he’s not even sure that developing a technology with the necessary qualities, which include the ability to massively bend and twist spacetime, is possible. Instead, he’s been busy trying to prove time travel would be possible in the first place. And now he says he has shown that the laws that govern the way things work in the universe would allow something to warp spacetime in such a way that someone could travel along a seemingly straight line and end up back in time.
The catch – and this is why the Old West visit is out of the question – is that even if someone does develop a machine with these cosmos-bending qualities, he’ll need a similar one at his destination. That future genius won't be able to travel back any farther than the date on which the first machine was created. If this seems lame compared to visiting dinosaurs or a frontier saloon, see the movie Primer. It's grounded in good physics, and is a great example of all the madness and mayhem that could ensue with short hops through the timescape.—Gregory Mone
(Image credit: James Jean)
 A cloud of Internet buzz is forming around an as-yet-unnamed JJ Abrams film (the project currently has the working-title "Cloverfield") concerned with monsters destroying New York City. Details are scarce, although the rumors declare it's either a new Godzilla film, a Gears of War film, an alien-invasion film or (I'll freely admit, I'm hoping for this last one), a Cthulhu film. (Lovecraft fans will be cheered to hear that another Cthulhu film is set to be released sometime this fall.)
Of course, no hep flick worth its celluloid would launch without a viral marketing scheme— in this case a series of websites with puzzles, videos of various stripes on YouTube and loads of other stuff that will make you feel like an utter schmuck if you spend too much time on it. So watch the trailer, futz around on the sites if you must, and try to ignore the hype until the actual film comes out. Cthulhu fhtagn! —Martha Harbison
As the iPhone launch day fiasco unfolds, we thought we'd take a moment to share our own tale of getting our hands on a phone. As the world's largest consumer electronics magazine, you'd think we'd be able to get a review unit from Apple, yes? Well, no. Herr Jobs decided to seed just a handful of iPhones into the hands of high-profile journalists at daily newspapers including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.
We contacted Apple back in April to try to secure an iPhone for review, but got no response. So senior editor Mike Haney sent this email on June 11:
> Hey [Apple employee's name withheld here]
>
> Just wondering what the going bribe is to be among the pubs to get
> a review phone on the 29th? Do we have to arm-wrestle the punks at
> Gizmodo? Name our first-born Steve?
>
> As always, any help is appreciated. We’ll be covering it
> extensively on PopSci.com right away and likely have editorial
> coverage in What’s New or H2.0 as soon as we can.
>
> Thanks!
> -Mike
Hi Mike, I hope my email finds you well and enjoying your day.
Thanks for your interest in iPhone.
I am forwarding your request to my colleague [name withheld] for her
records. She'll capture your request, and will get back to you if
we're able to accommodate. We don't know the availability of loaners
at this time. Please feel free to follow up with her directly. She
can be reached at [number] and or [email].
You may find pictures and information about the products on the Apple
Press Info website located at http://www.apple.com/pr/. We appreciate
your interest in the product.
We never heard back from [name withheld], so we placed a few more frantic phone calls. No answer. So, our alternative strategy? Dispatch far-flung staff members to tiny stores in the boonies.
Associate Web editor John Mahoney—who is on vacation visiting family in Indiana—is currently in line at an AT&T store near Indianapolis.
Marketing director Pete Michalsky is reclining in a folding chair outside a strip mall in Connecticut. He sent this dispatch:
On 6/29/07 4:05 PM, pete.michalsky wrote:
> Megan - on line now. The crowd is polite, but they started lining up here in
> Stamford @ 12 noon, so they're restless. Store manager's coming out making
> announcements every 20 minutes or so. Only one phone per. Everything,
> including service selection and # porting being done on iTunes. More updates
> later.
> What fun! Do you have a lawn chair?
>
All 2-fiddy sitting in a chair at a strip mall. Livin the dream...
Staff photographer John Carnett is at an AT&T store in Philadelphia (notice a pattern here? PopSci officially feels that anyone waiting outside an Apple store at this moment is a total schmuck). He sent this report:
I went to a brand new AT&T store in Philadelphia at 12 Noon today—It was very remote so I figured I'd have no trouble getting one. I pulled in the lot and I see three very sort of rough-looking guys on a blanket. I see a topless bar across the street and then it all becomes very clear—they tell me they got the idea at 1 AM... They were not APPLE fans, they just figured they would sell them to someone, or sell the slot in line. Then I talked to this guy in a white van who started screaming about the fact that he has three months to go on his contract. I expect to have an iPhone and a cold beer by 8 pm. Wish me luck!
So, there you have it. Three men, 9 hours or so of paid salary time between them... three semi-functional but widely-coveted gadgets to show for the effort. The question remains: what should we do with the iPhones once we get 'em? Tell us in the comments. —Megan Miller
Image: TheQ!
Want to experience all the travails of being an astronaut with none of the glory? Now's your chance! The European Space Agency is seeking healthy, psychologically-stable test subjects to make a mock trip to Mars.
What does a simulated Martian voyage entail? Well, for starters, 500 days in a "hermetically sealed module." The crew of six (bound to become either your best friends or worst enemies) will live and work in a roughly 650 square foot area filled with everything a fake astronaut could ever desire: Sauna! Gym! Experimental greenhouse! Food will be rationed, smoking and alcohol is forbidden, and every seven days you get a two-day "weekend." (which begs the question: what does one do on days off?) Should you need to communicate with "earth," a 20-minute signal delay will replicate interplanetary conditions.
So, aside from faint praise what can a pretend astronaut hope for in terms of compensation? "I don't remember the exact amount, but it's comparable to what is used regularly in medical studies," says Marc Heppener, the scientist behind the program. "About 120 euros a day."
Get yer application form here. No shoving, folks.—Abby Seiff
Cellphone cameras are kind of an afterthought in the U.S., fun for snapping off a picture of Great Uncle Harold blowing out the candles at his 93rd birthday party, or occasionally handy for a few seconds of grainy Zapruder-esque amateur news video. But that’s hardly the case in Japan, where cell cameras are like an extra appendage used for a host of applications not available in the West. You can translate English words
you photograph into Japanese characters, instantly buy practically any item you see for sale anywhere, or, with breathlessly-covered QR code technology, get a huge amount of information about any product or service you point your lens at, just like you were clicking a hyperlink to find material on the Internet.
Now weight-conscious cell jockeys in Japan are even putting their phones to work to help them shed pounds. The premise is pretty simple: Take pictures of the meals you eat, send the picture to a professional nutritionist, and receive tips on how to improve your diet. It’s lower-tech than some of the other applications, but health officials are hopeful it could help stem the increase in weight-related diseases the country has seen recently. Maybe it’s something we should explore here in the U.S. as well. Hundreds of Japanese already have signed up for the program—so by weight, that’s the equivalent of at least a few dozen Americans who could benefit from it.—Doug Cantor
We’ve always known that “popular” and “science” belong together. Even so, we were surprised to learn that they are, respectively, the 956th and 957th most frequently used words in the English language. We found the complete rankings of the 86,800 most common words at WordCount
WordCount currently gets its data from the British National Corpus, a 100-million-word collection of written and spoken texts. Eventually, WordCount’s creators plan to track word usage at many levels, ranging from a single document to the entire Internet.
According to WordCount, each word in its current archive “is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance.” So what comes before and after “popular science”? “Products” and “notes,” appropriately enough.—Dawn Stover
The Internet may be referred to as the "information superhighway," but a better analogy might be an enormous, hulking Tootsie Roll pop. Check out this colorful new Internet map (click the image to enlarge) from physicists at Tel-Aviv University in Israel and you’ll see what we mean. It’s a mathematical representation of the pipes, routers and other bits of hardware that ferry data across the Web. At the map’s red gooey center is a cluster of 100 networks operated by massive corporations like ATT Worldnet and Google. Its purple crunchy outer shell consists mostly of small ISPs. The trouble with being on the periphery is that your data must travel through the congested center, which is sort of like flying through O’Hare on your way from New York to Los Angeles. Basically, it’s really inefficient. The researchers don’t offer much in the way of solutions but say their model will help scientists better track the evolution of the Web, which in turn will help people innovate ways to make it less like a lollipop and more like, well, a superhighway.
If want to learn more about the map and you’re undaunted by math speak like “k-shell decomposition,” “percolation theory,” and “fractal geometry,” download the paper. —Nicole Dyer
In a few months, NASA scientists and the press will note the passing of the 30th anniversary since the launches of Voyagers I and II. By now, both interstellar probes have passed beyond Pluto's orbit and are speeding out toward neighboring star systems, carrying with them copies of the Golden Record, a phonograph record full of images, music and recordings of life on Earth intended for any extraterrestrials who might happen upon the probe and wonder who sent it. It's the same idea behind the plaque that was bolted onto the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, both of which are currently gliding out of the solar system behind the Voyager probes.
While many Americans have heard of the record, most probably don't remember just what was on it. Fortunately, you can find the amazing images, which were chosen over the course of six months by a committee headed by Carl Sagan, compiled here.
Today it's unlikely that we would choose to include this gee-whiz shot of the U.N. headquarters; or this greenhouse gas nightmare in India to portray ourselves. Not that we'd do so much better now than we did then; the aliens would probably be just as confused by a photo of President Bush, or an image of a kid using a laptop, or a YouTube video of Dancing with the Stars.
It was the late '70s when these pictures were chosen, and Carl Sagan was probably smoking a lot of grass, but that doesn't quite explain some of the stranger images. What is this picture, exactly, and who let Archie Bunker in?
Although the images don't always work, there's something admirable and humble about creating a record like this in the infinitesimal chance that it would be discovered by other intelligent beings. You could argue that launching a photo album of the human race is the height of egotism, or you can take President Jimmy Carter at his word when he says, in a message on the record:
"Of the 200 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some—perhaps many—may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe."
For better or worse, we don't really do things like this anymore. New Horizons, the last spacecraft NASA launched that will eventually pass beyond the edge of the solar system, carries the ashes of the man who discovered Pluto, along with a piece of another spacecraft, an American flag and, for some reason (probably because people paid for the privilege), the names of more than 430,000 people stored on a CD. Apparently we've replaced attempts at interstellar communication with marketing stunts that will seem far kitschier in 30 years than Sagan's Golden Record does today. —Kevin Friedl
The repetitive graphics of most iTunes visualizers are about as appealing as The Osmond Family doing an album of Public Enemy covers. But just in time for springtime party season, The Barbarian Group (usually a crackerjack Web design team; now, all of a sudden, software developers) has released Magnetosphere, a mesmerizing new open-source plugin you can customize to pulse and glimmer according to your own personal tripping-out style.
Compatible with Mac OSX and most versions of Windows (probably works with Linux, too, but we haven’t tried it yet), Magnetosphere takes about a minute to install and run. The graphics are superior to any of the myriad other visualizers available right now and you can even adjust the sensitivity of the on-screen splashes and sparks by hitting the + and – keys, or add and subtract the number of particles in each image with the A and S keys. Be careful, though: If you go crazy with the key punching, your computer will get a little angry and, Fred Sanford-style, call you a dummy by freezing the app. That’s why this is the beta version. While Barbarian works the kinks out, just restart iTunes and all is well.
Developer-types will appreciate that Magnetosphere was built in the open-source environment, Processing, and is licensed as freeware for non-commercial use (mushrooms not included). This is the first of five upcoming software releases from Barbarian, and I’m anxious to see what comes next. In the meantime, excuse me while I get back to staring at my computer screen. —Adam Dorn (Mocean Worker)
| | Le natural phenomenon or le UF |
Fancy yourself an amateur UFOlogist? One of those people who knows the truth is out there, and that the government is covering it up? Well, now you have a lot more evidence to comb through while looking to support your theories. Yesterday, with the introduction of a new section on the Web site of its national space agency, CNES, France became the first country to open its UFO files to the public—and also probably the first to have its server crash in three hours due to popularity. The initial batch (1,600 of some 100,000 documents that make up the complete archive of sightings reported) contains photographs, sketches, police reports and maps that the agency has used over the years to attempt to explain what was frequently deemed inexplicable. Now, of course, the 28 percent of cases that make up "Class D aerospace phenomena"—the real stumpers—will be handled by a crack team of Internet surfers. So just what was the shape-shifting brown disk that an Air France crew spied from the cockpit 13 years ago, or those beings that disappeared in a puff of sulfur in front of two cow herders back in '67? Take a look and let us know.—Abby Seiff
Happy Pi Day! You know, that über-cool holiday when math geeks from around the world (or at least from countries where the month precedes the day) gather to recite digits, gorge on pie, and fete that elusive number in all its irrational glory.
Here are our picks for Pi Day celebration:
1. Head over to San Francisco’s Exploratorium in person or on Second Life for pi shrines and circumambulation starting at 1:59 (3.14159, get it?).
2. Check out Harvard’s 3.14-minute pie-eating contest.
3. Write a "piku" or, better yet, a "piem," in which each word corresponds to a digit (read Mike Keith’s "Poe, E.: Near a Raven" for inspiration).
4. Memorize the first 1,000 digits.
Oh, and while you’re at it, a round of "Happy Birthday" might be nice—today would be Einstein’s 128th.
 | | Lisa Marie Nowak and William Oefelein, before the fall |
No one ever said Cupid worked gently—the guy carries a bow and arrow, after all—but lately his orchestrations have been downright violent. In the month leading up to Valentine’s Day, three macabre love triangles have burst into the media: one involving residents of Second Life, one concerning skydivers, and today, perhaps the most gripping scenario, which entangled a trio of astronauts.
The characters in the latest twisted story were William Oefelein, who piloted the space shuttle Discovery, Colleen Shipman, a Patrick Air Force Base employee, and the apparently unhinged astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak. Nowak (sadly, a married mother of three) believed that Shipman was her competitor for Oefelein’s affections. When she heard that the woman was flying to Orlando to meet with her beloved, she strapped on an astronaut diaper (you know, so she wouldn’t have to stop for pee breaks) and drove 960-odd miles, nonstop, to confront the “other” woman. It’s unclear exactly what she planned to do with her rival once she found her, but it wasn’t going to be pretty. Before Shipman was able to call the police, Nowak sprayed mace into her car, and authorities later found a metal mallet, a Buck knife, a length of rubber tubing and a trash bag in Nowak’s car. I think that constitutes the entirety of the Fatal Attraction tool kit, probably available for purchase online for $19.99 (boiled bunny not included).
A couple weeks ago, an upstate New York man was dumb enough to bring both of the other two corners of his love triangle on a skydiving trip, thinking they didn’t know about each other. (We always know, dude.) One crazy lady cut the cords to the other one’s chute, sending her plummeting to Earth—all the while videotaping her own descent. Yeesh.
And in early January, two men and a woman who all lived in the same town became ensnared in an affair in Second Life (this means there was no actual touching, dig?). The virtual romance spilled into real-life jealousy that led one man to kill the other. Just as a side note, the woman and the killer were both in their 40s, pretending to be 18-year-olds (photos the woman showed the men were actually of her daughter). The man who was killed was 22 in real life. As a Second Life resident myself, I can confidently speculate that the affair—if there were any “physical acts” involved at all—that caused this murder was one of partially rezzed, clunky animation and furious button pushing, at best. Again, no actual touching. Sooo not worth shedding human blood over.
Obviously, love triangles happen every day, but not normally in such nerdy and bizarrely dramatic circumstances. Trust me, the tech community is stunned by these events. What’s next, a murder-suicide among furries at Google? —Megan Miller
Everyone at the Chaos Communication Congress wants to participate in hands-on experiments as much as possible. That's why the worshop areas in the Berlin Convention Center -- both the officially labeled "Workshop" and all the ad-hoc arrangements everywhere on tables and floors -- are some of the most popular spots here at CCC. Although it would be impossible for me to summarize every cool project I've seen here, I'll offer you a few highlights so you can plan your next long weekend around them.
 1. Christian Daniel and Thomas Kleffel gave an excellent presentation on the new European digital television broadcast standard known as DVB-T. Eventually all TVs in Europe will receive TV signals through DVB set top boxes that de-scramble the digital signals send over the air, and already DVB has taken over in Germany. Daniel and Kleffel built their own DVB transmitter and explained it to an engrossed audience (at left, Daniel with the transmitter). According to Daniel, it's quite easy to inject your own data into the signal and take over somebody else's set top box. This is particularly spooky, he added, because most set top boxes can be reprogrammed remotely in a permanent way. (You can find out how to build a DVB transmitter and experiment with your own set top box here.) As Seth Schoen of the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out in his talk later that day, it's crucial to start hacking DVB now, before it has been locked down with DRM.
2. There's nothing like learning a made-up natural language when you've already mastered several computer languages, and Lojban was what everybody wanted to know more about at CCC. Lojban is a constructed langauge or "conlang," and its main properties are beauty and complete adherence to the rules of logic. Lojban is an outgrowth of Loglan, a logical language developed in the 1950s. Today Lojban has several thousand speakers -- including one named Alexander Koch (at left) who took over the Workshop area in the Conference Center basement to teach us how to have rudamentary but completely unambiguous conversations. Want to learn Lojban? As Koch put it, "Lojban is the hacker's spoken language." Check out the book "What is Lojban?" and learn more.
3. During one of the five-minute "lightning talks," SJ from the US nonprofit One Laptop Per Child introduced the new version of the so-called "$100 computer." It looks fantastic, and is the perfect size and durability for tiny humans. He said his organization will be handing 5 million of them to children in five countries next year, with the idea that if they work in remote, rural regions they can work almost anywhere. Showing off the computer and grinning, he said, "Kids who try these never want to give them back. They know exactly what they want to do with them." SJ asked the audience to help improve the devices by submitting proposals for games, stories, and software appropriate for teaching kids. Why not help improve the computers yourself by coming up with your own project and volunteering to build it?
4. On the first day of the convention, Fabienne Serriere spent two hours teaching people how to make their backpacks into wifi-sensing devices by modifying a wifi detector and sewing it into a backpack strap. It was the ultimate blend of home economics and home electronics, and the workshop attendees loved it. Want to build your own, so that you can glow when passing through the 2.4 ghz range of the spectrum? Find out how to do it here.
These projects should amuse you for days on end, and if you need more you can always come to CCC next year. --Annalee Newitz
IT security expert Sebastian Wolfgarten wanted to find out if he could get
around the so-called Great Firewall of China, a vast Internet
censorship system that prevents Chinese citizens from accessing
information their government deems sensitive. Yesterday, he told Chaos Communication Congress attendees how he did it.
Researchers have known
for the past several years that when Chinese citizens type certain
phrases like “Falun Gong” and “Taiwan” into Google, they
receive very different results than people outside the region do. Wolfgarten
wanted to know why, and whether there might be a simple technical way
to dig a little escape route through the Great Firewall.
Getting into China's network turned out to be easier than you might imagine. Wolfgarten simply bought a server at a Chinese ISP by phone. Once the server was set up, he could log into it from Germany. And all the data that went through the server
would be subject to the same digital censorship that Chinese citizens
experience every day. He quickly discovered that when he requested
information on Taiwan through his Chinese server, he got
no data in return. Sometimes, he couldn't access his server for days
on end. When he phoned the ISP for information, workers there told
him the server was running. He was just blocked from reaching it.
Over the next year, he tried several
methods for getting uncensored data to his Chinese server through
the Great Firewall. He would log into the server, then make requests for information about Amnesty.org or
Falun Gong. What he discovered was that there are three fairly simple
ways to trick the automatic Chinese censorship system.
The first, and easiest, is to use the anonymous network Tor. Though there has been some debate as to whether Tor would work in China, it seems to be successful for now. Another method, which had been previously identified by researchers with the OpenNet Initiative a couple of years ago, involves essentially ignoring censorship commands sent by Chinese servers. Apparently the Great Firewall censors data by responding to forbidden key words with a network command called a "reset." The reset instructs the Chinese computer to drop its connection. The hitch is that the data is still coming in, but injected with the "reset" command. Program your own firewall to ignore "reset" commands and you've got uncensored data.
Crafty anti-censorship types in China can also get uncensored data by doing something called "tunnelling," which seems particularly appropros when dealing with a Great Firewall. Wolfgarten tested what happened when he hid requests for "Falun Gong" inside seemingly-innocuous requests for e-mail or basic network information. A computer outside the Wall unwraps the requests, gets the data, rewraps them and returns them to China uncensored.
Wolfgarten admitted that it's not clear that servers owned by foreigners are subject to the same treatment as Chinese-owned servers. He concluded by saying that a lot more research needs to be done, and invited others to help him.
You can read Wolfgarten's paper about his research here. --Annalee Newitz
At the Chaos Communication Congress, there are hackers and a hacker "scene." The two overlap like a Venn diagram of social life. But the differences between them are obvious to anyone who spends any length of time observing what happens at this conference in between the lectures and technical demonstrations.
 Traditionally, hackers are people who like to explore the way technology works. Often, in the process, they come to question the way corporations and governments control computers -- or use technology to control people. This humanitarian, explorer spirit is what holds the hacker community together. It's what motivated Alan Bradley, one of Friday's late-night speakers, to deliver his entire talk via a VOIP phone whose data stream was double-cloaked with two software tools that hid the origin of his telephone call. "This is a proof of concept that demonstrates you can engage in completely anonymous public speech," his broadcast voice said. Everyone in the room listened to an empty podium (see photo at left) that contained only a computer while Bradley explained Tron, a tool that cloaks data stored in computer memory. It's also what motivated Hunz to give a talk called "Void the Warranty!" in which he encouraged people to open up "blackbox" technologies like printers and cell phones "because it's easy and fun."
But the hacker community isn't all about technical expertise. It's also about partying, music, art, and socializing among people who aren't likely to demean you for pulling out a laptop at a nightclub or obsessively reciting details from the latest Doctor Who episode. That's where the hacker "scene" comes in. Unlike other professional conferences, CCC is full of people who just want to drink beer or goof around online with their friends. It also includes people whose hacks are cultural in nature -- instead of reverse-engineering magnetic card readers with an oscilliscope, they reverse-engineer and question social norms. That's why some of the most packed talks at CCC were delivered by non-technical people like civil liberties activist and musician John Perry Barlow and copyright reformist attorney Lawrence Lessig. As CCC attendee and speaker Autumn Tyr-Salvia put it, "People at this conference often have to do things that aren't documented in the manual -- they're creative, and that's why the environment is a mix of work and play."
 Many events at CCC are purely recreational, but nevertheless infused geek values -- there's Hacker Jeopardy and "powerpoint karaoke." Other events take place outside the conference center at nightclubs like the hacker-run C-Base and at after-hours parties in the hotel rooms of conference organizers. Sure there may be some posing going on , and at CCC in general, but that's simply proof that hackers are more than robots with no social lives. They're as cliquey and drunk as any other group of people who have gotten together with 5000 friends for the weekend. Are people who identify as part of the "scene" any less important the people who see themselves as computer professionals? It's hard to say. You couldn't have CCC without both. --Annalee Newitz
Speaking to a packed and sweaty crowd this afternoon, RFID researcher Melanie Rieback explained the technology behind RFID Guardian, a personal firewall she's developing that will protect your privacy in an world where your clothes, library books, and passport contain RFID tags. You can see the latest completed version of the Guardian above -- it's an ordinary circuitboard with two antennae and powerful onboard processors. It intercepts signals from RFID readers that are attempting to get information from, say, the RFID in your passport. Like a software firewall, it won't let those signals reach your RFID unless you want them to -- for example, if you're passing through customs.
"You can set the Guardian to selectively block your RFIDs," Rieback explained. So if you don't want anybody snooping on the RFID in your credit card, but you don't mind if they read the one in your Nikes, you can use the Guardian to stop only signals that query your credit card. This device should prove a boon to privacy advocates who fear that people will be tracked everywhere when RFIDs become ubiquitous in most consumer items, key cards, and IDs.
Right now the Guardian is a prototype, but Rieback's working on compact version that will be available commercially in six months to a year for about 100 Euro. Simply clip the Guardian to your belt, and you can set it up to prevent people from reading your RFID tags and snarfing your personal data. As she fielded questions from the audience after her lecture (see right), Rieback explained the ins and outs of the chipset she'd chosen as well as why she'd become interested in this work. She wants to protect consumer privacy, as well as alert the RFID industry to some of the dangers that crop up when technology makes it easy for malicious individuals to make off with personal data or track a victim's location.
In the future, Rieback predicted, the RFID Guardian could be something you download to your next generation smart phone. Think of it as a do-not-call list for RFIDs. -- Annalee Newitz
This morning at the Chaos Communication Congress, Cambridge Ph.D. student Steven Murdoch (pictured at left) knocked everybody's socks off with a presentation about how people can unmask an anonymous online publisher by remotely monitoring his computer's temperature. It sounds about as tin foil hat as you can get, but the trick is real. Every computer's clock is run via quartz crystals, but those crystals change their speeds as the computer heats up. Therefore a computer's clock runs nanoseconds faster or slower depending on the overall temperature of the unit. This process is called clock skew, and it creates a uniquely off-kilter time "fingerprint" for every computer.
Researchers in the field have pointed out that asking a computer what time it is over and over for an extended period allows you to chart its time skew as it heats up and cools
off over a day's use. (See the chart at right for an example of a computer's unique time skew profile.) Murdoch talked about how time skew tracking could also be used to locate computers hidden via an anonymous network-within-a-network called Tor. Dissidents, whistleblowers, and other people who wish to remain anonymous can publish information on the Internet using Tor's "hidden services" mode. But a computer offering these hidden services can't hide its heat and resulting clock skew.
 Somebody who wants to nab dissidents can send lots of data to the computer running hidden services, heat it up, take a measurement, and then compare those measurements to other computers in the Tor network. Once she has a match, that person will know the IP address of the computer hosting the formerly-anonymous publisher. She can now track the computer down and destroy it. Murdoch speculated that time skew might also reveal the whereabouts of a computer because one could figure out what time of day air conditioning got turned on and off, or when sun was heating up the room where the computer is located. One could also figure out, based on the heat signature, whether a computer was stored in a rack or under somebody's desk.
There are no good ways to defend against time skew monitoring. Fans and temperature regulators don't correct for the tiny changes in temperature required to produce skew. So even if you're hiding using advanced tech like Tor, your heat can give you away. Read Murdoch's paper on the topic here. -- Annalee Newitz
In a day of fantastic lectures and demonstrations at the Chaos Communication Congress, one of the most intriguing came from a computer science/artificial intelligence undergraduate at MIT named Christine Corbett Moran. She's been a very active contributor to an open source project called MOSES devoted to statistical machine translation (SMT). Although there are already a number of automatic translation software programs available -- many people are familiar with Google's translator and BabelFish -- few are open source and none are as robust as MOSES.
The advantage of making the program open source is that many people can implement it in various applications for an arbitrary number of languages. And the more that people implement it, the better MOSES gets. Moran joked that MOSES would be perfect for Finnish people who want to translate their writing into Klingon. But of course fast, automatic translation online is crucial to many people's daily lives -- not just Nordic Star Trek fans.
MOSES works sort of like a Bayesean spam filter, learning statistically which translations are "good" from vast quantities of language data. MOSES "learns" correct translations by poring over corpora of translations, the same way your spam filter "learns" when you mark some mail as spam. Moran said an excellent source of translations for MOSES are available from the European parliament, where speeches and discussions are translated into many languages at once. She urged the audience to test out the software, and add as many languages as possible to it.
A representative from Wikipedia seemed particularly excited by the possibilities, and vowed to test out MOSES on Wikipedia entries to see if it might work for mass translation on the huge community-edited encyclopedia. Moran thought that would be a great idea -- after all, the more correct translations MOSES sees, the better its translations become. As Moran fielded dozens of questions in the hall after her talk, it was obvious that open source translation programs are sorely needed. MOSES, or perhaps the next version of MOSES, may be what allows you to talk to people around the world in their languages -- instantaneously. --Annalee Newitz
At the Chaos Communication Congress, a small group of hackers who love a strange computer langauge known as Dylan convinced several thousand people to voluntarily place themselves under surveillance with wearable radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs). They presented their project, called Sputnik, at the conference yesterday. The Sputnik crew placed RFID readers throughout the conference space, and anyone wearing the Sputnick RFID tags (on sale at the front desk for 10 Euros) would be tracked throughout the conference. Participants could register their RFID tag ID number online, and associate it with their name or other personal information. One of the project designers told a packed audience, "Anyone can click on your ID number via a web interface, and find out which lectures you have attended."
The RFID tags contain a transmitter, battery, and what appear to be two processors as well as two crystals (schematics will be posted on the Sputnik website soon). Best of all, the Sputnik crew set up a 3D visualization of the entire conference center, with avatars representing each person with an RFID tag. Using a large touchscreen (pictured at left), users could "look around" the 3D space, select avatars, and find out who they were and where they'd been. Essentially, the Sputnik visualization turned the entire conference into a virtual world containing real world data. As one person using the the display commented, "This is awesome!" Unfortunately, so many people hit the Sputnik website that the display was down for most of the day. But it appears to be back up today and there are more people than ever zooming around with the Sputnik RFID tags clipped to their jackets.
By the end of the conference, the Sputnik crew will know a great deal about what the typical person has done at CCC. They will also have sparked several debates about whether surveillance is ever a good thing -- even if it's done for amusement. --Annalee Newitz
 I arrived at the 23rd annual Chaos
Communication Congress in Berlin early Tuesday evening. The conference wasn't set to start
until the next day, and the registration desk in the cavernous,
Soviet Era Berlin Conference Center wasn't open yet. But
there was already a huge line of people waiting to buy badges. The event they waited for so patiently is
one of the oldest hacker conferences in Europe, and is organized in
part by the Chaos Computer Club, a Berlin-based group that works
within the government and the European technical community for civil
liberties and freedom of expression in the digital world. On the
roster for the four day conference? Everything from tutorials on
hacking Xboxes to lectures about the politics of trust in an age of
electronic surveillance.
Chattering excitedly in a mix of English and German, people in
t-shirts advertising secure operating systems discussed things like
smart phones (called “handies” in German), techno music, and
politics. When registration finally opened, around 7 PM, the harried
volunteer behind the counter couldn't find my name in the system and
finally admitted, in German-flavored English, “It is a bit chaos.”
The conference runs 24 hours a day, with many people spending the
night on the conference room floor in sleeping bags, so he advised
that I come back for my badge around 3 AM.
I needed to sleep off my jetlag, so I
vowed to come back at reasonable hour after poking around a bit.
Volunteers with Network Operations Center, or NOC, had a vast number
of tables laid out with equipment that would form the CCC computer
network. The central lounge, which normally serves as a cafeteria,
had been turned into a hipster-nerd haven full of sofas, computer
screens, a DJ station, and a display of LED confections that blinked
hypnotically in one corner. Groups of friends huddled in hacker
circles where laptops often outnumbered people.
The excitement of the hundreds of geeks
who had already arrived was palpable. By tomorrow, there would be
thousands of them. And I would be there too, playing with machines
and ideas just for the hell of it, and to make the world a better
place. That's what CCC is all about. Stay tuned for detailed reports about the stuff I'll learn over the next few days. —Annalee Newitz
What’s better than graphing calculators, Linux 2.6 and World of Warcraft combined? Watching a persecuted geek turn the tables by kicking ass and taking names. Yes, we at PopSci love underdogs—especially those with megawatt brainpower and unconventional fashion sense. It takes a real hero to buck the system with nothing more than major smarts, which is why the archetypal nerd has become a staple of Hollywood screenwriting.
From Steve Urkel to Lisa Simpson, nerds have proved that neither high-water pants nor an acute interest in quadratic equations will ever stop a determined soul from finding true love, foiling the bully, solving a mystery, or striking it rich. That’s why we’re paying homage to our beleaguered brethren with this gallery of all-time favorite on-screen nerds. We applaud these characters’ ingenuity, moxy and—in the case of the many ‘80s movies represented here—seriously nostalgia-inducing technology. So click open the slideshow, and get ready to cheer all over again as your favorite outcasts save the world. —Josh Condon
It’s comforting to know that our elected officials can really grasp a nuanced concept and break it down into terms we common folk can understand. Take global terrorism, for example: In comments made earlier this week, U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) equated terrorists to the “Eye of Mordor” trying to harass the hobbits scaling Mount Doom (no kidding—read it here) and went on to say that right now, the Eye of Mordor (ed.: Don’t you mean the Eye of Sauron, Rick?) has been drawn away from the U.S. to Iraq. Hooray! We’re safe! Mission accomplished!
First of all, if the terrorists are Sauron and the U.S. hobbits, then who the heck is Saruman? The Fighting Uruk-hai? Gollum? Where is Mount Doom? How does Gandalf fit in here, and what does Tom Bombadil really stand for?
And if this is the best analogy—the best thinking—a U.S. legislator can do on a subject, can we possibly trust his judgment when looking at such a nuanced and fraught issue as stem-cell research? I can’t wait to hear the analogy he comes up with for that (Perhaps the evil chest creature from Alien exploding out of the great stomach that is America?).
If you have any other ideas as to who belongs where (Osama bin Laden? Tony Blair? Poland?) in the Santorum LotR mythos, please let us know. And frankly, I’m dying to hear some more fantasy/sci-fi metaphors for the big issues of today. So we common folk can understand, see? —Martha Harbison
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We're a little miffed to not be on the 600-strong invite list to Larry Page's wedding, which is going down this weekend on Sir Richard Branson's private Caribbean island (he's got to have a Dr. No-ish clandestine research lab there, right?) What with all the love we give to the exploits of Google and Sir Richard, you'd think they'd be in a position to reciprocate. 
