Google + Social Networking Service System

YOUR spectre is haunting your technology industry. It is known as "electric wok syndrome" plus it mainly afflicts engineers and people who invest in their fantasies. The condition takes its name from that experts claim nobody in his and also her right mind would want a wok. But because you possibly can make such things, there're manufactured, regardless of regardless of whether there is a dependence on them. The syndrome is thus characterised with the mantra: "Technology is the result; now what was of which question again? "
Way back when two weeks have viewed a virulent outbreak belonging to the syndrome. It was triggered by simply Google's limited release of your new "service" called Google+ which was widely interpreted because search giant's first serious foray into social network . Initially available by invitation only to some select group of geeks and also early adopters (which wouldn't at first include that columnist), it has been the supply of frenzied speculation in the particular blogosphere, not least as it implied that Google was finally planning to take on this 800lb gorilla of social media, Facebook.
In its "limited industry test" form, Google+ features five components: Circles, Hangouts, Instantaneous Upload, Huddle and Sets off. The blurb explains that Circles enables you to assign your friends in an arbitrary lots of "circles" – family, acquaintances, poker buddies etc – "just including real life". Hangouts brings "the unplanned meet-up into the web for initially. Let specific buddies (or total circles) know you're chilling with your girls and see who drops by for your face-to-face chat". It can be, apparently, "the next very best thing until teleportation arrives". (I am not causeing the up. ) Instant Upload is the reason why your pictures and videos upload automatically with a private album, ready to get sharing. Huddle is class text-chat, which apparently will be handy "when you're getting six different people to determine on a movie". And Sparks is any recordings RSS feed on anabolic steroids. "Tell Sparks what you're into but it will send you stuff it thinks you might like. "
To read many of the excited commentary on these innovations you'd believe teleportation had actually appeared. Watching people salivate around Circles and, er, Hangouts helps you to explain how the historic Egyptians came to worship a great insect. It also reminds one of several astonishing power that large corporations possess to build a reality-distortion field about them which, among other pursuits, disables the capacity to think that these organisations may well sometimes do very absurd things indeed. There was a period, for example, when Microsoft's every move was greeted when using the hushed reverence with which in turn devout Catholics greet papal utterances. Grown up men swoon whenever Steve Work opportunities appears in public. And it's not that sometime ago since Google launched it is incomprehensible "Wave" service (now defunct) as well as an idiotic venture labeled "Buzz" – things in which excited geeks but left the remaining portion of the world unmoved.
So the question du jour is whether Google+ is surely an electric wok or not really. Initial reactions suggest it is. First of most of, it's engagingly flaky making sure that even simple tasks like setting up a individual profile are formidably hard, as my Guardian friend Charles Arthur reported with his hilarious, and admirably acerbic, review whereby he describes his attempts to generate a profile and publish a photograph. "If Yahoo were a start-up, " he or she concluded, "it would possess lost precisely 99. 999% of each and every would-be joiner. Getting photos uploaded will be the most fundamental thing you should be able to do as well as every start-up knows the item. " He's right: geeks along with early adopters revel throughout difficulty; ordinary users abominate them. They like stuff of which just works.
Charles Arthur's experience is on no account unique. What it suggests is Google+ is what application people call a "closed beta" – ie a release that is definitely OK for techies however is not suitable for normal individuals. And that's fine. It is going to improve over time. Though the thing about social networking usually it's now a zero-sum game since it depends on a really scarce resource – their users' time and consideration. Facebook's users already spend lots of time on the site, time that probably will not available to Google+, it doesn't matter how slick its photo-upload practice becomes.
Which is a new pity, because Facebook requires some real competition. This morning, it announced some brand-new features that look suspiciously similar to bits of Google +. But it let slip it has reached 750 zillion users. It's beginning to take a look like the winner this took all. Oh, and if you want an electric wok, you can aquire one out of Amazon. It even has a tempura rack and some sort of spatula.

Boost Europe's Galileo navigation system into the big money

The European Commission says it has about 500 million euros (£ 440) "in the pocket" using it to will make the additional purchase.

It would be the European version of GPS from 18 active satellites in the next few years to take to 24.

This should make a big difference to Galileo's performance.

It should also accelerate the eventual completion.

The announcement was made at the Paris Air Show by the Vice President of the European Commission Antonio Tajani, who has taken the overall responsibility for the flagship in Brussels the EU space project.

"It is possible to not only reduce costs but also the timing," he said. "And by reducing the time, we reduce the cost, this is a very good cocktail -. cost and schedule together."

Mr Tajani was necessary at Le Bourget airfield on the last two industry contracts to Europe's satellite navigation system venture to sign a reality.

The combination of these two agreements is estimated € 355m. They are both concerned with ground operations.

One (€ 281m), with Thales Alenia Space of France, who are looking for with the Galileo navigation and timing data, so it is correct for the transmission of the satellite commissioned formatted.

The other contract (73.5 million euros) is going to Astrium UK. Their work will ensure the good "housekeeping" of the satellite, including the maintenance and the correct positioning of the satellite in orbit.

But it was the news that Mr. Tajani had managed to find the major economies in the project that dominated the discussions at Le Bourget.

The much-delayed Galileo initiative is under constant attack from critics for its cost.

EU Member States had to have been € 3.4 billion on 18 satellites into orbit by the end of the year celebrated in 2014, and it recently said they may find a further 1.9 billion to a completed form "constellation" of 30 to get the satellite to the end of the decade.

The British government in particular has argued vociferously against any further funding, although the UK national companies are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries.

London will be pleased to hear that Mr. Tajani was now to be able to slow the expected future expenses.

Mr. Tajani said the Paris Air Show event that the savings from additional efforts by the industry to contain costs and were an improvement in the management of project resources as a whole. Are taken from the 500 in reserve, and for other obligations, believes that the EC-VP he will spend about 300 m are available.

The timing is crucial. It means, Mr Tajani has money available before the next EU budget, or new financial perspectives, to acquire more satellites.

The first two Galileo satellites will start to go into orbit in October, on a Russian Soyuz rocket from French Guiana. They are followed by a further pair in 2012.

Another 14 are under construction, with the last satellite of this series due to roll off the assembly line in mid-2014th That would total 18 in the orbit until 2015.

But Mr. Tajani now has it in his power to get the pace of construction, either by running the current contractor (OHB-System in Germany), his production continues, or by turning to the back-up provider (Astrium) parallel to the production of additional spacecraft.

Six more satellites, a total of 24 would be close to full capacity very Galileo.

It is assumed, of course, that finding enough rockets to launch additional satellites are, and that there is no startup failures or disruptions in the probe itself, as soon as they arrive in orbit. Were these problems arise, the newfound opportunity budget could quickly evaporate.

But if events go the way of the Lord Tajani 24 satellites in orbit could be by 2015/16.

The savings also mean that the EU Member States will be asked for less money for Galileo in the next Financial Perspective.

Galileo is expected to improve substantially the availability and accuracy of timing signals from space.

Its next-generation technologies to the users to get faster, more reliable fixes and be able to find their positions with an error of one meter, compared with the current GPS error of several meters.

It should in particular benefit in those locations where GPS signals penetrate current struggle, as in high-rise cities.

With Galileo cooperate with the American system, the performance improvements seen Navi work well even in the deepest "urban canyons".

Soon the majority of mobile phones, navigation integrated as standard, and many new companies are likely to spring up around the use of time and location data about the movement.

Colin Paynter, CEO of Astrium UK, said it was time for everyone, even the British government has fully behind Galileo because of the opportunities they are offered.

"We must do more to inspire the downstream applications market in the UK," he told BBC News.

"Over the next year while we work to promote at Astrium in the delivery of infrastructure, government and industry to get out there and Galileo needs. There is great income from UK companies have to be in the future."

Technology Growth Robots In Disguise

In 1950, computer scientist Alan Turing wrote that within 50 years it would become difficult to distinguish between humans and computers. In 2004, Bill Gates claimed that it would take two years to solve the problem of spam e-mail.

Turing proved to be correct, if a few years away on its projections. Gates seems to be simply wrong.

While the free web services, only 6% of Internet-pill-hawking and scam e-mail pitching generated a year ago, automated spam programs use Web e-mail services now produce more than 12% of digital junk mail, with Microsoft's webmail services alone accounting for around 4%.

In pictures: Protect yourself from identity theft

Since webmail spam comes from a reputable company servers, it is more likely to defeat filters, and at the end in users' inboxes. (And the volume of Web-based spam, according to MessageLabs, was affected far less than other spam the shutdown of the notorious McColo hosting companies on the Internet earlier in November, an event that wiped out over two-thirds of all spam .)

The weak link that allows robots to webmail in turn has a spam-tube? The CAPTCHA - the distorted image hateful words and numbers on some websites, the user to create or find an account or a message. A CAPTCHA - or "completely automated public Turing test to computers and people to distinguish from each other" - help websites keep robot spammers (see "Meta Data: An Invisible CAPTCHA").

The problem, according to many security experts, is that computers today are capable of much too many human abilities. In February, Web security firm Websense announced that CAPTCHAs for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo's Web e-mail services, all was broken. Company founder Jeremiah Grossman posted screenshots of a PC software has been successfully hijacked by criminals read the CAPTCHA to jointly documented a Gmail account after another for spamming purposes.

Some security experts even believe that the CAPTCHA-breaking software with Tesseract - an open-source image detection software from Google itself promoted and used in its book-scanning projects - to recognize the distorted characters.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have all the harder to break since the release of their CAPTCHAs. But in July dipped reports have already been beaten that services upgraded "CAPTCHAs too. After another round of patches, claimed the makers of XRumer, a $ 450-spam program, in October that it circumvented the Gmail and Microsoft's CAPTCHAs again.

"It's a cat and mouse that has no end," says David Dagon, a professor of Internet security at Georgia Tech. "The cyber security challenge of the next decade, the distinction between man and computer will be."

Some computer scientists are trying creative approaches. Microsoft last year introduced a CAPTCHA that the user asked to look into a grid of nine images of dogs and cats and asked them to identify the cats. Another experiment showed users pictures of women or men from the field assessment "Hotornot.com" drawn and asked to select the user which three were "hot."

The problem with this clever test of humanity, according to analysis of CAPTCHA hackers sla.ckers.org on the message board, is that both images are accessible sources. It is too easy to use hacker wrote Robert Hansen, also known as RSnake to indicate the source of the images, they use the same tools the CAPTCHA builder and use this index to find breaking the puzzle.

More generally, CAPTCHAs have a bigger problem: Teams of people in India and China together to solve the puzzle for a few cents. Some sites even import CAPTCHAs and entice users to break them in exchange for a pornographic image and then export the results back to a spambot.

But apart from that the human basis of fraud aside, the challenge of building a CAPTCHA, which can not be understood by automated software, much more complex. In August, won the National Federation of A $ 6,000,000 settlement against retail giant Target for using a CAPTCHA Blind on its website that are not visually impaired could be passed through. Then use the blind surfer automatic reading software to interpret pages that represent insurmountable walls CAPTCHAs on Target's website.

Now, with the target sentence must CAPTCHAs also offer an audio option - read a distorted recording of letters and numbers that is often much easier to interpret for a computer as a distorted image.

In a presentation at DefCon hacker conference showed August's security expert, Michael Brooks, how can the audio CAPTCHAs of computers are dismantled. Brooks was a program that he had written that guesses the audio file of the content, these assumptions are superimposed on the playing field level diagram of the noisy audio file. By analyzing the distance between points on the distorted grid CAPTCHA chart and the pitch chart of possible answers to the mystery, his program was able to remove the noise and "listen" to the file only as accurate as a man.

Luis von Ahn, one of the original inventors of the CAPTCHA and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, says that it's still sort out the fight for hope spambots. Last year he founded reCaptcha, a new take on the CAPTCHA, that he says is not yet broken, and is already in use on thousands of sites like Facebook, Twitter and Craigslist.

ReCaptcha takes a new approach: The project will scan and digitize thousands of pages of real-world text, including old books and archives of the New York Times. When interpreting the image-recognition software may not be a passage in the age or faded text, distort it, the picture and it serves as a CAPTCHA. This means that the project is not only a tremendous achievement of digitized documents produced for the purpose of preservation - it filters text and much more difficult for computers to recognize words to find.

"People are still testing our right about 96% of the time," says von Ahn. "Amazingly, they are still much better than computers on some things."

But dealing with reCaptcha still the same problem as any other test of human abilities: access for blind people. And von Ahn admits his audio CAPTCHA, is much harder for humans than its visual counterpart to solve: While computers can not crack, people make mistakes 30% of the time.

In a test of their own superiority, robot, I decided to test me on audio reCaptcha present. The first time I played the file, the stream of sound came out as an indecipherable garble of voices, therefore, played in reverse, and static. I suspect the answer to the test - and failed.

But listening to the audio CAPTCHA again only a few seconds later the numbers started from noisy confusion arising spoken by a mixture of high and low voices. Through to the fourth time, I was able to test more rigorously. In a few minutes I had marked man, had audio test reCaptcha predicted seven out of 10 cases as of Ahn. ? Had adapted to it - my brain was something done that solid software algorithms don t.