Technology Research News (TRN) is featuring an article on the two schools of cryptography, based on the two basic methods of cryptography, namely, computational and probabilistic.

Two schools of cryptography (TRN How it works)

Xen is the new kid in the virtualization arena, receiving well deserved attention from the industry and the academia, with some really big players betting on it.

Xen is an open source virtual machine monitor, or hypervisor, developed by the University of Cambridge. It has a design goal of being able to run 100 full featured OS instances on a single typical computer. Xen provides secure isolation, resource control, quality of service guarantees, and live migration of virtual machines.

Linux Journal is featuring an introductory article on Xen and its design. A nice, moderately technical read: Introduction to the Xen Virtual Machine

Nandagopal presented a small seminar on Swarm Intelligence at my college a few days back. A technique in Artificial Intelligence (his research interest), Swarm Intelligence is based around the study of collective behaviour in decentralised, self-organised, systems. I have attached the presentation slides to this post. Enjoy!

A Wireless LAN (WLAN) is a Wireless Local Area Network that uses radio waves as its carrier. The backbone network is usually wired and provides one or more wireless access points connecting the wireless devices to the wired network. So, communication distance is often constrained by the availability and location of access points. A Wireless Mesh Network on the other hand relies on all the nodes in the network to facilitate communication, thus extending the transmission distance upto the farthest node, where each node has atleast one reachable neighboring node that is closer to the base station. Since each node acts like a repeater in mesh networks, the more the number of nodes, the more the bandwith and the stronger the signal that reaches the access point.

If you are looking for a definition of a Mesh Network -

A mesh network is a network that employs one of two connection arrangements, full mesh topology or partial mesh topology. In the full mesh topology, each node is connected directly to each of the others. In the partial mesh topology, nodes are connected to only some, not all, of the other nodes.

• Wireless Mesh Networking (O'Reilly Network)
• From the Editor: Mesh Networking Matters (TechnologyReview.com)

Last week, PacketHop released its TrueMesh mobile mesh networking software and a suite of multimedia applications that provide instant wireless group communication. According to InformationWeek -

The concept could be especially useful for law-enforcements agencies that need to set up a network around an incident scene. They can use the suite of multimedia applications to instant message each other, send photos of suspects, whiteboard on the photos, and stream video if they have cameras connected to their mobile devices. Additionally, they can locate and track different law-enforcement units that are part of the network on electronic maps.

The beta 1 release of Internet Explorer 7 includes a subset of all the new features that will be delivered in the final version of Internet Explorer 7. This release is intended to enable developers to begin to test the new browser for compatibility with their applications and Web sites. Therefore, many of the important changes in beta 1 are at a “plumbing level” of Internet Explorer and therefore will not be as evident to end users.

Internet Explorer 7 beta 1 features focus on the core security architecture changes that offer dynamic protection against data theft, fraudulent Web sites, and malicious and hidden software, as well as improvements to the platform for Web developers. Architectural enhancements have been made to Internet Explorer 7 to make it less of a target for hackers and other malicious people, which will help users browse with better peace of mind. The release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 — also focused on security — underscored the challenge of striking the right balance between security and compatibility: As security is tightened, compatibility and extensibility tend to suffer. With Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft is working hard to ensure this balance is met effectively to ensure the best possible browsing experience for end users.

In addition, this release offers an early glimpse of how Microsoft Corp. is redesigning Internet Explorer to make everyday tasks easier and providing new tools to give browser users direct access to exactly the information they want. This includes built-in support for Web feeds that employ Really Simple Syndication (RSS), an XML-based format for gathering and distributing content from Web sources such as newspapers, magazines and blogs. Also, the Internet Explorer 7 user interface will continue to undergo significant changes until the final version is released.

Read more at: Goto IE7 Page

Here goes Google's secret test lab on europe. Google uses live human testers to go through their search algorithms and pays them in solid gold.

It's one of the best kept secrets of Google. It's a mystery on Webmasterworld. Also in Europe (France) they don't know what to expect from that odd URL eval.google.com. Click it and you get ...nothing. The site reveals itself only if you have the proper login and if you use a network known by Google. Residues of Eval.google are found on the web, but the full content of the mystery site has never been published before. Here it is: the real story about Eval.Google. They use... humans! Welcome to the first entry in Search Bistro.

Why does Google need a hidden test lab when it is so open to all?

What is it? It's a lab of humans from all over the world (from China to The Netherlands, from Korea to Brasil) They are paid to check search results of Google every day. Most of the employees, called international agents by Google, were recruited through universities all over the world. The aim is to avoid spam, to get the right sites at the top of the listing and to test new features, not shown to the public yet. I call it Google's Secret Evaluation Lab, but the real title is less adventurous; 'Rater Hub Google'. The coming days I will reveal all I know about this lab - must find the time first to do so. To keep you busy, here's a Flash-movie from a part of the site. Stay tuned, next posting will be tomorrow.

Sun Developer Network is featuring a story on Become.com's Java technology Web crawler that maybe -

[T]he most sophisticated, massively scaled Java technology application in existence, obtaining information on over 3 billion web pages and writing well over 8 terabytes of data (and growing) on 30 fully distributed servers in seven days.

The company has patented its Affinity Index Ranking (AIR) algorithm which -

[P]rovides highly targeted search results by understanding the context of pages on the web. AIR integrates advanced concepts from applied physics and engineering dynamics that Become.com will eventually make public.

Jaron Lanier, computer scientist, known as the co-inventor of "Virtual Reality" and that term, can also be called the father of Phenotropic Computing, ie if there is something like that. He claims that the current software model as "protocol adherence" is fundamentally wrong, and that it should be based on "pattern recognition". Phenotropics is, what he calls, "[A] high-risk, speculative, fundamental new approach to computer science."

[P]attern recognition is really starting to come into its own. Sadly, a lot of that's driven by security and defense requirements, but for whatever reason, it's becoming viable. And we're at the point where computers can recognize similarities instead of perfect identities, which is essentially what pattern recognition is about. If we can move from perfection to similarity, then we can start to reexamine the way we build software. So instead of requiring protocol adherence in which each component has to be perfectly matched to other components down to the bit, we can begin to have similarity. Then a form of very graceful error tolerance, with a predictable overhead, becomes possible. The big bet I want to make as a computer scientist is that that's the secret missing ingredient that we need to create a new kind of software.

A thought provoking but controversial passage from the interview -

What's the difference between a bug and a variation or an imperfection? If you think about it, if you make a small change to a program, it can result in an enormous change in what the program does. If nature worked that way, the universe would crash all the time. Certainly there wouldn't be any evolution or life. There's something about the way complexity builds up in nature so that if you have a small change, it results in sufficiently small results; it's possible to have incremental evolution.

This is arguably more philosophy than science (but then who said computer science has anything to do with science ;)). Some of his claims are questionable, his explanations and reasonings confusing. Nevertheless, its a radical new idea, and impels you to think from a whole new perspective.

• Coding from Scratch: A Conversation with Virtual Reality Pioneer Jaron Lanier Part 1, Part 2.
• JARON LANIER: THE CENTRAL METAPHOR OF EVERYTHING?
• WHY GORDIAN SOFTWARE HAS CONVINCED ME TO BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF CATS AND APPLES

On a side note- To quote, "The problem with software is that we've never learned how to control the side effects of choices, which we call bugs." Reminds me of the The Matrix

Project NEon - The Road from Appliances to Network Elements

By early 2004, appliances that combine a small set of related services as an integrated solution were beginning to be offered in the marketplace. Project NEon is the first proponent of driving this approach to its logical extreme. Project NEon investigates a paradigm shift away from special purpose network appliances to an integrated way to architect, operate, and manage data plane network services. We were interested in evaluating the benefits of data flow management and enforcement inside the data center edge. We therefore investigated ways to architect data flow management over high bandwidth network connections feeding data centers, and focused our attention on handling data flows vs. individual packets.

Integrated Network Service Processing Using Programmable Network Devices (Technical Report)

HP Labs is featuring an article on Prof. Josh Fisher HP senior fellow and founder of HP Labs Cambridge.

Some inventors trace their career choice to a lifelong passion. HP Senior Fellow Josh Fisher traces his to a single college lecture.

The lecture sparked his interest in computer architecture and then there was no turning back. The term VLIW, and the VLIW architecture concept, was invented by him in his research group at Yale University in the early 1980s.

• VLIW Pioneer: HP Senior Fellow Josh Fisher
• Joseph A. (Josh) Fisher: Biography (A tiny one at that)

Very Long Instruction Word or VLIW CPU architectures implement a form of instruction level parallelism. Similar to superscalar architectures, it uses several execution units (e.g. two multipliers), which enables the CPU to execute several instructions at the same time (e.g. two multiplications).

Since the very earliest days of computer architecture, some CPUs have added several additional arithmetic logic units (ALUs) to run in parallel. Superscalar CPUs use hardware to decide which operations can run in parallel. VLIW CPUs use software (the compiler) to decide which operations can run in parallel.

Very Long Instruction Word at Wikipedia