Sci-Tech Today

Patches Highlight Problems in Maintaining Older Software

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:51:32 -0500

Microsoft on Tuesday released two security bulletins to fix eight bugs in its Windows and Microsoft Office software. Both bulletins are rated important, but analysts said many of the vulnerabilities could potentially be more severe if exploited.

Joshua Talbot, security intelligence manager at Symantec Security Response, is concerned that in many enterprise environments, Windows XP is still common, and these vulnerabilities are more serious on XP and older systems.

"Since Windows 7, Microsoft has seemed to downgrade file-based vulnerabilities," Talbot said. "In the past, I think many of the vulnerabilities patched this month could have been rated critical, but with protections like DEP and ASLR, these types of vulnerabilities are less of an issue for Windows 7."

A Patch Roller Coaster

Andrew Storms, director of Security operations for nCircle, said IT security teams have been on a Microsoft roller coaster so far in 2010 in regards to bulletins. He pointed to January, which produced two bulletins, including the out-of-band emergency release for Internet Explorer. That was followed by a monster patch of 13 bulletins in February. March will go down in history as a light Patch Tuesday with only two important bulletins.

"Unfortunately, this was the first patch for the newer, safer Office 2007 file format. File-format attacks continue to be a favorite attack vector for earlier versions of Office, especially 2003," Storms said. "Since releasing Office 2007 three years ago, Microsoft hasn't had to patch a single bug in this file format, something I'm sure they are pretty proud of. IT security teams everywhere will be keeping their fingers crossed, hoping that this isn't the beginning of a new streak of vulnerabilities in Office."

For the second time in three months, Microsoft has also issued a warning about a new IE zero-day bug. Like the IE zero-day bug from January that got a lot of...

HP Turns Steve Jobs' Flash Snub Against Apple's iPad

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:12:09 -0500

No watered-down Internet. No sacrifices. That's the promise Hewlett-Packard Vice President and CTO Phil McKinney offered consumers in a blog post about the PC giant's upcoming tablet computer. HP's iPad competitor, he promised, will offer a full web browsing experience in the palm of your hand.

McKinney's blog even posted a demo of HP's upcoming tablet computer running Adobe System's Flash player and its Air application that lets Flash run outside of a browser. The video doesn't compare to the polished Apple commercial showcasing the iPad during the Oscars, but it does offer a sneak peak of what consumers can expect later this year -- including Flash capabilities.

HP's partnership with Adobe on the tablet flies on the face of Apple's iPad strategy. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Steve Jobs decided not to include Flash support in the iPad, insulting Adobe and opening the door for the software maker to find partners to rival Apple in tablets.

A Flashy Tablet Argument

"Flash performance, while critical to vast number of web sites, is not typically a subject whose interest extends much beyond concerned developers and their beleaguered spouses," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT. "But given the enormous interest generated by the iPad, the issue became something of a cause c�l�bre among Apple's fans and foes, Adobe's buddies and enemies, and nondenominational Internet aficionados."

No matter what one thinks of Flash, King said it seems odd to close the iPad, a device designed largely for media consumption, to some of the Internet's best-known media sites. However, Jobs doesn't have a reputation for suffering fools gladly, even when the fools are asking perfectly reasonable questions, King said.

"Beyond whatever Jobs might have hoped to achieve with his comments, we doubt that Phil McKinney's blog post was among his goals. In essence, Jobs' blanket...

Promising Alzheimer's Drug Fails in Study

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:58:07 -0500

A promising Alzheimer's disease drug Pfizer Inc. and a partner are developing failed to work in a late-stage study, a startling disappointment after the potential blockbuster kept symptoms from worsening for a year in a prior test.

Pfizer and partner Medivation Inc. said Wednesday that the experimental drug, Dimebon, failed to meet its primary and secondary goals -- improving thinking ability and overall daily function over six months in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease.

Still, the results don't necessarily spell the end for Dimebon, one of New York-based Pfizer's key prospects. Medivation and Pfizer, the world's biggest drugmaker by revenue, are continuing three studies that could prove Dimebon helps patients in combination with other Alzheimer's drugs or when used for a longer period.

Given strong results of the prior, midstage study, some doctors thought -- or at least hoped -- Dimebon might be able to stop or reverse the mind-robbing disease, which would be a first.

"It's a setback, because it was the drug nearest to approval," said Dr. Ronald Petersen, chairman of the Alzheimer's Association's medical and scientific advisory council. He said it could have been on the market in two years, and anything else will take much longer.

The news drove down shares of Medivation and Pfizer.

Still, Petersen said the result is "not a death knell," as the other Dimebon studies continue.

Dr. Lynn Seely, chief medical officer of San Francisco-based Medivation, said, "The battle did not go well, but the war isn't over."

The four existing drugs, led by Pfizer's heavily advertised Aricept, can only temporarily reduce symptoms: memory problems, confusion, aggression and a general decline in ability to function. The newest one, Namenda, was approved in 2003.

"It is a short-lived, finite benefit, a year, two years, somewhere in that ballpark," that these drugs reduce symptoms, Petersen said.

Already, about 5.3 million Americans...

NASA To Repair Deep-Space Antenna

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:58:24 -0500

The deep space antenna that relayed Neil Armstrong's famous "one giant leap for mankind" declaration from the moon to a rapt American audience will be offline for eight months for repair.

Work begins this week to replace a steel donut-shaped bearing on the aging 230-foot (70-meter)-wide dish at the NASA Deep Space Network site at Goldstone Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert about 150 miles (240 kilometers) northeast of Los Angeles.

The labor-intensive process, which will involve jacking up 9 million pounds (4 million kilograms), will keep the antenna out of service until at least November.

"It's not trivial," said Pete Hames of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is in charge of maintaining the antennas at the Goldstone complex.

Besides California, tracking stations in Australia and Spain make up the Deep Space Network. Together, they point nonstop to the sky, sending commands to robotic spacecraft millions of miles away and listening for their often faint replies -- communication streams filled with images, scientific findings and operational data.

During the repair, interplanetary communications will not be disrupted, said deputy project manager Wayne Sible.

Missions that normally depend on Goldstone, such as the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Saturn explorer Cassini, various Mars spacecraft and even the Voyager 1 probe -- which sailed to the edge of the solar system -- will instead communicate through other giant, bowl-shaped antennas near Madrid, Spain, and Canberra, Australia.

Engineers chose to do the repair this year -- at an estimated cost of $1.25 million -- so that the Goldstone antenna would be ready next year to support the launchings of the Juno spacecraft to Jupiter and the long-delayed Mars Science Laboratory to the red planet.

It's the first major work done on the antenna since the 1980s when it was enlarged to its current size. Engineers said the bearing, which helps it turn sideways,...

Web Standards Group Gets a New Leader

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:17:45 -0500

A former executive with IBM and other tech companies has been named the new CEO of an organization in charge of coordinating the technical specifications behind the World Wide Web.

The Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, is remaining the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and Jeffrey Jaffe, 55, will work under him as its CEO. Jaffe replaces Steve Bratt, 53, who left the position in mid-2009 to run a Web foundation also started by Berners-Lee.

Jaffe brings both business and technical expertise. He has been vice president of technology at IBM Corp. and most recently chief technology officer at Novell Inc. He also was an executive at Bell Labs.

"Just as the Web is constantly growing and changing, so is the community around it and so is the consortium," Berners-Lee said in a statement. "Jeff's broad experience gives him a deep understanding of many different types of organizations, which will be invaluable in managing W3C's evolution."

The consortium, known as W3C, writes the technical rules designed to ensure that Web pages can work using different software, different computers and different languages. For example, it created guidelines on how to format Web pages so that they work more easily with software designed for the blind. It also crafts the basic commands for HTML, the Web's main programming language.

W3C's members include such leading tech companies as Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Google Inc. and institutions such as universities and the Library of Congress. Its main offices are in Cambridge, Mass., Tokyo and the Sophia Antipolis science and tech center near Nice, France.

White House Starts Spreading the Tweets

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:01:01 -0500

#wanttospinWHreporters?

If you're PressSec -- White House press secretary Robert Gibbs' username on Twitter -- you join the powerful social media platform and push your message across the Internet, 140 characters at a time.

Blending behind-the-scenes nuggets with a defense of President Barack Obama's record, White House and administration officials increasingly are communicating through Twitter.

The popular social network is operating as a Web-based clearinghouse for public statements on weighty subjects (the federal budget) and the mundane (personal grocery lists). It's similar to a bulletin board where anyone can post short notes and users cull the pieces they see by choosing to "follow" individuals' account.

Forget press releases. Gibbs and his deputy, Bill Burton, are now sharing news in Twitter messages. So far 35,000 people have signed up to follow Gibbs and more than 6,000 are tracking Burton. Those two officials have a ways to go to catch actor Ashton Kutcher and his 4.6 million followers.

"Wow unreal game... POTUS watched OT in his office right off the Oval Office -- all of us are so proud of our great team," Gibbs tweeted during the men's Olympic hockey finals last Sunday, when the Americans lost the gold medal game to Canada in overtime. POTUS, of course, is the acronym for president of the United States.

Burton offered a midgame, inside-the-Beltway joke: "Tied! White House response, on bgnd, from a low- to midlevel administration official: USA! USA! USA!" (He was referring to a favorite administration request when talking to the press "on background" means the official won't be identified publicly.) After the U.S. loss, Burton noted that America still led the overall medal race.

These are hardly the pronouncements one expects from the president's top spokesmen. But as Obama's team continues an online strategy set in place during the campaign and imported to Pennsylvania Avenue, it seems only...

Not More Quakes, Just More People in Quake Zones

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:58:47 -0500

First the ground shook in Haiti, then Chile and now Turkey. The earthquakes keep coming hard and fast this year, causing people to wonder if something sinister is happening underfoot.

It's not.

While it may seem as if there are more earthquakes occurring, there really aren't. The problem is what's happening above ground, not underground, experts say.

More people are moving into megacities that happen to be built on fault lines, and they're rapidly putting up substandard buildings that can't withstand earthquakes, scientists say.

And around-the-clock news coverage and better seismic monitoring make it seem as if earthquakes are ever-present.

"I can definitely tell you that the world is not coming to an end," said Bob Holdsworth, an expert in tectonics at Durham University in northern England, referring to the number of quakes.

A 7.0 magnitude quake last month killed more than 230,000 people in Haiti. Less than two weeks ago, an 8.8 magnitude quake -- the fifth-strongest since 1900 -- killed more than 900 people in Chile. And on Monday, a strong pre-dawn 6.0 magnitude quake struck rural eastern Turkey, killing at least 51 people.

On average, there are 134 earthquakes a year that have a magnitude between a 6.0 and 6.9, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. This year is off to a fast start with 40 so far -- more than in most years for that time period.

But that's because the 8.8 quake in Chile generated a large number of strong aftershocks, and so many occurring this early in the year skews the picture, said Paul Earle, a seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey.

Also, it's not the number of quakes, but their devastating impacts that gain attention with the death tolls largely due to construction standards and crowding, Earle said.

"The standard mantra is earthquakes don't kill people, buildings do," he said.

There have been more...

IBM Develops Earth-Friendly Plastic

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:01:32 -0500

When you recycle a plastic bottle, it doesn't necessarily become another plastic bottle.

Because of limitations in recycling technology, a common type of plastic used in water bottles and food containers weakens so much when it's recycled that it can't be used again for the same purpose. Some small amount of the plastic might make it into another bottle, but more often than not, it instead becomes synthetic carpet or clothing and can't easily be recycled a second time. So when those products are used up, they end up in landfills.

Researchers from IBM Corp. and Stanford University believe they have developed a way to significantly improve the quality of recycled plastic and strip away those limitations.

A new recycling method the researchers are announcing Tuesday involves a way to break the plastic down so that it can be reused again and again in the same form. It is an advancement that could intrigue beverage companies and help cut the environmental damage from making plastic from scratch.

The innovation is a new family of catalysts that can reduce polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic to its basic building blocks, while retaining its original properties and making it "ridiculously economical" to build it back up again, said Bob Allen, senior manager of chemistry and functional materials for IBM's Almaden research center in Silicon Valley.

The project is in the laboratory on a small scale. Researchers are planning a bigger pilot at the King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology, home to Saudi Arabia's national laboratories. Allen said the technology could be commercially available within five years if the pilot goes well.

A critical question will be the price of the technology.

Andrew Williamson, a director with the venture capital firm Physic Ventures who has seen IBM's research, said it could help solve one of the biggest challenges facing food...

NTSB: Flight Simulators Could Save Lives

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 04:59:42 -0500

Accident investigators say new flight simulators could help correct the biggest killer in aviation: pilots who can't recover from out-of-control situations like the one that killed 50 people in a crash near Buffalo last year.

Pilots at airlines receive almost no hands-on training in how to recover from aerodynamic stalls and other extreme scenarios, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The reason for the glaring shortfall is that current flight simulators, the backbone of airline training programs, cannot accurately reproduce such calamities.

Years of research in the military and NASA has led to new simulators that accurately represent how planes behave in stalls, severe icing and other crash scenarios, according to the NTSB and scientists -- but there is no federal requirement to use those simulators.

The machines could help with one of the most vexing and deadly problems facing aviation. A USA TODAY review of NTSB accident reports over the past decade found that 317 of the 433 airline fatalities on U.S. carriers since 2000 -- or 73% -- could have been prevented with better simulator training. Around the world, planes that went out of control and crashed killed 1,991 people from 1999 through 2008, according to Boeing. That is more than twice that of the second-biggest category, accidentally flying into a mountain or the ground.

In the crash near Buffalo on Feb. 12, 2009, a pilot jerked the plane into a steep climb that stalled the wings. The proper way to recover would have been to lower the plane's nose, but the pilot kept trying to pull the nose up, according to the NTSB. The plane struck a house, killing all 49 aboard and a man in the home.

Expanded simulator training "is crucial if we want pilots to recognize and respond appropriately to these deadly stall upset events," NTSB Chairwoman...

Web-Connected TV: A Distant Dream for App Developers

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 08:59:18 -0500

Last year, Mark Phillip unveiled Are You Watching This?!, a tool for mobile phones that alerts sports fans to can't-miss, in-progress games, such as baseball no-hitters. Thousands of users have bought the 99-cent application and downloaded it to their Apple iPhones and other handsets. Phillip also wants to create a version of Are You Watching This?! for Web-connected TVs, which he calls the "Holy Grail" for this type of content, but that's been a struggle. "It's a tough platform to build on," says Phillip, a resident of Austin, Tex.

By the end of 2010, Americans will own more than two million Web-connected TVs, which let users access online services such as Twitter and Pandora with the same remote control they use to switch channels. Yet while developers have managed to create a wide range of apps for mobile phones, they're daunted by the prospect of building software tools for TVs. There's no easy way to create an app that can run on the wide range of sets, says Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey. "Nobody wants to get in the business of developing separate widgets for Samsung, LG, Vizio, and Sony," he says.

In addition to all those TVs, there's a growing range of set-top boxes, each with its own software. There's Roku and its Channel Store, which bundles movie-streaming services from Netflix and others with handy tools, like a Facebook photo viewer. Vudu, recently acquired by Wal-Mart, plans an Apps platform for watching video podcasts such as Diggnation. This summer, the Boxee Box by D-Link will bid to become the first hardware of its kind to let developers charge for programs through the TV.

To companies such as Internet music provider Pandora, each new outlet for TV applications presents a further opportunity to reach a fresh audience. The Oakland [Calif.]-based company...