Perhaps even a supercomputer needs a little time to get loosened during a big performance. After an admirable but not perfect round of Jeopardy on Monday in which it finished tied for the lead, IBM‘s Watson computer crushed human champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Tuesday’s episode and takes a huge lead into the final episode tonight.

Last night’s play began with Watson and Rutter at $5,000 apiece, with Jennings trailing at $2,000. After Watson’s dominance, last night’s show ended with the machine having tallied $35,734 to $10,400 for Rutter and $4,800 for Jennings.

Watson elegantly saw off the puny humans with responses on the likes of Franz Liszt, dengue fever, violin, Rachmaninoff and albinism. Even host Alex Trebek seemed spent: with Watson wanting to wage the extremely specific amount of $6,435 on a Daily Double, the laconic Trebek simply replied, “I won’t ask” (naturally, Watson was spot on here too). [TIME]

Though Watson steamrolled the best competition humanity could provide, its foibles are as telling as its dominance—especially when the seemingly unstoppable machine makes mistakes that would be laughable from a human contestant.

Watson’s one notable error came right at the end, when it was asked to name the city that features two airports with names relating to World War II. Jennings and Rutter bet almost all their money on Chicago, which was the correct answer. Watson went for Toronto. Even so, the error showed another side to Watson’s intelligence: knowing that it was unsure about the answer, the machine wagered less than $1000 on its answer. [New Scientist]

(more…)

Stuxnet seems to become scarier every time you hear about it. The sophisticated piece of malware came to the world’s attention in September; shortly thereafter we heard that it was perfectly designed to attack nuclear centrifuges, and in fact had disrupted some nuclear research in Iran. Now comes more news about how it works, and who might be using it next.

The security group Symantec has been trying to analyze and understand the waves of Stuxnet attacks against Iran, and now its researchers have found the base of the attacks, according to Symantec’s Orla Cox.

The new research, which analysed 12,000 infections collected by various anti-virus firms, shows that the worm targeted five “industrial processing” organisations in Iran. “These were the seeds of all other infections,” said Ms Cox. The firm was able to identify the targets because Stuxnet collected information about each computer it infected, including its name, location and a time stamp of when it was compromised. [BBC News]

Though Symantec isn’t naming the five targets in Iran, another security expert studying Stuxnet’s code, Ralph Langner, told CNET the likely target of the whole attack was the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant.

(more…)

NOTE: Before tonight’s big match begins, check out our feature, “Who’s Smarter, a Human or a Computer? Round 9: Jeopardy,” on the other human games that AI programmers have tried to perfect—and the ones where humans maintain the advantage.

I can already hear the Jeopardy theme music (which isn’t my ringtone, I swear!). Tonight, one of the highest-profile man versus machine contests in years begins, as Jeopardy will air the matches pitting former flesh-and-blood champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter against Watson, the question-and-answer supercomputer by IBM.

Since traveling to IBM’s research center for the practice/demonstration match (which Watson led when play stopped after 15 clues), we here at DISCOVER have been simultaneously excited for the match and anxious about the prospects for our species’ chosen representatives to come out on top. Jennings apparently feels the same way:

(more…)

It’s easy to feel both amazed and utterly overwhelmed by the amount of information that humans have created in the digital age. And now, researchers have calculated a number to go with those feelings. A big one.

As of 2007, humans had the capacity to store 295 exabytes. An exabyte is 10¹⁸ bytes. If you think of the gigabytes (a billion bytes) in which your hard drive space might be measured, an exabyte is a billion of those gigabytes. Another size comparison: Astronomers, by necessity, are designing new information processing techniques to help them grapple with the coming age of “petascale” astronomy, because they’re starting to get more information than they can handle. “Exa” is the prefix after “peta”; it’s a thousand times more.

Or, simply, a stack of CDs storing 295 exabytes of information would reach beyond the moon.

Scientists calculated the figure by estimating the amount of data held on 60 analogue and digital technologies during the period from 1986 to 2007. They considered everything from computer hard drives to obsolete floppy discs, and x-ray films to microchips on credit cards. The survey covers a period known as the “information revolution” as human societies transition to a digital age. It shows that in 2000 75% of stored information was in an analogue format such as video cassettes, but that by 2007, 94% of it was digital. [BBC News]

(more…)

Over the last two years (and perhaps as long as four), hackers probably based in China have been targeting several huge multinational energy companies and using long-established techniques to extract information. That’s according to the computer security firm McAfee, which helped some of the companies fight back against the ongoing wave of attacks it has dubbed “Night Dragon.”

“We have confirmed that five companies have been attacked,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee’s vice president for threat research. He said he suspected that at least a dozen companies might have been affected by the team of computer hackers seemingly based in Beijing and who appeared to work during standard business hours there. “These people seemed to be more like company worker bees rather than free-spirited computer hackers,” he said. “These attacks were bold, even brazen, and they left behind a trail of evidence.” [The New York Times]

In a blog post about the attacks, McAfee CTO George Kurtz notes that the hackers took advantage of techniques that have been around for more than a decade. In fact, he says, their simplicity helped them to evade security software.

During the last two years — and up to four years — the hackers had access to the computer networks, focusing on financial documents related to oil and gas field exploration and bidding contracts, said Alperovitch. They also copied proprietary industrial processes. “That information is tremendously sensitive and would be worth a huge amount of money to competitors,” said Alperovitch. [Reuters]

(more…)

Rupert Murdoch—head of NewsCorp, the owner of Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post—has just launched The Daily, his “iPad newspaper” built from the ground up. So will people soon be reading original newspaper content on Apple’s slick tablet, and will they being paying for it?

Early reaction to The Daily is coming out, with some focusing particularly on what the product is not. From the tech blog Mashable:

Murdoch and his cohorts stressed that The Daily is, first and foremost, a newspaper. Most content will be released in a single update in the morning, but breaking news will be added throughout the day and could include, for instance, a live feed from Twitter to deliver updates, executive editor Jesse Angelo said. There are two problems with this strategy: one, that most iPad owners don’t use their iPads to access breaking news, and that The Daily, in its current iteration, isn’t really a newspaper; it’s a magazine. [Mashable]

The Daily—available by subscription for a buck a week or $40 for a year—boasts an opinion page, horoscopes, gossip items, and other telltale signs of Murdoch’s love of the old-school newspaper. But, some reviewers note, its carousel layout—similar to iTunes—makes The Daily feel like several disconnected sections rather than a unified whole.

Open the app and you’re presented with a carousel navigation much like “cover flow” in iTunes. I’d imagine the designers felt that was the simplest way to give a good overview of all the content, and subconsciously remind the user that this is an iTunes-style paid content environment – though you can’t burn your existing digital publications and view them through the Daily. [The Guardian]

(more…)

As usual, Conan O’Brien may have said it best: “If you want people to stay at home and do nothing, you should turn the internet back on.”

The Egyptian government seemingly has learned that shutting down the Internet is no way to get protesters to be quiet, and today it turned the Web back on after protests succeeded in spite of the five-day blackout.

“Egyptian Internet providers returned to the Internet at 09:29:31 UTC (11:29 a.m. Cairo time),” said a blog post by Net monitoring firm Renesys today. Indeed, a variety of Egyptian Web sites, including the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, the Central Bank of Egypt, and the Egyptian Stock Exchange are available. And Twitter activity relating to Egypt is surging. [CNET]

Cell phones are coming back online for many people, too, though it’s not clear yet when everything will be fully restored.

In the end, the government’s attempt to kill the Internet proved a dismal failure. The world rallied to give disconnected Egyptians ways to work around the blackout, and the suppression of free speech fueled the fire of protest.

(more…)

When experts talk about discarding today’s silicon-based computer chips and building next-generation electronics out of new materials, they’re usually talking about graphene, and for good reason–the one-atom-thick layers of carbon can behave like semiconductors and have already been used in experimental transistors. But researchers from a Swiss lab think they have a material that can trump both silicon and graphene. World, meet molybdenite.

The researchers from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) note that the mineral looks similar to mica, and has a layered molecular structure that allows it to sheer off easily into thin sheets.

Molybdenite, the researchers said, is abundant in nature and is currently used in steel alloys and in lubricants, but it has not previously been studied for use in electronics. “It’s a two-dimensional material, very thin and easy to use in nanotechnology. It has real potential in the fabrication of very small transistors, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and solar cells,” said EPFL Professor Andras Kis, adding that molybdenite (MoS2) is far more compact than silicon, while still allowing electrons to circulate freely. [PC Pro]

(more…)

Supplies are dwindling, journalists are being arrested, and protests continue in Egypt today, with a mass demonstration planned for tomorrow. And still, the nation is Internet silent—almost. We remarked on Friday about this historic act of government internet censorship, but just how did the Egyptian government manage to shut down nearly all Internet communication coming out of the country?

It wasn’t a “kill switch,” experts say—the Egyptian government didn’t push a button and take down the country’s Internet service providers. Rather, Egyptian ISPs all must have licenses with the state and follow the government’s regulations, however draconian they may be. So if the Telecommunication Regulatory Authority called and told them to shut down, they didn’t have much choice.

That comports with the data published by Renesys, a net monitoring firm, which saw individual ISPs go dark within minutes of one another. “First impressions: this sequencing looks like people getting phone calls, one at a time, telling them to take themselves off the air,” wrote Renesys’s chief scientist James Cowie. “Not an automated system that takes all providers down at once; instead, the incumbent leads and other providers follow meekly one by one until Egypt is silenced.” [Wired]

The fact that so much censorship happened so quickly is a result of the relative simplicity of Egypt’s Internet, Cowie said in an interview with Scientific American.

“If you look at a complex system such as those in the United States or Canada, you might ask, ‘How many phone calls would I have to make to shut it down?’ It probably wouldn’t be possible. Most of the people you would call operate independent of the government and wouldn’t even listen to you. In a place like Egypt there’s a lot less diversity in that ecosystem. There were just a few key providers, they’re all licensed by the government.” [Scientific American]

(more…)

You know it’s getting serious when people aren’t using Facebook. The social networking giant now says it has noticed significantly reduced traffic from Egypt as a result of the Egyptian government’s attempt to shut down its country’s Internet this week to quash political protests. Though we’ve seen governments attempt to censor the Internet in times of uprising before (like during the 2009 Iranian election), Forbes says this is “the first time in modern history a major Internet economy is being shut down.”

Mobile phone networks have reportedly been disrupted, leaving millions without access to text messaging or phone calls. The country’s key Internet Service Providers are also off the air, says James Cowie, the chief technology officer of Internet monitoring firm Renesys on his blog. “Virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide. [Forbes]

Indeed, Cowie says, this is something new compared to other government internet censorship:

Similar demonstrations and Web outages are occurring in Tunisia, though Cowie noted that the Egypt Internet downtime “is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make Internet connectivity painfully slow.” [PC Magazine]

Thoughts of a government being able to just “turn off the Internet” has people in other countries frightened, but it was particularly easy to achieve in Egypt.

(more…)

“IPocalypse.” Disasters these days need a clever nickname, and so the worrying shortage of available new Internet protocol addresses now has one of its own. But what’s going on here, and how worried should we be about the Internet rotting away?

What’s the problem?

You probably don’t have it memorized like your Social Security number, but chances are you’re at least aware of your computer’s IP (Internet protocol) address—the code that identifies an individual hardware device hooked up to the Internet. The problem is, that number isn’t long enough. We’re approaching the maximum number of possible address under the current system—quickly. Countdown clocks that track these addresses predict that the last huge blocks of them will be given out around the end of this month.

When phone companies saw impending trouble in the past with too few new phone numbers available, they added new area codes to overburdened areas. But for Internet companies, it’s not that easy: The current protocol, called IPv4, allows for just more than 4 billion addresses.

In this case, there is no plan B. Years — decades, really — of foot-dragging mean that the world’s hardware manufacturers, OS coders, website builders and Internet service providers are stuck with the existing system. When the last block of IP addresses, as they’re known, is handed out, that’s it. [Technology Review]

Really? Just 4 billion?

With world population creeping toward 7 billion and the percentage of people on the Internet skyrocketing, it seems terribly short-sighted to employ a system that allows just 4 billion addresses (which were subdivided early on into so-called “/8 blocks” of 16 million addresses each). The disconnect exists because we’re still operating on a system that dates back to the dawn of the Internet, when its modern incarnation would be nearly inconceivable.

IPv4, instituted in 1983, allows for only about 4.3 billion addresses, and from the beginning there have only been 256 of the /8 blocks. Most are already allocated, and many are reserved for special uses such as multicasting of video streams. IPv6 has a much larger address space, which allows for an almost limitless number of unique addresses. The IANA allocates IPv6 addresses in a similar way to IPv4, except in much larger “/12″ blocks. [PC World]

(more…)

In life, most people try to avoid entanglement, be it with unsavory characters or alarmingly large balls of twine. In the quantum world, entanglement is a necessary step for the super-fast quantum computers of the future.

According to a study published by Nature today, physicists have successfully entangled 10 billion quantum bits, otherwise known qubits. But the most significant part of the research is where the entanglement happened–in silicon–because, given that most of modern-day computing is forged in the smithy of silicon technology, this means that researchers may have an easier time incorporating quantum computers into our current gadgets.

Quantum entanglement occurs when the quantum state of one particle is linked to the quantum state of another particle, so that you can’t measure one particle without also influencing the other. With this particular study, led by John Morton at the University of Oxford, UK, the researchers aligned the spins of electrons and phosphorus nuclei–that is, the particles were entangled.

(more…)

The road ahead looks smooth for automatic driving systems. For the first time, Volvo, in partnership with a European Commission research project called Safe Road Trains for the Environment (SARTRE), has successfully road-tested a linking system that allows drivers to relax and tune out.

In such systems, cars form “road trains” behind a professional driver, creating a semi-autonomous convoy–essentially, a truck and car conga line that could improve highway congestion and inefficient gasoline use.

SARTRE platoons are guided by a lead vehicle, which is … followed by a succession of other, computer-controlled cars that are electronically tethered in the convoy. Each vehicle in the platoon measures the distance, speed and direction of the vehicle directly in front, adjusting its movements to stay in formation…. Unsurprisingly, there’s a metric horsetonne of technology that goes into making this possible. Each platoon car uses cameras to detect the position of the vehicle in front, all have drive-by-wire technology that allows the steering, accelerator and brakes to be controlled by a computer, and all communicate using a car-to-car wireless network. [CNET UK]

Hit the jump for more info, and a video demonstration.

(more…)

Live, from IBM’s Thomas J. Watson  Research Center: This is Jeopardy!

Today, IBM rolled out its Jeopardy-playing computer, a whiz machine named Watson that was four years in the works. In today’s demonstration match for the media Watson played against Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, the two great (human) Jeopardy champions who will provide opposition for Watson in a two-day exhibition match. That man versus machine faceoff will air in February, and carries a prize of a million dollars. Bad news, humans: In today’s exhibition of about 15 questions, Watson tallied $4,400, compared to $3,400 for Jennings and $1,200 Rutter.

On stage, Watson was represented by a screen displaying its avatar (pictured) behind a podium, where a human player’s torso would be. Its avatar is a mobile graphic of the Earth with aurora-like lines swirling around it. When Watson was confident in its answer those swirls were shaded green; when it wasn’t they turned an orange hue. The questions were fed in plain text to Watson, but it had to wait the same amount of time to ring in as the human players did. To make the game fair, it also had to trigger a mechanical signaling button. Watson spoke in a stilted computerized voice–and was almost never wrong.

The machine started off on a roll in the category “Chicks Dig Me,” about women and archaeology. Jehrico. Agatha Christie. Mary Leakey. Crete. Watson fired off the answers so quickly it looked like it might blow its puny human competition off the stage. Fortunately for our species pride, Ken and Brad recovered with some right answers of their own.

(more…)

UPDATE: Today (Tuesday) the FCC voted to pass the net neutrality regulations mentioned toward the bottom of this post. The rules include the provisions that wireless and traditional Internet be treated separately, and generally made everyone unhappy. However, expect a fight in Congress to either overturn the rules or strip the FCC of its authority in this sphere.

Behind closed doors, wireless providers are talking about a future that’s a net neutrality advocate’s worst nightmare.

Last week the tech companies Allot Communications and Openet, which provide products for large carriers like AT&T and Verizon, demonstrated new products in a web seminar, some details of which have leaked out. The PowerPoint slides detail a plan to monitor your online behavior and charge you for your use of certain applications. For example:

In the seventh slide of the … PowerPoint, a Vodafone user would be charged two cents per MB for using Facebook, three euros a month to use Skype and $0.50 monthly for a speed-limited version of YouTube. But traffic to Vodafone’s services would be free, allowing the mobile carrier to create video services that could undercut NetFlix on price. [Wired]

(more…)