Donald Mitchell, a former image specialist for AT&T Bell Labs, has utilized new techniques on original telemetry broadcast from Soviet Venus lander craft - Venera, producing sharper and cleaner images of Earth's sister planet. Space.com is carrying this article. Some of the images can be seen here.
Researchers from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China have devised a distributed information retrieval system that promises to help. The system could eventually become part of the Internet infrastructure as an extension of the domain name service. The story is available here and here.
Chinese authorities have taken another step backwards by approving the use of government controlled video cameras to centrally monitor Shanghai's 1,325 Internet cafés.
The new controls, part of a crackdown also aimed at keeping children out of internet cafes, will begin in every one of the city's 1,325 internet venues by the end of June, the Shanghai Daily newspaper quoted a government official as saying.
The equipment will be used to "spot illegal activities immediately", the paper reported Yu Wenchang, of the Shanghai culture, radio, film and TV administration, as saying.
The article is available here.
The US has led an international crackdown on piracy and warez groups in the last 24 hours. The operation code-named 'fastlink' was carried out in Belgium, the United Kingdom, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Singapore and Sweden. A statement by the DoJ named warez groups including Fairlight, Kalisto, Class, Project X and Echelon.
Technology Review has an eye-opening article on the muscle behind Google's processing firepower. While it's primary intent is towards a comparison between Google's distributed network architecture and that of Akamai, the numbers at play are sometimes just too intense to believe. Read on..
Sify is carrying a fascinating interview with Maharani Gayatri Devi - the 85 year old (former) Queen of Jaipur and former Member of Parliament. An interesting read, complete with anecdotal references & reminiscences; On her time in Tihar during the emergency:
I remember, after dinner every night, we would hear slogans being raised from the male wards. One of them I recall distinctly. It went something like this: 'Desh ki billi/ Chhodo Dilli', 'Jaao Italy/ Hotel chalao!' (Bursts into long giggles). Don't ask me why Italy and why hotel chalao. They would raise the slogan and we in the female ward would join the chorus. Then, I remember, Holi arrived. I invited Rajmata to join some of us to celebrate. We made a cloth doll that was supposed to resemble Indira Gandhi. We set in on fire as Holika the night before Holi.
For some unfathomable reason, Sify have stripped the interviewer's name from the text :S This interview originally appeared in Calcutta's Daily Pioneer.. An Amazon link to Maharani Gayatri Devi's memoirs.. highly likely to be cheaper at your local bookstore :)
Researchers developing new open-source software for Internet Protocol routers are hoping that they can do for routing what Linux did for operating systems. The project, called the Extensible Open Router Platform (XORP), is being developed at the International Computer Science Institute, an independent research group closely affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley. Version 1.0 will be released in June, according to Orion Hodson, one of three developers working on the project.
This is for software-routing as opposed to hardware routing. Therefore, while this might make a dent in the low-end router market, large-scale implementations will find XORP unsuitable. The entire article can be read here.
The XORP homepage can be reached here. XORP is still alpha software..
Yahoo is carrying a press release on the latest record in the Internet2 Land Speed contest.
An international team has set a new Internet2® Land Speed Record by transferring data across nearly 11,000 kilometers at an average rate of 6.25 gigabits per second (Gbps), nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection, from Los Angeles, Calif. to Geneva, Switzerland.
That's roughly 800 megabytes per seconds, which would allow you to transfer an average DVD in about 6 seconds!
Security newsgroups are abuzz with news of a serious TCP vulnerability that could allow an attacker to 'create a Denial of Service condition against existing TCP connections, resulting in premature session termination'. BGP is said to be the most vulnerable to an attack.
James Gosling of Java fame, is to appear at Sun Tech Days 2004 in Hyderabad on May 20-21. Registration is open as I write this..
