As I mentioned in a short n’ sweet March post entitled "Human Cells," cell phones can easily be considered as primitive tools enabling "human cells" to exchange information. Learning about Twitter prompted this analogy, and I imagine that many over the past few months have made the same connection.
In the article below, two writers at the New York Times discuss the role that cell phones play in this "social networking phenomenon," using services like Twitter and now Kyte. As the Web becomes more personable, its developers continue to explore creative ways of appropriating existing technologies for our novel networking needs. In this light, it is no surprise that social networking is leaving the confines of the desktop. (Technically speaking, though, it is not leaving the confines of the computer, since even the most primitive and bulky two-handed 1980s cell phones are astoundingly complex computational devices.)
Social Networking Leaves Confines of the Computer
The social networking phenomenon is leaving the confines of the personal computer. Powerful new mobile devices are allowing people to send round-the-clock updates about their vacations, their moods or their latest haircut.
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intrinsi on April 30th 2007 in Ubiquitous Computing
In The Code Book by Simon Singh, which I read recently, Singh explains the concept of quantum cryptography in such a way that, at least to my mind, it is unbreakable. According to the article below, however, it is not. If true, then is any form of encryption unbreakable? I doubt it, since there must always be a transfer of information and information is, by its very nature, an ordering of data, which potentially, and, in theory, always, reveals a pattern.
Quantum cryptography is hacked
A team of researchers has, for the first time, hacked into a network protected by quantum encryption.
Quantum cryptography uses the laws of quantum mechanics to encode data securely. Most researchers consider such quantum networks to be nearly 100% uncrackable. But a group from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge was able to ‘listen in’ using a sort of quantum-mechanical wiretap. The trick allowed them to tease out about half of the data, in a way that couldn’t be detected by those transmitting or receiving the message.
The group admits that their hack isn’t yet capable of eavesdropping on a real network. "It is not something that currently could attack a commercial system," says Jeffrey Shapiro, a physicist at MIT and one of the authors on the study.
But they expect that one day it will be able to do so, if quantum encryption isn’t adequately adapted to stop such hackers from succeeding.
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intrinsi on April 29th 2007 in Information Science
