Super-Repellent Plastic

With GE’s new plastic, self-washing buildings, cheap diagnostic chips, and free-flowing honey jars are possible

If you’ve ever despaired over getting the last drop of ketchup or detergent out of a plastic bottle — or happen to be a microfluidics researcher wondering how you’ll ever mass-produce a cheap diagnostics chip — scientists at GE may have a plastic for you.

Company researchers have come up with a way to process a common polymer so that it repels fluid, even drops of honey roll right off. The resulting property is called “superhydrophobicity” — or extreme repelling of water-based fluids — beyond even that of a freshly waxed car.

While several existing engineered materials behave this way, the GE accomplishment is noteworthy because it was done with an inexpensive plastic, GE’s Lexan, that’s normally “hydrophilic,” meaning water spreads out on contact, not something that’s “hydrophobic” to start with, such as Teflon or silicone-based materials. These latter materials are far more expensive compared with Lexan, a ubiquitous thermoplastic used in products ranging from CDs and DVDs to automotive headlamps, food storage containers, and common household appliances.

While GE is not predicting specific applications yet, a few are theoretically possible. A cheap superhydrophobic plastic could be used in food containers from which every last bit of ketchup or syrup would flow right out. It could also allow for a building panel that repels water so efficiently that rain would wash away dirt — making it essentially self-cleaning.

Such a material could be a bonanza for medicine, too. In the field of microfluidics, superhydrophobic materials are needed so that tiny volumes of blood or other body fluids can flow more easily through micrometer-scale channels. Although some superhydrophobic materials are currently available, they’re expensive enough to preclude visions of diagnostic gadgets that you could buy in a drugstore. A cheap plastic, though, could make such a disposable diagnostic chip feasible. “It is a big deal and it is important for the microfluidics applications,” says Neelesh Patankar, a mechanical engineer and microfluidics at Northwestern University.

GE has not published its research achievement, out of intellectual property considerations. But the company believes it’s onto something entirely new. “To our knowledge, most if not all of the superhydrophobic materials that we had read about until the middle of last year [when the company made its first prototype] were starting with materials that were already hydrophobic. It’s a lot easier to make them superhydrophobic. We started in the hole, with something that is hydrophilic. That is what was unique,” says Margaret Blohm, advanced technology leader for GE’s nanotechnology lab at its Global Research Center in Niskayuna, NY. “We have turned hydrophilic into superhydrophobic. We are probably the first group to do this.”

GE accomplished this by modifying a material that’s a mainstay of its plastics business. And they took their inspiration from the leaves of the lotus plant, which is naturally superhydrophobic; microscopic inspection of lotus leaves reveals their nanocrystalline wax structure. The lotus leaf surface has cells 5-10 micrometers wide, on top of which are tiny wax crystals that are tens of nanometers wide. On a lotus leaf, water beads look almost like perfect spheres.

GE set out to mimic this pattern on the surface of its polycarbonate material, essentially by “roughening” the surface in a specific way. Tao Deng, materials scientist at GE, is tight-lipped about the process, but says it was done with a “chemical treatment of the surface.”

GE succeeded with its prototype last summer, but only began discussing the advance in recent weeks. One of the significant downsides is that the process leaves the plastic opaque, not transparent. That means it would not work for plastic windows or clear food containers. But a clear version is not far off. “That’s coming,” Deng says.

Even getting the opaque versions into real products will take some time. GE estimates it will be at least five years before commercialization, once the manufacturing issues are resolved. Five years isn’t that much time, though — about how long it takes for all the ketchup to drip out of today’s plastic bottles.

Ultrafast Imaging

AFM, a nanotech workhorse, just got far faster and more precise.

By Kevin Bullis

A novel instrument for scanning and manipulating molecules could open up new possibilities for nanotechnology, promising, among other things, far faster imaging of biomolecules and nanoelectronic materials.

The new microscope, invented by researchers at Georgia Tech and Stanford University, could be a dramatic improvement on atomic force microscopy, one of the main tools of nanotechnology. Much of nanotechnology is made possible by scanning tunneling microscopy, including atomic force microscopes (AFM), which provide detailed information about the atomic and molecular features of materials and nano devices. AFM, which use cantilever probes with perpendicular, ultrasharp tips to scan a material line by line, have also been used to fabricate nanostructures. But the process is slow, a drawback that has limited it largely to the research lab.

The new version of AFM uses a probe that scans materials 100 times faster than existing AFM. What’s more, the technology can simultaneously measure characteristics such as stiffness and stickiness while imaging the material. That type of information can, for example, help engineers design computer chips that use new nanomaterials, says Levent Degertekin, lead researcher on the project and professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech.

[Click here to view images from the AFM.]

The new probe replaces a conventional AFM cantilever with a drum-like membrane from which a tip extends that scans the material. In one scanning mode, as the tip moves above a surface, it lightly taps the material. With each tap, the instrument gathers precise information about both the tip’s position and the forces acting on it, sensing the shape of the material and how stiff and sticky it is, as the tip comes into contact, then pulls away. The new probe is faster than conventional AFM because, instead of using bulky actuators, it moves the tip by using electrostatic forces between the membrane and an electrode.

The design of the membrane-based probes makes them relatively easy to arrange in arrays in which each probe can move independently, Degertekin says. One possible application of such an array is fast parallel printing, in which each probe tip is used something like the nib of an old-fashioned fountain pen — an existing AFM technique called dip-pen lithography. This sort of printing might be used for future generations of electronics that have features too small to be made with current techniques, he says. A more immediate application is in printing arrays of biomolecules for biological assays.

The new device, which can be retrofitted into an existing AFM, could be in use by researchers within a year, says Degertekin. “People can take our device, put it on their own AFM, and they can achieve much better results,” he says. More advanced AFM machines in future years can take better advantage of the full range of the probe’s capabilities.

Eventually, the new probe might help AFM break out of the lab and into more commercial projects, such as chip testing. “Right now the scanning probe area is primarily dedicated to research applications, and the biggest reason for that is throughput,” says Chad Mirkin, the Northwestern University professor of chemistry who pioneered dip-pen lithography. Advances in the speed of AFM such as this one, he says, could start to change this.

Faster than Fiber !!

A new wireless technology could beat fiber optics for speed in some applications.

By Kate Greene

Atop each of the Trump towers in New York City, there’s a new type of wireless transmitter and receiver that can send and receive data at rates of more than one gigabit per second — fast enough to stream 90 minutes of video from one tower to the next, more than one mile apart, in less than six seconds. By comparison, the same video sent over a DSL or cable Internet connection would take almost an hour to download.

This system is dubbed “WiFiber” by its creator, GigaBeam, a Virginia-based telecommunications startup. Although the technology is wireless, the company’s approach — high-speed data transferring across a point-to-point network — is more of an alternative to fiber optics, than to Wi-Fi or Wi-Max, says John Krzywicki, the company’s vice president of marketing. And it’s best suited for highly specific data delivery situations.

This kind of point-to-point wireless technology could be used in situations where digging fiber-optic trenches would disrupt an environment, their cost be prohibitive, or the installation process take too long, as in extending communications networks in cities, on battlefields, or after a disaster.

Blasting beams of data through free space is not a new idea. LightPointe and Proxim Wireless also provide such services. What makes GigaBeam’s technology different is that it exploits a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Their systems use a region of the spectrum near visible light, at terahertz frequencies. Because of this, weather conditions in which visibility is limited, such as fog or light rain, can hamper data transmission.

GigaBeam, however, transmits at 71-76, 81-86, and 92-95 gigahertz frequencies, where these conditions generally do not cause problems. Additionally, by using this region of the spectrum, GigaBeam can outpace traditional wireless data delivery used for most wireless networks.

Because so many devices, from Wi-Fi base stations to baby monitors, use the frequencies of 2.4 and 5 gigahertz, those spectrum bands are crowded, and therefore require complex algorithms to sort and route traffic — both data-consuming endeavors, says Jonathan Wells, GigaBeam’s director of product development. With less traffic in the region between 70 to 95 gigahertz, GigaBeam can spend less time routing data, and more time delivering it. And because of the directional nature of the beam, problems of interference, which plague more spread-out signals at the traditional frequencies, are not likely; because the tight beams of data will rarely, if ever, cross each other’s paths, data transmission can flow without interference, Wells says.

Until a few years ago, the use of these electromagnetic frequencies that have enabled Gigabeam to build a higher-speed network, were off-limits for two reasons. First, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) approved public use of these high frequencies only in 2003, says Wells. When the FCC finalized the agreement in 2005, GigaBeam began to ship prototypes.

Second, there was no cost-effective material for making transmitters at such frequencies. Wireless transmitters that send traditional signals are made of silicon, which can’t operate at frequencies in GigaBeam’s range. Within the past few years, Wells says, manufacturing techniques for making high-frequency radio transmitters out of gallium arsenide have improved significantly, making the technology less cost prohibitive.

While working at these frequencies permits high-speed data rates, there’s an intrinsic physical challenge: molecules in the atmosphere absorb energy at certain frequencies. To deal with this, GigaBeam exploits those frequencies that are less susceptible to absorption by air and water molecules.

But the technology is still susceptible to heavy rains. In arid conditions, Gigabeam’s signal can travel about 10 miles, but in areas where heavy rains occur, says Wells, the company’s radios are only guaranteed to push a signal for about a mile, with the transmission will be down for a maximum of only five minutes per year.

Even with its advances, though, Gigabeam faces the same problem as other point-to-point technologies: creating a network with an unbroken sight line. Still, it could offer some businesses an alternative to fiber optics. Currently, a GigaBeam link, which consists of a set of transmitting and receiving radios, cost around $30,000. But Krzywicki says that improving technology is driving down costs. In addition to outfitting the Trump towers, the company has deployed a link on the campuses of Dartmouth College and Boston University, and two links for San Francisco’s Public Utility Commission.

Citing possible copyright violations, Apple has served notice on two user web sites.

By Associated Press

SAN JOSE, California (AP) — Two busy Web sites that focus on Apple Computer Inc.’s Mac OS X operating system went silent Friday, just days after they featured links to information on how to hack the software and run it on non-Apple PCs.

The OSx86 Project Web site stated Apple had served it with a notice on Thursday citing violations of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the site was reviewing all of its discussion forum postings as a result. The site has always aimed to adhere to copyright laws and is working with Apple to ensure no violations exist, according to a statement by the site administrator.

The other Web site, Win2OSX.net, was completely shut down. Administrators there could not be immediately reached for comment.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment Friday on the DMCA-based notices. The federal law prohibits anyone from distributing software or hardware that can circumvent copy protection mechanisms. The law has been criticized at times as being unconstitutional and too broad.

Apple does not authorize the use of its Mac OS on machines other than its own, and earlier this week, the sites posted links to the Web site of a hacker who claimed his software patches could be used to run a version of the Mac OS on a non-Apple machine.

The hacking endeavors are, for now, relegated to a small, technically savvy set, but it underscores a risk Apple faces if a pirated, functional version eventually becomes as accessible and straightforward as installing other software on a computer.

It’s a risk that became more apparent after Apple decided to make a historic transition from Power PC chips to Intel Corp.-based chips, the same type that its rivals use in predominant Windows-based PCs.

Apple so far has two Intel-based computers on the market and plans to migrate the rest of its Macs to the Intel platform by the end of the year.

The Mac maker had anticipated some people would try to crack its new Intel-compatible OS X operating system and deeply embedded some warnings to would-be hackers in the software, including one written in the form of a poem.

The OSx86 Project Web site, which was formed after Apple announced its switch to Intel in June 2005, was among the many Mac-user sites that posted a copy of the poetic warning earlier this week.

Google’s Private Lives
Its new desktop search application would make your personal files available for government searches without your knowledge.

By Dylan Tweney

A new search technology from Google makes it possible for law enforcement officials to examine personal documents from your hard drive, without your knowing it, according to the digital-rights advocacy organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Released last week, Google Desktop 3, the latest version of the company’s desktop search utility, adds a “Search Across Computers” feature that automatically uploads files from a user’s computer onto Google’s servers. Then, when a search is performed on any computer owned by the user, Google Desktop will pull search results from both the Web and information stored on all the user’s computers.

Certainly, such a feature will be handy for anyone trying to coordinate a project from different locations. Yet the idea of turning over private files to a public company is worrisome to privacy advocates. In fact, in a press release, the EFF has urged consumers to avoid the Search Across Computers feature because it would make consumers’ files more vulnerable to subpoenas from government investigators as well as private litigants.

Of course, it’s headlines news that Google (as well as its competitors) has already given in to pressure from a national government, by excluding censored content from its Chinese portal (Google.cn). Although so far the company has resisted a U.S. Department of Justice subpoena asking it to turn over logs for millions of recent search terms, smaller subpoenas — such as those for the search history of a particular user’s IP address — don’t make the news, because they’re often sealed.

EFF staff attorney Kevin Bankston says that files on a service provider’s computers, such as those stored by Google, would be easier for law enforcement to access because a subpoena would be issued to the provider, rather than the user. In some circumstances, as with Patriot Act requests, Google would not even be required to notify the user that their files were being turned over. Because of the secrecy of such investigations, it’s impossible to know how many such subpoenas have actually been issued. However, says Bankston, “It’s fair to assume that Google — and all the other search engines — have received and complied with this kind of request in the past.”

“This is every text document on your computer that you’ve set Google to index,” says Bankston. “Unless you’ve individually marked all of your private files [not to be indexed], you are going to be putting your most private data on Google’s servers.”

Google spokesperson Sonya Boralv counters that the company is taking measures to protect the security and privacy of its users. For one thing, the Search Across Computer feature gives users control over what they upload to the Google servers, allowing users to exclude specific files or types of files. Furthermore, Google Desktop encrypts files before transmitting them to and from Google, and they’re stored in encrypted form on Google’s servers. In other words, they can’t be easily snooped in transit. Finally, Google deletes personal files from its servers as soon as they’re downloaded to a user’s computer; and if the files aren’t downloaded, Google deletes them after 30 days.

However, Bankston points out that, since Google Desktop uploads files whenever they’re accessed, frequent users will be continually refreshing Google’s servers with the latest copies of their personal files. Google provides a button for users to clear all their files stored on its servers, but deleted files may reside there for as long as 30 days, according to Google’s Boralv.

To be fair, since Google Desktop is intended for power users, its Search Across Computers feature is not turned on until a user indicates his or her acceptance of the company’s privacy policy. “We’ve tried to take really proactive steps to make sure that people know where their data is going, and how it’s going to be handled,” says Boralv. “Our role as a service provider is to make it really easy for them to make an informed decision.”

Despite these controls, though, privacy advocates are concerned that most users won’t understand the implications of uploading their files to a public server. Boralv says that Google has a key to unlock the encrypted files stored on its servers. And, as its privacy policy states, the company will turn over personal information, including users’ stored files, to comply with law enforcement requests. And the ongoing controversy over the federal government’s secret surveillance of U.S. citizens makes such a possibility more than just theoretical.

“There’s a parade of horrible things that could happen” when files are stored on a service provider’s servers, says Jonathan Rosenoer, an attorney and author of Cyberlaw. “You’ll never know if you’re spuriously a target of investigation, and the government has gone fishing through your files.”

To its credit, in its privacy policy, Google informs users of its obligations to law enforcement and discloses how the Search Across Computers feature works — at least it explains it for those who understand it.

“We’re not blaming Google for the state of the law,” says Bankston. “[But] if they want to ‘not be evil,’ they should be mobilizing resources towards reforming the law and educating the public about its risks. And, until then, they should be designing around the law,” for example, by using peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies instead of storing files on Google’s own servers.

Brain Imaging Technology !!!!

Your Brain on Booze

Scientists are using a new brain imaging technology to understand how chronic drinking damages wiring in the brain.

By Emily Singer

Knock back a few too many and you’re likely to wake up with a hammering headache. But that short-term hangover pales in comparison to the long-term effects of alcoholism. Chronic drinking can lead to cognitive problems, such as impaired memory and problem-solving, and brain damage.

Scientists have already uncovered some of the major structural differences in the brains of alcoholics using magnetic resonance imaging, which gives a picture of the size and shape of different structures on the brain. But, until recently, researchers had been unable to study the fine network of nerve fibers that carry information from one brain area to another. These fibers are crucial for maintaining proper processing speed in the brain, so disrupting this circuitry could lead to many of the cognitive problems associated with alcoholism.

Now a new technology, known as Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), is allowing researchers to examine how alcohol affects this fine-scale wiring. DTI measures the diffusion of water molecules in the brain. In many brain areas, water molecules move around randomly. But nerve fibers (commonly known as “white matter”) are coated in a fatty substance, which forces water molecules to diffuse in the direction of the fiber. Scientists can construct a picture of the fiber tract by measuring the direction of diffusion. When water diffusion in a particular brain area is less organized than expected, scientists know there is a problem with the wiring in that area.

Edith Sullivan, a neuroscientist at Stanford, has spent the last 20 years studying how alcohol damages the brain. In the last few years, she’s added DTI to her arsenal of brain-imaging techniques. Using it, she found that alcoholics have suffered damage to specific parts of their corpus callosum, the thick tract of white-matter fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. Sullivan and colleagues also found that these abnormalities are linked to problems in attention and working memory, a form of memory allows one to remember, say, a phone number long enough to dial it.

Fortunately, research from Sullivan and others has shown that some parts of the brain can bounce back with sobriety. Now, Sullivan and collaborator Adolf Pfefferbaum, also at Stanford, are running a study of 200 healthy people, recovering alcoholics, and recovering alcoholics with HIV, to determine if the white-matter fibers can also recover.

“The brain damage [associated with alcoholism] is accrued over years and it will probably take years for the brain to recover,” says Sullivan. “That means people have to be in some form of rehab for an extended period of time in order to recover and live a relatively normal life and perform at a pre-alcoholic level.”

Daniel Hommer, chief of the brain imaging lab at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in Bethesda, MD, says it’s not yet clear how big a role changes in white matter play in alcoholism, but that DTI will allow scientists to answer that question.

Some parts of the brain may be able to recover when adults stop drinking, but what happens to teenagers who begin drinking? White-matter circuits may be particularly vulnerable in them, because these fibers continue to develop during adolescence. Susan Tapert, a psychologist at the University of California in San Diego, is studying white-matter development in teenagers who use alcohol and marijuana. “Because white matter is so clearly affected in adult alcoholics, we wonder when in the course of heavy drinking these problems develop,” says Tapert. “And because there is so much white-matter growth during adolescence, we want to know what happens if you damage those fibers early on.”

Previous studies using structural MRI show hints of white matter abnormalities in alcoholic teenagers. Now Tapert will use DTI to better characterize these changes, and to see how the defects are linked to cognitive problems in teenagers who drink. Preliminary results suggest that wiring defects relate to poorer performance on many kinds of tests, such as verbal skills, planning, and organization. “The differences are relatively subtle — it would probably translate to the difference between an A and B in school performance,” says Tapert. “But that is still enough to impact the outcome.”

Alcohol can also affect white matter very early in development: when a baby is still in the womb. For example, in rare cases, children with fetal alcohol syndrome are missing a corpus callosum. Other children exposed to prenatal alcohol have more subtle problems with their white matter. Claire Coles, a psychiatrist at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, has followed a population of children with fetal alcohol exposure since birth. Coles and colleagues found that these people, now in their early twenties, have significant differences in their corpus callosa compared with controls. The white-matter defects correlate with a slower speed of processing, as well as overall IQ, she says.

Edward Riley, at psychologist at UC San Diego who’s starting up similar studies, says the research could help doctors to distinguish children who have learning disabilities linked to prenatal alcohol exposure from those who have learning disabilities from other causes.

“In mental health disorders such as alcoholism, we are not very sophisticated in terms of figuring out what is wrong with a particular person and how to help them,” says David Oslin, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “Tools that help us understand subpopulations of patients and their neurophysiology are potentially very helpful. DTI may be a good way of determining that.”

Images on home page are DTI images of a brain with fetal alcohol syndrome. Colors in righthand image indicate the direction of fiber tracts in the brain. (Images courtesy of Xiaoping Hu, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Emory School of Medicine, Atlanta GA.)

Liquid Lenses

The Net Effect of Neutrality

Web surfing has been, from its beginning, an open digital road. However, Congress may soon build roadblocks to some content.

By Eric Hellweg

In Congress this week, two sides presented their cases in front of a Senate committee that’s considering revising a 10-year-old telecommunications bill. The topic was Internet neutrality: the idea that all bits coursing along the Web should be treated equally. It’s been a founding principle of the Internet — that anyone can access any Web page regardless of how they connect to the Internet — and a previous federal regulation had mandated Web neutrality in the dialup era. Now, with broadband the preferred access method, Congress is considering rewriting the rules so that some traffic can get preferential treatment.

On one side of the issue stand powerful Internet and software companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon. They — and others — are arguing that all bits should be equal — that a “best effort” should be made to deliver Internet information, regardless of where it comes from.

On the other side are the powerful infrastructure companies, who own the conduits through which the traffic flows, such as Comcast, Bell South, and SBC. They argue that because they own the pipes, they ought to have the right to charge companies such as Google or Apple something extra to “guarantee delivery” of their data.

At issue, potentially, is the ability of Internet users to visit the sites they want, with no speed difference in the delivery of data between a site that pays for preferential treatment (say, Google) and one that doesn’t (say, your favorite blog).

The issue of net neutrality, while seemingly weak on public awareness and galvanizing sound bites, is actually making headway through Congress. This week, the Senate Commerce Committee held hearings to gather evidence on how best to update the 1996 Telecommunications Act — which was written before the Internet exploded, and therefore is woefully out of date. Representative Joe Barton (R-TX) made it known on Wednesday that he planned on presenting President Bush with a revised telecommunications bill this year. “We don’t have that many legislative days this year, so it is time to stop talking and it is time to start working,” he said at a speech this week in Washington.

One of the key issues Congress is examining is whether or not to codify “net neutrality” in the revised bill. Cable and telecommunications companies are opposed to the idea, because they want to charge firms like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others additional levees to “guarantee delivery” of their traffic over the cable and telco pipes.

Right now, a carrier such as Comcast or BellSouth doesn’t discriminate between data from a competitor or from a service it provides. That’s why — with all variables removed — a video from YouTube.com should load as quickly as something from a Comcast site, and why users can surf to any site they want.

This scenario exists in large part because of a federal regulation that designated telephone companies (at the time the main route for Internet access) as “common carriers.” Under this FCC distinction, telcos couldn’t discriminate against data packets on their networks; they had to send them along just as they would voice calls. This allowed the Internet to flourish.

In August 2005, however, the FCC declared broadband conduits “information services” — not beholden to the same requirements as common carriers. The phone companies argued that this created an unfair competitive landscape, and, as a result, the FCC mandated that all high-speed carriers were information services, but also had to continue to carry other ISPs for one year.

With the net neutrality issue before Congress, the cable and telecommunications companies are mounting a classic “land grab” effort. They want to create a system where bits from companies that agree to pay a toll, essentially, will be given preferred delivery status. Ed Whitacre, CEO of the newly merged AT&T and SBC, laid out his opposition to codifying net neutrality in BusinessWeek magazine in November: “I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital [on fiber lines] and we have to have a return on it.”

he argument that these companies should be able to recoup their significant capital expenditures is not without merit. However, they’re already doing so in many ways by venturing into markets that weren’t available to them until they put down the fiber. Telephone companies are now offering television packages. Cable companies now provide digital cable services and sell On Demand movies. What’s more, consumers already pay to use these companies’ pipes via the monthly bill we receive. Any additional fees charged to a Microsoft or Yahoo will undoubtedly be picked up by the consumer.

But there’s a darker possibility ahead if the cable and telco companies succeed in blocking specific “net neutrality” language in the revised Telecommunications Act. A company could conceivably hamper delivery of content that doesn’t meet its standards of decency, doesn’t share its chairman’s political outlook, or doesn’t originate from a site owned by its network of media sites. Why would Comcast — a company that gleans the majority of its revenues selling cable television service to consumers — want to give those consumers equal access to sites such as YouTube, where a treasure trove of free videos is there for the taking?

One of the most exciting things happening online — the crux of the Web 2.0 movement — is the burgeoning of content created by individuals. Sites such as YouTube, the blog explosion (one in five people in the United States regularly reads a blog, according to Nielsen NetRatings), photo-sharing sites like Flickr, and the nascent podcast community — all got their start or get their content from individuals. The majority of those individuals would probably stop contributing if they had to pay extra to make sure their content would make it to users’ computers.

Unfortunately, these restrictive possibilities have become realities in the past. Vonage, the Internet phone company, found its service blocked by regional telephone companies that didn’t want their customers to discover cheaper alternatives. The service was eventually restored after Vonage complained to the FCC.

If such “packet discrimination” is codified into law, what will be the recourse? And, given our current Congress’s clumsiness with technology issues and tendency to favor big business, do we trust them to write a law that would allow some packet discrimination (a fast lane for companies that opt in) and disallow others (stealth handicapping of competitors’ sites) without making our voices heard? I hope not.­

I spoke with an exhausted Larry Lessig a few hours after he testified in front of the Senate Committee on Tuesday. Lessig, the noted Web author and expert, was tired in part because he’d sounded the alarm against this possibility six years ago: in his groundbreaking Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. In it, Lessig warned that when corporate or government interests control the code of the Internet, the Web as we know it will cease to exist.

“The [non-neutral] plan inverts the fundamental end-to-end architecture of the Internet,” he says. “Congress doesn’t have a clue about what they’re doing on this. The only question is whether they’ll have the spine to guarantee net neutrality. I’m not terribly optimistic at this point.”

High-Tech Gardening

High-Tech Gardening

Gardeners now communicate with each other and monitor their plantings with the latest technologies.

By Associated Press

NEW MARKET, Va. (AP) — A garden tool growing more popular by the season doesn’t have a handle, won’t belch smoke, isn’t noisy and leaves no dirt on your hands. It’s a computer and it’s changing the way we do our planting and harvesting.

Farmers have been using computers for years for such things as measuring milk production from their cows, drawing up profit and loss statements, keeping track of livestock breeding cycles and maintaining inventories — often emailing feed and seed orders to their local co-op. Some farmers have become adept at buying and selling their implements, tools and other gear on eBay, a popular online auction site.

Now it’s the home gardener’s turn. Gardeners are using computers for everything from operating lawn-sized irrigation systems to determining how much insecticide should be dusted on tomato plants, from running digital weather stations to logging the return of the first migrating hummingbird.

Some people use their computers to track the average dates of killing frosts. Many others buy special software to help landscape their property, plot the shape of their vegetable plots and flowerbeds or suggest how to rotate their plants from year to year.

Computers also can be used for some heavy-duty winnowing when stocking up supplies for the next planting season, said Kathy Purdy, a gardener and freelance writer who lives near Chenango Forks, N.Y.

”You use a spreadsheet to list every plant or seed you want from a certain catalog and it keeps a running total as you go,” Purdy said in an e-mail interview. ”You can figure out exactly what has to be dropped from the order to stay under budget. This is a great way to pass the winter months.”

With camera-capable cell phones, wireless laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other Web browsers, the plant doctor is always in.

If you spot what appears to be a disease or insect problem while strolling through the garden or orchard, you can take a digital photograph, jot down some notes and then query one of many university extension service computer databases for identification, background and a suggested remedy.

”Technology is faster, better, cheaper,” said Bob Boufford, an e-learning specialist with the University of Alberta and author of ”The Gardener’s Computer Companion.” ”You can see a problem and solve it within minutes.”

Many golf courses, lawn and garden stores use computers to help with the care and feeding of turf and plants, Boufford said. ”That kind of gear is filtering down to the home environment. It’s often not as sophisticated as what you might see on golf courses but there are some pretty fine residential set ups.”

Computers aren’t yet capable of pulling weeds but like tough-love schoolmasters, they can keep an eye on all your growing things. ”Some people post webcam pictures on the Internet so they and others can watch what’s going on in the garden all the time,” Boufford said.

Probably the most valuable service computers provide, though, is swinging open the gate to a great storehouse of information.

”It’s phenomenal,” Boufford said. ”That’s where we see the biggest benefit. It’s the access to the resources and the experiences of a wide garden community.”

Understand, please, that the garden community about which he speaks is not just neighborhood wide. It’s worldwide.

Marion Owen, a gardener and garden writer from Kodiak, Alaska, gives an all-new meaning to ”over-the-fence” chats with other growers.

”I compare notes about currants and runner beans with a friend in Scotland and I chat about potatoes with a gardener in Finland,” Owen said. ”Though we haven’t met in person, I cherish them as friends, nonetheless.”

There are larger cyber-communities from which to gather information — online forums, for example, that also offer opportunities for socialization. And then there is the increasing popularity of garden blogs, personal Web logs that read like journals and generally deal with a single theme.

”The big thing about garden blogs is that they have become a loosely organized garden club on an international scale,” said Purdy, a self-described ”information packrat” who reads so many garden blogs each day that she designed a ”feed reader” which collects content from different sources and then provides an index to keep track of them.

”Don’t forget digital cameras,” Purdy said about the wide array of cyber lawn and garden tools. ”Gardeners love them, and are more likely to document their garden’s progress that way than with any other kind of record-keeping software.”

Google, Anti Malware Effort

Google, Sun Backing New Anti-Malware Effort

Harvard, Oxford researchers aim to create Internet defensive strategies geared to consumers.

By David Talbot

Major figures at Sun and Google — including Vinton Cerf, one of the inventors of the Internet and now Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist — are backing a new academic anti-malware initiative that aims to spotlight spyware purveyors and ultimately give besieged computer owners simple technologies to guide their Web surfing and downloading decisions.

The new effort launches today in the form of a website, www.stopbadware.org, created by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Oxford University. The site’s initial function is to serve as a collection point for empirical information — from consumers and technical experts alike — about nasty code that infects computers and aims to steal data, send spam, and churn out obnoxious pop-up advertisements. The researchers behind the effort plan to use this data to understand the scourge, spotlight offending malware purveyors, and generate consumer-friendly defensive strategies.

Malware (or the anglicized “badware”) is a catchall term for little pieces of code that can ride like parasites inside pieces of software, games, and other objects downloaded from web sites. In some cases, the malware slips in when the user merely visits certain sites.

Infected machines often slow down dramatically and begin generating error messages. According a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project, the computers of roughly 59 million Americans suffer from these digital infections. And home computer users spent roughly $3.5 billion in 2003 and 2004 to fix the problems, according to a recent Consumer Reports investigation.

“There are lots of efforts at fighting spyware or badware,” says John Palfrey, the Berkman Center’s executive director. However, he adds, until now “there has been no consumer-focused, disinterested, nonprofit effort that will give consumers guidance in terms of what they want, or don’t want to download on their computers. We can bring expert guidance.” The research team will comprise researchers at academic institutions, including Harvard, MIT, and Oxford.

While the research will be done by academic figures, Palfrey says, it is supported by grants from Google, Sun, and Lenovo, the Chinese company that bought IBM’s PC business. He said the grants are in the “multi-year, multi-million dollar” range. Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, is helping design the program and assisting with strategies for notifying and educating consumers.

Google’s Cerf will offer technical input when it’s sought by the researchers, Palfrey says; as will his two counterparts at Sun, Greg Papadapolous, chief technical officer, and Carl Cargill, director of standards, and Lenovo’s George He, chief technology officer.

Asked what service or product he hoped to see coming from the effort, Cerf replied via e-mail that he sought “specific information for users about known badware” and “alerts for the software, networking, and operating systems industry about problems.” He added that “by cataloging as many of the known bad software cases and their means of infection, we may be able to assist operators and programmers to filter, inhibit, or even eliminate such software in a more automatic fashion.”

The team hopes to publish academic research, inform consumers, and highlight offending companies. Its long-range goal is to give consumers a simple collaborative technology for gauging the likely hazards of a web site they are considering visiting, or a file they’re considering downloading.

Berkman cofounder Jonathan Zittrain, now also the chair in Internet governance at Oxford, who helped hatch the idea for www.stopbadware.org, says this technology might take the form of a kind of PC “dashboard” that indicates the level of novelty or danger associated with a piece of code. This “dashboard” would draw upon the anonymized, aggregated mouse clicks and experiences of thousands or even millions of PC users.

To be sure, companies like Symantec are already offering sophisticated anti-malware products. Microsoft, too, regularly provides operating system updates meant partly to fight malware. And myriad small companies offer services; a recent entrant, SiteAdvisor, is launching a product that offers web site ratings based on its automated web-crawling technology.

The key question all consumers should ponder, Zittrain says, is: Who gets control over decisions to either banish a piece of code, or allow it through? “The definitions of what is bad and what is not are not agreed upon; software is constantly changing,” he notes. So giving one company control over the decision to block may not be the right decision for all people.

Zittrain argues that today’s anti-malware efforts may prove to be highly effective solutions. Yet they also reflect a toehold of corporate control over individuals’ computer activities that could metastasize into something more invasive, or one day serve as a vehicle for court-ordered software purges. Consumers should worry, too, that a worsening of Internet security — especially a successful cyber-attack — could precipitate heavy-handed government regulation akin to the USA Patriot Act that followed the September 11 attacks.

Zittrain describes the project as an effort to head off this dystopia, and preserve consumer willingness to operate open PCs. He calls the project a “collaborative effort to define the axes along which software can be evaluated, to develop and distill those evaluations in ways that consumers can understand, and in which they can participate, and to ultimately create an environment where heavy-handed regulation isn’t called upon to deal with these ills in ways that cause a lot of collateral damage.”

Sun, Google, and Lenovo did not immediately respond to interview requests. In a written statement, Cerf sounded a dire tone: “I believe the potential growth of the Internet will be limited if we allow invasive badware and spyware to continue to fester without strong action. All consumers must be in control of their experiences when they browse the Internet and the mass proliferation of badware threatens this control. We cannot allow that to continue. In order to stem the unimpeded growth of badware, we must develop a better understanding of the avenues by which this abusive behavior is conducted in order to inhibit its effects — and I believe that this initiative will help with that.” He added: “The providers of Internet services and software simply must get this problem under control.”

Cerf and Google left unanswered such questions as whether their www.stopbadware.org involvement might presage a Google bid to enter the PC market with, say, a machine that wards off “evil.” Cerf was cagey about the connection to Google’s corporate moves, offering only the usual high-level Google mission statement that the company would “continue on its path to organize all kinds of network-based information and learn how to index it so that it can be found again. We hope to make what is found more relevant to what the users are looking for at any particular moment.”

What’s clear is that the malware problem is far more than merely annoying. To many leading figures in Internet research, these problems could erode consumer confidence to the degree that Internet growth is stalled (see “The Internet Is Broken”). Earlier this year, MIT’s David D. Clark, an Internet elder statesman and onetime chief protocol architect, characterized the problem this way in a conversation with Technology Review: “We might just be at the point where the utility of the Internet stalls — and perhaps turns downward.” In recent months, Clark himself has been trying to cobble together a government-funded research effort to design new Internet architectures more in tune with the modern era, incorporating security features and other improvements.

Home page image courtesy of William Thomas Cain/Getty Images.

Drool The Goooooooooogle

In Google We Trust

Internet users should think carefully before relying on Gmail.

By Simson Garfinkel

This story, by a veteran TR correspondent, first appeared in the Dec. 2005/Jan. 2006 issue of Technology Review. It explores the complex issues of privacy and data security as they relate to Gmail, the increasingly popular, free web-mail service from Google.

Google’s Gmail raises important questions about the security and privacy of our personal information — questions that should matter not just to users of the free Web-based e-mail system but to everyone who exchanges e-mail with Gmail users.

And since the technical underpinnings of Gmail might very well be the prototype for the next generation of desktop-computer applications, the answers to these questions potentially affect everyone.

But wait — this is not another diatribe against the targeted advertisements Gmail shows while you read your mail. All of the worry surrounding that single issue has obscured a far more important one: data integrity and security. Gmail is so powerful, fast, and convenient that there’s a huge incentive for you to keep all of your e-mail there. But there’s a catch: Gmail makes no promise that a mail message you save today will still be there tomorrow — nor that e-mail you delete today will be gone tomorrow. Using Gmail means placing a lot of trust in Google.

When Gmail was launched in April 2004, it boasted three strengths: scale, search, and sales. Scale was the most obvious; Google promised each user the ability to store a gigabyte of e-mail when competitors like Hotmail were offering a measly two megabytes. Google could make this offer because, at the time, its 100,000-plus computers had more than 20 petabytes of combined storage. Since then, Google has shown it can buy new hard drives faster than its users can fill the old ones up.

Search was Gmail’s second strength. Instead of asking users to create “folders” and archive their e-mail like obedient file clerks, Gmail allowed them to simply click “archive” and banish e-mail messages from their in-boxes to an unseen holding area. Gmail users retrieve their archived mail by searching for it — a process that is so fast and thorough that it’s actually liberating.

Sales was Gmail’s third strength — one that was surprisingly controversial. When Google announced Gmail, it proudly proclaimed that it would analyze e-mail messages for common keywords and use them to customize advertisements. For example, an undergraduate reading a message about an upcoming assignment might simultaneously see an advertisement for a site that sells term papers.

Despite this apparent convenience, many privacy activists — me among them — called upon Google to describe how its targeted-advertising technology worked. The company responded this past October by dramatically expanding and clarifying its privacy policy. Google now explains that the advertisements are based on your computer’s IP address, the content of the message you’re reading, and your previous use of Gmail. But don’t worry, Google says: your e-mail is scanned only by computers and never by human beings.

In addition, Google now makes it clear that you can delete individual e-mail messages or your entire Gmail account at any time. If you do, however, your old e-mail might remain on Google’s servers for up to 60 days and on its “offline backup systems” for even longer. Although this may sound like an unacceptably long time, Google has in fact done a far better job in addressing the concerns of privacy activists than its competitors ever did.

It’s important for Google to get its privacy and security policy right with Gmail, because Gmail is the standard-bearer for an increasingly important approach to Web programming called Ajax, for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Simply put, Ajax applications have user interfaces that run inside a Web browser, but the heavy computation and data storage are done remotely — in the case of Gmail, on Google’s supercomputer cluster. When you start up Gmail, large parts of your in-box are downloaded into your computer’s memory and displayed in your browser as needed. This makes Gmail dramatically faster and more efficient than existing Web-based mail systems, where messages and mailbox lists have to be downloaded again and again every time you display a new Web page.

In recent months, Gmail has introduced a message editor that lets users bold and italicize text or change fonts within a message — much the way you can in a PC-based e-mail program like Microsoft Outlook. There’s even an “autosave” feature, so that if your browser crashes you don’t lose the message that you were composing. And Gmail can now be integrated with Google Desktop; for example, you can download your e-mails to your Windows-based computer and search and read them when you are not online. All of this is made possible by Gmail’s Ajax architecture.

So if Google is applying Ajax with such skill, why am I still concerned about privacy and security?

When most people think about privacy, they think about the threat of accidental disclosure of personal information. When they think about online security, they tend to think about worms, viruses, and phishing attacks — active attacks by bad people or bad software.

But privacy and security are more complex. Privacy, for instance, includes not just the right to keep personal matters out of the public eye but also the right to be free from intrusion — the right to be “let alone,” as Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis put it in their famous 1890 Harvard Law Review article “The Right to Privacy.” Gmail’s advertisements may be less intrusive than those of Hotmail and Yahoo, but they are intrusive nevertheless.

Google argues in its updated privacy policy that users should have the right to choose to read their e-mail through a free, advertiser-supported service. But of course, Google does not in fact offer a choice: there is no fee-based, advertising-free version of Gmail. I note this not to be obnoxious — clearly, Google can argue for choice in the market without itself having to offer more than one option — but to call attention to the most important characteristic of Google’s business model.

That characteristic is this: fee-based consumer services are not part of Google’s business model at all. Although Google is often called a search company or an e-mail provider, it earns its billions by selling clicks on targeted advertisements. Everything else is merely the honey designed to attract enough attention that some of it will spill onto those ads. Gmail’s users are not Google’s customers; they are its product. I personally find advertisements highly distasteful and have shied away from Gmail for that reason.

Far more troubling for me, however, is Gmail’s data security story.

Like privacy, security is a much deeper concept than most Internet users realize. Being free from spyware and viruses is important, certainly. But so is data integrity — retaining data whole, without additions, deletions, or other modifications. While Google provides a ton of storage and great availability, there is no obvious way to back up your e-mail once it has been delivered, read, and archived. This means that you have no choice but to trust Google totally for your data integrity.

But nowhere in Gmail’s “Terms of Use” does the company promise that it won’t delete some or all of your mail — now, or in the future. In fact, the termination clause of Gmail’s policy gives the company the right to delete any account, for any reason, at any time, with no user recourse.

Gmail could provide a backup system, of course. Google Desktop already downloads mail in the background for offline access, and it would be trivial to let users save that e-mail in archive files on their hard drives, for subsequent burning onto CD-ROMs or DVDs. Perhaps Gmail will do this in the future. But it doesn’t do it now.

The mere existence of that huge archive of personal e-mail — an archive that can neither be backed up nor deleted on demand — should give users pause. For example, such an archive could become a one-stop-shopping destination for subpoenas in civil litigation and criminal investigations. Gmail’s early adopters now have nearly two years’ worth of mail archived in the system — an attractive body of evidence in, say, a nasty divorce proceeding.

The preservation of old messages wasn’t previously a concern because earlier online e-mail providers like Hotmail didn’t offer their users enough storage. Also, folder-based archives give users a strong incentive to throw most messages away rather than keeping them all. And of course, if you download your e-mail with POP (the post office protocol) and keep it on a hard drive in your living room, you are responsible for the security of your mail — and you have the option of fighting a subpoena in court rather than turning over your files.

Many of my concerns could be addressed through the clever use of encryption. Mail could be encrypted while stored on Google’s servers and only decrypted when it is displayed to Gmail users. This would dramatically reduce the risk of a subpoena: now an attorney fishing for incriminating documents would have to demand not just e-mail but also the user’s decryption key. This would give users more opportunities to fight subpoenas — or perhaps to “lose” their keys.

Whether or not these risks actually matter to you depends on what uses, if any, you make of the Gmail service. But how Google responds to persistent concerns about privacy and data security should matter to everyone who uses the Web. For better or worse, Google remains the hottest Internet company on the planet — and the example it sets with Gmail will shape the products and policies of hundreds of other companies using Ajax technology to build new Web-based services.

Home page image courtesy of Jason Schneider.

Simson Garfinkel is a postgraduate fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Research on Computation and Society.
(This blog is just for the information and not for commercial use).