News summary for September 26th by Shvetank Jain. The 3 news articles are from NYT while the last 2 mentions are from WSJ. 1. "HP Spy case spotlights a Technology News Site" Summary: ========= Ms. Kawamoto wrote an article on Jan 23 that revealed strategic changes under consideration at HP. As a result, HP's chairwoman Patricia Dunn tried to track source of information leakage by hiring detectives to monitor Ms. Kawamoto's life by tapping her phone records and emails. Patricia had to resign when this event became public. Implication: ============ As our lives become more and more entwined with the internet, privacy and online identity management have gained strategic importance. Thus, the need for protocols that preserve anonymity and privacy have become a necessity. A term coined by a cartoon strip - "Ghost of Usenet Postings Past" has since become popular. [http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df9601/df960124.jpg] Some ground has been covered by attempts like Off-the-Record messaging and Ring Signatures. Idea: ====== Design anonymous VoIP call mechanism, privacy and anonymity preserving protocols for the web and online identity management system that manages personal information as one browses through websites. 2. "Wireless Networking may soon get Faster. Will anyone care?" Summary: ======== South Korean engineers have revealed a prototype of a wireless network known as fourth-generation wireless (4G) which they believe will usher a new era of internet availability. A 4G network would be able to transmit a gigabit of data every second. The concerns raised are that since the cost of the infrastructure would be high and would probably be passed down to users in the form of higher fees, will people care to use it? Implication: ============ Two competing 4G standards have already emerged. One championed by Japan's NTT DoCoMo ( claimed to have reached 4G-level transmission speeds in a field test) and the other supported by Intel called WiMax. As speed continues to increase for wireless networks, the ideas that were kept in mind while designing the wireless protocol may not be relevant anymore. Thus, it calls for a need to rethink our wireless protocols to be able to efficiently utilize the high bandwidths available. A measurement study which determines the behaviour of 802.11g in such high-speed scenarios would give valuable insight into the shortcomings of the current implementations and would provide seminal ideas to improve them. Idea: ===== Study behaviour of 802.11g in 1Gigabit networks using a simulator. 3. "Google to push for more electrical efficiency in PC's" Summary: ======== Google is calling on the computer industry to create a simpler and more efficient power supply standard that it says will save billions of kilowatt-hours of energy annually. The plan calls to shift from multivoltage power supplies to a single 12 volt standard. Although voltage conversion would still take place on the PC motherboard, simpler design would help in achieving higher overall efficiencies. Rant: ====== Google has evolved a high-energy efficient power supply system for its data centers. This may help in saving a lot of money as well as a lot of resources of the world that are being used to produce electricity. Although, the effort is targeted towards PCs, such advances might also be helpful for various power constrained devices. Estimates say that by deploying the new power supplies in 100 million desktop PCs running eight hours a day, it will be possible to save 40 billion kilowatt-hours over 3 years (roughly $5 billion). Researchers should be sensitive to social and environmental concerns as well. Special Mentions: ================= Two other articles that caught my attention were: 1) An article that discussed various techniques to perform SEO (Search Engine Optimizations) which led me to think that it would be interesting to develop an auto-SEO tool that reorganised the website to optimize it for certain keywords. 2) The other article discussed the major VoIP market players and the problems faced by them. It led me to ponder over the possibility of embedding ads in ringtones to make a shift from charging the users for their calls. - You could pay if annoyed, of course!! :-)