Monday, June 22, 2009
There’s no use crying over spilled milk in Japan. Not when it can be converted into biogas
As the alternative energy movement picks up steam, researchers are increasingly looking to their local communities for tons of organic waste that could be transformed into more environmentally friendly biofuels. At the Nigata Institute of Technology in Kashiwazaki, Japan, that mindset has spurred scientists to give new life to spoiled milk and rotting jellyfish. At the University of California at Davis, engineers have repurposed table scraps from swank Bay Area restaurants. And at the United Kingdom’s University of Birmingham, researchers have diverted gooey nougat, caramel and other confectionary waste from the nearby Cadbury Schweppes plant.Who knew that Cadbury Creme Eggs could be good for the environment?Food crops such as corn and sugarcane have been tapped as major sources of energy production around the world, especially for distilling ethanol. Amid growing concerns of potential food-or-fuel competitions, other companies are tinkering with oils made from flowering plants and algae or hoping to exploit the energy-rich biomass of fast-growing switchgrass to create biofuel. With mountains of discarded food slated for landfills or incinerators, however, researchers also are discovering that a little ingenuity can turn the world's abundant garbage into a whole lot of power.A new report by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., in fact, suggests that garbage could play a big role in helping the Pacific Northwest produce up to 15 percent of its own biofuel from locally available resources. In particular, waste-derived biogases such as hydrogen and methane can be fed into turbines to generate electricity and heat, compressed to power fuel cells, or concentrated into a form of natural gas. Methane is among the "greenhouse gases" blamed for global warming, though when burned it releases significantly less carbon dioxide — the main warming culprit — than other fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Alternatives to fossil fuels Nigata Institute of Technology, said hydrogen gas is gaining popularity as a fossil fuel alternative. “But how do we get hydrogen economically? It’s one of the problems.”Serendipitously,as it was explained during a presentation at last month’s annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Japan has been plagued recently discarded milk. Exactly why isn’t clear; perhaps schoolchildren prefer sodas and other aerated drinks over milk.With a friend whose company transports spoiled milk to a local incinerator,they have hit upon the idea of diverting the cargo and putting some of the curdled cow juice to good use.The professor and his colleagues began their two-step conversion process by brewing a batch of sugar-spiked solution mimicking the bacteria-friendly confines of wastewater. Their small bioreactor relied on heat-loving microbes to digest the sludge in the absence of oxygen at a toasty 131 degrees Fahrenheit, approximating the conditions within some landfills and creating methane as well as carbon dioxide .Professor’s team added a portion of the digested glop to a second container filled with rancid milk. When the solution was starved of oxygen and kept at a relatively neutral pH, it yielded eight times its own volume in biogas over a one-week period. Half the captured biogas was hydrogen, the other half carbon dioxide. (scientists consider the carbon dioxide release “carbon-neutral” because its escape into the atmosphere is balanced by what had been taken in during photosynthesis by the grass or corn that fed the dairy cows).By periodically replacing part of the bacteria-laden sludge with milk and making sure the solution remained at the right pH, they found that the system continuously produced biogas until he stopped it 100 days later. By then, the solution was yielding more than five times its own volume in biogas every two days.Using the same technology, there is a hope to harness the power of other school lunch castaways, whether pushed-aside carrots, detested peas, the tomato. The nearby presence of one of the world’s largest nuclear power plants has presented another unexpected bounty that might be similarly harvested: jellyfish.Like many other coastal installations, the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant uses seawater as a coolant. “Sometimes, many jellyfish come near the power plant,” Professor said especially when they become stuck in the cooling system. “In summertime, the jellyfish are producing a bad smell,” he said. One creative solution suggested by his bioreactor would use the power of bacteria to turn the gelatinous muck into methane, a potential boon for the surprising number of nuclear power plants around the world with similar jellyfish-induced headaches
ALL ABOUT CAPTCHA YOU WANT TO KNOW
In those early days before Google and Yahoo, there were two ways of getting a website or URL listed in Internet search engine databases; through web crawlers which automatically 'surfed' the net for URLs or through URL submission.
In order to prevent the search engine from being overloaded with URLs posted by automated systems, a means had to be found to ensure that the entity doing the listing was a human being, which led to the development of graphic puzzles as a test.
In 2000, Yahoo asked the Carnegie Mellon University to create a means to prevent bots from infiltrating its chat rooms. A team composed of Carnegie Mellon researchers developed a series of cognitive puzzles and called it 'CAPTCHA.' Although Yahoo was the first to make major use of CAPTCHA, others soon followed.
CAPTCHA stands for“ Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart”
It was given its name in the year 2000 in its birth place by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University.
CAPTCHA tests are dynamically generated by computers, in contrast to the standard Turing test which is administered by a human. This characteristic allows them to be widely used for practical security reasons.
The big fishes like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo use the CAPTCHA to ensure if the user performing the registration for a free e-mail id is a human and is not a bot.
When we talk about the world wide web consortium there are many insecurities prevailing there. The HTTP displays its vulnerability in not being able to distinguish among the human users and the machine users, better known as bots. The HTTP or the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) cannot guarantee complete security to the client software. The SSL are cryptographic protocols which provide secure communications on the net for eg: chats, e-mail etc.
The malicious bots can be anonymous and are distributed on the internet. The sites which have exclusive data and which receive payments for sharing their data are the worst hit. Copyright infringement is an issue which is of mega concern on the internet.
Some of the applications of CAPTCHA’s are as follows:
Preventing Comment Spam in Blogs.
Most bloggers are familiar with programs that submit bogus comments, usually for the purpose of raising search engine ranks of some website (e.g., "buy penny stocks here"). This is called comment spam. By using a CAPTCHA, only humans can enter comments on a blog. There is no need to make users sign up before they enter a comment, and no legitimate comments are ever lost.
Protecting Website Registration.
Several companies (Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc.) offer free email services. Up until a few years ago, most of these services suffered from a specific type of attack: "bots" that would sign up for thousands of email accounts every minute. The solution to this problem was to use CAPTCHAs to ensure that only humans obtain free accounts. In general, free services should be protected with a CAPTCHA in order to prevent abuse by automated scripts.
Protecting Email Addresses From Scrapers.
Spammers crawl the Web in search of email addresses posted in clear text. CAPTCHAs provide an effective mechanism to hide your email address from Web scrapers. The idea is to require users to solve a CAPTCHA before showing your email address.
Online Polls.
In November 1999, http://www.slashdot.org released an online poll asking which was the best graduate school in computer science ( a dangerous question to ask over the web!). As is the case with most online polls, IP addresses of voters were recorded in order to prevent single users from voting more than once. However, students at Carnegie Mellon found a way to stuff the ballots using programs that voted for CMU thousands of times. CMU's score started growing rapidly. The next day, students at MIT wrote their own program and the poll became a contest between voting "bots." MIT finished with 21,156 votes, Carnegie Mellon with 21,032 and every other school with less than 1,000. Can the result of any online poll be trusted? Not unless the poll ensures that only humans can vote.
Preventing Dictionary Attacks
CAPTCHAs can also be used to prevent dictionary attacks in password systems. The idea is simple: prevent a computer from being able to iterate through the entire space of passwords by requiring it to solve a CAPTCHA after a certain number of unsuccessful logins. This is better than the classic approach of locking an account after a sequence of unsuccessful logins, since doing so allows an attacker to lock accounts at will.
Search Engine Bots.
It is sometimes desirable to keep web pages unindexed to prevent others from finding them easily. There is an html tag to prevent search engine bots from reading web pages. The tag, however, doesn't guarantee that bots won't read a web page; it only serves to say "no bots, please." Search engine bots, since they usually belong to large companies, respect web pages that don't want to allow them in. However, in order to truly guarantee that bots won't enter a web site, CAPTCHAs are needed.
Worms and Spam
CAPTCHAs also offer a plausible solution against email worms and spam: "I will only accept an email if I know there is a human behind the other computer." A few companies are already marketing this idea.
Thus CAPTCHA’s have found a very important role in the various internet applications. The CAPTCHA’s have enhanced the role of the Artificial Intelligence fraternity. It’s a win-win situation. Many hackers try and crack the CAPTCHA’s so it’s a constant combat between them. If the CAPTCHA is solved then the bots win then a very difficult problem pertaining to the artificial intelligence is solved and it advances a step further or else if it is not solved then stenographic cryptography wins. Thus the CAPTCHA’s have given the Artificial Intelligence fraternity a big boost.
There are certain types of CAPTCHA’s they are presented as follows:
GIMPY:
Gimpy gives the images of the distorted text. In the current version you can see five pairs of overlapping words , in which the user needs to identify three words.
Gimpy basically includes random placement, font distortion, background pattern.
BONGO:
It is a visual puzzle. Computer can generate and display but not solve it.
The bongo CAPTCHA is basically named after the M. M Bongard who published a book on pattern recognition. One of the disadvantages of Bongo puzzle is if the number of choices is more then there are chances that the human beings may get it wrong and if the number of choices are not sufficient then the computers can be effective in making random guesses.
PIX:
Pix CAPTCHA works on the principle of photo recognition.
In this instead of typing the letters you authenticate yourself as a human by recognizing what object is common in a set of images this was the first example of a CAPTCHA based on image recognition.
SPEECH CAPTCHA:
It usually spells out one-time passwords in synthesized or recorded voices. It is used with image CAPTCHA for increased accessibility.
BAFFLE TEXT:
Scientists at the Palo Alto Research Center have designed a new breed of CAPTCHA called Baffle ext that follows the same approach as GIMPY but distorts the image much more than GIMPY.
They put image and scan it back in or apply a technique called threshold—transferring the image from color to black and white and back again. This changes gray levels and adds random noise to the image. The image deteriorates until pattern recognition systems fail. Further, Baffle ext unlike the earlier GIMPY, uses only nonsense words.
MAPTCHA :
There have been various attempts at creating CAPTCHAs that are more accessible. Attempts include the use of JavaScript, mathematical questions ("what is 1+1" -- also known as a MAPTCHA, or Mathematical CAPTCHA), or "common sense" questions ("what color is the sky").
COMPUTER CHARACTER RECOGNITION:
A number of research projects have attempted (often with success) to beat visual CAPTCHAs by creating programs that contain the following functionality:
Removal of background clutter, for example with color filters and detection of thin lines Extraction of the image from the web page.
Segmentation, i.e. splitting the image into regions each containing a single letter.Identifying the letter for each region.
Steps 1, 2, and 4 are easy tasks for computers The only part where humans still outperform computers is segmentation. If the background clutter consists of shapes similar to letter shapes, and the letters are connected by this clutter, the segmentation becomes nearly impossible with current software. Hence, an effective CAPTCHA should focus on the segmentation.Several research projects have broken real world CAPTCHAs, including one of Yahoo's early CAPTCHAs called "EZ-Gimpy"and the CAPTCHA used by popular sites such as Paypal and LiveJournal as well as open source software such as phpBB. In January 2008 Network Security Research released their program for automated Yahoo! CAPTCHA recognition.In February 2008 it was reported that spammers had achieved a success rate of 30% to 35%, using a bot, in responding to CAPTCHAs for Microsoft's Live Mail service.
HUMAN SOLVERS:
CAPTCHA is vulnerable to a relay attack that uses humans to solve the puzzles. One approach involves relaying the puzzles to a sweatshop of human operators who can solve CAPTCHAs. In this scheme, a computer fills out a form and when it reaches a CAPTCHA, it gives the CAPTCHA to the human operator to solve. If the humans are dedicated employees who receive minimum wage this is not likely to be viableAnother variation of this technique involves copying the CAPTCHA images and using them as CAPTCHAs for a high-traffic site owned by the attacker. With enough traffic, the attacker can get a solution to the CAPTCHA puzzle in time to relay it back to the target site In October 2007, a piece of malware appeared in the wild which enticed users to solve CAPTCHAs in order to see progressively further into a series of "striptease" images.
3D:
A future generation of 3D captcha will be coming into picture.
SAPTCHA:
SAPTCHA stands for Semi Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.SAPTCHA is proposed as more accessible alternative to CAPTCHA that may replace CAPTCHA in services such as most blogs and forums. SAPTCHA works as lightweight CAPTCHA.
The concept follows from observation that there is many cases where automated generation of unique test question or image does not add much to prevention of abuse - spammer do not need to pass test more than once on same forum or blog anyway. Often, there's no human spammer interacting with website at all [who wouldn't love to think that his site is so important that it is spammed personally :-)]; in such cases static question is not worse at stopping bot than dynamic. Human generated questions has much broader diversity and is thus harder for computer to answer. It must be also noted that CAPTCHA itself is not really "completely automatic" - human has to write and maintain test software, which will not change often but is costly to develop.
John had one thousand apples and five oranges. He ate as many of his apples as there is letters in word "apple". Also he ate two bananas :-). How many apples John have?
Your answer:
CONCLUSION:
CAPTCHA implies a win-win situation; either the CAPTCHA is not broken and there is a way to differentiate humans from computers, or the CAPTCHA is broken and an useful Artificial Intelligence problem is solved.This approach has the beneficial side effect of inducing security researchers, as well as otherwise malicious programmers, to advance the field of AI..
In order to prevent the search engine from being overloaded with URLs posted by automated systems, a means had to be found to ensure that the entity doing the listing was a human being, which led to the development of graphic puzzles as a test.
In 2000, Yahoo asked the Carnegie Mellon University to create a means to prevent bots from infiltrating its chat rooms. A team composed of Carnegie Mellon researchers developed a series of cognitive puzzles and called it 'CAPTCHA.' Although Yahoo was the first to make major use of CAPTCHA, others soon followed.
CAPTCHA stands for“ Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart”
It was given its name in the year 2000 in its birth place by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University.
CAPTCHA tests are dynamically generated by computers, in contrast to the standard Turing test which is administered by a human. This characteristic allows them to be widely used for practical security reasons.
The big fishes like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo use the CAPTCHA to ensure if the user performing the registration for a free e-mail id is a human and is not a bot.
When we talk about the world wide web consortium there are many insecurities prevailing there. The HTTP displays its vulnerability in not being able to distinguish among the human users and the machine users, better known as bots. The HTTP or the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) cannot guarantee complete security to the client software. The SSL are cryptographic protocols which provide secure communications on the net for eg: chats, e-mail etc.
The malicious bots can be anonymous and are distributed on the internet. The sites which have exclusive data and which receive payments for sharing their data are the worst hit. Copyright infringement is an issue which is of mega concern on the internet.
Some of the applications of CAPTCHA’s are as follows:
Preventing Comment Spam in Blogs.
Most bloggers are familiar with programs that submit bogus comments, usually for the purpose of raising search engine ranks of some website (e.g., "buy penny stocks here"). This is called comment spam. By using a CAPTCHA, only humans can enter comments on a blog. There is no need to make users sign up before they enter a comment, and no legitimate comments are ever lost.
Protecting Website Registration.
Several companies (Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc.) offer free email services. Up until a few years ago, most of these services suffered from a specific type of attack: "bots" that would sign up for thousands of email accounts every minute. The solution to this problem was to use CAPTCHAs to ensure that only humans obtain free accounts. In general, free services should be protected with a CAPTCHA in order to prevent abuse by automated scripts.
Protecting Email Addresses From Scrapers.
Spammers crawl the Web in search of email addresses posted in clear text. CAPTCHAs provide an effective mechanism to hide your email address from Web scrapers. The idea is to require users to solve a CAPTCHA before showing your email address.
Online Polls.
In November 1999, http://www.slashdot.org released an online poll asking which was the best graduate school in computer science ( a dangerous question to ask over the web!). As is the case with most online polls, IP addresses of voters were recorded in order to prevent single users from voting more than once. However, students at Carnegie Mellon found a way to stuff the ballots using programs that voted for CMU thousands of times. CMU's score started growing rapidly. The next day, students at MIT wrote their own program and the poll became a contest between voting "bots." MIT finished with 21,156 votes, Carnegie Mellon with 21,032 and every other school with less than 1,000. Can the result of any online poll be trusted? Not unless the poll ensures that only humans can vote.
Preventing Dictionary Attacks
CAPTCHAs can also be used to prevent dictionary attacks in password systems. The idea is simple: prevent a computer from being able to iterate through the entire space of passwords by requiring it to solve a CAPTCHA after a certain number of unsuccessful logins. This is better than the classic approach of locking an account after a sequence of unsuccessful logins, since doing so allows an attacker to lock accounts at will.
Search Engine Bots.
It is sometimes desirable to keep web pages unindexed to prevent others from finding them easily. There is an html tag to prevent search engine bots from reading web pages. The tag, however, doesn't guarantee that bots won't read a web page; it only serves to say "no bots, please." Search engine bots, since they usually belong to large companies, respect web pages that don't want to allow them in. However, in order to truly guarantee that bots won't enter a web site, CAPTCHAs are needed.
Worms and Spam
CAPTCHAs also offer a plausible solution against email worms and spam: "I will only accept an email if I know there is a human behind the other computer." A few companies are already marketing this idea.
Thus CAPTCHA’s have found a very important role in the various internet applications. The CAPTCHA’s have enhanced the role of the Artificial Intelligence fraternity. It’s a win-win situation. Many hackers try and crack the CAPTCHA’s so it’s a constant combat between them. If the CAPTCHA is solved then the bots win then a very difficult problem pertaining to the artificial intelligence is solved and it advances a step further or else if it is not solved then stenographic cryptography wins. Thus the CAPTCHA’s have given the Artificial Intelligence fraternity a big boost.
There are certain types of CAPTCHA’s they are presented as follows:
GIMPY:
Gimpy gives the images of the distorted text. In the current version you can see five pairs of overlapping words , in which the user needs to identify three words.
Gimpy basically includes random placement, font distortion, background pattern.
BONGO:
It is a visual puzzle. Computer can generate and display but not solve it.
The bongo CAPTCHA is basically named after the M. M Bongard who published a book on pattern recognition. One of the disadvantages of Bongo puzzle is if the number of choices is more then there are chances that the human beings may get it wrong and if the number of choices are not sufficient then the computers can be effective in making random guesses.
PIX:
Pix CAPTCHA works on the principle of photo recognition.
In this instead of typing the letters you authenticate yourself as a human by recognizing what object is common in a set of images this was the first example of a CAPTCHA based on image recognition.
SPEECH CAPTCHA:
It usually spells out one-time passwords in synthesized or recorded voices. It is used with image CAPTCHA for increased accessibility.
BAFFLE TEXT:
Scientists at the Palo Alto Research Center have designed a new breed of CAPTCHA called Baffle ext that follows the same approach as GIMPY but distorts the image much more than GIMPY.
They put image and scan it back in or apply a technique called threshold—transferring the image from color to black and white and back again. This changes gray levels and adds random noise to the image. The image deteriorates until pattern recognition systems fail. Further, Baffle ext unlike the earlier GIMPY, uses only nonsense words.
MAPTCHA :
There have been various attempts at creating CAPTCHAs that are more accessible. Attempts include the use of JavaScript, mathematical questions ("what is 1+1" -- also known as a MAPTCHA, or Mathematical CAPTCHA), or "common sense" questions ("what color is the sky").
COMPUTER CHARACTER RECOGNITION:
A number of research projects have attempted (often with success) to beat visual CAPTCHAs by creating programs that contain the following functionality:
Removal of background clutter, for example with color filters and detection of thin lines Extraction of the image from the web page.
Segmentation, i.e. splitting the image into regions each containing a single letter.Identifying the letter for each region.
Steps 1, 2, and 4 are easy tasks for computers The only part where humans still outperform computers is segmentation. If the background clutter consists of shapes similar to letter shapes, and the letters are connected by this clutter, the segmentation becomes nearly impossible with current software. Hence, an effective CAPTCHA should focus on the segmentation.Several research projects have broken real world CAPTCHAs, including one of Yahoo's early CAPTCHAs called "EZ-Gimpy"and the CAPTCHA used by popular sites such as Paypal and LiveJournal as well as open source software such as phpBB. In January 2008 Network Security Research released their program for automated Yahoo! CAPTCHA recognition.In February 2008 it was reported that spammers had achieved a success rate of 30% to 35%, using a bot, in responding to CAPTCHAs for Microsoft's Live Mail service.
HUMAN SOLVERS:
CAPTCHA is vulnerable to a relay attack that uses humans to solve the puzzles. One approach involves relaying the puzzles to a sweatshop of human operators who can solve CAPTCHAs. In this scheme, a computer fills out a form and when it reaches a CAPTCHA, it gives the CAPTCHA to the human operator to solve. If the humans are dedicated employees who receive minimum wage this is not likely to be viableAnother variation of this technique involves copying the CAPTCHA images and using them as CAPTCHAs for a high-traffic site owned by the attacker. With enough traffic, the attacker can get a solution to the CAPTCHA puzzle in time to relay it back to the target site In October 2007, a piece of malware appeared in the wild which enticed users to solve CAPTCHAs in order to see progressively further into a series of "striptease" images.
3D:
A future generation of 3D captcha will be coming into picture.
SAPTCHA:
SAPTCHA stands for Semi Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.SAPTCHA is proposed as more accessible alternative to CAPTCHA that may replace CAPTCHA in services such as most blogs and forums. SAPTCHA works as lightweight CAPTCHA.
The concept follows from observation that there is many cases where automated generation of unique test question or image does not add much to prevention of abuse - spammer do not need to pass test more than once on same forum or blog anyway. Often, there's no human spammer interacting with website at all [who wouldn't love to think that his site is so important that it is spammed personally :-)]; in such cases static question is not worse at stopping bot than dynamic. Human generated questions has much broader diversity and is thus harder for computer to answer. It must be also noted that CAPTCHA itself is not really "completely automatic" - human has to write and maintain test software, which will not change often but is costly to develop.
John had one thousand apples and five oranges. He ate as many of his apples as there is letters in word "apple". Also he ate two bananas :-). How many apples John have?
Your answer:
CONCLUSION:
CAPTCHA implies a win-win situation; either the CAPTCHA is not broken and there is a way to differentiate humans from computers, or the CAPTCHA is broken and an useful Artificial Intelligence problem is solved.This approach has the beneficial side effect of inducing security researchers, as well as otherwise malicious programmers, to advance the field of AI..
GOOGLE TACKLED ON EMAIL SECURITY -- BBC NEWS UK
Google has been asked to explain why it is not making its Gmail e-mail service more secure. Google has been asked to explain why it is not making its Gmail e-mail service more secure. In an open letter to Google boss Eric Schmidt, security experts, lawyers, and privacy advocates ask why Gmail users are "needlessly" being put at risk. The 38 signatories want Google to start using the secure version of the HTTP protocol to protect Gmail users. In response, Google said it was considering trials of the secure system with a select group of users. Secure session"As more of us end up using insecure internet access - such as wi-fi in coffee shops, libraries, and so forth - there's a real risk of session hijacking," said Ben Edelman, a signatory of the letter and assistant professor at Harvard Business School. When users sign on to Gmail, their login name and password are encrypted as the data passes back and forth using the secure version of HTTP known as HTTPS. However, said Mr Edelman, this is turned off once sign-on is completed. A similar system works for Google Docs and Calendar. The risk, he said, was from hi-tech criminals who snoop on the unencrypted data passing back and forth to steal ID files called "session cookies" generated when these applications start being used. Mr Edelman said that using the cookies could let a criminal pose as a user. In Gmail's case, this could mean they might send e-mails in the owner's name, abuse their identity, change a password, or hijack an account. As data moves to the cloud more people will be at risk"It's a frightening prospect," said Mr Edelman. The open letter pointed out that Google used HTTPS to protect the data of users of its Health and Voice applications. While Google does make it possible to use HTTPS all the time when signed on to Gmail, Docs, or Calendar the option was so hard to find that few would use it, suggested the letter. It pointed out that most users retain default options and were likely to be leaving themselves at risk. "...unless the security issue is well known and salient to consumers, they will not take steps to protect themselves by enabling HTTPS," said the letter. If Google took the step to turn on HTTPS all the time, the risks would be removed. In response, Google said it was looking into whether it made sense to use HTTPS all the time in Gmail. But, it said, before it did so it wanted to be sure that the average user experience of Gmail was not markedly changed by turning it on. It feared that enabling the encryption would slow down response times as data was scrambled and unscrambled on a PC and Google's mail servers. "We're planning a trial in which we'll move small samples of different types of Gmail users to HTTPS to see what their experience is, and whether it affects the performance of their e-mail," said Google. Mr Edelman said it was not just Google that was putting users at risk. Every webmail company faced the same problem and should do more to protect the its users . He said it was a problem that would get more acute as services move towards so called "cloud computing". "Many of the systems we have built for authentication and session maintenance assume no man-in-the-middle attack," he said.
The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) has suffered server loss involving customer data once again in barely two months.
A computer server containing transaction data of about 159,000 customer accounts was discovered to be missing from one of the HSBC’s branch which was undergoing renovation at that time in Hong Kong on Apr. 26, the bank disclosed Wednesday in a company statement.According to the sources, the lost information included customer names, account numbers as well as transaction types and amounts. Customer PINs , user IDs and passwords were not captured on the server, HSBC added.The bank said the risk of data leakage and fraudulent transactions was low because the missing server was protected by multiple levels of security. HSBC also said it has since put in place preventive measures to avoid a similar occurrence.This is the second incident where the bank reported losing customer data in as many months.
INDIAN CONTEST FOR RUPEE SYMBOL
The rupee is generally shortened to Rs or INRThe Indian finance ministry has begun a public competition to select a design for the symbol of the rupee.Unlike the major currencies of the world like the dollar, the pound, the yen and the euro, the rupee does not have a globally recognised symbol.The new symbol would be the "identity of the Indian currency," a finance ministry official told the BBC.The contest, which closes on 15 April, is open only to resident Indians, a release on the ministry website says.'Ethos of India'The rupee is generally shortened to Rs or sometimes the currency is described as INR (Indian rupee).But, the government says, these are not symbols, they are mere abbreviations for rupee.To get an internationally-accepted symbol, the finance ministry has invited entries from the public."The symbol should represent the historical and cultural ethos of India," the deputy secretary in the finance ministry's coin and currency department, BS Rawat, told the BBC."The entries can be in any of the Indian languages. They can even be in English which is also an accepted language of use by the government," Mr Rawat said.Each entry has to be accompanied by a fee of 500 rupees ($10) and a participant can send a maximum of two entries.The rules also say that the "symbol should be applicable to the standard [computer] keyboard".Officials say the winning entry will be chosen by a seven-member jury of experts drawn from various art institutes, the government and India's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India.Five shortlisted entries for the final selection will be awarded a prize of 25,000 rupees ($500) and the winner will take 250,000 rupees ($5,000)."The final selected symbol will become the property of the government and the designer will have no rights over it any more," Mr Rawat said.Experts say implementing a new currency symbol can be an expensive exercise.According to one estimate, when the euro was introduced in 1999 it cost Europe's biggest companies more than $50bn to update their computer systems to deal with the changeover."We have not thought about the costs yet," Mr Rawat said. "First, we'll select a symbol and then we'll do the costing," he added.The contest closes on 15 April at 1300 local time (0730G).Detailed guidelines on how to prepare the entries have been put up on the finance ministry's website.
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