Google has a beta SMS service which answers queries sent from your mobile phone or device. Simple conventions are used to express queries for phone book listings, dictionary definitions, product prices, etc. Google touts their service as

“Just text. No links. No web pages. Simply the answers you’re looking to find.”

Examples of queries are “pizza 21228″ to find pizza places near UMBC or “george bush, washington dc” to find the address and phone number of the US president and “Price ipod 20gb” to get a prices (and sellers) for an ipod. The SMS messages are sent to the 5-digit US shortcode 46645 which corresponds to GOOGL on most phones. My mobile phone has a good browser, but I think I’d prefer to use this SMS service for the supported common query types for several reasons. The interaction model is simpler and a better fit when I’m away from my desk. I can fire off a query without bringing up a page and navigating to the query form. I don’t have to and am not tempted to sit and wait for the result page to come up, but can do somethihg else with my phone. Finally, the results come back in a very compact form — more suited for a small screen.

A sophisticated computer hacker had access to servers at wireless giant T-Mobile for at least a year, which he used to monitor U.S. Secret Service e-mail, obtain customers’ passwords and Social Security numbers, and download candid photos taken by Sidekick users, including Hollywood celebrities… read more here…

Should bots carry weapons? Should they win patents? Questions we must answer as automation advances.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/view.html?pg=1

ias-opportunities is a new mailing list for distributing announcements of funding opportunities, conference and journal calls, and similar solicitations specifically about issues of information assurance, information security, and cybercrime-related issues. It has been set up by Gene Spafford of Purdue’s Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. The list is a low-volume list for announcements of interest to researchers as well as practitionaers. An archive of past messages is available. List members can send announcements directly and non-members can send announcements to ias-opportunities-submit@cerias.purdue.edu for posting. To subscribe to the list, send email to ias-opportunities-request@cerias.purdue.edu with the command subscribe in the body. To subscribe an address other than the one from which you send the email, use the command subscribe <someEmailAddress>.

This is abstracted from from Peter Harsha’s CRA Computing Research Policy Blog.

“The National Academies have released their long-awaited report, Assessment of Department of Defense Basic Research . This is the study that was requested by the Senate Armed Services Committee in the FY 2004 Defense Authorization Act after they raised questions about the state of DOD basic research (”6.1″ research in defense parlance) as part of the hearings leading up to the bill. The NAS panel’s recommendations mirror a lot of things we’ve been saying about the DOD research — mainly that it’s become less basic and it’s declining in both absolute dollars and as a percentage of the overall DOD science and technology budget. The full report doesn’t seem to be online (I get an error at the NAS link above), but here’s a copy of the summary. I haven’t read the full report so far, but from the executive summary the recommendations are worth reading: …”

Aduna Metadata Server 2005.1 RC1 Release : ” The Aduna Metadata Server automatically extracts text and metadata from information sources, like file servers, intranets or public web sites. The extracted information is available for tools such as Aduna AutoFocus and Aduna Spectacle. These tools enable the user to find and explore information by using the extracted metadata. Other tools can also make use of the extracted information by use of the Sesame library (see www.openrdf.org).”

Technology Review has an interesting article that talks about how Amazon’s Web Service API has encouraged 65,000+ developers to build new web applications based on its web store data.

For example, Alan Taylor (a former Amazon programmer) has developed Amazon Light, a less cluttered Amazon web store that also offers product links to external web sites. For example, if the item you are viewing is a DVD, there will be a button that let’s you see in a single click whether the same disc is for rent at Netflix. If it’s a CD, you can check whether Apple’s iTune music store has a downloadable version.

After reading the story, I begin to realize the truth power of Web Services. By making its Web Service API public and free of charge, an e-commerce company like Amazon can encourage the innovation of new web services and attract new customers.

A recent study by mi2g reveals that BSD may be living up to its reputation of being one of the most secure operating systems available at present. The results from the study show that Apple customers running Apple Mac OS X, an implementation of BSD, appear also to benefit from the operating system’s track record.

Out of a total sample of 197,488 successful and independently verifiable overt digital attacks against online servers worldwide recorded by the mi2g SIPS database over the last twelve months the least breached Operating System (OS) was BSD including BSD/OS, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Mac OS X which together recorded just 6,278, ie, 3.2% successful hacker attacks. All versions of Mac OS recorded just 255 online attacks against themselves, ie, less than 0.13%.

All flavours of Microsoft Windows Servers recorded 68,398 online server breaches, ie, 34.6%. However, Windows Server 2003 recorded just 178 attacks against itself, ie, less than 0.09%. These numbers do not include malware - virus and worm - breaches. The top ten virus and worms of all time have all targeted Microsoft software including the recent Sobig, which was the most economically damaging malware on record according to mi2g Intelligence Unit data.

Linux, including Debian, Mandrake, Red Hat, SCO and Suse distributions, recorded 105,848 breaches, ie, 53.6%. The high number of attacks against Linux may be a result of a greater market share within the online server market.

The precise market share of each operating system within the online server market is difficult to ascertain because of licensed versus non-licensed versions currently deployed. Various surveys reveal remarkably different numbers. All surveys are agreed that the most main stream operating systems deployed in the server market at present are BSD, Linux and Microsoft Windows.

www.mi2g.com/cgi/mi2g/press/170903.php