Is Smartphone Technology the Future of US Elections?

With more and more Americans upgrading to smartphones, and as smartphone capabilities continue to improve, even the U.S. government is considering innovative ways to harness this advancing technology. Human factors/ergonomics researchers have evaluated the potential benefits of using smartphones to enable online voting in future U.S. elections and will present their findings at the upcoming HFES 55th Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The 2000 presidential election debacle in Florida became a national embarrassment, prompting many U.S. election officials to opt for more technologically advanced voter systems. Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, which aimed, in part, to increase usability and promote accurate election results through the creation and distribution of electronic voting systems. Little research was completed to determine the efficiency of the new systems, however, which has caused additional usability issues. This gap has led some to speculate that mobile voting may prove to be the wave of the future for voters.

In their upcoming Annual Meeting presentation, "Voting on a Smartphone: Evaluating the Usability of an Optimized Voting System for Handheld Mobile Devices," Bryan Campbell, Chad Tossell, Michael Byrne, and Philip Kortum asked more than 50 men and women ranging in age from 18 to 68, with and without smartphone experience, to vote on two types of systems: a custom-built mobile Web application, and either a traditional electronic voting system or a paper ballot. The researchers found that participants who own and use smartphones completed the voting task more accurately than did those without smartphone experience, indicating the need to design mobile voting systems -- including content for such systems -- to accommodate inexperienced voters' mental model to increase usability, effectiveness, and accuracy.

The authors note some potential benefits of implementing smartphone technology for voters: "Mobile voting carries the potential to increase voter participation, reduce election administration costs, and allow voters to interact with familiar technology. In the near term, remote voting should not be considered a viable option for elections. Over the long term, however, with the support of the human factors/ergonomics and computer science communities, mobile voting can be a viable -- and desirable -- means of conducting elections."

Congress has given preliminary approval for remote electronic voting to replace slow and unreliable postal ballots for U.S. soldiers stationed overseas. "As a result," say the authors, "some form of Internet voting seems inevitable, and it follows then that smartphones and other Internet-capable mobile technologies will likely play a key role."

Breakthrough Could Double Wireless Capacity With No New Towers

 

The days of waiting for smartphones to upload video may be numbered. Rice University engineering researchers have made a breakthrough that could allow wireless phone companies to double throughput on their networks without adding a single cell tower.

Get Gmail in MSN messenger…

This tutorial is for all those Gmail Account Holders that whish to use a Gmail account with MSN Messenger & .Net Passport Service

What you will need:

=> A Gmail Account

=> MSN messenger / Window Messenger – use verify your gmail account.

 

Once you have downloaded / obtain all of those you are ready to continue.

1. Log in to your gmail account via – http://www.gmail.com

2. Load up MSN messenger and cancel any automatic sign in attempt so that you have it ready to sign in with your gmail account later on.

3. You will need to visit the Microsoft .Net Passport website- http://www.passport.net

4. Now you will need to click the register for your free .net passport today button that is in the right hand corner of the page.

5. That will take you to a registration page. Fill in the form as you would if you where filling a hotmail account accept when asked for your email account you would enter myaccount@gmail.com

6. Once the registration of your .net registered gmail account has been made, sign in to MSN messenger using this newly registered account, you will notice that when you sign in to messenger your messenger name will be youraccount@gmail.com (un—verified) and you won’t be able to change it, this is solved below.

7. As soon as you have signed in , a messenger will appear in an information box( the same as when a contact sign in), click on this and you will be taken through the process of Verifying your account the reason you have to go through this is because at current gmail is not affiliated with .net passport e.g.  .net passport doesn’t recognise the @gmail.com as a valid email provider therefore they cannot automatically verify your account (hotmail and msn auto verify as there .net passport affiliated websites),

8. Once you have been taken through the verification process you will be asked to log in to your email account and visit the url given in an email form the .net passport verification service, maximize the internet browser window that you signed in to gmail on earlier, you will have 2 emails form .net passport the first will be welcoming you to .net passport, the second will be the one we are after, the verification email, open this up the url to finish verifying your email address(usually its either the first to this url in the email)

9. Once you have completed these actions and you have been told that your gmail account is verified, sign out of MSN messenger, then re sign back in (you don’t need to wait for any period of time just sign out then straight back in again), you will now notice the(not verified) had been removed from your MSN name, and now you are bale to change their name to, if this is so, then congratulations you now have a fully functioning .net passport gmail account( you cannot access your gmail email account via MSN messenger you will still have to visit the gmail login page for this) http://www.gmail.com

10. If for any reason this didn’t work, and you again receive the message asking you to verify, or you haven’t received your verification email from .net Passport, then re-try 2-7 times until you get it working correctly.

 

I hope this helps some of you gmail account users out there that have been wracking your brains over how to get gmail in to MSn messenger..

Hackers steal SSL certificates for CIA, MI6, Mossad

Criminals acquired over 500 DigiNotar digital certificates; Mozilla and Google issue 'death sentence'

The tally of digital certificates stolen from a Dutch company in July has exploded to more than 500, including ones for intelligence services like the CIA, the U.K.'s MI6 and Israel's Mossad, a Mozilla developer said Sunday.

The confirmed count of fraudulently-issued SSL (secure socket layer) certificates now stands at 531, said Gervase Markham, a Mozilla developer who is part of the team that has been working to modify Firefox to blocks all sites signed with the purloined certificates.

Among the affected domains, said Markham, are those for the CIA, MI6, Mossad, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft's Windows Update service.

"Now that someone (presumably from Iran) has obtained a legit HTTPS cert for CIA.gov, I wonder if the US gov will pay attention to this mess," Christopher Soghoian, a Washington D.C.-based researcher noted for his work on online privacy, said in a tweet Saturday.

Soghoian was referring to assumptions by many experts that Iranian hackers, perhaps supported by that country's government, were behind the attack. Google has pointed fingers at Iran, saying that attacks using an ill-gotten certificate for google.com had targeted Iranian users.

All the certificates were issued by DigiNotar, a Dutch issuing firm that last week admitted its network had been hacked in July.

The company claimed that it had revoked all the fraudulent certificates, but then realized it had overlooked one that could be used to impersonate any Google service, including Gmail. DigiNotar went public only after users reported their findings to Google.

Criminals or governments could use the stolen certificates to conduct "man-in-the-middle" attacks, tricking users into thinking they were at a legitimate site when in fact their communications were being secretly intercepted.

Google and Mozilla said this weekend that they would permanently block all the digital certificates issued by DigiNotar, including those used by the Dutch government.

Their decisions come less than a week after Google, Mozilla and Microsoft all revoked more than 200 SSL (secure socket layer) certificates for use in their browsers, but left untouched hundreds more, many of which were used by the Dutch government to secure its websites.

"Based on the findings and decision of the Dutch government, as well as conversations with other browser makers, we have decided to reject all of the Certificate Authorities operated by DigiNotar," Heather Adkins, an information security manager for Google, said in a Saturday blog post.

Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox engineering, echoed that late on Friday.

"All DigiNotar certificates will be untrusted by Mozilla products," said Nightingale, who also said that the Dutch government had reversed its position of last week -- when it had asked browser makers to exempt its DigiNotar certificates.

Google Street view…

 

Google is looking to develop the features of its Street View and further enhance it by refreshing the images every year from now on. This decision was prompted by the fact that urban landscapes are in a state of flux at all times. To be able to keep up with this constant changes happening in the cities, this move was decided upon by Google.

In the same vein, the European Union is reviewing certain regulations concerned with the way Google is trying to make images of the cities of the world available on the World Wide Web for everyone to see. The EU want to know more about Google’s retention policy concerning the Street View Image.

According to Google, the Street View Images should be retained for a year. However, according to the European Union, the officials think that the period of one year is too long and want it to be shortened to six months. Also, the EU wants Google to put out notices in the media so that people know when the company will send their Street View cameras to take the pictures of the cities in general.

ASUS RT-N16: Wifi Router with Torrent,HTTP,FTP Download Support

 

If you are looking for an economical multidimensional router that has support for print server, Home media server and Download support from FTP, FTP and Bit-torrent ASUS RT-N16 is the right choice. This compatible with the modems of the Indian ISPs: Reliance,  Airtel, BSNL, MTNL broadband. Please note that, it is only a router and does not include DSL modem. You need to use the Modem supplied by the ISP and connect it to the router.

The cost of this router in India as on June 2011 is Rs6000/-

Key features:

1. 4 Gigabit Ethernet posts
2. Two USB Ports
3. HTTP, FTP and Torrrent Downloads via Download master. You don’t need to leave your PC running for days to download a big file. RTN16 will take care of that!
4. Network Printer support. See printer compatibility in ASUS support
5. WPS(Wifi protected setup) button support for easy Wifi configuration
6. You can add custom firmware like TomatoUSB and make it a Linux workhorse! You can have your favorite Torrent client that can manage torrent via HTTP instead of ASUS supplied clients. You can also run custom scripts( like automatic login to ISP authentication via Curl/Wget ). The possibilities are infinite!!!

The drawbacks:

1. This router is that it does not support dual-band.
2. USB flash drives works well. But, the USB power of RT-N16 is low that some USB powered hard drives don’t function well. In that case you may have to buy “Powered USB Hub”

Discovery Channel Tamil(தமிழ்): Dedicated new Channel in Tamil

 

Discovery India has launched an dedicated Tamil Channel: Discovery Tamil. Before this, they used to just give multiple audio feed on the Discovery Channel: English,Hindi,Telugu,Bangla and Tamil. The problem with that is , it still has English on video feed and the advertisements are in English and Hindi catering to the bigger market. Probably they should have found that with local advertising they could cater to local advertisements. This indicates they have good amount of viewership for Discovery in Tamilnadu where Sun TV is dominating major viewership.

Now this dedicated Tamil channel is available in most areas in Tamilnadu. But had negative impact on the DTH segment. Now they have removed the Tamil audio feed from the original Discovery Channel. So the DTH like Tatasky does not have Tamil discovery in both forms. They may not add the dedicated Tamil channel as well. Probably other DTH like Dish TV,Airtel,Videocon may add this channel.

Just wear your 3D personal theatre

 

   Models unveil the world's first 3D head-mounted display, a sleek device that enables the wearer to experience cinema-like virtual screen viewing anywhere. The visor-like gadget, weighing 420g, wraps around the head to let the wearer view high definition 3D images using two panels mounted in front of each eye. The device is tethered to a processor unit and boasts of surround-sound via earphones.
The display offers the experience of watching on a 750-inch virtual big screen 65 feet away. It can be used for watching videos, listening to music and playing videogames. It costs $783