IEEE Spectrum's Tech Talk

Businesses struggle mightily to keep their secrets. They spend billions on firewalls and encryption schemes meant to keep out the wolves at the door. But there is still little that can be done when the perpetrators are trusted parties. Intel got a first-hand reminder of that cold reality in June, when it was discovered that Biswamohan Pani, a design engineer at the company's Hudson, Mass., R&D facility, pilfered the recipes for some of the chipmaker's soon-to-be-released offerings.

Sure, Pani helped develop the recipes for chips such as Intel's Itanium, perhaps adding morsels that made them more appealing to the company's legions of customers. But Intel owns the rights. And the way he carried out the caper suggests that he knew his actions would leave a bad taste in his employer's mouth and possibly land him in hot water.

Pani turned in his Intel apron at the end of May. But by that time, he had already been hired by Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices to cook up some competitive designs at one of its R&D kitchens. Shortly after he reported for duty at AMD on 2 June, he apparently remembered that:

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At last week's Future Combat Systems Limited User Test in Fort Bliss, TX, soldiers demonstrated the kinds of technology being integrated into the military right now. Here are some highlights. A longer video is on the way.

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One of the problems nanotechnology has faced is that it brings back together disparate scientific disciplines that over the last century had been growing increasingly apart. It was becoming difficult with the high-level of specialization for a physicist to talk to biologist and for the biologist to speak to a chemist, and have them all understand one another.

Now, with nanotechnology they are all thrown back into the same cauldron of science and they need to define terms. This definition issue is no more acute than in the area of length and time scales. It was all fine and good when crystalline materials and biological materials were separate, but now with trend towards hybrid systems it's time to get this sorted.

In a meeting I moderated some time ago with a mix of biologists, chemists and physicists an agreed upon length scale that would keep everyone happy in performing nanotechnology research was an instrument capable of 4 or 5 orders of magnitude, ranging from .1nm to 10 microns. Electron microscopy seemed to be the most likely candidate to fill the role with its ability to bridge multiple scales.

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As the pace of repair work picked up on three Internet cables in the Middle East this week, word that more damage has occurred to nearby undersea fiber-optic lines in the last 24 hours arrives. The slew of slashed cables has caused a frenzy of speculation on their causes in the blogosphere. As of today, Egyptian officials still had no explanation as to the cause of the damage to the first two lines, slashed a week ago, but they said there was no evidence that ship's anchors caused the breakage.

The two new damaged lines being reported are to some of the same systems as were cut recently, namely the FLAG Europe-Asia and SeaMeWe-4 networks. Landline and satellite connections have ameliorated some of the outages in the Middle East and South Asia regions, but it is estimated that some 85 million Internet users have been adversely affected. According to one report, nearly 90 per cent of Internet traffic is routed through undersea cables in these parts of the world...

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Where Will U.S. Spy Satellite Fall?

By now, if you're even the least technically inclined person, you've heard that a large U.S. satellite in orbit above us has lost the ability to control its position and is slowly drifting back to earth. U.S. officials conveyed the information to major news outlets, such as the New York Times and the Associated Press, on Saturday under anonymous conditions. Though the officials were cautious to categorize the nature of the machine, independent space experts quickly pegged it as a crippled spy satellite.

"Appropriate government agencies are monitoring the situation," Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, replied when asked about the matter after the news was leaked. "Numerous satellites over the years have come out of orbit and fallen harmlessly. We are looking at potential options to mitigate any possible damage this satellite may cause."

Beyond that, he would not comment on the status of the satellite or what measures might be employed to control its descent.

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