Vanish – A Self Destructing Public Encryption System

Vanish, announced by researchers at the University of Washington today, is a new concept for sending protected messages over the internet.  It is not a shared key system, meaning that you dont have to exchange anything with someone beforehand in order to send them a protected message.  The concept is that the message is encrypted by a key, which is scattered across a peer-to-peer file sharing network and is unknown even to the sender.  After a specific amount of time, the key will erode away from the peer-to-peer network, off of several different nodes, making it more difficult if not impossible to ever reassemble the key that was used to protect the data.  Vanish is a perfect digital equivelent to disappering ink.  You can send someone a message and encrypt it with a self destructing key, which makes it mathematically “impossible” to read without.  The University of Washington has a FireFox plugin you can use to test out this new system here.

Windows Mobile 6.5 No VoIP

I’ve been testing a Windows Mobile 6.5 ROM on my HTC Touch Pro for about 3 weeks now.  So far, it seems much faster and considerably more stable.  It could be that I’m using a stripped down ROM without the carrier bloatware, but my phone feels very responsive.

Most applications that worked on Windows Mobile 6.1 also work in 6.5.  One thing that seems to be missing though, is the built-in VoIP compatibility.  While it may seem innocuous that one application, which very few people used, is suddenly not part of the new mobile operating system by Microsoft; I see a much bigger issue.

With the advancement and refinement of “Voice over IP” technologies like the SIP protocol…we are right around the corner from not needing to rely on old phone infrastructure (like analog phone lines) for having voice conversations.  It finally looked like the stranglehold that phone companies had on us was about to be over with.

With the majority of new cell phones coming equipped with a wi-fi connection, and applications like Skype or the built-in VoIP support that Windows Mobile 6.1 had, you could make a call from your cell phone [over a free wi-fi connection] completely bypassing any major phone carrier’s network.  With the right phone and enough wireless network coverage one could potentially cancel their cell-phone contract and stop paying ridiculous monthly fees.  Well, as they say: “If it seems too good to be true…”
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Wolfram Alpha – A How-To Guide

Wolfram|Alpha, launched a little over a week ago, has gotten a huge amount of attention online and many people are saying that they don’t feel like they know how to utilize this new search engine’s full potential.  Here are a few tips that could help you get what you are seeking out of the “computational knowledge engine”.

1. Use Keywords

   The Wolfram Research group did a great job developing its natural-language interpreter which can take in human friendly questions and interpret them as search queries.  The thing is, the skills we’ve learned searching Google using keywords all these years still come in handy when searching Wolfram|Alpha.  If you phrase your question or search term carefully, you will get a more accurate answer as a result.  In some cases, it wont matter what you type because as long as Wolfram|Alpha can understand the query, the answer will be the same, but you can still save some time and typing by using keywords.  For example, you could type:

   ozs. to lbs.

   or you could type:

   How many ounces are in a pound?

   The result will be the same.

2. Make Sure it Can Be Computed

   Wolfram|Alpha is not a search engine in the way that we have come to understand them.  It is more like a math engine that can take in questions/queries and compute the answer by referencing a massive database containing trillions of data points.  If there is no computational nature to your question or if there is no source for the data you are looking for, Wolfram|Alpha will respond with:

   Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input.

For Example, “how many beers in a keg” cannot be calculated by Wolfram|Alpha because “beer” is not a specific enough measurement and Wolfram|Alpha cannot be sure what you are referring to.  However, if you phrase the question like this:

fluid ounces in a keg of beer / 12 oz. cup

Wolfram|Alpha will calculate the number of ounces in a keg of beer and then divide that by 12 ounces because that is the typical amount of beer in a cup.  The answer would look like this:



Now I know there are 165.3 beers in my keg.


3. If it’s Measured in Terms of Numbers, it’s Probably Indexed

   Wolfram|Alpha can display information on all sorts of things like weather, stocks, even trends for these things like average human growth rate.  You see, weather isn’t measured by whether its sunny or cloudy, that is all deduced by things like temperature, barometric pressure, etc.  Date can also be used as a reference point, so the point is that when you search Wolfram|Alpha for:

   weather in san francisco ca on July 20th 1982

   Wolfram|Alpha will look up all weather related data points it has in its database for San Francisco on the date of July 20th 1982.

   Stocks are another good example for a Wolfram|Alpha search query because they are charted by their stock value based on whatever exchange they are traded on.  It is purely numerical and can therefore be used in searches and comparisons on Wolfram|Alpha.  To search for a stock just type its ticker symbol in the search bar, or multiple symbols separated by commas if you would like to see a charted comparison.
   Such as:

   DJIA,NYSE:V

   For an example of how there are certain “odd data points” that can be referenced, check out this query:

   how many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop?

   I recommend you check out the example page here for other ideas on things you can search for.

Wolfram Alpha – A New Kind of Search Engine

There is another search engine, which is about to go live Today at 7pm CST, which is rumored to have advanced functionality beyond Google’s capabilities.  Anyone remember Cuil?  The useless search engine that had it’s five seconds of fame due to the claim that because they indexed more sites than Google, their search results would be more accurate?  Well, there is a new challenger about to enter the ring and its called Wolfram|Alpha.  So is this the next search engine release that will be forgotten by the end of the summer?  Well with Stephen Wolfram heading up this project, I should think not.

Stephen Wolfram

A true prodigy, Wolfram published an article on particle physics when he was 16.  He received significant notoriety for his paper on heavy quark production when he was 17.  He then received his Ph.D. in particle physics from Caltech by the time he was twenty at which time he also joined the faculty of that institution.  That was in 1979.  I skipped many other accomplishments that happened in-between those years, but covering his entire career would be an article in itself.

In 1986 Wolfram began developing a computer algebra system, called Mathematica. In 1987 he co-founded a company called Wolfram Research and managed to release the first version of Mathematica by 1988.  In the last 21 years, Mathematica has become a standard computational software package used in scientific, engineering, and mathematical fields as well as other industries requiring advanced computational capabilities.

So what does all of this have to do with web search?  The Wolfram Research Group has built a search engine which uses mathematica based computation to power its search function.  It allows you to enter a question in human friendly language and it will provide you with an answer.  It doesn’t provide you with a list of search results that may pertain to your search criteria, it actually gives you an answer, based of millions of lines of algorithmic code and trillions of indexed data points.

For example, you could supply it with this:

Wolfram|Alpha, would respond with this:

Premature Conclusion

Its not out yet, and i wont presume to make judgements about this new tool before we’ve had a chance to use it, but i think Wolfram Research has built something here that can really fill a need with regard to current internet information gathering.  It is not a replacement for Google, or anything Google has to worry about, but it looks to be a groundbreaking tool that could become invaluable for some of us.

See a demonstration of Wolfram|Alpha done by Stephen Wolfram Here.

You can watch Wolfram|Alpha being brought online live via webcast tonight at 7 pm CST.  Link Here.

Twitter hides @replies

Twitter made a change to their system today, and I don’t think it is going to go over well within the Twittosphere. When someone you follow makes a reply to someone you dont follow, you will no longer see the post. Most people who have amassed large twitter networks have done so by following new people that are communicating with people they follow, by being able to see those messages. I thought that one aspect alone was what made twitter different than other social networks, because you could grow your network into other social circles by following those who are connected to other people in your existing network. I believe this is in some way related to the recent spike in twitter sign ups, but I don’t think removing that feature was the right way for twitter to handle this.

Twitter’s post about it