Technology

In these days of PhotoShop and its brethren, it’s becoming almost impossible to tell whether or not an image has been digitally manipulated. While some ‘shopping is done simply for whimsical reasons (see picture above), the matter becomes a bit more serious when things such as military images are altered. Visible watermarks are sometimes overlaid on digital photos, but these permanently alter and obscure that copy of the picture. Recently, however, researchers in India came up with a system for verifying a photo’s authenticity, without altering it in any way.

Back when I was a younger man, I was a Beltway Bandit. What that means is that I worked as a technical contractor for the federal government. In my case, I worked for several years for NASA and NAVSEA (Naval Sea Systems Command ). Then, I worked with numerous bright developers, network engineers and system administrators. Unfortunately, we often worked with federal staffers who were often, ah, clueless. Since then, things have only gotten worse. Much worse.

Femtocells sound vaguely like a cross between a Feynman diagram and a biology class, but they're the latest piece of gear that millions of people will soon want in their homes without having missed them before. A femtocell is a small cellular base station designed to provide superior, short-range, indoor cellular coverage in a home or office. The idea behind femtocells is simple: the hardware tries to capture the ease of setup of a Wi-Fi network while allowing seamless connectivity for existing cell phones.

South-African physicists are working on a technology called 'Quantum Cryptography' to thwart hackers from leaking out information about the FIFA World Cup.

It will prevent hackers from monitoring videos, emails and phone calls relayed between Durban's Moses Mabhida Stadium and a nearby operations center for police, firefighters, and military personnel.

"The goal is to ensure not only the confidentially but also the integrity of this information," Fox News quoted Gregoire Ribordy, CEO of ID Quantique in Geneva as saying.

Goodbye computer mouse, keyboard and monitor. Say hello to a new, simpler era of human-computer interaction -- this time, with no clunky hardware standing between you and digital information.

In this new world, there are options aplenty. Instead of sliding a mouse across your desk, you could just point at whatever you'd like to select. Instead of pecking away at a keyboard, you could just say what you're thinking. And instead of glaring at a big screen all day, why not just project that information on the surface of your contact lenses?

IBM has created the world's greatest pub quizzer: a supercomputer that the company reckons can match the intelligence of the best trivia buffs.

The electronic mastermind, Watson, has been entered into popular American TV game show 'Jeopardy!', where it will be pitted against some of the best Jeopardy players of all time.

A virtual graveyard which lets Hong Kong mourners remember their loved ones without leaving their homes or buying flowers went online Thursday.

The site enables users to pay tribute to dead relatives and friends by creating an online memorial page with pictures and messages.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs may believe that the personal computer - Mac and Windows PCs - will diminish in importance in the near future, but Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer sees thing differently.

Ballmer, during an interview at the Wall Street Journal's D8 conference, told the Journal's Walt Mossberg that PCs will continue to evolve but will remain popular, even in a world where more and more people carry smartphones and tablet devices like the iPad.

A Chinese supercomputer has been ranked as the world’s second-fastest machine, surpassing European and Japanese systems and underscoring China’s aggressive commitment to science and technology.

The Dawning Nebulae, based at the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, China, has achieved a sustained computing speed of 1.27 petaflops — the equivalent of one thousand trillion mathematical operations a second — in the latest semiannual ranking of the world’s fastest 500 computers.

Desktop virtualisation harks back to the good old mainframe days of centralised computing while upholding the fine desktop tradition of user empowerment. Each user retains his or her own instance of desktop operating system and applications, but that stack runs in a virtual machine on a server -- which users can access through a low-cost thin client similar to an old-fashioned terminal.