Gift Baskets

Dan Kaminsky, the security researcher who discovered a major flaw in the DNS protocol last year, said this week that broad adoption of DNS Security Extensions technology may be needed to protect systems, despite its complexity.

Remember when those two satellites collided the other day? Seems that they'll be the space junk gift that keeps on giving, as their 800-km debris orbiting field could hamper all future space launches.

"Future launches will have to be adjusted with regard to the fact that the debris [from the collision] has spread over an 800-km area and will gather at a common orbit in 5-6 years," said Alexander Stepanov, director of the Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg.

According to NASA this massive cloud of human failure joins the 19,000 other objects that currently pollute the low and high orbit space around the planet. As we reported last week, the Hubble Space Telescope is already in danger.

On a related note, anyone who criticized the Pixar movie Wall-E for "liberal bias" or for "unfairly" depicting future humans as slovenly creatures that polluted Earth and space to the point where it was uninhabitable is a dufus. And so ends my personal rant for the day. [Space Fellowship]

The W3C Multimodal Interaction working group has posted the finished recommendation of EMMA: Extensible MultiModal Annotation markup language. According to the abstract, this spec "provides details of an XML markup language for containing and annotating the interpretation of user input. Examples of interpretation of user input are a transcription into words of a raw signal, for instance derived from speech, pen or keystroke input, a set of attribute/value pairs describing their meaning, or a set of attribute/value pairs describing a gesture. The interpretation of the user's input is expected to be generated by signal interpretation processes, such as speech and ink recognition, semantic interpreters, and other types of processors for use by components that act on the user's inputs such as interaction managers."

Mckinsey licks finger, asks audience where to stick....

MWC Day four of Mobile World Congress saw an assembly of the mobile money working group. Flush with $12.5m from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it’s working towards the GSMA's target of getting 20m of the 1bn people who have a mobile phone but do not have a bank account onto the first rung of the financial ladder.…

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