Scientist controls another man's brain via internet

Scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have conducted the world's first non-invasive human-to-human brain interface in which one person was able to control the motions of another person via internet. 

Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao, a University of Washington professor, sent a brain signal to his colleague Andrea Stocco, causing Stocco's finger to move on a keyboard. 

While researchers at Duke University have demonstrated brain-to-brain communication between two rats, and Harvard researchers have demonstrated it between a human and a rat, Rao and Stocco believe this is the first demonstration of human-to-human brain interfacing. 

"The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains. We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain," Stocco, a research assistant professor in psychology at the UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, said. 

Rao sat in his lab wearing a cap with electrodes hooked up to an electroencephalography machine, which reads electrical activity in the brain. 

Stocco was in his lab across campus wearing a purple swim cap marked with the stimulation site for the transcranial magnetic stimulation coil that was placed directly over his left motor cortex, which controls hand movement. 

The team had a Skype connection set up so the two labs could coordinate, though neither Rao nor Stocco could see the Skype screens. 

Rao looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game with his mind. When he was supposed to fire a cannon at a target, he imagined moving his right hand (being careful not to actually move his hand), causing a cursor to hit the "fire" button, researchers said. 

Almost instantaneously, Stocco, who wore noise-cancelling earbuds and wasn't looking at a computer screen, involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. 

Stocco compared the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily to that of a nervous tic. 

"It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain," Rao said. 

"This was basically a one-way flow of information from my brain to his. The next step is having a more equitable two-way conversation directly between the two brains," said Rao. 

Rao cautioned this technology only reads certain kinds of simple brain signals, not a person's thoughts. And it doesn't give anyone the ability to control your actions against your will.

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Samsung to launch Galaxy Tab 3 Kids

Samsung has announced Samsung GALAXY Tab 3 Kids, a tabletspecifically designed for children. Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 Kids will come preloaded with educational and fun apps for kids and an all new Kid's Store. 

The tablet has a 7-inch screen with 1024x600 pixel resolution and runs on a 1.2GHz dual-core processor. It has GB RAM, 8GB of internal storage expandable up to 32 GB. The tablet has a dual camera, 3.2 MP at the back and a 1.3MP camera in the front. Tab 3 Kids runs on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) and has a 4,000mAh. 

Galaxy Tab 3 Kids includes a Time Management feature that will allow parents to set specific time period for use, once the set period is up, a password protected lock screen will appear, requiring a parent or an adult to enter the password to unlock the device. This tool is aimed at restricting the time children spend on the device. 

The tablet also packs a kids case featuring a child-friendly grip and multiple stand options. The case also comes equipped with an easy-to-grip C Pen. 

Samsung plans to launch the tablet in South Korea early next month. Other global markets are expected to get the tablet later this year. 

Samsung has not disclosed the device's pricing so far. 

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Nokia Asha 502 and 503 specs ‘appear‘ online

Internet is abuzz with details of Nokia's next in line Asha series phones. The details come courtesy eveleaks and a blog titled 'This is Nokia'. According to eveleaks, which has a fair record of leaking gadget information,Nokia Asha 503, codenamed Lanai, will be similar to Asha 501 in appearance.

However, Nokia Asha 503 will have have its entire front covered by a curved glass. The phone is expected to come in a dual-SIM version and spot 5MP rear camera with a LED flash.

Eveleaks has not revealed much details about Asha 502, codenamed Pegasus.

However, another blog titled 'This is Nokia' has also leaked specs of the two phones.

According to the blog, which quotes an anonymous tipster, Nokia Asha 502 will have a Polycarbonate body with scratch resistant display. The RAM is expected to vary between 128-512MB. Camera is reported to be 5MP.

On Asha 503, the blog says that the phone will have polycarbonate body design (similar to eveleaks). It is reported to be powered by a by a 1-1.5GHz processor.



The dual-SIM device will support 3G and come with new camera apps. The blog further states that both the phones will have Nokia SLAM Bluetooth transfer for faster sharing of files, pictures and videos.

So far, there has been no official statement from Nokia about the pricing or the availability of the phones.

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New York Times, Twitter hacked by Syrian group

Media companies including the New York Times,   Twitter and the Huffington Post lost control of some of their websites Tuesday after hackers supporting the Syrian government breached the Australian Internet company that manages many major site addresses.


The Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker group that has previously attacked media organizations that it considers hostile to the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, claimed credit for the Twitter and Huffington Post hacks in a series of Twitter messages. 

Security experts said electronic records showed that NYTimes.com, the only site with an hours-long outage, redirected visitors to a server controlled by the Syrian group before it went dark. 

New York Times Co NYT.N spokeswoman Eileen Murphy tweeted the "issue is most likely the result of a malicious external attack", based on an initial assessment. 

The Huffington Post attack was limited to the blogging platform's UK web address. Twitter said the hack led to availability issues for an hour and a half but that no user information was compromised. 

The attacks came as the Obama administration considers taking action against the Syrian government, which has been locked for more than two years in an increasingly bloody struggle against rebels. 

In August, hackers promoting the Syrian Electronic Army simultaneously targeted websites belonging to CNN, Time and the Washington Post by breaching a third party service used by those sites. 

The Syrian Electronic Army, or SEA, managed to gain control of the sites by penetrating MelbourneIT, an Australian Internet service provider that sells and manages domain names including Twitter.com and NYTimes. 

Officials at The New York Times, which identified MelbourneIT as its domain name registrar and the primary hacking victim, warned its employees to stop sending sensitive e-mails from their corporate accounts. 

MebourneIT spokesman Tony Smith said that login credentials from one of its resellers had been used improperly. 

Once MelbourneIT was notified, he said, the company restored the correct domain name settings, changed the password on the compromised account, and locked the records to prevent further alterations. 

"We are currently reviewing our logs to see if we can obtain information on the identity of the party that has used the reseller credentials, and we will share this information with the reseller and any relevant law enforcement bodies," Smith said. "We will also review additional layers of security that we can add to our reseller accounts." 

Twitter did not respond to requests for comment. In a blog post, the company said "it appears DNS (domain name system) records for various organizations were modified, including one of Twitter's domains used for image serving, Twimg.com. Viewing of images and photos was sporadically impacted." 

Hackers limited targets, say experts 

Jaeson Schultz, a Cisco Systems researcher, said that in the authoritative records known as WHOIS the Syrian Electronic Army listed itself as the contact for all of Twitter.com, which would have given it the power to take the site offline or place its own content there. 

"It seems that their message is redirecting people back to their own website for news about the SEA or about Syria," Schultz said. "They don't seem to be interested in infecting end users, which is a good thing." 

Hackers who successfully break into MelbourneIT's systems could potentially redirect and intercept emails sent to addresses under certain domains, researchers said. And users of sites that don't begin with "https" could have been fooled into entering passwords that could have been captured, said Jaime Blasco, a researcher with security firm AlienVault. 

Because MelbourneIT serves as the registrar for some of the best known domain names on the Internet, including Microsoft.com and Microsoft.com, Tuesday's breach could have had potentially catastrophic consequences. 

"This could've been one of the biggest attacks we've ever seen, if they were more subtle and more efficient about it," said HD Moore, the chief research officer at Rapid7, a cyber security firm. "They changed just a few sites, but if they had actually gone all out, they could've had most of the Internet watching them run the show." 

Media companies, which were largely ignored by hackers until 2011, have been targeted since then by pranksters and suspected Chinese agents, as well as partisans in the Middle East. 

"As long as media organizations play a critical role as influencers and critics, they will continue to be targets of cyber attacks," said Michael Fey, chief technology officer at Intel Corp's McAfee security division.

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Microsoft‘s new CEO: Guessing game begins

As Steve Ballmer bows out of Microsoft, the guessing game over who will replace him has started with a British bookmaker putting Nokia's Stephen Elop as the favourite. 

Ballmer, 57, unexpectedly announced his retirement after more than three decades at the world's largest software company, including 13 years as chief executive. 

With no heir apparent, Ladbrokes opened up betting on successors for Ballmer who will depart within the next year, with Elop, 49, topping a list of 26 candidates with odds of 5/1. 

British and Irish bookmakers offer a wide range of bets as a niche sideline to more lucrative wagers on sports. Online gambling is far more restrictive in the United States. 

Elop, a Canadian, led Microsoft's business division before becoming chief executive of the Finnish firm Nokia in 2010 with a brief to revive the once-undisputed leader in mobile phones. 

Senior Nokia employees say he has forced them to make faster decisions. But Nokia's ability to compete in the global smartphone market is increasingly questioned; its market share stands at around three percent, far behind Samsung and Apple which control around 50 percent between them. 

Internal Microsoft candidate Kevin Turner, chief operating officer, is second favourite with odds of 6/1 to replace Ballmer, according to Ladbrokes. In third is former Microsoft executive Steve Sinofsky, who left the company last November. 

The top female candidate in the stakes is internal head of devices and studios, Julie Larson-Green, in fourth place. 

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is ranked as a 50/1 shot to return to fill the void but he is considered more likely than rank 100/1 outsider Tim Cook, CEO at Apple. 

Ladbrokes' spokesman Alex Donohue said the market was a "who's who of high fliers" in the technology world. "With a year to go we anticipate that this market will smash all previous records for technology betting," Donohue said in a statement. 

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Sprint to cut 800 customer-service jobs

Sprint is eliminating about 800 customer service jobs because fewer people are calling its centres, the company said. With growth in other parts of the business, however, Sprint said it expects the company's work force to remain at about 40,000. 

Sprint said most of the affected workers were notified last Thursday. Others will be told next month after Sprint figures out which additional positions will be cut. The company said the cuts are at various locations across the country. 

Sprint's headquarters are in Overland Park. Last month, Japanese investment firm SoftBank completed a $21.6 billion investment in Sprint, giving it a 78% stake in the third-largest US wireless carrier. 

Sprint said its efforts to increase customer satisfaction helped to reduce the number of calls for customer service. According to the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index, Sprint had a 71 rating out of 100. That was unchanged from last year, but an improvement from its low of 56 in 2008. Verizon Wireless was at 73, AT&T at 70 and T-Mobile at 68 this year. 

"As customer satisfaction improves and in turn calls to customer care decrease, our staffing needs in this area decrease," Sprint said in a statement. "This organizational action keeps our costs in line with these efficiencies." 

Growth areas include positions at its retail stores, Sprint said. 

Sprint's stock fell 18 cents, or 2.6%, to $6.73 in afternoon trading Tuesday.

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IBM: India remains a big focus

IBM India managing director Vanitha Narayanan said here on Tuesday that the country's attractiveness as a market had not changed at all for the company. She was responding to a question on whether all the negative news about the Indian economy in recent times had impacted the US company's perception of the country.


"It's still a growth market for us, it's still very positive. India is the second largest consumption driven economy, after the US. Indian companies are going global, entrepreneurs have not stopped investing," she said in her first interaction with the media since taking over as the MD in January.

The $106-billion IBM has been among MNCs that have been extremely bullish about India over the past decade. It has grown its India headcount rapidly, to an estimated 1.3 lakh, which is over a third of its global employee strength. On this measure, it's almost on par withInfosys and Wipro. Every dimension of IBM's global business is represented in India, including hardware, software, services, global delivery and R&D.

The company also has the highest share of the India IT services market, estimated by research firm IDC at 12.6% for the second half of 2012. It has been particularly successful in the telecom sector, having won massive IT outsourcing deals from Bharti, Vodafone and Idea Cellular.

Narayanan said she still saw opportunity in telecom. "The last decade was about subscriber growth, rural penetration, and hyper-competition that brought prices to amongst the lowest in the world. In the coming years it will be about leveraging 3G and 4G, creating value, new capabilities and offerings, and raising average revenue per user," she said.

Narayanan, who has been with IBM for over 25 years in multiple roles around the world, said that for many segments of Indian industry, the next decade would be about transformational growth. "Banks are going beyond core banking to client engagement, risk management, retail, portfolio expansions. Manufacturing and natural resources is going beyond ERP to supply chain management, making product development best-in-class, dealer management, marketing. There are big opportunities in organized retail, in monetizing content, in security," she said.

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