Desktop "Crystal Fusion"

It’s been long since I have posted any blog here, sorry for that but today I have a good story to be told it’s about another Tech Findings. Friends this is about a great development at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Researchers here have developed a tabletop accelerator that produces nuclear fusion at room temperature using 'crystal fusion', it is simpler, less expensive and it has the potential to produce even more neutrons than the previous version. Two opposing "pyroelectric" crystals that create a strong electric field when heated or cooled, it is filled with deuterium gas (almost similar to hydrogen, but has more electrons). The electric field rips electrons from the gas, creating deuterium ions and accelerating them into a deuterium target on one of the crystals. The particles smash into the target, neutrons are emitted, which is the shows that nuclear fusion has occurred.

A similar device was developed by a research team UCLA in 2005. The two major advantages of the new device are:

1. It has two crystals compared to one in the previous version. This makes it doubles the acceleration potential.
2. The new device does not require cooling of crystals which means that it is not only cost effective but also simple to develop.

The device, which uses two opposing crystals to generate a powerful electric field, could potentially lead to a portable, battery-operated neutron generator for a variety of applications, from non-destructive testing to detecting explosives and scanning luggage at airports. This can be implemented as a substitute to the heavy batteries for various devices. We can expect an efficient batteries that are very light weight and more efficient that the ones available these days. This concept can also be used to develop portable X-Ray generator. There is already a commercial portable pyroelectric x-ray product available, but it does not produce enough energy to provide the 50,000 electron volts needed for medical imaging whereas the new device is capable of producing about 2,00,000 electron volts, which could meet these requirements and could also be enough to penetrate several millimeters of steel. In the future this concept can also be used to treat cancer.

4G in India

India to adopt 4G Technology India plans to skip 3G and jump to 4G (4th generation) standards wireless technology. According to Dayanidhi Maran, the country's new minister for IT and communications, Current 3G services are not considered cost-effective enough and it is hoped that 4G might help reduce the expenses and stay on pace with the global market. Besides 4G networks could be the adequate tool to introduce broadband in rural areas: some 50,000 Indian villages do not have telephone facility. India's mobile telephony service providers are currently providing services based on GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), or CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technologies. "The 3G standard has been evolved, but has not proved cost-effective," said Maran in Delhi this week. "I therefore plan to leapfrog this generation and develop 4G technologies. India has an opportunity with its large market and high technical skills to be a significant player in this field. We are going to set up a National Center for Excellence in this area." The minister also rules out privatization of government-owned telecom services companies, such as BSNL and MTNL. The previous government had been pushing for privatization of some key government-owned companies. "I shall make all endeavors to make India the world's hub for outsourcing skilled manpower in the IT sector," he says. "India cannot hope to aspire to become a great IT nation without adequate level of research and development work. Toward this, our national R institutions would be given encouragement to invest in R and bring about world-class technologies." India also plans to have a national Internet exchange through which it hopes to connect all Internet service providers to achieve efficient Internet traffic routing, cost reduction, and improve the quality of service for the Internet users in India. The country also plans to migrate to Internet Protocol version 6 by 2006. "Worldwide, IPv6 is being implemented on the Internet to accommodate increased number of users and take care of security concerns," Maran says. On the whole we find India moving north... with new technologies coming in, outdated practices being trashed and young ministers stepping in INDIA seems to be clearer in its ideas and set to move north...

KamaSutra Effects

The KamaSurta worm also known as Blackmail, MyWife, Nyxem.E, and Grew is thought to have infected more than half a million PCs. Security vendor IronPort warned Thursday that these machines are now hard-coded to propagate the virus on Feb. 3.

According to F-Secure:

When run on a Windows PC, the worm copies itself to shared network locations and sends itself to e-mail addresses found on the target computer. The pest includes a timed attack that attempts to disable antivirus and firewall software and delete certain files, including Office documents on 3rd of the month. At the moment it's just sitting there quietly, and we won't know how many home users have been infected until Feb. 3. It is similar to the 'Email-Worm.Win32.VB.bi' that was found a few days ago.

Nyxem has the potential to cause havoc throughout the year, as infected PCs are set to activate on the third day of every month, unless they are cleaned up. F-Secure has reported that Nyxem.E reached the top position on Thursday in its virus statistics list, with 21.7 percent of all reported infections. The worm also has its own counting mechanism, and it showed 510,000 infected systems on Saturday.

Nyxem is certainly malicious. It can be delivered via e-mail, but also as a network worm. It probes other PCs on a closed network to compromise them and send itself to the other computers, to infect as many hosts as possible. The malicious software hides in attachment types not typically blocked by attachment filters

It got a lot of media attention because of the name and the illicit material, but it did not get attention from the major antivirus companies There was "some hype" fueled by some in the security industry that published high infection numbers. vast majority of the machines infected...are home computers.

Companies are unlikely to be directly affected if they are running up-to-date antivirus software, because the major antivirus vendors have now released patches. But IronPort warned that companies could experience secondary effects, as the virus tries to propagate itself by harvesting e-mail addresses on an infected machine. McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro say KamaSurta has come and gone. Still, PC users should keep their antivirus software up to date to be protected against possible variants.

The bottom line is that: There is nothing to fear about the KamaSurta since it no more exists on a large scale view, but as far as home users running age old antivirus systems (with no or older updates) and no firewall are still the once who will suffer.

technorati tags: Virus, worm, Blackmail, MyWife, Nyxem.E, Feb 3 2006, KamaSurta, internet

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