Dean Takahashi sent me an e-mail pointing to a piece he wrote on VentureBeat describing statements Wednesday by Intel's Chief Technical Officer Justin Rattner targeted at NVIDIA. CNET's own Brooke Crothers covered the same story and provides additional background here.
Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin R. Rattner
(Credit: Intel)The technology at issue relates to 3D graphics for PCs. All current PC graphics chips use what's called polygon-order rendering. All of the polygons that make up the objects to be displayed are processed one at a time. The graphics chip figures out where each polygon should appear on the screen and how much of it will be visible or obstructed by other polygons.
Ray tracing achieves similar results by working through each pixel on the screen, firing off a "ray" (like a backward ray of light) that bounces off the polygons until it reaches a light source in the scene. Ray tracing produces natural lighting effects but takes a lot more work.
(That's the short version, anyway. For more details, you could dig up a copy of my 1997 book Beyond Conventional 3D. Alas, the book is long since out of print.)
Ray tracing is easily implemented in software on a general-purpose CPU, and indeed, most of the computer graphics you see in movies and TV commercials are generated this way, using rooms full of PCs or blade-server systems.
Naturally, Intel loves ray tracing, and there are people at Intel working to ... Read more
Someday, browsers will make it easy to retrace our Web steps by providing total recall of every page we've opened. Until then, we get the imperfect history features in Internet Explorer and Firefox.
They're imperfect because they seem to remember every page I've visited except the only one I actually need to return to. At least Firefox gives you a few more options for changing how it records your surfing history. With Internet Explorer, the only two options you get are to 1) change the number of days your history is stored and to 2) clear your history completely.
Tweaking Firefox's history settings
To adjust the history settings in Firefox, click Tools > Options > Privacy. Here, you can reset the number of days the browser remembers the sites you visit (the default is nine), or tell Firefox not to record the data you enter into forms and the search bar. You can also erase Firefox's memory of the files and programs you download. The default in both cases is to remember.
Reset the number of days Firefox remembers your browsing history via the Privacy Options dialog box.
(Credit: Mozilla Firefox)When you press Ctrl-Shift-Delete to clear Firefox's private data, you're shown seven options, five of which are selected. I usually just want to clear the cache--Gmail sometimes balks at downloading my in-box unless I clear out the browser's store of temporary files.
To change the defaults, reopen the Privacy Options, and click Settings in the Private Data section. Check the items you want to clear, uncheck those you don't, and click OK. The next time you open the Clear Private Data dialog box, your new defaults will be the only ones checked.
Customize the categories of private data that Firefox deletes by default when you click Clear Private Data.
(Credit: Mozilla Firefox)By default, Firefox shows up to 50 entries in each history folder. You can reduce Firefox's memory consumption (and possibly slow some page reloads) by reducing this entry via the browser's configuration options. Type about:config in the address bar, and press Enter. Scroll to and double-click browser.sessionhistory.max_entries, and enter the maximum number of pages you want Firefox to remember for each site you visit.
Internet Explorer's meager history options
When you click Tools > Delete Browsing History in Internet Explorer 7, you're given five options: Temporary Internet Files, Cookies, History, Form data, and Passwords. Or click "Delete all" to clear all five.
Internet Explorer 7's Delete Browsing History dialog box gives you five options.
(Credit: Microsoft)To change the number of days IE stores your browsing history, click Tools > Internet Options, click Settings under "Browsing history" on the General tab, and click the up or down arrows in the History section at the bottom of the resulting dialog box.
Change the number of days Internet Explorer 7 retains a list of the sites you've visited via the Browsing History Settings dialog box.
(Credit: Microsoft)Tomorrow: a Firefox add-on that shows all the files downloaded by the current page.
Part of the challenge of making semiconductors in the 1950s was developing your own equipment.
"All of the equipment for the photo lithography had to be developed from scratch. Photo lithography had been used for printed circuit boards, but we wanted to really apply it to production silicon technology, and that required everything new," said Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder and one of the "traitorous eight," in an interview with SEMI, the semiconductor manufacturing equipment trade group.
"We had to develop the mask-making technology as well as the techniques for coating wafers with the photo resist material and so forth. So it was an extensive amount of new technology that we were bringing to bear in our first products," Moore said.
It's part of an ongoing oral history project at SEMI. You can check out the full interview, but here are some highlights:
Gordon Moore in 2007.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland)• At Shockley Semiconductor, engineers developed a machine for making masks, which define circuit patterns on a chip, that used lenses from movie cameras.
• Moore and others experimented early on with the idea of using gallium arsenide, rather than silicon, for making transistors, but realized silicon would provide more bang for the buck. Gallium arsenide remains a relatively niche market today.
• Shockley's first facility was a Quonset hut and was pretty dirty.
• Intel, which got started 40 years ago in the middle of 1968, set a goal of getting its first fab up and running that year. It met the goal on December 31.
Again, more here.
Correction: The authors of the Netflix de-anonymization study contacted me to point out that they originally published a draft of their results a mere two weeks after Netflix released its dataset. Netflix has known about their study for over a year.
Over the past year, there have been a number of high-profile incidents in which sensitive user data was accidentally revealed to the Internet at large. As a result, I believe that high-tech companies will never again share anonymized data on their users with academic researchers, at least not without requiring contracts and nondisclosure agreements. For the users and privacy advocates, this is probably a good thing. However, for researchers, the scientific community, and Internet users who want cool new technologies, this is almost certainly a change for the worse.
Netflix
(Credit: Flickr / thebluedino)In 2006, Netflix released over 100 million movie ratings made by 500,000 subscribers to their online DVD rental service. The company then offered $1 million to anyone who could improve the company's system of DVD recommendation. In order to protect its customers' privacy, Netflix anonymized the data set by removing any personal details.
Researchers announced this week that they were able to de-anonymize the data, by comparing the Netflix data against publicly available ratings on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). Whoops.
For Internet privacy geeks, this Netflix incident is just another version of an all-too-familiar tale: A well-meaning company releases a large data set of user data, which it has scrubbed to remove any identifying information. Armed with this data set, researchers are able to trace backwards, and match names to the profiles and their online behavior.
The same thing happened back in 2006 when AOL released the search records of 500,000 of its users. Within days of the database's release, journalists from the New York Times had revealed the identity of user number 4417749 to be Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow from Lilburn, Ga. Over 300 of the woman's searches were traced back to her, ranging from "60 single men" to "dog that urinates on everything."
The fallout from the AOL incident was devastating, both for the company and the industry as a whole. The CTO of the company and the researchers responsible for sharing the data were all fired. In addition to pulling the data set, the entire Web presence for AOL's research division was taken offline. More than one year onward, the AOL Research group still does not have a working homepage.
The shockwaves spread to the entire search engine industry. Google's CEO Eric Schmidt spoke to journalists shortly after AOL posted the data. After calling the data release "a terrible thing," he assured the public that "this kind of thing could not happen at Google."
The end result was that no search engine would ever again release anonymized log data to the research community.
Big Brother
(Credit: Flickr / surfstyle)The announcement by researchers of their Netflix project is so recent that it has yet to be seen how the company will respond. The data has been public for over a year, and With a $1 million prize, the release almost certainly required the sign-off from executives (and so the company cannot blame rogue researchers as AOL did). While search engine logs are obviously extremely sensitive, video rental records are also very private. Enough so that Congress has given video rental records a higher level of protection than almost any other form of personal data (this was prompted by the worry that the politicians' own rental records could be published by journalists).
Companies do not make money by giving researchers access to data. They do it to promote and encourage research in the field. Based on the AOL and Netflix incidents, I suspect that we will see a major chill hit the industry. No high-tech company with large amounts of user data will ever again risk making it available to researchers without first requiring them to sign a lengthy contract. The risk of the data being de-anonymized (and the resulting public relations and legal trouble) is simply not worth it.
So, what if companies require researchers to sign agreements before the firms hand over anonymized user data? Isn't that a good way to protect users, yet still enable researchers to do their thing? Unfortunately, research is rarely respected by the community when the data comes with strings. It is for good reasons that people are dubious when drug companies sponsor research into the safety of one of their drugs. When a company holds the keys to the data, they can stop the publication of anything which will make them look bad.
As a privacy advocate and end user, I think the shift against sharing anonymized data is probably a good thing. After all, I don't want some random student browsing through my search history, anonymized or not. However, if I take the end-user hat off, and put on my PhD student hat, then this is a really bad thing. Researchers depend on accurate data in order to do their work. Without the data, we don't get new exciting research, and thus no new cool technologies. For the research community, this Netflix incident will be the final nail in the coffin of information sharing from the dot-coms.
I had a great time over the weekend at the 10th Vintage Computer Festival, which took place in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
A LINC system in the home of programmer Mary Allen Wilkes in 1965
(Credit: Courtesy Mary Allen Wilkes and DigiBarn)In addition to the exhibits of vintage computers--including the largest collection of Radio Shack Pocket Computers I've ever seen--and the marketplace, where I managed to avoid buying any slide rules, Vectrix video games, or Cray supercomputer circuit boards--there were several notable presentations.
On Saturday, Tim McNerney spoke about his work to reimplement the Intel 4004 microprocessor, which led to a 130x-scale working model of the chip composed of individual transistors on a large circuit board exactly duplicating the layout of the original integrated circuit. Pretty cool.
On Sunday, two talks were especially interesting to me.
Phil Lapsley presented a history of phone phreaking--using tone generators called "Blue Boxes" to make long-distance phone calls without paying. Several key players in the computer industry were introduced to engineering and computer science through phreaking, including Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Woz's friend John Draper, who wrote EasyWriter, an early word processor for the Apple II.
Draper was on hand for Lapsley's presentation and offered his personal insights on some of the key events Lapsley described. For example, Lapsley talked about the 1971 article in Esquire magazine that brought phreaking to broad public awareness. After the article was published, criminal prosecutions of phone phreaks (usually for wire fraud) soared, then began to taper off again five years later when AT&T introduced new telephone switching systems that were immune to the techniques described in the Esquire article.
Draper was able to explain the origin of the Esquire article: a fellow allegedly selling Blue Boxes to the Mafia got caught phreaking because he was using relatively insecure methods. Several phreaks called him to chastise him, which annoyed him enough to spill the beans to the Esquire reporter.
Also according to Draper, phreaking remained technically possible until relatively recently, particularly in towns with small, independent phone companies--but calls in and out of these places are routed through modern switching systems that would cut off any attempts to exploit this potential vulnerability.
However, some international phone systems may remain vulnerable today. An audience member mentioned a 2004 article in Wired that described a trio of blind brothers, Palestinians living in Israel, who were convicted of telecommunications fraud after a "six-year spree of hacking into phone systems and hijacking telephone time" in the 1990s that allegedly yielded $2 million.
And the first shall be last--the final big presentation at VCF X was a 45th anniversary celebration of LINC (Laboratory INstrument Computer), which some say was the world's first personal computer. No less an industry luminary than Gordon Bell, for example, was on hand to make that claim.
The celebration was organized by Bruce Damer, founder of the DigiBarn Computer Museum, a private computer museum in the Santa Cruz mountains currently open by appointment only (apart from occasional open-house events; see this recent CNET article about the DigiBarn collection), and Severo Ornstein, an engineer of the original LINC and author of Computing in the Middle Ages.
Although LINC systems were generally purchased and used for professional rather than personal reasons, it otherwise qualifies as a personal computer. They came with keyboards and displays that could show text or 256x256-pixel black & white graphics, and could be operated from a single AC power outlet. LINCs could be used for biomedical laboratory scientific research, document processing, simple graphical games, and even, in a limited way, digital photographic imaging (according to an anecdote related at the event).
The photo above shows a LINC in the home of Mary Allen Wilkes, who wrote the LINC's system software. I don't know if this qualifies LINC as the world's first home computer, but it has to be pretty close.
It was a big machine; the cabinet on the right side of the picture was roughly the size of a refrigerator, and the cabinet for the operator console and dual tape drives was also pretty hefty. All that hardware combined to offer a 12-bit computer system with 1,024 or 2,048 words of memory. Not bad for 1962...
A LINC machine-- one of several rescued from destruction and stored for years by Scott Robinson--was recently restored by a group of early LINC users who were honored at the celebration along with LINC designer Wesley A. Clark ("not the general," as he says). That machine was up and running in the VCF exhibit area, looking pretty good for a computer almost as old as me!
[Updated with more information about LINC and the LINC event courtesy of Bruce Damer. Thanks, Bruce!]
(Credit:
Hewlett-Packard)
The information age just got a little older, as the "birthplace of Silicon Valley" has been formally listed on the National Register of Historic Places. More specifically, this is 367 Addison Ave. in Palo Alto, California: the garage where, in 1938, two guys named Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started a company that became known as Hewlett-Packard the next year.
The new historic status is official as of Thursday. (You think it's been Zillowed?)
The house had been built circa 1905 and apparently once housed Palo Alto's first mayor; the garage, however, wasn't built until around 1924--coinciding with the paving of the city's streets to deal with those newfangled contraptions known as "cars." The "HP Garage" was already listed as an historical landmark in the state of California (number 976, if you like numbers). It achieved that status in 1987.
HP bought back the garage, along with the house, in 2000 for a reported $1.7 million (last year, Google did the same thing with the garage that had been home to Larry and Sergey's early start-up days), and in 2005 the HP Garage underwent an extensive renovation.
Google has renamed its "Search History" service "Web History" and broadened its coverage. Previously, the service would record your Google searches. Now, Web History can associate the web pages you visit with your Google Account. Web History keeps a list of the times and links to the web pages viewed and searches conducted. Users have to be signed in to their Google account and need to have the Google Toolbar installed with PageRank enabled.
Google's
The launch of Google's new Web History product should send those fears into overdrive.
The new service allows you to search and view your entire online life, including which pages you visited and when. Google will also analyze your online travels, revealing which sites you visit most frequently and what your top searches are.
The data is available only when you log on with your Google account and password, and Google does have a feature that lets you remove items or turn off the service. The tool itself can be extremely useful, both to users and to developers. But many bloggers looked askance at a tool that lays right out in the open the fact that Google knows just about everything you see and everything you do online.
Blog community response:
"Yes, that is truly amazing, if it works, and is a feature that could make one overlook all of the creepiness of being shown the reality of everything Google knows about you when you use one service for searching, mapping, comparing products, sending email, and then, embed a tool of theirs in your web browser."
--Rex Hammock's Weblog
"Outside of the world of users who gawk at every shiny new thing on the web, though, this is going to give people the heebie-jeebies in a way that we're probably only used to getting from Microsoft. In fact, it's probably safe to say that no other major web company could release this product today; The backlash from the user community of players like Microsoft, Yahoo, or AOL would simply be too strong."
--Anil Dash
"Should you be concerned? Of course. Everyone should be concerned about their private data. Everyone should really think about what is being logged and how it is being used. But we also make tradeoffs. We want certain things from companies, and to get them, we have to give up some of our privacy often trusting it will be protected."
--Search Engine Land
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