technology

Google is unveiling a new personal health records service, Google Health

Ten years ago, a similar product might have saved me some serious heartache. I was ambulanced to an emergency room with chest pains, and the cardiologist on call diagnosed me as having a heart attack. Not quite. If she had been able to access my medical history, she might have seen that my father had had an aortic aneurysm and checked for that. Instead, she put me on blood thinner, causing my aneurysm to bleed all the more and almost bringing my brilliant career, among other things, to an untimely end. Thanks to a surgeon-god named Paul Corso and a St. Jude's valve, I survived.

A federal judge granted a motion restoring access to the Internet, for the first time in seven years, to employees in various offices at the U.S. Department of the Interior.

As part of a class-action suit filed against the Interior Department 12 years ago, American Indian plaintiffs convinced a judge that their Indian Trust accounts, which are managed by the agency, were not safe from hackers. In December 2001, Interior hustled to disconnect, and then hustled to find ways for the thousand-plus affected employees to get their jobs done in the Internet age, without the Internet.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) announced a $1-million prize for whoever comes up with a commercially viable way to produce in vitro meat by 2012.

PETA's million-dollar prize is an occasion for irony -- delicious or repulsive, depending on one's perspective. About a decade ago, an urban legend claimed that the government had barred Kentucky Fried Chicken from calling its food "chicken," because it used genetically modified Frankenbirds, brainless and grown in jars, that bore no resemblance to chicken or poultry of any kind. That supposedly explained the rebranding of Kentucky Fried Chicken as "KFC" -- a government demand for truth in advertising. Needless to say, this idiotic myth contained not even a grain of truth. KFC continued to use real chickens, and to abuse them wantonly in the production process. PETA noticed and launched a campaign, "Kentucky Fried Cruelty," to draw attention to KFC's brutal methods. Now PETA's prize suggests the organization wishes the urban legend had been true from the start. One looks forward to clever PETA graphics featuring Colonel Sanders in a lab-coat, instead of bloodstained and sporting devil-horns.

A leaked U.S. document details the proliferation among Iraqi insurgents of proximity-fuze rockets, a deadly improvement on previous weapons.

The roadside bomb is the signature weapon of the Iraq war, but measured purely by the man-hours of dread they inspire, rockets and mortars easily have it beat. Roadside bombs kill soldiers only when they're on the road. But indirect fire can hit U.S. bases at any hour, in any place, and with little warning. (Some bases have red-alert sirens, which usually crank up only after the attack has started and are therefore widely ignored.) The homey comforts of the bases -- rich food, well-stocked stores, fast-food restaurants -- only increase the psychological stress, since they make death a constant presence during what otherwise feels like your safest moments. That war-zone Whopper tastes a lot less like comfort-food when you know each bite could be your last.

Everyday products, from baby-bottles to beer, contain particles manipulated by unregulated and potentially dangerous nanotechnology, according to a new report by Friends of the Earth.

The report, "Out of the Laboratory and On To Our Plates," identifies 104 products -- like Miller beer brands, Baby Dream's "Nano Silver" milk bottle, and Samsung refrigerators -- with particles artificially manipulated at the atomic level. Nanoparticles are more chemically reactive than their larger counterparts, can be more toxic to human cells, and can more easily invade our tissues and organs. The authors advocate a moratorium until governments test their safety -- and, perhaps more critically, require companies to label products that contain them. MORE

Princeton researchers published a paper describing a devastating attack on standard encryption -- including encryption used to secure government secrets.

Data remain safe, most of the time.  The attacker needs access to the computer minutes after the user has walked away, and if he arrives later the data stay locked.  If the user guards the computer jealously, by clutching it close to the chest, or, as Atlantic employees with company-issued laptops are required to do, entrusting it during nights and weekends to a Gurkha security team, then even the geeks of Princeton can't get in.

One line from John Markham's informative NYT article stood out.  "The team [...] did not know if such an attack capability would compromise government computer information, because details of how classified computer data is protected are not publicly available."  Many readers will take this statement as a sign of government computers' security.

Security experts would suggest the opposite conclusion: vulnerabilities reveal themselves only when many eyes are looking for them.  It took so long to find this one because thousands of computer scientists and engineers all over the world have over the years collaborated to make encryption stronger.  The government's methods, if they are different, will have had none of the same scrutiny.  And other than a squad of Gurkhas, scrutiny is the only security worth having.

Microsoft makes a hostile takeover bid for Yahoo! Google cries foul.

The notion of Microsoft as the ultimate corporate villain is so deeply ingrained that it's easy to forget that one of the most dominant brands in history is now the underdog.  MORE