Google opens up malware blacklist API

Google employees from the Antiphishing and Antimalware Teams have announced that the company is opening up its Safe Browsing API to the public. The Safe Browsing API allows easy access to Google's updated blacklist of suspected phishing and malware-infested web pages. The blacklists are the same ones used in Google's antiphishing plug-in for the Firefox web browser, as well as Google Desktop.

Anyone with a Google account can sign up for an API key, which is a 58-character string used to authenticate the user. It also allows Google to disable access to certain users if they violate the terms of service agreement. Applications that use the Safe Browsing API must limit the number of times they poll Google's servers for updates to the blacklists, which Google updates every 30 minutes. There is also a limitation on the number of users an application using the Safe Browsing API is allowed to service: the license agreement states that if more than 10,000 users are expected to send regular requests to the API, an e-mail must be sent to Google to lift the cap. In addition, applications that use the API are required to inform users that the service does not provide 100 percent malware protection.
Google has been working on making the web safer for Internet surfers for some time now. The recent purchase of the web security firm GreenBorder, combined with the opening of their Safe Browsing API to the public, shows that Google is serious about wanting to improve the public's perception of the safety of the web, and in particular of web-based applications. The effort has not always gone smoothly. Google had to quickly patch their blacklisting software when it was revealed that some of the URLs it listed contained user names and passwords. Google maintains that the Safe Browsing API is still "experimental" and subject to change. The company hopes to improve the API in the future, making it easier for small developers to integrate it into their applications.

Wireless electricity test completed

The day may be coming when PCs, cell phones and many other devices will be run without a battery or electrical cord.

Last week, an MIT research team announced that it had juiced up a 60-watt light bulb using "WiTricity," the name it has given a wireless electricity source it is developing.

The team generated the WiTricity using two copper coils, one attached to a power source. The power coil emitted a field of magnetism to the unpowered coil, stimulating it to generate a current that powered the light bulb from seven feet away, said Andre Kurs, a graduate student in MIT's physics department who worked on the project.

The team has been testing WiTricity options over the past year. The WiTricity generated by the coils powered the light bulb in a way similar to magnetic induction, which is used in power transformers so that one coil carries power to another.

Using an energy converter, any object near the WiTricity generating coils could be powered, and the technology could, in the future, be used to replace cords and bulky batteries, which often contain toxic chemicals.

Kurs contended that WiTricity is safer than electricity or batteries and will "run forever if you take care of it."

Depending on how the coils are configured, a single WiTricity source could provide power for several laptops or dozens of cell phones.

The team plans to expand the tests with a goal of covering greater distances and generating more power

Microsoft Surface

After five years of keeping the project shrouded in secrecy, Microsoft today revealed its plans for Microsoft Surface, the first product in a category the company calls "surface computing." The technology, formerly code-named Milan, lets Microsoft turn a seemingly ordinary surface, such as a tabletop or a wall, into a computer. Introduced today at the D: All Things Digital conference in Carlsbad, California, Microsoft Surface is a "multi-touch" tabletop computer that interacts with users through touch on multiple points on the screen.

The concept is simple: Users interact with the computer completely by touch, on a surface other than a standard screen. "It will feel like Minority Report," promises Pete Thompson, general manager of Microsoft's surface computing group. "Very futuristic--but it will be here this year."

The product unveiled today will be Microsoft branded and available to the company's four partners--Harrah's Entertainment, International Game Technologies, Starwood Hotels, and T-Mobile--in November. Starwood Hotels plans to put Microsoft Surface devices in common areas, to provide functions such as a virtual concierge; T-Mobile will use them to enhance the cell phone shopping experience. Microsoft expects to deploy dozens of units with each of its partners by year's end.
Microsoft Surface couples standard PC components with the cameras and projectors necessary to enable surface computing. The demo unit employed a 3-GHz Pentium 4 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and an off-the-shelf graphics card with standard drivers (and Microsoft's own application layer to allow the GPU to help with sensing touch).

The images the PC outputs are displayed on the tabletop surface through a short-throw DLP projector contained inside the table; the lens is just 21 inches from the surface. The rear-projection system produces a 30-inch-diagonal, 4:3-aspect-ratio image at a resolution of 1024 by 768 at 60 Hz.

The table also houses a power supply, stereo speakers, an infrared illuminator, and five overlapping cameras that sense movement on its surface. The cameras feed images of objects on the surface--be they fingers or tagged objects such as game pieces, a Wi-Fi camera, or a digital audio player--back into the computer, where they're processed mostly in the GPU, according to Nigel Keam, one of Microsoft's architects behind Surface.

The specially treated surface's multi-touch capability has no implicit limit, says Keam. "We optimize it for 52 [points of touch], based on the most extreme reasonable scenario we could come up with: Four people with all fingers down, and 12 game pieces in the center."

One of the hardest things about working with the technology was to get the touch surface right. Developers had to walk a fine line in creating a surface that's opaque enough to hold a rear-projected image but translucent enough for cameras to see through it. "You need a strong diffuser on the topmost surface," Keam notes, "but the camera wants to see straight through the diffuser to what's on the surface. So it's a balancing act. We had to research a lot of different ways to make the surface look right, feel right, and be tough. Everything meets at this one layer."

The device's infrared capability means you can do more than just use your fingers on the tabletop surface. Tags on a Wi-Fi camera or a digital audio player, for example, could be used to transfer images, music, or playlists. Or perhaps a card could store your account information and let any Microsoft Surface unit grab your images from a central server. Tagged pieces might generate special effects for drawings or images, and puzzle pieces could act as props in interactive games.