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Domain: bham.ac.uk

Stories and comments across the archive that link to bham.ac.uk.

Stories · 9

  1. Researchers Devise Voting System That Seems Secure, But Is Hard To Use

    It · Security · · posted by Soulskill · from the find-the-candidate-and-hand-them-your-vote dept. · 103 comments
    An anonymous reader writes: According to an article in ReadWrite, a team of British and American researchers have developed a hacker resistant process for online voting called Du-Vote. It uses a credit card-sized device that helps to divide the security-sensitive tasks between your computer and the device in a way that neither your computer nor the device learns how you voted (PDF). If a hacker managed to control the computer and the Du-Vote token, he still can't change the votes without being detected.

  2. Most Torrent Downloaders Are Monitored, Study Finds

    Yro · Piracy · · posted by timothy · from the you-ah-being-vatched dept. · 309 comments
    derekmead writes "A new study from Birmingham University in the U.K. found that people will likely be monitored within hours of downloading popular torrents by at least one of ten or more major monitoring firms. The team, led by security researcher Tom Chothia, ran software that acted like a BitTorrent client for three years and recorded all of the connections made to it. At SecureComm conference in Padua, Italy this week, the team announced that they found huge monitoring operations tracking downloaders that have been up and running for at least the entirety of their research. According to the team's presentation (PDF), monitors were only regularly detected in Top 100 torrents, while monitoring of more obscure material was more spotty. What's really mysterious is who all of the firms are. Chothia's crew found around 10 different monitoring entities, of which a few were identifiable as security companies, copyright firms, or other torrent researchers. But six entities could not be identified because they were masked through third party hosting. Now, despite firms focusing mostly on just the top few searches out there at any given time, that's still a massive amount of user data to collect and store. Why? Well, if a reverse class-action lawsuit were feasible, those treasure troves of stored data would be extremely valuable."

  3. All the Best Games May Be NP-Hard

    Games · Games · · posted by kdawson · from the easy-for-you-to-say dept. · 322 comments
    Catullus writes "Following in the footsteps of Tetris and Minesweeper, the simple yet addictive multiplatform game Flood-It is the latest puzzle to be proven to be hard — NP-hard, to be exact. This means that there's no way to write an efficient program to beat the game, unless P=NP. This research by computer scientists from Bristol University raises the intriguing question: are these games fun precisely because they're hard for computers to solve, and need a spark of human creativity?"

  4. Variety, Social Aspects More Important To Game Success Than Graphics, Plot

    Games · Graphics · · posted by Soulskill · from the world-of-tweetcraft dept. · 236 comments
    proslack writes "In a study presented at the Human-Computer Interaction conference in Cambridge, England, British researchers Beale and Bond found that plot and graphics are not critical to the success of video games; price and the inclusion of social aspects (e.g. multiplayer or chat) were found to be more important." An unfinished version of the paper (PDF) is available from the researchers' web site. They said, "One of the most unexpected findings was that gameplay was not featured as one of the most important categories to fulfill," though they acknowledge that variety and cohesion were measured separately from gameplay, which past studies have not done.

  5. Karaoke Revolution Specifics Unearthed

    Games · Playstation · · posted by simoniker · from the furthering-the-avrilution-through-karaoke dept. · 27 comments
    Thanks to GameSpy for their hands-on preview of Karaoke Revolution, Konami's PlayStation 2 title that uses the USB headset and "...requires you to match the rhythm and pitch for the vocals in a song" (although luckily for the tone-deaf among us: "Karaoke mode allows you to just kick it to a song without having to worry about performance.") This Harmonix-developed title, originally unveiled a couple of months back, sports "more than 35 tracks in all", from Mr.Mister to Avril Lavigne, and the previewer handily points out that "Not everyone can rock a guitar or a keyboard. Not everyone can dance... but almost all of us can sing (whether the results are appealing or not is another matter)."

  6. Nanotech Pinball and Miniature Engines

    Science · Science · · posted by michael · from the tiny-bubbles dept. · 171 comments
    glenmark writes "Researchers at the Solid State Electronics Laboratory at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed the world's smallest pinball game. The video is fascinating. The flippers are electrostatically-actuated monocrystalline silicon cantilevers. I hope Pat Lawlor and Steve Ritchie see this. I have a feeling they would get a kick out of it." And in another nanotech story, psmears writes "Three hundred times more powerful than ordinary batteries, but much lighter and smaller? Researchers at the University of Birmingham have developed a micro-engine that will allow people to charge mobile phones using lighter fluid. Further information at Research-TV including photos and a film."

  7. What AI Elements Could Improve the Web?

    Ask · News · · posted by Cliff · from the stuff-to-think-about dept. · 328 comments
    DavidpFitz asks: "I'm entering my final year of my Artificial Intellgience/Computer Science degree at Birmingham Uni. (UK). The trouble is that I can't decide what to do for my final project. I'd like to do something of practical value delivered over the web (things like an intelligent Slashdot filter spring to mind :-), but I always come up with reasons against everything I think of. Can anybody think of ways they would like a web site to react more intelligently that they currently do. Clever shopping carts? More targeted news? Both of these are rubbish, I think - so more interesting and complex ideas are welcome! The main thing, is that it has to have a strong AI element in it, not just appearing to be clever."

    Interesting thought. So if we were to apply more AI to the web, what areas should we target? And I feel this is a valid question even if someone may be using these ideas for their school project. These are still just that: ideas. DavidpFitz will have to finish and implement his final project regardless of anything said in this forum, so why not take his line of reasoning, brainstorm a bit and have some fun with it?

  8. British Telecom Announces Unmetered Net Access

    Internet · · posted by ryuzaki0 · from the at-long-last dept. · 0 comments
    Dodgie writes "UK telco BT finally announced yesterday their plans for BT Surftime, the UK's first unmetered dial-up internet access plan. It is expected to be released next Spring but doesn't come cheap... For FULL 24hr unmetered access, users can expect to pay £34.99 a month. Various other cheaper plans are also available such as weekend only and off-peak and weekend access. Looks like this could be the opportunity Britain needs to finally get onto the Internet without continually worrying about the phone bill on your 57.6 snail-link.. Full article on ZDnet."

  9. Oracle offer 1 million dollars for Benchmarks

    News · News · · posted by CmdrTaco · from the I-like-cocky-CEOs dept. · 0 comments
    Guy Coates sent us a summary of Larry Ellison's Comdex speech:" He will give anyone 1 million dollars if a) Anyone can publish a benchmark for Microsoft SQL server, period. b) Get SQL server to run less than 99 times more slowly than oracle database. Quote; "If oracle is only 70 times faster, we will pay you 1 million dollars."" I want a million dollars! But you'd have to pay me almost that much just to convince me just to use MS SQL again, much less benchmark it.