The researchers, Wei-Po Lee, Tsung-Hsien Yang and Bingchiang Jeng of National Sun Yat-sen University, have now turned to neural networks to help them break the cycle of repetitive behavior in robot toys and to endow them with almost emotional responses to interactions.

“We have developed a user-centric interactive framework that employs a neural network-based approach to construct behavior primitives and behavior arbitrators for robots,” the team explains in the current issue of the International Journal of Modeling, Identification and Control. Their evaluation of the approach should allow them to construct an emotion-based pet robot much more quickly than current design and manufacturing prototyping allows.

Building fully autonomous artificial creatures with intelligence akin to humans is a very long-term goal of robot design and computer science. On the way to such machines, home entertainment and utility devices such as “Tamagotchi” digital pets and domestic toy robots such as Aibo, the robotic dog and even the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, have been developed. At the same time, popular science fiction culture has raised consumer expectations.

“With current technologies in computing and electronics and knowledge in ethology, neuroscience and cognition, it is now possible to create embodied prototypes of artificial living toys acting in the physical world,” Wei-Po Lee and colleagues at the National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, explain.

There are three major issues to considered in robot design, the team explains. The first is to construct an appropriate control architecture by which the robot can behave coherently. The second is to develop natural ways for the robot to interact with a person. The third is to embed emotional responses and behavior into the robot’s computer.

The researchers hope to address all three issues by adopting an approach to behavior-based architecture — using a neural network — that could allow the owner of a robot pet to reconfigure the device to “learn,” or evolve new behavior and at the same time ensure that the robot pet functions properly in real time.

The team has evaluated their framework by building robot controllers to achieve various tasks successfully. They, and countless other research teams across the globe, are currently working on vision modules for robots. The technique is not yet fully mature, but ultimately they hope to be able to build a robot pet that could recognize its owner’s facial expressions and perhaps respond accordingly. Such a development has major implications for interactive devices, computers and functional robots of the future.

Since that rumble last year, the Mac security front has been relatively quiet. This begs the question that has been on many people’s minds and one I get asked on a daily basis: “Why don’t Macs get viruses?”

Of course, we know the question isn’t valid. Macs can be attacked as evidenced earlier. Even Apple suggests running some kind of antivirus software on your Mac and included one with a .Mac subscription. Additionally, numerous security flaws are found and Apple releases regular security updates to patch them up. So, a better question might be “Why don’t Mac users have to worry about malware like Windows users do?” I suspect a relatively small number of readers have active antivirus software running on their Mac, despite Apple’s recommendation. For purposes of simplicity, we’ll lump viruses, worms, spyware, malware, and trojans under the common term of “viruses.” Here are the common responses given and my take on them.

Macs Aren’t Popular

Why do people rob banks? That’s where the money is! (Sutton’s Law). Because Windows-based computers represent around 90 percent of the market, virus writers get more bang for their buck. Not only does a Windows virus spread farther and faster due to its numbers, but the people writing viruses are more likely to have Windows machines upon which to code. And the banks are running Windows as well, so Windows is where the money is.

Of course, when Apple introduced Intel-based computers, some were concerned that Macs would get PC viruses because they were running the same chips. The chip switch was a legitimate concern, but for a different reason. If cheap PCs could be turned into Macs, the enemy could use that to their advantage and begin diversifying. Hacking the Mac OS to run on a PC would provide an easy way for malware writers to explore the MacOS.

However, as the Mac’s popularity has increased, we haven’t seen a rise in viruses for the Mac. Popularity is a weak rationale.

Macs Don’t Maintain Backward Compatibility

Since 1984, Apple has made multiple shifts in its operating system strategy. First there was the shift from 68K processors to PowerPC, and then the shift from Classic to OS X, and then finally the shift from PowerPC to Intel based processors. That old copy of MacWrite or NetTrek won’t run on your new MacBook without major emulation and other trickery. On the other hand, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS runs great on a Windows 7 PC with just a minor tweak.

Microsoft, in order to maintain compatibility with older products, has never fully excised old code and flaws in its operating system. Apple has been willing on at least three occasions to completely abandon old software and start from scratch. Because Apple controls the hardware and the software and has a much smaller installed base, it is better positioned to make these drastic moves.

Ironically, Macs used to get tons of viruses in the System 7 days. I fondly remember “Disinfectant,” and countless viruses spread via floppy disk. As the Classic OS evolved, less and less viruses worked until finally OS X rewrote the OS book. Which leads to the final reason for the dearth of Mac nasties.

Macs Were Designed with Security in Mind

Since Apple knew about Mac viruses, it was able to redesign the operating system with safeguards in place to prevent malware outbreaks. The proper use of the Administrator account and password was the most important key in preventing the spread of any Mac viruses. For those unfamiliar, on a Windows XP PC, programs can install automatically without an administrator name and password. While Vista and Windows 7 ask permission sometimes, you can still easily install programs (and therefore viruses) without intervention from a user.

Alternatively, Mac programs requires someone with Administrator privileges in order to install most software. In my day job as a computer repair tech, countless Mac clients can’t even remember their own password, so they are extremely unlikely to accidentally install some software. Windows PCs are usually infected by clicking on some kind of link followed by Windows automatically installing a virus in the background without user consent or intervention. This idea is as foreign to Mac users as a .dll file.

Because Apple has a quicker schedule in updating and patching its operating system, any flaw that is found and acknowledged by Apple can easily be patched via an update or the next operating system. Getting Apple to acknowledge some of these flaws is a different story, though Snow Leopard provided protection against the trojans discovered last year.

Should You Run Mac Antivirus Software?

Good question. Apple said at one time it recommended antivirus software (though later it recanted), yet most Mac users don’t. The risks of a virus on your Mac are slim and protection software is perceived as slowing down computers and being generally buggy. Unlike most other software, virus protection requires a yearly fee to keep protection active. If you stay away from the red light district on the Internet, you are much less likely to get a virus. Make sure your system password is a good one and hard to guess. Be wary of any software you download and check the source. That’s why you get the warning now whenever you download a program from the Internet. Common sense is your first line of defense.

Given the variety of companies that have used social media to effect, it would be fair to say that it is not the product that ensures success but rather the company’s execution and commitment to social media.

Employing various social media platforms into your marketing campaign can potentially reduce costs involved in market research, logistics and advertising as well as providing a channel that can deliver news and information instantly.

If you decide to employ social media as part of your marketing campaign be warned; social media can just as easily invite criticism and bad press if not handled correctly and could be disastrous if left to the mercy of viral vultures.

The following tips should help you to get started:

1. Be consistent. Don’t just start Tweeting because everyone else is doing it. Establish what it is you want to say and to whom and decide on the best platform to do this. Also fix on an online personality in keeping with your company’s offline personality and ethics in order to present a coherent company image. Social media isn’t a stand alone tool; it should seamlessly connect with other marketing endeavors so that people receive the same brand experience both online and offline.

2. Be logical. Following the four Cs framework should help you to devise a suitable social media plan and will increase the significance of you endeavors. By focusing on Content, Conversation, Connection and Collaboration, your company’s social media strategy will provide increased customer value as well as a consistent structure.

3. Be engaging. There is little point in having accounts full of consumers if you are not going to engage with them. More online followers does not equal success. Engaging content will provide more value to the customer and aid retention and loyalty to the brand. Consumers can be very promiscuous and switch to the competition at the click of a mouse. If people don’t have a good reason to follow your company online then they won’t.

4. Be transparent. Social media channels provide companies with the opportunity to present a human side to the faceless corporate image and enable real interactions and open dialogue. Making connections with people builds opportunities for the business and allows for valuable discussions that can be as effective as employing market research. Never manipulate dialogue or attempt to control what people view. This contradicts what social media is about and consumers will see straight through the facade.

5. Be prepared. Social media invites open conversation and people are free to write whatever they want, within reason. Be prepared to deal with negative feedback or unwanted comments. Monitoring and listening to conversations means that this can be dealt with promptly before it incurs negative results. Responses should be considerate of customers’ remarks and demonstrate that the company is listening. Ignoring comments or responding in an unprofessional way could spell disaster, especially if the content is picked up by other channels or the mass media.

6. Be aware. Don’t just concentrate on what you do or the channels that you use. Chances are conversations about your company or brand are happening elsewhere and could be doing more damage to the business than you think. Be aware of what’s going on in the online world as not all publicity is good publicity. On the other hand, contributing to positive online input elsewhere will increase your public profile.

7. Be original. Creating entertaining, original and creative content can be useful for increasing sales but also brand awareness. Particularly entertaining content can create a buzz and potentially become viral if picked up by bloggers or social media sites like Digg. Creating memorable and original content that also provides value to the customer is priceless. However, be careful not to sacrifice the brand identity or customer worth in return for a clever gimmick.

8. Be organized. Having a specific person or team working alongside the main marketing team will help to keep social media efforts up-to-date and input coherent. Constantly monitoring, listening to and contributing to conversations and adding new content will keep the channels fresh and avoid accounts becoming stagnant and ineffective.

9. Be dedicated. If you decide to use social media as part of your marketing campaign, you should be one hundred percent committed to the cause. A half hearted attempt could do more damage than not having any social media presence at all.

10. Be cool. Don’t use social media to simply push sales or talk about products and services. Similarly don’t just talk about rubbish or office gossip. Think about what might interest your customers or try to incorporate recent trends or events into your posts. Keep input at a consistent level; consumers don’t want to be continually bombarded with updates or posts. There can be too much of a good thing.

Using a simple definition, a proxy is basically a server that sits between a user and the destination server that the user is accessing. It is an intermediary or go-between that requests resources from the destination server on the user’s behalf.

On of the most common uses of a proxy server is for anonymous web surfing. When a user is connected through a proxy server, the IP address of the web proxy is used to communicate with the destination server and thus the IP address of the user is hidden. This can be used to allow a user access to systems where their access might normally be blocked, or because an IP address identifies a user’s geographic location, it can be used to disguise the country where a user is located.

There are thousands of free proxy servers set up in countries around the world, and lists of these servers can easily be found on the web. When a user visits one of these sites, they enter the web address of the site they wish to visit. From that point on, the true IP address of the user is protected and the destination server only sees the IP address of the proxy server.

Students use web proxies to allow them to access web sites whose IP addresses are blocked by their school’s server. For example, if a school has blocked all the known IP addresses for porn sites, students might still be able to access these sites through a proxy. Because of uses intended to circumvent normal security, lists of the IP addresses of known proxy servers are available, which can also be blocked by a company or school network.

If you are concerned about protecting your identity while on the web, a proxy server can help with anonymity. But be aware that these servers can have a malicious intent and can be used to cache information that passes through them, which means that you never want to use one of these intermediaries to log into your bank account or any web site where exposing user IDs and passwords can be detrimental. This can be a path to identity theft.

There are other malicious uses for these servers. Many e-commerce sites capture the IP addresses of customers who purchase products. They are used to identify the geographic location of a customer to help prevent fraud. If a customer’s street address is in Boston, but their IP address identifies their geographic location as Nigeria or China, the chances are more than good that a stolen credit card is being used. Many sophisticated online thieves use domestic drop points or freight forwarding companies where products are shipped and later forwarded to the thief. They have also learned to use web proxy servers to hide their location, or make it appear that they are located in a country not known for credit card fraud.
There are many legitimate uses for proxy servers. AOL has traditionally cached commonly visited web pages and altered JPG images by compressing them to speed up web access for their users. They can also be used by schools and companies to filter content, and by ISPs that restrict access to family friendly content.

If you are going to use a proxy server, try to identify those that are legitimate. Many are, but some are not. As a general rule, never access sensitive sites that require a user ID and password. This includes your e-mail accounts.

In 2003, the Wi-Fi Alliance released a security standard called Wi-Fi Protected Access. Although the first version (WPA), which uses TKIP/RC4 encryption, has gotten beaten up a bit, is not totally cracked, and can still be very secure.

The second version (WPA2), released in mid-2004, does provide complete security, however, because it fully implements the IEEE 802.11i security standard with CCMP/AES encryption.

In this article, we’ll discover the two very different modes of Wi-Fi Protected Access. We’ll see how and why you’d want to move from the easy-to-use Personal mode to the Enterprise mode.

Two Modes of WPA/WPA2: Personal (PSK) versus Enterprise

Both versions of Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA/WPA2) can be implemented in either of two modes:

* Personal or Pre-Shared Key (PSK) Mode: This mode is appropriate for most home networks—but not business networks. You define an encryption passphrase on the wireless router and any other access points (APs). Then the passphrase must be entered by users when connecting to the Wi-Fi network.

Though this mode seems very easy to implement, it actually makes properly securing a business network nearly impossible. Unlike with the Enterprise mode, wireless access can’t be individually or centrally managed. One passphrase applies to all users. If the global passphrase should need to be changed, it must be manually changed on all the APs and computers. This would be a big headache when you need to change it; for instance, when an employee leaves the company or when any computers are stolen or compromised.

Unlike with the Enterprise mode, the encryption passphrase is stored on the computers. Therefore, anyone on the computer—whether it be employees or thieves—can connect to the network and also recover the encryption passphrase.
* Enterprise (EAP/RADIUS) Mode: This mode provides the security needed for wireless networks in business environments. Though more complicated to set up, it offers individualized and centralized control over access to your Wi-Fi network. Users are assigned login credentials they must present when connecting to the network, which can be modified or revoked by administrators at anytime.

Users never deal with the actual encryption keys. They are securely created and assigned per user session in the background after a user presents their login credentials. This prevents people from recovering the network key from computers.

We have all seen the icons that appear next to the address bars on some websites, and the logos that appear on the bookmark list when you bookmark the websites. If you use Firefox, you will see the icon appear on that tab bar.

But have you ever wondered how it’s done? Here’s how to add it, and I’m going to try to make it as easy as possible for you to implement it on your own website or blog site.
So here is how you add it to your website

1. Find a picture you want to use, and make sure it’s something that looks good at 16 x 16

2. In order to make the image appear on the website, it has to be in a icon or .ico format. You can use a image editor program to do it, such as Irfanview, or you can follow this link to html-kit, and use their FavIcon from pics Generator. A website that lets you create your own Icon, is http://www.favicon.cc/ . You can just draw in the icon you want and download the picture. and it gives you a live view of the icon you are drawing, underneath the input area.

2a. If you used Irfanview – all you need to do is open the picture in the program, Press Ctril + R. Then look at the bottom of the screen for Preserve Aspect Ratio and un-check it. Then set the width and the height to 16. Press ok, and then Press S to save it, and under the filename you will see a box that says Save as type. Change this to ICO – WIndows ICO and save it as favicon. ( You can use different names for this icon, I just prefer to use favicon )

2b. If you used Html-kit, just click Browse in the Source Image box, and find the image you want to use, and then click generate FavIcon.ico. Then on the next page click Download Favicon.ico.  The file is zipped so you need to use a program to uncompress it. If your computer doesn’t automatically open the file, then I recommend using IZArc.

3. Once you have the picture converted to an .ICO file, you need to upload it to your website. I prefer to put the favicon.ico file in the root directory of the website.

4. Now that it’s on your website, you need to add 2 lines of html code to header part of your website. If you use WordPress, this is how you add it.

4a. WordPress – Log into the WordPress back office, and click on Presentation. Now goto Theme Editor, and on the right hand side under theme files, you want to locate Header and then click on it. Once it opens you want to find the last <link rel=  Line then copy and paste these 2 lines in. Remember to put in your website address, and the name of the icon if you changed it to something other than favicon.ico

<link rel=”icon” type=”image/x-ico” href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico” />
<link rel=”shortcut icon” type=”image/x-icon” href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico” />

The reason I type out the full address to the FavIcon is because of a bug in some wordpress themes. I have noticed that if you just use /favicon.ico, that sometimes the icon will only appear on the home page and not appear on other pages.

The first link rel line adds the Icon to Address bars, and Firefox Tabs,

The second link rel line adds your icon to a users Bookmark list.

The Domain Name System (DNS) converts web addresses, such as cbronline.com, into a unique Internet Protocol (IP) number, which computers use to communicate with each other.

Google believes that its own public DNS system should speed up the web browsing process, which can be slowed down by multiple DNS requests on a single site. “The average Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading,” said Prem Ramaswami, product manager, on the official Google blog.

“Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users’ web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable,” Ramaswami said.

DNS provider Nominum earlier this year launched Intelligent DNS, which it said makes Internet browsing safer. The new platform can block access to any site that is carrying malicious software such as botnets, phishing attempts and illegal content. This also uses real-time visibility to protect against attacks within seconds of their launch.

Speaking to CBR about the launch of Intelligent DNS, Gopala Tumuluri, Nominum’s VP of marketing and business development said that legacy DNS did not adequately protect users from online threats. “All legacy DNS did was get the request for a domain name and get the IP address from that,” he said. “It didn’t check whether the site was safe, secure or even whether it was the intended destination.”

The recently introduced 21-inch iMac was the top-selling desktop for the month, Stephen Baker, NPD’s vice president of industry analysis, said in an interview. Apple’s high-end iMac 27-inch model took the No. 3 spot in the desktop category, he said.

“Apple gets a bounce whenever they come out with new computers,” Baker said. “For the most part, October was a down month on the Windows side because [PC manufacturers] were working through inventory before the Windows 7 launch.”

The company also took the top spot in the notebook category in October, with the $1,199 MacBook Pro, Baker said. Overall, Apple took 4 out of the top 10 positions for notebooks in U.S. retail for the month, according to Baker. In addition to the top-seeded MacBook Pro, Apple also secured the 8, 9, and 10 positions.

“[The $1,199 MacBook Pro has] always been a great seller,” Baker said. “It’s priced pretty aggressively for Apple, but to some extent, it also benefited from the same slowdown on the Windows side.”

NPD has not released an official report on the sales data, and Baker declined to give a rundown of the other computers in NPD’s top-10 lists for desktop and notebook retail sales in the United States in October. It is important to note that while the NPD data includes online and retail stores, it does not factor in direct sales.

Sales of computers in October were obviously very good for Apple, but Baker doesn’t feel that the so-called “halo effect” from the iPhone or iPod is what is driving sales. Rather, he points to the overall consumer experience.

“Over past few years, Apple has continued to gain share in the market, and there are a lot of ways to explain that,” Baker said. “It could be the stores, the computers themselves, the iPod, or iPhone. I think it’s a combination of all those things.”