Symform offers 100GB cloud storage for free, kind of

Symform, a once business-oriented cloud storage provider, announced today that it is giving general consumers 100GB of online storage for free. Considering the fact that most other online storage services offer just 2GB or 3GB for free, this seems like a great deal.

However, as there's no such thing as a free lunch, this huge amount of online storage comes with a possibly even larger catch. In order to get the "free" online storage, you must contribute 150GB of your local storage on a device that's always on in a broadband-connected home network.

This is because Symform, as it claims, is the first company to break away from the traditional data center cloud storage model. Instead it uses a technology called RAID-96 to geographically distribute, encrypt, and store its data.

In layman's terms, this means data stored via Symform's service is divided and replicated into 96 pieces that are distributed to 96 different participating computers over the Internet. In addition to providing redundancy, the company says that this allows for uploads and downloads up to 50 times faster than you get using a centralized data center. According to Symform, data distributed and stored on participating computers is encrypted and therefore can't be accessed by local users but only those who have the authorization.

The idea of trading local storage for online storage is not new and has been offered by Wuala for a long time. While this is cool, it's definitely not free. Especially when you have to trade 150GB of local storage for just 100GB of online storage. On top of the giving up local storage, users will also have to contribute in terms of equipment, electricity, and the broadband connection, which may come with a monthly data cap.

For those who need a large amount of online storage and can live with the drawbacks, however, Symform's offering is available here.

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Gmail posts 'intervention' tool to wrangle non-users

Google's not exactly hurting when it comes to the number of people using its Gmail Web e-mail service, though in a new marketing move it's trying to grow that pot to catch up to Yahoo and Microsoft.

The company today rolled out a cheeky new "email intervention" program, offering existing Gmail users with a way to nudge their friends to switch over from their existing provider.

"You've probably already improved the lives of your friends and family members by helping them switch to Gmail, but what about that one friend who still hasn't made the switch?" the site reads. "It's time to take a stand and stage an intervention."

What that amounts to is one of three specialized form e-mails that existing Gmail users can pick from and send to friends that includes a prepared "intervention video" that pitches the service. Users can also record their own personalized message that uses YouTube.

Reports: Tea Party leader arrested on piracy charges

A cached version of the Grand Strand Tea Party home page. The site was inaccessible today.

A leader of a South Carolina Tea Party group has been arrested for allegedly selling pirated software, according to reports.

Anthony Trinca, 61, is accused of selling versions ofMicrosoft Office, Windows, Adobe Photoshop, and Rosetta Stone language programs that were counterfeit, news site TG Daily reported today, one of several outlets to write about it. Trinca, president of the Grand Strand Tea Party, was arrested after someone to whom he allegedly sold software resold some of it and refused to give a refund when a buyer insisted it was pirated, the report said.

He and his 23-year-old son, Michael, were both charged with unauthorized use or trafficking in counterfeit trademarks and were released on $50,000 bond, according to the report.

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Universities to bring 1Gbps broadband to local communities

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A group of 29 universities in the U.S. is banding together to bring ultra-high-speed broadband access to the communities surrounding their campuses in an effort to attract start-ups and spur innovation.

The project, called Gig.U, was announced today and aims to build world-class broadband infrastructure to attract high-tech start-ups to areas close to universities. Some of the sectors the project directors hope to target are health care, energy, and telecommunications.

Several of the universities participating in the program, including Arizona State University, Duke University, and University of Michigan, are not in a major metropolitan areas. And others, such as Howard University, University of Chicago, Case Western Reserve, and George Mason University, are in or are close to major cities. But most of the universities involved in the project are not in regions that are considered hotbeds of innovation for technology start-ups.

The hope is that the new infrastructure, which will provide broadband speeds up to 1Gbps to individuals and businesses, will create a hub where cutting-edge start-ups and other businesses will flock to be closer to university researchers and a pool of talented students and graduates.

The project itself is still in the early days, and details about funding haven't been hammered out yet. But Blair Levin, a fellow at the Aspen Institute who is heading up the project, told the New York Times, that the group is not looking for government funding to build the network. Instead, Gig.U participants are reaching out to broadband companies and other private investors to partner on building the infrastructure.

"The idea is that current and existing providers would fund the networks," Levin said in an e-mail to CNET. "But that universities and communities could explore ways to improve the business case by lowering capital cost and improving demand."

Levin said that he has talked to all the major broadband providers and they are intrigued by the notion of a discrete market, such as the ones that the Gig.U networks would produce. But so far no broadband providers have offered firm commitments to participating or offering funding. That said, Levin emphasized that the participating universities will be targeting specific businesses and industries and will in effect create demand for the high speed networks.

The Gig.U project is similar to a network that Google is building. Earlier this year, Google said it would choose a few cities around the country to test new 1Gbps networks. In March, it announced Kansas City, Kansas, as the first city to get the 1Gbps test-network.

Google's goal in building these ultra-fast broadband test-beds is to deliver more than 100 times the speed of broadband connection to communities and allow entrepreneurs and businesses to figure out what to do with all the bandwidth.

"High-speed Internet access must be much more widely available," Eric Schmidt, Google's chairman, said at the time. "Broadband is a major driver of new jobs and businesses, yet we rank only 15th in the world for access. More government support for broadband remains critical."

Levin said that the goal of Google's project and the Gig.U project are similar, which is to accelerate the deployment of next-generation networks. Prior to coming to the Aspen Institute, Levin worked at the FCC and was in charge of developing the agency's National Broadband Plan. This plan calls on the extending broadband to every American and it promises to offer 100 Mbps broadband to 100 million people by 2020.

The Gig.U and Google plans could help make these plans a reality, as researchers and entrepreneurs develop applications to use more bandwidth.

"What we don't know is how many great ideas and revolutionary products wait to see the light of day while network bandwidth and computer resources play catch up," Hugh Hallman, mayor of Tempe, Ariz., where Arizona State University is located, said in a statement. "It is for this reason that the city of Tempe is partnering with Arizona State University and other leading research universities intent on accelerating the deployment of ultra-high speed data networks."

But Levin added that even the goal of the Gig.U and Google projects is similar, the strategy for achieving the goals is different. The Gig.U initiative focuses exclusively on bringing high bandwidth to university communities, where Levin said there is demand for high speed Net access even outside the walls of the universities.

Most major universities already have access to cutting edge Internet technology and many are involved in research and development networks such as Internet 2, which is used to connect universities throughout the world to share data and also test new Internet technologies. But Gig.U is about extending the high speed Internet access outside the university to the private sector.

Elias Eldaryrie, chief information officer for the University of Florida in Gainsville, Fla., said that its important for the businesses in the community to have access to the same type of network resources that the universities have.

"In order for research universities and communities to grow and prosper together, we need access to the same technology," he said. "Ultra-high-speed broadband is the new baseline; it's where U.F. and Gainesville need to be so that we can compete together with the best the world has to offer."

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Juno spacecraft poised for five-year voyage to Jupiter

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NASA's solar-powered Juno spacecraft, the centerpiece of a $1.1 billion mission to Jupiter, was mounted atop an Atlas 5 rocket today, setting the stage for launch August 5 on a five-year voyage to the solar system's largest planet.

Once in orbit around Jupiter's poles, Juno's instruments will precisely map the planet's gravitational and magnetic fields, probe its turbulent atmosphere and hidden interior and study the mechanisms responsible for its powerhouse auroras, the strongest in the solar system.

"Jupiter probably formed first, it's the largest of all the planets, in fact it's got more material in it than all the rest of the solar system combined," Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, told reporters today. "If I took everything in the solar system (except the sun), it could all fit inside Jupiter.

"So after the sun formed,

Water-walking robot takes cue from insects

(Credit:American Chemical Society)

While some people who idolize robots might say the machines walk on water, a new microbot out of China actually does.

The robot was built to imitate the capabilities of water-striding insects such as mosquitoes and water spiders, which can walk and even jump on water without drowning thanks to their highly water-repellent legs. The robot is about 6 inches long and uses 10 water-repellent supporting wire legs and 2 movable, oar-like legs propelled by two mini motors to maneuver like a real water strider. It also looks great in a caterpillar Speedo.

While the new microrobot weighs as much as about 390 water striders, it's still able to walk (at a speed of about 6 inches per second), stand, and turn freely on water surfaces without sinking. The scientists say the radius and contact angle of the legs mainly accounts for the large supporting force.

The water-loving bot, which is detailed in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, isn't the first robot to mimic insects, nor is it the first aquatic robot to do so.

However, the scientists say the motion of a water strider-like microrobot on the water's surface had rarely been studied and their work yields valuable insights into making a bot that's speedy, agile, and inexpensive enough to fabricate that it could potentially have broad applications in water quality surveillance, water pollution monitoring, and the like.

To make the biomimetic bot, which weighs 3.88 grams (less than a quarter of an ounce), the researchers from the Harbin Institute of Technology's School of Chemical Engineering and Technology carefully analyzed water striders' locomotion to better understand exactly how the creatures get around the local pond. (For way more technical details on factors like the maximal vertical depth of water striders' legs and the volume of the resulting "water dimples," visit this PDF on the research

Automated stock trading poses fraud risk, researcher says

James Arlen, principal at Push the Stack Consulting, warns about security risks with automated and high-frequency trading.

(Credit:Sprogsta)

An emphasis on speed and a lack of security makes automated trading in financial markets ripe for exploitation and fraud, a security researcher warned today.

Most stock trades in the U.S. and many around the world in general are now made by data-crunching computers that buy and sell stocks in microseconds--something that used to take human traders minutes to do. With these algorithm-based, high-frequency trades a fraction of second can be worth millions of dollars for an investor. (See CBS 60 Minutes report on this.)

In the push for greater speed and thus higher profits, security is sacrificed, James Arlen, principal at Push the Stack Consulting, told CNET in a preview of a presentation he will give at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas next week titled "Security When Nano Seconds Count."

Basically, traders are using automation to speed the analysis of information on stocks and do more trades faster.

"In this race toward faster we've gone from human time scale, trading decisions in hours or minutes to milliseconds, or thousands of a second...Now we're talking about microseconds, a millionth of a second, and nanoseconds, one-thousandth of a microsecond," he said. "We're compressing the markets, pulling them closer together, and putting in custom hardware that does things like skip the operating system. The application making the decisions is actually building an Ethernet frame in its own memory and then pushing that frame down into the wire side of the networking card."

The implementations are built for speed and not for security, which slows down functions, according to Arlen. Traders are choosing the stripped down and fast sportscar over the sedan with air bags and other security measures, he added. "We've left security behind. These implementations have no security at all," he said.

The potential for problems isn't purely theoretical--automated trading was found to have contributed to a market crash in the U.S. in May 2010 in which the Dow Jones dropped 600 points, the second-largest point swing in one day.

What if someone were able to create an unfair market advantage by introducing some latency in a competitor's system? "Are you ever really going to notice?" Arlen wondered. "This can be a very nefarious, very small game."

The complexity of the trades, often based on multiple consecutive transactions and leveraging the price differences on different markets with simultaneous trades, amplifies the potential for problems and makes oversight more difficult, he added.

"It's highly likely or statistically likely that someone is abusing a market somewhere in the world. Will they be caught at any time in the short term? Probably not," he said. "That level of complexity makes it really hard to point a finger. This is going to be hard to find in the real world."

Arlen said he doesn't have a solution. He just wants to get the industry talking about the problem so something can be done to prevent problems. His timing couldn't be better.

The so-called "Flash Crash" of May 2010 has spurred the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to action. It voted unanimously yesterday to adopt a rule requiring large traders like banks and hedge funds to identify themselves and to maintain transactions records.

"May 6 dramatically demonstrated the need to enhance the SEC's ability to quickly and accurately analyze market events. The large trader reporting rule will significantly bolster our ability to oversee the U.S. securities markets in a time when trades can be transacted in milliseconds or faster," said SEC Chairman Mary L. Schapiro in a statement. "This new rule will enable us to promptly and efficiently identify significant market participants and collect data on their trading activity so that we can reconstruct market events, conduct investigations, and bring enforcement actions as appropriate."

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