LISTEN To This Issue.
            Give your eyes a rest, and listen at your own rate.

Quote of the Week - Security.
            Serious cyber-security concerns, from a top source.

CPU Futures?
            A "different spin" on more of Moore's Law;
            even "monomolecular computing" futures!

Storage Update.
            Megabytes used to be massive; today gigabytes are the norm. 
            Tomorrow, it will be terabytes.

Repealing "The Law!"
            It's not often that we have to repeal what we thought
            were fundamental laws, but here we go!

Our Ever-Moore-Fascinating 'Tinker Toys...'
            Building a virus -- from scratch.  It's not sci. fi. anymore...

About "The Harrow Technology Report"

LISTEN To This Issue.

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Quote of the Week - Security.

 

"By 2009, there will be over 2 billion Internet-enabled devices, each with an IP address, in the U.S. alone.  And 6 billion altogether." ...

"The devices on the IP packet-based network of the future will include not just computers, but also traffic lights, elevators, appliances, and even pacemakers. But the IP networks of 2009 will be unstable, subject to 'constant security outages,' unless both governments and private industry focus on eliminating network vulnerabilities through research and better practices." ...

"Electrical power grids, controlled by networks, could collapse in 2005 due to distributed denial-of-service attacks that block traffic to IP-based management devices...  Economically, all these disruptions will take a toll by 2009, with the Federal Reserve coming to the conclusion that cyberattacks are depleting growth. Then, Fedwire, the government-run network for monetary transfers to banks, will be hit by a database scrambler attack and there will be an unscheduled bank holiday to clean up the mess.

"That's where we're headed if we don't turn this [security] ship around."

Howard Schmidt,
Presidential advisor on cyber-security.
July 9 PCWorld.com
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,102567,tk,dn070902X,00.asp

 

Internet security is no longer a luxury.  It's a deadly serious necessity.  This is one area where we really do not want to blink.

And so the forthcoming U.S. national Cyber-security Plan, due out on Sept. 19, promises to be interesting and important reading.  Many people, often with good reason, look at such "government plans" askance, but according to the July 18 PCWorld.com (http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,102788,tk,dn071802X,00.asp), this plan was primarily written by people actually working within the Industry.  As a result, the federal government is cast in the position of a "facilitator" to "remove barriers," rather than as a new, ponderous, once-removed bureaucracy.  You can find additional insights into this issue at http://detnews.com/2002/technology/0207/19/technology-540519.htm .

The proof, of course, will be in the pudding, but this security pudding is one that had best turn out "right."  And these issues don't only affect the U.S; they also affect most developed nations.  Because the Internet has truly become the next "utility," reaching out globally and touching critical elements within many countries' infrastructures. 

We wouldn't leave the physical gates to a power plant hanging open and unguarded, and none of us had better do that to our virtual gates, either.  We do need locks, stout and strong, to bar our virtual "city gates..."

 

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CPU Futures?

 

Moore's Law as we know it, the doubling of the number of transistors in a given space every 18 months while maintaining a level cost, surely must come to an end, mustn't it?  Oh, it won't quit for at least 10 to 15 years based on what we know today, although Mr. Moore himself recently cautioned that,

"The doubling will slow down...  You really get bit by the fact that the materials are made of atoms." (http://news.com.com/2100-1001-942671.html)

On the other hand, Mr. Moore acknowledges that the technology industry is rather good at breaking through barriers.  (For example, Intel has told us to expect 2.8 GHz Pentium 4s before the end of August, and 3 GHz chips, ahead of schedule, in this year's holiday PCs - http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,102989,tk,dn072302X,00.asp .)  Which is why I'm rather sure that as we approach each new set of limits to what we can do using today's techniques, innovative people will come up with completely new ways of keeping Moore's Law alive and cooking.  For instance:

 

It's All In The Spin.

Consider "spintronics," the evolving science of going beyond the "flow of electrons" that has sustained us through the industrial and information revolutions, to using a property of an individual electron, it's "spin," which can be either "up" or "down."  It's analogous to a magnet's North or South poles, but here we're dealing on the level of individual, sub-atomic electrons.

Essentially, as described by Philip Ball in the July 5 Nature (http://www.nature.com/nsu/020701/020701-9.html) and brought to our attention by reader Jamie Walker, a "spintronics transistor" is made from a Quantum Dot, a kind of artificial atom which contains just a few electrons.  As additional electrons are added into the Quantum Dot, the spin of the electrons within the Quantum Dot (determined by a magnetic field, or the "gate" in traditional transistor parlance) determines whether or not new electrons will be allowed to pass through the Quantum Dot (hence a current flow), or not (a switched-off current flow).  Voila -- a controllable transistor at the Quantum Dot level (far smaller than transistors we can produce today.) 

Although just a prototype, this demonstrates, according to Pawel Hawrylak at Canada's Institute for Microstructural Science in Ottawa,

"...that information can be stored, read out and erased by manipulating the spins of the electrons in the [Quantum Dot] well."

Additional insights into this experiment are available at http://rtnews.globetechnology.com/servlet/ArticleNews/tech/
RTGAM/20020718/gtspin/Technology/techBN/ , brought to our attention by reader Wayne Carrigan.

 

"Monomolecular Computing?"

Another interesting "out of the box" exploration of the post-Moore's Law world comes to us courtesy of reader Sander Olsen, and it lies in the realm inside of molecules, according to a paper titled "Bonding More Atoms Together for a Single Molecule Computer" published in the Institute of Physics Publishing by C. Joachim (http://www.iop.org/EJ3-Links/21/gByR3KreSH7qrfFmPn6BGw/na22r1.pdf).  In this possible future twenty-five years from now, by which time many believe that Moore's Law will have run out of steam, Joachim makes the case that Dupont's old tag line, "Better Living Through Chemistry" may apply to computing as well.

In essence, he is suggesting that current experiments, where single molecules are being used as components of transistors (http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
20020701/20020701.htm#_Toc13055041), might be replaced by individual molecules that each contains ALL of the elements of a transistor.  He calls this "monomolecular computing":

"By the term monomolecular computing, I mean the implantation inside a single molecule of ALL the functional groups or circuits to realize a calculation, without any help from external artifices such as re-configuration, calculation sharing between the user and the machine, or selection of the operational devices. The wish to integrate the full system inside the molecule is an answer to the reliability and manufacturing problems of the hybrid molecular electronics approach. This is the answer of the organic chemists to the solid-state monolithic approach of the physicists and of the solid-state chemists."  (The emphasis is mine.)

Whew -- this requires a bit of a rethinking.  Instead of the millions or billions of molecules that make up today's logic blocks and integrated circuits, it seems that Joachim is suggesting that we do onto today's integrated circuit what the integrated circuit once did onto individual transistors -- taking computing, and everything it affects, to yet another realm of miniaturization.

 

Same Old, Same Old...

I leave it to you to explore Joachim's article in more detail so you can form your own opinion.  But I do suggest that today's commonplace integrated circuit surely once seemed as fanciful.  

Just imagine what we could invent if the building blocks fell to this next level of miniaturized complexity.  Today, you wouldn't get very far building things out of individual transistors; it's more common to build things out of ICs that contain millions of transistors.  Could 25 years from now have us building things out of similarly-functional MOLECULES?

Don't Blink!

 

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Storage Update.

  

Hard drives may stay about the same physical size that we've been used to, but according to a recent announcement from Fujitsu (http://www.fcpa.fujitsu.com/news/press-releases/
press-releases/pa-05-08-2002.html - brought to our attention by reader Raoul Teeuwen), the capacity of these drives is going to continue to increase dramatically.  Using a refinement of the Giant Magneto-Resistive (GMR) read/write head commonly used today, they expect their "Current-Perpendicular-to-Plane (CPP)" head will generate one-third-terabyte (360 gigabyte) notebook hard drives by 2006 (which rather overshadows their recent announcement of 60 gigabyte, 2-platter notebook drives - http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/
0,aid,102947,tk,dn072302X,00.asp)!  Assumedly, this new GMR technology could also be applied to the larger 3.5-inch drives commonly used in desktops as well, so I'd guess that in just a few years, terabyte-plus PCs will not seem outrageous at all (just as we can't, today, imagine a PC with less than tens of gigabytes of storage...)

 

Speaking of "Spin" -- "Ballistic Magnetoresistance."


Yet THAT may be NOTHING when it comes to storage density, considering that the University of New York at Buffalo has now developed,

"...a nickel-based magnetic sensor, which measures only a few atoms in diameter, that, according to the July 1 NewsFactor, could increase data storage capacity 1,000 times through the use of 'spintronics,' a field that takes advantage of electron spin as well as charge." (http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/18446.html)

This technique, brought to our attention by reader Dana Hoggatt, intends to improve on GMR (Giant-MagnetoResistive) sensors through the technique of "Ballistic MagnetoResistance," (BMR),

"...which uses an electrical conductor only a few atoms in size."

This technology could, according to Professor Harash Deep Chopra,

"...ultimately shrink storage to one terabit (one trillion bits) per square inch, enabling the storage of 50 or more DVDs on a hard drive the size of a credit card, or a handheld supercomputer."

This is one more fascinating case where innovative scientists simply refuse to accept previously held limits.  According to Chopra,

"Whereas 'giant magnetoresistance' (GMR) read heads have enabled hard drives to approach the theoretical limit of magnetic media (about 20 Gbits per square inch), ballistic-magnetoresistance heads could redefine those limits, enabling atomically small domains to pack terabits per square inch."

You can find additional insights into this effect at http://www.eet.com/at/news/OEG20020709S0041 .

It's still early -- very early -- on this road towards a terabit per square inch, just as it's early for IBM's potentially as-dense "Millipede" technology which we discussed in a previous issue (http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
20020701/20020701.htm#_Toc13055040).  But as the number of very different approaches towards terabits per square inch storage proliferates, it's increasingly likely that one (or more) will make it to our desktops and notebooks. 

Are you running out of storage?  Are there applications you could create "if only" massive amounts of storage were inexpensive and readily available?

What can I say, other than, again,

Don't Blink!

In fact, I suggest that we're going to have to be controlling our "blinking" a lot, because of the tenacity with which scientists insist on approaching, and then finding a way around, all of the "limits" that we set for ourselves. ("Man can't fly;" "Nothing can travel faster than sound;" "Magnetic media can't store more than about 20 gigabits/square inch...")

Don't like a "limit?"  Just change it, because even the most fundamental of "laws" seem amenable to renegotiation under the right circumstances, as we're about to see...

 

Back to Table of Contents

Repealing "The Law!"

 

The "Second Law of Thermodynamics" has been the bedrock (and perhaps the bane) of many a physics student, and perhaps of many an inventor of "perpetual motion" machines, since it (effectively) states that in any given closed system, chaos will reign supreme as things "run down" and entropy (or 'disorder') increases.  This is "A Given;" just ask your physics prof.  This is so ingrained that, as the July 18 BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/
tech/newsid_2135000/2135779.stm , brought to our attention by reader Kenneth LaCrosse) points out,

"...there is a common adage that if anyone has a theory that violates the Second Law then, without any discussion, that theory must certainly be wrong."

The Law is so entrenched that it even rates its own song lyrics!  (http://users.durge.org/~edwin/songs/firstandsecond.html - with thanks to reader Danny Mayer.)

Well, more than a few scientists and inventors might now be rummaging in their basements looking for the boxes that contain their old papers, because scientists at the Australian National University have now run an experiment that they say proves that when it comes to things very tiny, for short periods of time, entropy CAN be reversed, and The Law does NOT apply.

In their experiment, they were able to measure entropy running backwards, towards a state of order rather than chaos, during one-tenth second periods.  (Details of this demonstration of the "fluctuation theorem" can be found in the July 29 issue of Physical Review Letters - http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v89/e050601 .)

That may be interesting, but most of us aren't physicists, so what does this REALLY mean?  It's that as nanotechnology is now forcing us to pay very careful attention to how things work at the molecular, atomic, and even smaller scales, it's increasingly important that we be able to predict how our new tiny machines will work.  If they're willing, under certain conditions, to violate The Law, we'd better know just when, and in what ways.  For example, we wouldn't want tiny cancer-fighting nanobots, scouring our bodies for mutant cells, to follow a different agenda than we had set for them, or for battlefield nano-sized Smart Dust to change its tune...

I suspect we'll be seeing many more surprising things as we continue to delve into the world of the tiny, but perhaps none will be as "gut-satisfying" as this one, especially if you've ever had an idea quashed simply because it violated the Second Law.  You might now be able to issue one giant-sized "I told you so," and, just perhaps, get that old grade changed...

 

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Jeff Harrow

 

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Our Ever-Moore-Fascinating 'Tinker Toys...'

 

Finally, in our last issue (http://www.theharrowgroup.com/articles/
20020715/20020715.htm#_Toc14328983) we explored how Australian artist Pro Hart is now embedding a bit of his DNA into each new painting, enabling them to be unambiguously authenticated in the future.  But little did I know that the use of DNA for authenticating objects is already old hat.  Reader Gerry Power points out that DNA ink has already been used to mark sports memorabilia (http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,13953,FF.html) and even Super Bowl footballs (http://www.dnatechnologies.com/news/jan_31_2002.shtml)!

So it seems as if DNA marking is already being accepted as being pretty foolproof. 

Yet in talking about Hart's use of DNA, I had quipped:

"Of course the day may come when we can generate artificial DNA on the fly, but until that time, this is a novel example of how the Convergence of technologies continues to make new things possible."

Well, tomorrow is today, as brought to our attention by readers Richard Weeks and others, since the July 2 NewScientist.com (http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992539) describes how scientists at the State University of New York at Stony Brook have now created a fully functioning polio virus "from scratch," based on nothing but cookbook genetic sequences that are available in public online databases, and off-the-shelf biological components and services. 

"The result was an infectious agent that could destroy cultured human cells and paralyze or kill mice in much the same way as the normal polio virus."

The implications are of course staggering.  Although not quite (yet) at the stage of garage technology, it seems likely that scientists, and perhaps later hobbyists(!), may be able to recreate specific life forms, or perhaps to generate totally new ones.  Which could, of course, result in both astonishingly good, and fearsomely dangerous, results.  

Not to mention that such capabilities might well allow people to generate DNA sequences that could compromise the authenticity tests for Mr. Hart's paintings, or for that prized Super Bowl football, or for more...

When I see "Home DNA Kits" in the local toy store, I'm going to worry.  A lot.

Let's hope it never gets quite that simple...

 

About "The Harrow Technology Report"