Tizen-based smartphone could come in 2013, reports say

IDG News Service - Japan's biggest cellular network operator, NTT DoCoMo, is working with Intel and Samsung on development of the Tizen operating system and the first smartphone based on the platform could be out in Japan in 2013, according to a Japanese newspaper report.

The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest circulation daily newspaper, didn't attribute the source of the information, which was published in a report on its website on Dec. 31.

Tizen is a Linux-based operating system targeted at smartphones, tablet PCs and other consumer applications. It is hosted at the Linux Foundation but counts Intel and Samsung among its major backers.

Tizen's backers have said little about commercialization of the OS, but, if successful, it could play a balancing role to Android. The Google-developed OS, which is also based on Linux, has grown to dominate the smartphone sector in just a few years and put a lot of power in the hands of Google.

A Tizen-based smartphone has been expected from Samsung ever since September, when a phone called the "GT-I9300_TIZEN" was listed in a Wi-Fi Alliance document as passing a Wi-Fi interoperability test. GT-i9300 is the model name Samsung gives to Galaxy S3 smartphones. After reports of the document surfaced, it was later modified to delete the Tizen name, but the phone is still expected.

For Samsung, developing a Tizen-based phone is only half the battle. It then has to sell it to cellular network operators, so support from a major carrier like NTT DoCoMo could help Tizen make the jump from engineering project to consumer OS.

NTT DoCoMo had 60.8 million subscribers at the end of November, according to data from Japan's Telecommunication Carriers Association. That gave it a 47 percent share of the entire market.

But even with the support of DoCoMo, Tizen's success isn't guaranteed. The history of smartphone operating systems is littered with failures and the market is getting more competitive with the recent launch of Windows Phone 8 as well as the January launch of the BlackBerry 10 operating system.

Martyn Williams covers mobile telecoms, Silicon Valley and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Martyn on Twitter at @martyn_williams. Martyn's e-mail address is martyn_williams@idg.com

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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Could smart gun technology make us safer?

Computerworld - In the latest James Bond film, Skyfall, smart gun technology prevents a bad guy from using Bond's own Walther PPK to shoot him. Far fetched? Not at all.

And, in the wake of the mass shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. last week, interest in gun safety is rising anew after developments in smart gun technology stalled out for a lack of interest and investors.

President Barak Obama on Wednesday announced a gun violence task force to come up with solutions to the problem of gun violence and is pressuring Congress to reinstate an assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004. He also wants stricter background checks and a limit on high-capacity gun magazines.

One area the president hasn't mentioned, but that is likely to come up, involves smart gun technology. Under development for more than a dozen years, it could use a person's unique grip, fingerprints or an RFID chip to limit weapon use only to someone authorized to fire the gun.

In fact, a half dozen campus police at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) already carry smart guns that prevent unauthorized use by disabling the trigger mechanism.

Smart gun technology proponents are quick to point out their systems would not necessarily have prevented the murder of the 20 children and six Sandy Hook Elementary staff by Adam Lanza on Dec. 14. "It is important to understand that these criminal acts have been perpetrated by authorized users with legally purchased firearms, and nothing in our technology would have stopped these killings," said Donald H. Sebastian, NJIT's senior vice president for research and development.

Sabastian pointed to news reports that Lanza's mother was a gun enthusiast who owned several weapons and took her son shooting with her, which would mean he would have likely had access and have been allowed to use the weapons. Had he not been authorized to use the guns, smart technology might at least deterred him.

Biometric authentication algorithm technology is about securing weapons in the home or workplace against unauthorized use.

NJIT is a leading, and early, developer of smart gun technology. For more than a dozen years, it has been testing a Dynamic Grip Recognition technology that Sebastian claims is 99% effective in preventing unauthorized use of a gun.

Dynamic Grip Recognition uses 32 sensors in the gun's grip, which, like voice recognition technology, can be trained to recognize a particular person's grip pattern profile and discriminate between authorized and unauthorized users.

The effort began with discussions on how to protect law enforcement officials who may have their guns taken in a struggle with a suspect.

"That led to the introduction of RFID technology and that goes back to the early 1990s," Sabastian said. "That's a different set of constraints than the gun sitting in the sock drawer, locked and loaded in case something goes bump in the night -- protecting your kids from having access to that.

"That's what led to the selection of biometrics and use of grip recognition technology," he said. "It works while you're pulling the trigger. It's not like you put a thumb print on the bottom to turn it on, and for some period of time it's active and ready to go for some period of time whether you have custody or not."

Development has been slow, however, because funding has lagged, with little interest so far from venture capitalists. In fact, current prototypes are based on 10-year-old microprocessors because of a lack of funds, Sebastian said.

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MIT research shows new magnetic state that could aid quantum computing

IDG News Service - Researchers at MIT and other institutions have demonstrated a new type of magnetism, only the third kind ever found, and it may find its way into future communications, computing and data storage technologies.

Working with a tiny crystal of a rare mineral that took 10 months to make, the researchers for the first time have demonstrated a magnetic state called a QSL (quantum spin liquid), according to MIT physics professor Young Lee. He is the lead author of a paper on their findings, which is set to be published in the journal Nature this week. Theorists had said QSLs might exist, but one had never been demonstrated before.

"We think it's pretty important," Lee said, adding that he would let his peers be the ultimate judges.

Lee and his fellow researchers didn't carry out their work with IT advancements in mind, but while studying how a QSL works, they saw a phenomenon called "long-range entanglement" that may brighten the prospects for new types of storage, computing or networking.

The two other known forms of magnetism are already widely used. Ferromagnetism, the effect that makes compass needles turn and refrigerator magnets stick to metal, causes attraction or repulsion between two objects. In this type of magnet, the "magnetic moment," or direction of magnetism, of all the atoms inside is the same.

In antiferromagnetism, the atoms within an object have opposite magnetic moments and cancel each other out, which makes them line up in orderly patterns. This effect is used in materials added to hard disk drives to make them more reliable.

In the crystal that the MIT researchers studied, each particle constantly changes its magnetic moment. They never line up with their neighbors or cancel each other out to form patterns. Though this state is called a "quantum spin liquid," that's just an analogy. The crystal is a solid material.

"If the magnetic moments do not order, and they're constantly fluctuating with respect to each other, then we call that a liquid," Lee said.

It wasn't easy to demonstrate this magnetic state. First, the team had to create a pure crystal of herbertsmithite, a mineral that was discovered in the Atacama desert of Chile and named for mineralogist Herbert Smith. That forced the team to invent its own technique, carefully raising and lowering the temperature in a furnace, and produced thin crystals no more than a centimeter across. For the QSL research, which was carried out using a technique called neutron scattering, the crystal had to be cooled to near zero Kelvin, or hundreds of degrees below zero in Celsius or Fahrenheit.

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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