Contaminated Chip, Inside User’s Body, Can Transfer Virus To Electronic Systems That Interact With It

In what is being touted as a world first, a British scientist says he has been infected with a computer virus.
The scientist, Mark Gasson, claims to have been infected with the virus after he contaminated an electronic chip which was inserted into his hand.
Gasson, of the University of Reading, said the device was programmed with a virus which could transfer itself to other electronic systems it came in contact with, the BBC News website reported on Wednesday.
Any other chips that interacted with the infected systems would also contract the virus, he said, raising the possibility that in the future, advanced medical devices such as pacemakers could become vulnerable to cyber attacks.
Gasson’s computer chip, a refined version of the ID chips used to track animals, has been programmed to open security doors for him and to unlock his mobile phone automatically.
The chip in Gasson’s hand is a high-end radio frequency identification chip, a sophisticated version of the technology used in shop security tags and for identifying pets. The device, the size of the grain of rice, allowed him secure access to University buildings and his mobile phone.
Once infected with the virus, the microchip contaminated the system that was used to communicate with it. It would also have infected any other devices it was connected to.
Gasson deliberately introduced a computer virus into an electronic chip that had been implanted into his left hand last year, in order to study its effects.
The results allegedly prove the principle that in future, human implants like this could contaminate increasingly complex medical devices such as pacemakers and cochlear implants.
“With the benefits of this type of technology come risks. We may improve ourselves in some way but much like the improvements with other technologies, mobile phones for example, they become vulnerable to risks, such as security problems and computer viruses,” Gasson was quoted by BBC News as saying.
Implanted technology has become increasingly common in the United States, where medical alert bracelets can be scanned to bring up a patient’s medical history.
Professor Rafael Capurro, of the Steinbeis-Transfer-Institute of Information Ethics in Germany, added: “If someone can get online access to your implant, it could be serious.
“From an ethical point of view, the surveillance of implants can be both positive and negative. Surveillance can be part of medical care, but if someone wants to do harm to you, it could be a problem.”
Gasson, however, said technology with surveillance capabilities could in future become widely used for non-medical purposes. “If we can find a way of enhancing someone’s memory or their IQ then there’s a real possibility that people will choose to have this kind of invasive procedure,” he said in the BBC interview. AGENCIES

Resource – Times of India

27 May 2010

After the launch of the Freedom from Desk Keyboard with an inbuilt mouse, Amkette has now announced the launch of Black Diamond Desktop, which is a combination of wireless keyboard and mouse. The desktop, with an embedded metal plate will provide a fusion of wireless freedom and contemporary design to its users.

“The most important innovation is that we have embedded a metal plate at the back of the keyboard, for extra stability. This makes the keyboard slimmer yet solid. With its chic glossy finish, it looks like it has been delicately carved out of stone – a Black Diamond.” said Rajiv Bapna, Director, Amkette.

The recently designed duo is a full featured desktop based on 2.4 GHz technology and gives upto 10 meters of wireless freedom. The advance power management system saves the battery life by consuming less power. Its slim design will also provide users with a comfortable typing experience and its multimedia keys will help for many applications and media control.

It may look like a piece of gel but it’s a new nano-based telecom technology “enabler” that can make computers and the internet hundreds of times faster.

The technology, that may be in use only five or 10 years in the future, is being designed by Koby Scheuer of Tel Aviv University’s (TAU) School of Electrical Engineering.

Mr. Scheuer has developed a new plastic-based technology for the nano-photonics market, which manufactures optical devices and components. His plastic-based “filter” is made from nanometre (a billionth of a metre) sized grooves embedded into the plastic.

When used in fibre optics cable switches, this new device will make our communication devices smaller, more flexible and more powerful, he says.

“Once Americans have a fibre optics cable coming into every home, all communication will go through it – telephone, cable TV, the Internet,” adds Mr. Scheuer.

“But to avoid bottlenecks of information, we need to separate the information coming through into different channels. Our polymeric devices can do that in the optical domain – at a speed, quality and cost that the semi-conductor industry can’t even imagine,” Mr. Scheuer says.

In the next decade, fibre optic cables that now run from city to city will feed directly into every individual home. When that technology comes to light, the new plastic-based switches could revolutionise the way we communicate.

“Right now, we could transmit all of the written text of the world though a single fibre in a fibre optics cable in just a few seconds,” says Mr. Scheuer.

“But in order to handle these massive amounts of communication data, we need filters to make sense of the incoming information. Ours uses a plastic-based switch, replacing hard-to-fabricate and expensive semi-conductors.”

Semi-conductors, grown on crystals in sterile labs and processed in special ovens, take days and sometimes months to manufacture. They are delicate and inflexible as well, Mr. Scheuer explains.

“Our plastic polymer switches come in an easy-to-work-with liquid solution. Using a method called ‘tamping,’ almost any lab can make optical devices out of the silicon rubber mould we’ve developed.”

His biggest hurdle, says Mr. Scheuer, is in convincing the communications industry that polymers are stable materials.

“There is a lot of prejudice in this industry against plastics. But this approach could take us to a new level of communication,” the researcher says, according to a TAU release.

He also notes that the process is not much different from the way that mass numbers of DVDs are produced in a factory – except Mr. Scheuer works on a nano, not a “giant” micro, scale.

His device can also be used in the gyros of planes, ships and rockets; inserted into cell phones; and made a part of flexible virtual reality gloves so doctors could “operate” on computer networks over large distances.