Teleportation over 10 miles: the ultimate secure line [Entanglement]

We picked our jaws off the floor when we heard about tiny particles being teleported just a foot or two away, but now scientists have topped that by 10 miles. This tech won't be transporting Kirk and his Away Team to the surface of some distant planet anytime soon, but it has seriously practical applications to communications.


Quantum physics says photons can, in some ways, occupy two places at once. When one photon gets entangled with another, whatever happens to one of those particles also happens to another, even if it's TEN frickin' miles away! Now THAT's a fast connection.


The good news: The researchers were able to send this info with 89% fidelity. The bad? Information transmitted in this way will be hard to encrypt. But they're working on that. There's good reason to work on it; if they can get this right, the communication would be completely secure. Since there's no physical medium for the transmission to travel through — not even spacetime itself ૼ it would be physically impossible to jam or intercept.


[DVICE via Ars Technica via Gizmodo]

What Is This? [What Is This]

Some people are masters of this item, while others are—willingly or unwillingly—its slaves. With a little bit of dust, we can see its inner workings laid bare. What oh what could it be?
Try a credit card covered with magnetized rust particles.


As you can see, the stored data on the card's magnetic strip has been revealed by way of a science experiment. Using nothing more than fine iron powder or iron oxide, a magnet and the aforementioned credit card, 'Anaglyph' was able to reveal the nitty gritty details on a friend's frequent flyer card:

First of all, you will notice that Gilbert's card has three horizontal magnetic bands. This is the standard for all swipe cards. In most cases, information is recorded on one, or sometimes two of these bands. The two outside bands are called high density tracks and contain data at 210 bits per inch. If you know anything about computers, you will realise that the term 'high density' here is relative: 210 bits per inch, by modern data standards, is pretty damn lousy. To give you some idea, one of these tracks can carry about 79 x 6bit alphanumeric characters. Your credit card would typically have, on track 1, your name, your card number and an expiry date

Kind of primitive. No wonder the Japanese have been swiping their phones at vending machines all these years.

[Gizmodo via Tethered Cow via Boing Boing]

Lockface: USB drive that uses face recognition to verify users [Face Recognition]

A Japanese company called Futen (they don’t have a website) is selling a USB flash drive that uses face recognition technology to check the identity of users. Needless to say, the so-called Lockface only works with your computer’s web cam.

The first thing to do is to register a number of pictures of your face. After that, the Lockface verifies your face every time you need to access data on it (the verification process takes about a second). The USB drive doesn’t require extra software to be downloaded or installed.

Alternatively, you can also use a password, completely ignoring the face recognition function of the device. It uses 256-bit AES to encrypt the data. Futen says the device has an error rate of about 2% (it verifies the “wrong” person in 1.91% of cases and won’t verify the right person in 1.98% of cases).

The first version will hold 4GB of memory and is sized at 22×4×55mm. The Lockface costs $110 in Japan (where it’s already on the market). Futen is planning to bring models holding more memory in the near future.

I suggest you contact the Japan Trend Shop, Geek Stuff 4 U or Rinkya in case you live outside Japan and you’re interested in getting one.

[CrunchGear via Excite News (JP)]