ReacTable & ReacTVision

Some colleges from the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona have been working on a really cool project for about six years now, which may be the next revolution in electronic music. One of the developers, a former Hagenberg student, presented the ReacTable at the University of Applied Sciences this week and here are some impressions of this innovative instrument:

The idea behind this table is to use simple plastic artefacts to produce any signal, modulation or filter you like. The table provides a tangible interface and is really easy to use. Nowadays, many people wish to play an instrument but are too lazy to study one for many years. The ReacTable is not only easy to use, it is also really simple for anybody to learn to play with it.

There is also the first famous band using the ReacTable for live performances. The DJ of Björk in action:

New Download Available

Hi folks!

Recently I added a Matlab program that applies a modulation effect to any audio sample you wish. The algorithm is a flanger/chorus and as a normal effect of a guitar, you can set an individual depth, speed and lfo-frequency. So please check out this new download and let me know if you like it.

AutoPanner is Now Available

I’ve updated the Publications section. There is now an AutoPanner available for Matlab. The AutoPanner can be used for panorama effects for music production. A stereo signal fades left-to-right-to-left and so on. Using some additional parameters, the amplitude as well as the range of the fading can be selected when you apply this effect.

The Computer Game is 50

50 years ago, the American physicist William Higinbotham developed the first computer game ever. Tennis for two simulates a ping pong game on an oscilloscope. When Higinbotham “released” the game he could not even imagine what era he would introduce to the digital world.

The game was created to cure the boredom of visitors to Brookhaven National Laboratory, in which Higinbotham worked. Tennis for Two was a predecessor of Pong, one of the most widely recognized video games as well as one of the first, though there was no direct correlation between the two games. Tennis for Two was brought out only twice, on “Visitor’s Day” at the Laboratory. It remained virtually unheard of until the late 1970s and early 1980s when Higinbotham was called on to testify in court cases for defendants against Magnavox and Ralph Baer. Unlike Pong and similar early games, Tennis for Two shows a simplified tennis court from the side instead of a top-down perspective, with no representation of the player on the screen. The ball is affected by gravity and must be played over the net. The game was controlled by an analog computer and “consisted mostly of resistors, capacitors and relays, but where fast switching was needed—when the ball was in play—transistor switches were used.”

Mobile Emergency Application

Me and my friend Markus, we actually have started to develop a mobile emergency application for smart phones. The application could be used by sportsmen, hikers but also eldery persons. For the operator of the emergency system, it should be able to interact with ambulances related to the location, where the emergency occured.

Disputable Anniversary

The computer virus is 25. November 10th 1983, the US resarcher Fred Cohen presented the first computer virus at University of Southern California. At this time, the criminal potential was not really obvious and the subsequent appearence of viruses on the Internet caused a mass epidemic.

How to hack WPA?

Erik Tews, a German security specialist, announced his speech for the upcoming security conference PacSec 2008. His report is called “Gone in 900 Seconds – Some Crypto Issues with WPA” and shall show how to spy on WLAN connections using WPA and TKIP. Also packets could intrude into the network using this secured network connection. Therefore it is not needed to hack the TKIP-Key. The exact tutorial has not been published so far.

Details will be published in an academic magazine. The only thing known at the moment is, that Tews uses mathematical methods to hack WPA and that it requires a lot of traffic. Although time is not the problem. He, his partner and aircreck-ng-coworker Martin Beck found a trick how to force a WPA router to send enormous amounts of data, which is almost the same strategy used for cracking WEP, where the router is forced to produce traffic by replay attacks. Parts of the algorithm are allegedly already part of the aircrack-ng tool.

WPA2 is still not in danger of being hacked because this algorithm uses AES. If WPA is really hacked now, customers can use WPA2 although the change from WEP to WPA took years.

Content Update

Recently, I made some changes here. There is now a section available for publications, where you can download free open source coding examples and other stuff in the field of Mobile Computing. For the beginning there are some tiny examples for computer graphics (textures, blending, splines) and some examples for mobile media services. Hope you enjoy them!

iPhone gets a rival

In New York, the first smart phone operated with the Google Operating System was announced. The mobile phone is being produced by HTC, a well known producer of Windows Mobile smart phones.

The G1 will be controlled via touchscreen just like the iPhone. Additionally, the mobile phone offers a hardware hidden keyboard as well. The phone features WLAN, GPS, UMTS and a camera with 3.1 mega pixels. The G1 will feature all google tools available for common desktop users. Google Maps, Google’s navigation software, provides the usage of satellite images for the coordination within any environment for example. For entertainment issues, Amazon.com developed an application that offers access to free MP3 titles. For usability issues also a link to the Android market has been established. So the user can download and install new software for the G1. The mobile phone is now available in the United States for about 180 USD.

Happy Birthday Denial of Service

Today, 20 years ago, a informatics student (Robert Tappan Morris) launched a program, which should count how many personal computers are connected to the internet. Therefore, his program should exploit a security leak and infect the computer, increase a counter, forward this counter and reproduce itself to infect other systems. The implementation of this worm program caused multiple infections on each single computer and led to extremely high network traffic on infected computers. Today this worm is known as Denial of Service.

20 years ago, providers published that the Internet is broken. Robert Tappan Morris was the first person condemned for misuse of a computer. He had to pay 10.050 USD and was sentenced to 400 hours of community service. Today the 42 years old man is professor at the Insitute of Technology in Massachusetts (MIT), where the worm was once released.

Concerning the history of this worm many legends exist. There are hardly any facts and figures about how many computers as a matter of fact have been infected by this worm because Morris’ worm did not count correctly. It has been estimated that about 10 percent of all computers connected to the internet, which have been about 6000 systems at this time, were infected by the worm. The harm of the worm is estimated by about 100 million USD. Although, Morris’ program was not the first worm at this time. 1979, researchers of Xerox made some experiments with worms in apropriate facilities. 1986 a worm was up to IBM’s mischief. However, this mess has been glossed over by IBM.

In respect thereof, we should thank Mr. Morris for demonstrating the connectivity of the network to the public.

The Internet Worm Program: An Analysis