Obayashi Corp claims it could use carbon nanotube technology, which is more than 20 times stronger than steel, to build a lift shaft 96,000 kilometres above the Earth.

The company said on Wednesday it would carry up to 30 passengers at a time and travel at a speed of 200 kilometres per hour for a week, stopping off at a station at 36,000 kilometres.

Tourists would stay there, but researchers and specialists would be able to travel all the way to the end, said Satomi Katsuyama, the project’s leader.

“Humans have long adored high towers,” she said. “Rather than building it from the earth, we will construct it from the space.”

However, while Obayashi says the plan could work, there are presently no estimates for the cost of the structure, nor any idea where to build it, or who would pay for it.

Obayashi is just days away from completing work on Japan‘s tallest structure, the Tokyo Sky Tree, which will stand 634 metres.

The tower will serve as a digital broadcasting antenna as well as a sightseeing attraction that allows uninterrupted views of the Japanese capital and beyond.

“We were inspired by construction of Sky Tree,” which will open for business in May, she said. “Our experts on construction, climate, wind patterns, design, they say it’s possible.”

When Obayashi is not drawing up plans to conquer space it works on a number of projects from building corporate headquarters, bridges and power plants to renovating ancient temples.

Among its portfolio are the Dubai Metro in United Arab Emirates, Universal Studios Osaka, Japan, and Stadium Australia, which was used for the Sydney Olympics.

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Scientists are enormously excited about what life-forms might be found there, but are equally worried about contaminating the lake with drilling fluids and bacteria, and the potentially explosive ”de-gassing” of a body of water that has especially high concentrations of oxygen and nitrogen.

To prevent a sudden release of gas, the Russian team will not push the drill far into the lake but just deep enough for a limited amount of water – or the slushy ice on the lake’s surface – to flow up the borehole, where it will then freeze.

Reaching Lake Vostok would represent the first direct contact with what scientists now know is a web of more than 200 subglacial lakes in Antarctica – some of which existed when the continent was connected to Australia and was much warmer. They stay liquid because of heat from the core of the planet.

”This is a huge moment for science and exploration, breaking through to this enormous lake that we didn’t even know existed until the 1990s,” said John Priscu, a researcher at Montana State University, who has long been involved in Antarctic research, including a study of Vostok ice cores.

”If it goes well, a breakthrough opens up a whole new chapter in our understanding of our planet and possibly moons in our solar system and planets far beyond,” he said. ”If it doesn’t go well, it casts a pall over the whole effort to explore this wet underside of Antarctica.”

Some groups have called for a ban on scientific research beneath the Antarctic ice sheet so the area can remain pristine. Priscu said Russian scientists on the scene emailed him last week to say they had stopped drilling about 12 metres from the expected waterline to measure the pressure levels deep below. He expected that they were also sending down a special ”hot water” drill to make the final push, but a message from the Russian team early this week reported ”no news”.

If the Russians break through as planned, it will cap more than 50 years of research in what are considered the harshest conditions in the world – where the surface temperatures drop to 100 degrees below zero. That extreme cold is likely to return within a few weeks, at the end of the Antarctic summer, putting pressure on the Russians to make the final push or pull out until the next Antarctic drilling season.

Valery Lukin is leading the effort for the Russians. Last year, he told Reuters that their work was ”like exploring an alien planet where no one has been before. We don’t know what we’ll find.”

American and English teams are planning drilling campaigns next year into much smaller Antarctic lakes as scientists work to understand the dynamics of the continent, which holds more than 70 per cent of the world’s fresh water. But Vostok – where the former Soviet Union began work after the United States settled in at the South Pole more than 50 years ago – is now acknowledged to be the ”crown jewel” of Antarctica from a scientific perspective.

In recent years, researchers have discovered that microbes live in the ice wherever they explore in Antarctica, including deep in the Vostok borehole. This finding has revolutionised thinking about the snow-and-ice-covered continent, and has encouraged researchers, including Priscu, to conclude that life almost certainly will be found in Vostok and the other subglacial lakes.

If microbes are found in Vostok, the discovery would have particular significance for astrobiology, the search for life beyond Earth. That’s because Jupiter’s moon, Europa, and Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, have deep ice crusts that scientists think cover large amounts of liquid water warmed by sources other than the sun – just like Vostok.

The Russian effort has drawn criticism for its extensive use of kerosene, Freon and other chemicals to enable the drilling and to keep the borehole open during the long winter. Priscu said the Russians have worked with an international group he helped form to come up with cleaner ways to drill the final section of the hole.

Organisations including the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition – the official environmental umbrella group sitting at Antarctic Treaty organisation meetings – have spoken against the drilling methods used by the Russians.

Claire Christian, director of the coalition’s secretariat, said her group generally supported study of the subglacial Antarctic lakes but that she wished the first entry would not take place at Vostok because of its importance. Of the Russian team, she said, ”They have responded to some concerns but are not drilling to the highest standards available.”

Researchers such as Robin Bell, of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, said learning more about the subglacial world in Antarctica was essential to understanding the changing climate and how it may effect Earth. Because the continent had so much of the world’s freshwater ice, significant changes there would have a major impact on sea-level rise.

Vostok, which is about the size of New Jersey, is the world’s third-largest lake by volume of water. Priscu said the gas in the lake made it like a can of carbonated soda: Open it under high pressure, and it will spurt out.

He said the doomsday scenario for the Russian breakthrough would be if the suddenly released water pushed its way past machinery to block it and shot up the narrow borehole. The result, he said, could be an enormous geyser that could empty a quarter of the lake. Priscu said he didn’t expect that to happen, but if it did, the sudden addition of substantial water vapor to the Antarctic atmosphere could change the continent’s weather in unpredictable ways.

But, while the device is new in name, the hardware specs aren’t much of a leap forward, but rather a variation of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus with less powerful hardware.

The Galaxy Tab 2 is powered by a 1-gigahertz processor and packs a 4000 mAh (milliampere-hour) battery. The Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus runs on a 1.2-gigahertz processor and a 4100 mAh battery.

Both Galaxy Tabs have a 3-megapixel/720p camera on the back, but the Galaxy Tab 2 has a VGA front-facing camera while the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus has a 2-megapixel front facing camera.

The two slates also use a 7-inch touchscreen with a 1024 x 600 resolution and 1-gigabyte of RAM. And while the Galaxy Tab 2 will ship on Ice Cream Sandwich when it arrives in March in the US, Samsung has promised an update to Ice Cream Sandwich for the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus too.

The Galaxy Tab 2 will launch in both a wi-fi-only and 3G version in Britain, with other countries to follow, Samsung said. Storage will come in either 8-gigabyte, 16-gigabyte or 32-gigabyte options and the new tablet will include a microSD card slot for those who want to expand further.

Samsung hasn’t announced pricing details on the Galaxy Tab 2, but ideally the pricing will be about the same or less than the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, which starts at about $US400.

When Google showed off its latest operating system for smartphones in October last year, “Ice Cream Sandwich“, many were excited to see a feature that allowed the ability to unlock a phone using just a user’s face. But as soon as the feature was shown off, it didn’t take long for people to begin to point out how insecure it was, demonstrating that holding up a picture of an authenticated user to a mobile phone’s camera would allow anyone with access to a photo of that user to unlock it with ease.

It raises the question: if one of the world’s largest technology giant’s implementation of facial recognition technology can be tricked so easily, will the idea ever take off as a secure authentication mechanism?

Some young entrepreneurs from Dublin in Ireland seem to think so. Although they are yet to publish any evidence supporting their claim, they say they plan to release about August this year technology that any website can use to enable its users to log in by presenting their face to their computer’s web camera.

Co-founder of the Ireland startup named Viv.ie, Niall Paterson, is attempting to create the technology with several other friends which he hopes will “destroy” passwords.

“I was on Facebook logging in with my password which is 21 characters long and I got it wrong and I thought that there had to be a better way,” said Niall, 17, in an interview yesterday. “Instead of using passwords the aim . . . will be that passwords will be eliminated and you will be able to log in just using your face.

“A web camera would take a picture of your face, analyse it, and if you’ve been registered already, log you in.”

Security experts, however, remain sceptical over whether it would work in practice and if it would be secure enough.

Paul Ducklin, of security firm Sophos, said the primary problem with Viv.ie was that evidence of how reliable the system was relied entirely on the “unsupported claim of one of the inventors that it is ‘impossible to crack’”. The second problem was “whether you’d want your Facebook identity tied to your face”.

Questioned on security, Niall claimed Viv.ie used the image editing software ImageMagick that could detect whether an image was 2D or 3D. “We feel that a 2D picture of a face will sort of be exposed [by the software].” A number of other security measures were also being implemented, he said, such as detecting whether the images being fed into a computer were that of a web camera or software acting as a fake video stream.

Passwords ‘redundant and bankrupt’

Australian security expert James Turner, of IBRS, said the entire concept of a password, as in a series of characters that you type in via a keyboard, had “become redundant and bankrupt”.

“It just doesn’t work for the number of sites and resources that your typical person uses personally, and then you include corporate [resources] and it just becomes a nightmare.”

The security industry was “desperately” looking for an alternative to passwords, he added, and biometrics – what facial recognition is a part of – had “caused a great deal of appeal”.

One organisation he knew that used facial recognition successfully was Customs at places like Sydney’s international airport, where Australian holders of electronic passports can use their passport and face to clear Customs to re-enter Australia.

The SmartGate system compares your passport photo with images taken by three cameras, noting such things as your bone structure, length of your nose, and the distance between your eyes.

“The technology to actually make [facial recognition] happen is developing very, very rapidly,” Mr Turner said. “What we’re now able to do with voice recognition is phenomenal . . . I know they’re talking about putting facial recognition on laptops as one of the means for locking them.”

A couple of challenges facing biometric technology, however, are what are likely to be the main reasons implementation hasn’t been more wide-spread. One of the major hurdles, according to Mr Turner, included what to do when biometric data was compromised.

“I can change my fingerprint ten times and then I’m stuffed. I can change my iris once to the other eye, and then if that’s compromised I’ve got no options [left]. [As for] my face, I don’t have any options there.”

He believes that if facial recognition was to become adopted by web services like Facebook or Google as an accepted log in method then it would only occur in conjunction with another factor of authentication, such as a smartphone that had a special digital certificate on it that talked with Facebook or Google to say you had authenticated with it rather than you authenticating directly via your computer’s web camera. That way if your face’s biometric data was ever stolen, the bad guy would also need your phone, Mr Turner said, which could be replaced even if it was stolen and have a new digital certificate installed onto it.

“The simple reality is that biometrics are a convenient form of authentication because you’re carrying it with you all of the time, whether it’s your voice, your face, your fingerprints or your iris.”

Joaquin Almunia, the EU competition commissioner, did not impose any requirements for Google to complete the $US12.5 billion deal, which represents the internet search giant’s first foray into hardware.

But the deal comes at a time of heightened scrutiny by regulators over ownership of intellectual property governing computers and mobile communications. Almunia indicated in a statement that he would be watching the sector.

The decision “does not mean that the merger clearance blesses all actions by Motorola in the past or all future action by Google,” the statement said. He added that any action on “the question whether Motorola’s or Google’s conduct is compliant with EU antitrust law” would be taken separately.

Because US and European regulators seek to coordinate on major transactions, the US Justice Department, which is also reviewing the deal, could similarly approve the acquisition soon.

If the takeover wins global approval, it could give Google a portfolio of patents to serve as an impressive defense against infringement claims as it works to develop its popular Android operating system for mobile devices.

Almunia said he cleared the deal partly because Google’s business model has been to share its Android mobile operating system with other device makers in order to gain the widest user base, making it less likely that the company would restrict the use of Android solely to Motorola, which is a relatively minor player in Europe.

But Almunia expressed strong concerns about the way powerful technology companies had participated in setting the standards for the proper functioning of mobile devices like smartphones.

Owners of such patents could, “hold up competitors or even an entire industry to the detriment of consumers and innovation,” he said. “I can assure you that the commission will take further action if warranted to ensure that the use of standard essential patents by all players in the sector.”

Last week, Google wrote to standard-setting organisations around the world pledging to license Motorola patents on fair and reasonable terms if the deal succeeded.

Google promised to keep a cap on the fees it charges for licensing its technology and sought to outline the conditions under which it would sue companies for patent infringement.

An upcoming campaign announced by the hacking group Anonymous directed against the Internet’s core address lookup system is unlikely to cause much damage, according to one security expert. 

Anonymous said last Thursday it would launch an action on March 31 as part of “Operation Global Blackout” that would target the root Domain Name System (DNS) servers.

Anonymous said the attack has been planned as a protest against “our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun”.

The DNS translates a Web site name, such as www.google.com, into a numerical IP (Internet Protocol) address, which is used by computers to find the Web site.

The 13 authoritative root servers contain the master list of where other nameservers can look up an IP address for a domain name within a certain top-level domain such as “.com.”

The group said it had built a “Reflective DNS Amplification DDOS” (distributed denial-of-service) tool, which causes other DNS servers to overwhelm those root servers with lots of traffic, according to the Pastebin post.

But there are several factors working against the Anonymous campaigners, wrote Robert Graham, CEO of Errata Security.

“They might affect a few of the root DNS servers, but it’s unlikely they could take all of them down, at least for any period of time,” Graham wrote. “On the day of their planned Global Blackout, it’s doubtful many people would notice.”

Although there are 13 root servers, an attack on one would not affect the other 12, Graham wrote. Additionally, an attack would be less successful due to “anycasting,” which allows traffic for a root server to be redirected to another server containing a replica of the same data.

There are hundreds of other servers worldwide that hold the same data as the root servers, which increase the resiliency of DNS.

ISPs also tend to cache DNS data for a while, Graham wrote. ISPs may cache data for a day or two before needing to do a fresh lookup, a time period that can be set on servers known as “time-to-live.” It means that even if a root server was down, it would not necessarily immediately affect an ISP’s customers.

Lastly, root DNS servers are closely watched. If trouble started, the malicious traffic to the root servers would likely be blocked, with disruptions lasting a few minutes, Graham wrote.

“Within minutes of something twitching, hundreds of Internet experts will converge to solve the problem,” he wrote.

Twitter has admitted that its iPhone app uploads the entire contents of a user’s address book for up to 18 months.

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