This canine version of access control combines radio transmitters with a high pitched warning signal to keep each dog away from the other’s bowl. The scenario is similar to many that role-based access control (RBAC) solves in an enterprise.

Unfortunately, programmers would still have to eat their own dogfood.

I wonder if this would help keep my roommate out of my beer.

Fox News aired a report in 2006 that described how the FBI can turn on the mic on a cellphone and eavesdrop — even if the phone is turned off.

Today’s Word of the Day, government Trojan, describes efforts by various governments to covertly survail traffic of all kinds to and from suspect hard drives, including VoIP, cellphones and email.

These kinds of measures are only likely to increase as groups of all stripes turn to the Web to organize and communicate about activity the government wants to monitor. I find the “analog hacks” used here intriguing. VoIP or cellphone conversations and email messages may be encrypted during transmission but if an agency can record a target on the microphone or by using a keylogger, even quantum encryptography could be sidestepped.

It’s sometimes said that the only constant that you can count on is change. Change is necessary, after all — “Adapt or die” being an imperative of the natural world. And perhaps even more so in the world of technology…

These are the sorts of thoughts that occur as I poke around in the definition database, reviewing likely suspects for Words of the Day.  WhatIs has been around since 1996, when founder Lowell Thing started his little “dining room table experiment in hypertext.” Eleven calendar years ago. I’m not sure how long ago that is in Web years, for which the calibration must always be ramping up. However long the years since, though, what it means for us editors is a whole lot of updating.

We try, with varying success, to make definitions as future shock proof as we can without compromising the value of current information. Today’s Word of the Day, Antikythera mechanism, lends itself to that approach pretty well. You don’t expect a lot to change on a 2000-year-old computer. But for breaking news and link rot, we’re pretty much set with that one.

On the other hand, there are those definitions that seem to have been written in a simpler time, probably in the last century. Occasionally, I review a definition that predicts future developments that have either not panned out or have proven so prescient that all we have to do is change the tenses and phrases like “might become” to “is.”

Take silicon cockroach for example. I came across that one yesterday, looking for WODs for the weekend. John Sidgmore coined the term back in ‘98 to refer to the multiplicity of small electronic devices that he predicted would prevail in the future. We added the definition in ‘01. Now, as we flip lightly over into ‘08, I see that not only do the tenses need to be changed from future to present but a host of new life forms added to the species. No mention of MP3 players, GPS , USB drives…

What does our definition say now? Well … that depends. How far into the future are you reading it?
~ Ivy Wigmore

Permanence is both fleeting and intractable on the Internet. In the print world, once the newspaper, magazine or book has been proofed and fact-checked to the point where the law of diminishing returns kicks in, the final product is just that.

Online, “stop the presses” just doesn’t cut it. It’s a nearly universal experience to have clicked “send” before the message or attachment is ready for its audience — or post, in the age of the blogosphere, YouTube and Twitter. And it’s not just novice users that wish they had thought twice before responding or composing their thoughts. Part of the job here at WhatIs.com is always making sure that our copy and links are accurate and working, whether you find our content though this blog, within our definitions or learning content or in any of the new media types that have appeared on the site over the past few years, like podcasts, embedded videos or screencasts.

Earlier today, unfortunately, came one of the moments that editors cringe to admit, where a grammatical rule was broken and a wild card character made its way into one of the few remaining digital media forms that can’t be recalled: the email newsletter. Once it goes out of the mail server, there’s no calling your words back. WhatIs.com sends out a Word of the Day newsletter (Subscribe ere), each weekday, chosen from among the thousands of IT-related terms in the database. Our editors write three questions to go along with the term, usually written to match whatever the theme of the term might be — mobile computing, open source, SAP, CRM or perhaps whatever major tech events has occurred recently.

The three categories of tech trivia include:

• a Secret Word of the Day, where we describe a term without naming it
• an IT Acronym Challenge, where we test your ability to make sense of the alphabet soup
• and a Daily Tech Trivia question, which can be about nearly anything related to technology or current events

Today’s Word of the Day was BotHunter, which meant that our questions centered on security and threat management. The final question should have read as follows:

In IT security, AAA means more than roadside assistance. A AAA server is a server program that handles user requests for access to computer resources and “AAA” services. What do the three A’s stand for in AAA server?
Answer

When I originally wrote the question, I heard “triple A” in my head when I read AAA, a symptom of depending on a certain highway assistance service for decades. In the context of IT security, however, AAA is pronounced by saying each letter separately, or “Ay Ay Ay,” spelling out the acronym. That means that “an” is correct, not “a” as I wrote in the newsletter, just as it is in our definition for AAA server. My apologies to you, dear reader, for the mistake.

If you’re further interested in the correct pronunciation for some of the most commonly mispronounced terms in IT, make sure to consult our guide, How do you pronounce IT? You can see the correct phonics and hear the word spoken aloud by yours truly. Leave us a voice message if you disagree, approve or want to add to the list.

It’s not quite perpetual motion — but it might be the next best thing. Dr. Steve Beeby and a team of researchers at the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) at Southampton University in the UK have developed a kinetic energy generator that harnesses the energy of environmental vibrations and movement. When you think about it, Elvis was right: There’s a whole lotta shakin’ going on. And the scientists working on the VIBES (Vibration Energy Scavenging) project want to put all that energy generated to good use.

Actual size: less than 1 cubic centimeter

Although the generator is not the first of its kind, it’s said to be 10 times more powerful than any previous implementation. The technology, which has an industrial background, is being adapted for use with pacemakers. In this application, the beat of a person’s heart could power their pacemaker, which would mean that they would no longer require surgery to replace the batteries.

Here’s Beeby’s explanation (quoted in IndiaTimes Infotech):
“There is a big drive towards using wireless devices, but one of the challenges in supplying power to these devices is that batteries have a finite supply that needs to be replaced. We have a spin-out company that is now looking at powering pacemakers from the movement of the heart.

“As the power consumption of electronic devices continues to fall, the opportunity to use these devices to power them becomes more apparent. The potential is there for devices like mobile phones and MP3 players being at least augmented by vibration generators. There is quite a lot of energy available on a human such as the impact of a heel on the floor which could also be used.”

When you think about it, there’s no end of vibrational energy being generated all day every day. The VIBES team and other researchers are also exploring the potential of vibrations from roads and bridges. ~ Ivy Wigmore

Juice Receiver is an open source application written in Python and licensed under the GPL that allows you to save Internet audio (like, say, podcasts) onto your local hard drive to listen to at your leisure.
Sweet timeshifting and placeshifting goodness, free of DRM concerns.

Juice Receiver is available as a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux at sourceforge.net.

The application has been ported to more than 15 languages as of March 2007, supports multiple media players and is accessible to blind and disabled users. If you’re looking for a “fresh squeezed” alternative to iTunes, check out this app!

(Hat tip: Matt Cutts)

Podlinez allows users to listen to podcasts on a phone. Simple, a tad brilliant and free, other than any charges you might incur in calling.

All you have to do is enter an RSS feed on the Podlinez Web site to retrieve the specific phone number to call to hear a podcast. You can simply browse the site to find numbers for popular shows as well.
Once you’ve called in, just use the # and * keys on the numeric keypad of your cell phone to reverse or fast forward through podcasts in one minute increments.

If, for instance, you’d like to listen to our podcast, Tech Buzzwords from WhatIs.com, just call +1 (281) 739-0443 or click “Listen By Phone.”

Many thanks to John C. Havens, About.com’s Guide to Podcasting, for the link.

LibriVox.org is an open source project that provides free audiobooks from the public domain without any advertising. To pull that off, LibriVox enables volunteers to record chapters of books and then upload the audio files as .MP3 and .OGG files back onto LibriVox, where they are then listed within the online catalog. LibriVox’s stated goal is to make all public domain books available as free, downloadable content. We wish them luck! If you would like to help, it’s easy to volunteer. Don’t worry — quite a bit of Tolstoy’s War and Peace remains to be recorded, along with numerous works of Shakepeare, if you’re feeling your thespian oats.

Podzinger distinguishes itself in several areas of innovation, including an embedded media player that allows a user to play a podcast directly from within search results. This removes the need to download a podcast before listening to it. Additionally, Podzinger lists excerpts from the podcast that its algorithms have converted using speech-to-text technology, displaying the time and context of each occurrence of the term that was entered into Podzinger’s search engine. These excepts are linked directly into the podcasts, enabling a user to click directly to the time(s) in the podcast where the term occurred. It’s easy to add a podcast to your subscription lists on either iTunes or Yahoo!. It’s also possible to create and save searches for specific terms, allowing you to add that feed to whichever RSS reader you use and keep up to date easily on that topic. Podzinger has added the ability to search within video content to its offering as well, making it rather useful for finding keywords within your favorite iFilm or YouTube content.