Tools of the Trade - Stranger Than String-Net Liquids

Xiao-Gang Wen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michael Levin at Harvard University ran with Laughlin's ideas and have come up with a prediction for a new state of matter, and even a tantalising picture of the nature of space-time itself. Levin presented their work at the Topological Quantum Computing conference at the University of California, Los Angeles, early this month.

In the experiment, electrons moving in the interface between two semiconductors behaved as though they were made up of particles with only a fraction of the electron's charge. This so-called fractional quantum hall effect (FQHE) suggested that electrons may not be elementary particles after all.

Wen suspected that the effect could be an example of a new type of matter. Different phases of matter are characterised by the way their atoms are organised. In a liquid, for instance, atoms are randomly distributed, whereas atoms in a solid are rigidly positioned in a lattice. FQHE systems are different. "If you take a snapshot of the position of electrons in an FQHE system they appear random and you think you have a liquid," says Wen. But step back, and you see that, unlike in a liquid, the electrons dance around each other in well-defined steps.

This led Wen and Levin to the idea that there may be a different way of thinking about matter. What if electrons were not really elementary, but were formed at the ends of long "strings" of other, fundamental particles? They formulated a model in which such strings are free to move "like noodles in a soup" and weave together into huge "string-nets".

New stabs at the grand unified theory are fun....on to the tools.

-----------------------------------------

1) On March 16th, Oxid.it released Cain & Abel v4.6. New features include the following:

• WPA-PSK (Dictionary and Brute-Force Attacks).
• WPA-PSK Auth (Dictionary and Brute-Force Attacks).
• Added IE7 passwords support in Credential Manager Password Decoder.
  

2) On March 16th, Apple released iTunes 7.1.1. Apple states that this update Adresses "stability issues and minor compatibility problems". If your 4th Gen iPod freezes, just hold down menu + the SELECT button for a few seconds and it should reset. I have had to pass this advice to several friends, so I figured I would paste it here.

3) On March 16th, Foxit Software released its Foxit PDF Reader v2.0 Build 1516. Foxit Reader 2.0 is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 1.5 M download size), breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.6. This build fixes the bug that some password-protected PDF files are displayed as blank pages.It also reduces the time to print to non-PostScript printers those PDF file generated by scanning.

4) On March 12th, OSSEC HIDS v1.1 was released. OSSEC is an Open Source Host-based Intrusion Detection System. It performs log analysis, integrity checking, Windows registry monitoring, rootkit detection, time-based alerting and active response. This version comes with numerous new features, including support for Microsoft IIS6, Cisco VPN concentrator, Cisco PIX VPN AAA, Cisco FWSM, and OpenBSD/Solaris 10 su logs. It also adds more granular email alerting options, a new Windows agent installer, and more advanced log analysis rules options and much more.

5) On March 9th, OpenSSH v4.6 was released. See the release notes for details.