Nissan turns to high-tech to stop drunken driving Nissan Motor has installed three prototype high-tech systems in a car, designed to stop drunken driving as a part of its drive to reduce road deaths and injuries. The first attempts to directly detect alcohol in a driver’s sweat. After drinking, a certain amount of alcohol escapes the body in perspiration and this can be picked up by sensitive detectors if they are in proximity with the driver. One of the four sensors in the car is on the gear shift lever. As this has to be touched in order to start driving, the system can stop the car from being started if alcohol is detected. A second system in the car uses a camera mounted in front of the driver to monitor eye movement. If the driver is drowsy it triggers the seat belt to tighten and this movement will hopefully snap the driver out of his drowsiness or prompt him to take rest. A voice alert also sounds and a message pops up on the navigation screen. In the prototype the system quickly administered a few jerks to the seat belt when the driver simulated tiredness. A third system monitors the path of the vehicle to ensure that it’s traveling in a straight line and not weaving about on the road, as is common with a drunken driver. This also triggers the voice and visual alerts and pulls the seat belt when signs of drunk driving or drowsiness are detected.

Indiana University dumps Google for ChaCha ChaCha and IU have announced a strategic partnership that will install ChaCha’s software on every IU Web site, from IU Libraries’ www.libraries.iub.edu to the general portal search.iu.edu. The goal for IU is to give students, faculty and the public more advanced search tools. Yet for ChaCha, the partnership is also a pilot program to work out the kinks in its offering before it rolls out its software to other universities. Now IU searches will no more be powered by computer-driven Google, but only by people-powered ChaCha. Later this month, IU will draft hundreds of librarians and information technology employees to be “credentialed” ChaCha guides for the university’s Web sites. They will do what ChaCha's 30,000 other guides do now for the broader Internet—help people find what they want by suggesting Web sites during a real-time chat. IU’s guides could be asked to locate a building on campus, find a book in one of the university’s libraries or answer a question about Windows Vista. Students, faculty and the public could ask the IU guides questions, said Brad Wheeler, IU’s vice president for information technology. The IU guides also won’t get paid for their services because helping students, faculty and the public is part of what IU employees do, Wheeler commented.

Microsoft to offer free office suite Microsoft said it would make ad-supported copies of the Works package available within “months”. The programs will not run in a Web browser but will be installed on a PC and have its cost offset by running advertisements while in use. The move has widely been seen as an attempt by Microsoft to counter the growing number of rivals offering Web versions of its popular Office programs. Microsoft said the service would debut with Version 9.0 of Works that was due to launch by the end of the year. Word processing and spreadsheet software are expected to be the main part of the package. The ad-supported version will have a store of ads it will show to people while they put together documents or spreadsheets. The store of ads would be refreshed every time that computer goes online. Microsoft has not said which PC makers it is working with on the project who will pre-install the ad-supported copies of Works. The software company said the trial would run until mid-2008 and was being run to find out if it can generate enough cash to support such a service. The usual retail price of Works in the US is $39.99 (£20). Microsoft has faced increasing competition in recent years as rivals produce free versions of business software that can be downloaded or used online. Sun has released the OpenOffice package of programs and there are many free online packages such as Zoho and Ajax 13. One of the bigger rivals is Google’s web-based Docs and Spreadsheets service that lets people put together and edit these types of files online. While mainly aimed at individuals, Google also offers an “enterprise” version that comes with technical support to help people use it. As Web technology improves, the gap between the full-featured versions on PCs and the Net-based versions will shrink putting more pressure on Microsoft’s flagship Office suite of programs.

California Restricts e-voting California’s secretary of state has mandated tough new security standards for the state’s e-voting systems and curtailed their use, following an independent review of the technology. The state will still allow the use of e-voting systems manufactured by Diebold Election Systems and Sequoia Voting Systems, but under strict new conditions. Polling stations will not be allowed to have more than one of the Diebold AccuVote-TSx and Sequoia Edge Model systems in place, and county registrars will have to do things like reinstall the devices’ software and firmware, reset the machine’s encryption keys, and take new measures to prevent physical access to systems. Similar security measures are now mandated for Hart InterCivic’s voting systems, but without the single-machine limitation. Systems from a fourth e-voting system maker, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), were decertified after ES&S was late in providing access to their products. The ES&S InkaVote Plus systems, which are used in Los Angeles County, are now being evaluated and they could be approved for use in the February 2008 election, the secretary of state said in a statement. California’s review of e-voting has been a rushed affair, since it was kicked off in early May. That’s because the state subsequently moved its upcoming presidential primary vote ahead by four months, to February 5, 2008. State law requires that county registrars be given six months notice on any decertification of voting systems, forcing Bowen to come up with decisions by Friday, earlier than she had first anticipated. E-voting systems were used by between a quarter and a third of California’s 8.9 million voters in last November’s election, the secretary of state said. The researchers’ findings were not encouraging for backers of the current electronic voting systems. A “red team” of penetration testers found 15 security problems in the devices. For example, researchers were able to exploit bugs in the Windows operating system used by the Diebold GEMS election management system to circumvent the system’s audit logs and directly access data on the machine. They were able to get a similar level of access to Sequoia WinEDS data as well. Testers were also able to overwrite firmware, bypass locks on the systems, forge voter cards, and even secretly install a wireless device on the back of a GEMS server. A source-code review, released earlier this week found problems in all three e-voting systems it evaluated, saying that Diebold’s systems were subject to a virus attack.