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Digital Planet: 25/01/2011

Factual: Science & Nature

25/01/2011

BBC World Service - Digital Planet, 25/01/2011

What are the prospects of all-out cyber warfare? A new report assesses the risks.

Is global cyber-warfare a realistic prospect?  How open is the internet in Burma; Hi-tech highlights from Campus Party in Sao Paulo; and the role of art and music in voice recognition technology

The risk of all-out cyber war between nations is low, but there are many smaller-scale threats to national security from cyber attacks.  So concludes a new report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.  Gareth Mitchell talks to one of its authors, Dr Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University.


Last week Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi was connected to the internet for the first time. She’s yet to launch a website or a Facebook account, but we hear from Professor John Palfrey of the OpenNet Initiative on the current state of internet freedom in Burma.


Digital Planet heads to Sao Paulo for some of the best geek culture Brazil has to offer.  Gareth reports back from the 2011 Campus Party, which played host to 7,000 hackers, hobbyists, students and surfers.  Daniel Ratai from Hungarian start-up 3D For All demonstrates a platform they have developed which lets you virtually sculpt in 3D, while German PhD student Jan Herling shows us software that makes objects virtually disappear.  And we witness the extreme sport of 'overclocking': manually ramping up computer processors so they have to be cooled by water or even liquid nitrogen.


Nowadays, voice recognition technology is so sophisticated that software can decipher exactly what we are saying.  But there is much more that we communicate through our voices: volume, pitch, emotion, as well as sounds we make that are not words at all.  Digital Planet reporter Angela Saini meets musicians and artists who are digitising the human voice to understand more than just the words.

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25/01/2011

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