Apparently, Yamaha is starting to unveil information about their new vocal synthesis technology at Musikmesse in Germany. No more Pop divas or boy bands when we can do it all via DSP. I'm not 100% convinced, but apparently they are showing a VST instrument with the technology now... This link takes you to a babelfish translation of the Japanese-language page.

Vocaloid - Vocal Synthesis via Yamaha

SAN DIEGO — A software development firm says it has solved one of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence, successfully extracting hierarchical categories from streams of sensory data. And for $50,000, HNC Software Inc. will tell you just how it accomplished that feat.

The company's software, called Cortronics, uses neural networks to model fundamental operations that a person's brain calls on to handle those same tasks.

EE Times - AI software system extracts meaning from babble

IMHO, Site Meter is *the* best webcounter service out there right now. It's free, easy to use, stable, and provides a wealth of information on visitors. Since my site got listed in Schneier's "Crypto-Gram" newsletter yesterday, I've been using sitemeter to see who's visiting my site, from where, and what they clicked on to get to my site. All as a free service. It's awesome. :)

BTW, I've gotten over 2000 unique visitors to http://elonka.com/steganography since yesterday. Whee!

Site Meter - Counter and Statistics Tracker

While I was giving my talk at CIA Headquarters in October, I managed to obtain some rubbings of the mysterious Kryptos sculpture in the main courtyard. Three of the four encoded sections on that sculpture have been cracked, but the last 97 characters are still unsolved. If this is something you're interested in working on, check this link for more information about the sculpture, as well as scans of the rubbings that I obtained.

CIA Kryptos Sculpture

] "Our goal is to provide an engaging and educational
] experience for Mac OS X Server administrators and
] afficionados."

A useful site about using OSX as a server.

Welcome to AFP548.com

http://www.ableton.com/beta/

Ableton Live 2,0 Public Beta

"Bing Fung and colleagues at the University of Oklahoma found that the 19 hydrogen atoms in a lone liquid crystal molecule can store at least 1024 bits of information. The data are stored in the complex interaction of the protons' magnetic moments."

New Scientist - Digital Image stored in single molecule

Homebuilt MIDI controllers - A world of knobs.

MIDIboxes!