Here are updates on some of the issues I've been following for the past few weeks.

Infrastructure attack a false alarm – for now. In a series of posts, I have made clear my concern about the ongoing effort to computerize utilities and municipal-infrastructure control systems. While intelligent systems can help us conserve resources and use energy more efficiently, computerization also leaves critical systems vulnerable to hack attacks. A data-point supporting my argument was November 8's widely reported cyber attack against an Illinois water utility's SCADA system. The Illinois Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center reported that a hacker with a Russian IP address had caused a pump to burn out. The cyber war had begun! Or maybe not. It turns out the SCADA system was accessed by a utility contractor, Jim Mimlitz, who was on vacation in Russia. While everyone is breathing a little easier, the fact remains that these systems are still vulnerable. It's only a matter of time until they are really hit.

Microsoft bullish on Kinect 2: Microsoft has realized that its Kinect game controller for the Xbox platform is potentially a good solution for a huge range of problems. Beta 2 of the Kinect SDK is available now, and Microsoft promises that a commercialized SDK will be available in early 2012. In the meantime, the Kinect hacker community is running full-tilt at every offbeat and potentially useful application it can imagine. Meanwhile, the Kinect 2 will reported greatly extend the Kinect's abilities. The new device may be able to read lips and even to detect users' emotional states with its facial-recognition algorithms. (If hackers were to install a back door into Kinect-enabled systems, they would essentially have around-the-clock video access to user sites, and the Kinect's voice-recognition routines could monitor speech for key words. What if the government were to install such software?) Check out Kinect Hacks. And if you haven't seen it yet, you might as well look at Microsoft's Kinect Effect video.

Software detects lies with voice analysis. Researchers are using a variety of methods to analyze speech and detect whether speakers are telling the truth. The New York Times has an informative article here: Software that listens for lies. It must be a lot of fun working on applications like these.

Pentagon sponsors hacking contest. A determined team of programmers has won $50,000 in a contest sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The eight-member team successfully retrieved the contents of seven pages of documents that had been shredded into more than 10,000 fragments. The Pentagon is quite open about its motivation for the contest: “The goal was to identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used by our warfighters operating in war zones, but might also create vulnerabilities to sensitive information that is protected through our own shredding practices throughout the U.S. national security community.” We already knew the government could intercept anything on the Internet. Now it turns out that they're looking to read our shredded documents. Congratulations, in any case, to the winners.

Web recommendation: Perhaps you have noticed that many programmers are also serious about cooking. You may be a good cook yourself, in which case you have no doubt already discovered the new Developer Cookbook section of sdtimes.com. Those recipes look good, but they're positively primitive compared to the cooking-as-rocket-science entries in Modernist Cuisine, a six-volume encyclopedia of cooking ingredients, methods, and technologies dreamed up by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. This lavishly illustrated tome has 2,438 pages and weighs more than 50 pounds. Your status as an amateur cook may not justify the book's $625 purchase price, but you should at least take a look via the authors' beautiful Web site. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He likes raisins and walnuts in his oatmeal cookies.