Today, you can translate almost any word, phrase or document by simply plugging it into a search engine.
Microsoft, however, is envisioning a future where you'll be able to hold a conversation with anyone around the world without the obstacle of language barriers.
At Re/code's inaugural Code Conference, Microsoft unveiled it's real-time speech translator for Skype—a technology that conjures up references to "Star Trek" and "A Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" that's been in the works for years.
The demo made the technology look natural and fluid—simply speak as you would in normal conversation, and the person on the other side would hear your words followed by a clean translation in their preferred language.
The "Star Trek"-like translator will become available before the end of 2014.
Vikram Dendi, a technical and strategy advisor for Microsoft Research, was brought on to the team five years ago specifically to work on translation technology.
We spoke with Dendi to learn a little more about how Microsoft created its real-time translator. Here's the lightly edited Q&A.
Business Insider: When Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella talked about Skype's real-time translator on stage, he emphasized how humanistic the technology is. What has Microsoft done to make the translations seem natural and conversational?
Vikram Dendi: So one of the early realizations for us as we were investing in translation was that it was really important that we don't think like computers.
We don't think like computers.
It was really important that we think of it as a human communication problem. While we were doing very cutting edge work on the computer science side, we were also looking very closely into how people communicated with each other.
I used to spend a lot of time going to a number of different countries where I'd interact with translators. And I came to the realization that no translators agrees 100 percent on how is best to translate something. If you take something and give it to two different translators, there will be a variation in how they translate.
Ultimately the end goal is to really create an understanding. So a lot of the work that we have done in our translation engine was really around creating a lot of flexibility and customizability.
For example we have something called a Translator Hub. The Translator Hub allows you to bring in -- For more information read the original article here.
A popular encryption tool used and endorsed by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden abruptly shut down on Wednesday, with its website telling users the tool is "not secure" without giving additional detail.
The decade-old tool — called TrueCrypt — allowed users to encrypt sensitive files and hard drives and was a favorite of security-minded individuals. One of those people was Edward Snowden, who hosted a "Crypto Party" in Dec. 2012 to teach a group of people how it to encrypt hard drives and USB sticks, while still working as a contractor for the NSA in a Hawaii.
But the sudden closure of TrueCrypt has led some to speculate the anonymous developers behind it had aroused the eye of the U.S. government and they decided to just throw in the towel. (Snowden's encrypted email service, Lavabit, suffered a similar fate).
The "advisory comes as a shock to the security community, though no one has been able to confirm its authenticity so far," wrote Runa Sandvik, a developer of the Tor anonymous web browser, in Forbes.
Snowden's endorsement of Truecrypt almost certainly put a target on those anonymous developers, 100x so if moonlighting Feds.
— Dan Kaminsky (@dakami) May 29, 2014
Interestingly, the shut down came as a full-scale professional security audit of the TrueCrypt software was underway, led by Matthew Green, a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, journalist Brian Krebs reported.
So far, the audit had not found anything suspicious in the code, but Green told Brian Krebs the fact TrueCrypt has been taken down could lead some to believe there's some "big evil vulnerability in the code."
"I was starting to have warm and fuzzy feelings about the code, thinking [the developers] were just nice guys who didn't want their names out there,” Green told Brian Krebs. "But now this decision makes me feel like they're kind of unreliable. Also, I'm a little worried that the fact that we were doing an audit of the crypto might have made them decide to call it quits."
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The mountainous background of the banner suggests OS X 10.10 will be receiving a land-related name to complement the water-based name given to OS X 10.9, possibly Yosemite or El Cap, as the image appears to feature the state park's El Capitan rock formation. We detailed some of the names Apple has apparently filed for trademarks on back in April. Some trademarked land-themed names include Yosemite, Redwood, Mammoth, California, Diablo, Miramar, El Cap, Redtail, Condor, Grizzly, Tiburon, Skyline, Shasta, and Sierra.
Because OS X Mavericks only introduced minor visual changes, OS X 10.10 is expected to feature a more drastic redesign, adopting a "flatter" look and taking on some iOS 7-style design elements. While little is known about the operating system at this point, we will get our first glimpse of the operating system on Monday June 2 at 10 AM Pacitic Time, when Apple kicks off the Worldwide Developers Conference with its keynote presentation.
Apple will be live streaming the event both on the web and on the Apple TV. MacRumors will also provide a live blog, live tweets via the MacRumorsLive Twitter account, and a spoiler free page for those who want to watch the full keynote at a later time.
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