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Two security researchers at ShmooCon demonstrated on Saturday how a laptop connected to a VoIP telephone could, in some cases, expose a business' internal network to outsiders.

John Kindervag, senior security architect for Vigilar, said that public waiting areas in hospitals, conference rooms, and hotel rooms are particularly vulnerable to this attack since often there is no IT staff around. Appearing on stage at the East Coast computer hacker conference with Kindervag was Jason Ostrom, manager of Vigilar's Vulnerability Assessment and Compliance Practice team, who used the ShmooCon conference to show off his latest version of VoIP Hopper, a tool he uses for penetration testing of companies that are running voice over IP phone systems.

Kindervag said that VoIP was gaining acceptance with large companies and organizations for many reasons: there are no toll calls over the Internet; there's less cabling involved; employees can move offices without having to rewire or change switching operations for their phones; and finally, voice mail notices can appear in one's Outlook inbox. "This is very popular among CIOs," Kindervag said.

But Ostrom's tool allows one to hook up a laptop computer to a public VoIP phone and connect to the company's or organization's internal network with full administrator access. VoIP Hopper can be used to intercept Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP), which announces the device type and the SNMP agent address of neighboring devices, and automatically create a new ethernet device. This could allow someone to map or otherwise do damage to a company's network from a public waiting area. The tool also allows one to physically remove the phone and have a laptop spoof the phone's MAC address, so the network is unaware that a laptop has replaced the expected phone.

To prevent such attacks, the researchers recommend turning off CDP. They also recommend disabling port 2 on any public VoIP phone, and include the public phone within a firewall.

Machines will achieve human-level artificial intelligence by 2029, a leading US inventor has predicted.

Humanity is on the brink of advances that will see tiny robots implanted in people's brains to make them more intelligent, said Ray Kurzweil.

The engineer believes machines and humans will eventually merge through devices implanted in the body to boost intelligence and health.

"It's really part of our civilisation," Mr Kurzweil explained.

"But that's not going to be an alien invasion of intelligent machines to displace us."

Machines were already doing hundreds of things humans used to do, at human levels of intelligence or better, in many different areas, he said.

Man versus machine

"I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029," he said.

"We're already a human machine civilisation; we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that."

Humans and machines would eventually merge, by means of devices embedded in people's bodies to keep them healthy and improve their intelligence, predicted Mr Kurzweil.

"We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons," he told BBC News.

The nanobots, he said, would "make us smarter, remember things better and automatically go into full emergent virtual reality environments through the nervous system".

Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering.

The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter.

The 14 challenges were announced at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston, which concludes on Monday.