17255202
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
Four driverless electric vans successfully ended a 13,000-kilometre test drive from Italy to China which mirrored the journey from East to West carried out by Marco Polo in the Middle Ages.
The four vans, packed with navigation gear and other computer software drove themselves Across Eastern Europe, Russia, Kazakhstan and the Gobi Desert without getting lost.
The vans arrived at Shanghai Expo. They had been equipped with four solar-powered laser scanners and seven video cameras that work together to detect and avoid obstacles.
17188352
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
A standardisation of coding for automated trading programs, which allows trading algorithms to be developed substantially quicker, could revolutionise the stock market.
Trading algorithms have become increasingly commonplace as firms have realised the potential to offer a fast way to spot, and act upon, market opportunities. Now new coding, dubbed FIXatdl, offers a way to reduce the time between the conception and implementation of putting new and revised algorithms in place.
The algorithms offer the advantage of being quicker and more reliable than stock market traders, as well as also not actually being stock market traders, which is presumably at least part of the reason behind development.
17102630
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
Scientists are trying to create some of the tiniest lithium-ion batteries on earth which will be no bigger than a grain of sand.
The research, funded by DARPA, aims to reduce the size of lithium-ion batteries, commonly used in electrical goods, so they can be used to power electronics and mechanical components of micro- to nano-scale devices.
Jane Chang, an engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles, is designing one component: the electrolyte that allows charge to flow between electrodes.
"We're trying to achieve the same power densities, the same energy densities as traditional lithium ion batteries, but we need to make the footprint much smaller," she said.
17026340
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
Cameron has announced Whitehall will spend £1 billion on "cyber defence". A Home Security spokesman in the US has said that it needs to wise up the cyber threat. We've been talking to some cyber security experts, anonymous and with either direct access to, or access to those with direct access to, top level government agencies in both the United States and the UK. Guess what? Defence don't mean defence.
Meetings have been going on and continue about the possibilities of using cyber attacks as weapons. We're not just talking Stuxnet, which is believed by many to have come from Israel, China or the US to sabotage Iranian and/or Indian infrastructure, but botnets too. "Defence" agents don't just want to know how to neutralise a threat, but how to gain access to and control the world's largest botnets to point at who they need to.
"You would be a fool," one source suggested to us this week, "to think that governments are not considering the applications for cyber warfare."
Earlier on in the week someone else close to the matter, who also wished to be anonymous — you'd be mad not to remain anonymous — told us that attacks on hospitals and power grids are "likely". In fact attacks on hospitals are happening already. All of this must be kept under wraps — if attackers know they're causing trouble that's cause for celebr
17025222
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
Recently TechEye was hit by a particularly nasty DDOS. At first we, deluded as always, thought our servers were getting a thumping from Slashdot. The attackers will be happy to know that it took us time, effort and yes, dosh, to scramble around trying to fix it. WebScreen, which as far as we are aware is the only outfit offering thorough DDOS protection in the UK, jumped to our rescue. Thank you WebScreen. Anyway — TechEye decided it would be a good idea to have a chat with Paul Bristow, Chief Operating Officer.
"All DDOS attacks in the early days were from organised crime to put rivals in online gaming or pornography out of business, or to extort money," Bristow tells TechEye "but the whole thing has moved on now."
There are websites you can go onto where you provide your credit card details and that will let you hire a botnet for an hour. It's fact, says Webscreen, that you can even take a three minute try before you buy — just to show you that it works. These services play in their own back yard, employing the capabilities of attackers in the places you'd expect — China, Russia, India. But the services themselves are sold to target local businesses.
17021786
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
Whistleblowing site, Wikileaks claims that the US government is mounting a dirty tricks campaign to kill off its funding.
Moneybookers, a British-registered internet payment company that collects Wikileaks donations, has told the outfit that its account had been closed because it had been put on an official US watchlist and on an Australian government blacklist.
But if the story is true then Wikileaks has sat on the information for months. According to the Manchester Guardian, the blacklisting came a few days after the Pentagon publicly fumed at Wikileaks for obtaining thousands of classified military documents about the war in Afghanistan,
Moneybookers shut down Wikileaks account on 13 August which means that the outfit sat on the information for some time before going public.
17008734
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
Some of the poorest countries in the world are suffering from a “digital lag” of 17 years, according to a UN report.
And companies need to work with governments to get things moving.
Professor Richard Heeks of the University of Manchester, who contributed extensively to the 2010 Information Economy Report from the UN Conference on Trade and Development, (UNCTAD) warned: “Even with current high growth rates, our calculations show that it will be 2019 before the poorest countries achieve the internet usage rates reached by the richest countries in 2002.
"That's a 'digital lag' of 17 years so governments and private firms must work together to improve access.
"We have to change our view of the world's poor from one that sees them as passive consumers of ICTs, to one that sees them as producers of and innovators with the technology.
Professor Heeks said the mobile phone market was growing at 50 percent or more in some African countries, with 3G and broadband likely to be rolled out at a slightly slower rate.
He added: “The poor will spend up to 75% of their disposable income on running a mobile."
16969896
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
A new report from rights group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) says conditions at the notorious Shenzhen factory in China have not improved.
Despite public breast-beating and treats for staff such as days out at worker rallies — what fun! -Foxconn and its customers, which include Apple, HP and Dell, are still treating workers as machines, says SACOM.
The organisation interviewed 100 Foxconn workers to reach its conclusions, and says, most notably, that the promised pay rise to Y2,000 per month has failed to materialise — indeed, most workers haven't even been told about it.
"This is the result of permanent pressure from buyers on their suppliers to produce cheaper," says Chantal Peyer, from the Swiss NGO Bread for All, which supports the findings of the report.
16969664
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
Carnegie Mellon University has taught a computer how to read and learn from the internet.
According to Dennis Baron at the Oxford University press blog, the computer is called NELL and it is reading the internet and learning from it in much the same way that humans learn language and acquire knowledge. Basically by soaking it all up and figuring it out.
NELL is short for Never Ending Language Learner and apparently it is getting brainier every day.
16955266
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
Security experts familiar with government security have told TechEye that a very likely source is China, which could have developed the worm in a bid to breach its neighbour, India's, systems.
16952904
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
While the tame Apple press is doing its level best to write off Microsoft's Windows Mobile 7 in case it upsets Jobs' Mob's cash cow, it seems that Ballmers' boys are doing their best to miff developers.
An icon for the mobile game Angry Birds appeared in a Windows Phone 7 promotional image.
Many assumed the game would be on Redmond's new smartphones. However, the people behind Angry Birds were incandescent with rage and , ironically, tweeted a denial of any commitment to Windows Mobile 7.
16952788
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
The Australian military networks are under continuous attack by foreign intelligence agencies.
According to the country's top electronic spy unit, the Defence Signals Directorate, Foreign spooks are are making 700 attempts a month this year, up from 200 a month last year.
16841216
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
People using the iPhone Facebook app could unknowingly be sharing their number, their friend's numbers and their friend's friend's numbers thanks to a syncing feature.
Facebook's "Contact Sync" feature synchronises your friends' Facebook profile pictures with the contacts in your phone, but instead of keeping them safely on your handset it imports all the names and phone numbers you have on your phone, uploads them to Facebook's Phonebook app and lets you and your mates view everyone's details. It's taking data from your handset.
16649268
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
BT has confirmed it sent customer details in unencrypted Excel spreadsheets as email attachments to the legal firm ACS:Law.
BT said this morning it was investigating how this had happened and was still waiting for ACS: Law to let it know if any of its customer details had been compromised by the leak.
When asked if the details were sent unencrypted, a BT spokeswoman told TechEye: “I can confirm that this did happen but has no bearing on the current situation.
“We are investigating how this occurred as we have robust systems for managing data. We have already ensured that this will not happen again. In this circumstance our legal department sent data to a firm of solicitors (ACS Law) which reached them safely and we trusted that they would keep the data safe.
“At a later date, due to an attack on the systems of the law firm, data was leaked, which was outside of our control. At this time we do not believe any of BT's customers details have been compromised by this leak, although we are continuing to pressure ACS Law for confirmation of this.”
16648046
submission
bossanovalithium writes:
After failing in 1990's to make it mandatory for encryption software to have a backdoor that can be used to spy on communication, the FBI are once again calling for the feature.
Under the FBI's latest proposal, any company doing business in the States could not create an encrypted communication system without having a way for the government to order the company to decrypt it, and those who currently do offer that service would have to retool it.
What the spooks do not understand is that creating backdoors means that government security systems will be softer targets for hackers. It also means that rogue security obsessed states such as Iran and Australia will be able to find new ways to terrorise their citizens.
