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Google

Submission + - Google Awarded Driverless Vehicle Patent

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: On Tuesday, Google was awarded U.S. Patent No. 8,078,349 for methods and devices for Transitioning a Mixed-mode Autonomous Vehicle from a Human Driven Mode to an Autonomously Driven Mode. From the fast-tracked patent application, which was filed last May and kept under wraps at Google's request: 'The autonomous vehicle may be used as a virtual tour guide of Millennium Park in Chicago. In the example embodiment, the vehicle may have an instruction to drive to the Cloud Gate (Silver Bean) sculpture at Millennium Park. When the vehicle arrives, the autonomous instruction may tell it to wait in the location for a predetermined amount of time, for example 5 minutes. The instruction may then direct the vehicle to drive to the Crown Fountain at Millennium Park and again wait for 5 minutes. Next, the instruction may tell the vehicle to drive to the Ice Rink at Millennium Park and wait for another predetermined amount of time. Finally, the vehicle instruction may tell the vehicle to return to its starting position.'
Technology

Submission + - Plane-mounted camera detects hazardous volcanic as (gizmag.com)

Submitted by cylonlover
cylonlover writes: A new invention out of Norway promises to keep the skies of the world open. When a volcano in Iceland erupted in 2010, it spewed out invisible clouds of ash that spread across Europe — effectively shutting down all civilian and military air traffic, stranding millions of people and costing the world economy billions of dollars. Now, a new camera has been developed that will allow pilots to see and avoid volcanic dust clouds, making similar eruptions in the future much less disruptive.
Music

Submission + - DDoS a Rockstar, Face Jail Time. (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: FBI agents arrested a Connecticut man on Tuesday morning, who is being charged with conducting a denial of service attack against GeneSimmons.com, the official website for the rockstar leader of the band KISS.

According to the FBI, In October 2010, Poe and others linked to the Anonymous hacking collective, allegedly conducted a five-day long distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the server hosting Simmons’ website. According to the indictment, Poe made use of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC,) a favorite tool used by the group to conduct DDoS attacks.
NASA

Submission + - NASA Developing Comet Harpoon for Sample Return (scienceblog.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: NASA appears t have decided that the best way to grab a sample of a rotating comet that is racing through the inner solar system at up to 150,000 miles per hour while spewing chunks of ice, rock and dust may be to avoid the risky business of landing on it. Instead, researchers want to send a spacecraft to rendezvous with a comet, then fire a harpoon to rapidly acquire samples from specific locations with surgical precision while hovering above the target.

Comment 'Cell Carrier' Network (Score 2) 234

by philmarcracken (#38254854) Attached to: An Easy Way To Curb Smart-Phone Thieves, In Australia
Considering the dominant carrier in Aus has been Telstra for the last 10 years in which time it has enjoyed a monopoly under - wait for it - former US CEO leadership then losing potential revenue from bricking stolen phones was simply an oversight.

Anyone who lives here knows that Telstra would never knowingly pass up an opportunity to do business unethically.
The Internet

Italian Court Rules Web Editors Not Responsible For Comments 72

Posted by samzenpus from the not-my-responsibility dept.
itwbennett writes "Internet freedom got a boost Wednesday when Italy's highest court ruled that the editors of online publications can't be held legally responsible for defamatory comments posted by their readers. The judges said online publications could not be treated in the same way as traditional print media and could not be expected to exercise preventative editorial control over readers' comments."
Google

Submission + - Google Activates Forward Secrecy SSL Feature (eff.org)

Submitted by esocid
esocid writes: Google has now enabled "forward secrecy" by default on all its search-traffic. What that means is that part of the key needed to decrypt the traffic is never stored, so that in the event of a security breach at Google, older, intercepted traffic can't be descrambled.

Other web sites have implemented HTTPS with forward secrecy before [...] but it hasn’t yet been rolled out on a site of Google’s scale. Some sites have publicly resisted implementing forward secrecy because it is more CPU intensive than standard HTTP or HTTPS. In order to address that problem, Google made improvements to the open source OpenSSL library, and has incorporated those changes into the library for anybody to use.

Submission + - Best way to accelerate embarrassingly parallel app 3

Submitted by
QuantumMist
QuantumMist writes: "I'm helping someone with an embarrassingly parallel application. What's the best way to spend $10K to $15K to receive the maximum number of simultaneous threads of execution? The focus is on threads of execution as memory requirements are decently low e.g. ~512mb in memory at any given time (maybe up to 2 to 3X that at the very high end). I've looked at the latest Tesla card and am having trouble justifying the markup for what's essentially "double precision FP being enabled, a few heat improvements, and ECC which actually decreases available memory (I don't need the ECC)." Spending close to $11K for the 4 Teslas in a 1u setup seems ridiculous when GTX cards can be replaced for a fraction of the cost? Note, they don't have to pay the power/cooling bill. Amazon is too expensive for this level of performance, so can't go cloud. Any parallel architectures out there? Any good manycore offerings that I've missed e.g. somebody who can stuff a ton of ARM or other CPUs in a box? It would be great if this could be easily addressed via a PCI or other standard interface. Should I just stuff 4 GTX cards in a server and replace them as they die from heat? It's mainly single FP operations that I'm parallelizing, but double precision would be "nice to have". Thanks for any thoughts!

Website: www.SinaBahram.com
Twitter: @SinaBahram"
Linux

Submission + - systemd journal (slashdot.org)

Submitted by
epiphani
epiphani writes: "After the recent kerfuffle around a replacement for syslog, Rainer Gerhards (the lead developer of rsyslogd, used in most Linux distributions) has responded to the paper in an attempt to clarify many of the misunderstandings. In his post, he points out the inherent misconceptions around the difference between syslog the protocol, syslog the API, and syslog the application, and makes the point that the systemd proposal ignores most of the last 10 years of enhancements to both protocol and application."
Privacy

Submission + - New Corp. Hacking Scandal Spreads to Gov't (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: The scandal revolving around the News Corporation’s now defunct British tabloid, “News of the World”, has entered a new phase with news that the hacking techniques used in the British tabloid media are reported to have extended into areas of national security, as detectives working for the Murdoch media empire may have hacked into the computer of a government minister responsible for Northern Ireland.

Scary stuff, yet the enterprise security community seems strangely quiet on the topic, aside from showing other journalists how easy it is to do.

Potentially, if you know the correct mobile number and you can guess 4 Digits, you too can be listening to your elected leaders personal messages. The chances are pretty good that it could be their birthday.

Does your security policy take the carrier into consideration? Does your security policy make a point of your users changing the default PIN?
Science

Submission + - Stephen Wolfram Bets on Singularity (fastcoexist.com)

Submitted by kodiaktau
kodiaktau writes: This week the Lifeboat foundation announced that Stephen Wolfram would be joining its organization. The purpose of the group is to think through scientific solutions to existential problems that might be used to save humanity from such risks as asteroids hitting the earth or some other diabolical disaster. Wolfram brings computational science to the table and has posited that the earth and universe can be understood as a computer program that can be significantly altered as we continue to advance in technology.
Science

Submission + - Wiping out mosquitoes with GM mosquitoes (gizmag.com) 1

Submitted by doug141
doug141 writes: Scientists are releasing genetically modifies male mosquitoes that produce flightless female offspring. The male offspring go on to wipe out another generation of females.This is similar to the way screwworms were eradicated in the U.S., except with nature itself making more of the modified males.
Field trials are already underway.
Apple

Submission + - Siri: Coming Soon to Apple TV? (ibtimes.com)

Submitted by
redletterdave
redletterdave writes: "Apple's new TV set-top, revealed by code found within the iOS 5.1 update, will reportedly feature the newest version of Bluetooth, called Bluetooth Smart (4.0). With this technology, Apple could potentially implement motion-sensitive controls and even Siri onto its TV platform. With the ability for Bluetooth 4.0 to connect with a greater number of wireless devices faster and more reliably, it's likely Apple will use Siri to help users control and navigate the Apple TV interface, especially for finding and discovering content. With the addition of Bluetooth, sources also say the next-gen Apple TV could become a gaming port. Bluetooth 4.0 can leverage the gyroscopes and accelerometers within the iOS devices to make any iOS handheld into a motion-sensitive game controller, which could potentially help Apple compete with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii."
Security

Submission + - Why Password Wisdom Is All Wrong (internetevolution.com)

Submitted by hapworth
hapworth writes: Contrary to popular wisdom, using complex passwords with varying letters and numbers is all wrong and far from secure, says Stephen Gallagher, a Red Hat Linux Software Engineer. The truth about creating safe passwords is three-fold, he says, requiring a second form of authentication, such as a smartcard or time-based authentication token; a "physical device on your person"; and, lastly and most importantly, creating long passwords with letters and spaces (e.g., "vagrant pizza mouse garden pick"). Says the developer, this approach "has effectively zero cost to a corporate environment while providing a significant gain in security."

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