An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday NXP and Green Wave Reality announced to the world that they plan to give every lightbulb an IPV6 address. Hot on the heels of Google's 900 mhz announcement, Green Wave Reality already has iPhone / Android / and Web-based support. Looks like the lighting wars have started."

Jeremiah Cornelius writes "The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, said the Commercial Mobile Alert System that Congress approved in 2006 will direct messages to cellphones in case of a terrorist attack, natural disaster, or other serious emergency. There will be at least three levels of messages, ranging from a critical national alert from the president to warnings about impending or occurring national disasters to alerts about missing or abducted children. The alert would show up on the phone's front screen, instead of the traditional text message inbox, and arrive with a distinct ring and probably a vibration. People will be able to opt out of receiving all but the presidential alerts."

oxide7 writes "In Texas, a battle is brewing over the teaching of evolutionary theory as the Board of Education considers a new set of instructional materials to be used in science classrooms. [Two sections of the new material] deal with the origin of life. Those sections say the 'null hypothesis' is that there had to be some intelligent agency behind the appearance of living things. It is up to the scientists proposing a naturalistic explanation to prove their case."

An anonymous reader writes "Until today, GPGPU computing was a userspace privilege because of NVIDIA's closed-source policy and AMD's semi-open state. KGPU is a workaround to enable Linux kernel functionality written in CUDA. Instead of figuring out GPU specs via reverse-engineering, it simply uses a userspace helper to do CUDA-related work for kernelspace requesters. A demo in its current source repository is a modified eCryptfs, which is an encrypted filesystem used by Ubuntu and other distributions. With the accelerated performance of a GPU AES cipher in the Linux kernel, eCryptfs can get a 3x uncached read speedup and near 4x write speedup on an Intel X25-M 80G SSD. However, both the GPU cipher-based eCryptfs and the CPU cipher-based one are changed to use ECB cipher mode for parallelism. A CTR, counter mode, cipher may be much more secure, although the real vanilla eCryptfs uses CBC mode. Anyway, GPU vendors should think about opening their drivers and computing libraries, or at least providing a mechanism to make it easy to do GPU computing inside an OS kernel, given the fact that GPUs are so widely deployed and the potential future of heterogeneous operating systems."

ewhenn writes "Security experts monitoring open Internet forums learned months ago that Sony was using outdated versions of the Apache Web server software, which 'was unpatched and had no firewall installed.' The issue was 'reported in an open forum monitored by Sony employees' two to three months prior to the recent security breaches."

angry tapir writes "Startup chip design company Adapteva has announced the multicore Epiphany processor, which is designed to accelerate applications in servers and low-power devices such as smartphones and tablets. The RISC-based processor is scalable to thousands of cores on a single chip, and can sit alongside CPUs to provide real-time execution of diverse applications. Epiphany chips are currently scalable up to 64 cores in smartphones and up to 4,000 cores in servers. The processor can accelerate tasks like hand gesture recognition, face matching or face tracking, but is not designed to be a full-fledged CPU."

H_Fisher writes "In a letter to Congress, Kazuo Hirai, chairman of Sony's board of directors, blames hacker group Anonymous for making possible the theft of gamers' personal information. 'What is becoming more and more evident is that Sony has been the victim of a very carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated criminal cyber attack designed to steal personal and credit card information for illegal purposes,' Hirai wrote. He also indicated that Sony waited two days before notifying the FBI of the theft."

itwbennett writes "There are tech fads that flare up quickly and then, pouf, they're gone (Tamagotchi, anyone?). And then there are technologies that industry bigwigs predict will follow that familiar pattern and instead end up withstanding the test of time. The Internet, for example, has famously failed to implode, despite dire predictions by Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe. And what about TV, the cornerstone of the American living room? Inventor Lee DeForest, known as one of the 'fathers of the electronic age,' declared TV a commercial and financial impossibility, a sentiment that was shared by 20th Century Fox exec Darryl Zanuck. And FCC engineer T.A.M. Craven was absolutely certain back in 1961 that there was 'no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States.'"

Twinbee writes "Gamers often find 'input lag' annoying, but over the years, delay has crept into many other gadgets with equally painful results. Something as simple as mobile communication or changing TV channels can suffer. Software too is far from innocent (Java or Visual Studio 2010 anyone?), and even the desktop itself is riddled with 'invisible' latencies which can frustrate users (take the new Launcher bar in Ubuntu 11 for example). More worryingly, Bufferbloat is a problem that plagues the internet, but has only recently hit the news. Half of the problem is that it's often difficult to pin down unless you look out for it. As Mick West pointed out: 'Players, and sometimes even designers, cannot always put into words what they feel is wrong with a particular game's controls ... Or they might not be able to tell you anything, and simply say the game sucked, without really understanding why it sucked.'"

If you think the idea of french kissing someone over the internet with a robotic tongue is kind of gross, go outside and enjoy your afternoon. For those of you still sitting here, The University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo has just what you've been looking for. The Kiss Transmission Device is a motion-sensing receptacle that records your tongue's movements and then sends that information to a corresponding machine in your partner's mouth. From the article: "In addition to real-time smooching, the Kiss Transmission Device can be programmed to 'remember' specific rotations. The pre-recorded information can then be accessed by multiple recipients. According to the inventor, this could be a good way for celebrities to get closer to their fans." The University gave no word on the possibility of tentacles in future models.

gabbo529 writes "Twitter has been a source of breaking news since its inception five years ago, and the social network was used at a high rate last night with the death of Osama Bin Laden. [Sunday night] saw the highest sustained rate of Tweets ever. From 10:45 p.m. to 2:20 a.m. ET, there was an average of 3,000 Tweets per second."

An anonymous reader writes with an update to yesterday morning's news that Sony Online Entertainment's game service was taken offline to investigate a potential data breach related to the PSN intrusion. SOE has now said that they too suffered a major theft of user data. "... personal information from approximately 24.6 million SOE accounts may have been stolen, as well as certain information from an outdated database from 2007. The information from the outdated database that may have been stolen includes approximately 12,700 non-US credit or debit card numbers and expiration dates (but not credit card security codes), and about 10,700 direct debit records of certain customers in Austria, Germany, Netherlands and Spain."

Annirak writes "I've recently started a paid internship at a company which is expanding faster than their IT department can supply new hardware. As a consequence, I've been issued a P4 2.4GHz with 512MB of RAM. Currently, I am using Firefox 4, but I find that it eats up far too much of my limited RAM. I'd rather not give up some of the more modern UI features that are offered by the current versions of Firefox and Chrome, but I need a smaller footprint. What other browsers are out there which could help me conserve resources?"