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Submission + - Android Devices Banned From Princeton Campus (nyud.net) 1

Submitted by pmdubs
pmdubs writes: A major bug in the Android DHCP implementation has forced network administrators to (effectively) ban the use of such devices on the Princeton campus. In the last few months, Princeton has had to kick more than 400 Android devices off the campus network for using IP addresses well beyond the alloted DHCP lease (to the detriment of other users), sending invalid DHCPREQUEST messages after lease expiration, and a variety of other wacky behaviors. The link provides a clearly documented explanation of the buggy behavior, as does this largely neglected bug report [http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=11236].

Without doubt, this buggy behavior is affecting other, less vigilant networks, and disrupting wifi traffic for android and non-android devices alike.
NASA

Submission + - NASA Awards New Commercial Crew Contracts (nasaspaceflight.com)

Submitted by FleaPlus
FleaPlus writes: Continuing last year's successful CCDev (Commercial Crew Development) program, NASA has selected 4 companies to receive "CCDev2" seed funding for commercial crew systems. The companies will only receive money if they meet development and testing milestones in the next year, with up to $75M to SpaceX for developing their sidemount escape system and testing their Dragon capsule, $92M to Boeing for developing their CST-100 capsule, $80M to Sierra Nevada Corp.'s DreamChaser top-mounted spaceplane, and $22M for Blue Origin's capsule and pusher escape system.
Linux

Submission + - F1 computing kit: 1,500 cores, Linux & SSDs (pcpro.co.uk)

Submitted by
Barence
Barence writes: "PC Pro has taken a peek behind the scenes at the Lotus Formula 1 garage — and the computing technology used to power the team. It's server farm comprises of 1,500 cores in a room full of blade servers, connected to 96TB of iSCSI storage. Currently, the farm is running on Linux, because that OS is apparently what best supports the number-crunching engine for the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. Meanwhile, all the laptops in the pit are now running on SSDs, because of the increased risk of disk failure caused by the high vibration levels experienced near a running F1 car."
Censorship

Submission + - Tails 0.7 release (boum.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Tails Project (http://tails.boum.org/) is happy to announce the release of Tails 0.7, The Amnesic Incognito Live System.

Built upon many years of work and thorough review, Tails is the spiritual successor of the well-known Incognito Live System and is developed with the support of the Tor Project (https://www.torproject.org/projects). With human rights workers and freedom activists in mind, Tails is a GNU/Linux operating system based on Debian Live (http://live.debian.net/) that runs directly from CD and/or USB flash memory and provides a secure environment for work and communications.

As no installation or configuration is required, Tails turns virtually every PC(*) into a secure workstation in a matter of seconds. The Tails operating system, all software and all hardware drivers shipped with it operate independently of the PC's operating system and leave no trace after use.

Tails does not store any data permanently and channels all Internet connections through the Tor anonymization network (the I2P network is available, too). Tails offers carefully preconfigured, security-enhanced Free and Open Source Software, including the Firefox/Iceweasel web browser, the Pidgin Instant Messenger with the Off-The-Record encryption plugin and built-in support for GoogleTalk, Jabber/XMMP, AIM, Yahoo and others, the OpenOffice suite, GIMP, Inkscape, the Scribus desktop publishing software, the Claws mail client with OpenPGP mail encryption, Cryptkeeper and many other programs (see http://tails.boum.org/features/ for details).

Tails is easy to use, designed for average computer users and is available for free download at http://tails.boum.org/. Once downloaded, the hybrid image can be written to CD/DVD or USB thumb drive and is immediately ready for use. From image scanners and printers through WiFi to audio and graphics cards, Tails comes equipped with preinstalled and preconfigured drivers for virtually all common devices and automatically loads the right ones for your hardware.

The Tails operating system also offers a language selection menu at boot, where the user can select between English (default), Arabic, Chinese, French, Italian, German, Portuguese and Spanish.

"There are many professional tools to enhance privacy and protect sensitive data and communication", a Tails developer said in a recent chat session. "Human rights workers and freedom activists usually are not aware of all these tools and most recent developments in computer science, and they don't know all the switches and buttons to configure the programs correctly. On the one hand the tools waiting to be used, and on the other hand the users do not know about those tools and how to use them", he added. "This is where the Tails Project comes in and carefully selects, reviews, configures and refines the best tools for the job into a free Operating System package that can be downloaded and used right off the shelf".

On this occasion, another member of the Tails Project described its purpose in three sentences: "Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Press consist of both free thoughts to be spoken and a voice to actually speak them. As they can't suppress the thought, oppressive regimes suppress the voice. With Tails, we provide a tongue and a pen protected by state-of-the-art cryptography to guarantee these basic human rights and allow journalists worldwide to work and communicate freely and without fear of reprisal."

As you are aware, the Web plays a vital role in the current struggles for freedom and justice and will most likely continue to do so in the future. From all over the world, human rights workers and organizations like Reporters Without Borders, Greenpeace and Amnesty International â" not to mention the countless local organizations and human-rights workers whose names most of us have never heard — are in need of secure communications that can only be provided by a trusted computing platform at their workplace.

A notification about or review of Tails in your magazine will not only offer a unique and highly interesting insight into state-of-the-art privacy systems to your readers, but also is a comfortable opportunity for you to provide for a better future: helping human rights workers and activists all over the world by making them aware of Tails and the possibilities it offers.

* Minimum System Recommendations:
    — 800 MHz x86 processor or better
    — 512MB of system memory (RAM) or more
    — Monitor capable of 800 by 600 or better
    — CD/DVD Drive or a USB port
    — Rule of Thumb: If your Computer can run Microsoft Windows XP or newer, it can run Tails as well

Submission + - Bicycle Stability -- new research results (tudelft.nl)

Submitted by MITguy21
MITguy21 writes: Researchers look deep into the physics of bicycle self-stability...it's not simple! From their abstract:

"Long known, but still amazing, is that a moving bicycle can balance itself. Most people think this balance follows from a gyroscopic effect. That's what Felix Klein (of the Klein bottle), Arnold Sommerfeld (nominated for the Nobel prize 81 times) and Fritz Noether (Emmy's brother) thought. On the other hand a famous paper by David Jones (published twice in Physics Today) claims bicycle stability is also because of something called "trail". Trail is the distance the front wheel trails behind the steer axis. The front wheel of a shopping cart castor trails behind its support bearing and so must a bicycle front wheel, Jones reasoned. Jones insisted that trail was a necessary part of bicycle stability.

"We suspected that such simple images were missing at least part of the picture.

"To find the essence of bicycle self balance we looked at simpler and simpler dynamical models until we found a minimal two-mass-skate (TMS) bicycle that theory told us should be self-stable. This bicycle has no gyroscopic effect and no trail. We built a bicycle (of sorts) based on the theory to prove the point."

Several news sites have picked up the story:
http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=riderless+bicycle
This BBC audio interview starts at about 12 minutes in:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00fwm7k/Science_In_Action_14_04_2011/
Science

Submission + - Updating Amdahl's Law (joeweinman.com)

Submitted by Random Feature
Random Feature writes: Can distributed application performance be distilled down to a simple formula? Joe Weinman of HP and Cloudonomics fame has a new paper out called "As Time Goes By: The Law of Cloud Response Time" that provides an update to Amdahl's law as it relates to web application performance. This paper is full of tasty mathematical formula meat, so chew thoroughly.
Android

Submission + - Google Reacts to Recent Openness Criticism (infoq.com)

Submitted by aabelro
aabelro writes: Andy Rubin, VP of Engineering at Google and head of Android group, has addressed the latest comments in the media regarding Google’s dedication to openness and policy around Android, remarking that Google wants both an open and healthy ecosystem for their mobile OS.
Robotics

Submission + - Is it a bird? No it's a robot (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: Festo, well known for their biologically inspired robots, have done it again SmartBird . A mechanism that flys like a bird. It is amazing to watch and all the more amazing when you realise that it just flaps its wings and all of the control is via a torsion drive which twists the wings during each flap. The whole thing depends on the constant intervention of the software to keep it under control.
Businesses

Submission + - Friends Don't Let Geek Friends Do Finance

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: If Vivek Wadhwa remade Pinocchio, instead of The Coachman luring naughty boys to Pleasure Island to engage in mischievous behavior and be transformed into donkeys, you might find Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein luring bright engineering grads to Wall Street to, well, engage in mischievous behavior and be transformed into, well, asses. While the practice of poaching engineering talent slowed after the economy tanked in 2008, Wadhwa is dismayed to report that thanks to hundred-billion-dollar taxpayer bailouts, investment banks have recovered and gone back to their old, greedy ways, snagging engineering grads who might otherwise solve the world's problems, making them financial offers they can't refuse, and morphing them into quants, investment bankers and management consultants. 'Not only are the investment banks siphoning off hundreds of billions of dollars from our economy with financial gimmicks like CDOs,' writes Wadhwa, 'they are using our best engineering graduates [25% of MIT grads in '06] to help them do it. This is the talent that our country has invested so much resource in producing.' He concludes: 'Let's save the world by keeping our engineers out of finance. We need them to, instead, develop new types of medical devices, renewable energy sources, and ways for sustaining the environment and purifying water, and to start companies that help America keep its innovative edge.' Amen, but how 'ya gonna keep 'em down on the Engineering farm after they've seen Wall Street?

Submission + - The Ethics of Sex with Robots 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "The Sonoma State Star reports that philosophy professor John Sullins says that as engineers work to design visually pleasing and life-like mechanical robots that simulate emotions, the potential psychological outcomes of this form of advanced technology may pose a threat to the way society functions as a whole. "Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize things in their environment, like naming their car, for instance. People have a compelling need to make connections with things in their lives," says Sullins adding that engineers have the ability to access human psychological weaknesses when they build a computer that takes the shape of a visually pleasing and attractive mate that can say emotionally moving things, like "I love you," during physically intimate moments. Author David Levy says that these types of robots will be able to end pedophilia and prostitution and that robot sex will become the only sexual outlet for a few sectors of the population: the misfits, the very shy, the sexually inadequate and uneducable but although Levy enlightens his readers with the benefits that sex robots can provide humans, Sullins still believes that they will ultimately cause social isolation.. "Plato argues that in life, humans should not just try to obtain sexual gratification, but they should try to attain the erotic," says Sullins adding that the concept of "the erotic," can be described as a loving and meaningful relationship that transports lovers to a philosophically higher place and helps them become better people."

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