52027459
submission
skipkent writes:
Chinese search engine Baidu, the world's fifth most visited site according to one set of rankings, has announced it has started to accept the online currency, bitcoin, for its security service.
Jiasule, a Baidu division aimed at improving the security and performance of websites, started supported bitcoin payments on Monday to meet the needs of its users, the company said in a statement Tuesday.
51988221
submission
skipkent writes:
A solar power company capable of "printing" colourful glass that can generate electricity from the sun's energy announced a £2m funding boost on Tuesday.
Oxford Photovoltaics, a spin-off from the University of Oxford, said the investment from clean-tech investors MTI Partners will help its solar glass, which can be dyed almost any colour, take a step closer to the commercial market.
"What we say here is rather than attach [solar] photovoltaics to the building, why not make the building the photovoltaics?" Kevin Arthur, the company's founder and CEO, told the Guardian. "If you decide to build a building out of glass, then you've already decided to pay for the glass. If you add this, you're adding a very small extra cost. [The solar cell treatment] costs no more than 10% of the cost of the facade."
37604917
submission
skipkent writes:
Battleships, aircraft carriers, minesweepers and submarines from 25 nations are converging on the strategically important Strait of Hormuz in an unprecedented show of force as Israel and Iran move towards the brink of war.
Western leaders are convinced that Iran will retaliate to any attack by attempting to mine or blockade the shipping lane through which passes around 18 million barrels of oil every day, approximately 35 per cent of the worlds petroleum traded by sea.
A blockade would have a catastrophic effect on the fragile economies of Britain, Europe the United States and Japan, all of which rely heavily on oil and gas supplies from the Gulf.
34953083
submission
skipkent writes:
Pentagon-funded researchers have come up with a new plan for busting leakers: Spot them by how they search, and then entice the secret-spillers with decoy documents that will give them away.
Computer scientists call it it “Fog Computing” — a play on today’s cloud computing craze. And in a recent paper for Darpa, the Pentagon’s premiere research arm, researchers say they’ve built “a prototype for automatically generating and distributing believable misinformation and then tracking access and attempted misuse of it. We call this ‘disinformation technology.’”
32938069
submission
skipkent writes:
Britain's military will be armed with a sonic device that can be used as a high-volume loudspeaker or a non-lethal weapon to disperse crowds at this summer's Olympic Games in London, the defence ministry said on Friday.
The equipment, which can project a piercing sound over hundreds of metres causing physical pain, has been used during protests at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh in 2009 and against pirates operating off the Somali coast.
The Ministry of Defence said it expected to use it primarily in loudspeaker mode to communicate with boats it wants to stop on the River Thames.
Defence chiefs have already caused controversy by announcing plans to put surface-to-air missiles on the top of residential buildings near the Olympics site in east London.
32660653
submission
skipkent writes:
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared global warming a national security threat yesterday during a speech before an environmentalist group in Washington, D.C.
"The area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security," Panetta told the Environmental Defense Fund last night. "Rising sea levels, severe droughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief."
32080585
submission
skipkent writes:
Residents of a Chicago condo whose building will be in the eye of the NATO storm are being warned that they should move out for the weekend ... or risk being trapped inside by rioters.
FOX Chicago News was first to report Friday that the people living in the 17-floor Library Tower building at 520 South State Street were warned in a letter from condo management that "we are STRONGLY recommending that all residents find places to stay during the conference from May 18 through May 21." Video is included with the story.
32051303
submission
skipkent writes:
Iran's military has started to build a copy of a U.S. surveillance drone captured last year after breaking the software encryption, Iranian media reported on Sunday.
General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace division, said engineers were in the final stages of decoding data from the Sentinel aircraft, which came down in December near the Afghan border, Mehr news agency reported.
