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Microsoft

Submission + - Credit Card Numbers Recovored From Xbox (theverge.com)

Submitted by butilikethecookie
butilikethecookie writes: Restoring an Xbox 360 console to factory settings before selling it apparently isn't enough to remove your personal information.Drexel University researcher Ashley Podhradsky said that her team had successfully retrieved credit card data from a refurbished Xbox using simple modding tools. The software gave them access to the console's files and folders, letting them extract information that hadn't been wiped even by the Microsoft-authorized reseller.
Power

Submission + - Researchers Generate Liquid Fuel Using Electricity (gizmag.com)

Submitted by Zothecula
Zothecula writes: While electric vehicles have come a long way in the past decade, they still have many disadvantages when compared to internal combustion engine-driven vehicles. The lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles have a much lower energy storage density when compared to liquid fuel, they take longer to “refuel,” and they lack the supporting infrastructure that has built up around conventional vehicles over the past century. Now researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a process that could allow liquid fuel to be produced using solar generated electricity.
The Internet

Submission + - Could Anonymous bring down the web?

Submitted by
EliSowash
EliSowash writes: "I once heard Anonymous described as "a handful of geniuses surrounded by a legion of idiots.” But, they've made it pretty clear they intend to "shut down the internet" on March 31 in what they call Operation Global Blackout. Their "plan" is to knock out the 13 root DNS servers. Seems easy enough, right? The IP addresses are published, there's only 13, seems a prime target for a DDoS.

But, as Cricket Liu explaints , the real world just ain't that easy. The boffins that manage the root DNS servers have designed a fault tolerant and resiliant infrastructure. Those 13 IP addresses actually represent about 280 individual name servers, unicasting across the internet in such a way that a DDoS is practically impossible."
Privacy

Submission + - Should have seen it coming: Twitter sold your tweets (rt.com)

Submitted by JR-Fire
JR-Fire writes: That's right. After introducing censorship (http://mashable.com/2012/01/26/twitter-to-censor/) and ads in your stream (http://www.shoemoney.com/2010/04/20/want-to-advertise-on-twitter-with-promoted-tweets-here-is-the-skinny), Twitter finally gave — your old tweets, to the marketers. From the article,
“You thought that tweets you posted months ago had vanished, or were simply hidden away so deeply and awkwardly on the Twitter website that they would be too difficult to uncover? Think again,” Graham Cluley from security firm Sophos says, as quoted by The Daily Mail web edition.

It turns out that Twitter had archived every tweet and will now be rewarded for its ingenuity. Datasift, for instance, will charge companies up to £10,000 a month to analyze tweets posted each day for anything said about their products and services.
The Internet

Submission + - Why Didn't The Internet Take Off In 1983? (itworld.com) 2

Submitted by
jfruh
jfruh writes: "An amazing pair of videos from the AT&T archives tout a service called Viewtron that brought much of what we expect from the modern Internet to customers' homes in 1983. Online news, banking services, restaurant reviews, shopping, e-mail — all were available on your TV set, controlled by a wireless infrared keyboard. The system had 15,000 customers in cities on the U.S. east coast, but was shut down after $50 million was spent on it. But why did it flop? Was the world just not ready for it?"

Submission + - Why Tesla Cars Aren't Bricked By Failing Batteries (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "Don't believe recent claims made by a blogger that non-functioning batteries in the Tesla Roadster cause the electric cars to be bricked, says IDC analyst Sam Jaffe. 'Here's the primary fact that the blogger in question doesn't understand: the Tesla battery pack is not a battery,' says Jaffe. 'It's a collection of more than 8,000 individual batteries. Each of those cells is independently managed. So there's only two ways for the entire battery pack to fail. The first is if all 8,000 cells individually fail (highly unlikely except in the case of something catastrophic like a fire). The second failure mechanism is if the battery management system tells the pack to shut down because it has detected a dangerous situation, such as an extremely low depth of discharge. If that's the case, all that needs to be done is to tow the vehicle to a charger, recharge the batteries and then reboot the battery management system. This is the most likely explanation for the five 'bricks' that the blogger claims to have heard about.'"
China

Submission + - Where Next Generation Rare Earth Metals May Come From (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by
retroworks
retroworks writes: "Great piece in The Atlantic by Kyle Wiens of IFIXIT.org, who visited and photographed the Molycorp Mountain Pass rare earth facility in California's Mojave Desert. The mine is the only source of rare earths in North America, one of the only alternatives to the mineral cartels in China, and one of the only sources for the key metals such as tantalum needed in cell phones. There is of course actually one other source of rare earth metals in the USA — recycled cell phones. Is the best "state of the art" mining as good as the worst state of the art recycling? If the US Department of Energy subsidizes the mine, will China open the floodgates and put it out of business? Or will electronics be manufactured with alternative materials before the mine ever becomes fully scaleable?
       "
Google

Submission + - Google's Smart Glasses (usatoday.com)

Submitted by
rivin2e
rivin2e writes: "Google seems to be working on a pair of sunglasses with the ability to "stream real-time information right to its lenses." These 'smart glasses' will cost between $250-$600 and be available to the public by the end of the year. At would also appear that Google isn't worrying about money, but rather use this as an open experiment. Driving your car should be fun with these."

Submission + - NSA concerned about Anonymous taking down power grid (pcmag.com) 1

Submitted by
rivin2e
rivin2e writes: "Something that comes as somewhat as a shock to me. The NSA "apparently" has concerns that anonymous, the cybernetic DDoSing group, will take down the nation's electrical grid via cyber-attacks.

" 'GlobalBlackOut is another Fake Operation. No intention of #Anonymous to cut Internet,' @AnonOps tweeted," and fighting on their side for this one, I personally don't understand why the thought would cross their minds.

However,"This is not the first time the government has tangled with Anonymous," and nor will it be the last."

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