26476578
submission
Meshach writes:
Google maps can now provide you with directions when you are inside airports, transit centers, and major shops in the United States and Japan. The service is available for Android phones and Google is encouraging businesses to upload their floorplans.
26475682
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
A robotics team from Harvard University recently created a flexible robot made from polymers that's able to negotiaterough terrain and perform delicate tasks that were previously thought impossible forautomatons. The robot was modeled afterstarfish, worms and squid and it flexes a series of small, inflatable chambers embedded within its legs and its central spine to move.
26466110
submission
nairnr writes:
Technology that tracks shoppers using their cellphones has been shut off at two U.S. malls over privacy concerns, a U.S. senator says.
Promenade Temecula in Southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va., had planned to run tests of the technology from Nov. 25 to Jan.1, reported Cleveland, Ohio-based Forest City Commercial Management, which owns the two malls.
The cellphone tracking technology, called Footpath, is made by Path Intelligence Ltd., a Portsmouth, U.K.-based company. It uses sensors placed throughout the mall to detect signals from mobile phones and track their path around the mall. The sensors cannot gather phone numbers or other identifying data, or intercept or log data about calls or SMS messages, the company says.
Forest City Commercial Management said it planned to use the data gathered about shoppers' length of stay and shopping patterns to determine whether to relocate some stores, figure out what other retailers should be added, and learn what events and promotions are most effective for attracting shoppers.
26465782
submission
Trailrunner7 writes:
The security industry has no shortage of hard problems to solve, but the one that's getting the most attention right now is finding a way to improve, or ideally, replace, the CA infrastructure. The latest in what has become a series of recent proposals to help shore up the certificate authority system comes from a pair of Google security researchers who have laid out a plan for providing auditable public logs of certificates as well as proofs for each certificate that's issued.
The system proposed by Google's Adam Langley and Ben Laurie comprises three separate ideas, but relies on the creation of a publicly viewable log of every public certificate that's issued by a CA. There could be any number of public logs of these certificates, but the logs will be structured so that they are append-only. The entries in the logs will be the end certificates in the issuance chain. In addition to the logs, the proposal includes the use of proofs that are sent with each certificate to the user's browser. Laurie and Langley haven't defined exactly what the proof would look like, but suggest that it could be an extra certificate or a TLS extension.
26465006
submission
bs0d3 writes:
While the internet has been buzzing with protest against SOPA; the bills evil sister, "protectip" is poised to proceed to the Senate. Reports predict that they will rush it through the next couple of weeks before the end of the next session. Many public interest groups oppose protectip, including Eff, Public Knowledge, Fight for the Future, and Demand Progress. A a list of senators who support and oppose the bill, can be viewed here.
26460610
submission
Kraftwerk writes:
With little public warning Democrat leaders in the Senate are attempting to rush through a National Defense Authorization Act (S. 1867) which includes controversial provisions which could open the door to authorizing the military to detain United States Citizens within the US and hold them indefinitely without charge or trial. They could even potentially face military justice instead of trial in a civilian court, with no regard for their Constitutionally protected rights.
Read more: http://blogcritics.org/politics/article/defense-bill-includes-authorization-for-indefinite/#ixzz1f72Bc2O4
You can see the live stream at http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN2/
25477590
submission
msmoriarty writes:
Following up on its May announcement, IBM has now confirmed that by December 16 (if not earlier) it will support Microsoft Windows on zEnterprise via its zBX component
25227960
submission
msmoriarty writes:
10 years ago this month, IBM open sourced an internal project focused on creating a common component framework for developers: Eclipse. In an interview with ADTmag.com, Eclipse Foundation director Mike Milinkovich remarks on what was, back then, a revolutionary move: "You've got to give IBM a lot of credit...Ten years ago, the notion that open source might be the best way for software vendors to collaborate was really a novel idea... Eclipse demonstrated the advantages of collaboration in open source, even amongst fierce competitors." The Eclipse Foundation is celebrating the anniversary with a kickoff party at its EclipseCon Europe 2011 conference, and if you're an Eclipse community member, the Foundation is also inviting you to add yourself to the Eclipse 10th Birthday Timeline.
25227182
submission
sammcj writes:
HP's server design packs 288 Calxeda chips into a 4U rack-mount server, or 2,800 in a full rack, with a shared power, cooling, and management infrastructure. By eliminating much of the cabling and switching devices used in traditional servers and using the low-power ARM processors, HP says it can reduce both power and space requirements dramatically.
The Redstone platform uses a 4U (7-inch) rack-mount server chassis. Inside, HP has put 72 small server boards, each with four Calxeda processors, 4GB of RAM and 4MB of L2 cache. Each processor, based on the ARM Cortex-A9 design, runs at 1.4GHz and has its own 80 gigabit cross-bar switch built into the chip
25226534
submission
wiredmikey writes:
Taking another page from Stuxnet, it seems the attackers behind Duqu used a Microsoft Windows zero-day as part of their attack campaign.
Researchers at the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security (CrySyS) — the group that initially discovered the original Duqu binaries — has located an installer for the malware. The installer file is a malicious Microsoft Word document that exploits a previously-unknown kernel vulnerability that allows code execution.
Once the Word file is opened, the malware executes and installs the Duqu binaries.
The revelation that Duqu uses a zero-day is yet another similarity with Stuxnet, the notorious worm discovered in 2010 targeting industrial control systems. In the case of Stuxnet, the attackers used four Microsoft zero-days to infect systems.
Microsoft has been notified and is working on a fix.
