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Cellphones

Canada Opens Wireless Industry To Competition 116

Posted by samzenpus from the free-the-waves-eh dept.
FreeKill writes "The Canadian government on Wednesday paved the way for new cellphone companies by announcing new rules for an auction of radio airwaves designed to spur competition in the wireless industry. About 40 per cent of the spectrum will be reserved for new entrants with the remainder open to all bidders, including Canada's big three providers — Rogers, Bell, and Telus. The government will also mandate roaming area agreements which will force existing carriers to share their networks with newcomers for five years, plus another five if the new entrants can build up their own networks nationally."
Microsoft

What If Gmail Had Been Designed by Microsoft? 279

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thank-god-we-could-all-standardize-on-ie7 dept.
caluml writes "There is a humourous look at "What would happen if Microsoft had designed GMail". Gems include: "Another security measurement we'll add is that you won't be able to log-in with just username anymore but are required to enter the full username@gmail.com. Furthermore, we will change the browser URL from 'http://gmail.microsoft.com/' to the more professional looking 'http://by114w.bay114.gmail.live.com/mail/mail.aspx?rru=home'.""
Science

Turkey Day Chemistry in the Kitchen 131

Posted by samzenpus from the obligatory-story dept.
instupor writes "Just in time for the holiday, PopSci runs through the food science behind moist turkey, perfect potatoes and flaky pie crust. Besides the actual "why," the article explains how to apply the scientific principals in your own kitchen."
Graphics

Recreating Cities Using Online Photos 87

Posted by Zonk from the taking-a-walkabout dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "The billion of images available from a site like Flickr has stimulated the imagination of many researchers. After designing tools using Flickr to edit your photos, another team at the University of Washington (UW) is using our vacation photos to create 3D models of world landmarks. But recreating original scenes is challenging because all the photos we put on Flickr and similar sites don't exhibit the same quality. With such a large number of pictures available, the researchers have been able to reconstruct with great accuracy virtual 3D model of landmarks, including Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Statue of Liberty in New York City."
Security

Transform Cellphones Into a CCTV Swarm 106

Posted by Zonk from the now-how-to-interface-your-brain dept.
holy_calamity writes "Swiss researchers have developed java software that has bluetooth-capable camera phones form a distributed camera network. Each phone shares information on visual events with its neighbours and can work out the spatial position of phones around it (pdf). The software will become open source sometime next year, and the creators say it could be used to make a quick and dirty surveillance system. 'The phones currently use the average speed people walk to guess the distances between themselves, based on how long people take to move from one phone's view to another's. In testing, the system determined the distances between each phone with about 95% accuracy. They were placed 4 metres apart, making it accurate to about 20 centimetres. In future, recording the speed at which objects pass by would make more accurate judgments possible.'"
Google

Verizon Might Deliver Google Phone 115

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oh-no-wait-i-thought-it-wasn't-real dept.
MrCrassic writes "There are talks floating around surrounding Google's possible talks with Verizon and possibly T-Mobile to establish an agreement for the carrier to deliver phones carrying Google's speculated mobile operating system. According to the article, one of the main hurdles slowing down the product are concerns about user privacy and advertising, one of Google's well-renowned strengths. With over 6 million customers potentially at their disposal, could this be "the deal" that establishes Google's hegemony in the internet sphere?"
Networking

Google Caught in Comcast Traffic Filtering? 385

Posted by Zonk from the it's-the-craziest-thing dept.
marcan writes "Comcast users are reporting 'connection reset' errors while loading Google. The problem seems to have been coming and going over the past few days, and often disappears only to return a few minutes later. Apparently the problem only affects some of Google's IPs and services. Analysis of the PCAP packet dumps reveals several injected fake RSTs, which are very similar to the ones seen coming from the Great Firewall of China [PDF]. Did Google somehow get caught up in one of Comcast's blacklists, or are the heuristics flagging Google as a file-sharer due to the heavy traffic?"
Encryption

Ultra-low-cost True Randomness 201

Posted by CmdrTaco from the and-a-damn-fine-hack dept.
Cryptocrat writes "Today I blogged about a new method for secure random sequence generation that is based on physical properties of hardware, but requires only hardware found on most computer systems: from standard PCs to RFID tags." Basically he's powercycling memory and looking at the default state of the bits, which surprisingly (to me anyway) is able to both to fingerprint systems, as well as generate a true random number. There also is a PDF Paper on the subject if you're interested in the concept.
Businesses

Acer to Acquire Gateway for $710 million 222

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the bargain-shopping dept.
downix writes "On the way into work today, I heard about Acer buying Gateway. A bold move strategically, I wonder what consequences this will have for Gateway's employees and customers. As the purchase price was at $1.90 per share, those of us that purchased Gateway shares a few years ago are reminded just how far it has fallen."
NASA

Images of Endeavour's Damaged Tiles 331

Posted by CmdrTaco from the that-sure-doesn't-look-good dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Neptec Design Group, a Canadian company and a NASA prime contractor for 25 space missions, was kind enough to send me exclusive images of Endeavour's damaged tiles during its last take-off. So here are some of these pictures" The pictures are pretty amazing and make the urgency of this whole thing much more amazing.
Networking (Apple)

Journal Journal: iPhones flooding wireless network at Duke

Journal by rhewt
"The Wi-Fi connection on Apple's recently released iPhone seems to be the source of a big headache for network administrators at Duke. The built-in 802.11b/g adapters on several iPhones periodically flood sections of the school's wireless LAN with MAC address requests, temporarily knocking out anywhere from a dozen to 30 wireless access points at a time. Campus network staff are talking with Cisco, the main WLAN provider, and have opened a help-desk ticket with Apple. But so far, the precise cau
Networking

Submission + - Brookline, MA launches municipal Wi-Fi (boston.com)

Submitted by keithjr
keithjr writes: The city of Brookline, MA plans to open the first border-to-border Wi-Fi network open to commerical and residential use. The wireless canvas, touted as the first of its kind, has been free for preview by Brookline residents. Upon launch, it will be available with a subscription fee. The multi-use service network will also serve as a means of relaying public safety information among city departments, as well as providing Internet access. Free Internet service will also be available in various parks and hotspots throughout the town. The official "wirecutting" information can be found at the Brookline Wireless official website.
Utilities (Apple)

Submission + - Review of Parallels 3.0 Desktop for Mac (lunapark6.com)

Submitted by
Michael
Michael writes: "http://lunapark6.com/parallels-desktop-30-for-mac. html Article reviews the latest virtualization software from Parallels. Several new features including 3D support, Snapshot, Parallels Explorer and Parallels SmartSelect have been included in Parallels 3.0. The review covers all the new features and finds most of the new features well done except, SmartSelect. That application does pose a significant security risk for the OS X desktop. Besides SmartSelect the review found Parallels 3.0 to be a worthy upgrade."
Security

Submission + - iPhone has a built-in spyware module? (blogspot.com)

Submitted by pilok22
pilok22 writes: Russian underground hackers released a white paper with analysis of iPhone firmware. They found a very suspicious function which can steal all personal information from an iPhone.

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