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Communications

Chemical "Infofuses" Communicate Without Electricity 115

Posted by kdawson from the can-you-see-me-now dept.
Al writes "Researchers at Harvard and Tufts University have developed a way to send coded messages without using electricity. David Walt, professor of chemistry at Tufts, and Harvard's George Whitesides have developed 'infofuses' that can transmit information simply by burning. The fuses — metallic salts depositing on a nitrocellulose strand — emit pulses of infrared and visible light of different colors whose sequence encodes information. They were developed in response to a call from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for technologies to allow soldiers stranded without a power source to communicate. In the first demonstration of the idea, they used the infofuses to transmit the message look mom no electricity." Currently the researchers are "trying to figure out a way to dynamically encode a message on the fly in the field without specialized equipment."
Supercomputing

Creating a Low-Power Cloud With Netbook Chips 93

Posted by timothy from the but-what's-the-wattage-equivalent-cfl dept.
Al writes "Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have created a remarkably low-power server architecture using netbook processors and flash memory cards. The server design, dubbed a 'fast array of wimpy nodes,' or FAWN, is only designed to perform simple tasks, but the CMU team say it could be perfect for large Web companies that have to retrieve large amounts of data from RAM. A set-up including 21 individual nodes draws a maximum of just 85 watts under real-world conditions. The researchers say that a FAWN cluster could offer a low-power replacement for sites that currently rely on Memcached to access data from RAM."
Government

Submission + - CIA says most voting machines can be hacked (mcclatchydc.com)

Submitted by ISoldat53
ISoldat53 writes: "The CIA, which has been monitoring foreign countries' use of electronic voting systems, has reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela, Macedonia and Ukraine and a raft of concerns about the machines' vulnerability to tampering." mcclatchydc.com
The Internet

Submission + - ISP's vs Web Services....who will win?

Submitted by
Son of Rea
Son of Rea writes: "The internet is getting more restrictive and harder to use because of limitations imposed by ISPs. The biggest example of this is bandwidth limitations. These limitations prevent users from using modern services, so it seems like there would be a major conflict with internet businesses and ISP's. With high ISP limitations, many internet businesses will lose out on customers, so it would be in their best interest to discourage ISP limits. With a 5 gig per month bandwidth limit, nobody will be able to effectively back up their hard drives to the net, download movies from netflix, purchase downloadable games, and countless other examples of services that require large amounts of bandwidth. ISP's are further limiting our ability to use the internet. Frontier replaced a bunch of modem/routers with ones that don't allow port forwarding. So now I can't use Remote Desktop to fix my mother's computer. This is just the latest example of how we're losing use of the internet. So I was wondering who you think will win this battle (or are the web companies even fighting ISP's?) and why?"
Upgrades

Linux 2.6.28 Promises Year-End Presents 305

Posted by timothy from the my-holiday-thanks-go-mostly-to-the-finnish-guy dept.
darthcamaro writes "Little penguins all around the world are waiting for Penguin-Master Linus Torvalds to deliver some Glogg inspired Xmas cheer in the form of the new 2.6.28 kernel. Among the innovations in 2.6.28 are ext4 as stable, wireless USB drivers, better KVM support and the GEM graphic memory management technology. 'We now have a proper memory manager for video memory, the GEM [Graphics Execution Manager] memory manager,' Greg Kroah-Hartman said. 'This gives Linux much better graphics performance than it previously had.'"
Space

Iran Announces Manned Space Mission Plans 559

Posted by timothy from the look-out-below dept.
Lucas123 writes "After Iran's first attempt to launch a satellite on Sunday fell noticeably short of the Earth's atmosphere (though Iran claimed it made it into orbit), government officials stated they intend to put a man into space within 10 years. The long-range ballistic technology used to put satellites into space can also be used for launching weapons. Iran says it has no intention to use the technology for launching nuclear warheads."
Microsoft

Microsoft Pulls Vista SP1 Update 268

Posted by CmdrTaco from the undo-undo-undo dept.
1shooter writes "news.com reports that Microsoft is withdrawing SP1 for Vista. Nick White, Microsoft product manager blogged 'We've heard a few reports about problems customers may be experiencing as a result of KB937287,' wrote White. 'Immediately after receiving reports of this error, we made the decision to temporarily suspend automatic distribution of the update to avoid further customer impact while we investigate possible causes.'"
Books

Submission + - SPAM: Authors to be

Submitted by
Clive Worth
Clive Worth writes: "This clip tells you about my book that is full of advice to help others like me who are dyslexic, yet I am now an Author or anyone who wants to write a book and become an Author."
Link to Original Source
Privacy

Submission + - TJX data criminal gets five years in prison (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
jbrodkin
jbrodkin writes: "The leader of an identity theft ring that stole credit card numbers from TJX has been sentenced to five years in prison and fined $600,000. Irving Escobar of Miami, Fla., pleaded guilty to charges of an "organized scheme to defraud." Escobar and his team used stolen data to make counterfeit credit cards, which they used to buy gift cards at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club. They redeemed the gift cards for jewelry and electronic equipment in what Florida's attorney general calls "a modern-day version of money laundering" that resulted in a loss of $3 million nationwide."
Communications

First Nations Want Cellphone Revenue 513

Posted by samzenpus from the the-great-spirit-wants-his-cut dept.
Peacenik45 writes "The CBC is reporting that First Nations in Manitoba want compensation for every cell phone signal that passes through their land because it violates their airspace. The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs recently resolved to negotiate revenue sharing with Manitoba Telecom Services. Ovide Mercredi of the Grand Rapids First Nations says "When it comes to using airspace, it's like using our water and simply because there's no precedent doesn't mean that it's not the right thing to do." This move may inspire First Nations in other provinces to follow suit."
Quickies

Submission + - poll:favorite acronym

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: whats your favorite acronym? 1- WTF 2- LOL 3- PITA 4- TFA 5-
Communications

Submission + - What causes cell phone connection errors?

Submitted by Anonymous Cell Phone User
Anonymous Cell Phone User writes: Earlier today, I called a friend on my cell phone and was connected to "Tom", a stranger. I knew I didn't have the wrong number because my friend's number was saved in my phone. I tried the same number again and got my friend this time. My friend told me he had just gotten a call from somebody wanting to speak to Tom, but his caller ID had said that the call was from me. This has happened to me a few times, both when I tried calling somebody on a landline from my cell phone and also when somebody tried to call me on my cell phone from a landline (it might also have happened between two cell phones once, but I'm not sure about that). The information in the caller ID seems to always match the intended call, but the voices get switched. I have had this happen with a Cingular/ATT contract in the USA and with a Vodaphone pay-as-you-go card in Germany (different phones). I am wondering if this error is due to a limitation of the GSM protocol or how it's implemented. I'm hoping that there's some cell phone / telecommunications expert here that can shed some light on the issue. Can anybody here explain how/why these errors happen?

Feed NSA Spy Documents Stay Sealed (wired.com)

From feed by wiredfeed
A federal judge rejects a bid by Wired News and other media outlets to unseal whistle-blower papers in a lawsuit over surveillance of Americans. In 27B Stroke 6.


Data Storage

Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong 330

Posted by kdawson from the mean-time dept.
modapi writes "Google's wasn't the best storage paper at FAST '07. Another, more provocative paper looking at real-world results from 100,000 disk drives got the 'Best Paper' award. Bianca Schroeder, of CMU's Parallel Data Lab, submitted Disk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you? The paper crushes a number of (what we now know to be) myths about disks such as vendor MTBF validity, 'consumer' vs. 'enterprise' drive reliability (spoiler: no difference), and RAID 5 assumptions. StorageMojo has a good summary of the paper's key points."

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