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Submission + - Apple attempts to trademark the term "startup" in Australia (startupsmart.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple has lodged a trademark application for the term “startup” in Australia. If the application passes the examination phase, and isn’t successfully opposed, the term could become officially protected after seven-and-a-half months.

Submission + - Korean 'Armadillo' Electric Car Folds Up, Parks, Controlled By Your Smartphone (greencarreports.com)

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have unveiled a crazy foldable, compact electric vehicle that, well, folds up like an armadillo. What's more, you can engage the armadillo-like folding process as well as actually park the car with a smartphone. Yes, there's an app for that. Not sure if its the folding part or the idea of people trying to park any car using their cellphones that makes this concerning. The shrinking process takes only around 15 seconds, and reduces the car's 110-inch length to just 65 inches as it essentially curls into a ball. No idea what this non-desert creature does when merely threatened in the wild.

Submission + - Mark Shuttleworth: The Ubuntu Edge was a "time machine" (zdnet.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth on how the Ubuntu Edge phone would have been a "time machine", offering a glimpse of a future where the phone is the only computer we need. Shuttleworth also touches on how the crowd funding initiative for the phone was almost saved by the last-minute intervention of a handset manufacturer, as well as detailing the timetable for getting Ubuntu phones and tablets into shops.

Submission + - Wikipedia Can Predict Box Office Flops (vice.com)

Submitted by Daniel_Stuckey
Daniel_Stuckey writes: Despite a record year though, like every year before it, 2013 remained fraught with its fair share of box office disasters. What if studios could minimize their loses and predict when the next Pluto Nash-level flop was imminent? According to new research published in PLoS One, they may actually be able to. Using data gleaned from Wikipedia articles, researchers measured the likelihood of a film's financial success based on four parameters: number of total page views; number of total edits made; number of users editing; and the number of revisions in the article's revision history, or "collaborative rigor."

Submission + - NASA Testing Frickin' Laser Communications (itworld.com)

Submitted by itwbennett
itwbennett writes: The lunar laser communications demonstration will be part of the agency's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission, which is scheduled to launch on Sept. 6. Here's how the system will work: When the satellite is in orbit around the moon and visible from Earth, one of three ground stations will shoot a laser towards its approximate location. The laser beam from Earth will scan a patch of sky and should illuminate the spacecraft at some point. When that happens, the spacecraft will begin transmitting its own laser towards the ground station and the two will lock on to each other. The technology should allow an upstream data rate, from the Earth to the spacecraft, of around 20Mbps and a much faster downstream rate of 622Mbps. That's roughly six times the speed that's currently possible with radio-based transmission, said Don Cornwell, mission manager for the lunar laser communications demonstration.

Submission + - MIT reports 400 GHz graphene transistor possible with 'Negative resistance' (technologyreview.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The idea is to take a standard graphene field-effect transistor and find the circumstances in which it demonstrates negative resistance (or negative differential resistance, as they call it). They then use the dip in voltage, like a kind of switch, to perform logic.
They show how several graphene field-effect transistors can be combined and manipulated in a way that produces conventional logic gates. Graphene-based circuit can match patterns and it has several important advantages over silicon-based versions.
Liu and co can build elementary XOR gates out of only three graphene field-effect transistors compared to the eight or more required using silicon. That translates into a significantly smaller area on a chip. What’s more, graphene transistors can operate at speeds of over 400 GHz.

Submission + - Groklaw Closure (groklaw.net)

Submitted by JImbob0i0
JImbob0i0 writes: After many years amid fears of forced exposure in light of the recent NSA/PRISM/Lavabits events PJ has closed the doors of Groklaw.

With Microsoft/Motorola, Oracle/Google, SCO/IBM, Apple/Samsung still going on in the background will the legal implications of technology companies fade from view without the light that has been shined on them over the years?

SCO was ridiculed in no small part to researchers at the site.

Oracle was shown to have severe misunderstandings of the Java licenses.

Microsoft was forced out of the background.

When PJ last retired she passed the site over to another but recently she's been managing it herself again. This closure notice appears pretty final however.

What now for legal blogs in the technological world?

Submission + - EUV Chipmaking Inches Forward

Submitted by szotz
szotz writes: You've got falling droplets of molten tin, bright lasers, and fancy evacuated optics. What's not to love about EUV light sources? The fact that we still don't have them in production lines producing chips. Light source maker ASML says it's "more confident" that the technology's on track now, and that the machines should meet their target brightness by 2015, in time to help pattern the 10nm generation of chips — the next next generation. We'll see. Or then again maybe we won't. The light's outside the visible range.

Submission + - BREACH Compression Attack Steals SSL Secrets (threatpost.com)

Submitted by msm1267
msm1267 writes: A serious attack against ciphertext secrets buried inside HTTPS responses has prompted an advisory from Homeland Security. The BREACH attack is an offshoot of CRIME, which was thought dead and buried after it was disclosed in September. Released at last week’s Black Hat USA 2013, BREACH enables an attacker to read encrypted messages over the Web by injecting plaintext into an HTTPS request and measuring compression changes.
Researchers Angelo Prado, Neal Harris and Yoel Gluck demonstrated the attack against Outlook Web Access (OWA) at Black Hat. Once the Web application was opened and the Breach attack was launched, within 30 seconds the attackers had extracted the secret.
“We are currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem,” said the CERT advisory, released one day after the Black Hat presentation.

Submission + - Multiple banking IP addresses hijacked

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This incident clearly shows the dark side of BGP attacks and ISP/operator trusting each other to configure their networks properly. All it takes is one typo somewhere, misconfiguration, or a deliberate attack on BGP to bring down the Internet. On 24 July 2013 a significant number of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that belong to banks suddenly were routed to somewhere else. Sampling of some of the owners of the IP addresses includes ecom giant Amazon, financial and banking companies such as JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America, HSBC and others.

So how does one protect from such attacks? IPSec and DNSSEC? How does bank end users verify the identity of bank web sites and protect themselves from such attacks?

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