Several readers have sent in news of a presentation at the Black Hat security conference from a diabetic security researcher, Jerome Radcliffe, who is looking into the security of automated insulin pumps. While most of the headlines are sensationalist, referencing "lethal attacks from a half-mile away," Scott Hanselman breaks down the media reports and weeds out the inaccuracies, explaining that while this is a valid area of concern, diabetics don't need to cover themselves in tinfoil just yet. "Just to be clear, Jerome has not yet successfully wirelessly hacked an insulin pump. He's made initial steps to sniff wireless traffic from the pump. I realize, as I hope you do, that his abstract isn't complete. Hopefully a more complete presentation is forthcoming. I suspect he's exploiting the remote control feature of a pump. ... What Jerome has done, however, is posed a valid question and opened a door that all techie diabetics knew was open. It is however, an obvious question for any connected device. Anyone who has ever seen OnStar start a car remotely knows that there's a possibility that a bad guy could do the same thing."

An anonymous reader writes "A Bradley University student has built a mobile robot that uses a hemispherical omnidirectional gimbaled, or HOG, drive wheel. It consists of a black rubber hemisphere that rotates like a spinning top, with servos that can tilt it left and right and forwards and backwards. The HOG system delivers an amount of torque directly proportional to the tilt of the hemisphere, allowing the robot to move incredibly fast nearly instantaneously."

adeelarshad82 writes "Building on last year's efforts, PCMag once again hit the road on a 6,000 mile trip to test out eight 3G and 4G networks to determine which ones were the fastest (and slowest) in 21 different cities. With 10 stops in each city for at least 15 minutes each, the team used custom speed test software on 16 different handsets which ran HTTP upload and download tests every 25 seconds to 3 minutes. The test results were broken down by city as well as region. As expected, Verizon's 4G led the pack. It performed the best in Dallas, where it averaged 15.75 Mbsp and also hit the highest download speed of 37.66 Mbsp. On the other hand, Sprint's 4G results were disappointing; in some cities even AT&T provided better download speeds. Beyond the 4G, T-Mobile's HSPA+ offered blazing fast speeds as well, going as high up as 15.93 Mbsp in Detroit while averaging the best in Dallas at 6.44 Mbps. Amongst the 3G networks, AT&T mostly outperformed all others."

Gunkerty Jeb writes "Spammers, it turns out, aren't like everyone else: they have fewer friends. 'Social Graphs for Online Service Security,' a study done by researchers Yinglian Xie and Fang Yu, uses studies of legitimate and malicious social network usage to spot bogus email accounts that are used to push spam, malware, and otherwise malicious links. The researchers are analyzing natural social connections between users on the Web that are difficult for attackers or botnets to replicate. Spotting a spammer isn't hard, they say, when you look at his or her patterns of communication."

abhatt writes with news that "Big Becky," a 4,000-ton tunnel boring machine, has finished chewing through over 10 kilometers of rock underneath Niagara Falls, Ontario, a project that's been underway since 2006. "The 10.2 kilometer tunnel is 14.4 meters in diameter. Big Becky ate through 1.6 million cubic meters of rock to reach her goal. That’s enough rock, officials said, to fill the Rogers Centre in Toronto. And the cement used to line the tunnel would build a sidewalk stretching from Windsor to Quebec City. ... The project took longer and cost more because Becky ran into unexpected conditions. She’s designed to go through solid rock, but encountered a stretch of loose, crumbling material that was unsuitable for tunneling. That forced a long and expensive detour."

SonnyJim writes "I frequently use Tor for my anonymous browsing needs, via the Tor Firefox bundle for Windows. I noticed that there are many other applications out there that use Tor as a proxy as well (Janus VM, ChrisPC, etc.) Are any of them more secure than the original Tor bundles, or am I just wasting my time trying these other applications? Is there anything more secure than Tor, as far as anonymous browsing goes?"

Davis Freeberg writes "The Department of Homeland Security is hard at work again, protecting the industry from websites that the big studios don't want you to see. This time they're targeting the Mafiaafire plugin by asking Mozilla to disable the addon at the root level. Instead of blindly complying with the government's request, Mozilla has decided to ask some tough questions instead. Unsurprisingly, when faced with legitimate concerns about the legality of their domain seizure program, the DHS has decided to clam up."