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Google News Sci Tech: Google acquires kite-power generator - BBC News->

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GigaOM
Google acquires kite-power generator
BBC News
Google has acquired a US company that generates power using turbines mounted on tethered kites or wings. Makani Power will become part of Google X - the secretive research and development arm of the search giant. The deal comes as Makani carries ...
Google X acquires kite-power start-up MakaniCNET
Inside Google's Secret LabBusinessweek
Google X Acquires Makani Power And Its Airborne Wind TurbinesTechCrunch
GigaOM-The Verge-The Atlantic Wire
all 18 news articles

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+ - Aurora Attackers Were Looking for Google's Surveillance Database

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "When in early 2010 Google shared with the public that they had been breached in what became known as the Aurora attacks, they said that the attackers got their hands on some source code and were looking to access Gmail accounts of Tibetan activists. What they didn't make public is that the hackers have also accessed a database containing information about court-issued surveillance orders that enabled law enforcement agencies to monitor email accounts belonging to diplomats, suspected spies and terrorists. Whether this was the primary goal of the attacks as well as how much information was exfiltrated is unknown. current and former U.S. government officials interviewed by the Washington Post say that the database in question was possibly accessed in order to discover which Chinese intelligence operatives located in the U.S. were under surveillance."

+ - Dart Is Not the Language You Think It Is

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "Seth Ladd has an excellent write-up of Dart "When Dart was originally launched, many developers mistook it for some sort of Java clone. In truth, Dart is inspired by a range of languages such as Smalltalk, Strongtalk, Erlang, C#, and JavaScript. Get past the semicolons and curly braces, and you’ll see a terse language without ceremony. ""

+ - 3-D Printable Food for NASA and the Very Hungry-> 2

Submitted by cervesaebraciator
cervesaebraciator writes ""[...] Systems & Materials Research Corporation, just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer. But Contractor, a mechanical engineer with a background in 3D printing, envisions a much more mundane—and ultimately more important—use for the technology. He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store." No word yet on whether anyone other than the guy trying to sell the technology thinks it'll make palatable food."
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+ - Transporting a 15-m, 600-ton Magnet Cross Country

Submitted by necro81
necro81 writes "Although its Tevatron particle accelerator has gone dark, Fermi Laboratory outside Chicago is still doing physics. A new experiment, called muon g-2 will investigate quantum mechanical behavior of the electron's heavier sibling: the muon. Fermi needs a large ring chamber to store the muons it produces and investigates, and it just so happens that Brookhaven National Laboratory outside NYC has one to spare. But how do you transport a delicate, 15-m diameter, 600-ton superconducting magnet halfway across the country? Very carefully."

+ - House Bill Would Mandate Smart Gun Tech By U.S. Manufacturers->

Submitted by Lucas123
Lucas123 writes "U.S. Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass) is pushing a bill that would require all U.S. handgun manufacturers to include "personalization technology" in their weapons. Tierney said he got the idea for The Personalized Handgun Safety Act of 2013 from the latest James Bond film, "Skyfall". In it Bond escapes death when his handgun, which is equipped with technology that recognizes his fingerprints, becomes inoperable when a bad guy picks it up. "This technology, however, isn't just for the movies — it's a reality," Tierney said. Tierney pointed to a myriad of cases where the smart gun tech could prevent children from being harmed or killed in firearms accidents. Jim Wallace, executive director of the Massachusetts Gun Owners Action League, the official state association of the NRA, said he knows of no gun owners who would want smart gun technology on their weapons. Wallace said any technology that may impede the proper function of a weapon is a problem. He pointed to the fact that any integrated processer technology would also require a battery of some kind, which could pose a system failure if it lost power."
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+ - Do Developers Need Free Perks to Thrive?->

Submitted by jammag
jammag writes "Free sodas, candy and energy bars can be surprisingly important to developers, says longtime coder Eric Spiegel. They need the perks, not to mention the caffeine boost. More important, free sodas from management are like the canary in the coal mine. If they get cut, then layoffs might be next. “The sodas are just the wake-up call. If the culture changes to be focused more on cost-cutting than on innovation and creativity, then would you still want to work here? I wouldn’t.” Are free perks really that important?"
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+ - HGST intros world's first 1.5TB notebook drive->

Submitted by crookedvulture
crookedvulture writes "For years, three-platter notebook hard drives have been too thick to actually fit into most notebook drive bays. HGST's Travelstar 5K1500 is different; it squeezes three platters into a notebook-friendly 9.5-mm casing. Shrinking the drive's circuit board and internal mechanics allowed HGST to cram in the extra platter. Thanks to the additional disc, the Travelstar boasts 1.5TB of storage—50% more capacity than its 9.5-mm peers. The platters spin at only 5,400 RPM, so this isn't a high-performance model. To make up for the slower rotational speed, notebook makers are expected to combine the 5K1500 with separate caching SSDs."
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+ - Immigration reform may spur software robotics->

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes "The Senate's immigration bill may force the large offshore outsourcing firms to reduce their use of H-1B visa-holding staff, forcing them to hire more local workers and raising their costs. But one large Indian firm, Infosys, will try to offset cost increases with software robotics. Infosys recently announced a partnership with IPsoft, a New York-based provider of autonomic IT services. With IPsoft's tools, work that is now done by human beings, mostly Level 1 support, could be done by a software machine. Infosys says that IPsoft tools can "reduce human intervention." More colorfully, Chandrashekar Kakal, global head of Infosys's business IT services, told the Times of India, that "what robotics did for the auto assembly line, we are now doing for the IT engineering line." James Slaby, a research director of HFS Research who has been following the use of autonomics closely, wrote in a recent report that the IPsoft partnership may help Infosys "reap fatter margins by augmenting and replacing expensive, human IT support engineers with cheaper, more accurate, efficient automated processes," and by improving service delivery."
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+ - Inside the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes "The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit has been spearheading botnet takedowns and other anti-cybercrime operations for many years, and it has had remarkable success. But the cybercrime problem isn’t going away anytime soon, so the DCU is in the process of building a new cybercrime center here, and soon will roll out a new threat intelligence service to help ISPs and CERT teams get better data about ongoing attacks. Dennis Fisher sat down with TJ Campana, director of security at the DCU, to discuss the unit’s work and what threats could be next on the target list.

"We’re trying very hard to find the person who owns the servers we want to seize. When we go into a data center, that person isn’t there to defend himself, so we are working very hard to notify them that we took the servers. We want to find the person. We have to satisfy the judge that we did everything we could. We see a huge advantage in handing off a very nice package to law enforcement," Campana said."

+ - Hypervisor or Bare Metal 1

Submitted by Hunabka
Hunabka writes "I’ve been tasked to re-provision old hardware for an off-site file server. The machine has 2X Xeon E5440 CPUs, 12GB of memory, and 7 Disk Raid 5 with 1 Hot Spare, no warranty. This client does not have any IT staff at the remote location, any hardware issues will require additional cost for support. The plan is to install Server 2012 and enable DFS for the remote office file storage.

My question is: Do I install Server 2012 on the Bare Metal or install a hypervisor (VMware ESXi) Then 2012? Other options or ideas?

Problems with VMware: Our monitoring agent does not support ESXi and it does not look like the ESXi (Free version) supports SNMP monitoring. Although I do get hardware status just no emailing of errors.

Problems with Bare Metal: If anything does go wrong and on-site visit will require physical support staff."

+ - Working Handgun Printed On A Sub-$2,000 3D Printer->

Submitted by Sparrowvsrevolution
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "When the high-tech gunmakers Defense Distributed demonstrated earlier this month that they could 3D print an entire working gun, it was only a matter time of before that printed weapon's price and practicality dropped into the realm of normal consumers. Just a few weeks later, a couple of Wisconsin hobbyist gunsmiths have already managed to adapt Defense Distributed's so-called Liberator firearm and print it on a $1,725 Lulzbot 3D printer, a consumer grade machine that's far cheaper than the industrial quality Stratasys machine Defense Distributed used. They then proceeded to record their cheaper gun (dubbed the "Lulz Liberator") firing nine .380 rounds without any signs of cracking or melting. Eight of the rounds were fired from a single plastic barrel. (Defense Distributed only fired one through its prototype.) In total, the Lulz Liberator's materials cost around $25 and were printed over just 48 hours."
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+ - Goodbye, Lotus 1-2-3->

Submitted by walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes "In 2012, IBM started retiring the Lotus brand. Now 1-2-3, the core product that brought Lotus its fame, takes its turn on the chopping block. IBM stated, "Effective on the dates listed below, [June 11, 2013] IBM will withdraw from marketing part numbers from the following product release(s) licensed under the IBM International Program License Agreement:" IBM Lotus 123 Millennium Edition V9.x, IBM Lotus SmartSuite 9.x V9.8.0, and Organizer V6.1.0.
Further, IBM stated, "Customers will no longer be able to receive support for these offerings after September 30, 2014. No service extensions will be offered. There will be no replacement programs.""
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+ - Australia Makes Asian Language Learning a Priority->

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian government came a step closer to formalising its plans to make Asian language study compulsory for schools this week. It has released a draft curriculum for public consultation which reveals plans to include Indonesian, Korean and french language in the curriculum.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard publicly stated in September 2012 that in response to the “staggering growth” in the region, the government would be instigating 25 key measures to strengthen and exploit links with Asia. The plan includes the requirement that one third of civil servants and company directors have a “deep knowledge,” thousands of scholarships for Asian students, and the opportunity for every schoolchild to learn one of four “priority” languages- Chinese, Hindi, Japanese or Indonesian"
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+ - Justice Department got more than phone records in journalist probe->

Submitted by PolygamousRanchKid
PolygamousRanchKid writes "When the Justice Department began investigating possible leaks of classified information about North Korea in 2009, investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material.

They used security-badge access records to track the reporter’s comings and goings from the State Department, according to a newly obtained court affidavit. They traced the timing of his calls with a State Department security adviser suspected of sharing the classified report. They obtained a search warrant for the reporter’s personal emails.

The case of Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, the government adviser, and James Rosen, the chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, bears striking similarities to a sweeping leaks investigation disclosed last week in which federal investigators obtained records over two months of more than 20 telephone lines assigned to The Associated Press. AP executives and First Amendment watchdogs have criticized the Justice Department in part for the broad scope of the phone records it secretly subpoenaed. “The latest events show an expansion of this law-enforcement technique,” said attorney Abbe Lowell, who is defending Kim on federal charges filed in 2010 that he disclosed national-defense information.

Investigators also scrutinized computer records and found that someone who had logged in with Kim’s user profile viewed the classified report “at or around” the same time two calls were placed from his desk phone to Rosen, according to the documents."
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