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Education

Raspberry Pi $25 PC Goes Into Alpha Production 137

Posted by Soulskill from the perhaps-not-vaporpi dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Game developer David Braben caused geeks to get excited back in May when he announced plans to develop and release a $25 PC. It is called the Raspberry Pi and takes the form of a USB stick that can be plugged into the HDMI port of a display ready to act as a fully-functional PC. Two months on and the spec of the PCB layout has been finalized and an alpha release has been sent to manufacture. Any doubts this PC wasn't going to happen should now disappear as this alpha board is expected to be almost the same as the final production unit. Although we don't know a release date as of yet, the Raspeberry Pi Foundation is promising images of the alpha boards in a couple of weeks."
Robotics

Hackers' Flying Drone Now Eavesdrops On GSM Phones 90

Posted by Soulskill from the it-slices-it-dices-it-makes-juilenne-fries dept.
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "At the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas next week, Mike Tassey and Richard Perkins plan to show the crowd of hackers a year's worth of progress on their Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform, or WASP, the second year Tassey and Perkins have displayed the 14-pound, six-foot-long, six-foot wingspan unmanned aerial vehicle. The WASP, built from a retired Army target drone converted from a gasoline engine to electric batteries, is equipped with an HD camera, a cigarette-pack-sized on-board Linux computer packed with network-hacking tools, including the BackTrack testing toolset and a custom-built 340 million word dictionary for brute-force guessing of passwords, and eleven antennae. On top of cracking Wi-Fi networks, the upgraded WASP now also performs a new trick: impersonating the GSM cell phone towers used by AT&T and T-Mobile to trick phones into connecting to the plane's antenna rather than their carrier, allowing the drone to record conversations and text messages on 32 gigs of storage."

Comment Huh? (Score 5, Insightful) 149

by adamjcoon (#36920548) Attached to: Analyzing Long-Term SSD Failure Rates
I didn't read TFA but the chart doesn't tell me that "SSDs aren't more reliable than hard drives".. the SSDs were generally 6% or under (assuming the linear progression) whereas regular HDD approached 14%+ after five years. And "Long-term" in the title? The SSD data in the chart only goes for 1 year. Not exactly long term when the chart goes from 1-5 years of use. The actual data for the SSDs is only 20% of the time span.
Data Storage

GE Bets On Holographic Optical Storage 159

Posted by samzenpus from the putting-all-your-bits-in-one-basket dept.
Lucas123 writes "Years after announcing they had developed holographic optical disc technology that could store 500GB of data, GE this week said they're preparing to license the technology to manufacturing partners. At the same time, InPhase, which failed to actually get its holographic disc product out the door for years, says GE's product is nothing more than a 'science project,' and its own optical disc is almost ready to go to market — again. But, as one analyst quipped, the old joke about optical disc is that 'there's more written about optical disc than stored on it.'"
Security

Anonymous Hack One Gigabyte of Data From NATO 304

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wear-a-helmet dept.
GeekTech.in writes "The AnonymousIRC hacking organization have claimed this afternoon that they have hacked into NATO servers. As one of their tweets says: ' Yes, #NATO was breached. And we have lots of restricted material. With some simple injection. In the next days, wait for interesting data :) '"
NASA

NASA's Hubble Discovers Another Moon Around Pluto 208

Posted by CmdrTaco from the spinning-round-and-round dept.
thebchuckster writes "Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite – temporarily designated P4 — was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet. The new moon is the smallest discovered around Pluto. It has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By comparison, Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is 648 miles (1,043 km) across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range of 20 to 70 miles in diameter (32 to 113 km)."

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