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Robotics

Submission + - Hacked iRobot Uses XBox Kinect to See World (singularityhub.com) 1

Submitted by kkleiner
kkleiner writes: Millions are drinking the Kinect Kool-aid, jumping around in front of their XBox and playing games by flailing their bodies. Now a student at MIT’s Personal Robotics Group is going to put all that wild gyrating to a good use: controlling robots. Philipp Robbel has hacked together the Kinect 3D sensor with an iRobot Create platform and assembled a battery powered bot that can see its environment and obey your gestured commands. Tentatively named KinectBot, Robbel’s creation can generate some beautifully detailed 3D maps of its surroundings and wirelessly send them to a host computer. KinectBot can also detect nearby humans and track their movements to understand where they want it to go.
Robotics

Submission + - Robot Actress Makes Stage Debut In Japan (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by Robotron23
Robotron23 writes: The BBC reports that a robot named Geminoid-F has made it's acting debut in Japan. The short play in which it appeared was a sellout with the Japanese public who were curious to see the robot's performance. However an actress who co-starred pointed out that the lack of human presence made the droid difficult to act alongside.
Patents

Submission + - 3D printing may face legal challenges (idg.com.au)

Submitted by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes: "A coming revolution in 3D printing, with average consumers able to copy and create new three-dimensional objects at home, may lead to attempts by patent holders to expand their legal protections, a paper from Public Knowlege says. Patent holders may see 3D printers as threats, and they may try to sue makers of the printers or the distributors of CAD (computer-aided design) blueprints, according to digital rights group Public Knowledge."
Security

Submission + - Research Inches Toward Processor Specific Malware (threatpost.com)

Submitted by chicksdaddy
chicksdaddy writes: The Windows/Office/IE monoculture is disappearing faster than equatorial glaciers — Mac OSX and iOS, Linux and Android...and whole new application ecosystems to go with each. That's bad news for malware authors and other bad guys, who count on 9.5 out of 10 systems running Windows and Microsoft applications to do their magic. What's the solution? Why, hardware specific hacks, of course! After all, the list of companies making CPUs is far smaller than, say, the list of companies making iPhone applications. Malware targeting one or more of those processors would work regardless of what OS or applications were installed. There's just one problem: its not easy to figure out what kind of CPU a device is running. But researchers at France's Ecole Superiore d'Informatique, Electronique, Automatique (ESIEA) are working on that problem. Threatpost.com reports on a research paper that lays out a strategy for fingerprinting processors by observing subtle differences in the way they perform complex floating point calculations. The method allows them to distinguish broad subsets of processor types by manufacturer, and researchers plan to refine their methods and release a tool that can make specific processor fingerprinting a snap.
Earth

Submission + - Gold Nanoparticles Turn Trees Into Streetlights (inhabitat.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Street lights are an important part of our urban infrastructure — they light our way home and make the roads safe at night. But what if we could create natural street lights that don’t need electricity to power them? A group of scientists in Taiwan recently discovered that placing gold nanoparticles within the leaves of trees, causes them to give off a luminous reddish glow. The idea of using trees to replace street lights is an ingenious one – not only would it save on electricity costs and cut CO2 emissions, but it could also greatly reduce light pollution in major cities.
Robotics

Submission + - Toy Robots Can Guard Your Home

Submitted by Orome1
Orome1 writes: Worried about burglars ransacking your house? Buy yourself some toy robots! It is what Robert Oschler, a Florida-based programmer, did. He bought a Rovio — a Wi-Fi enabled mobile webcam robot that can be picked up from toy sections of many stores — and modified it to suit his needs. The robot already has a camera, a microphone and speakers, but the improvements he made to the software allowed him to enhance the audio and video quality of this existing equipment, and to create specific routines for the robots. This way, every time he feels the need to check what's going on in the house, he simply goes online with his laptop and directs the robot through the house.
Displays

Submission + - E Ink unveils first color e-reader (newscientist.com)

Submitted by Kensai7
Kensai7 writes: E Ink, the firm behind the monochrome displays on the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader, launched its first colour ebook-reader display this week. Unlike LCDs that constantly draw power, electronic ink uses power to change the image – but not to display it – increasing battery life from hours to weeks. Electronic ink works by attracting black or white powders to the front of a clear pixel capsule.

Submission + - An Anonymous, Verifiable E-Voting Tech (ted.com) 1

Submitted by Kilrah_il
Kilrah_il writes: After the recent news items about the obstacles facing E-voting systems, many of us feel it is not yet time for this technology. A recent TED talk by David Bismark unveiled a proposal for a new E-voting technology that is both anonymous and verifiable. I am not a cryptography expert, but it does seem interesting and possibly doable.
Books

Submission + - How Google is Solving its Book Problem (theatlantic.com)

Submitted by
Pickens
Pickens writes: "Alexis Madrigal writes in the Atlantic that Google's famous PageRank algorithm can't be deployed to search through the 15 million books that Google has already scanned because books don't link to each other in the way that webpages do. Instead Google's new book search algorithm called "Rich Results" looks at word frequency, how closely your query matches the title of a book, web search frequency, recent book sales, the number of libraries that hold the title, how often an older book has been reprinted, and 100 other signals. "There is less data about books than web pages, but there is more structure to it, and there's less spam to contend with," writes Madrigal. Yet the focus on optimizing an experience from vast amounts of data remains. "You want it to have the standard Google quality as much as possible," says Matthew Gray, lead software engineer for Google Books. "[You want it to be] a merger of relevance and utility based on all these things.""
Australia

Submission + - Aussie research company brings Wi-Fi to TV antenna (zdnet.com.au)

Submitted by joshgnosis
joshgnosis writes: The CSIRO has unveiled new technology that could bring internet to people in rural or remote parts of Australia using their existing TV antennas. Analog TV signal is set to be switched off in 2013 but this technology could see the spectrum used to deliver internet straight into people's homes through their TV antenna. Gartner expert Robin Simpson told ZDNet Australia that this would make it much easier for companies to get new customers. "What appeals to me about it is that it re-uses existing infrastructure, all of the competing wireless technologies tend to use high frequencies and therefore require new base stations, new spectrum and new receiving antenna infrastructure as well," he said. "The fact that they're re-using the analog TV stuff gives them a much easier market entry strategy."
Google

Google Settles Buzz Privacy Suit 165

Posted by timothy from the lawyers-win-the-pie dept.
bouldin writes "This evening, Google e-mailed Gmail users who had been invited to Google Buzz to advise of settlement on a class-action privacy suit. The class action suit alleged privacy breaches due to the default privacy settings when Google rolled out the service. Terms of the settlement include $8 million to cover lawyer fees and fund privacy policy education on the Internet, but do not include cash payouts to Gmail users. With several outstanding class action privacy suits against Facebook and Zynga, it is interesting to see Google set this precedent."

Submission + - Google settles Buzz privacy suit (theregister.co.uk)

Submitted by bouldin
bouldin writes: This evening, Google e-mailed Gmail users who had been invited to Google Buzz to advise of settlement on a class-action privacy suit. The class action suit alleged privacy breaches due to the default privacy settings when Google rolled out the service. Terms of the settlement include $8 million to cover lawyer fees and fund privacy policy education on the Internet, but do not include cash payouts to Gmail users.

With several outstanding class action privacy suits against Facebook and Zynga, it is interesting to see Google set this precedent. How will Facebook and Zynga respond to their suits?
Google

First Chrome OS Notebooks Due This Month 246

Posted by timothy from the sooner-the-better dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "According to recent reports, a Google-branded Chrome OS notebook will be launched by Inventec later this month. Acer and HP will be launching theirs a month later, in December. This report is also backed by a source close to Google stating that the company is still on track to launch its Chrome OS by the end of the year, as well as its Chrome app store."
Bug

Serious Security Bugs Found In Android Kernel 230

Posted by timothy from the dang-thought-we-had-those dept.
geek4 writes with this excerpt from eWeek Europe: "An analysis of Google Android Froyo's open source kernel has uncovered 88 critical flaws that could expose users' personal information. An analysis of the kernel used in Google's Android smartphone software has turned up 88 high-risk security flaws that could be used to expose users' personal information, security firm Coverity said in a report published on Tuesday. The results, published in the 2010 edition of the Coverity Scan Open Source Integrity Report, are based on an analysis of the Froyo kernel used in HTC's Droid Incredible handset. ... While Android implementations vary from device to device, Coverity said the same flaws were likely to exist in other handsets as well. Coverity uncovered a total of 359 bugs, about one-quarter of which were classified as high-risk."

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