A collection of stories tagged 'technology' from Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/ Copyright 2006 RoomforMilk.com. RoomforMilk is not affiliated with Slashdot.org. Sat, 22 Nov 2008 01:46:54 EST Anti-Globalism writes with this excerpt from the Guardian: "China is stealing sensitive information from American computer networks and stepping up its online espionage, according to a US congressional panel. Beijing's investment in rocket technology is also accelerating the militarisation of outer space and lifting it into the 'commanding heights' of modern warfare, the advisory group claims. ... A summary of the study, released in advance, alleges that networks and databases used by the US government and American defence contractors are regularly targeted by Chinese hackers. 'China is stealing vast amounts of sensitive information from US computer networks,' says Larry Wortzel, chairman of the commission set up by Congress in 2000 to investigate US-China issues." The full study addresses these issues and others relating to the US-China relationship (PDF).Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26316 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/zhVROub0q2E/article.pl Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:05:04 EST I'm a programmer engaged to an inner-city public school teacher. I've been thinking for a long time now about what I can do to help close the technology gap, and I finally did something (very small) about it. I convinced my company to give me a few old computers they were replacing, refurbished them, installed Edubuntu on them, and donated them to her classroom. I also took some vacation time to go in, install everything, and give a lesson on computers to the kids. It was a great experience, but now I know first-hand how little technology these schools have. I only helped one classroom. The school needs more. (Really the whole district needs more!) And while I want to help them, I don't really know how. With Thanksgiving a week away and more holidays approaching, I suspect I'm not the only one thinking about this sort of thing. I know it's a hard problem, so I'm not looking for any silver bullets. What do Slashdot readers do? What should I be doing so that I'm more effective? How do you find resources and time to give back?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26311 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/nCMQr4Rv7wk/article.pl Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:05:08 EST desmondhaynes sends along a posting from the TechWatch blog detailing the sale of Transmeta (most recently discussed here). Linus moved ten time-zones west, from Finland to Santa Clara, CA, to join Transmeta in March 1997, before this community existed. Here is our discussion of the announcement of the Crusoe processor from 2000. Our earliest discussion of Transmeta was the 13th Slashdot story. "Transmeta, once a sparkling startup that set out to beat Intel and AMD in mobile computing, announced that it will be acquired by Novafora. The company's most famous employee, Linux inventor Linus Torvalds, kept the buzz and rumor mill about the company throughout its stealth phase alive and guaranteed a flashy technology announcement in early 2000. Almost nine years later Transmeta's journey is over."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26304 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/WZTtLmHTODQ/article.pl Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:05:01 EST Oblong Industries, a startup based in LA has unveiled g-speak, an operational version of the notable interface from Minority Report. One of Oblong's founders served as science and technology adviser for the film; the interface was an extension of his doctoral work at the MIT Media Lab. Oblong calls g-speak a 'spatial operating environment' and adds that 'the SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984.'" The video shown on Oblong's front page is an impressive demo.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26300 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/3ai48z0e-sY/article.pl Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:05:01 EST somanyrobots writes with an interesting followup in the New York Times to the earlier-reported substantial reconstruction of the woolly mammoth genome: "Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million. The same technology could be applied to any other extinct species from which one can obtain hair, horn, hooves, fur or feathers, and which went extinct within the last 60,000 years, the effective age limit for DNA." (The Washington Post article linked from the earlier post was much more skeptical, calling such an attempt "still firmly the domain of science fiction." The New York Times article, while describing the process in similar terms, also calls attention to recent advances in sequencing DNA, as well as recoding DNA for cloning.)Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26297 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/Gixr7v3xy7g/article.pl Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:05:01 EST Chinese-born physicist Shu Quan-Sheng Monday pleaded guilty before a US court to violating the Arms Export Control Act by illegally exporting American military space know-how to China. The 68-year-old naturalized US citizen, pictured here on his company profile, admitted handing over the design of fueling systems between 2003 and 2007. Also, in 2003 he illegally exported a document with the impossibly long name of 'Commercial Information, Technical Proposal and Budgetary Officer — Design, Supply, Engineering, Fabrication, Testing & Commissioning of 100m3 Liquid Hydrogen Tank and Various Special Cryogenic Pumps, Valves, Filters and Instruments.' This contained the design of liquid hydrogen tanks for space launch vehicles. He also admitted to a third charge of bribing Chinese officials to the tune of some 189,300 dollars for a French space technology firm." Here's the FBI press release regarding Shu's plea.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26232 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/7wANvRv8VWg/article.pl Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:05:09 EST schwit1 sends along an Ars Technica report covering the release of documents obtained under the FOIA suggesting that the Justice Department may have been evading privacy laws in their use of "triggerfish" technology. Triggerfish are cell-tower spoofing devices that induce cell phones to give up their location and other identifying information, without recourse to any cell carrier. "Courts in recent years have been raising the evidentiary bar law enforcement agents must meet in order to obtain historical cell phone records that reveal information about a target's location. But documents obtained by civil liberties groups under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest that 'triggerfish' technology can be used to pinpoint cell phones without involving cell phone providers at all. The Justice Department's electronic surveillance manual explicitly suggests that triggerfish may be used to avoid restrictions in statutes like CALEA that bar the use of pen register or trap-and-trace devices..." The article does mention that the Patriot Act contains language that should require a court order to deploy triggerfish, whereas prior to 2001 "the statutory language governing pen register or trap-and-trace orders did not appear to cover location tracking technology."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26220 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/xiakBSvFspg/article.pl Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:05:01 EST Intellectual Ventures (IV) will be setting up shop at the top of a Four Seasons this week as Headline Sponsor of the Ready to Commercialize 2008 conference hosted by the University of Texas at Austin. It's the patent firm's 100th university deal, though some, such as Professor Michael Heller at Colombia University, warn against such deals. '... their individual profit comes at the cost of the public ability to innovate. The university's larger mission is to serve the public interest, and some of these deals work against that public interest.' It's a follow-up to the conference IV sponsored last summer for technology transfer professionals entrusted with commercializing their universities' intellectual property, and should help IV, a friend of Microsoft, snag even more exclusive deals (PDF)."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26198 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/Jkkpm0hvEN4/article.pl Sun, 16 Nov 2008 15:05:01 EST With the announcement that President-Elect Obama will record his weekly address as a YouTube video to be posted at Change.gov, questions arise as to how an Internet-fueled candidacy based in part on a platform of government openness can begin to use technology to make government transparent. Aside from popular Slashdot policies, such as Net Neutrality, how do you think government (either in the United States or elsewhere) can best utilize technology to engage the public and make government more transparent and accessible?" Reader Rick Zeman points out a related New York Times story about how Obama will have to give up some of his communications gadgets because of the Presidential Records Act. Despite that, he apparently hopes to be the first US president to have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26196 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/lYGUGrKYOBY/article.pl Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:05:00 EST Yesterday Apple quietly slipped out an update to their Safari Web browser to version 3.2. The notable feature is that it finally adds anti-phishing technology, an area where Safari has lagged behind competitors. Aside from that, it provides some security fixes, improved JavaScript performance, and a slightly newer version of Webkit, pulling their Acid3 score up to 77." Apple forums across the Net are reporting frequent crashes in Safari 3.2, some possibly caused by 3rd-party add-ons, others perhaps related to the anti-phishing feature.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26193 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/gMZfLphoXUE/article.pl Sun, 16 Nov 2008 09:05:01 EST An air conditioning technology called the 'heat wheel' is getting a test drive in data centers, and early adopters cite impressive reductions in their power bills. The heat wheel — also known as a rotary heat exchanger or Kyoto Cooling — is a refinement of cooling systems using outside air. Rather than introducing exterior air directly into the server room (the air economization we discussed recently), the heat wheel briefly mixes the outside air and exhaust air to create an air-to-air heat exchanger. A data center in the Netherlands using this approach only has to use chillers 11 days a year." The article points out that the heat wheel is not new, but it hasn't been applied to data centers until recently.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26185 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/H59hrBa3t9M/article.pl Sat, 15 Nov 2008 17:05:01 EST Ostracus writes with news of another contender for a next-gen device suitable for displaying a newspaper page. It's very thin but weighs a bit more than a Kindle. "Plastic Logic, a spin-off company from the Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory, has recently released its design of a future electronic newspaper reader. This lightweight plastic screen copies the appearance, but not the feel, of a printed newspaper. This electronic paper technology was pioneered by the E-Ink Corporation and is used in the current generation Sony eReader and Amazon.com's Kindle. Plastic Logic's device, yet to be named, has a highly legible black-and-white display and a screen more than twice as large compared to current versions available on the market."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26183 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/7WyboqNGM-g/article.pl Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:05:01 EST The Guardian has an interesting article based on a new book (Outliers: The Story Of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell) which examines some persons of interest to computer technology (Bill Joy, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, amongst others). It examines reasons for their successes and strongly suggests a link between practice (10,000 hours by age 20 being the magic milestone) and luck. This maybe an obvious truism, but the article does give interesting anecdotes on how their personal circumstances led to today's technological landscape. It points out that many of the luminaries of the current tech industry were born around 1955, and thus able to take advantage of the emerging technologies.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26182 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/xdjzT4MkR7M/article.pl Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:05:03 EST Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's HCI Institute have developed a new input technology that allows mobile devices to use surfaces they rest on, like tables, for gestural finger input. This is achieved with some clever acoustic tricks — basically taking advantage of high frequency sound propagation through dense materials. Their video highlights some neat applications, such as controlling an MP3 player by scratching on a wall and muting a cell phone by scratching on a table. Further details are available in the academic paper (PDF)."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26181 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/kaaAjgofcoM/article.pl Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:05:01 EST The Obama-Biden transition team on Friday named two long-time net neutrality advocates to head up its Federal Communications Commission Review team. Susan Crawford, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, member of the board of directors of ICANN, and OneWebDay founder, as well as Kevin Werbach, former FCC staffer, organizer of the annual Supernova technology conference, and a Wharton professor, will lead the Obama-Biden transition team's review of the FCC. 'Both are highly-regarded outside-the-Beltway experts in telecom policy, and they've both been pretty harsh critics of the Bush administration's telecom policies in the past year.' The choice of the duo strongly signals an entirely different approach to the incumbent-friendly telecom policy-making that's characterized most of the past eight-years at the FCC." Reuters has a related story about Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), who plans to introduce net neutrality legislation in January.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26178 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/Ji6KMOEOEsI/article.pl Sat, 15 Nov 2008 10:05:03 EST Stanford artificial intelligence researchers have developed software that makes it easy to reach inside an existing video and place a photo on the wall so realistically that it looks like it was there from the beginning. The photo is not pasted on top of the existing video, but embedded in it. It works for videos as well — you can play a video on a wall inside your video. The technology can cheaply do some of the tricks normally performed by expensive commercial editing systems. The researchers suggest that anyone with a video camera might earn some spending money by agreeing to have unobtrusive corporate logos placed inside their videos before they are posted online."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26167 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/IYJ9h9GMdeQ/article.pl Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:05:19 EST The New York Times is reporting that Google has added a voice interface to their iPhone search software. Expected to make its debut as early as Friday, users will be able to speak into their phone and ask any question they could type into Google's search engine. The audio will be digitized and results will be returned via the normal search interface. "Google is by no means the only company working toward more advanced speech recognition capabilities. So-called voice response technology is now routinely used in telephone answering systems and in other consumer services and products. These systems, however, often have trouble with the complexities of free-form language and usually offer only a limited range of responses to queries."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26165 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/sPzkPQUw1jc/article.pl Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:05:02 EST George Washington University has today released a three-volume history of NSA activities during the Cold War (major highlights). Written by agency historian Thomas R. Johnson, the 1,000-page report, 'Cryptology During the Cold War, 1945-1989,' details some of the agency's successes and failures, its conflict with other intelligence agencies, and the questionable legal ground on which early American cryptologists worked. The report remained classified for years, until Johnson mentioned it to Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian, at an intelligence conference. Two years later, an abstract and the three current volumes of the report are now available (PDF) from GWU and the National Security Archive. Aid, author of the forthcoming history 'The Secret Sentry: The Top Secret History of the National Security Agency,' says Johnson's study shows 'refreshing openness and honesty, acknowledging both the NSA's impressive successes and abject failures during the Cold War.' A fourth volume remains classified. Johnson says in an audio interview: 'If you are performing an operation that violates a statute like FISA, it's going to come out. It always comes out.'" And reader sampas zooms in on a section in Document 6 about the growth of NSA's IT: their first Cray purchase in 1976, the growth of circuits between facilities, and internal feuds over centralized IT development vs. programmers-in-departments. "A young systems engineer named [redacted] was urging NSA to look at some technology that had been developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In 1969 DARPA had developed a computer internetting system called ARPANET... NSA quickly adopted the DARPA solution. The project was called platform."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26163 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/HkpZWnlHkdI/article.pl Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:05:01 EST Asus' budget motherboard wing, ASRock, claims that it's found a way to load a clean boot of Windows from a full shut down in just four seconds, using its new Instant Boot technology. The technology takes advantage of the S3 and S4 features of ACPI, which normally enable the Sleep/Standby and Hibernation modes in Windows respectively. However, by calling them at different times in the boot-up and shutdown process, Instant Boot enables you to boot up to your Windows desktop in three to four seconds, even after a proper shut down. Two modes are available; Fast mode, which uses S3 and boots up in around four seconds, and Regular Mode, which uses S4 and apparently takes between 20 and 22 seconds to boot. The advantage of Instant Boot when compared with normal Sleep and Hibernation modes is that you get the advantage of a clean boot of Windows, without what ASRock calls 'accumulated garbage data,' and you also get the security of knowing that you won't lose any data if there's a power cut and you lose AC power. There's also a video of it in action at the link above."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26122 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/0QCQxqC1DNA/article.pl Wed, 12 Nov 2008 22:05:23 EST In September, we discussed a class-action suit filed against Electronic Arts over the DRM in Spore. Now, two new class-action suits have been filed that target the SecuROM software included in a free trial of the Spore Creature Creator (PDF) and in The Sims 2: Bon Voyage (PDF). If this sort of legal reprisal continues to catch on, EA could be seeing quite a few class-action suits in the future. One of the suits accuses: "The inclusion of undisclosed, secretly installed DRM protection measures with a program that was freely distributed constitutes a major violation of computer owners' absolute right to control what does and what does not get loaded onto their computers, and how their computers shall be used ... [SecuROM] cannot be completely uninstalled. Once installed it becomes a permanent part of the consumer's software portfolio ... EA's EULA for Spore Creature Creator Free Trial Edition makes utterly no mention of any Technical Protection Measures, DRM technology, or SecuROM whatsoever."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26063 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/W6DQV5LByN8/article.pl Sun, 09 Nov 2008 15:05:12 EST With modern console technology making it easy to develop and distribute small games, more and more companies are taking advantage of gamers' nostalgia to re-release decades-old hits, and to create entirely new titles in older styles. Gamasutra takes a look at what the retro game fad has become, and where it can go from here. What old games or series do you think would translate well onto today's consoles? "Many gamers who bought Mega Man 9 did so because of the game's inherent nostalgia, or because they never had a chance to enjoy the older games on the Nintendo Entertainment System when they were younger. Mega Man 9 is very much a product of its context. Its gameplay is fantastic, but it too is a product of the time period in which it reigned supreme. It suggests the question: can neo-retro games stand the test of time? Will games that mimic or lampoon the 8-bit era remain relevant and interesting to the masses long after its original audience has disappeared?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26040 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/lDrQ8Jun0ww/article.pl Sat, 08 Nov 2008 01:05:02 EST A startup named Mgestyk Technologies claims that they have an affordable solution for 'Minority Report'-like PC control. They have released a video in which they use hand gestures to play games like Halo and Guitar Hero, as well as perform 'multi-touch' interactions for applications like Google Earth. Engadget and Gizmodo discuss the potential of the technology but point out that the system has visible lag when used for gaming. Will camera-based interfaces ever meet the low-latency demands of gaming? For how much longer will we still be using keyboards, mice and joysticks?"Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26038 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/piY-nLu5_uw/article.pl Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:05:09 EST With the release of this whitepaper, the FCC unanimously approved plans for a new technology with strong supporters and even stronger detractors. White Space Wi-Fi effectively allows manufacturers of wireless devices to incorporate transceivers that operate on unused DTV channels. Although the deregulation is new, the idea seems to have caught Google's interest recently as well. It seems that this has been rather rushed through the normally stagnant channels at the FCC. While some view it as interference in the already crowded spectrum, it seems the FCC Chairman really likes the idea of re-purposing dark parts of the newly allocated DTV bands once more." Update: 11/06 18:15 GMT by T : You may want to look at Tuesday's mention of the decision as well, but the additional links here are interesting.Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/26006 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/lJ604WGiriw/article.pl Thu, 06 Nov 2008 14:05:12 EST The US Army is ramping up the development of technology right out of the X-Files; 'making science fiction into reality' as Dr. John Parmentola — Director of their Research and Laboratory Management — puts it. The list of things currently in the works is amazing: regenerating body parts on 'nano-scaffolding,' telepathy through electronic impulses in the scalp, and self-aware virtual photorealistic soldiers that can be deployed in the battlefield through 'quantum ghost imaging.' To test these they want to use them into a massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft or Eve online."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25995 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/YCRDAp6cdfc/article.pl Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:05:03 EST The US Army is ramping up the development of technology right out of the X-Files, "making science fiction into reality" as Dr. John Parmentola--Director of their Research and Laboratory Management--puts it. The list of things currently in the works is amazing: regenerating body parts on "nano-scaffolding", telepathy through electronic impulses in the scalp, and self-aware virtual photorealistic soldiers that can be deployed in the battlefield through "quantum ghost imaging". To test these they want to use them into a massively multi-player online games like World of Warcraft or Eve online."Read more of this story at Slashdot. http://www.roomformilk.com/launch/25993 http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/8qdNTYOt-h8/article.pl Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:05:05 EST