Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Serious Reading Takes a Hit from Online Scanning and Skimming
April 9th, 2014Via: Washington Post: Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won’t commit to. “I give it a few seconds — not […]
Navy’s New Railgun Can Hurl a Shell Over 5,000 MPH
April 9th, 2014Via: Wired: The U.S. Navy is tapping the power of the Force to wage war. Its latest weapon is an electromagnetic railgun launcher. It uses a form of electromagnetic energy known as the Lorentz force to hurl a 23-pound projectile at speeds exceeding Mach 7. Engineers already have tested this futuristic weapon on land, and […]
‘Heartbleed’ Bug in OpenSSL Puts Encrypted Communications at Risk
April 8th, 2014Via: PC World: Computer security experts are advising administrators to patch a severe flaw in a software library used by millions of websites to encrypt sensitive communications. The flaw, nicknamed “Heartbleed,” is contained in several versions of OpenSSL, a cryptographic library that enables SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Security Layer) encryption. Most websites […]
U.S. Navy $100 Million Program to Develop New Autonomous Aircraft
April 6th, 2014Via: Wall Street Journal: Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder has positioned himself to become the Jeff Bezos of the Pentagon. Much as the Amazon.com Inc. founder envisions mini-drones that deliver small packages across America, Adm. Klunder, the Navy’s research chief, wants to create innovative unmanned helicopters able to perform tasks now carried out by humans: resupplying […]
Amazon Dash
April 4th, 2014I, for one, find grocery lists so odious that I need a wi-fi enabled barcode scanner with voice recognition to make sure my whims are catered to immediately. Can we just cut to the chase and order coffin-sized pods full of lukewarm nutrient agar and neural interfaces? Via: Amazon:
The “Cuban Twitter” Scam Is a Drop in the Internet Propaganda Bucket
April 4th, 2014Via: Firstlook: This week, the Associated Press exposed a secret program run by the U.S. Agency for International Development to create “a Twitter-like Cuban communications network” run through “secret shell companies” in order to create the false appearance of being a privately owned operation. Unbeknownst to the service’s Cuban users was the fact that “American […]
DARPA: Biological Technologies Office
April 3rd, 2014I saw this trailer for The Machine a couple of weeks ago, and I couldn’t resist including it with this news from DARPA. Via: DARPA: Technology, like biology, constantly evolves. It is DARPA’s mission to stay ahead of the shifting technology curve by making critical, early investments in areas that cut across fields of research […]
NSA Infiltrated RSA Security More Deeply than Thought
March 31st, 2014Via: Reuters: “We could have been more sceptical of NSA’s intentions,” RSA Chief Technologist Sam Curry told Reuters.
GCHQ and NSA Targeted Private German Companies
March 29th, 2014Shocker. Via: Spiegel: Documents show that Britain’s GCHQ intelligence service infiltrated German Internet firms and America’s NSA obtained a court order to spy on Germany and collected information about the chancellor in a special database.
Possible Classified Aircraft Photographed Over Texas
March 29th, 2014Via: Aviation Week: The photos tell us more about what the mysterious stranger isn’t than what it is. The size is very hard to determine, for example, although the image size at contrailing height suggests that it is bigger than an X-47B. However, the basic shape – while it resembles Boeing’s Blended Wing Body studies […]
