Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Avatar Officer Installed at Arizona-Mexico Border Station
August 7th, 2012Via: Scientific American: People crossing the Mexican border into Nogales, Ariz., this week will have a chance to meet U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s newest officer—a polite yet no-nonsense bilingual gatekeeper with a thick shock of black hair and a striped gray tie. He may not have a name or join his fellow officers for […]
Windows 8 Will Apparently Prevent Booting to the Desktop
August 7th, 2012Via: ZDnet: If you were one of those business users counting on being able to circumvent the new tiled Windows 8 start menu, you may be disappointed. The final release-to-manufacturing (RTM) builds of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 have been leaking to the Web for last few days. Those with access to the final […]
Huawei: The Company that Spooked the World
August 6th, 2012Via: The Economist: BANBURY, a little English town best known for a walk-on part in a nursery rhyme and as the eponymous origin of a fruitcake, is an unlikely fulcrum for the balance of power in the world of telecoms. But the “Cyber Security Evaluation Centre” set up there by Huawei, a Chinese telecoms giant, […]
Facebook: ‘Dark Profiles’
August 6th, 2012Via: Washington Post: Another time, Losse cringed when she learned that a team of Facebook engineers was developing what they called “dark profiles” — pages for people who had not signed up for the service but who had been identified in posts by Facebook users. The dark profiles were not to be visible to ordinary […]
NASA: Mars Curiosity Livestream
August 6th, 2012Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Captured Image of Curiosity During Parachute Descent Via: NASA: An image from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance orbiter captured the Curiosity rover still connected to its 51-foot-wide (almost 16 meter) parachute as it descended towards its landing site at Gale Crater. — They did it. […]
DARPA Receiver Hits 0.85 Terahertz
August 5th, 2012Via: U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: DARPA researchers have created the world’s first solid state receiver to demonstrate gain at 0.85 terahertz (THz). This is the latest breakthrough in the DARPA THz Electronics program in its quest for transistor-based electronics that will enable electronic capabilities at THz frequencies. This represents progress toward the second […]
‘And who wouldn’t want to be at the forefront of that?’
August 3rd, 2012Business is booming for terminator drone pilots. Via: Guardian: The electronic cavern is dark, save for the glow of consoles, and Lt Col Mike Weaver surveys his apprentice warriors with satisfaction as they project American might halfway around the world. One crew – two young men in flight suits seated before half a dozen screens […]
Full Disk Encryption on Solid State Drives
August 3rd, 2012I’m planning a system build and I want to use a SSD this time. TrueCrypt advises against using their crypto system with SSDs because SSDs use wear leveling routines to prolong the life of the memory modules. The problem is that, theoretically, the drive could write multiple versions of information, some of which could be […]
Knight Capital Group Down 60% Intraday
August 2nd, 2012Via: Los Angeles Times: Knight Capital Group, a major brokerage, said it lost $440 million in a trading glitch that rattled the stock market and renewed concerns over computerized trading on Wall Street. The Jersey City, N.J.-based firm said the pre-tax loss left its capital base “severely impacted.” Knight pinned the technology malfunction on newly […]
Body Blow to New Zealand: Pacific Fibre Dead
August 2nd, 2012I honestly thought we were seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. It turned out to be the train. Telecom wins again, the rest of New Zealand loses. Via: interest.co.nz: A Kiwi project to lay another undersea internet cable between New Zealand, Australia and the United States was scuppered by American concerns about […]
