Techno-News Blog Ray Schroeder, editor, OTEL - University of Illinois at Springfield |
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Saturday, July 04, 2009
US 'concerned' over cyber threat - BBC
The issue of cyber security is of "great concern" to the US, the nation's homeland security secretary has said. Janet Napolitano told the BBC that protecting against virtual attacks was something the US was "moving forward on with great alacrity". Speaking on a visit to the UK, she said the US also had "a number of capabilities" to launch such attacks. Ms Napolitano's comments follow the announcement last month of a new cyber security office in the White House.
Jackson’s Death Caused Spike in Web Traffic - Brian Stelter, New York Times
Did your Internet connection seem slow Thursday afternoon? It likely wasn’t your computer, it was the surge of interest in Michael Jackson’s hospitalization and death. Akamai said that traffic to news Web sites spiked around 6 p.m. Eastern, clocking in at one point at 4.2 million visitors per minute. During the rest of the day, the sites tracked by Akamai never exceeded 3 million visitors per minute.
New York City Starts Contest for Big Apple Apps - Sewell Chan AND Patrick McGeehan, New York Times
The winners don’t get a million-dollar Netflix Prize, but, hey, it’s dinner with a billionaire. From our colleagues at City Room: In an effort to improve government transparency and accountability and stimulate development of the digital media industry, New York City is inviting software developers and related professionals this fall to develop applications to help Internet users navigate vast stores of data in areas like citywide events, property sales, recreational centers and restaurant inspections. The winners of the competition will get a cash prize, recognition at a dinner with the mayor, and marketing opportunities. Friday, July 03, 2009
Iranians take risks to upload their dissent online - Associated Press
The Iranian protesters sneak their cell phones onto the streets and hit record, frantically trying to evade being caught or beaten. The shaky, grainy images are e-mailed to friends. Then they are uploaded to blogs, YouTube or social networking sites -- offering the world some of the only firsthand glimpses of tensions following disputed presidential elections on June 12. But the Internet window on Iran's upheaval is being increasingly blacked out by the information crackdown by authorities, who have restricted foreign media from the streets and blacked out many Web sites considered sympathetic to opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi and his claim that the election was stolen by fraud vote rigging.
China postpones controversial Web filter - Associated Press
China postponed a plan to require personal computer makers to supply Internet-filtering software Tuesday, retreating in the face of protests by Washington and Web surfers hours before it was due to take effect. Manufacturers would have been required to include filtering software known as Green Dam with every computer produced starting Wednesday for sale in China. The official Xinhua News Agency said regulators "will delay" the plan but gave no indication whether it might take effect later. It gave no other details.
A Robot that Navigates Like a Person - Anne-Marie Corley, Technology Review
European researchers have developed a robot capable of moving autonomously using humanlike visual processing. The robot is helping the researchers explore how the brain responds to its environment while the body is in motion. What they discover could lead to machines that are better able to navigate through cluttered environments. The robot consists of a wheeled platform with a robotic "head" that uses two cameras to capture stereoscopic vision. The robot can turn its head and shift its gaze up and down or sideways to gauge its surroundings, and can quickly measure its own speed relative to its environment. Thursday, July 02, 2009
Protecting an inalienable right in the age of Facebook - Simson Garfinkel, Technology Review
I'd be a fool to include my Social Security number in this article: doing so would leave me vulnerable to all manner of credit fraud, scams, and even criminal arrest. All of this would surely happen because a few bad people would read the article, write down my SSN, and pretend to be me. We know a lot more about the use and abuse of SSNs today than we did back in 2002. That was the year the California state legislature passed SB 1386, the first U.S. law requiring that consumers be notified when computer systems holding their personal information are "breached" or that information is otherwise compromised.
Simpler Data Visualization - Kate Greene, Technology Review
There are many ways to slice and dice data to better understand what it means. Software like Microsoft's Excel offers a simple way to create charts and graphs, while more complex applications, such as IBM's Many Eyes, provide more interesting ways to visualize more complex data. Specialized programming languages can do more by tweaking the design of visualizations. But these languages tend to be difficult for non-experts to use. Now researchers at Stanford are offering a suite of tools called Protovis that streamline the process of building data visualizations.
Firefox Aims to Unplug Scripting Attacks - Robert Lemos, Technology Review
Sites that rely on user-created content can unwittingly be employed to attack their own users via JavaScript and other common forms of Web code. This security issue, known as cross-site scripting (XSS), can, for example, allow an attacker to access a victim's account and steal personal data. Now the makers of the Firefox Web browser plan to adopt a strategy to help block the attacks. The technology, called Content Security Policy (CSP), will let a website's owner specify what Internet domains are allowed to host the scripts that run on its pages. Wednesday, July 01, 2009
The best Firefox extension: AutoCopy - Seth Rosenblatt, CNet news.cnet.com
Once you've highlighted anything from a single letter to entire multipage New Yorker articles, the add-on opens a small options box where your cursor is. Through the extension options, you can configure how long that box appears for, or turn it off. If you choose to use it, the post-copy options box offers a couple of useful choices. You can undo the copy, or access up to 10 previous clipboards and bring them back as the active clipboard. You can also paste to the location bar or the search bar, search from your default provider using the clipboard text as the search term, or open the text in a new tab.
Reading machine to snoop on Web - Mark Rutherford, CNet news.cnet.com
What if the wisdom of Web could be yours, without having to read through it one page at a time? That's what the military wants. DARPA has hired a company to develop a reading machine to reduce the gap between the ever increasing mountain of digitized text and the intelligence community's insatiable appetite for data input.
What the iPhone teaches us about cloud adoption - James Urquhart, CNet news.cnet.com
Chris Hoff (now a colleague at Cisco, but long a phenomenal blogger in his own right) described in a recent post a fascinating analogy for the inevitable adoption of cloud computing--the adoption of the Apple iPhone: The thing I love about my iPhone is that it's not a piece of technology I think about but rather, it's the way interact with it to get what I want done. It has its quirks, but it works...for millions of people. The point here is that Cloud is very much like the iPhone. As Sir James (Urquhart) says "Cloud isn't a technology, it's an operational model." Just like the iPhone. Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Thumbing Windows 7 onto Netbooks - Ina Fried, CNet news.cnet.com
Microsoft is considering offering Windows 7 on a thumb drive to allow Netbook owners to more easily upgrade their machines, a source tells CNET News. The move, which is still under consideration, is one of several things Microsoft has looked at to try to make it convenient to upgrade machines that don't come with a CD or DVD drives.
The perils of five-star reviews - Finlo Rohrer, BBC News Magazine
A publishing giant got into hot water after offering gift vouchers to anyone who would give their textbook a five-star review. It raises one of the key questions in online purchasing, how much can you trust the customer reviews you read? In the US, it is called "shill reviewing". You are the owner of a company whose product - Brand X Widget is struggling. On a major online retailer, Brand X Widget has been given a slew of one-star reviews by customers.
Web slows after Jackson's death - Maggie Shiels, BBC News
The sheer number of queries concerned Google. The internet suffered a number of slowdowns as people the world over rushed to verify accounts of Michael Jackson's death. Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack. Millions of people who searched for the star's name on Google News were greeted with an error page. Monday, June 29, 2009
Apple iPhone 3GS: The sum ($) of its parts - Brooke Crothers, CNet news.cnet.com
The iPhone, of course, is more than the sum of its parts, but the cost of individual components adds up--to $178.96, to be exact. A new analysis by iSuppli details the cost of the iPhone 3GS and the motley collection of chips inside. The entry-level (16GB) version of the iPhone 3GS carries a BOM (bill of materials) cost of $172.46 and a manufacturing expense of $6.50, for a total of $178.96, said Andrew Rassweiler, director and principal analyst, teardown services, for iSuppli, in a statement.
Microsoft offers free anti-virus - BBC
Microsoft Security Essentials is aimed at home users. A trial version of Microsoft's free anti-virus software has been launched in the US, China, Brazil, and Israel. Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) promises to provide people with basic protection against viruses, trojans, rootkits and spyware. The software giant has been criticised in the past for failing to include free security software with Windows.
Cell Phones That Listen and Learn - Kristina Grifantini, Technology Review
Researchers are increasingly using cell phones to better understand users' behavior and social interactions. The data collected from a phone's GPS chip or accelerometer, for example, can reveal trends that are relevant to modeling the spread of disease, determining personal health-care needs, improving time management, and even updating social-networks. The approach, known as reality mining, has also been suggested as a way to improve targeted advertising or make cell phones smarter: a device that knows its owner is in a meeting could automatically switch its ringer off, for example. Sunday, June 28, 2009
Apple: More than 1M new-model iPhones sold - Associated Press
Apple Inc. sold more than a million units of its latest iPhone model in the first three days, making it the most successful model yet.The iPhone 3G S went on sale Friday in the U.S. and seven other countries.When Apple Inc. launched the previous model last year, it also sold one million units in the first three days, but that model launched simultaneously in 22 countries. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster had expected the Cupertino, Calif., company to sell half a million 3G S in the first three days.
Computer Clusters That Heat Houses - Duncan Graham-Rowe, Technology Review
They have been used to model climate change, forecast economic trends, and simulate the intricate complexities folding proteins. Now IBM has something new in store for high-performance computers: heating buildings. Thanks to a novel on-chip water-cooling system developed by the company, the thermal energy from a cluster of computer processors can be efficiently recycled to provide hot water for an office, says Bruno Michel, manager of advanced thermal packaging at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory, in Switzerland. The goal, he says, is to improve the energy efficiency of large computing clusters and reduce their environmental impact.
$100 Laptop Becomes a $5 PC - David Talbot, Technology Review
The open-source education software developed for the "$100 laptop" can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to run aging PCs and Macs with a new interface and custom educational software. "What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost," says Walter Bender, former president of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. "It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines." |
