Google has updated its terms of service, allowing the company to use your profile information in ads. That means your face, name and personal details will start popping up all over your network.
Your Face and Name Will Appear in Google Ads Starting Today.
Using inexpensive materials configured and tuned to capture microwave signals, researchers at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering have designed a power-harvesting device with efficiency similar to that of modern solar panels.
The device wirelessly converts the microwave signal to direct current voltage capable of recharging a cell phone battery or other small electronic device, according to a report appearing in the journal Applied Physics Letters in December 2013. (It is now available online.)
It operates on a similar principle to solar panels, which convert light energy into electrical current. But this versatile energy harvester could be tuned to harvest the signal from other energy sources, including satellite signals, sound signals or Wi-Fi signals, the researchers say.
http://www.pratt.duke.edu/news/wireless-device-converts-lost-energy-electric-power
This is bad news for energy companies, great for the environment
Feedly has done an evil thing: it is now demanding anyone who uses the service to log in via a Google+ account – thereby helping the Chocolate Factory to scrape yet more data from netizens.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/08/feedly_insists_on_google_plus_sign_in/
Update:
Feedly is rolling this back, 1000s of users quit using Feedly
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/08/feedly_kills_google_plus_login/
Engineers from the University of Sheffield have developed a way to significantly reduce the volume of some higher activity wastes, which will reduce the cost of interim storage and final disposal.
The researchers, from the University’s Faculty of Engineering, have shown that mixing plutonium-contaminated waste with blast furnace slag and turning it into glass reduces its volume by 85-95 per cent. It also effectively locks in the radioactive plutonium, creating a stable end product.
http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/news/nr/nuclear-research-sheffield-university-fukushima-1.324913
Aside from the fact that these dabases leak all the time and it’s a major breach of privacy, this will only help track a few hundred suspected terrorists. Coming two weeks after launching AlertOnline, an initiative raising awereness of the dangers of online activity, this seems a bit wry.
Feedly has done an evil thing: it is now demanding anyone who uses the service to log in via a Google+ account – thereby helping the Chocolate Factory to scrape yet more data from netizens.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/08/feedly_insists_on_google_plus_sign_in/
One of the better, understandable, but still technical, explanations of why the encrypted password list of 38 million users being out in the open is such a disaster.
Anatomy of a password disaster – Adobe’s giant-sized cryptographic blunder | Naked Security.
This biological microcomputer sprang from the mind of Drew Endy, PhD, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford. In three scientific papers released over a 13-month span in 2012 and 2013, Endy and a team of researchers from his lab showed how they used ordinary genetic engineering techniques to turn the bacterium E. coli — that stalwart of the Petri dish — into a machine capable of the basic functions of a computer: logic, data storage and data transmission. They also showed that their techniques will work in any type of living cell, not just bacteria.
And while others have accomplished similar feats, Endy’s system has the singular advantage of being able to amplify the information flow.
“Amplification is what makes this system the best,” says Endy. “It’s the equivalent of the transistor in an electronic device. It’s what makes our computer really useful.”
[…]
An advocate of open-source technology (which, as with open-source software, makes its discoveries and technologies free to the public), he has made the instructions available free online. A video primer is also on YouTube (http://stan.md/15u6OtC); it’s been viewed nearly 30,000 times.
A Melbourne security professional has sent ear-piercing ‘garbage’ tunes to the top of online music charts by spoofing track plays.
Despite that Peter Filimore (@typhoonfilsy) has never played an instrument, in a month he accrued hundreds of thousands of plays for his tunes hosted in online music charts, trumping artists like P!nk, Nicki Minaj, Flume and chart topper album The Heist and making $1000 in royalties in the process.
Not only that, but he’s thought of a way to use his technique to bump rival artists off the services entirely as a DDoS.
So does the British Phonography Industry
RIAA Uses Pirated Code on Its Website Because of Course It Does.
Of the 150,000 stars in our Milky Way galaxy snapped by the NASA probe in the past three years, more than 3,000 planets have been identified. Scientists then focused on the stars similar to our Sun and tried to find planets between one and two times the size of Earth in those stars’ Goldilocks orbital zones.
Their findings suggest that 22 per cent of those stars had planets about the size of Earth that could harbor liquid water – a basic building block for life as we know it. The team said the actual total could be much higher given the difficulty involved in finding them. Kepler relies on seeing planets pass directly in front of the target star on the same orbital plane as the telescope.
Galaxy is CRAMMED with EARTHLIKE WORLDS – plus, possibly ALIENS • The Register.
In 2012 I bought an apartment specifically to rent out on airbnb. I’ve been managing it remotely for the past year. This post includes everything I learned as well as some revenue numbers
Have you ever wanted to get your hands on the latest game, only to find that the Google Play thought it wasn’t compatible with your phone?Maybe you don’t have a snapdragon device, but youre’re pretty sure an old device could handle it still. Have a Kindle Fire and want access to more than just the Amazon AppStore?Until now you’ve been stuck, but a new online service also come with Chrome extension called APK Downloader will allow you to download an apk file from the Google Play directly to your desktop rather than to your device.
http://apps.evozi.com/apk-downloader/
Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging allows you to have private conversations over instant messaging by providing:
Encryption
No one else can read your instant messages.
Authentication
You are assured the correspondent is who you think it is.
Deniability
The messages you send do not have digital signatures that are checkable by a third party. Anyone can forge messages after a conversation to make them look like they came from you. However,during a conversation, your correspondent is assured the messages he sees are authentic and unmodified.
Perfect forward secrecy
If you lose control of your private keys, no previous conversation is compromised.
It plugs in to loads of xmpp clients out of the box
As one way to utilize this flexibility, SEL have produced side-roll and top-roll OLED displays, with the display curving over the edge where a bezel would usually be.The prototypes on show were a 3.4-inch 960×540 pixel display with a resolution of 326 ppi, and a 5.4-inch 960×1280 pixel display with a 302 ppi resolution. They still provide the high color reproduction characteristic of OLED displays.
http://www.diginfo.tv/v/13-0084-d-en.php
This means that software can position buttons anywhere they like around the side of your mobile or tablet. The video in the link is very worth watching.
Nortel went bankrupt in 2009. In 2011, it held an auction for its massive patent portfolio. The winners of the auction were Apple, Microsoft, Sony, RIM, and others, who bought the patents for $4.5 billion as a consortium named Rockstar Bidco.
http://m.slashdot.org/story/193739
Great. They want to stop Google from being a search engine. Patents are really good for innovation. Not.
Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging allows you to have private conversations over instant messaging by providing:
Encryption
No one else can read your instant messages.
Authentication
You are assured the correspondent is who you think it is.
Deniability
The messages you send do not have digital signatures that are checkable by a third party. Anyone can forge messages after a conversation to make them look like they came from you. However,during a conversation, your correspondent is assured the messages he sees are authentic and unmodified.
Perfect forward secrecy
If you lose control of your private keys, no previous conversation is compromised.
It plugs in to loads of xmpp clients out of the box
The court has struggled over the issue of allowing the copying of the hard drive. This is a serious invasion of privacy and is certainly not a standard remedy… The tipping point for the court comes from evidence that the defendants – in their own words – are hackers. By labeling themselves this way, they have essentially announced that they have the necessary computer skills and intent to simultaneously release the code publicly and conceal their role in that act. And concealment likely involves the destruction of evidence on the hard drive of Thuen’s computer. For these reasons, the court finds this is one of the very rare cases that justifies seizure and copying of the hard drive.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/10/23/hacker_loses_4th_amendment_rights_case/
The italics are mine. The definition of a hacker runs more into using things for a purpose they were not originally intended for. This destructive interpretation on the word by the US courts is worrying, because it blankets a huge grouo of people who are furthering technical innovation all over the world.
Given the US track record of handling people they don’t grant rights to, is this the start of an anti-intellectuals pogrom?
Specifically the qra (quick reactiin alert) and renegade tasks
Not only does this make economic sense, but also taking a wider view at European military cooperation, this is hopefully a first step towards many more far reaching integrated forces within the EU. Doing so will ease economic defense spending burdens, but also create a much more effective and flexible armed forces structure that can put some serious punitive weight behind the EU.
An identity theft service that sold Social Security and drivers license numbers — as well as bank account and credit card data on millions of Americans — purchased much of its data from Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, according to a lengthy investigation by KrebsOnSecurity.
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/10/experian-sold-consumer-data-to-id-theft-service/
Looks like it. It’s protocol independent, reduces complexity and duplication and will sigificantly reduce the packet filtering footprint in the kernel. It should also make it more easily extensible in the future, as it runs in user space in a virtual machine.
http://lwn.net/Articles/324989/
The gist is pretty simple: drive traffic to sites via links, recieve money (about $1 per 1000 hits) via their affiliate advertising programmes.
http://torrentfreak.com/making-money-from-movie-streaming-sites-an-insiders-story-131019/
These guys have a sticker SIM card which you stick over your existing SIM card. Once you’re roaming, it intercepts the call and re routes it to it’s own services. These are way cheaper than the roaming costs of the company you are using. Once you’re back, you are using your own provider.
