moonbuggy

‘Pope Benedict XVI is to become the first pontiff to harness solar power to provide energy for the Vatican, engineers say.

The deteriorating cement roof tiles of the Paul VI auditorium will be replaced next year with photovoltaic cells to convert sunlight into electricity.

The cells will generate enough power to light, heat or cool the hall, the Vatican engineers say.

Last year the Pope urged Christians not to squander the world’s resources.’

‘American cell phones can already check e-mail, surf the Internet and store music, but they could have a new set of features in coming years: the Department of Homeland Security wants them to sense biological, chemical and radioactive material.

Putting hazardous material sensors in commercial cell phones has been discussed in scientific circles for years, according to researchers in the field. More recently, the idea gained support among government agencies, and DHS said publicly in May that it wants businesses to start coming up with proposals. [..]

S&T spokesman Christopher Kelly said the theoretical system’s strength would lie in the sheer number of sensors. The cell phone sensors might be less sophisticated than highly advanced ones some developers are fitting into hand-held models, but they would make up for it in what Kelly called “ubiquitous detection.”’

‘One or two of us have regrettably lost phones in a place or two (I myself lost a Treo 650 and a Cingular 8125 within the first four months of last year) but our friends across the pond literally flush an astounding 850,000 phones down the crapper each year.

850,000. Down the toilet.

Research by SimplySwitch, a company specializing in price comparison and switching carriers, found 4.5 million handsets are lost or damaged in the UK each year. Second to the death by watery grave, 810,000 handsets end up amongst the peanuts and broken hearts at a local pub, 315,000 stay behind for an extra long cab ride, 225,000 keep riding public transportation after their owners leave and 116,000 ended up in some dirty laundry.’

‘Nuclear power stations will be banned in Western Australia by legislation aimed at thwarting the prime minister’s nuclear push, Premier Alan Carpenter says.

Mr Carpenter announced the new legislation at the WA Labor Party state conference.

The legislation will prohibit the construction or operation of a nuclear facility, the transportation of certain material to a nuclear facility site and the connection of nuclear generation works to electricity transmission or distribution systems.

Mr Carpenter said new technology was the answer to climate change challenges not nuclear power.’

‘Sometimes I have some challenging ideas, or crazy like some other people would say. This time I thought about our cat who is the whole day out, returning sometimes hungry sometimes not, sometimes with traces of fights, sometimes he stay also the night out.

When he finally returns, I wonder where he was and what he did during his day. This brought me to the idea to equip the cat with a camera. The plan was to put a little camera around his neck which takes every few minutes a picture. After he is returning, the camera would show his day.’

The images are here.

It seems a bit stupid to be claiming this is an alternative energy source, ’cause thermodynamics dictate you’ll be putting more energy into the system than you can recover from the combustion. But, it’s a neat little trick anyway. 🙂

see it here »

‘Canadian encryption vendor Certicom yesterday filed a wide-ranging lawsuit against Sony, claiming that many of the products offered by the electronics giant infringe on two Certicom patents. This might sound like business as usual until you realize what’s being targeted: AACS and (by extension) the PlayStation 3.

Certicom has done extensive work in elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), and the patents in question build on this work. The patents have already been licensed by groups like the US National Security Agency, which paid $25 million back in 2003 for the right to use 26 Certicom patents, including the two in the Sony case. Now, Certicom wants Sony to pay up, claiming that encryption present in several key Sony technologies violates Certicom patents on “Strengthened public key protocol” and “Digital signatures on a Smartcard.”

The biggest charge is that the encryption in AACS itself is infringing. The practical implications of this claim are huge; AACS is included in Sony’s Blu-ray players, PlayStation 3, and Blu-ray and PS3 discs. Certicom says Sony needs to take out a license for all of these uses.’

‘A Minnesota woman who was forced to the ground and handcuffed after a DirecTV dispatcher told police that an installer was being held hostage is suing.

“These are regular people. She’s a schoolteacher. … You shouldn’t have SWAT teams coming after someone if they know there’s not a crisis,” Marc Kurzman, a lawyer for Julie and Steven Pyle of Savage, Minn., told the St. Paul, Minn., Pioneer Press. The Pyles are seeking more than $75,000 in damages in a federal civil rights lawsuit against DirecTV, Savage police and Scott County enforcement dispatchers. [..]

Julie Pyle felt bad the job was taking the installers so long, so she baked them cookies, the lawsuit said.’

‘This weekend, learn how to hack your brain by making Mitch Altman’s Brain Machine! It flashes LEDs into your eyes and beeps sounds into your ears to make your brain waves sync up into beta, alpha, theta, and delta brainwaves!’

‘A faulty bank fax printed a message that was misinterpreted as a bomb threat Wednesday, leading authorities to evacuate more than a dozen neighboring businesses and a day care center.

The branch manager of the Bank of America called police about 10 a.m. after receiving a fax containing images of a lit match and a bomb with a fuse, bank spokesman Ernesto Anguilla said.

But text explaining the fax was an internal bank promotion failed to transmit. The missing text included the phrases “The countdown begins” and “Small business commitment week June 4-8,” according to a copy circulated by police.’

‘Manitoba First Nations are seeking compensation from Manitoba Telecom Services for every cellphone signal that passes through First Nations land, saying the airspace should be considered a resource like land and water.

At a recent economic development summit, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs resolved to negotiate revenue sharing with MTS for transmissions signals that cross the land, water and air space of their reserves and traditional territories.

“[The request is] based on the understanding that we do have some fundamental rights as indigenous people to land, water and airspace,” said Chief Ovide Mercredi of the Grand Rapids First Nation.

“When it comes to using airspace, it’s like using our water and simply because there’s no precedent doesn’t mean that it’s not the right thing to do,” he said.’

‘Peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks, which let users trade movies, music and software online, are increasingly being used to trick PCs into attacking other machines, experts say.

Computer scientists have previously shown how P2P networks can be subverted so that several connected PCs gang up to attack a single machine, flooding it with enough traffic to make it crash. This can work even if the target is not part of the P2P network itself.

Now, security experts are warning that P2P networks are increasingly being used to do just this. “Until January of this year we had never seen a peer-to-peer network subverted and used for an attack,” says Darren Rennick of internet security company Prolexic in an advisory released recently. “We now see them constantly being subverted.”‘

‘Doom9, the forum that made headlines last year by extracting and publishing a “processing key” used to lock HD-DVD discs, has published a new key. [..]

The last processing key leak created an Internet firestorm when the AACS licensing authority sent hundreds of legal threats to sites that published the key. The strategy backfired: within days, more than a million pages had published the key, ensuring that more people knew how to break HD-DVD players than owned the devices.

AACS has the capacity to “revoke” a processing key. When they do this, all HD-DVD players are unable to play new discs unless they get an update (woe betide you if your DVD player is on your boat, in your cottage, or at your grandparents’ place where there is no Internet access). The big question is whether the AACS can revoke keys faster than hackers can extract them.

It’s a race. AACS is losing.’

‘Apparently Sony thinks this one little “Special Screw” is so special, that it’s worth over 61 euro (appx. $82 US Dollars.)’

‘Tim Fofonoff, a 31-year-old grad student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stands at the base of a 50-foot-tall, graffiti-covered rock wall just south of Boston. He’s clipped into the Atlas Powered Rope Ascender, a toaster-size battery-driven device that he and his three co-inventors built themselves. With it, he’s about to do something no one outside of a Hollywood script has done before: rappel up a wall at an astonishing 10 feet per second. He stares hesitantly for a moment at the craggy rock face, presses a small button, and darts off the ground as if he were wearing a cape. Halfway up, he lets go of the button and stops, dangling, a little out of breath–it’s been awhile since his last test, and he’s forgotten what it’s like to fly.’

(4.4meg Flash video)

see it here »

‘Being crazy is hard, but it’s worth the effort. Especially if you’re a cop, paramedic, or social worker who may someday need to deal with a person having a psychotic episode. At those times, empathy can be crucial.

That’s where Virtual Hallucinations comes in. The training device, created by Janssen L.P., is a rig with earphones and goggles that plunges the wearer into the mind of a serious schizophrenic. The system offers two interactive scenarios. In one, you’re riding a bus in which other riders appear and disappear, birds of prey claw at the windows, and voices hiss, “He’s taking you back to the FBI!” The other features a trip to the drugstore, where the pharmacist seems to be handing you poison instead of pills, and hostile customers stare at you in disgust.’

‘The computer hardware business has razor-thin margins which means making a profit is tough. So the opportunity for Dell to get a recurring revenue stream from an existing customer long after the sale of the computer is more than just enticing, it’s huge. It also means a couple other things:

1. Dell and Google have an incentive to make it very hard for users to turn this off.
2. Because users can’t get rid of it, Dell and Google can get away with putting more ads on the page and pushing user-relevant content off the page.

They’re now doing both of these things.‘

‘What a day for Apple investors. The stock started off strong today on a lot of pre-market buying, despite news that Amazon will finally start competing on sales of DRM-free music.

Then, whoops, at 11:49 AM EST Engadget posted saying that the iPhone and Leopard operating system launches would be seriously delayed. They based the story on an internal Apple email that was forwarded to them. [..]

Apple’s stock promptly tanked on massive selling, going from $107.89 to $103.42 in six minutes (11:56 – 12:02). This wiped just over $4 billion off of Apple’s market capitalization. A lot of people lost a lot of money very quickly.

Well, it turns out that the email was a hoax. [..]’

‘These days, data get stored on disks, computer chips, hard drives and good old-fashioned paper.

Scientists in Japan see something far smaller but more durable – bacteria.

The four characters – T, C, A and G – that represent the genetic coding in DNA work much like digital data.

Character combinations can stand for specific letters and symbols – so codes in genomes can be translated, or read, to produce music, text, video and other content.

While ink may fade and computers may crash, bacterial information lasts as long as a species stays alive – possibly a mind-boggling million years – according to Professor Masaru Tomita, who heads the team of researchers at Keio University.’

‘A California lawmaker, who favors a penalty for people caught driving while using their cell phone, reportedly caused a car accident this weekend – while she was on her cell phone. [..]

Officials say the vehicle in front of Migden was slowing down for a red light, when the senator slammed into the back of the car – which then ran into another van. [..]

Last year, Migden voted in favor of a new law that will impose a minimum fine of $20 for drivers caught using a cell phone on the road, without the aid of a hands-free device.

Migden will not be fined, however, because the new law doesn’t take effect until July 2008.’

‘Instructs dealership technicians re: understanding and servicing a radical new transmission theory. (Circa ~1990)’

(8.8meg Flash video)

see it here »

‘That was evidenced by the 409 people who clicked on an ad that offers infection for those with virus-free PCs. The ad, run by a person who identifies himself as security professional Didier Stevens, reads like this:

Drive-By Download
Is your PC virus-free?
Get it infected here!
drive-by-download.info

Stevens, who says he works for Contraste Europe, a branch of the IT consultancy The Contraste Group, has been running his Google Adwords campaign for six months now and has received 409 hits. Stevens has done similar research in the past, such as finding out how easy it is to land on a drive-by download site when doing a Google search.’

‘Welcome to our side of the fence. The life of your average Tech Support person is one that is complex, fulfilling, and yet strangely sadomasichistic. Those that have escaped wonder why we ever turn up to work in the morning. Those that are still there know exactly what I’m talking about.

Here, you’ll find largely fictional, fake and phoney stories that just need to be told about the Tech Support business. Sure, it’s not as much of a downer as this intro makes it out to be, but that’s not the point. Sometimes, it’s just entertaining to think that it is this bad.’

‘Just in case you didn’t already piece it together, many (if not all) of the new HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc titles set for release on May 22nd will feature the latest revisions to AACS. Right, the update hinted at by those forced user updates to the WinDVD and PowerDVD software. Yeah, well no worries… it’s cracked. That’s right, a week before the disks have even hit the shops, the kids over at Slysoft have already released AnyDVD HD 6.1.5.1 (beta) which kicks AACS MKB v3 swiftly to the curb. Thus you can continue to rip all your newly purchased HD DVD and BD flicks for playback any damn way you like.’

‘A three-week wave of massive cyber-attacks on the small Baltic country of Estonia, the first known incidence of such an assault on a state, is causing alarm across the western alliance, with Nato urgently examining the offensive and its implications.

While Russia and Estonia are embroiled in their worst dispute since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a row that erupted at the end of last month over the Estonians’ removal of the Bronze Soldier Soviet war memorial in central Tallinn, the country has been subjected to a barrage of cyber warfare, disabling the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and companies. [..]

While planning to raise the issue with the Russian authorities, EU and Nato officials have been careful not to accuse the Russians directly.

If it were established that Russia is behind the attacks, it would be the first known case of one state targeting another by cyber-warfare.’

‘Media Rights Technologies and its digital radio subsidiary BlueBeat.com said in a press release Thursday that it had issued cease and desist letters to the high-tech titans. It argues that the companies have manufactured billions of copies of Windows Vista, Adobe Flash Player, Real Player and Apple’s iTunes and iPod “without regard for the DMCA or the rights of American intellectual property owners.” [..]

MRT, based in Santa Cruz, Calif., argues that its X1 SeCure Recording Control technology has been “proven effective” as such a protective measure by plugging the “digital hole” that allows even copy-protected music streams, when played back, to be captured and potentially copied. The company says that because the companies are avoiding use of its purportedly effective product, they are violating the DMCA.

“We’ve given these four companies 10 days to talk to us and work out a solution, or we will go into federal court and file action and seek an injunction to remove the infringing products from the marketplace,” CEO Hank Risan said in a phone interview Friday. [..]’

‘South Korea’s LG Philips LCD has developed the world’s first A4-sized colour electronic-paper – a paper-thin and bendable viewing panel.

The e-paper – which measures 35.9cm across its diagonal and is just 300 micrometres (0.3 millimetres) thin – can display up to 4096 colours, the world’s second largest liquid crystal display maker said in a statement.

It is designed to be energy-efficient, only using power when the image changes on the display, it said.’

‘A student told yesterday how he lost his mobile phone after being “mugged” by an angry flock of geese.

Sam Rozati, 23, was attacked by four birds as he walked past their nest.

They pecked so hard he dropped his phone.

Then one bird grabbed the mobile and disappeared into the undergrowth in Colchester, Essex.

Final-year law student Sam said: “They flew over and started biting my hand until I dropped the phone. I had to move away for my safety.”

His attempts to find his phone have failed — as it is set on silent.’