Column of the Wolf

A daily mix of news covering technology, science, human rights, wolf news, stupid human tricks and many other topics.

29.12.2009

A German computer scientist has published details of the secret code used to protect the conversations of more than 4bn mobile phone users. Karsten Nohl, working with other experts, has spent the past five months cracking the algorithm used to encrypt calls using GSM technology. GSM is the most popular standard for mobile networks around the world

China on Saturday launched what it described as the world's fastest train service covering a distance of 1,068 kms at the average speed of 350 kms an hour. The distance between Wuhan in central China and Guangzhou in the country's south was covered by the high-speed train in two hours forty five minutes. The new service will cut the travel time between these cities by more than six hours. The train reached a maximum speed of 394.2 km per hour during trail runs that begun on December 9. The commercial operation was launched today with two trains covering the distance while passing through 20 different cities along the route

28.12.2009

For two years as a researcher with security company FireEye, Atif Mushtaq worked to keep Mega-D bot malware from infecting clients' networks. In the process, he learned how its controllers operated it. Last June, he began publishing his findings online. In November, he suddenly switched from defence to offence. And Mega-D — a powerful, resilient botnet that had forced 250,000 PCs to do its bidding — went down

If Amazon is Santa, then the 400 folks living in RVs outside the Coffeyville, KS fulfillment center at Christmas time are the elves. Amazon didn't always lure in workcampers from the RV community with the promise of free campgrounds and $10.50-$11 an hour seasonal jobs. Amazon had a bad experience busing in people from Tulsa, explained tech nomad Chris Dunphy. There was a lot of theft and a lot of people who weren't really serious. Workers from Tulsa were adding a 4-hour round-trip commute to a grueling 10-to-12 hour shift, Cherie Ve Ard added. They'd get there exhausted. The work wasn't exactly what Cherie had envisioned — via Slashdot

27.12.2009

Nearly 62 years after researchers at Bell Labs demonstrated the first functional transistor, scientists say they have made another major breakthrough. Researchers showed the first functional transistor made from a single molecule. The transistor, which has a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts, could behave just like a silicon transistor

26.12.2009

Generally speaking, the BBC isn't allowed to encrypt or restrict its broadcasts: the license fee payer pays for these broadcasts. But the BBC has tried to get around this, asking Ofcom for permission to encrypt the metadata on its broadcasts — including the assistive information used by deaf and blind people and the 'tables' used by receivers to play back the video. As Ofcom gears up to a second consultation on the issue, there's one important question that the BBC must answer if the implications of this move are to be fully explored, namely: How can free/open source software co-exist with a plan to put DRM on broadcasts? — via Slashdot

Panasonic has announced plans to create home batteries. They are lithium-ion batteries large enough to power a house for a week, making energy sources such as solar and wind power more feasible. Also, you can buy energy when it is cheapest, and don't need to worry about power outages anymore — via Slashdot

25.12.2009

i4i, the Canadian developer that won a $290 million court judgment against Microsoft, will be going over future Microsoft software extremely carefully to make sure its patent hasn't been infringed. Although Loudon Owen declined to say whether his company's software engineers had been picking through Office 2010 — which Microsoft said did not use i4i's Custom XML technology — he promised that they would be looking at all Microsoft software for evidence of wrongdoing. Microsoft released a public beta of Office 2010 in mid-November

There is a current mass market for cognitive enhancement products — and arguments about the black market potential for neurostim. The same neurostim device that uses electric impulses from a brain implant to treat people with Parkinson's Disease can be tweaked by a few millimeters and pulse rates to make cocaine addicts feel like they are high all the time... Mix the glamour of surgical self-improvement with the geekiness of high-tech gadget fetishism and you have a niche cosmetic neurostim market waiting to be tapped... — via Slashdot

24.12.2009

An Israeli hacker claims to have broken the copyright protection on Amazon's Kindle e-reader. The hack will allow the ebooks stored on the reader to be transferred as pdf files to any other device. The hacker, known as Labba, responded to a challenge posted on Israeli hacking forum, hacking.org. It is the latest in a series of Digital Rights Management hacks, the most famous being the reverse engineering of iTunes

The micro-blogging website Twitter is buying the location tracking start-up Mixer Labs for an undisclosed sum. Mixer Labs, founded by two former Google employees, makes an application for Twitter called GeoAPI. Twitter chief executive Evan Williams said the deal would allow Twitter users to show people where they are when they post updates to the site

The time has come for WikiLeaks, which calls itself the first intelligence agency of the people, to think locally, says Daniel Schmitt, a German computer engineer who is a full-time unpaid spokesman for the Web site. We are trying to bring WikiLeaks more directly to communities, he said in a telephone interview. The organisation has applied for a $532,000 two-year grant from the Knight Foundation to expand the use of its secure, anonymous submission system by local newspapers. The foundation's News Challenge will give as much as $5 million this year to projects that use digital technology to transform community news. WikiLeaks proposes using the grant to encourage local newspapers to include a link to WikiLeaks' secure, anonymous servers so that readers can submit documents on local issues or scandals. The newspapers would have first crack at the material, and after a period of timeperhaps two weeks, Schmitt saidthe documents would be made public on the main WikiLeaks page

Diabetics are saddled with the unenviable task of checking their blood sugar levels constantly, usually through a repeated ritual of pin-pricks and blood drawing. But a new non-invasive technology developed by a biochemical engineer at the University of Western Ontario lets diabetics keep tabs on their glucose levels with contact lenses that change colours as their blood sugar rises and falls

23.12.2009

Australia is the only Western democracy where human rights are not formally protected, either by law or by the Constitution. Minorities, elderly, and disabled want a human rights charter. But a proposal for a charter has unleashed fierce opposition from church groups and opposition politicians

The time has come for WikiLeaks, which calls itself the first intelligence agency of the people, to think locally, says Daniel Schmitt, a German computer engineer who is a full-time unpaid spokesman for the Web site. "We are trying to bring WikiLeaks more directly to communities." The organisation has applied for a $532,000 two-year grant from the Knight Foundation to expand the use of its secure, anonymous submission system by local newspapers. The foundation's News Challenge will give as much as $5 million this year to projects that use digital technology to transform community news

StatCounter Global Statistics shows that in the last few days Firefox 3.5 became the most used browser version worldwide, edging ahead of IE7. IE8 is rising fast (along with Windows 7), but over the last few months the slope of Firefox's worldwide curve has been steeper. In the US, IE8 has always been ahead of Firefox 3.5; in Europe Firefox has led since late summer — via Slashdot

22.12.2009

A small design company in America has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, alleging that it is unfairly using the Bing name for its search engine. Bing! Information Design, based in St Louis, Missouri, launched a legal action last week in a local court — alleging that the multibillion-dollar software corporation had knowledge of the mark and intentionally interfered when it relaunched its search engine with a new name earlier this year

The first three-dimensional carbon nanotube circuits, made by researchers at Stanford University, could be an important step in making nanotube computers that could be faster and use less power than today's silicon chips. Such a computer is still at least 10 years off, but the Stanford work shows it is possible to make stacked circuits using carbon nanotubes. Stacked circuits cram more processing power in a given area, and also do a better job dissipating waste heat

Sonitus Medical of San Mateo in California has created a small device that wraps around the teeth. It picks up the sounds detected from a tiny microphone in the deaf ear and transforms them into vibrations. These then travel through the teeth and down the jawbone to the cochlea in the working ear, where they are transmitted to the brain providing stereo sound. The same process of bone conduction explains how we hear our own voices, and why they sound different when they are recorded and played back to us. Some existing hearing aids also use bone conduction to transmit sounds to the cochlea, but these either require a titanium post to be drilled into the skull, or rely on cumbersome headsets. It also differs from conventional hearing aids, which employ air conduction to simply turn up the volume of sound travelling into the ear. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio voted Sonitus's device its top medical innovation for 2010

Scientists have identified a novel antifreeze molecule in a freeze-tolerant Alaska beetle able to survive temperatures below minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Unlike all previously described biological antifreezes that contain protein, this new molecule, called xylomannan, has little or no protein. It is composed of a sugar and a fatty acid and may exist in new places within the cells of organisms

21.12.2009

The Government's nicely-timed announcement last week that they will proceed next year with their Internet censorship scheme has not only drawn widespread ire in Australia but has continued to raise eyebrows overseas. The filter has been covered around the world from the BBC to news outlets in Poland, Pakistan and even China. Unfortunately, it's not a good look — despite any nuances the policy might have, we're gaining a reputation as the Iran of the South Pacific

European authorities may soon approve a global standard for SIM cards designed to operate in harsh conditions that could open new enterprise markets for mobile carriers. France Telecom's enterprise group Orange Business Services, said that the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) could ratify the standard as early as next year. Anne-Marie Thiollet, machine-to-machine (M2M) marketing vice president for Orange Business Services, said ETSI was close to achieving consensus between carriers, and modem and SIM card manufacturers

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a brief late Wednesday arguing that its lawsuit challenging an unconstitutional government spying law should be reinstated. The ACLU and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed the landmark lawsuit in July 2008 to stop the government from conducting surveillance under the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the executive branch virtually unchecked power to collect Americans' international e-mails and telephone calls by the millions, without a warrant and without suspicion of any kind

20.12.2009

The Etherpad code has been released by Google under the Apache license. Google's initial plan, after acquiring the service, was to use Etherpad's tech with its new Wave collaboration platform and to shut down the original service entirely. Soon after the Etherpad code was released, the Swedish Pirate Party launched their instance of the service at piratepad.net. An announcement, which also mentions a new Tor node, is published on the party website (Google translation). The original Etherpad service had in a short time become a killer application for collaborative work within at least the Swedish, and according to my personal experience, in the Finnish Pirate Party as well. The Etherpad open source project is available at Google Code — Slashdot

Three library associations have asked the Justice Department to oversee Google's plans to create a massive digital library, so as to prevent excessively high pricing for institutional subscriptions. They said that there was unlikely to be an effective competitor to Google's massive project in the near term. They also asked for academic author representation on the Registry board — via Slashdot

George Lucas's empire failed to strike back yesterday after he lost a legal battle with the British maker of Stormtrooper helmets for the film Star Wars. Andrew Ainsworth recently began selling replicas of helmets and armour made from his original mould, prompting a $20million lawsuit from Lucasfilm. But the Court of Appeal agreed that even though Mr Ainsworth did not own the design, he had not broken any British law because his creations were not art

19.12.2009

Twitter went offline for a while Friday after hackers calling themselves the Iranian Cyber Army apparently managed to change DNS records, redirecting traffic to another web page. Instead of the usual Twitter Web site design, visitors to the site instead saw a black screen with an image of a green flag and Arabic writing. The defaced site also included a message that said, This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army, and an e-mail address. Whether or not Iranian hackers are responsible for the attack wasn't immediately clear. However, Twitter and other Internet sites have been used by Iranian opposition groups and protestors to share details of anti-government protests in that country

A Paris court has found Google guilty of copyright infringement in a ruling which could have ramifications for its plans to digitise the world's books. The search giant must pay 300,000 euros in damages and interest to French publisher La Martiniere. It was one of many to take Google to court for digitising its books without explicit permission. Google was also ordered to pay 10,000 euros a day until it removes extracts of the books from its database

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