Tech Today w/ Ken May

MrKevvy writes “An Ottawa physicist is using laser light to create truly random numbers much faster than other methods do, with obvious potential benefits to cryptography: ‘Sussman’s Ottawa lab uses a pulse of laser light that lasts a few trillionths of a second. His team shines it at a diamond. The light goes in and comes out again, but along the way, it changes. … It is changed because it has interacted with quantum vacuum fluctuations, the microscopic flickering of the amount of energy in a point in space. … What happens to the light is unknown — and unknowable. Sussman’s lab can measure the pulses of laser light that emerge from this mysterious transformation, and the measurements are random in a way that nothing in our ordinary surroundings is. Those measurements are his random numbers.’” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Are you unemployed? More to the point, are you under employed and have extra time, but no job to fill it? A website called TaskRabbit is one of several that are hiring people to do immediate, temporary jobs for anyone. Need someone to do a chore for which you don’t have time? There might be someone who has time right now to do it: Erika Dumaine, 24, logged onto TaskRabbit this April and saw the following plea for help: “Buy me shoes ASAP. I stepped in dog poop.” So Ms. Dumaine, now a full-time nanny, bought and delivered a requested new pair of navy blue Toms shoes from Nordstrom’s to the poster, Guillermo Rauch. (Her payment: $17.) Aura Montano, a 21-year-old nursing student, stood on the Brooklyn Bridge holding an “I heart Anie Lewis” sign one Friday evening in August so she could attract the attention of Eric Lewis’s wife and hand her flowers as she walked home from work. (She earned $19.) Those handful of dollars per job can add up to a substantial sum: After submitting an online application, completing a video interview and going through a Social Security number trace and a federal criminal background check, Ms. Greenham joined the San Francisco-based company’s crew of about 2,000 “TaskRabbits.” She does odd jobs via the service every day, aiming to clear at least $25 an hour. So far, she’s completed about 250 jobs and has racked up around $1,500 a month. Like the guy who started renting out his personal possessions , we’re seeing more and more people using the Internet to create their own jobs and run microbusinesses. Isn’t that awesome? Link -via Marginal Revolution | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user mahalie

Lucas123 writes “President Obama this week issued a directive to all federal agencies to upgrade records management processes from paper-based systems that have been around since President Truman’s administration to electronic records systems with Web 2.0 capabilities. Agencies have four months to come up with plans to improve their records keeping. Part of the directive is to have the National Archives and Records Administration store all long-term records and oversee electronic records management efforts in other agencies. Unfortunately, NARA doesn’t have a stellar record itself (PDF) in rolling out electronic records projects. Earlier this year, due to cost overruns and project mismanagement, NARA announced it was ending a 10-year effort to create an electronic records archive.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Philips company introduces lights that run without electricity or solar power. Instead, they harness the bioluminescence of bacteria. You have to feed them fuel, namely methane and compost. The lights developed so far aren’t bright enough to read by, but they may have other uses, like illuminating dark roads and exit signs. Link -via Buzzfeed

After a series of one-sided hearings, luxury goods maker Chanel has won recent court orders against hundreds of websites trafficking in counterfeit luxury goods. A federal judge in Nevada has agreed that Chanel can seize the domain names in question and transfer them all to US-based registrar GoDaddy. The judge also ordered “all Internet search engines” and “all social media websites”—explicitly naming Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bing, Yahoo, and Google—to “de-index” the domain names and to remove them from any search results. The case has been a remarkable one. Concerned about counterfeiting, Chanel has filed a joint suit in Nevada against nearly 700 domain names that appear to have nothing in common. When Chanel finds more names, it simply uses the same case and files new requests for more seizures. (A recent November 14 order went after an additional 228 sites; none had a chance to contest the request until after it was approved and the names had been seized.) Read the comments on this post

The iPad hasn’t been much of a revenue stream for Microsoft, which has been focusing on developing its own competing tablet ecosystem. But as a software company, it can’t ignore the scores of millions of Apple devices out there for long. Sure, it has a few things in the App Store, but one of its biggest earners, Office, is entirely absent. The Daily reports that this is likely to change shortly, as Microsoft is planning to debut an iPad version of their productivity suite next year. It would be a stripped-down version more in line with their mobile apps than the desktop ones. Users can, after all, easily view and make simple edits on a tablet machine, but heavy duty spreadsheet or slide work will still necessitate a desktop OS. The price would likely be similar to that of Apple’s productivity apps: around $10, or at any rate in that vicinity. Price parity would be the ideal, but Microsoft may feel (perhaps rightly so) that its offering is worth more to enterprise users who have adopted the iPad informally as an email and calendar platform. On the other hand, Microsoft doesn’t need the money so much as the platform presence, so a higher price seems unlikely. Preventing the leakage of users to Apple platforms is crucial in maintaining Microsoft’s dominance in the office apps arena. The timing just turned out to be a bit awkward; Microsoft will certainly be putting out its own native and complete solution alongside Windows 8, but the iPad’s prominence is too great to be ignored at this point, and supporting it ASAP became more important than a unified tablet infrastructure. Hence a release to satisfy impatient customers and then later the “real” Office Tablet Edition.

Google has begun mapping indoor establishments like malls, airports, and retail stores, and today added the first indoor maps to its application for Android. Now, air travelers don’t have to bother with information booths and freestanding maps: Google Maps can show the way to their gate or the nearest coffee shop or bathroom. Turn-by-turn directions aren’t provided, but the maps will show users where they are in relation to nearby landmarks.  Instead of creating X-ray imaging satellites for the task, Google is partnering with the organizations that manage the facilities to get their floor plans into its Maps service. Airports in Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, and Tokyo are among the first to receive the indoor mapping treatment, joined by the Mall of America in Minnesota, certain locations of IKEA, Home Depot, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and others. While Google worked with these businesses to ensure a certain level of precision, the search company also set up a do-it-yourself site for other business owners to upload floor plans, blueprints, and directories and line them up with satellite images. “Detailed floor plans automatically appear when you’re viewing the map and zoomed in on a building where indoor map data is available,” Google said in an announcement today . “The familiar ‘blue dot’ icon indicates your location within several meters, and when you move up or down a level in a building with multiple floors, the interface will automatically update to display which floor you’re on.” But business owners that want to join in on the fun may have to wait a while. Google notes that “Google Maps Floor Plans is still in Beta. We’re still working out the kinks in how we process your floor plans, so right now we can’t give estimates on when your floor plans will appear in Google Maps for Android.” Indoor Maps was added to version 6.0 of the Google Maps application for Android, and will presumably be added to additional mobile platforms in the future. We asked Google if Indoor Maps will work on desktop Web browsers, but were told that “the new indoor maps feature of Google Maps is only available on Android mobile devices at this time.” Microsoft, by the way, already has indoor mapping of major malls for Windows Phone  and indoor mapping of airports  and malls for the desktop.  Read the comments on this post