November 2012 – Page 17

Scientists raise the alarm on human enhancement technologies

The Royal Society, along with the Academy of Medical Sciences, British Academy, and Royal Academy of Engineering, recently concluded a workshop called Human Enhancement and the Future of Work in which they considered the growing impact and potential risks of augmentation technologies. In their final report , the collaborative team of scientists and ethicists raised serious concerns about the burgeoning trend, and how humanity is moving from a model of therapy to one in which human capacities are greatly improved. The implications, they concluded, should be part of a much wider public discussion. More »

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Scientists raise the alarm on human enhancement technologies

Apple’s @me and @mac e-mail users now have @icloud, too

Owners of @me.com and @mac.com e-mail addresses—relics of Apple’s past attempts at offering cloud services—now own an @icloud address too. The company began sending out e-mails to those who have accounts on the old domains on Tuesday, letting them know they can now take advantage of Apple’s latest e-mail service in the form of iCloud. But worry not: if you’ve been using your old addresses but moved your account to iCloud earlier this year, you’ll still be able to keep using them (whether or not you choose to use the new @icloud.com address). The move was foreshadowed earlier this year as part of an iOS 6 prerelease beta to developers. In the iOS 6 Beta 3 changelog, Apple stated those signing up for new Apple IDs, as well as those enabling Mail on iCloud for the first time, would automatically receive an @icloud.com address. But if you had an existing @me.com address from the MobileMe days, or even a @mac.com address from the .Mac days, you would receive an iCloud address that matched the username you previously had. That appears to be the case now with Apple alerting users to the change. As pointed out by our friends at TidBITS , there’s no difference in implementation—if you want to make use of the new address, you just have to add it to your mail client. If you don’t want to use the new address, however, you don’t have to. You can stick to the old ones, as long as you weren’t one of the stubborn few who didn’t move your MobileMe account to iCloud before the beginning of August. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

US Warships Could Soon Run on Detonated Waves

Every one of the modern US Navy’s 129 ships, and its entire fleet of aircraft, relies on gas turbines for either basic propulsion or to generate electricity for their critical systems—typically both. But as fuel costs continue to rise, these turbines now burn through nearly $2 billion of fuel annually. That’s why the Naval Research Lab is developing a revolutionary new type of engine that could reduce our armada’s energy consumption by as much as 25 percent (and save $400 million a year) even as the Navy transitions to “all electric” propulsion systems. More »

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US Warships Could Soon Run on Detonated Waves

AT&T to spend $14 billion over the next three years on broadband, wireless infrastructure

AT&T has announced that it will be dropping a cool $14 billion over the next three years or so to beef up its wireless and wireline broadband networks. Project Velocity IP (VIP) will see the company boost its 4G LTE network to 300 million users by year-end 2014 and expand its wired IP broadband base to 75 percent of customer locations by the end of 2015. In addition, the operator intends to have fiber deployed to a million business locations and plans to expand U-verse by 8.5 million users to 33 million customer locations. It predicts that 99 percent of customers will get broadband services either through terrestrial IP or wireless 4G LTE when it’s all said and done. $8 billion will go toward wireless projects, while $6 billion will help goose up wired broadband — so, nobody can say the telecom giant is hoarding all those profits . Check the PR after the jump for a full breakdown. Continue reading AT&T to spend $14 billion over the next three years on broadband, wireless infrastructure Filed under: Wireless , Internet , AT&T AT&T to spend $14 billion over the next three years on broadband, wireless infrastructure originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Nov 2012 09:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink | AT&T | Email this | Comments

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AT&T to spend $14 billion over the next three years on broadband, wireless infrastructure

Electoral College college

It’s time for some American Democracy 101. Every election cycle, it frustrates me to no end that most news outlets spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the latest polls without explaining the significance those polls actually have on the outcome of a presidential election that isn’t truly decided by the voters. My Halloween wish this year was for someone to explain the electoral college to me, and Twin Cities journalist Frank Bures has obliged*. This piece has actually been around since 2000, but I think it’s a nice explanation of what the electoral college is, where it comes from, and why it’s going to matter to you tonight. The only votes that count in this election will be cast in mid-December by the 538 members of the electoral college. That’s who you and I will vote for on November 7: electors for Bush or electors for Gore, and their votes are the currency of presidential politics. Each state gets as many electors as it has representatives and senators. In all but two states, the winning party takes all the state’s electoral votes. …At first, in several states, there was no popular presidential vote. For decades after 1787, in states like Delaware, New York, and Georgia, the legislatures chose the electors. In South Carolina, there was no popular vote for the chief executive until 1860. But today, party loyalty prevents electors from acting as the free agents envisioned by the founders. In 99% of the cases, the electoral vote is a formality. …Electors tend to be either ordinary people—teachers, carpenters, middle managers, retirees, and lawyers’ or party activists sent to the state capital for half an hour of raw power. Some, like Marc Abrams, a 1996 Oregon elector I talked to in the course of researching this article” are blasé about choosing the most powerful man on earth. They voted in a room in the Capitol basement. It took about twenty minutes, and hardly anyone noticed they were there. When I asked Abrams how it felt, he said, “It was sorta cool. ” Read the full story at Byliner *Of course, I also wished for all the children of the world to join hands and sing together in the spirit of harmony and peace. And for a million dollars to be placed, in my name, in a Swiss bank account. Image: doris day , a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from velvettangerine’s photostream

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Electoral College college

Microsoft Retiring Messenger, Replacing It With Skype

Entropy98 writes “Windows Live Messenger will be shut down by March 2013, after nearly 13 years of service, so Microsoft can focus its efforts on Skype, its recent $8.5bn acquisition. No word on whether users will be able to transfer their WLM accounts to Skype. ‘According to internet analysis firm Comscore, WLM still had more than double the number of Skype’s instant messenger facility at the start of this year and was second only in popularity to Yahoo Messenger. But the report suggested WLM’s US audience had fallen to 8.3 million unique users, representing a 48% drop year-on-year. By contrast, the number of people using Skype to instant message each other grew over the period.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Retiring Messenger, Replacing It With Skype

Is this the oldest d20 on Earth?

Romans may have used 20-Sided die almost two millennia before D&D , but people in ancient Egypt were casting icosahedra even earlier. Pictured above is a twenty-faced die dating from somewhere between 304 and 30 B.C., a timespan also known as Egypt’s Ptolemaic Period . More »

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Apple Considering Switch Away From Intel For Macs

concealment sends this quote from Bloomberg: “Apple Inc. is exploring ways to replace Intel processors in its Mac personal computers with a version of the chip technology it uses in the iPhone and iPad, according to people familiar with the company’s research. Apple engineers have grown confident that the chip designs used for its mobile devices will one day be powerful enough to run its desktops and laptops, said three people with knowledge of the work, who asked to remain anonymous because the plans are confidential. Apple began using Intel chips for Macs in 2005.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why Google Went Offline Today

New submitter mc10 points out a post on the CloudFlare blog about the circumstances behind Google’s services being inaccessible for a brief time earlier today. Quoting: “To understand what went wrong you need to understand a bit about how networking on the Internet works. The Internet is a collection of networks, known as “Autonomous Systems” (AS). Each network has a unique number to identify it known as AS number. CloudFlare’s AS number is 13335, Google’s is 15169. The networks are connected together by what is known as Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP is the glue of the Internet — announcing what IP addresses belong to each network and establishing the routes from one AS to another. An Internet “route” is exactly what it sounds like: a path from the IP address on one AS to an IP address on another AS. … Unfortunately, if a network starts to send out an announcement of a particular IP address or network behind it, when in fact it is not, if that network is trusted by its upstreams and peers then packets can end up misrouted. That is what was happening here. I looked at the BGP Routes for a Google IP Address. The route traversed Moratel (23947), an Indonesian ISP. Given that I’m looking at the routing from California and Google is operating Data Centre’s not far from our office, packets should never be routed via Indonesia.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Why Google Went Offline Today

Researcher advises against use of Sophos antivirus on critical systems

Antivirus provider Sophos has fixed a variety of dangerous defects in its products that were discovered by a security researcher who is recommending many customers reconsider their decision to rely on the company. “Sophos claim that their products are deployed throughout healthcare, government, finance, and even the military,” Tavis Ormandy wrote in an e-mail posted to a public security forum . “The chaos a motivated attacker could cause to these systems is a realistic global threat. For this reason, Sophos products should only ever be considered for low-value non-critical systems and never deployed on networks or environments where a complete compromise by adversaries would be inconvenient.” A more detailed report that accompanied Ormandy’s e-mail outlined a series of vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit remotely to gain complete control over computers running unpatched versions of the Sophos software. At least one of them requires no interaction on the part of a victim, opening the possibility of self-replicating attacks, as compromised machines in turn exploit other machines, he said. The researcher provided what he said was a working exploit against Sophos version 8.0.6 running Apple’s OS X. Attackers could “easily” rewrite the code to work against unpatched Sophos products that run on the Windows or Linux operating systems, he said. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Researcher advises against use of Sophos antivirus on critical systems

Ken May

Month: November 2012