Author: kenmay

Multi-gigabit cable modems ready to help you blow past your data cap

(credit: CableLabs ) Next-generation cable modems that can deliver multi-gigabit speeds have been certified by CableLabs, the cable industry’s research and development lab. The new modems use version 3.1 of DOCSIS (the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification), cable’s answer to fiber Internet speeds. The first DOCSIS 3.1 certifications were earned by Askey, Castlenet, Netgear, Technicolor, and Ubee Interactive, according to the announcement by CableLabs . The group’s testing confirms that the modems comply with the new DOCSIS spec. DOCSIS 3.1 reduces network latency and will enable “high-speed applications including Virtual and Augmented Reality, advanced video technologies such as Ultra High Definition 4K television, tele-existence and medical imaging, and gaming,” CableLabs said. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Multi-gigabit cable modems ready to help you blow past your data cap

EU Companies Can Monitor Employees’ Private Conversations While At Work

An anonymous reader writes: A recent ruling of the European Court of Human Rights has granted EU companies the right to monitor and log private conversations that employees have at work while using the employer’s devices. The ruling came after a Romanian was fired for using Yahoo Messenger back in 2007, while at work, to have private conversations with his girlfriend. He argued that his employer was breaking his right for privacy and correspondence. Both Romanian and European courts disagreed. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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EU Companies Can Monitor Employees’ Private Conversations While At Work

David Bowie’s ISP, as remembered by the guy who helped create “BowieNet”

David Bowie. (credit: davidbowie.com ) When David Bowie became an Internet service provider in 1998, a man named Ron Roy helped him start the business. Now, three days after the legendary musician’s death at age 69, we’ve interviewed Roy about how “BowieNet” came to life and why it was so important to the artist. “David was tremendously involved from day one,” Roy told Ars via e-mail. Roy appeared in some of the first press releases that followed BowieNet’s US and UK launches; we tracked him down at his current business, Wines That Rock . It was a lot easier to become an Internet service provider in 1998 than it is today. Instead of the enormous expense of  deploying fiber or cable throughout a city, ISPs could spring to life by selling dial-up connections to anyone with a telephone line. BowieNet’s dial-up service sold full access to the Internet for $19.95 a month (or £10.00 in the UK), but it was also a fan club that provided exclusive access to David Bowie content such as live video feeds from his studio. Customers who already had a dial-up Internet provider and didn’t want to switch could buy access to BowieNet content separately for $5.95 a month. BowieNet had about 100,000 customers at its peak, Roy said. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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David Bowie’s ISP, as remembered by the guy who helped create “BowieNet”

19th Century Shipwreck Discovered by Australians Still Looking for MH370

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 mysteriously disappeared on March 8, 2014—nearly two years ago, if you can believe it. And while Australian researchers still haven’t found the plane, they recently discovered a shipwreck dating back to the 19th century . Read more…

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19th Century Shipwreck Discovered by Australians Still Looking for MH370

The first working Hyperloop could arrive by the end of 2016

Rob Lloyd, the recently-minted CEO of Hyperloop Technologies , believes that his firm will have a fully-working test loop ready for the end of the year. The executive is here at CES to oversee the breaking ground on the facility which is being constructed on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The two-mile track is, if all things go to plan, expected to be ready for passengers to try out before the end of the holidays. We sat down with Lloyd to talk about the past, present of future of Hyperloop in this wide-ranging interview with Engadget.

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The first working Hyperloop could arrive by the end of 2016

This Is How Much the Average American Diet Has Changed Over the Last 40 Years

Americans, unsurprisingly, are not hitting the major dietary milestones of the recommended diet —and they haven’t been for quite some time. But the ways in which they’re doing that has changed quite a bit in the last few decades. Read more…

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This Is How Much the Average American Diet Has Changed Over the Last 40 Years

Verizon Accused of Helping Spammers By Routing Millions of Stolen IP Addresses

An anonymous reader writes: Spamhaus, an international non-profit organization that hunts down spammers, is accusing Verizon of indifference and facilitation of cybercrime because it failed for the past six months to take down stolen IP routes hosted on its network from where spam emails originated. Spamhaus detected over 4 million IP addresses, mainly stolen from China and Korea, and routed on Verizon’s servers with forged paperwork. Spamhaus says, “For a start, it seems very strange that a large US-based ISP can be so easily convinced by abusers to route huge IP address blocks assigned to entities in the Asian-Pacific area. Such blocks are not something that can go unnoticed in the noise of everyday activity. They are very anomalous, and should call for an immediate accurate verification of the customer. Internal vetting processes at large ISPs should easily catch situations so far from normality.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Verizon Accused of Helping Spammers By Routing Millions of Stolen IP Addresses

Graphene Flakes Facilitate Neuromorphic Chips

An anonymous reader writes: One of the hot areas of semiconductor research right now is the creation of so-called neuromorphic chips — processors whose transistors are networked in such a way to imitate how neurons interact. “One way of building such transistors is to construct them of lasers that rely on an encoding approach called “spiking.” Depending on the input, the laser will either provide a brief spike in its output of photons or not respond at all. Instead of using the on or off state of the transistor to represent the 1s and 0s of digital data, these neural transistors rely on the time intervals between spikes.” Now, research published in Nature Scientific Reports has shown how to stabilize these laser spikes, so that they’re responsive at picosecond intervals. “The team achieved this by placing a tiny piece of graphene inside a semiconductor laser. The graphene acts as a ‘saturable absorber, ‘ soaking up photons and then emitting them in a quick burst. Graphene, it turns out, makes a good saturable absorber because it can take up and release a lot of photons extremely fast, and it works at any wavelength; so lasers emitting different colors could be used simultaneously, without interfering with each other—speeding processing.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Graphene Flakes Facilitate Neuromorphic Chips

Here’s How Long Those Small Condiment Packets Last Before They Expire

You open up your cupboard, or take a peak in your camping cooking supplies, and you find a bunch of old ketchup packets. Are they still good to eat? How long do they last? Let’s find out. Read more…

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Here’s How Long Those Small Condiment Packets Last Before They Expire

Autonomous car makers hand over data on glitches and failures to California DMV

Delphi’s autonomous vehicle. (credit: Delphi ) If you want to build a self-driving car and test it on public roads in California, the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles says that every year you have to submit a disengagement report—basically a list of every time the human driver had to take over for the car. This year, Bosch, Delphi, Google, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, and Volkswagen Group were required to submit disengagement reports, and the results are largely what you’d expect from a novel and complicated technology. Google, as the company that’s driven the most miles on public roads in California, said it experienced 341 significant disengagement events over 424,000 miles of driving  (PDF). Similarly, Nissan reported that it drove 1,485 miles on public roads in California and it experienced 106 disengagements. Delphi’s two autonomous vehicles drove 16,662 miles and the company reported 405 disengagements. Tesla, for its part, reported no disengagements  (PDF) from fully-autonomous mode from the time it was issued a permit to test self-driving cars in California. While it’s tempting to use those numbers as a comparison point as to how good a company’s autonomous vehicles are, there are many variables that could obscure an otherwise accurate comparison. The numbers only reflect miles driven on California roads and disengagements that happen in that state. If a company primarily tests its public road driving in another state, those numbers won’t be reflected in these reports. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Autonomous car makers hand over data on glitches and failures to California DMV