We’ve known for years that China’s military is spearheading one of the biggest land reclamation projects ever in the middle of the South China Sea. But a report from the Pentagon yesterday says that the project is far larger than previously thought: 2, 900 acres of new land has been created—roughly tripling the size of the entire group of natural islands. Read more…
Read More:
China’s Dredging In the South China Sea Created 2,900 Acres of New Islands
So far, the most practical use man has found for ferrofluid—the mesmerizing black goo that reacts to magnets in cool ways—is as gorgeous eye candy. And that’s totally OK, because how else would have Nike realized this slick animated display for its new Kevin Durant sneakers? Read more…
Taken from:
An Amazing Ferrofluid Display Brings Nike’s New Sneakers To Life
An anonymous reader writes: It’s bad enough that some places have outfitted their police vehicles with automated license plate scanners, but now the city of San Jose may take it one step further. They’re considering a proposal to install plate readers on their fleet of garbage trucks. This would give them the ability to blanket virtually every street in the city with scans once a week. San Jose officials made this proposal ostensibly to fight car theft, but privacy activists have been quick to point out the unintended consequences. ACLU attorney Chris Conley said, “If it’s collected repeatedly over a long period of time, it can reveal intimate data about you like attending a religious service or a gay bar. People have a right to live their lives without constantly being monitored by the government.” City councilman Johnny Khamis dismissed such criticism: “This is a public street. You’re not expecting privacy on a public street.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See the original article here:
San Jose May Put License Plate Scanners On Garbage Trucks
You may not yet have stumbled across the Activity Log page in your wanderings around Facebook, but it’s worth exploring. It provides a blow-by-blow account of everything you do on the social network, and you can use it to take back likes or comments, find your favorite posts again, change your privacy settings and more. Read more…
See the original post:
Fix All Your Facebook Mistakes With the Activity Log
Chatroulette often brings surprises, but usually not good ones. However, several users were recently greeted with an amazing real life, live-streaming Doom-style first person shooter ( FPS ) game complete with undead characters and a creepy graveyard setting. To play, they talked the hero character through the scenes, giving commands like “Run! Run, fat boy, run!”, “Go for the head shot!” or “Check what’s in that pot!” The “game” was replete with sound effects, blood and guns, including a “rhino turret” and rocket launcher. The reaction of the players was beyond hilarious, with many adapting surprisingly quickly to the scenario (“Hit him again to make sure he’s dead!”). The UK production team from Realm Pictures released a companion making-of video, and it’s hard to believe they only spent £900 (about $1, 450) on the whole thing. There were video and sound effects experts who did their stuff on-the-fly, along with makeup people, a gun touch-up painter (they used nerf guns), and a cosplayer. The main actor wore a motorcycle helmet with a GoPro camera, light and Teradek HDMI transmitter. 30 intrepid extras from a nearby town played the zombies. The producers added plenty of on-the-nose FPS touches like overly-dramatic gun-cocking, comic health avatars and useless hand gestures. The show’s director, who also played the hero witih a Batman-style voice, tried to lead players into making the correct decisions. Many didn’t catch on, resulting in a gruesome death, but those with some experience in the genre eventually got to the final scenario, an encounter with the “Boss.” You’ll definitely want to see how that plays out below. Filed under: Gaming Comments Via: Reddit Source: Realm Pictures (YouTube) Tags: Chatroulette, FirstPersonShooter, FPS, live-action, livestream, omegle, RealmPictures, video
See more here:
Chatroulette users stumble into a live-action zombie shooter
The ratio of newborn boys to girls slightly and consistently leans toward males: around 106 boys are born for every 100 girls. If that seems odd to you, it should : the way sperm form suggests that the ratio of X-sperm to Y-sperm should be exactly 50:50–and scientists are only now beginning to understand why the skew occurs. Read more…
Read More:
We’re Only Beginning To Understand Why Humans Have a Skewed Sex Ratio
The hyperloop sounds like science fiction, Elon Musk’s pipe dream: leapfrog high speed rail and go right to packing us into capsules that fling us across the country in hours using what are, essentially, pneumatic tubes. It sounds crazy, when you think about it. It’s starting to look a little less crazy. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies announced today that it has signed agreements to work with Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum and global engineering design firm Aecom. The two companies will lend their expertise in exchange for stock options in the company, joining the army of engineers from the likes of Boeing and SpaceX already lending their time to the effort. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Link:
Elon Musk’s hyperloop is actually getting kind of serious
Google has given everyone a rare look inside its server rooms and detailed how keeps up with the massive growth of its search business. In a blog post , Google Fellow Amin Vadat said that the company’s current network, Jupiter, can deliver a petabit per second of total throughput. That means each of its 100, 000 total servers can randomly speak to each other at a speed of 10Gb/s, a hundred times faster than the first-generation network it created in 2005. To get there, Google did something surprising — it built its own hardware from off-the-shelf parts. It was back in 2004 that Google decided to stray away from products by established companies like Cisco and build its own hardware using off-the-shelf chips from companies like Qualcomm. The aim was to put less onus on the hardware and more on software, something that’s impossible with off-the-shelf switches. Vadat said hardware switching is “manual and error prone… and could not scale to meet our needs.” Using software switching was not only cheaper but easier to implement remotely — critical for a company whose bandwidth requirements have doubled (or more) every year. Google considers its servers as a key advantage over rivals like Microsoft and Amazon, so why is it talking now? For one, it’s recently started selling its cloud services to other businesses, so it’s keen to brag about them. It’s also being pragmatic — its data requirements are now so huge that it needs academic help to solve configuration and management challenges. That’s why it’s presenting the paper at the Sigcomm networking conference in London, and if you’re in the mood for a (much) deeper dive, you can read it here . Filed under: Peripherals , Internet , Google Comments Via: WSJ Source: Google Tags: DataCenters, google, GoogleCloud, Growth, Servers, Switches
Read the original:
Google gives the world a peek at its secret servers
An anonymous reader writes: Lightning struck a Google data center in Belgium four times in rapid succession last week, permanently erasing a small amount of users’ data from the cloud. The affected disks were part of Google Computer Engine (GCE), a utility that lets people run virtual computers in the cloud on Google’s servers. Despite the uncontrollable nature of the incident, Google has accepted full responsibility for the blackout and promises to upgrade its data center storage hardware, increasing its resilience against power outages. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
When Bruce Schneier says of a security problem “This is serious, ” it makes sense to pay attention to it. And that’s how he refers to a recently disclosed Cisco vulnerability alert about “an evolution in attacks against Cisco IOS Classic platforms. Cisco has observed a limited number of cases where attackers, after gaining administrative or physical access to a Cisco IOS device, replaced the Cisco IOS ROMMON (IOS bootstrap) with a malicious ROMMON image.” Schneier links to Ars Technica’s short description of the attack, whicih notes The significance of the advisory isn’t that the initial firmware can be replaced. As indicated, that’s a standard feature not only with Cisco gear but just about any computing device. What’s important is that attackers are somehow managing to obtain the administrative credentials required to make unauthorized changes that take control of the networking gear. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Follow this link:
Bruce Schneier On Cisco ROMMON Firmware Exploit: "This Is Serious"