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How To Encode 2.05 Bits Per Photon, By Using Twisted Light

Thorfinn.au writes Researchers at the University of Rochester and their collaborators have developed a way to transfer 2.05 bits per photon by using “twisted light.” [Abstract here.]This remarkable achievement is possible because the researchers used the orbital angular momentum of the photons to encode information, rather than the more commonly used polarization of light. The new approach doubles the 1 bit per photon that is possible with current systems that rely on light polarization and could help increase the efficiency of quantum cryptography systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How To Encode 2.05 Bits Per Photon, By Using Twisted Light

DC airport tries using face recognition to catch imposters

If you come to the US through Washington DC’s Dulles airport in the near future, don’t be surprised if Customs and Border Protection takes your snapshot before letting you through. The agency has confirmed to Motherboard that it will be testing a facial recognition system which captures a photo and compares it against your passport picture to see if you’re an imposter. The relatively short (2 to 3 months) trial won’t rely solely on face detection to flag suspicious travelers, but it could give customs agents a way to double-check identities without relying so heavily on keen eyes and intuition. As you might guess, this government-backed face detection is raising a lot of privacy concerns. CBP won’t directly link photos to people and promises to delete the images once the experiment is over, but critics are worried that the timestamps would make it possible to link a person to a given portrait. Also, there’s no guarantee that a full-fledged program would be as respectful of your privacy as officials attest — the TSA misrepresented what its millimeter wave scanners could do, for example. While there’s no certainty this trial will prove successful, let alone lead to an Orwellian future for air travel, it’s easy to understand why you’d feel anxious. [Image credit: Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images] Filed under: Transportation Comments Source: Motherboard

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DC airport tries using face recognition to catch imposters

OS X Users: 13 Characters of Assyrian Can Crash Your Chrome Tab

abhishekmdb writes No browsers are safe, as proved yesterday at Pwn2Own, but crashing one of them with just one line of special code is slightly different. A developer has discovered a hack in Google Chrome which can crash the Chrome tab on a Mac PC. The code is a 13-character special string which appears to be written in Assyrian script. Matt C has reported the bug to Google, who have marked the report as duplicate. This means that Google are aware of the problem and are reportedly working on it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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OS X Users: 13 Characters of Assyrian Can Crash Your Chrome Tab

Arkansas Is Now the First State To Require That High Schools Teach Coding

SternisheFan writes Arkansas will be implementing a new law that requires public high schools to offer classes in computer science starting in the 2015-16 school year. Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who signed the bill, believes it will provide “a workforce that’s sure to attract businesses and jobs” to the state. $5 million of the governor’s proposed budget will go towards this new program. For the districts incapable of of administering these classes due to lack of space or qualified teachers, the law has provisions for online courses to be offered through Virtual Arkansas. Although students will not be required to take computer science classes, the governor’s goal is to give students the opportunity if they “want to take it.” Presently, only one in 10 schools nationwide offer computer science classes. Not only will Arkansas teach these classes in every public high school and charter school serving upper grades, the courses will count towards the state’s math graduation requirement as a further incentive for students. Training programs for teacher preparation will be available, but with the majority of the infrastructure already primed, the execution of this new law should hopefully be painless and seamless. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Arkansas Is Now the First State To Require That High Schools Teach Coding

Scan Images Into Text with Google Keep’s OCR Feature

Chrome: If you’re a regular Google Keep user, you might have missed a (relatively) new feature in the app. If you paste an image into a note, Google lets you convert the image into editable text. Read more…

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Scan Images Into Text with Google Keep’s OCR Feature

Movie piracy app Popcorn Time thinks it can thwart a shutdown

About a year after Popcorn Time’s death and resurrection show , comes news that app is taking even more of the legwork out of watching pirated movies online. To further stretch the meaning of “legal, ” the service is moving to a peer-to-peer streaming system so that its userbase (which is apparently growing by 100, 000 downloads per day) hosts the requisite data, according to Wired . “Making all our data available via P2P will mean that Popcorn Time will no longer rely on domains and centralized servers, but only on its user base, ” an anonymous software engineer said. “After everything we went through, this will be our sweetest revenge and our biggest victory.” So there’s that. Wired says the application will use the same P2P protocol for streaming that BitTorrent does , so if the central servers are knocked offline the service itself should remain operational. Another forthcoming addition will issue software updates for the app via P2P downloads that take advantage of “cryptographic signatures” to ensure that no malicious code proliferates the community. The interview is a really interesting, but the engineer seems incredibly cavalier about what the app is doing and how long it can outrun the law. Reading through it reminded me a lot of the attitude the original Pirate Bay crew had before the shutdowns and litigation ensued. We all know how that turned out. Filed under: Home Entertainment , Internet , HD Comments Source: Wired

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Movie piracy app Popcorn Time thinks it can thwart a shutdown

Safe white light disinfects hospitals around the clock

Add / Remove In certain workplaces, especially hospitals and restaurant kitchens, regular levels of bacteria are unsafe. In the past, UV lighting and chemicals have been used to disinfect fragile areas, but both of these options are unsafe for continuous use. Offering a new solution, Vital Vio is a disinfectant lighting which can reduce harmful micro-organisms by up to 99.9 percent, using harmless white light from specialized overhead light fixtures. Vital Vio’s disinfectant lighting can be installed in thirty minutes anywhere there is a light fixture. Once in place, the system can remain on around-the-clock, providing continuous protection from bacteria such as MRSA, E.Coli and Salmonella for patients and staff. The system uses precision control of LEDs, and integrates the invisible cleansing into white light. Vital Vio can even work with customers to create modified protection — adjusting the color temperature to best suit their environment. Vital Vio offers 90 percent disinfection after just one and a half hours rising to 99.9 percent after 16 hours. While the primary applications for Vital Vio are healthcare and catering environments, the company also suggest implementing it in hotels, gyms and public restrooms — anywhere that bacteria can easily thrive and spread. Where else could the technology be implemented? Website: www.vitalvio.com Contact: www.vitalvio.com/contact

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Safe white light disinfects hospitals around the clock

Watch Nissan’s glowing Leaf tear down a glowing stretch of highway

Daan Roosegaarde’s Smart Highway concept saw a third of a mile of asphalt in the Dutch town of Oss festooned with phosphorescent stripes — they spend the day soaking up sunlight and convert it into a slightly eerie blue/green glow to guide drivers for eight hours once night falls. Seeing the road is trippy in and of itself, so (naturally?) watching Nissan’s glow-in-the-dark Leaf tear down it is a whole other story. Friendly reminder: You might want to have the Tron or Starlight Express soundtracks cued up before you press play. If you’re asking yourself why this exists, just stop — there’s really no meaning to this little artistic exercise other than to demonstrate an understanding that glowing thing plus glowing equals cool. You won’t be recreating this with the same sort of gear soon either, since the relatively exotic strontium aluminate paint that makes the Leaf shine in the dark is Nissan’s and it won’t share. You’re better off just buying a Tron bike of your own for the same effect, but for now just enjoy the light show as you wait for the weekend to engulf you. Comments Via: Autoblog

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Watch Nissan’s glowing Leaf tear down a glowing stretch of highway

All four major browsers take a stomping at Pwn2Own hacking competition

The annual Pwn2Own hacking competition wrapped up its 2015 event in Vancouver with another banner year, paying $442,000 for 21 critical bugs in all four major browsers, as well as Windows, Adobe Flash, and Adobe Reader. The crowning achievement came Thursday as contestant Jung Hoon Lee, aka lokihardt, demonstrated an exploit that felled both the stable and beta versions of Chrome, the Google-developed browser that’s famously hard to compromise . His hack started with a buffer overflow race condition in Chrome. To allow that attack to break past anti-exploit mechanisms such as the sandbox and address space layout randomization, it also targeted an information leak and a race condition in two Windows kernel drivers, an impressive feat that allowed the exploit to achieve full System access. “With all of this, lokihardt managed to get the single biggest payout of the competition, not to mention the single biggest payout in Pwn2Own history: $75,000 USD for the Chrome bug, an extra $25,000 for the privilege escalation to SYSTEM, and another $10,000 from Google for hitting the beta version for a grand total of $110,000,” Pwn2Own organizers wrote in a blog post published Thursday . “To put it another way, lokihardt earned roughly $916 a second for his two-minute demonstration.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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All four major browsers take a stomping at Pwn2Own hacking competition