Tech Today w/ Ken May

Mark.JUK writes “Telecommunications giant Alcatel-Lucent has today become the first-to-market with VDSL2 Vectoring technology which, it claims, will push the top broadband internet access speeds of existing copper telephone lines over 100Mbps and without needing to bond multiple lines together. Vectoring is essentially a ‘noise cancellation’ method (similar, in principal, to the technology found in some headphones) that works to cancel out background noise / interference (i.e. crosstalk) and can thus boost performance and reach (coverage) by between 25% and 100%.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Alcatel-Lucent Boosts Copper Broadband To 100Mbps

An anonymous reader writes “After more than 30 years of unerring and yet surprising supremacy, BIOS is taking its final bows. Taking its place is UEFI, a specification that begun its life as the Intel Boot Initiative way back in 1998 when BIOS’s antiquated limitations were hampering systems built with Intel’s Itanium processors. UEFI, as the article explains, is a complete re-imagining of a computer boot environment, and as such it has almost no similarities to the PC BIOS that it replaces.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Demystifying UEFI, the Overdue BIOS Replacement

Earlier in the week, we posted news of a vulnerability discovered in virtually all websites secured with theoretically outdated (but widespread) versions of SSL and TLS encryption. Luckily for all non-nefarious users, this vulnerability (called BEAST, short for Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS) was discovered and disclosed by researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo, and browser makers are pushing out changes to nullify it. Many systems, though, will remain unpatched for a long time. Nick Mathewson (nickm) of the Tor project has posted an explanation of why Tor traffic, as he understands the attack, remains safe. As a side benefit for those of us who aren’t security experts, his description explains in plain language just what the danger is.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Why the BEAST Doesn't Threaten Tor Users

Windows/Mac/Linux: If you’re tired of your browser crashing and killing your 2GB upload, you may want to consider Neembuu Uploader, which features automatic download URL generation, (and deletion URLs if the filehost supports it) login support for filehosts where you have accounts, upload histories, and the ability to drag and drop files from anywhere onto the Neembu window to begin uploading. More

In Airshark: Detecting Non-WiFi RF Devices using Commodity WiFi Hardware (PDF), researchers from U Wisconsin (Madison) document a firmware for WiFi access points that can detect and dynamically adjust to interference from vacuum cleaners, baby monitors, and other non-WiFi devices that operate in the WiFi’s radio spectrum. This kind of thing is the backbone of the theory of cognitive radio: devices that can use software defined radio, phased-array antennas, and cleverness to route around other devices in the band, which may, eventually, enable the a lot more data to occupy the radio spectrum. In Airshark’s case, the cleverness is in using the wireless cards on the computers and other devices as a sensing array to triangulate on interference.

Airshark taps into the application programming interface of wireless cards used on access points to gather data about radio frequencies in the surrounding environment. The software has been trained to recognize signatures of various devices, and can pick them out from the ambient radio noise with more than 90% accuracy even if signals from multiple such devices are present.

False positives were .39% for environments with four or more interfering devices and using various signal strengths. The researchers found the rate was .068% for signals stronger than -80dBm. “We also found its performance to be comparable to a commercial signal analyzer,” according to their research paper “Airshark: Detecting Non-WiFi RF Devices using Commodity WiFi Hardware.”

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WiFi firmware that can detect and route around interference from non-WiFi devices

Think a flexible smartphone is just science fiction? You might have to think again, thanks to Samsung. The Korean company recently unveiled Galaxy Skin, an Android smartphone that can take on different shapes and take on even hammer blows, set for a 2012 Q2 release.

So aside from its flexible form, what specs can Galaxy Skin boast of? For starters, it will have a flexible 4″ AMOLED display (800×480) made of plastic polyimide substrate. Samsung already confirmed that they have started production of such screens. This form of AMOLED technology consumes less energy but still delivers good screen brightness compared to the normal Samsung AMOLED screens.

Other known specs of Galaxy Skin include 1 GB RAM; 1.2 GHz processor; 8 MP rear camera and VGA front camera with auto focus, self-portrait, stop motion, action shot, and Panorama shots; and 1500 mAh battery. Connectivity-wise, it has Bluetooth 3.0, USB 2.0, and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n features. It will reportedly run on Android Jellybean (the next Google OS version after Ice Cream Sandwich), but there are speculations that Google will make a special version for it, namely Android Flexy.

With the Galaxy Skin, one can have table clock, smart projector, or even a wristwatch. Now we await Apple’s statement regarding this.

via IBTimes

Related posts:

1. Rumored Samsung Galaxy Q to Be a Bit of Smartphone, a Bit of Tablet
2. Nexus Prime, Samsung Galaxy S III Possibly Among Deluge of Upcoming Samsung Android Devices [Updated with Release Dates]
3. Samsung Galaxy S II with 4G LTE Sighted in South Korea, Codenamed Samsung Celox

See the article here:
Samsung Unveils Flexible Android Smartphone

A forensic worker walks at the city’s morgue past the recovered bodies of people that had been dumped around Veracruz September 22, 2011. At least 11 more bodies were dumped around the Mexican city of Veracruz on Thursday, according to local media reports, two days after the discovery of 35 other corpses in the once-quiet Gulf port.The bodies found on Thursday were in small groups scattered in various parts of the city, despite high security for a summit of attorneys general and justice officials. (REUTERS/Yahir Ceballos)

NPR’s John Burnett, whose reporting I have admired for many years, has a story on All Things Considered today about social media and the drug war in Mexico.

In areas where they are powerful, the Mexican drug cartels silenced the mainstream media by threatening and killing journalists. Now they seem to be extending the practice to social media.

Many Mexicans have had to rely on social media to find out what’s going on in their cities after newspapers, TV and radio stations stopped reporting on drug-related violence.

But last week, the mangled bodies of a young man and woman were hung from a highway bridge in Nuevo Laredo along with a sign that read: “This is what happens to people who post funny things on the Internet. Pay attention.”

People are paying attention.

“It suggests that the blogosphere has been included in the media landscape that the cartels are looking at. Because up until now it has only been traditional media — print, TV and radio,” says Javier Garza, the editor of El Siglo de Torreon, a newspaper in the neighboring Coahuila state, which is also aflame with cartel violence.

Listen here.

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Mexico: Drug cartels shift threats to social media

YouTube has announced a few new features, most notably the fact that all users in good standing can now upload videos longer than 15 minutes. More

A forensic worker walks at the city’s morgue past the recovered bodies of people that had been dumped around Veracruz September 22, 2011. At least 11 more bodies were dumped around the Mexican city of Veracruz on Thursday, according to local media reports, two days after the discovery of 35 other corpses in the once-quiet Gulf port.The bodies found on Thursday were in small groups scattered in various parts of the city, despite high security for a summit of attorneys general and justice officials. (REUTERS/Yahir Ceballos)

NPR’s John Burnett, whose reporting I have admired for many years, has a story on All Things Considered today about social media and the drug war in Mexico.

In areas where they are powerful, the Mexican drug cartels silenced the mainstream media by threatening and killing journalists. Now they seem to be extending the practice to social media.

Many Mexicans have had to rely on social media to find out what’s going on in their cities after newspapers, TV and radio stations stopped reporting on drug-related violence.

But last week, the mangled bodies of a young man and woman were hung from a highway bridge in Nuevo Laredo along with a sign that read: “This is what happens to people who post funny things on the Internet. Pay attention.”

People are paying attention.

“It suggests that the blogosphere has been included in the media landscape that the cartels are looking at. Because up until now it has only been traditional media — print, TV and radio,” says Javier Garza, the editor of El Siglo de Torreon, a newspaper in the neighboring Coahuila state, which is also aflame with cartel violence.

Listen here.

See the original article here:
Mexico: Drug cartels shift focus of threats toward social media

Can you block sites from hacker news ? Who would want to do it and how? I know it sounds funny, everybody’s wanting to get on hacker news, and sometimes i get my blog posts or posts about projects i’m working on posted to the site. I’ve never tried to engage in black hat hacker news manipulation, but i have stumbled across various ways it would be possible. Here’s how it works. First off, once a url has been posted, it’s done, the original user who posted it gets a lock on it and the karma associated with it getting popular or not. I noticed that sometimes the www and non www versions of websites, two links to the same thing with different urls, are treated separately. When other people try and post it, they just upvote instead. I first discovered this when i posted a link to asciiflow.com not using the www. It was cool, and i was surprised it wasn’t already on hacker news. Turns out it was posted about a month earlier. Nobody seemed to mind my reposting although there was some discussion about it . The yesterday i posted a link to drawastickman.com , the cool animation of a stickman you create. I wanted to know, with a really cool link, and myself with decent karma, 890, would it get on the front page without me asking anybody to vote for it. It ended up with 14 points, but didn’t make it on the home page. Maybe i gave it a bad title, “Draw A Stickman – Interactive Canvas Story Telling”. A few hours later it got posted again as “Bring a stick man to life.” by kgthegreat who had little karma a the time, but now has about the same as me. Perhaps he/she gave it a much better link title, i’m not sure. What’s more likely is that s/he got a few friends to upvote in the first few minutes after posting. I think it’s fine that kgthegreat got the karma and the link posted, and i don’t really care who gets credit. It’s a cool link and i’m glad it got shared with the community. My real question is this, what if somebody else had done like me, posted the link and ignored it? What if both the www and non www versions of the url had been posted and lost in the flow. Then those links would be on hacker news, but never float up and sit on the top like they deserve. Now imagine instead of two hackers posting links they think are interesting, and instead think, what if somebody wanted to keep things from hacker news. The best way to do it would be to post links you wanted buried at high traffic times with two low karma accounts. Simply make it so nobody notices or upvotes the pages. Give them terrible titles. I wonder if anybody’s done this to their competitors websites? The new way to censor stuff is not to delete it, but rather to let it get lost in the noise. With crowd sourced content discovery platforms, like hacker news, it’s possible for participants to play the role of censor. It’s fascinating stuff. Update: According to PG , the karma of the poster is not used in calculating whether or not the posts get moved to the front page.

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How to block sites from Hacker News?