technology – Page 294 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Bitcoin Tops $1,000 For the First Time

An anonymous reader writes with this bit from The Next Web “Bitcoin hit a new milestone today, passing the $1, 000 mark for the first time. The virtual currency is currently trading above the four-digit figure, with its highest at $1, 030 on Mt. Gox, one of the largest exchanges. Last week, Bitcoin’s high for the day was $632. That means its trading value has surged 62.83 percent in a week, assuming we’re looking at just its high points. That figure could of course rise even further if Bitcoin continues to push further up throughout the day.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Bitcoin Tops $1,000 For the First Time

Chicago Transit System Fooled By Federal ID Cards

New submitter johnslater writes “The Chicago Transit Authority’s new ‘Ventra’ stored-value fare card system has another big problem. It had a difficult birth, with troubles earlier this fall when legitimate cards failed to allow passage, or sometimes double-billed the holders. Last week a server failure disabled a large portion of the system at rush hour. Now it is reported that some federal government employee ID cards allow free rides on the system. The system is being implemented by Cubic Transportation Systems for the bargain price of $454 million.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chicago Transit System Fooled By Federal ID Cards

NYT: Healthcare.gov Project Chaos Due Partly To Unorthodox Database Choice

First time accepted submitter conoviator writes “The NY Times has just published a piece providing more background on the healthcare.gov software project. One interesting aspect: ‘Another sore point was the Medicare agency’s decision to use database software, from a company called MarkLogic, that managed the data differently from systems by companies like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. CGI officials argued that it would slow work because it was too unfamiliar. Government officials disagreed, and its configuration remains a serious problem.'” The story does not say that MarkLogic’s software is bad in itself, only that the choice meant increased complexity on the project. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Failed Software Upgrade Halts Transit Service

linuxwrangler writes “San Francisco Bay Area commuters awoke this morning to the news that BART, the major regional transit system which carries hundreds of thousands of daily riders, was entirely shut down due to a computer failure. Commuters stood stranded at stations and traffic backed up as residents took to the roads. The system has returned to service and BART says the outage resulted from a botched software upgrade.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Failed Software Upgrade Halts Transit Service

Google Maps, Lasers Reveal Vatican Catacombs

Nerval’s Lobster writes “The Vatican, while notoriously secretive about things buried in its vaults and archives, is being as public as the digital age allows it to be about the nearly completed restoration of catacombs early Christians used as secret churches as well as burial sites. Contractors, archaeologists and art experts spent the past five years restoring the Priscilla catacombs under the Vatican using lasers, among other techniques, to restore frescoes painted on the walls of the burial chambers. The Vatican unveiled the work Nov. 19 with a press conference in the Basilica of San Silvestro outside the burial tunnels, accompanied by a virtual tour of the Priscilla catacombs provided by Google Maps. The basilica is divided into an area for religious services and another that acts as a deposit for sculptures and artifacts dug up during excavations of the catacombs and other areas underneath the Vatican.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Maps, Lasers Reveal Vatican Catacombs

The Prettiest iPad Drawing App Now Has the Prettiest Stylus Companion

Have you used Paper by 53 Design? It’s that iPad drawing app that is so decked out in pretty, design-y, feel-good-ness that it makes all who use it feel like Matisse. Well, now its creators have put out an equally gorgeous stylus. Read more…

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The Prettiest iPad Drawing App Now Has the Prettiest Stylus Companion

Lead Contractor On Health-Care Web Site Led By Execs From Troubled IT Company

thomst writes “The Washington Post’s Jerry Markon and Alice Crites report that ‘The lead contractor on the dysfunctional Web site for the Affordable Care Act is filled with executives from a company that mishandled at least 20 other government IT projects, including a flawed effort to automate retirement benefits for millions of federal workers, documents and interviews show. CGI Federal, the main Web site developer, entered the U.S. government market a decade ago when its parent company purchased American Management Systems, a Fairfax County contractor that was coming off a series of troubled projects. CGI moved into AMS’s custom-made building off Interstate 66, changed the sign outside and kept the core of employees, who now populate the upper ranks of CGI Federal.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK Town To Get Driverless ‘Pods’ Mixing With Pedestrians

Bruce66423 writes “Milton Keynes is the most successful new town in the U.K., being built on a green field site from the ’60s onward. Initially famous for concrete cows, it is the home of the Open University, which offers college-level courses at home. Now, the U.K. Business Secretary has announced plans to have small driverless cars shuttle people around parts of the town starting in 2015. There will be about 20 of the pod-like vehicles to start, each capable of holding two people. They will have their own pathways and move at about 12mph. The plan is to continue developing and testing the vehicles, and by 2017, 100 of them will share walkways with pedestrians.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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UK Town To Get Driverless ‘Pods’ Mixing With Pedestrians

The World Just Got Its First Entirely 3D-Printed Metal Gun—and It Works

Regardless of whether you saw them as a menace , the first 3D-printed guns were an objectively far, boxy cry from the weapons we’re used to seeing. But just from looking at Solid Concept’s newest firearm offering, you’d have no idea that it, too, started out as a mere 3D CAD file before being printed to life. Read more…

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The World Just Got Its First Entirely 3D-Printed Metal Gun—and It Works

Google Bots Doing SQL Injection Attacks

ccguy writes “It seems that while Google could really care less about your site and has no real interest in hacking you, their automated bots can be used to do the heavy lifting for an attacker. In this scenario, the bot was crawling Site A. Site A had a number of links embedded that had the SQLi requests to the target site, Site B. Google Bot then went about its business crawling pages and following links like a good boy, and in the process followed the links on Site A to Site B, and began to inadvertently attack Site B.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Bots Doing SQL Injection Attacks