wired – Page 38 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Robotic glove gives you extra fingers for grabbing

Melanie Gonick / MIT Four fingers and a thumb on each hand is pretty useful. Humans have gone from caves to sprawling cities in part because of our dexterous digits. But researchers at MIT think we could do even better if we had an upgrade. They have developed a glove with two extra robotic fingers that respond intelligently to your movements, allowing you to perform two-handed tasks with just one robot-enhanced hand. “You do not need to command the robot, but simply move your fingers naturally. Then the robotic fingers react and assist your fingers,” said the glove’s creator Harry Asada, of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering . Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

DOE, commercial partners start world’s largest carbon capture project

Earlier this week, the US Department of Energy announced that work has started on what when finished will be the world’s largest carbon capture facility. Located in Thompsons, Texas, the project will capture a portion of the emissions from the coal-fired W.A. Parish Generating Station. The CO 2 will then be compressed and piped to the West Ranch oil field, where it will be injected under ground. This will help liberate oil that’s otherwise difficult to extract, but has the added benefit that the carbon dioxide typically stays underground, sequestered. The project was originally planned as a small pilot that would only extract CO 2 from the equivalent of 60 megawatts of the plant’s 3,500MW of generating capacity. When it was realized that the amount of CO 2 from 60MW of would be too little CO 2 to supply the oil field’s needs, the project scope was expanded to 240MW. At that scale, the facility would become the largest of its type in the world. The exhaust gas will have its sulfates removed before being bubbled through a solution of amines, which will bind the CO 2 . Once separated from the rest of the gasses, the carbon dioxide will be released by heating the amine solution, which can be recycled. The CO 2 is then sent under pressure via a pipeline. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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DOE, commercial partners start world’s largest carbon capture project

Ars editor learns feds have his old IP addresses, full credit card numbers

Jonathan Ryan In May 2014, I reported on my efforts to learn what the feds know about me whenever I enter and exit the country. In particular, I wanted my Passenger Name Records (PNR), data created by airlines, hotels, and cruise ships whenever travel is booked. But instead of providing what I had requested, the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) turned over only basic information about my travel going back to 1994. So I appealed—and without explanation , the government recently turned over the actual PNRs I had requested the first time. The 76 new pages of data, covering 2005 through 2013, show that CBP retains massive amounts of data on us when we travel internationally. My own PNRs include not just every mailing address, e-mail, and phone number I’ve ever used; some of them also contain: Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ars editor learns feds have his old IP addresses, full credit card numbers

Why Google took years to address a battery-draining “bug” in Chrome

Aurich Lawson A recent Forbes report says that Chrome on Windows uses up more battery than competing browsers, thanks to a high system timer setting. Unlike Linux or Mac OS X, Windows uses a timer to schedule tasks. At idle, the timer on Windows is set to about 15 ms, so if it has no work to do, it will go to sleep and only wake up every 15 ms to check if it needs to do something. Applications can change this timer, and other browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer don’t mess with it until they need to do something processor intensive, like playing a video. After the video is done, the timer is set to return to 15 ms so that the computer can idle again. Chrome, though, boosts the timer to 1 ms and keeps it there forever. The difference means that on Firefox at idle, the CPU only wakes 64 times a second. On Chrome, it wakes up 1,000 times a second. In its Windows documentation, Microsoft notes that setting the system timer to a high value can increase power consumption by “as much as 25 percent.” This means that on a laptop, you’ll get a shorter runtime with Chrome than you will on a competing browser. And the issue has been around for a long time. Forbes links to a bug report documenting the problem that was first filed in 2010. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why Google took years to address a battery-draining “bug” in Chrome

Id shows off double-jumping, skull-crushing new Doom at QuakeCon

If you weren’t at QuakeCon, this content-free teaser is all you get to see of the new Doom for the time being. The bad news is that only people who were actually at Dallas’ QuakeCon last night were able to see the world-premiere gameplay footage from the next Doom game, which somehow hasn’t been leaked online yet. The good news is that plenty of people that were there are reporting on the unveiling, which seemed to include a number of extremely un- Doom -like additions. One of the bigger changes brought by the new Doom (which is notably not being called Doom 4 anymore ) is a jet-pack powered double-jump, à la Crysis 3 , Titanfall , Destiny and, now, presumably, every first-person shooter to come out in the next year or two. Players can also climb up the sides of “large crates and gaps” according to PC Gamer’s report , adding even more ability to go vertical. But it’s the Mortal Kombat -style melee finishing moves that seem to have gotten the crowd the most riled up. PC Gamer describes how, once an enemy is low on health, the player can get close and activate moves that see “lower jaws pulled off, skulls stomped on, and hearts torn out with the level of detail usually reserved for those slow-mo bullet cams in the Sniper Elite series.” Rock Paper Shotgun noted that “enemies break apart like moldy bread… literally tearing them in half sometimes.” The outlet also reported scenes with “crushing heads, chunks flying everywhere.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Faulty red light cameras produced thousands of bogus traffic tickets

At least 13,000 Chicago motorists have been cited with undeserved tickets thanks to malfunctioning red-light cameras, according to a 10-month investigation published Friday by the Chicago Tribune . The report found that the $100 fines were a result of “faulty equipment, human tinkering or both.” According to the investigation: Cameras that for years generated just a few tickets daily suddenly caught dozens of drivers a day. One camera near the United Center rocketed from generating one ticket per day to 56 per day for a two-week period last summer before mysteriously dropping back to normal. Tickets for so-called rolling right turns on red shot up during some of the most dramatic spikes, suggesting an unannounced change in enforcement. One North Side camera generated only a dozen tickets for rolling rights out of 100 total tickets in the entire second half of 2011. Then, over a 12-day spike, it spewed 563 tickets—560 of them for rolling rights. Many of the spikes were marked by periods immediately before or after when no tickets were issued—downtimes suggesting human intervention that should have been documented. City officials said they cannot explain the absence of such records. City officials and Redflex Traffic Systems of Arizona, the report said, “acknowledged oversight failures and said the explosions of tickets should have been detected and resolved as they occurred. But they said that doesn’t mean the drivers weren’t breaking the law, and they defended the red light camera program overall as a safety success story. The program has generated nearly $500 million in revenue since it began in 2003.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Faulty red light cameras produced thousands of bogus traffic tickets

Fossils of strange Cambrian predator preserved with brains preserved

The new species, showing the eyes (upper and lower center) and a single clawed appendage (top left). Peiyun Cong The animals of the Cambrian are noted for being a collection of oddballs that are sometimes difficult to match up with anything currently living on Earth. But even among these oddities, Anomalocarids stand out (as their name implies). The creatures propelled themselves with a series of oar-like paddles arranged on their flanks, spotted prey with enormous compound eyes , and shoveled them into a disk-like mouth with large arms that resided at the very front of their bodies—although some of them ended up as filter feeders . We’ve identified a large number of anomalocarid species, many of which appear to have been the apex predators of their ecosystems. Yet for all our knowledge of them, there’s a key issue we haven’t clarified: how do they relate to any species that might exist today? New fossils from a Cambrian era deposit in China have revealed three samples of a new species that are so exquisitely preserved that their discoverers can trace the animals’ nerves. And the structure of the brain reveals affinities for two completely different types of organisms. The new species, Lyrarapax unguispinus , is a relatively small anomalocarid at only about eight centimeters long. Like others of this group, it’s got a set of distinctive features, such as a neck, large compound eyes, and large frontal appendages, in this case shaped a bit like claws. Just past the neck, it’s got two large segments that look a bit like the fins on the sides of animals like dolphins. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Fossils of strange Cambrian predator preserved with brains preserved

Bitcoin pool GHash.io commits to 40% hashrate limit after its 51% breach

Antana GHash.io announced that “it is not aiming to overcome 39.99 [percent] of the overall Bitcoin hashrate,” in a new statement published Wednesday . This marks a clear departure from the large Bitcoin pool’s recent flirtations with 51 percent . If that threshold is crossed for sustained periods of time, it concentrates power in ways that Bitcoin’s decentralized design normally does not allow. “If GHash.io approaches the respective border, it will be actively asking miners to take their hardware away from GHash.io and mine on other pools,” the statement continues. “GHash.io will encourage other mining pools to write similar voluntary statements from their sides.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bitcoin pool GHash.io commits to 40% hashrate limit after its 51% breach

GHCQ’s “Chinese menu” of tools spreads disinformation across Internet

Just a few of the “weaponized” capabilities from GCHQ’s catalog of information warfare tools. What appears to be an internal Wiki page detailing the cyber-weaponry used by the British spy agency GCHQ was published today by Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept . The page, taken from the documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, lists dozens of tools used by GCHQ to target individuals and their computing devices, spread disinformation posing as others, and “shape” opinion and information available online. The page had been maintained by GCHQ’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) Covert Internet Technical Development team, but it fell out of use by the time Snowden copied it. Greenwald and NBC previously reported on JTRIG’s “dirty tricks” tactics for psychological operations and information warfare, and the new documents provide a hint at how those tactics were executed. GCHQ’s capabilities included tools for manipulating social media, spoofing communications from individuals and groups, and warping the perception of content online through manipulation of polls and web pages’ traffic and search rankings. Originally intended to inform other organizations within GCHQ (and possibly NSA) of new capabilities being developed by the group, the JTRIG CITD team noted on the page, “We don’t update this page anymore, it became somewhat of a Chinese menu for effects operations.” The page lists 33 “effects capability” tools, as well as a host of other capabilities for collecting information, tracking individuals, attacking computers, and extracting information from seized devices. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Human memory-saving devices get $37.5m research boost from DARPA

Flickr user: Dierk Schaefer Two teams creating devices that stimulate the brain to restore memory function have been granted $37.5 million by DARPA to develop the technology. Both will initially work with people with epilepsy who have been given implants to locate where their seizures originate. The researchers will reuse the data gathered during this process to monitor other brain activity, such as the patterns that occur when the brain stores and retrieves memories. One team will then attempt to map these patterns by recording the brain activity of epilepsy sufferers with mild memory problems while they play a computer game about remembering things. The pattern differences between the best and worst scores among these patents will be used to develop an algorithm for a personalized stimulation pattern to keep the brain performing at an optimal level. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Human memory-saving devices get $37.5m research boost from DARPA