Pipedot

Last weekend, 24 teams from around the world converged in Pomona, California to compete for the DARPA Robotics Challenge. DARPA launched the competition in response to the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami when, if robots been among the first responder teams, human lives could have been saved. Up in the grandstand, hundreds of excited children and parents were ready for a modern-day gladiator spectacle. "Will there be killer robots?" asked one boy, who was very disappointed to find out the steel humanoids were there to help, not destroy.

The US Air Force has responded to fears that it is weaponizing space through its secret space shuttle by providing some details of what it will contain at launch on Wednesday. The now not-so-secret X-37B launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on an Atlas V rocket operated by the United Launch Alliance. According to the published manifest the X-37B will be carrying a new form of Hall ion-powered thruster, ten CubeSats, a satellite containing a TCP/IP web server, test equipment for plasma thrusters, and a device to control low-orbital vehicles, among other gizmos.

HEVC (H.265) might be getting more attention, but Google's VP9 appears to match H.265 in quality and might play a bigger role in the transition from Flash to HTML5. VP9 is an open and royalty free video coding format being developed by Google to succeed H.264 and be competitive with HEVC, as part of its WebM project. HEVC has already made inroads into commercial hardware and software, following on the heels of the already widespread MPEG-4/AVC rollout. Intel, NVIDIA, ARM, Broadcom, LG, Philips, Samsung, and Realtek are among the many hardware vendors that have agreed to incorporate VP9 codec support. While VP9 may play only a minor role in broadcast markets, mobile, or OTT (although a handful of LG & Samsung 4K TVs already support it), it may never-the-less be an essential component for reaching the traditional desktop/notebook market.

Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. These updates address 13 vulnerabilities that could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. Adobe recommends users update their product installations to the latest versions:

Airbus hasn’t won a new airline customer for its flagship A380 superjumbo, the world’s biggest commercial jet, in almost three years and needs to sell close to 30 a year just to break even. Now Airbus is set to face a fresh challenge as used A380 aircraft hit the market. Malaysia Airlines would like to dispose of two of its six A380s, while two built for failed carrier Skymark Airlines are seeking new owners. Thai Airways could also attempt to sell some of its six planes, all of them less than three years old. In addition, some of the oldest A380s are poised come off lease.

According to NASA, there is almost 3,000 tons of space debris residing in a low-Earth orbit. This includes old, derelict satellites, leftover rocket parts and bodies, and other parts and tiny bits of wreckage produced by collisions of other larger objects. Impacts from this junk can cause damage to satellites due to their speed, as most are traveling about 22,370 miles per hour. As more and more satellites and spacecraft are sent into space, the problem of space debris is growing. Most spacecraft, including the International Space Station, can withstand impacts from most of the smaller junk in the neighborhood of 0.4 inches due to the shielding on the crafts. However, there are more than 700,000 pieces larger than that currently in orbit. While items larger than 4 inches are easy to spot, the ones between 0.4 inches and 4 inches in size are difficult to identify and dodge.

Chromebooks may be hot-ticket items, but with its sixth-generation A-series chips for mainstream laptops, AMD is instead placing its bets on Microsoft's Windows 10. The new chips, code-named Carrizo, will appear in laptops priced between US$400 and $800 from Asus, Acer, Lenovo, Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba. The first wave of laptops will become available starting in July, initially with Windows 8, and later in the year with Windows 10.

Call it a Roomba for the ocean. The non-profit Ocean Cleanup has come up with an invention to help the Pacific Ocean rid itself of some of the 8 million tons of plastics. The plan is to set up enormous floating barriers in rotating tidal locations around the globe (called gyres), and let the plastics naturally flow into the "corrals," reports Gizmodo.

Fifty years ago on Wednesday, NASA astronaut Ed White stepped out of his space capsule and walked in space for the first time. White's spacewalk was part of NASA's Gemini program. He left the confines of his Gemini capsule while astronaut James McDivitt stayed inside, monitoring the walk. Since White's historic spacewalk (called an extra-vehicular activity, or EVA, in NASA-speak), the space agency has continued to send men and women into the vacuum of space with only a well-designed suit to protect them. In total, NASA astronauts have performed more than 260 spacewalks, including the EVAs that put people on the moon for the first time.

Netflix has confirmed that it's publicly testing ads (for now just trailers for Netflix-original series) both before and after shows. What you see as a test subject varies in length and whether or not it's skippable, so it's not certain just how tolerable these promos would be. However, Netflix is quick to note that a lot of things are up in the air, and that you might not see these clips at all

When a group of modern humans began their exodus out of Africa, Egypt may have been the last stop. Genetic similarities between Egyptians and Eurasians suggests that Pleistocene emigrants traveled through Egypt. If the route to Eurasia passed through East Africa, Ethiopians should be more genetically similar to Eurasians than Egyptians are. But according to Pagani, the opposite is true.

After two days sending data back to Earth, a suspected software glitch in the LightSail spacecraft's Linux-based flight software has silenced the craft. Every 15 seconds, LightSail transmits a telemetry beacon packet. The software writes corresponding information to a file called beacon.csv. When it reaches 32 megabytes it can crash the flight system. The manufacturer corrected this glitch in later software revisions, but LightSail’s software version doesn’t include the update. A fix was scheduled to be uploaded, but before that happened, LightSail fell silent.

It's a dreaded day for many Internet companies: On June 30, an extra second will be added to the clock, creating the potential to wreak havoc on computer systems not equipped to handle the change. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems (IERS) announced an extra second will be added at the end of June to account for a discrepancy between Earth's rotation and the atomic clock. The extra second will be added as the clock strikes midnight universal time, meaning the extra second will come for people in the United States at 8 p.m. EDT. There have been 25 instances since 1972 of an extra second being added.

Britons may soon face identity checks to access adult material on the internet, according to discussions between Whitehall and the private sector. “Nobody in the UK wants a centralised identity database,” so a new scheme proposed by the pornography industry would see adult sites verifying visitors’ identity through banks, credit reference agencies or even the NHS. It comes ahead of an expected new law demanding age checks for online pornography and threatening a block on any sites which don’t comply. It is a key Conservative pledge and has widespread support. But critics say the plans are a privacy nightmare, and warn they will require Chinese-style “draconian” levels of internet censorship.

Security researchers have discovered millions of PCs have Computrace software enabled. This software is enabled in the BIOS by default. It allows for a Windows PC to be taken over remotely. Computrace does not enforce encryption when it communicates and it does not verify the identity of the remote server from which it receives commands. Most users are not even aware that this software is installed and enabled in their BIOS.

LG Display showed off the scintillating possibilities of OLED technology last year with a rollable 22-inch OLED display. Now, the company has unveiled a detachable 55-inch display that you can literally stick to a wall using nothing more than a magnet.

Reinventing the acoustic coupled modem of the 1970s, Google engineers have found a way for computers to share data through their speakers. Dubbed Tone, the Chrome app broadcasts the URL of the current tab to any machine within earshot that also has the extension installed. The extension is available now in Chrome's web store. "Tone grew out of the idea that while digital communication methods like email and chat have made it infinitely easier, cheaper, and faster to share things with people across the globe, they've actually made it more complicated to share things with the people standing right next to you. Tone aims to make sharing digital things with nearby people as easy as talking to them," Kauffman and Smus said in a blog post.

Self-driving cars have become a frequent topic for auto executives as the technology for the vehicles emerges. The market for autonomous technology will grow to $42 billion by 2025 and self-driving cars may account for a quarter of global auto sales by 2035, according to Boston Consulting Group. By 2017, partially autonomous vehicles will become available in “large numbers,” the firm said in a report in April.

Chris Roberts, a security researcher with One World Labs, who has been issuing warnings about vulnerabilities in inflight entertainment systems for years, told the FBI agent during an interview in February that he had hacked the in-flight entertainment system on an airplane and overwrote code on the plane’s Thrust Management Computer while aboard the flight. “He stated that he thereby caused one of the airplane engines to climb resulting in a lateral or sideways movement of the plane during one of these flights,” FBI Special Agent Mark Hurley wrote in his warrant application. “He also stated that he used Vortex software after comprising/exploiting or ‘hacking’ the airplane’s networks. He used the software to monitor traffic from the cockpit system.”

It turns out that Microsoft not only has the power to ban you from Xbox Live permanently, but it can also temporarily make your Xbox One totally unusable, as the beta testers behind the Gears of War Remastered leak have found out. If you didn’t think Microsoft had this power, you’re not alone.

All 50 state attorney generals, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Federal Communications Commission, reached settlements with Sprint and Verizon Wireless that include $158 million in payments to resolve allegations that Sprint and Verizon placed unauthorized, third-party charges on consumers' mobile telephone bills, a practice known as "cramming."

As vehicles become more technologically advanced, thieves are becoming technologically savvy, too. Cars with a hands-free key fobs typically unlock a car within about 30 centimeters. But across the USA, thieves have begun using a device called a power amplifier to help unlock cars. The amplifier, which can cost less than $20 over the Internet — takes the signal from the car and projects it as far as 100 meters, so your car can find your key fob in your purse, pocket or the table where you dump your stuff when you come in the door.

The Russian spacecraft that failed to dock at the International Space Station two weeks ago has safely crashed back into the Earth. NASA and Russian space agency Roscosmos report that Progress 59, which launched on April 27 on a supply mission to the ISS, re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean at 10:04PM ET last Wednesday night. NASA footage shows the Progress 59 spinning uncontrollably in space after it had launched successfully from Kazakhstan.

Search-and-rescue technology developed in part by NASA helped free four men trapped under 10-feet of debris in Nepal. The two-year-old FINDER tool users microwave-radar technology to detect heartbeats of people trapped in wreckage. Following the April 25 earthquake, two prototype FINDER devices were deployed to search teams in Nepal. Arriving on April 29 to assist with rescue efforts, the FINDER tools detected two heartbeats beneath two different collapsed structures in the village of Chautara, where the four men had been trapped for days.

International aviation officials are trying to quickly come up with safer packaging for cargo shipments of lithium-ion batteries on passenger planes after U.S. testing confirmed that aircraft fire suppression systems put out the initial flames but can't prevent thermal runaway from causing powerful explosions and fires. Such an explosion could blow a hole in a plane and cause depressurization for passengers. If the working group cannot come up with such packaging, officials said they consider it likely that a formal proposal to ban bulk battery shipments from passenger planes will be offered in October. The global battery industry has been lobbying heavily against restrictions on battery shipments. A growing number of airlines have said they will no longer accept bulk battery shipments, including Delta, United, American Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Qantas, British Airways and Cargolux. All three US airlines will continue to accept shipments when the batteries are packed inside or with equipment such as laptops or power tools. The increasing focus on battery safety will put pressure on other airlines to follow suit.

ConnochaetOS, a Slackware- and Salix OS-based GNU/Linux Distribution, has announced a Release Candidate 2 for its version 14.1 after a several year hiatus.

There's a vulnerability in Master Lock branded combination padlocks that allows anyone to learn the combination in eight or fewer tries, a process that requires less than two minutes and a minimal amount of skill to carry out.

Launched in 2004, NASA’s Mercury-orbiting spacecraft, Messenger, is going out with a bang this week, adding a hefty crater to the little planet closest to the sun. The first spacecraft to circle Mercury, Messenger is expected to slip out of orbit and slam into Mercury on Thursday following a successful four-year tour of the rocky planet. The spacecraft will be traveling 8,750 mph (14,081 kph) when it hits, fast enough to carve out a crater 52 feet (16 meters) wide. The spacecraft itself stretches 10 feet (3 meters) solar wingtip to wingtip. Only one other spacecraft, NASA’s Mariner 10, has ever visited Mercury, and that was back in the 1970s. Mariner 10 flew past, but did not orbit the innermost planet.

Never saw this one coming: Enlightenment has been forked. The new product is called Moksha (Sanscrit: "emancipation, freedom") and is based not on the newest version of Enlightenment, E19, but rather an older version, E17. Behind Moksha is Jeff Hoogland and the folks at Bodhi Linux, who got frustrated with the turn that Enlightenment development has taken, and believe Moksha will be the path that takes the useful, stable release of E17 and makes it into something better. From Hoogland's blog:

The Tor project has decided to stop using the Startpage search engine and will be standardizing on the Disconnect Search Engine, a project that, in theory, uses VPN technology to permit you to use Google, Bing, and Yahoo search services without revealing your IP address or any personal information that would allow companies to build a profile using data revealed as you search. Disconnect was written by former Google and NSA engineers.

(Finally) after years of development, Mailman has reached its third release.

A hi-tech signalling system that will eventually control all of Britain's trains could potentially be hacked to cause a serious crash, according to a scientist who advises the government. Network Rail, which is in charge of the upgrade, acknowledges the threat. "We know that the risk [of a cyber-attack] will increase as we continue to roll out digital technology across the network," a spokesman told the BBC.

Ben Everard | April 23, 2015

Of all the potential solutions offered for Arizona’s water challenges, one has a decidedly science fiction feel: planes flying over the Rockies, seeding clouds with aerosolized silver iodide to stimulate rain and snow. It’s not magic or raindancing but a very real process that dates back to the 1940s. Cloud seeding works by adding ice nuclei, or the initial seed of a rain drop or snowflake, into a cloud that has extra moisture. That’s typically done with silver iodide in an aerosol form. The Central Arizona Project has put about $1 million toward research since 2007, in hopes of increasing the supply in the Colorado River system.

Anyone who spends significant time on aircraft probably agrees that internet access at 30,000 feet is pretty cool. But only if the internet access system isn't stupidly tethered to other aircraft systems of critical importance.

Today, Google unveiled it's long anticipated mobile phone service, called Project Fi. However, Google is not building their own network, but relying on the existing Sprint and T-Mobile networks. Because the service can intelligently switch from one LTE network to the other, depending on signal strength, access is initially limited to Nexus 6 owners. Project Fi phones will need a cellular radio that can work with different network types and support a unique SIM that grants access to multiple networks.

In the software world, it's long been the practice that you don't purchase software, you purchase a license to use it. But as software increasingly gets woven into other products - like the many chips and circuits that run your modern automobile - this practice starts to chip away at the traditional sense of ownership of physical goods.

Norway is making an historic move into a new radio era, being the first country in the world to decide upon an analog switch-off for all major radio channels. Several countries in Europe and Southeast Asia are in similar processes, choosing DAB-technology as the backbone of future radio distribution. Norway began the transition to DAB back in 1995. The DAB-coverage in Norway now exceeds FM-coverage. DAB provides Norway with 22 national channels, as opposed to five channels transmitting nationwide on FM.

The oldest known stone tools in the world were made some 3.3 million years ago, which would make these newly discovered implements older than modern humans. Archaeologists working in the Kenyan Rift Valley that discovered the tools said the set of 20 stone flakes and anvils are some 700,000 years older than stone tools from Ethiopia that previously held this record. These tools predate the earliest fossils representing our genus, Homo, by 500,000 years. What these tools suggest is that stone tool manufacture didn't begin with Homo as previously held but with a more primitive member of the human family.

Worldwide, statistics show that crickets are the most widely cultivated insects for the human diet and are considered the “gateway bug” for people who choose to eat insects. Crickets are readily available in pet stores as food for turtles, frogs, and other pets. They are considered delicacies or snacks for people in many countries. Cricket flour is now commonly found in protein bars, baked goods, and protein powders. Crickets have been touted as much better for the planet—environmentally and financially—than livestock, due to the supposedly more-efficient rate at which they convert feed into body mass. But in reality, there is very little data to support this.

Naranda Modi (prime minister of India) and Stephen Harper (prime minister of Canada) recently met in Toronto where they announced a new 5-year agreement for India to purchase uranium from Saskatoon's Cameco corporation to generate nuclear energy in India. In an article at thehindu.com, Modi is reported as describing India's moves to support the so-called "saffron revolution" in which his administration is growing their commitments to nuclear, solar, wind, biomass and energy saving missions in India. The Hindu article states that: "At the heart of Mr. Modi’s speech was his repeated assertion, jan man badla hai, or “The minds of the people have changed," over his 10 months in office, and that India was finally on the move".

Astronomers are getting ready to do battle with the iRobot corporation over their new lawn mowing robots. The makers of the Roomba are working on a similar device used to mow lawns. Astronomers are concerned about potential interference with radio telescopes. In February, iRobot filed a waiver request with the FCC to use part of the radio spectrum to guide the robots. The company wants to use the frequency band between 6240 and 6740 MHz, which is a frequency that several large radio telescopes use to observe methanol, which is plentiful in stellar nurseries.

Police departments across the United States are easy targets for hackers who infect their computers, encrypt their documents and give them a deadline to make a payment to decrypt their data. Over the weekend, some Maine police agencies reported having to pay ransom to hackers in order to keep their files. In Tewksbury, Massachusetts the police chief said he paid a $500 bounty to get back the department's data.

Popular Science recently reported on a wearable air quality monitor designed and prototyped by electrician, Kevin Hart, and nurse, Laura Moe. They are targeting a late fall 2015 release at a price point of $100 (US).

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reports that two researchers have stepped down from the Science Hall of Fame selection panel over claims that cultural bias is limiting the number of female researchers nominated for the honour. No female researchers have been nominated for two years running and former panelists Judy Illes and Catherine Anderson argue in their resignation statements that the lack of nominations reflects a cultural bias that fails to reflect the contributions women make to science nationally and globally.

Mark Russinovich, a Microsoft technical fellow and senior engineer, and well-known for his Sysinternals/Winternals products, dropped a bombshell in front of several hundred people during a panel discussion at the ChefCon DevOps conference in the United States. Russinovich told the crowd it was "definitely possible" that Microsoft could, in the future, choose to open up the Windows source code. "It's a new Microsoft," he said. "Every conversation you can imagine about what should we do with our software -- open versus not-open versus services -- has happened," he said. Almost 20 percent of the the company's Azure cloud computing virtual machines run Linux already.

A new report out of Canada suggests that high numbers of students at Canadian universities involves the acceptance of too many "marginally talented" students. University of Saskatchewan researcher, Ken Coates, has proposed reducing Canadian university student populations by 30% -- to be complemented by an increased emphasis on job training programs at technical colleges -- to improve the education and employment outcomes of all student cohorts.

Verizon Wireless said there are a handful of areas in which it had hoped to increase its spectrum holdings, but will instead use small (or pico) cells to increase frequency reuse on the network rather than simply using a larger block of spectrum. “We simply have to adjust our plans in certain places where we may have anticipated spectrum.” New York and Boston are two markets in which Verizon Wireless did not acquire additional 1.7/2.1 GHz spectrum in the recent auction. Their budget for this year now includes an incremental $500 million for this kind of network densification.

The continent of Antarctica had its hottest day ever in recorded history earlier this week, as temperatures soared to 63.5 degrees Fahrenheit (17.5 °C) for the first time, eclipsing a record that’s lasted over 50 years.

There have been several articles in the recent past about Rutan and his retirement project, a motorglider with the ability to take off and land on rough water, smooth water, snow, and unimproved fields. He has said the range will allow flight from California to Hawaii non-stop at 170 knots.