Archive for November, 2011

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Phone spying busted

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

BUSTED! Secret app on millions of phones logs key taps article tells that Android app developer Trevor Eckhart has published what he says is conclusive proof that millions of smartphones are secretly monitoring the key presses, geographic locations, and received messages of its users.

Many Android, Nokia, and BlackBerry smartphones have software called Carrier IQ. Carrier IQ is a diagnostic tool designed to give network carriers and device manufacturers detailed information about the causes of dropped calls and other performance issues. But it seems that it is collecting more information than smartphone user might like it to have. Carrier IQ allows allows your carrier full access into your handset, including keylogging, which apps have been run, URLs that have been loaded in the browser, etc.

CarrierIQ tried to silence Eckhart, but later backtracked. Eckhart labeled the software a “rootkit,” and software maker threatened him with legal action and huge money damages. The Electronic Frontier Foundation came to his side last week, and the company backed off on its threats.

In a YouTube video, Trevor Eckhart shows how software from Carrier IQ recorded in real time the keys he pressed into a stock handset. The company denies its software logs keystrokes. Eckhart’s 17-minute video clearly undercuts that claim.

After all this you just have to learn to trust your phone operator even more than you wanted before… or hack your phone to get rid of this kind of programs. By the way, it cannot be turned off without rooting the phone and replacing the operating system. Why aren’t mobile-phone customers informed of this and given a way to opt out?

Posted in Mobile, Security | 22 Comments »

Resistors

Wednesday, November 30th, 2011

The resistor is the most common and well-known of the passive electrical components. There are many uses for resistors: they are used to drop voltage, limit current, attenuate signals, act as heaters, act as fuses, furnish electrical loads, and divide voltages. Resistor 101 tutorial provides an in-depth guide to the types of fixed resistors, their key specifications, and different fixed-resistor technologies.

resistor

Posted in Electronics Design | No Comments »

How Much Does The Internet Weigh

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

How heavy is the internet? Information on the internet such as e-mails, documents, video clips, Web pages, are represented in binary digits, 1s and 0s. How Much Does The Internet Weigh video gives you some idea of the wight of the information on the Internet.

Posted in Computers, Telecom and Networking | 1 Comment »

The Top 10 Supercomputers

Sunday, November 27th, 2011

The twice-a-year list of the Top 500 supercomputers documents the most powerful systems on the planet. But what do those supercomputers look like? The Top 10 Supercomputers, Illustrated, Nov. 2011 article takes a look at the top finishers in the latest Top 500 list. Many of them are striking not just for their processing power, but for their design and appearance as well. The article has nice pictures of them.

Posted in Computers | No Comments »

25,000 Angry Christmas Lights

Friday, November 25th, 2011

What do you get when you take Angry Birds and Christmas lights? 25,000 Angry Christmas Lights video shows that you get 25,000 Christmas lights pumping to the Angry Bird Theme song covered by Pomplamoose.

The video description tells that the lights don’t actually go on until after Thanksgiving. This video is shot at a middle of the night test run according to the video description. More information on this light show can be found at http://www.listentoourlights.com/

Posted in Entertainment Technology, Off topic fun | 1 Comment »

Display in contact lens

Thursday, November 24th, 2011

Enhancing contact lenses with electronics seems to be a topic that has gained research interest. Smart contact lenses for health and head-up displays article the litany of research projects underway in the field of contact lens enhancement. Sensimed has already contact lens with surface-mounted strain gauge to assess glaucoma risk. Those medical measuring lenses have lacked display.

I wrote to years ago at Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens posting that researches are developing a new generation of contact lenses built with very small circuits and LEDs.

The news today tells that the idea of those contact lenses has progresses. Electronic contact lens displays pixels on the eyes tells that the first contact lenses containing electronic displays into the eyes of rabbits as a first step on the way to proving they are safe for humans. US and Finnish team says that they have demonstrated the operation of a contact lens display powered by a remote radio frequency transmitter in free space and on a live rabbit.

The test lens was powered remotely using gigahertz-range radio-frequency energy. The power transmitter was placed ten centimetres from the rabbit’s eye and RF energy was picked up on the lens with 5-millimetre-long antenna printed on the lens. The test lens had only one pixel.

Now we have to wait displays with good resolution become available some day. Maybe some day they can replace some larger displays…

Posted in Audio and Video | 3 Comments »

Nokia Research Center 25 years

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

Nokia Research Center http://research.nokia.com has fueled the creation and development of the mobile industry we all enjoy today, and has contributed to a wide spectrum of ground-breaking innovations which have shaped the wireless world.

This short video retrospective showcases a few of the contributions coming from Nokia, in a fun narrative with the people Nokia has spent decades connecting and inspiring.

Nokia did very many things first, but they also tend to shove things in the store room a lot. People at Nokia Research Center did good research and innovations, but there was a huge gap from the inventions to the business and product. Nokia has lost a huge number of big opportunities they had in this way.

By the way I have worked many years at Nokia Research Center many years ago.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Captcha security

Monday, November 21st, 2011

Outsmarted: Captcha security not much of a gotcha article tells that a team of Stanford University researchers has bad news to report about Captchas, those often unreadable, always annoying distorted letters that you’re required to type in at many a Web site to prove that you’re really a human. Captcha is often used to defend against malicious ‘bots, including operators of botnets who try to automatically create accounts on Web e-mail services to send spam.

Modern-captcha

Many Captchas don’t work well at all. More precisely, the researchers invented a standard way to decode those irksome letters and numbers found in Captchas on many major Web sites. Fortunately for normal users and the owners of those web sites the researches have no plans to release their Decaptcha. This gives the Captha users some time to fix their systems before the “bad guys” can work out their own decaptha program (trust me, it will happen sooner or later).

The major problem according to the researches is that most Captchas are designed without proper testing and no usability testing and are fundamentally unable to fully guarantee application security. Capatcha was always doomed to degrade over time, so they need to evolve. Even there are considerable problems, Captchas are still useful for protecting against certain threats.

Google’s slanted-red-letters Captcha (used in Gmail) and the fuzzy-lettered ReCaptcha was found to be pretty secure against the attacks (everything else tested much less secure). Free ReCaptcha is used by what Google estimates to be over 100,000 Web sites including Twitter, Facebook, Craigslist, Ticketmaster, and Microsoft. If you are looking for Captcha solution, try fuzzy-lettered ReCaptcha and do try to make your own weaker solution. For more details read The Robustness of Google CAPTCHAs paper.

Posted in Security, WWW dev | No Comments »

Cool tech news

Thursday, November 17th, 2011

Burton rolls out True 3D laser plasma display article tells that Engineers from Burton Inc. in Japan have rolled out a “True 3D” display. This new system, which can function in air or under water, needs no screen of any sort, and the effect is quite impressive. This display is like Star Wars 3D holo display coming true. This system uses a laser to creates luminous points of light at desired locations in air or underwater. It works by focusing laser light, to produce plasma excitation from the oxygen and nitrogen in the air.

Mimicking the brain, in silicon article tells how new computer chip developed by MIT researchers models how neurons communicate with each other at synapses. The MIT researchers designed their analog computer chip so that the transistors could mimic the activity of different ion channels. With about 400 transistors, the silicon chip can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse. By the way there are about 100 billion neurons in the human brain, each of which forms synapses with many other neurons. The MIT boffins are planning to use their synaptic chip to model specific parts of the brain, such as the visual cortex. Compared to trying to simulate it in software on a supercomputer cluster, by using the analog synaptic chip, the simulation will run faster than your own brain does. (The brain has a 65Hz to 80Hz cycle time).

Posted in Audio and Video, Computers, Electronics Design, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Obfuscated C Code Contest

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

The IOCCC Competition Is Back posting and IOCCC Home Page tell that The International Obfuscated C Code Contest is open again. The 20th International Obfuscated C Code Contest is open from 12-Nov-2011 11:00 UTC to 12-Jan-2012 12:12 UTC.

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (abbreviated IOCCC) is a programming contest for the most creatively obfuscated C code. Winning entries are awarded with a category, such as “Worst Abuse of the C preprocessor” or “Most Erratic Behavior”, and then announced on the official IOCCC website. Due to the nature of the contest, entries often employ strange or unusual tricks, such as using the C preprocessor to do things it was not designed to do, or avoiding commonly-used constructs in the C programming language in favor of much more obscure ways of achieving the same thing. Wikipedia International Obfuscated C Code Contest has some nice examples of obfuscated code. This is a good competition because it helps exploit the guts of C in new and exciting ways.

A good programmer can (and does) write well structured, clean, documented and maintainable product in any language. Many bad C coders seem to achieve obfuscation without any additional incentive, but this competition is looking for the most creative ways to obfuscate the C code. Good coders know how to create good code, but for fun they can write a really obfuscated code for the competition. The entries for the IOCCC can show a lot of cleverness, but nobody in their right mind would accept such code. When someone knows C well enough to create a truly obfuscated or compressed piece of portable C code that follows the rule of the language to a tee, i.e. that can be compiled strict or linted, and wins the IOCCC, it’s a very good sign that this someone can create excellent C code.

ioccc

Another coding competition to look is Underhanded C Contest. The aim is to write innocent-looking C code implementing malicious behavior. The beauty of the Underhanded C ones is that the code looks reasonable, but does extremely undesirable things. In many ways this is the exact opposite of the Obfuscated C Code Contest: in this contest you must write code that is as readable, clear, innocent and straightforward as possible, and yet it must fail to perform at its apparent function. To be more specific, it should do something subtly evil.

Happy coding.

Posted in Computers | 1 Comment »

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