A UC Berkeley physicist and a Nobel prize-winning colleague now in President Obama’s Cabinet report they have confirmed one of Albert Einstein’s most revolutionary theories 10,000 times more accurately than ever before.
Einstein’s theory of general relativity has already been tested and confirmed to a degree as a true picture of reality by scores of experimenters, ever since he proposed it to the world nearly a century ago.
In the immediate decades after the theory’s publication, legend had it that only 12 people in the world could understand it, although physicists have long revered it.
Even today, relativity remains an arcane subject for most of us, but it does have relevance to all science and even to everyday life – for meticulous timekeepers, for space explorers, for astronomers studying black holes and even for anyone driving a car with a Global Positioning System device navigating around the Bay Area’s tricky freeway mazes.
One basic prediction from Einstein’s theory is that the tug of gravity makes clocks slow down.
As the online search giant Google has completed its acquisition of video compression outfit On2 Technologies the company was recommended by the Free Software Foundation to release On2’s latest codec under an irrevocable free license and use it to replace Adobe Flash on YouTube.
“With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world’s largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec: VP8,” reads a open letter to Google, posted to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) blogs.
“Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web’s dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash).”
Full Story ~ Ecommerce Journal
Nearly 15 months after the Defense Department banned the use of external computer flash drives, officials have agreed to allow limited use of the convenient high-tech storage devices.
The approved flash drives will be included in kits that the military will soon begin to distribute, with the first priority being troops in Afghanistan and Iraq who need the devices to carry or transfer critical data.
Vice Adm. Carl V. Mauney, deputy commander of U.S. Strategic Command, told reporters Friday that initially only dozens will be sent to the war zone, but eventually more kits will be created and distributed. He said he does not know how much the kits will cost, or how many will be handed out over time.
Plagued by millions of computer probes and attacks every day, the Pentagon has been struggling to balance its need for strict computer security with the urgent battlefield demands of its commanders. Defense Department and other U.S. government officials repeatedly warn of the growing threat of coordinated cyber attacks that pose potential national security risks.
Full Story ~ The Washington Post
Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of World of Warcraft, donated $1.1 million to The Make-A-Wish Foundation on Tuesday.
In a press release Wednesday, the charity dedicated to bringing joy to the lives of children with life-threatening medical conditions applauded the gamemaker for its large contribution.
The dough didn’t come straight out of Blizzard’s pocket. Players of the popular MMO pitched in by buying the Pandaren Monk in-game pet (pictured above left). Blizzard promised to donate $5 every time a player made a $10 microtransaction to gain the pet during the months of November and December.
“This donation also reflects the spirit and generosity of our players,” said Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime. “Their enthusiasm for World of Warcraft and for supporting a good cause made this possible.”
The two schools in question are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School, according to anonymous sources of the newspaper.
Jiaotong touts one of China’s top computer science programs. Lanxiang is a vocational school that was founded by the military and trains computer scientists for the military.
Google first announced on Jan. 12 that it and other companies were the targets of computer hijacking which were believed to be from China. The attacks, which were intended to steal trade secrets and computer codes and also the e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun in April — months earlier than originally thought.
Only until recently, the investigation had led the National Security Agency to Taiwan.
Spokesmen for the Chinese schools said that they were unaware that American officials traced the hacking to the schools.
According to an interview with a professor of Jiaotong’s School of Information Security Engineering in the Times article, it is common for students to hack into foreign Web sites.
And it’s still up and running.
But worse, the security analysts who detected the underground network believe the criminals behind it aren’t even after money. Instead they have built a secret underground network to rent out to gangs, cybercrooks — and even rogue governments.
Detected by network-forensics firm NetWitness, the newly-discovered infestation — dubbed the “Kneber botnet” after the username linking the infected computers — gathers login credentials to online financial systems, social networking sites and e-mail systems from infested computers and reports the information to miscreants who can use it to break into accounts, steal corporate and government information, and replicate personal, online and financial identities.
Information compiled by NetWitness showed that hackers gained access to a wide array of data at 2,411 companies, from credit-card transactions to intellectual property.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Eva Hibnick, a resident of Florida, though the suit seeks to include all 31.2 million Gmail users as potential plaintiffs. Buzz was rolled out to most, if not all, Gmail users last week. In at least some cases the feature was automatically activated, and generated publicly accessible lists of followers gleaned from users’ Gmail accounts and Gtalk conversations. There is real concern that sensitive information related to some contacts could have been exposed.
Google made numerous changes last weekend in an attempt to make it easier to opt out of the service and make contact lists private. It also dropped the automatic following features, replacing it with a list of suggested contacts. Buzz won’t automatically connect and use public data from Picasa and Google Reader without a user explicitly activating the connecting, either.
What is alleged to have occurred is that the parents of student Blake Robbins received word in November from an official at Harriton High School that their son has been involved in “improper behavior in his home.”
I can find no specifics as to what this improper behavior was supposed to be, or, indeed, how improper it might have been. However, the official allegedly showed the parents a photo taken by his school-issued laptop Webcam. This photo was not one intentionally taken by Robbins, but rather remotely, by the school.(Credit: CC Sergis Blog/Flickr)
The story, you see, heads in a direction somewhere east of disturbing. The Robbins family says an assistant principal at Harriton High, Lindy Matsko, confirmed that the school district “in fact has the ability to remotely activate the Webcam contained in a student’s personal laptop computer issued by the school district at any time it chose, and to view and capture whatever images were in front of the Webcam.”
Update, 3:46 p.m. PST: Lower Merion School District has issued a statement regarding the allegations on its Web site.
It says the remote-activation Webcam system has been deactivated, effective immediately. It further states that the feature was enabled only “to track lost, stolen, and missing laptops.”
While declaring that the system was only able to take “a still image of the operator and the operator’s screen,” the School District says it “has not used the tracking feature or Webcam for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever.”
The school district says it is continuing to review the matter.
Apple has banned at least two prominent iPhone hackers from accessing its App Store.
Sherif Hashim, an iPhone developer who developed a hack for the latest iPhone OS 3.1.3, and iH8Sn0w, who developed the XEMN tool designed to unlock iPhone 3.1.3 radio baseband for the 3G and 3GS, found that their Apple IDs were blocked and accounts deactivated when they tried to access the app store of Monday. Their respective reactions can be found in Twitter posts here and here.
The move sparked concerns that Apple might ban all jailbroken iPhones was accessing the App Store. However, such a move would prevent Apple’s application developers from selling to the millions of users of jailbroken devices and would be especially bad politics following the launch of the Wholesale Applications Community at the Mobile World Congress conference earlier this week.
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