NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Hackers Cyberattacking Israeli Government Sites

As violence between Israel and Palestinian militants continues to escalate, new fronts of digital warfare are being declared in cyberspace.

Reuters' Steven Scheer reports that Israeli government websites have been bombarded by more than 44 million hacking attempts since Israel began its air strikes last week. Defense-related websites have been the biggest targets, while 10 million attempts have been made on Israeli President Shimon Peres's website, 7 million on the Foreign Ministry and 3 million on the prime minister's website.

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"The war is taking place on three fronts. The first is physical, the second is on the world of social networks and the third is cyber," said Carmela Avner, Israel's chief information officer, according to Reuters.

DNEWS VIDEO: COOL JOBS: HACKER

Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz said that one hacking attempt succeeded in taking down one site, which he declined to name, but it was back online within 10 minutes.

According to a ministry spokesman, most cyberattacks have come from within Israeli and Palestinian territories, but some have come from around the world.

On Friday, international hacking collective Anonymous published a list of Israeli websites it had taken down or defaced. Though all sites have returned to normal, many had their homepages temporarily replaced with pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas messages.

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Anonymous started their #OpIsrael campaign in solidarity with Palestine after Israel "crossed a line in the sand" by threatening to sever all Internet and telecommunications in and out of Gaza.

However, both sides in the conflict have embraced social media as a means to spread their message and document the turmoil. The Israeli Defense Force is quite active on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram while Palestinian militants are primarily active on Twitter.

via Reuters

Credit: Kobi Gideon/Xinhua Press/Corbis

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Coming Soon: Free Wi-Fi for Facebook Check-In?

Laptop coffee-shop squatters, rejoice! Your days of repeatedly asking the barista for Wi-Fi passwords may soon be over. No need to awkwardly avoid eye contact as you shamble up to the counter to buy the cheapest refill possible just so you can re-up your time limit. Your next Wi-Fi refill could come compliments of Facebook.

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That's right, the social network Goliath is testing a new Wi-Fi hot spot service for local businesses that grants users free Internet access if they do a Facebook check-in. Businesses would provide the access via a Facebook router that directs customers to the business' Facebook page once users check in.

DNEWS VIDEO: COOL JOBS: HACKER

"We are currently running a small test with a few local businesses of a Wi-Fi router that is designed to offer a quick and easy way to access free Wi-Fi after checking in on Facebook," the company confirmed to Inside Facebook. "When you access Facebook Wi-Fi by checking in, you are directed to your local business’s Facebook Page".

Developer Tom Waddington is credited with discovering the test when he found a new entry called "social wifi" in the "Like sources" section of the Insights API.

While businesses would still provide the Internet access, Facebook would provide a router. Page owners would be able to monitor how many new 'Likes' the page received from those who used the Wi-Fi service. Visitors who don't want to jump through the Facebook hoop could still access the network via a password from the business.

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Rumored to be the product of a hackathon project, Facebook Wi-Fi only exists as a limited test run and likely won't be popping up at your local coffee shop anytime soon. Until then, laptop squatters, you'll just have to dig deeper in your couch for all that loose change for refills.

via CNET

Credit: Turba/Corbis

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The Eyes Have It: Control of Your Tablet

A group of Danish programmers has come up with the ultimate hands-free set: tracking eye movements to interact with tablets and smart phones.

Eye tracking has already been proposed as a way to tailor advertisements by tracking how long a viewer lingers on a given part of the screen. That technology is still in the future. But it isn't hard to envision using eye tracking to move a cursor, and essentially take the place of the finger-swipe.

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That's what The Eye Tribe (formerly known as Senseye) did. With some $800,000 in seed money the team came up with software that works with an infrared LED and the phone or tablet's front-facing camera. The LED lights up the eye, and the camera picks up an image that is interpreted by the software to show where the user is looking.

The Eye Tribe says on its web site that it plans to have a working version out in 2013. One thing smart phones and tablets will need to have is the LEDs, as right now they have to be tacked on for The Eye Tribe's system to work. That said, a new generation of devices could have it pre-installed.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Laitr Keiows

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3-D Printing Pirates Paused: DNews Nugget

3-D Printers to Have Digital Rights Management: Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the music and film industry's way of keeping you from illegally sharing their content, and now it may be coming to 3-D printing, reports TorrentFreak.

3-D printers, with the right printer cartridges, could ostensibly be made to print anything from a complete shoe to parts for a battleship. Their versatility allows 3-D printers to create any shape, including copyrighted works. This has some worried about printing piracy.

In response to an announcement from the popular piracy forum, PirateBay, a patent has surfaced outlining the methods to secure three-dimensional printed designs.

Essentially the patent says, "a digital fingerprint of 'restricted items' will be held externally and printers will be required to compare the plans of the item they’re being asked to print against those in a database. If there’s a match, printing will be disallowed or restricted," explains TorrentFreak.

Whether this new DRM for printing will stop piracy is unknown, but as 3-D printing becomes more mainstream, the lawyers and rights-holders are already preparing for battle. via TorrentFreak

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Getting A Grip On Inputs

When using illustration or drawing software, it's necessary to first chose a tool -- such as a pen, brush or even a piece of charcoal -- from a menu. And although the on-screen effect varies for each tool, the illustrator still grips the stylus the same way. Similarly, when using a smartphone, a person typically clicks on an app to select a function -- such as phone or camera. And then the user holds the phone a particular way to carry out that function, whether it's making a call or taking a picture.

But soon it could be all in the grip. Researchers are working on a way to engage the function of an electronic device simply by the way it's held. They call it FlexAura, for "flexible near-surface range sensor." It would allow an illustrator, for example, to hold a stylus like a brush and immediately engage the brush tool in the software. Or if a person held her phone like a camera, the camera app would pop up. 

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Senwei Liu and Francois Guimbretière at Cornell University presented their prototype at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Boston this week.

The technology itself is a set of infrared LEDs wrapped around a pen-shaped stylus, which is connected to a computer. The LEDs sit alongside photo-transistors that pick up how the infrared light is reflected off of a person's hand as they hold the stylus. That allows the software to create a kind of topographic map of the shape of the grip, which indicates how the pen is being held. "The pressure of the grip doesn't mater," Guimbretière, an associate professor of information science at Cornell, told Discovery News. "What matters is the volume."

When the user grips the "pen" in a different way, the software can read that as input -- and change tools, as in the drawing program example.

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The next step, he said, is to build a wireless connection because the prototype's wired link is a bit cumbersome. He added that it might be possible to use a system of capacitive touch sensors to accomplish the same thing. That would lend itself better to devices such as phones, as LEDs tend to be power-hungry and battery life is at a premium. The difficulty is that capacitive touch sensors only tell you where a hand is contacting the device, not how far away the surface is.

Credit: Shenwei Liu / Francios Guimbretière

Via: "FlexAura: A Flexible Near-Surface Range Sensor" presented at UIST

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Smallest Folding Bluetooth Keyboard's Pocketable

Jorno: $79 and up

Since winning a 2011 CES Innovations Award for their prototype almost two years ago, the team at Jorno has worked tirelessly to make their uniquely designed mobile accessory a reality. Of course, other full-size keyboards have come down the pike, folding once or even twice. But this touch typing tool folds five ways, down to a 3 1/2-inch square just over an inch thick, more compact than all of them. And with a little help, it may come to fruition this spring.

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Made from metals and premium plastic resins, Jorno features a standard layout and proprietary key mechanism designed to replicate a laptop keyboard experience. It comes with a detachable cradle that can stably hold your smartphone or tablet in either  landscape or portrait orientation. In addition to Android, iOS, Symbian and WebOS mobile devices, it'll work with Mac and Windows desktops. With normal usage, it claims to be able to go one month on a full charge.

If this innovative product seems like just your type, now would be a good time to lock in a good deal. As of this writing, it's approximately 18.17 percent of the way towards its Kickstarter goal. But after next month when it's been funded, the retail will pop up 50 percent to $119.

Credit: Jorno

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Supermodels, Google's Project Glass Hit Runway

If we know anything by now about eyewear trends it's this: what was yesterday's fashion faux pas is today's must-have accessory of haute couture. Case in point: black, thick-rimmed glasses. Once the hallmark of nerds everywhere, now they're a hipster-chic trademark, worn everywhere from the streets of Williamsburg to NBA post-game interviews.

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Though they'll likely experience a quicker ascent to cool-kid-christened popularity, augmented-reality glasses are still stuck in the getting-beat-up-on-the-playground phase. Remember Steve Mann? He's the University of Toronto professor who was physically assualted in a Parisian McDonalds restaurant because he was wearing self-designed, augmented-reality glasses.

But bullies beware, there's a new kid on the block.

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Because they were developed by celebrities of the tech world's cool, new Babylon -- Silicon Valley -- Google's Project Glass augmented-reality glasses already have a fashionable leg up on the competition. However, now that they've done their thing down the runway, they might have both legs up.

The glasses are being used to record behind-the-scenes footage of designer Diane von Furstenberg's show for New York Fashion Week. They may not be too sexy for Milan, but this marks the first time the glasses have been publicly used for anything other than an arguably less-vogue tech demo.

The culmination of this project will be "DVF through Glass," a short film offering a first-person glimspe of what it's like for designers and models to prepare and perform during fashion week. Though the video won't be released until September 13th, Furstenberg has been publishing runway photos at DVF's Google+ gallery.

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If augmented-reality glasses and New York Fashion Week are just too funky for you, remember, you have the freedom to wear whatever you like. However, if staying ahead of the curve is the name of the game, Steve Mann might be one of the coolest guys in the world. 

Personally, I think Mann has a long way to go before he becomes a pioneer of style. For starters, when at a McDonald's in Paris, don't order a Chicken Ranch Wrap. Everyone knows the cool cats order the Royale with Cheese.

via The Verge

Credit: Aygul Zagidullina

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Write With Your Eyes

It's every writer's dream: just look at the page and have the words appear.

Jean Lorenceau, a neuroscientist at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, has developed an interface to do that, by tracking eye movement. With a little training, he says, a person can learn to control a cursor on a screen.

This isn't a cure for writer's block, though. Lorenceau sees it as an aid to people who are paralyzed and want to communicate. He plans to test it with people who have Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease.

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The system works by attaching a camera to the person's head (using a frame for glasses). The camera tracks eye movements. That's more complicated than it sounds, though, because a person's eyes don't move smoothly.

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Ordinarily, when a human eye is not following something that moves, it makes what are called saccades. These are tiny, sudden movements. A good way to see this is to watch someone's eyes as they look out the window of a car or subway train. The eyes will smoothly track what's out the window, and snap back. The eyes move smoothly only when they track the moving objects (or, strictly speaking, objects that appear to move across the field of view).

Lorenceau 's system tracks the eyes for 30 seconds at a time. The movement data is sent to a computer that can then ignore the saccades. If the user moves the eyes as though they were writing something, the eye behaves as though it were tracking a real object even if one isn't there. It does take some practice though, because the person is learning to "see" his or her own eye movements, which are largely involuntary.

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The system isn't as sophisticated as it could be -- there are ways to add processing to smooth out the movement more. But for poeple who cannot write with their hands, this technology could allow them to communicate more fully.

Image: Lorenceau et al., Current Biology

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Eyes Inspires Clog-Free Inkjet Printer

We all hate it: clogged inkjet nozzles. They smudge and make your "photo quality" printer a dud.

Jae Wan Kwon, associate professor in the College of Engineering at the Uniersity of Missouri, decided to do something about it. He turned to the human eye for inspiration.

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An eye stays moist because it is covered with a thin film of oil. Kwon decided to do the same thing for inkjet nozzles, except he used silicone oil.

He couldn't duplicate the eye exactly; the eye has eyelids that spread the film of oil over the layer of tears. An "eyelid" on a printer, such as a mechanical shutter, would add a level of complexity to the printer and would get trapped in place by the surface tension of the oil. Kwon used an electric field to move the droplet of oil instead.

This would be a big improvement on the current method, which is just to have ink droplets break through the dried gunk that forms on the nozzles if the printer isn't used a lot. When it prints, a burst of fresh ink breaks through. Over time this can waste a large amount of (expensive) ink. Kwon’s invention eliminates that waste.

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And it isn't just inkjet printers. Rapid protoyping machines (3-D printers) run into similar problems. The liquid used in them can make it necessary to replace the whole nozzle when they get clogged -- at a cost of thousands. If those nozzles can be rendered clog-free, it would save a lot of money there as well.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Human Eye Inspires Clog-free Ink Jet Printer Invented by MU Researcher from MU News Bureau on Vimeo

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Leap Brings Motion Control To PCs

Leap: $69.99

Creators of Leap were inspired by Microsoft Kinect to put motion-sensing technology into one teeny tiny peripheral. The USB-drive sized device creates a 3-D interactive space that is meant to replace a mouse by enabling people to use finger, arm or other hand movements to control what’s going on their PC.

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The goal in creating Leap, according to co-creator Michael Buckwald, was to bring real world interaction experience to the virtual world of everyday computing. For example, in the demo video, a user is shown holding a pencil and illustrating in front of the screen, without interacting with anything else. One can also zoom in and out of maps, play touch-based games and show off a Powerpoint presentation sans clicking. Just beware of any erratic hand movements. Pre-orders are available, and shipping should begin winter 2012. If you’re a developer, software kits are available on Leap’s site to create programs controlled by the device. 

 

via Venture Beat

Credit: Leap Motion

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