...will he ever win?

The organization that oversees the Internet's unique identifier naming system has joined forces with the U.S. Department of Commerce and secure infrastructure specialist Verisign Inc to try and make our online lives a little safer. The Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has revealed that a solution has been found to a flaw in the security of the domain name system. The collaboration has announced the deployment of a new security extension to make sure that our website addressing requests are not hijacked by dishonest types looking to steal our savings... Continue Reading Internet gets security upgrade

Tags: ICANN, Infrastructure, Internet, Security, Upgrade

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July 31, 2010 07:09 PM

The main event of the Robotech exhibition held in Tokyo this past week featured the Robo-One Grand Prix event, pitting an assortment of bipedal humanoid robots against each other in an improvised octagonal wrestling ring. Many of you might have seen clips of Japan's rastlin' robots, but as there were more than a few impressive takedowns and attacks on show, I thought I'd share a few highlights... Continue Reading Video: Robot Wrestlers battle it out at Robotech

Tags: Exhibition, Humanoid, Japan, Remote Control, Robot, Robotics, Robots, Video

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July 31, 2010 07:03 PM

Toshiba has unveiled its new line of CELL REGZA 3D LED TVs. The new 3D TVs, CELL REGZA 55X2, CELL REGZA Slim 55XE2 and CELL REGZA 46XE2 all include "3D Super Resolution Technology" for upgrading the resolution of 3D content along with 2D-3D conversion. The 55X2 has dynamic contrast ratio of 9,000,000:1 while the other two models have 4,000,000:1. All feature 240 Hz refresh rate, support DNLA, are web enabled and feature a 3 TB hard drive with 2 TB dedicated to CELL REGZA’s Time Shift Machine, which allows you to record up to eight channels simultaneously. .. Continue Reading Toshiba unveils three new CELL REGZA 3D LED TVs

Tags: 3D, 3D TV, Cell Regza, High Definition, LED TV, Regza, Toshiba

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July 31, 2010 05:57 PM

The Haier PowerPad is a concept device shown at SinoCES which captures the energy contained within the water that runs off our bodies every morning in the shower, and returns said energy to the hot water tank. Haier claims the PowerPad is currently capturing and returning 15% of the energy coming out of the faucet and by the time it goes on sale six weeks from now, that figure will be 20-30%. Haier is one of the world’s most innovative companies and is hence foolish to bet against, but we’re struggling to understand the technologies being used and just how optimistic the claims are... Continue Reading Haier Power Pad takes energy from shower water and returns it to hot water system

Tags: CES China, Consumer Electronics, Dishwashers, Haier, Refrigerator, Shower, Washing Machine

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July 31, 2010 05:03 PM

We're approaching the dog days of summer in the northern hemisphere, and tech news shows no signs of cooling down.

Apple loses big in DRM ruling: jailbreaks are "fair use": Every three years, the Library of Congress approves a handful of exemptions to the DMCA, allowing consumers to break or bypass DRM in particular instances. On the list this time: jailbreaking an iPhone, ripping clips from a DVD, and investigating SecuROM on computer games.

Overkill as art: Ars reviews the Cyborg R.A.T. 7: It's not easy to justify a $100 price tag for a gaming mouse, but the R.A.T. 7 is adjustable in both size and shape, features multiple levels of DPI control, and offers more options than anything else on the market.

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July 31, 2010 05:00 PM

The details are out for the DefCon 18 badges. The new design has a lot of goodies packed into it, most notably a 128×32 LCD display. You can’t see it in the image above because it’s on the other side of the badge; the ribbon cable passes through a slit in the substrate to reach the connector on the back. The board has a mini-USB connector and is meant to get even the unseasoned novice up and running with some firmware tweaks. The Freescale processor (which is the same chip as last year’s badge) is running a bootloader that can be accessed and flashed using a terminal program. Yeah… impressive.

But it doesn’t stop with the component selection or firmware mastery, these badges are beautiful too. What you see above is the prototype, but the 7780 badges produced come in seven different flavors (as usual), laser etched on a PCB that uses Aluminum as the substrate. Line up all the badges side-to-side and you get a graphic art storyboard. [Joe] outdid himself this year, and he’s been nice enough to share the development details (PDF) which we spent way too much time drooling over.

[Thanks Kim]

July 31, 2010 04:04 PM

[Image: Watership Down by Maier Yagod and Jon Reed at the Cleveland Public Library].

In a project for the Cleveland Public Library, designed by Toronto-based architects Maier Yagod and Jon Reed, "domestic fragments" have been embedded in the pavement, forming a surreal new kind of public bench:

Watership Down creates a scenario where five houses are frozen for a moment in a process of complete submersion into the ground of the Eastman Garden. Placed throughout the Garden, the gables of these houses project out of the earth at various angles. These create focal points of interest within the garden and become follies to climb, sit and rest upon.

Taken too far in one direction, of course, this idea could very easily become a kind of postmodern joke—architectural theme-props for a children's playground—but the installation manages to avoid explicit dramaturgy, its fragments more like Gordon Matta-Clark's Building Cuts emerging from the surface of the city.

[Image: Watership Down by Maier Yagod and Jon Reed at the Cleveland Public Library].

A fever of roofs pushing up from below, breaching ground level with the archaeological buoyancy of lost ships.

[Image: Watership Down by Maier Yagod and Jon Reed at the Cleveland Public Library].

While the deliberate use of simulated building fragments can run the risk, mentioned earlier, of simply repeating the PoMo theatrics of things like "upside-down buildings," the evocation of underground architecture, like tombs, scratching through the earth, buried by an orderly landslide of the urban fabric around them, is an interesting direction to take.

July 31, 2010 12:55 PM

Recently, Benji York joined Canonical’s Launchpad team. I asked him a little about himself and his work.

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Benji: I work on the Foundations team. Right now I’m concentrating on the web service APIs and improving the OpenID integration.

Matthew: Can we see something that you’ve worked on?

Benji: There’s not much to see yet. Most of my changes thus far have been bug fixes or purely internal.

Matthew: Where do you work?

Benji: I work from my home in Virginia, USA.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Benji: Just the shrubs that border my lawn. Once the weather cools off a bit I want to try working from the wifi-covered park/beach near my house.

Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?

Benji: I worked at Zope Corporation for about 6 years, most of that time as the team lead for their main product. Before that I worked in the automotive industry, mostly writing supply chain and manufacturing software.

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

Benji: I think the first piece of open source software I used to any degree was Python 1.5. Since then open source software has slowly taken over almost every niche of my computing world.

Matthew: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?

Benji: Pragmatism. If a thing doesn’t do what it needs to do, it’s not worth much.

However, I believe that principles are there to help us be pragmatic in a scope larger than the immediate moment. It’s not pragmatic in the long term to skimp on good design or testing just to get something out the door. Any good principal is grounded in pragmatism.

Matthew: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?

Benji: When I was in college the console (NES, SNES, Genesis, etc.) emulation scene exploded and I had a side project that let people connect console controllers to their PC. I was approached by one of the Linux input device guys about contributing some of that code. That was my first open source contribution.

Since then I’ve made large and small contributions to dozens of open source projects. Most of those have been in the Zope ecosystem.

Lately I’ve put most of my open source hacking time into Manuel, a system for writing better tested documentation and better documented tests — it’s sort of a spiritual successor to Python’s doctest.

Matthew: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.

Benji: I’m sure most readers of this blog will know, but I didn’t know that the Launchpad and Bazaar integration is as nice as it is. Being able to branch from LP, make changes, mark the branch as fixing a particular bug, push the branch to LP, view the diffs online and then generate a merge proposal that will be automatically emailed to reviewers is very convenient.

Matthew: Is there anything in particular that you want to change in Launchpad?

Benji: I’m not familiar enough with LP yet to have strong feelings about changing it. Give it a few months and I’ll be plenty opinionated.

[Discuss Benji York’s Interview on the Forum]

Originally posted by Matthew Revell here on Thursday, July 29th, 2010 at 12:44 pm

July 31, 2010 04:53 AM

Have the copyright enforcers been caught with their hands in the cookie jar? The blog TorrentFreak today published its claim that the US Copyright Group, which has filed more than 14,000 lawsuits against anonymous P2P movie sharers, ripped off another copyright settlement group in crafting its own settlement website.

The site was tipped off by a reader, who claimed that US Copyright Group had jacked code and visual elements from Copyright Settlements, which is in a similar business: sue P2P users, then send them letters demanding a settlement to avoid trial.

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July 30, 2010 11:08 PM