For sport or safety, hurtling to Earth from space without the protective shroud of a heavily engineered space vehicle seems like sheer lunacy—a hellish descent punctuated by intense heat and terminal. But the physics actually works out. With a heat-resistant space suit and the right kind of chutes, such a daredevil plunge should indeed be possible. Future space divers will need a suit able to withstand the high heat of reentry and provide adequate oxygen to the diver. Because no current pressure suit meets that criteria.
A company called Orbital Outfitters is working on an innovative way of bringing them back, whether it’s done purely as a sport or as an emergency backup plan in case things go awry.
>>
Looking for a way to see how our web creations will look on iPhone? iPhoney is the answer, It is a free and open source application, designed for web developers who want to create 320 by 480 [or 480 by 320] websites for use with iPhone, it gives us a pixel-accurate web browsing environment—powered by Safari—that we can use when developing web sites for iPhone. Phoney requires Mac OS X.
>>
Dynahand, a new online authentication system which could make logging in to websites a little easier. With Dynahand, users simply identify their own handwriting, instead of entering a cryptic password or buying a biometric device to scan their fingerprints. Passwords can be secure when used properly, but many people don't use them well. Dynahand seems to be solve the problemm, It requires no extra hardware or feats of memory.
>>
Smaller companies with their specialized search services are doing things better than Google. It's not scale that's important, but specialization. After all, no one needs 4.7 million links in response to a question about 'New York plumbers'. They just want a few answers that will help them quickly. In December, Ask.com launched Ask City, a search engine combining local information and reviews from sources such as Citysearch, maps, and even tickets. In February, Microsoft bought Medstory, a medical search engine. In April, Steve Case, founder of AOL, began RevolutionHealth.com, a health search engine. And this month, media search company Marchex introduced 100,000 sites that let users search on particular, local topics, such as New York beauty salons.
>>
Mpack is the latest among many such tools for spreading malware on the Internet According to Symantec, Mpack or Web Attacker II is a collection of PHP software components designed to be hosted and run from a PHP server running a database on the backend. Mpack compromises legitimate Web sites through an automated tool. A hacker sitting at a keyboard appends in a line of code to the Web page of common sites. Anyone who visits the compromised site will automatically load that line of code, typically an IFrame. IFrames are used by Web designers to open additional windows, often hosted on other sites, within a main Web page, IFrames can also be used by criminal hackers to redirect browsers to malicious-code sites. With Mpack, the call isn't direct; usually there are intermediary servers along the way to further obfuscate the true malware server.
watch Mpack in action >>
The TechnologyReview Magazine looks at the inner workings of the Nintendo Wii game console. Initially discounted by game-industry watchers as graphically underpowered compared with the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360. Behind the Wii's success is its unique controller, it responds to our movements in a natural manner, turning into a baseball bat, a sword, or a hand, as necessary. It is, in a word, fun.
>>
The teens holing up in their rooms, ignoring friends, family, even food and a shower, while grades plummet and belligerence soars. The culprit isn't alcohol or drugs. It's video games, which for certain kids can be as powerfully addictive as heroin. A support group called On-Line Gamers Anonymous has numerous postings on its Web site from gamers seeking help. Liz Woolley, of Harrisburg, Pa., created the site after her 21-year-old son fatally shot himself in 2001 while playing an online game she says destroyed his life.
>>
Google plans to speedup the development of plug-in hybrid cars by giving away millions of dollars to people and companies that have what appear to be practical ways to get plug-ins to market faster. As auto development is crushingly expensive, especially when it involves the kind of advanced battery and power train technology used in plug-in hybrids. Google is not planning to get into the business of building and selling hybrid electrics, but it focus on accelerating their developing through research, testing and investment.
>>
We don't have to spend a pile of money to give our system some of the cutting-edge features of super fast gaming and graphics PCs costing $5000 or more. A few frugal upgrades can bring our PC's performance to a new level. Overclocking boosts performance by pushing the CPU and the graphics chip to run faster than their factory presets. Most CPUs can operate comfortably at frequencies higher than PC vendors use. If you're cautious, then you can overclock a PC with almost no risk. Your CPU will run hotter, but monitoring and controlling your system's temperature is easy. Keep in mind, however, that overclocking usually invalidates our warranty.
>>
DropBoks is a simple web storage application which allows us to securely store our files online. Each account gets an 1 GB of storage space. We can upload/download files [any format] as large as 50 MB. When we log in, DropBoks switches to https so our files are encrypted as well as authenticated.
>>
Yoggie is a tiny linux-based hardware firewall that fits in our hand, requires no wall outlet, and provides enterprise-level firewall protection for our computer. It has two operating modes one draws power from the built-in USB cable, connects to our ethernet port, and the ethernet wall socket, and the second just uses the USB port and performs packet-packet filtering for our computer's own WiFi adapter through the use of a virtual bridge. It has a web based front end that shows us its status, and keeps us informed as to what sorts of attacks it has encountered.
>>
3D Mailbox is an e-mail client for Windows like Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora. But unlike them, it has a incredible 3D worlds which lets us to interact with our e-mail graphically. 3D Mailbox is fully compatible with all web-based e-mail services, like GMail and other mail services. It's available in 2 versions Free version which is fully functional for the first level of the program "Miami Beach" and a 3D Mailbox watermark with promotional text appears at the bottom of all outgoing e-mails sent via the free version of the program.
>>
Voice Pay a new payment system lets consumers pay for goods by talking on the phone. The new service uses biometric voice analysis to authenticate users. To use Voice Pay, consumers first need to set up an account. This one time enrollment process involves calling a Voice Pay number from a cell phone and establishing a user name and password, as well as providing credit-card information. The consumer will also be asked to register a particular cell-phone number and give a voice print by repeating a series of randomly generated numbers.
>>
As we know captchas are the puzzles on many Web sites that present a string of distorted letters and numbers. Most major Internet companies use captchas to keep the automated programs of spammers from infiltrating their sites. Aleksey Kolupaev works for an Internet company in Kiev, Ukraine, and in his spare time, with his friend Juriy Ogijenko, he develops and sells software that can thwart captchas by analyzing the images and separating the letters and numbers from the background noise. They charge $100 to $5,000 a project, depending on the complexity of the puzzle.
>>
Imagine future, in which wireless power transfer is feasible, cell phones, household robots, mp3 players, laptop computers and other portable electronics capable of charging themselves without ever being plugged in, freeing us from that final, ubiquitous power wire. Some of these devices might not even need their bulky batteries to operate. A team from MIT has experimentally demonstrated an important step toward accomplishing this vision of the future, they were able to light a 60W light bulb from a power source seven feet away and there was no physical connection between the source and the appliance. The concept is called as "WiTricity" [wireless electricity].
>>
web server distribution across malicious servers
Researchers at Google’s new anti-malware team found that Microsoft’s IIS server software was being used to launch drive-by malware downloads more than any other server type. The statistics come from a Google examination of 70,000 domains that have been either distributing malware or have been responsible for hosting browser exploits. Compared to their sample of servers across the Internet, Microsoft IIS features twice as often (49% vs. 23%) as a malware distributing server. Read the full Google Security Team report.
>>
Japanese scientists have created a newest Japanese humanoid robot, named 'Kansei', which frowns when he hears the word 'bomb' and looks scared and disgusted when someone says "president". The robot created by a Japanese university research team can pull up to 36 different facial expressions based on a program which creates word associations from a self-updating online database of 500,000 keywords. Watch the video.
>>
Ask.com search engine that used to be called AskJeeves dwarfed by competition from Google, armed with a site redesign it hopes will reorganize the online world into a far more financially favorable universe. Ask is a lot older than Google, but its use and revenue pales by comparison. In its latest advance, Ask.com on Tuesday will introduce a more dynamic way of displaying search results. The new approach, dubbed "Ask 3D," will be highlighted by a panel on the far right of the screen devoted to relevant photos and multimedia results, including video and music clips that can be played without leaving the page. In other instances, the third panel may feature weather reports or snippets from blogs and news sites.
>>
According to McAfee's "The State of Search Engine Safety" report, search terms related to music and technology are most likely to return sites with spyware and other malicious code. Some 42 percent of the results using the term for example "screensavers," led to sites flagged with a "red" warning or a cautionary "yellow" by McAfee. Other keywords McAfee deemed risky include names of file sharing software "BearShare," "LimeWire" and "Kazaa."
>>
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates appear together on stage at Digital Conference to discuss their contribution to the computing industry, they talk about their relationship. Checkout the 3 sets of interesting videos.
Part 1 : Steve Jobs and Bill Gates TogetherPart 2 : Gates and Jobs on Their RelationshipPart 3 : Gates and Jobs Take Questions
BasicLinux is designed specifically for old PCs. It uses a small kernel and busybox to provide a low-RAM Linux, capable of browsing the web, doing email, and functioning as an X terminal. The current release of BasicLinux is particularly suitable for old laptops it has PCMCIA capability and includes MagicPoint [a presentation tool similar to PowerPoint]. It comes in two versions one boots from a DOS harddrive, the other boots from floppies. Both versions have the option to install themselves to a Linux partition on the harddrive.
>>
