The Pirate Bay Airborne Servers Division !!!

TPB airborneArsTechnica states that The Pirate Bay plans to build aerial server drones with $35 Linux Computer. The idea is to move the proxy server to the air creating a small network of mobile computers that are tethered to GPS-enabled aerial drones. And why, you may ask? Well, with the airborne LOSS (Low Orbit Server Stations) it will be harder for law enforcement agencies to terminate since TPB states that any attempt to ground its vessels will be viewed as an act of war.

Electronic Countermeasures @ GLOW Festival NL 2011 from liam young on Vimeo.

Where do copyright lawsuit's big numbers come from?

 Here’s a good reasonable and easy to understand explanation where those big copyright lawsuit’s numbers come from:

Ever wondered how to silently start your macbook?

You can do it with the hardcore method by Lifehacker or, the easy way in another lifehacker article with help of the Start Ninja. 

Start Ninja

wikileaks and anonymous joins forces

The motherboard website has an awsome article about the US government massive collection of data about citizens. The problem is that the US government wastes milions of dollars in data collection that they can’t analyze due to logistic reasons.

“The most recent bombshell of confidential documents dropped by infamous watchdog organization Wikileaks is already looking to have an enormous impact on our understanding of government security practices. Specifically, intimate details on the long-suspected fact that the U.S. has been paying a whole lot of money to have private corporations spy on citizens, activists and other groups and individuals on their ever-expanding, McCarthy-style naughty list. But perhaps more importantly, the docs demonstrate something very interesting about the nature of U.S. government intelligence: They haven’t really got much of it.”

World Record Energy Density for Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Batteries

Engadget’s ArticleEnvia Systems Achieves World Record Energy Density for Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Batteries. You’re hopping to gat a laptop battery with twice the autonomy? You’re wrong. Since the companny is owned  by General Motors, you’re most likely to see it’s use in future Electrical Vehicles.

Engadget States:

If you’re one of those worried about the battery on your expensive EV running out, look away now. Envia has unveiled a new cell that boasts a record-breaking energy density of 400Wh/kg (most currently offer between 100 and 150). It’s estimated that when commercialized, this could bring the cost of a 300-mile range EV down to as little as $20,000. The performance gains come from a special manganese-rich cathode and silicon-carbon nano-composite anode combination. The battery maker is also partly owned by GM, which unsurprisingly means we’re likely to see these very cells in its EVs in the future. Perhaps with the right choice of upholstery, we might see even better savings? Want to know more? Tap the fully charged press release parked just after the break.

Here’s the press release: 

Envia Systems Achieves World Record Energy Density for Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Batteries

Breakthrough 400 Watt-hour/kilogram Lithium-ion Battery Poised to Revolutionize Cost, Range and Safety in Electric Vehicles

NEWARK, Calif., Feb 27, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Envia Systems, a technology leader in high-performance, low-cost lithium-ion energy storage solutions today announced test results that verify the company’s next-generation rechargeable battery has achieved the highest recorded energy density of 400 Watt-hours/kilogram (Wh/kg) for a rechargeable lithium-ion cell. When commercialized, this 400 Wh/kg battery is expected to slash the price of a 300-mile range electric vehicle by cutting the cost of the battery pack by more than 50 percent.

The testing of Envia’s next-generation lithium-ion battery was performed by the Electrochemical Power Systems Department at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) in Crane, Ind., under the sponsorship of ARPA-E. Tests at various cycling rates at NSWC confirmed that Envia’s automotive battery cell demonstrated energy density between 378-418 Wh/kg for rates between C/3 to C/10 for a 45 Amp-hour (C/3) cell. Similar cells have been cycling in Envia’s test labs for over 300 cycles. NSWC Crane will also test these cells to validate cycling performance. [See excerpts of the test results here: http://enviasystems.com/announcement .]

“Since the inception of Envia, our product team has worked tirelessly and logged over 25 million test channel hours to optimally develop each of the active components of the battery: Envia’s proprietary Si-C anode, HCMR cathode and EHV electrolyte,” said Dr. Sujeet Kumar, Envia Systems co-founder, president & CTO. “Rather than just a proof-of-concept of energy density, I am pleased that our team was successful in actually delivering 400 Wh/kg automotive grade 45 Ah lithium-ion rechargeable cells.”

“Envia’s new battery technology represents exactly the kind of innovation and breakthroughs that ARPA-E is looking for from the American research and development community,” said ARPA-E Director Arun Majumdar. “We hope that this low cost and high density battery technology enables wide spread adoption of electric vehicles across the country and around the world.”

“In an industry where energy density tends to increase five percent a year, our achievement of more than doubling state-of-art energy density and lowering cost by half is a giant step towards realizing Envia’s mission of mass market affordability of a 300-mile electric vehicle,” said Envia Systems Chairman and CEO Atul Kapadia.

Programing is only 5th in Most Sleep Deprived Profession rank

According to National Health Interview Survy the rank of the most sleep deprived professions is leaded by Home Health Aides, Lawyers take 2nd place and Police Officers third, followd by Doctors/Paramedics and only then, in the 5th position Tie Computer Programmers,Economists, Social Workers.

The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) has monitored the health of the nation since 1957. NHIS data on a broad range of health topics are collected through personal household interviews. For over 50 years, the U.S. Census Bureau has been the data collection agent for the National Health Interview Survey. Survey results have been instrumental in providing data to track health status, health care access, and progress toward achieving national health objectives.

NSA to build an android secure phone

scmagazine

The National Security Agency (NSA) has developed an ultra-secure Android phone built from only comercial parts.The idea was to build cheap and easy-to-use secure phone for Gouvernment Staff. And there are about 100 of the “Fishbowl” encrypted phones in test.

The phones were designed by NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate, which is responsible for providing secure communications to the US Government. IAD’s Head Margaret Salter, said anyone can reproduce the phone using specifications published online today because it uses off-the-shelf components.

The plan was to buy commercial components, layer them together and get a secure solution. It uses solely commercial infrastructure to protect classified data. Previously we needed to “speak in code” if using a commercial mobile device to discuss classified information.

According to scmagazine, users will be able to install defence applications on the device from an enterprise app store run by the US Defence Information Systems Agency. This would ensure only secure applications were installed, and remove the need for NSA staff to otherwise vet the integrity of third party applications.

The phone is part of a wider NSA Mobility Program to design all communications technologies used for classified discussions from commercial off-the-shelf components.

The aim, Salter said, was to produce secure devices that had the ease-of-use at a low cost.

Tech troubles

The Information Assurance Directorate ran into a string of problems during the build due to a lack of interoperability between vendor products.

Salter said a lack of interoperability between SSL VPN options forced designers to use IPSEC.

Several other compromises were made but none that reduced the security of the phone, Salter said.

“We needed a voice app that did DTLS (Datagram Transport Layer Security), Suite B and SRTP (Secure Real-time Transport Protocol) and we couldn’t buy it,” Salter said. “But the industry was thinking more aboutsession description … so we went with that.”

Fishbowl encryption

Designers were also challenged by the functionality in commercial products. Vendors were chosen not by reputation or preference, but by their support of required functionality. Each was plotted on a grid and chosen by “drawing a line through the list”.

Salter said the security specifications, such as those sought for the voice application, would be useful to everyone.

She urged colleagues to demand vendors improve unified communications interoperability.

“We need to send a message [about] standards, interoperability and plug and play,” she said.

All traffic from the phone is routed through the enterprise as a primary security design goal.

“If we let it go to all kinds of places, we lost control of figuring out what the phone was doing. If I want pizza, I have to go through the enterprise which has to route me to Pizza Hut.”

Voice calls are encrypted twice in accordance with NSA policy, using IPSEC and SRTP, meaning a failure requires “two independent bad things to happen,” Salter said.

She said the Android operating system and key store were customised to be made secure enough for top secret conversations, and a “kind of police app” was designed to monitor operations on the device.

SC Magazine, Australia

The future Desktop computer

GeekSpot The inicial computer interfaces were prompt-like, when computers only executed one instruction at a time it made perfect sence. But then came the computers with CPU’s that had interrup signals, this alows for example to usa a mouse cursor while computing something else. So we made the jump to Graphical User Interface with windows and point and click interfaces wich is much more productive. but now we face another problem, with today’s computers having multiple cores, my desktop currently looks like a mess (<——). The solution has been the Win/Cmd/Alt + Tab for a number of years now. The truth is, with computer paralellism getting more and more powerfull we’ll need another sollution. For Mac users and Linux based Distros there is a more powerfull solution, the multiple desktops and fullscreen apps, perhaps we’ll se some of these in windows 8 to.

Just like when GUI appeard many users were still using Cmd-Line Interfaces. People won’t easily “dig” a new Interface, but maby  the time has come to jump to a new paradigm. So here are a few concepts of what they might be.

The first is the 3D display organization.

The Holodesk

 This one is about Augmented Reality Interface and its called Holoflector:

The Last is called Illumishare

"PREY" to recover your stolen computer or phone

project prey website linkA few day ago I made a review of “ever lost your precious macbook?” that allows you to track your iOS/OSX devices, and as promised, here is the review of a similar software that besides working with iOS and Mac OS also works with Windows, Linux, Ubuntu (popular linux distro) and Android. 

Its called “PREY” and its free. I came across Prey a while back, when I was still using my windows laptop, and although I never got my laptop lost or stolen, I tested it several times with help of some friends and I got to say It works extremely good.

I can’t see any reason why this shouldn’t be instaled on your computer, since It’s free and its asleep until remotely triggerd, then it can provide you with the computer’s location and a big number of other features like sending a message to the computer or even receive a photogaph of the person using it. And since it sits so silently in your computer, a thief will not be suspicious that his actions are being watched. But, as always, keep in mind that just like Apple’s solution it only works when the device is on and connected to the net. But hey, what do you got to lose, right?

So head on to Prey website and install it right now.

Best Browser for 2012 ?

Microsoft built a mini internet to ensure IE9 is competitive and IE10 is the fastest web browser in the world. The lab is equiped with 128 test computers, 20K tests/day, 850+ metrics analyzed, 480GB of runtime data/day and a granularity of just 100nanoseconds. All the data is sent to 11 server-class computers (16 core, 16GB of RAM) and stored on a 24 core, 64GB SQL server. The mini Internet has content servers, DNS servers and network emulators to model various different latencies, throughputs, packet loss.

According to both wikipedia and w3schools the IE is still the most widely used web browser with about 35% share, followd by Google Chrome with 26%, but the latest version IE9 only has about 5% of the with IE8 still being the most used with 10% share.

The question is, will IE10 realy beat the other browsers?

It is going to have a bad time because both chrome and firefox are pretty fast and becoming better every day!

What’s your favourit web browser?

Ever lost you precious macbook?

Apple | iCloud | Find My MacHave you ever got your laptop lost or stolen? Remeber how mad you were about losing all your work? How about all your precious personal stuff like the unrecoverable photos of you wife and kids, scary right?

For everyone that has a gadget from the One Infinite Loop company, there is a great solution named “Find my iphone”, for everyonel else I will review another software in a few days that’s compatible with almost all devices.

This was available since “mobile me” and now with “iCloud” it is even better, its free, works flawlessly with great precision through all you iOS devices. But The best part is that now it’s also available for your hardly earned MacBook as long as you’re running OS Lion.

Setting it up is very straight forward. On your iOS devices simply go to your Mail Settings chose “New” chose “iCloud” and fill with your iCloud ID and password. When you’re done tap “Next”, activate “Find my iPhone” and your done! Keep in mind that the service only works when your iphone’s location system is on.

On your Mac under “System Prefrences” chose “iCloud” and login with your @me ID then check the “Find my Mac” option and you’re good to go.

Now just head on to iCloud.com/find and you can locate all of your devices. You can send an instant message with sound, lock it or even wipe all content remotely from any browser on mac or “Find my iphone” app on iOS. But remember that once you wiped it, you can’t track it anymore and it’s gone forever.

This is no fool-proof feature, if the device is turned off it doesn’t work, especially if the thief fully wipes the device. But its good to know that Companies are starting to care. Perhaps in a near future these features might come integrated in a Hardware-level rendering almost all stolen computers useless, thus discouraging theft.

App | Chose the best Wifi Channel

Google Android Market / Wifi Analyzer
Its Free and it works simply by analyzing how much traffic is in each wifi channel recommending the best option. Wifi Analyzer presents you with slick graph showing the nearby wifi networks and channel useage. The app has beautiful interface With an averige score of 4.6 by 65.000 rates and even more downloads, this is without doubt one of the best tools of its kind.

How to geek review of Wifi Analyzer

You can get it from the Android Market or iOS version in the Cydia store.

Cracking Down VIN Code

Mint VIN code crackDid you ever wonder about the 17-digit VIN on your vehicle?

Mint posted another awsome article that teaches you to verify if a given VIN is a fake.

Have you ever looked at your car’s VIN code? It’s a 17-digit collection of letters and digits that, on the surface of it, is completely random and incomprehensible. But the truth is, each car’s VIN number carries a wealth of information, from where the vehicle was manufactured to its weight, chassis type, series and even engine. In fact, by doing some fairly straightforward math (admittedly, you’ll need pen and paper for it), you can confirm whether a VIN is valid — or fake — by following the steps outlined in this infographic.

Now worry no more when you’re about to buy a used car!

Cracking the Credit Card Number

Mint blog by JessMint posted an article about credit card becoming the number one way to pay:

There’s hardly a more prominent financial product in America today than the almighty credit card. Nearly everybody has at least one — almost 80% of consumers in 2008, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston — and many use it on a daily basis. Without a doubt, there are also those consumers who know their credit card numbers by heart (makes online shopping and booking travel so much easier, if anything). But how many of you know what those numbers really mean? Contrary to what you may think, they aren’t random. Those 16 digits are there for a reason and, knowing a few simple rules, you could actually learn a lot about a credit card just from its number. This infographic shows you how to crack that code.

Federal Reserve BankBut according to the same source, after one year the trend is changing. Now it appears that Debit Cards are growing fast as Credit Cards are declining.

In a near future we’ll probably se an increase in the use of new payment methods such as eBanking PayPal or even NFC wallet.

What’s your favourite payment method?

Jump in Quantum Computer direction

Deutsches Elektronen-SynchrotronDeutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) investigation might accelerate the development of the arrival of quantum computers.

The technique electromagnetically induces transparency in Iron isotopes and can be applied in other opaque materials. According to research published in Nature magazine this technique allows control over both transmition and speed of the photons. This can be acheived with an intense laser with specific frequency which makes the material invisible to another light frequency, for example invisible to X-Ray.

leader investigator Ralf Rohlsberger explains: 

Certainly there is still a long way to go until the first light quantum computer becomes reality, however this discovery has already led to a series of new experiments in quantum optics with high sensitivity.

Quantum computers will be a leap in computing power, to bad we won’t be seeing one any time soon.

Wolfram Alpha | Pro

Example of wolfram Alpha If you never used Wolfram|Alpha you should. It is a 2 and a half year old extremely helpful and free computational Knowledge engine, whom Apple’s Siri gets most of the answers from. You can ask wolfram for a lot of things and wolfram interprets what you ask and outputs an answer. For instance you can ask about weather and wolfram outputs a lot of information about it like the station it got the data from and even a chat of Historical temperatures for that today. But it also does Mathematics, Statistics and Analisys, Physics, Places and Geography, Music, Organizations, Education, Sports… the complete list is available at wolframalpha.com/examples/.

Today, Wolfram anounced the biggest single step in the development of Wolfram|Alpha and it is called WolframAlpha|Pro. Unlike Alpha it is not free, but if you take advantage of its capabilities it is very cheap. For $4.99/month or $2.99/month for students, the Alpha|Pro supports uploading data processing it and re downloading it.

Wolfram Alpha Pro | general analysis of a pure binary fileAn example of this is to upload an image and apply filters to it and download the output. Same can be done with a spreadsheet or even a sound file. You can also give an input like “sin (xy)” and download the 3D plot as a CDF (Computable Document Format) that can be manipulated in many other programs

You can also upload a binary file and it analysis it. Another feature is Dates and curency

Wolfram Alpha Pro FeaturesIt is customizable and keeps track, for instance of the mesure units you use for future uses, and also supports bookmarks. 

Wolfram is giving a 14 day free trial with no payment request. I fully recommend you to give it a try!

Operation Federal Bureau of Investigated?

FBI Conference of anonymous in Anonymous’s hands Date: February 3, 2012

Place: Internet

Weather: Electric

Anonymous are on FBI’s scope, still, these Hacktivists started taunting authorities even harder. Anonymouse released an internal FBI conference call with UK Metropolitan Police. In it an agent of the UK MP shares status updates on their investigations. Aperantly they are intentionally trying to delay the court cases against Ryan Cleary and Jake “Topiary” Davis, two hackers connected to Lulzsec arested last year as a favor to the FBI’s New York field office. The goal is to delay at least 6 weeks and idealy 8 for some unspecified action by the Bureau.

In another investigation in West Midlands about a hacker who goes by “tehwongz” is also mentioned. The hacker tourned out to be a 15 year old “who’s doing this all for attention and [is] a bit of an idiot,” he’s a “pain in the bum” and a “wannabe type character”. The teen Published his resume and linked his twitter account.

And.. Of course.. Hacking:

I am known mainly for this, my hacking portfolio includes Steam (which, when I was pissed with Omni (the owner of this site) I used to hit this site offline for a good few hours.

I have also hacked Police websites, released an SQLi on police.uk - Hacked 2 Stock Exchanes, Defaced 2 Banks, DDoS’d MasterCard, Paypal & multiple Gov sites, Defaced hundreds of Websites and given out gifts, Christmas presents, domain names etc for “LulzXmas” worth over $100.000 to shelters, charities, twitter followers & random people.

The cat and mouse game goes on. Authorities are very determined to catch these hacktivists.

Google doodles are legend...wait for it!

Mark Twain’s 176th BirthdayEveryone is familiar with google doogles, those nicely custom made logos google uses for 24 hours from time to time celebrating some event. Events like the fence-painting sequence from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer celebrating Mark Twain’s 176th birthday. A few days ago google used a doodle with a black rectangle covering it’s logo in form of protest against SOPA/PIPA. Google keeps all doodles very well organized here, you can search by year or even by country.

Some are more detailed and creative than others like (May 21, 2010) PAC-MAN’s 30th anniversary was playable for 2 days “because its to cool to keep just for one day”, just press “Insert Coin” button and you start playing the 8bit era game.  Taking Wolfram|Alpha data,

$120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3-2 times bigger than pay rate) Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day).

But the one I find most interesting is the Les Paul’s 96th Birthday doodle. Where you can play guitar using your keyboard’s keys. Try it yourself I’ll leave you a few examples.

Godfather: dhkjhkhjhfgd

titanic: tyyuiuytyoiutew

Star Wars: 2543285432854342

Imperial March: 444153153.

Dary, Legendary!

ACTA, is it really needed?

ACTA protest using Anonymous maskLast week EU signed the ACTA, this gives this agreement the force it needed. It even got some Polish parliamentarians to use “V” masks showing their support to Internet users from whom the agreement has been secretly negociated.

But really how bad is ACTA? The video made by anonymous showes extreme possibilities. Much of ACTA has changed since. ars technica has a full article about what media tell about ACTA’s impact and what it really states.

We at Geek Spot fully support those who protest against any kind of censorship like ACTA or PIPA/SOPA or even the newer Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). All of this agreements have been negociated in secret by organizations like MPAA or RIAA. This would give this organizations powers to dictate prices and severely punish thoso who wouldn’t do as they say. You know things are expensive when a video game costs about 10% of the averige European salary. I am not defending piracy here, but a google search will name a few autors that state piracy, in some cases is free publicity. Stoping piracy would not make people buy more originals, as seen by the use of French laws. Lastly, Jammie Thomas case lasted for 5 years and states the following exagerated and ridiculously different penalties:

• $222,000 against Thomas-Rasset in 2007 ($9,250 per song)
• $1.92 million against Thomas-Rasset in her 2009 retrial ($80,000 per song)
• $1.5 million today ($62,500 per song)

It seem that RIAA gets this values randomly. It is also know that RIAA and other organizations likewise calculate prejudice values as if every illegally downloaded track would be sold if there was no piracy and this is way insubstantial.

ACTA - Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

After SOPA/PIPA, now there is a new threat and its called ACTA. There is also a new movement pro "net neutrality" and they defend that the Internet should remain as it is, not owned by anyone whether its the copyright office or the US government, without censorship or pressures like what happened to the WikiLeaks or the ThePiratBay.org.

This agreement was negociated by a series of organizations with personal interest in it and not voted. It was made a secret to the public exept with some leaks like in wikileaks. Ultimatly the European Union signed the agreement. And Kader Arif, European rapporteur for ACTA, subsequently resigned from his position on 26 January 2012 saying

I want to send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation. I will not take part in this masquerade."

What's you opinion on this matter?

Update on February 7, 2012 at 1:55 by Axel Ferreira

There is an online petition that in order to be effective needed 25000 signatures until Feb 20 2012. It already gathered more than 40000.