Technology Effect

I’ve now received confirmation from Google’s Security Team that the latest vulnerability Philipp posted about has been fixed. After carrying out some investigations of my own, I believe this is the case – so I’m going to share with you what the problem was and how I was able to exploit it. In doing so, I hope to educate other developers about the potential flaws that can occur in growingly complex web applications.

The digital revolution has triggered a wild proliferation of video games, but what of the revolution in biotechnology? Does it have the potential to spawn its own brood of games? Stanford physicist Ingmar Riedel-Kruse has begun developing "biotic games" involving paramecia and other living organisms. He hopes the games lead to advances in education and crowd-sourcing of laboratory research while helping to raise the level of public discourse on bio-related issuesUsing living organisms, the group created three games that mimic some classic video games. Video game designers are always striving to make games more lifelike, but they'll have a hard time topping what Stanford researcher Ingmar Riedel-Kruse is up to. He's introducing life itself into games. Riedel-Kruse and his lab group have developed the first video games in which a player's actions influence the behavior of living microorganisms in real time -- while the game is being played. ...

A new mobile phone ‘app’ from Google can now solve Sudoku, the popular maths puzzle which took the world by storm with its simple grid of digits and empty boxes - no matter what the level of difficulty. In fact, any cell phone can now solve the puzzle, thanks to the latest version of ‘Google Goggles’ which uses a cell phone’s camera to capture a picture of any Sudoku and then sends it back to Google. The company’s servers compute the answers and send an image of the completed puzzle back to the user. Depending on the speed of the phone’s internet connection, the results can be back in seconds. “When you finally solve a real mind-bender, it brings a rush of achievement. I hope Google’s new tool won’t diminish that feeling,” ‘The Daily Telegraph’ quoted its Puzzles Editor Phil McNeill as saying. Google Goggles works by capturing images and sending them to the company’s central servers. They are then compared to the firm’s vast web index, just as if they were a sea...

A novel hybrid of computer gaming and real-world biochemistry may soon give researchers the ability to predict the complex folding patterns of RNA molecules. This would allow them to synthesise bespoke molecules that can function as chemical sensors or be used in other applications. The folding of RNA molecules is difficult to predict, because each molecule is a long string of units, or bases, that can pair up with each other in many different ways. Because of this, even the best computer algorithms do badly at predicting the shape a molecule will actually take. A team led by computer scientist Adrien Treuille at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, turned the problem over to online gamers to crack. "Instead of having powerful computers go through the data, why not have lots and lots of people do it?" says Treuille. Players of the game, called EteRNA, are given a target shape and can then join bases in any order. With each chang...

New Delhi: Amid a debate over phone-tapping and making conversations public without authorization, the Telecom Ministry has proposed a penalty of up to 2 crore on unlawfully tapping, as against just Rs 500 at present. In a communique to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), the Department of Telecom (DoT) has proposed the imposition of a penalty between 1 lakh and Rs 2 crore for breaches under different sections of the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885For breach of Section 26 of the Act, which prohibits telegraph officers or other officials from making away with or altering, unlawfully intercepting or disclosing messages, or divulging the purport of signals, the maximum penalty has been proposed. As per the existing Act, any breach of this section attracts imprisonment, which may extend up to three years, along with a fine of Rs 500.

Bangalore: Cisco has launched a comprehensive TV platform called the Cisco Videoscape that combines digital TV with online content from social media and communication applications. Videoscape is part of Cisco's overall video strategy to provide the next generation of TV that simplifies consumer experience and creates market opportunities for service providers.The TV platform from Cisco is an open platform that makes use of the the cloud, the network, and client devices to deliver new video experiences over the Internet. The new elements of Videoscape in the home include media gateway, IP set-top box, and software clients. The media gateway integrates voice, linear and online video, high-speed data, Wi-Fi and network traffic routing while the IP set-top box is engineered to support all video forms delivered to a TV, including pay TV, broadcast channels, premium channels, VoD and the Web. The Videoscape Media Suite offers full life-cycle content management through th...

Beijing: With corruption among official ranks emerging as a major menace, a Chinese provincial government has introduced a computer software which continuously monitor the work of officials. "If an official violates the protocol when dealing with a case, a red light will flicker," Ding Haiyang, head of the discipline department of the bureau told official Xinhua newsagency. The system enables public to follow their case, know the result of the official's work on a website and make complaints online, Ding said. "Since the system was installed, every official has tried his best to finish his part of his work in time and hand it to colleagues in the next step. A survey shows most Chinese believe relations with the U.S. worsened last year, and the overwhelming majority blame Washington for the decline. The figures published in the official China Daily newspaper on Monday come just ahead of Chinese President Hu Jintao's state visit to the U.S. thi...

Google has unveiled a mobile phone application that allows users to translate chats instantaneously. Google Translate can use devices running its Android operating system to allow translation of English to Spanish and vice versa. Users will have to punch a key to activate the translation between sentences, but Google expects the service to operate in real-time within 18 months. It uses technology similar to the updated Googles application, which uses a phone’s camera to snap images of sudoku puzzles and, via internet, whiz back the solution in seconds, the Daily Mail reports.

Bangalore: Microsoft India has announced the availability of WebMatrix, a free Web development tool designed to help website developers. It helps to create, customize and publish websites to the Internet. There is also a set of video tutorials, how-to tips and other resources for helping new Web developers get started. Available in nine languages, WebMatrix includes tools to create new websites, using code provided through a variety of available templates or using existing free open source Web applications, such as WordPress, Joomla DotNetNuke and UmbracoWebMatrix is useful to a variety of people like students, developers, Web agencies, and professional developers. Professional developers can also contribute to a directory of code published through NuGet, a free open source package management system, so others can benefit from their expertise. The tools provided by WebMatrix include Web server, database and Web frameworks. When a website is ready to be published, We...

Plant biologists are facing pressure to quantify the response of plants to changing environments and to breed plants that can respond to such changes. One method of monitoring the response of plants to different environments is by studying their vein network patterns. These networks impact whole plant photosynthesis and the mechanical properties of leaves, and vary between species that have evolved or have been bred under different environmental conditions.To help address the challenge of how to quickly examine a large quantity of leaves, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a user-assisted software tool that extracts macroscopic vein structures directly from leaf images. "The software can be used to help identify genes responsible for key leaf venation network traits and to test ecological and evolutionary hypotheses regarding the structure and function of leaf venation networks," said Joshua Weitz, an assistant professor in the...

Bangalore: Are Indian youngsters less tech savvy? A recent study by market researcher Nielsen found that Indian youngsters lag behind in their usage of mobile internet compared to their global counterparts. The research on youth and cellphone usage has found that less than 10 percent of young Indians used their mobile devices to access the web in the last month while 73 percent of Chinese aged between 15 and 24 used mobile Internet in the last 30 days, The Independent reported."Usage patterns vary greatly among youth throughout the world, demonstrating how culture, economy and age can all play a large part in mobile behaviour. These factors affect device selection, payment and usage," said Nielsen in its research published on January 11. The study added: "Indian males aged 15-24 are twice as likely as their female counterparts to use text messaging and four times more likely to use picture messaging. "China and Saudi Arabia also skew male when...

Torrents of mud and water that followed heavy rains cut a destructive path through the mountainous Serrana region near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, toppling houses, buckling roads and burying families. “It’s like an earthquake struck some areas,” said Jorge Mario, mayor of the Brazilian mountain top town of Teresopolis, where at least 158 people died in a mudslide. Fernando Rodrigues, a bar owner, added: “It was terrifying. There were cars flying everywhere. It was dark. People were screaming.” The total number of deaths due to the weather in southern Brazil is at least 388, including 13 who died in Sao Paulo state earlier this week. Floods in Australia, meanwhile, have left parts of Brisbane looking “like a war zone”, according to the Queensland premier, Anna Bligh. Peak waters in the city were lower than predicted, but 12,000 homes were flooded in the city of two million, and 118,000 buildings were left without power. Bligh said restoration efforts would cost as much ...

Researchers report that they can predict "with unprecedented accuracy" how well you will do on a complex task such as a strategic video game simply by analyzing activity in a specific region of your brain.The findings, published in the online journal PLoS ONE, offer detailed insights into the brain structures that facilitate learning, and may lead to the development of training strategies tailored to individual strengths and weaknesses. The new approach used established brain imaging techniques in a new way. Instead of measuring how brain activity differs before and after subjects learn a complex task, the researchers analyzed background activity in the basal ganglia, a group of brain structures known to be important for procedural learning, coordinated movement and feelings of reward. Using magnetic resonance imaging and a method known as multivoxel pattern analysis, the researchers found significant differences in patterns of a particular type of MRI sig...

The unusually cold weather this winter has been caused by a change in the winds. Instead of the typical westerly winds warmed by Atlantic surface ocean currents, cold northerly Arctic winds are influencing much of Europe.However, scientists have long suspected that far more severe and longer-lasting cold intervals have been caused by changes to the circulation of the warm Atlantic ocean currents themselves. Now new research led by Cardiff University, with scientists in the UK and US, reveals that these ocean circulation changes may have been more dramatic than previously thought. The findings, published January 14, 2011 in the journal Science, show that as the last Ice Age came to an end (10,000 -- 20,000 years ago) the formation of deep water in the North-East Atlantic repeatedly switched on and off. This caused the climate to warm and cool for centuries at a time. The circulation of the world's ocean helps to regulate the global climate. One way it does th...

We recently received a tip from someone who claims to work internally at T-Mobile.  The information in the tip has just confirmed everything we have ever thought about Samsung, OTA’s and new devices. Our source has confirmed that there is already a fully functioning 2.2 OTA update ready to be pushed out by T-Mobile but Samsung has told them NOT to release the update for fear of it decreasing the value of the newly announced Vibrant 4G+. Further information has revealed that not only is the Samsung Vibrant 4G nothing more than a Vibrant with a front facing camera (FFC), but the software update would also enable the same 4G speeds that we are already capable of. The only thing missing at this point is a nice little 4G icon on your screen, which is in the update as well.  This is questionable as the hardware needs to support HSDPA+ for this to work, but you never know. Quote from our Tipster: Some disturbing things have happened the last w...

Gamers can now start a game on their PC and will be able to finish it on their mobile phone as announced by game distribution company Extent. The mobile gaming service will be called Gametanium and will offer gamers on Android devices all the day long gaming with more than 100 Android native games. Android GameTanium will be the first integrated gaming service that will allow gamers to start a game on one device and continue it on another, bringing in platform independent gaming.

0 diggs dig   Share   The speed of the site is important for a better ranking in Google, as well as, for a better experience for your users. CDNs (Content delivery networks) exist for quite a while and they are a very good way to speed your website. CDNs ares used by the big websites to store static files like: images, style sheets, files to download for a bigger internet speed. The files hosted on a CDN are scattered on the CDN company servers and loaded from the closest location of the visitor. On the internet you can find other  free CDNs but in my opinion they aren’t as good as Google App Engine.   Transforming Google App Engine in a Free CDN, for sure it will bust your page load time for free, also by transforming  Google App Engine in a Free CDN you will take advantage of the servers that Google has ( it is said that Google has more then 40 servers in the entire world). Google App Engine as a Free CDN Limitations: Ev...

This post is part of our ReadWriteCloud channel, which is dedicated to covering virtualization and cloud computing. The channel is sponsored by Intel and VMware. Read the case study about how the city of Santiago, Spain turned to virtualization.   Salesforce.com announced Database.com, its hosted relational database service, in December. Since that time it's clear that Salesforce.com is far from alone in the market for offering stand-alone, cloud-hosted databases. There are at least four other competitors, with more on the horizon. And one of those is a company all too familiar to Salesforce.com: Microsoft. Although customers have been able to install Oracle or MySQL in on commodity cloud instances for years, these services all provide databases specifically designed for the cloud. In reverse alphabetical order: Xeround Xeround, based in Bellvue, WA, offers its own elastic database service based on MySQL. Today it announced that its service will now be available fro...

email share   The Social Analyst is a column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr , where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space. Google Google is preparing for war with Apple and Microsoft over the future of web video, and the rest of will be caught in the crossfire. Earlier this week, Google quietly announced that it would be phasing out Chrome support for H.264, the video codec and standard supported by Adobe Flash, Blu Blu -ray, Internet Explorer Internet Explorer , Safari Safari and others. Instead, it will be supporting WebM and Ogg Theora, which are supported by Mozilla and Opera Opera . What Google hoped would be a small footnote turned into a tidal wave of criticism. Google was chastised for turning its back on “open innovation” by dropping a more widely used codec for a lesser-used one. Compounded by the fact that Google is a strong supporter of Adobe and Flash, and it’s easy to see wh...

PHP is probably the most popular web development language right now. At least 20 million domains use PHP and it’s the language used on major sites such as Wikipedia and Facebook as well as in some of the world’s biggest open source projects like WordPress and Drupal. In this article, I’ll share with you ten things I wish I was told when I was just getting started with PHP development, and I’m hoping you’ll be able to learn a thing or two if you’re just taking your first steps into this awesome web development language. 1. Use PHP Core Functions and Classes If you’re trying to do something that seems fairly common, chances are, there’s already a PHP function or class that you can take advantage of. Always check out the PHP manual before creating your own functions. There’s no need to create a function to remove the white space at the beginning and at the end of a string when you can just use the trim() function. Why build an XML parser for RSS feeds when you c...

It all began with a simple web foray to Designing Monsters . Their simple, typographic design was beautiful. But why? Their combination of the beautiful League Gothic font, use of Lettering.JS , and some simple font scaling gave the page a wonderful consistent vertical alignment. Like the Million Dollar Homepage, I wanted to rebuild it — but I didn’t want to spend a lot of time manually adjusting font sizes. So I did what any programmer with the jQuery Golden Hammer would do, I turned my problem into a nail. At it’s simplest, the BigText jQuery plugin takes a single element and sizes the text inside of its child s to fit the width of the parent elemen t. Gives the text that lovely vertical alignment. The elusive BIGTEXT plugin exclusively captured on film $('#bigtext').bigtext(); See the above at JSFiddle . Implementation Details The plugin itself is more than just a simple font-size incrementer. I wasn’t happy with the performance of simply iterating through f...

The latest Firefox 4 Beta is available to test the cool features and improvements in the next version of Firefox. As we continue to refine features and performance in Firefox 4 Beta, this release includes faster start-up time, bookmarking and makes complex animations smoother. Firefox 4 Beta is built for the way people use the Web today, offering more control over the browsing experience. It introduces a fresh new look and features like App Tabs and Panorama to make it easier and more efficient to navigate the Web. Firefox 4 Beta also includes performance enhancements to make everything faster from start-up time to page-load speed and the performance of Web applications and games. Firefox Sync is integrated into the browser with Firefox 4 Beta, giving you access to your Awesome Bar history, bookmarks, open tabs and passwords across computers and smartphones. Firefox 4 Beta also enables developers to create fun Web apps and websites. With full support for HTML5 features...

The changing of the year is a time of celebration as people reflect thoughtfully on the past year and grow excited with anticipation for what’s to come in the year ahead. Today, there’s one less thing to anticipate as we announce the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3 and NuGet 1.0! Oh yeah, this never gets old. Install it via Web Platform Installer or download the installer directly to run it yourself. Here are a few helpful resources for learning more about this release: What’s New in ASP.NET MVC 3 ASP.NET MVC 3 Release Notes MSDN Documentation NuGet Project Homepage The MVC Music Store Tutorial and associated CodePlex project . Those links will provide more details about what’s new in ASP.NET MVC 3, but I’ll give a quick bullet list of some of the deliciousness you have to look forward to. Again, visit the links above for full details. Razor view engine which provides a very streamlined syntax for writing clean and concise views. Improved support for Dependency ...