Nanostructures Boost Battery Life Fivefold

Posted on by

Some of the most promising battery chemistries—which, in theory, could store several times more energy than today’s lithium-ion batteries and cost much less—have a fatal flaw. They can’t be recharged very often before they stop working, making them useless for applications such as electric vehicles. Now researchers at Stanford have created novel nanostructures that greatly increase the number of times one of these chemistries can be recharged, even to levels high enough for many commercial applications.

via Nanostructures Boost Battery Life Fivefold | MIT Technology Review.

Gov’t will open up radio spectrum to improve Wi-Fi

Posted on by

The Wi-Fi traffic jam was predictable, just as it’s predictable that there will be a mobile spectrum crunch, he said. 195 MHz of new spectrum will be opened up, all in the 5 GHz band, which has less interference but shorter ranges than the 2.4 GHz band. Opening up more spectrum has the potential to alleviate Internet-use congestion, particularly at crowded places like public Wi-Fi access points.

via FCC’s Genachowski: Gov’t will open up radio spectrum to improve Wi-Fi | Ars Technica.

The Billion-Dollar Startup: Inside Obama’s Campaign Tech

Posted on by

The Obama campaign tended to hire senior developers, which meant nearly everyone on the team had an extensive skillset. They worked in weeklong sprints, with the goal of releasing new software every week. They were determined to remain technology agnostic, building apps in a variety of languages—Ruby on Rails, Java, PHP backed by Kohana. The management and engineering teams worked in close physical proximity, helping close the feedback loop: if something was going drastically wrong, the path to fixing it started with a ten-yard walk to another cubicle and smacking the responsible party in the back of the head.

via The Billion-Dollar Startup: Inside Obama’s Campaign Tech.

In a perfect world, the Romney campaign would have led its volunteers through several dry runs on Orca before Election Day; but someone had decided to keep the major parts of the software a secret for as long as possible. As a result, Orca proved toothless against Narwhal and the other Obama apps.

Nokia’s MITM on HTTPS traffic from their phone

Posted on by

From the tests that were preformed, it is evident that Nokia is performing Man In The Middle Attack for sensitive HTTPS traffic originated from their phone and hence they do have access to clear text information which could include user credentials to various sites such as social networking, banking, credit card information or anything that is sensitive in nature.

via Nokia’s MITM on HTTPS traffic from their phone « Treasure Hunt.

Spain Intelligence Report–September 2012

Posted on by

Pyramid Research expects the telecom market in Spain to generate a total service revenue of $33.5bn in 2012 and to grow over the next five years to $36.61bn. Due to the economic recession and volatility of the euro exchange rate, the market will contract in dollar terms in 2012 and 2013 before rebounding in 2014.

However, there are a number of telecom sectors that we expect to experience continuous growth over the forecast period, including fixed VoIP and mobile data.

via Spain Intelligence Report–September 2012.

$990 for this report.

NTLM Challenge Response is 100% Broken (Yes, this is still relevant)

Posted on by

According to the last data from the W3 Schools, 21% of computers are running XP, while NetMarketShare claims it is 39%. Unless someone has hardened these machines (no MS patches do this), these machines are sending LM and NTLM responses! While these lists leave out server OSs, 2003 Server still sends NTLM responses by default. Yes, every MS OS since NT 4.0 SP4 has supported NTLMv2, but NTLM and LM were not excluded by default until Vista.

via Mark Gamache’s Random Blog: NTLM Challenge Response is 100% Broken (Yes, this is still relevant).

Well, here it is: I’VE BROKEN NTLM.

From the wiki definition of NTLM:

Microsoft no longer recommends NTLM in applications:[6]

“Implementers should be aware that NTLM does not support any recent cryptographic methods, such as AES or SHA-256. It uses cyclic redundancy check (CRC) or message digest algorithms (RFC1321) for integrity, and it uses RC4 for encryption. Deriving a key from a password is as specified in RFC1320 and FIPS46-2. Therefore, applications are generally advised not to use NTLM.”

While Kerberos has replaced NTLM as the default authentication protocol in an Active Directory (AD) based single sign-on scheme, NTLM is still widely used in situations where a domain controller is not available or is unreachable. For example, NTLM would be used if a client is not Kerberos capable, the server is not joined to a domain, or the user is remotely authenticating over the web.[1][3]

German Military Laser Destroys Targets Over 1Km Away

Posted on by

For its finale, the laser’s ability to track a very small ballistic target was demonstrated. It honed in on and destroyed a steel ball 82mm in diameter traveling at 50 meters per second. The small ball was meant to simulate an incoming mortar round. Rheinmetall says their laser will reduce the time required for C-RAM – Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar measures – to a matter of seconds, even in adverse weather conditions. In fact, weather at the Ochsenboden Proving Ground in Switzerland where the demonstration was carried out included ice, rain, snow, and extremely bright sunlight – far from ideal.

via German Military Laser Destroys Targets Over 1Km Away | Singularity Hub.

Netflix Open-Sources ‘Janitor Monkey’ AWS Cleanup Tool

Posted on by

Janitor Monkey detects AWS instances, EBS volumes, EBS volume snapshots, and auto-scaling groups. Each of these resource types has distinctive rules for marking unused resources. For example, an EBS volume is marked as a cleanup candidate if it has not been attached to any instance for 30 days. Janitor Monkey determines whether a resource should be a cleanup candidate by applying a set of rules on it. If any of the rules determines that the resource is a cleanup candidate, Janitor Monkey marks the resource and schedules a time to clean it up.

via Netflix Open-Sources ‘Janitor Monkey’ AWS Cleanup Tool.

Turkish agency blamed by U.S. companies for intercepted Web pages

Posted on by

“The logical theory is that the transportation agency was using it to spy on its own employees,” said Chris Soghoian, a former Federal Trade Commission technology expert now working for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Validation authority alone isn’t enough to intercept traffic, the most likely goal of the project. The authenticator would also have to come in contact with the Web user.

via Turkish agency blamed by U.S. companies for intercepted Web pages | Reuters.