Stealth wallpaper keeps company secrets safe

Posted on by

A type of wallpaper that prevents Wi-Fi signals escaping from a building without blocking mobile phone signals has been developed by a British defence contractor. The technology is designed to stop outsiders gaining access to a secure network by using Wi-Fi networks casually set up by workers at the office.

via Stealth wallpaper keeps company secrets safe – 08 August 2004 – New Scientist.

Copper coated

Solid metal antennas normally give a very strong reflection to enemy radar scanners. To hide them, FSS sheeting can be electrically set to allow through only the precise frequency the antenna wants to transmit and receive, while absorbing all other frequencies including those of the incoming radar.

BAE’s anti-Wi-Fi wallpaper is made from a 0.1-millimetre-thick sheet of kapton, the same plastic used to make flexible printed circuit boards in lightweight portable gadgets like camcorders. The kapton is coated on each side with a thin film of copper.

SmartDeco

Posted on by

SmartDeco was founded in 2011 and is based in LA with manufacturing in Northern California. We believe in making supreme & eco-friendly products right here in the USA. When you open a box of SmartDeco, you’ll find handsome furniture that is refreshingly easy to assemble and 100% recyclable. No tools and no stress, just smart furniture for smart living.

via SmartDeco.

I find this idea fascinating.  It’s a new way to sell boxes and I think for people who move a lot it’s  just throw everything in the recycling — keep the move short and simple.

I do find their prices kind of steep.  $63 for a desk?  I think I paid  less than that for some particle board piece of junk on sale from Office Depot a bunch of years ago.  That this is just a fancy box if this idea takes off I’m sure people could make money selling desks for, say $20?  $10?   What does a cardboard box cost to make and fold?   Also, most office furniture sold at office big box stores are made of particle board which isn’t long lasting either.

File cabinets are absolutely perfect for this concept.  No need to box up the filing cabinet because the filing cabinet is a box.  🙂

Google makes plans to move Motorola Mobility to Chicago

Posted on by

Among the handful of sites under consideration are upper floors of the landmark Merchandise Mart in River North and Fulton Market Cold Storage, a large warehouse that’s slated for redevelopment in the West Loop, according to a source familiar with the matter.

via Google makes plans to move Motorola Mobility to Chicago – Technology News – Crain’s Chicago Business.

Motorola opened the campus at 600 N. US 45 in the early 1990s, and employed about 5,000 people at its peak.

Ethernet over Copper

Posted on by

ADTRAN’s Ethernet over Copper (EoCu) products enable service providers to extend packet-based business-class services beyond the reach of their fiber networks by leveraging the existing investment of copper-based TDM business services assets. This means leveraging the full advantages of TDM, the most understood, successful, and ubiquitous business service infrastructure. Due to budget restrictions and time to market requirements, deploying fiber to address nascent or disperse service demand is not feasible. This leaves a large percentage of businesses to rely on copper business access.

via Ethernet over Copper | EoCu Products | TDM Business Services from ADTRAN.

GoGo to buy Airfone to boost in-flight Wi-Fi

Posted on by

Airfone has been around for decades as an in-flight telephone service provider and has passed through a long string of corporate ownership, including GTE Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. In 2008, Verizon sold Airfone to LiveTV. Now Gogo will acquire Airfone’s network infrastructure, as well as a 1 MHz spectrum license currently held by LiveTV. Gogo already has a 3 MHz license. The company’s network is air-to-ground, meaning it has cellular towers that beam signals to aircraft. The network covers the contiguous U.S. and portions of Alaska.

via GoGo to buy Airfone to boost in-flight Wi-Fi – chicagotribune.com.

Raspberry Pi Review & Initial How-To Setup Guide

Posted on by

We received a Model B ($35), which is powered by a Broadcom BCM2835 SoC that includes a 700MHz ARM1176JZF-S CPU core, 256MB of RAM and a Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU with OpenGL ES 2.0 that supports 1080p at 30FPS as well as H.264 and MPEG-4 high-profile decoding for smooth Blu-ray playback. Connectivity includes two USB ports, Ethernet, HDMI, RCA video, an SD card slot, a 3.5mm audio jack and two rows of 13 General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) pins for further expansion.

via Raspberry Pi Review & Initial How-To Setup Guide – TechSpot Reviews.

Once the process is finished, a popup will notify you that the write was successful. Close the box, exit the application, unmount the SD card from your PC and attach it to the Raspberry Pi. Assuming everything went well, you’re ready to fire the device up. The first time the computer boots from the SD card it will automatically configure itself. It will then reboot and load up once again to the login screen.

The default username for Debian is pi and the password is raspberry. You can then load the LXDE desktop environment by entering startx. A few moments later, the desktop will load up as below:

Why Verizon Doesn’t Want You to Buy an iPhone

Posted on by

Here’s the problem: Verizon has spent millions of dollars rolling out its massive LTE network to cover 200 million people so far. You could call it billions, if you include the $5 billion spent on the C Block 700-Mhz spectrum licenses. But according to its first-quarter earnings presentation it’s only been able to convert 9.1 percent of its 93 million users to LTE.

via Why Verizon Doesn’t Want You to Buy an iPhone | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.

You Can’t Move an iPhone Customer to 4G
From Verizon’s position, the solution looks simple: move heavy data users in crowded urban areas from 3G to 4G as fast as possible. That would help everyone. The new 4G users get much faster connections, and the 3G users would see better speeds and network quality, too, as that network becomes less crowded.

get-flash-videos – A command line program to download flash videos

Posted on by

Download videos from various Flash-based video hosting sites, without having to use the Flash player. Handy for saving videos for watching offline, and means you don’t have to keep upgrading Flash for sites that insist on a newer version of the player.

via get-flash-videos – A command line program to download flash videos – Google Project Hosting.

Update 10/14/2012: Try this site.  The relatively newer github site here.  I think I had problems with the code.google.com version which didn’t seem up to date.

Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft (updated)

Posted on by

The change, which Immunity Security’s Kostya Kortchinsky said occurred about two months ago, represents a major departure from the design that has powered Skype for the past decade. Since its introduction in 2003, the network has consisted of “supernodes” made up of regular users who had sufficient bandwidth, processing power, and other system requirements to qualify. These supernodes then transferred data with other supernodes in a peer-to-peer fashion. At any given time, there were typically a little more than 48,000 clients that operated this way.

via Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft (updated).

What’s more, the boxes are running a version of Linux using grsecurity, a collection of patches and configurations designed to make servers more resistant to attacks. In addition to hardening them to hacks, the Microsoft-hosted boxes are able to accommodate significantly more users.