The app used the near field communication (NFC) antenna built into the Galaxy SIII phone, a feature available on many phones running Google’s Android operating system. The antenna is normally used to allow two phones to talk to each other.
via Smartphones easily used to skim credit card data – Manitoba – CBC News.
It is well past time, though, for the W3C and the browser vendors to stop talking as if they constrain the markup developers can use and focus instead on the many things they can do to make the browsers supporting that markup processing more capable. HTML’s legacy vocabulary is a great foundation on which developers can build their own toolsets. The Web will benefit, however, from letting developers solve their information problems in their own ways, rather than trying to stuff too many things into a single vocabulary.
Algorithmic trading bots react instantaneously to keywords in news reports and even tweets, which is likely why the market fell so quickly. Stocks started to recover about three minutes later but took seven minutes to return to their earlier levels.
via Someone could have just made a ton of money hacking the AP’s Twitter account – Quartz.
That humans can be replaced by robots that do the job faster and cheaper is an idea that now pervades Chinese employers. “Chinese companies usually start considering robots when the payment for a skilled worker exceeds 50,000 yuan ($8,060) a year,” Tan Xueke, a manager at the Xinsong Robot Automation Company in Shenynang, told Xinhua News Agency.
via Chinese Restaurant Owner Says Robot Noodle Maker Doing “A Good Job!” | Singularity Hub.
During the class in the spring of 2012 he learned the graphics programming language CUDA, and that opened the doors for tweaking GPUs to divide advanced computations across the GPUs massively parallel architecture.
He knew he had something when he wrote an algorithm to connect millions of points on a map, joining the data together spatially. The performance of his GPU-based computations compared to the same operation done with CPU power on PostGIS, the GIS module for the open-source database PostgreSQL, was “mind-blowing,” he said.
via Fast Database Emerges from MIT Class, GPUs and Student’s Invention.
There are various captive portal software packages available (both free and open source) that will allow you to setup an internet access facility that people have to logon to first. None of the packages I tried did what I wanted and they were not particularly customisable. Therefore I created my own, using a few iptables rules and PHP (along with a handful of other standard packages). This page details the steps that were taken. The key to this method as opposed to other iptables based solutions is that tracking information is removed after the user has signed up. Failure to do this will sometimes cause the user to still be redirected to your logon page even after they have signed up.
via Using iptables and PHP to create a captive portal – Andywiki.
Captive portals allow for a splash screen to be delivered to a user upon entering an open network such as free wifi hotspots at various establishments. This portal typically shows terms of service and displays some branding. The user hits OK and then they’re free to use the network. I find this burdensome but in the world of branding and advertising I can understand why places may want this. I found the above iptables only solution with some PHP interesting. Here’s another site.
For Squid users it appears to be even easier by only requiring some configuration changes. See Portal Splash Pages for more information.
1. Abandon antivirus
Businesses could remove host-based security from their desktops and trust that their perimeter will keep out the malware.
via Time To Dump Antivirus As Endpoint Protection? — Dark Reading.
There are some other useful tips in this article as well. I like the above quoted idea because AV software can be a pretty heavy load on an endpoint requiring constant maintenance and upgrade. These upgrade cycles in and of themselves pose a security hazard. The more complex a system becomes, the more that can go wrong.
Darwin is Wilson’s Bill Gates, his outlier from which he draws general conclusions. However, even Darwin himself wrote:
I have deeply regretted that I did not proceed far enough at least to understand something of the great leading principles of mathematics; for men thus endowed seem to have an extra sense.
It is this extra sense that makes math such a powerful asset to biological thinking. Indeed “thorough, well-organized knowledge of all that is known or can be imagined of real entities and processes within that fragment of existence.” requires math to chart and define these “processes” as processes in the first place
via Terrible advice from a great scientist | Byte Size Biology.
The Internet and web applications have been enablers for these server farms, for these mainracks, if you will. People use these web apps on smartphones, on notebooks, on tablets, and on the fading desktop. The client paints pixels while the server farm — the mainrack — does the backend work. More than a dozen iterations of Moore’s Law later, and the Wheel of Reincarnation has returned us to terminals connected to Big Iron.
And there’s the rub. The movement to replace the mainframe has re-invented not only the mainframe, but also the reason why people wanted to get rid of mainframes in the first place.
Storm-induced seismic vibes aren’t a newly recognized phenomenon. In 2005, ground motions triggered by Hurricane Katrina were picked up by seismometers in California. And even storms that remain far from land can trigger ground motions, Sufri and Koper note.
Because the strongest ground motions are typically created at or near a storm, researchers can track its progress using seismic data alone. That offers opportunities for scientists to delve through old data sets—especially those from the presatellite era—to look for signs of storms that might have been missed by earthbound observers, or to better estimate their paths and intensities, Sufri says.
via Superstorm Sandy Shook the Earth – ScienceNOW.
It amazes me how sensitive those seisometers must be.