Between March and April, here is how the browser market changed, according to the latest figures from Net Applications:
- Internet Explorer: down 0.71 points to 55.83 percent
- Chrome: up 0.69 points to 25.68 percent
- Firefox: down 0.19 points to 11.70 percent
- Safari: up 0.12 points to 5.12
- Opera: up 0.05 points to 0.48 percent
Source: Chrome passes 25% market share, IE and Firefox slip | VentureBeat | Dev | by Emil Protalinski
It has been written many times in these pages, and it begs repeating: this rover was sent on a 90-day expedition, with the mission success mobility objective of driving 600 meters. In March, Opportunity completed 42.195 kilometers or 26.2 miles. It’s the first marathon “run” on another planet. And in April – the 4000th sol. “This rover just keeps giving and giving,” said Planetary Society President Jim Bell, professor of astronomy and planetary scientist at Arizona State University and lead scientist on the MERs’ panoramic cameras (Pancams).
At the utility scale, it may actually be even more disruptive. Tesla appears to be selling the utility scale models at < $250 / kwh. Multiple utility studies suggest that such a price should replace natural gas peakers and drive gigantic grid-level deployments.
Source: Tesla Battery Economics: On the Path to Disruption | Ramez Naam
Tentative Conclusion: The battery is right on the verge of being cost effective to buy across most of the US for day/night arbitrage. And it’s even more valuable if outages come at a high economic cost.
At the halfway point of the “Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence” poker competition between software developed at Carnegie Mellon University and four of the world’s best players, the nod unquestionably goes to the humans.
The CMU computer program, Claudico, is playing a total of 80,000 hands of Heads-Up No-limit Texas Hold’em against Doug Polk, Dong Kim, Bjorn Li and Jason Les. And after 42,100 hands, the humans had a cumulative lead of 626,892 chips.
Source: Human Pros Dominating Poker AI – Robotics Trends
Looks like poker may be more difficult than chess and Jeopardy.
If you want to see what services are being hosted by a particular svchost.exe instance, you can use the tasklist command from the command prompt in order to see the list of services.
tasklist /SVC
The Federal Aviation Administration this week said it had completed the momentous replacement of 40-year old main computer systems that control air traffic in the US.
Known as En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM), the system is expected to increase air traffic flow, improve automated navigation and strengthen aircraft conflict detection services, with the end result being increased safety and less flight congestion.
Source: FAA: 2 million lines of code process new air traffic system | Network World
Cryptographic backdoors will not work. As a matter of technology, they are deeply incompatible with modern software platforms. And as a matter of policy and law, addressing those incompatibilities would require intolerable regulation of the technology sector. Any attempt to mandate backdoors will merely escalate an arms race, where usable and secure software stays a step ahead of the government.
The easiest way to understand the argument is to walk through a hypothetical. I’m going to use Android; much of the same analysis would apply to iOS or any other mobile platform.
In a contest that echoes Deep Blue’s chess victory over Garry Kasparov and Watson beating two Jeopardy! Champions, computer poker software developed at Carnegie Mellon University will challenge four of the world’s best professional poker players in a “Brains Vs. Artificial Intelligence” competition beginning April 24 at Rivers Casino.
Over the course of two weeks, the CMU computer program, Claudico, will play 20,000 hands of Heads-Up No-limit Texas Hold’em with each of the four poker pros. The pros — Doug Polk, Dong Kim, Bjorn Li and Jason Les — will receive appearance fees derived from a prize purse of $100,000 donated by Microsoft Research and by Rivers Casino. The Carnegie Mellon scientists will compete for something more precious.
“Computing the world’s strongest strategies for this game was a major achievement — with the algorithms having future applications in business, military, cybersecurity and medical arenas,” Sandholm said.
Basically, by generating a specially crafted SSL certificate, attackers can regenerate a bug and cause apps that perform SSL communication to crash at will. With our finding, we rushed to create a script that exploits the bug over a network interface. As SSL is a security best practice and is utilized in almost all apps in the Apple app store, the attack surface is very wide.
via “No iOS Zone” – A New Vulnerability Allows DoS Attacks on iOS Devices ».
This exploit only crashes a device making it unusable. There is no mention of making end to end encrypted communications vulnerable. By moving outside the range of the access point the IOS device automatically connected to should break the connection bringing the phone back to normal.
Devices with wifi left on will try and connect themselves to any open access point. While this shouldn’t be a problem attacks like this can happen. I would classify this attack more of an irritant than anything serious.
Experts say that recent advances in LED technology have made it possible to modulate the LED light more rapidly, opening the possibility of using light for wireless transmission in a “free space” optical communication system.
“In addition to improving the experience for users, the two big advantages of this system are that it uses inexpensive components, and it integrates with existing WiFi systems,” said Thinh Nguyen, an OSU associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Nguyen worked with Alan Wang, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, to build the first prototype.
via Innovation boosts Wi-Fi bandwidth tenfold.
The electromagnetic spectrum with wifi can be flakey and interconnecting access points using this spectrum can fail frequently and cause significant bandwidth problems. Integrating led tech into devices may take time to develop some kind of standard but using this for point to point wireless communication could prove very useful in certain use cases.