The Biggest Battle in All Of EVE

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Once the TCU onlining was decided, the fight just became about carnage: who could kill the most the fastest. The fleets committed by both sides represent a staggering amount of time, effort, and ISK. Each titan costs about 100 billion ISK (up to 160 or even 220b for particularly expensive fits), which can be purchased for about $3,000 USD by buying game time and selling it to other players for ISK. More than that, though, to build a titan requires several weeks and a nice quiet undisturbed area of space, something harder to find in the current climate. Supercarriers are similarly challenging. Dreadnaughts and carriers, while not as difficult to build, still represent a significant investment of effort on the part of an industrialist somewhere.

via B-R5RB: The Biggest Battle in All Of EVE | TheMittani.com.

App Pays Attention to Phone’s Behavior to Spot New Malware

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Today, San Francisco-based Zimperium unveiled its zIPS Android app (the “IPS” stands for “intrusion prevention system”), which the company says uses machine learning to watch how your smartphone normally acts and can spot strange changes in its usage, enabling it to detect and prevent attacks, including those that may strike via unprotected Wi-Fi networks.

via App Pays Attention to Phone’s Behavior to Spot New Malware | MIT Technology Review.

Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

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This is in large part an artificial intelligence talent acquisition, and Google CEO Larry Page led the deal himself, sources said. According to online bios, Hassabis in particular is quite a talent, a child prodigy in chess who was later called “probably the best games player in history” by the Mind Sports Olympiad.

via Exclusive: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M | Re/code.

BeWifi lets you steal your neighbor’s bandwidth when they’re not using it

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The way Telefonica has made this happen in a practical way is to build its own routers that can be installed in houses within a neighborhood. So far these have had to be installed by engineers, but the next generation are plug-and-play, and eventually all that will be needed is an over-the-air software update to customers’ existing routers. According to Rodriguez, the software “creates a mesh to aggregate the capabilities [of the routers].” Pooling all of the bandwidth from these routers allows anyone within the network to take advantage of it at home, and they can also connect to any BeWifi network they come across on their mobile devices when out and about.

via BeWifi lets you steal your neighbor’s bandwidth when they’re not using it | Ars Technica.

The title is a bit dramatic using the term “stealing” as if something as ephemeral as unused bandwidth, which disappears never to be used by anyone ever as time passes, is an asset that could be considered “stolen” if taken or used by someone else.  The victim of this kind of “theft” does not wake in the morning and see something missing unless they’re subscribed to some kind of data cap.  Most home installations do not have caps.

Telefonica is currently looking towards developing economies and its huge customer base of over 200 million households in 14 countries in South America as the places in which BeWifi could have a real impact.

How Silicon Valley’s most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers’ wages

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These secret conversations and agreements between some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley were first exposed in a Department of Justice antitrust investigation launched by the Obama Administration in 2010. That DOJ suit became the basis of a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of over 100,000 tech employees whose wages were artificially lowered — an estimated $9 billion effectively stolen by the high-flying companies from their workers to pad company earnings — in the second half of the 2000s. Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied attempts by Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe to have the lawsuit tossed, and gave final approval for the class action suit to go forward. A jury trial date has been set for May 27 in San Jose, before US District Court judge Lucy Koh, who presided over the Samsung-Apple patent suit..

via The Techtopus: How Silicon Valley’s most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers’ wages | PandoDaily.

Burden of proof of infringement on patent holder

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The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the decision of the district court, stating that it holds that “when a licensee seeks a declaratory judgment against a patentee to establish that there is no infringement, the burden of proving infringement remains with the patentee.”

via US Supreme Court: Burden of proof of infringement on patent holder | ITworld.

A new transparent display system could provide heads-up data

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The secret to the new system: Nanoparticles are embedded in the transparent material. These tiny particles can be tuned to scatter only certain wavelengths, or colors, or light, while letting all the rest pass right through. That means the glass remains transparent enough to see colors and shapes clearly through it, while a single-color display is clearly visible on the glass.

via Seeing things: A new transparent display system could provide heads-up data – MIT News Office.

What Hard Drive Should I Buy?

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At the end of 2013, we had 27,134 consumer-grade drives spinning in Backblaze Storage Pods. The breakdown by brand looks like this:

Hard Drives by Manufacturer
Brand Number
of Drives		 Terabytes Average
Age in Years
Seagate 12,765 39,576 1.4
Hitachi 12,956 36,078 2.0
Western Digital 2,838 2,581 2.5
Toshiba 58 174 0.7
Samsung 18 18 3.7

via Backblaze Blog » What Hard Drive Should I Buy?.

Why do we have the drives we have? Basically, we buy the least expensive drives that will work

There are a lot of numbers tossed around in this article that are difficult to summarize.  The above table shows the data set they worked from.

BT and Alcatel-Lucent Claim Fastest Real World Fibre Optic Speed of 1.4Tbps

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Admittedly some of you might look at this and point out that Alcatel-Lucent has already successfully transmitted data at the staggering speed of 31Tbps (Terabits per second) over a single long-haul 7200km optical fibre cable (here). Similarly a UK team managed to push 73.7Tbps down a hollow fibre optic cable (here). But the difference here is that BT has pulled off an impressive improvement using an existing link in a real-world environment with commercial grade hardware. ISPs will be happy to hear that.

via BT and Alcatel-Lucent Claim Fastest Real World Fibre Optic Speed of 1.4Tbps – ISPreview UK.