DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the government agency that has given us so much including the Internet, and their good friends Boston Dynamics, who have given us such wonderful, cuddly creations as Big Dog from the header picture, are now furthering work on their Atlas robot, a man-sized robot that is capable of navigating over obstacles, running, and maintaining its balance if impacted by an outside force.

Amazing as that is, Atlas is only capable of doing what it does while tethered via lifelines to a control center. However, and this is a big however, now with MIT’s CSAIL lab at the helm they are getting ready to have those tethers removed, and Atlas will, if everything goes according to plan, be able to navigate on its bipedal own completely unattached to anything. I VERY STRONGLY encourage you to watch the video in that link (it wouldn’t embed, sadly), as it is very interesting and a little unnerving.

This is a big deal, as robots have incredible difficulty maintaining balance if something goes wrong. Humans have well-developed systems that rely on all senses as well as the spine and inner ear to maintain balance, and we all know if they are thrown off even slightly we can become very sick or lose our orientation. Robots obviously don’t do those last two, but their ability to balance and recover that balance is it’s lost has to be programmed in. Here’s another example of Atlas doing his thing.

As many of you may know, the Heartbleed bug has been outed and is one of the most severe security risks to come along in quite some time. It exploits the Open Secure Sockets Layer (Open SSL) encryption used to protect the identity of sites and encrypt traffic, namely usernames and passwords, and it’s the security used on about 75 percent of all websites.

What it does is relatively simple in the end; it extracts bits of memory a little at a time and sees if there is anything of value in the chunk it extracts. It may be nothing, but it may be account information, a social security number, a username, a password, or other important information.

It has affected hundreds of thousands of sites, all of which use the Open SSL protocol. Most of them have now been patched, but it is very important you not use these sites until you can be sure yours has as well. You can contact the site if you have their contact information, or you can use The Heartbleed Test or The LastPass Heartbleed Test to check if the server has been patched up or not. If it has, change your password. If it hasn’t, don’t change your password until it has, or your *new* password could be taken.

Many popular sites, including Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Imgur, and Yahoo were affected, and many of them should have indicated via email whether they’ve been fixed up.

This vulnerability and bug has apparently been around for a couple of years, and at least now it is hopefully being taken care of.

A couple of you sent me links to stories about a new FCC ruling which will open up the channels Wi-Fi is able to use, making wireless network speeds much, MUCH faster.

Wireless connections are, by their very nature, slower, less secure, and more prone to interference than wired connections. If you can plug a cord directly from your device into the router, you’ll have a much better experience overall. But with many devices (most, now, actually), that is not an option. You need the wireless connection so you can connect a tablet or smartphone or digital band or whatever other wireless-only device you have.

In a shared environment, in which many devices are using that wireless connection, the connection is actually skipping from device to device very rapidly, giving each device a little bit of connection time before moving on to the next, then cycling back through them all over and over; no two devices have access at the same time.

With this new ruling, which opens up 100Mhz of frequency in the 5.15 – 5.25 gigahertz frequency range, that will no longer be necessary. Now, each device can have its own wireless channel for connecting to and using a wireless hotspot. This will make your connection speed much faster, up to one gigabit per second – or possibly even faster – as opposed to the speeds available now, which at their absolute fastest are 300 megabits, although we all get closer to 25 or 50. It will be as though your device has its own provate commute lane instead of having to share the road with a thousand other cars. This will be especially welcome in public places like libraries or airports or coffee shops or schools to name a few. It applies to ‘unlicensed devices’ which provide infrastructure-based (remember that word from class?) hotspots and the devices that use them such as routers and baby monitors and tablets. It also removes the indoor-only requirement for these devices. Licensed devices would be those used for regulated data transmission, such as emergency personnel, airlines, etc. and they are not affected by this.

Now you can do both of these things, and much faster to boot!

You may remember we talked about the various wireless protocols in use today; if you look at your wireless router, it likely sys something like ‘a/b/g’ compatible. It may have other protocols listed as well, such as ab or ag. Those protocols, which all fall under the 802.11 standard, are simply the rules that the router uses to send traffic back and forth. This new protocol hasn’t been classified as far as I can tell, but I suspect new devices that can use it will be coming pretty soon, as I’m not convinced a simple firmware update, or flash update (which we also discused in class) will be sufficient.

There’s so much information about it I have decided to simply link three relevant articles – you can read much more about the recent ruling and what it means at Cnet, PC World and The Register.

FCC frees up 100MHz of spectrum for Wi-Fi (Cnet)

FCC Clears the Way for Gigabit Wi-Fi (PC World)

FCC doubles 5GHz spectrum in prep for one-giagbit Wi-Fi (The Register, from the UK)

Remember our discussion of Frequently Asked Questions lists (FAQs)? Usually, there are about 10 questions or so that address questions that are frequently asked; The device won’t power on, something doesn’t work, won’t recharge, etc. If you would like to know how *not* to create a FAQ, take a look at the one provided by ImageViewer IrfanView! No search, no categorical arrangement, no ranking by popularity, nothing. Additionally, the font is so small you can’t make out one question from the next. Finally, there’s no possible way these are *all* ‘frequently asked.’ This is not how you do it, people!

Today is the day. We’ve all known it was coming, but it has finally arrived. Yes, today is the day Microsoft finally ends all support for Windows XP, the stalwart OS that has been gracing home computers, and many other devices, since late 2001.

Well, not all. If you have embedded XP, which is used in everything from ATMs to POS terminals, support will last until 2016 for some versions, later for others, but that’s not you. You have good old regular XP, and Microsoft will no longer support it. So what does that mean?

It means no more security updates, no more bug fixes, no more enhancements or service packs or technical support or anything else. The XP you’re running now is the XP you will ALWAYS be running from here on out.

But what does *that* mean?

Depending on who you talk to, XP is still installed on anywhere from 20% of workplace machines to 46% of home PCs worldwide! The numbers tend to be all over the place with the business estimate the less variable of the two, but either way, that’s a lot. A whole lot. 500 million at least. And they’ll be immediately more vulnerable to crashing, viruses and other malware, as well as dwindling resources and options for fixing those problems.

If you’re still using XP, what can you do? The only real thing you can do is keep using it and accept it’s the equivalent of a digital petri dish, or upgrade your operating system. Even upgrading to Windows 7 is a huge improvement. Keep in mind that if you have hardware that runs XP well, it likely will *not* run a later version of the OS as swimmingly. It might be time for a full upgrade.

I thought watches had gone out of style. I have one that looks like a Rolex, but it’s not. It’s very nice, though, a Seiko that I bought about 20 years ago but haven’t worn for 10. I have another that was very expensive that I received as a gift, and I only wear that when I need to look professional or give an impression. In other words, rarely.

Now, however, ‘Smart Watches’ seem to be causing mass hysteria, with everyone wanting one and a bunch of talk about how great they’ll be.

There’s the rumored iWatch from Apple, Samsung’s Galaxy Gear, Google’s AndroidWear, the Pebble, Sony’s cleverly-named SmartWatch, even things like the FitBit (which was recently recalled) and a host of others.

Now *that* would be nifty

I have to be honest, I’m surprised. Watches were, or at least I thought they were, going out of style. Especially the big gaudy ones, but all watches since we had smartphones we could use instead. It’s been debated on forums and in popular press, with that last link arguing we don’t need smart watches because we have regular watches, and while horologists might disagree, I guess the promise of even more immediate connectivity can’t be ignored. In fact, I noticed at Target it’s an entire section!

The big appeal is that these watches will update you if you get an email/facebook/text message, track your workouts, give biometric feedback, connect to services that can send and receive information…

But your phone does that already. I don’t know, I have been trying to wrap my head around the idea of these new smartwatches, and while the ones I’ve personally seen have been well-made and interesting, I just don’t see the need.

Allow me to introduce you to Alex. She looks like many other models you might see, gifted with the luck of genetics. Here’s another photo of her from the front:

You can see that Alex is lucky to have many of the features that both men and women find physically attractive: Symmetry, physical features, hair length, and other chracteristics that tend to enhance attractiveness.

You all know, however, that I never make posts like this without a huge catch. The point here isn’t to make social commentary or objectify, but to point out amazing technology. You may already know where this is going, but here’s the big reveal:

She’s not real. Alex is completely computer-animated. Artist Mao Lin-Liao, from Khitan Digital in the Netherlands and who has made many other amazing renders, breaks down the extensive considerations that had to be made to create this digital design.

 Alex -Portrait of a Young Woman – Breakdown video from Khitan Digital on Vimeo.

We’ve talked about many different types of technology, and their applications therein, but I wanted to step slightly outside of our regular focus and talk about one of the most incredible advances in reverse manual-spline control, Rockwell’s Retroencabulator. The video below goes into pretty good detail about the specifics, but it’s important to also consider that when you have multi-spline locking coils, the within-vector differential between sub-level inverse reactants and surface-grade linear modalities is exponential to the pan-thermal extrusion values above octals of 16. Not only that, if consideration isn’t given to the fractional pulse spikes that can occur in the Nielsen phase-currents mentioned only briefly in the beginning of the video, the resulting *over*-phase sub-current wouldn’t be able to balance out the self-inflective low-voltage sub-bit dropouts. That’s why they’re there, after all.

Even-so, magneto-reluctance and capacitive diractance, as mentioned in the video, is an inventive way of minimizing transistive backflow at sub-3.6 tetrahetz conductive levels. Toroidal pham-shafts can help with reducing ionic plane-shifting as he correctly mentions, but not when currents are front-flowed at levels outside the operating range of the initial dioptic conductors.

Another possible result is limiting flux overload outputs, lessening safety.

Very important! it has just been discovered that humans can now catch computer viruses, and hackers can turn your PC into a bomb and detonate your whole dang neighborhood! Please see the articles below for details.

Ever wonder about that thing? I received an email from Travis with the following very interesting bit of information on it from Intel, explaining the origin of the power symbol.

They are certainly correct; the symbol is based on binary code, with the ‘one’ or vertical line representing on, and the ‘zero’ or circle representing off, which is what they both represent in code. I’d like to offer a little more clarification about their use and application. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has standardized this iconography, which makes sense since setting standards is one of their functions. IEC 5007 standardizes the ‘power on’ symbol (the line) with its definition being the symbol represents the equipment being placed into a fully powered state. IEC 5008 indicates the ‘power off’ symbol (the circle) indicates power will be disconnected from the device. There are other symbols as well which can be seen in this one-page .pdf.

You can see these symbols not just in the standard overlapping form presented above, but on almost every power switch, since they are standards. The power-strip below (from England, by the way) and the PC power supply pictured below that both feature the same symbols, just in a different form, but with ‘1’ representing on and ‘0’ representing off.