John Lemke's List: Tech

• Four hackers have been jointly charged with conspiracies to commit computer fraud, copyright infringement, wire fraud, mail fraud, identity theft, and theft of trade secrets. Individually, they have been charged with counts of aggravated identity theft, unauthorized computer access, copyright infringement, and wire fraud.
• The defendants, aged between 18 and 28, are believed to have stolen more than $100 million in intellectual property and other proprietary data from the likes of Microsoft Corporation, Epic Games, Valve, and even the US Army. This includes pre-release versions of Gears of War 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Apache helicopter simulation software developed for the US army, and information about the Xbox One console. Two of the suspects have pleaded guilty, one of which is 22-year old David Pokora. His plea represents what may be the first conviction of a foreign-based individual for hacking into US businesses to steal trade secret information.
• 18-count superseding indictment

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• t's a messaging app for iOS.
• based on peer-to-peer “mesh networking” and connects to nearby phones using Bluetooth and WiFi, with connectivity increasing as more people use it in an area.

• In Hong Kong mostly, where pro-democracy protesters are using it to communicate amid fears of network shutdowns.

   

  It's also been used by Iraqis and Taiwanese students during their anti-Beijing Sunflower Movement.

   

  Aside from not being reliant on the internet (which some governments restrict), it is more clandestine and less traceable.

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• Biofuels made using corn waste could release 7 percent more greenhouse gases in the early years compared to conventional gasoline. As a result, this type of cellulosic ethanol could be inelligible to meet quotas under the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA).
• In the longer-term, the study says that these types of biofuels will result in a net emissions decrease. However, the short term increase is enough to keep this type of biofuel from complying with regulations in the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA).

• GM, Honda, Audi, Hyundai, and chipmaker Nvidia, and will focus on bringing the successful mobile operating system to in-car entertainment systems
• planned for launch by the end of 2014.
• Sync system found in Fords is based on Microsoft technology
• Car companies don't appear to be choosing just one partner either — Honda is already involved in Apple's efforts, while, Chevrolet, a division of Google's newly announced partner GM, recently demonstrated an app store and in-car interface for its 2015 lineup.

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• Natural stones usually contain flaws at a level of about one-in-a-thousand atoms, which is much too many to make them useful for information storage: the defects are so close together that they interfere with each other, meaning that electrons cannot reliably hold any given spin state for long. By contrast, the Russian diamond contains fewer than one nitrogen atom per billion carbon atoms.

  Back in 2005, Wrachtrup's tests showed that electrons in the Russian diamond could maintain a defined spin state for almost a millisecond; the only other set-ups able to maintain a spin state for this long were those that were super-cooled to near absolute zero and maintained under a high vacuum. Diamond allows scientists to change and read the quantum state of a single electron at room temperature using everyday lab equipment.

• Pictured above is Valkyrie from NASA JPL. We reported on Valkyrie earlier this month. Arguably one of the better looking robots of the bunch, Valkyrie proved to be all show and no go today, failing to score any points in its day 1 trials. The day one lead went to Team Schaft, a new robot from Tokyo based startup company Schaft inc. Schaft scored 18 points in its first day. In second place is the MIT team  with 12 points. Third place is currently held by Team TRACLabs with 9 points. All this can change tomorrow as the second day of trials take place. The live stream will be available from 8am to 7pm EST on DARPA’s robotics challenge page.

• The key property that will allow us to say whether or not it is a Higgs particle is called spin. If this particle has spin-zero, then it is a Higgs particle. If not, then it is something different, possibly linked to the way gravity works. All the analysis conducted so far strongly indicates spin-zero, but is not yet able to rule out entirely the possibility that the particle has spin-two.
• If the new particle is a Higgs, it could be the Higgs as predicted in the 1960s, which would complete the Standard Model of particle physics, or it could be a more exotic particle that would lead us beyond the Standard Model. The stakes are high. The Standard Model accounts for all the visible matter in the Universe, including the stuff that we are made of, but it does not account for the 96% of the Universe that is invisible to us - the dark universe. Finding out what kind of Higgs it is will rely on carefully measuring the particle's interactions with other particles, and that may take several years to resolve.

• Wilson’s nonprofit organization, Defense Distributed, released a video this week showing a gun firing off over 600 rounds—illustrating what is likely to be the first wave of semi-automatic and automatic weapons produced by the additive manufacturing process.

• Monkeys are controlling bipedal, walking robots thousands of miles away using only their minds. Miguel Nicolelis, a neuroprosthetics researcher at Duke University, has been working for years on the interface between brain signals and electronics, and in 2003, was able to get his rhesus monkey Aurora to accurately control a robotic arm with her brain. "Aurora realized that she didn’t need to move anymore, she could just imagine the movements and this interface… was able to enact her will," he explained to Scientific American. In Nicolelis’s more recent experiments, signals from the brain of a monkey walking on a treadmill were used in the same way to control a robot in Japan, while it watched video footage of the walking robot in nearly real time. As he notes in a TEDMED presentation below, the control signal's round trip from monkey brain to Kyoto University happened 20 milliseconds faster than an equivalent signal traveling to the monkey's own muscles.