If you want recorded content – you’re all set. But seamlessly watching live TV is a work in progress.
After subscribing to Aereo, I note the service has an occasional weakness: actually delivering live TV seamlessly.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Aereo’s Achilles’ Heel: Delivering Real-Time TV
After subscribing to Aereo, I note the service has an occasional weakness: actually delivering live TV seamlessly.
Could Electric Cars Threaten the Grid?
Some neighborhood grids just aren’t built for huge spikes in power demand. The rise of the electric car has utilities scrambling to adjust.
Plugging in an electric vehicle is, in some cases, the equivalent of adding three houses to the grid. That has utilities in California—where the largest number of electric vehicles are sold—scrambling to upgrade the grid to avoid power outages.
Last year in the United States, only about 50,000 electric cars were sold. And researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have calculated that the grid has enough excess capacity to support over 150 million battery-powered cars, or about 75 percent of the cars, pickups, and SUVs on the road in the United States. But there’s a catch. While power plants and transmission lines have excess capacity, things can get tight when it comes to distributing power to individual neighborhoods.
Device Could Spot Seizures by Reading Brainwaves through the Ear
A tiny, unobtrusive brain monitor could help track daily seizures.
Neuroscientists often use electroencephalography (EEG) as an inexpensive way to record electrical signals in the brain. Though it would be useful to run these recordings for long periods of time, that usually isn’t practical: EEG recording traditionally involves attaching many electrodes and cables to a patient’s scalp.
Now engineers at Imperial College in London have developed an EEG device that can be worn inside the ear, like a hearing aid. They say the device will allow scientists to record EEGs for several days at a time; this would allow doctors to monitor patients who have regularly recurring problems like seizures or microsleep.
Remotely Assembled Malware Blows Past Apple’s Screening Process
Research unmasks a weakness of Apple’s App Store: new apps apparently are run for only a few seconds before approval.
Mystery has long shrouded how Apple vets iPhone, iPad, and iPod apps for safety. Now, researchers who managed to get a malicious app up for sale in the App Store have determined that the company’s review process runs at least some programs for only a few seconds before giving the green light.
This wasn’t long enough for Apple to notice that an app that purported to offer news from Georgia Tech contained code fragments that later assembled themselves into a malicious digital creature. This malware, which the researchers dubbed Jekyll, could stealthily post tweets, send e-mails and texts, steal personal information and device ID numbers, take photos, and attack other apps. It even provided a way to magnify its effects, because it could direct Safari, Apple’s default browser, to a website with more malware.
New Form of Carbon is Stronger Than Graphene and Diamond
Chemists have calculated that chains of double or triple-bonded
carbon atoms, known as carbyne, should be stronger and stiffer than any
known material.
The sixth element, carbon, has given us an amazing abundance of extraordinary materials. Once there was simply carbon, graphite and diamond. But in recent years chemists have added buckyballs, nanotubes and any number of exotic shapes created out of graphene, the molecular equivalent of chickenwire.
So it’s hard to believe that carbon has any more surprises up its sleeve. And yet today, Mingjie Liu and pals at Rice University in Houston calculate the properties of another form of carbon that is stronger, stiffer and more exotic than anything chemists have seen before.
Smartphones As Weather Surveillance Systems
Tricks such as tracking the temperature of smartphones’ batteries enables them to provide useful atmospheric data.
Outdoor air temperature in central London, as measured based on an app that monitors smartphone batteries (Credit: OpenSignal)You probably never think about the temperature of your smartphone’s battery, but it turns out to provide an interesting method for tracking outdoor air temperature. It’s a discovery that adds to other evidence that mobile apps could provide a new way to measure what’s happening in the atmosphere and improve weather forecasting.
Devices Connect with Borrowed TV Signals and Need No Power Source
Devices that can make wireless connections even without an onboard battery could spread computing power into everything you own.
A novel type of wireless device sends and receives data without a battery or other conventional power source. Instead, the devices harvest the energy they need from the radio waves that are all around us from TV, radio, and Wi-Fi broadcasts.
These seemingly impossible devices could lead to a slew of new uses of computing, from better contactless payments to the spread of small, cheap sensors just about everywhere.
“Traditionally wireless communication has been about devices that generate radio frequency signals,” says Shyam Gollakota, one of the University of Washington researchers who led the project. “But you have so many radio signals around you from TV, Wi-Fi, and cellular networks. Why not use them?”
Gollakota and colleagues have created several prototypes to test the idea of using ambient radio waves to communicate. In one test, two credit-card-sized devices—albeit with relatively bulky antennas attached—were used to show how the technique could enable new forms of payment technology. Pressing a button on one card caused it to connect with and transfer virtual money to a similar card, all without any battery or external power source.
Why E-mail Can’t Be Completely Private
The closure of two “ultra-private” e-mail services shows just how weak the system really is.
The episode pointed out two fundamental weaknesses in e-mail. First, even if an e-mail service encrypts messages for secrecy, as Lavabit and Silent Circle did, the e-mail headers and routing protocols reveal who the senders and receivers are, and that information can be valuable in its own right. And second, the passcodes used as keys to decrypt messages can be requested by the government (if held by the e-mail company) or simply stolen by sophisticated malware.
Denser, Faster Memory Challenges Both DRAM and Flash
A new memory technology can store a terabyte on a chip the size of a postage stamp.
A new type of memory chip that a startup company has just begun to test could give future smartphones and other computing devices both a speed and storage boost. The technology, known as crossbar memory, can store data about 40 times as densely as the most compact memory available today. It is also faster and more energy efficient.
The technology’s ability to store a lot of data in a small space could see it replace the flash memory chips that are the basis of memory cards, some hard drives, and the internal storage of mobile devices. Data can be accessed and written to crossbar memory fast enough to see it also possibly compete with DRAM, used as short-term memory, in computing devices. The technology is significantly more energy efficient than both flash and DRAM.
“Spoofers” Use Fake GPS Signals to Knock a Yacht Off Course
Civilian GPS is vulnerable to being spoofed—and researchers are looking for ways to ensure the signals are legit.
University of Texas researchers recently tricked the navigation system of an $80 million yacht and sent the ship off course in an experiment that showed how any device with civilian GPS technology is vulnerable to a practice called spoofing.
Led by GPS expert Todd Humphreys, the researchers used a handheld device they built for about $2,000. It generates a fake GPS signal that appears identical to those sent out by the real GPS. The two signals reach the targeted system in perfect alignment. The strength of the fake signal slowly ratchets up and overtakes the real one.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)