mbone writes "The 'no cost' contract between the U.S. Department of Commerce and ICANN over hosting the Internet Assigned Names and Number Authority (IANA) was supposed to be re-let this March. Now, it has been withdrawn, and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) says that 'we are cancelling this RFP because we received no proposals that met the requirements requested by the global community.' This is a pretty stunning vote of no confidence in ICANN by the U.S. government, on the eve of the 43rd ICANN meeting in Costa Rica. Speculation is that this is related to the attempts of the ITU-T to take over Internet governance, but it also could be over the new global top level domains. I am sure we will be hearing a lot more about this in the weeks to come."
Doofus writes "The Washington Post has a profile of Roger Fidler, who 'invented' the tablet computer in the 1990s, while working as a visionary for newspaper firm Knight-Ridder. He is now embroiled in the Apple/Samsung legal war, as an expert witness. Fidler admits that other prior art influenced him, such as the tablets being used as computing devices in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Prior prior art."
An anonymous reader links to a short note at Tech Newest, according to which "Apple Inc. plans to create a $304 million campus in Austin, Texas, which will add 3,600 jobs over the next decade, more than doubling its labourforce in the city. The Cupertino, California, customer device huge already employs thousands in Austin, whose tasks include handling customer issues and support."
theodp writes "The rich are different; the geek rich are different-er. The WSJ's Emily Glazer reports that when Richard Garriott de Cayeux threw a costume party the night before his wedding in Paris, his 82-year-old mother — too frail to travel from her Las Vegas home — still dressed up as an Indian princess and attended the party using a $9,700 personal-presence robot from Anybots Inc. At the wedding reception the next day, Mama Garriott shook her robootie on the dance floor, encircled by kids and family. Telepresence robots aren't just for the likes of Sergey Brin anymore — companies like VGo, Xaxxon, Willow Garage, and iRobot have introduced personal-presence robots that range in price from $270 for a simple model to $50,000 for a machine that allows doctors to diagnose illnesses remotely. And, as an old NY Times article noted, they can also make fine Robot Overlords."
Sanity writes "LastCalc is a cross between Google Calculator, a spreadsheet, and a powerful functional programming language, all with a robust and flexible heuristic parser. It even lets you write functions that pull in data from elsewhere on the web. It's all wrapped up in a JQuery-based user interface that does as-you-type syntax highlighting. Today, LastCalc's creator, Ian Clarke (Freenet, Revver), has announced that LastCalc will be open sourced under the GNU Affero General Public License 'to accelerate development, spread the workload, and hopefully foster a vibrant volunteer community around the project.'"
An anonymous reader writes "Harry Shum, who oversees research and development for Microsoft's Bing search engine, believes his company has now matched Google's ability to build software platforms that can harness the power of tens of thousands of servers. — 'For many years, we've really tried to play the catch-up game,' Shum says. 'And now we feel that after a lot of effort, we understand search quality problems better than before, and that if you look at Google and Bing, the quality is beginning to be very comparable.' While his comments might be a little biased, many people do share the same opinion. How do you feel about Bing's search results compared to Google's? For example DuckDuckGo, the privacy oriented search engine, uses Bing's back-end and has gained a small following on Slashdot."
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Network World: "A lengthy report prepared for the U.S. government about China's high-tech buildup to prepare for cyberwar includes speculation about how a potential conflict with the U.S. would unfold — and how it might only take a few freelance Chinese civilian hackers working on behalf of China's People's Liberation Army to sow deadly disruptions in the U.S. military logistics supply chain. As told, if there's a conflict between the U.S. and China related to Taiwan, "Chinese offensive network operations targeting the U.S. logistics chain need not focus exclusively on U.S. assets, infrastructure or territory to create circumstances that could impede U.S. combat effectiveness," write the report's authors, Bryan Krekel, Patton Adams and George Bakos, all of whom are information security analysts with Northrop Grumman. The report, "Occupying the Information High Ground: Chinese Capabilities for Computer Network Operations and Cyber Espionage," focuses primarily on facts about China's cyberwar planning but also speculates on what might happen in any cyberwar."
MojoKid writes "T-Mobile's Chief Marketing Officer Cole Brodman has an interesting idea for revamping the mobile industry, and it involves killing the subsidy plans that have driven smartphone adoption over the past five years. Asked what one thing he'd change if he had the power to do so, Brodman pointed to subsidy programs. 'It [device subsidies] actually distorts what devices actually cost and it causes OEMs, carriers — everybody to compete on different playing fields ...' Brodman isn't kidding about an irregular playing field. The HTC Titan is the most subsidized device in the chart seen here (unsubsidized at $549, $0.01 on contract). Microsoft is obviously desperate to gain market share in mobile but both the iPhone 4S and the Galaxy Note carry $400+ discounts too. The cheapest smartphone AT&T offers without a subsidy is the thoroughly mediocre HTC Status, for $349. To add insult to injury, it's only available in mauve. It's an interesting idea, but practically unworkable as far as the mass market is concerned. Carriers have built a market structure in which consumers gladly accept a new bauble every 18 months in exchange for paying for text messaging (which literally costs carriers nothing) and overage charges in which 300MB of data for $20 is a fair market value."
Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that Oklahoma is one state benefitting from the energy boom. With a wind power rush underway, companies are competing to secure the windiest spots, while breathing life into small towns. The problem is, each turbine requires regular maintenance during its 20-year lifespan, with a requirement of one turbine technician for every 10 turbines on the ground. So even with a job that can pay a good starting salary (for technicians with a GED or high school diploma who complete a four-week turbine maintenance training program), there aren't enough qualified technicians to do the work. 'It seems odd, with America's unemployment problem, to have a shortage of workers for a job that can pay in excess of $20 per hour. But being a turbine technician isn't easy,' says Logan Layden, adding that technicians typically have to climb 300 foot high towers to service the turbines. Oscar Briones is one of about a dozen students who recently finished a maintenance training program after leaving his job as a motorcycle mechanic and now has his pick of employers. 'So I was in the market to find something else to do, and this seemed pretty exciting. Being 300 feet in the air, that's pretty exciting in its self. So yeah, I'm a thrill seeker.'"
An anonymous reader writes "Stanford's Ryan Calo has previously told us that 'that there is very little in American privacy law that would prohibit drone surveillance within our borders.' But will UAVs not only be legally permitted to monitor us in public, but also be used to 'peer' into homes with high-tech thermal and chemical sensors and alert police to the presence of illicit substances or other suspicious activity? Calo writes in Wired about a pending Supreme Court case, Florida v. Jardines, which will determine 'whether the police need a warrant before a dog can sniff your house' like they already do to luggage at airports. According to Calo, if the Court approves of these searches, it's a small leap to extend that same logic to the use of drones, allowing them 'to roam a neighborhood in search of invisible infractions such as indoor marijuana.' He concludes: 'The wrong decision in Jardines makes this and similar surveillance scenarios uncomfortably plausible.'"
First time accepted submitter Sez Zero writes "Google and ASUS have been collaborating on a co-branded 7-inch Android tablet, with a launch as early as May, according to sources, challenging low-cost rivals and the iPad with a $199-249 price tag. The fruits of the partnership, whispered to the runes readers at DigiTimes by industry sources, will take on the NOOK Tablet and the Kindle Fire, with ASUS selected for its willingness to flex to Google's requirements."
DeviceGuru writes "Although generally overshadowed by the iPad 3 debut, Apple also introduced the third incarnation of its Apple TV streaming media players this week. Sporting a revamped icon-based UI, the third-generation Apple TV doesn't add much to its predecessor beyond a truly-HD 1080p video output mode. Although Apple TV is still not supported by an Apple Apps Store plug-in apps ecosystem, its new UI (available as a free update for 2nd-generation Apple TVs) does seem to imply that this capability is coming soon. Meanwhile, Roku is gearing up for a $50M IPO, so this cord-cutting story is far from over."
ananyo writes "A scientific panel has narrowly recommended South Africa over Australia as the best site for the proposed Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an enormous US$2.1-billion radio telescope. While the project's member states have yet to make a final decision on where the telescope will go, the odds are now that the African bid will ultimately win out against the joint bid from Australia and New Zealand to host the project. The SKA radio telescope will be made up of some a 3,000 dishes, each 15 metres in diameter. The project will try to answer big questions about the early Universe: how the first elements heavier than helium formed, for example, and how the first galaxies coalesced. The telescope is so sensitive that it could even pick up television signals from distant worlds — something that might aid in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence."
waderoush writes "The venture backers behind Lytro, the Silicon Valley startup that just released its new light field camera, say the device will upend consumer photography the way the iPhone upended the mobile business. This review takes that assertion at face value, enumerating the features that made the iPhone an overnight success and asking whether the Lytro camera and its refocusable 'living pictures' offer consumers an equivalent set of advantages. The verdict: not yet. But while the first Lytro model may not an overnight success, light field cameras and refocusable images are just the first taste of a revolution in computational photography that's going to change the way consumers think about pictures."
Director Kristy Guevara-Flanigan's documentary dives deep into the influence of the iconic comic book character Wonder Woman.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
A teenage hacker known as Pinkie Pie pokes a hole in Google's Chrome browser, an unlikely winner who's taking home $60K and a possible job at the search giant.
Slow movies. Slow music. Slow art. The title of England's intriguing month-long AV Festival, now in its fifth edition, is ?As Slow as Possible? -- a counter-argument to the frenzy of the upcoming London 2012 Olympics, with its feverish tagline "Faster, Higher, Stronger." One festival highlight that welcomes participants from anywhere in the world is a 744-hour-long radio show curated by artist Vicki Bennett, also known as People Like Us. Listeners can tune in live to the broadcast, called ?Radio Boredcast,? at any time, day or night, during the entire month of March.
Wired's editors bring you up-to-the-minute information on the sights, sounds and of course the smells of Game Developers Conference on this week's podcast.
On this week's edition of the Gadget Lab Podcast, we talk about what Apple showed off at its big media event Wednesday: the new iPad and new Apple TV.
Microsoft has sicced its lawyers on the OnLive Desktop -- an internet service that streams Windows onto the iPad -- but this won't stop another free-thinking startup from sending Microsoft's flagship operating system onto Apple's tablet by way of the proverbial cloud.
When reports of Apple's third iPad first started emerging, the prospect of the tablet including a 9.7-inch Retina Display seemed slim to none. Fast forward to Wednesday, and the Retina Display is reality. So how did Apple pull it off?
Almost one-third of Americans believe the ancient Mayan prediction of global calamity this December are "somewhat true," according to a recent National Geographic poll. The prediction is based on a huge stone calendar wheel but exact nature of the disaster is an open question. Why are such rampant notions of the validity of nonsense claims so firmly established in our culture?
The airport of the future will float, and we'll fly here and there on hypersonic aircraft that take off and land vertically. So goes the winning entry in a contest to envision the airport of tomorrow.
co-star and guitar goddess Carrie Brownstein that she doesn't have to feel like a fraud anymore.
Susan Crawford discusses Comcast, Verizon Wireless and the state of internet access in America.
Ready, set, hatch! The first California condor to hatch on live webcam will poke through its egg's shell this weekend, possibly as early as Saturday.
Fresh on the heels of Amazon Web Services and Google announcing a new round of cloud price cuts, Microsoft on Friday cut its prices on Azure storage-as-you-go and "XSmall" compute services. Will the cloud price war end up like the burger wars?
Finding zero-day exploits to win a hacking contest can be really hard work these days. So sometimes the better strategy is just to game the game.
The secret base-within-the-base was the first sign that I was about to see something special. It was early February at a snow-encrusted NATO compound on the outskirts of Kabul. I'd come at the invitation of a U.S. Army sergeant assigned to Special Forces Task Force 10.
The personal cloud that exists today is mainly about file synchronization across devices and the virtualization of client/server web apps and services. This is great stuff, mind you. But this week I focus on an ambitious next-generation idea that's being implemented by a company called Kynetx and that's described in Phil Windley's new book
Twitter is now serving up pages over Google's improved web protocol, making the site a bit speedier in Chrome and (soon) Firefox. Google is hoping that its SPDY protocol, pronounced "speedy," will one day speed up not just Google and Twitter, but the entire web.
is a film for everyone who caught themselves dancing in public to the music in their headphones and just didn't care. It's also a piece of visual art painted with the colors of New York City, where the residents don't even blink when a goofy girl in a windbreaker starts dancing like a crazy person right through a park in broad daylight.
Bees have different "personalities," with some showing a stronger willingness or desire to seek adventure than others, according to a new study.
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes would like to reinvest in and reinvent 98-year-old liberal magazine for tablets and the web.
Dredged from the dark depths of Nordic folklore, the Huldra shares a common trait with other characters from sci-fi, fantasy and cartoons: a rather conspicuous posterior appendage.
A volcano in Colombia that hasn't erupted in over 20 years seems headed toward a potential revival. Volcanologist and Eruptions blogger Erik Klemetti explains what recent activity could mean and delves into the mountain's deadly history.
Let's get one thing out of the way: isn't as bad as some were worried it might be. In fact, the movie's pretty good. But that doesn't mean it's great, and the two-hour-plus Martian epic's main shortcoming may be its ambition.
As most recently seen in faster-than-light neutrino measurements caused by a loose cable, science is difficult at the edge of the unknown -- and neutrinos are especially tricky. More often than not, neutrino experiments have returned perplexing results, challenging scientists and helping them learn ever more about the universe's rules.