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The incident, which was probably a case of the French finance ministry going overboard in its efforts to monitor employee activities, provides a timely reminder of how certificates are the weak point in online security.

Google appears to have caught the French finance ministry spying on its workers’ internet traffic by spoofing Google security certificates, judging from an episode that took place last week.

The web firm said in a blog post on Saturday that, on the preceding Tuesday, it had become aware of “unauthorized digital certificates for several Google domains.” It tracked the provenance of these certificates back to ANSSI, the French state information security agency, which in turn pointed to the Treasury as the culprit.

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3D printing specialists Solid Concepts is to partner with the wcUAVc for an international student competition to create state-of-the-art, affordable UAVs to seek out hot spots of human activity and warn national park rangers in time to save animals. With poaching still at large in national parks in Africa where staff are limited, the outcomes could be very beneficial indeed.

The wcUAVc, founded by Princess Aliyah Pandolfi – a well known animal preservation activist – sought out Solid Concepts earlier in the year for advise and sponsorship regarding this challenge. Pandolfi and Solid Concepts strongly believe that 3D printing, which has already helped to lower the costs of manufacturing in many other industries, could help to lower costs as well as enhance and widen possibilities for UAVs.

A key to this challenge is creating a UAV that can fly for long periods of time, is easy to use and doesn’t require heavy maintenance. After consulting with researchers who have flown UAVs in Africa in the past, it is also clear that a UAV with easily interchangeable parts would be useful, as access to spare parts is nigh on impossible out in the bush lands of Africa’s national wildlife reserves. The drones currently used cost USD$15,000 (£10,000), which increases to $23,000 with the cost of the camera, ground control equipment and training factored in – roughly equal to one ranger’s annual salary.

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warp drive

Well, maybe Star Trek isn’t really that far away. An announcement a few months ago from physicist Harold White surprised many in the space community. White claimed that he and a NASA team were working on developing faster than light warp drive.

White spoke to website io9 last month to explain the project, which combines Einstein’s theory of relativity, the latest in science and a touch of science fiction.

The idea came out of a 1994 paper White wrote regarding an equation proposed by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. Alcubierre suggested that space-time could be warped both in front of and behind a spacecraft.

“Remember, nothing locally exceeds the speed of light, but space can expand and contract at any speed,” White says to io9. “However, space-time is really stiff, so to create the expansion and contraction effect in a useful manner in order for us to reach interstellar destinations in reasonable time periods would require a lot of energy.”

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Bebionic3

Simple tasks, like plucking the stem off a cherry, are still monumental challenges for artificial hands. With a bill of materials perhaps a few hundred components long, it is not surprising that their functionality is low compared with one assembled from trillions of components. A new prosthetic bionic hand, designed and built by researchers at Case Western University is now capable of using measurements from 20 sensor points to control the grip force of its digits. Incredibly, the sensor data is linked directly to the sensory nerves in the patient’s forearm. The control for the grip closure is then extracted myoelectrically from the normal biological return loop to the muscles in the forearm.

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WAYNE HOLMES

Written by John Kelly USA Today

The National Security Agency isn’t the only government entity secretly collecting data from people’s cellphones. Local police are increasingly scooping it up, too.

Armed with new technologies, including mobile devices that tap into cellphone data in real time, dozens of local and state police agencies are capturing information — about thousands of cellphone users at a time, whether they are targets of an investigation or not, according to public records obtained by USA Today, The Des Moines Register and other Gannett newspapers and TV stations.

The records, from more than 125 police agencies in 33 states, reveal:

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If NSA employees were bummed that President Obama hasn’t paid them a visit, they’re going to be devastated to learn that all their favorite tech companies are publicly calling them out. Eight companies – Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, LinkedIn and AOL – have put aside their rivalries and issued a call for the reform of government surveillance. “We understand that governments have a duty to protect their citizens. But this summer’s revelations highlighted the urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide,” says an open letter featured in full-page ads in several newspaper on Monday. “The balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual — rights that are enshrined in our Constitution. This undermines the freedoms we all cherish.”

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surgery

Hands-free devices like Google Glass can be really transformative when the hands they free are those of a surgeon. And leading hospitals, including Stanford and the University of California at San Francisco, are beginning to use Glass in the operating room.

In October, UCSF’s Pierre Theodore, a cardiothoracic surgeon, became the first doctor in the United States to obtain Institutional Review Board approval to use the device to assist him during surgery. Theodore pre-loads onto Glass the scans of images of the patient taken just before surgery and consults them during the operation.

“To be able to have those X-rays directly in your field without having to leave the operating room or to log on to another system elsewhere, or to turn yourself away from the patient in order to divert your attention, is very helpful in terms of maintaining your attention where it should be, which is on the patient 100 percent of the time,” said Theodore.

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‘The Hobbit’ and ‘Ender’s Game’ are making 3D printing Hollywood’s smartest new marketing tool

December 4, 2013 8:16 AM

Ricardo Bilton

Hollywood, despite being ancient and entrenched, is embracing 3D printing in a big way.

To help market The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug, Warner Bros. will offer fans digital blueprints of “The Key to Erebor,” a key item from the series, which fans can 3D print on their own or send to a company like Shapeways to print for them.

And the Hobbit is not alone. With Ender’s Game, released last month, Hollywood tapped 3D printing company Sandboxr to make 3D-printed replicas of the film’s ships, which fans could tweak and customize to their liking.

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K5-Blur-Kids_banner

In the wake of the tragic shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, last December, many called for stricter gun control. Others called for better mental health care. Some called for more guns in the hands of teachers and school security officers.

Knightscope, a Silicon Valley startup, called for more robots.

“We founded Knightscope after what happened at Sandy Hook. You are never going to have an armed officer in every school,” William Santana Li, co-founder and CEO, told the New York Times.

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William Pentland, Contributor

I write about energy and environmental issues.

Massive reserves of “freshwater” are buried beneath the seabed on continental shelves around the world, including off Australia, China, North America and South Africa.

This is the conclusion of a new study by a team of Australian scientists that appears in this week’s issue of the journal, Nature.

Based on an analysis of seafloor water studies conducted for oil and gas exploration purposes, the study showed that an estimated that 500,000 cubic kilometers of low-salinity water is trapped in aquifers under the ocean floor.

“The volume of this water resource is a hundred times greater than the amount we’ve extracted from the Earth’s sub-surface in the past century since 1900,” said Vincent Post, a groundwater hydro geologist from Flinders University in Adelaide and the new study’s lead author.

This new freshwater resource could give regions suffering with limited access to freshwater more options for combating the impact of droughts and alleviating the impact of water scarcity on future generations.

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