Everyone have fun while I was away? If so, good. If not, maybe you should re-think your routine for the holiday season. Season isn’t over yet though, you still have one opportunity to send the year out with a bang on New Years. So go get tanked (if you’re legal age of course) and hang out with some friends, fire up the gaming console and see who plays better after they have had a bit of alcohol in their system. Until then, you can always sit back and skim through Tech Tuesday as your way of taking a break from any cool gadgets you procured over the last week.
In the wake of all this holiday cheer, Google has been hard at work as always. While it is all still speculation, but they are currently looking to netbook makers to design various lines of netbooks fitted for Chrome OS. The tentative specs for the netbook are listed in the article, but what should make some people quirk an eyebrow is the fact they will support multi-touch and are completely HD ready. This new OS, if you haven’t looked into it already, will rely on Cloud based storage. Meaning a bunch of servers out there is where most of the apps and your data will be securely stored. The netbook as of now looks like it will include a 64GB solid state drive, so you don’t have to store everything on the Cloud servers. Looks like we will have to wait a year before this netbook hits store shelves, and the price tag is estimated at around $300 USD.
What would you spend $2.1 million on? If your answer was a robot modeled after a hummingbird then…well, wow. Good guess. A team of researchers in Japan have developed such a robot, and the price tag of development is climbing as they try to work out a few new design additions. One, they want the robot to be able to hover stationary in the air like a real humming bird is capable of. Two, they want to put a camera on it so it can be remotely operated. Current prospects for use of this little robot could be anywhere from a flying spy cam to searching through areas a human can’t go through.
Now, back in August I remember hearing about this computer engineer from Germany trying to get phone companies to adopt a better security other than the GSM encryption that is applied to around 80% of cellphone calls made across the globe. The GSM algorithm was developed back in 1988. Not kidding, here is the Wikipedia link for you if you want some more info: G.S.M. So back to the computer engineer, needless to say his pleas to the companies were brushed aside so what does he do? He decides to give them a reason to rethink their positions a bit. He challenged around 24 computer hackers to help him build a code book of all the possible encryption algorithms that GSM uses to encrypt cellphone calls. Don’t go panicking just yet, this doesn’t really pose a threat to us as end users of cellphones yet. There is already another encryption standard that has been developed, but most phone companies haven’t decided to take up the costs of upgrading their security. The code book has been published to the internet, so if you want to take a peek I would recommend hitting a bit torrent tracker. The method this particular computer engineer employed to get his point across isn’t anything new to the world of computing, hackers are the reason we have the security like email threat protection and we have now…now whether the hackers are up to no good or just helping out by finding and reporting vulnerabilities is what is left up to debate.
Nope, no New Years video for you today. I nearly went and found one for you, but I discovered another really awesome video that I absolutely must share with everyone. A Youtube user has taken the theme that appears in nearly every Final Fantasy game, and he’s put lyrics to it. Yes, it is as awesome as it sounds. Enjoy everyone.
