My year with Google Glass

Original Wired article is available here.

An anecdote: I wanted to wear Google Glass during the birth of our second child. My wife was extremely unreceptive to this idea when I suggested it. Angry, even. But as we got a bit closer to the date, she began to warm to it and eventually landed somewhere in the neighborhood of bemused hostility.

I assumed the plan would sell itself. Glass has a slew of features that made my case: hands-free Internet, voice recognition, and a camera that makes snapping pictures an automatic action. Touch it at the temple and you take a photo. Hold the button a second longer and you’re shooting video. Bark a few commands, and you can send that photo or video to anyone. Even better, you can share what you are seeing, live, with other people in real time. I have no idea why my wife was resistant to live-casting the birthing experience.

It seemed a great way to remain in the moment yet still document it and share it with our far-flung family. I could Hangout ™ with our parents during the birth of their grandchild, even though they were half a continent away. I figured I’d just wait until the time came, pop them on, and see what happened.

As it turned out, I never got the chance — babies keep unpredictable schedules. But what was interesting to me in retrospect was I had to work to convince my wife to let me use Glass. I didn’t have to convince her I should take pictures or shoot video. She hoped I would do that. It was the form factor of the camera that irked her. It was the way Glass looked. It might let me remain in the moment, but my wife worried it would take her out of it, that its mere presence would be distracting because it’s so goddamn weird-looking.

There’s some weird shit on your face.

For much of 2013, I wore the future across my brow, a true Glasshole peering uncertainly into the post-screen world. I’m not out here all alone, at least not for long. The future is coming to your face too. And your wrist. Hell, it might even be in your clothes. You’re going to be wearing the future all over yourself, and soon. When it comes to wearable computing, it’s no longer a question of if it happens, only when and why and can you get in front of it to stop it with a ball-pein hammer? (Answers: Soon. Because it is incredibly convenient. Probably not.) In a few years, we might all be Glassholes. But in 2013, maybe for the last time, I was in dubiously exclusive face-computing company.

Here’s what I learned.

Look at that asshole.

Even in less intimate situations, Glass is socially awkward. Again and again, I made people very uncomfortable. That made me very uncomfortable.

People get angry at Glass. They get angry at you for wearing Glass. They talk about you openly. It inspires the most aggressive of passive aggression. Bill Wasik refers apologetically to the Bluedouche principle. But nobody apologizes in real life. They just call you an asshole.

Wearing Glass separates you. It sets you apart from everyone else. It says you not only had $1,500 to plunk down to be part of the “explorer” program, but that Google deemed you special enough to warrant inclusion (not everyone who wanted Glass got it; you had to be selected). Glass is a class divide on your face.

The people who were selected too often made things worse. I’m not talking about provocateurs like Robert Scoble, but the precious set of beautiful millennials you most commonly see wearing Glass in social settings here in the Bay Area. Bay Area Explorers tend to be young, dressed in expensive denim and bespoke plaids.

The few times I’ve seen multiple people wearing Glass in public, they’ve kept to self-segregated groups. At the party, but not of it. Worse is the evangelism, full of wide-eyed enthusiasm that comes across as the arrogance of youth and groupthink. It has its own lingo, its own social norms, and of course you must pay top dollar to enter. No wonder it reminds me of Landmark Forum.

And yet I’m one of them. I know that I’ve enraged people because I’ve heard them call me an asshole. “Look at that asshole,” they say. And I always sort of agree.

Where can you wear wearables?

My Glass experiences have left me a little wary of wearables because I’m never sure where they’re welcome. I’m not wearing my $1,500 face computer on public transit where there’s a good chance it might be yanked from my face. I won’t wear it out to dinner, because it seems as rude as holding a phone in my hand during a meal. I won’t wear it to a bar. I won’t wear it to a movie. I can’t wear it to the playground or my kid’s school because sometimes it scares children.

It is pretty great when you are on the road — as long as you are not around other people, or do not care when they think you’re a knob.

When I wear it at work, co-workers sometimes call me an asshole. My co-workers at WIRED, where we’re bravely facing the future, find it weird. People stop by and cyber-bully me at my standing treadmill desk.

Do you know what it takes to get a professional nerd to call you a nerd? I do. (Hint: It’s Glass.)

Google Now for your face is uhhhhhhhhmazing.

Whatever you may think of Glass and those who wear it, it’s a completely unique experience. Even that itty-bitty display, which fills your vision, is like nothing I’d seen before.

You could install some apps on it from the get go, and more over time. But I never found the first batch of third-party apps particularly useful. Twitter was just too much; it was too noisy for something that was, literally, in my face. The New York Times breaking news alerts were okay. But mostly the third party apps were just noise.

Google’s native apps, on the other hand, were pretty great. I loved Glass for (very basic) rapid-fire email replies. The navigation stuff was aces. And the Google Now for your face is incredible — its ambient location awareness, combined with previous Google searches, means extremely relevant notifications come to your attention in a way they just can’t on a smartphone, unless you wear your smartphone on your face. If you want to know what Glass is really, really good at, it’s Google Now for your face.

You are so going to love Google Now for your face.

I’m so bored.

Glass is still very limited. Aside from directions, it’s more novelty than utility. The really cool stuff remains on the horizon, which means I got tired of it before I’d had it for even a year.

It took a long time before Google truly opened it up to third party developers. Once it did, things got interesting again. The Strava cycling app, for example, really shows off the promise of Glass by combining location tracking with updates that let you keep your eyes on the road and hands on the handlebars. So too does AllTheCooks, which lets you create and follow recipes without taking your eyes and hands away from sharp knives and hot ovens. There’s another app that will translate signs just by looking at them. What a world.

Which is to say, I’m really, really excited about where Glass is going. I’m less excited about where it is.

The inadvertent Android

Did I mention I swapped to Android because of Glass? That was weird and unexpected, but it happened.

I’ve been an iOS guy since the first iPhone, which I bought with my own hard-earned dollars the day it shipped. And although I’ve gone full time Android a few times in the past, mostly to stay current, it’s never taken. But I started lugging around a Nexus 4 when I began wearing Glass regularly because tethering to my iPhone didn’t work well. (Glass needs to hook up to a phone to take advantage of its internet connection when there is no Wi-Fi.) So everywhere I went, I had two phones in my pocket.

An aside: Few things will make you feel like quite so big an asshole as stepping out in public with Glass and two smartphones.

I gradually noticed I was pulling the Nexus out of my pocket far more often that I was reaching for the iPhone. That was especially true after I started running iOS 7. That’s not a knock on iOS as much as it is a testament to how much Google has improved its mobile operating system. For sheer brutal efficiency, Android is ace.

But moreover, Glass changed the way I think about phones.

Phones are the worst.

Glass kind of made me hate my phone — or any phone. It made me realize how much they have captured our attention. Phones separate us from our lives in all sorts of ways. Here we are together, looking at little screens, interacting (at best) with people who aren’t here. Looking at our hands instead of each other. Documenting instead of experiencing.

Glass sold me on the concept of getting in and getting out. Glass helped me appreciate what a monster I have become, tethered to the thing in my pocket. I’m too absent. Can yet another device make me more present? Or is it just going to be another distraction? Another way to stare off and away from the things actually in front of us, out into the electronic ether? I honestly have no idea.

Glass is normal. Kind of. One day.

Glass, and the other things like it, won’t always be ugly and awkward. At some point, it’s going to be invisibly indistinguishable from a pair of glasses or sunglasses. Meanwhile, Google is going to continue getting better and better at figuring out what to send you, based on where you are and when you’re there, and what you’ve done in the past. Third-party developers will create amazing new apps, things we haven’t thought of. Its form will encourage new functions, new ideas, new realities.

And here’s the thing I am utterly convinced of: Google Glass and its ilk are coming. They are racing toward us, ready to change society, again. You can make fun of Glass, and the assholes (like me) who wear it. But here’s what I know: The future is on its way, and it is going to be on your face. We need to think about it and be ready for it in a way we weren’t with smartphones. Because while you (and I) may make fun of glassholes today, come tomorrow we’re all going to be right there with them, or at least very close by. Wearables are where we’re going. Let’s be ready.

German coalition favors German-owned or open source software, aims to lock NSA out

Original article from PC World:

Germany’s new coalition government listed open source software among its IT policy priorities, and said it will take steps to protect its citizens against espionage threats from the NSA and other foreign intelligence agencies.

Coalition parties CDU, CSU and SPD signed up to the plans Monday in Berlin.

The new government’s goal is to keep core technologies, including IT security, process and enterprise software, cryptography and machine-to-machine communication on proprietary technology platforms and production lines in Germany or in Europe, according to the coalition agreement.

But the government will also promote the use and development of open platforms and open source software as an alternative to closed proprietary systems, and will support the use of those in Europe, the parties said in the agreement. The public sector will need to consider open source solutions as a possibility when purchasing new IT, they said.

They also want to compete on a global level with “software made in Germany” and strengthen the quality of security, data protection, design and usability by doing so.

The government also plans to start operating in a more transparent way, for example by making parliamentary documents and transcripts of debates available in open data formats that can be used under free licenses, they said.

This is much better than the last coalition agreement, said Matthias Kirschner vice president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).

However, while there are good intentions, there are also missed opportunities, he said. For instance, It would have been better if the new government had prioritized the use of open source software for public institutions instead of simply making them consider it, he said, adding that the agreement’s formulation is often cautious.

He said the FSFE regretted that references in earlier drafts to open standards had disappeared from the final agreement, and had been replaced with weaker terms such as interoperability.

Kirschner called on the coalition to move from words to concrete action. “The question is: how hard will they try?” he said.

The Business Software Alliance welcomed the new government’s focus on nurturing technology innovation in Germany.

”However, if this is extended to technology mandates or procurement preferences, whether based on development model or country of origin, it will significantly impede innovation and create unnecessary barriers to trade, investment, and economic growth,” said Thomas Boué, director of government relations, EMEA of the BSA software alliance in an email. A level playing field for all competitors will ensure that customers have access to the best products and services the world has to offer, he said.

”Governments should lead by example, making procurement decisions that are based on merit for the needs at hand and best value for money—rather than according to national origin,” he added.

The agreement also dealt with security under a heading “Consequences of the NSA affair.”

The coalition parties plan to keep pushing for more explanations about who spied on German citizens to what extent, and to negotiate a legally binding agreement with the U.S. to protect Germans against espionage.

Communications infrastructure also needs to be made safer, they said. They will push European telecommunications providers to encrypt communication links within the E.U. They also plan to make sure that European telecommunication providers are not allowed to forward data to foreign intelligence agencies.

The coalition will advocate for the Europe-wide introduction of a requirement for companies to report to the E.U. when they transmit the data of their customers without their consent to authorities in third countries. Besides that, it will press for the renegotiation of the E.U.-U.S. Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP) Agreement and the Safe Harbor agreement on the protection of personal data.

Under the TFTP Agreement, some data from the SWIFT international bank messaging system is transmitted to U.S. authorities. More recently, it was alleged that the NSA spied on the data.

Following revelations about the NSA’s spying on Internet data, the European Parliament had called for the suspension of the Safe Harbor agreement. The European Commission decided not to suspend the agreement, but instead put forward a range of proposals to strengthen it.

On Tuesday, the German Bundestag re-elected Angela Merkel as German chancellor for the third time. The inaugural meeting of the cabinet was scheduled to take place at 5 p.m. local time.

Moving a city to Linux needs political backing, says Munich project leader

The original PC World article is available here.

This year saw the completion of the city of Munich’s switch to Linux, a move that began about ten years ago. “One of the biggest lessons learned was that you can’t do such a project without continued political backing,” said Peter Hofmann, the leader of the LiMux project, summing up the experience.

The Munich city authority migrated around 14,800 of the 15,000 or so PCs on its network to LiMux, its own Linux distribution based on Ubuntu, exceeding its initial goal of migrating 12,000 desktops.

Munich decided to migrate its IT systems when Microsoft said it planned to discontinue support for the operating system the city then relied on, Windows NT 4.0. The city was forced to choose between moving to a newer version of Windows, or finding an alternative platform, as new software and new versions of existing software would not be available on Windows NT. The city council decided to go with Linux to become more independent from software vendors.

Continued political backing was key to the success of the migration, said Hofmann.

”We had it from the start and it never failed. We had to treat our politicians as stakeholders and keep them informed,” he said.

By doing this, the politicians never lost interest and always knew what the people involved in the project were doing, he said. “I saw a lot of other open source projects going down the sink,” because they didn’t have that backing, or lost it, he said.

It took the city about 10 years from the first decision to switch through to completion of the LiMux project, which was originally scheduled for completion in 2009. However, there were several delays along the way.

First, the migration started a year later than originally planned, said Hofmann. The second delay was caused in 2007 when the city council decided that Munich’s IT department should also be responsible for the standardization of the infrastructure that is necessary for Linux clients, he said. Munich however didn’t have the right processes nor the right organization for that kind of standardization, he said.

The project was delayed for a third time in 2010, when the city council decided to enlarge the project, said Hofmann. Goals were added to develop three additional processes within the project: risk management, test management and requirement engineering.

Despite the difficulties, Hofmann said he would do it again tomorrow.

The heterogenous infrastructure of Munich’s IT organization was one of the projects biggest problems, Hofmann said. When the project started there were 22 organizations that each had their own individual configuration, software, hardware, processes and knowledge for their Windows clients and the accompanying infrastructure they were using, he said. “We wanted to have a standardized, centrally delivered and developed Linux client,” he said.

While Hofmann expected the splintered infrastructure to cause problems, standardizing the clients proved harder than he expected, for both technical and organizational reasons.

Luckily, he had the freedom to rebuild the whole of the city’s IT infrastructure.

”Anyone planning to switch needs to be prepared to rethink their entire IT organization. Switching to Linux is more than saving costs and using free software,” he added.

Munich’s switch did save money though. In November 2012, responding to a question from a council member, the city calculated that migrating to LiMux instead of modernizing its existing Microsoft software would save it over €11 million.

That calculation compared the LiMux option with a switch to either Windows 7 and Microsoft Office or Windows 7 and OpenOffice, the productivity suite Munich chose for LiMux. It included necessary hardware upgrades, training, external migration support and optimization processes, among other things. Both Windows options were significantly more expensive than LiMux, mainly due to Microsoft’s software licensing fees.

One expense Hofmann said he doesn’t have with LiMux is support contracts. “What do you need a support contract for? You really get no support, you get new versions. The only reason you need it is because your lawyers tell you so they can have someone to blame if it is failing. We no longer blame anyone, we try to fix it,” he said.

If Munich’s IT staff can’t fix a bug themselves, they will find a specialist to solve the specific bug, Hofmann said. “You no longer rely on some vendor or some service that you buy. You rely on yourself and what you know,” he said.

There are still complaints though. Word and Excel documents received from external organizations sometimes have to be modified and sent back, which can lead to difficulties with interoperability, he said. The city is trying to convince its correspondents to use ODF, the file format of OpenOffice, or PDF for documents that don’t need to be changed, Hofmann said, adding that the city has helped finance development of interoperability tools.

As part of its switch to OpenOffice, however, the city implemented WollMux, an office extension for templates and forms, that was published as free software 2008 and is now used by a handful of other organizations, he said.

There were other obstacles to the elimination of Microsoft Office—including the city’s reliance on over a thousand Microsoft Office and Visual Basic macros in its in-house applications, Hofmann said.

Now there are around 100 such macros still in use on the few remaining Windows PCs.

”It never was our goal to eliminate Windows as a whole,” he said, although the city has gone well beyond its initial target of migrating 80 percent of its PCs.

The financial department, for instance, still has three Windows PCs running special banking software. To switch that department to LiMux the city would have had to pay the software vendor to develop a Linux version of its application for the three PCs, Hofmann said.

The city faced a similar problem in its dealings with the Bundesdruckerei, the German authority that prints passports. It mandates the use of a Windows application to transmit the data required to personalize the passports, he said.

While Hofmann can look confidently to the city’s future, he recognizes that switching to Linux is not for everyone. Yet even those who don’t want to switch can still profit from the city’s experience: “Some guy once told me, ‘Since you started your project I can negotiate with Microsoft.’”

Mercedes SLS Electric Drive. Can Volts Ever Match Pistons?

Interesting video from Mercedes Benz. Chris Harris the presenter is not a fan of 'electric'. However whilst driving the car he does get a few surprises.

The numbers are significant: 750hp, 737lb ft, 2200kg. But can you actually enjoy driving it? Find out for yourself.

Remember this car is only the first of it's kind.

Whilst watching you will be amazed by the electronic wizardry incorporated in this vehicle. It is expensive to buy now but take note that we already have the technology to build nano-copters that operate with a chip smaller than a credit card and can cooperate with each other autonomously. They fly in 'swarms' and deal with cross winds and up drafts doing hundreds of computations per second. A video of this technology is available here.

Set Up a Secure Network / File Sharing Server in 5 Minutes

This is how easy it is to set up a secure file sharing network for yourself.... enjoy!

HEARD ON THE LONDON UNDERGROUND TUBE

A list of actual announcements that London Tube train drivers have made to their passengers...

1) 'Ladies and Gentlemen, I do apologize for the delay to your service. I know you're all dying to get home, unless, of course, you happen to be married to my ex-wife, in which case you'll want to cross over to the Westbound and go in the opposite direction.'

2) 'Your delay this evening is caused by the line controller suffering from E & B syndrome: not knowing his elbow from his backside. I'll let you know any further information as soon as I'm given any.'

3) 'Do you want the good news first or the bad news? The good news is that last Friday was my birthday and I hit the town and had a great time. The bad news is that there is a points failure somewhere between Mile End and East Ham, which means we probably won't reach our destination.'

4) 'Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for the delay, but there is a security alert at Victoria station and we are therefore stuck here for the foreseeable future, so let's take our minds off it and pass some time together. All together now.... 'Ten green bottles, hanging on a wall.....'.'

5) 'We are now travelling through Baker Street ... As you can see, Baker Street is closed. It would have been nice if they had actually told me, so I could tell you earlier, but no, they don't think about things like that'.

6) 'Beggars are operating on this train. Please do NOT encourage these professional beggars. If you have any spare change, please give it to a registered charity. Failing that, give it to me.'

7) During an extremely hot rush hour on the Central Line, the driver announced in a West Indian drawl: 'Step right this way for the sauna, ladies and gentleman... unfortunately, towels are not provided.'

8) 'Let the passengers off the train FIRST!' (Pause ) 'Oh go on then, stuff yourselves in like sardines, see if I care - I'm going home....'

9) 'Please allow the doors to close. Try not to confuse this with 'Please hold the doors open.' The two are distinct and separate instructions.'

10) 'Please note that the beeping noise coming from the doors means that the doors are about to close. It does not mean throw yourself or your bags into the doors.'

11) 'We can't move off because some idiot has their hand stuck in the door.'

12) 'To the gentleman wearing the long grey coat trying to get on the second carriage -- what part of 'stand clear of the doors' don't you understand?'

13) 'Please move all baggage away from the doors.' (Pause..) 'Please move ALL belongings away from the doors.' (Pause...) 'This is a personal message to the man in the brown suit wearing glasses at the rear of the train: Put the pie down, Four-eyes, and move your bloody golf clubs away from the door before I come down there and shove them up your @rse sideways!'

14) 'May I remind all passengers that there is strictly no smoking allowed on any part of the Underground. However, if you are smoking a joint, it's only fair that you pass it round the rest of the carriage.'

The Fastest Way to Cool Down Beer

This is about the science... Really... Truly...

Beer. I prefer to drink it cold.

Unfortunately, sometimes the beer which I have is warm. This usually happens when we are planning a party, because I buy a bunch of beer on pallets at Costco.

I mean, I don't buy it on pallets. It is on pallets at Costco, and I buy one case of 24 bottles.

The time-tested way to cool down some beer is to put it into the freezer. That works, but has three shortcomings:

1) It takes an hour. 
2) Frozen beer.
3) Exploding beer.

My recent experiments with the heat transfering properties of water (Hairdryer vs. Bowl of Water) encouraged me to try improving on this beer-cooling method. Instead of cooling the beer with very cold air, I decided to try cooling the bottles with very cold water.

I was certain that cold water would work better than the freezer. I prepared three bottles of Heineken. All three bottles started in a 12-pack in the garage, where I assume they settled to the same temperature. I opened the first bottle and took the temperature of the beer inside. It was 82°F (28°C). Warm. This was my starting temperature.

I prepared a cold bath. For the "ice bath" beer, I used three cups of tap water (24 oz) and ten ice cubes.

12345 ...12

I cleared out a little spot in the freezer and was ready for the test to begin. With superhuman agility, I dropped one bottle into the ice water and stood one up in our freezer.

The race. was. on.

Cooling beer takes FOREVER. Luckily I had some rum and Coke handy to pass the time.

Even with 10 cubes, the ice bath wasn't very impressive. The beers were still sealed shut, but I could check the temperature of the ice water bath. The temperature was falling. As the ice melted, it quickly cooled the water from room temperature, 75°F, down to 60°F. Condensation began to form on the outside of the ice bath. In 15 minutes, as the last ice cube disappeared, the water approached 52°F.

After 20 Minutes

After 20 minutes, it was time to check the results. I opened the beers and tested the temperature of their contents.
The ice bath beer was colder.

Although both glass bottles felt cold, the beer from the freezer had only dropped to 63°F! (17°C) The icewater-cooled beer was down to 56°F! (13°C)

It wasn't even close. Why hadn't I been cooling beer like this before now? The freezer is for fools!

The bottles were open now, but I decided to continue the experiment for another 20 minutes.

The freezer beer went back into his freezer and the ice-water bath got another ten ice cubes. I mixed myself a singapore sling... and waited.

Twenty minutes later, the freezer was starting to have a genuine deliciousing effect.

I measured the bottles. The freezer beer was now down to 48.5°F (9°C), just a shade warmer than the ice bath beer (47.5°F (8.6°C)

The ice water was almost at its limit when it came to cooling power. It was hard to imagine the beer getting any closer to freezing temperature (32°F 0°C) when the ice water itself wasn't there yet.

13

Opinions vary on the subject, but I pretty much draw the "cold enough" line at 55°F (13°C). If the beer is warmer than that, I'll pass. Of course, it is hard to judge the temperature until after you open the bottle...

The results of this experiment demonstrates that if you only have 20 minutes to cool down beer, use an ice-water bath instead of the freezer. It is faster.

If you have 40 minutes, both setups work with about the same level of effectiveness. After 40 minutes, the freezer will work faster, eventually dropping the temperature of the beer to freezing.

I really like the ice-water bath method. Next I wanted to try aluminum cans!

I was curious what the difference would be if I was using aluminum cans rather than glass bottles full of beer. Any metal is more conductive than glass, and aluminum is particularly conductive.

Here's a short list of the thermal conductivity of some materials. Thermal conductivity is measured in watts per meter kelvin.

Thermal resistance is highly dependant on the thickness of the insulating material, so the paper-thin aluminum will be much easier for the coldness to pass through than a quarter-inch of glass.

Glass bottles are great for drinking, and the glass is a good insulator for when you are trying tokeep the beer cold, but when you are trying to cool down the beer, that insulation works against your efforts to pull all the heat out.

I started with a six pack of tall cans of warm Coors Light from a gas station. The start temperature for these cans was 78.8°F (26°C).

I don't think I've ever wanted beer less than when I was handling these warm cans of Coors Light.

I restarted the experiment, placing one can in the freezer...

...and one can in a jar with 3 cups of water and 10 ice cubes.

The race. was. on. again.

Knowing that the canned beer would change temperature much faster, I only waited 10 minutes to open the cans and test the temps.

The temperature difference was even more impressive with beer cans. Check out these results on the chart below.

The beer in ice water had dropped dramatically in temperature, from 79°F (26°C) to 50°F (10°C)! Awesome.

The beer in the freezer had lost 15 degrees. It was losing heat faster than the freezer bottle had, but the ice-water bath was having an even more extreme effect on the metal can than it had on the glass bottle.

In ten minutes, the cans of beer in ice-water had gone from warm to cold, from bad to good.

I put them back for another 10 minutes of cooling.

A second ten minutes really proved the case for an ice water bath. The freezer beer was down to 54°F, but the ice bath beer was down to 43°F!

My cans of Coors Light featured this two-stage temperature indicator. The can on the left came out of the freezer. The can on the right came out of the ice-water bath. The indicator on the left isn't even showing the can as "cold", where the can from the ice water is registering as "super cold"!

In the photo above, check out the difference in condensation on the cans!

With two experiments complete, and four beers sacraficed in the pursuit of knowledge, I can wholeheartedly declare that a bath of ice water is the fastest way to cool beer down to a pleasant drinking temperature.

The freezer is colder, but surrounding a can of beer with cold air is never going to cool it off as fast as dunking it into a vat of cold water.

Unless, of course you are making beer slushies.

Related Links:

• Icebreaker! The Ultimate Frozen Drink Temperature Challenge!
• Using Salt and Ice Water to Cool Down Beer
• Where Is the Coolest Place to Store Things in Your Car?
• How Much Backwash is left in the glass after you drink?

Image: Shutterstock/Valentyn Volkov

---

This post was originally published on Cockeyed.com's Science Club, created by Rob Cockerham who has worked doing internet tech support for MCI, as a graphic designer for iConvention, for Blue Moon Printing, EDS, and Hewlett Packard. His latest job is at Intel.You canfollow Cockeyed.com on Twitter here or like his Facebook page here.

This post has been republished with permission from Rob Cockerham.

This Handheld 3D Printer Could Let Doctors "Draw" New Bones

The original Gizmodo article is here.

Waving a magic wand over an injured bone to create a custom, living repair patch sounds like something out of I, Robot. But researchers have created a handheld 3D-printing pen that could someday do just that. It's not magic, it's science.

The BioPen, developed at Australia's University of Wollongong, holds two different "inks:" one made of human cells, the other a protective, UV-activated structural gel. The pen layers the cells inside the protective gel, which hardens under the device's built-in UV light. Instead of the current weeks-long process of harvesting and growing replacement cartilage tissue, the compact, handheld device could enable doctors to "draw" functional material directly on to a damaged bone.

The benefit, as with most 3D-printed organs and body parts, is total customization. Instead of mass-produced orthopedic implants, which don't work exactly like human tissue, a matrix of human cells printed directly onto an injured bone would create actual, functional cartilage. And with the right mix of cells, growth factors, and drugs in the ink wells, doctors could even draw replacement tissue that would grow into functioning nerve or muscle tissue, with the protective scaffold biodegrading as the cells grew and matured.

Scientists Have 3D-Printed Mini Human Livers for the First Time Ever

The dream of one day completely doing away with frustratingly long transplant lists in favor of made to order, 3D-printed organs is closer to…Read…

How 3D Printers Are Cranking Out Eyes, Bones, and Blood Vessels

At the dawn of rapid prototyping, a common predication was that 3D printing would transform manufacturing, spurring a consumer revolution that would… Read…

Someone’s Been Siphoning Data Through a Huge Security Hole in the Internet

BGP hijacking is an “exceedingly blunt instrument” to capture traffic, and is “about as subtle as a firecracker in a funeral home,”

The full Original Wired article is available here.

This is just a summary of that article:

In 2008, two security researchers at the DefCon hacker conference demonstrated a massive security vulnerability in the worldwide internet traffic-routing system — a vulnerability so severe that it could allow intelligence agencies, corporate spies or criminals to intercept massive amounts of data, or even tamper with it on the fly.

The traffic hijack, they showed, could be done in such a way that no one would notice because the attackers could simply re-route the traffic to a router they controlled, then forward it to its intended destination once they were done with it, leaving no one the wiser about what had occurred.

Now, five years later, this is exactly what has happened. Earlier this year, researchers say, someone mysteriously hijacked internet traffic headed to government agencies, corporate offices and other recipients in the U.S. and elsewhere and redirected it to Belarus and Iceland, before sending it on its way to its legitimate destinations. They did so repeatedly over several months. But luckily someone did notice.

And this may not be the first time it has occurred — just the first time it got caught.

BGP hijacking happens in some form or fashion every day, but it’s usually unintentional — the result of a typo in a routing announcement or some other mistake. And when it does occur, it generally results in an outage, as the traffic being routed never reaches its destination. This was the case in 2008 when Pakistan Telecom inadvertently hijacked all of the world’s YouTube traffic when it attempted to prevent just Pakistan citizens from reaching video content the government deemed objectionable. The telecom and its upstream provider mistakenly advertised to routers around the world that it was the best route through which to send all YouTube traffic, and for nearly two hours browsers attempting to reach YouTube fell into a black hole in Pakistan until the problem was corrected.

In April 2010, another outage occurred when China Telecom distributed an erroneous announcement for more than 50,000 blocks of IP addresses, and within minutes some of the traffic destined for these domains got sucked into China Telecom’s network for 20 minutes. After analyzing the details, Renesys concluded that this incident, too, was likely a mistake.

But the incidents this year have all the characteristics of an intentional intercept, Renesys says.

BGP hijacking is an “exceedingly blunt instrument” to capture traffic, and is “about as subtle as a firecracker in a funeral home,” Renesys has noted in the past.

In all the years Renesys has been monitoring internet traffic, analysts had never seen anything that looked intentional before. Generally, Madory says, mistakes look clumsy and show obvious signs of being mistakes. They also generally last minutes, not days as these did, and they also generally do not result in traffic being re-routed to its legitimate destination, as occurred in these cases.

“To achieve this thing where you can get [hijacked] traffic back to its destination, . . . you have to craft your [BGP] messages in a way that you control how far it propagates or where it propagates,” he says. “And we can see these guys experiment over time, modifying different attributes to change the propagation until they’ve achieved the one that they want. We’ve never seen anything like that, that looks very deliberate where someone is tweaking the approach.”

As Renesys warned on its blog: “We believe that people are still attempting this because they believe (correctly, in most cases) that nobody is looking.”