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Back in June 2008, PrimeSense was looking to sell the technology that would eventually be engineered into what we now know as Xbox Kinect. The first company in Silicon Valley that PrimeSense CEO, Inon Beracha tried to demonstrate the sensor that powers Kinect to was none other than Apple. The technology had been developed by engineers in the Israeli military. When asked about why he thought of Apple first, Beracha told Cult of Mac that "It was the most natural place for the technology." The negotiations didn't go so well. Beracha figured the technology was so good that he would...

Dr. Long Que, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Louisiana Tech University, has reported success in designing and fabricating a device that allows microscale electronic devices to harvest their own wasted energy. The work was described in a paper published in the September edition of Applied Physics Letters, co-authored by students Pushparaj Pathak, Tianhua Zhang, Yuan He, and Shashi Yadav. Developed at Louisiana Tech and described in the paper, this technology uses a cantilever made out of piezoelectric material -- material capable of converting distortions to itself into electrical energy -- and is coated with a carbon nanotube film on...

LOS ANGELES -- The three major broadcast networks, uneasy about viewers bypassing cable and satellite providers -- and the networks' own websites -- to watch their TV shows, have begun blocking a new service from Google Inc. that is designed to make it easy for people to watch programming online. ABC, CBS and NBC confirmed that this week they began blocking Google TV from accessing full-length episodes of prime-time shows such as "NCIS: Los Angeles," "Dancing With the Stars" and "Parks and Recreation," a move aimed at forestalling the technology giant's entry into the living room. Google TV seeks to...

The ITU has given its stamp of approval only to the next versions of those technologies If someone is trying to sell you 4G wireless these days, don't believe them.The truth is, neither WiMax nor LTE (Long-Term Evolution) qualify as 4G (fourth-generation) technologies, according to the International Telecommunication Union Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R). On Thursday, the group announced it had finished its assessment of submissions for the 4G standard, also called IMT-Advanced. Based on that group's decision, to really be selling 4G, carriers will have to get going with one of two future technologies, called LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced. The latter, also...

Amid the mass of published analysis of the Stuxnet virus, Iran's most obvious vulnerability to cyber-war has drawn little comment: much of the Islamic Republic runs on pirated software. The programmers who apparently cracked Siemens' industrial control code to plant malware in Iran's nuclear facilities needed a high degree of sophistication. Most Iranian computers, though, run on stolen software obtained from public servers sponsored by the Iranian government. It would require far less effort to bring about a virtual shutdown of computation in Iran, and the collapse of the Iranian economy. The information technology apocalypse that the West feared on...

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran acknowledged Saturday that some personnel at the country's nuclear facilities were lured by promises of money to pass secrets to the West but insisted increased security and worker privileges have put a stop to the spying. The stunning admission by Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi provides the clearest government confirmation that Iran has been fighting espionage at its nuclear facilities. In recent weeks, Iran has announced the arrest of several nuclear spies and battled a computer worm that it says is part of a covert Western plot to derail its nuclear program. And in July, a...

The Stuxnet worm has taken the computer security world by storm, inspiring talk of a top secret, government-sponsored cyberwar, and of a software program laden with obscure biblical references that call to mind not computer code, but "The Da Vinci Code." Stuxnet, which first made headlines in July, (CNET FAQ here) is believed to be the first known malware that targets the controls at industrial facilities such as power plants. At the time of its discovery, the assumption was that espionage lay behind the effort, but subsequent analysis by Symantec uncovered the ability of the malware to control plant operations...

Yesterday, some T-Mobile stores began selling its newest mobile device, the G2, an Android-based smart phone originally slated for an October 6 release while AT&T is slated to release it later in the year. This device truly is representative of the next generation of mobile devices. The hardware capabilities surpass the abilities of most available netbook computers, including the ability to play High Definition video seamlessly. Unfortunately, the G2 also comes with built-in hardware that restricts what software a device owner might wish to install.Specifically, one of the microchips embedded into the G2 prevents device owners from making permanent changes...

The computer worm Stuxnet broke out of the tech underworld and into the mass media this week. It’s an amazing story: Stuxnet has infected roughly 45,000 computers. Sixty percent of these machines happen to be in Iran. Which is odd. What is odder still is that Stuxnet is designed specifically to attack a computer system using software from Siemens which controls industrial facilities such as factories, oil refineries, and oh, by the way, nuclear power plants. As you might imagine, Stuxnet raises big, interesting geo-strategic questions. Did a state design it as an attack on the Iranian nuclear program? Was...

debkafile's intelligence sources report from Iran that dozens of Russian nuclear engineers, technicians and contractors are hurriedly departing Iran for home since local intelligence authorities began rounding up their compatriots as suspects of planting the Stuxnet malworm into their nuclear program. Among them are the Russian personnel who built Iran's first nuclear reactor at Bushehr which Tehran admits has been damaged by the virus. One of the Russian nuclear staffers, questioned in Moscow Sunday, Oct. 3 by Western sources, confirmed that many of his Russian colleagues had decided to leave with their families after team members were detained for questioning...

Industrial control systems made by German company Siemens, which are widely used in Iran, were the targets of the worm, indicating that its creators had advanced knowledge of these types of systems far beyond the scope of a most information technology experts. The code is so specialized that it targets only two models of Siemens programmable logic controllers, the S7 300 and S7 400, and will execute only if it finds very specific parameters within the machine. These controllers are usually associated with the management of oil pipeline systems, electrical power grids, and nuclear power plants

SAN FRANCISCO: Computer security experts are studying a scary new cyber weapon: a software smart bomb that may have been crafted to find and sabotage a nuclear facility in Iran. Malicious software, or malware, dubbed "Stuxnet" is able to recognise a specific facility's control network and then destroy it, according to German computer security researcher Ralph Langner. "Welcome to cyber war," Langner said in a post at his website. "This is sabotage." Langner has been analyzing Stuxnet since it was discovered in June and said the code had a technology fingerprint of the control system it was seeking and would...

"A computer virus dubbed the world's "first cyber superweapon" by experts and which may have been designed to attack Iran's nuclear facilities has found a new target -- China. The Stuxnet computer worm has wreaked havoc in China, infecting millions of computers around the country, state media reported this week..."

(Sept. 30) -- The intrigue surrounding the mysterious, highly sophisticated computer worm Stuxnet got a little more Dan Brownish today with the revelation that there may be hidden messages embedded in the malware's code. The New York Times reported this morning that one of the files in the worm was called "Myrtus," which may be a reference to the Old Testament Book of Esther, in which Jews thwart a Persian plot against them. Along with mysterious Myrtus were two numbers that might be additional clues to who is behind the worm. Or, as the Times points out, they could mean...

Symantec security researcher Liam O Murchu (photo above) says he found the “05091979" date in the Stuxnet code, a possible link to the May 9, 1979 execution of Jewish Iranian businessman and philantropist Habib Elghanian. (snip) We’ve heard murmurings of biblical references and public confirmation that the Iran’s Buescher nuclear reactor was the main target. Now comes O Murchu with this tittilating disclosure suggesting a direct link to Israel. However, security experts are cautioning against reading too much into anything deliberately left in the code by the Stuxnet authors because, at this level, there could be all kinds of decoys...

Other than the frenzied anticipation for the coming breed of tablet PCs, the one topic that dominates the mindspace of the technorati these days is the world of e-readers. More specifically, a great debate is brewing; each of the e-readers and their associated online book stores favor differing standards and file formats, and we may have another good ole fashioned format war on our hands. (Nothing gets a techie's blood pressure going more than watching as competing technologies duke it out.) Format wars are to the tech world what elections are to politics, or what playoffs are to sports: a...

Computerworld - A majority of mobile application developers see Google's Android as the smart bet over the long run even as they vote for Apple's iOS in the short term, according to a survey published Monday. The survey, conducted jointly by Appcelerator and IDC, polled more than 2,300 developers who use Appcelerator's Titanium cross-platform compiler to produce iOS and Android native applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Of those developers, 59% said that Android had the "best long-term outlook," compared to just 35% who pegged Apple's iOS with that label. ... To make things even tougher for Apple down the...

The world’s first cyber ‘super weapon’ may have been designed to attack a nuclear power station in Iran, experts believe. A computer virus called Stuxnet has been described as the most sophisticated 'worm' ever created and has already infected more than 45,000 networks worldwide. A 'worm' is a type of computer virus that can reproduce by sending copies of itself to any PC that is connected to the infected machine. Now internet security experts fear that Stuxnet, which was first detected in June, is the first 'worm' specifically created to target real-world infrastructure such as power stations and water plants....

A quest to get Barack Obama to shout his commitment to solar power from the roof tops - by re-installing vintage solar panels at the White House - ended in disappointment for environmental campaigners today. Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, had led a group of environmental activists to Washington in a bio-diesel van hoping to persuade Obama to re-install a set of solar panels originally put up by Jimmy Carter. The actual Carter-era solar panels - which weigh in at 55 kilograms and are nearly 2 metres long - are out-dated now. But campaigners had hoped that the White...

Justin Bieber uses 3% of Twitter resources at any moment. According to a Twitter employee—talking to designer Dustin Curtis—Bieber has "racks of servers dedicated to him. I'm sure this will excite his haters (hello 4chan!) even more. Updated Dustin confirmed to us that his tweet is not a joke. He was told about it by a Twitter employee. Since Bieber is almost a perennial trending topic, I'm not surprised. Still, and given the 180 million unique visitors every month, that's quite an achievement. What is really important, however, is this: Now, every time that whale pops, you will have one more...