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Is the password to an encrypted laptop more like a key to a lock or a handwritten key to a secret code? That is the question a federal court will probably have to answer in deciding whether a Colorado woman must give the feds the password to an encrypted laptop seized in her bedroom, according to CNET News' Privacy Inc. blog.Ramona Fricosu wouldn't have to provide the password, but rather enter it herself to release the material being sought by the U.S. Department of Justice. But her lawyer, Philip Dubois, is objecting to the disclosure. Fricosu is facing bank fraud,...

When Jennifer Barassa started her business, she did not even have a computer. She thought she saw a gap in the market, set up in her sitting room and spent her first 30 shillings (35 US cents) paying someone to type a letter for her. Fifteen years later, her marketing promotion agency, Top Image, turns over more than $3m a year and employs more than 300 people in three countries, hired to promote everything from mobile phones to bank accounts to the continent’s growing consumer class. Nor does she intend to stop there: next she wants to take on multinational...

The buzz at Pivot25, a conference for mobile-phone software developers and investors held this June, is all about the future of money. Ben Lyon, the 24-year-old business-development VP of Kopo Kopo, wants $250,000 to produce his app for shops to process payments made by text message. Paul Okwalinga, 28, describes his money app — called M-Shop, it allows you to buy travel tickets and takeout via mobile phone — as "not reinventing the wheel but pimping it." Kamal Budhabhatti, 35, claims Elma, the latest product from his company Craft Silicon, lets a phone do and be almost anything financial —...

This is a LINK to a demonstration video.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the launch of TechGirls, an educational initiative for girls from Muslim countries interested in technology. "It will bring teenage girls from the Middle East and North Africa for an intensive month of educational activities here in the United States," Clinton said Wednesday. Clinton made the announcement at the closing luncheon honoring the first class of participants from TechWomen, a public-private partnership that brought emerging female leaders in technical fields from predominately Muslim countries to the United States for one month. The women were paired with 24 leading, U.S. technology companies in Silicon Valley...

America needs the Jewish state's technology and innovation as much as it needs us. America's enemies understand deeply and intuitively that no U.S. goals or resources in the Middle East are remotely as important as Israel. Why don't we? Israel cruised through the recent global slump with scarcely a down quarter and no deficit or stimulus package. It is steadily increasing its global supremacy, behind only the U.S., in an array of leading-edge technologies. It is the global master of microchip design, network algorithms and medical instruments. During a period of water crises around the globe, Israel is incontestably the...

This is a doozy, even as it's still unverified. According to Anonymous, hacker @Abhaxas just leaked a lengthy text file revealing part of Florida's voter database. Included are voter statistics, candidates, and electoral race data. In the release, Abhaxas writes: So, this is a little ironic. Here is inside details of florida voting systems. Now.. who still believes voting isn't rigged? If the United States Government can't even keep their ballot systems secure, why trust them at all? FAIL!

A Japanese man paralysed from the waist down has embarked on an ambitious trip to Normandy to climb a mountain... with the help of a cutting-edge robotic suit. Father-of-two Seiji Uchida, 49, will be carried up Mont Saint Michel - a World Heritage site - by a companion clad in a cybernetic exoskeleton which can boost the wearer's strength tenfold. For Mr Uchida, who lost the ability to walk 28 years ago after a car accident, reaching the picturesque abbey at the top of the mountain on the French coast is just the beginning of his trip of a lifetime.

China’s "carrier killer," the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile that can destroy American ships, had a unique origin: its base technology was pilfered from U.S. military trash during the 1990s, according to recent revelations by a Chinese military analyst. Further, a key part of the rocket system for that missile was obtained from U.S. engineering firm Martin Marietta, also in the 1990s. Richard Fisher, who has kept close tabs on the transfer of military technology to China, says that a “U.S. source” recently told him what he had suspected all along: that from the tons of military scrap China bought from...

In a letter dated August 9, 1971, Caltech Professor of Geology and Geophysics Dr. Gerald Wasserburg wrote to NASA administrator Robert R. Gilruth extending his congratulations for “one of the most brilliant missions in space science ever flown”. He was referring to the Apollo 15 mission, which began 40 years ago this month. The flight of Apollo 15 marked the true beginning of lunar exploration from a scientific viewpoint. Lunar science was the primary focus of this mission, whereas engineering and geopolitical considerations had dominated the preceding lunar landings. Apollo 15 would make use of uprated equipment to enhance the...

Historical documents related to the capture of seven Swedes by the Gestapo in Poland in 1942 puts Sweden's subsequent ball bearing deliveries to Nazi Germany in a new light, argue historians Susanne Berger and Ingela Magner. A new review of document collections in the Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet) shows that the arrest of the seven "Warsaw Swedes" by the Gestapo in Poland in 1942 not only seriously jeopardized the men's lives but posed an existential threat to Swedish Match companies and other Swedish businesses throughout Eastern Europe. The men's release two years later was apparently secured not only through painstaking...

  Technology: Servant or Master? David C. Stolinsky June 30, 2011 No, this isn’t a liberal column advocating that we all ride bicycles, use low-flow toilets, and “go green.” Instead, it is a conservative column warning that we must not let technology outpace our ability to control it. People controlled by technology are just as unfree as people controlled by bureaucrats. And if we are not careful, we will wind up being controlled by both. Cars you can’t stop. Perhaps you recall the problems with Toyota and Lexus cars. There were multiple reports of unintended acceleration. Most were attributed...

Sometimes it happens. Sometimes you’re having one of those days where you just need a hug, but none of your loved ones is around to give you one. Well, now there’s something you can do about that. The new Japanese Sense-Roid jacket allows you hug yourself. Yes, you read that right. You can hug yourself. (Let’s leave aside the question of whether this would make you feel better … or worse.) In order to use Sense-Roid, you put on a jacket that contains 36 pager motors that can vibrate and several air compressors. The jacket is connected by wire...

A Nobel Laureate speaks out on the Energy Catalyzer June 22, 2011 by Ivy Matt Dr. Brian Josephson, winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on superconductivity, has recently released a YouTube video of an interview of himself conducted by Judith Driscoll, Professor of Materials Science at Cambridge University. The stated purpose of the video is to wake up the media to the E-Cat story, which has not been widely reported on in the mainstream media of the English-speaking world. While some cold fusion advocates hypothesize the existence of a conspiracy of silence to suppress news...

DETROIT — A team of Wayne State University researchers was awarded $330,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a 3-D neural probe. Their aim is to develop an implantable device that will suppress tinnitus, a neurological disorder that affects more than 250 million people worldwide. With the ever-expanding knowledge in the fields of neuroscience and neurosurgery, there is an increasing need for devices and tools that enable neuroscientists to delve deeper into the physiological and pathological function of neural tissue at the level of groups of neurons. A variety of neural probes developed have significantly contributed to important...

Now, online real estate data is so abundant, buyers and sellers can do most of the research themselves, according to speakers at the 45th annual conference of the National Association of Real Estate Editors. Nonetheless, speakers maintained, the Internet won't replace the real estate agent the way it did the travel agent.

Merciless mocking from Republicans hasn't put President Obama off his focus on the economy, as the White House insisted Thursday that the president is taking "enormously seriously" the hardships Americans are enduring. "It's patently obvious that the president is focused on the economy, that he takes enormously seriously the hardship that Americans continue to endure," White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said. Earlier in the week, at a jobs council meeting, the president was called out for saying that "shovel-ready projects' weren't quite as shovel-ready as he thought. Then later, in an interview with NBC News, Obama suggested that innovation...

SSo far this week has been all about that sad clown, Rep. Anthony Weiner. Or more specifically, about his habit of sending young women half-naked self-portraits using his TweetDeck account. Then lying about being hacked, reversing himself in the most humiliating way, and begging forgiveness from a disgusted American public. We don’t blame him for crying. The lifelong work he put into his political career just got the industrial airport super flush. The question on everyone’s mind: How could anyone be so stupid? Was he blinded by the glare off his waxed chest? What this seemingly boils down to is...

Amid some $40 billion in budget cuts in April, Congress decided to preserve a favorite – education programs for science, technology, engineering, and math. "STEM" programs, as they're called, have rare bipartisan support in a Congress worried about the United States' economic competitiveness. Business groups are pushing for more funding. President Obama has called the crisis "our generation's Sputnik moment." But what if the crisis isn't real? Political rhetoric aside, there's no lack of workers to fill technical jobs. And the pipeline of US math and science students to fill future positions has not deteriorated in terms of international competitiveness...

Like tens of millions of others, US technology writer Nicholas Carr found the lure of the worldwide web hard to resist -- until he noticed it was getting harder and harder to concentrate. He set out his concerns in a celebrated essay headlined "Is Google making us stupid?" And his latest book "The Shallows" explores in depth what he fears the Internet is doing to our brains. "The seductions of technology are hard to resist," Carr acknowledges in that book, which has sold an estimated 50,000 hardback copies in the United States alone. But he thinks it's time to start...