Samsung and LG to launch Android-based tablets this year
Apple's successful strategy of moving a mobile OS up to a touchscreen tablet is proving popular as manufacturers look to produce tablets based on Google's Android OS. Both LG and Samsung plan to launch such products by the end of this year.
LG says that it plans to have a product ready to ship in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a Dow Jones Newswires report. Meanwhile, Samsung said that will launch a tablet with Galaxy branding in the third quarter.
These announcements come shortly after Cisco revealed plans to launch a business-oriented Android tablet in early 2011. Netbook maker MSI announced plans for a Tegra-based Android tablet earlier this year, though when we looked at the current state of such devices, none seemed ready for market.
Rumors have suggested that version 3.0 of Android is slated for release later this year and may contain features more suited to tablets, whereas Android 2.x will remain more suited to smartphones.
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Porn pranksters have a field day with YouTube injection flaw
Eager YouTube fans were greeted with annoying pop-ups, disabled comments, and even porn redirects over Independence Day weekend as they tried to scope out their favorite videos. A group of malicious pranksters—believed to be from 4chan—was able to take advantage of an cross-site scripting vulnerability in YouTube's comments Sunday, breaking as many video pages as possible before Google stepped in with a fix.
YouTube heavily restricts the use of HTML in the comments for videos, and with good reason. Left to their own devices, users could (purposefully or accidentally) redirect others to sites with malware or porn. YouTube employed a filter to ensure any HTML used in the comments was properly sanitized, but there was a flaw that allowed the 4chan crowd to get past the block with their own scripts.
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Price shocks waiting as US abandons helium business
Robert Richardson got a Nobel Prize for creating the first superfluid, a Bose-Einstein condensate comprised of chilled helium. But he started his talk at the Lindau Nobel Laureates Meeting by announcing that he'd be focusing purely on science policy—policy related to his work, given that the policy in question is the one that governs much of the world's stockpile of helium.Because of how the US is privatizing its stock of the gas, prices are artificially low, which is encouraging a pattern of consumption that may leave us without significant supplies of the gas midway through the century.
Inert but interesting
Why is that significant? Richardson started by describing helium's more interesting properties, which are key to its commercial use. These include its chemistry—his slide led with the text, "helium has no chemistry; it is a mere placeholder between hydrogen and lithium on the periodic table." Being completely inert may seem rather dull, but for industries that work with highly reactive materials, this absence of chemistry can be essential.Read the comments on this post
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Nonvisual interface may allow blind people to drive cars
A newly developed driving interface may let blind people independently drive cars on the open road. Designed by engineers at Virginia Tech, the system incorporates various nonvisual cues into the driver's seat of a dune buggy that could help the blind navigate roads without assistance. The project began in 2007, when a group of Virginia Tech researchers placed in a DARPA competition to develop a vehicle that could drive itself. Later, the same group received a grant from the National Federation of the Blind to incorporate the laser detection system that allowed the car to navigate and detect obstacles into an interface that could be understood through senses other than sight.
The new, nonvisual interfaces use a combination of tactile cues to inform the driver. One is called Drive Grip; it's a set of gloves that vibrate on various portions of the knuckles to signal the driver when it's time to turn.
The interfaces are set to be incorporated into a Ford Escape and demonstrated at the Rolex 24 At Daytona on January 29, 2011. The ultimate goal is an ambitious one: the car could lead to a change in longstanding legislation that prohibits driving while blind, so long as the vehicle is equipped with the appropriate technology.
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How even the dumbest Russian spies can outwit the NSA
By now, you've no doubt heard of the Russian spy ring that was recently busted in the US, and you've also probably heard that they apparently weren't very bright. The complaint filed in their case documents a litany of unprofessionalism and carelessness, from leaving written passwords out in the open to asking a federal agent posing as a fellow spy to troubleshoot a laptop without even bothering to check back with HQ to see if the "spy" was legit. But as incompetent as these spies were, they were bright enough to at least partially outwit the large-scale e-mail snooping efforts of the NSA's backbone taps and multibillion-dollar datacenters. How? By using steganography to encode secret text messages in image files, which they then placed on websites.
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Climate scientist cleared, but zombie "controversy" won't die
Kiddies, gather round and let me tell you another chapter in the story of "If you irritate people, they act irritated."Let's begin with a recap: just before the Copenhagen climate conference, a large wodge (that's a technical term) of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at University of East Anglia magically appeared in public. Those e-mails contained all the makings of a false controversy. And, as you can imagine, anyone who had been grinding an axe wasted no time in placing said axe vigorously into the back of any climate scientist they could find.
The first target was Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit. The colloquial language used in his e-mail correspondence was trumpeted as fraud, while he also showed that his response to harassment (and there is no doubt that he was being harassed) was to become belligerent and petty-minded. Jones was cleared by not one, not two, but three separate enquiries.
Target number two was Michael Mann at Penn State in the US. He had corresponded with Phil Jones and, of course, in the leaked e-mails much of that correspondence became public. Skeptics swung into action and rained complaints down on Penn State. Although no formal accusations of fraud were made, the tone of the e-mails was apparent and Penn State launched its own enquiry.
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Unusual quantum states may shake up quantum computing
Researchers have found a new method of controlling the quantum states of solid particles, and the research could enable a different approach to quantum computing, according to a paper published in Nature.Using doped silicon, scientists found that they were able to exert control over the solid atoms using terahertz frequency radiation, getting the atoms to oscillate between states normally found in hydrogen atoms. While the equipment they used was very specialized, the authors hope that this new level of coherent control will allow for a different style of entanglement, as well as finer manipulation of quantum information held in excited atoms.
Scientists have had a field day using lasers to perform all manner of quantum manipulations on various particles: trapping photons, entangling them, and sending them over long distances, even using this to perform simple quantum calculations. However, these quantum states are often unstable and hard to control, creating errors and unreliability in their information and in the calculations they perform.
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