Nintendo is a company that can do little wrong in the current marketplace, but the introduction of the "Vitality Sensor," a piece of hardware that fits onto your finger and measures certain types of biometric feedback, was one of the famously flat notes of this year's E3. It was announced during the press conference with an image, to a tittering crowd, with no indication of how it would be used in a game. In short? Nintendo messed up: the Japanese giant can only get away with its crazy moves when it has the software to back it up.

An anonymous reader writes "Moxie Marlinspike, who recently published new attacks on SSL at Defcon 17, seems to have released the new version of sslsniff which supports these attacks. While the release appears to coincide with a patch from Mozilla, every product that uses the Microsoft CryptoAPI is still vulnerable, including Internet Explorer and Outlook. The new version of sslsniff also supports built-in modes for hijacking software auto-updates that depend on SSL, and apparently includes techniques for defeating OCSP as well — making the elimination of existing null-prefix certificates difficult."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Moxie Marlinspike, who recently published new attacks on SSL at Defcon 17, seems to have released the new version of sslsniff which supports these attacks. While the release appears to coincide with a patch from Mozilla, every product that uses the Microsoft CryptoAPI is still vulnerable, including Internet Explorer and Outlook. The new version of sslsniff also supports built-in modes for hijacking software auto-updates that depend on SSL, and apparently includes techniques for defeating OCSP as well — making the elimination of existing null-prefix certificates difficult."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tahoe is a secure distributed filesystem that is designed to conform with the principle of least authority. The developers behind the project announced this month the release of version 1.5, which includes bugfixes and improvements to portability and performance, including a 10 percent boost to file upload speed over high-latency connections.

Tahoe's underlying architecture is similar to that of a peer-to-peer network. Files are distributed across multiple nodes in a manner that allows data integrity to be maintained in the event that individual nodes are compromised or fail. It uses AES encryption to protect file contents from tampering and scrutiny. Tahoe can be used to establish a relatively fault-tolerant storage pool that spans a number of conventional computers over a local network or the Internet. This approach to cloud storage might be more appropriately described as "crowd" storage.

Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, located in Milton, Delaware, is one of the 25 largest microbrewers in North America. Starting in 1995, Dogfish Head went from a backroom operation of three little kegs with propane burners underneath to a full-fledged brewery and bottling powerhouse. They ship and sell beer in over 30 states, are currently expanding their brewery, branching out with restaurant franchises, and continue to grow.

The Dogfish Head brand prides itself on a ‘do it yourself’, ‘off-centered’, grassroots style work ethic. When it came time for them to choose a company to build their website, they chose another ‘off-centered’ company, Inclind Inc, not too far from the brewery.

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OrangHutan writes "Google's Android software source code has been offered up for those looking to create applications on MIPS32 chips, which are different from Intel's x86 architecture and used by companies such as Cisco (in its Linksys devices), Motorola (set-top boxes) and Sony (DVD players). MIPS Technologies made the announcement on Monday and is giving 'software developers an early access program for customers, which will give them access to MIPS engineers and specific hardware and software optimizations.' The article goes on to say that MIPS made waves at the 'Computex electronics exhibition in Taipei by showing off a home media player and a 10.4-inch LCD with a built-in computer both running Android. They were among the first non-phones to be seen running the Google-developed OS.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that inventor Stephen Kurtin has developed glasses with a mechanically adjustable focus that he believes can free nearly two billion people around the world from bifocals, trifocals and progressive lenses. Kurtin has spent almost 20 years on his quest to create a better pair of spectacles for people who suffer from presbyopia — the condition that affects almost everyone over the age of 40 as they progressively lose the ability to focus on close objects. The glasses have a tiny adjustable slider on the bridge of the frame that makes it possible to focus alternately on the page of a book, a computer screen, or a mountain range in the distance. 'For more than 140 years, adjustable focus has been recognized as the Holy Grail for presbyopes,' says Kurtin. 'It's a blazingly difficult problem.' Each 'lens' is actually a set of two lenses, one flexible and one firm. The flexible lens (near the eye) has a transparent, distensible membrane attached to a clear rigid surface. The pocket between them holds a small quantity of crystal-clear fluid. As you move the slider on the bridge, it pushes the fluid and alters the shape of the flexible lens."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The following self reported and verified activities were conducted by the Hoboken Curriculum Committee on August 3, 2009. Today marked the beginning of Week 4 for the curriculum committee. -Dr. Petrosino

Mathematics: completed the 8th Grade Algebra unit planner. We reorganized the folders in the computer and we are in the process of compiling the final binder. Tomorrow and Wednesday we will proof read and edit where needed.
Science: 8/2/09 - All of the essential questions and the enduring understandings foe the 6 units in grade 9 (Environmental Science) were revised and retyped according the proper UbD format. The information from the revised bid ideas pages for each unit was transferred into the new MYP planner format for each unit. The Unit assessments were revised and the approaches to Learning were aligned according to the MYP protocol.

8/3/09 – All of the completed units in grade 9 were printed and organized into the binders. Two of the assessments were searched on the internet and saved into the appropriate units for grade 9. All grades 9-12 folders were organized to make them user friendly. The Final exam was uploaded for grade 9 as the district assessment. For grade 10 the midterm was uploaded as the district assessment. For grades 11 and 12 both the midterms and finals were uploaded for the district assessments.

We going to go to the high school and scan a pdf for the remaining two exams ( 9th grade midterm and 10th grade final exam) and attach them to the appropriate folders before leaving today.

Visual Arts: These past two days I had to add some technology standards into the Visual Art lessons. Then I began with grade 1 unit 1 to quickly review each Big Idea & MYP Planner to check for correct terminology as well as add more information for easier understanding for the teachers who will be utilizing these lesson/unit plans. I am also making copies of the revised lesson/units to be placed in binder. As of now 11:00 AM Grade 1 and all 8 units & grade 2 and all 9 units have been reviewed, corrections made, copied and are in binder. I am going to start with reviewing grade 3 now.

Language Arts: Prepared for visit with Pat Reily of LitLife, also created assessments for Grades 6, 7, and 8.

Physical Ed/Health: We added technology to our all of unit planners and created the second grade Chess unit. We printed all of our revised unit planners and organized everything in the binders. In addition, we have started to work on PE assessments that will provide consistency districtwide.

Disclaimer: The 2009 Summer Curriculum Committee is roughly 50% the size of the 2008 Summer Curriculum Committee (29 teachers vs 60 teachers) and the budget allocated is approximately 2/3 less than the allocation for Summer 2008. Dr. Petrosino has explained numerous times that this represents a significant reduction in both expenditures and faculty involved with the curriculum project.

(From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest and are pleased to have Sergeant Dale Sweetnam join us here. SGT Sweetnam is working with Google's communications team this year through the U.S. Army's "Training with Industry" Program. -Ed.)

It's not easy to stay in touch with friends and family when you're fighting in a country thousands of miles from home. I spent 13 months in Iraq as an Army journalist where I flew in Black Hawks over Balad and Baghdad working to generate news coverage about my fellow soldiers. The whole experience was physically and emotionally draining, but it was especially difficult when I called home at the end of the day and nobody was there to answer.

For servicemen and women who are constantly on the move, having a single number and an easy way to retrieve messages from loved ones can be invaluable. To help our service members communicate with their loved ones and show our support to those serving our country, Google is launching a new program. Starting today, any active U.S. service member with a .mil email address can sign up for a Google Voice account at www.google.com/militaryinvite and start using the free service within a day.

When you deploy, your life is put on hold. While you live and work in a different world, everyone else moves on with life back home. Your family and friends keep moving, and this sometimes means it's just not possible for them to stay awake until 2 a.m. to receive a phone call. Calling Iraq or Afghanistan is seldom an option.

Google Voice provides a solution to some of these problems. Service members can set up an account before they deploy. Or if they're already deployed, families can now set up an account for their service member. Loved ones can call to leave messages throughout the day, and then when that service member visits an Internet trailer, all the messages are right there. It's like a care package in audio form.

I signed up for an account when I came to Google, and it's already making communications much easier here in the States. I know when I return to combat, Google Voice will help make life a little more manageable.

Posted by U.S. Army SGT Dale Sweetnam, Army Fellow

digitalhermit writes "A C student (not the programming language) has sued her former school because she has been unable to find a job in the three months since her graduation. Yup, some schools are degree mills, but this just seems... bizarre."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here in the U.S. we have officially converted to digital broadcast and most stations (with the exception of low-watt operations) have turned off the broadcast of a signal that some have kept running for over 50 years. This got me to thinking about frame of reference and forgotten methods of communications.

Every morning, millions of people wake up to a very refreshing experience at work. They don't see "mailbox is full" errors in their email. They don't worry about backing up their data. They can get to any file they need from any computer, anywhere with Internet access and a browser. They can all access and edit the same documents and spreadsheets at the same time as their colleagues. They use Gmail and Google Calendar at work as fluidly and easily as they use their personal Gmail accounts. They video, voice and text chat with their peers globally as naturally as they send email.

The IT people at these companies and organizations don't waste time or money buying, installing or managing email servers. They focus on the smart, innovative stuff they want to work on, because they never have to bother with expensive and painful software upgrades, hardware compatibility issues or managing data centers. They have left many IT frustrations and costs behind and moved on to something better.

Here at Google, we have a term for the moment a company realizes there's a better way and goes for it: "going Google." Over 1.75 million businesses, schools and organizations have gone Google — including Motorola, University of Notre Dame, the Mercy Corps and many more — and each day, 3,000 more organizations join them. We want every organization to understand the benefits of going Google, so today we're telling the story in a new way. We're kicking off a series of outdoor billboards in four cities — Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco — that will change every weekday for the next four weeks. The billboards tell the story of an anonymous IT manager who gets so fed up with the typical IT status quo that his company eventually — you guessed it — goes Google. Here's a preview:



Visit www.google.com/appsatwork to get more information about the benefits of going Google. Already gone Google? Tweet your story and check out our tools to help spread the word.

Posted by Andy Berndt, Managing Director, Google Creative Lab

coondoggie writes "Published reports today say the Pentagon is rattling swords in the direction of North Korea and Iran by speeding the development a 20-foot, 30,000-lb bomb known as Massive Ordnance Penetrator. This weapon is intended to annihilate underground bunkers and other hardened sites (read: long-range missile or underground nuke development) up to 200 ft. underground. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which has overseen the development of this monster since 2007, says it is designed to be carried aboard B-2 and B-52 bombers and deployed at high altitudes, from which it would strike the ground at speeds well beyond twice the speed of sound to penetrate the below-ground target." Reuters has more specifics on the MOP's chances for deployment by 2010, and the detail that the bomb's load of explosives weighs in at 5,300 lbs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

USB 3.0 is coming, and the hour approaches when the computer and electronics industries can sink their collective teeth into a new, faster USB interface for the first time in ten years. USB 2.0, with 480Mbps High speed, launched in April 2000, and USB 3.0, with 4.8Gbps Super Speed, will launch in the first consumer devices in early 2010. As this happy day draws closer, USB 3.0-related news has come fast and brisk, and it has been hard to follow. Let's review the milestones of the past and take a look ahead to see what the future has in store for USB 3.0.

History's Coming To writes "xkcd creator Randall Munroe has revealed on his blag that the acclaimed stick-figure comic will be produced in real dead-tree book form. Fantastic news for all fans of comedy, maths, science, and relationship screw-ups — especially given that the book will be sold in aid of the charity 'Room To Read.' Rumors that the book contains a joke in the ISBN remain unconfirmed." The NY Times article that Munroe links (registration may be required) is from April of this year, and I am amazed that this community didn't note the story at that time. The book will be published by breadpig, which was created by Alexis Ohanian, one of the founders of reddit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Improvements to CSS3, in particular a revival of the @font-face directive for linking to server-based fonts, promise to allow designers to deliver richer and more nuanced typography on the Web. And while Firefox and Safari (via WebKit) are leading the way by supporting standard TrueType and OpenType font files, posting commercial fonts on a publicly available Web server violates the licensing agreements from most type foundries. So, at least three services are close to launching, giving Web designers and developers access to licensed typefaces that will work with @font-face. And even while several foundries are looking to license their fonts for these services, several prominent foundries have expressed support for the .webfont format that is being proposed to the W3C.

DigiTimes has been making the rounds of the Taiwanese OEMs, and the company claims to have the scoop on a coming wave of ARM-based netbooks, often called "smartbooks," that will wash ashore in the US in the last quarter of this year. Smartbooks based on Qualcomm's SnapDragon processor and NVIDIA's Tegra line are allegedly on deck from netbook names like ASUS, Acer, and Foxconn. Lesser-known Chinese netbook maker Compal, which was showing off products at this past CES but which doesn't yet ship to the US, is also named as an ARM netbook maker, as are Inventec and Mobinnova.

Then there's the Touch Book, from Always Innovating, which sent out a note today to everyone who contacted them via web form (including Ars) to say that the device is is now shipping. We haven't really covered the Touch Book, but boy have we been getting reader mail about it. A lot of folks want us to review it, and I've contacted the company in an effort to get a review unit. (No response so far, but I'll keep trying.) The Touch Books' main gimmick is that its screen can be detached and used as a standalone tablet, and the second gimmick is that it runs the TI OMAP 3 chip, which is looking like a killer PMP/tablet processor.

Conversations.net Interview Series
http://www.conversations.net

Date: Wednesday, August 5th, 2009
Time: 4pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern / 11pm GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tinyurl.com/convnet. The Elluminate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event.

Andrew Hargadon is a Professor of Technology Management at the Graduate School of Management at University of California, Davis and author of How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate (Harvard Business School Press 2003). Professor Hargadon's research focuses on the effective management of innovation and the strategic role of design in managing technology transitions, particularly in the development and commercialization of sustainable technologies. He has written extensively on knowledge and technology brokering and the role of learning and knowledge management in innovation and has published numerous articles and chapters in leading scholarly and applied publications. His research has been used to develop or guide new innovation programs in organizations as diverse as Hewlett-Packard, Avery Dennison, Clorox, Edmunds.com, Mars, Canadian Health Services, and Silicon Valley start-ups. He teaches corporate executive programs and serves on the advisory boards for Physic Ventures and American River Ventures.

As the founding director of two key centers at the University of California, Davis—the Center for Entrepreneurship and the Energy Efficiency Center—Professor Hargadon is at the forefront of teaching, research, and practice in cross-disciplinary entrepreneurship. The centers are dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship and innovation through educational programs bridging science, engineering, and business and they provide a successful framework for university scientists and engineers to move their ideas out of the lab and into the world. He received the 2009 Olympus Emerging Educational Leader Award in recognition for his strong entrepreneurship curriculum and success with the two centers.

Professor Hargadon launched the Center for Entrepreneurship at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management in 2006. The center’s programs are designed for science and engineering graduate researchers and faculty and include four one-week entrepreneurship academies as well as a year-long fellows program. The academies provide a framework for universities to build a network between their research and the investment community and combine a comprehensive and pioneering curriculum developed by Professor Hargadon with hands-on exercises that participants use to develop business opportunities and investigate the potential opportunities for commercialization around their research. The curriculum is taught by university faculty and practicing professionals: venture capitalists, angel investors, entrepreneurs, intellectual property lawyers, and others.

Professor Hargadon also launched the nation's first university-based Energy Efficiency Center at UC Davis in 2006 and served as the founding director. As Director, he built relationships with the three largest independently-owned utility companies (PG&E, Sempra, and Edison International), the California Public Utility Commission and the California Energy Commission, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in the market, and major customers like WalMart and Chevron Energy Solutions. The EEC works with faculty researchers to identify and develop the commercial potential of their research as well as prepares graduates students in engineering, science, and business to build successful businesses advancing technologies in energy efficiency, including buildings, transportation, and agriculture and food processing.

Professor Hargadon received his Ph.D. from the Management Science and Engineering Department in Stanford University's School of Engineering, where he was named Boeing Fellow and Sloan Foundation Future Professor of Manufacturing. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Stanford University's Product Design Program in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Prior to his academic appointment, he worked as a product designer at Apple Computer and taught in the Product Design program at Stanford University. Additional information and articles by Professor Hargadon can be found at www.gsm.ucdavis.edu.

And yes, he is my brother. :)

Many thanks to Elluminate for their support for the Conversations.net interview series.

Future of Education Interview Series
http://www.futureofeducation.com
Date: Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
Time: 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern / 6pm GMT (next day) (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tinyurl.com/futureofed.

Dave Tosh is the co-founder and CEO of Elgg, a leading open source social networking engine.

Links:
Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/davetosh
Elgg - http://elgg.org/

Event Details:
The Elluminate room (http://tinyurl.com/futureofed) will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event.
Many thanks to Elluminate for their support for the Future of Education interview series.

An anonymous reader writes "American users of Wipeout HD might have noticed that there's an advertisement showing up all of a sudden during loading, both during online and offline play. This, according to a poster on the well-known gaming forum NeoGAF, is being done covertly. The writer suspects that the display software was installed during update 2.01, and the ad-content is now being snuck in. Gamasutra has a story on the company responsible for the software to deliver these ads, Double Fusion, which said it plans to launch in-game advertising in 'another handful' of PS3 games by the end of the year. So, what's next? Can we look forward to fighting the Kool-Aid Man and zombified Mars bars in Uncharted, or is there anything that can be done to hinder companies from adding advertisements retroactively, without the customer's prior knowledge?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.