Technology posts

There’s a scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves’ character, Neo, gets the tar beaten out of him by Agent Smith. After an extremely intense fight that has him narrowly avoiding death by jumping out of the way of an oncoming train, he is tired and staggering away. The train stops and a refreshed Agent Smith steps off, ready to fight again. This is much like the fight that the people of the internet are faced with right now. Fighting SOPA in January, 2012, took a monumental effort that called in the combined efforts of juggernaut websites like Wikipedia and Reddit to defeat. It was a long, sustained battle…

That didn’t take long. Just as Google announced that Austin would be the second recipient following Kansas City as the having the fastest home internet connection in the United States, Japanese company So-net Entertainment launched a home service in Tokyo and surrounding areas that doubles up on Google’s 1Gbps. The company, backed by Sony, launched “Nuro”. With a $535 installation charge and $51 a month service, it isn’t the cheapest in the world, but those who want the fastest available will pay the price. Japan already has services that are a match for Google Fiber with nearly 1 in 4 households…

As of April 30th, several of Yahoo’s products will be shuttered as part of their initiative to consolidate focus and resources around their core services. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you’re probably not using any of them. You probably didn’t even know some of them existed. Here’s the list that they announced today: Upcoming Yahoo! Deals Yahoo! SMS Alerts Yahoo! Kids (formerly known as Yahooligans) Yahoo! Mail and Messenger Feature Phone Apps It’s not exactly as earth shattering as Google’s announcement that they were killing off their feed reader. Included in the announcement…

As technology grows more and more advanced, so too does its need for power. Unfortunately for us, batteries haven’t advanced all that much. Not as much as other technology has, at least. Phones used to be able to last for days between charges. Now, even (or perhaps especially) the best smartphones and computer tablets run out of juice in a matter of hours. We may very well see a solution to this problem in the near future, though, but not in a way you’d think. Instead of designing a new battery, a nanotechnologist named David Carroll and his research group at Wake Forest University has designed…

A research team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, headed up by professor William P. King, has developed a new lithium-ion battery technology that they call “a new enabling technology” that “breaks the normal paradigms of energy sources”. Batteries are one of the largest individual pieces on your phone but this new technology will shrink batteries down to the size of buttons, potentially shrinking your phone by up to thirty percent. You may think this will make your phone’s battery much weaker but it’s quite the contrary. The new lithium-ion battery is able to…

We thought that the nonsense was behind us when we stopped SOPA. The only thing we really did was teach Washington and the supporters in the technology world that if they want to destroy our privacy, they have to ease into it with more subtlety. Thus, CISPA was born. We will go into much more detail about it in the very near future, but for now it’s important to note that companies that did not support SOPA (at least openly) have quietly thrown their support over to CISPA. According to RT: A lobbying organization that counts Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and other tech giants among its clients has lent…

When people worry about protecting themselves from hackers, it’s usually their computer that they’re concerned about. No one concerns themselves with their printers, or their webcams, or their home security systems because nobody can hack them… right? As technology becomes more focused on connectivity, cloud computing, and being wireless, it inevitably becomes more intertwined with the internet. How is your iPhone able to control that RC helicopter? They’re connected through the internet. How is your HD camera able to send pictures directly to your computer? They’re connected…

In modern warfare, airpower is arguably the most important asset that a military can have.  From the P-51 Mustang to the F-22 Raptor, the U.S has always been good in this regard. With the strongest arsenal of fighter jets in the world, the U.S is usually defines “modern airpower” instead of striving for it. As such, it’s no surprise that so many countries have joined up with America so that they can get a piece of the latest batch of fighter jets. In the 90’s, the U.S, Canada, the U.K, Australia, the Netherlands, and their allies formed the Joint Strike Fighter program. The JSF program was…

The US Navy released a video yesterday that demonstrated its new LaWS (Laser Weapon System). With it, they were able to destroy a drone heading in the direction of the USS Dewey, a guided-missile destroyer that is temporarily carrying the weapon system. “You’ve seen what it’s suited to: A small drone, or something like that,” said Navy Admiral Jonathan Greenert. “It might also be suited to be able to address small boats or fast craft.” The real question that everyone is asking, particularly at this time with North Korea rattling their sabre, is whether or not it could be used to shoot down a fast-moving…

Let’s establish one thing immediately. Despite the shock journalism and uneducated claims out there saying that the internet attack was so severe that it almost break, the reality is this. It was a big hit that was felt by a lot of people. That’s it. It would be like saying that a 6.5 magnitude earthquake hit a big city. Sure, there was probably a lot of damage depending on which city it was, but at no point during or after the earthquake was the entire planet about to explode. The DDoS attack that has been hitting Spamhaus, an anti-spam non-profit, has been nothing short of historic. At its peak it hit…