Technology

It’s getting a little late for these roundup things, but I’m too tired with post-New Year’s party haze to come up with much of anything better right now.

Annalee Newitz subtitles her website with “technology, pop culture, sex.” Her index of stories isn’t actually a roundup per se, but it’s good material if you’re too lazy to leave the couch and find a book to re-read off the shelf (because you’ve read all you new books by now, right?).

Then, DefenseTech has been rounding up their year of stories this past week.

Five topics for five days include:

Pain rays, laser jets, and stun gun shockers.

Nukes spread, labs clamp down.

Space war, moon bases, and spysat mysteries.

Explosive, sticky, ad-hoc armor.

Drone doggies, robo-copters, and more.

I’m definitely trying to avoid the standard “year in gadgets” or “year’s best music” roundup. The above relate to technology and it’s role in defense and in pop culture. Fortunately, These should be the last of such stories I’ll post/link to.

I got to spend the holidays near home this year, and with everything else going on I didn’t really pay much attention to the Comair/Delta problem that stranded over 30,000 passengers last weekend. Now that I’m starting to pay attention to the news again, though, I was interested in ArsTechnica‘s discussion of the software glitch that made everything go wrong:

At the core of the problem was an application created by SBS, a subsidiary of Boeing. What happened on SBS’s system is that the massive ice and weather delays necessitated an abnormally high number of crew reassignments which overflowed a hard limit of 32,768 changes per month.

It makes a me wonder what hard limits I’ve left in code here or there.

Michael Sciannamea at WirelessWeblog noted that:

BMW, Audi, Daimler Chrysler, Volkswagen, Renault, and Fiat have all received grants from the German government to develop a car-to-car wireless data network using 802.11a and IPv6 technologies to link vehicles to each other to pass on information about traffic, bad weather, and accidents.

They’re calling it “NOW: Network on Wheels,” and there’s more at Wi-FiPlanet.com.

My comment: static mesh networks are so 2004. 2005 will be about fully mobile, autonomys mesh networks. And to prove it I’m posting this quote from Forschungsbereich Dezentrale Systeme und Netzdienste (Decentralized Systems and Network Services) at the University of Karlsruhe:

The research group ‘Decentralized Systems and Network Services’ designs and analyzes protocols and algorithms for computer networks and distributed systems. Our main focus is on increasing the level of self-organisation in networks and oncorresponding efficiency, security and robustness issues. The group has a strong background in ad hoc networking techniques, in particular for inter-vehicle communications, andin IP-based mobility support. Methodology-wise we cover analysis, simulation and actual prototypes and testbeds.

Jon Aquino‘s holiday gift to us is to make FreewarePalm useful:

Why this work was necessary: FreewarePalm contains a goldmine of ratings of Palm freeware. But it does not provide a way to sort the programs by rating. That is why I extracted the ratings and sorted them.

With over 6000 listings, there’s a lot to choose from, but, as Jon says, no way to sort those listings. Jon has crawled FreewarePalm with “Cygwin lynx, XEmacs, and a 60-line Ruby script” and done what FreewarePalm couldn’t: made a list of apps sorted by rating. And, for those who need pictures, there’s this other list that includes Palm screenshots. Caveat: the lists are one big file.

Now you can wast the remainder of your holiday time playing free games on your Palm-OS handheld.

The public radio show Future Tense did a story Monday that asks “Will you regret buying a cheapie PC?”

Computers are cheaper than ever. But if you’re looking at a new machine this holiday season, Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle says beware of the low, low prices.

Why will you regret it? The machines are RAM starved, have lousy video hardware, bad monitors, processors that are slower than their MHz ratings make them look, small hard drives, and often lack even a CD burner. One vendor’s $399 PC jumped to $1188 after upgrading the pieces to a usable level. But you say you only need to do word processing and browse the web and that you don’t need fancy stuff? I know. You’ll still need to spend more than $400 on a PC. My bet, you’ll spend $900 to $ 1200 on a desktop, and $1100 to $1500 on a laptop.

WiFi Net News is saying R.I.P. W.E.P. after news of a new version of Aircrack was released that can break WEP in seconds after passively sniffing only a small number of packets. The result is that it takes only two to five minutes to crack a key.

Even keys changed every 10 minutes are thus susceptible to an attack that might allow several minutes of discrete information. Unique keys distributed by 802.1X to each machine on a network reduces the number of packets sent by individual computers, thus still offering a window of possibility of crack-free WEP use. But it’s a thin margin.

[…A] laptop could break keys quite easily without any intervention. Leave such a laptop running and it could gather a lot of data over a few hours even if the window of decryption is just minutes long for each key.

It’s also worth looking at the WiFi Net News 2004 Roundup of the site’s most popular stories. There was a lot of interest in wireless printing and WiFi signal finders, but the site notes that “seven of the top 10 stories were about security and three of those about WPA weaknesses.” Interesting.

Gizmodo popped a link over Dan Washburn’s gadget round up. Dan had been on a four month road trip through China, and has now posted the results of how his gear stood up to the trek.

On the trip he took an iPod with a media reader, extended battery, and voice recorder mic; two cameras — Cannon S30 and S80; an iPaq with keyboard and GPRS modem; and a Garmin eTrex. Some worked better than others, some didn’t work at all.

Closer to home, Glenn Fleishman at WiFiNetNews writes that the Wired Test special issue is out on the magazine racks and available as PDF for free. “It’s worth a solid look if you’re planning to purchase practically any electronics gear in any major category.”

The Wired thing is obviously timed to take advantage of the holiday buying season (it was released a month ago), but, as they say at Cat And Girl: “it’s time to overcompensate for our year-long disregard of others and buy them shiny things.”