Do Gooders: people kicking butt in your own town and around the world: 2011

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Hovercraft that has many uses and applications...I agree, I want a person sized version of this thing

Video: Japan’s Defense Ministry Develops Awesome Ball-Shaped Drone | TechCrunch

Monday, October 24, 2011

"Shoot Now, Focus Later" Camera: great idea

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38930/?p1=MstRcnt

Looking over a haul of digital photos can involve as much regret over fudged shots as reminiscing over golden moments. A camera from Silicon Valley startup Lytro promises to change that by allowing a user to focus a photo after it has been taken. The camera also has a novel "lightfield" sensor that enables photos to be viewed in 3-D. It is available to order today and will start shipping next year.

The camera has a novel design reminiscent of a telescope. It features only two buttons: one to turn the device on or off, and one to take a photo. Only after a photo is taken does the user need to worry about focusing the resulting image.

The photos are dynamic and interactive. When viewing them on the camera, a user taps on the device's touch screen to choose the object or area that should be in focus. Everything closer or farther away is artfully blurred. A photo can also be set to show everything in sharp focus. The same experience is possible when viewing an image on a PC, with Lytro's software, or online, with tools for sharing images via Facebook or embedding them in a Web page. (See a galleryof interactive images taken with a Lytro camera.)

Rather than just a convenience for bad photographers, photos that can be refocused also allow more playful and creative photography, says Ren Ng, who founded Lytro to commercialize research he began at Stanford University. "Refocusing the image becomes a new way to tell the story," he says. "It injects a drama into the viewing moment, like when you discover a face that was out of focus in the background."

It seems ambitious for a startup to take on the camera industry, but Ng says Lytro is more than a camera maker. "It's not just a consumer electronics company—it's a Web 2.0 company as well," he says, referring to the Facebook sharing tools and other online features. Ng says he expects word of mouth to drive interest in Lytro when people encounter and "like" the photos it produces.

The light sensor is what makes Lytro's product different from any other consumer camera. In a conventional camera, the sensor's pixels come in three versions that record red, green, and blue light to build a full-color image. On Lytro's "lightfield" sensor, pixels are more discriminating. As well as being specialized to red, green, or blue, each detects only light coming from a particular angle.

Knowing the angles that different rays of light travel allows the camera's software to simulate the photo that would be produced by a virtual cameras focused in a particular way. When a person interacts with a Lytro photo, software tweaks the settings of that virtual camera to produce the new, refocused image.

Lytro's sensor is made by bonding a carefully etched sheet of glass on top of a conventional digital-camera sensor. The glass is patterned with tiny lenses, ensuring that specific pixels can receive light only from the specified angles. That gives Lytro's software the information it needs to refocus photos.

Another consequence of this design is that the camera records depth, which makes it possible to reproduce 3-D images. "We're not going to be emphasizing it from the start, but these pictures are inherently 3-D," says Ng, who showed Technology Review images from a Lytro camera on a laptop with 3-D-capable screen.

Lytro's approach to camera design and photography emerges from a relatively young area of research known as computational photography. Researchers in that field use various computing and mathematical techniques to achieve novel feats of photography and videography, including taking cell-phone photos in very low light or even taking pictures around corners.

Ramesh Raskar, who heads the computational photography research group at MIT's Media Lab, says that Lytro is the first company to try to commercialize computational photography. "The camera industry looks at what we do as very new and experimental," he says. "If Lytro are even partially successful, they will make people realize that computational photography can be practical." Raskar says that Lytro's basic design approach is sound and that he believes users of conventional cameras will be interested in the ability to focus after the fact.

However, Raskar adds that Lytro's sensor design causes its output to be of lower resolution than an equivalent sensor configured normally, because of the need to restrict pixels to receive light only from certain angles. Raskar's own research group have an alternative design that places a sheet perforated with small holes slightly in front of a camera's sensor. That arrangement doesn't have the effect of specializing pixels to certain directions of light as in Lytro's sensor, but it does attenuate light rays in a known way such that the path of different light rays can be mathematically worked out from what the sensor records. An image can then be refocussed as with Lytro's design.

Most importantly, the MIT lab's approach cuts the resolution of photos less, and in a way proportional to the amount of depth range a person chooses to be in focus, says Raskar. By contrast, Lytro's resolution penalty is always the same and likely means a cut of at least ten times in a sensor's output in each dimension, he says. Raskar says there is strong interest in commercializing his group's design, although he is far from ready to launch a competing product to Lytro's.

Ng says camera sensors are today so high-resolution that any resolution penatly should not be a problem. He argues that marketing efforts by camera manufacturers have led to consumers to believe they need more megapixels than they do. "Most of photos that are shared are a tiny fraction of a camera's ability," he says. Ng wouldn't say what the output quality of Lytro images is, preferring to say that his sensor captures 11 million light rays of data (or 11 "megarays"). The largest images shown by the company online are 800 pixels square. A standard six-by-four-inch photograph requires a digital photo that is 1,800 by 1,200 pixels in size.

6 Companies that could change the world

EmTech: Four Startups Bill Joy Says Could Change the World

The companies are turning abundant materials, and even waste materials, into fuels, chemicals, and building materials.

KEVIN BULLIS 10/19/2011

Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems and partner at the venerable venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, is talking up a handful of companies he's invested in that make use of abundant materials—in some cases materials that get thrown away or burned up—to make valuable commodities and reduce carbon emissions and replace petroleum. He described the new companies today at the Emtech Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Solidia: The company, based on technology developed at Rutgers, is using carbon dioxide to make building materials that have the strength of concrete, but that rather than emitting one ton of carbon dioxide per ton of concrete, Joy says, it actually uses carbon dioxide as a building material.

Siluria: Natural gas is extremely abundant, but it's not useful for much other than burning it to generate electricity. Unlike oil, it isn't a good building block for drugs and plastics. And unlike oil, it's difficult to ship. To this day, some oil fields burn off the natural gas that comes up the well because there's no economic way to get it to market. Siluria is using directed evolution techniques developed at MIT to quickly sort through large numbers of potential catalysts for breaking down methane and forming building blocks that can be used to make ethylene, an important feedstock material, and eventually a range of chemicals and liquid fuels. The company says it's catalysts work well enough now to make liquid fuels at about $50 a barrel.

Renmatix: Cellulosic materials like wood chips are abundant, but turning them into sugar, which can be used to make ethanol and diesel—is expensive. Renmatix uses water at high temperatures and pressures to break cellulose down. The company says it will be cheaper because it doesn't require the enzymes or expensive catalysts used in current methods.

Aquion: The company is building cheap batteries to store power from wind turbines and solar panels, which could be key to making up for the variability of these electricity sources. The battery uses abundant materials—manganese, salt, water, and carbon—rather than potentially expensive metals like nickel.

Computer cost of a book, with the power of a supercomputer-Mr.Tian (Chinese Internet Magnate)

This guy knows what he is doing.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/38726/

Jump start: Edward Tian poses in front of a sign for Beijing’s Cloud Valley, an incubator for startups in China’s cloud computing industry.
Cloud Valley

In a suburb of Beijing, 800 workers arrive each day to a glass-and-masonry office block and a shared mission: to create China's version of the Internet cloud.

Known as Cloud Valley, the 7,000-square-meter technology campus is the creation of Edward Tian, a 48-year old entrepreneur credited with bringing broadband Internet to China in the 1990s. On the campus, millions in investments from Tian's enterprises now fund engineers to wire-up servers into refrigerated shipping containers and all-night coding sessions by young programmers. These are components of what Tian hopes will become a complete supply chain for cloud computing—all of it Made in China.

China is home to the world's largest population of Internet users, some 485 million, as well as its most-used micro-blogging service, the freewheeling and often-controversial Sina Weibo. Despite a boisterous Internet culture, however, the country has not been on the cutting edge of computer innovation. China assembles PCs and laptops that were designed elsewhere, and its use of web-based technology still lags badly. Government offices often require fax communications, and many small businesses do accounting, literally, out of a shoebox. With cloud computing, Tian believes he can help Chinese businesses, individual users, and government departments leapfrog into the 21st century—bypassing decades of legacy hardware and software.

Cloud computing allows data and applications to be stored not on individual personal computers but on remote servers. That can cut IT costs and give access to powerful software via smart phones and laptops. As important as such advances are in the West, Tian says, they are even more important to China. "With the cloud, you could have access to unlimited storage power with a very simple computer," he says. "The cost of a computer could be like a book, maybe $100; all you'd really need is display. And this is fundamental for China, which is still a very poor country. To me, the goal of promoting cloud computing is to let every citizen—particularly those people in underdeveloped regions—afford computing access and information. My slogan is 'The price of a book, the power of a supercomputer.'"

Tian's ambitions dovetail with those of the Chinese government. In its most recent Five Year Plan, released in March, Beijing named information technology as one of seven strategic "emerging industries" targeted for investment totaling $600 billion (others include clean energy and advanced manufacturing). Cloud computing was placed under control of the newly created Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

"Government is a big advocate because they recognize the strategic importance of cloud," says Panha Chheng, senior director of strategy for iSoftStone, an IT services company headquartered in Beijing. "Since cloud is still relatively new, it is still possible for China to be an early adopter and then stay at the forefront."

Tian has a long history in China's Internet scene. In the early 1990s, as a graduate student at Texas Tech University, he cofounded a company, AsiaInfo Holdings, to bring Internet technology to China. In 1999, the Chinese government asked Tian to take the helm at the newly created China Netcom Group, with the goal of building the country's broadband network. Today, he is a business heavyweight who sits on the boards of Lenovo and MasterCard International and whose Rolodex includes many of Silicon Valley's elite.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Anonymous Hackers take down worlds largest child porn ring host (called DarkNet)

Although I dont necessarily support them, the Anonymous Hacker group has taken down the worlds largest child porn ring (called DarkNet). I dont support child porn at all, nasty stuff. Here is the article off CNN.

Anonymous takes down darknet child porn site on Tor network

By Sean Gallagher | Published about 4 hours ago

Pedophiles connecting to a concealed child pornography site got an unwelcome surprise last week, courtesy of the hacktivist group Anonymous. Lolita City, a child pornography site run on over a concealed “darknet,” has been taken down by Anonymous members, and account details of 1,589 users from the site’s database were posted as evidence.

The takedown is part of Anonymous’ Operation Darknet, an anti-child-pornography effort aimed at thwarting child pornographers operating on on the Tor network. Anonymous’ attack was focused on a hosting service called Freedom Hosting, which the group claims was the largest host of child pornography on Tor’s anonymized network. “By taking down Freedom Hosting, we are eliminating 40+ child pornography websites,” Anonymous claimed in its statement. “Among these is Lolita City, one of the largest child pornography websites to date, containing more than 100GB of child pornography.”

Based on a secure networking technology originally developed by the US Navy, Tor routes traffic through a collection of volunteer servers scattered across the Internet, making monitoring of what is being viewed or where communications are coming from difficult. The Tor network also hosts a private “dark” top-level domain, .onion (which is not an official TLD), via its Hidden Service Protocol; these sites are visible only to Tor users or those using a Tor gateway such as tor2web.org.

Because of its anonymity, Tor is widely used by individuals and groups seeking to communicate without being surveilled by authorities, employers, or eavesdroppers watching packets on public WiFi networks, as well as those wishing to visit websites anonymously without having their IP address recorded. According to the Tor Project’s own metrics, the service has recently been averaging over 400,000 users per day.

The Tor network was heavily used in Egypt earlier this year by dissidents to get around the Mubarak regime’s Internet shut-down, and is used by bloggers in Syria to communicate with the outside world. The network is also used by some who want to publish other sorts of material and conceal themselves from prying eyes, including pirated movie and software torrent publishers (which has made some Tor server providers the target ofDMCA takedown notices). It's also attracted child pornographers and the pedophiles who are their customers.

However, as revealed last December, the anonymity offered by Tor isn’t foolproof. While the IP addresses of sites on the Tor network are concealed, they have a digital fingerprint that can be used to identify services hosted from a single location, and track visits to that site. And while it blocks some services that are typically used for denial of service attacks and other hacks within the Tor networks, such as UDP, .onion sites remain just as vulnerable to hacking as sites on the open Internet.

The Anonymous operation against Lolita City began on October 14, when members discovered links to child pornography on a .onion site called The Hidden Wiki. According to the group’s statement, Anonymous members removed the links, but they were reposted by a site administrator. Anonymous then moved to shut down the site with a denial of service attack. Additionally, the hackers matched the digital fingerprints of links on the site to Freedom Hosting. After sending a message demanding that the hosting service remove the content, Anonymous’ hackers were able to exploit the PHP site with a SQL injection attack and extract the user database before launching a denial of service attack. “The server was using hardened PHP with escaping,” Anonymous said in its statement. “We were able to bypass it with with UTF-16 ASCII encoding.”