HackingTheUniverse

You are browsing the archives of 2009 April.

This describes a concept of building spacecraft using “flux pinned interfaces” (FPI) that make the spacecraft easily reconfigurable. Flux pinning is the process of maintaining structural integrity by using superconductors and magnetic fields to create “non-contacting virtual structures”. Flux-Pinned Spacecraft – [ spacecraftresearch.com] (at Cornell Univ.) The effective stiffness and damping of a flux-pinned connection [...]

Conficker has been updating nodes via encrypted p2p and is beginning to look like a conventional botnet with commercial spamming capability. New Conficker Action – [f-secure.com] A new variant of Conficker was found yesterday. We’re still investigating the files but here’s what we know so far Conflicker Worm / Botnet Downloads Mystery Payload – [nist.org] [...]

In the main asteroid belt, there are groups of asteroids that form clusters in similar orbits. Within the groups are smaller groups known as families who show orbital characteristics that are so similar that it has led to to theories that these families were formed by larger rocks being broken up by collisions. Main belt [...]

Wikitude is a travel guide smartphone application for the android platform that keeps track of your current location by GPS and links it to search results about the location. The results can be presented in a variety of forms including dots on a map with information bubbles or a camera view that superimposes information over [...]

The Neurosky Mindset is a headset that can pick up a variety of brainwave activity and interact with nearby software via bluetooth. This allows the user to interact with games, virtual reality environments and much more based on changes in their thought patterns. Neurosky – [neurosky.com] Begin harnessing the power of your mind with the [...]

Adam is a robot scientist that uses scientific analysis to carry out and compare test results and has the ability to independently discover new information. Adam uses AI based software to develop hypotheses, carry out experiments and analyze the results. While Adam is a prototype and still needs some support and attention, this is likely [...]

The “Drake Equation” was composed by Frank Drake in 1960 as a means to predict the chances that there is intelligent life somewhere else in the universe. The equation includes a series of values that are estimated by common sense or logic or any other means available. Once the values are filled in, the equation [...]

Grid Appliance is a virtual appliance (a virtual machine system application) that enables grid computing across multiple hardware platforms using an IPOP virtual network and Condor grid scheduling software. The software is linux based, open source and runs on VMWare workstation, player or server. VirtualBox and KVM images are also supported. The appliance can be [...]

Network miner is a passive network sniffer that captures live packets and performs analysis on them to determine operating systems, sessions, hostnames, ports and more. It can automatically recognize and extract plain text data, images, files, credentials, and DNS information. It uses passive OS fingerprint databases from p0f, Ettercap, Satori and Fingerbank for identification. It [...]

Benoit Mandlebrot was born in Poland in 1924 and is known as the “father of fractals”. He is a mathematician who has a reputation for establishing fractal geometry as a mainstream field. He created the term, “fractal” and has applied his ideas to fields such as; economics, fluid dynamics, and cosmology. “Clouds are not spheres, [...]