HackingTheUniverse

You are browsing the archives of 2012 January.

DARPA-Funded Hacker’s Tiny $50 Spy Computer Hides In Offices, Drops From Drones – [forbes.com] At the Shmoocon security conference Friday in Washington D.C., O’Connor plans to present the F-BOMB, or Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors. Built from just the hardware in a commercially-available PogoPlug mini-computer, a few tiny antennae, eight gigabytes of flash [...]

In the fall of 2011, Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig decided to offer their “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course at Stanford in an online delivery and free. Responding to an email invitation that went viral in the blogosphere, over 160,000 students registered to take the course, although many of them dropped their participation early. The [...]

Andrey Kolmogorov was born in Russia in 1903 and was a mathematician who made contributions to the fields of probability, topology, turbulence, and complexity. He contributed over 300 hundred papers in most areas of mathematics and also supported creating special schools for gifted students. In 1933, Kolmogorov established a set of axioms that he considered [...]

Swarms of small robotic devices can be used to collect sensory data, gather samples, map terrains, and assemble and construct objects. The qualities of a swarm of small objects make these tasks applicable in a variety of forms. They may be used to perform medical diagnostics inside a body or explore objects in space. Ant-Sized [...]

We use a variety of terms to qualify what we consider to be intelligent life: intelligence, consciousness, self-awareness, higher consciousness. There seem to be two primary ingredients common to most of the definitions of intelligent life and those are: Intelligence as some level of analytical reasoning ability and perhaps also the experience or knowledge necessary [...]

Composites are made by combining two different materials with different properties: Concrete – concrete by itself is a composite of cement and crushed rock, which has a high strength against compression or crushing (like rock) but can be poured like a liquid into forms to create specific shapes before it hardens. Concrete does not have [...]

Data mining is the process of searching through data sets (typically large) and extracting smaller data sets that often show some form of pattern or relevance to the data that was not obvious before the extraction. As data sets grow larger, the need for automated tools also grows. Usually, the purpose of data mining is [...]

Maxwell‘s equations showed that light, electricity and magnetism all had similar wave characteristics and suggested that light was a variation of the electro-magnetic wave form. If this was true, light and other electro-magnetic waves impacting metal would cause a flow of electric current in the metal. At the time, scientists were using electrified glass tubes [...]

MiniPwner is a battery powered TP-Link TL-WR703N router running OpenWrt. It has an ethernet port, integrated wifi and some tools installed. It is small and cheap. MiniPwner – [minipwner.com] What is the MiniPwner The MiniPwner is a penetration testing “drop box”. It is designed as a small, simple but powerful device that can be inconspicuously [...]

Construction on the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) is scheduled to begin in 2012. The E-ELT will be built at Cerro Armazones in northern Chile and will have a primary mirror that is almost 40 meters across. The European Extremely Large Telescope – [eso.org] Extremely Large Telescopes are considered worldwide as one of the highest [...]