Cody Taylor

rsk writes “For the last few weeks I’ve been experiencing terrible streaming video performance from Netflix on both my Xbox 360 and PC. While my Xbox 360 would at least stream at a lower resolution, my PC cannot seem to avoid 2-hr. buffering times before playback even started. I smelled shenanigans and started digging. With some help finding the debug menu for the streaming video player, I set out to figure out why playback was so slow. It seems that Netflix is significantly throttling Watch Instantly users (on the PC) down to an unusable cap — in my case, 48 kbps — on a per-connection basis.”

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Reader Hugh Pickens sends in news from the NYTimes a few days back of what is believed to be a 500-year-old portrait of William Shakespeare, painted 6 years before his death. No existing portrait, that most experts consider to be genuine, was captured during Shakespeare’s lifetime. “It shows Shakespeare as a far more alluring figure than the solemn-faced, balding image that has been conveyed by previous engravings, busts and portraits. ‘His face is open and alive, with a rosy, rather sweet expression, perhaps suggestive of modesty,’ said a brochure for an exhibition opening in Stratford. The portrait came to light when Alec Cobbe visited the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2006 to see an exhibition, ‘Searching for Shakespeare,’ and realized that the Folger portrait, whose authenticity had been doubted for decades, was a copy of the one that had been in his family’s art collection since the mid-18th century, with the family unaware that the man depicted might be Shakespeare. Scientific studies at Cambridge showed that the oak panel on which the Cobbe portrait was mounted came from trees felled in the last 20 years of the 16th century, pointing to a date for the painting in the early 1600s.” For balance, the New Yorker disputes some of the claims in the NYTimes account, and for good measure tosses in another purported Shakespeare portrait from life, this one discovered 3 years ago in Canada.

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NigelTheFrog writes “Researchers in England have used fMRI to map the activity in volunteers’ hippocampuses. From these scans, they could pinpoint exactly where they were in a virtual reality landscape. ‘Specific parts of each participant’s hippocampus were active after that person had navigated to particular places in the room. A few practice rounds provided fodder for creating algorithms for each participant that correlated different brain activity patterns with different virtual locations. The algorithms, the team found, could in turn “predict” new virtual locations, not those used during practice rounds, based on each person’s pattern of brain activity.'”

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Al writes “The economy has hit green energy technologies hard, but technologies focused on energy efficiency and clean coal are still attracting money. Over the next few years, venture capitalists say that the biggest winners in clean tech will most likely be companies with technologies that improve efficiency. Such ventures often take advantage of cheap sensors, communications hardware, and software packages to monitor and control energy use both in buildings and on the electricity grid. High-capital businesses are now more likely to succeed if they can attract foreign funding. For instance, Great Point Energy, based in Cambridge, which has developed a process for converting coal into natural gas, has attracted 0m in funding from China.”

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dp619 writes “Capped per-unit royalties make FAT licensing agreements permissible under the GPL, and SD Times has found that Microsoft’s public license policy caps royalties at 0k. If the royalties are capped — as they seem to be — TomTom should be able to license FAT without violating the GPL. And if that is the case … TomTom needs some serious explaining to do as to why they aren’t licensing FAT. That said, Microsoft still needs to explain why it just cannot say that folks won’t violate the GPL if they license FAT under its terms.”

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eggegick writes “My wife has taken a number of college courses over the last three years and many of the classes used on-line materials rather than books. The problem was these required IE along with Java, Active X and/or various plug-ins (the names of which escapes me), and occasionally I’d have to tweak our firewall to allow these apps to run. I don’t think any of these training apps would work with Firefox. All of this made me cringe from a security point of view. Myself, I use just use Firefox, No-Script, our external firewall and common sense when using the web. I have a very old windows 2000 machine that I keep up to date. To my knowledge I’ve never had a virus or malware problem. Her computer is a relatively new XP machine, and this point she feels here computer has something wrong. But now she prefers to use my old machine instead of hers since it seems to be more responsive. We plan to run the recovery disk on hers. Assuming the college course work applications were part of the cause, what recommendations do any of you have when having to run this kind of software? Is there a VMware solution that would work — that is have a Windows image that is used temporarily for the course work and then discarded at the end of the semester (and how do you create such an image, and what does it cost?).”

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narramissic writes “Two separate research teams have found that the electromagnetic radiation that is generated when a computer keyboard is tapped is actually pretty easy to capture and decode. Using an oscilloscope and an inexpensive wireless antenna, the Ecole Polytechnique team was able to pick up keystrokes from virtually any keyboard, including laptops — with 95 percent accuracy over a distance of up to 20 meters. Using similar techniques, Inverse Path researchers Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco picked out keyboard signals from keyboard ground cables. On PS/2 keyboards, ‘the data cable is so close to the ground cable, the emanations from the data cable leak onto the ground cable, which acts as an antenna,’ Barisani said. That ground wire passes through the PC and into the building’s power wires, where the researchers can pick up the signals using a computer, an oscilloscope and about 0 worth of other equipment. Barisani and Bianco will present their findings at the CanSecWest hacking conference next week in Vancouver. The Ecole Polytechnique team has submitted their research for peer review and hopes to publish it very soon.”

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Muad’Dave writes “CNN is reporting that the crew of the International Space Station was forced to take refuge from a possible collision of the ISS with a piece of space debris Thursday. From the article: ‘Floating debris from a satellite forced the crew of the international space station to retreat to a safety capsule Thursday, according to a NASA news release. .. The debris was too close for the space station to move out of the way, so the station’s three crew members were temporarily evacuated to a the station’s Soyuz TMA-13 capsule, NASA said.'” Update: 03/12 18:42 GMT by T : The original story incorrectly said the ISS had 18 crew members. Luckily for the three in the Soyuz, that was a mistake.

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eggegick writes “My wife has taken a number of college courses over the last three years and many of the classes used on-line materials rather than books. The problem was these required IE along with Java, Active X and/or various plug-ins (the names of which escapes me), and occasionally I’d have to tweak our firewall to allow these apps to run. I don’t think any of these training apps would work with Firefox. All of this made me cringe from a security point of view. Myself, I use just use Firefox, No-Script, our external firewall and common sense when using the web. I have a very old windows 2000 machine that I keep up to date. To my knowledge I’ve never had a virus or malware problem. Her computer is a relatively new XP machine, and this point she feels here computer has something wrong. But now she prefers to use my old machine instead of hers since it seems to be more responsive. We plan to run the recovery disk on hers. Assuming the college course work applications were part of the cause, what recommendations do any of you have when having to run this kind of software? Is there a VMware solution that would work — that is have a Windows image that is used temporarily for the course work and then discarded at the end of the semester (and how do you create such an image, and what does it cost?).”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

narramissic writes “Two separate research teams have found that the the electromagnetic radiation that is generated when a computer keyboard is tapped is actually pretty easy to capture and decode. Using an oscilloscope and an inexpensive wireless antenna, the the Ecole Polytechnique team was able to pick up keystrokes from virtually any keyboard, including laptops — with 95 percent accuracy over a distance of up to 20 meters. Using similar techniques, Inverse Path researchers Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco picked out keyboard signals from keyboard ground cables. On PS/2 keyboards, ‘the data cable is so close to the ground cable, the emanations from the data cable leak onto the ground cable, which acts as an antenna,’ Barisani said. That ground wire passes through the PC and into the building’s power wires, where the researchers can pick up the signals using a computer, an oscilloscope and about 0 worth of other equipment. Barisani and Bianco will present their findings at the CanSecWest hacking conference next week in Vancouver. The Ecole Polytechnique team has submitted their research for peer review and hopes to publish it very soon.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.