Up, A Flying House?

On Saturday morning, March 5, at dawn, a team of scientists, engineers and two world-class balloon pilots successfully launched a 16' X 16' house 18' tall with 300 8' colored weather balloons from a private airfield east of Los Angeles, and set a new world record for the largest balloon cluster flight ever attempted. The entire experimental aircraft was more than 10 stories high and reached an altitude of over 10,000 feet and flew for approximately one hour.

DARPA goes Avatar

Pentagon's Project 'Avatar': Same as the Movie, but With Robots Instead of Aliens | Danger Room | Wired.com

f you’ve got Danger Room’s taste in movies, you’ve probably seen both ideas on the big screen. Now Darpa, the Pentagon’s far-out research arm, wants to bring ‘em into the real world.

In the agency’s $2.8 billion budget for 2013, unveiled on Monday, they’ve allotted $7 million for a project titled “Avatar.” The project’s ultimate goal, not surprisingly, sounds a lot like the plot of the same-named (but much more expensive) flick.

According the agency, “the Avatar program will develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate.”

FBI monitoring social media

FBI Searches Social Media for Insider Trading

In January, the FBI put out a request for proposals to firms that could develop a system to monitor social networks as a way of predicting and analyzing crime. And, as we reported yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring an extensive list of keywords used online and marking them as "items of interest."

But this is the first time a law enforcement agency has said it is also monitoring social media for evidence of securities fraud.

Hack... My Car?

Anonymous vs The Vatican?

Anatomy of an Anonymous Attack on the Vatican

In the middle of last year, the hacking group Anonymous tried but failed to attack various Vatican Internet servers. A report that was just released by Imperva shows the extent of their prowess, and is a blueprint for other corporate security managers who want to try to protect their own networks in the future from miscreants. While the report itself doesn't divulge the destination of the attack, it has been widely reported by the New York Times and other news outlets that it was the Vatican.

Evernote stays with MySql (for now)

Evernote: NoSQL? Not Now, Thanks! We're Good

Big services demand NoSQL, right? With nearly a billion notes and almost 2 billion resource files, Evernote should be ready to jump on the NoSQL and Big Data bandwagon, right? Not so fast, says Evernote's CTO Dave Engberg. According to Engberg, some applications may benefit from modern key-value storage engines, but Evernote has good reasons for sticking with its MySQL setup for account metadata.

In a post yesterday on the Evernote Tech Blog, Engberg says that the ACID-compliance of MySQL's default storage engine (InnoDB) is key to their synchronization model (PDF).

Space Junk: 12000 pieces of debris orbit us

More than half a century of sending objects into space has left the Earth surrounded by junk. Bits of long-dead satellites, spent rocket stages and other debris orbit the planet at almost 18,000 mph, each chunk a potential hazard to working satellites or astronauts.

The Swiss have a plan, however. Scientists at the Swiss space centre at EPFL, the federal institute for technology in Lausanne, want to send a “janitor satellite” into orbit, to sweep up debris and permanently remove it from orbit.

The SFr10m (£7m) satellite, called CleanSpace One, could launch within five years, according to EPFL.