Implantable 'lab on a chip' monitors health via Bluetooth

Implantable 'lab on a chip' monitors health via Bluetooth

Researchers in Switzerland have developed a tiny personal blood testing laboratory on a chip that gives an immediate analysis of substances in the body and transmits the results over a mobile phone. 
The device integrates five sensors for different proteins, a radio transmitter and a power delivery system into a few cubic millimetres so the device can be implanted under the skin of the patient. Outside the body, a battery patch provides 1/10 watt of power, through the patient’s skin so that there’s no need to operate every time the battery needs changing. 


By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Lime wants a Raspberry Pi for RF - Electronics Eetimes

Lime wants a Raspberry Pi for RF - Electronics Eetimes:

RF chip developer Lime Microsystems wants to make its configurable RF hardware as ubiquitous as the Raspberry Pi low cost computer by making it open source.

The company, based in Fleet, has provided all the schematics and documentation for the board for an open source project called Myriad-RF, and is looking for partners to make more boards to bring the cost down. The board is currently made by Taiwanese distribution partner Azio but costs $300.

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Search Engine Project Finds Internet-Facing Critical Infrastructure Devices

Two US researchers have identified over 7,000 critical control devices that are accessible via the Internet and so may be vulnerable to attack.
The researchers from Infracritical built a suite of scripts that includes 600 search terms for equipment built and managed by close to seven dozen manufacturers of SCADA equipment and support systems for SCADA. The pair found not only devices used for critical infrastructure such as energy, water and other utilities, but also SCADA devices for HVAC systems, building automation control systems, large mining trucks, traffic control systems, red-light cameras and even crematoriums. They initially approached the US Department of Homeland Security with a list of close to 500,000 devices; DHS helped pare the list down to search terms for 50 critical systems it believed were relevant. That eventually shrunk the list of devices to 7,200.
Shodan Search Engine Project Enumerates Internet-Facing Critical Infrastructure Devices 

'via Blog this'

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Point of Sale equipment targetted by hacking malware

A security firm has found that point of sale equipment around the world has been targetted by malware to skim off credit card numbers, a deeply embedded security attack.
"Custom-made malware that has been used over the past 2-3 months to infect hundreds POS systems," said the Seculert Blog: Dexter - Draining blood out of Point of Sales. "Some of the targeted POS systems include big-name retailers, hotels, restaurants and even private parking providers. The name Dexter comes from a string found in one of the malware related files and its Track 1 / Track 2 online parsing tool "
Over 30 percent of the targeted POS systems were using Windows Servers, which may acocunt for how this is happening.


By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Researcher Finds 23 SCADA Security Flaws in One Morning

This is the reason I bang on about security for embedded systems, particularly for the Internet of Things:

Researcher Aaron Portnoy found a remote code execution bug and a denial-of-service (DoS) flaw in Rockwell Automation SCADA products; three remote execution flaws and one DoS bug in Schneider Electric products; a DoS flaw in Indusoft SCADA products; eight DoS flaws in Realflex SCADA products; and three remote code execution bugs, two DoS, and three file vulnerabilities in Eaton products, a total of 23 from a simple scan. And if he can do it, so can hackers.

It also didn't take long - the first exploitable zero day bug took a mere 7 minutes to discover from the time the software was installed. For someone who has spent a lot of time auditing software used in the enterprise and consumer space, SCADA was absurdly simple in comparison he said.

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Ten... technology FAILS • The Register

Ten... technology FAILS from The Register:

Nokia's N-Gage, Palm's Foleo, Motorola's Atrix, Apple's Newton MessagePad, HD DVD, Sony's Rolly, Sony's Mylo, Philips' CD-i, Commodore's CD-TV, IBM's PCJr, the Camputer's Lynx, Gizmondo, the Phantom, Atari's Jaguar, MySpace, Beenz - behind every iPad there are dozens and dozens of technology products that aspired to greatness but were successful only in their distinct lack of commercial success.

Some were simply beaten by better rivals, others were just released too early or too late, still more were just plain wrong. Not all were specific products - entire categories of goods and services have been hailed as the Next Big Thing only to disappear with nothing but a handful of miserable early adopters to show they were ever there.

Here, then, are some of our favourite tech fails - products, technologies, concepts and trends - from the past 30-odd years.

Great piece from the Register - how many do you remember? (Sadly, all of them for me!) 

The Dragon 32 is 30 • Reg Hardware

The Dragon 32 is 30 • Reg Hardware:

'via Blog this'

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

Adding a '3D print' button to animation software

By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk

A group of graphics experts led by computer scientists at Harvard have created an add-on software tool that translates video game characters—or any other three-dimensional software animations—into fully articulated action figures, with the help of a 3D printer.

The project is described in detail in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Graphics and will be presented at the ACMSIGGRAPH conference on August 7.

Besides its obvious consumer appeal, the tool constitutes a remarkable piece of code and an unusual conceptual exploration of the virtual and physical worlds.

"In animation you're not necessarily trying to model the physical world perfectly; the model only has to be good enough to convince your eye," said lead author Moritz Bächer, a graduate student in computer science at SEAS. "In a virtual world, you have all this freedom that you don't have in the physical world. You can make a character so anatomically skewed that it would never be able to stand up in real life, and you can make deformations that aren't physically possible. You could even have a head that isn't attached to its body, or legs that occasionally intersect each other instead of colliding."

Returning a virtual character to the physical world therefore turns the traditional animation process on its head, in a sort of reverse rendering, as the image that's on the screen must be adapted to accommodate real-world constraints.

Bächer and his coauthors demonstrated their new method using characters from Spore, an evolution-simulation video game. Spore allows players to create a vast range of creatures with numerous limbs, eyes, and body segments in almost any configuration, using a technique called procedural animation to quickly and automatically animate whatever body plan it receives.

As with most types of computer animation, the characters themselves are just "skins"—meshes of polygons—that are manipulated like marionettes by an invisible skeleton.

"As an animator, you can move the skeletons and create weight relationships with the surface points," says Bächer, "but the skeletons inside are non-physical with zero-dimensional joints; they're not useful to our fabrication process at all. In fact, the skeleton frequently protrudes outside the body entirely."

The team of computer graphics experts developed a software tool that achieves two things: it identifies the ideal locations for the action figure's joints, based on the character's virtual articulation behaviour, and then it optimizes the size and location of those joints for the physical world. For instance, a spindly arm might be too thin to hold a robust joint, and the joints in a curving spine might collide with each other if they are too close.

The software uses a series of optimization techniques to generate the best possible model, incorporating both hinges and ball-and-socket joints. It also builds some friction into these surfaces so that the printed figure will be able to hold its poses.

The tool also perfects the model's skin texture. Procedurally animated characters tend to have a very roughly defined, low-resolution skin to enable rendering in real time. Details and textures are typically added through a type of virtual optical illusion: manipulating the normals that determine how light reflects off the surface. In order to have these details show up in the 3D print, the software analyzes that map of normals and translates it into a realistic surface texture.

Then the 3D printer sets to work, and out comes a fully assembled, robust, articulated action figure.

Before and after. (Image courtesy of Moritz Bächer.)

---

"With an animation, you always have to view it on a two-dimensional screen, but this allows you to just print it and take an actual look at it in 3D," says Bächer. "I think that’s helpful to the artists and animators, to see how it actually feels in reality and get some feedback. Right now, perhaps they can print a static scene, just a character in one stance, but they can’t see how it really moves. If you print one of these articulated figures, you can experiment with different stances and movements in a natural way, as with an artist’s mannequin."

Bächer's model does not allow deformations beyond the joints, so squishy, stretchable bodies are not yet captured in this process. But that type of printed character might be possible by incorporating other existing techniques.

"Perhaps in the future someone will invent a 3D printer that prints the body and the electronics in one piece," Bächer muses. "Then you could create the complete animated character at the push of a button and have it run around on your desk."

Harvard’s Office of Technology Development has filed a patent application and is working with the Pfister Lab to commercialize the new technology by licensing it to an existing company or by forming a start-up. Their near-term areas of interest include cloud-based services for creating highly customized, user-generated products, such as toys, and enhancing existing animation and 3D printer software with these capabilities.

Black Hat hacker gains access to 4 million hotel rooms with Arduino microcontroller | ExtremeTech

Black Hat hacker gains access to 4 million hotel rooms with Arduino microcontroller | ExtremeTech:


Bad news: With less than $50 of off-the-shelf hardware and a little bit of programming, it’s possible for a hacker to gain instant, untraceable access to millions of key card-protected hotel rooms.

Bristol software firm develops first anti-virus protection for TVs : SW Innovation News

Bristol software firm develops first anti-virus protection for TVs : SW Innovation News:

'via Blog this'

Transparent memory chips are coming

Transparent memory chips are coming:

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By Nick Flaherty www.flaherty.co.uk