California’s Silicon Valley’s tech gurus are famous for their technical problem-solving skills, but as we’ve all experienced, sometimes there’s a ghost in the machine, that particular gremlin that no amount of tech support seems to exorcise. But tech companies know who to call, and it’s a specialist with a seemingly unlikely skillset…
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With the help of a smart tablet and Angry Birds, children can now do something typically reserved for engineers and computer scientists: program a robot to learn new skills. The Georgia Institute of Technology project is designed to serve as a rehabilitation tool and to help kids with disabilities.
The researchers have paired a small humanoid robot with an Android tablet. Kids teach it how to play Angry Birds, dragging their finger on the tablet to whiz the bird across the screen. In the meantime, the robot watches what happens and records “snapshots” in its memory.read more
A hacker recently led a disturbingly successful attack against a U.S. military web server, that took security services completely by surprise. Russ Cooper, of TruSecure, says, “We believe the military was being targeted.” The timing of the attack suggests it may be connected to the war in Iraq. Cooper says a cryptic message left on the attacked computer read, “Welcome to the Unicorn beachhead.” Meanwhile, the Arabic satellite television channel Al Jazeera, which broadcast the heart rending video of the U.S. soldiers captured by Iraqi forces, as well as corpses of U.S. soldiers, says computer hackers have crashed its website, which also carried the images.
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