3D-Printed Face Made This Man’s Life Whole Again

Mashable

Thanks to 3D-printing technology, Eric Moger is getting his life back.

Four years ago, doctors detected a massive tumor growing beneath the skin on his face. They successfully removed the cancerous growth, but were also forced to remove most of the entire left side of his face.

After the lifesaving procedure, the British restaurant manager had a gaping hole where his eye, cheek bone, and part of his jaw had been. Moger would have gone on to live the rest of his life with half his face missing.

This is what Moger looked like prior the surgery. This is him with the prosthetic.

3D Printing is Way Scarier Than Plastic Guns

ShellyPalmer

Ever the publicity hound, Sen. Chuck Schumer, who obviously has no idea what additive manufacturing actually is, came out big and strong against “stomach-churning” 3D printed plastic guns last week.

Ever the publicity hound, Sen. Chuck Schumer, who obviously has no idea what additive manufacturing actually is, came out big and strong against “stomach-churning” 3D printed plastic guns last week.

“Everyone’s seen the movie ‘In The Line of Fire,’ where one of the great bad guys, [played by] John Malkovich, labored at making a gun out of plastic and wood so it could get through metal detectors and he could assassinate the president…” Senator Schumer went on to say, “But that was only a movie, and just this week, it has become reality. We’re facing a situation where anyone — a felon, a terrorist — can open a gun factory in their garage and the weapons they make will be undetectable. It’s stomach-churning.”

This naive, sensationalist rant so misunderstands the issue, I almost don’t know where to start.  He goes on to inform the public that because these guns are made of plastic, they are undetectable, so he must introduce legislation that will make it illegal to possess an undetectable or an untraceable weapon.  This is like putting a “Band-Aid on a heart attack.”  Sen. Schumer simply doesn’t understand what he is dealing with.  In fact, most of us don’t.

An iPhone Jury-Rigged as a Microscope

NYTimes

By sticking a little $8 lens to an iPhone with a piece of double-sided tape, a Canadian doctor has produced a microscope that works reasonably well at diagnosing intestinal worms in children.

The invention, described recently in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, was tested in Tanzania on 200 stool samples from children who had a mix of hookworms, roundworms and giant roundworms.

A three-millimeter ball lens was taped over the camera lens of an iPhone 4. The zoom was increased to maximum, and slides, with tape atop the samples, were pressed right up to the lens. A pen flashlight shone light through the slide.

This inexpensive arrangement did not match the accuracy of a scan of the same slides with a conventional microscope, but it did about 70 percent as well.

The iPhone setup correctly detected giant roundworm eggs 81 percent of the time and roundworm eggs 54 percent of the time. But it was only 14 percent accurate at finding hookworm eggs.

What Could Go Wrong?

Pentagon Paying China — Yes, China — To Carry Data

The Pentagon is so starved for bandwidth that it’s paying a Chinese satellite firm to help it communicate and share data.

U.S. troops operating on the African continent are now using the recently-launched Apstar-7 satellite to keep in touch and share information. And the $10 million, one-year deal lease — publicly unveiled late last week during an ordinarily-sleepy Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing — has put American politicians and policy-makers in bit of a bind. Over the last several years, the U.S. government has publicly and loudly expressed its concern that too much sensitive American data passes through Chinese electronics — and that those electronics could be sieves for Beijing’s intelligence services. But the Pentagon says it has no other choice than to use the Chinese satellite. The need for bandwidth is that great, and no other satellite firm provides the continent-wide coverage that the military requires.

“That bandwidth was available only on a Chinese satellite,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy Doug Loverro told a House Armed Services Committee panel, in remarks first reported by InsideDefense.com. “We recognize that there is concerns across the community on the usage of Chinese satellites to support our warfighter. And yet, we also recognize that our warfighters need support, and sometimes we must go to the only place that we can get it from.”

What Happened When One Man Pinged the Whole Internet

MITechnologyReview

You probably haven’t heard of HD Moore, but up to a few weeks ago every Internet device in the world, perhaps including some in your own home, was contacted roughly three times a day by a stack of computers that sit overheating his spare room. “I have a lot of cooling equipment to make sure my house doesn’t catch on fire,” says Moore, who leads research at computer security company Rapid7. In February last year he decided to carry out a personal census of every device on the Internet as a hobby. “This is not my day job; it’s what I do for fun,” he says.

Moore has now put that fun on hold. “[It] drew quite a lot of complaints, hate mail, and calls from law enforcement,” he says. But the data collected has revealed some serious security problems, and exposed some vulnerable business and industrial systems of a kind used to control everything from traffic lights to power infrastructure.

Moore’s census involved regularly sending simple, automated messages to each one of the 3.7 billion IP addresses assigned to devices connected to the Internet around the world (Google, in contrast, collects information offered publicly by websites). Many of the two terabytes (2,000 gigabytes) worth of replies Moore received from 310 million IPs indicated that they came from devices vulnerable to well-known flaws, or configured in a way that could to let anyone take control of them.

It’s a Feature, Not a Bug!

Secrets of FBI Smartphone Surveillance Tool Revealed in Court Fight

A legal fight over the government’s use of a secret surveillance tool has provided new insight into how the controversial tool works and the extent to which Verizon Wireless aided federal agents in using it to track a suspect.

Court documents in a case involving accused identity thief Daniel David Rigmaiden describe how the wireless provider reached out remotely to reprogram an air card the suspect was using in order to make it communicate with the government’s surveillance tool so that he could be located.

Rigmaiden, who is accused of being the ringleader of a $4 million tax fraud operation, asserts in court documents that in July 2008 Verizon surreptitiously reprogrammed his air card to make it respond to incoming voice calls from the FBI and also reconfigured it so that it would connect to a fake cell site, or stingray, that the FBI was using to track his location.

Air cards are devices that plug into a computer and use the wireless cellular networks of phone providers to connect the computer to the internet. The devices are not phones and therefore don’t have the ability to receive incoming calls, but in this case Rigmaiden asserts that Verizon reconfigured his air card to respond to surreptitious voice calls from a landline controlled by the FBI.

Maryland proposal to claim copyright on students’ work prompts backlash, legal review

Fox

According to a draft of the proposal obtained by FoxNews.com, “Works created by employees and/or students specifically for use by the Prince George’s County Public School or a specific school or department within PGCPS, are properties of the Board of Education even if created on the employee’s or student’s time and with use of their materials.”

The draft policy prompted a backlash from teachers and education activists — causing the board to put the policy on hold pending a more thorough legal review.

As written, though, the policy could include anything published on the school’s website, curriculum documents, instructional materials, platforms and software developed for use by the school system, as well as a broad-reaching “other works created for classroom use and instruction” category.

“A Line Has Been Crossed”

CBSNews

The hacker-activist group Anonymous says it hijacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission to avenge the death of Aaron Swartz, an Internet activist who committed suicide.

The website of the commission, an independent agency of the judicial branch, was taken over early Saturday and replaced with a message warning that when Swartz killed himself two weeks ago “a line was crossed.”

The message read in part:

Citizens of the world,
Anonymous has observed for some time now the trajectory of justice in the United States with growing concern. We have marked the departure of this system from the noble ideals in which it was born and enshrined. We have seen the erosion of due process, the dilution of constitutional rights, the usurpation of the rightful authority of courts by the “discretion” or prosecutors. We have seen how the law is wielded less and less to uphold justice, and more and more to exercise control, authority and power in the interests of oppression or personal gain.”

The hackers say they’ve infiltrated several government computer systems and copied secret information that they now threaten to make public.

At least someone is taking a stand, rather than sitting around hand-wringing…

FCC Chair Wants Gigabit Internet Access In All 50 States By 2015

Consumerist

With some critics claiming the U.S. is falling behind other developed nations in access to high-speed Internet, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has announced the “Gigabit City Challenge,” hoping to get at least one city in each state to offer gigabit Internet access by 2015.

“American economic history teaches a clear lesson about infrastructure. If we build it, innovation will come,” said Genachowski today at the U.S. Conference of Mayors Winter Meeting. “The U.S. needs a critical mass of gigabit communities nationwide so that innovators can develop next-generation applications and services that will drive economic growth and global competitiveness.”

Faster, please!

Illiterate Kids Learn to Hack Tablet Computers with No Outside Help

NextNature.net

The One Laptop Per Child program is experimenting with what at first seems to be the lazy way to philanthropy: dropping off tablet computers in remote Ethiopian villages and then simply leaving. Could illiterate children learn not only how to operate the Motorola Zooms, but teach themselves to read? According to  Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child, the results were astonishing:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”