Technology

Phew: iPhone service restored in the Northeast

adamg — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:03:45 -0400

You can go back to mobiling it up, you iPhone users expressing your frustration on Twitter.

Rob Sama sums up the support hell he found himself in this morning: AT&T sucks.

When a Comcast Internet outage can mean life or death

adamg — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:09:56 -0400

Not everybody uses their broadband just to download porn. Sometimes on-call social workers need access to Google Maps to find out how to get to emergency locations in the middle of the night. And sometimes, Comcast just doesn't care, John Greiner-Ferris explains.

How would you make mass.gov better?

adamg — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 12:56:09 -0400

Tell the people who run it.

Forget CharlieCards, what about hacking pacemakers?

adamg — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:49:38 -0400

Those MIT kids got all the attention thanks to that little lawsuit and all, but Mass High Tech reports on some researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess and UMass-Amherst who figured out how to "change the settings on an implantable defibrillator by impersonating the computer it communicates with wirelessly."

More details on their work:

... William H. Maisel, a doctor at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital and Harvard Medical School, granted Fu access for the project. Fu received an old pacemaker as the doctor installed a new one in a patient. The team had to use complicated procedures to take apart the pacemaker and reverse engineer its processes. Halperin said that the devices have a built-in test mechanism which turns out to be a bug that can be exploited by hackers. There is no cryptographic key used to secure the wireless communication between the control device and the pacemaker. ...

A hair-raising amount of money

adamg — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:09:45 -0400

Follica, a Boston company that hopes to re-grow hair by using chemicals made by the skin when it's cut, has raised $11 million in venture funding, the Boston Business Journal reports.

Broadband provider becomes Best Buy marketing arm

adamg — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:07:04 -0400

I've been using Speakeasy for broadband since back in the day when 384k speeds were way cool. They provide good service and when things go wrong, their customer support has been helpful and quick - especially important for me since I often work at home for my all online day job. Fortunately, that didn't change when Best Buy bought them. But today I got this:

Effective immediately, Speakeasy is changing the Privacy and Security section of your Service Addendum and the Privacy Policy of the Master Service Agreement. These changes will allow Speakeasy to share your customer data with affiliated companies, including our parent company Best Buy and its subsidiaries. We are committed to protecting your personal information and will only share it for the purpose of providing products and/or services to you.

No, no, no. Spamming me with Best Buy ads is not providing me a product and/or service. It is sending me e-mail I didn't ask for and don't want to get (the Best Buy circulars in the Sunday paper are enough for me, guys). Oh, well, that's why God gave us e-mail filtering rules, I guess.

T bus info on an iPhone

adamg — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:37:48 -0400

Me2Bus Boston claims to let you know when the next bus will arrive at your stop - at least, based on published T schedules. They say it's for iPhones, but it works even on my laptop (albeit not with fancy finger whooshing).

Why we'll keep losing to California in high tech

adamg — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:35:17 -0400

Bijan Sabet is impressed by a new search engine called Cuil for a couple of reasons. One is its technology (although David at Blue Mass. Group is completely non-impressed). But the other is the way the new site came about: It was built by some former Google engineers - and they could do that because they live in California, where non-compete agreements in contracts are against the law, unlike in Massachusetts:

... So CA entrepreneurs have more rights & flexability compared to entrepreuneurs in NYC or MA or WA etc.

California has it right. We need to give startups & entrepreneurs the ability to innovate without breaking any NDAs or trade secrets. But they should be able to compete fairly and openly. That is how innovation happens. ...

Making a silk purse out of a sow's ear

adamg — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 17:31:20 -0400

ADL Chronicles is where Irv Arons plans to catalog all the interesting products that came out of the defunct Arthur D. Little labs in Cambridge.

Naturally, one of the first things described by Arons, a Product Technology Section staffer at ADL from 1969 until 1994, was the fabled silk purse made from a sow's ear - as well as the follow-up project 50 years later: lead balloons that actually rose in the air:

... The chemists' first step was to observe the production of silk by silkworms, analyzing both the process and the product. They found that the viscous liquid emitted from ducts in the worm's head turned to silk after contact with air and that it was chemically akin to glue. Following this lead, the lab purchased one hundred pounds of sows' ears (certified to be authentic by an affidavit from the supplier, Wilson & Company, meatpackers in Chicago) and reduced it to ten pounds of glue, which was turned to gelatin by adding small amounts of chrome alum and acetone. After much trial and error the chemists hit upon a means of producing fine strands by filtering the gelatin under pressure and forcing the substance through a perforated spinneret. ...

Big Dog - Boston Dynamics

Suldog — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:18:27 -0400

This is easily one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. Since it's BOSTON Dynamics, I figure it's worth putting the link out here.

Big Dog