Technology

Technologists at telecommunications hardware provider Cisco have predicted that within the next few months mobile carriers will begin to use offloading to seamlessly load-balance data from cellular networks on to faster, lower-latency Wi-Fi networks.

At a media briefing in North Sydney last week, Cisco Systems Australia chief technology officer Kevin Bloch said that in the next 12 months, he expected that carriers like Telstra would begin to make use of Wi-Fi to help balance the load from their cellular networks — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Cybercriminals are using a modified version of the ZeuS computer Trojan that no longer relies on command and control (C&C) servers for receiving instructions, according to Symantec security researchers.

ZeuS is very popular in the cybercriminal world because it’s capable of stealing a wide variety of information, documents and login credentials from infected systems. For many years it was the weapon of choice for most fraudsters targeting online banking systems.

The Trojan’s source code was published on Internet underground forums last year, paving the way for many third-party modifications and improvements

It may be possible to travel to space in an elevator as early as 2050, a major construction company has announced.

Obayashi, headquartered in Tokyo, on Monday unveiled a project to build a gigantic elevator that would transport passengers to a station 36,000 kilometres above the Earth.

For the envisaged project, the company would utilise carbon nanotubes, which are 20 times stronger than steel, to produce cables for the space elevator.

The idea of space elevators has been described in several science-fiction novels. Obayashi, however, believes it is possible to construct one in the real world thanks to carbon nanotubes, which were invented in the 1990s, the company said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Wi-Fi Alliance will launch a program to simplify the use of Wi-Fi hotspots in July, making it easier for both users and mobile operators to get off strained cellular networks.

Users of smartphones, tablets, cameras and other Wi-Fi-equipped devices will be able to get onto hotspots without entering usernames or passwords, the group said in a white paper released on Tuesday. The paper outlined the program, called Wi-Fi Certified Passpoint, and said the first phase of certification tests will begin in July. A second phase beginning next year will add more features — via redwolf.newsvine.com

So you’re out of the house for the weekend, and you’ve brought your trusty laptop with you, but you need something from your home machine. Here are a ton of different ways you can get to your home computer from anywhere, whether you just need a few files or full, unfettered access — via Lifehacker

After creating the Decaptcha software to solve audio CAPTCHAs, Stanford University’s researchers modified it and turned it against text and, quite recently, video CAPTCHAs with considerable success. Video CAPTCHAs have been touted by their developer, NuCaptcha, as the best and most secure method of spotting bots trying to pass themselves off as human users. Unfortunately for the company, researchers have managed to prove that over 90 percent of the company’s video CAPTCHAs can be decoded by using their Decaptcha software in conjunction with optical flow algorithms created by researchers in the computer vision field of study — via Slashdot