Technology

A trawl of Chinese crowd-sourcing websites — where people can earn a few pennies for small jobs such as labelling images — has uncovered a multimillion-dollar industry that pays hundreds of thousands of people to distort interactions in social networks and to post spam.

The report’s authors, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also found evidence that crowd-sourcing sites in the US are similarly dominated by ethically questionable jobs. They conclude that the rapid growth of this way of making money will make paid shills a serious security problem for websites and those who use them around the world. A paper describing their results is available on the Arxiv pre-print server — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The world’s smallest working steam engine has been built in Germany, according to a team of researchers.

The microscopic model was based on a 195-year-old design by the inventor Robert Stirling.

Changes included the replacement of the original pistons with a laser beam.

The physicists said they were astonished by how efficiently the machine converted heat into power — but said it did not run smoothly and had no practical use in its current form — via redwolf.newsvine.com

— via It’s Tactical

Full-blown project management demands dedicated software, but for simpler tasks a spreadsheet can do the job. Microsoft presentations and spreadsheet expert Glenna Shaw is sharing a project plan template which lets you plan your project and track milestones.

As well as letting you define project parameters, the spreadsheet is designed for easy integration with PowerPoint so you can easily produce update presentations on your progress. One detail to watch for: the spreadsheet calculates holiday dates for the US, so follow the instructions in Glenna’s post for deleting those (and adding Australian ones if you wish) — via Lifehacker

The idea that your smart phone could make you vulnerable to a thief has triggered a strong reaction.

Earlier this week I highlighted this problem and readers asked why the cell phone’s serial number couldn’t be used to block stolen phones, rendering them useless.

I assumed that idea was simplistic. Surely there was a good reason why it wouldn’t work.

There isn’t.

Randal Markey of the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association explained that not only is it possible for carriers to block the use of stolen phones, Australian phone carriers have done it for nearly 10 years.

What it means is stealing a phone is a complete waste of time, Markey said. Although the thief could probably use it as a paperweight.

But American phone companies aren’t doing that. When asked why, representatives from Sprint, Verizon and AT&T instead touted their apps to locate a lost phone or wipe out a SIM card. But that’s not the issue. Petty thieves ditch the SIM card immediately. That doesn’t shut down the phone — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Fraudsters are increasingly using social engineering techniques to steal mobile phone numbers and intercept their owners’ online banking verification codes, according to an investigation published in the inaugural Australian print edition of SC Magazine.

With the country’s police forces too stretched to investigate and telcos unwilling to accept responsibility for the problem, Australia’s banks have been forced to wear the risk and cost of the fraud as they look to new methods of protecting online accounts — via redwolf.newsvine.com

— via HackCollege

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live

— via Martin Golding

Millions of Hewlett Packard Co.’s LaserJet printers contain a security weakness that could allow attackers to take control of the systems, steal data from them and issue commands that could cause the devices to overheat and catch fire, according to two researchers from Columbia University.

Printers from other vendors likely have the same issue, leaving users of those devices exposed to similar threats, the researchers said — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Japanese component maker Rohm said it has developed an experimental chip that can send and receive signals at terahertz-range frequencies, which can carry data at speeds of up to 30Gbps and penetrate clothing and paper.

The company aims to bring the device to market in the next three or four years at an initial price of less than ¥1,000 (US$13), a spokeswoman said Tuesday. That would allow for its use in home electronics and other consumer devices — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The debate over whether to use liquid or fixed layouts on the web is one of those perennial and not-very-interesting debates like Mac vs Windows or Emacs vs Vim. What if, however, there were a simple way to offer up both a fixed width and liquid layout on the same page? Peace on the web? Well, not exactly, but it’s a pretty clever trick nonetheless.

CSS guru Daniel Glazman (co-chairman of the CSS Working Group) shows you how to use just one pseudo class on a single HTML document and still create two different layouts, one liquid, one fixed — via Webmonkey

Internode has launched a new service allowing customers to utilise the company’s Naked ADSL2+ plans while keeping their traditional home phone number for use with Internet calls.

The service — which up until now Internode says has not been technologically feasible — will allow customers to switch from traditional landline plans to naked (or home phone-less services) where no home phone is provided, but retain their home phone number.

Normally by switching to a naked plan, customers lose their home phone number because no landline service is used. Instead they’re forced to rely on a new number provided by a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) provider such as Internode, or not use a home phone at all.

However in what Internode says is a big breakthrough for its customers, it says it has found a solution to the number loss issue that will allow customers to switch to its NodePhone VoIP platform while retaining their home phone number — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Do you think that you’ll never be able to afford a robot of your own that isn’t a toy? Well, if you can get Swiss robot-maker K-Team Corporation to sell you one, chances are you can easily afford a Kilobot — perhaps even a whole bunch of them. Designed and first built by Harvard University’s Self-Organizing Systems Research Group, the three-legged robots aren’t much larger than the 3.4-volt button cell batteries that power them, and move by vibrating across smooth, flat surfaces. They were created to study robotic swarming behaviour, with the intention that tens, hundreds or even thousands of them could be used simultaneously in one experiment. Harvard has just announced that it has licensed the Kilobot technology to K-Team, which will commercially manufacture the robots so that other groups and institutions can purchase them for their own research.

Along with its lithium-ion battery and rigid legs, each Kilobot incorporates an LED bulb, two motors (which vibrate the legs), a wide-angle infrared transceiver, and a microcontroller. An unlimited number of the little guys can be programmed via a computer-linked overhead infrared controller in under 40 seconds, and each have the ability to act autonomously, based on the parameters of that programming — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Finnish boffins have developed a proxy to reduce the power required for mobile web access by up to 74 per cent, taking that consumption of power into the cloud instead.

The proxy works in much the same way as Opera Turbo, or Amazon’s Silk, in that it gathers the required content and pre-renders it before delivery. But by focusing on reducing the power consumed, rather than accelerating the web experience, the Aalto University researchers reckon they’ve got power consumed by browsing pages down by 74 per cent — via redwolf.newsvine.com