Technical Devices

Hackerspace Global Grid (HGG) like many opposes the entertainment industry’s vision of the internet. A team of hackers calling themselves HGG detailed there plans to create an independent network using low orbit satellites and various ground stations at Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin. The goal of HGG is an uncensorable internet in space. The team expects to have three ground station prototypes ready in the first half of 2012. The ground stations are expected to cost $130. The big hurdle will be getting satellites up into space which isn’t easy. I f

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St. Clair Intellectual Properties, a company with a history of suing mobile phone vendors over patents, has expanded a patent infringement lawsuit that has targeted Apple, RIM and HTC to LG, Motorola Mobility and Samsung.

St. Clair alleges that the Android smartphones and tablets made by LG, Motorola Mobility and Samsung violate six of its patents:

5,630,163: Computer having a single bus supporting multiple bus architectures operating with different bus parameters
5,710,929: Multi-state power management for computer systems
5,758,175: Multi-mode power switching for computer systems
5,892,959: Computer activity monitor providing idle thread and other event sensitive clock and power control
6,079,025: System and method of computer operating mode control for power consumption reduction
5,822,610: Mappable functions from single chip/multi-chip processors for computers

The filed patent infringement lawsuits are expansions of a first wave that was filed in November of 2010.

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Apparently, President Obama had some VoIP glitches when he attempted to tried to steal some of the Republican Iowa Caucuses’ spotlight last night via a live address to his Democratic supporters over the Internet. The video teleconference had sporadic audio issues making him hard to understand. It’s bad enough trying to understand some of President Obama’s policies when he is speaking clearly never mind when he’s encountering VoIP packet loss and jitter!

According to ABC News, Obama’s video teleconferences utilized a proprietary software program developed for the Obama campaign by Adobe Systems Inc. Full Article…

During the past three years Qualcomm’s business has grown exponentially, outpacing even smartphone sales.

The company now owns 35 per cent of the market as of Q2 2011.

The Snapdragon S4 sets to build on that gain through the introduction of more processing power, improved power efficiency and built-in support for next-level technologies like LTE, HD Flash video and 4G speeds of up to 100mbps.

Qualcomm also detailed the type of optimised software experiences users’ can expect from the Snapdragon S4 chipsets once they arrive in handsets. Ren

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Hollywood has to resort to trickery to show moviegoers laser beams traveling through the air. That’s because the beams move too fast to be captured on film. Now a camera that records frames at a rate of 0.6 trillion every second can truly capture the bouncing path of a laser pulse.

See a video of a laser pulse moving through a Coke bottle, or bouncing off a tomato.

The system was developed by researchers led by Ramesh Raskar at MIT’s Media Lab. Currently limited to a tabletop inside the group’s lab, the camera can record what happens when very short pulses of laser light—lasting just 50 femtoseconds (50,000 trillionths of a second) long—hit objects in front of them. The

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