We’ve hit critical mass! Time for another round of bizarre, terrible or interesting gadgets:

• The Phillips iPill contains a power supply, processor, medicine reservoir and micro pump. Intended for swallowing like a normal capsule, this pill can provide medication targeted directly at the source of the problem. The pill can also be monitored externally.
• This UMID carries all the horsepower of a netbook in a footprint that’s approximately half the size. Do want.
• We’re close to fuel cells finally making a mass appearance, and designs like this one really help. MyFC’s fuel cells are flexible, allowing them to occupy dead space in a device or reduce the footprint of existing batteries.
• Best Buy is demonstrating gift cards that double as mini speakers, complete with 1/8″ plug for interfacing with that holiday iPod.
• Leave it to Klipsch to make in-ear headphones that don’t completely suck.
• A new approach to lithium ion batteries gives them a seven-fold increase in longevity. The technique was just developed at a university, so expect the technology to be introduce shortly after the perpetual motion machine.

Hump day!

At just shy of 9 PM EDT on October 21, India has successfully launched an unmanned rocket headed for the moon on a two year mission.

Lifting off from southern Andhra Pradesh, the Chandrayaan 1 is carrying eleven payloads to study the Earth-Moon relationship and further map the moon’s surface. The international collaboration resulted in five of the instruments being designed and developed in India, three on the behalf of the European Space Agency, one from Bulgaria, and two from NASA.

Your daily dose of wallet-burning doodads:

• Further lay the hax on your jailbroken iPhone by slapping in an external GPS dongle.
• Update the speed of your DSLR with the CFMulti adapter, which allows for the use of SD cards in CF cameras.
• This 8GB flash drive is not only pretty swank, it’s incredibly small.
• Nuclear-powered, LASER-shooting, skycrane-having, four stage lander-using Mars Science Laboratory demo video dumped on YouTube. This is easily the best thing all day.
• Apple’s 17″ MacBook Pro has been delayed until next year.
• How about a dual core Intel Atom machine inside the chassis of an old (how we miss you…) Sega Saturn?

Th-th-th-that’s all, folks.

It’s Monday! That’s right, while we all return to the grind to get our work on, gadget lust never stops. Take a peek at what the weekend wrestled up:

• A bizarre little device from OLO will allegedly use the iPhone to deliver full-sized screen and keyboard. This product remains unrealized, but it’s coming real soon, honest guv.
• RIM recently announced the Blackberry Pearl Flip 8220. It’s a ghastly little clamshell phone that only a mother could love. It’s coming to T-Mobile today, so maybe it’s in the cards for you.
• The Samsung BD-P1500 — typically $400 — will hit the shelves for a mere $149 on Black Friday. If you’re willing to struggle through the crowds of spawning and frantic people, you can secure set top Blu-ray for a fraction of MSRP.
• Asus continues to dilute its Eee brand with a touch screen.
• The XOHM-packing Nokia N810 tablet is finally in stock and ready to roll.  It’s so sleek, we can almost forgive that it’s a MID.
• One phrase: Microscope on a chip. We know it sounds awesome enough that you just want to click.
• Maybe you’re an Apple fan and want to look at what is allegedly the product of Apple’s new “brick” manufacturing process.

More to come throughout the day!

Researchers from the University of Michigan have developed “CloudAV,” a next-generation anti-virus technology. CloudAV seeks to improve PC resource utilization and virus detection rates by shifting the burden of virus analysis into the computing “cloud.”

Jon Oberheide and Evan Cooke, working under the guidance of Professor Farnam Jahanian, tout the cloud’s significant advantages over traditional client-side anti-virus:

• The cloud aggregates the detection results of many anti-virus engines; a feat that would be improbable, if not impossible, on a client system.
• The cloud offers enough resources to provide virtual behavioral analysis.
• The client buys reduced disk and CPU usage at the cost of increased network utilization.
• The burden of application maintenance is completely removed from the client side.

The engine currently consists of detection routines and signatures from Avast, AVG, BitDefender, ClamAV, F-Prot, F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro. Analysis reveals (PDF) that the combined signature databases of these varied anti-virus applications yields a 91% detection rate.

While the technology sounds similar to centralized anti-virus, such as Symantec Corporate, it is quite different. Today’s corporate anti-virus products centrally manage user policies while leaving the burden of scanning and detection on the client end. Under this model, a significant processor and memory footprint is incurred.

Behavioral analysis is one of the more exciting aspects of this technology, according to the developers. Cooke and Oberheide explained that “behavioral analysis allows us to open a file in an emulated environment and trace the execution of a file through a system.” The cloud has enough resources to execute a potentially infected file in a virtual sandbox to determine its impact. This is a significant advance in anti-virus technology that would be impractical to run on a desktop, much less a smartphone.

Other new functionality includes the caching of files in the cloud so that detection isn’t a constant resource drain. Once a file signature is cached, it does not need to be reanalyzed. In effect, a single user that may be running Microsoft PowerPoint would submit the signature data for that version of PowerPoint to all PowerPoint users in the cloud. Because a single computer can contribute all the necessary information, deployments that have a swath of similarly-configured computers would benefit from reduced network overhead.

While the technology is being used in a production environment on the University of Michigan campus, there are no plans to commercialize the product. Agents have been developed for Windows, Linux, BSD, Nokia Maemo, and sendmail. Cooke and Oberheide envision implementations of these clients for ISP, campus and corporate deployments.

We were concerned about privacy in the cloud; specifically, we wondered whether or not we would want our ISP to scan sensitive files for us. They envisioned a hybrid system with a lightweight detection engine on the client side for files somehow tagged as private. Meanwhile the CloudAV technology would remain for system files, executables, and other non-sensitive information.

You can find more information on their website, including links to white papers about the technology.

Through the flurry of hardware releases, architecture and roadmaps, we occasionally stumble upon a delightful morsel of raw ingenuity that does nothing less than astound. Today, that morsel comes to us in the innocuous form of the Apple I BASIC cassette tape.

These cassettes are extremely rare, given that there were only 200 Apple I computers released, and less than 100 are known to exist. To make matters worse, not all Apple I computers came with this prized cassette tape. This tape contains the first piece of software that Apple ever sold.

In 2002 someone produced an audio recording of the BASIC tape being played back. A simple algorithm was created to analyze the waveform on the Atari, convert that to binary and run it on an Apple I emulator. They dumped the output of the emulated BASIC and released it to the public, where others continued to modify the code to correct what were perceived as errors. The only dump of the tape that can be easily found includes these changes, which gives us cause to question the accuracy of the code.

Assembly language blog Pagetable recently took another stab at the project by analyzing the original and unmodified WAV recording with new tools. With Audacity, custom conversion code and a HEX editor, Pagetable has produced the world’s first certifiably pristine code of software that was written to magnetic tape more than 30 years ago.

What a fantastic and outrageously clever project.

The Cassini-Huygens probe flies through Saturn’s rings today.

Security microdots, the microscopic patterns produced by some color laser printers to identify the serial number, have been called out by civil liberties activists as a privacy threat.

The intent of the microdots is to allow a printout to be tracked back to the source printer, and therefore manufacturer and point of sale, to aid the Secret Service in solving counterfeiting crimes. Modern color laser printers are capable of producing extremely convincing fake currency, and the microdots, which show up under special lighting, call out a counterfeit immediately and contain information on the printer that created it.

Privacy activists are warning that the widespread affordability of color laser printers and the proliferation of microdot technology is opening the door to Big Brother keeping an eye on you through what you’re printing.

Overreaction or valid concern? I suppose that’s something we’ll find out soon enough.

Source.

See Mars like you’ve never seen it before with these amazing shots taken by the Phoenix Lander and HiRISE.

A nice guide to GPU computing and NVIDIA’s CUDA get-up. Folders, take note.

Mars Phoenix mission is on twittering.

Petaflop? No problem.

Researchers in Belgium build a 4x 9800GX2 SLI rig in the name of science (that’s 8 GPUs). I’ll bet the grad students are playing Crysis tonight.

A research team at the University of Washington have come up with a novel way to get the online community involved in the research of protein folding. They have turned it into a fun, puzzle solving PC game, called Foldit

The outcome they hope to achieve is almost identical to the project run by Stanford University known as Folding@home. By understanding the way proteins fold or misfold they hope to find cures for ailments such as HIV/ Aids, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and related syndromes. Where Folding@home unobtrusively runs the application in the background, requiring little or no intervention from the user, Foldit is a lot more hands on.

The game requires online registration. After a quick tutorial and a few practice rounds, it’s onto the serious task of protein folding. Presented with three dimensional models of proteins that has been misshaped or unravelled, the aim of the game is to fold them back into their original shapes.

To add community appeal, Foldit allows individual players to band together in groups to battle it out for top spot in the rankings, which are regularly updated on the sites home page. A live chat window is also ever present throughout the game. Players may not be saving the world from an alien invasion or rescuing a damsel in distress, but this is a game with a purpose.

The team behind Foldit are collecting data to determine whether humans are better and more efficient at puzzle-solving and pattern recognition than existing computer programs. If this proves to be true, computers can be taught human strategies to fold proteins faster than ever, bringing us closer to a cure for many of the age old diseases that still plague mankind today.

Why life on Mars could foretell our own doom. Really good essay on probability and E.T. life.