Technology

Web-connected gadgets will 'transform' the art of spying and the real kicker is that Americans will willingly bug their own homes. "CIA Director David Petraeus cannot wait to spy on you" through your smart  appliances, according to Danger Room.

Chinese telecommunications company ZTE has demonstrated an optical fiber network transmitting at a blazing 1.7TBs! 

The network which uses Wavelength Division Mutiplexing separtes data into different wavelengths and transmits them over the same optical fiber. In the demonstration, ZTE made use of 8 different channels, each transmitting at 216.4Gbps and covered a distance of 1,087 miles over standard optical cables. 

Don't hope of this coming to an ISP near you within the next 5 years though. 

 The founder of Australian voice biometrics outfit Armorvox, Dr. Clive Summerfield, claims that between 10% and 20% of utterances collected by voice biometric systems are not strong enough identifiers on the individual that spoke them.

Most voice biometric implementations require users to utter a phrase as part of the authentication process. However, a small fraction of the population Dr Summerfield labels as “wolves”, have voice prints that can match many others, while "goats" are those with generic voice prints. 

How many servers does Amazon use to keep its EC2 platform afloat? 445,000. That is, according to Huan Liu, a researcher with Accenture Technology Labs, who came up with this number after a little bit of digging and number crunching. 

His analysis found that Amazon's main cluster of servers, 322,000 of them, are located in Northern Virginia. Outside of the US however, Amazon has a relatively small footprint. For example in Brazil, there are only 1600 EC2 servers. 

Hacks working for CPU-World have been given a briefing by the suits at Chipzilla about the performance of its latest Ivy Bridge CPU.

Apparently it is all down to something that Intel has worked out called the Tick Tock regime, which appears to have been developed by the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. In Oxford. It is a cadence. It is also the clock ticking and tocking in the belly of the pirate, Captain Hook, in Peter Pan.

A US outfit called WiTricity is releasing a product which it claims can wirelessly recharge electronic devices from up to several feet away. It is all a little bit Tesla-like.

According to Associated Press, it will mean that you don't even have to take your phone out of your pocket for it to magically recharge.

Tom Smith, chief marketing manager for Nissan North America, planned to unveil the redesigned Pathfinder at the Chicago Auto Show in February. His problem: Although much of the allure of the new Pathfinder is in its upgraded interior, Smith didn’t have the whole car to show off, just a fiberglass shell.

Ray Ozzie, the man who succeeded Bill Gates as Microsoft Corp's tech visionary, believes the world has moved past the personal computer, potentially leaving behind the world's largest software company.

The PC, which was Microsoft's foundation and still determines the company's financial performance, has been nudged aside by powerful phones and tablets running Apple and Google software, the former Microsoft executive said.

Body scanners are a controversial tool that's currently being installed at airports worldwide -- particularly in the U.S., where the government has paid contractors such as Rapiscan and Brijot hundreds of millions of dollars to deploy over 500 of the devices.  In the U.S. the deployment has reportedly been pushed by illicit financial ties, such as former U.S. Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) chief Michael Chertoff's financial relationship with Rapiscan, who paid off the chief for his "consulting services."