computer

Psiphon Fights Censorship

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Earlier this year we covered that Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto was creating some software called Psiphon that lets people bypass firewalls. Psiphone is designed to let people access sites that are blocked for censorship reasons like in China where there is a lot of online censorship.

“psiphon is a censorship circumvention solution that allows users to access blocked sites in countries where the Internet is censored. psiphon turns a regular home computer into a personal, encrypted server capable of retrieving and displaying web pages anywhere.”

Ancient Computer Hacked

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

A bizarre looking device that was used to chart and predict moon cycles. Researchers had to use the most modern of today’s technology to understand this 2,000 year old device.

“Using 21st-century technology to peer beneath the surface of the encrusted gearwheels, stunned scientists say the so-called Antikythera Mechanism could predict the ballet of the Sun and Moon over decades and calculate a lunar anomaly that would bedevil Isaac Newton himself.

Built in Greece around 150 to 100 BC and possibly linked to the astronomer and mathematician Hipparchos, its complexity was probably unrivalled for at least a thousand years, they say.”

Microsoft Has Green Potential, Linux Currently Green

- Adam Clare

Over at the geek-news site Slashdot there recently was a post about how Microsoft can save energy by changing some minor code. Slashdot readers also had a neat discussion regarding power consumption and computers. The community (not surprisingly) concludes that Linux is just as good – if not better – than Windows at conserving energy.

“The author figures that the upgrade would affect 100 million computers and that the power cost savings could hit $7 billion per year. CO2 emissions would be cut by 45 million tons. But what about the impact on computing?”

More Distributed Goodness

- Cam Proctor

As I sit typing this post, I’m listening to the Tragically Hip, downloading a 24 lecture series on Science to my iPod and I just listened to an inspiring speech by William McDonough (I highly recommend him as THE resource for environmental design). So I cant help but think of all the positive changes computers have brought around.

To add one more to the list check out climateprediction.net. Its a distributed software that uses idle computing capacity to predict the climate in the 21st centuary.

Ion Catching Device

- Adam Clare

When it comes to anything quantum I tend to only have a loose idea of what is going on, but I know this much: ion catching is good

“Ions (electrically charged atoms) are promising candidates for use as quantum bits (qubits) in quantum computers. The NIST team, one of 18 research groups worldwide experimenting with ion qubits, previously has demonstrated at a rudimentary level all the basic building blocks for a quantum computer, including key processes such as error correction, and also has proposed a large-scale architecture. “.

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