Source: http://gizmodo.com/a-perfume-that-smells-like-roses-but-is-actually-made-f-1689526675
A rose is a rose is a rose, except when it's actually a yeast. A company called Gingko BioWorks in Boston is partnering with French fragrance company Robertet to create a genetically-modified yeast that makes the rose oil used in perfumes.
One of the challenges associated with the internet of things is figuring out where to put all that data. If you have dozens of connected devices talking to the cloud (and that is a big if) you've got to think about where that data lives, how to normalize it and how to grant others access to it so...
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/htc-vive-virtual-reality-so-damn-real-that-i-cant-even-1689396093
I saw the future today. I mean that. I got the chance here at MWC to try the new VR headset that Valve and HTC are developing. Is it good? It's absolutely incredible. This thing is just...my god you guys I can't even.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/04/the-faa-is-vulnerable-to-hacks/
On the scale of extremely disconcerting government revelations, this isn't PRISM, but damn if it isn't alarming. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a scathing report on the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) air traffic control systems. The FAA is basically just asking to be hacked thanks to its lackadaisical approach to security and software updates. Things are so bad, that relying on servers that have past their "end-of-life" date is probably the least concerning revelation made by the GAO. The government also found that FAA employees were sharing passwords through unencrypted communications channels, and had failed to patch out of date software with three-year-old security flaws.
The GAO report states right off the bat that, despite the FAA's efforts to improve security "significant security control weaknesses remain, threatening the agency's ability to ensure the safe and uninterrupted operation of the national airspace system." Any effort to prevent, detect or combat an intrusion by hackers is basically undermined by the agency's failure to fully implement a security program required under a law passed in 2002.
If you're not alarmed by all this, you should be. Think about it: This is the agency in charge of directing traffic for over 2,000 planes in the air at any given moment. (Planes, you know, the metal tubes hurtling through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour, each filled living human beings.) And they're relying on hardware that isn't supported by the manufacturer and left security flaws with simple fixes go unpatched for three years.
Senators John Thune and Bill Nelson were among those who quickly demanded answers from the FAA and the Transportation Department. So far the response has been disappointing, with the FAA saying its working on the problem, but offering little in the way of concrete solutions.
Filed under: Transportation
Via: Ars Technica
Source: GAO
There were a lot of announcements at Game Developer Conference in San Francisco today, but one flew under the radar: a preview of WebGL 2. Mozilla gave us a sneak peek of what will one day power games and other intensive applications in the browser. WebGL, which stands for Web Graphics Library, i...
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