When Roger Shawyer first unveiled his EmDrive thruster back around 2003, the scientific community laughed at him. They said it was impossible, that it was based on a flawed concept, and couldn’t work because it goes against the laws of conservation of momentum. But somehow, despite all of the reasons it shouldn’t work, it does. Scientists at Nasa just confirmed it. Read more…
World’s fastest network lets you download a movie in 0,2ms
Danish researchers just created the Usain Bolt of networks. A team from the Technical University of Denmark used a single multi-core optical fibre to transfer 43Tbit/s, making it the world’s fastest fibre network. Read more…
European regulators training sights on Google’s mobile software
European regulators are preparing what could be a stern challenge to Google’s mobile software business in the coming months after a nearly four-year investigation into the company’s Web search practices left rivals and European politicians dissatisfied. Two sources with direct knowledge of the matter said that with a new antitrust chief taking over in November, European regulators are laying the groundwork for a case centred on whether Google abuses the 80% market share of its Android mobile operating system to promote services from maps to search. Read more…
Apple’s content delivery network is reportedly live and it’s huge
Earlier this year, we heard that Apple was starting to build its own content delivery network instead of relying on third-party CDNs like Akamai and Level 3 to deliver iTunes media content and software updates. That plan has come to fruition sooner than expected, according to CDN expert Dan Rayburn: traceroutes from downloads of OS X now show data coming directly from Apple infrastructure. Read more…
Google grants majority of ‘right to be forgotten’ requests
Google has removed tens of thousands of links from its European search results, according to a person familiar with the matter, illustrating the scale of Europe’s nascent “right to be forgotten” law. Read more…
Vibrating smart shoes put Google Maps at your feet
Smartshoes could be the next big thing in wearable technology, an Indian startup claims, revealing a pair of Internet-connected shoes that connect to Google Maps and guide the wearer with small vibrations. Read more…
The Hubble found a galaxy so huge it acts like a magnifying glass
“Lensing” galaxies are so huge that they act like magnifying glasses for the space behind them. Their gravity can bend and distort light from smaller galaxies further beyond.
Now, scientists using Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope have unexpectedly found the most distant lensing galaxy to date. Its light has taken 9,6bn years to reach us and the object it’s magnifying — a tiny spiral galaxy that we can now see undergoing a surge of star formation — is 10,7bn light years away. Read more…
Countries don’t own their Internet domains, Icann says
The Internet domain name for a country doesn’t belong to that country — nor to anyone, according to Icann, the organisation that oversees the Internet. Plaintiffs who successfully sued Iran, Syria and North Korea as sponsors of terrorism want to seize the three countries’ country code top-level domains as part of financial judgments against them. Icann says they can’t do that because ccTLDs aren’t even property. Read more…
The remarkable story of the underwater Internet
Back in the 1970s, Operation Ivy Bells was probably the first underwater cable-tapping operation in history. The operation took place when copper wires, which radiate electromagnetic energy, were used to relay relatively small amounts of data that could be non-invasively intercepted by fitting a recording device around the cable. At the time, the Soviets were so confident in the security of their line they left it completely unencrypted, enabling US intelligence teams to simply record the transmissions, extract them from the seabed and listen to them at the end of each month. Read more…
Amazon’s cloud is growing so fast it’s scaring shareholders
Amazon has pulled off a pretty amazing trick over the past decade. It’s invented and then built a nearly US$5bn cloud computing business catering to fickle software developers and put the rest of the technology industry on the defensive. Big enterprise software companies such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard and even Google are playing catch-up, even as they acknowledge that cloud computing is the tech industry’s future. Read more…
- Top picture: SPR Ltd
