A computer virus has infected the cockpits of America’s Predator and Reaper drones, logging pilots’ every keystroke as they remotely fly missions over Afghanistan and other warzones.
The virus, first detected nearly two weeks ago by the military’sHost-Based Security System, has not prevented pilots at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada from flying their missions overseas. Nor have there been any confirmed incidents of classified information being lost or sent to an outside source. But the virus has resisted multiple efforts to remove it from Creech’s computers, network security specialists say. And the infection underscores the ongoing security risks in what has become the U.S. military’s most important weapons system.
“We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.”
Military network security specialists aren’t sure whether the virus and its so-called “keylogger” payload were introduced intentionally or by accident; it may be a common piece of malware that just happened to make its way into these sensitive networks. The specialists don’t know exactly how far the virus has spread. But they’re sure that the infection has hit both classified and unclassified machines at Creech. That raises the possibility, at least, that secret data may have been captured by the keylogger, and then transmitted over the public internet to someone outside the military chain of command.
Drones have become America’s tool of choice in both its conventional and shadow wars, allowing U.S. forces to attack targets and spy on its foes without risking American lives. Since President Obama assumed office, a fleet of approximately 30 CIA-directed drones have hit targets in Pakistanmore than 230 times; all told, these drones havekilled more than 2,000 suspected militants and civilians, according to theWashington Post. More than 150 additional Predator and Reaper drones, under U.S. Air Force control, watch over the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. American military dronesstruck 92 timesin Libya between mid-April and late August. And late last month, an American dronekilled top terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki— part of anescalating unmanned air assaultin the Horn of Africa and southern Arabian peninsula.
But despite their widespread use, the drone systems are known to have security flaws. Many Reapers and Predators don’t encrypt the video they transmit to American troops on the ground. In the summer of 2009, U.S. forces discovered “days and days and hours and hours” of the drone footage on the laptops of Iraqi insurgents. A$26 piece of software allowed the militants to capture the video.
Thelion’s share of U.S. drone missionsare flown by Air Force pilots stationed atCreech, a tiny outpost in the barren Nevada desert, 20 miles north of a state prison and adjacent to a one-story casino. In a nondescript building, down a largely unmarked hallway, is a series of rooms, each with a rack of servers and a “ground control station,” or GCS. There, a drone pilot and a sensor operator sit in their flight suits in front of a series of screens. In the pilot’s hand is the joystick, guiding the drone as it soars above Afghanistan, Iraq, or some other battlefield.
Some of the GCSs are classified secret, and used for conventional warzone surveillance duty. The GCSs handling more exotic operations are top secret. None of the remote cockpits are supposed to be connected to the public internet. Which means they are supposed to be largely immune to viruses and other network security threats.
Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military. But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit. Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use.
In the meantime, technicians at Creech are trying to get the virus off the GCS machines. It has not been easy. At first, they followed removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security firm. “But the virus kept coming back,” a source familiar with the infection says. Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool calledBCWipeto completely erase the GCS’ internal hard drives. “That meant rebuilding them from scratch” — a time-consuming effort.
The Air Force declined to comment directly on the virus. “We generally do not discuss specific vulnerabilities, threats, or responses to our computer networks, since that helps people looking to exploit or attack our systems to refine their approach,” says Lt. Col. Tadd Sholtis, a spokesman for Air Combat Command, which oversees the drones and all other Air Force tactical aircraft. “We invest a lot in protecting and monitoring our systems to counter threats and ensure security, which includes a comprehensive response to viruses, worms, and other malware we discover.”
However, insiders say that senior officers at Creech are being briefed daily on the virus.
“It’s getting a lot of attention,” the source says. “But no one’s panicking. Yet.”
The Apple “Let’s Talk iPhone” event has
concluded. Tim Cook and a slew of Apple execs have taken it in turns to
tell us about the latest and greatest Apple goodies, and rather
underwhelmingly there’s no iPhone 5 and just significant takeaways: a
cheaper and faster iPhone 4S, and an interesting software package called
Siri. You can read all about the iPhone 4S on our sister sites Geek and PC Mag — here we’re going to talk about Siri.
If
we look past the rather Indian (and feminine) name, Siri is a portable
(and pocketable) virtual personal assistant. She has a
speech-recognition module which works out what you’re saying, and then a
natural language parser combs through your words to work out what
you’re trying to do. Finally, an artificial intelligence gathers the
possible responses and works out which one is most likely to be
accurate, given the context, your geographical location, iOS’s current
state, and so on.
Siri
is, in essence, a computer that you can interrogate for answers, kind
of like a search engine that runs locally on your phone. If you’ve seen IBM’s Watson play Jeopardy,
Siri is basically a cut-down version. She isn’t intelligent per se, but
if she has access to enough data, she can certainly appear intelligent.
Siri’s data sources are open APIs, like Wikipedia or Wolfram Alpha, and
in theory there’s no limit to the number of sources that can be added
(though it does require significant developer time to add a new data
set). For now you can ask Siri about the weather or the definition of a
word, but in the future, if Apple links Siri up to United Airlines,
you’ll be able to book a plane ticket, just by talking. Because Siri
runs locally, she can also send SMSes or set reminders, or anything else
that Apple (or app developers) allow her to do.
Artificial
intelligence isn’t cheap in terms of processing power, though: Siri is
expected to only run on the iPhone 4S, which sports a new and
significantly faster processor than its predecessors, the A5. Siri
probably makes extensive use of Apple’s new cloud computer cluster, too,
much in the same way that Amazon Silk splits web browsing between the cloud and the local device.
Noise
That’s
enough about what Siri is and how it works. Let’s talk about whether
anyone will actually use Siri, which is fundamentally a glorified voice
control search engine. Voice commands have existed in some semblance
since at least as far back as the Nokia 3310, which was released in
2000. Almost every phone since then has had the ability to voice dial,
or in the case of modern smartphones, voice activate apps and features.
When
was the last time you saw someone talk to their phone? Driving and
other hands-otherwise-occupied activities don’t count. When was the last
time you walked down the street and heard someone loudly dictate “call
mom” into their phone? Can you really see yourself saying “Siri, I want a
kebab” in public?
It might lose its social stigma if everyone
talks to their phone, but isn’t it already annoying enough that people
swan down streets with hands-free headsets, blabbing away? It’s not like
voice recognition is at the stage where you can whisper or mumble a
command into your phone, either: you’re going to have to say, nice and
clearly, “how do I get to the bank?” in public. Now imagine that you’ve
just walked past the guy who’s talking to Siri — is he asking you for
directions, or Siri? Now imagine what it would be like if everyone
around you is having a one-sided phone conversation or talking to Siri.
Finally,
there’re practical implications to consider, which Apple usually
ignores in its press events. For example, will Siri only recognize my
voice? What if I leave my phone in the living room and my girlfriend
shouts out “honey, we should go to that Italian restaurant” — will Siri
then make a reservation? On a more nefarious note, will my wife be able
to say “Siri, show me my husband’s hidden email.” When walking down a
street, will Siri overhear other conversations and react accordingly?
Siri
will be fantastic in the car, that’s for certain. She will also be very
accommodating when you’re on your own — imagine shouting across the
room “Siri, do I need to wear a jacket today?” or “Siri, download the
latest episode of Glee.” Siri will be unusable in public, though, while
on the move — and that’s the one time where you really don’t want to be
looking down at that darn on-screen keyboard.
When Microsoft released the Windows 8 Developer Preview
last month it warned that it was unstable, incomplete, a very early
build which has a long way to go before it's ready for release.
That
doesn't sound too promising - but on installing it we were surprised to
see just how many great new features Windows 8 already contained.
From
the shiny new Metro interface and interesting Explorer tweaks, to new
applets and major performance enhancements, Windows 8 is - even at this
early stage - packed with essential functionality.
Here are 18 cool things Windows 8 does that Windows 7 doesn't
1. Boot quickly - by default
Yes, we know - every version of Windows promises boot time improvements. But this time Microsoft has really delivered.
Our test Dell Inspiron 1090 (a seriously basic laptop) took 48 seconds to launch Windows 7 from the boot loader.
Choose the Windows 8 option, though, and the Metro screen appeared in only nine seconds - more than five times faster.
How
does it work? There are many tweaks, but maybe the most important
happens when the system shuts down. It closes all your programs as
normal, but the kernel is now hibernated, its RAM contents saved to your
hard drive. This doesn't take long, and when you reboot your system can
be reinitialised far faster than before.
2. Display alerts immediately
Your
Windows 8 laptop won't just load faster, it'll also display useful
information right away, without you having to do anything at all.
And
that's because your lock screen, where you'll normally log in, can now
be customised with apps which show you details on waiting emails, your
schedule, RSS feeds, whatever you like.
So Windows 8 means you
won't necessarily have to turn on your laptop, wait for an age as it
loads, then wait even longer to launch an application, just to discover
some really basic item of data: it could be available on the lock screen
in seconds.
3. Log on without passwords
If you already
have more than enough passwords to remember, then the good news is that
Windows 8 will offer you an unusual alternative: the picture password.
You'll
be able to point Windows to a picture you'd like to use, which you then
click, tap or draw on with your mouse or using a touch screen. So if
you choose a picture of your house, say, you might draw an outline
around the roof, then tap on a window and the front door. Windows will
remember your gestures, and won't allow anyone to log in later unless
they can repeat them.
If that doesn't sound appealing, don't worry
- you can continue to log in with a regular alphanumeric password if
you prefer, just as before.
4. Enjoy a dynamic desktop
The
Windows 8 Metro interface doesn't give you static shortcuts to launch
its applications. Instead you get dynamic tiles, which you can change in
size to reflect an app's importance, and freely organise into whatever
groups best suits your needs.
And, again, these tiles aren't just
used to launch the apps. They can also display information from them, so
if something interesting has just appeared on an RSS feed you're
watching, then you'll get to see it right away.
5. Synchronise your settings
Of
course, with so much functionality on the Metro desktop, it may take a
while to set it up just the way you like. But don't worry, you only have
to do this once, even if you've several Windows 8 PCs, because you'll
be able to synchronise your Metro apps, their settings and application
histories (as well as login details for applications and websites)
across all your systems, entirely automatically.
6. Spot resource hogs
All
this syncing, email-checking, RSS monitoring and so on could become a
little expensive if you're using a metered 3G connection, of course. So
it's just as well that the new Windows 8 Task Manager includes an App
History feature which can show you exactly who's hogging all your
network bandwidth (as well as your CPU time, hard drive and RAM).
7. Close apps automatically
Traditionally
Windows has left it up to you to manage the programs you run. So you
can launch as many as you like, and the system won't complain: it'll
just get slower, and slower, and slower as you run out of RAM and it
starts swapping to disk.
Windows 8 is fortunately a little
different, at least when running Metro apps. If you're running short of
resources then it'll close down anything you've not used for a while, to
try to help out. Don't worry, the app's state is saved first, so you
don't lose anything; relaunch it and you'll carry on exactly where you
left off.
8. Share easily
Sharing something you've found
online is an everyday experience for most web users, and so it's great
to see Microsoft build that idea into Windows 8. If you've discovered a
great photo or web page in IE10
then simply hit the Share button and you'll be able to send its link
via any compatible app you've installed - and they'll then update your
Twitter, Facebook or other account right away.
9. Work on files with ease
The Windows 8 Explorer now uses a
ribbon-style interface, which brings many otherwise tricky to find
options within very easy reach.
If you want to remove metadata
containing personal information in Windows 7, for instance, you must
right-click the file, select Properties, choose the Details tab, and
click "Remove Properties and Personal Information".
In Windows 8, all you have to do is click the file and choose Remove Properties from the Properties list: much easier.
There
are many similar shortcuts. But if they're not enough, then you can
make any Explorer ribbon option even easier to access it by adding it to
the Quick Access toolbar, which appears in the Explorer title bar.
It'll then only ever be a couple of clicks away.
10. Back up automatically
Windows
8 includes a very easy-to-use File History feature, which can
automatically back up whatever folders you like, at the frequency you
specify.
This could be a complete system backup to a network
drive, if you like. But it could also just save key folders like
Documents and Pictures to a USB flash drive, and once you've set this up
there's no further configuration required. Simply plug in the drive
every few days, File History will automatically detect it, and your
preferred files will automatically be backed up.
11. Download safely
Internet
Explorer's SmartScreen filter is a handy technology which can check
downloads against a database of known malicious sites and dangerous
programs, blocking the file if it finds a match. Previously this was
only available within IE, but in Windows 8 SmartScreen will be used
system-wide, so you'll have an extra layer of protection no matter which
browser you're using.
12. Mount ISO files
Windows 7
gained the ability to burn ISO images to disc, but if you just want to
check or access their contents then Windows 8 goes one better. Just
right-click the image, select Mount, and a new virtual optical drive
will appear in Explorer. Double-click this to view the image contents,
launch whatever programs it contains, or generally treat it just like
any other disc.
13. Pause file copies
Once you've started a
Windows file copy operation, that used to be it: you had to wait until
it was finished. But not any more. The new File Copy dialog includes a
tiny pause button, so if you need to do something else for a moment,
just click to pause the copies, click again to resume.
14. Fix problems easily
If
your PC is in a bad way then you've always been able to reinstall
Windows. But you'd have to find your Windows disc, first, and pay close
attention to the installation options to make sure you choose the one
you need.
Windows 8 gets rid of all that hassle by introducing a
"Refresh your PC" option (Control Panel > General). This also
essentially reinstalls Windows, but there's no disc required, no complex
options to consider, not even very long to wait: we've used it two or
three times and it's quickly repaired any glitches we encountered.
15. Run other operating systems
If,
despite all of this, you still feel that Windows 7 has some advantages -
then that may not be a problem. Because Windows 8 now includes
Microsoft's Client Hyper-V virtualisation platform, which allows you to
install other operating systems onto virtual machines and run them on
your desktop.
You will need to be running 64-bit Windows,
however, and have a CPU which supports Second Level Address Translation
(that's Intel's Core i3, i5 and i7 and AMD's Barcelona processors).
But
if your system qualifies then you'll find this is a far better and more
powerful solution than Microsoft's Virtual PC, or Windows 7's XP Mode,
and should be ideal for running most legacy applications on your Windows
8 system.
Well, this is a little unsettling: it turns out that Wi-Fi signals are slightly affected by people breathing, and with the right tech someone could pinpoint where you are in a room from afar using just Wi-Fi.
This was discovered when University of Utah researcher Neal Patwari was looking for a way to monitor breathing without using uncomfortable equipment. If you can track breathing using just a Wi-Fi signal, it'll make sleep studies easier for both researchers and subjects. And it worked! By laying in a hospital bed surrounded by a bunch of wireless routers, they were able to accurately estimate his breathing rate within 0.4 breaths per minute.
Now that this is known, it's only a matter of time until there's a way to detect people in rooms using Wi-Fi signals. But don't worry! If you're nervous, there's a simple solution: stop breathing.
MakerBot's Thing-O-Matic 3D is a toy-printing badass.
Robot Santa's going to be busy this year. With all theshiny new gadgetshe needs to deliver, his elves will have it hard. You want one toy? Pfft. What you want is a whole elf workshop of your own — a place that pumps out unlimited amounts of toys — or at least, something similar. That's a3D printer.
The ultimate present this year is a 3D printer — a machine thatmakes, err, "prints" toys. Who needs to keep asking for gifts from people, when you can print some new ones whenever you want to?
The next time you go to the doctor, you may be dealing with a supercomputer rather than a human. Watson,
the groundbreaking artificial intelligence machine from IBM that took
on chess champions and Jeopardy! contestants alike, is about to get its
first real-world application in the healthcare sector. In partnership with health benefits company WellPoint,
Watson will soon be diagnosing medical cases – and not just the
everyday cases, either. The vision is for Watson to be working
hand-in-surgical-glove with oncologists to diagnose and treat cancer in patients.
The WellPoint clinical trial, which could roll out as early as 2012, is
exciting proof that supercomputing intelligence, when properly
harnessed, can lead to revolutionary breakthroughs in complex fields
like medicine. At a time when talk about reforming the healthcare system
is primarily about the creation of digital health records, the
integration of Watson into the healthcare industry could really shake
things up. By some accounts, Watson
is able to process as many as 200 million pages of medical information
in seconds – giving it a number-crunching head start on doctors for
diagnosing cases. In one test case cited by WellPoint, Watson was able
to diagnose a rare form of an illness within seconds – a case that had
left doctors baffled.
While having super-knowledgeable medical experts on call is exciting,
it also raises several thorny issues. At what point – if ever - would
you ask for a “second opinion” on your medical condition from a human
doctor? Will “Watson” ever be included in the names of physicians
included in your HMO listings? And, perhaps most importantly, can
supercomputers ever provide the type of bedside manner that we are
accustomed to in our human doctors?
This last question has attracted much attention from medical practitioners and health industry thought leaders alike. Abraham Verghese,
a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine as well as
bestselling author, has been particularly outspoken about the inability
of computers to provide the type of medical handholding that we are used to from human doctors.
Verghese claims that the steady digitization of records and clinical
data is reducing every patient to an "iPatient" – simply a set of
digital 1’s and 0’s that can be calculated, crunched, and computed.
Forget whether androids dream of digital sheep – can they take a digital Hippocratic Oath?
Given that the cost of healthcare is simply too high, as a society we
will need to accept some compromises. Once the healthcare industry is
fully digitized, supercomputers like Watson could result in a more
cost-effective way to sift through the ever-growing amount of medical
information and provide real-time medical analysis that could save
lives. If Watson also results in a significant improvement in patient
treatment as well, it’s clear that the world of medicine will never be
the same again. Right now, IBM envisions Watson supplementing – not
actually replacing - doctors. But the time is coming when nurses across
the nation will be saying, “Watson -- Come Here –- I Need You,” instead of turning to doctors whenever they need a sophisticated medical evaluation of a patient.
The technicians at SecureAlert’s monitoring center in Salt Lake City sit in front of computer screens filled with multicolored dots. Each dot represents someone on parole or probation wearing one of the company’s location-reporting ankle cuffs. As the people move around a city, their dots move around the map. “It looks a bit like an animated gumball machine,” says Steven Florek, SecureAlert’s vice-president of offender insights and knowledge management. As long as the gumballs don’t go where they’re not supposed to, all is well.
The company works with law enforcement agencies around the U.S. to keep track of about 15,000 ex-cons, meaning it must collect and analyze billions of GPS signals transmitted by the cuffs each day. The more traditional part of the work consists of making sure that people under house arrest stay in their houses. But advances in the way information is collected and sorted mean SecureAlert isn’t just watching; the company says it can actually predict when a crime is about to go down. If that sounds like the “pre-cogs”—crime prognosticators—in the movieMinority Report, Florek thinks so, too. He calls SecureAlert’s newest capability “pre-crime” detection.
Using data from the ankle cuffs and other sources, SecureAlert identifies patterns of suspicious behavior. A person convicted of domestic violence, for example, might get out of jail and set up a law-abiding routine. Quite often, though, SecureAlert’s technology sees such people backslide and start visiting the restaurants or schools or other places their victims frequent. “We know they’re looking to force an encounter,” Florek says. If the person gets too close for comfort, he says, “an alarm goes off and a flashing siren appears on the screen.” The system doesn’t go quite as far asMinority Report, where the cops break down doors and blow away the perpetrators before they perpetrate. Rather, the system can call an offender through a two-way cellphone attached to the ankle cuff to ask what the person is doing, or set off a 95-decibel shriek as a warning to others. More typically, the company will notify probation officers or police about the suspicious activity and have them investigate. Presumably with weapons holstered. “It’s like a strategy game,” Florek says. (BeforeBloomberg Businessweekwent to press, Florek left the company for undisclosed reasons.)
It didn’t used to be that a company the size of SecureAlert, with about $16 million in annual revenue, could engage in such a real-world chess match. For decades, only Fortune 500-scale corporations and three-letter government agencies had the money and resources to pull off this kind of data crunching.Wal-Mart Stores (WMT)is famous for using data analysis to adjust its inventory levels and prices.FedEx (FDX)earned similar respect for tweaking its delivery routes, while airlines and telecommunications companies used this technology to pinpoint and take care of their best customers. But even at the most sophisticated corporations, data analytics was often a cumbersome, ad hoc affair. Companies would pile information in “data warehouses,” and if executives had a question about some demographic trend, they had to supplicate “data priests” to tease the answers out of their costly, fragile systems. “This resulted in a situation where the analytics were always done looking in the rearview mirror,” says Paul Maritz, chief executive officer ofVMware (VMW). “You were reasoning over things to find out what happened six months ago.”
In the early 2000s a wave of startups made it possible to gather huge volumes of data and analyze it in record speed—à la SecureAlert. A retailer such asMacy’s (M)that once pored over last season’s sales information could shift to looking instantly at how an e-mail coupon for women’s shoes played out in different regions. “We have a banking client that used to need four days to make a decision on whether or not to trade a mortgage-backed security,” says Charles W. Berger, CEO of ParAccel, a data analytics startup founded in 2005 that powers SecureAlert’s pre-crime operation. “They do that in seven minutes now.”
Now a second wave of startups is finding ways to use cheap but powerful servers to analyze new categories of data such as blog posts, videos, photos, tweets, DNA sequences, and medical images. “The old days were about asking, ‘What is the biggest, smallest, and average?’?” says Michael Olson, CEO of startup Cloudera. “Today it’s, ‘What do you like? Who do you know?’ It’s answering these complex questions.”
The big bang in data analytics occurredin 2006 with the release of an open-source system called Hadoop. The technology was created by a software consultant named Doug Cutting, who had been examining a series of technical papers released byGoogle (GOOG). The papers described how the company spread tremendous amounts of information across its data centers and probed that pool of data for answers to queries. Where traditional data warehouses crammed as much information as possible on a few expensive computers, Google chopped up databases into bite-size chunks and sprinkled them among tens of thousands of cheap computers. The result was a lower-cost and higher-capacity system that lots of people can use at the same time. Google uses the technology throughout its operations. Its systems study billions of search results, match them to the first letters of a query, take a guess at what people are looking for, and display suggestions as they type. You can see the bite-size nature of the technology in action on Google Maps as tiny tiles come together to form a full map.
Cutting created Hadoop to mimic Google’s technology so the rest of the world could have a way to sift through massive data sets quickly and cheaply. (Hadoop was the name of his son’s toy elephant.) The software first took off at Web companies such asYahoo! (YHOO)and Facebook and then spread far and wide, withWalt Disney (DIS), theNew York Times, Samsung, and hundreds of others starting their own projects. Cloudera, where Cutting, 48, now works, makes its own version of Hadoop and has sales partnerships withHewlett-Packard (HPQ)andDell (DELL).
Dozens of startups are trying to develop easier-to-use versions of Hadoop. For example, Datameer, in San Mateo, Calif., has built an Excel-like dashboard that allows regular business people, instead of data priests, to pose questions. “For 20 years you had limited amounts of computing and storage power and could only ask certain things,” says Datameer CEO Stefan Groschupf. “Now you just dump everything in there and ask whatever you want.” Top venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Redpoint Ventures have backed Datameer, while Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, and In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA, have helped finance Cloudera.
Past technology worked with data that fell neatly into rows and columns—purchase dates, prices, the location of a store.Amazon.com (AMZN), for instance, would use traditional systems to track how many people bought a certain type of camera and for what price. Hadoop can handle data that don’t fit into spreadsheets. That ability, combined with Hadoop’s speedy divide-and-conquer approach to data, lets users get answers to questions they couldn’t even ask before. Retailers can dig into not just what people bought but why they bought it. Amazon can (and does) analyze its website logs to see what other items people look at before they buy that camera, how long they look at them, whether certain colors on a Web page generate more sales—and synthesize all that into real-time intelligence. Are they telling their friends about that camera? Is some new model poised to be the next big hit? “These insights don’t come super easily, but the information is there, and we do have the machine power now to process it and search for it,” says James Markarian, chief technology officer at data specialistInformatica (INFA).
Take the case of U.S. Xpress Enterprises, one of the largest private trucking companies. Through a device installed in the cabs of its 10,000-truck fleet, U.S. Xpress can track a driver’s location, how many times the driver has braked hard in the last few hours, if he sent a text message to the customer saying he would be late, and how long he rested. U.S. Xpress pays particular attention to the fuel economy of each driver, separating out the “guzzlers from the misers,” says Timothy Leonard, U.S. Xpress CTO. Truckers keep the engines running and the air conditioning on after they’ve pulled over for the night. “If you have a 10-hour break, we want your AC going for the first two hours at 70 degrees so you can go to sleep,” says Leonard. “After that, we want it back up to 78 or 79 degrees.” By adjusting the temperature, U.S. Xpress has lowered annual fuel consumption by 62 gallons per truck, which works out to a total of about $24 million per year. Less numerically, the company’s systems also analyze drivers’ tweets and blog posts. “We have a sentiment dashboard that monitors how they are feeling,” Leonard says. “If we see they hate something, we can respond with some new software or policies in a few hours.” The monitoring may come off as Big Brotherish, but U.S. Xpress sees it as key to keeping its drivers from quitting. (Driver turnover is a chronic issue in the trucking business.)
How areIBM (IBM)and the other big players in the data warehousing business responding to all this? In the usual way: They’re buying startups. Last year, IBM bought Netezza for $1.7 billion. HP,EMC (EMC), andTeradata (TDC)have also acquired data analytics companies in the past 24 months.
It’s not going too far to say that dataanalytics has even gotten hip. The San Francisco offices of startup Splunk have all the of-the-moment accoutrements you’d find at Twitter or Zynga. The engineers work in what amounts to a giant living room with pinball machines, foosball tables, and Hello Kitty-themed cubes. Weekday parties often break out—during a recent visit, it was Mexican fiesta. Employees were wearing sombreros and fake moustaches while a dude near the tequila bar played the bongos.
Splunk got its start as a type of nuts-and-bolts tool in data centers, giving administrators a way to search through data tied to the low-level operations of computers and software. The company indexes “machine events”—the second-by-second records produced by computing devices to keep track of their actions. This could include records of every time a server stores information, or it could be the length of a cell phone call and what type of handset was used. Splunk helps companies search through this morass, looking for events that caused problems or stood out as unusual. “We can see someone visit a shopping website from a certain computer, see that they got an error message while on the lady’s lingerie page, see how many times they tried to log in, where they went after, and what machine in some far-off data center caused the problem,” says Erik Swan, CTO and co-founder of Splunk. While it started as troubleshooting software for data centers, the company has morphed into an analysis tool that can be aimed at fine-tuning fraud detection systems at credit-card companies and measuring the success of online ad campaigns.
A few blocks away from Splunk’s office are the more sedate headquarters of IRhythm Technologies, a medical device startup. IRhythm makes a type of oversize, plastic band-aid called the Zio Patch that helps doctors detect cardiac problems before they become fatal. Patients affix the Zio Patch to their chests for two weeks to measure their heart activity. The patients then mail the devices back to IRhythm’s offices, where a technician feeds the information into Amazon’s cloud computing service. Patients typically wear rivals’ much chunkier devices for just a couple of days and remove them when they sleep or shower—which happen to be when heart abnormalities often manifest. The upside of the waterproof Zio Patch is the length of time that people wear it—but 14 days is a whole lot of data.
IRhythm’s Hadoop system chops the 14-day periods into chunks and analyzes them with algorithms. Unusual activity gets passed along to technicians who flag worrisome patterns to doctors. For quality control of the device itself, IRhythm uses Splunk. The system monitors the strength of the Zio Patch’s recording signals, whether hot weather affects its adhesiveness to the skin, or how long a patient actually wore the device. On the Zio Patch manufacturing floor, IRhythm discovered that operations at some workstations were taking longer than expected. It used Splunk to go back to the day when the problems cropped up and discovered a computer glitch that was hanging up the operation.
Mark Day, IRhythm’s vice-president of research and development, says he’s able to fine-tune his tiny startup’s operations the way a world-class manufacturer likeHonda Motor (HMC)or Dell could a couple years ago. Even if he could have afforded the old-line data warehouses, they were too inflexible to provide much help. “The problem with those systems was that you don’t know ahead of time what problems you will face,” Day says. “Now, we just adapt as things come up.”
At SecureAlert, Florek says that despite the much-improved tools, extracting useful meaning from data still requires effort—and in his line of work, sensitivity. If some ankle-cuff-wearing parolee wanders out-of-bounds, there’s a human in the process to make a judgment call. “We are constantly tuning our system to achieve a balance between crying wolf and catching serious situations,” he says. “Sometimes a guy just goes to a location because he got a new girlfriend.”
We’ve worked hard to reduce the amount of energy our services use. In fact, to provide you with Google products for a month—not just search, but Google+, Gmail, YouTube and everything else we have to offer—our servers use less energy per user than a light left on for three hours. And, because we’ve been a carbon-neutral company since 2007, even that small amount of energy is offset completely, so the carbon footprint of your life on Google is zero.
We’ve learned a lot in the process of reducing our environmental impact, so we’ve added a new section called“The Big Picture”to ourGoogle Green sitewith numbers on our annual energy use and carbon footprint.
We started the process of getting to zero by making sure our operations use as little energy as possible. For the last decade, energy use has been an obsession. We’ve designed and built some of the most efficient servers anddata centersin the world—using half the electricity of a typical data center. Ournewest facilityin Hamina, Finland, opening this weekend, uses a unique seawater cooling system that requires very little electricity.
Whenever possible, we use renewable energy. We have a large solar panel installation at our Mountain View campus, and we’vepurchased the outputof two wind farms to power our data centers. For the greenhouse gas emissions we can’t eliminate, we purchase high-qualitycarbon offsets.
But we’re not stopping there. Byinvestinghundreds of millions of dollars in renewable energy projects and companies, we’re helping to create 1.7 GW of renewable power. That’s the same amount of energy used to power over 350,000 homes, and far more than what our operations consume.
Finally, our products can help people reduce their own carbon footprints. Thestudy(PDF) we released yesterday on Gmail is just one example of how cloud-based services can be much more energy efficient than locally hosted services helping businesses cut their electricity bills.
Marloes ten Bhromer
is a critically acclaimed Dutch designer. She produces some
incredible outworldly shoe designs based on a unique combination of art
and technological functionality.
Why did she use rapid prototyping? According to Marloes, this is because; "rapid
prototyping – adding material in layers – rather than traditional shoe
manufacturing methods – could help me create something entirely new
within just a few hours."
And why Objet? Again, in her words; "Objet Connex printers make
it possible to print an entire shoe – albeit a concept shoe – including a
hard heel and a flexible upper in one build, which just isn't possible with other 3D printing technologies."
The Objet Connex multi-material 3D printer allows the simulatneous printing of both rigid and rubber-like material grades and shades within a single prototype, which is why it's used by many of the world's largest shoe manufacturers.
And of course, because it's 3D printing and not traditional
manufacturing methods, there are no expensive set-up costs and no
minimum quantities to worry about!
This particular shoe design is based on a modular concept – with an
interchangeable heel to allow for specific customizations as well
as easy repairs (see the bottom photo which shows the heel detatched).
The 3D printed modular shoe will be available for viewing at the Power of Making exhibition – starting today at the world-famous Victoria and Albert Museum in London. If you are anywhere near the UK this is worth a visit.
If you can't make it right at this moment, don't worry – the shoe and the exhibit will remain there until January 2nd.
The Power of Making exhibition is created in collaboration with the
Crafts Council. Curator Daniel Charney's aim is to encourage visitors to
consider the process of making, not just the final results. For this
the 3D printing process is particularly salient.
For more details on this story read the Press Release here.
During his keynote speech at the annual Edinburgh Television Festival last Friday, Google Executive Eric Schmidt announced plans to launch Google's TV service in Europe starting early next year.
The original launch in the United States back in October 2010 received
rather poor reviews, with questions being raised regarding lack of
content being available. This has seen prices slashed on Logitech
set-top boxes down as low as $99 in July, with similarly poor sales of
the integrated Sony Bravia Google TV models.
How much of a success Google TV will become in Europe remains to be
seen, with the UK broadcasters especially concerned about the damage it
could do to their existing business models. Strong competition from
established companies like Sky and Virgin Media could further complicate
matters for the Internet search giant.
During the MacTaggart lecture,
Schmidt sought to calm the fears of the broadcasting elite, taking full
advantage of the fact he was the first non-TV executive to ever be
invited to present the prestigious keynote lecture at the festival.
"We seek to support the content industry by providing an open platform
for the next generation of TV to evolve, the same way Android is an open
platform for the next generation of mobile” said Schmidt. “Some in the
US feared we aimed to compete with broadcasters or content creators.
Actually our intent is the opposite…".
Much like in the United States, Google faces a long battle to convince
broadcasters and major media players of its intent to help evolve TV
platforms with open technologies, rather than topple them.
Google seems to have firmly set its sights on a slice of the estimated
$190bn TV advertising market which will do little to calm fears,
especially when you consider Google's online advertising figures for
2010 were just $28.9bn in comparison.