Hackaday Prize Worldwide: Berlin, Germany

Join the Hackaday Crew in Berlin this Saturday for a meetup!

This weekend in Berlin, Germany, there are at least two events happening and [Sophi], [Elliot] and [Bilke] are going to check them all out. The Vintage Computing Festival is one of the big events, and it looks like there will be lots of geeky magic to play with. This weekend is also Maker Faire Berlin where we’re looking forward to hanging out with our friends from Hackaday.io and we’re excited about meeting new people and projects.

Hackaday often throws a party after Maker Faire to celebrate all of our community projects and we’re doing it again Saturday night. We are co-hosting a party with the Vintage Computing Festival, on the same site as the festival, and all are welcome. We’ll have drinks and snacks, and the VCF has live music planned for the evening. This event is free, but we’d like you to RSVP so we know how many refreshments are needed.

Your first drink is on us, and naturally, if you bring a project,your second one is on us too! Please help spread the word by telling your friends, sharing on social media, and mobilizing all the people at your Hackerspace. See you on Saturday!

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

Filed under: Hackaday Columns, The Hackaday Prize

CIA officers pulled from China because of OPM breach

John McCain is not pleased. (credit: US Senate Armed Services Committee / CSPAN)

The employee records from the Central Intelligence Agency were not included in the data cache from the Office of Personnel Management hack, according to government officials. However, that doesn't mean the CIA has been unaffected by the breach. The Washington Post reports that according to unnamed current and former US officials, the CIA pulled "a number of officers" from the US Embassy in Beijing as a precautionary measure following the breach—precisely because their names would not appear in State Department personnel files believed to have been obtained by Chinese intelligence operatives.

The question of how to respond to the OPM breach was raised yet again during testimony by intelligence and defense officials on September 29 before the Senate Armed Services Committee. The hearing on "United States Cybersecurity policy and threats" delved into the distinction being made by the Obama administration between electronic economic espionage and the hacking of government agencies and why the breach at the OPM was not considered an attack warranting a proportionate response from the US. No US official has gone on the record to attribute the OPM breach to China.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the committee that while "we don't know in terms of specifics" what was taken in the OPM breach, it had "potentially very serious implications, first among them close to home [for me] in terms of the Intelligence Community and identifying people who may be under public status... This is a gift that's going to keep on giving for years." Still, he said, as "egregious" as the OPM breach was, it didn't amount to an attack on national infrastructure. "Rather, it would be a form of theft or espionage. We, too, practice cyber espionage. We're not bad at it."

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Female applicants have harder time getting grants funded in Netherlands

(credit: Image from San Jose State)

Women earn over half of college graduates in certain countries, yet they continue to be underrepresented in academia, where they face shortfalls in leadership positions, salary, and funding. Of these three issues, funding is particularly important: sufficient funding would make the other gender-based gaps easier to close. A new study in PNAS suggests that this issue isn’t going away, as committees making funding decisions are more likely to decide in favor of male applicants.

The study used data from the Netherlands, tracking early career researchers who had applied for a Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research grant between 2010 and 2012. Though women accounted for approximately 40 percent of the initial applicants, their success rates declined at every step in the review process.

During the time period in question, there were over 3,000 applications submitted, and 16.7 percent secured funding. However, the success rate for female applicants was only 14.9 percent, significantly lower than that of male applicants (17.7 percent).

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TiVo’s new Bolt offers 4K streaming and commercial skipping

The 4K game is heating up: the Nvidia Shield and the Nuvola NP-1 were the original boxes to support 4K streaming, along with services built into some TVs. Then came Amazon, which announced 4K streaming capabilities for its Fire TV box. Now we have a company known for recording—not streaming—entering the game. TiVo has released its new Bolt DVR, which streams 4K content in addition to recording your favorite shows and letting you watch them back at lightning speeds.

TiVo gave the Bolt a serious aesthetic upgrade compared to its existing Roamio Pro box. It's a sleek, modern rectangle with an off-center curve, making it look like an artistic, avant-garde Apple product. It has a four-tuner DVR, meaning you can record up to four shows at once, and it improves on the specs of the Roamio Pro by sporting gigabit Ethernet, optical audio out, and faster 802.11ac WiFi. It's available in a 500GB model or 1TB model, and each will also let you stream recorded content to mobile devices on the same network as the Bolt.

The Bolt supports HDMI 2.0 as well as HDCP 2.2, which protects 4K content from being copied against the programmer's wishes. It should also help the box play 4K content at 60fps, which isn't common in most 4K streaming devices yet. Currently, Bolt has Netflix and YouTube apps built in, so you'll be able to stream 4K content from those sources immediately.

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Teeny Tiny Very Small – Atomic Resolution and the Home Hobbyist

Why the Navy needs more than just more ships

The USS Coronado (LCS-4) underway in April 2014. The Coronado and other LCS ships are supposed to fill the role of frigates, which the Navy retired en masse in the late 2000s. (credit: U.S. Navy photo by Chief Mass Communication Specialist Keith DeVinne)

Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO turned Republican presidential hopeful, has gotten oddly specific about what size military she believes the US needs: 50 Army brigade combat teams, 36 Marine battalions, and a 350-ship Navy combat fleet (not counting support ships, hospital ships, and cargo carriers). She's proposed a retooling of the military that could cost more than $500 billion over ten years. Fiorina didn't come up with those numbers on her own—they closely matched numbers from a report on military readiness from the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think-tank, and numbers that Mitt Romney proposed during his campaign four years ago.

"350 is not a crazy number," Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution specializing in defense and foreign policy issues, told Ars. "It's not the number I endorse, but it's not crazy, with all the tasks being assigned [the Navy]. Even in the late Bush and Obama years, we've seen a goal of 335 ships." And the last president to have a fleet of 350 ships was Bill Clinton, who O'Hanlon said "was not an uber-hawk."

The numbers, while appearing to be part of a detailed plan, don't mean much alone. There's little disagreement (at least among defense analysts) that the military needs to be strengthened. But even meeting the much-less-specific call for military spending that Donald Trump made from the deck of the USS Iowa recently ("We're gonna make our military so big and so strong and so great and it will be so powerful that I don't think we're ever going to have to use it [because] nobody's gonna mess with us") requires an understanding of what exactly "strong" is supposed to mean.

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Build Your Own Satellite Ground Station

We talk to the creators of SatNOGS, an open source and open hardware satellite ground station built using a 3D printer, off the shelf components, and $300.

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The post Build Your Own Satellite Ground Station appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.