TechnologyOwl.com

Carly Fiorina: McCain Different Than Bush on the Environment. Really

McCain is set to lay out specifics of his position on global climate change Monday. His chief surrogate and economic advisor Carly Fiorina (remember her?) tries to distance her candidate from the Bush administration when it comes to the environment, talking up the differences on a weekend TV show.

Meet the Pulverizers: New Munitions Tear Up Rock and Concrete Quick

New munitions called Pam, Barnie and Bam Bam tear apart rock and concrete easily -- and that's hard to do with traditional explosives. The new blasters use a two-step process: A "shaped charge" drills a hole, then explosives are fired into the hole, and -- ka-boom.

IE8 to boost ActiveX security on Vista

ActiveX has long been regarded as a gaping hole through which spyware and viruses can contaminate your PC and compromise your data. With Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft's forthcoming version of its embattled browser, steps will be taken to reduce the exposure caused by ActiveX.

BT, HP Discuss Data Center Deal

The companies aim to tackle enterprise telephony deals together....
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Get off of my cloud: Rolling Stones on, then off eMusic

Indie-focused music download service eMusic scored a huge win by bagging the complete Stones catalogue between 1964 and 1970. After weeks of stellar sales, the label abruptly pulled the tracks.

North Carolina city will test run DTV transition in September

If Wilmington, NC can't get the DTV transition right in September, hold onto your hats when the whole country goes digital after February 17th.

Asus Eee PC 900 pre-order on Amazon.com started

Yesterday we reported that some online stores including 3rd party vendors on Amazon.com started to offer the new Asus Eee PC 900. Now Amazon.com itself started to take pre-orders for both new Asus Eee 900 notebooks for $549.99 each. Amazon.com does no...

Wii Fit Out of Stock

Mid-April we reported that the Wii Fit fitness accessory and game for the Nintendo Wii will be in short supply. Wii Fit did not even start shipping yet, but as far as I can see all major online retailers stopped taking pre-orders. Wal-mart, Amazon, Ga...

Families to Plead Case for Vaccine Link to Autism

Claiming that Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative in vaccines, triggers autism, attorneys for two Oregon boys take on mainstream medicine in a federal court Monday.

China to Make Its Own Jumbo Jets

State media reports Sunday that the Chinese central government and the Shanghai government are major shareholders in a homegrown company that will make passenger jumbo jets. The idea is that China Commercial Aircraft will make the country less dependent on Boeing and Airbus.

Tricky Exposes His Roots, Crowdsources Remixes

Adrian Thaws, better known as Tricky, has come a long way from his days in Massive Attack with a successful solo career and film career. His next CD, Knowle West Boy, explores his roots in a "white ghetto" with a post-punk, Two-Tone, dancehall sound. Fans can remix the single "Council Estate."

Nintendo Taps U.S. Indie Talent in Search of WiiWare Hits

Japanese gaming visionary Shigeru Miyamoto of Nintendo says the most unique videogames come from America. Nintendo's games-on-demand download service launches Monday, and the company shifts its focus from Japanese studios to U.S. garage developers to find the next brilliant game.

Facebook, Google to Join MySpace in Data Portability

Facebook announces Connect, and Google also prepares a data portability initiative....
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Weekly Top 10: HTC Touch Diamond, GTA IV burns, Live TV on iPhone

The Microsoft Yahoo take-over topic got finally closed this week. Grand Thef Auto IV for Xbox 360 and Sony PS3 makes $500 million in sales the first week. This is more than Hollywood blockbusters are making. ...

Indie Musician's Tumblelog Packs Music, Photos

Singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur uses his tumblelog, "Bag Is Hot," to build his next two EPs and a full-length CD, due for release in 2008. Sample the goods on the photo and music journal posted by the indie musician discovered and signed by Peter Gabriel.

I4U Community powered by Flux officially launched

We are happy to officially announce our new I4U Community service. We have been running the Flux powered social network platfrom on the Review and Gadget Model sections of I4U News for a while to test and optimize the integration. Now I4U Community feature...

Hulu

Now, I realize that Hulu got lot of crap for being a YouTube ripoff, and I know NBC got a lot of crap for pulling all its stuff off every video sharing site in the world, but…

Hulu is awesome. Seriously. I don’t know how I ended up there today, but I think I’m in love.

Here are all the things I watched today:

Saturday Night Live clips, including this one with Steve Martin that could solve the American financial crisis if everyone just put it into practice,
An episode of 30 Rock that I missed.
An episode of Miami Vice (they have the first two seasons — the first two seasons!! True story — if Isabella had been a boy, he was gonna be named “Sonny.” I’m not kidding.)
The pilot episode of Stacked, a sitcom with Pamela Anderson that really shouldn’t have been canceled — it was genuinely funny.

In exchange for this, my show stopped every 10 minutes or so for a commercial that lasted all of about 20 seconds. The timeline on the Flash Player even has little dots on it that let you know when it’s going to break. (You can’t skip them — the controls disappear during the ad, and an ad plays if you move the scrub bar past a dot.)

Picture quality was good, ad intrusion was acceptable, content selection was good and, I’m assuming, just going to get better.

As much as I want to join the “Let’s Bash Big Media Party” on this one, but I’m still looking for a downside on this.

News Corp. Pulls Bid for Newsday

Despite Rupert Murdoch's boast lthat he was about to close a deal for the Long Island newspaper, a News Corp. rep says the company has withdrawn its $580 million bid to purchase Newsday. News Corp. already owns two New York papers, WSJ and New York Post.

iTunesU

Apple - Education - iTunes U: This is the audio version of OpenCourseWare, I suppose. Apple has gotten a bunch of high-end schools to contribute lectures to iTunes, which are available for download, and appear to be free (I didn’t find any with prices attached, at any rate).

iTunes U delivers easy, 24/7 access to educational content from hundreds of top colleges, universities, and educationally focused organizations across the country. And it’s accessible to anyone with a Mac or PC.

I didn’t find anything that jumped out at me as interesting, but there are some great schools represented: MIT, Yale, DePaul, Carnegie Mellon, etc.

Data Recovered From Melted Columbia Disk Drives

Jon Edwards recovers data from computers wrecked in floods and fires. He has retrieved info from a melted disk drive that fell from the sky when space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003. The drive held scientific data -- some was radioed to Earth during the voyage and Edwards recovered the remainder from "two hunks of burned metal."

Clay Shirky and the Cognitive Surplus

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody: Clay Shirky gave a heckuva talk at the Web 2.0 Expot about what he calls “the cognitive surplus.” Here’s the theory —

After the industrial revolution, Americans had something new: free time. And we needed to figure out what to do with it. So we started drinking gin and watching TV, instead of thinking and participating.

Television, Shirky argues, has become a huge heat sink that dissipates time that could be spent on constructive pursuits — a “cognitive surplus.” He offers this statistic, which is amazing.

[…] ll of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in — that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

[…] And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. […] Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.

So, we spend “2,000 Wikipedias” a year watching television. Seriously.

The entire talk is great. The link above goes to the printed transcript. Here’s a link to Zawodny, for the 15-minute video.

Craft Brewers Reformulate Beer to Cope With Hop Shortage

OAKLAND, California -- At Pacific Coast Brewing here, brewer Donald Gortemiller is reworking his recipes and altering his brewing styles like never before.

Gortemiller isn't acting on a spurt of creativity. He's coping with a worldwide shortage of hops -- the spice of beer. The dry cones of a particular flowering vine, hops are what give your favorite brew its flavor and aroma. Prices of the commodity are skyrocketing as hop supplies have plummeted, forcing smaller brewmasters around the United States to begin quietly tweaking their recipes, in ways that are easily discerned by serious imbibers.

The shortage -- caused by a dwindling number of hop growers worldwide, and exacerbated by a Yakima, Washington, warehouse fire -- has forced Gortemiller to use fewer and different hops than before, changing the flavor of his beer. He's also resorted to beer hacks, like "dry hopping," in which the hops are added late to the mix, consuming fewer hops and yielding a more consistent flavor.

"When hops were $2 a pound, compared to $20 or $30 a pound now, it didn't matter. We'd throw them into the boil at various times," Gortemiller says. "That was an inaccurate way of doing things. We're modifying recipes and using about 20 percent less hops."

Brewer Chuey Munkanta at the 21st Amendment Brewery pulls the grain out of the wash tun.
Photo Jim Merithew, Wired.com

The beer-brewing situation demonstrates how the global-commodity shortage is spilling over to affect diverse industries in unexpected ways. The hop shortage lives on the outer edges of a food crisis that's prompted riots across the planet, and last month led U.N. Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon to implore the world's governments to increase food production to stave off a 40 percent jump in the cost of staples.

While nobody in the craft-beer industry is going hungry, they are being forced to adapt. There's no replacement for hops in beer -- they give the brew its flavor. But other key ingredients are in short supply, as well. Malt, which comes from sprouted barley, produces the alcohol and body of beer -- its prices have doubled along with hops. The price of rice, used by industrial brewers, has charted a similar course.

The larger commercial brewers are better off. Most have long-term contracts for hops, barley and rice, and are doing whatever is necessary not to tinker with their brand names.

"Coors Banquet has been tweaked very little since it was introduced in the 1800s," says Molson Coors spokeswoman Jenny Volanakis. "We don't play around with our beers."

But even the big brewers aren't immune from the shortage, says industry analyst Jack Russo of Edward Jones in St. Louis. "Most everybody has raised prices in the 2-to-3-percent range," says Russo.

The small, craft brewers are taking the brunt of the beer crisis, though. "When I called my hop supplier," Gortemiller says, "they told me you're 250th on the list."

At the 21st Amendment Brewery in San Francisco, brewer Shaun O'Sullivan says he just increased the price of a pint 25 cents, to $5.50. Like Gortemiller, he's reducing the amount of hops used in some recipes. "We've backed off," O'Sullivan says. "We had to get smart. We could have easily limped along."

O'Sullivan is lucky. One of his most popular beers is Watermelon Wheat, which "has virtually no hops in it," he says.

Head brewer at the 21st Amendment Brewery, Jesse Houck.
Photo Jim Merithew, Wired.com

Ken Grossman, the head brewer at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in Chico, California, says he's not tinkering with his brand-name recipes, such as his Pale Ale. He has long-term contracts in place to purchase his hops of choice.

He's paying more for barley, though -- the price has jumped because of a drought in Australia, flooding in Europe and a trend that has farmers worldwide switching to corn to produce biofuels.

"A lot of brewers got caught short on hops," says Grossman. Still, that hasn't stopped him from brewing a new, hop-laden beer called Torpedo Ale, produced with New Zealand hops. "We have been in a fortunate position," Grossman says.

But not everybody in the business is as beer savvy as is Grossman, one of the first to commercialize microbrewing.

Ian Ward, president of Brewers Supply Group in Shakopee, Minnesota -- the nation's largest craft brew supplier -- says things are only going to get worse. "That's the crisis that brewers are finding themselves in," Ward says. "They're having to review their recipes. The crisis really hasn't hit hard yet."

The hop shortage became noticeable around July, when a market glut and hop reserves stored in extract began dwindling.

The bulk of U.S.-grown hops are produced in the Yakima, Washington, area. Farmers weren't getting a profitable return and got out of the market, switched crops or went bankrupt. The same was happening in Germany, the world's No. 1 hop-growing country.

In the United States alone, there were an estimated 515 hop growers in 1950; 75 in 2000 and just 45 today, Ward says. In 2006, about 2 million pounds of hops were destroyed in an S.S. Steiner warehouse in Yakima, equaling about 4 percent of the U.S. hop crop.

All the while, beer sales are increasing worldwide by about 1 to 2 percent annually. The craft brewing industry is growing yearly by 12 percent. That economic reality is pushing hop growers back into the fields.

21st Amendment head brewer Jesse Houck adds hops to the brew.
Photo Jim Merithew, Wired.com

About 8,500 acres of hops were just planted in Yakima alone, and about 2,500 thousand acres in Germany, Ward says.

"The cure for high prices is high prices," he says.

But that isn't sitting well with Omar Ansari, the owner and brewer of Surly Brewing in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, who just signed a long-term hop deal

"My jaw hit the floor when I saw the price," Ansari says. And next year, he'll have to reformulate his brown ale Bender beer, a blend he described as a "flagship" flavor requiring the "Willamette" hop from the Pacific Northwest.

"We were informed by our supplier that next year we can't get that hop. It's just gone," Ansari said. "We're going to have to make changes."

"Everybody," he says, "is crossing their fingers there is going to be good hop crop."

Security flaw turns Gmail into open-relay server

A newfound flaw in Google's Gmail allows would-be spammers to treat the service as an open-relay server. Compounding the issue is the fact that services such as Hotmail and Yahoo "trust" Gmail. This may facilitate e-mail delivery, but it also makes it easier for spammers to reach their intended targets.

iPhone unavailable in online Apple Store

The online Apple store has currently no iPhones in stock. Both the 8GB and 16GB iPhone are marked as "Currently Unavailable". This could also just be a store glitch, but we also already learned that week that O2 has run out of iPhones in the...

Takara Tomy Air Guitar Pro from Japan

Takara Tomy introduced the fun Air Guitar Pro in Japan last year. In the wake of Guitar Hero: On Tour I stumbled over them again and also found a must see Japanese video review of these Air Guitar gadgets. This toy consists of the upper neck of a guit...

Mom's Day Gifts for Gamer Mums

Whether your mom likes adventure, nostalgia or "cute" we can recommend games for her. The only question is, how well do you know your mom?

The Utlimate Elevator Article

Up and Then Down: This is a fascinating article about all aspects of elevators. It’s set amid the story of a guy who got stuck in an elevator for 41 hours, but it touches on things like elevator phobias, the social aspects of elevators, and — more interestingly — the logistical aspects of how elevators work.

Elevator logistics, it turns out, have some serious theoretical issues to resolve.

There are two basic elevatoring metrics. One is handling capacity: your aim is to carry a certain percentage of the building’s population in five minutes. Thirteen per cent is a good target. The other is the interval, or frequency of service: the average round-trip time of one elevator, divided by the number of elevators. In an American office building, you want the interval to be below thirty seconds, and the average waiting time to be about sixty per cent of that. Any longer, and people get upset.

Having elevators work well is not a trivial thing:

The Bronx family-court system, for example, was in a shambles last year because the elevators at its courthouse kept breaking down. (The stairs are closed, owing to security concerns.) This led to hour-long waits, which led to missed court dates, needless arrest warrants, and life-altering family strife.

Even more interesting is the psychology of how humans place themselves in elevators:

Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die.

This makes me remember a really funny SNL skit with David Schwimmer that I thought was subtly brilliant (pictured at top).

Schwimmer was in an elevator, and people kept coming in and standing…oddly. For instance, he stood in the middle when he was my himself, then dutifully moved to the corner when other people got in. But those people didn’t stand in the opposite corner as expected — they stood right next to him in his corner. In another instance, the other guy in the car just turned around and faced the back of the car.

It was fascinating in that it revealed some of the ingrained psychological and social frameworks we deal with daily and don’t even realize. I can’t find a video of it, but here’s a transcript of the skit, which includes the picture from this post.

Why Twitter?

Video: Twitter in Plain English: This video attempts to explain what value Twitter brings to the world. I will admit that after watching it, I maybe have some understanding about what people see in Twitter.

But I still think it’s creepy. We don’t have to know about everything that happens, all the time.

Like the video says, one of the first things we ask each other is “What are you doing?” Twitter seems to do a fine job of removing the need to ask that question.

And that’s a little sad.

And I refuse to forget

Filmaka: And I refuse to forget: This movie is worth 3 minutes and 11 seconds of your life.

A Sensory Archiver keeps paperless secrets for the world’s most powerful institutions. Against orders he clings to sensations of his most precious memories - that of the woman he loved.

Wonderfully done.

Zebra Striping: Pointless?

Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?: This article suggests that zebra-striping (alternate row color) in tables does nothing to improve usability.

This experiment yielded no evidence that zebra striping consistently improves the accuracy or speed of tasks.

It does, however, make the tables look nicer to most people. Maybe that’s reason enough?

Review Round-up: Gateway C-141x, Asus EAH3850 X2, Asus R300

Last week we reviewed for instance the Gateway C-141x Convertable Tablet Notebook. This is a low-cost 14-inch tablet notebook that offers good performance and features for the price. We also tested the Asus EAH3850 X2 Video Card and liked its performa...

With Motorcycles, Eco-Friendly and Badass Can Mix

Electric and alternative-fuel bikes are the future of individual transportation not because of their fuel efficiency but because they are extremely cool. That's right. Creators of eco-friendly motorcycles are pushing the limits of their designs to make them desirable to a biking community that sees little difference between their (relatively) efficient gas engines and the new-fuel wave of alternatives. Riding bikes is all about the cool factor, so the crazier and more technologically advanced they get, the more people will want to ride them, clean fuel or not.

Gaze upon the alt-fuel bikes most likely to break the mold of motorcycle design in the near future.

Left: The ENV Fuel Cell Bike

Intelligent Energy's ENV Bike is on track to become the first available hydrogen-powered motorcycle when it's released next year. The zero-cylinder ENV runs on a removable fuel cell (stored where a conventional gas tank would be) and runs peacefully quiet. The fuel cell uses a proton-exchange membrane that pushes a full 6 kilowatts of peak-load power, resulting in a nice high torque. And one hydrogen tank will last about four hours without a charge, or about 100 miles.

The ENV is also supposed to offer a fairly gentle ride, since power is distributed evenly through a single gear, avoiding the regular gear-induced kickback of a gas bike. But the best part is that instead of CO2, the bike emits water. Not so pure that you could bend backwards for a little midride drink, but better than adding to the global carbon load.

Technically, a tesseract is a four-dimensional analogue of a cube. To us, it's a bike design that looks just a like a Praying Mantis Predacon Transformer come to life.

Yamaha's Tesseract is a four-wheeled motorcycle powered with a liquid-cooled V-twin engine and an electric motor. It's designed with a dual-scythe suspension for slick turns, allowing the wheels to adapt individually to uneven, rocky terrain independently of one another.

Similarly to other new-wave, multiwheeled green bikes, the body is built up instead of out, so that the body width is more equivalent to regular-size bikes. That leads to above-average handling and stability. Add the thin-but-durable body frame and expect to ride this one fast. Just don't wait up for it -- it won't come out until after 2010.

This is a superhero's bike. Suzuki's slick Crosscage prototype uses a fuel-cell block developed by Intelligent Energy, which creates power from hydrogen gas. According to IE, its fuel designs are based on thin metallic bipolar plates and make the fuel block small, compact and cheaper to produce. To the lay reader, this means that it's more likely to come out sooner rather than later. With blue neon V-shaped flares on its rims -- and a look that the Silver Surfer would envy -- PEM fuel cells and lithium-ion batteries are just icing on the cake.

If you drain your wallet every week at the pump, the relief promised by Yamaha's FC-Dii fuel-cell prototype bike will be as refreshing as the water it runs on. Well, partially.

The FC-Dii, available for ogling at the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show, runs on a methanol-fuel-and-water build, with a new type of cell stack that promises the "highest levels of power density in the 1-kilowatt class." It also features a detachable lithium-ion battery for recharging, and a model 30 percent efficiency standard for a direct-methanol-fuel-cell system. Plus, you can look into the insides of the bike's cellblock, and that's just too future-cool for us.

The design of the Enertia electric motorcycle from Brammo smartly resembles the classic lines of the 1961 Triumph TR6 Trophy Bird from the movie The Great Escape. And what's more fantastic than the thrill of Steve McQueen racing away from the Nazis? Nothing.

The Enertia uses lithium-ion phosphate batteries with power settings that let the user trade off performance for range. At 12 to 25 horsepower (19 kilowatts) in its "performance" mode, it's on the same power level as the Kawasaki Ninja 250 gas bike (though its speed tops out at 50 mph).

Better still, the carbon-fiber chassis enables lightweight maneuverability, and its six lithium-phosphate batteries reduce its emissions footprint to close to zero. If you live in a small city, you won't find a more viable commuting vehicle. McQueen would have plugged it in himself.

The Killacycle is the fastest electric drag bike in the world. Unfortunately, its name almost became a self-fulfilling prophecy at Wired's NextFest conference last September. During the conference, owner Bill Dube crashed into a minivan while attempting a burnout on a narrow sidewalk.

The inventor had barely ridden the beast before but knew the massive stats: 0-to-60 in 0.97 seconds, 400 horsepower, and a top speed of 158 mph. The bike's 619 pounds (100 pounds more than regular bikes) make it difficult for a rookie rider to maneuver safely. Dube ended up in the hospital with a few body nicks. Afterwards, he came out with his head high and -- believe it -- promised to push his machine to even greater speeds. Currently, his team is working on a 1,000-horsepower drag bike that will attempt to break the land speed record on salt.

The VentureOne looks like a car and is legally classified as a three-wheel motorcycle, but -- copy Blue Leader! It looks just like a Tron Light Cycle come to life. Carver Europe's VentureOne superbike features an automatic balancing system that stabilizes the body and allows it to tilt into a turn like a motorcycle without fear of wipeout.

The bike is scheduled to come out in hybrid build (with a 350-mile range) and two all-electric propulsion models (up to 125 miles). It'll cost between $20,000 and $30,000 and will include GPS navigation and an entertainment system to provide as much distraction as possible.

We think this car-bike mashup could push out its identity crisis and make a name for itself, and we can't wait to (legally) race our Venture Ones out on the grid.

The Piaggio Vespa scooter is as intrinsically connected to the Italian experience as cannoli from Mozzicato's. Now, the Vespas are growing with the times by introducing the lithium-ion-battery-powered Vespa M3 Hybrid. With a 125-cc engine, the M3 will ride just like any other Vespa but will latch on tighter to the pavement with the addition of the third wheel. The added rubber won't extend the width of the scooter -- in fact, the wheelbase at the front is still narrow enough to maneuver tightly, just like the classic.

The M3 has four different performance modes at the flip of a switch: all-electric, low-charge hybrid, high-charge hybrid and standard hybrid. In its all-electric mode, the hybrid turns off the combustion and becomes beautifully silent. But this is sadly lame: At electric-only power, it's supposed to last only 12 miles. The other options push the scooter to a more city-friendly range of 25 to 50 miles on a full charge.

A hybrid motorcycle can't promise the same raw power and performance as a V-Twin Harley, can it? That would be like the Hell Angels going green and Al Gore becoming cool. Well, it's about to happen.

The Gen-Ryu Hybrid bike is the future eco-friendly Harley, with a lightweight 600-cc engine and a high-output, high-efficiency electric motor. And it has awesome features you will not find in a regular hog: noise-canceling system to reduce wind noise, voice-navigation function and hands-free music player and cellphone. Plus, it'll have our favorite feature from recent smart cars -- the rear-view monitoring camera to make sure you can fit in those ridiculously tight urban parking spots.

The prototype includes a cornering light system that makes it easy to see around curves at night. The balance will prevent you from popping a wheelie in the street, but the wide-ish tires will give you a comfortable, smooth ride -- perfect for the trip from the dusty fields into the nanotech-laced asphalt of the future San Angeles.

The Silence PT2 is another car-bike tweener. The electric-powered PT2 has a range of 125 to 250 miles and a high speed of 125 mph due to its smallish size at only 13 feet long, 6 feet wide and 900 pounds. That's about one-third of the 2008 Mini Cooper Clubman S, and 400 pounds lighter than the minimum weight of an F1.

As the wild child from the unholy union of a Go Kart-making company and another that built high-speed three-wheelers, there's a childlike sense of fun in this design. With a wide-open top frame, large front wheels sticking close to the ground, and an aerodynamic front screen to cut the wind, you could easily place it on the track next to Racer X, and it would feel at home. Just wear a helmet.

The Silence PT2 is scheduled to be available in early 2009 for close to $50,000.

Industrial designer Sam Jilbert hit upon a great concept while creating his final-year project at Britain's Northumbria University: Take a past success, tweak it for the present, and fill it with technology from the near future. Voilà! A new design for us to drool over.

The Honda Cub Concept updates the 50-year-old (and 50 million-selling) Honda Super Cub by adding a hydrogen-fuel-cell case. The resulting design resembles a giant LifeSaver mixed with a collapsible bike. Though Honda hasn't endorsed it, its concept has sparked many consumers' imaginations, which could eventually land it on city streets. Like other fuel cell-based bikes, expect to sacrifice a high torque for a slim riding range -- probably close to 50 miles at first.

The Vectrix is the first commercially available electric bike on the market designed like a mullet in reverse: all business in the back and party on the front. The nickel-metal hydrate, battery-charged engine sits in the back of the bike for controlled, efficient acceleration, and the front resembles the angular shape of a ravenous one-eyed wasp. That's hot.

It's expensive at $13,000, but it'll save you money on the back end: It takes three hours to charge the bike fully (at about 1 cent per mile), and has a 40-to-50-mile range at 25 mph. There's also no clutch and no transmission, forcing down the maintenance fees. But it's the ingenious regenerative breaking system that rounds it out: Twist the throttle in a radial backwards motion and the bike will slow down, while cooling and charging the engine at the same time.

NSA Attacks West Point! Relax, It's a Cyberwar Game

Five hours into their assault on West Point, the hackers got serious.

The SQL [structured query language] inserts that came earlier were just pablum intended to lull the Army cadets into a false sense of security. But then the bad guys unleashed a stealthy kernel-level rootkit that burrowed into one workstation, started scraping data and "calling home."

It was a highly sophisticated attack, but this time the bad guys were really good guys in wolves' clothing.

For four days in late April, the National Security Agency -- the nation's most secretive repository of spooks, snoops and electronic eavesdroppers -- directed coordinated assaults on custom-built networks at seven of the nation's military academies, including West Point, the Army university 50 miles north of New York City.

It was all part of the seventh annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a training event for future military IT specialists. The exercise offered a rare window into the NSA's toolkit for infiltrating, corrupting or destroying computer networks.

The 34 Army cadets comprising the West Point IT team operated in a different kind of battlefield, but their combat skills and instincts need to be every bit as sharp. Like George Washington said: "There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet the enemy."

The SQL injections, targeting their Fedora Core 8 Web server, were a piece of cake for these IT combatants. Each injection tried to smuggle malicious code inside the seemingly harmless language used by the network’s MySQL software. The cadets handily defended with open source Apache web server modules, plus some manual tweaking of the SQL database to "avoid any surprises," in the words of Lt Col. Joe Adams, a West Point instructor who helped coach the team.

But the kernel-level rootkit was much more dangerous. This stealthy operating-system hijacker can open unseen "back doors" into even highly protected networks. When they detected the rootkit's "calls home" the cadets launched Sysinternal's security software to find the hijacker, then they manually scoured the workstation to find the unwelcome executable file.

Then they terminated it. With extreme prejudice.

"This was probably the most challenging part of the exercise, since it required them to use some advanced techniques to find the rootkit," Adams says. And rooting it out helped boost the West Point team to the top of the pile when, in the aftermath of the exercise, the referees rated all the universities' network defenses.

For the second year in a row, the Army placed first over the Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and others, winning geek bragging rights and the privilege of holding onto a gaudy, 60-pound brass trophy festooned with bald eagles and American flags. Adams credits the team’s thorough preparation and their excellent teamwork despite the round-the-clock schedule.

At the network control room on the second floor of West Point’s 200-year-old engineering building (which once was an indoor horse corral and still smells like it in some remote corners, according to one instructor), the IT team set up cots and, just for the hell of it, camouflaged netting. They worked in shifts, with one team member always monitoring incoming and outgoing traffic. He or she would alert other cadets -- "router guys" -- to block any suspicious addresses. Meanwhile, off-shift cadets would make food and coffee runs to keep everyone fueled up and alert. Together, the team was "faster than anyone else," Adams says.

But the way the cadets designed their network was a big factor in their victory, too. The NSA dictated some terms: All networks had to be capable of e-mail, chat and other services and had to be up and running at all times despite any attacks or defensive measures. Beyond that, the teams were free to come up with their own designs.

West Point's took three weeks to build. The cadets settled on a fairly standard Linux and FreeBSD-based network with advanced routing techniques for steering incoming traffic in directions of the IT team's choosing.

The choices in software tools for responding to any attack really boiled down to "automatic" versus "custom," says Eric Dean, a civilian programmer and instructor. He adds that while automatic tools that do most of their own work are certainly easier, custom tools that allow more manual tweaking are more effective. "I expect one of the 'lessons learned' will be the use of custom tools instead of automatics."

Even with a solid network design and passable software choices, there was an element of intuitiveness required to defend against the NSA, especially once it became clear the agency was using minor, and perhaps somewhat obvious, attacks to screen for sneakier, more serious ones.

"One of the challenges was when they see a scan, deciding if this is it, or if it’s a cover," says Dean. Spotting "cover" attacks meant thinking like the NSA -- something Dean says the cadets did quite well. "I was surprised at their creativity."

Legal limitations were a surprising obstacle to a realistic exercise. Ideally, the teams would be allowed to attack other schools' networks while also defending their own. But only the NSA, with its arsenal of waivers, loopholes, special authorizations (and heaven knows what else) is allowed to take down a U.S. network.

And despite the relative sophistication of the NSA's assaults, the agency told Wired.com that it had tailored its attacks to be just "a little too hard for the strongest undergraduate team to deal with, so that we could distinguish the strongest teams from the weaker ones."

In other words, grasshopper, nice work -- but the NSA is capable of much craftier network take-downs.

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