Tag Archives: UC Berkeley

One-Legged Jumping Robot Shows That Control Is Everything

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Robots that can jump have been seen before, but a robot that jumps all the time is a little different. Salto-1P is a one-legged jumping robot at UC Berkeley, and back in 2017 it demonstrated the ability to hop continuously with enough control to keep itself balanced. Since then it has been taught some new tricks; having moved beyond basic stability it can now jump around and upon things with an impressive degree of control.

Key to doing this is the ability to plant its single foot exactly where it wants, which allows for more complex behaviors such as hopping …read more

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U.S. Mobile Giants Want to be Your Online Identity

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The four major U.S. wireless carriers today detailed a new initiative that may soon let Web sites eschew passwords and instead authenticate visitors by leveraging data elements unique to each customer’s phone and mobile subscriber account, such as location, customer reputation, and physical attributes of the device. Here’s a look at what’s coming, and the potential security and privacy trade-offs of trusting the carriers to handle online authentication on your behalf. Continue reading U.S. Mobile Giants Want to be Your Online Identity→

Study: Attack on KrebsOnSecurity Cost IoT Device Owners $323K

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A monster distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against KrebsOnSecurity.com in 2016 knocked this site offline for nearly four days. The attack was executed through a network of hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices such as Internet routers, security cameras and digital video recorders. A new study that tries to measure the direct cost of that one attack for IoT device users whose machines were swept up in the assault found that it may have cost device owners a total of $323,973.75 in excess power and added bandwidth consumption.

My bad. Continue reading Study: Attack on KrebsOnSecurity Cost IoT Device Owners $323K→

Better Beer Through Gene Editing

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As much as today’s American beer drinker seems to like hoppy IPAs and other pale ales, it’s a shame that hops are so expensive to produce and transport. Did you know that it can take 50 pints of water to grow enough hops to produce one pint of craft beer? While hops aren’t critical to beer brewing, they do add essential oils and aromas that turn otherwise flat-tasting beer into delicious suds.

Using UC Berkley’s own simple and affordable CRISPR-CaS9 gene editing system, researchers [Charles Denby] and [Rachel Li] have edited strains of brewer’s yeast to make it taste like …read more

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‘Petya’ Ransomware Outbreak Goes Global

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A new strain of ransomware dubbed “Petya” is worming its way around the world with alarming speed. The malware appears to be spreading using a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows that the software giant patched in March 2017 — the same bug that was exploited by the recent and prolific WannaCry ransomware strain. Continue reading ‘Petya’ Ransomware Outbreak Goes Global→

Bee Partners closes $30 million fund to seed very early-stage startups

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 Bee Partners in San Francisco has raised a $30 million fund, its second, to lead investments in very early stage startups based in the U.S. Founded in 2009, the firm is best-known as the first investor in TubeMogul, now a publicly traded adtech c… Continue reading Bee Partners closes $30 million fund to seed very early-stage startups→