Peder

Camille van Gestel and co-founder Maurits Groen started solar-centric manufacturer WakaWaka with an explicit aim other than making money, though he's certainly not opposed to making some along the way. So it's not a non-profit, but van Gestel calls WakaWaka, which was named in a roundabout way after the Shakira song, a "purpose-driven company," with that purpose being -- no exaggeration needed -- to cast light on the world. They're doing just that, with the aid of recycled materials, low-power LEDs, and efficient solar cells. As a result, one of the portable light products that the group has created has become one of the most valued possessions among people displaced by the war in Syria, and more are lighting up villages in Haiti and elsewhere. I talked with Van Gestel at this year's CES, where the company's picked up a pair of CES Innovation Awards, and he has some advice for people who'd like to turn their technical skills to philanthropic endeavors, especially ones that involve hardware or technical infrastructure. Some of it can be summed up as "Spread the wealth, but don't do it for free." Between ongoing feedback gathered from users, a buy-one-give-one style distribution system, and requiring participation by recipients, he says WakaWaka has been able to reach people with their solar lighting products in a way that's much more valuable than just dumping hardware on them, and along the way has gotten a lot of feedback from the buyers whose purchases subsidize the company's non-profit activities. (Alternate Video Link.)

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jones_supa writes: Dave Jones from Red Hat has written a wrap-up of the strange bug that has made some machines running Linux to freeze. (Previous discussion.) Right down to his final week at Red Hat before Dave gave all his hardware back, Linus Torvalds managed to reproduce similar symptoms, by scribbling directly to the HPET timer. He came up with a hack that at least made the kernel survive for him. When Dave tried the same patch, the machine ran for three days before he interrupted it, which was a promising result. The question remains, what was scribbling over the HPET in his case? The only two plausible scenarios Dave could think of were that Trinity generated 0xFED000F0 as a random address and passed that to a syscall which wrote to it, or a hardware bug. That's where the story ends for now. Linus' hacky workaround didn't get committed, but him and John Stultz continue to back and forth on hardening the clock management code in the face of screwed up hardware, so maybe soon we'll see something real get committed on that area.

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SternisheFan writes: The original Starship Enterprise was on a 5-year mission, but the original series was canceled after the third year. A continuation of Star Trek:TOS is being created by a dedicated cast and crew intent on keeping true to the spirit of Gene Roddenberry's television show. From recreating the original sets with incredible accuracy and attention to details, staying faithful to original storylines has been a true labor of love for all involved. Here are a series of videos showing the progress being made on recreating the iconic series. (And if you missed it last time, here's the first episode they produced.)

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An anonymous reader writes: Stephen Hawking and Intel have worked together for the past several years to build a new communication system for those suffering from diseases that severely impair motor function. The system is called ACAT (Assistive Context Aware Toolkit), and it will be free and open source. Hawking's previous system had been in use for over 20 years, so the technological upgrade is significant. His typing rate alone has doubled, and common tasks are up to 10 times faster. ACAT uses technology from SwiftKey, a cell phone keyboard enhancement. "Over three million people around the world are affected by motor neuron disease and quadriplegia and because the system created for Hawking is based on open-source software, it could potentially be adapted to suit many of them. Different functions can be enabled by touch, eye blinks, eyebrow movements or other user inputs for communication. Hawking and Intel hope that because the system is open and free it will be adopted by researchers who will want to use it to develop new solutions for those with disabilities."

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About six weeks ago, a hole in Paypal's two factor authentication and their mobile client was discovered. hypnosec (2231454) wrote in with news of another trivial way to bypass Paypal's two-factor authentication. A bug in a feature for eBay integration allows passing a GET parameter to completely bypass two-factor authentication, and you don't even need to be coming from eBay to use it. You still need the password, but additional protection is lost. From the article: eBay, in conjunction with Paypal, provide a service as to where you can link your eBay account to your Paypal account, and when you sell something on eBay, the fees automatically come out of your Paypal account. ... When you are redirected to the login page, the URL contains "=_integrated-registration." ... Once you're actually logged in, a cookie is set with your details, and you're redirected to a page to confirm the details of the process. And this is where the exploit lays. Now just load http://www.paypal.com/ , and you are logged in, and don't need to re-enter your login. So, the actual bug itself is that the "=_integrated-registration" function does not check for a 2FA code, despite logging you into Paypal. You could repeat the process using the same "=_integrated-registration" page unlimited times.

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Taco Cowboy (5327) writes Nine days before the announcement from WHO regarding the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, an online tool had the incident flagged. HealthMap, a team of 45 researchers, epidemiologists and software developers at Boston Children's Hospital founded in 2006, hosting an online tool that uses algorithms to scour tens of thousands of social media sites, local news, government websites, infectious-disease physicians' social networks and other sources to detect and track disease outbreaks. Sophisticated software filters irrelevant data, classifies the relevant information, identifies diseases and maps their locations with the help of experts. The tool was introduced in 2006 with a core audience of public health specialists, but that changed as the system evolved and the public became increasingly hungry for information during the swine flu pandemic. To get a feel of how HealthMap works, in the case of the Ebola outbreak, visit the site.

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