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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

The 6th annual RoboGames, a robot competition that takes place in the United States, was held this month with 403 robots from 18 different parts of the globe competing in the categories of combat, sumo, robo-one/androids, open, hockey, art bots and junior league.

This year’s medals went to the United States, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, Canada, Indonesia, South Korea and Russia (see table below). Other participants were Australia, Austria, Colombia, Egypt, Hong Kong, Iran, Japan, Peru and Taiwan.

Although the host country carried off most of the medals, visiting countries stood out at some events, like Mexico at 1 lb autonomous combat, 500 g autonomous sumo, 100 g autonomous sumo and autonomous line follower, Brazil at 3kg sumo (both autonomous and radio-controlled), and the United Kingdom in the “best of show” and “walker challenge” modalities.

“Taking part gave us the opportunity to test our knowledge against students from other nations, and proved that we are at the same level or better than other students from famous schools”, said Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute student Erick Rodríguez who, along with his fellow team member Rogelio Baeza, took gold in the autonomous line follower event.

RoboGames, previously ROBOlympics, holds the Guinness Record for “world’s largest robot competition”. It was founded in 2004 by David Calkins to help robot builders exchange ideas and learn from each other.

Friday, October 2, 2009

At least thirteen people have been killed after torrential rains caused mudslides in Italy on Friday.

The mudslides occurred in the city of Messina, located in the northern part of Sicily. The mud blocked rails and road, cut off communications, and destroyed several buildings.

Search and rescue teams were using dogs to locate survivors buried beneath the rubble. Around forty people were hospitalised.

“Most of the dead and seriously injured were in two buildings that collapsed in mudslides,” emergency services spokesman Giampiero Gliubizzi told the Agence France-Presse news agency.

Over one hundred people were forced to evacuate when mudslides threatened their homes, officials said. Some escaped onto roofs, where they were airlifted by helicopters.

“I didn’t understand what was happening. I was at home and everything started moving. Then I found myself surrounded by rubble,” said a survivor. Witness reports suggest the depth of the mud reached seven metres (23 feet) in some areas.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Pope Benedict XVI has confirmed that he will be travelling to Scotland as part of his tour to the United Kingdom this year.

The Pope made the announcement, which was in a gathering with the Scottish Catholic bishops in Rome, Italy, in response to an address from Cardinal Keith Michael Patrick O’Brien.

The Pope has been quoted as saying: “Later this year, I shall have the joy of being present with you and the Catholics of Scotland on your native soil.”

Pope Benedict, who announced that he would be taking a visit to the United Kingdom in 2010 last year, spoke against sectarianism and euthanasia. He said that “[f]aith schools are a powerful force for social cohesion.”

“Together with my brother Bishops,” Cardinal Keith O’Brien stated in reaction to the address, “I am filled with joy at the news that the Holy Father will visit Scotland, since he has confirmed his intention to visit us we in turn will now begin our preparations for his visit in earnest.” O’Brien wished Pope Benedict XVI a “heartfelt welcome” and said that “[w]e are thrilled that your visit will include Scotland.” The Cardinal also declared: “As Scots Catholics we are proud of our nation’s long relationship with the Holy See.”

At present, a precise route has not been announced by the Vatican. Pope Benedict XVI’s visit will be the first papal visit to the United Kingdom since 1982, when Pope John Paul II came to the country.

Monday, April 4, 2005

The wedding of Britain’s Prince Charles to Camilla Parker Bowles was postponed by one day to allow Prince Charles to represent the Royals at Friday’s funeral of Pope John Paul II. The Royal’s wedding will now be celebrated on Saturday, April 9.

The Prince cut short his Swiss skiing holiday and returned to London today. He will make travel arrangements for his trip to The Vatican on Friday, and attend a memorial service for the pope at London’s Westminster Cathedral this afternoon. Mrs. Parker Bowles will accompany him today, according to his Clarence House office.

Parker Bowles will not be joining Prince Charles for the Pope’s funeral. However, Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, will be in attendance.

The change in wedding plans threw Windsor businesses in disarray, where hotels had taken bookings for Friday wedding parties. The owner of a crafts center there, Kashmir Dhillon, had to order fresh tea towels with the April 9 date. “We will be the only ones with the 9th on it if it goes ahead,” she said.

A series of postponements have hampered the Prince’s and Parker Bowles’ wedding arrangements. Initially they were planning to use Windsor Castle, but were unable since it was not licensed for civil ceremonies. After it moved to a more meager town hall setting, the Queen decided not to attend, immediately generating rumors of a royal snub.

The Queen will still attend the blessing ceremony at Windsor Castle afterwards.

There also was debate over what name Parker Bowles would take should her husband become King. Prince Charles liked “princess consort,” but the government says she must be called “queen,” whether she uses the title or not.

Final arrangements for the wedding will be announced soon, according to the prince’s spokesperson.

Prince Charles divorced his first wife, Princess Diana in 1996, a year before she died in an automobile accident in Paris.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Buffalo, New York — A massive warehouse complex of at least 5 buildings caught on fire in Buffalo, New York on 111 Tonawanda Street, sending a plume of thick, jet black colored smoke into the air that could be seen as far away as 40 miles.

As of 6:40 a.m., the fire was under control, and firefighters were attempting to stop it from spreading, but could not get to the center of the fire because of severe amounts of debris. Later in the morning, the fire was extinguished.

“The fire is mostly under debris at this point. It’s under control, but it’s under some debris. We really can’t get to it. We’re just going to have to keep on pouring water on it so it doesn’t spread,” said Thomas Ashe, the fire chief for the North Buffalo based fire division who also added that at one point, at least 125 firefighters were on the scene battling the blaze. One suffered minor injures and was able to take himself to the hospital to seek medical attention.

Shortly after 8:00 p.m. as many as 3 explosions rocked the warehouse sending large mushroom clouds of thick black smoke into the air. After the third explosion, heat could be felt more than 100 feet away. The fire started in the front, one story building then quickly spread to three others, but fire fighters managed to stop the flames from spreading onto the 3 story building all the way at the back.

According to a Buffalo Police officer, who wished not to be named, the fire began at about 7:00 p.m. [Eastern time], starting as a one alarm fire. By 8:00 p.m., three fire companies were on the scene battling the blaze. Police also say that a smaller fire was reported in the same building on Saturday night, which caused little damage.

At the start of the fire, traffic was backed up nearly 4 miles on the 198 expressway going west toward the 190 Interstate and police had to shut down the Tonawanda street exit because the road is too close to the fire.

At one point, traffic on the 198 was moving so slow, at least a dozen people were seen getting out of their cars and walking down the expressway to watch the fire. That prompted as many as 10 police cars to be dispatched to the scene to force individuals back into their cars and close off one of the 2 lanes on the westbound side.

One woman, who wished not to be named as she is close to the owner of the warehouse, said the building is filled with “classic cars, forklifts, and money” and that owner “does not have insurance” coverage on the property. The building is not considered abandoned, but firefighters said that it is vacant.

Officials in Fort Erie, Ontario were also swamped with calls to fire departments when the wind blew the smoke over the Niagra River and into Canada.

It is not known what caused the fire, but a car is suspected to have caught on fire and there are reports from police and hazmat crews, that there were also large barrels of diesel fuel being stored in one building. Firefighters say the cause of the blaze is being treated as “suspicious.” The ATF is investigating the fire and will bring dogs in to search the debris.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Besides becoming a political stomping ground for the Pan-Green and Pan-Blue coalitions, there are other changes from past years of Taipei Audio Video Fair (TAVF). With those changes in mind, Wikinews reporter Rico Shen interviewed You-peng Wang, chairman of the Taipei Electrical Commercial Association (TECA), the main organizer of TAVF, about the 60th year anniversary of TECA and the changes to the show.

Sunday, December 26, 2004

Indian Ocean – The death toll continues to grow and millions face a homeless life in the new year as coastal communities in south Asia struggle against continued aftershocks and flooding caused by the largest earthquake to strike the planet in more than a generation.

The magnitude 9.0 undersea megathrust earthquake struck off the western coast of Sumatra, Indonesia on December 26, 2004, at 00:58:50 UTC (or 07:58:50 local time in Jakarta and Bangkok).

The earthquake was the strongest in the world since the 9.2-magnitude Good Friday Earthquake which struck Alaska, USA in 1964, and the fourth largest since 1900. More than 140,000 deaths[1] were caused by resulting tsunami, which in Thailand were up to 10 meters (33 feet) tall, and struck within three hours of the initial event.

Multiple tsunamis struck and ravaged coastal regions all over the Indian Ocean, devastating regions including the Indonesian province of Aceh, the coast of Sri Lanka, coastal areas of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the resort island of Phuket, Thailand, and even as far away as Somalia, 4,100 km (2,500 mi) west of the epicenter.

While the earthquake and the tsunamis are no longer ongoing (other than aftershocks), the humanitarian and economic crisis generated by the disaster is still ongoing. This report will attempt to cover the crisis as it continues to develop.

Friday, May 16, 2008

A major security hole was discovered in the pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) of the Debian version of OpenSSL. OpenSSL is one of the most used cryptographic software, that allows the creation of secure network connections with the protocols called SSL and TLS. It is included in many popular computer programs, like the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Apache web server. Debian is one of the most used GNU/Linux distributions, on which are based other distributions, like Ubuntu and Knoppix. The problem affects all the Debian-based distributions that were used to create cryptographic keys since the September 17, 2006. The bug was discovered by Luciano Bello, an argentine Debian package maintainer, and was announced on May 13, 2008.

This vulnerability was caused by the removal of two lines of code from the original version of the OpenSSL library. These lines were used to gather some entropy data by the library, needed to seed the PRNG used to create private keys, on which the secure connections are based. Without this entropy, the only dynamic data used was the PID of the software. Under Linux the PID can be a number between 1 and 32,768, that is a too small range of values if used to seed the PRNG and will cause the generation of predictable numbers. Therefore any key generated can be predictable, with only 32,767 possible keys for a given architecture and key length, and the secrecy of the network connections created with those keys is fully compromised.

These lines were removed as “suggested” by two audit tools (Valgrind and Purify) used to find vulnerabilities in the software distributed by Debian. These tools warned the Debian maintainers that some data was used before its initialization, that normally can lead to a security bug, but this time it was not the case, as the OpenSSL developers wrote on March 13, 2003. Anyway this change was erroneously applied on September 17, 2006, when the OpenSSL Debian version 0.9.8c-1 was released to the public.

Even though the Debian maintainer responsible for this software released a patch to fix this bug on May 8, 2008, the impact may be severe. In fact OpenSSL is commonly used in software to protect the passwords, to offer privacy and security. Any private key created with this version of OpenSSL is weak and must be replaced, included the session keys that are created and used only temporary. This means that any data encrypted with these keys can be decrypted without a big deal, even if these keys are used (but not created) with a version of the library not affected, like the ones included in other operating systems.

For example any web server running under any operating system may use a weak key created on a vulnerable Debian-based system. Any encrypted connection (HTTPS) to this web server established by any browser can be decrypted. This may be a serious problem for sites that requires a secure connection, like banks or private web sites. Also, if some encrypted connection was recorded in the past, it can be decrypted in the same way.

Another serious problem is for the network security software, like OpenSSH and OpenVPN, that are used to encrypt the traffic to protect passwords and grant the access to an administrative console or a private network protected by firewalls. This may allows hackers to gain unwanted access to private computers, networks or data traveled over the network, even if a not affected version of OpenSSL was used.

The same behavior can be applied to any software or protocol that use SSL, like POP3S, SSMTP, FTPS, if used with a weak key. This is the case of Tor, software used to offer strong anonymity on the TCP/IP, where about 300 of 1,500-2,000 nodes used a weak key. With 15-20% of weak Tor nodes, there is a probability of 0.34-0.8% circa to build a circuit that has all tree nodes weak, resulting in a full loss of anonymity. Also the case of only one weak node begin used may facilitate some types of attack to the anonymity. The Tor hidden services, a sort of anonymous public servers, are affected too. However the issue was speedly addressed on May 14, 2008.

The same problem also interested anonymous remailers like Mixmaster and Mixminion, that use OpenSSL to create the remailer keys for the servers and the nym keys for the clients. Although currently there is no official announcement, at least two remailer changed their keys because were weak.