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Robot avatar MeBot gives you wriggling bug body

In the future, all business meetings will be conducted by telepresence robots--on-site avatar machines that will take care of the boring business of earning a living while we sit back at home sipping lattes and generally enjoying our 300-year lifespans.

Even if you don't believe telepresence robots are going to eliminate the need to get out of bed in the morning, it's hard to dismiss them as a powerful new communication tool, especially if one is waving at you while perched on someone's shoulder.

MIT doctoral student Sigurdur Orn's MeBot is a mobile telepresence bot with richly expressive gestural abilities. It's part of what he terms "socially embodied communication," which is more immediate than an e-mail or phone call.

The robot--which was displayed this week at the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Osaka, Japan--has a small screen atop a three-axis neck that displays the remote user's face, as well as two moving arms. These moving parts help convey user expressions to the other party as the bot moves around on its wheeled base.

The arms seem to be controlled manually, but the moving screen automatically tracks user head movements like nodding or shaking. … Read more

Four men charged in computerized online ticket scam

Four men accused of using a network of computers and automated software to buy up online tickets to concerts and sporting events and selling them at a profit were indicted on fraud, conspiracy, and computer hacking charges, federal prosecutors said on Monday.

They allegedly made more than $25 million by re-selling more than 1.5 million of the "most coveted tickets" to performances by Bruce Springsteen, Hannah Montana, Bon Jovi, Barbara Streisand, and Billy Joel; shows including Wicked and The Producers; sporting events such as the 2006 Rose Bowl and 2007 Major League Baseball playoff games at Yankee … Read more

Beware strangers on IM who won't answer your questions

Web robots, commonly referred to as "bots," are software programs written to do automated tasks, like crawling the Web looking for new sites. They also appear in chat rooms and instant messaging services masquerading as real people.

Depending on the level of sophistication of the artificial intelligence, they can attempt to understand questions and respond appropriately. Usually the conversation is pre-set, which makes for some rather silly conversations.

Bots are nothing new, but not everyone has personally interacted with one. I, for one, have never been approached by a bot in a chat room or on IM, so … Read more

Amazon EC2 cloud service hit by botnet, outage

The folks who run Amazon's EC2 cloud service must be happy the week is nearly over.

The cloud-based EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) was kept jumping this past week by two incidents: a compromised internal service that triggered a botnet, and a data center power failure in Virginia.

On Wednesday, security researchers for CA found that a variant of the infamous password-stealing Zeus banking Trojan had infected client computers after hackers were able to compromise a site on EC2 and use it as their own C&C (command and control) operation.

Don DeBolt, Director of Threat Research for CA Internet Security Business Unit, told CNET that the botnet first came to light while his firm was reviewing spam and found one with a URL for a piece of malware called xmas2.exe, described in a blog. After examining the file, DeBolt discovered it was a variant of the Zeus bot that was calling home to a computer inside Amazon Web Services, which houses EC2.

As a keylogger, Zeus is known to specifically capture bank account information, noted DeBolt, and was trying to perform the same crime in this case. The bot was also attempting to report the IP addresses of any clients that were infected via spam. The cybercrooks reportedly snuck their way into EC2 by gaining access through a site hosted on Amazon's service.

Once the bot was discovered, DeBolt and his team contacted Amazon to provide all the information from their client-based analysis. Since then, the files that were serving up the botnet on Amazon's side are no longer active.… Read more

Military looks for better touch with PacBots

Advanced gamer hardware may soon allow PacBot operators to tell exactly how hard a robot's grip is, allowing soldiers to more safely pick up and handle fragile or dangerous objects, while also increasing their situational awareness.

Novint Technologies, a company that makes 3D touch controllers for video and computer games, announced last month that it has been awarded a subcontract to co-develop a remote touch kit (RTK) for the iRobot unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) PacBot.

The new RTK will allow soldiers to tactually sense the amount of force a robot is exerting from a safe operating distance--a first for … Read more

iRobot's oozy ChemBot amazes and terrifies

We're getting a first glimpse of that shape-shifting ChemBot we first told you about last year, and well, it looks like the love child of a beating heart and a wad of Silly Putty.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Research Office awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to iRobot to create the flexible military bot. The maker of the Roomba and Scooba, along with University of Chicago researchers, showed off the oozy results at the Iros conference (the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in St. Louis this week.

DARPA envisions the … Read more

iRobot gets single biggest order from Army

Best known for its Roomba vacuums, iRobot also counts the U.S. Army as a top customer. And the latest Army deal is the company's single biggest.

iRobot said Tuesday it has received an order from the U.S. Army for $35.3 million for robots equipped to help soldiers safely evaluate dangerous conditions.

The order, made by the U.S. Army TACOM Contracting Center in Warren, Mich., calls for 486 iRobot PackBot 510 with FasTac Kit robots by March 31, 2010. This single order is part of an overall larger contract worth $286 million, of which $125 million … Read more

Survey: Why do people respond to spam?

Most people may think they're smart enough not to answer an obvious spam message. But is that really the case?

Almost one third of consumers questioned admitted answering e-mails they suspected were spam, says a survey released Wednesday by the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG).

Among those who responded to spam, 17 percent said they clicked on it by mistake, 13 percent said they sent a note to the spammer to complain, while 12 percent said they were interested in the product or service.

The MAAWG's survey study, "A Look at Consumers' Awareness of Email Security and … Read more

Q&A: iRobot taps into its Warrior spirit

Corrections were made to this interview. See below for details.

The PackBot robot has made a name for itself in dangerous places like Iraq, but the future may belong to both its bigger and smaller siblings.

U.S. military forces have long made use of the PackBot to discover and disarm roadside bombs, keeping flesh-and-blood soldiers out of harm's way. Now its maker, iRobot, is looking to make inroads with two variations on the design.

The SUGV (short for small unmanned ground vehicle) may be one of the technologies that emerges in good shape from the Army's massively … Read more

Know your neighborhood: Thirteen sites

Whether you're moving to a new place or you just want to be more familiar with your surroundings, there are a variety of sites on the Web that fill you in on everything from restaurants to businesses to apartments in your area.

Find some businesses

BooRah If you're only looking for restaurants, BooRah is for you. The site features information on how to get to a restaurant, but really shines when you read through the informative reviews from users and consider the "similar restaurant" tab, which features a listing of local eateries that are similar to … Read more

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