The Foresight Institute, a think tank concentrating on the possibilities and potential hazards of emerging and potentially disruptive technologies has announced the Kartik M. Gada Personal Manufacturing Prize totaling $100kus. Part of an effort to spur the development of rapid fabrication and manufacturing technologies at the grassroots level, the prize aims to help bootstrap the quality of life of people living in the twenty most poor economies on the planet. The idea is to lower the cost of entry to the field of manufacturing commodity personal goods by making use of recyclable materials and cheap to construct additive fabbers. The …

Every year at Defcon they assemble a huge computer network and populate it with machines of all kinds as part of a competition. The objective is simple: Crack as many of the system on the network as you can, find the flag (it's a Capture the Flag competition), and defend your turf as best you can. The game requires the competitors to think fast on their feet because they don't know what they'll run into on the CtF network, and they'll be faced with network services that they may never have seen before. The challenge is to find vulnerabilities in …