A program called Neural Karaoke was created by PhD student Hang Chu has been trained to create songs based on its' analysis of a photograph.  It can even create a dance to go along with the song it has written.  Just in time for the holidays it  has written a charming little Christmas song based on a picture of a tree with presents under it.

Read more about this interesting project here.

Last Saturday in Seattle the very first Special Olympics Robotics Championship was held at the Pacific Science Center.  This program pairs "students with and without intellectual disabilities with the goals of bringing STEM education to students of all abilities and creating communities of acceptance for all."  The program was started by a student who's autistic sister was interested in robotics but couldn't find a team to participate in.  Modeled around the Special Olympics Unified Sports team this program is designed to provide more opportunities to special needs students and to break down societal barriers and help everyone to learn a more inclusive mindset.

Geekwire covered last weeks' competition here.

Unified Robotics Club Hom...

At last week's meeting in Seoul the IETF began testing a new DNS Privacy Daemon know as Stubby.  DNS data is public and can reveal a lot about users activity and metadata leakage is a big concern.  The idea is to "provide a resolver that can accept connections and return responses over Transport Layer Security (TLS) at the user-side."  Stubby is designed to encrypt the data from individual DNS transactions and represents a small but significant step in protecting users.

Read more about Stubby here

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

IETF 97 is taking place in Seoul this week and DDN Founder Rob Nagy is once again on-site working with the network team to make it all happen.  The IETF hackathon happened last weekend and information on the outcomes is already being reported on the IETF blog. It looks like YANG Datastores models have been a big focus of the meeting this week as well as IANA Stewardship and some new RFCs.  Read the IETF Blog for more information and continued updates.

It is pretty unusual for DNS to be make the news, but lately it seems to be happening more and more. DDoS attacks are becoming more frequent and severe and this has many experts speculating on what the future holds.  CircleID.com posted an interesting article that takes an in-depth look at the Dyn attack 2 weeks ago and speculates on the long term effects and the changes that need to come.

Read the full article here.