Just try to beat this robo-cheetah on the treadmill.

For years, robots have been rendering humans' jobs obsolete. Now, they're about to do the same thing to cheetahs.

In the bowels of MIT's engineering department, researchers have ushered a new creature into being: a 70-lb. robotic cheetah with comparable endurance to an actual cheetah. Though the robo-cheetah runs at around 13mph (less than a quarter of the speed of a real cheetah), it's designed to "outpace its animal counterparts in running efficiency," MIT News reported in March. According to researchers, robo-cheetah can run at 5mph for an hour and a half, without wasting very much energy (if only we could do that on the treadmill).

The robo-cheetah strutted its stuff at last month's International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Some noted that Boston Dynamics' version of the Robot Cheetah (apparently this is a trend?) can run over twice as quickly, but viewers were still impressed by the MIT cheetah's seemingly unparalleled efficiency.

Other attempted "running machines," the MIT researchers said, lose energy through heat, friction, and foot (paw?)-to-ground impact. Robo-cheetah, on the other hand, has special energy-saving motors and gears mounted on its joints, as well as a motor that re-purposes the energy the robo-cheetah expels through ground impact, to name a few of its features.

What's the point, you might ask, of designing a robot cheetah (besides ultimate coolness, obviously)?

Sangbae Kim, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, said that super-efficient running machines could aid in emergency response following a disaster. “In order to send a robot to find people or perform emergency tasks, like in the Fukushima disaster, you want it to be autonomous,” Mr. Kim said, “If it could run for more than two hours and search a large field, that would be useful."

(Photo: TED Blog)

What does Genesis frontman and prog rock god Peter Gabriel see when he looks in your eyes? The light, the heat and also an interspecies Internet capable of allowing highly intelligent animals to communicate with humans. Naturally.

Mr. Gabriel spoke on stage at TED last week alongside cognitive psychologist Diana Reiss, MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld and Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vincent Cerf. After spending time gazing into the eyes of animals and composing a song with a bonobo, Mr. Gabriel decided to team up with the trio in order to spread the word about the need for an interspecies Internet.

"Perhaps the most amazing tool man has created is the Internet," Mr. Gabriel said. "What would happen if we could somehow find new interfaces—visual, audio—to allow us to communicate with the remarkable beings we share the planet with?"

The group believes that animals can be incorporated into the Internet of things, allowing species like dolphins, apes and elephants to connect and communicate using the web. "These other sentient species should be part of the network too," Mr. Cerf said.

We all probably should've seen this coming from Mr. Gabriel, who's spent his career writing songs like "Animal Magic" and "Shock the Monkey."

As a for-instance. (Photo: screencap)

We suppose there's worse ways to end a blue winter Monday than by watching another startup cash out. Business Insider is reporting that Twitter has acquired social TV analytics firm Bluefin Labs. While headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (nestled in the warm bosom of its mother institution, MIT), CEO J.P. Maheu is based here in the New York City.

So far there's no number, but Business Insider says it's Twitter's largest acquisition to date, north of the $40 million it paid for Tweetdeck, suggesting a price tag somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. Cha-ching! 

It's pretty much a no-duh move for Twitter, the service where people rush to crack copycat Bane jokes as soon as the Superdome's lights go out. If Twitter's going to turn all that potential into filthy lucre, the company needs to offer would-be advertisers something a little more solid than a sea of 140-character hosannas to Beyonce and plaudits for whoever runs the Oreo account.

Bluefin Labs offers a way of translating "awareness" into numbers; witness this infographic the startup produced for Ad Age, which tracks the top 10 Super Bowl ads according to social media response. Bluefin has also partnered with Neilsen to develop a social TV rating. Add it all up, and it begins to look like a promising way for Twitter to appeal to marketers and media partners that want to see some hard numbers.

We've reached out to Bluefin Labs and Twitter for comment and will update if we hear anything more.

UPDATED: Twitter has now confirmed the acquisition on its blog, explaining the move: "We believe that Bluefin’s data science capabilities and social TV expertise will help us create innovative new ad products and consumer experiences in the exciting intersection of Twitter and TV."

Super Bowl jokes, anyone?

(Screencap: MIT.edu)

Hackers have defaced the MIT.edu website in response to the death of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who was being prosecuted with the cooperation of M.I.T for illegally downloading JSTOR files over the university's network and uploading them for free use by the public. Mr. Swartz hung himself in his Brooklyn apartment 10 days ago, and a memorial was held for him at Cooper Union in New York on Saturday.

The MIT website has been defaced to display a black screen with the text of a blog post from Mr. Swartz's blog superimposed overtop. "R.I.P. Aaron Swartz," reads bolded white text in the middle of the site. "Hacked by grand wizard of Lulzsec, Sabu. God Bless America. Down with Anonymous." (Please also note that it says "Reddit sucks k" in the righthand corner. Lulz.)

Betabeat has been unable to confirm whether or not the hack was indeed the responsibility of the hacker crew Lulzsec, though we have to guess it wasn't done by Sabu, since the former LulzSec operative was outed as an FBI informant last year.

Upon refresh, it appears the website has been taken offline, serving the message "This website is offline. No cached version is available."

Update: Aaaaand we're back.

(Photo: Slash Gear)

In a press release published to Pastebin last night, the hacktivist collective Anonymous announced its plans for the second phase of #OpAngel, an operation executed in reaction to the suicide of famed hacker Aaron Swartz.

Mr. Swartz, a champion of the open Internet, was integral to the creation of RSS and defeating SOPA/PIPA. Over the last week, Anonymous has sought to defend his memory by hacking into MIT’s website and launching an operation against the Westboro Baptist Church when they planned to protest Mr. Swartz's funeral. (WBC backed down after Anonymous threatened to hack them.)

Now, Anonymous has revealed its plans for the second phase of #OpAngel. During this phase, some Anonymous members plan to "publicly endorse" changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act proposed by California representative Zoe Lofgren. The changes to this Act are called "Aaron's Law," as Mr. Swartz was prosecuted under certain statutes in it.

Several Anonymous members also plan to participate in online protests leading up to live protests on January 25th. The release says that "multiple Anonymous groups" have vowed to deface or hack into websites belong to MIT and the Department of Justice, with focus on the websites of the prosecutors involved in Mr. Swartz's case.

On January 25th, Anons will congregate in Boston and Washington D.C. for live protests in an effort to combat wide-reaching laws that allow the "unfair" punishment of hackers. "It is our conclusion that dubious laws such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act serve only to provide prosecutors with the means to selectively target and unfairly punish online activists," reads the statement.

At least, that’s the feeling that we’re left with in the wake of news last week that the 26-year-old Internet activist Aaron Swartz had hung himself at home in Brooklyn.

Mr. Swartz, as you likely know by now, was facing data theft charges that could have landed him up to 35 years in a federal penitentiary.  In the days since his tragic death, the web has been awash with recriminations. The most strident complaints have been aimed at the federal prosecutors bent on imprisoning Mr. Swartz for actions one security expert deemed not “wrong,” but merely “inconsiderate,” and at MIT, widely blamed for enabling the government lawyers.

MIT has launched an investigation into its own role in Mr. Swartz's suicide. For its part, the U.S. attorney’s office has removed itself from the fray, dropping charges against Mr. Swartz, as is customary following the death of a defendant, and keeping its own counsel on the matter. Not everyone has remained quiet. Yesterday, the husband of U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz, who oversaw Mr. Swartz’s prosecution, took to Twitter, bashing the family of Mr. Swartz for laying blame with prosecutors.

It was the height of bad taste. "The impropriety and lack of judgment of criticizing the family of a young kid who just killed himself is so mind-boggling offensive to me," one former federal prosecutor told Betabeat, adding that the tweets were so bad that he didn't want to discuss them on the record.

It wasn't just Mr. Dolan's nerve in confronting mourning family members that offended the former prosecutor. It was the notion that the U.S. Attorney's spouse would discuss plea negotiations—best kept private in under any circumstances—that was particularly galling.

"When you're a U.S. attorney, your opinion about your cases shouldn’t be shared with a hell of a lot of people," the former prosecutor said. "Do spouses share information about their day at work? Of course. But for the US attorney’s spouse to get out there, in a way that can only be viewed as acting as her agent, is a complete and utter lack of judgment."

(Betabeat called Ms. Ortiz's office for comment, and we'll update if we get one. Mr. Dolan, meanwhile, has deleted his Twitter account since.)

Meanwhile, we can't help reading a certain recklessness in Mr. Dolan's ill-considered comments, perhaps borne out of the same self-righteousness that may have lead prosecutors to press the case against Mr. Swartz in the first place.

As Mr. Swartz’s lawyer Elliot Peters told the Boston Globe:

“There was such rigidity with the people we were dealing with,” Peters said. “I couldn’t find anyone in that office to talk about proportionality and humanity. It was driven by a desire to turn this into a significant case, so that some prosecutor could put it in his portfolio.”

Nor do we fail to note that that Mr. Swartz’s alleged crimes were comprised of actions that others commit each day. As cyber-security expert Robert Graham put it, "Aaron Swartz was charged with wirefraud for concealing/changing his "true identity". It sent chills down my back, because I do everything on that list (and more)." Mr. Graham continued:

As Arthur C Clarke puts it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Here is my corollary: "Any sufficiently technical expert is indistinguishable from a witch". People fear magic they don't understand, and distrust those who wield that magic.

Perhaps it goes too far to equate the former stubbornness to the latter. But in Mr. Dolan's reckless comments, we see a prosecutor's office that was desperate and confused, driven to tame to the wilds of an Internet it didn't completely understand, eager, in the name of order, to seek a punishment that didn't fit the crime.

Even after Mr. Swartz’s lawyers told prosecutors they believed their client to be a suicide risk, prosecutors continued to press for a draconian punishment. Perhaps it goes too far to equate Mr. Dolan's stubbornness with the government's insistence that Mr. Swartz serve time. But in his impromptu defense of his wife, Mr. Dolan may have shown the prosecutor's office in the truest light: desperate and confused, driven to tame to the wilds of an Internet it didn’t completely understand, eager, in the name of order, to seek a punishment that didn’t fit the crime.

Mr. Swartz

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology will launch an investigation into its role in the suicide of Internet activist Aaron Swartz, as recriminations mounted after the 26-year-old programmer hanged himself in his Brooklyn home on Friday.

"I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many," said MIT President L. Rafael Reif in a written statement. "It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy."

Mr. Swartz, a gifted programmer and Reddit alumus who helped develop the technology underlying the RSS feed as a 14-year-old, had been facing federal computer fraud charges after using MIT networks to download 4 million files from JSTOR, the academic database. Those charges, filed in July 2011, had loomed large for Mr. Swartz in the days leading up to his death, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that his negotiations with prosecutors had broken down in recent days:

"The government indicated it might only seek seven years at trial, and was willing to bargain that down to six to eight months in exchange for a guilty plea, a person familiar with the matter said. But Mr. Swartz didn't want to do jail time."

While MIT wasn't directly involved in the government's case, it was widely believed that the university played a role in allowing the government to move forward with its aggressive charges. Anonymous was among those to point fingers at MIT in the days after Mr. Swartz's death, defacing at least two university websites with messages calling "for this tragedy to be a basis for a renewed and unwavering commitment to a free and unfettered internet, spared from censorship with equality of access and franchise for all."

As AllThingsD notes, the fact that Professor Hal Abelson, a free software advocate, was named to lead MIT's investigation makes a strong statement. But if MIT was fast to get out in front of accusations that the university was complicit in the case against Mr. Swartz, it wasn't the only institution to come in for blame.

In an official statement released after his death, Mr. Swartz's family lay blame with "a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach." Mr. Swartz's friend, the free speech activist Lawrence Lessig, wrote that Mr. Swartz was "driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying." Last year, Mr. Lessig's wife, social activist Bettina Neuefeind organized the website free.aaronsw.com to raise money for Mr. Swartz's defense.

In a blog post, security expert Alex Stamos, who would have testified as an expert witness on Mr. Swartz's behalf had the case gone to trial, wrote that the prosecution's case was largely overblown, arguing that "Aaron did not 'hack'" the JSTOR website for all reasonable definitions of 'hack,'" but took advantage of MIT's and JSTOR's unusually open systems to download millions of files:

"If I had taken the stand as planned and had been asked by the prosecutor whether Aaron’s actions were “wrong”, I would probably have replied that what Aaron did would better be described as “inconsiderate”. In the same way it is inconsiderate to write a check at the supermarket while a dozen people queue up behind you or to check out every book at the library needed for a History 101 paper."

In support of Mr. Swartz, members of the academic community have been posting hundreds of copyright-protected links to articles on Twitter. Researcher Micah Allen, who called for others to join in the protest on Reddit, wrote:

"a fitting tribute to Aaron might be a mass protest uploading of copyright-protected research articles. Dump them on Gdocs, tweet the link. Think of the great blu-ray encoding protest but on a bigger scale for research articles." 

Danah Boyd, an assistant professor in media, culture, and communication at New York University, and a friend of Mr. Swartz, said that what angered her most in the wake of Mr. Swartz's death is that the government chose to make an example of the young activist:

"the reason they threw the book at him wasn’t to teach him a lesson, but to make a point to the entire Cambridge hacker community that they were p0wned. It was a threat that had nothing to do with justice and everything to do with a broader battle over systemic power."

Others expressed their outrage at the prosecutor they deemed responsible for charges by petitioning the Obama Administration to remove U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office. Posted on Saturday, the petition had more than 12,000 electronic signatures as of this writing, putting it nearly halfway to the threshold of 25,000 signatures which guarantees that the White House will respond.

While outrage at prosecutors often fueled reactions to Mr. Swartz's passing, others remembered Mr. Swartz as a brilliant and inspiring thinker, and a troubled soul. Former girlfriend recalled Mr. Swartz as a caring partner dogged by demons:

Later, I tried to take care of him while he was being destroyed, from inside and out. I struggled so hard, but not as hard as he did. I told him, time and again, that this was his 20s. It would be better in his 30s. Just wait. Please, just hold on.

And a website dedicated to Mr. Swartz's memorial was filled with statements to his precociousness, as a technically brilliant programmer, iconoclastic thinker and a crusader for Internet freedom, but also as a generous and devoted friend. The journalist Sarah Lai Stirland recalled the impression a teenaged Mr. Swartz had made: "It was undoubtedly his advanced intellect that set him apart from most of his peers. Aaron expressed the sense that he didn’t fit into the world around him early on."

Another commenter, Zach Lipton, counted himself in the "awfully large club, of people who found inspiration in Aaron’s amazing mind." Mr. Swartz's habit of thrusting himself into public debate wasn't borne of arrogance, Mr. Lipton wrote:

It was simply pure chutzpah, born of kindness and a genuine desire to help, which he had in droves. He was someone who would see a problem, say, as Sorkin once put it, “I want to be a part of this,” and would throw himself out there to contribute with whatever skills he could. That attitude could, and did, get him into trouble, but it also gave us all a chance to know him and learn from him.

Update: The Department of Justice has dropped its case against Mr. Swartz, as is customary after the death of a defendant.

Mr. Musk, please take my money for your rockets. (Photo via flickr.com/jurvetson)

Yesterday, before venturing forth to the casting call for Bravo's Start-ups: Silicon Valley spinoff, we made a rather wonkier stop, at this month's meeting of the MIT Enterprise Forum. The topic of the panel? Space, the final frontier, and aerospace investing in particular.

As we arrived, a brief SpaceX video with a Top Gun-style soundtrack was wrapping up. Adam Harris, the company's VP for Government Affairs, let slip a little, "Yay!" as it came to a close. 

Much of the panel that followed focused on the knotty details of the business. For example: If you make rockets, you can't export them, because they're classified the same as ICBMs. Panelists included NASA Associate General Counsel for IP Courtney B. Graham and Aireon CEO Don Thoma, whose company sells satellite phone technology for use as an air traffic surveillance product.

But when somebody brought up crowdfunding in the Q&A, things got almost rowdy. (Almost!)

One man in the audience posed the question of whether, now that the SEC is finalizing rules for equity-based crowdfunding, that might work to fund the more starry-eyed of aerospace projects. He offered the example of the Kickstarted Pebble. The creators wanted $100,000; they got more than $10 million. "You don't get any stock or anything," he said, sounding a bit incredulous. And people love space way more than they love dorky watches.

"For some of these startups that sell a dream, like SpaceX, I do think that's a perfect funding resource," he said.

Then, nodding in the direction of Mr. Thoma, he added: "When you're talking about Iridium, and all we remember is that it was a great idea but a very expensive telephone, it doesn't have the same sex appeal."

Aireon is a subsidiary of Iridium, selling a wonky product without much obvious sex appeal. Unsurprisingly, Mr. Thomas disagreed with the man's assessment.

"I've spent my whole career in space or telecom associated with space," he said. "I always wondered if other industries have as many nuts as the space industry has."

Mr. Thomas is perpetually running into dreamers with ideas of, shall we say, varied quality. "I think there's dangers in crowdfunding, because they're going to fund these dreams that don't really have a real business," said Mr. Thoma. There are viable companies for whom it might be valuable, but there'll be a whole lot of dreck to sort through.

The crowdfunding proponent immediately leapt back into the fray, before Mr. Thoma could get any further. "I don't think we need guardians of people's decision to invest in something," insisted the Kickstarter fan, adding that "The Wright Brothers may have looked like a bunch of nuts to their neighbors."

The notion of a cable to the moon might be "a great idea for somebody to put money into. I don't know. And I don't think that you know," he said.

"Let's democratize investment," said the man, who we were beginning to suspect as an Indiegogo ringer, before concluding with a flourish: "Why do we want to protect people from making stupid investments when we don't even know which ones are stupid and which ones are terrific!"

To boldly go, indeed.

Troll Face IRL (Photo: Creative Commons)

Yesterday, we told you about the new charges being brought against early Reddit employee and activist coder Aaron Swartz. He's now facing 13 federal counts after allegedly downloading large portions of JSTOR, an academic database filled with articles and data, in order to release it to the public for free use.

Today it seems that Mr. Swartz has a potentially influential ally in his corner--Bettina Neuefeind, wife of Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig.

She is the organizer behind the site free.aaronsw.com to raise money for his defense. At the top of the homepage, it says, “The fund is overseen by Bettina Neuefeind and funds go directly to pay legal costs.”

Ms. Neuefeind's husband is Larry Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons and the director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Mr. Swartz is a former fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics. His whole alleged crime was based off of the belief of fair use, the ideals that Creative Commons holds up. And according to this 2011 article by The Harvard Crimson, "He [Swartz] also helped design the standards that underlie Creative Commons and RSS technology."

Her husband's professional affiliations aside, Ms. Neuefeind’s involvement hardly comes as a surprise. She describes herself in an online profile as "a housing and disability rights lawyer, mother of three and social activist very focused on public health, nutrition, sustainability and social justice."

It’s unclear whether or not Mr. Lessig is directly connected to this defense fund, but the three individuals are certainly connected. Take, for instance, Ms. Neuefeind's and Mr. Swartz's appearance in Mr. Lessig’s 50th birthday lip sync video:

UPDATE: Reached by email, Mr. Lessig told Betabeat, " My wife is a friend of Aaron and a lawyer. She's known him for more than a decade. She offered to help."

Mr. Swartz (Photo: Wikipedia)

You may remember activist coder Aaron Swartz, an early Reddit employee who was charged with four felonies last year for daring to illegally download academic articles off of JSTOR through the MIT network. Now, the 25-year-old Mr. Swartz, who serves as the executive director of the progressive political action committee Demand Progress, has been charged by the federal government with nine more felonies for breaching hacking laws, bringing the total to 13.

According to Wired:

[Mr. Swartz] has a history of downloading massive data sets, both to use in research and to release public domain documents from behind paywalls. He surrendered in July 2011, remains free on bond and faces dozens of years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted.

Like last year’s original grand jury indictment on four felony counts, (.pdf) the superseding indictment (.pdf) unveiled Thursday accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading millions of documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals that are normally inaccessible to the public.

Mr. Swartz wasn't just dodging a paywall to nab an article he needed to write an academic paper. He was allegedly using a program that continuously scraped academic information and datasets from JSTOR, one so powerful that the indictment says it took down JSTOR's servers multiple times. Mr. Swartz's motives for downloading all those docs? Information wants to be free, man.

Still, it helps to keep Mr. Swartz's alleged crimes in perspective--downloading scholarly articles isn't exactly trafficking heroin. We have no doubt the former fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics has a righteous argument for not keeping academic informtion behind a paywall.