Robot That Shovels Snow Automatically

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdEf60wcKcs]

Those of you that live in snowier climates will drool over the I-Shovel, a battery powered robot that shovels the snow off your driveway, saving you countless hours of backbreaking labor over the course of a single winter. Its inventors claim that, despite its relatively underpowered motor, it keeps the driveway clear even in heavy snowfall; the trick, apparently, is that the robot constantly monitors the amount of snow on the driveway and springs into action whenever a significant but manageable layer has built up. Unfortunately, the I-Shovel is still a prototype, but with any luck you’ll be able to actually buy one soon. If you’re impatient, of course, you could always try building your own.

[via Toolmonger]

Crawling + SQL Injection With Scrawlr

Scrawlr is the latest tool to come out of HP’s Web Security Research Group. It was built in response to the massive number of SQL injection attacks happening on the web this year. Most of these vulnerable sites are found through googling, so Scrawlr works the same way. Point it at your web server and it will crawl all of the pages and evaluate the URL parameters to see if they’re vulnerable to verbose injection. It reports the SQL server and table names if it comes across anything.

It only supports 1500 pages right now and can’t do authentication or blind injection. It’s still a free tool and a great way to identify if your site is vulnerable to automated tools finding you website via search engines.

[via Acidus]