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Cinnabon’s signature product is an 880-calorie cinnamon roll that the Dallas Observer has called a “gut bomb.” It’s a swirly pillow of dough dripping with cinnamon, brown sugar, margarine, and cream-cheese frosting. To call it a cult object understates the zombie-like relationship patrons have with Cinnabon’s 1,100 stores, which collectively sell about 100 million rolls each year. Cinnabon is mentioned every 10 seconds on social media. Comedian Jim Gaffigan has said the chain is run by Satan. Consumers in focus groups have told the company they often experience anxiety on their way to Cinnabon. They’re not worried about the calories, though a Classic Roll contains 330 more than a Big Mac. They’re concerned someone ahead of them might get the last fresh one. A fan on Twitter writes, “Just ate a Cinnabon while staring through a window of a gym watching people work out. This is what heroin must be like.” It’s difficult to understand the way the Classic Roll supercharges multiple senses at once—unless you have eaten one. The plastic knife cuts through an outside that’s mildly crusty before giving way to a softer middle. Frosting melts into the ridges of the bun, which sits in a brown puddle of excess. Take a bite and the buttery flavor bathes the edges of the tongue as the gritty sweetness of sugar and cinnamon washes over the tip. The texture is lighter than expected. The sensation of pure sugar can be overwhelming. It coats the mouth and clogs the back of the throat. Halfway through the roll, the body cries out for water or, even better, Diet Coke, which has a way of cutting through the varnish laid by the fats and sugars. Deep inside the roll, the bun’s core is hot and yet just barely cooked. Once gone, the bottom of the clamshell box is left smeared like a crime scene with a mash of syrup and cream cheese. Each one is 3 inches high and 4 inches in diameter and costs $3.69. The company is not run by Satan. It’s run by Kat Cole, 35, whose last job was at Hooters. Although some leaders equivocate about the indulgences they sell, Cole embraces them. “It’s almost pornographic,” she says. “It’s just so over-the-top, it’s a sensory experience.” Cole came to Cinnabon three years ago. She had worked at Hooters, the beer-and-buffalo-wing chain staffed by waitresses in shrunken tank tops and orange hot pants, for 15 years, starting as a waitress in Jacksonville, Fla., and working her way up to vice president. Globally, retail sales of Cinnabon products will reach $1 billion this year. The first stores were in mall food courts, and Cole has helped the company move its caloric missiles onto supermarket shelves and into fast-food restaurants such as Taco Bell (YUM) by way of licensing deals for everything from cookies to drive-through mini rolls. Licensing now accounts for more than half the chain’s revenue. The brand can be found on 72 products in grocery stores. General Mills (GIS) was one of the first, with its Pillsbury refrigerated dough Cinnabon rolls, sold in pressurized cardboard tubes. There’s also Cinnabon-flavored Cream of Wheat (BGS), International Delight creamer, and Keebler Cinnamon Roll Original cookies. Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (GMCR) will soon introduce a Cinnabon Roll Coffee K-Cup for the Keurig brewer. Burger King (BKW) sells a miniature version of the Cinnabon roll, as does the Pilot Flying J chain of truck stops. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=UNSyvK5BJkk

In journalism, there's something called a lede, which is just another word for the main or most important part of your story. Normally you want to lay it out for the reader in the first sentence or two. Obviously, I'm hesitating here. That's because I can't decide if it's more important that researchers at MIT and Harvard have just managed to create a previously unobserved form of matter by getting photons to bind together into molecules, or the fact that the result is basically a real-life lightsaber -- that could be part of a quantum computer one day. Actually, I think what this story is really about is...friendship. See, photons -- which are the elementary particles of light -- tend to be massless and kind of aloof. If you shoot two laser beams at each other, the photons just pass right through each other without so much as a hello or a high five. But when the researchers fired a few photons into a vacuum chamber with a cloud of extremely cold rubidium atoms to take advantage of an effect called a Rydberg blockade, the photons started hanging out and even left the chamber together as the first "photonic molecule" -- a sort of quantum bromance -- ever observed. And it's that bond between new particle bros that creates the new form of matter, which bears a resemblance to that most awesome weapon from a galaxy far, far away. "It's not an in-apt analogy to compare this to lightsabers," said Harvard Professor of Physics Mikhail Lukin in a news release. "When these photons interact with each other, they're pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what's happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies." Proof that friendship is possible at the particle level. The team made no mention of the potential for weaponizing the new molecules to take on any Sith lords, but I suppose DARPA or any number of Jedi masters who follow Crave could come calling at any moment. Photonic molecules would be more likely to advance quantum computing, according to Lukin: "Photons remain the best possible means to carry quantum information. The handicap, though, has been that photons don't interact with each other." Until now. Turns out you just had to get some photons in the same place and introduce them to each other through some totally chill atoms, and they'll actually hit it off. Lukin says this new bond between photons could also have practical applications for contemporary chipmakers working to convert light into electric signals. Most mind-blowing of all, he also suggests the breakthrough could one day lead to technologies that allow for the creation of complex 3D structures, like crystals, made out of light.

Emotiv and the Royal Automobile Club of Western Australia have joined forces to come up with a slightly unusual solution for the dangers of driver inattention. The so-called Attention Powered Car features a neuroheadset made by Emotiv, creator of a range of electroencephalography-based monitoring gear. The EPOC headset. When worn, the headset, known as the EPOC, measures electrical activity in the brain to gauge how focused the driver is on driving. The headset interfaces with custom software installed in the car, with any lapses in concentration resulting in the vehicle slowing down safely to about 9 mph as a way of alerting the driver to his or her inattention. In fact, the car -- a Hyundai i40 -- will only run at full capacity when it senses that drivers are giving their full attention to the task at hand. According to Pat Walker, RAC executive general manager: The prototype Attention Powered Vehicle is largely meant to bring attention to the issue of driver distraction, and also serve as a tool for investigating the problem further. Researchers have been using the car (on a track) to test how various tasks, such as switching radio stations or sending a text message, impact a driver's attention. Factors measured include blink rate and duration, eye movement, and head tilts. RAC WA has produced a number of videos about the Attention Powered Car, including the one embedded below.

"There she was, sitting on her porch, reading her newspapers." That's what surprised Dustin Moore of Beaverton, Ore. It wasn't that his Grandma Alice didn't like to read newspapers. It's that she's dead. And it seemed that Google Street View had captured one of the last images of her alive. As Moore explained to KATU-TV, Moore was idly viewing Street View when he came across his grandmother. She was just hanging out. "I made the joke with my brother. I was like, 'Well, grandma's gone, but she still somehow lives on in Google and is watching over us," Moore told KATU-TV. It seems that Grandma Alice was quite a character. "She was supposed to be using a cane all the time. Well, I don't see a cane in this picture," said Moore. He first posted his discovery to Reddit, only to learn that there were many people who thought his grandma was the coolest grandma in Oregon. It is, perhaps, the kindest Reddit thread there has ever been. By its random and universal nature, Street View will always provide a surprise or two. The saddest part of this story is that, one day, Grandma Alice will be gone from Street View. The site is regularly updated, though in this case it might be another six years or so before it is. I wonder how many more lost, loved ones might be lurking in some small corner of Street View's panorama.

Today, vertical NAND (v-NAND) flash memory is in production and bumping storage densities in mobile devices to new highs. Yet while many players -- including Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (KSC:005930) -- are actively producing v-NAND, vertical DRAM -- stacked volatile memory -- remained unsampled until now. HMC -- 70 Percent Less Power, 8x the Transfer Rate of DDR4 Micron Technologies Inc. (MU) this week announced the industry's first stacked DRAM. While Micron describes the stacked chips as a "hybrid memory cube" (HMC) (also known as vertical DRAM (v-DRAM), the structure appears more like little stacks of poster board on a circuit board. Micron's hybrid memory cube is finally sampling. Each layer features a 4 Gb (Gigabit) die, and there are four layers for a total capacity of 2 GB (Gigabytes) for the stack. Micron is claiming to get 160 GB/s (Gigabytes per second) of bandwidth for the chip. That's an incredible data transfer rate, compared to the approximately 11 GB/s DDR3 gets and the 21-24 GB/s DDR4 is expected to get. Moreover, the packaging cuts power consumption by 70 percent by reducing the distance signals have to travel between chips. The Boise, Idaho-based chipmaker sees potential demand for HMC chips in "data packet processing, data packet buffering or storage, and computing applications such as processor accelerators." The latter sounds like the new DRAM could be targeted at graphics processing units (GPUs), among the most memory-hungry components of a modern PC. But HMC stock for consumer devices such as GPUs or smartphones won't be available for "three to five years", according to Micron. Commercial Clients Get First Dibs on Smoking Fast HMC In the meantime Micron plans to work its way up to volume production, selling the chips at higher prices to performance-sensitive commercial clients that are willing to pay more for the fresh technology. To those ends the chipmaker's plan is straightforward; following its 2 GB sampling Micron plans to sample 4 GB stacks in early 2014, followed by volume production of the 2 GB and 4 GB stacks in late 2014 for enterprise clients. Micron's DRAM Solutions VP Brian Shaw boasts, "System designers are looking for new memory system designs to support increased demand for bandwidth, density, and power efficiency. HMC represents the new standard in memory performance; it's the breakthrough our customers have been waiting for." In a press release distributed by Micron, Jim Handy, an analyst for Objective Analysis, says that it's natural for DRAM to evolve a similar 3D stacking approach to flash, despite inherent technical difficulties that have stymied top chipmakers like Samsung. He comments, "The Hybrid Memory Cube is a smart fix that breaks with the industry's past approaches and opens up new possibilities. Although DRAM internal bandwidth has been increasing exponentially, along with logic's thirst for data, current options offer limited processor-to-memory bandwidth and consume significant power. HMC is an exciting alternative." Samsung should eventually have a HMC of its own, as it's been working with Micron to develop some of the specifications and technologies underlying the process. Both companies are part of the HMC Consortium (HMCC). Xilinx, Inc. (XLNX), the top designer of field programmable gate array (FPGA) chips, has also been collaborating on the project and has a keen interest in becoming an early adopter of the faster, more power-efficient v-DRAM. FPGAs are key application for Micron's HMC chips to target next year, as they are very sensitive to the DRAM that's embedded inside the devices' many reprogrammable logic cells. Micron is also winding up towards its launch of DDR4 memory, which may be made available at volume to commercial clients later this year.

When someone tells Peter Cordani that it can't be done, that's when he just gets started. Cordani is the inventor of FireIce, a fire retardant capable of putting out fires as hot as 20,000 degrees Fahrenheit. "The techniques we have been using for the past 50 years were fine, at the time, but you can see that they're being outgunned," he told The Huffington Post. "These long term retardants aren't working anymore and forest fires are getting just huge. That's what made me leap forward." So how is FireIce different that other retardants? When the baby-powder substance is mixed with water, it turns into a gel. Once the gel is applied to something, a flame will essentially be unable to ignite it. Cordani is so confident in his product that he demonstrates its effectiveness by coating his hand with it and holding a blowtorch to his skin. FireIce is an eco-friendly fire retardant as well. Cordani is more than willing to demonstrate this aspect of the product as well by putting some on his tongue. Apparently, it "tastes like applesauce. " The product has been proven to extinguish car, house, forest and even electrical fires. Despite the success of FireIce, Cordani said he gets most excited when he hears about the gel saving lives. Recently, a firefighter told him that if his team didn't have FireIce, they would have lost two people to a fire.

Voltaic's solar bags sure can be useful, but not everyone likes lugging a laptop or a 10-inch tablet around while on a holiday. It's a good thing the company has developed the new Switch solar bag specifically for smaller slates like the iPad mini, so you don't pull a muscle carrying a 6-pound gadget as you navigate the jungle. The firm claims Switch's 6-watt solar panel can charge a typical smartphone in about four hours while under direct sunlight. If you're not keen on leaving a device under the sun, you can always leave the bag outside to charge its built-in 4,000mAh battery, and when sunlight's scarce, the Switch can also take a charge via USB. Unfortunately, the battery only juices up an iPad mini until it's about two-thirds full, unless you purchase Voltaic's optional 10,600mAh cell for $39. Outdoorsy types check out Voltaic's online store to purchase one for $129.

In August, Google open sourced a tool called word2vec that lets developers and data scientists experiment with language-based deep learning models. Now, the company has published a research paper showing off another use for the technology — automatically detecting the similarities between different languages to create, for example, more accurate dictionaries. The method works by analyzing how words are used in different languages and representing those relationships as vectors on a two-dimensional graph. Obviously, a computer doesn’t need a visualization to understand the results of the computations, but this one from the paper is instructive in showing the general idea of what the technique does. Here’s how authors Tomas Mikolov, Quoc V. Le and Ilya Sutskever describe the concept and the chart: The actual techniques they used were the Skip-gram and Continuous Bag of Words models, which are the same ones exposed by word2vec. The authors describe them thusly: Here’s how I explained their general functionality when covering the word2vec release: You can see the power of the translation application of these models even when they’re not entirely accurate. One example they note in translating words from Spanish to English is “imperio.” The dictionary entry is “empire,” but the Google system suggested conceptually similar words: “dictatorship,” “imperialism” and “tyranny.” Even if the model can’t replace a dictionary (in fact, the authors note, dictionary entries for English to Czech translations were as accurate or more accurate 85 percent of the time), it could certainly act as a thesaurus or understand the general theme of a foreign text. There are clear implications to this type of research for Google, which wants to make searchable and understandable the vast amount of data (search, web pages, photos, YouTube videos, etc.) it’s collecting, and also is banking on speech recognition as major point of distinction for its mobile device business. I think you can see some of this work paying off in the new search algorithms and features Google announced on Thursday. AlchemyAPI Founder and CEO Elliot Turner noted to me recently that the same vector representations Google is using on text could also be used on photos and videos, theoretically categorizing them based on the similarity of their content. Google isn’t the only company working on new deep learning techniques or applications, either. Companies such as Ersatz and the aforementioned AlchemyAPI are exposing the technology as commercial products, and web companies like Baidu and Microsoft are hard at work on their own research efforts.

Kopi has announced Kbar Multiple, a power strip that allows multiple iPads to be charged simultaneously. The power strip uniquely offers 2.4-Amp charging on each of its eight USB ports, allowing for full-power charging on up to eight iPads at once. Kbar Multiple features a built-in surge protector and comes in orange, purple, black, blue, gray, and pink. Pricing and release information are currently unavailable.

Most people who want to boost their desktop computer’s performance will upgrade either its GPU (easy) or its CPU (only slightly more complicated). Typically it’s impossible to upgrade either component on a laptop. Storage upgrades, meanwhile, usually happen only after you’ve accumulated too much digital stuff (movies, music, and what have you), not when you’re looking to make your PC faster. Most SSDs don’t offer a lot of storage capacity, so they’re relatively expensive on a per-gigabyte basis compared with mechanical hard drives. Modern SSDs are many times faster than their mechanical cousins, though, so it stands to reason that installing one in an older PC will improve the system’s performance. But just how much of an increase can you expect to realize? The typical SSD product review is designed to test the drive’s maximum performance, so the testbed usually consists of a state-of-the art PC. What happens when you put an SSD into an aging computer? Do the PC’s older components—its CPU, motherboard, core-logic chipset, and the like—squelch the SSD’s potential? To answer those questions, PCWorld Labs ran our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 benchmark suite on a recent-vintage Toshiba Satellite P75-A7200 laptop powered by a fourth-generation mobile Core i7-4700MQ CPU (part of the processor family code-named Haswell), and our Desktop WorldBench 8.1 suite on an older Maingear tower PC equipped with a second-generation Core i7-2600K (Sandy Bridge). Our colleagues at Macworld helped us out by running SpeedMark on an Apple MacBook Pro with a third-generation Core i5-3210M (Ivy Bridge). All three test suites measure the performance of the entire system—not just its storage subsystem. The Labs staff first benchmarked each computer with its original hard drive, and then replaced that drive with an SSD and reran the benchmarks. The performance differences in all three scenarios were stunning. The numbers When we benchmarked the Toshiba Satellite P75-A7200 with its stock 750GB, 5400-rpm hard drive (a Western Digital Travelstar HTS541075A9E680), the machine posted a Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 279. That’s good performance. But when we replaced that drive with a 500GB Samsung EVO SSD, the laptop’s score jumped to 435—a 56 percent improvement. An SSD upgrade can boost the performance of a brand-new notebook When we tested the Maingear tower PC with its original 1TB, 7200-rpm Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS hard drive, the computer earned a Desktop WorldBench 8.1 score of 162. With a 256GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD installed, the score doubled to 325. Replace an aging desktop system’s hard drive with a fast SSD, and you’ll feel as if you have a whole new machine. The SSD upgrade dramatically improved the tower’s boot time, too, reducing it to 23 seconds from 63. We didn’t see as much of an improvement with the Satellite P75-A7200, because that machine benefits from a more recent CPU and core-logic chipset. The MacBook Pro, meanwhile, arrived with a 500GB, 5400-rpm Toshiba MK5065GSXF hard drive. Its SpeedMark score jumped 55 percent—from 121 to 188—when we replaced that drive with the 500GB Samsung 840 EVO. No one likes to wait for a computer to start up. An SSD upgrade reduced this PC’s boot time by half. When an SSD upgrade makes sense Any PC running a CPU introduced within the past six or seven years (that is, an AMD Phenom; an Intel Atom, Core 2, or Core i3/i5/i7; or any newer processor family) is a good candidate for an SSD upgrade. You’ll still see a performance boost with an SSD even if your CPU is older than those mentioned. In such cases, however, it’s probably time to put that computer out to pasture, because there are many other advancements—chipset improvements, new bus technologies, faster I/O ports—that you can’t get short of replacing your motherboard (at a minimum). You should also consider an SSD upgrade if you’re buying a new computer. A PC with a midtier CPU and an SSD (or an SSD cache for a mechanical hard drive) will start up faster and feel significantly faster than a computer that’s hobbled by a slow hard drive, even if it has a higher-end CPU. If you want it all and have the budget to indulge that strategy, buy a PC with both types of drives. It’s hard to do so with a laptop, though, so in that situation you’ll want to buy the largest SSD you can afford. An alternative mobile strategy is to supplement the internal storage with an inexpensive, high-capacity external hard drive (500GB mechanical drives cost about $60). You can buy an external SSD, too, but those devices are much more expensive. Shopping tips SSD technology has changed rapidly, and performance has nearly tripled in just a few years. You can find a lot of SSDs on the market, and shopping strictly by price can be a big mistake—that supercheap drive you just pulled out of the bargain bin might have slow memory and a dated controller that kills its price-to-performance ratio. You’ll see big performance differences among newer drives, too: Samsung’s 840 Pro, for instance, is the fastest consumer SSD we’ve tested, but Samsung’s 840 EVO is among the slowest. Other top performers include Seagate’s 600 series, Corsair’s Neutron series, the OCZ Vertex and Vector series, and SanDisk’s Extreme II series. SSD upgrades are easy to perform on a desktop PC, and only slightly more difficult on a laptop. Keep in mind that a higher-capacity drive will deliver better performance than a lower-capacity model from the same family. Such results are due to the fact that higher-capacity drives have more NAND chips and more channels for data to travel over, but the phenomenon typically begins to flatten at about 256GB. When you’re looking at capacities, be aware that some manufacturers overprovision memory (they reserve some cells to replace others that wear out). A 480GB SSD, for example, might have the same amount of physical memory as a 512GB drive but set aside 32GB. The same goes for 240GB drives versus 256GB drives, and 120GB models versus 128GB drives. Overprovisioned drives can handle more program/erase cycles, so manufacturers usually give them longer warranties (five years versus three). Speaking of program/erase cycles, you can safely ignore warnings about prematurely wearing out your SSD by writing to it too often. Modern SSD controllers use wear-leveling techniques to spread write operations evenly across all the memory cells. You should expect even a non-overprovisioned SSD to have a useful life span of ten years or more under normal circumstances. Does your desktop PC lack a SATA 6Gb/s interface? Apricorn’s Velocity Solo x2 adds two of them, and you can mount one SSD right onto the card. Finally, an SSD will use one of two interface technologies: SATA 3Gb/s (also marketed as SATA 2 or SATA II), or the newer and faster SATA 6Gb/s (aka SATA 3 or SATA III). Drives with the newer interface are compatible with computers outfitted with the older technology, and vice versa. But a SATA 6Gb/s drive will deliver its best performance only if it’s connected to a SATA 6Gb/s interface. It is possible to add that feature to an older desktop PC with an add-in card such as Apricorn’s Velocity Solo x2, provided that the computer has an available PCIe 2.0 x2 slot, PCIe 3.0 x1 slot, or better. SSD: The upgrade that satisfies SSDs aren’t cheap, but benchmarks don’t lie: Our tests show that they can pay for themselves, and then some, if you install one in an older computer or choose one for your new computer. The benefits to overall performance and even boot time will make you happy that you took the plunge.

A U.S. judge has agreed to allow a class action lawsuit against Google to proceed. In the suit, nine plaintiffs say that Google violated several laws, such as federal anti-wiretapping laws, by reading email messages in order to target ads, reports Reuters' Dan Levine. Google asked the judge to dismiss the suit, arguing that users consented to this when they agreed to Google's terms of service. But the U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, Calif., didn't see it that way. "Nothing in the policies suggests that Google intercepts email communication in transit between users, and in fact, the policies obscure Google's intent to engage in such interceptions," Koh wrote. Obviously, just because a trial may take place doesn't mean Google won't settle out-of-court or, if it fights, win. A Google spokesperson told us: "We're disappointed in this decision and are considering our options. Automated scanning lets us provide Gmail users with security and spam protection, as well as great features like Priority Inbox." Even so, Microsoft has got to be doing the happy dance. It's been engaged in a sometimes witty, sometimes vicious, marketing campaign called "Don't Get Scroogled," which blasts Google for scanning emails and tries to convince people to switch to Outlook.com instead.

Telecom New Zealand is launching a nationwide WiFi service piggybacking on its legacy network of pay-phone booths. 700 hotspots will be live by 7 October with a target of 2000 by the middle of 2014 – and Telecom New Zealand customers on monthly plans and on NZ$19 and NZ$29 prepaid packs will get 1Gb a day of data free. Other users can access the WiFi network for NZ$9.95 a month and Telecom is working on a range of other pricing plans. Telecom Retail chief executive Chris Quin said that the conversions will help to make customers’ mobile data go further and make broadband access more pervasive. It will also clearly make Telecom customers more sticky and possibly entice some to switch from competitors. “We want to encourage our customers to use as much data as possible, because we know how the smartphone applications and services they’re using are at the very centre of the way people now live, work and play,” Quin said. Verizon trialled a similar scheme in New York as early as 2003, but the service was replaced by EVDO in 2006. In 2012, New York City announced wireless would be provided in 12,000 phone booths. Others have been less practical, but perhaps more creative, converting old phone booths into libraries, toilets, showers and even smoking booths. In many other cities phone booths have become too rare to provide a foundation for a WiFi service. The New Zealand WiFi venture has been developed by Telecom Digital Ventures, an incubator-style business unit designed to develop innovative business opportunities. Telecom was structurally separated from its network business two years ago to enhance retail competition, but retained ownership of the phone booth network. Users have to register and 175,000 had already done so during a trial period, said Digital Ventures’ Ed Hyde. A large proportion of those who used the WiFi network during the trial were not Telecom mobile customers, he said. The network is spread throughout the country, with concentrations of hotspots in the main population centres of Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch and in holiday spots. Users need to register a device and they will then automatically connect to a hotspot whenever they are within range if WiFi is turned on.

Have you noticed recently that Google has gotten a bit better at offering up direct answers to questions? If so, there’s a reason for it: they recently flipped the switch on a new search algorithm they call “Hummingbird”, which focuses on parsing searches as complex questions. Google mentioned the new algorithm for the first time today, at an event that was (in a confusing surprise to everyone who arrived at Google HQ and was put on a bus) hosted in the garage that Larry and Sergey rented as Google started to prove successful. Other things announced include a tweak to Google’s Knowledge Graph to allow it to handle comparison questions (“Which is better for me — olive oil or butter?”), and Push Notifications for Google Now on iOS. Despite a good amount of questioning from the audience on just how Hummingbird worked, Google avoiding getting too technical. While they did say that this was the biggest overhaul to their engine since the 2009 “Caffeine” overhaul (which focused on speed and integrating social network results into search) and that it affects “around 90% of searches”, there wasn’t much offered in terms of technical details. The main focus, and something that went repeated many a time, was that the new algorithm allows Google to more quickly parse full questions (as opposed to parsing searches word-by-word), and to identify and rank answers to those questions from the content they’ve indexed. As for how it’ll affect results, moving forward (the ears of a zillion SEO dudes/dudettes just perked): the engine overhaul was silently put in place weeks ago, right under all of our noses. If you haven’t noticed any huge jumps or drops in your search engine placement, you probably won’t any time soon — at least, not as a result of the new algorithm.

With recent NSA leaks and surveillance tactics being uncovered, researchers have redoubled their scrutiny of things like network protocols, software programs, encryption methods, and software hacks. Most problems out there are caused by software issues, either from bugs or malware. But one group of researchers at the University of Massachusetts decided to investigate the hardware side, and they found a new way to hack a computer processor at such a low-level, it's almost impossible to detect it. What are hardware backdoors? Hardware backdoors aren't exactly new. We've known for a while that they are possible, and we have examples of them in the wild. They are rare, and require a very precise set of circumstances to implement, which is probably why they aren't talked about as often as software or network code. Even though hardware backdoors are rare and notoriously difficult to pull off, they are a cause of concern because the damage they could cause could be much greater than software-based threats. Stated simply, a hardware backdoor is a malicious piece of code placed in hardware so that it cannot be removed and is very hard to detect. This usually means the non-volatile memory in chips like the BIOS on a PC, or in the firmware of a router or other network device. A hardware backdoor is very dangerous because it's so hard to detect, and because it typically has full access to the device it runs on, regardless of any password or access control system. But how realistic are these threats? Last year, a security consultant showcased a fully-functioning hardware backdoor. All that's required to implement that particular backdoor is flashing a BIOS with a malicious piece of code. This type of modification is one reason why Microsoft implemented Secure Boot in Windows 8, to ensure the booting process in a PC is trusted from the firmware all the way to the OS. Of course, that doesn't protect you from other chips on the motherboard being modified, or the firmware in your router, printer, smartphone, and so on. New research The University of Massachusetts researchers found an even more clever way to implement a hardware backdoor. Companies have taken various measures for years now to ensure their chips aren't modified without their knowledge. After all, most of our modern electronics are manufactured in a number of foreign factories. Visual inspections are commonly done, along with tests of the firmware code, to ensure nothing was changed. But in this latest hack, even those measures may not be enough. The way to do that is ingenious and quite complex. The researchers used a technique called doping transistors. Basically, a transistor is made of a crystalline structure which provides the needed functionality to amplify or switch a current that goes through it. Doping a transistor means changing that crystalline structure to add impurities, and change the way it behaves. The Intel Random Number Generator (RNG) is the basic building block of any encryption system since it provides those important starting numbers with which to create encryption keys. By doping the RNG, the researchers can make the chip behave in a slightly different way. In this case, they simply changed the transistors so that one particular number became a constant instead of a variable. That means a number that was supposed to be random and impossible to predict, is now always the same. By introducing these changes at the hardware level, it weakens the RNG, and in turn weakens any encryption that comes from keys created by that system, such as SSL connections, encrypted files, and so on. Intel chips contain self tests that are supposed to catch hardware modifications, but the researchers claim that this change is at such a low level in the hardware, that it doesn't get detected. Fixing this flaw isn't easy either, even if you could detect it. The RNG is part of the security process in a CPU, and for safety, it is isolated from the rest of the system. That means there is nothing a user or even administrator can do to correct the problem. There's no sign that this particular hardware backdoor is being used in the wild, but if this type of change is possible, then it's likely that groups with a lot of technical expertise could find similar methods. This may lend more credence to moves from various countries to ban certain parts from some regions of the world. This summer Lenovo saw its systems being banned from defense networks in many countries after allegations that China may have added vulnerabilities in the hardware of some of its systems. Of course, with almost every major manufacturer having their electronics part made in China, that isn't much of a relief. It's quite likely that as hardware hacking becomes more cost effective and popular, we may see more of these types of low level hacks being performed, which could lead to new types of attacks, and new types of defense systems.

Windows users are probably all too familiar with the Ctrl-Alt-Del key sequence. Although it’s commonly associated with closing unresponsive applications through the task manager -- and, in fact, it was originally meant to remain a developer-only tool to reboot a computer -- it is also used as a way to log into Windows. David Bradley, the designer of the original IBM PC and responsible for coming up with the key combination, famously poked fun at then Microsoft CEO Bill Gates on stage at the 20th anniversary of the IBM PC in 2001. "I may have invented it, but Bill made it famous," Bradley said. The audience laughed and applauded at the clear reference to Windows’ app instability at the time, and though he softened the jab adding that he was merely referencing the Windows NT secure logon procedure, Gates looked far from amused. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=K_lg7w8gAXQ Ten years later, in an interview with Cnet, Bradley said he didn't understand why Gates decided to make Ctrl-Alt-Del a login feature, adding that "I guess it made sense for them." Well, not quite. Speaking at a Harvard fundraising campaign earlier this week Gates was asked about the decision to use the three-finger sequence as a log in command. Funnily, after explaining they needed a low level way of signaling the OS so malicious software could not fake the login screen during boot and steal passwords, and that wanted a single button “but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design” wouldn't give it to them, he just sort of gives up and admits -- much to the audience’s amusement -- that it was a mistake. I guess that puts the mystery to rest. The sequence is required in Windows NT, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 to gain access to the logon screen securely. Client versions up to Windows 7 won’t see this screen by default but the secure logon option can still be enabled via the Windows Registry or the Local Security Policy Editor. You can watch the full interview in the video below. His comments on Ctrl-Alt-Del start at around 16:35, but the talk also touches on a number of topics from Gates’ early days at Microsoft to his work at the Foundation, and the decision to spend all their resources within 20 years after Bill's and Melinda's deaths. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cBHJ-8Bch4E

Shallot onion with garlic-flavoured bulbs, to put a bit of flavor in the tomato omelette, and if you add some lemon to the mixture, it will have a lighter taste, then add salt, pepper and a very little pinch of sugar to remove the acid taste

If Samsung's reveal of a forthcoming smartphone with a curved screen sends shivers down your spine and visions of bendable handsets dancing through your head, you may want to rein in your excitement. While Samsung (and LG and Nokia and Apple) are all experimenting with kinetic displays that move when you bend them, you should prepare yourself for this phone to feature a contoured display instead. The difference? A screen whose glass topper has been molded in a subtle stationary arc, rather than one you can wiggle. There's very definitely a precedent for curved displays that give your phone face a slight smile. Samsung's own Galaxy Nexus S had one, and so does the in-development YotaPhone, which uses formed Gorilla Glass 3 as its cover glass material. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=0VCVuKDrQPg Since Samsung already knows how to do shallow screen contours, it's likely that this new device, slated for an October unveiling, will return to the theme of fitting its face to your cheek. In addition to curved displays being more comfortable to hold up to your ear for longer conversation (yes, some of us still do that), the design also serves an aesthetic purpose of standing out among competitors, and encouraging more contours in other parts of the phone. In other words: no more boring box of a phone. And as for truly flexible displays? They're still a ways off. Creating molded glass is one thing, but manufacturing materials both flexible enough and strong enough to move without breaking is a major feat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=CckFd79KDPg Even the pliable Corning Willow Glass isn't the whole solution, especially since it's meant to go underneath display material (like AMOLED or LCD) and not on top. The bottom line is this: there are still major hurdles in engineering and materials that the industry needs to clear before we start seeing smartphones that bend when you do.

Google Glass is about to get one of its biggest updates yet. That’s right, Glass is finally getting the long-awaited ability for users to install third party apps. Google’s wearable computer has improved dramatically since we first started writing about it on here at Geek.com. As promised, every month the Glass developer team has delivered updates to the platform. Each of those updates has not only brought new features, but also improved the usability of the device. Battery life has been extended, camera quality has been improved, and connection stability with smartphones has stabilized, all marking points of focus for the Glass team’s efforts. The project has clearly used their 10,000+ bed of beta users well, and improved their product dramatically in the process. This next update, which will be XE10 on Explorer Edition headsets, will be the most significant update yet for both developers and users. Glassware is finally landing. In true Google fashion, developers have been making the trek to Mountain View, signing NDAs, and been given space in the Googleplex to work with the Glass team so that their newly built Glassware apps will be available at launch. Multiple sources have now confirmed to Geek.com that the update offers developers access to the sensors in Glass for use in motion tracking and development. Developers will also be able to create their own voice commands through Glassware, giving the user the ability to launch the app from the “OK Glass” menu if they so choose. Google has typically released the Glass update within the first half of each month, and it is looking like October will be no exception. The update will include a launch announcement from Google in which the app developers they have been working with will also be able to announce their apps for the platform. As it was explained at Google I/O this past year, Glassware isn’t meant to replace the existing Mirror APIs for most developers. Glassware gives developers who absolutely need it, like video game developers who are already building Glass apps that you can sideload, access to the proper tools for the best experience. Month by month, Google brings Glass one step closer to being a viable platform that will make sense to average users, and bring wearable computing further into the mainstream.

With growing animosity toward the government’s massive spying programs, it’s likely that some reform is going to pass. Yesterday, a bi-partisan group of senior members of Congress unveiled a package that combines the most promising proposals to the National Security Agency’s phone and Internet dragnet. Here are the essentials of Ron Wyden, Mark Udall, Richard Blumenthal and Rand Paul’s reform proposal: –End bulk collection–all of it. Specifically, it would forbid the NSA from indiscriminately sweeping up phone and Internet data under section 215 of the Patriot Act. Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has long argued that the dragnet does not actually prevent any attacks. Instead, the NSA would need a warrant to target suspects. –Create a public advocate on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the secret military court that approves NSA spying requests. Currently, the FISC has only rejected 0.03 percent of all requests, so it seems like privacy should have representation in the courtroom. –Make Suing the NSA Possible. Last February, the Supreme Court declared that the ACLU couldn’t sue the NSA since they couldn’t prove damages. Unfortunately, since the NSA is so secretive, it’s kinda hard to prove who gets harmed. The new law would allow Senator Rand Paul to live out his libertarian dream of suing the federal government. Details are still scant; I’ve reached out to Wyden’s office for specifics on this provision. This package has a decent shot at passing. While a bill to completely cut funding for the NSA’s dragnet program narrowly failed last July, a key Republican, Darrell Issa, came out in favor cutting off the NSA this month. So, there’s momentum to stop bulk collection of data, along with the other provisions. Of course, none of this will likely be brought to a vote until President Obama’s NSA task force makes its recommendations later this fall. And, given that the government could shut down next Tuesday, and no one has yet made any headway on how to deal with military intervention in Syria, it’ll be a while before the most unproductive Congress in history can take up the issue. Still, progress…maybe. Watch the press conference below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LmV56zE3SK4

iOS 7.0.2 is has started making its way out there, and it fixes that embarrassing lockscreen exploit we saw last week. Phew! And, as a bonus, it also reintroduces Greek language options for passcode entry! But the (re)added security is what you'll want. So go check for an update now!

To most regular TechSpot readers, the thought of having no internet might be a little disconcerting. After all, many of us use the web day in and day out to connect with friends, play online games, conduct research, manage our finances, and organize our lives. However, a new study by research firm Pew has discovered that 15% of Americans don’t have Internet, while 5% think that the resource is completely “irrelevant”. It’s important to note that the respondents were all aged 18 and over, so the slew of children who have grown up in the technological era aren’t included in these figures. To learn more about these results, Pew asked people their reasoning for not going online. The most popular reason was that it’s a waste of time, it’s not relevant to them, or they have no need or interest in the service (34% of non-internet users). Other reasons stemmed from the high setup and service fees, living in an inaccessible area, or simply finding the internet overly complicated to use. Several respondents (32%) explained that going online can be a frustrating experience, and that they constantly worry about problems such as spam, spyware, and viruses. Furthermore, for those that do have internet access, their connectivity methods vary greatly. 76% of American adults connect from home, while 9% connect from elsewhere. Understandably, a lack of finances was the main reason why these individuals did not have a home computer, or chose to access internet from an outside source (44%). Other interesting tidbits are that 3% of internet users still use dial-up, and that 44% of non-internet users have asked others to look something up on their behalf.

Apple has banned any fanbois running iOS 7 from reverting back to a previous version of the iDevice operating system. Fanbois who downloaded the latest release or developer beta of iOS 7 had the option of retreating back to the warm (and functional) cocoon offered by iOS 6. But with the release of the latest update to its mobile operating system, Apple has now stopped "signing" its older firmware. Without a signature, the older operating system won't install. If a fanboi tries to go back to the past, they will be shown an error message and will have to reinstall iOS 7 to get their iDevice working again. Some dyed-in-the-wool Apple fans have been grumbling about the new design of iOS 7, complaining about its saccharine colour scheme, unfamiliar new processes and redesigned icons. However, this doesn't seem to have affected the success of the latest operating system, which Apple claimed was the "fastest software upgrade in history". The latest operating system accounted for about about half of all American iOS web traffic just one week after its launch, according to online ad network Chitika. Anyway, for the oldies iPhone 4 and iPhone 3s, this upgrade it's a hog that will slow down their machines, so...don't upgrade!

Look out, silicon: boffins in the US have created a simple working microprocessor out of carbon nanotubes, possibly paving the way for faster and less power-hungry computer chips. Nicknamed Cedric by its creators at Stanford University, it is the first of its kind: it can fetch software written in a subset of MIPS machine code from memory and execute instructions at an almighty 1KHz clock rate. With just 178 decision-making logic gates and the ability to count up to 32, it's a long, long way off from today's sophisticated smartphone and desktop processors with millions and billions of gates. But the experimental nine-nanometre-size carbon nanotube gates are dwarfed by the 22nm gates on the latest generation of silicon chips. And it's already getting harder and harder to shrink these silicon designs without ruining their energy efficiency or becoming too complex to reliably build. Smaller silicon gates switch faster but they leak more current and heat - as anyone who has perched a notebook computer on their lap knows. So mass-produced tiny carbon nanotube chips could be the answer to humanity's demand for nippier and smaller technology - as, in theory, the nanometre-wide tubes should operate more quickly and gobble less power than bulky silicon transistor gates. (And it comes just as the world is ready to give up on Moore's Law.) This wafer contains tiny computers using carbon nanotubes, a material that could lead to smaller, more energy-efficient processors CNTs are made of long chains of carbon atoms that work as semiconductors: they can be switched on and off just like a typical transistor gate, needing a tiny voltage to alter their state between highly conductive and non-conducting. The researchers compared the nanotubes to a garden hose: the narrower it is, the easier it is stamp on it and shut off the flow. Their primitive processor is built out of PMOS logic, meaning the nanotube gates are normally powered on (which isn't particularly good for energy efficiency) and have to be switched off by a gate signal - just like early digital electronics. Today's silicon chips use far more efficient CMOS tech, something the Stanford boffins will have to address. 'There have been few demonstrations of complete digital systems using CNTs' The team said its CNT computer, presented in the journal Nature today, "runs an operating system that is capable of multitasking: as a demonstration, we perform counting and integer-sorting simultaneously. In addition, we implement 20 different instructions from the commercial MIPS instruction set to demonstrate the generality of our CNT computer". Multitasking might be pushing it in the circumstances, but we're told the machine is Turing complete - meaning it can solve any computation problem. "People have been talking about a new era of carbon nanotube electronics moving beyond silicon. But there have been few demonstrations of complete digital systems using this exciting technology. Here is the proof," said Prof Subhasish Mitra, an electrical engineer and computer scientist who is one of seven boffins who worked on the project. We're told the group has come up with an "imperfection immune" way of building the nanotubes: a fraction of these tubes often end up behaving like metallic wires, meaning they always conduct electricity and cannot be shut off as required to operate as a digital decision-making circuit. So the scientists worked out a way of routing enough current through these imperfect, metallic tubes to vaporise them into little puffs of carbon dioxide. And it's extremely difficult to grow the the tubes in straight lines, which is critical to building a working device. A natty layout algorithm is used to ensure the tiny number of wonky tubes do not affect the operation of the circuit. "We needed a way to design circuits without having to look for imperfections or even know where they were," Mitra added. The CNT chip design will need to undergo a vast amount of revision before it can be ramped up to today's standards and mass-produced, but H S Philip Wong, another professor who worked on the project, added: "CNTs could take us at least an order of magnitude in performance beyond where you can project silicon could take us." Professor Jan Rabaey, a world expert on electronics at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "Carbon nanotubes have long been considered as a potential successor to the silicon transistor. "There is no question that this will get the attention of researchers in the semiconductor community and entice them to explore how this technology can lead to smaller, more energy-efficient processors in the next decade." Although you won't be buying a nanotube iMac any time soon, the latest experiment has brought an era of CNT computers one step closer, said said Supratik Guha, director of physical sciences for IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center and a leading CNT buff. "These are initial necessary steps in taking carbon nanotubes from the chemistry lab to a real environment," he suggested.

http://butterteam.com/03%20Win%20in%20the%20End.mp3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=S9jEq0cfHjw http://mp3-blog.net/get/Mark%20Safan%20%20%20Win%20in%20the%20end Found those ones... hope this help, let me know, Cheers

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