Saran999

The Raspberry Pi microcomputer, which costs as little as $25/$35 and has helped fledge many a DIY hardware project, has racked up worldwide sales of 1.75 million, its U.K.-based creator, The Raspberry Pi Foundation, said today. The first Pis went on sale in March 2012, with its U.K. makers imagining they might sell a thousand in the first year (in the event they sold circa one million — and are now well on their way to two million). Another U.K.-specific milestone for the device is that one million Pis have been produced since the Foundation shifted the bulk of production to a factory based in the U.K. (Sony’s Pencoed, Wales facility). So that’s one million U.K.-made Pis. Initially, as with scores of inexpensive electronic devices before it, Pi was made in China. But the Foundation, itself a U.K. startup, was keen to support a production facility closer to home — to make it easier to visit and oversee elements of Pi production, but also to support local manufacturing. And so Sony was brought on board and the Pencoed factory turned out its millionth Pi today. The rest of the 1.75 million Pis produced to-date were built in China. The Foundation’s primary Pi distributor, Premier Farnell/element 14, shifted all its production to Wales back in March but a small portion of non-U.K. Pi production remains. As well as keeping the maker community busy by powering DIY hardware projects like this solar-powered FTP server, the Pi has been helping schoolkids cut their teeth on coding projects. At the start of this year, Google put up $1 million to fund 15,000 Pis for U.K. schoolkids, for example. Further afield, Pi has been used as a low-cost component to kit out school computing labs in Africa. Back in April, the Pi Foundation revealed details of the countries where the — at the time — 1.2 million Pis had been shipped to. The vast majority (98%) were being sold in Western nations such as the U.K. and the U.S. Helping Pi spread further around the world to reach more developing nations is one of the Foundation’s challenges this year, Pi founder Eben Upton said then. Discussing what it’s been doing to improve Pi distribution globally since then, Upton said Pi distributor RS Components now stocks units locally in South Africa — and can then ship directly to a number of countries in Southern Africa. he told he added. Upton also revealed that Pi shipments are growing in Asian markets. ”Looking at the per-country stats, while the U.S. remains our largest market, and the U.K. our largest per-capita market, what’s really striking is that Asian markets, notably Japan, Korea and the Philippines, are consistently up month on month,” he said. Today’s millionth-made British Pi (rightly) isn’t going to stray far. “Sony have made us a gold-plated case to keep it in, and we’ll be displaying it proudly here at Pi Towers [in Cambridge, U.K.],” the Foundation said today.

...there is nothing more intelligent to add... so I'll keep quiet. thank you, cheers

Nice! I've copy&pasted them on my personal notebook. Thanks for sharing those, I was searching for them, Cheers

ROFLMAO, even if I'm sure that hearing those directly from kids it's even more funny! Cheers

One of the more ambitious and interesting hardware projects on a crowdfunding platform recently has to be the Quasar IV, a smartphone designed entirely around security, encryption and identity protection. QSAlpha’s Quasar IV uses authentication tech called Quatrix, and a hybrid Android/Linux and Quatrix mobile OS called QuaOS to make sure communications in and out of the phone are protected. The Quasar IV is going to be made, despite the fact that there are only nine days remaining in its Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, and only $48,796 raised out of $3.2 million sought on a fixed funding goal (meaning they don’t get anything if they haven’t got the whole amount committed). While the Quasar IV won’t raise that much money in the next 9 days, it apparently will get made regardless thanks to help from outside investors. On the Quasar IV Indiegogo page, an update posted a few hours ago says that production with “one of the world’s largest consumer electronics OEMS manufacturers” has already begun, as a result of support from “various vendors and companies” who share the founding team’s passion for a vision of an ultra-secure mobile device. Early backers will be added to the pre-order list for the Quasar IV automatically, and will be notified about how to buy one when the time comes, which QSAlpha CEO and founder Steve Chao says will happen sometime in Q2 2014. There’s very little in the way of information about who has picked up the tab for the initial production run, but Quasar’s appeal, while niche, applies very specifically to firms that require incredibly high levels of security and encryption, which are resistant to outside attempts (*cough* NSA *cough*) to read said data. QSAlpha has said it was inspired by the stealthy ways of the ninja in designing the phone and its operating system, and there are, conceivably, clients who would pay well for a phone that stays truly off-grid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=TJ8edQY5Sfo Indiegogo has sort of become a place for ambitious new smartphone concepts to go to attract a lot of attention before falling well short of their funding goal (see the Canonical Ubuntu Edge), but it looks like the Quasar IV might become real with a little help from some potentially high-powered friends. Or, it could always disappear in a puff of smoke, ninja-style.

Researchers at Disney have invented a unique method to generate tactical feedback on a smooth glass display – all without physically modifying the screen. Unlike traditional haptic feedback solutions that use a vibrating mechanism, the new method uses electrostatic combined with a slick algorithm to accomplish the same task. The researchers determined that the sensation one feels when sliding a finger across a bump on a surface was mostly caused by the fingertip being stretched and pulled as it travels over a raised area. This sensation can be created artificially, the Mickey Mouse team found, by using electrovibration to generate electrostatic. This in turn creates friction which is said to feel just as if your finger was coming into contact with a raised area. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zo1n5CyCKr0 Using the aforementioned algorithm, the team is able to generate sensations on-the-fly. For example, an on-screen ball would feel like a gradually curved surface while a stack of DVDs would exhibit a series of bumps as if running your finger across them in real life. The technology has a lot of potential, especially for those with a visual disability. What’s more, typing or playing a game on your mobile device could become a whole new experience although I’m not so sure how I feel about the idea of constantly getting zapped by my phone or tablet. I imagine its safe or they wouldn’t be looking into it for everyday use, but I digress.

Apple needs to start making bargain basement mobes because soon there won't be enough rich new iPhone customers left in the world to prop up its sales growth, a leading analyst has suggested. The claim comes in a report by Toni Sacconaghi, senior analyst with Bernstein Research, with the snappy title: The tech sales researcher said that "only a finite number of users globally can afford a $450-plus smartphone", warning that Apple could struggle to pull in new users in the face of tough competition from Android phones. This could mean that the fruity firm's growth will "invariably slow" unless it caters to the lower end of the market. There are expected to be five times as many first time budget smartphone buyers in 2015 as in 2013 year, the analyst suggested, and Apple needs to get in fast and steer them towards the fruity path if it wants to survive. Sacconaghi added: The report made the "surprising" claim that the majority of new iPhones are still sold to first-time fanbois and gurlz. In 2011, 52 million iPhones were sold to new users, accounting for 72 per cent of the market. This figure dipped in the next two years, but in 2013 the majority of new iPhone owners were still brand new to the world of Apple mobes, with 57 percent, or 85 million people, choosing to take Cupertino's blue pill for the first time. However, to keep up this ratio between Apple virgins and world-weary fanbois, Apple will have to sell a whopping 125 million iPhones in the next two years. Sacconaghi fears this might not be achievable, asking where these users will come from "if the benefit from carrier additions is modest beyond China Mobile" – a carrier with more than 100 million customers, probably the world's biggest, which does not offer the iPhone on contract. If a deal is inked between Apple and China Mobile, the analyst continued, Apple could bolt on at least 15 million more customers almost overnight. The analyst said: As Apple watchers already suspect, the fruity firm's ability to, ahem, "innovate needs" as far as smartphones are concerned appears to have been dampened, the report concluded. So far, the only thing on Apple's horizon is the rumoured launch of a new iPad on 22 October, and we don't know how much of a features jump that will be on the existing iPad, although the technical specifications are likely to be upgraded. So, Mr Cook, are you up to the job of stopping Apple from rotting?

In the city, getting somewhere is only half the battle — and sometimes much less than that. Finding a parking spot can be an even bigger time-waster. Not any more, if Israel-based Anagog has its way. Via multiple apps and a service for developers to integrate into their own apps, Anagog has built a real-time service that knows when people are vacating parking spots, and where you should go to get them. The company calls it “the first living parking map of an urban center,” and says that its data has just been built into the Easypark app. “We all saw what crowdsourcing did for traffic and navigation, and we are excited to see this concept brought to the world of parking,” says Ofer Tziperman, CEO of Parx, which makes EasyPark. Clearly, he’s referencing another Israeli startup, Waze, which was recently bought by Google for about $1.3 billion. And, of course, the two would be perfect companions: Waze to help you find your destination, Anagog to get you parked once you get there. Anagog has a variety of apps such as FindMyCar, 2Park, OTO, StopPark, and ParkDroid, which help people find their car again after parking. Clearly, data accumulated by those types of apps feeds into the open parking spot database, as does data from EasyPark and other partners. Altogether, Anagog says it has about 500,000 users, which enables it to do this: Israel, of course, is one story. The company has about 100,000 users there, in a country of about eight million people. Getting good enough data for San Francisco, New York, London, or other global cities is an entirely other matter, with 400,000 Anagog users spread over the rest of the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UuPKLQibUTo Still, partnership like that with EasyPark will help — Parx currently works in 130 cities. But more partners will be needed. says Yaron Aizenbud, Co- CEO of Anagog. Anagog is currently raising a funding round.

The odd, controversial signs that have been popping up all around the Bay Area lately with messages like “all your data should belong to the NSA” and “the internet should be regulated” now have a source: BitTorrent. BitTorrent posted today on its blog. BitTorrent’s goal, of course, is freedom and privacy. Freedom from surveillance, whether by the shadowy arms of the executive branch or the silent tracking of the modern advertising ecosystem. And freedom to send and store data and files as you wish. In other words, BitTorrent says, freedom like the internet used to have. This is not just an expression of who and what BitTorrent is, of course — although it is that too. It’s also a marketing campaign — that has had the entire Bay Area technorati talking — for BitTorrent’s new store-in-the-file product for artists, a file format called BitTorrent Bundles where the art is the cash register and sharing is a form of currency, not a form of theft. The new format embeds a pay gate inside content, and the payment can be a share, a like, a sign-up, a donation, an actual cash payment, or just about anything the artist wishes, which is a really interesting way for BitTorrent to remain true to its core values of privacy and freedom while offering an option to artists both indie and corporate to benefit from the fruits of their labor. BitTorrent BundlesIn fact, BitTorrent goes so far as to call itself not just a decentralized file-sharing network or protocol but an “artist-owned publishing platform.” It’s one that Tim Ferriss of 4-Hour fame has used, as have Madonna, the Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, and Linkin Park, among other groups, artists, and publishers. BitTorrent’s protocol has always been about freedom — freedom for Internet users to do what they want without surveillance or without thought for law or regulation. The organization’s new file format retains that freedom while also adding a very welcome way for artists’ and publishers’ real contributions to our culture be recognized, where and how they see fit.

WhatsApp, the popular free messaging app, was hacked and defaced yesterday — but don’t worry, it was only the website. A group, which calls itself the KDMS Team of Plaestinian [sic] Hackers” took over the company’s domain whatsapp.com posting pro-Palestine messages and threats toward anonymity. One message said, “There is no full security, we can catch you!” with an image of one of the hacktivist group Anonymous’ insignia — the headless, suited man — with the words “Anonymous Palestine” written around it. It seems a little contradictory, but we get the point for the most part. It seems KDMS was able to take over the site by changing the IP address associated with the domain, according to CNET. The hackers reportedly changed the IP address on record for the domain today, redirecting any visitors to their new page. This likely means the WhatsApp website itself wasn’t harmed. a WhatsApp spokesperson said in a statement. But it doesn’t seem like we’ll be hearing from the KDMS Team again in the near future. The very last message left on WhatsApp’s website reads:

A new way of verifying you’re a real person and not a spam machine might eliminate the chore of typing phrases like “beetle sausage” and so on, with a start-up looking to gamify the art of verifying you’re a human. The PlayCaptcha system, developed by the UK’s Future Ad Labs, replaces the tired old text verification system with a mini game, suggesting it’s quicker than squinting at a normal captcha and, in good news for advertisers and brands, provides an exciting new little animated box that grabs the attention of internet users. Products made and advertised by giant conglomerates Heinz and Reckitt Benckiser are among the first to sign up to these interactive adver-games on their sign-up pages, so look out for them the next time you’re voluntarily adding your details to some company’s spam database. The early demo example supplied asks you to move the (Heinz branded) salad cream onto the sandwich, a gaming experience that’s perhaps not quite up there with the 20-minute epic police chases people are currently enjoying in GTA V, but still. It’s quicker and easier than identifying some wonky words.

Sabliere sand pit (no pun intended...)

I'm still waiting for GTA V on PC... but the 'cured' version off course ...and the cheat codes... I LOVE cheat codes... waiting to find those for reality!

....is this an old picture, or there really are still ppls waiting in line outside Apple Store for new iPhones and stuff? Amazing, at least Apple may provide some sort of accomodation and sell refreshments and food, some blanket... there is a whole new market outside Apple Store...

Funny!

1TB email space free!!! That's terrific! Thanks for the info mate, Cheers

Life's hard...

Noooooooooooooo! (this one sent to my grandpa... )

HTC’s next big smartphone will offer up a fingerprint sensor like the iPhone 5s, the Wall Street Journal is now reporting, and will be unveiled on October 15. Separately, invites have been sent out to journalists from HTC Taiwan, pegging October 18 as the date for a special event in Kaohsiung, which is being promoted with a couple of sentences that hint at a fingerprint sensor and possibly improved BoomSound stereo speakers. The One Max is said to sport a 5.9-inch display, but otherwise be similar in design and features to the HTC One, the Taiwanese company’s flagship device. The metal-backed Android smartphone has been well-received by reviewers and press, but hasn’t done too much to turn around HTC’s ailing financial picture. WSJ’s sources couldn’t comment on how the fingerprint sensor in the HTC One Max will be used, so it’s unclear whether it would serve phone unlocking and purchase authorizing purposes like those found on the Apple iPhone 5s. It will actually sit between the Max’s SIM card slot and the smartphone’s camera, according to leaked pictures, which would make it accessible to fingers resting on the back of the device instead of on the front. We’ve separately heard evidence to suggest that HTC is indeed planning a reveal of a device likely to be the HTC One Max next week, so it’s fairly safe to take that as fact at this point. Can a phablet design for its flagship save the day for HTC? Probably not all on its own, but with metal case components and a fingerprint scanner, the company will be Apple’s closest analog on the Android side of the fence, at least when it comes to hardware.

I've written a bit about smartwatches that count steps and measure heart rates. But here’s one that quantifies the biggest life metric of them all — time. The Tikker, which is currently raising funding on Kickstarter (it’s more than two-thirds of the way to $25,000), is a watch that displays your own personal life expectancy, as deduced by a basic medical survey. Then the countdown begins. It also tells normal time. The point is to remind yourself to make the most of your life, said Fredrik Colting, the L.A.-based creator of Tikker, who has priced the first batch at $39. Colting said. Colting said he has received a full range of responses, including one from a moderator of a large Buddhist organization who said it resonated well with their view of life and death. he said. Of course, Tikker is unlikely to be terribly accurate, and on a daily basis, its life-expectancy display won’t change much. But the seconds are always ticking down. Colting said.

Crackers tap new sources to uncover "givemelibertyorgivemedeath" and other phrases. Early last year, password security researcher Kevin Young was hitting a brick wall. Over the previous few weeks, he made steady progress decoding cryptographically protected password data leaked from the then-recent hack of intelligence firm Stratfor. But with about 60 percent of the more than 860,000 password hashes cracked, his attempts to decipher the remaining 40 percent were failing. The so-called dictionary attacks he mounted using lists of more than 20 million passwords culled from previous website hacks had worked well. Augmented with programming rules that substituted letters for numbers or combined two or more words in his lists, his attacks revealed Stratfor passwords such as "pinkyandthebrain", "pithecanthropus", and "moonlightshadow". Brute-force techniques trying every possible combination of letters, numbers, and special characters had also succeeded at cracking all passwords of eight or fewer characters. So the remaining 344,000 passwords, Young concluded, must be longer words or phrases few crackers had seen before. He cracked the first 60 percent of the list using the freely available Hashcat and John the Ripper password-cracking programs, which ran the guesses through the same MD5 algorithm Stratfor and many other sites used to generate the one-way hashes. When the output of a guessed word matched one of the leaked Stratfor hashes, Young would have successfully cracked another password. (Security professionals call the technique an "offline" attack because guesses are never entered directly into a webpage.) Now, with his arsenal of dictionaries exhausted and the exponential increase in the time it would take to brute force passwords greater than eight characters, Young was at a dead end. In the passwords arms race, he was losing. Young knew he needed to compile new lists of words he never tried before. The question was where to find the words. After cracking 60 percent of passwords leaked in the hack of Stratfor, Kevin Young mined the Internet for longer passphrases. A free cracking dictionary anyone can compile Young joined forces with fellow security researcher Josh Dustin, and the cracking duo quickly settled on trying longer strings of words found online. They started small. They took a single article from USA Today, isolated select phrases, and inputted them into their password crackers. Within a few weeks, they expanded their sources to include the entire contents of Wikipedia and the first 15,000 works of Project Gutenberg, which bills itself as the largest single collection of free electronic books. Almost immediately, hashes from Stratfor and other leaks that remained uncracked for months fell. One such password was "crotalus atrox". That's the scientific name for the western diamondback rattlesnake, and it ended up in their word list courtesy of this Wikipedia article. The success was something of an epiphany for Young and Dustin. A crotalus atrox, aka western diamondback rattlesnake. Almost immediately, a flood of once-stubborn passwords revealed themselves. They included: "Am i ever gonna see your face again?" (36 characters), "in the beginning was the word" (29 characters), "from genesis to revelations" (26), "I cant remember anything" (24), "thereisnofatebutwhatwemake" (26), "givemelibertyorgivemedeath" (26), and "eastofthesunwestofthemoon" (25).

If South Korea is looking for evidence that the Obama administration is playing favorites in the patent war between Apple (AAPL) and Samsung (005930:KS), it got some discomfiting signals on Tuesday. The White House decided against overruling a ban on certain Samsung products imposed by the International Trade Commission in August after the panel ruled that some older Samsung mobile devices violated Apple’s patents. The immediate practical implications aren’t significant, and Samsung will likely seek to delay a ban by appealing in U.S. courts. Even if the South Korean manufacturer were ultimately to stop selling the banned products in the U.S., the affected models are older and not popular. By letting the ban stand, however, the White House failed to give Samsung the same benefit it gave Apple following the ITC’s move to likewise ban some older Apple products from entering the U.S. In that case, the White House issued the first veto of an ITC ban (PDF) since the Reagan administration. https://www.eff.org/sites/default/files/white-house-veto-of-itc-ban-on-iphones.pdf At that time, the South Korean government immediately complained that the U.S. was putting a finger on the scale to help a domestic business. Seoul now might see Obama’s disinclination to offer the same relief to Samsung as further proof that the U.S. government is playing favorites. The cases are somewhat different, though. The patents Apple was found to have violated were so-called standard essential patents, meaning they are related to the basic functions of a device. As a result, Samsung was required to license them to Apple under reasonable terms. The patents in the more recent case aren’t required to be licensed. In addition, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, who represents the Obama administration in these issues, said that there isn’t enough impact on consumers and competition to justify a veto. The ITC has become a key battleground in patent disputes, both because it has been relatively friendly to plaintiffs and because an import ban is such a serious penalty. But the White House has been indicating that it is fed up with the commission. The administration has asked Congress to make it harder for companies to win import bans in front of the commission and to make sure that the ITC is hiring qualified judges. The White House took an unusually confrontational stance by slapping down the ban against Apple products. Letting this one stand seems to dial that down.

Come Tuesday, people should begin to see colorful newly redesigned $100 bills in circulation. This is good news for shops and businesses that need to verify the money and bad news for counterfeiters. The Federal Reserve Board, which hasn't been shuttered in the government shutdown, announced that the new Benjamin Franklins will make their debut chockfull of security features -- most notably a blue 3D security ribbon and a color-changing image of the Liberty Bell. The security ribbon is said to be easy for people to verify but difficult for counterfeiters to replicate. It's a blue ribbon woven into the paper and when people tilt the bill back and forth, they'll see images of bells change to "100s." When the bill is tilted back and forth, the bells and 100s move side to side. The Liberty Bell image in the inkwell also changes as users handle the money. While looking at the inkwell, people should see an image of a green bell inside a copper-colored inkwell on the front of the bill. When the bill is tilted, the bell will change color from green to copper, which makes the image of the bell appear and disappear within the inkwell. Some security features from the older $100 notes were also retained or updated, including the portrait watermark, security thread, color-shifting 100, raised printing, gold 100, serial numbers, and more. The Federal Reserve has been working on the $100 bill redesign and security features for more than a decade. Its goal has been to create a bill that's more difficult to counterfeit. According to the Associated Press, the $100 bill is the most counterfeited note outside of the US. The completed design was first unveiled in 2010, but production delays halted the actual release of the note until now. Besides the $100 bill, the government agency has also redesigned the $5, $10, and $20 notes. While banks and financial institutions can begin ordering the new $100 bills on Tuesday, it could take a few weeks until people actually see the money in person.

Currently, the US government's online presence needs help. The world is offering assistance. Russia's Pirate Party is happy to host NASA's Web site, especially as this week is NASA's 55th birthday. The current state of the NASA Web site. When a parent dies, when disaster strikes, that's when you know who truly cares. So in a time when its government is shut down, the American people need to know who its friends are. Thankfully, the Russians are yet again standing firm at America's side. Not wanting to see NASA's Web site languishing without the gravity of hosting, some fine Russians have stepped forward and offered their services. As Techdirt reports, Russia's Pirate Party has girded its buccaneering loins and come to the international rescue. In a letter on its own, fully-functioning, Web site the pirates wrote:

Two-step authentication helps protect your account from unauthorized access if someone manages to steal your password. It can be a pain to set up, but that’s a small price to pay for extra security. There’s been a big red exclamation point at the top of my WordPress dashboard over the last couple of weeks. This is the type of thing I usually ignore, but starting around week two curiosity got the better of me. I clicked on the notification and it asked me if I wanted to “Activate Two Step Authentication.” Two-step authentication, eh? What’s that? First off, you should know that two-step authentication, two-factor verification or any similarly worded variation on the theme all refer to the same thing. It is often explained in terms of something you know and something you have. Think about it like this: When you take money out of the ATM you use your debit card (something you have), and enter your PIN number (something you know). If someone were to obtain just your PIN, they wouldn’t be able to do much about it without your debit card. So in short, two-step authentication helps protect your accounts from unauthorized access if someone manages to obtain your password. An additional layer of security (or a second step, if you will), requires a verification code to be entered along with your username and password, which is accessible only via something you have on you, like your mobile phone. There isn’t much of a downside, except that two-step authentication can sometimes be a bit of a pain to activate. To set it up on my WordPress account, for instance, I needed to provide my mobile phone number, download the Google Authenticator app to my iPhone, scan a barcode on my computer screen to get a verification code, enter said verification code on WordPress, generate a list of ten backup codes in case my phone is lost or stolen, print the list of backup codes, and voilà, I was two-step authenticated. Now if someone manages to get my WordPress password, they’ll also need to enter the authentication code, which only I can access via Google Authenticator on my phone or through my list of backup codes. The problem is — that’s kind of a lot of up-front work. And while it’s a relatively simple process, I feel like it still lacks some clarity. For instance, you don’t have to go through the whole two-step authentication process every time you want to log into a site or an app. Instead, you can usually change the settings to deem a particular machine or device to be recognized, so only need to authenticate your account once. Many services, however, will require you to re-authenticate yourself every 30 days, no matter where you sign in. For some people (myself included) that’s enough to make the whole process seem like it’s more trouble than it’s worth. On the other hand, I really don’t want to wake up one day to find that a fraudulent Alex Colon has hijacked my WordPress account. And between WordPress, Google and Evernote, it seems like an awful lot of the services I use lately feel like just one password isn’t enough. So while I don’t appreciate the added step, I do like the added sense of security. I’m going to activate two-step authentication on all of my accounts that support it and give it a shot. Now I just need to make sure I never lose my phone.