Saran999
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Wearable technology, which includes camera-equipped smartwatches like the Galaxy Gear and Internet-connected eyewear like Google Glass, is set to explode over the next few years, according to a report released Friday.
The report, from Swedish telecom market researcher Berg Insight, says that by the end of 2017, companies will ship more than 64 million wearable technology devices. That includes smartwatches like the Samsung Galaxy Gear, smart glasses like Google Glass, and fitness and activity trackers like the FitBit, Jawbone UP and the Nike+ Fuelband.
While 64 million is no doubt a big number, it's not huge when it comes to consumer electronics. To put it in perspective: This year, 1 billion smartphones will be sold worldwide, according to Gartner, the technology market research firm.
But at the same time, there were only 16 million e-readers like Kindles and Nooks shipped in 2012, and about 28 million personal navigation devices, according to Berg Insight. So when compared to those figures, 64 million is pretty significant.
Buying a wearable device "will be as common as it is to buy a standalone camera," Johan Svanberg, a senior analyst at Berg Insight and the author of the report, said in an interview with The Huffington Post. "Most of us have or know someone who has a standalone digital camera."
So while they won't be as ubiquitous as smartphones, there's a good chance that either you or someone you know will have a wearable device in the coming years, Svanberg said.
Although Google Glass has received a lot of attention over the last year, the biggest wearable category in the next few years will be the smartwatch, said Svanberg, writing in the report that "The market for smart watches is on the verge to take off."
This isn't too surprising, as research has shown that people are much more willing to put wearable tech on their wrist as opposed to their face.
In its report, Berg Insight predicted that 400,000 smartwatches will be sold this year, up from 250,000 last year. But by the end of 2017, Berg Insight predicted that 35 million smartwatches will ship.
There are a number of smartwatches currently on the market, from huge technology players like Sony and Samsung to startups like Pebble. Samsung announced the Galaxy Gear last month, but the watch has received poor reviews. Apple and Google have for months been rumored to be developing a device that will be worn on the wrist. Just last week, 9to5Mac reported that Apple had poached a Nike designer who had worked on the Fuel Band, and recent rumors suggest a watch from Google could be released as early as this month.
"Everything in Google's smart glasses -- which are already available -- is very easily transferrable to a good smartwatch," said Svanberg. "So I think that the next step for smartwatches is actually Google Glass on your wrist."
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Bang & Olufsen has launched a new 65-inch plasma television line that the company says will "take both sound and vision into a new era." The BeoVision 12-65 New Generation 1080P television boasts a motorised floor stand in some configurations to move the 65-inch Bang & Olufsen flagship screen to the user's favorite viewing position on command, as well as a discrete "video engine" that can be installed in a different location than the television.
A dedicated centre channel speaker integrated below the screen is included as standard as part of a full 7.1 surround sound module. The BeoVision 12 New Generation includes a number of dedicated sound modes designed to automatically optimize the film viewing, gaming or dedicated music playback for users. Custom profiles can be configured as well.
The controlling BeoSystem 4 video engine is placed in a dedicated cabinet that can be placed in a separate room for a more streamlined media room installation. The dedicated cabinet acts as hub for an entire entertainment system, giving users complete control from one remote or a smart device.
The 1080p, 65-inch screen set is 3D-capable, requiring active shutter glasses. The video engine cabinet boasts five class D amplifiers, with 4 80W midrange amplifiers, and an additional 45W tweeter amp. The audio system has a frequency range of 100Hz to 20KHz.
A wall-mounted version of the BeoVision 12-65 New Generation is available for $15,995. The unit mounted on a motorized floor stand retails for $17,895.
In conjunction with the television, Bang & Olufsen and American artist Miya Ando have teamed up to present "Transformations, Bang & Olufsen by Miya Ando" –- a series of 20 hand-dyed, anodized aluminum paintings and hand painted Bang & Olufsen BeoLab 12 loudspeakers, similar to those included with the new television. A descendant of Bizen sword makers, Ando was raised among sword smiths and Buddhist priests in a temple in Okayama, Japan and in a redwood forest in Northern California. Combining traditional techniques of her ancestry with modern industrial technology, Ando transforms plates of anodized aluminium into ephemeral, abstract paintings. -
The theft of source code for Adobe Acrobat, Cold Fusion and other products poses a wide-spread threat given the installed base of these products, particularly the Acrobat reader, security specialists said. Adobe disclosed the issue in a blog post on Thursday.
In the post, Adobe Chief Security Officer Brad Arkin wrote:“Our investigation currently indicates that the attackers accessed Adobe customer IDs and encrypted passwords on our systems. We also believe the attackers removed from our systems certain information relating to 2.9 million Adobe customers, including customer names, encrypted credit or debit card numbers, expiration dates, and other information relating to customer orders. At this time, we do not believe the attackers removed decrypted credit or debit card numbers from our systems.”
Not good at all. This may be the biggest compromise of a software vendor’s security since the RSA Security stolen token meltdown two years ago. While that was extremely embarrassing because RSA is explicitly in the software security business and big customers were dinged in the process, Adobe’s products are more widely used by more sorts of customers. Acrobat and Flash are nearly ubiquitous.
Update: In a statement, Hold Security, credited along with Brian Krebs with discovering the breach, said:“Over 40 Gigabytes in encrypted archives have been discovered on a hackers’ server that appear to contain source code of such products as Adobe Acrobat Reader,Adobe Acrobat Publisher, and the Adobe ColdFusion line of products. It appears that the breach of Adobe’s data occurred in early August of this year but it is possible that the breach was ongoing earlier. While it is unclear at this time how the hackers obtained the source code and whether they analyzed or used it for malicious purposes, it appears that the data was taken and viewed by unauthorized individuals.”
Security experts said this is serious business. “This is a source code breach not just a data breach,” said Dan Hubbard, CTO of web security vendor OpenDNS. “Having source code is a huge advantage because they can more easily hunt for and find weaknesses in the code. Before they’d have to run lots of black-box testing to do that.”
Another security specialist who could not speak on the record because he works with many of these vendors, agreed.“The issue here is that these guys will be able to find vulnerabilities and develop custom malware and use it privately before it ever goes public,”
he said.
And, they could also outright sell the source code to China or other parties that could then develop counterfeit versions of the programs, he said.
Indeed, because Adobe products like Flash and Acrobat are so widely used, they’ve been prime targets in the past. One unstated motivation for Adobe moving to an all-cloud distribution model for its desktop software — or as critics called it “forced upgrades” – may have been to get a lot of old and unpatched software off the market.
As of now, Adobe is unaware of any zero-day exploits or specific increased risk to customers, but that may not make anyone feel any better. After all, Acrobat Acrobat Reader is installed on millions and millions of PC and Mac devices. -
Here in the US, it's easy to slip into the comfortable idea that the internet is unrestricted, a home for free speech and exploration, whether it's meaningful and important, or dumb hashtags. It's not that way everywhere though, and Freedom House has mapped out the current state of affairs across the globe.
Freedom House's Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media comes out once a year, and the 2013 edition, which dropped on Thursday, shows that there's still a lot of censored, un-free internet out there. For the most part, the over-aching categories have stayed much the same as they were in 2012; it takes a lot to go from free internet to not-free internet, or vice verse.
Still, Freedom House indexes the little changes too. And as you can see in the graph of countries whose scores have declined, the United States has taken a hit thanks to all that NSA jazz, but still gets to remain classified as "free."
But perhaps the must illustrative graph is this list of countries from most free, to least free:
So the next time you're miffed because your connection cuts out our that page won't load, remember it could be way worse.
Download the full report @
http://www.freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/resources/FOTN%202013%20Summary%20of%20Findings.pdf
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Removal of Adobe from Mozilla and Firefox has been an ongoing process. It was a thorn in the side of these two. Now that Shumway has come of age, things are about to change for the better. This bold and daring experiment is all about shuffling the Flash plug-in with a JavaScript renderer.
All this is purely for the sake of Flash’s SWF file format. And this format doesn’t employ any platform-indigenous code either. If the tentative procedure yields its results, then Firefox will do away with any Flash plug-in requirements. This in turn will lend browsers a shot at rendering Flash content on forums where the availability of Adobe support is nonexistent. And a collective vector would be weeded out to boot. Of course, all this is well and good.
The entry of Shumway into Firefox’s code took place via the debut of PDF.js at the start of 2013. It happens to be a PDF viewer encrypted in JavaScript. And it is now openly available in Firefox 19. The user base of Firefox may even test Shumway by implanting an extension. This will allow them to see it work in its splendor.
Concurrently, Shumway has joined the ranks of Firefox’s Nightly builds. Both developers and design gurus may test the new sensation via the Shumway Inspector. Meanwhile, Chrome has some similarities to Mozilla yet it has a radically alternative scope. It appears to be that Shumway is all set to become the new highway in place of Flash. -
While most start-ups feverishly track figures like the total number of users, Ron Gutman, the founder and chief executive of the health information start-up, HealthTap, is more interested in a different data point.
This week, the start-up heard from its 10,000th user who said the site saved her life.“My local doctor brushed me off and told me it was anxiety without doing any tests at all,”
wrote one woman who turned to HealthTap after seeing her doctor. After spending two hours on HealthTap, she was told by a doctor who contributes to the site that her condition sounded like a blocked artery. She soon saw a cardiology specialist who later inserted a coronary stent.
Since its founding in 2012, the site has logged nearly a billion questions and answers, from simple queries about headaches or the flu, to more complicated ones, like whether mechlorethamine is a cancer medication. Questions are then routed to a physician who is both an expert in that particular field of medicine, and who is determined by an algorithm to be likely to respond fast, Mr. Gutman said.
None of that would be possible without the participation of nearly 50,000 doctors who contribute their advice free. (Every page on the site has a disclaimer saying that the site “does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.”)
HealthTap, which is both a Web site and a mobile application, was recognized at its introduction for applying the principles of gaming — features like badges, rewards and reputation scores — to health care. Today, however, that has shifted.
If “gamification” was the hot phrase driving new app design 18 months ago, today start-ups are increasingly looking to the principles of behavioral psychology to encourage behaviors and return visits. HealthTap’s evolution shows how moving to behavioral psychology has helped it increase its number of users and the number of doctors who offer knowledge on the site at no cost.
Instead of the goofy digital awards that were featured in an earlier version of HealthTap, the site’s rewards for doctors have been now recast as decorous professional markers of accomplishment. Instead of the “Doogie Howser Award,” physicians are given more serious designations like “advocates,” “mentors” or “founding experts.”
A special dashboard on the site provides a slate of ego-boosting statistics and prompts with physicians’ reputation scores, user comments and most crucially, areas in which other doctors consider them experts.
This way, the site appeals to the value that doctors place on reputation, expertise and authority. It is also marketed to doctors as a way to find new patients.“There’s something really powerful in the ability to create positive feedback loops,”
said Mr. Gutman, who learned through his many conversations with doctors that they craved something simple after days full of appointments — they simply wanted to be thanked.
https://www.healthtap.com/
So now, after a person receives an answer from a HealthTap doctor, they are prompted by the system to thank the doctor, or the site, or both. The woman with the blocked artery, for example, was even prompted to indicate if the service saved her life — a smart touch that not only helps the site track its success, but offers incredibly powerful reason for a doctors to keep coming back and answer more questions.
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Good digital security inevitably requires some hassle, but the size of that headache is really up to you. If you’re someone who wants to go all out with 64-character passwords, no Facebook account, and a second laptop that never connects to the Internet, because it houses all your deep, dark secrets, well, this guide is not for you.
This is a guide for practical folks. People who want a healthy amount of PC security (perhaps motivated by ongoing revelations about the National Security Agency and its surveillance activities), but with a minimum of hassles such as dealing with key fobs for two-factor authentication, juggling complicated passwords, and setting up email encryption. We can’t promise you a completely pain-free experience, but we will show you how to get up and running with a pretty good security setup that keeps your passwords, email, hard drive and sensitive USB drives as secure as possible without going overboard.
A strong password is the first, best line of defense
Good computer security and privacy begins with strong passwords. Sure, there are serious criticisms about how online services use passwords, and Apple may be trying to take biometrics mainstream with TouchID on the iPhone 5s, but for now passwords are still the best solution we have for keeping third parties away from our data.
KeePass is a great, free option for desktop-based password management.
The problem with passwords is that they should really be random, unique, and relatively long to be of any use. That’s where password managers come in: These programs help you generate random passwords and store them securely, allowing you to remember just a handful of gnarly 10-character random passphrases instead of 15 or 20.
KeePass and LastPass are both good, free password managers that are worth your time. KeePass is popular because it’s open-source, and it has a few nice features, like keylogging obfuscation and secure notes.
http://keepass.info/
The problem with KeePass, however, is that it doesn’t have an online component to sync passwords across devices. That means you’d have to create a cloud sync setup yourself using Dropbox or another cloud storage service. You can read more about how to do that with our look at the third-party utility Dropbox Folder Sync, or by perusing the KeePass plugins library.
LastPass encrypts your password database before sending it to the cloud.
Another good alternative—and my personal favorite—is LastPass. Like KeePass, LastPass offers password generation and encrypted notes, but it also syncs your encrypted password database to the cloud so you can access it across multiple devices.LastPass is available as a free browser plug-in, and you can also use the LastPass mobile app for $12 per year. Read all the technical details on the LastPass website.
Password managers are a relatively personal choice and will depend largely on your own needs and what level of trust you’re willing to put in a commercial company like LastPass or newcomer Dashlane.
Encrypting Mail
Most of us prefer to use Web-based email apps like Gmail, because it’s faster and much easier to open a Web page than to fire up a desktop app. But when you need to keep your email private from prying eyes, an old-fashioned email desktop client combined with OpenPGP public-private key encryption is the way to go.Email travels across the Internet as plain text by default, which means a determined snooper could intercept and read your message. Encryption helps combat this by making it nearly impossible for anyone but the recipient to decode your message. OpenPGP is an excellent open-source encryption system you can use to send encrypted email. Problem is, you can only encrypt email to people who are also using an implementation of OpenPGP. So if you plan on swapping ciphered mail with someone, make sure they are set up for this as well.
Encryption is also only as secure as the people using it. If someone decrypts your mail, copies it as plain text and forwards it on to someone else, the effectiveness of your encryption is broken. Malware can also ruin encryption by snatching data in a decrypted state. So remember that while encryption is definitely more secure than plain old email, it is not foolproof.
Finally, keep in mind that email metadata is never encrypted. So you won’t be able to hide the subject line or the email address of the person you’re corresponding with.
The first step is to download and install the Mozilla Thunderbird email client for the account you want to use for encryption and email signing. Thunderbird has a plug-in that makes it particularly easy to set up OpenPGP. (PGP’s inventor also recommends HushMail.)
https://www.hushmail.com/
Next, download and install the OpenPGP key management software Gpg4win.
http://www.gpg4win.org/
Creating your own key pair
Start Thunderbird, click the menu icon in the far right corner, and select Add-ons. In the next window that opens, search for Enigmail and click Install. After Enigmail installation is complete, shut down Thunderbird and then open the program again.Now you’ve got all the tools you’ll need to create your own key pair. Go back to the menu icon in the far right corner and select OpenPGP > Key Management.
When the Key Management window opens, select Generate > New Key Pair.
Enigmail’s Key Management window lets you create and revoke new key pairs for your account.
Now we’re just about to generate our first encryption key pair. Most of the default settings in this window should be fine. However, I would highly recommend creating a passphrase for your keys. If you don’t and one day Thunderbird decides to ask you for a password even though you don’t have one (it happened to me), you’ll be heading for a world of frustration.
When you’re ready to enter the fabulous world of OpenPGP email, click the Generate key button. After a few minutes, your key pair will be ready.
Save yourself some trouble and create a password.
Once your key pair is done, Enigmail will suggest you create a revocation certificate. This is an extremely important step that I suggest you take: A revocation certificate is a simple file with the .ASC extension that you can use to invalidate your keys, should you forget your password or lose control of your computer.Best practices say you should save the certificate to a USB thumb drive and then keep that thumb drive in a safe place.
Go public
Now that your key pair and revocation certificate are ready, you need to let the world know you’re accepting encrypted email. The best way to do that is to upload your public key to a keyserver where other users can find it—it’s sort of like a phone book for security-minded people.
Uploading your public key to a keyserver is a good way to get the news out.
To do this, open the Key Management window again—if it isn’t already open—and select Keyserver > Upload Public Keys.By default, Enigmail will suggest you upload your key to:
pool.sks-keyservers.net
That should be fine, since this isn’t actually a keyserver at all, but a hub that pools its database with multiple keyservers.You can change this by clicking on the drop-down menu. Another option, for example, is to upload directly to MIT’s keyserver.
You could also publish your public key on a personal website, Tumblr, or blog. To copy your public key, go back to the Key Management window, make sure the Display All Keys by Default checkbox is marked, and then highlight your email account once it appears. Next, right-click and select Copy Public Keys to Clipboard.
Testing, testing
So you’ve generated a new key pair and published your public key. Now it’s time for a test run by sending a signed email to Adele, the friendly OpenPGP email robot.Hold down the shift button on your keyboard and then click on the Write button in the top left side of Thunderbird. This will open a new message window without any HTML formatting. Adele can only handle plain text, so bold headlines, italics, and embedded links are out. In fact, for simplicity’s sake, it’s always easier to create encrypted email as plain text.
Send a test message to Adele the email bot to make sure your settings are working correctly.
Next, fill out Adele’s email address, which is:adele-en@gnupp.de
Create a subject line and message body with whatever you’d like to say. Then click the OpenPGP menu option, and make sure that only the “Sign Message” and “Attach My Public Key” options are selected. Hit Send, enter your password, and you’re done. In a few minutes, Adele should send you a reply to confirm whether your signing was successful.
Once Adele gives you the okay, you are ready for the world of encrypted email.-
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Apple keeps adding injury to insult with the latest release of iOS. In the two weeks since the release of iOS 7, users have complained about the design, battery life and a security hole that allowed people to bypass the lock screen.
The latest bug in iOS 7 cuts straight to the heart of how people use their iPhones and iPads: messaging. Users have reported flaws in Apple’s iMessage text system in which text messages are not being sent (or arrive very late). Users see an exclamation point and a “message not sent” alert next to their messages. Many users have said that this glitch has only been present since Apple rolled out iOS 7.0.2, which was intended to fix the security problem with the lock screen.
The iMessage app is supposed to timeout after a message has failed to send. But users are reporting that messages remain in a perpetual “send” state.
Users report that their messages will eventually be sent if they restart their device or turn off iMessage in the settings in iOS 7 and then turning it back on. This is a temporary fix for frustrated users as the error will likely crop back up even after restarting the device or resetting iMessage.
Apple told the Wall Street Journal that it will be shipping an update to iOS 7 soon—iOS 7.0.3—that is intended to fix the bug. This will be the second public update to iOS 7 since it was released on September 18.
Apple's statement to WSJ:We are aware of an issue that affects a fraction of a percent of our iMessage users, and we will have a fix available in an upcoming software update,” Apple said in a statement. “In the meantime, we encourage any users having problems to reference our troubleshooting documents or contact AppleCare to help resolve their issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes impacted users.
The complaints and criticism of iOS 7 come after a tumultuous summer for the operating systems beta phase. Application testing firm uTest anecdotally said in a recent conversation that the beta of iOS 7 had “twice as many” bugs in its beta than previous betas of iOS. Some of those bugs have cropped into the public release.
Apple’s headache is compounded by the fact that demand for iOS 7 has been enormous. The beta of iOS 7 was the most downloaded of any version of the operating system and many people upgraded to iOS 7 the day it was released. With such a public eye on Apple’s latest operating system, every misstep, flaw or bug is met with headlines and an outpouring of frustration.-
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The problem with a tornado shelter is simple: you can’t live in it when a tornado destroys your home. That’s what makes this home design so unique:
Q4 Architects created a safe space within a home instead of a shelter underneath it, a kind of house inside of a house. The result is an idea that could be replicated anywhere in tornado alley: A highly indestructible 600 square-foot core of concrete masonry, hurricane shutters and tornado doors where a family could survive a tornado and live beyond it, with several more flexible (and affordable) rooms wrapped around it.
You can see the space in the floor plan above––it’s the bolded part.
The genius of this idea is that it would be significantly more expensive to build out the same tornado precautions for the entire home (the CORE house, as with each of these projects, is meant to be constructed for under $50,000). And, chances are, you wouldn’t want to live there. Instead, houses of numerous styles could be wrapped around such a safe space.
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Looking at these reconfiguring robo-cubes, created by research scientists at MIT in the face of ongoing naysaying, it strikes me that the human race can’t be far off a huge achievement: building a physical version of Tetris that self assembles. From angular chaos, to robot-enabled order. That and giving future Dalek armies the ability to bound up stairs.
The M-Blocks, shown off in the above video, are reconfigurable, modular robots with no external moving parts. The cubes’ ability to move results from harnessing the momentum of an internal flywheel (which can hit speeds of 20,000 revolutions p/m) — allowing them to climb over one another, make jumps, spin and roll around. And do all that without the need for wheels or legs.
Magnets on the corners of the blocks are used for course correction and stability, so that one small leap results in an M-Block snapping tidily into place atop its fellow, rather than going rogue and skittering uselessly off the table — although they can apparently do that, too. Chamfered edges on the cubes enhance the strength of the magnetism as the cubes rotate over each other to take up their new positions.
Reconfigurable modular robots with no external moving parts have evidently been something of a Holy Grail in the modular-robotics community. “It’s one of these things that the community has been trying to do for a long time,” says Daniela Rus, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of CSAIL, speaking to MIT news. “We just needed a creative insight and somebody who was passionate enough to keep coming at it — despite being discouraged.
“Our objective is to design self-assembling and self-reconfiguring robot systems. These are modular robots with the ability of changing their geometry according to task and this is exciting because a robot designed for a single task has a fixed architecture. And that robot will perform a single task well but it will perform poorly on a different task in a different environment,” she adds in the video.
Very long term, the goal of much modular robotics research is to be able to miniaturise modules to such an extent that swarms of self-assembling microbots (or even nanobots) can be created — capable of reconfiguring themselves into different forms, shapes and sizes, and changing their function accordingly. Albeit, that’s far-off sci-fi stuff.
In the shorter term, the researchers behind M-Blocks reckon there are still potential use-cases for their more substantially sized, reconfiguring robo-cubes. They note that large numbers of the blocks could be used to temporarily repair bridges or buildings during emergencies, for instance, or raise and reconfigure scaffolding, or assemble different types of furniture or heavy equipment. Different cubes could also carry different functions — such as a camera, lights or a battery pack — to augment overall function.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6aZbJS6LZbs
The researchers are currently building an army of 100 cubes, each with the ability to move in any direction, and designing algorithms to guide them — with the aim of having the cubes transform their state from being randomly scattered across the floor, to identifying each other, coming together and then autonomously transforming into various forms (chair, ladder, etc.) on demand. -
There are a lot of shortcuts for Win8 and Win 7 to remember.
I've compiled a list that may be useful to those that don't want to have always a pdf opened with all the shortcuts at hand.
10 Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows 8 you need to remember
The shortcuts for Windows 7If you have not made the leap to Windows 8, this little cheat sheet will help you work more efficiently with Windows 7.
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I have this conversation all the time. Clients, friends, and neighbors invariably claim to understand the merits -- including approachability, reliability, fit and finish, performance, and security -- of Macs. Even diehard Windows aficionados admit application incompatibilities are now largely eliminated thanks to cloud computing’s popularity. Cost remains the holdouts’ sole argument.
But is a MacBook Pro really more expensive than a comparable Windows system? While debating the cost differential between a standard Mac and business-class Windows laptop at lunch one day with a Windows holdout, I promised to explore the question. Here’s what I found.
The Intel Core i5-powered 13.3” MacBook Pro Apple possesses 4 GB RAM, a 500 GB hard drive, integrated Bluetooth, a webcam, an SDXC card reader, a backlit keyboard, and a DVD burner standard. The cost on Friday, September 27th, 2013, was $1,199 (USD). And most everyone knows you typically receive a 5% discount if you establish a business account, but let’s pretend you don’t know that and you pay full price. Considering OS X includes Mail, Contacts and Calendar, plus iPhoto and iMovie, $1,199 is a competitive price.
But just how competitive is it?
Consider Dell’s Latitude E6330, a corporate workhorse 13.3” laptop. While Dell touts a low E6630 price on its web site, customizing the laptop to match the MacBook Pro and include a backlit keyboard, DVD burner, Intel Core i5, 4 GB RAM, integrated Bluetooth, and a webcam results in the Latitude costing $1,166.30 (USD), after $499.84 (USD) in promotional business pricing discounts.
In other words, the Dell computer is only $32 (USD) cheaper.
But wait. We haven’t calculated the costs for office productivity tools. And remember, OS X already includes Mail, Contacts and Calendar, and personal information management tools fully capable of replacing Microsoft Outlook. OS X also includes iPhoto and iMovie, tools that small businesses frequently use to complete basic marketing and social media campaigning tasks.
So, to the Dell computer's cost, we need to add a copy of Microsoft Office Home and Business 2013 for $219.99 (USD) and a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements bundled with Adobe Premier Elements for $149 (USD). Now, we’re looking at a Dell that really costs $1,535.29 (USD).
To be fair, we also need to add the cost for Apple office productivity tools to the MacBook Pro’s price. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are each $19.99 (USD) from the Apple App store, bringing the MacBook Pro’s total cost to $1,258.97 (USD).
Thus, comparing a business-class Apple MacBook Pro with office productivity tools, a photo-editing app, and a video-editing tool to a comparable Dell Latitude with similar Office productivity tools and audio- and video-editing programs results in a cost savings of $276.32 (USD) when purchasing a Mac. -
Microsoft co-founder and Chairman Bill Gates and outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer are both up for re-election to the company’s board of directors according to a recent proxy filing. It’s a situation that normally wouldn’t be newsworthy but the stakes have changed in recent months as activist investors have been calling for new leadership to help Microsoft better compete in the mobile industry.
Earlier this month, three of Microsoft’s top 20 investors reportedly urged Bill Gates to step down as Chairman. They believe the amount of power he has over the board is too high compared to the amount of shares he owns and that he might have a negative impact on selecting the next company CEO.
Company shareholders will convene on November 19 to vote on the new board of directors. Fortunately for Gates and Ballmer, the board has recommended they both be re-elected to their current positions. Furthermore, the two will likely have some power at the company as Gates is the single largest shareholder with 4.52 percent of the company’s stock while Ballmer holds 3.99 percent.
All other board members own less than one percent of the company although investment firm BlackRock owns 5.57 percent - still less than the 8.51 percent Gates and Ballmer own together.
Ballmer announced plans to retire as CEO back in August but will stay on until a replacement is found. A special committee was created and is actively seeking his successor. At last check, Ford chief Alan Mulally was said to be the frontrunner for the job. -
It's not spying, it's an attempt to 'understand online communication tools'
The NSA has published a statement explaining why US spies have been studying, infiltrating, and subverting so many of the digital technologies upon which people depend.
The statement, "Why the Intelligence Community Seeks to Understand Online Communication Tools & Technologies", was published by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday, shortly after news broke that the NSA has spent years trying to crack the anonymous Tor communications network.
"The articles fail to make clear that the Intelligence Community's interest in online anonymity services and other online communication and networking tools is based on the undeniable fact that these are the tools our adversaries use to communicate and coordinate attacks against the United States and our allies," the NSA wrote.
Though Tor is undoubtedly used by many people for many different purposes, we would note that Osama Bin Laden, the architect of the September 11 2001 World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, lived his final years in a compound with no internet connection whatsoever and studiously avoided all internet and carrier-based communications, depending instead on people.
The statement goes on to note that "the Intelligence Community is only interested in communication related to valid foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes and that we operate within a strict legal framework that prohibits accessing information related to the innocent online activities of US citizens."
Recent revelations around the NSA's spying systems have shown that the agency spent two years indulging in the bulk collection of mobile phone locations at home and abroad without oversight. Another leak described how its "Project Marina" scheme indiscriminately slurped metadata on internet users – both European and American – and stores that data for a year allowing it to be looked at "regardless whether or not it was tasked for collection."
"In the modern telecommunications era," the NSA writes, "our adversaries have the ability to hide their messages and discussions among those of innocent people around the world. They use the very same social networking sites, encryption tools and other security features that protect our daily online activities."
This appears to be a subtle justification for the NSA graphing connections between people both at home and abroad, such as its scheme to analyse people through the traces they leave on social networks.
"Americans depend on the Intelligence Community to know who and what the threats are, and where they come from," the notoriously press-shy agency said.
"Many of the recent articles based on leaked classified documents have painted an inaccurate and misleading picture of the Intelligence Community," the mercurial surveillance agency noted. "The reality is that the men and women at the National Security Agency and across the Intelligence Community are abiding by the law, respecting the rights of citizens and doing everything they can to help keep our nation safe."
Documents declassified by the NSA in September show that between May 24, 2006, and February 17, 2009, the organization was monitoring 17,835 phone accounts, barely 2,000 of which had "reasonable articulable suspicion" of wrongdoing.
A recent statement from NSA inspector general Dr. George Ellard disclosed that some spies "intentionally misused" the NSA's signals intelligence techniques to spy on their lovers and partners without oversight. -
How does a technologically savvy city respond to rising crime rates? By crowd-funding itself a private security detail.
Oakland residents have launched three separate campaigns for a security force on Crowdtilt, a crowdfunding platform that promises to "makes it dead simple to pool funds for any purpose." The residents all hail from Rockridge—not the tony side of town, with its high "creative class" density, but Lower Rockridge, a middle class neighborhood north of Highway 24.
Andy Lutz, a spokesperson for Crowdtilt, told TechPresident, a "crosspartisan" blog about the intersection of tech and politics, that the campaigns were not a disavowal of government:
“They know the government means the best, and will help when they can,” he says, “but in the meantime, they're taking matters into their own hands.”
In addition to the dangers of vigilantism, civic crowdfunding can also exacerbate inequalities in infrastructure investment, as Internet activist Ethan Zuckerman wrote last year. He told TechPresident:
“Crowdfunding a solution for one neighborhood without working on the larger, underlying issues is concerning to me,” says internet scholar Ethan Zuckerman. [...]
Still, he believes that there is potential for the program to benefit all of Oakland, assuming “hiring private security guards is part of a larger strategy to work with Oakland PD to increase funding for officers.”
None of the campaigns indicate that there is any such arrangement in place. An admin for the most recent Crowdtilt campaign explicitly referenced an early morning robbery at the "Casual Carpool" line at the Rockridge BART station as the impetus behind the fundraising.
All three campaigns want to use a company called VMA Security Group, whose patrol officers are certified to carry a firearm. One of the campaigns says "I will request they be unarmed unless they feel they cannot accomplish their duties otherwise." The other two make no reference to whether the private officers will be armed. -
Boston Dynamics, the company that’s singlehandedly trying to hasten the fall of humankind with its incredible robot technology, has just unveiled the WildCat – the next generation of its Cheetah robot.
“WildCat is a four-legged robot being developed to run fast on all types of terrain. So far WildCat has run at about 16 mph on flat terrain using bounding and galloping gaits. The video shows WildCat’s best performance so far. WildCat is being developed by Boston Dynamics with funding from DARPA’s M3 program,” says the company.
Sure, the Cheetah has been clocked at 28.3 mph, a bit faster than Usain Bolt. But that’s only when it’s running on a high-speed treadmill, powered by an off-board hydraulic pump. The WildCat, as seen in the terrifying video below, is untethered and coming at you down a dark alley.https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wE3fmFTtP9g
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You couldn't choose a worst picture for the 'poor' Ballmer... perhaps we must organize an offertory for him...
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Geat heads up! Thanks for sharing this, Cheers
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supposing that your word was 'lachrymose'... beware of...
Echinuliform resembling small spines
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Ramson A Eurasian garlic (Allium ursinum) having broad, stalked, oblong to lance-shaped leaves and bulbous roots used in salads and relishes. Often used in the plural.
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We all know the internet is a dangerous place, where many things can (and will) go wrong if you visit the wrong sites with the wrong browser. But it doesn't end there..
So I downloaded a program called "Cube Desktop Pro 1.31" and after unpacking the archive, I had 2 files; a key.txt file with a serial number inside (no group release nfo), and a executable file:
See the exe icon? Thats the icon microsoft uses for its cabinet (.cab) format. So it's a self-extracting archive (which can automatically execute files after extracting). Weird, since this should be a normal installer, not another archive.
So after opening the archive, I saw this:
To me the crack.exe looks very suspicious and its also kinda big for a crack. Why would a crack be needed anyway since a serial was provided? Something is wrong here, so time to check it out! A peek inside shows us this:
I dont think I have to explain what is going on in here. And indeed, upon running the main exe file, it immediatly started the crack.exe which grabbed all my logins and passwords, saved it to a temp file in the default temp folder and then tried to send the the file somewhere, which -obviously- my firewall prevented. lol!
If I just ignore the crappy coding (they're surely not pro's), I must say this is kinda creative, since no anti-virus/spyware/malware/whatever will detect this. Technically its not a virus or trojan, and your anti-whatever will not see this as a potentional problem. I haven't done a detailed analysis, but the info in here already gives you an idea about the damage that can be done.
Also please note that the above is just one of many. There's lotsa crap like this floating around on the internets. Often with attractive words like *NEWEST*, *LATEST* or *FULLY WORKING* etc etc in the title to get you to download it.
So always be careful with what you download and from who! Even if it looks safe!
(tip: download from respected posters ;-))
Also if you don't trust your download, you can upload the file to a service likehttp://virusscan.jotti.org/
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You must rate it Tech! ... ok, it's my fault, let's be more precise...
Give a vote on a 10 system basis.
I'll start with your that's a 8/10 only because it's too big for me, but I do really like the flaming Harley
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...as titles says...
Have fun!
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Most people are now fully aware of how much tracking is going on when you go online, and how easy it is for companies and governments to know where you go, what you do there, and who you talk to. But meanwhile, another piece of technology has slowly started being adopted by organizations all over the world, and is still relatively unknown by most people, yet could be the key to bringing the type of surveillance state that we currently experience online, to the offline world.
Let me give you a little anecdote of something that happened to me last month. I walked into a local bank branch near where I live in XXX, a bank where I don't have any account, and never interacted in any way, in order to ask about some investment products. I get directed to one of the staff members and I talked to her for about 10 minutes, never saying my name or giving her any way to identify me. I ended up not being interested in what she was offering and walked away. But as I did, the last thing she said was "Goodbye, Mr. XXX." That's nice but how did she know who I was, despite the fact that I never gave any hint of my identity?
I didn't think much of it at the time, but after getting back home I did some research and found articles from a few years back about some banks here in Italy contracting with a company to provide them with facial recognition cameras. Going over the incident in my head, this seems like the most likely explanation. Now one argument people could make is that banks already have cameras, lots of them, and so do stores and buildings all around our modern towns. But I would argue that facial recognition brings this to a whole new level. What we're basically seeing is the same thing that happened years ago with phone calls.
Back in the day, when you picked up a telephone and placed a call, it would go along an analog circuit and the wire would need to be physically plugged in. We knew it was possible for someone at the central office to listen in, but the chance was remote, and there was no way they could start listening to every phone call as they went on. This is the same way normal cameras function. The best refinement the industry has managed to do is divide several cameras into a single screen, and then place multiple screens in front of a single security guard. But facial recognition completely changes the rules of the game. Now, we have software programs able to recognize anyone who walks by instantly, and record that in a database.
Facial recognition systems can work in a number of ways. The traditional system uses a standard camera and software that can compare some features of your face to a database of photos. By looking at the size of your nose, your eye position, or the slope of your jaw, it may be able to figure out who you are. A newer and much more reliable way to do facial recognition is to use multiple cameras and do a 3D comparison. This way, many more features of your face can be compared with what's in the database. Finally, some systems can even identify skin patterns such as lines, moles, spots and other characteristics found on most faces.
But how widespread is it really? This technology is nothing new. Back in 2004 the US State Department began implementing a huge facial recognition system for visa applicants. The New York Times reported last month that the Department of Homeland Security is in the final stages of developing such a system as well. The FBI is also spending over $1 billion on its own facial recognition system. Recently, it was revealed that the Attorney General of Ohio already implemented such a system back in June, without telling anyone. The system relies on 10 years of information from driver's licenses, gun permit holders, known criminals, sex offenders and more, all stored in a central database. The technology is also widely used in advertising. This video is just one such system which can access 36 million users within 1 second.
So we know the technology exists, and has become very refined. We also know corporations and governments are hard at work to implement it for their own purposes. The problem is that as with most things in technology, the law is lagging behind. There is no legal framework as to how facial recognition can be done. We're all used to seeing cameras everywhere we go, but the question that needs to be answered sooner rather than later is whether we're alright with these cameras automatically identifying us, recording everywhere we go, and then acting on this information, providing anything from personalized ads on a nearby billboard to a complete tracking profile at your local government office.
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Report: Microsoft Asks HTC to Run Windows Phone OS as Alternative to Android
in Tech News
Posted · Report reply
If asking nicely doesn't work, Nokia will likely try to force HTC into it with a ban on Android-powered HTC phones in the U.S.
Microsoft is looking to spread Windows Phone's love to hardware other than Nokia, and HTC is on its radar.
According to Bloomberg, Microsoft’s operating systems unit head Terry Myerson approached HTC about using the Windows Phone OS as an alternative option on handsets that traditionally use Google's Android. Microsoft is even considering cutting or terminating the license fee for the OS for this arrangement.
The two companies haven't yet reached a deal concerning this proposal. HTC hasn't released a handset featuring the Windows Phone OS since June of this year, and it doesn't seem to have any on the burner for future releases.
Microsoft is clearly on a mission to partner up with more hardware makers despite its recent $7.2 billion purchase of Nokia's devices and services unit. However, the company might want to be a little more selective about who it chooses since HTC hasn't been in a great financial position lately.
HTC reported a third-quarter net loss of NT$2.97 billion ($101 million USD), which represents the company’s first loss "on a consolidated basis" since 2008. HTC even tried an executive shakeup in July amid a stock slump and a poor quarterly outlook.
Interestingly, it was reported just days ago that Nokia is looking to ban all Android-powered HTC smartphones from the U.S. This looks like an attempt to either score licensing fees, or force HTC into using Windows Phone OS instead of asking nicely for it.
Nokia alleges that Qualcomm's radio circuitry inside the Snapdragon 600 and other smartphone components violate dozens of patents owned by Nokia. But rather than sue Qualcomm, Nokia has decided to selectively target phonemakers that use these chips.