Yahoo! Mail gets new design and features; launches Yahoo! Ad Free Mail for $49.99 a year

[Yahoo! Mail gets new design and features; launches Yahoo! Ad Free Mail for $49.99 a year]

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

[sworn off women for life]

Life's hard...

[buried in a dark blue suit]

Noooooooooooooo!

(this one sent to my grandpa... )

[HTC One Max Will Have Fingerprint Sensor And Be Introduced Next Week]

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.

[A Morbid Carpe Diem: Tikker Watch Counts Down Wearer’s Life Expectancy]

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.

“It’s been called a ‘death watch’ by some, but I really see it more as a happiness watch,”

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.

“Some think it’s a horrible and morbid idea, while others really see the positive message of Tikker, that it’s your time, and that you should value it as much as possible”

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.

“Tikker isn’t really about the technology, because what it is, in its most basic form, is an advanced egg timer,”

Colting said.

“But the point we are trying to make is that the wearer should in some way be conscious of their own expiration, and that in turn will make you better appreciate life. Like people who’ve had near-death experiences, or lived through diseases.”

[How the Bible and YouTube are fueling the next frontier of password cracking]

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.

"I was starting to run out of word lists," he recalled. "I was at a loss for words—literally."

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.

"Rather than try a brute force that makes sense to a computer but not to people, let's use human beings because people typically make these long passwords based on things that humans use," Dustin remembered thinking. "I basically utilized the person who wrote the article on Wikipedia to put words together for us."

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).

[Did Obama Just Pick Sides in the Apple-Samsung Patent War?]

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.

[High-tech money -- redesigned $100 bill gets security features]

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 3-D security ribbon is magic. It is made up of hundreds of thousands of micro-lenses in each note," Bureau of Engraving and Printing Director Larry Felix told the Associated Press. "This is the most complex note the United States has ever produced."

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.

[NASA gets Web host offer during shutdown -- from Russian pirates]

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:

To NASA, USA from Pirate Party of Russia

    Dear Madame/Sir,

    We do care about the situation around your web site and the budget crisis in USA. Thereby we would like to offer you bulletproof collocation or dedicated servers on our hosting platform till the end of the crisis. We stand for Internet privacy, and as the result you would not have to worry about programs such as PRISM and other illegal activities of secret services of different countries. Your traffic, your activity and the activity of your users will be in safety.

    We love Mars!

[What is two-step authentication? WordPress example...]

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.

[14-Year-Old Works 11 Hours A Day At An iPhone App Startup And Concludes: 'It Was Like Heaven']

Fourteen-year-old Shalin Shah worked for seven to 11 hours per day coding as an intern at MakeGamesWith.Us, an iPhone game app developer, and loved every minute of it, he says on his blog about the experience.

San Francisco area-based MGWU offers tools and tutorials for developers who want to make their own games for Apple's iOS operating system.

When Shah arrived this summer as an intern, this was his first impression:

There were people coding everywhere. I didn’t expect even close to as many people as there were, and all of them had their laptops out and were all coding their games. It was like heaven.

He created his first app ("but come on, it was like the most simple app ever") and then moved on to a more complex game using the Objective-C coding language. Tellingly, Shah doesn't say what his new game actually does — he's not just going to give the idea away, duh — but the portfolio section of his web site indicates that it's coming soon.

In the meantime, you can download this productivity app, Ideya, from Shah, which helps you remember and rank all those inspiring ideas you get before you forget them.

Other internship highlights included not being in his bedroom all summer:

... the MGWU team somehow even got Reddit founder, Alexis Ohanian, to come and give a talk, which by the way, was very inspiring and gave me a whole new perspective on the tech world.

Even the friends I made while there, were people with similar interests as me. I would just like to thank MakeGamesWith.Us for actually having an internship because it gave me an opportunity to actually explore the real world, instead of just sitting in my bedroom programming in isolation.

[Google Has A New Laptop With A Super-Sharp Screen That Only Costs $279]

Remember Google's fancy laptop, the Chromebook Pixel?

There's a new one now that's a lot more affordable than the $1,300 Google asks for it.

Today, Google and HP announced the HP Chromebook 11, an 11-inch laptop with a super-sharp screen that runs Google's Chrome operating system. It only costs $279.

(If you're unfamiliar, Google's Chrome operating system is essentially just a tweaked version of the Chrome browser. Instead of storing most stuff to your computer, you store it all online using the Google Drive cloud storage service.)

Even though the device is cheap, it's extremely well built. The Chromebook 11 is made from durable plastic that includes a sturdy frame on the inside so it doesn't bend or creak. It comes in black or white. The white version has a variety of Google-themed color accents like blue, green, or yellow.

Another interesting spec: The Chromebook 11 charges with a normal USB cord, the same kind used on just about every non-Apple smartphone or tablet.
The screen is just about as sharp as the one on the Chromebook Pixel, but doesn't include touch to keep costs down. (You don't really need touchscreens on a laptop running Chrome anyway.)

The Chromebook 11 goes on sale starting today. You can get it directly from Google or at stores like Best Buy.

[Red Cross Wants Consequences For Video-Game Mayhem]

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) wants developers to consider building "virtual consequences" for mayhem into their video games. 'Gamers should be rewarded for respecting the law of armed conflict and there should be virtual penalties for serious violations of the law of armed conflict, in other words war crimes,' read the ICRC's new statement on the matter.

'Game scenarios should not reward players for actions that in real life would be considered war crimes.' Like many a concerned parent or Congressional committee before it, the ICRC believes that violent video games trivialize armed conflict to the point where players could see various brands of mayhem as acceptable behavior.

 

At the same time, the ICRC's statement makes it clear that the organization doesn't want to be actively involved in a debate over video-game violence, although it is talking to developers about ways to accurately build the laws of armed conflict into games. But let's be clear: the ICRC doesn't want to spoil players' enjoyment of the aforementioned digital splatter.

'We would like to see the law of armed conflict integrated into the games so that players have a realistic experience and deal first hand with the dilemmas facing real combatants on real battlefields,' the statement continued. 'The strong sales of new releases that have done this prove that integrating the law of armed conflict does not undermine the commercial success of the games.'"

[Michal Bodzianowski, 11-Year-Old Colorado Boy, Will Brew Beer In Space]

An 11-year-old Colorado boy may have found a way to literally make a beer that’s out of this world.
Michal Bodzianowski, a sixth grader at Douglas County's STEM School and Academy in Highlands Ranch, Colo., recently won a national competition where his beer-making experiment will be flown to the International Space Station, the Denver Post reports.

"I really didn't expect this from the start. I just designed this experiment to get a good grade in my class," Bodzianowski told KDVR.

A sixth grader at Douglas County's STEM School and Academy in Highlands Ranch, Colo., recently won a national competition where his beer-making experiment will be flown to the International Space Station.

The National Center for Earth and Space Science Education sponsored the competition where 11 proposals, out of 744 submitted by 3,900 students, were selected for the flight that will launch in December.

Bodzianowski said the idea of bringing beer to space stemmed from a book he read about the Middle Ages.
"It was a punishment for crimes, that you couldn't drink beer," Bodzianowski said describing the book called “Gruesome Facts” that explained why beer was popular during mediaeval times, "and most people didn't survive (that) because the water was contaminated."

In space, Bodzianowski says that beer can be used “in future civilization as an emergency backup hydration and medical source." That way, if a project explodes, that wounds people and contaminates the water, "the fermentation process could be used to make beer, which can then be used as a disinfectant and a clean drinking source."

His teacher, Sharon Combs, is proud of Bodzianowski’s success. “I never expected it to be one of my sixth graders,” Combs said. “But Michal’s got the natural curiosity of people who go after science. He’s very talented.”

6th-grader Michal Bodzianowski performs experiment that will soon test microbrewing in space.
Bodzianowski’s experiment will be flown to the International Space Station out of Cape Canaveral in December. Once in space, an astronaut will follow Bodzianowski’s instructions and combine the ingredients of hops, malted barley, yeast and water in a 6-inch silicon tube.
"We're just trying to get the yeast to react with the ingredients of beer," Bodzianowski said. "If it doesn't react at all, this tells you it won't work."

Despite the risks, Bodzianowski remains optimistic. "It's going to be the greatest moment of my life, so far," he said.

[Basis Fitness Watchmaker Raises $11.75M To Build A Cross-Device Health Data Hub]

Fitbits, FuelBands, and Jawbones don’t matter and neither does their data unless they make us healthier. That’s why Basis wants to build a platform that unites our fragmented quantified self data and mines it for healthy ways to improve our behaviors. So today Basis announced an $11.75 million extension of its Series B and the hire of Ethan Fassett, former head of platform at gaming giant GREE.

The idea of a health data hub isn’t new. The promise is that instead of having one piece of software for each of our devices, all our data flows into a central repository where insights can be gleamed that no single piece of hardware could provide. But all attempts have failed. Even Google couldn’t make it work. But Basis CEO Jef Holove thinks he knows why: They didn’t start with hardware people loved and needed.

Hardware, Software, Platform In One
That’s where Basis’ own multi-sensor wristwatch comes in. While Fitbit, the Nike FuelBand, and the Jawbone Up just use accelerometers to track your steps and overall physical activity, Basis also tracks your heart rate, perspiration level, skin temperature and more. It’s bigger and costs more, but does a lot more too.

Until now, the Basis has been back-ordered. But now the company has finally worked through its “high five-digits” waiting list and is starting to openly sell the Basis B1 watch to the public for $199.

The watch hooks into Basis’ software that collects all your data. But beyond the typical charts and graphs whose novelty wears off because they don’t really tell you much, Basis crunches its multi-sensor data to provide more serious health insights. It can give you actionable suggestions for how to modify your behavior, and encourage you to keep exercising, This combats the number one problem with fitness devices, which is that people stop wearing them because they don’t feel like they’re getting any real value out of it.

What could make those suggestions even better is data more other non-Basis devices and apps. So Basis plans to build a device-agnostic platform with Fassett’s experience and part of the $11.75 million it raised from Intel Capital (which will help it bolster its supply chain to crank out watches faster), iNovia Capital, Dolby Family Trust, Stanford University, and Peninsula-KCG, as well as previous investors Norwest Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, and DCM. The funding expands the $11.5 million Series B that Basis raised in March, bringing it to a total of $32.3 million in venture capital.

Holove explains that “The platform we’re building is intended to be open. There’s no reason we couldn‘t have complementary devices contribute data and make habits out of that data.”

Becoming the central quantified self hub brings all sorts of opportunities, both to make the human race healthier and to make a lot of money, so it’s no wonder Basis was able to raise again. With its platform pre-populated with data from its own watch, Basis may have the gravity to attract data from other devices. And there are plenty of other devices on the way.

Surviving The Smartwatches
Beyond helping the Basis watch distinguish itself from other health hardware, its extra sensors and software are critical to it surviving the coming onslaught of smartwatches from Pebble Samsung, LG, Sony…and likely Google and Apple. Most have or will have accelerometers and be able to serve as rudimentary fitness trackers. They could make Fitibit obsolete.

The question is whether smartwatches will give so many of us a compelling reason to buy them that the industry can support a half dozen manufacturers or more. I’m skeptical. Most smartwatches seem to just make what we already do with our phones a tiny bit easier. Gee thanks, it now takes two hands to answer a phone call? One with the watch strapped to it, and one to press the buttons? That doesn’t sound worth my dollars yet.

Basis’ Holove agrees, telling me “If we’re going to ask consumers to wear technology, it must do something magical because you’re wearing it, that’s fundamentally impossible if you’re not wearing it. And I think smartwatches miss this.”

Basis couldn’t be in your pocket like a phone with an accelerometer. It has to be on your wrist to get the rest of its readings. And since Basis doesn’t just collect data but uses it to enhance your lifestyle, Holove says “When they look at it, the value is very clear. People know why they’re buying us.”

[Next version of Chrome essentially runs Chrome OS inside Windows 8]

 Google has pushed out a new version of its browser onto the developer channel, and with it we’re getting an interesting glimpse at the company’s next move to bring its Chrome-based operating system to a wider audience. Essentially, launching the browser within Windows 8’s Metro-style mode will bring up a multi-window interface, complete with a taskbar and app launcher that looks and feels a lot like Chrome OS.

As seen on the screenshot below, the bottom shelf contains an app launcher to the left next to Chrome, Gmail, Google, Docs, and YouTube icons for quick access. This shelf can also be snapped to the left or right of the screen while icons can be re-arranged or customized with other Chrome Apps. Once you launch an app you can have it run either in tabs or its own window, which you can move around or snap to the sides.

With the current stable release, launching Chrome within Windows 8’s Metro-style start screen simply brings up the desktop client in full screen mode. The upcoming version is still a full fledged desktop application; however, according to The Verge, it uses a special mode in Windows 8 that Microsoft has enabled specifically for web browsers allowing them to launch in the "Metro-style" environment providing they're set as default.

It’s unclear when the new feature will be graduated onto the stable channel but reports indicate it’s still a little buggy and it crashes occasionally. Google has yet to announce it on the official Chrome blog.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the company taking steps to extend its reach within Microsoft’s operating system. Back in July, it quietly launched its Chrome App Launcher for Windows, and with the introduction of packaged apps, desktop notifications and improved touch support for Chrome, Google is slowly building something that could be seen as a more serious threat to established desktop platforms.

[Origin PC no longer sells AMD GPUs due to overheating, other technical issues]

 Boutique computer manufacturer Origin PC has announced that it will no longer be selling AMD GPUs due to a number of technical issues. The company will instead be tapping Nvidia for its graphics chips for all future systems.

The decision to oust the AMD graphics solutions are based on a number of things, but Origin PC says it is mainly due to the lack of customer satisfation the company has been experiencing pertaining to AMD hardware.

In an email to gaming outlet Polygon, co-founder and CEO of Origin PC Kevin Wasielewski said, "Origin PC is dedicated to providing the best experience for our customers and right now that is with Nvidia GPUs. It's not about brand loyalty or marketing; our loyalty is 100 percent to our customers."

Not only is it simply a matter of technical issues with hardware itself, Origin PC was also having a hard time internally, citing issues with AMD's support staff. Origin says AMD's extremely relaxed attitude towards stability and driver updates on both desktop and mobile GPUs is also part of the problem.

"Primarily the overall issues have been stability of the cards, overheating, performance, scaling and the amount of time to receive new drivers on both desktop and mobile GPUs," said Alvaro Masis, one of the technical support managers at Origin PC.

AMD is yet to make a public statement regarding the issue, we will update this article as more information becomes available.

[AMD launches new Radeon graphics family for both the masses and gamers]

Advanced Micro Devices is launching graphics cards today that use its new R7 and R9 series Radeon graphics processing units (GPUs).

These new chips will cover the whole range of computing, from the low end to the high end of the entertainment and gaming PC markets. Normally, graphics chip makers introduce a high-end chip, followed by a series of dumbed-down chips. But AMD is taking the unusual step of introducing graphics across the board, and that should make consumers happy.

“We took the bold step of introducing an entire family, all at once, to the public,” said Evan Groenke, the graphics product manager at AMD, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We’re delivering much better performance, and that translates to better value for gamers.”

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company is positioning itself against rivals Nvidia and Intel for the fall season. The new chips have doubled the performance of AMD chips in the past couple of years.

They include the AMD Radeon R7 240, the R7 250, and the R7 260X at the low end. These chips will be built into graphics cards aimed at “everyday gamers” looking to boost the graphics performance of their PCs. They are designed to enable faster web browsing and better video editing. The R7 260X graphics card has AMD TrueAudio technology, which enables audio processing on the graphics chip itself. That will deliver features like “true-to-life echoes.”

At the high end, AMD is launching the AMD Radeon R9 270X and R9 280X. The highest-end chips will support UltraHD (4K) resolution and AMD Eyefinity multimonitor technology. The R9 270X is targeted at 1080p high-definition resolution while the R9 280X is suited for 2560 by 1440 resolution for graphically demanding games like Battlefield 4.

Groenke said that the 280X 3GB card is almost twice as fast as its predecessor Radeon 6970 graphics chip. It is also 39 percent faster than the Nvidia GTX 760 with 2GB of main memory.
The chips all share a common heritage of the Graphics Core Next architecture, which is being used in upcoming game consoles the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One.

They also have support for Mantle, a new AMD technology that matches and tries to outdo Microsoft’s DirectX graphics technology. Games enabled with Mantle will be able to speak the native language of the GCN architecture, enabling better performance and image quality.

“We have winning products at every price point, and AMD is proud to be able to deliver affordable hardware designed for performance to suit the needs of every gamer,”

said Matt Skynner, the corporate vice president and general manager of the graphics business unit at AMD.

280X

The R7 240 will be sold in cards that cost $69. The R7 250 will sell in $89 cards, and the R7 260X will sell in $139 cards. The R9 270X will be $199 for 2GB of video memory and $229 for 4GB. The R9 280X will be sold in cards that cost $299. All of the graphics cards will be available on Oct. 11. The chips are built in a 28-nanometer manufacturing process.

[See a Functioning Rapture in New BioShock DLC Clip]

Though BioShock games can certainly be fun to play, the titles are lauded more for their story than their first-person-shooting. The two episodes of BioShock Infinite‘s Burial at Sea DLC, then, are much more anticipated than the already-released Clash in the Clouds.

The story DLC will take player back to Rapture, the setting of BioShock and BioShock 2. A teaser mockumentary released last week shows that the characters may play just as big of a part in Rapture as they did in Columbia.

Irrational and 2K today released a five-minute, un-cut look at the beginning of the first episode of the DLC. It shows an alternate-universe Booker as he is approached by the sultry alternate-universe Elizabeth. She leads him on a short tour of a pre-disaster Rapture, complete with bystanders throwing out Randian quips. On close inspection, however, not everything seems perfect and it becomes clear that Burial at Sea might just detail how Rapture fell in the first place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_8cLOuLBH3E

[Five Things You Should Know About the Nobel Prize Winner’s Higgs Boson]

Analysts said it would happen. Professor Stephen Hawking said it should happen. And now it has. Peter Higgs, the man who first predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, or ‘God particle’, has been given a Nobel Prize for his efforts along with Belgian physicist Francois Englert.

It’s been a long time coming. For Peter Ware Higgs, an emeritus (or retired) professor at the University of Edinburgh first told us of this tiny but all-powerful particle way back in 1964. Trouble is, it’s taken us a good while to track it down.

It took the world’s biggest machine — the Large Hadron Collider (so big it sits in Switzerland but spills out over the French border) and some of the finest minds in science to track it down. But once they did, Peter Higgs was something of a shoe-in for the ultimate gong in science. So, here’s the lowdown on this subatomic bad boy.

1. It should be called the Goddamn Particle
American physicist Leon Lederman first used the name God Particle in a book; claiming he picked it because the Higgs boson was crucial to understanding the way the Universe works but is also pretty elusive. Lederman joked that he actually wanted to call it the Goddamn Particle because it’s so goddamn hard to find and because of the expense it has caused. After all, the LHC did cost a whacking great £2.6 billion to build and then there’s the electricity bill… But he reckons his publisher would never have gone with the “goddamn” name.

2. We’re surrounded by a Higgs treacle
As bizarre as it sounds, physicists reckon the universe is filled with an invisible treacle — known as the Higgs field. Some particles interact with it loads, and it gives them a lot of mass. But others, such as particles of light, don’t interact with it at all. In other words, it’s this Higgs field that’s responsible for giving everything — you, me, goats, planets — mass. A Higgs boson is just one tiny, tiny blob of this treacle.

3. We haven’t actually seen one
The Large Hadron Collider can be thought of as a crash test centre for subatomic particles. It’s operators — the physicists — send protons around circuits and when they’re going fast enough (99.99 per cent the speed of light), they smash them into each other. It’s the wreckage of these collisions they’re interested in. Peter Higgs is receiving his Nobel because Higgs bosons were spotted in the wreckage. Only, they weren’t. Or not directly, at least. The thing is, these crafty little particles actually break down pretty quickly into even smaller ones. And these break down into even smaller ones. And so on. What the physicists have to do is track back through the ‘decay paths’ to see whether there’s likely to have been a Higgs boson at the start. And after some collisions, they think there was.

4. The Higgs idea got off to a wobbly start
Back in 1964, Peter Higgs wrote two scientific papers, each just a couple of pages of A4 paper long. One of them was accepted by the journal Physical Letters and the other was rejected. Another physicist took a gander and suggested a few tweeks. Peter Higgs added a paragraph saying that in certain conditions the Higgs field would give up a particle — and hey presto the Higgs boson was born and the research paper was accepted.

5. Don’t believe the hype
Read lots of accounts about what the Higgs boson is and you’ll discover that it’s the thing that gives mass to everything in the Universe. But it ain’t. The Higgs field actually just gives mass to what’s known as elementary particles — ones that can’t be broken down into smaller chunks. But all stuff — the aforementioned you, me, goats, planets — are actually made up of composite particles like electrons: particles made up of several components. And with these there’s another force — known as the strong nuclear force — that gives them mass too. In fact, it gives everything most of its mass.

[Watch This Girl With Telekinetic Powers Freak Out Coffee Shop Patrons]

 This absolutely amazing and terrifying prank, where a girl with telekinetic powers appears to freak out in a coffee shop, is actually a publicity stunt for the upcoming remake of the film Carrie. But that doesn't make it any less entertaining or awesome. Make sure you watch it all the way through, too, it just gets better and better.

Using everything from fake walls, to hidden pulleys, to remote control tables, to even spring-loaded shelves full of books, the customers stopping by this innocent looking cafe have no idea they're about to witness a girl with telekinetic powers lose control after a stranger knocks over her drink. And by 'stranger' we of course mean 'fellow actor,' but the terrified patrons don't know that.

If the Carrie remake is half as entertaining as this video is, we'll definitely be there on opening night—although we probably can't say the same for the terrified folks in these clips.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VlOxlSOr3_M

[Do you still get horny?]

I've immediately sent this to my grandma...

[What you got for collateral?]

Finally an intelligent question!

[Deep Web Users Are Ready To Launch Silk Road 2.0]

In an interesting post-mortem release by the creators of the defunct anonymous marketplace Atlantis there is information that the former admins and users of the Silk Road are planning to resurrect the service. User RR writes: “We have SilkRoad v2.0 ready to launch and is now in its final testing stages. Our site has all the features of the original one and we have kept the same style of forum for your ease.”

The new SilkRoad will be sending out anonymous invites to former vendors and then open to the Tor-using public soon after.

The representatives of Atlantis write:

From a quick scout around I’ve counted at least 5 publicly stated projects with the said aim of replacing becoming “Silk Road 2.0″ and many many more gathering info and building alliances.
And this is what Law Enforcement is now parading as a victory? Over two years of investigation, millions of dollars spent and for what so a couple of armchair programmers can build it again in a few days while in the meantime vendors simply move to other site’s .

Users are already planning ways to keep the new site secure. This includes the creation of something called BitWasp, an “open source, anonymous bitcoin marketplace specifically built for use in conjunction with Tor or I2P via the hidden services such as .onion websites and eepsites.”

What does this mean for law enforcement and fans of the original Silk Road? First SR won’t be dead for long and I suspect that hackers, now emboldened, will produce many more SR-like sites than any government can police. While the last mile problem of shipping products to and from vendors and clients can still be controlled by customs and postal authorities, I doubt it will be as easy to take down these variegated new services.

“What’s striking to me as an outside observer is there seems to be no shortage of well educated American males in their late 20′s (Manning/Snowden and now Ulbricht) willing to sacrifice bright futures and their own personal liberty to highlight the draconian laws and downright totalitarianism being inflicted by their government on the populous,”

writes the Atlantis representative.

“History will show it’s the will of the people that’ll win in the end and not that of the dictators in power and I thanks to the actions of DPR and others like him I believe I am now witnessing a full revolution in progress and I for one will be sticking around to document it.”

[Narrative Clip Wearable Cam Logs Your Life in Detail]

Jealous of those elite Google Glass explorers who are the first to try out the camera-equipped smart glasses (for $1,500)? Now you can film your life with a subtler wearable gadget that costs just $279, starting next month.

Slightly larger than an iPod Shuffle, the Narrative Clip (formerly known as Memoto) takes photos twice a minute all day so that anyone can capture all the special moments in their lives — up to nearly 3,000 photos, or 4 GB per day of data. Special software organizes the photos so the flood of images doesn't become overwhelming. It clips onto a collar or can be worn like a necklace.

Initially funded on Kickstarter late last year and the new recipient of $3 million in venture funding led by True Ventures, the founders of Narrative say their mission is to create the "ultimate lifelogging device." While "lifelogging" used to conjure up images of a solitary geek — such as wearable pioneer Steve Mann — covered in awkward wires, cables and belts, new wearables such Narrative Clip promise to be unobtrusive.

 

Who wants wearable tech?
Company co-founder Oskar Kalmaru said that initial Kickstarter backers have come from many walks of life: early-adopter types, yes, but also people with a specific use in mind. "People who travel a lot, [or] parents of young children who want to capture these rare early moments," he told Tom's Guide. "You can't have too many photos of that."
Narrative Clip's software sorts through all the photos taken in a day and separates them into "moments" based on time and GPS data. "Going to work is one moment, meeting for coffee is one moment," Kalmaru said. Then the computer algorithm automatically picks what it thinks is the "best" picture to display from that moment, chosen by factors like brightness, sharpness, whether there are people in the photo, and how colorful it is. (Users can always click through each photo if they want to.)

 "Any camera can take photos, but organizing those photos and making sense of them" is the draw with the Clip, Kalmaru told us. The software runs on Android and iOS and photos can also be accessed through the Web. The team is also interested in getting a client to work on Linux. The actual crunching and storage of photos takes place in the cloud, and all of this will cost an extra $9 plus tax per month. (Alternately, users can store all their photos locally and nothave access to Memoto's algorithms.)
Kalmaru and co-founder Martin Källström believed they'd have working Clips in customers' hands by February 2013. But Kalmaru said that turned out to be optimistic.

"You might have thought, 'this is [just] a camera...'" he said. Turns out, "We have three products, not one like we thought....We have a really high-tech complex hardware unit, we have a high-tech back-end, and the third part is these apps for Android and iPhone."

 Building all three together and troubleshooting the bugs turned out to be more difficult than anticipated. Finally, however, Narrative expects the first Clips to go out to early Kickstarter backers Nov. 1, and interested buyers who didn't get in on the Kickstarter can pre-order one for $279, to be shipped in the future (after all the backers first get theirs and are ensured a smooth experience)

 

Wearables and privacy
A lot of work went into the design of the Clip, Kalmaru said. "We tried to give it a friendly feel." Users found that a round camera looked too much like a "Big Brother"-esque eye, but they also expressed a desire that the product not be too camouflaged -- in other words, it should look like a camera.

That would allow friends who don't want to be recorded to notice the device and ask the wearer to remove it.
Still, a lot of the concerns being raised over privacy in the company of lifeloggers sound awfully familiar.

"I read somewhere that [after the introduction of] the first cameras you were able to carry with you in the 1920s, much of the same type of worries were raised," Kalmaru said. (And in fact, after the Kodak camera was first introduced, the Hartford Courant wrote: "The sedate citizen can't indulge in any hilariousness without the risk of being caught in the act.") Added Kalmaru: "This is a worry that has been around much longer than wearable cameras have been around."