Rexfeng

In a roundabout way, Armstrong may have done something to help clean up the sport of cycling by naming names in a lawsuit about doping.

The shutdown, which began Saturday and is part of a reconstruction project, will affect roughly 40,000 vehicles daily in and around Jersey City and Newark, disrupting a key link to New York City.

Pricenomics revisits the perennial scandal of the 11-99 Foundation, which benefits California Highway Patrol officers and their families in times of crisis. Major donors to the foundation receive a license-plate frame that, drivers believe, acts as a license to speed on California highways. The plates were withdrawn in 2006 after a CHP commissioner's investigation seemed to validate the idea that CHP officers would let off drivers with the frames. The frames are back now, thanks to a funding crisis from 11-99, and some posters on cop-message boards say that the frames themselves aren't enough to get you out of a ticket -- because many of them are counterfeits -- but if you have a member's card, too, well, that's another story, wink, nudge.

On Officer.com, in a discussion about 11-99 frames (and fakes) mentioned earlier, a number of cops weighed in. Priceonomics is still trying to verify identities, so their statements could be fabrications. But it presents an intriguing perspective of officers’ potential views on the 11-99 frames.

A number of cops reported ignoring the license plate frames when they decided whether to pull over and ticket drivers. One cop describes a driver whose “first words” were about the stickers indicating the donations he made. When the driver insisted that they required big donations, the cop replied, “Well, paying for these citations shouldn’t be a problem.”

But some answers indicate that people have reason to believe that the frames will help them avoid tickets. In addition to the frames, the CHP 11-99 Foundation gives out membership cards to big donors. In reference to secondhand or fake frames, one cop wrote, “Unless you have the I.D. in hand when (not if) I stop you, no love will be shown.” Another added, “Ya gotta have more than just a license plate frame or a sticker.” The implication from these officers seems to be that buying a fake license plate frame is useless, but real donors will receive some leniency.

Can You Buy A License to Speed? [Alex Mayyasi/Pricenomics]

(via Naked Capitalism)

Many see Hurricane Sandy as merely a taste of what's to come for coastal regions like the New York tri-state area as sea levels rise, and it's led to a call for action. But there are two approaches to tackling the water: either try to forcefully block it with walls and similar devices, or work around the water and give it a place to go. The latter approach has recently been championed in the Netherlands (which is no stranger to water), and last year one of the top minds in charge of keeping the Dutch dry came to work for the Obama administration. His name is Henk Ovink, and a New York Times profile looks into some of the work he's doing in the States. According to Ovink, the challenge is changing how we deal with water: it's not a matter...

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Titanfall pilots that are a bit fatigued from stomping around the same set of maps, take note - the game's first round of DLC maps is due in May under the title of "Expedition." Polygon reports that the three-pack of maps will include "Swampland," a...

Titanfall developer Respawn announced at their PAX East panel today that they'll be bringing new modes, among various other tweaks, to their heartwarming game about soldiers and the robots they so dearly love. One such mode will be a 2v2 variant of...

Jeff John Roberts, writing for GigaOm:

Even judging by the low standards of creepy data-mining apps, “Brightest Flashlight” did something pretty egregious. The free app, which was installed by at least 50 million Android users, transmitted users’ real-time locations to ad networks and other third parties. It was, in other words, a stalking device disguised as a flashlight.

An anonymous reader writes "When Microsoft terminated official support for Windows XP on April 8th, many organizations had taken the six years of warnings to heart and migrated to another operating system. But not the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. Only 52,000 of their 110,000 Windows-powered computers have been upgraded to Windows 7. They'll now be forced to pay Microsoft for Custom Support. How much? Using Microsoft's standard rate of $200 per PC, it'll be $11.6 million for one year. That leaves $18.4 million of their $30 million budget to finish the upgrades themselves, which works out to $317 per computer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Vlambeer's Nuclear Throne is adding four-player online and local multiplayer. If you're familiar with the brutal Gauntlet-style game, you're cheering right now. Online multiplayer will be added to the Steam Early Access version of the game soon. It's going to be glorious.

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PAX Prime, PAX East, PAX Australia and now ... PAX South. The new show will take place in January 2015. The announcement was just made at PAX East by Penny Arcade's Jerry Holkins. PAX South will run from January 23-25 at an undisclosed venue. "We've...

Sid Meier's Civilization series is leaving home.

This fall on Linux, Mac and Windows PC for $49.99, Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth will take the strategy game beyond the confines of its home turf to an alien world that players will colonize and where they will forge a new future of humanity.

Polygon spoke with four of the upcoming game's developers to learn about the game, the challenges a new venture like this poses for those creating it and how escaping Earth's gravitational pull will change the long running series.

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Pamela Vagata and Kevin Wilfong, writing for the Facebook Engineering Blog:

At Facebook, we have unique storage scalability challenges when it comes to our data warehouse. Our warehouse stores upwards of 300 PB of Hive data, with an incoming daily rate of about 600 TB. In the last year, the warehouse has seen a 3x growth in the amount of data stored. Given this growth trajectory, storage efficiency is and will continue to be a focus for our warehouse infrastructure.

600 TB of incoming data per day is mind-blowing. I can’t fathom it. And it’s great that they’re sharing this information. There can’t be that many entities dealing with this scale of data storage, and the others likely aren’t sharing what they’ve learned. This is the cutting edge of computer science.

Brent Simmons:

The cloud is more than just a file system. It’s data plus code.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

This week we learned, thanks to a February 2012 internal Samsung document marked “top secret” and unearthed by Apple as part of its ongoing patent infringement proceedings, that we were right and those more credulous news outlets were wrong.

When Strategy Analytics was telling the world that Samsung sold 2 million Galaxy Tabs in six weeks, the truth was that it took Samsung all of 2011 to sell half that many.

Shocker. But as Elmer-DeWitt points out, the blame doesn’t lie solely with Samsung or even Strategy Analytics — it lies also with the news outlets that gleefully passed along the report as fact. The reason: they wanted it to be true. iPad Continues to Dominate Tablet Sales is a boring story.

Blizzard announced its upcoming Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft single-player Adventure Mode at PAX East today, detailing the challenges players will face as they progress through the new Curse of Naxxramas campaign. Curse of Naxxramas features a...

Herbalife, a Los Angeles-based company that sells nutritional shakes and supplements through a network of millions of distributors, is now reportedly under criminal investigation by the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. According to a story in the Financial Times, the inquiry is still in its preliminary phase, and no charges have been filed against the company. This follows news earlier this year that the Federal Trade Commission was opening a civil investigation against Herbalife.

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Aerial arena shooter Strike Vector, which launched earlier this year, intends to continue adding more free content into the foreseeable future. "Each month we are making new maps, new modes ... for free. We decided to make all our DLC for free,"...

Not exactly a huge advertising rollout.

For years, loyal Five Guys fans have begged for milkshakes, but the company — motto: "Always Fresh. Never Frozen." — has always demurred. In 2010, owner Jerry Murrell explained, "If we put one frozen thing in our restaurant, we'd be done. That's why we won't do milk shakes. For years, people have been asking for them! But we'd have to do real ice cream and real milk." Well, Reddit user petruchi41 posts an invitation from the Five Guys in Huntington Station, Long Island, about an hour outside the city, to get a sneak peek this Saturday at "our long awaited milk shakes!!" Lo and behold, the Five Guys website now also has this tidbit on its FAQ page: "We are testing a milkshake in select stores in the New York/NJ market in 2014." [Reddit]

Read more posts by Clint Rainey

Filed Under: the chain gang, five guys

Sir David Attenborough may be 87 years old, but he's still embracing the latest technology. After spending 60 years sharing nature's marvels with documentary films like Planet Earth and Life, his latest work may appear in virtual reality. According to a report at Realscreen, the upcoming Conquest of the Skies is currently filming with a special eight-camera rig to deliver 360-degree video for users of the upcoming Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. While we don't actually know the subject matter of the film, you can expect some airborne footage, as the eight-camera rig was recently used in a flight over Borneo.

Oculus recently achieved mainstream recognition when it was purchased by Facebook for $2 billion, and an Attenborough...

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Carol Grimaldi, co-founder of Brooklyn's famed Grimaldi's Pizzeria, has died from cancer at the age of 75. [ more › ]

If you control storage and sync, you control a lot. (There’s not much left but apps, media, and the pipe.)

Dropbox has storage and sync, and now a growing collection of apps: Mailbox, which is expanding to the desktop, and now Carousel, a photo- and video- sharing app. Expect more of these consumer and business productivity apps — both homemade and via acquisition. The Dropbox OS is taking shape.

Given the choice, I’d probably rather someday buy a Dropboxbox than a Chromebook.

Previously: “Dropbox Acquires Microsoft For Patents — Future SplatF Headline”

Batman: The Animated Series co-creator Bruce Timm delivers a brand new Batman short in honor of the hero's 75th anniversary. Styled as a 1930s pulp, it follows Batman to the lair of Hugo Strange.

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After this week's massive Heartbleed bug, one of the biggest concerns was that the bug might leak a website's private SSL keys, the key to the green lock that secures data sent to users. It's especially dangerous because, if an attacker did access the keys, they could be used even after the server was patched, allowing attacks months or even years in the future.

"If it is possible, it is at a minimum very hard."

But today, the content distribution network CloudFlare has announced Heartbleed may not allow access to those private keys after all. In two weeks of testing, the company has been unable to successfully access private keys with Heartbleed, suggesting the attack may not be possible at all. "If it is possible, it is at a minimum...

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[Photo: Facebook]

As part of their recent agreement with the SLA, Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich are closing Eataly Vino for six months starting next week. And from now until the doors close on Sunday, the shop is offering insane deals on wine. According to the store's website, customers now get 25 percent off all bottles and cases, and one dollar for every bottle sold will go to the Food Bank of New York. An employee at the shop recently told DNAInfo: "People are just grabbing what they can...The only time it's been this busy is usually during Christmas or Thanksgiving." Apparently, nearly three quarters of the stock is already gone, and the shop will probably run out of bottles by Sunday night.
· Eataly Running Out of Wine as Shop Prepares to Close [DNAinfo]
· As Expected, Eataly Wine Store to Close for Six Months [~EN~]

Get on this.

The chef sent this missive out on social media last night: "@missioncantinanyc new this week: Double decker, alambres style- homemade flour and corn tortillas, fried beans, grilled flap steak, jowl bacon, chicharron de queso. SUPREME." In the accompanying photo, Bowien looks about as happy as you'd expect someone to look while eating something that sounds so delicious. [Instagram]

Read more posts by Alan Sytsma

Filed Under: menu changes, danny bowien, mission cantina, new york, yum

In its continued efforts to clean up and optimize your News Feed, Facebook today announced plans to start penalizing pages that bait users into liking and sharing content. Facebook specifically pointed to three kinds of posts it plans to pull from user feeds: "Like-baiting" posts that ask users to like or share a spammy image; "Frequently Circulated Content," which ostensibly aims to scrub out "reposts," as a Redditor might call them, from the News Feed; and "Spammy Links," posts that use deceptive formatting to trick people into clicking. "For instance, often these stories claim to link to a photo album but instead take the viewer to a website with just ads," a Facebook blog post on the update reads.

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Internet ads are as old of the internet itself, but broadcast television always remained the place advertisers spent most of their money — despite the millions and millions spending hours every day online. However, that balance has been upset for the first time: according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), internet ad revenues for 2013 hit $42.8 billion, surpassing broadcast TV ad revenues of $40.1 billion.

While ubiquitous search ads still makes up the largest piece of that spending, advertisers are increasingly targeting your smartphone. The IAB says that mobile ads revenue experienced triple-digit growth for the third year in a row — in 2013, it was up 110 percent compared to 2012, reaching just over $7 billion in...

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Shiny Toy Guns: check out this write-up on Mattel's quest to make the best toy gun—one of the lead designers seems to take at least some inspiration for Borderlands, according to the article.

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Brian Feldman, writing for The Wire:

Tucked away near the end of a Businessweek article on the startup is news of Rice taking a fourth seat on the board:

The former secretary of state’s consulting firm, RiceHadleyGates, has been advising the startup on management issues for the last year. Now she’ll help the company think about such matters as international expansion and privacy, an issue that dogs every cloud company in the age of Edward Snowden and the NSA.

You know, privacy and the NSA. The same NSA that, as Ars Technica points out, Rice herself authorized to wiretap UN officials and other domestic targets without warrants. She definitely seems like the right person to help craft Dropbox’s privacy policies.

Strikes me as an oddly tone-deaf move for Dropbox, in the post-Snowden world. Is not warrantless government eavesdropping the single biggest concern people have regarding Dropbox?