Craig Brittain, owner of a revenge porn website who has been banned from posting nude photos of women without their permission, is attempting to get Google to unlink to stories about him.
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The latest variation on the "smart lock"—one that secures your front door until you open it with your smartphone—is here. Candy House's Sesame adds a few new twists, including an inexpensive starting price (though only for those who snap up the few remaining offers in its Kickstarter), simple assembly and functions that will unlock your door via a special knock or secret passphrase.
The smart locking system launched on Kickstarter Wednesday. More than 570 people backed it on the first day, lifting it to 87% of its $100,000 funding goal. As of writing , the project has 1,100 backers and has raised almost $170,000.
Door, Lock Thyself
Smart locks are not a new concept. There are dozens of options on the market today. As with any new technology, some smart locks are prone to glitches such as jamming or inconsistent connectivity.
Many are expensive, too. The August smart lock, available in Apple stores as well as online, sells for $250.
Sesame, by contrast, costs early Kickstarter backers a mere $90 for its most stripped down model. Those deals are almost gone, though, and once they are, the Sesame will set you back $150. Of course, you can't get it yet; it won't start shipping until late April.
Open Sesame
No-tools installation is one of the Sesame's big selling points, and it does appear to be pretty straightforward. You basically put the Sesame device over a deadbolt latch using a 3M adhesive strip that comes with the kit. You can put it on at any angle, and the company says the mechanism can fit almost any deadbolt in the U.S., Canada, and Australia.
Whether you feel good about trusting the security of your home to a gadget that's basically stuck to your door with double-sided tape is a separate question. Though the upside here seems to be that if the Sesame comes unstuck, you can always use a regular key—though you might be stuck yourself if you've decided to leave your keys at home, as the project explicitly urges backers to do.
You'll control the lock via the Sesame app on your smartphone. That will let the smart lock know who you are and what you’d like the lock to do.
Who's That Unlocking At My Door?
Sesame connects to your smartphone via Bluetooth. You can also pair it via Bluetooth to an optional Wi-Fi bridge that will let you control the lock remotely from virtually anywhere. That would also let you grant access to others, so you could let in a relative or a sitter without having to hand them a key.
The smart lock also notifies the owner whenever someone tries to access your home using Sesame, whether they’re on the list or not. You also have the ability to store and review log records which document the people that have triggered the lock, and when they did so.
Sesame ultimately hopes to add voice and facial recognition technology as well.
The Golden State Warriors fired head coach Mark Jackson after finishing 51-31 and losing in the first round of the playoffs last year.
They hired first-time head coach Steve Kerr, and have since become the best team in the league.
At 44-10, the Warriors rank first in defensive rating, second in offensive rating, and have the best point differential in the NBA.
Kerr likes to deflect the attention and credit by saying he simply inherited a good team, but according to SI's Chris Ballard, Kerr's coaching philosophies have been two years in the making.
According to Ballard, while Kerr was still a TV analyst for TNT, he began keeping a Word file on his laptop where he compiled notes on plays, philosophies, workouts, and team policies. He then expanded from written notes to full video. From Ballard:
Kerr began collecting plays too, pausing games on the flat-screen at his San Diego home whenever he saw an action he liked – a backdoor lob off an inbounds or a particularly potent flare screen. Then he’d shoot an email to Kelly Peters, a friend and coach at nearby Torrey Pines High (and now a Warriors advance scout). Peters pulled the footage and compiled it using iMovie. Week by week, Kerr’s file – named ATOs, for ‘After Timeouts” – grew.
By the spring of 2014, the video library had swelled to over 50 plays and the Word file had morphed into a detailed Power Point presentation.
Kerr has been brilliant from top to bottom in his first year as coach.
At the start of the season, he decided to place 11-year veteran Andre Iguodala on the bench while starting third-year forward Harrison Barnes (wh0 had struggled under Jackson). He also replaced power forward David Lee with third-year forward Draymond Green in the starting lineup.
Both players have excelled as starters, putting up career years, and the Warriors' starting five has been the best five-man unit in the league based on net rating.
As an in-game strategist, Kerr has been great.
The Warriors mastered a "weave" play that throws off defenses and gets a wide variety of looks, like an open three-pointer:
Or an open dunk:
One of Kerr's inbounds plays is a trick that fools defenses into thinking it's a complicated play, only to be a simple pass to the corner for an open three-pointer:
The Warriors are currently the favorite to win the NBA title, and given their youth — from the players to Kerr as a rookie head coach — they could conceivably get better in the coming years.
To settle a class-action lawsuit, LinkedIn has agreed to pay about $1 each to the roughly 800,000 people who were premium users between March 2006 and June 2012.
A LinkedIn premium user, Katie Szpyrka, sued the social network shortly after roughly 6.5 million hashed user passwords (and 1.5 million from a dating website) were published in June 2012. She alleged that the company was in violation of a number of California state laws, in breach of implied contracts, and was negligent, among other things.
A federal court in San Jose, California approved (PDF) the preliminary settlement which among other things, sets up a fund worth $1.25 million. Lawyers will take up to one-third of that amount, and after some administrative fees, the rest will be distributed to the individual plaintiffs. In the class-action settlement agreement, which was published (PDF) in August 2014, LinkedIn "continues to deny that it committed, or threatened, or attempted to commit any wrongful act or violation of law or duty alleged in the Action."
B, did you notice this when we were watching the game?
Yesterday, Maryland traveled to Happy Valley to play and ultimately defeat Penn State. It was a hard-fought game that went down to the wire, but perhaps the most interesting moment came midway through the first half, when Terps senior star Dez Wells went to the foul line.
The Big Ten Conference announced today that they fined Penn State men's basketball coach Pat Chambers $10,000 for remarks he made after the team's loss to Maryland Saturday. Now, some Penn State students are trying to crowdfund the fine for him. Please don't do that.
"How do I stop this virus infecting my computer?" someone with the username dkk wrote in a forum in July 2010. "You insert the USB thumbdrive, the computer gets infected. Even when the patches has been applied, and autorun and autoplay has been turned off. The weirdest thing of all is, there is in fact no autorun.inf on the root of the infected USB drive."
He went on to say the USB drive contained seven files all ending in *.lnk, along with a file called fanny.bmp. Sadly, no one ever responded.
New England is getting hit with a snowstorm of historic proportions.
Some parts of the region were buried in more than two feet of snow over the weekend, according to The New York Times. Boston got hit especially hard. Some mounds of snow in the city have reached 15 feet high, The Times notes.
Several people have already died from effects of the storm, according to The Weather Channel.
This blizzard is just the latest in a series of storms that have blanketed the region with snow this winter. This February has become Boston's snowiest month on record, according to The Boston Globe. The city has seen 58.5 inches of snow this month — the previous record was set in January 2005 and was 15 inches less than this month's snowfall.
Here's how New England looks after the snow dump:
A woman in Norwood, Mass., shovels a path in the snow in front of her home.
Up to two feet of snow landed on parts of Connecticut.
This giant pile of snow in Boston is called a "snow farm."
Your typical store-bought dominoes are all of the same size, but what happens when you set up a series so that each is a bit bigger than the last?
It won't come as a surprise that they fall just as a regular series of dominoes do, but things quickly start to take on a pretty massive scale.
Stephen Morris (who holds a PhD in geophysics and lists "the Physics of everyday phenomena" as a research interest) set up a series of 13 dominoes, each roughly one and a half times the size of the one knocking it over.
The first domino is so tiny — it's 5 millimeters tall and only 1 millimeter thick, it's actually smaller than a Tic Tac — that it needs to be set up with tweezers. The 13th is more than three feet tall and weighs about 100 pounds.
One of the critical factors in the physics at play here, Morris explains, is that a domino only needs to be slightly tipped forward before gravity takes over and pulls the weight of the domino to the ground. And with such high centers of gravity — resting as they do on a small surface area — it doesn't take much to take dominoes to that all-important tipping point.
Gravitational potential energy — or the energy stored by balancing the tall domino on such a tiny footprint — comes from the domino's mass and height, both of which increase with every subsequent domino.
"As in all gravitational phenomena, the total mass of the object drops out of the equations, but not the mass distribution," a heady paper (by Leiden University's J. M. J. van Leeuwen) on the physics of "domino magnification" notes. Like Morris, Leeuwen has a funny label for this odd research interest: Curiosa.
A summarization of that paper by the MIT Technological Review explains that "the force required to topple the domino is smaller than the force it generates when it falls. It is this 'force amplification' that can be used to topple bigger dominoes."
In fact, the kinetic energy exerted to push that first domino is just 2 billionths of that released by the last one as it comes loudly crashing down.
Another important factor of domino physics is that they lean on one another as they fall. Since one falling domino is being weighed upon by its predecessor, its force is greater than if you or I had simply tipped it over. Van Leeuwen even proves that — with optimal spacing and no domino "slipping" — a domino series like this one could use dominoes that double in size from one to the next.
But that's more theoretical than practical. In Morris's demonstration, you can clearly see that the dominoes slip back after they've fallen.
But fall they do. "That was 13 dominoes," Morris says. "If I had 29 dominoes, the last domino would be as tall as the Empire State Building."
That exponential growth is pretty surprising, right? In that way it's reminiscent of the "wheat and chessboard" problem: If you had a single grain of wheat and doubled that for every square on a chessboard (there are 64), how many would you be left with?
The answer — 18,446,744,073,709,551,615, or roughly 18 and a half quintillion — is much greater than most people would guess before doing the math.
"Lower oil prices represent a large tax cut for consumers in the developed world, particularly in the United States," BlackRock analysts write.
In a new report on the impact of falling oil prices, the analyst relate tumbling gas prices to stagnant wages.
"The average hourly US wage bought about 10 gallons of gasoline in January, up from 5.7 gallons in mid-2014," the analysts write. "The response should be swift: any gasoline price decline that is part of an extreme fall (over 15% in a quarter) tends to generate a bump in consumption in the next quarter that is four times as large as the effect of milder price falls, we find."
Linus Torvalds, creator and curator of the Linux kernel, has a quandary on his hands: should he stick to Linux's long-time tradition of massive, multple-decimal-point version numbers, or should he abandon them in favor of shorter, more easily distinguishable major versions?
The problem at hand is the imminent arrival of Linux 3.20. Unlike most major pieces of software, a new version of the Linux kernel is released every 10 weeks or so. In some cases, developers simply bump the major version number every time there's a big release, which is why we're now up to Chrome 40 and Firefox 35. The Linux kernel, however, has historically opted for a "conventional" scheme, which resulted in some incredibly long-winded version numbers such as 2.6.39.4.
Back in 2011, with the release of Linux 3.0, Torvalds said those "2.6.<bignum>" days were over—and now here we are, a few weeks away from the release of Linux 3.20, and it seems we're on the cusp of the Linux kernel assuming a much simpler version scheme. "I'm once more close to running out of fingers and toes," muses Torvalds, before going on to suggest that it might be time to skip 3.20 and jump straight to 4.0. In a poll attached to Torvalds' Google+ post, which had more than 24,000 votes at the time of publishing, 54% were in favor of numbering the next version of the kernel Linux 4.0.
You probably didn't know bros were an endangered species.
Dairy brand Organic Valley is out with "Save the Bros," a mock PSA asking for help weaning musclebound dudes from conventional protein shakes in favor of the company's new Organic Fuel product—which it's touting as free of "artificial flavoring, sweeteners, GMOs, toxic pesticides, antibiotics or artificial hormones often found in other 'health' products."
The two-minute, tongue-in-cheek video, created by Humanaut, stakes out its position early, opening with the smirkingly ambiguous claim, "Bros are pretty amazing," before proceeding to make a slew of other dubious arguments. One woman actually worries to the camera that in a world without bros, no one "would make comments about your physique that aren't appropriate, but still appreciated."
In other words, for an ad that, at moments, panders to its target by trolling everyone else, it's pretty funny—deftly sending up cheesy public-service tropes, while also largely poking fun at the consumers it's trying to woo. Ultimately, everyone is treated to images of bros doing yoga, bros looking at eggplants like they're aliens (because, let's be real, they are), bros meditating on mountaintops, and bros making pottery, as part of bros' efforts to better themselves.
There's also an accompanying website that hawks "Save the Bros" paraphernalia, like T-shirts, duffel bags, and obviously, tank tops and trucker hats. (They might want to do a slightly tighter job of filtering the Instagram posts it pulls in by hashtag—on Monday night, one screenshot of an iChat, under #brolife, read, "Life is like a penis; it is simple, soft, and relaxed. Then women make it hard.")
Luckily, you can rest assured that even if you don't share the ad, the bros will be fine.
CREDITS Client: Organic Valley Product: Organic Fuel Campaign: "Save the Bros" Agency: Humanaut Creative Adviser: Alex Bogusky Creative Director: David Littlejohn Associate Creative Director: Mike Cessario Copywriters: David Littlejohn, Mike Cessario Art Directors: Stephanie Gelabert, Sean Davis Production Company: Fancy Rhino, Chattanooga, Tenn. Director: Daniel Jacobs Producer: Katie Nelson Director of Photography: Annie Huntington Editor: Tyler Beasley Production Designer: Chad Harris Music Company: Skypunch Studios Composer: Carl Cadwell
Samsung is doing a series of teasers this year to hype up the launch of the next Galaxy S6 (or whatever it’s calling its 2016 flagship Android smartphone), and the latest details the tech and progress of wireless charging. In a post on Samsung’s official blog, the company’s lead engineer for IT and Mobile Seho Park described how advances in wireless charging over the past… Read More
Here is what people want their smoke detector to do: sound an alarm when there is smoke. Here is what they do not want their smoke detector to do: sound an alarm for no reason whatsoever in the middle of the night. Users of the connected smoke detector from Nest, a company owned by Google, complain that this is what’s happening to them.
Don’t take our word for it, though. One Google employee, Brad Fitzpatrick, took to his Google+ account (where else?) and warned the general public not to buy the current version of the Nest Protect. The problem, he says, is that false alarms are a problem, and that when they happen, you can’t turn the alarm off. He called the product an “unhushable pieces of crap.”
There’s a video of the nightmare available, which we don’t recommend actually watching, because it is loud and annoying. Fitzpatrick isn’t alone, though: here are excerpts from Amazon reviews of the product posted just during the month of February 2015 (which is only half over.)
This product is a nice path light, I’ll give it that. Otherwise, it is a machine designed to place terror in the hearts of your children as it randomly triggers false alarms on different units at random times. Fortunately, since the nest protects are all wirelessly interconnected, no one misses out on any of the false alarms.
What happens when the alarms go off while you’re not home? They annoy your neighbors if you live in an apartment or condo. What if they go off while your kids are home with a babysitter? Everyone has to go huddle in the car because the alarm can’t be turned off.
My wife and I were at a close friend’s wedding, and our babysitter called to let us know the alarms were going off. This time, she couldn’t get the unit to “hush”. The alarms went off for over an hour late at night, and the babysitter had to take the kids out of the house and sit in her car for an hour just to get a break– Nest literally ran my kids out of their own home.
Another reviewer pointed out that when their home actually did fill with smoke, the alarm didn’t go off. So there’s that.
We’ll contact Google and find out whether they have any comment on the false alarms issue, and update you if they do.
Malcolm Brenner is the only man on Earth to achieve international fame for having sex with a dolphin. A former investigative journalist who covered the American Southwest, he remains best known for his 1970's love affair—mostly romantic, briefly sexual—with a bottlenose dolphin named Dolly. Their "courtship," which Brenner sees as dolphin-initiated and also transcendently romantic, took place in a theme park in Florida, the state where Brenner, now 63, currently lives. He chronicled these events in his autobiographical novel Wet Goddess, and Brenner's story is the subject of a new short documentary called Dolphin Lover.
Google purchased Boston Dynamics last year, which means it now owns the company’s ongoing robotics projects, including BigDog. Today, the Google subsidiary posted videos of a smaller dog-like robot, aptly named Spot, which weighs around 160 lbs, has an electric powerhouse and can operate both indoors and outside. The robot, as you can see from the clip, can walk, trot and climb across… Read More
Scientists may say that brakes save lives, but virtually every car-wreck co-occurs with panicked braking -- did you know that in the old days, cars didn't have brakes?
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Add former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) too the long list of critics of President Barack Obama's speech on religion last week.
Huckabee, a likely 2016 presidential candidate, even accused Obama on Monday of supporting radical Islam by refusing to specifically condemn it in his speech.
"Everything he does is against what Christians stand for. And he's against the Jews in Israel," Huckabee said on Fox News, according to video posted by Mediaite. "The one group of people that can know they have his undying, unfailing support would be the Muslim community. And it doesn't matter if it's the radical Muslim community."
Huckabee was reacting to Obama's address last Wednesday to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. In the speech, Obama told Christians they shouldn't be arrogant and compared violent terrorists in the Middle East to the Crusades and the Inquisition.
"Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ," Obama said. "And in our home country, slavery, and Jim Crow, all too often was justified in the name of Christ."
But Huckabee insisted Obama has his US history mixed up. The former governor noted many Christians led the fight to end slavery and racist Jim Crow laws.
"I think he's forgetting that it was the Christian movement, led by the reverend, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who resisted racism. And many of the most staunch voters that helped to bring this country in a whole new understanding of racial justice were voices from the pulpits," Huckabee said. "The same thing with slavery."
Before this week's big Swiss banking leak, authorities had been trying to get information on that opaque and shady side of global finance for decades.
In fact, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has previously described his involvement in a CIA plan to recruit a Swiss banker. As described in The Guardian:
CIA operatives were attempting to recruit a Swiss banker to obtain secret banking information. Snowden said they achieved this by purposely getting the banker drunk and encouraging him to drive home in his car. When the banker was arrested for drunk driving, the undercover agent seeking to befriend him offered to help, and a bond was formed that led to successful recruitment.
These dirty tricks went too far Snowden, who had been working as CIA technician:
"Much of what I saw in Geneva really disillusioned me about how my government functions and what its impact is in the world," he says. "I realised that I was part of something that was doing far more harm than good."
Apple is basically the only company making money from smartphones anymore.
Every quarter, Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Walkley takes a look at the state of the profits of smartphone companies. This quarter, Walkley found Apple had a record breaking 93% of the industry's profits.
Apple is always the leader, but for a short while, it looked like Samsung was going to catch Apple. Those days are long gone. Apple has blasted away from the pack.
Samsung's share of the industry's profits is down to 9%, its lowest point since 2008 as its profits crater. Samsung is under attack from Apple at the high end with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, which both have big screens.
It's also under attack at the low-end from cheap Chinese phone makers like Xiaomi. Walkley doesn't have Chinese phone maker Xiaomi in his table, saying, "since Xiaomi is a private company, we are unable to get their sales and profit metrics. If I could get their profit metrics, then I would certainly include."
Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones last quarter, generating roughly $12.6-$13.5 billion in profits.
If you're more into pie charts, here it as a pie chart for Q4.
But the PayPal cofounder still wishes he could have done some things differently.
He said as much in a new column for conservative student magazine the Intercollegiate Review:
My advice for you — the advice I wish I could have given my younger self — is this: Before getting swept up in the competitions that define so much of life, ask yourself whether you even want the prize on offer.
The bone that Thiel is picking here is competition.
For him, it's a sacred cow that needs to be killed off.
"In economics, Americans mythologize competition, crediting it with saving us from socialist bread lines," he writes. "But if you're an entrepreneur who wants to create and capture lasting value, you don't want to compete with a bunch of interchangeable businesses. You want to build a monopoly."
The same goes for individuals trying to navigate their careers, he says. That's something he wished he knew earlier, when he was first out of school.
As you might imagine, Thiel was a pretty competitive student.
He got into Stanford University for undergrad, and then attended Stanford Law. Then he landed a gig at a prestigious Manhattan law firm, a place that, in his words, "from the outside everyone wanted to get into" but "on the inside ... everybody wanted to leave."
Working in law helped Thiel to see that living a life where you're just trying to out-compete everybody was a trap.
When I left — after seven months and three days — one of the lawyers down the hall from me said, "You know, I had no idea it was possible to escape from Alcatraz." Of course that was not literally true, since all you had to do was go out the front door and not come back. But psychologically this was not what people were capable of, because when their identity was defined by competing so intensely with other people, they could not imagine leaving.
It made him realize what's toxic about using competition as your guide in the world:
This is, I think, the big problem with competition: it focuses us on the people around us, and while we get better at the things we're competing on, we lose sight of anything that's important, or transcendent, or truly meaningful in our world.
In other words, living in a competition-driven world will likely make you a copy of your highly competitive peers. For that reason, he doesn't hire MBAs.
The author of this article lost of credibility when she said this: ""Soft leafy herbs such a cilantro, mint, basil and parsley, are often interchangeable."
Shoppers often waste money at the grocery store without realizing it.
We asked Melissa d’Arabian, Food Network host and author of the best-selling book Ten Dollar Dinners, about some of the most common mistakes they make.
Here are the expensive blunders—and easy ways to fix them.
1. Paying full price for meat. "Meat is usually the most expensive item on your dinner plate," d'Arabian says. She suggests checking circulars for "loss leaders"—highly discounted items that get shoppers into stores. Often, cuts of pork, beef, and chicken will be 50 to 75% off. Buy this meat in bulk then freeze it for later.
2. Being a slave to a recipe. Instead of buying every item on a long recipe list, think about ingredients you already have and could swap in. "Lemon juice is an acid, so try using another acid, such as vinegar or orange juice in its place," d'Arabian told us. "Soft leafy herbs such a cilantro, mint, basil and parsley, are often interchangeable."
3. Not using the freezer. You can save a lot of money by freezing bread, bacon, herbs (d'Arabian freezes fresh herbs with oil in ice-cube trays), and tomatoes. Buy these items in bulk when they're on sale, and you'll save even more.
4. Thinking that "inexpensive" ingredients don't warrant budget shopping. Yeah, a can of beans is pretty cheap. But d'Arabian points out that you can buy five cans' worth of dried beans for the price of one can. Check out her blog post for how to portion out and cook your own.
5. Not doing math in the produce aisle. Most produce items are available pre-packaged or loose. "Take 10 seconds to do some quick math to determine the per-pound price of a package before deciding whether to buy loose or packaged," d'Arabian says. Usually, potatoes and carrots are cheaper packaged, while mushrooms, apples, and oranges are cheaper by themselves.
6. Grabbing a big cart. "Studies have shown that grocery stores can do one simple thing that will result in you unwittingly spending more money: put out bigger grocery carts!" d'Arabian says. "Use this information to your advantage and always select the smallest cart available." If the store only has carts, fill up yours with less expensive products like produce before hitting the snack aisles.
7. Splurging in the wrong department. Replacing rib-eye steak with filet mignon can cost you an extra $15 per pound, d'Arabian says. Instead, treat yourself in the produce aisle. Expensive wild mushrooms or heirloom tomatoes cost $1 or $2 more, but will make your meal a lot nicer.
8. Overlooking the salad bar. "A handful of hazelnuts from that aisle will set you back only 20 or 30 cents—toast, chop, and sprinkle over green beans or in an inexpensive lettuce salad and you have a fancy restaurant-worthy dish," d'Arabian says. "The salad bar is also a great way to grab a small quantity of a high-impact ingredient (such as high-quality briny olives for a tapenade)."
9. Not asking the grocery staff for help. "Ask the person behind the butcher counter for advice on how to cook an unfamiliar cut of meat that is on sale, or ask if he will break down a large inexpensive pork loin into a variety of cuts: chops, cubes, and a few smaller roasts," d'Arabian recommends.
10. Getting bogged down by a list. "Be open to guidance from the sales prices," d'Arabian shares. "I usually just write 'vegetables for dinner' on my list, and let the prices be my guide when I’m in the produce aisle."
11. Not knowing the prices of the things you buy most. In order to shop smarter, you need to know how much essential items like chicken breasts, milk, or diapers cost normally. That will help you spot a bargain at the store. Make a list of the items you buy most so you can stock up when there's a sale.
12. Thinking that saving only happens at the store. "Ask any restaurateur: Half the battle in saving money is in inventory management. Manage your pantry and ingredients wisely, and you will save money!" d'Arabian says. "Also important: managing your leftovers. Remember, the most expensive ingredient in your kitchen right now is the one you throw away."
The Find My Phone feature for the iPhone is a godsend for those prone to losing their mobile device, but non-web connected items like wallets and bags are nearly impossible to track when left behind.
A new tech startup called Pixie is looking to give traditional products a digital presence with the help of little sensors called "Pixie Points."
The Beacon-equipped sensors, which communicate with a smartphone's Bluetooth technology, are packed into small, thin tags the size of a guitar pick. They can be attached and tucked into whatever needs tracking. This means if you lose your wallet, you'll be able to power up the Pixie app (for iOS or Android) and see the precise location of where it was when it went out of range (about 150 feet from your mobile device). Read more...
You and me, we have Wikipedia. Radiologists, they have Radiopaedia. If you can get past the clinical language, you can see it for what it really is: An amazing cache of images that show the human body at its extreme limits. And a place to find (and share!) x-rays of weird stuff people have put up their butts.
One recent post on Hacker's List, a site dedicated to matching up hackers with those who need something hacked, was headed "FB [Facebook] Account Hack for Justice."
"Scumbag guy I met at a bar over the weekend followed me home and assaulted me," it read. "Thankfully the police caught him and he's thinking long and hard about what he did in a county jail. This is apparently not the first time he's done this, but he got off free of charge the last time. I want to hit him where it hurts."
The poster offered between $200-$300 for access to the man's account.
mask.of.sanity sends this report from El Reg: The maker of BlackPhone – a mobile marketed as offering unusually high levels of security – has patched a critical vulnerability that allows hackers to run malicious code on the handsets. Attackers need little more than a phone number to send a message that can compromise the devices via the Silent Text application. The impact of the flaw is troubling because BlackPhone attracts what hackers see as high-value victims: those willing to invest AU$765 (£415, $630) in a phone that claims to put security above form and features may well have valuable calls and texts to hide from eavesdroppers.
It's easy to forget how young North American nations are compared to the rest of the world, but this GIF is a cool look at the overseas nations that ruled the continent for decades before the United States, Mexico, and Canada established independence.
Wikipedia user Esemono created a series of maps that show which parts of North America were controlled by which countries before they declared independence. (We first saw the map on Reddit.)
The United Kingdom, France, and Spain were the major players in North America until the late 1700s, when United States independence was recognized. Canada and Mexico were established later in the 1800s. (The maps don't include Native American rule.)
Earlier this month, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson made the first free ascent of El Capitan's 3,000-foot Dawn Wall at Yosemite. This dizzying footage is sure to have your palms sweating. Read the rest
One of the critical factors in the physics at play here, Morris explains, is that a domino only needs to be slightly tipped forward before gravity takes over and pulls the weight of the domino to the ground. And with such high centers of gravity — resting as they do on a small surface area — it doesn't take much to take dominoes to that all-important tipping point.
Samsung is doing a series of teasers this year to hype up the launch of the next Galaxy S6 (or whatever it’s calling its 2016 flagship Android smartphone), and the latest details the tech and progress of wireless charging. In a post on Samsung’s official blog, the company’s lead engineer for IT and Mobile Seho Park described how advances in wireless charging over the past… Read More
Here is what people want their smoke detector to do: sound an alarm when there is smoke. Here is what they do not want their smoke detector to do: sound an alarm for no reason whatsoever in the middle of the night. Users of the connected smoke detector from Nest, a company owned by Google, complain that this is what’s happening to them.
Google purchased Boston Dynamics last year, which means it now owns the company’s ongoing robotics projects, including BigDog. Today, the Google subsidiary posted videos of a smaller dog-like robot, aptly named Spot, which weighs around 160 lbs, has an electric powerhouse and can operate both indoors and outside. The robot, as you can see from the clip, can walk, trot and climb across… Read More
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