Andrew

Conveying the grandeur of the Aurora Borealis is a serious challenge for a photographer. How are you supposed to capture the splendor of the event, give it a sense of scale, and somehow imbue that photograph with the emotion involved in actually witnessing the polar spirits for yourself?

There probably isn’t a magical mixture of ingredients that will yield the ideal northern lights photograph, but the image above by photographer Max Rive is one of the closest we’ve seen, and he was kind enough to share the details behind it with us.

The photo, which is made up of 3 exposures, was captured in March above Austnesfjorden close to Svolvear on the Lofoten islands, Norway. On a snowboarding trip to the region, Rive set aside an extra week for photography and spent the weeks prior finding locations using online-hiking maps, Google Earth and Google Images.

Funny enough, this particular peak wasn’t even on his list. “On this day we thought we were heading to the summit of Matmora, which was on my list,” he explains, “but went to a false peak of the neighboring summit (Durmalstinden, 828m) instead, which wasn’t on my list.”

Returning that night to the same location, he had his friend Philippe Bouillard climb up to the top of the peak, giving him a very simple set of instructions: when you see the Northern Lights, put your arms up.

In the meantime, Rive himself set about composing the perfect image. He explains his process below:

What I really like about this spot are the pointy rocks in the foreground which lead my eye directly towards the peak. You can also follow the foreground all the way to the mountain peak. I took some test shots during daytime and it was quite a task to get the exact same composition again, especially because I was very close to the nearest rock.

I also found the shape of the mountain very spectacular, which looks a bit like the Matterhorn. The peak is only 20 meters higher than the camera but it is so small and steep you have a view on both sides which is very unique and hard to find.

The light pollution from the city of Svolvear on the right does give some balance to the lights of the houses and streets in the valley on the left. In the beginning I was not sure whether I should put the peak in the middle or put it a bit more on the right side. I choose for the last option because I wanted to put some attention on the left side which looks more interesting than the right part. The non-symmetrical shape of the mountain did allow this.

In the end, it took three nights to get the final shot. The first two were too cloudy, so they sat atop the mountains and ‘danced’ to make sure they didn’t freeze while they waited for the perfect conditions. On night three, mother nature delivered.

The lights were active the entire time, allowing Rive to adjust the exposure as needed each time they got really bright and spectacular.

Here’s one last look at the final shot:

To see more of Rive’s photography, or if you’d like to follow along as he captures more images, head over to his Facebook page by clicking here. You can also follow him on Flickr and 500px if either of those are your cup of tea.

(via APOD)

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Image credits: Photographs by Max Rive and used with permission

It's been a pretty good election night for Republicans so far. That means that, naturally, former GOP member of Congress and general gadfly Ron Paul decided to rain on the parade:

Republican control of the Senate = expanded neocon wars in Syria and Iraq. Boots on the ground are coming!

— Ron Paul (@RonPaul) November 5, 2014

On a night when most of his former party is celebrating its moves toward taking the Senate, Paul is bemoaning the idea of a Republican takeover on grounds that it'll lead to more wars in the Middle East. Normally, vitriol from an ex-congressman wouldn't bother anyone. But there's the small matter of Paul's son, Rand — the GOP senator who's almost certainly running for president in 2016. This tweet bemoaning the GOP takeover of the Senate is just a taste of the problems that the father will cause the son in his bid to win the Republican nomination.

Here's the big issue. Both Ron and Rand Paul share a commitment to downsizing America's involvement in foreign wars. But while Ron is an absolutist more interested in speaking his mind than building allies in the Republican party, Rand is a strategist who's built a version of foreign policy non-interventionism designed to succeed in the actual Republican party.

This isn't to say that Rand agrees with Ron on everything and is lying to voters. That doesn't appear to be true: Rand has long had a different vision of the world than Ron. But not everyone believes that. A number of media reports have already linked Rand and his ideas to Ron's ideas, each time providing grist for the anti-Rand Paul mill among more hawkish Republicans.

And Rand Paul is already facing an uphill battle on that front. The Republican consensus on foreign policy is considerably more aggressive than Rand's views are. He's trying to gently nudge them in a different direction — but the more he's linked to father's extreme — and sometimes outright crankish — views, the harder that's going to be. Ron Paul is toxic among Republican elites, exactly the kind of people Rand needs to win over in his presidential bid.

Which is why things like this tweet are so problematic. For one thing, Ron's prediction here is kind of crankish: the president, not Congress, will determine whether US soldiers go to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Moreover, he's implicitly saying that Democrats (as the somewhat less interventionist party) are better if you hold views like his — or Rand's. When Ron says things like this in a high profile way — say, on election night — it raises questions about Rand-Ron links among exactly the wrong people.

It's not clear Ron is going to stop anytime soon. He's now the chairman of the Ron Paul Institute, a think tank whose publications have names like "Neocon Watch." Ron's publications have been a problem for him in the past, but it doesn't look like he plans on packing his keyboard away. But as long as he's publishing, he's a threat to his son's 2016 campaign.

If you drop a bowling ball and a feather in a vacuum, which hits the ground first?

Physics tells us they'll land at the exact same time. And now, thanks to the folks from BBC Two's Human Universe, we can see this demonstrated on a grand scale:

(BBC Two)

The show's host, physicist Brian Cox, carried out the experiment in the world's largest vacuum chamber — a 12-story tall cylinder operated by NASA in Ohio to test spacecrafts.

Even though most of us know the result of the experiment beforehand, it's still pretty cool to see it happen. There's something deeply counterintuitive about a feather falling as quickly as a bowling ball — which happens because, in the absence of air and other interfering factors, gravity acts on all objects in the exact same way.

Cox also carried out the experiment without the vacuum turned out, showing how air resistance messes with the results:

(BBC Two)

Watch the full video below:

Hat tip to io9.

The black hole in the highly-anticipated Christopher Nolan blockbuster Interstellar has already made headlines. Put together with some serious mathematical help from astrophysicist Kip Thorne, it was so accurate he’s actually going to get a few academic papers out of it.

It is, however, 100% CGI and as such outside of our purview as photographers… until now. Just a few days away from the movie’s debut, Shanks FX and PBS decided to recreate the effect using all in-camera elements they’ve shown you how to create before.

First, the results. On the left we have the CGI black hole from Insterstellar, on the right is Shanks FX’s version created by combining elements shot in-camera:

Not too bad right? In fact, downright impressive. The cosmos in the background was created on a sheet of glass with colored milk and dust particles (details here), while the rest of the effects were shot using steel wool and Christmas lights (details here and here, respectively).

Put it all together with some nifty post-processing and you get the final product below, which isn’t quite as neat as Nolan’s but does include the real in-camera effects Nolan praised when he said:

However sophisticated your CGI is, if it’s been created from no physical elements and you haven’t shot anything with the camera, it’s going to stick out.

Check out the video up top to see just how many shots it took and how Shanks combined them to get the final product. And then watch this last video to find out more about what is being called, ‘most accurate simulation ever of what a black hole would look like.’

Brooklyn-based photographer Kent Rogowski recently turned the nightmares of many a child into a reality when he decided to create a somewhat disturbing photo series titled Bears.

For it, he took teddy bears, turned them inside out, and re-stuffed them to shine a different light on the comfort objects many of us spent so much time cuddling with at a young age.

Each inside-out portrait shows off the insides of the bears, with seams, stitches and internalized objects all exposed for the world to see. As Rogowski explains in his artist statement about Bears:

Their fasteners become eyes, their seams become scars, and their stuffing creeps out in the most unexpected places. Together these images form a typology of strange yet oddly familiar creatures.

If you can afford to lose some sleep tonight, scroll down to see the rest of the series:

If you’d like to keep up with Rogowski and his work, you can do so on his website by clicking here. Bears has also been turned into a book, which you can pick up over on Amazon.

(via DesignTaxi)

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Image credits: Photographs by Kent Rogowski and used with permission

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Christian Bale just dropped out of the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic, leaving what can reasonably be considered the role of a lifetime vacant. The Danny Boyle-directed film is now once again without a star. So who can step into Jobs’ tennis shoes? Boyle may be meeting with potential replacements this week, but we had some thoughts we think he should consider:

Photo Credit: Flickr / DFID

Idris Elba: For so many Apple aficionados, Elba is the obvious choice. He’s accustomed to playing figures in authority, having portrayed ambitious drug kingpin Stringer Bell in The Wire and Nelson Mandela himself in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. As we saw in Pacific Rim, he has boatloads of charisma and can give the kind of reality-distorting speech...

Continue reading…

Poll

Who should play Steve Jobs?

(Chart courtesy of the New England Journal of Medicine)

Measles is an insidious infectious disease that typically strikes children. It can be deadly. The disease comes on as a fever and runny nose, and causes an uncomfortable blotchy, rash all over the body. It's airborne, so it spreads quite easily, too: it just takes an infected person breathing or coughing near someone who is unvaccinated.

And according to a new New England Journal of Medicine article, measles is making a comeback here: more measles cases have been reported in the US this year than during any year in the past two decades. The author writes that there are two key reasons for this resurgence:

First, though significant progress has been made in reducing global measles incidence, there is still substantial circulation of the virus in other countries. Susceptible U.S. residents who travel to countries where measles is endemic or epidemic and susceptible residents of those countries who travel to the United States are bringing the virus here.

Second, an increasing number of parents in this country are hesitant to have their children vaccinated, and such hesitancy has resulted in an accumulation of unvaccinated populations who can become infected and maintain transmission.

This is especially worrisome, considering how easily measles spreads. In a recent article in The Week, the author points out that readers should be more worried about measles than Ebola. One case of Ebola, on average, leads to the infection of 1.5 to 2.2 other people. "By contrast, a person with measles is infectious for several days before they become sick. And a person with measles will on average infect 12 to 18 additional people."

Worldwide, 330 people die of measles every day. This resurgence in America is a concern.

Loved this take on the Giants’ World Series victory from Adam Kilgore:

The Kansas City Royals clung this October to the well-founded belief they owned the most dominant bullpen in the major leagues. On Wednesday night, Madison Bumgarner emerged from the gates of the left field corner at Kauffman Stadium and informed them of their mistake. The best bullpen in baseball, Bumgarner let them know, with no shortage of menace, dangled from his colossal left shoulder. The best bullpen in baseball was him.

Bumgarner’s entire postseason performance, culminated with his amazing appearance to finish game seven, is one of the greatest athletic feats I’ve ever seen. And then to end the whole thing with the potential KC tying run just 90 feet away from home plate? Two days later I still can’t believe how good a game that was.

Posted by Ian Leader, Product Manager

Today we’re introducing a brand new Google Calendar app. It’s designed to be a helpful assistant, so you can spend less time managing your day, and more time enjoying it.

It takes a lot of work to stay on top of your schedule, after all. You have to manually enter that hotel or dinner reservation, then update it if your plans change. You have to hunt around for addresses and phone numbers, then add them to your events. And if you’re on a mobile device, you might just give up on these kinds of tasks entirely.

Calendars (like email) should do better—especially on phones and tablets—so we set out to build one that’s always at your service. Here are just some of the ways the new Calendar app can help.


Events from Gmail: now emails can turn into Calendar events automatically
Every time you book a flight, buy concert tickets, or make a hotel reservation, odds are you get an email with dates, times and other important details. But who has the time (or patience) to copy and paste all this into their calendar? In the new Calendar app these kinds of emails become events automatically, complete with things like flight numbers and check-in times. They’ll even stay updated in real time if your flight's delayed, or you receive another email update.
Assists: suggestions that save you time
Of course, not all event info arrives in your inbox. You often have to piece together phone numbers, addresses and attendees from lots of different sources, then add them to your calendar manually. With Assists, Calendar can suggest titles, people and places as you type, as well as adapt to your preferences over time. For example, if you often go running with Peter in Central Park, Calendar can quickly suggest that entire event when you type ‘r-u-n.’
Schedule View: easy to scan and lovely to look at
Your calendar is more than just a list of dates and times—it’s your life! So Calendar’s new Schedule view includes photos and maps of the places you’re going, cityscapes of travel destinations, and illustrations of everyday events like dinner, drinks and yoga. These images will bring a little extra beauty to your day, and make it easy to see what’s going on at a glance—perfect for when you’re checking in from your phone or tablet.
The new Google Calendar will work on all Android 4.1+ devices. It’s available today on all devices running Android 5.0 Lollipop, and you’ll be able to download the update from Google Play in the coming weeks. (And yes, we’re also working on a version for iPhone!) Learn more on our website.

Fans were furious last week when pop sensation Taylor Swift refused to upload her new album 1989 to Spotify. They are about to get angrier: all five Swift albums disappeared from Spotify's catalogue on Monday morning.

Hey @taylorswift13 the haters gonna hate, hate, hate but 40 million+ Spotifiers gonna play, play, play. Don’t let them down for too long. xo

— jonathan prince (@jonathanmprince) October 30, 2014

Spotify doesn't just get new albums when they release; the company has to negotiate with artists and record labels to strike a deal before an album can be uploaded. The music streaming service has said it's working with Swift to get her albums back on the site.

"We hope she'll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone," it said in a Monday statement. "We believe fans should be able to listen to music wherever and whenever they want, and that artists have an absolute right to be paid for their work and protected from piracy. That's why we pay nearly 70% of our revenue back to the music community."

Neither Swift nor her record label have commented on the disappearance of the albums

The fact that 1989 isn't on Spotify shouldn't come as a surprise. Swift also kept her fourth album Red off of Spotify when it dropped in 2012 for months after the release date. Other artists who sell in large numbers, such as Beyoncé, Coldplay, and Adele, have also kept their albums off of Spotify except for the singles.

And Swift has especially been an opponent of free music services, writing this in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal earlier this year:

"It's my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album's price point is hope they don't underestimate themselves or undervalue their art."

In many ways, she's correct. Album sales are down 14 percent across the board this year.  And Swift isn't hurting for listeners; she's using incentives like cute Polaroid photos packaged with the CDC to get fans to buy the hard copy. Billboard initially predicted Swift would sell 700,000 or 800,000 copies of 1989 in her first week. That estimate has since risen to 1.2 million.

In the meantime, Spotify has added a playlist titled "What to Play While Taylor is Away."

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Former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson has become something of a hero among segments of the right ever since she was pushed out from the network this spring over concerns that her reporting had taken an anti-Obama bias. In the view of Attkisson and her supporters, CBS had silenced her for telling the truth on Benghazi and other scandals. (She also drew heat for reporting a link between vaccines and autism, an idea that has been widely debunked.)

"The way to do it wouldn't be to hold down the delete key"

On Tuesday, Attkisson will publish her book, Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington. It reiterates her criticisms of the Obama administration and alleges a campaign to silence such dissent.

The book is in the news this week because it details what Attkisson describes as hacking attacks on her computer. She presents the evidence in such a way as to strongly imply that the Obama administration ordered her computer hacked as retribution for her critical reporting. On Friday, Attkisson released a video of the central allegation in her book. But it turns out that what the video actually appears to show is not sophisticated US government hacking, but a stuck delete key, and a former reporter with breathtakingly poor computer literacy.

Sharyl Attkisson's video is being presented as showing the US government hacking her in real-time

The video has taken the right-leaning web by storm, and is widely seen as proof of Attkisson's unstated-but-clear implication. The Blaze called the video "what could be evidence of the government taking over her computer." TownHall ran it with the headline: "Watch Someone in The Government Take Over Sharyl Attkisson's Computer." Fox News columnist Howard Kurtz called it "highly sophisticated hacking" and "chilling stuff." Breitbart News deemed it "More Evidence the Government Hacked Sharyl Attkisson's Computer."

But it turns out, based on Attkisson's own video, that the computer may not have been hacked at all. It turns out that not only does this bear none of the hallmarks of anything remotely resembling hacking but, based on all available evidence, it looks like what actually happened is probably that her delete key got stuck.

Let's look at what Attkisson claims. There are a number of incidents, all of which seem like perfectly anodyne technology glitches. The book opens with her computer's hard drive making a whining sound ("Reeeeeeeeeee" is the very first word). Attkisson breathlessly recounts how her digital TV would "spontaneously jitter, mute, and freeze-frame." She finds a stray cable dangling out of the Verizon box on the back of her house, something that would in fact be necessary for hacking had the Internet never been invented.

The key hacking incident, which Attkisson very strongly suggests was political retribution

But the incident that's being portrayed as the real slam-duck evidence is this scene, in which text is mysteriously deleted on her screen as she's writing. The scene comes just after she's learned that White House officials Jay Carney and Eric Schultz had complained to the White House about her Benghazi reporting:

That very night, with Schultz, Carney, and company freshly steaming over my Benghazi reporting, I'm home doing final research and crafting questions for the next day's interview with [Thomas] Pickering. Suddenly data in my computer file begins wiping at hyperspeed before my eyes. Deleted line by line in a split second: it's gone, gone, gone. I press the mouse pad and keyboard to try to stop it, but I have no control. The only time I've seen anything like this is in those movies where the protagonist desperately tries to copy crucial files faster than the antagonist can remotely wipe them.

What a coincidence: just hours after the White House is "fuming" over her hard-hitting reporting, her computer is attacked. In another scene, she meets with an anonymous "government source" she calls Number One — the book seems to often turn on strange meetings with unnamed sources who may or may not be actual experts — who all but confirms that it was hacked by the US government in an act of intimidation.

Attkisson was hacked, Number One says, by a "sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that's proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the National Security Agency." Number One adds, "This is outrageous. Worse than anything Nixon ever did. I wouldn't have believed something like this could happen in the United States of America."

Then she released the video, and it looked like she hadn't been hacked at all

On Friday, Attkisson released her video of the alleged hack, which she claims shows the incident in which "my computer files begins wiping at hyperspeed before my eyes" and which right-wing sites have presented as unassailable evidence of government hacking:

Here's what the video actually shows: text being deleted from whichever Word document Attkisson happens to have her cursor on, at about the rate it would delete if someone got their delete key stuck.

"From what we looked at and what we were able to replicate, from that piece of video we don't see what we would call evidence of hacking," Brad Moore, an employee with the Ohio-based firm Interhack Corp, told Media Matters. "There are multiple explanations and we were able to demonstrate quickly and easily one possibil[ity], the backspace key."

"Suddenly data in my computer file begins wiping at hyperspeed"

"A key can get stuck, sometimes dirt can get under a keyboard and a key will inadvertently be held down," Matthew Brothers-McGrew, also of Interhack, said, describing an incident that every computer-owner on Earth has encountered. This can also happen because of a glitch; in either case, "if you have Word open it will continually backspace text at about the same rate we are seeing in the video."

Vox's own Timothy B. Lee expressed skepticism as well when the Attkisson charges first surfaced, a few days before she released the video. "The larger problem with Attkisson's story is that she doesn't seem able to distinguish evidence of hacking from the kind of routine technical glitches that everyone suffers," he wrote.

Remotely opening up a Word document on someone's computer and manually deleting text is just not how hacking — especially NSA hacking — works. "The way to do it wouldn't be to hold down the delete key," an expert at Syntax Technical Computer Forensics also told Media Matters.

The remaining evidence is Attkisson's bizarre anonymous sources, who provide little actual information

For anyone who has even the remotest computer literacy, it's just extremely difficult to watch this video of text deleting from a Word document (and listen to Attkisson's dumbfounded commentary) and conclude anything other than the delete key got stuck. It is even more difficult to look at this video, which shows a problem that will be readily familiar to anyone who works with computers, and conclude it must be the work of nefarious government hackers.

That leaves us to rely on Attkisson's many anonymous sources, who puzzlingly present no evidence or credentials for their repeated and often quite heated claims of slam-dunk proof of a massive government conspiracy.

"I see evidence that shows a deliberate and skilled attempt to clean the log files of activity," says another of Attkisson's anonymous sources, whom she names as Jerry Patel. The work, he claims, is "far beyond the the abilities of even the best nongovernment hackers."

Maybe "Jerry Patel" and "Number One" really do have concrete evidence proving that the Obama administration turned the world's most powerful spy agency on Sharyl Attkisson to punish her for her critical reporting on Benghazi by deleting some lines from one of her Word documents. But the only evidence that we can see at this point suggests that what likely actually happened is that her delete key got stuck.

Want to know what it's like to run for Congress? One recent first-time candidate has written a lengthy first-person account of his effort in Politico Magazine — and it isn't pretty.

When Matt Miller decided to make a bid for the retiring Henry Waxman's House seat in Los Angeles, he was no stranger to politics. Miller had worked in the Clinton White House, written political columns for the Washington Post, and hosted a public radio talk show. But he wasn't prepared for how the imperative for campaign cash would dominate nearly his entire campaign — and would change him as a person. Miller writes:

Campaign fundraising is a bizarre, soul-warping endeavor. You spend your time endlessly adding to lists of people who might be in a position to help. You enter them on a spreadsheet (dubbed "The Tracker") and sort the names from high to low in terms of their giving potential. You start to think of every human being in your orbit as having a number attached to them. You book breakfasts, lunches, coffees and drinks at which you make the case for your candidacy ... and ask for money. Always money. You call dozens of people a day ... and ask for money. When people ask how they can help, you mostly ask them for the names of folks you can ... ask for money.

Since Miller's rivals had better name recognition and ties to local interest groups, Miller's consultants advised him that expensive ad campaigns were the only way to get his name and message in front of the district's voters. He ended up raising $848,440 — but his key opponents raised even more.

In the end, it wasn't enough — Miller came in fifth place in the 18-candidate field, with just 12 percent of the vote. Head over to Politico Magazine to read his lengthy, enlightening account of his experience: "Mr. Miller Doesn't Go to Washington."

If you're going to indulge on Halloween, you can take the path of least damage to your waistline: the folks at the Daily Meal ranked popular treats by calorie count.

(Infographic: The Ultimate Halloween Candy Guide by the Daily Meal via The Kitchn)

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If you swear from time to time -- or, if you're like me and curse like you just stubbed your toe in your everyday conversations -- you've probably noticed by now that every popular third party keyboard available for iOS (and the same is true for...

Me: What genre would your theme song to be?

Client: Okay.

Me: Well, we could meet up in person to discuss the project further.

Client: Sounds good to me! 

Me: Alright, what time would you like to meet?

Client: Yes.

I did not hear from this person again.

On Tuesday, Marvel released an extended trailer of Avengers: Age of Ultron. Because of a leak last week, the company was prompted to release its trailer earlier than its expected date of October 28 (last night), and this extended trailer seems to be a way for Marvel to live up to its trailer promises:

The main difference between the two trailers is an extra 54 seconds or so, largely comprised of the heroes hanging out at Toney Stark's house, drinking and trying to lift Thor's hammer Mjolnir. According to legend, only someone "worthy" can lift Thor's hammer. Almost all the Avengers take a turn. Hilarity ensues.

It's at the tail end of that tomfoolery that the Avengers, to their surprise, are interrupted by an ear-piercing screech. The screech is followed by a wobbling Ultron who states: "How could you be worthy? You're all puppets … tangled in strings."

(Marvel)

That opening scene changes the tone from the original trailer a bit — the Avengers seem to be celebrating a victory (over what, we don't know) and are then shocked at Ultron's appearance.

It also drives home the idea that Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is responsible for creating Ultron, possibly without the other heroes' knowledge — most of the Avengers look surprised and befuddled, while Stark looks like he knows exactly what's going on.

The rest of the trailer then aligns with the one released last week.

Avengers: Age of Ultron will be released on May 1, 2015

Following the publication of a blog post earlier today outlining some details of its upcoming CurrentC mobile payments solution and disclosure of a hack resulting in unauthorized access to users' email addresses, Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) held a conference call with members of the press to further address questions and concerns.

During the call, MCX CEO Dekkers Davidson and COO Scott Rankin clarified that MCX merchants who choose to accept Apple Pay are not subject to fines. As stated in the blog post earlier today, merchants are also free to leave the consortium entirely at any time without penalty beyond forfeiting the time and money already invested in the effort.

As a result, MCX certainly appears to be placing the blame for its member retailers' refusal to accept Apple Pay on the merchants themselves. Asked whether Apple Pay and MCX's CurrentC solution should be able to exist side-by-side, the executives noted that believe they will in the future and that it will take two or three major players in mobile payments to allow the entire market to thrive.

But pressed as to why some retailers such as CVS and Rite Aid have shut down NFC entirely rather than allow unofficial Apple Pay payments in their stores, Davidson argued that merchants know their customers best and are making the choices they believe are right for their customers. He said the merchants believe customers want more than just mobile payments, and CurrentC's integration of payments with loyalty cards and coupons will in his opinion prove to be the best solution.

On the topic of the hack that has resulted in compromised email addresses, Davidson noted that attacks on their systems were expected and have been heavy over the past week but that the email breach did not affect the app or the actual CurrentC systems. As a result, the issue has not shaken MCX's confidence that the cloud is the best place to store personal information for CurrentC users. Asked why MCX has been the target of such attacks over the past week, Davidson speculated that with MCX "challenging the status quo" of large, entrenched payment systems, there are bound to be attacks.

Addressing privacy issues, Davidson and Rankin also highlighted the privacy dashboard that will be available to all CurrentC users. The dashboard will allow users to tailor their level of engagement with retailers, ranging from complete anonymity to identifiable relationships that will allow for customized offers, coupons, and other benefits.

The executives also touted CurrentC's technology and payment platform agnosticism, noting that while the system has been initially built out using QR codes for maximum compatibility, the system can easily pivot to NFC or other technologies as appropriate. Responding to questions of security with QR codes, the executives pointed to Starbucks, which processes 5-6 million transactions per week using the technology.

On the payment front, CurrentC will support a variety of methods including store cards, gift cards, debit cards, and checking account withdrawals, with two credit card companies even on board at this stage. Over time, MCX expects all cards to be welcomed, even with the interchange fees charged for credit card usage.

CurrentC is currently in limited testing with an undisclosed number of partners in undisclosed locations around the country, and a full nationwide launch is planned for early next year.

Update October 30 7:26 AM: Following continued unclear answers and dodging from MCX executives, an MCX spokesperson has confirmed to Business Insider has confirmed that consortium members who choose to accept Apple Pay must indeed leave the CurrentC group. During yesterday's conference call, the executives refused to share whether any retailers have left the group or are considering doing so.

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Time-lapses have the ability to turn some pretty mundane things into really interesting videos. Case in point, ‘watching teeth straighten’ sounds like a joke excuse you’d give for why you don’t want to help that one friend move… again. But this 30 second time-lapse shows just that, and it’s downright fascinating.

Breaking open the wonder of how these metal wires work, this time-lapse video — posted to YouTube by Ernest McCallum half a decade ago — shows how a teenager’s extremely crooked teeth are corrected over eighteen months of gum-rending pain.

(via Laughing Squid)

Most of the time, when a person kills an intruder who breaks into his home, dressed in all black and screaming, the homeowner will avoid jail time. But what happens when the break-in was a no-knock SWAT raid, the intruder was a police officer, and the homeowner has a record?

A pair of cases in Texas are an example of how wrong no-knock raids can go, for both police and civilians, and how dangerously subjective the SWAT raid process can be. In December 2013, Henry Magee shot and killed a police officer during a pre-dawn, no-knock drug raid on his home. He was initially charged with capital murder, but he argued that he shot the police officer, who he thought was an intruder, to protect his pregnant girlfriend. In February 2014, a grand jury declined to indict him, and charges were dropped.

In May, a Texas man named Marvin Guy also killed a police officer during a pre-dawn, no-knock raid on his home. Guy, too, was charged with capital murder. Unlike Magee's grand jury, a grand jury in September 2014 allowed the capital murder charge against Guy to stand. His trial is likely to happen in 2016.

Guy, who is black, now faces the death penalty. Magee is white.

Magee's case wasn't completely identical to Guy's — the latter had done prison time on robbery and weapons charges, while Magee's previous arrests were for marijuana possession and DUI. But the circumstances of the raids, if anything, made Guy's reaction more justifiable. Police were trying to enter McGee's house through the door when he shot at them, while, in Guy's case, they were trying to climb in through the window. And during the raid on McGee's house, the cops did in fact find a few pounds of marijuana plants. In the raid on Guy's house, they found nothing.

Advocates say these cases highlight racial bias in the criminal justice system, particularly when the victim is a police officer. But they also highlight the bizarre nature of no-knock raids, which have been criticized for causing unnecessary confusion and endangering innocent adults and children.

In theory, no-knock raids are supposed to be used in only the most dangerous situations. So what might be most surprising about them is how infrequently police officers get killed when they bust into suspected criminals' homes unannounced.

In reality, though, no-knock raids are a common tactic, even in less-than-dangerous circumstances. There are a staggering 20,000 or more estimated no-knock raids every year across America. By the numbers, it's clear that no-knock SWAT raids are far more dangerous to civilians than they are to police.

Here's what you need to know about why no-knock raids happen, why police think they're necessary, and what happens when things go wrong.

A SWAT team enters a Denver house after using explosives to bust down the door. (Hyoung Chang/Denver Post via Getty)

How did no-knock raids become a thing?

The Fourth Amendment protects citizens from "unreasonable search," meaning police can't bust into your home whenever they feel like it — they need a warrant, granted by a judge. Even a search warrant doesn't give police the right to enter your home by force — they're supposed to knock, announce themselves, and give you a chance to open the door.

But as the war on drugs ramped up in the 1970s and 1980s, police argued that criminals and drug dealers were too dangerous to be granted the typical courtesy of knocking first. In the early 1970s, the federal government made it legal for federal law enforcement agents to conduct no-knock raids — but the law was so widely abused that it was repealed a few years later.

Since then, though, a series of court decisions and state laws have carved out a set of circumstances that make it legal for police to raid a house without announcing their presence beforehand. This has happened at the same time that SWAT teams have proliferated around the country. (For more on the history behind SWAT teams and no-knock raids, check out Radley Balko's definitive book on the subject, Rise of the Warrior Cop.)

Most SWAT teams spend their time carrying out home raids. The ACLU analyzed 818 records of SWAT exercises from police departments around the country in 2011 and 2012. They found that 80 percent of the time, SWAT teams were deployed to execute a search warrant — instead of crises such as hostage situations or active shooters.

Not all SWAT raids are no-knock raids; police are supposed to jump through an extra set of legal hoops before they can raid someone's house without knocking. But the line between regular SWAT raids and no-knock raids can get a little blurry.

SWAT teams often use quick-knock raids during which they might not give the suspect a whole lot of time to answer the door after they announce their presence. The legal standards for no-knock and quick-knock raids are different, but to someone whose house is being raided, they can seem pretty similar.

A SWAT team enters a house during the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers. (Mario Tama/Getty)

Why do police use no-knock raids?

It's rare that police really need to raid a home in order to bust someone for drugs. They could always set up a drug buy on the street and surround the suspect there. But police have focused on drug busts in stash houses, or in dealer's homes, for a few reasons.

For one thing, in theory, busting the house where drugs are stored in bulk disrupts the drug supply chain. For another, if they can charge a dealer with not just the drugs he happens to have on him or in his car when he's arrested, but with anything he's keeping in his house, they can slap him with a longer prison sentence. And finally, thanks to civil asset forfeiture, raiding a home lets cops seize whatever drug money (or other illegal money) is being stored there — and perhaps even the home itself — and use it for their own departments.

Over the last few decades, police have also argued successfully that there are some circumstances in which a standard "knock and announce" raid would either jeopardize police safety or make it impossible for them to fight crime.

Police during a SWAT team training. (Jonathan Wiggs/Boston Globe via Getty)

What are the rules for a no-knock raid?

To get a special no-knock warrant signed by a judge, police have to show that a standard "knock-and-announce" raid wouldn't work. There are two different arguments police can use for this:

1. The suspect is too dangerous. If police knocked and announced their presence, the suspect would have more time to get a weapon and fight.
2. If police knocked and announced their presence, the suspect would have time to destroy evidence of a crime before the cops got to him.

The first of those sounds pretty straightforward. The second is rather broad. If they think there are drugs in the house, and the drugs could get flushed down the toilet, police have a case for a no-knock raid. (It's been argued that this actually makes police more likely to use no-knock raids on small-time dealers rather than major ones, because major dealers would likely have too much product to flush down the toilet.)

For a more detailed, but easy-to-follow, explanation of the legal standards for raids, check out webcomic artist Nathan Burney's Illustrated Guide to Law.

Is it hard for police to meet those standards?

Nope. It's rare that judges deny warrants for no-knock raids.

Back in 2000, the Denver Post analyzed a year's worth of no-knock warrants and found that judges rejected five out of 163 requests. The Post also found that, 10 percent of the time, a judge would approve a no-knock raid even when police had simply asked for a standard warrant.

Unsurprisingly, proving that a subject is too dangerous for a regular warrant is pretty subjective — especially for drug searches. Often, police will assert that the suspect is "high-risk." Other times, they'll say that the suspect is "likely to be armed" because they think the suspect might have gang affiliations or because he has been convicted on weapons charges in the past or, sometimes, without any reasoning at all.

In other cases, police have said they need to conduct a no-knock SWAT raid when homeowners have legally registered guns — to the outrage of conservatives and libertarians. (It's unclear why police think that someone who is following gun-registration laws is likely to open fire on police officers, or why it's safer for them to burst into a known gun owner's house unannounced instead of knocking.)

In one case in spring 2014, police in Iowa conducted a no-knock SWAT raid on the home of people suspected of credit-card fraud, and tried to destroy the security cameras in the house. The police defended the raid afterward by saying that another person in the house — not the ones they were looking for — had a registered gun.

Even without a special warrant, if police at the scene have reasonable belief that they can't afford to knock, they're justified in barging in.

In fact, in a case that went to the Supreme Court in 2011, Kentucky police successfully argued that it was okay for them to bust down a door of an apartment they didn't have a warrant to search, because they smelled marijuana in the apartment and heard the sound of a toilet flushing. They'd been looking for a drug dealer in the building and assumed that the dealer must have lived in that apartment. He didn't, but they arrested the occupant for having marijuana and cocaine anyway.

A man is arrested by a SWAT team that conducted a raid on his house after he foreclosed on it but refused to leave. (RJ Sangosti/Denver Post via Getty)

Is there ever such a thing as an unjustified no-knock raid?

Sure. If police officers didn't get a warrant to conduct a no-knock raid, and there's no evidence on the scene that changes the situation, it's illegal for them to just bust in.

But when they conduct an unjustified raid, it doesn't really matter.

Usually, when police do something illegal in order to get evidence of a crime, that evidence can't be used in court. (Lawyers call this the "exclusionary rule.") That's pretty significant — it's not very easy to convict someone for having a few kilograms of cocaine in his house if the prosecutor can't mention the cocaine.

But about a decade ago, the Supreme Court decided that rule didn't apply to evidence collected during an unjustified no-knock raid — as long as police would have gotten hold of the evidence anyway, through a traditional raid.

The police who conducted an unjustified raid can still be disciplined by their department's internal affairs unit (though that's uncommon). And they can still be sued by the victims, though lawsuits against police don't succeed very often.

How often do civilians get injured or killed in SWAT raids?

19-month-old Bounkham Phonesavanh recuperating from his injuries. (Photo courtesy of WSBTV.com)

The ACLU analysis found at least seven civilian deaths in the 818 SWAT reports they analyzed. In two of those cases, the suspect appeared to have committed suicide to avoid being taken by police. Forty-six civilians were injured. It's not clear whether any of these incidents were investigated by a prosecutor or the police department, or whether any of the officers were disciplined.

Other analyses have turned up more cases of civilian injuries; a 2006 Cato Institute paper by Radley Balko collects cases of SWAT raids gone wrong throughout history.

For family members of loved ones killed or injured during these raids, it can be very difficult to find justice. (For a more in-depth look at the legal latitude police have to use force against civilians, read this explanation of when it's legal for a cop to shoot you.)

In May 2014, police in Georgia threw a flash-bang grenade into the crib of a 19-month-old toddler during a SWAT raid. The toddler, Bounkham Phonesavanh, was burned so badly that he was placed into a medically-induced coma. In October, a grand jury decided the officers shouldn't be charged for injuring Phonesavanh. The grand jury accepted the police chief's explanation that the officers hadn't seen any evidence there was a child in the house (despite the fact that, according to Phonesavanh's mother, there were toys in the yard) and had needed to throw the grenade to distract the suspect (who was not home at the time). Phonesavanh's family settled a lawsuit against the sheriff's department for $1 million.

In another high-profile case, Detroit police killed seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones during a no-knock raid in 2010. Stanley-Jones was sleeping on the couch when a police officer's bullet hit her skull. (The raid was being taped for an A&E Cops-style reality show called The First 48.) The officer who killed Stanley-Jones was put on trial in October 2014, but the most serious charges against him were dismissed, and the jury deadlocked on whether  to convict him for reckless use of a firearm — causing the judge to declare a mistrial.

Police in Sacramento gather outside a home where the homeowner shot an animal control officer during a raid. (Randy Pench/Sacramento Bee/Getty)

How often do police find what they're looking for?

There isn't great data, but the ACLU's analysis showed that about 35 percent of SWAT drug raids turned up contraband, while 36 percent of them turned up nothing. (And 29 percent of SWAT reports didn't mention whether they found anything — a fact police are more likely to omit when they didn't find anything than when they did.) In forced-entry SWAT raids, the "success" rate of actually finding drugs dropped to about a 25 percent.

Not all drugs the SWAT team found were the ones they were looking for. In several cases, SWAT teams will raid a house looking for a large stash of drugs, only to find a small quantity of marijuana for personal use. But that counts as finding "contraband" in the raid report, and it's something they can arrest the homeowner for.

Sometimes, SWAT raids simply hit the wrong house. Either the address on the warrant is wrong (or police misread it), or the warrant itself is based on bad information. In the raid that killed Stanley-Jones in Detroit, for instance, police had entered the wrong apartment — the one they meant to raid was upstairs.

In 2003, the commissioner of the NYPD estimated that, of the more than 450 no-knock raids the city conducted every month, 10 percent were wrong-door raids. That estimate came after a wrong-door raid resulted in the homeowner's death: when police broke into the home of 57-year-old Alberta Spruill and threw in a flash-bang grenade, the shock gave her a fatal heart attack.

An officer during a SWAT raid. (Joe Raedle/Getty)

How often do police get injured or killed in SWAT raids?

The ACLU's analysis didn't include any cases of police getting injured or killed during a raid, which implies that it's more common for a civilian to get hurt than a police officer. But there are cases of police officers getting shot and killed during SWAT raids — such as the Guy and McGee cases in Texas.

In some of these cases, the target of the raid might reasonably claim self-defense; the law allows a homeowner to defend himself against someone he thinks is an intruder. But unlike when a cop shoots a civilian in a raid, a homeowner doesn't have a police chief on hand to tell a jury that the shooting was justified. So, as Guy's case demonstrates, even though civilians are more likely to get killed in SWAT raids than cops, civilians are the ones more likely to get brought into court for murder.

Last week, privacy advocates turned up some unsettling news: for two years, Verizon's Precision Insights division has been seeding web requests with unique identifiers. If you visited a website from a Verizon phone, there's a good chance the carrier injected a special tag into the data sent from you phone, telling the website exactly who you were and where you were coming from, all without alerting customers or informing the public at large. Today, Forbes' Kashmir Hill reports that AT&T is testing a similar program, although it may be possible to opt out. In both cases, the message is clear: there's a lucrative business in tracking users across the web, and carriers want in on it.

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Worth a revisit — Charles Duhigg’s 2012 report on Target’s customer data collection:

Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that?” […]

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code — known internally as the Guest ID number — that keeps tabs on everything they buy. “If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know everything we can.”

Also linked to your Guest ID is demographic information like your age, whether you are married and have kids, which part of town you live in, how long it takes you to drive to the store, your estimated salary, whether you’ve moved recently, what credit cards you carry in your wallet and what Web sites you visit. Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you’ve ever declared bankruptcy or got divorced, the year you bought (or lost) your house, where you went to college, what kinds of topics you talk about online, whether you prefer certain brands of coffee, paper towels, cereal or applesauce, your political leanings, reading habits, charitable giving and the number of cars you own.

This is what retailers like Target want to preserve, or even improve upon, with CurrentC. And this is exactly the sort of thing that Apple Pay, with its per-purchase unique tokens — is designed to prevent.

In case you somehow missed it yesterday, today's your last full day to preorder Amazon's Fire TV stick for $19, or $20 off MSRP. You'll still need to be a Prime member to get the deal, but you can sign up for a free trial if that isn't in the cards.

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Phones are more beautiful than ever. Close your eyes and pick one: the sleek, rounded, comfortable iPhone 6; the stark, metallic Galaxy Note 4; the rugged, cohesive Xperia Z3; the curved, customizable Moto X. Walk into a carrier store or browse Amazon and you'll see nothing but remarkable feats of industrial design and engineering.

That moment, in the store, will be the last time your phone's design matters. Because you, like the overwhelming majority of smartphone buyers in 2014, are going to take your phone out of its box and put it directly into a case, where it will remain for the duration of your two-year contract.

It doesn't matter what your phone looks like. You'll never notice anyway.

If you buy a smartphone, there's an...

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Microsoft introduced new trackpad gestures in Windows 8, but the company is expanding them further with the upcoming release of Windows 10. In a keynote speech at TechEd Europe today, Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore demonstrated new trackpad features that will soon be available to Windows 10 testers. "In the past touch pads on Windows have really been done very differently because OEMs do them," explained Belfiore. Microsoft introduced precision trackpads with the help of Intel in Windows 8 to improve the hardware situation, and now the focus is on gestures in software. "With Windows 10 we’re adding support for power users in a touch pad, where multiple finger gestures — which all of you power users learn — can make you really efficient."

The...

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Well… this is different. In an attempt to capture a unique perspective on his friends’ wedding, one guest decided to duct tape a camera to a bottle of Fireball whisky and walk around the rest of the attendees to take pulls.

What resulted was the kind of “how has nobody else ever thought of this!?” Fireball Cam perspective that will probably become a ‘thing’ at many a wedding over the next couple of months at least. Might not be a bad idea to add this to your service offerings if you’re a wedding photographer…