Roumen.ganeff

If you're the sort who overspends at the mall, you may need a firm reminder to watch your budget. How does an ever-vigilant handbag sound? Finder.com.au could soon make one: meet the iBag, a prototype carryall that locks you out if it believes you're ...

lemur3 writes "On January 24th Google had some problems with a few of its services. Gmail users and people who used various other Google services were impacted just as the Google Reliability Team was to take part in an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. Everything seemed to be resolved and back up within an hour. The Official Google Blog had a short note about what happened from Ben Treynor, a VP of Engineering. According to the blog post it appears that the outage was caused by a bug that caused a system that creates configurations to send a bad one to various 'live services.' An internal monitoring system noticed the problem a short time later and caused a new configuration to be spread around the services. Ben had this to say of it on the Google Blog, 'Engineers were still debugging 12 minutes later when the same system, having automatically cleared the original error, generated a new correct configuration at 11:14 a.m. and began sending it; errors subsided rapidly starting at this time. By 11:30 a.m. the correct configuration was live everywhere and almost all users' service was restored.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Within Temptation's new opus Hydra will be released in a few days, and to tease the already excited fans the band has just unveiled the third video in support of the album. While the tracks chosen before were "Paradise" featuring Tarja and "Dangerous" featuring Howard Jones, this time the song is "The Whole World Is Watching" featuring Soul Asylum's Dave Pirner.

In many countries, ISPs are regarded as partly culpable for the P-word that's now synonymous with the internet. We're talking, of course, about piracy. Government and legal pressure has forced several ISPs to block sites known for illegal file ...

Twitter isn't shy when it comes to experimentation. The social network tests some new features by rolling them out to regular users, albeit on a very limited basis, while other projects, such as @eventparrot, are made available to the entire ...

An amazing post on Livejournal from Ilya "Zyalt" Varlamov gives a glimpse of life behind the barricades at the #Euromaidan uprising in Kiev, Ukraine. Zyalt's photos and text convey the diversity of the rebel lines -- "from students to pensioners" -- and the ingenuity they display in everything from homebrewed catapaults to morale-boosting drumming ("When casual stone- and grenade-throwing takes place, the knock is monotonous, in order to set rhythm and keep the morale. When Berkut attacks, drumming becomes louder and everyone hears that – for some it is a signal to run away, for some, on the opposite – defend the barricades.") At the end, we see the moment when the smoke clears and the truce begins. This is nailbiting, engrossing, terrifying stuff.

Here's hoping that all our readers in Ukraine are safe, especially Daniel, who wrote our first post on #Euromaidan.

I would like to dispel the most common myths about Maidan.

1."They destroyed the whole city" Not true. All of the action you see in the pictures are happening on a small square near the entrance to a Dinamo stadium. This is a government sector, there is no intereference in peaceful life outside of this area. If you make an analogy with Moscow, imagine that the barricades are someone in the area of Ilinka or Varvarka, near the president's administration. Sure, it's the center, but regular Moscovites wouldn't notice. There is dark smoke and fire on all pictures: those are mostly burning tires. There is not tangible damage to the buildings. Unfortunately one store burned down last night near the barricades, resulted from a poorly thrown molotov cocktail. Even the statue of Lobanovsky, located in the epicenter of fighting has been covered with cloth to prevent damage. Overall, the protesters are very careful regarding property. They've take apart fences and benches, but no windows are broken, noone is vandalizing, and all looters are caught and beaten. So the picture is pretty apocalyptic, but things are not so bad.

2. "This is not a revolution, nothing horrible is happeneing"

Also not true. This is a real revolution. Decide for yourselves: it's been two months since the center of Kiev has been in the hands of the opposition. Several government buildings are seized. The work of many government offices is paralyzed. The opposition has created barricades, which the authorities have not be able to take. Despite the freezing temps, tens of thousands of people are on the streets for the last two months. The system of defense and supply chain are established. There is perfect order at the protestor HQ, people are fed, dressed, people are pooling money to gather supplies. The most important thing: the people in power are unable to restore order. The police has failed several times at try to storm the barricades. I'll make a separate post about this, but trust me, the only way to dismantle this is with heavy artillery, or drop in commandos. Every day the opposition is securing more territories. What is this if not a revolution?

3. "The entire Kiev is paralyzed, there is no peaceful life for the regular people."

Kiev is living its own life. All stores and cafes are working, people are going to work, study in universities, get married, divorce and even die their own death. Most of the Kiev populace are not inconvenienced. Imagine if Navalny took over the Red Square and set up his camp there. What would change for you, Moscovites? Nothing. So the only people who are inconvenienced are toruists. A few stores and cafes had to close down in the very center. Also, those living in the center have troubles with logistics. But the entire Kiev is not paralyzed.

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Revolution in Kiev, Ukraine (via Hacker News)

americaengland:

the-voice-leading-nazi:

WHAT THE FRACK ARE THOSE THIS IS HIGHLY DISTURBING

hello yes this is an arctic hare! they’re like little pup-buns

My “white” cousins in the north are hella dope yo!

The fact that a Nismo engineer can physically pick up the engine that his team has been working on over the past year and happily walk around with it tucked under an arm is impressive enough.

Lamborghinis have long adorned the walls of supercar-obsessed youngsters thanks to their futuristic, angular styling and headline-grabbing performance figures.

Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days. Science. What good is it if the end result is Robosapien and a sweet 3D printed phone cases? Thankfully, there are great minds at work to put it to ...

Can 3D print complex prototypes and moving parts without assembly

Driving often throws up some difficult situations, from animals loitering in the road, angry pedestrians, crazy cyclists to flooded motorways. But a good driver doesn't get flustered in these situations; they simply anticipate, adjust their driving accordingly and get home safely.

Clearly bored of souping-up his Ford Fiesta and burning rubber on the streets of San Francisco, serial tyre-shredder Ken Block has turned his attention to the mountains in his latest project.

Proverbial 'software bug' sent a spiral of bad configurations to other systems

Following one of the longer cross-service outages for Google in recent memory, the search and software giant sent out an apology and explanation for today's occurrences. According to the Official Google Blog, an internal system that sends out configuration information for systems beyond it encountered a software bug that sent out incorrect commands to several areas.

It only took from 10:55am PT when the bug was first seen to 11:02am when users began seeing massive outages in Gmail, Google+, Drive and other services. Roughly 12 minutes later while engineers were still in the process of figuring out what was happening, the initial system that sent out the bad information had self-corrected and began to properly configure other systems. Google claims nearly all users' services were back up and running by 11:30, which seems to be consistent with the general consensus among users.

As you would expect, the post gives some detail on what's being done to prevent this from happening in the future. More checks are being put in place so that improper configurations, if they are generated by bugs, aren't so easily sent out to other systems. Additionally, Google plans to improved targeted searching for issues during service failures.

Needless to say, we don't think we're going to be seeing outages like this with any higher frequency than we already experience now.

Source: Google Blog

The anti-pornography firewall run by the UK's four top internet providers has blocked the latest League of Legends update because it happens to contain the letters "s," "e" and "x" in a row in two of its file names. The filter dings the following two ...

The Mentalist has found Lisbon’s new flame! EW has confirmed that Pedro Pascal, who will appear in the upcoming fourth

The next Star Wars TV series is embracing an era from a long, long time ago: 1977. Disney XD’s Star

Three episodes into the HELIX story and it seems like everyone is getting infected faster than they can come up with a cure. But because a mutating virus cannot be seen readily by the human eye, they can strike anywhere, any time and anyone. It is even more scary when one is found in a
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Put an email addresses in an event title? They'll be automatically invited

A minor bug potentially embarrassing bug in Google Calendar could lead to private events being revealed to third parties. Researcher Terence Eden discovered discovered that placing a Gmail address in an event title leads to that person being automatically invited to the event, regardless of the context. It's not hard to imagine how this might lead to a few red faces through supposedly private info being released to third parties. Eden uses his wife as an example —

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I don't even know what the hell "Operation Blue Shark" is but it looks awesome and it sure beats staring at blips on a sonar screen. Comments

Some may see the internet primarily as a source of anger or a dangerously addictive distraction, but not Pope Francis. In a message for the Catholic Church's World Communications Day, the pontiff called the internet a "gift from God" for social ...

A 22-year-old man has been summonsed to appear before magistrates for allegedly driving through a puddle and deliberately splashing school children and their parents, Hannah Brewer reports.

While the idea of 3D printing a house in 24 hours is pretty damn cool, I'm not sure I'd want to be the first person to live in one. University of Southern California's Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis has designed the giant robot that replaces construction workers with a nozzle on a gantry, this squirts out concrete and can quickly build a home according to a computer pattern. It is "basically scaling up 3D printing to the scale of building," Prof Khoshnevis told msnUK. Comments

Behind every great man is a woman. This especially holds true on the CW drama ARROW.  Where would Oliver Queen be without his trusty teammate and computer-whiz, Felicity?  In a press interview at the Warner Bros. Mondo International Press Tour, star Emily Bett Rickards talked about the evolution of her character and how she thanks
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Like swerving bends and screaming "powerrr!" as much as you dislike electric vehicles? Imagine your delight, then, when you learn that Google and the BBC have teamed up to send one of the former's street view cars around Dunsfold Aerodrome -- more ...

Created by Tel Aviv-based design firm Peleg Design, the Yolkfish is a clever kitchen tool designed like a fish that slurps up yolks as means to separate them from egg whites. The yolks can then be deposited elsewhere with a gentle squeeze. See it in action in the video. If you liked this also check out their awesome kitchen elephant, Jumbo. (via Designboom)

A Russian motorist has seen his driving career prematurely ended after he was handed a 106-year ban for drink-driving.