Maxim Bange

Announces mass production of chips after 10 years of research

Virtual money realistically banned

A frame from a video demonstration showing a proof-of-concept malware attack on a smartphone-controlled light system from Philips.

Nitesh Dhanjani

Weaknesses in a popular brand of light system that's controlled by computers and smartphones can be exploited by attackers to cause blackouts that are remedied only by removing the wireless device that receives the commands, a security researcher said.

The vulnerabilities in the Hue LED lighting system made by Philips are another example of the risks posed by connecting thermostats, door locks, and other everyday devices to the Internet so they can be controlled by someone in the next room or across town. While the so-called Internet of Things phenomenon brings convenience and new capabilities to gadgets, they come at a cost. Namely, they're susceptible to the same kinds of hack attacks that have plagued computer users for decades. The ability to load a Web page that causes house or office lights to go black could pose risks that go well beyond the typical computer threat.

"Lighting is critical to physical security," Nitesh Dhanjani, the researcher who discovered the weaknesses and developed proof-of-concept attacks that exploit them, wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. "Smart lightbulb systems are likely to be deployed in current and new residential and corporate constructions. An abuse case such as the ability of an intruder to remotely shut off lighting in locations such as hospitals and other public venues can result in serious consequences."

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Earth is sitting in the path of more than 1,400 asteroids that could potentially cause significant damage, but according to NASA we likely won't see any of them smash violently into our planet anytime soon. In a chilling graphic of Earth sitting in a web of possible danger, NASA mapped out data it's collected on potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) that have intersecting orbital patterns with Earth and its neighboring planets. The PHAs that NASA has visualized, as a part of its Jet Propulsion Labratory Photojournal project, are "fairly large" and measure at least 460-feet wide. Each of these asteroids is traveling as what the agency described as "close" to Earth's orbit. Close, NASA says, is within 4.7 million miles — which...

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Gates being installed by construction crews at the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal Lake Borgne, a $1.1 billion flood protection project outside New Orleans. (Credit: US Army Corps of Engineers/Flickr)

Climate change is already making its presence felt today in the form of a melting Arctic, rising sea levels and a century of rapidly rising global temperatures. But the future projections from most scientists are far more dire, indicating we’re all in store for a much hotter planet with more extreme weather events and natural disasters, which could cause a massive financial hit to the global economy, in the multiple trillions of US dollars.

two industries in particular are poised to take off

But that’s not to say that a warming world...

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Whether it's having Dropbox back up every Instagram photo you take, getting a text message in the morning when the forecast calls for rain, or receiving an email when a favorite artist uploads a new Soundcloud recording, IFTTT — which stands for "if this, then that" — has offered users a pretty simple way to automate tasks across web services since launching in 2010. It already supports nearly 70 services (called "channels"), and the company plans on supporting a bunch more by year's end. That expansion starts today with the addition of The New York Times.

The more apps that work with IFTTT, the more powerful it becomes, and the company's hoping that it'll become indispensable as it connects with more web services. For now, that...

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Most world records are pretty standard — the world's smallest man (21.5 inches tall), the world's oldest twin sisters (103 years old), or the world's highest standing jump (4 feet 10 inches onto a platform) are all interesting factoids to know.

But other records are totally wacky, like the biggest jigsaw puzzle made of tents or the largest gathering in Sumo wrestler suits (seriously).

These categories are often completely invented and submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records. Sometimes, they even make it into the official book itself.

So in honor of the release of the Guinness Book of World Records 2013, here are the 15 weirdest records broken by people around the world.

On July 28, 2013, 1,213 people broke a Guinness World Record by applying facial masks for 10 minutes at the same time in Taipei.

Source: Reuters

Chris "The Duchess" Walton is the current Guinness World Record holder for longest fingernails. Seen here in NYC back in 2011, her nails (which she's been growing for 18 years) measured 10 feet 2 inches on her left hand and 9 feet 7 inches on her right at the time.

Source: Reuters

In February 2013, 4,483 people hula-hooped for seven minutes, setting the Guinness World Record for most number of people simultaneously hula-hooping. The event took place at the Thammasat University stadium on the outskirts of Bangkok.

Source: Reuters

The Emotiv team are veterans when it comes to brainwave-reading headsets.

Back in 2010, the company presented a rough version of what would later transform into the Insight, demonstrating with a TED talk the possibilities of the technology.

And now Emotiv is back, with a new Insight headset and a Kickstarter that has already blown past its crowdfunding goal of $100,000 — our last count had the campaign at over $250,000.

But how does it work, and what can it do?

The Insight is a sleeker, more advanced version of the headset presented at the TED conference. Utilizing five sensors that attach to your head, the Insight monitors the electrical impulses that your brain releases, turning this information into usable data.

For example, if you were playing a video game and wanted to map a brain command to make your character run forward, you could hypothetically record yourself visualizing the 'forward' command.

Once the Insight headset can recognize your 'forward' thought, it could be taught to move your game character forward each time you think it.

Besides being able to recognize up to four mental commands, the Insight can also turn facial expressions such as winking, smiling, and blinking into commands.

Gaming is only one aspect of what the Insight is capable of — the company is billing the Insight as a device to "optimize your brain fitness & performance, measure and monitor your own or your family’s cognitive health & wellbeing, and develop amazing new applications."

And while applications implementing direct integration with the Insight are scarce, Emotiv is hoping that a successful Kickstarter will put enough developer units in people's hands early enough to have a solid app selection upon launch.

You can pre-order an Insight starting at $199 over at their Kickstarter page, with an estimated delivery of March 2014.

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Sean MacEntee

Infosys, an Indian IT software and services company with offices throughout the world, has been accused of discriminating against American job applicants. One Infosys employee who raised concerns about the company's hiring practices was repeatedly called a "stupid American," the lawsuit states.

Infosys has about 15,000 employees in the US "and approximately 90 percent of these employees are of South Asian descent (including individuals of Indian, Nepalese, and Bangladeshi descent)," the lawsuit states.

Infosys allegedly achieved this ratio "by directly discriminating against individuals who are not of South Asian decent in hiring, by abusing the H-1B visa process to bring workers of South Asian descent into the country rather than hiring qualified individuals already in the United States, and by abusing the B-1 visa system to bring workers of South Asian descent into the United States to perform work not allowed by their visa status rather than hiring individuals already in the United States to perform the work." Infosys "used B-1 visa holders because they could be paid considerably lower wages than other workers including American-born workers," the lawsuit states.

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Site that help aggregate news, like Twitter, Hacker News, and Reddit, are a great way to keep informed on what other people think are the most important or interesting stories at any given time. 

But they have one major problem: as their communities get too big, their value for individual users actually decreases.

When a community is small, its users generally have many interests in common. That's why they join in the first place.

But as a community gets larger, the group gets more diverse. On a community site with an emphasis on news, the links that are shared will also become increasingly diverse.

Each site has its own way of deal with this, and each solution has its own problems.

On Twitter, the links and pictures you see come from the individuals you follow. Obviously, this means that if you want to hear about gaming news, you follow gaming news sites and journalists. Same thing for tech or politics.

But Twitter is also a social networking site. People use it to not only share links but also to discuss them in real-time. 

The problem with this stems from the insane number of followers that newsmakers have. If someone has 50,000+ followers and shares an interesting story, it could be replied to hundreds or even thousands of times. No one has the time to engage with that many people. 

So people follow their friends or other non-newsmakers so that they can actually have conversations with people. But then those people start sharing things involving their other interests.

This turns Twitter into a balancing act between following people they can converse with and people who share things they actually care about.

Reddit has a similar problem. Rather than following what individuals post, people subscribe to sections of the site dedicated to specific topics, called "subreddits." There are thousands of these subreddits, so to keep new users from being overwhelmed the site has created a set of curated "defaults" that new or unregistered users see when they go on the site.

As the subscriber counts for these subreddits increases, an ever-larger number of links and comments is submitted each day. On Reddit, this has created a system where certain cultures become dominant within a given subreddit. Since Reddit users only see what gets "upvoted" (liked) by other members of the community, people submit links and comments that they think greatest number of users will like.

That's why the politics subreddit turned into a left-leaning sounding board and atheism became a place for angsty atheist teenagers to make fun of their religious friends and family. And that's why Reddit had to remove those sections from the defaults people saw when they first started using the site: they just aren't good examples of what the site can be anymore. 

Like Twitter, Reddit has become a balancing act. If you don't want the content you see to become an endless stream of repetitive drivel, you have to always be looking for subreddits where people aren't self-conscious about posting things they're sure will be upvoted. If you want your links and comments to be seen, you have to post on subreddits that actually have subscribers.

It's for this reason that Rob Malda, the founder of Slashdot, doesn't think there will be another site like Hacker News or Reddit. In an interview with Timothy Lee at the Washington Post, he states that in the past, the issue with online news used to be finding stuff to read. Now, it's about finding the stuff that's actually relevant to you:

"This is why Hacker News would be better if I could get the 10 best items. I don’t care about a new version of CoffeeScript, but when tech culture stuff happens, the right story is there and it’s fast. But I have to click through a lot of stories that aren’t relevant to me.

Slashdot we kept bounded to 10 or 15 [posts per day in the early years] and by the end we kept it bounded by 20 or 25. At some point that 31st story isn’t really that much better. With more and more voices, you tend toward broader subjects. Eventually it becomes less and less interesting."

Providing interesting, relevant content for many people with many interests is a difficult problem to solve. For now, it seems that the best solution the biggest sites have is to let the users handle curating their own content to varying degrees and through vastly different methods.

If you want to "disrupt" something, why not try here?

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High-level League of Legends players can now be awarded the same visas as more traditional pro athletes, says publisher Riot Games. On July 11th, Riot e-sports manager Nick Allen told GameSpot that the company had convinced US immigration services to recognize League of Legends as a professional sport and simplify the visa process accordingly; the first person to benefit will be Canadian player Danny "Shiphtur" Le, who was temporarily unable to compete this spring because of work permit problems. E-sports VP Dustin Beck later confirmed the change to Polygon. "This is a watershed moment," he said. "It validates e-sports as a sport. Now we have the same designation as the NBA or NHL or other professional sports leagues."

The change, Beck...

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About 40 Japanese commuters joined forces with railway staff to move a 70,550-pound train after a woman fell into the 8-inch gap between it and the platform.

They pushed the train so it was leaning back, allowing others to pull the woman free. The woman, in her mid-30s, had fallen to her waist and was not seriously injured, according to the AP.

The train, stopped at Tokyo's Minami-Urawka station, was delayed by just eight minutes, the Guardian reported.

Photographer Norihiro Shigeta from Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun got the shot:

SEE ALSO: Take A Tour Of The Abandoned Subway Tunnels Beneath Los Angeles

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LinkedIn is consolidating its position as the second-largest social media platform among U.S. PC users.

The latest data, from comScore for June 2013, puts the site's unique monthly visitors at 50.6 million. 

In the 12 months to June 2013, this audience grew 28%.

Google+ grew 26.1% in the same period, surpassing Twitter as the third-largest social media platform. 

All these numbers are impressive considering that they are desktop-only. It may be that some or all of these networks would be growing even faster once mobile users are accounted for. 

But, will Google+ catch LinkedIn on the desktop? Based on its current trajectory, it appears not. 

Google+ experienced rapid adoption and growth early in its existence, but it slowed down dramatically in the middle of 2012. 

Google+ saw 173% PC-based growth from its July 2011 launch through December 2011, and 61% growth in the first six months of 2012. But then it had only 6% growth in the last six months of 2012, and 7% growth from January 2013 through June 2013

Unless Google+ growth speeds up again, it's not going to get within reach of LinkedIn. 

Download the chart and data in Excel. 

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We're hanging out at the International Conference On Quantum Technologies in Moscow this week and grabbed some time to speak to Professor Eugene Polzik of the Niels Bohr Institute Of Copenhagen University.

Professor Polzik is noted for his work in quantum teleportation, the transmission of quantum data (called qubits) from one place to another at the speed of light.

This smacks of science fiction, but it happens every single day – electrons "teleport" by themselves all the time by way of a process called quantum tunneling.

Our biggest question for him was a straightforward one: Why are the rules for the quantum world so drastically different from the rules for the macroscopic world that we see with our naked eye?

Polzik smiled and said, "The rules are the same. You just have to look closely."

Indeed, those weird electrons that constitute every part of your very body (and all matter) are doing all kinds of non-obvious things that defy understanding at the surface level – they're engaging in quantum tunneling, they're existing in multiple places at once, they're moving forwards and backwards in time.

If the very stuff that makes us up can do all this, then why can't we teleport and time travel ourselves?

It's because probability plays a very large role in the quantum world. Theoretically you could push your hand through a wall if your hand's atoms passed through the empty spaces between the wall's atoms. Maybe even every particle of your body "teleport" themselves around the world and assemble themselves to re-make you in another place.

But this would require the organized participation of every single particle in your body. The odds of this happening are so infinitesimal that it might as well be a statistical impossibility.

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So the Europe subreddit recently celebrated their 30,000th subscriber with an informal poll that sought to figure out what Europeans thought of other Europeans. 

The results of the "sillier" questions were absolutely hilarious. 

These maps were compiled and published by user IchBinSisyphos and show what European redditors really think of other Europeans. While IchBinSisyphos cautioned that they didn't think they are of much significance outside of the sub, they gave us permission to publish the maps. 

Respondents were asked questions and told that they had to pick a country besides their own. 

The most common least-favorite country is Vatican City. Russia and France were also rather disliked. 

Everyone loves Germany.

Russia wins this superlative by a mile. 

BREAKING: Swedes are hot.

The rest of Europe considers the French accent to be very silly. 

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The top-tier panels at Comic-Con are usually dedicated to upcoming blockbusters or fan favorites — yesterday, thousands of people packed into the giant Hall H to see Harrison Ford or the cast of Dexter. Between these panels, though, we also got a chance to see three slightly more low-profile directors talk about their craft: Hot Fuzz and The World's End's Edgar Wright, Children of Men director Alfonso Cuarón, and Marc Webb, responsible for both the latest Spider-Man reboot and 500 Days of Summer. In some ways, Webb, Wright, and Cuarón couldn't be more different. But their current projects all have the basic elements of a Comic-Con movie — alien invasions, astronauts stranded in space, superheroes. They also share a common fear:...

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A crop of Bitcoin enthusiasts has launched a Kickstarter campaign to create a film about the digital currency.

"Bitcoin: The Movie" will require a minimum of $100,000 to make (but they'll amp up international coverage if donations reach $150-200,000).

"The fact that Bitcoin is relatively unknown can also act as the catalyst to making a good film," would-be producer Andrew Wong writes. "A good Bitcoin documentary will play an important role in educating the public and helping them adopt to a new currency."

The team is offering the usual Kickstarter swag for donations — Tshirt, posters, DVDs, private screenings, your name in the credits, etc.

Bitcoin reached highs north of $250 before a calamitous fall in April. This week it is trading at around $90.

Though it's off its early July lows, the digital currency's major problem has always been confidence. Presumably, a film would help elucidate Bitcoin's benefits (and shortfalls) for a wider audience.

In a cruel twist, however, Kickstarter does not accept Bitcoin donations.

Watch the pitch below:

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Since it launched in 2010, IFTTT (if this, then that) has been building a Lego set made out of web companies. The free service, which until now has existed only on the web, automates tasks using public APIs from companies including Facebook, Dropbox, Evernote, and Foursquare. I use IFTTT to save all my Instagram photos to Dropbox, and to note every time I check in at the gym, among other things. Now a new iOS app is making it easy to browse and enable the most popular “recipes” on the service — while also introducing recipes exclusive to the device that’s always at your side.

The iOS app adds new recipes built around the Camera, Contacts, and Reminders apps: it can be programmed to upload all photos taken with the front-facing...

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The landing site of NASA's Apollo missions may be transformed into a popular tourist destination, if a new bill in Congress is ratified. Two democratic congresswomen are seeking designate a national park on the moon, protecting abandoned Apollo artifacts, such as the landing gear, roving hardware, and the famous footprints.

The last manned lunar landing was in 1972, and no human has stepped foot on the surface of the moon since. But that might not be the case much longer as other countries and commercial space programs seek to replicate NASA's past successes.

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Wikipedia

Since its founding in 1992, Defcon has been a venue where anarchists, geeks, and employees of three-letter federal agencies became unlikely comrades under a live-and-let-live credo that placed the love of computer tinkering above almost everything else. No more. As tensions mount over the broad and indiscriminate spying of Americans and foreigners by the National Security Agency, Defcon organizers are asking feds to sit out this year's hacker conference.

"For over two decades DEF CON has been an open nexus of hacker culture, a place where seasoned pros, hackers, academics, and feds can meet, share ideas and party on neutral territory," Jeff Moss, aka The Dark Tangent, wrote in a blog post published Wednesday night. "Our community operates in the spirit of openness, verified trust, and mutual respect." He continued:

When it comes to sharing and socializing with feds, recent revelations have made many in the community uncomfortable about this relationship. Therefore, I think it would be best for everyone involved if the feds call a "time-out" and not attend DEF CON this year.

This will give everybody time to think about how we got here, and what comes next.

Defcon, which is scheduled to run August 1 through 4 this year at the Rio, has almost always gone out of its way to welcome federal agents. The annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas during the dead of summer has long been famous for its "spot the fed" contest. Former federal prosecutor Curtis Karnow spoke at the inaugural event, according to this Defcon press archive. US Department of Defense Director Jim Christy has been attending since 1999 in an open campaign to attract top hacker talent to the ranks of military and federal agencies. Still many more agents prefer to attend under the shadow of anonymity.

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Dave Dugdale

A researcher says he has uncovered a security weakness that can easily trick people into executing malicious code when they use the Microsoft Internet Explorer and Google Chrome browsers to visit booby-trapped websites.

The attack was recently presented at the Hack in the Box security conference by independent security researcher Rosario Valotta. It exploits weaknesses in the way browsers notify users when they execute operating-system-level commands, such as printing or saving. He said the attack works against Windows 7 and Windows 8 users running IE versions 9 and 10 when they enter either one or two characters while visiting a malicious website. Windows 8 machines running Chrome can be forced to execute malicious code when users click on a single HTML button on a malicious page, such as "Play" for a video or a Facebook "Like." Windows provides some protection against this social engineering attack, but Valotta said attackers can often bypass those defenses.

When a user visits the attack website, it opens a pop-under window that in most cases will remain invisible. The hidden window immediately begins downloading a malicious executable file without notifying the user or requiring any kind of permission. When the website is visited using IE, the file can be executed when English-speaking Windows 7 users type "r" and when Windows 8 users enter the tab key followed by the r key. The keystrokes, which can be invoked by asking the visitor to solve a CAPTCHA puzzle used to filter out bots, send a Windows command to the pop-under window instructing it to run the recently downloaded file. Clicking a booby-trapped HTML button while visiting the page in Chrome similarly executes the malicious file.

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The update will make 3D object production ‘as easy as writing a document in Word’

Google gaat de huisstijl van Motorola Mobility aanpassen. Motorola Mobility, sinds augustus 2011 in handen van Google, krijgt een nieuw logo met een knipoog naar het logo van Google en Android.

The latest killing in the name of Google+: Google Latitude.

Google announced plans today to retire the location reporting and tracking service Latitude—and the company will instead encourage customers to direct their geolocation-reporting energies to Google+. Judging by Google's recent activity, this "Attack of the Google+ Blob" is far from over.

To the Internet's shock and dismay, Google also killed off Reader on July 1. Google's initial reasoning was that the service has been little-used. Google later explained that it thinks Reader is actually no longer a fit for the times we live in, where people can simply be Google+ users instead and get their news from their social media feeds, subscribe to brand pages, and forget their RSS salad days.

Google announced back in June 2011 that it had a cryptic but benign-sounding plan to put "more wood behind fewer arrows." This meant less effort on kooky Google Labs inventions, better user experiences, and more iterations on products people actually use. Well, make that "products Google wants people to use"—notably, Google+.

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