Yousef Alnafjan

Earlier this month, there was a rumor that Apple was facing possible delays with its next-gen iPad mini due to supplier issues with an (also rumored) next generation Retina display. Now WSJ is reporting that Apple may have gotten around the problem thanks to, of all companies, Samsung. The ubiquitous "people familiar with the matter" told the journal that Cupertino originally wanted to be supplied solely by LG Display and Sharp for the high res screens (likely to be the same 7.9 inches as the current model). However, to ensure enough supply, Apple has reportedly been forced to resort to Samsung's display division for the next iPad mini, too. It bears noting that such supplier leaks are often unreliable, and as we've mentioned before, Apple frequently tests components before deciding on a final design. If true, though, it would show that despite its best efforts, Apple can't make a clean break from its frequent sparring partner.

Filed under: Tablets, Apple

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Source: WSJ

At this point we are quite confident that public The Old Reader will be available in the future, now with a proper team running it.

More details later this week.
Sorry about Monday. Again.

Updated 10:55 PM with another message from Apple

Apple’s developer website, which has experienced some significant downtime this past week, has been hacked.

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Update: “white hat” hacker claims responsibility

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Apple released the information just a few moments ago in an email to registered developers, saying that sensitive emails, names, and physical addresses could have been compromised, and that it took the website down on Thursday to prevent any further damage:

Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then.

In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.

The last time Apple’s developer website went down, it was due to a rush on the company’s iOS 7 beta release in early June. This week’s outage, however, was longer-lived — for much of a day — and for a much more damaging reason.

Previous Apple hacks have all been clientside, often through vulnerabilities in the Java software the company used to ship with OS X, and occasionally via social-engineering attacks on iCloud passwords. This is potentially a much more serious issue, as there are 300,000 iOS developers in the U.S. alone, and probably well over a million globally.

Apple is a tempting target not just for its developers, but also for its users.

iCloud and iTunes have over 300 million accounts, all with juicy credit card information. An attacker who could penetrate Apple’s security in one place — the developer site, for instance — might be able to penetrate Apple’s security in other places. I’ve contacted Apple for more information on what the company is doing to protect those users and to ensure that none of their information has been affected.

Apple’s worst fear, of course, might be that hackers could gain access to its app store or the signing credential technology that certified iPhone apps as safe, known, and malware-free. Google recently had a major scare of exactly that category — which it so far appears to have been able to contain — and the last thing Apple wants is for its iPhone-buying public to consider the iOS ecosystem anywhere near as malware-laden as Android sometimes appears to be.

The front page of the site is currently live, but developers attempting to log into the site will find this message:

In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. We apologize for the significant inconvenience that our downtime has caused you and we expect to have the developer website up again soon.

Filed under: Business, Cloud, Security

تقديم: يوسف النفجان | عبدالله الثاني

نتحدث في هذه الحلقة عن هاتف نوكيا لوميا 1020 الجديد بكاميرته المذهلة التي تستخدم مستشعراً بدقة 41 ميجابكسل ونظام ويندوز فون، وأيضا نتحدث عن آخر أخبار الساعات الذكية، وآبل تي في القادم، والنسخة المصغرة من HTC One، وتفاصيل جديدة عن هاتف Moto X القادم. أيضا نجيب على أسئلتكم التي وصلتنا، والمزيد!

• اضغط هنا لمتابعتنا ومراجعتنا على آيتونز أو اضغط هنا لمتابعتنا عن طريق أي برنامج يدعم خلاصات الـRSS

 

• تحديث ويندوز 8 للطلاب – النسخة المستقلة من ويندوز 8

• لترجمة الأفلام على الماك

In case you couldn’t tell from our most recent episode, I’ve been a little obsessed with the Wario Land series — no surprises there. I’m still working on getting 100% in Wario Land 2 (something I rarely do with any game); as I said on the podcast, WL2 displays a sort of “world map” after you finish it once, and this level select screen shows all of the branching pathways you might have missed along the way. (But not where they’re located in the levels themselves.)

Since I inadvertently stuck to the main path during my first playthrough, I’ve spent the past few days searching for the hidden exits that lead to clusters of unplayed levels. I managed to clear nearly all of the alternate pathways, but the entrance to one absolutely eluded me — Wario Land 2 claims that its first level has a secret exit, but after scouring this fairly straightforward stage a handful of times, I turned to the Internet to rectify my ignorance.

I can’t stop stressing just how subversive and brilliant Wario Land 2 is, and its very first level contains one of the more extreme examples. The game begins with Wario in bed (which makes sense, since its main musical theme seems to be a riff on “Beautiful Dreamer”), and hitting any button will wake him up for the first objective: turning off the massive alarm clock ringing somewhere in his castle. But if you want to find this level’s secret exit — and the shortest path to the end of the game — you simply have to do nothing.

After thirty seconds, the stage ends as any normally would, and the inattentive Wario is unceremoniously removed from his private property by Captain Syrup’s gang. And this small alteration to WL2′s story explains why this path makes for the shortest one in the game: instead of having to track down the crooks who pulled a B&E on his valuables, the objective changes to simply retaking his castle from an army of squatters.

Obviously, this isn’t news by any definition, but I turned this unexpected concept around in my mind about a thousand times, and I might be in love. This secret may be a little too hidden — I never would have thought to keep Wario from waking up on my own — but I definitely appreciate how the game rewards Wario for his laziness by making the goal so much closer. It’s rare a game can surprise me so much, but I guess this stands as more evidence why the Wario Land series remains so awesome and secretly revolutionary. Do I really need to give you guys any more reasons to pick these games up on the 3DS eShop? If we work together, we might even be able to confuse Nintendo into releasing more of them. (But let’s not go crazy.)

HaleytheHedgehog VS. SammyClassicSonicFan: Zelda Debate

I am so happy that this debate exists. Thank you, HaleytheHedgehog and SammyClassicSonicFan, ya fricks. And thank you, Lucillesballs, for the GIFs.

Guess what? You can watch the heated four-minute argument after the break:

PREORDER The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, upcoming releases

People competed in nine different fighting games in last weekend's EVO 2013 tournament in Las Vegas. To see everything, you had to continuously switch between two streams back and forth from Friday to Sunday evening, so even hardcore fighting game fans might have missed one or two.

Nine different games mean nine grand finals and we've collected all of them below. (Up top, it's the Super Street Fighter IV Arcade grand finals between DM MCZ Xian and MCZ Tokido). Check them and be amazed how insanely good these players can be.

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Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3

Injustice: Gods Among Us

Street Fighter X Tekken

Super Smash Bros. Melee

Mortal Kombat 9 (starts around 1:30:00)

Persona 4 Arena

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (starts around 1:50:00)

King of Fighters XIII

Now with 100% more sticks destroyed.

To contact the author of this post, write to: gergovas@kotaku.com

Pixar famously scatters easter eggs throughout its films that point to the movies that came before them and to the movies that are coming next. It seems like a way for the always-charming movie studio to have a little bit of fun with its fans — but what if those easter eggs were more than just casual connections? One theory suggests just that by compiling a single master narrative through all of Pixar's feature films, from the first Toy Story through Monsters University.

In the theory, published Thursday by blogger Jon Negroni, Pixar's films fall into roughly three groups within the same universe: first are films with intelligent animals, second are films with complex machines, and third are films in an apocalyptic future filled mainly with insects and mutant animals. The narrative spans a history from medieval times to the present day and well beyond, detailing a complex series of evolutions and inventions that make it all possible. It sounds like a stretch — but the further you delve into Negroni's theory, the more his initially hard-to-believe timeline starts to add up. You can read what Negroni's calling "The Pixar Theory" over at his website.

If you created a full backup for your Google Reader account while it was still possible, you probably need a way browse the data. Fortunately, Mihai Parparita created Zombie Reader, a tool that resurects the Google Reader interface and transforms into a viewer for your data.

"Reader is a canonical single page application: once the initial HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. payload is delivered, all other data is loaded via relatively straightforward HTTP calls that return JSON (this made adding basic offline support relatively easy back in 2007). Therefore if I served the archived data in the same JSON format, then I should be able to browse it using Reader's own JavaScript and CSS," says Mihai.

Go to readerisdead.com, download the updated archive and use the instructions from the page. You still need Python 2.7 and some basic command-line skills. For Windows, you could use the instructions from my previous post and replace:

c:\python27\python reader_archive\reader_archive.py --output=download

with

c:\python27\python zombie_reader\zombie_reader.py download


Zombie Reader uses the Google Reader interface and your local data. It's like a Google Reader snapshot that preserved all your subscriptions, all the items you've read or marked as read, all your starred items, your tags and much more. Obviously, many features don't work (search, trends, subscribe), the application doesn't save your state and it doesn't show the latest posts from your subscriptions.

It does show your first read item, first starred item and the first shared item, as well as the people you followed before Reader's social features were removed. The "sort by oldest" feature is no longer limited to the last 30 days, it now sorts all your feed items.

"A side effect is that I now have a self-contained Reader installation that I'll be able to refer to years from now, when my son asks me how I spent my mid-20s," says Mihai. "It also satisfies my own nostalgia kicks, like knowing what my first read item was. In theory I could also use this approach to build a proxy that exposes Reader's API backed by (say) NewsBlur's, and thus keep using the Reader UI to read current feeds. Beyond the technical issues (e.g. impedance mismatches, since NewsBlur doesn't store read or starred state as tags, or has per item tags in general) that seems like an overly backwards-facing option." I'm sure that someone will build the proxy.

Google Image Search has a feature that lets you find images on the web by uploading the files or pasting their URLs. It's a clever feature, but it's a lot more clever than you imagined.

It's obvious that Google finds an image if exactly the same file is embedded by a web page or there's a link to that file. Google also finds images if you resize them, crop them or apply various photo effects.

Here's an image from a Wikipedia page, after resizing it and applying the pixelate effect from Picasa. Can Google find it?


Google can't find other sizes of the image, but if you look at the "Pages that include matching images" section, you'll find the image.


What if you convert the photo to black and white? Will Google's reverse image search engine be able to find it?


You'll get the same pages that include matching images:


Let's try something more difficult - apply multiple Picasa effects: soft focus, tint, filtered black-and-white and posterize. There's no way to recognize this image, right?


Wrong.


I used IrfanView to remove EXIF data and compress the image above a lot more. Here's what I got:


I edited the image in Paint and added some random shapes:



Here's the original photo:


To call this impressive is an understatement. It's a resilient algorithm that goes beyond matching pixels, colors, shapes - it understands the structure of the image, its essence.

{ The image from this post ("a red flower in the Philippines") has been licensed as Creative Commons Attribution by bingbing. Thanks, Brian Anderson. }

Klei Entertainment, which has been getting some solid attention for Don't Starve and Mark of the Ninja, has just announced Incognita, a "turn-based tactical espionage" game.

Beyond a name and a genre declaration, there isn't much on Incognita at the moment. However, if you click on the bottom right of its splash page, it does take agents to another page for deciphering. Klei has a forum post up so folks can "speculate, discuss and communicate with [Klei]."

So, this is a game in deep cover? Gotcha.

Mark of the Ninja developer Klei announces Incognita originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 02 Jul 2013 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A large group of Swedish and Danish football hooligans held a pre-arranged and surprisingly well disciplined fist fight on a quiet country road while cameramen filmed it. Fans of Swedish second-division club GAIS (wearing dark blue) started at one one of the street while the combined forces of FC Copenhagen and Swedish first-division side Helsingborg IF supporters (wearing red) were at the opposite end. The two mobs marched toward each other, shouting and growling, with their wrapped fists as their only weapons.

Once they got within striking distance of each other, the front lines started the brawl with flying kicks that gave way to a unified swarm of meat-headed humanity punching each other. The surreal fight carried on for about a minute or so, with the red combo side steadily pushing the blue lugs back up the road, leaving bodies on the pavement in their wake.

There was a decidedly sporting atmosphere to the whole thing, though. When a man would go down under a hailstorm of fists, his assailants would back off. When it was decided that the blues had enough, the fight ended and according to Danish paper Ekstra Bladet, the two sides thanked each other for a good fight.

Next time Zlatan Ibrahimovic will defeat them all. And he will show no mercy or thanks.

adraksethmera:

eliotgarciaa:

 

I FEEL LIKE YOU SHOULDN’T BE TEACHING ME THIS.

ΧΑΧΑΧΑΧΑΧΑΑΧΑΧΑΧΑΧΑΧΑΧ ΧΡΥΥΥΥΥΥΥΥΥΥΣΑ

We may still be looking for excuses to wear Google Glass in the office, but the headset's peripheral display is becoming more and more appealing in the garage: someone just made a Tesla Model S Glass app. The simply named GlassTesla is an unofficial suite of headgear accessible controls for the electric sedan, allowing users to start and stop charging, check battery levels, remotely lock doors and monitor and adjust the vehicle's temperature controls. More features are on the way too -- Sahas Katta, the app's creator, told Engadget that he's working on voice control ("ok glass, unlock my car"), charge completion notification and real-time vehicle tracking. Not bad, if you happen to own both a Tesla Model S and Google Glass. All three of you can find the app at the source link below.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Filed under: Transportation, Wearables

Comments

Source: GlassTesla

Tired of taking too long with answering your cellphone calls? Lucky for you, someone has invented an arm device that gives you access to your phone in an instant. However, you'll have to make sure that you grab your phone when it launches; otherwise, your phone will end up flying in a random direction. If anything, the device could also be used to launch small projectiles at people that have ruined your day. 

For some reason, the guy's random poses reminds me of the start of a Kamen Rider transformation sequence. Hell, if he had a Changing Belt on, the next step would be to insert the phone into the buckle -- I think I've been watching too much Kamen Rider 555. 

The device may not revolutionize the way how people answer calls, but it was still a fun video to watch. At the end of the day, a part of me is tempted to create the Arm Device one day. 

[via @GeorgeBray]

(via The Clearly Dope)

Microsoft couldn't help mentioning last week that the Windows Store was on the cusp of hitting 100,000 total apps, and now the firm's announced on Twitter that the shop has officially reached the mark. Redmond may not best its competitors in the sheer number of applications available on their respective storefronts, but it did manage to rack up the apps much faster. While it took roughly a year and a half for Apple's App Store to score the same badge, and approximately two trips around the sun for the Android Market, the Windows Store has arrived at the figure in just eight months. With a healthy app shop and Windows 8.1 on the horizon, Ballmer and Co. must be pleased with their eight-month-old OS.

Filed under: Microsoft

Comments

Via: The Verge

Source: Windows App Builders (Twitter)

Since details of the NSA’s massive phone and internet spying programs first came to light, America’s allies in the EU have been demanding for Washington to explain what it’s doing with Europeans’ data. Now, a new report from German news weekly Der Spiegel provides some more insight into the size of Washington’s telecommunications dragnet, claiming that US intelligence compiles metadata on half a billion German data connections (including phone calls, emails, and text messages) every day. The report points out that the NSA’s interest in Germany is much higher than that of other EU countries like France, whose communications the NSA only logs a tenth as often.

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Germany is considered a "third party foreign partner"

Citing a map published by the Guardian, the report states that the NSA’s spying efforts in Germany are comparable to the attention it spends on China, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. And pointing to one top secret document, Der Spiegel writes that Germany is considered a "third party foreign partner" by the NSA, unentitled to the freedom from spying exclusively granted to the most prestigious group of US partner nations: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK.

Last month, EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding demanded more information from Attorney General Eric Holder on the scope of, and legal justification for, PRISM and similar data collection programs in use by the NSA. The two met in Dublin to discuss the spying, which Reding characterized as "a good first step." But many questions remain unanswered and tensions are running high following news that the NSA routinely spied on EU offices in the US and abroad. And it’s likely that more details are just around the corner: Der Spiegel isn’t releasing its full report on the NSA’s spying until Monday.

A scene from a video designed to induce ASMR, "Space Travel Agent"

The barber turns on his trimmers.

Click. Bzzzzzzzzz.

He brings them closer and closer to my ears. He moves from one side of my head to the other. The gentle buzzing sound slowly pans from my left ear... behind my head... and then on to my right ear. BZZzzzzzzz.............zzzzzzzZZZ.

I notice an odd, tingly sensation in the back of my head. It feels good. The sound of the buzzing approaching my ear and the personal attention from the barber cause the back of my scalp to explode in tingles. It’s a distinct feeling, but until recently I never thought much of it. Then, last year, I discovered it had a name, and that there was a large community dedicated to eliciting this exact response. Preliminary research has even started exploring the obscure phenomenon.

The crackling sounds in this video, depicting the assembly of a miniature fast food meal, trigger ASMR for some

In 2010, a Facebook group dedicated to the sensation dubbed it Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or ASMR for short. The name is somewhat awkward, but it’s also preferable to other, more blunt proposals — "head orgasms" among them — and has been largely embraced by the community. Head orgasms are, however, a decent analogy for the experience itself: a certain buildup and then a quick, pleasurable release.

The internet essentially discovered ASMR. Slate traces the origins of the community back to a forum post created in 2008 on SteadyHealth.com. The explosive growth in ASMR awareness can be attributed to online communities that have emerged on Facebook, Reddit, and, importantly, YouTube, where people discuss their experiences and compile videos meant to trigger the sensation via whispers, crinkles, and interactions.

Because it was only recently identified, there is essentially no peer-reviewed research on the subject

Many of these videos feature a host playing a role, emulating situations or "triggers" that might elicit ASMR in real life — getting a haircut, having makeup applied, or even a lice check. Some videos drop the pretense of feigning normal situations and attempt to hit on raw ASMR triggers without any role play. And then there are the "unintentional" videos — clips made for other purposes, but popular in the ASMR community because they cause cascades of tingles in the viewer. Often, these videos feature someone quietly showing off a collection of trinkets or gently demonstrating a certain skill that requires a deal of precision. For this reason, Bob Ross is very popular among ASMRers: the combination of meekness, personal attention, and careful technique — along with the sounds of paint brushes — creates for many a sort of perfect storm of tingles.

Because it was only recently identified, there is essentially no peer-reviewed research on the subject. In fact, ASMR is so controversial that Wikipedia had refused to keep an article on the phenomenon. And most investigations into ASMR remain firmly on the fringe: one small group of amateur researchers, who run a website called asmr-research.org, are currently creating general questionnaires to identify and study ASMR, but they’re hampered by a lack of expertise and funding. So many with ASMR were thrilled by an announcement from Reddit user Bryson Lochte — an undergraduate at Dartmouth College — that he planned to perform brain scans to study it.

Another popular ASMR video, "Psionic Initiation"

These brain scans are a part of an honors thesis Lochte is doing in the university’s Brain Imaging Lab. The lab uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track changes in brain activity in response to various stimuli.

The experimental setup is to image the brains of people who experience ASMR while they watch videos designed to trigger the sensation. Lochte hopes to see what areas of the brain "light up" in response, and from there create a hypothesis about why ASMR is linked to certain brain regions. This research might be preliminary, but it’s also a significant step towards defining what, exactly, ASMR really is.

Lochte hopes that one day those YouTube videos might yield research-backed relief for ailing patients

Lochte, who plans to reveal early research results within a few months, says he was stunned by the response to his Reddit post. "I didn’t realize I’d get this huge feedback about the research I was doing," he said, adding that the post also elicited several brain scan volunteers and interesting fodder for future research. "Something I didn’t realize coming into studying this topic is just how helpful ASMR has been for certain people."

Some shared stories about using ASMR to cope with depression, while others found that it relieved insomnia or even mitigated the symptoms of PTSD. In other words, while ASMR seems like little more than a strange quirk, Lochte hopes that one day those YouTube videos might yield research-backed relief for ailing patients.