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Because who hasn't dreamed of smelling like whiskey all the time, the Heriot Watt University's School of Textiles and Design teamed up with Harris Tweed and Johnny Walker to develop a fabric that permanently smells like Johnny Walker Black. Alternatively, pour a shot on yourself before going out. PROTIP: this method also works for beer and tequila (trust me, I've independently verified this fact on numerous occasions).

The tweed carries aromas of "rich malt, golden vanilla, red fruit and dark chocolate tones" and has been designed to reflect the colors of the whisky ingredients. The scent is layered into the fabric throughout the finishing process and is permanently imbued in the tweed that will not go off even after dry cleaning.

You know what would be even cooler than a fabric that smells like whiskey all the time? A fabric that smells like just about anything else all the time. Listen -- I love whiskey as much as the next man who's convinced his liver is a supervillain and must be stopped, but that doesn't mean I want to smell like it constantly. I want to smell like...baby powder. Or a pot roast. FUN FACT: If I don't shower for more than two days I start to smell like a chili cheese dog with onions. LOTS of onions. That is 100% true and you can come smell my armpits if you don't believe me. I will charge you $10 though, because I would like to get my water turned back on eventually. Keep going for a shot of Mr. Dapper McBlowyhair sporting the fabric.

One enterprising engineer decided to maximize his chances of obtaining a Tinder match by building a battery-operated robot to endlessly swipe right for him. 

The Java developer, James Befurt, constructed the apparatus by writing a computer program that hooks up with what appears to be some type of microcontroller, a small piston, and stylus.

Right swiping on Tinder indicates interest in your potential match. So by right swiping on every match Befurt is essentially maximizing his options by automatically saying "yes" to anyone who might be interested. 

He can leave the machine running for as long as he decides while the robotic finger flips endlessly though women.

This isn’t the first time a users has tried to hack the app.

Back in September, one man built a Google Chrome extension that transforms Tinder into a desktop interface to more easily swipe though and like or dislike matches.

Some users, however, prefer the old fashioned method.

H/t the Daily Dot. 

 

 

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Have you placed an online order from a store while you were standing in one of their brick-and-mortar locations? In an interview with CNBC (Warning: auto-play video), Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said that the company’s analysis shows something interesting about how customers shop using their smartphones. 10% of orders placed on mobile phones are actually placed while customers are standing inside the store. Is it because the items they really want are out of stock? Are online prices lower? McMillon doesn’t say. [CNBC]

As Business Insider’s founder and CEO said at Tuesday’s Ignition conference, “There is one law of media: money follows eyeballs.” To prove his point, Henry Blodget showed off this chart, which shows just how much Google dwarfs all the biggest media companies, from older companies like The New York Times to newer ones like Facebook. 

Based on company filings charted by BI Intelligence, Google’s estimated $70 billion in revenue is more than twice that of Time Warner's ($30 billion), five times that of Viacom's ($14 billion), and 14 times more than Yahoo’s expected revenue this year. Even more impressive: Its revenue is almost half the size of all TV advertising around the globe ($174 billion).

SEE ALSO: Young People Don't Care About Newspapers, Old People Don't Care About Smartphones

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Last summer, an organization led by Facebook fired a huge shot at Cisco. On Thursday, one of Cisco's oldest rivals, Juniper, jumped in to back Facebook in a big way.

And the threat to Cisco from Facebook went from huge to enormous. It won't kill Cisco, but it will shake the trees a little bit and force Cisco to make some uncomfortable choices.

The shot was a new piece of networking equipment called the Wedge, which pushed Facebook into the $23 billion Ethernet switch market, currently dominated by Cisco.

This new switch wasn't an actual product. It was a design for a new product, one that Facebook gives away for free through its Open Compute Project (OCP).

OCP is a radically new way to build and buy computer hardware. Anyone can contribute to the designs and use them for free, ordering them from a contract manufacturer.

Now, Juniper has done exactly that. It designed its own version of the OCP switch, which works with its operating system, Junos OS. It ordered this design from a contract manufacturer, Alpha Networks, and Juniper will sell this switch to enterprises with big data centers.

There are a few important things about all of this.

Facebook's switch isn't just a radically new way to buy a piece of hardware, it's also part of a radically new way to design networks called software-defined networking (SDN). 

SDN takes all the fancy features found in networking equipment and puts them into software that runs on servers. You still need the network equipment, but you need less of it and less expensive varieties. It will almost certainly cause a price war one day, if companies start to experiment with it and like it.

Facebook's involvement with SDN will encourage them to do just that. If it works for Facebook, it could work for them.

The Wedge, and Juniper's version of it (named the "OCX1100"), is designed to work with lots of open source software, too. People can program it with a common language like Python. It works with popular open source management tools from Chef and Puppet Labs.

All the network equipment makers are creating SDN switches, Cisco included. In fact Cisco says that its SDN product released last year is selling well.

But Cisco's gear is not like the Wedge. Traditional switches from Cisco or Juniper are a single piece of equipment.

They look like this:

 

The Wedge is designed to stitch together standard bits of hardware, that you can change as you see fit. It's like Legos, only for a computer server, like so:

Facebook has no interest in competing with Cisco. It just wants to build reliable, low-cost and easy-to-maintain equipment to use in its own data centers. OCP hardware saved Facebook over $1 billion in its first three years, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. Many other companies want the same.

Most enterprises, even big telecom companies, don't want to deal with designing and building their own Lego-like servers.

That's where Juniper comes in. They can buy a Wedge from Juniper.

Cisco is well aware of the Wedge. In October, a few months after the Wedge launched, Cisco joined the OCP as a a Gold member. It told its customers that if they want OCP products, they can come to Cisco. They don't need to go to Alpha Networks or Juniper. 

Still, should Juniper's OCP switch become popular, this should put Cisco in an uncomfortable position. Should it jump on the bandwagon, create its own Wedge, and put a knife in the back of its own SDN switch, which is selling well? Cisco has spent about $1 billion to create that product.

Or should it watch customers go to Juniper and its other competitors involved with OCP, like Arista?

Cisco had no comment on the Juniper switch, but did tell us, "Cisco has been a leader in advancing multiple open source programs, including the Open Compute Project."

SEE ALSO: Why Cisco Has Showered These 3 Men With Billions Of Dollars

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Microsoft's Windows Phone is a fine platform with a huge app problem. 

Popular apps available for iOS and Android simply aren't there for Windows Phone.

Worse, Microsoft's app store is filled with fakes and ripoffs — and some of those are among the 100 most popular.

A 30-page report published today by Jackdaw Research highlights how bad the situation is. 

For instance:

• A search for "YouTube" on the Windows Phone returns dozens of obvious fake YouTube apps. Check out a screenshot here. The official Microsoft app is circled. (Google won't make one.)

• A search for "Swing Copters," a game for iOS and Android created by the maker of "Flappy Bird," returns more than 25 fake apps with "Swing Copters" in their title. In fact, the app isn't available for Windows Phone.
• Of the top 100 most popular apps, 38 of them are also available on iOS and Android (in other words, Windows Phone has very few exclusives), 38 are generic apps like flashlights, 9 are substitutes for popular apps that haven't come to Windows Phone yet (like Snapchat), 8 are fakes, and 7 were made by Microsoft. 
• There's usually a lag of at least 200 days between the time a popular app comes to iOS and Android and when it comes to Windows Phone. Microsoft's platform is almost never in the first wave of releases.

The paper also suggests that Microsoft may never be able to turn it around. Because Windows Phone's market share is so low — it peaked at 3.4% in the last quarter of 2013, and has since fallen to 2.8%, according to IDC — that developers see little reason to build apps for it. The lack of apps drives people to other platforms, which keeps popularity low, which keeps app count low, and so on, into a death spiral. 

The researchers don't think Windows 10 will help. Microsoft says with Windows 10, programmers will be able to make apps for PC,s tablets, and phones without much extra work for each platform. But the types of apps that are needed on Windows Phone typically aren't the same kinds of apps made for PCs, and developers may not do the work necessary to customize their apps for the smaller screen because, again, there's not enough opportunity to justify the cost.

Jackdaw's recommendation for Microsoft? Build a great flagship phone, explain what Windows Phone actually stands for, and somehow convince developers that they can make money on the platform.

Easier said than done.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft Dumps 1,500 Apps From Its Windows Store

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The hack on Sony Pictures Entertainment is one of the most debilitating ever targeted at US corporate servers.

The Nov. 24 incident didn't just result in the theft of proprietary data, including unreleased films and employee information.

It is also, experts say, the first to use "a highly destructive class of malicious software that is designed to make computer networks unable to operate" within a company's computer system in the US, according to Reuters.

North Korea has emerged as a leading suspect in the hack. Pyongyang had already vowed "merciless" retaliation over "The Interview," a coming Sony release in which James Franco and Seth Rogan play talk show hosts whom the CIA enlists for an assassination plot against North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. And it has greatly developed its cyberoffensive capabilities over the past decade. An unnamed security source told Reuters that North Korea was the "principal suspect."

If the Hermit Kingdom really is involved, it would make the Sony incident a potential turning point in the history of cyberwarfare.

For the past several years, states have started to compromise the computer systems of rival governments and private companies to further political or strategic aims: think China's infiltration of computers at The New York Times in response to a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning reports in 2012 on the private wealth of the country's top leadership, or Russia's "cyber-invasion" of Estonia in 2007.

But according to Dave Aitel, a former NSA research scientist and CEO of the cybersecurity firm Immunity, the severity of the Sony attack, along with its nakedly political motives, would put the incident in its own unique category assuming it was North Korea's handiwork.

"If it was North Korea, these attacks against Sony would indicate that foreign powers are going beyond the traditional information-stealing attacks to enforcing their own law against American companies via what we would consider cyber terrorism," Aitel told Business Insider by email. "It would be a watershed moment in how the world handles cyber policy and reaction."

Aitel says the hacks are potentially  "a 'near red-line moment'" because they represent the kind of incident that would almost require a US policy response assuming a rival state was behind it. As Aitel says, "This is the first demonstration of what the military would call Destructive Computer Network Attack (CNA) against a US Corporation on US soil ... a broad escalation in cyberwarfare tactics" that would demand some kind of American response.

It would also signal an increased willingness for North Korea to deploy its developing cyberoffensive capabilities against American targets.

An August 2014 report from Hewitt Packard Security Research explained Pyongyang's longstanding policy of attempting to integrate cyberattacks into its doctrine of "asymmetrical warfare" — namely, North Korea's attempts at closing the defense gap with its more conventionally capable enemies, like South Korea and the US, in whichever ways it can.

"Cyber warfare allows North Korea to leverage the Internet's inherent flaws for offensive purposes while maintaining its defenses, primarily via air-gapping its most critical networks from the outside world," the report says.

To that end, North Korea established a group of hackers within its military special forces architecture, called Unit 121, that is trained in a hotel in eastern China. Early results were alarming: As early as 2004, North Korea "reportedly gained access to 33 of 80 South Korean military wireless communication networks;" in 2006, "an attack on the US State Department originating in the East Asia-Pacific region coincided with US-North Korea negotiations over the regime’s nuclear missile testing."

There's evidence that North Korea was attempting ambitious attacks on private sector entities as well. According to the HP report, in February 2013, a private security firm called Solutionary recorded 11,000 "touches," or electronic attempts to steal information, on "a single financial institution," all originating from North Korean IP addresses. Solutionary noted that North Korean IPs attempted just 200 touches a month at a time, suggesting this rapid uptick was part of a concerted attack on the institution, which goes unnamed in HP's report.

North Korea has been developing its hacking capabilities from the safety of a web infrastructure that's largely cut off from the rest of the world. And it might feel as if it can afford to gamble a bit, given successful nuclear tests and rocket launches in the past couple of years. The international community responded with trade sanctions and a policy of diplomatic isolation — but not the point where the regime's control over the country has ever been all that seriously in question.

It would be unsurprising if North Korea believed it could get away with something of the Sony hack's magnitude. The question now is how the US might respond if Pyongyang's responsibility is more conclusively proven.

Michael B. Kelley contributed to this report.

SEE ALSO: South Korea Is Building A Giant Christmas Tree Near The DMZ

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“Have you been good or baaaad this year?”

(DP&F.)

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Christmas 2014, sheep

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Google is to start replacing its CAPTCHA tests with a simple request for users to confirm they are not a robot. The company believes the new system will be easier for humans and harder for computers.

Until now Google, and numerous sites that use its CAPTCHA service, have asked web users to type two words shown in images of scans from books. Only one of these words is actually the test; the other is a cheeky way for Google to get help with words its system wasn’t able to automatically recognize after scanning.

Humans struggling to make out the words and the test thus becoming an irritation is one problem with the system. The other is that it’s no longer as secure as originally intended. Ironically Google’s own attempts to develop automated recognition for figuring out building numbers captured in shots for its Street View maps were so successful it was able to achieve 99.8 percent accuracy when it used the tool on its own CAPTCHA system.

Google now says it will roll out a revised system that, on the face of it, simply asks the users to tick a box next to the words “I’m not a robot.” What’s actually being tested is the time it takes the user to figure out what to do and move the mouse, plus the movement of the mouse throughout the process. The theory is that humans will do this in an unpredictable, imprecise manner, whereas computers trying to replicate the task will be too neat and predictable.

Users on mobile devices will carry out a separate test in which they are shown an image, then asked to pick the matching image (or images) from a selection of nine shown below. That’s the type of task that humans can do much quicker than a computer, partly because we have the ability to determine and match a few key features.

It’s not the end of the traditional text-based CAPTCHA however. That will remain as a back-up test in case the new test doesn’t produce a conclusive result.

Sure, those might be a little pricey, but they are absolutely gorgeous and are hand-made by an actual artist.

A Saturn that actually LOOKS like Saturn, with Cassini data used to etch the rings! A Sun with sunspots! Earth and Mars with clouds and polar caps, Jupiter with a red spot, and I include Pluto, just because! Very cool!! And with a loop on the top to hang on your tree. I like to hang these in the window during non-Christmas months. The sunlight coming through them is amazing! I hand blow these ornaments myself. Ornament size is about 2″ for the small ones, up to 4 inches, and Saturn has the rings about 4.5″. With the rings, the ornament is heavier than my others and may be too heavy for little trees. All of the ornaments are thicker than cheap breakable ones, and have been crash tested by my cats to be able to withstand normal handling and last a lifetime as heirloom pieces.

[Blown Glass Solar System Ornament Set, 9 Planets with Sun!]

The post Gorgeous Hand Blown Glass Solar System Christmas Tree Ornaments appeared first on Geeks are Sexy Technology News.

Researchers studying the universe are ramping up to take the "image of the century" — the first ever image of a supermassive black hole.

Since the 18th century, astronomers have discussed the possibility of exotic objects in space so massive that their gravitational grip swallows everything that dares to get too close, including light. We call these objects, black holes, but in truth we do not know what a black hole really is because we've never actually seen one.

While the evidence for the existence of black holes is compelling:

"We have abundant evidence that black holes — or something very much like them — exist," Todd Thompson, astronomy professor at Ohio State University, told Business Insider earlier this year. "This evidence comes from the orbits of stars around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy."

Scientists will continue to argue the contrary until physical, observational evidence is provided.

Now, a dedicated team of astrophysicists armed with a global fleet of powerful telescopes is out to change that. If they succeed, they will snap the first ever picture of the monstrously massive black hole thought to live at the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

It will be the "image of the century" according to scientists at the MIT Haystack Observatory, one of the 13 institutes from around the world involved with the project.

This ambitious project, called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), is incredibly tricky, but recent advances in their research are encouraging the team to push forward, now.

The reason EHT needs to be so complex is because black holes, by nature, do not emit light and are, therefore, invisible. In fact, black holes survive by gobbling up light and any other matter — nearby dust, gas, and stars — that fall into their powerful clutches.

How to glimpse a black hole

So, how do you see something that is invisible? The answer leads us to the most advanced sub-millimeter telescopes in use today — telescopes that detect wavelengths of light longer than the human eye can see.

The EHT team is going to zoom in on a miniscule spot on the sky toward the center of the Milky Way where they believe to be the event horizon of a supermassive black hole weighing in at 4 million times the mass of our sun.

Every black hole has a point of no return, called the event horizon. Once light, or anything else in the universe, passes the event horizon, it never escapes and is swallowed up. Forever.

We can still see the material, however, right before it falls into eternal darkness. The EHT team is going to try and glimpse this ring of radiation that outlines the event horizon. Experts call this outline the "shadow" of a black hole, and it's this shadow that the EHT team is ultimately after to prove the existence of black holes.

"If we see the shadow, that will be the most powerful evidence we have that [black holes] do exist," MIT's Shep Doeleman told PBS.

A difficult task

This shadow, however, is incredibly small from our perspective.

The spot on the sky where the team is looking is the size a grapefruit would appear on the moon, as seen from Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope couldn't even see something this small.

That's why the EHT team turned to radio dish telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona, California, Chile, and Spain that, when combined, can resolve details more than 2,000 times finer than Hubble.

Recently, other EHT researchers, at the University of Arizona, simulated what our galaxy's central black hole and its shadow should look like, to get a better idea of what they might expect from their observations.

"That ring of light makes the black hole easier to find than if we were looking for complete blackness," Dimitrios Psaltis, of The University Of Arizona, said in a statement. "These simulations also help us find ways to distinguish this signature from all this swirling plasma around the black hole."

As shown in the clip below, the black hole at our galaxy's center is emitting jets of extremely hot plasma in confined columns at opposite ends. These columns are known as jets and have been observed around other objects throughout the universe. The EHT team wants to see beyond these jets, to the event horizon.

Using the university's powerful supercomputer, they created a black hole that is even more scientifically accurate than the visually stunning black hole in Christopher Nolan's latest film "Interstellar."

"Our team of four here at the UA can produce visuals of a black hole that are more scientifically accurate in a few seconds," Feryal Ozel, also of the University of Arizona, in the statement. Some of the visuals in "Interstellar" took a special-effects team of 30 and up to 100 hours for the computers to process.

Building the telescope team

To further improve their chances of seeing a black hole's shadow, the EHT team is continuously adding new telescopes to their global network. This is because the sensitivity of their measurements increases with each additional telescope, allowing them to measure finer and finer detail.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) — the world's most powerful submillimeter array — is slated to join the EHT project soon, along with additional telescopes in Mexico and the South Pole.

Last July, scientists installed the world's most precise atomic clock, costing $250,000, at ALMA's Operations base. The clock will sync ALMA's telescopes to other observatories of the EHT to ensure their recordings are accurate to within milliseconds. In fact, this atomic clock is so precise it will still be accurate to within a second 100 million years from now.

"The Event Horizon Telescope is the first to resolve spatial scales comparable to the size of the event horizon of a black hole," University of California, Berkeley astronomer Jason Dexter told Universe Today. "I don't think it's crazy to think we might get an image in the next five years."

CHECK OUT: These Incredible Images Show What Humanity Will Look Like When We Colonize The Solar System

READ MORE:  The Incredible Story Of The Women Who Were Meant To Be The First Astronauts But Were Left On Earth

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Photo courtesy of Tony M.
T-shirt found in Japan.