firehose

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First time accepted submitter spineas writes "JetBlue is rolling out a new form of inflight Wi-Fi operating from satellites instead of ground-based cell towers. Up to eight times faster than traditional inflight Wi-Fi, it will enable users to stream video whilst in the air, something that is nearly impossible to do with current dial-up speed access in aircraft."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MCKEESPORT, PA—Descending into a lurid bacchanal of decadence and excess, sources confirmed that modern-day Caligula Mike Suzik indulged the darkest and most debauched of his hedonistic appetites Thursday morning by ordering an everything bagel...

FOXBOROUGH, MA—After the star tight end suffered a torn ACL and MCL in his right knee last Sunday, New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick announced this week that Rob Gronkowski has officially been placed in the team’s injured reserve ...

Robinson Cano Admits Mariners Give Him Best Chance To Make $240 Million

Haaretz

missing American in Iran was working for CIA Fox News WASHINGTON – An American who vanished in Iran seven years ago was working for the CIA, Fox News confirmed Friday. Three sources familiar with events at the CIA told Fox that Robert Levinson was collecting intelligence for the agency at the time of his ... White House: Levinson not a government employee when he made Iran tripCNN Ex-FBI agent who disappeared in Iran was on rogue mission for CIAWashington Post Missing American Jew in Iran was on unapproved CIA missionHaaretz Wall Street Journal -TIME -Voice of America all 802 news articles »

submitted by MaxFenig [link] [41 comments]

Back in October, we told you that Toei Animation was making a cartoon called Marvel Disk Wars: The Avengers, which would have a toyline from Bandai, and sounded suspiciously like it was going to be Pokémon but with Marvel super heroes. Well, rest easy — it's definitely going to be Pokémon but with Marvel super heroes.

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Pay what you want for awesome games from ACE Team, ATLUS Games and Tripwire Interactive and support charity!

me playing sports

Well, besides that it appears impossible to play and insanely dangerous there is no good reason.

Why did we ever stop doing this RT @HistoryInPics Auto Polo, early 1900s pic.twitter.com/qKWiUybtet

— GOOD KING SPENCESLAS (@edsbs) December 12, 2013

Imagine the equestrian polo to which you're accustomed, but with humanity's initial attempt at cars and the ever-present threat of death. That seems to be Auto Polo, according to the source documents in Wikipedia's reference material.

Here's some quick Auto Polo trivia to impress your friends and neighbors!

(1) Auto Polo was perhaps popularized by something called Ralph "Pappy" Hankinson. According to Bain's New York, he used it as an advertising stunt to sell the Model T (by destroying many of them, I guess).

(2) Before the Model T, the Dedham Polo club used Runabouts "mobiles" to varying degrees of success as long as there was no "riding off" attempted, which I think means people just left with the cars?

(3) There is a position called "Malletman." This sounds fun, but looks terrifying.

(Photo: Harper's Weekly, Volume 57)

(4) Some lunatics agreed to referee all this!

(Photo: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

(5) No one ever stayed in their automobile!

(6) Seriously, not once.

popular shared this story from Charlie's Diary.

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The internet of things may be coming to us all faster and harder than we'd like.

Reports coming out of Russia suggest that some Chinese domestic appliances, notably kettles, come kitted out with malware—in the shape of small embedded computers that leech off the mains power to the device. The covert computational passenger hunts for unsecured wifi networks, connects to them, and joins a spam and malware pushing botnet. The theory is that a home computer user might eventually twig if their PC is a zombie, but who looks inside the base of their electric kettle, or the casing of their toaster? We tend to forget that the Raspberry Pi is as powerful as an early 90s UNIX server or a late 90s desktop; it costs £25, is the size of a credit card, and runs off a 5 watt USB power source. And there are cheaper, less competent small computers out there. Building them into kettles is a stroke of genius for a budding crime lord looking to build a covert botnet.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I have an iPad. (You may be an Android or Windows RT proponent. Don't stop reading: this is just as applicable to you, too.) I mostly use it as a reacreational gizmo for reading and watching movies, and a little light gaming. But from time to time it's handy to have a keyboard—I use it for email too. So I bought one of these (warning: don't buy it direct, it costs a lot less than £90 on the high street). It's a lovely piece of kit: charges over micro-USB, magnetically clips to the front of the iPad to cover it when not in use, communicates via bluetooth.

But I suddenly had a worrying thought.

This keyboard contains an embedded device powerful enough to run a bluetooth stack. The additional complexity of adding wifi is minimal, as is the power draw if it's designed right. Here's an SD card, with wifi. It's aimed at camera owners: the idea is it can automatically upload your snapshots to the cloud. Turns out it runs Linux and it's hackable.

Look at that cute Logitech bluetooth keyboard. There's a lot of space in it, behind the slot the iPad sits in. Presumably that chunk of the case is full of battery, and the small embedded computer that handles the bluetooth stack. Even if it isn't hackable in its own right, what's to stop someone from buying a bunch of bluetooth keyboards and installing a hidden computer in them? Done properly it'll run a keylogger and some sniffing tools to gather data about the device it's connected to. It stays silent until it detects an open wifi network. Then it can hook up and hork up a hairball of personal data—anything you typed on it—at a command and control server. Best do it stealthily: between the hours of 1am and 4am, and in any event not less than an hour after the most recent keypress.

I hear tablets are catching on everywhere. Want to dabble in industrial espionage? Get a guy with a clipboard to walk into an executive's office and swap their keyboard for an identical-looking one. When they come back from lunch they'll suffer a moment of annoyance when their iPad or Microsoft Surface turns out to have forgotten it's keyboard. But they'll get it paired up again fast, and forget all about it.

I don't want you to think I'm picking on Logitech, by the way. Exactly the same headache applies to every battery-powered bluetooth keyboard. I'm dozy and slow on the uptake: I should have been all over this years ago.

And it's not just keyboards. It's ebook readers. Flashlights. Not your smartphone, but the removable battery in your smartphone. (Have you noticed it running down just a little bit faster?) Your toaster and your kettle are just the start. Could your electric blanket be spying on you? Koomey's law is going to keep pushing the power consumption of our devices down even after Moore's law grinds to a halt: and once Moore's law ends, the only way forward is to commoditize the product of those ultimate fab lines, and churn out chips for pennies. In another decade, we'll have embedded computers running some flavour of Linux where today we have smart inventory control tags—any item in a shop that costs more than about £50, basically. Some of those inventory control tags will be watching and listening to us; and some of their siblings will, repurposed, be piggy-backing a ride home and casing the joint.

The possibilities are endless: it's the dark side of the internet of things. If you'll excuse me now, I've got to go wallpaper my apartment in tinfoil ...

Trees for Cars is a carpool app that hopes to save the environment by helping New York commuters share rides. For those driving, a meeting place is selected on the app and a list of nearby riders is suggested. The users are then connected if they choose to. The app will then track how much CO2 was saved by the passengers, which encourages a competitive saving element.

Original Source

truebluemeandyou:

DIY D&D D20 Dice Gingerbread House Tutorial from Our Nerd Home here. These are made of graham crackers and put together with melted chocolate melts. They are putting up a tutorial for the red and green chocolate dice next week.

georgetakei:

Bat mobility. http://ift.tt/1d5h9Sl

Congratulations, Michigan Right To Lifers! You pushed through a very important law that will encourage women to keep their babies by banning insurance companies from covering abortion, unless policyholders purchase a separate rider. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder had already vetoed a previous version of the bill, but it was reintroduced through a citizens’ petition, which allows the bill to become law without the governor’s signature, a nice little end-run that allows terrible but popular ideas to become law. Opponents of the legislation note that since the rider cannot be purchased once a woman becomes pregnant — even if by rape or incest — it requires women who want the option of abortion following a rape to plan ahead, leading some to call the law a “rape insurance” act.

State Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer called the law “one of the most misogynistic proposals I’ve ever seen in the Michigan Legislature,” and said during a hearing Wednesday that the law

“tells women who are raped … that they should have thought ahead and bought special insurance for it.”

“The fact that rape insurance is even being discussed by this body is repulsive,” she added.

Whitmer went on to tell the story of her own rape, 20 years ago while she was in college, saying she was thankful it hadn’t resulted in a pregnancy:

“Because I can’t imagine going through what I went through and then having to consider what to do about an unwanted pregnancy from an attacker,” she said. Whitmer continued, “If this were law then and I had become pregnant, I would not be able to have coverage because of this. How extreme does this measure need to be? I’m not the only woman in our state that has faced that horrible circumstance…. I think you need to see the face of the women you are impacting by this vote today.

On the other hand, you had compelling pro-Freedom ideas like this, from state Rep. Nancy Jenkins:

“I don’t think elective abortion should be a part of insurance … This doesn’t affect access to abortion. It will still be legal when this law takes effect. Who should be required to pay? Not Michigan taxpayers.”

That’s a pretty nice little dance from “policyholders” to “taxpayers,” Ms. Jenkins — well played!

With the passage of the new measure, Michigan is now the ninth state to restrict private insurance from covering abortion services. Because the only thing more important than the free market is making sure that slutty women don’t take advantage of it to escape the consequences of their slutty sexing.

[Detroit Free Press / MSNBC]

If lawyers wrote ads

Let’s

le Bat

gramarye:

if this isnt ur reaction everytime i come online u need 2 go

nayx:

im a gif and youre just a jpeg

Creating a video game can be an incredibly daunting task, but with the recent rise in independent development, garage-based game creation is more accessible than ever. The tools are out there to help you create a game no matter your skill level. But how do you learn the tools, especially if you're too young for a college class?

For that, there's Gamebot School.

Founded by former developers at Neversoft, one of the many teams behind the Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero franchises, Gamebot School exists to teach the next generation of developers the ins and outs of video game creation. Alan Flores, Allen Freese and Nolan Nelson are using years of game development experience to educate groups of young makers who are full of excitement and creativity. While the "core age" of their students is around ages 9 to 12, they've taught a variety of kids both younger and older. After all, they're offering a service that isn't easily found elsewhere.

Continue reading Deconstructing Spelunky: Teaching the next (next) generation of game devs

Deconstructing Spelunky: Teaching the next (next) generation of game devs originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 12 Dec 2013 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This fork, the kind of fork you eat with, connects to your computer via Bluetooth. You eat all of your food with the fork, and it measures how you ate with the fork. Of course, for this to actually work, you’d have to take your gigantic Bluetooth fork everywhere you go, and eat all your food with it. The lone customer review suggests that it doesn’t really work, though, and when contacted, the company told the user that they were “eating wrong.”

I view this as a companion piece to the internet-enabled scale I wrote about last year. Broadcast your weight-shame to the internet and then have your bluetooth fork vibrate your skull when it determines you are eating too fast. It’s the future of weight-loss, and that’s why none of us are overweight anymore, in 2013.