Android Phones Will Power NASA's New Fleet of Mini-Satellites

 

Hoping to inject new life into low-cost space exploration, NASA's 'PhoneSat' program will launch a series of Google Nexus One–controlled mini-satellites into space later this year. 

While most of the recent media attention on NASA has understandably focused on the Curiosity rover on Mars, that’s not the only experiment that the space and aeronautics research agency has in the works. A team at NASA’s Ames Research center in Moffett Field, California, is working on the future launch of miniature satellites constructed with Android-powered Nexus One smartphones at the helm. Dubbed “PhoneSat,” this project is part of a larger experiment called the CubeSat Launch Initiative that incorporates small consumer electronics into working nanosatellites.

Apple-Samsung Patent Battle Now in Jury's Hands

A nine-person California jury will begin their deliberations Wednesday in the landmark patent battle between Apple and Samsung. The case, which has been argued since the beginning of the month, pits two of the world's largest electronics makers against each other and could result in billions of dollars in fines depending on the jury's decision.
The case revolves around a handful of patents covering the look and feel of the iPhone and iPad and some of the icons on the devices' home screens. It's one of several legal battles the companies are fighting around the world but, given its location in the heart of Silicon Valley and close to Apple's Cupertino headquarters, it is perhaps the most closely watched.

The Top-Performing Android Phones: Benchmark Blitz

We put six Android phones through our suite of benchmark tests to see which ones had the best CPU, graphics, and browser performance.

 

HTC EVO 4G LTE 

Choose the Right Graphics Card: 2012 Edition

GPUs today are more than just gaming accelerators. They speed up a wide range of applications, and this guide helps you pick the best match for your needs.

Modern graphics cards are intimidating, hulking beasts in a world of increasingly tiny PC components. Most of them are double-wide, occupying two expansion-slot spaces, even though they use only a single physical slot. Many require two power connectors and beefier-than-average power supplies. Their primary audience appears to be serious PC gamers, who use an arcane jargon of their own: frame rates, VSync, antialiasing.
Graphics processing units, or GPUs, are at the heart of these cards, and their sheer physical size and transistor count--some models have in excess of 4 billion transistors--help explain why they consume so much power and require sophisticated cooling systems. The transistor count also suggests why these new graphics chips aren't just graphics accelerators: They improve performance across a broad range of applications.

EnemyGraph Facebook Application

UPDATE: you can follow the trending & top enemies on enemygraph.com and my ongoing comments on the project on twitter. For press see bottom of this post.
For the past six months my research group has been looking into an app that explores social dissonance on Facebook. Today we are announcing the public release of EnemyGraph. The project was developed principally by graduate student Bradley Griffith with invaluable help from undergraduate Harrison Massey.
EnemyGraph is an application that allows you to list your “enemies”. Any Facebook friend or user of the app can be an enemy. More importantly, you can also make any page or group on Facebook an “enemy”. This covers almost everything including people, places and things. During our testing testing triangles and q-tips were trending, along with politicians, music groups, and math.

How to Fix Your Wi-Fi Network: 7 Tips

A quick guide to fixing the most common Wi-Fi problems that crop up at home, in the office, or on the road.

Wireless Internet networks afford us the luxury of browsing the Web cable-free, but a connection that relies on radio waves is subject to failure due to interference, signal range limits, hardware problems, and operator error. With that in mind, we've put together a quick guide to the most common Wi-Fi troubles and how to fix them.

If you're struggling with your Wi-Fi network at home or in the office, read on to discover a few different ways to troubleshoot your Wi-Fi woes and restore your wireless network.

iOS 6 Passbook App Shown Off In A Real-World Scenario, Looks Impressive [VIDEO]

When Tim Cook and his cohorts took to the stage to introduce us to the next-generation of iOS, we were pretty much expecting most of the announcements which were rumored beforehand. However, as the demonstration of iOS 6 continued, there was a couple of little additions that took us by surprise and had managed to slip through the rumor net which led up to the event. One of those surprises came in the form of Passbook, a new iOS stock app which offers a new and efficient way for users to store tickets, coupons, gift cards and vouchers in one central place for easy access later on.

The Clutch Looks Like More Than Just Another iPad Case

Let’s face it: This is a world that’s packed to capacity with iPad cases. Do we really need one more? If you’ve seen the Clutch by DC Mobile Design, you might be willing to say “yes”.

Using a snap-on frame to attach a cylindrical handle, it’s less of a “case” than a system of handling your iPad. With it, you can comfortably hold an iPad in portrait or landscape orientation while on the move without getting your greasy meathooks all over the screen. Once you put your iPad down, the adjustable handle props it up at an angle (how much of an angle is up to you) and comfortably view or type away.

The Sad Lives of Smartphone Slaves

Too many people experience life through tiny device screen, and that ain't living.

We've all seen the funny YouTube videos of a person walking into a mall fountain or a glass door because they were so engrossed in their smartphones.

And most of us saw that commercial last year -- I think it was for Verizon, but I'm not even sure, to be honest -- of a young guy walking out of his home and onto the street without even having to stop playing his video game because he could transfer it from his computer right to his smartphone!

GM developing Wi-Fi app to help pedestrians avoid being hit [w/video]

 

Since even the threat of serious injury or death isn't enough to keep people engrossed in their phones from walking out into traffic, General Motors is developing a new pedestrian safety technology that will sense the phone itself. Using Wi-Fi Direct, a peer-to-peer wireless standard that's like a medium-range Bluetooth, a car would be able to detect a smartphone directly and alert the driver in time to avoid kneecapping the pedestrian.

The Top 5 Social Media Management Tools for Small Business

 

Managing your company’s social media presence is becoming an increasingly complex task. Small-business owners who used to rely on Twitter to post updates to LinkedIn, for instance, no longer have that option.

Fortunately, other tools allow you to manage your business’s assorted social media accounts from a single dashboard. We've selected the top five that are specifically geared toward small business. To make our list, each tool had to meet several criteria.

• Affordability: The tool is either free or priced low enough to meet the budget of a one- or two-person business.
• Scalability: The tool grows with your company's needs, even if you start with just one or two accounts.
• Support for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter: If a social media management tool doesn’t post to all three networks, it’s dead to most small businesses.
• Update posting assistance: The tool allows you to schedule posts in advance.

How To Add A Live Facebook Timeline Feed To Your iPhone’s Lock And Home Screen

When it comes to mobile smartphones and the operating systems that power them, there is always going to be a great divide from users who prefer one platform over the other. We all know that the two largest mobile OSes in the game are iOS and Android, with each one having its own set of pros and cons when compared against the other. Apple fans will argue that iOS is a more powerful and intuitive OS, whereas Android fans love the control they have over their devices as well as the ability to have live widgets on their home screens.
I can’t argue with the benefits of widgets, as they do – in some cases – provide some great additional interactivity with the device, but the more experienced will know that jailbreaking an iOS device opens the system up to a whole world of powerful widgets. With that said, the Facebook Live Widgets package that has just landed in the Cydia store is an attempt by Bluemetal to bring some dynamic social network type functionality to the home screen and lock screen of a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch. iOS is one of the largest mobile platforms in the world and Facebook is the king of the social networks, so what could possibly go wrong?

4 Things Apple Will Eliminate With iPhone 5 and iOS 6

The next-generation iPhone is set to bring some radical changes for users, and it will also mark a very public break-up between Apple and Google. Much-loved Google products on iOS will now disappear or be replaced with Apple variants, while hardware design changes will bring long-term improvements, but short-term headaches for some users.
The latest beta releases of iOS 6 are now giving a clearer indication of which of Google’s services Apple will drop or replace with its own, with several reports indicating upcoming design and hardware changes that you’ll have to keep in mind. Until the new iPhone is announced on September 12, as reports indicate, here are the changes being discussed and what they mean.

How to Share Personal Data While Keeping Secrets Safe

 

A new technique could help companies like Facebook make money from your data without putting it at risk.

Giant stockpiles of personal data, whether Web browsing logs, credit-card purchases, or the information shared through social networks, are becoming increasingly valuable assets for businesses. Such data can be analyzed to determine trends that guide business strategy, or sold to other businesses for a tidy profit. But as your personal data is analyzed and handed around, the risk increases that it could be traced back to you, presenting an unwelcome invasion of privacy.

How to Maximize Battery-Life While Traveling

If you take an iPhone, iPad, or MacBook along when you travel, you know how much of a challenge it can be to keep your device powered up. Here are a few tips.

Admit it: Your carry-on bag is stuffed full of digital gear you can’t bear to leave at home. Not only will your iPhone, iPad, or MacBook keep you entertained while en route, they’ll make great navigation, research, and photo tools once you’ve reached your destination. But keeping these devices charged up when you’re constantly on-the-go or stuck in the air can be a challenge. But there are a few things you can do to extend battery life and save power.

5 Things Windows 8 Can Learn from OS X Mountain Lion

Apple's newest iteration of its OS has some great features we'd like to see in Microsoft's upcoming Windows 8. Here's our list.

Apple's OS X Mountain Lion will launch Wednesday, so it's a good time for Windows users to peer across the border at what features in Mountain Lion might prove useful.
Note that Windows 8 is a complete overhaul, while Mountain Lion is more of a refinement. Yet the Apple update adds lots of new features that would fit in nicely on Microsoft's OS. In hopes of keeping alive the tradition of stolen OS features, here are five aspects of OS X Mountain Lion that we'd like to see in future versions of Windows.

Holiday Tech: Droolworthy Gear Coming This Fall

Ultrabook laptops, games, and HDTVs are likely to be hot this holiday season. And it's not too early to prepare for Black Thursday. Here's the lowdown.

You're still slathering on sunscreen, and the dog days of summer (by ancient reckoning) arrived less than two weeks ago; but the most tempting HDTVs, Ultrabooks, games, and smartphones for the impending holiday season are already coming into focus.
What's going to be hot this winter? Will retailers slash prices on Windows 7 laptops as they push newly arriving Windows 8 PCs? What pricing gimmicks will they try? What's going to be the big thing with HDTVs, games, and cameras?

How Did Apple Allow Hackers to Access iCloud Account?

The Internet is abuzz this weekend as a result of the Gizmodo Twitter account getting hijacked. That incident was traced back to the hack of an Apple iCloud account--allegedly accomplished through social engineering.

A Forbes.com story from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes explains that a former contributor for Gizmodo, Mat Honan, was the original victim of the attack. Hackers were able to access Honan’s iCloud account, and remotely wipe his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook. The original theory was that the hackers used a brute force attack to crack Honan’s iCloud password, but further investigation revealed that social engineering was used to convince Apple the attackers were Honan, and Apple gave them the keys to walk right in.

Recommend: 28 1 30 Email 2 Comments Print Antivirus on Windows 8: Looking at Your Options

Windows 8 will come with bundled antivirus software, but will you need to supplement it with other programs? We look at some of your options.

Microsoft will include antivirus in Windows 8 for the first time in the history of Windows. But will this software--the new version of Windows Defender--provide adequate protection against viruses, spyware, and other malware? Let's take a closer look at what Windows Defender provides, and whether its features are enough to keep you safe.

Bear in mind that even though Microsoft will include Windows Defender in Windows 8, PC manufacturers may disable the program on new PCs that carry preinstalled antivirus software from a third-party such as Norton or McAfee. The preinstalled third-party antivirus options are usually limited-time trials, so your initial decision may be whether to keep any preinstalled antivirus; if you decide against keeping it, you'll need to decide whether to enable Windows Defender and use it or to switch to another third-party antivirus program.
The most important thing to consider when choosing antivirus software is its protection strength--how well it detects, disables, and removes viruses, spyware, and other malware. In this article I'll focus on comparing the protection strength of Windows Defender to that of other antivirus programs.

Qualcomm's Quad Snapdragon S4 Pro Tablet Now Available to Developers

NVIDIA may have been first to the quadcore game, but Qualcomm is ready to bring on the competition.
On Tuesday morning in San Francisco, Qualcomm introduced the press to its latest Snapdragon processor running on a developer tablet. The Snapdragon S4 Pro is Qualcomm's direct contender to NVIDIA's quadcore Tegra 3 processor. Built by BSquare, this tablet (also known as a Mobile Development Platform, or MDP) is available today from BSquare's website for $1300.

How to Make Your Own Network Cables

We show you how to clean up the rat's nest of cables behind your PC by making custom-length network cables and wiring your own network jacks.

Although it’s easy to head to the electronics store to buy network cables, making do with cables of predetermined lengths can be a problem. More often than not, premade cables are either too short (and require coupling) or too long (in which case, you have to tie up excess cabling and tuck it away somewhere). The end result is usually a mess of extra network cable, wrapped and bundled up alongside your devices and network switches. It works, but it isn't ideal, and it looks horrible.

The MyEvents247 For iPhone App Provides A New Way To Find Local Events With Deep Facebook Integration

We are all involved in a modern world that is connected through social media and made smaller by gadgets like the iPhone and iPad which allow us all to remain in constant contact with each other. Apple has provided us with the technology to stay connected, but the development community also has a responsibility to provide us with apps that want us to connect to one another and share our interactions.

Windows 8 Store Detailed By Microsoft, Free 7-Day Trials For Paid Apps, Pricing Plans And More

 

With a considerable amount of ground to make up already on the various app hubs available from the likes of Apple, Microsoft needs to deliver the goods with its Windows 8 Store, and the Redmond company has now released details via the MSDN Blog of how its new store will distribute apps.
The Windows 8 Store itself has been on the cards for quite a while, but little has been known with regards to how things will operate. Now though, it has been revealed the minimum cost of paid apps will be at a minimum of $1.49, which is around 50% higher than most other platforms. Having said that, the software maker also plans to include a 7-day trial setup, which will allow consumers to test the waters of an app for one week, before opting out if necessary.

Microsoft's Shift to the Cloud: What It Means for You

With Office 2013 and Windows 8, Microsoft launches into its most ambitious strategic shift since the original release of Internet Explorer. Here's how it will affect you.

Microsoft's announcement of Office 2013 is another linchpin in the company's effort to assume a leadership role as a cloud-computing services provider.
The new version of Office will be tightly coupled to the company’s SkyDrive cloud-storage service. SkyDrive, in turn, is one of the key built-in features of Windows 8.
Microsoft has yet to announce pricing for the new Office. But with Windows 8 Pro upgrades costing just $40 if you upgrade online directly from Microsoft, the software giant has already signaled a willingness to change its upgrade models.

Google Brings Emails to Feature Phones in Africa, No Internet Access Required

 Some of us in the Western hemisphere might already take Internet access and smartphones for granted, but this is not the case all over the world. Bearing that in mind, Google has launched a cool new service called Gmail SMS, which allows Gmail users who own a simple feature phone to send and receive emails using only text messages.

How to Get Started With CSS

Web designers use CSS to turn basic HTML into cutting-edge visual layouts. Our getting-started guide tells you everything you need to know to understand it.

I've already discussed how you can learn to code for free using languages such as Ruby and JavaScript, but this time we'll explore an even more basic language that can help to make your websites pop. Cascading Style Sheets is like HTML's cooler, more artistic sibling: While HTML handles the structure and content of your website, CSS allows you to add cutting-edge design to it. This guide tells you everything you need to know to get started making better-looking websites fast.

A Phone that Knows Where You're Going

An algorithm can better predict your future movements by getting a little help from your friends.
Beyond merely tracking where you've been and where you are, your smartphone might soon actually know where you are going—in part by recording what your friends do.
Researchers in the U.K. have come up with an algorithm that follows your own mobility patterns and adjusts for anomalies by factoring in the patterns of people in your social group (defined as people who are mutual contacts on each other's smartphones).

Information on the Green ICT Hackathon and the 2nd Green ICT Application Challenge

The application “SocialElectricity” has been awarded the winner of the second ITU Green ICT Application Challenge. Designed by Andreas Kamilaris, from Cyprus, “SocialElectricity” is a Facebook application that allows people to compare their electricity footprint with their friends and also their neighborhood/village/town in a country-wide scale. The application aims to help people become aware of their electricity consumption and manage it more rationally.

Microsoft Expected to Unveil Office 15

Microsoft is expected to show off Office 15, the next version of the company's productivity suite, on Monday at an event in San Francisco, according to numerous reports.
Office has been available to a select group of users in a technical preview since January. It's not clear whether a public beta of Office might be available Monday, or whether it will arrive later this summer.
Few details have seeped out about Office 15. Several reports claim Windows XP and Windows Vista won't be able to run Office 15. Microsoft is scheduled to stop supporting XP in 2014 and Vista support is expected to run out in 2017.

How to Undo RAID: Best Practices

Changing from a RAID 0-array boot drive to a single-drive boot should be easy, I thought, but the operation can be more complicated than may you anticipate. Here's what I learned from the experience.

It seemed like a simple, relatively safe task: I needed to undo the RAID array on my PC.
As its primary boot drive, my production system used a RAID 0 array consisting of a pair of Corsair Force GT 240GB drives paired to create a single 480GB volume. All of the valuable data lived on a single 2TB, 7200RPM Western Digital RE drive. The system is based on a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 motherboard running a Core i7 3930K CPU. Intel's RapidStore storage software manages the array in Windows.
One day, RapidStore presented me with a "SMART event" notice, indicating that the drive had generated an error from the SMART monitor built into the drive controller. SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) constantly monitors the drive for potential failure conditions, and generates an error when it detects such a condition. Unfortunately, SMART rarely provides specifics about the source of the problem; a single SMART event may turn out to be nothing at all, or it may be a crucial harbinger of imminent drive failure.

Tablet Encryption 101

Thinking about encrypting your Apple or Android tablet? The process can be daunting, but here's how to do it.

 Today’s workplace is becoming increasingly agreeable to the BYOD (bring your own device) concept: Employers are finally giving the green light for staffers to use their own equipment for work while they're at the office. For businesses, it's cheaper to let employees bring in their own laptops, smartphones, or tablets, since that cuts down on the need to purchase hardware (though not on the need to support it). Regardless, businesses seem to have little choice in the matter, since many employees are bringing their devices in whether they have permission or not--and some people are knowingly breaking the company’s security policy in doing so.

10 Crazy IT Security Tricks That Actually Work

Network and endpoint security may not strike you as the first place to scratch an experimental itch. After all, protecting the company's systems and data should call into question any action that may introduce risk. But IT security threats constantly evolve, and sometimes you have to think outside the box to keep ahead of the more ingenious evildoers.

And sometimes you have to get a little crazy.
Charles Babbage, the father of the modern computer, once said, "Propose to a man any principle, or an instrument, however admirable, and you will observe the whole effort is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: If you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple."
The world of network security is no different. Offer a new means for IT defense, and expect to meet resistance. Yet, sometimes going against the wave of traditional thinking is the surest path to success.

No Web for Hundreds of Thousands on Monday

Starting that day, computers still infected with the notorious DNSChanger malware will be unable to connect to websites.

Trouble spots: This map is a visualization of DNSChanger infection density by location, as of June 12.
Team Cymru

Hundreds of thousands of people are likely to be confused on Monday when they fire up their home or office computers and can't connect to the Internet. Their network connections will be fine, but attempts to visit their favorite domains will be fruitless.

A Butane Recharger for Your Cellphone

A USB-based fuel cell system will recharge your portable electronics for pennie.

Steven Cherry: Hi, this is Steven Cherry for IEEE Spectrum’s “Techwise Conversations.”
We live in a miraculous age in which we can carry computers around in our backpacks, pockets, and pocketbooks. But portable devices are only as good as the power within them, and as they get more powerful, they need more and more power.
Battery technologies keep getting better but still aren’t better enough for 14-hour flights over the Pacific or watching the Olympics all day on a cellphone.
For decades, we’ve dickered with fuel cells, mostly based around portable proton exchange membranes [PEMs]. But even the military, which has been more interested in portability than anyone, doesn’t use them much.

Apple Preps for Smaller Tablet

Apple Inc.'s component suppliers in Asia are preparing for mass production in September of a tablet computer with a smaller screen than the iPad, people familiar with the situation said, suggesting a launch for the device is near.

Two of the people said that the tablet's screen will likely be smaller than eight inches. The iPad's screen measures 9.7 inches, unchanged since the first model was released in 2010.
Officials at the component suppliers, who declined to be named, said this week that Apple has told them to prepare for mass production of the smaller tablet. The Wall Street Journal reported in February that Apple was testing such a device but hadn't yet decided whether to proceed with production.

When Will Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) Get to Your Smartphone?

Although the next version of Google's mobile operating system, Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), is expected to go live later this month, there will be a lag, as usual, between release time and when you might see the OS on your Android device.
That's because the handset makers, not Google, determine when to allow upgrades to their smartphones. The arrangement is supposed to foster innovation, but it also fosters frustration among users who can't get the latest version of Android in a timely manner--or in some cases, at all. It has also fostered a fragmented ecosystem that's vulnerable to attacks by hackers.

PC Building Best Practices: Software

In the second part of our PC building best practices series, we outline a number of issues that can arise when you're configuring and installing software on a newly built PC.

Building a PC is a protracted, multistep process. First you must pick a platform and choose a case to best suit your needs. Then you have to do some research and acquire the individual components. Finally, once you've chosen all of the components, you can begin the actual assembly. See the first installment in this two-part series, "PC Building Best Practices: Hardware," for our complete guide.

Power-Saving Clock Scheme in New PCs

Tick Tock: Cyclos Semiconductor tested its clock-energy recycling technology on an ARM processor.

A long-studied strategy for recycling the energy used to clock computer processors is now starting to make its way into commercial chips. The approach—dubbed resonant clocking—has been integrated into Advanced Micro Devices’ new AMD A10-4600M processor. The chip, known by the code name Trinity, debuted in May and is now shipping in desktop and laptop computers. 


Apple Siri Versus Google Jelly Bean: Voice Search Showdown

Which one listens to you and delivers information better: Google's Jelly Bean on the Galaxy Nexus or Apple's iOS Siri voice search? We put them to the test.

Top Ten Factors for Choosing a Gaming PC

When you're shopping for a gaming system, consider our ten rules of thumb before you pull out your wallet.

 PC gaming is big again. According to market research firm NPD, the release of Diablo III drove PC game sales up 230 percent in May. That was in a month where overall sales of games dropped by 28 percent. The Gods and Kings expansion to Sid Meier’s Civilization V did well in its recent release, too. Even smaller companies, such as Ironclad Games, with its Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, are shipping PC games that garner great reviews and attract new players.

FIFA 13 vs PES 2013 Comparison

P.S.

Report: Apple Wins Injunction Against Galaxy Nexus

A California court has granted Apple an injunction against Samsung over sales of its Galaxy Nexus smartphones in the U.S. The injunction was handed down on Friday afternoon by the same California court that earlier this week issued an injunction against sales of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1.

It will go into effect as soon as Apple posts a US$96 million bond that will be used toward any damages sustained by Samsung if the injunction is subsequently found to be erroneously enjoined, according to a report by Reuters.

The $10 000 College Degree. A Texas university offers a low-cost bachelor’s in IT. But what’s it worth?

In the summer of 2016, Texas A&M University–San Antonio will graduate its very first group of students with bachelor’s diplomas in information technology, at the bargain price of US $9700.
When the university’s president, Maria Hernandez Ferrier, announced the bachelor’s of applied arts and sciences IT degree [PDF] in March, listeners were astounded by its cut-rate price. Just last year, critics scoffed and education officials scratched their heads at Governor Rick Perry’s call to his state’s public higher-ed institutions to develop a four-year bachelor’s degree for no more than $10 000. That’s within range of just one year’s tuition and fees at sister school Texas A&M–College Station or the University of Texas–Austin.

Google I/O: Chrome Browser Improvements; Chrome and Google Drive for iOS; New Chromebooks

Google rolled out a series of improvements to some of its core web products on Day Two of its giant developer conference in San Francisco. 

Google Thursday announced improvements to its Chrome browser, improvements to Google Docs, and Chrome and Google Drive for iPhone and iPad, among other things on Day Two of the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco.

Web Attackers Borrow Domain Generation Tricks From Botnet-type Malware

 

Hackers have started to adopt domain-generation techniques normally used by botnet-type malware in order to prolong the life of Web-based attacks, according to security researchers from antivirus firm Symantec.
Such domain-generation techniques were recently observed in a series of drive-by download attacks that used the Black Hole exploit toolkit to infect Web users with malware when visiting compromised websites, Symantec security researcher Nick Johnston said in a blog post on Tuesday.

The Best Google Chrome Extensions 2012

Once again, Google Chrome is our Editors' Choice for Web browsers. Version 19 features an amazingly responsive browsing experience, security to prevent crashing, synchronization of bookmarks and preferences between Chrome browsers on other computers, great HTML5 support, and built-in Flash and PDF readers.
But even all of that isn't enough for true browser aficionados. We need extensions.
Google Chrome's support for extensions kicked off just three years ago and has exploded since. After last year's Chrome Web Store facelift, the collection now rivals Firefox's.
Rather than stumble through the almost endless number of entries in the store, however, browse through our efficient list of the 61 extensions just about everyone should consider. These are not the "apps" that are also very popular in the Web store, which are essentially links off to select Web app sites. Instead, we're concentrating on the actual software that extends and improves your browsing experience, sometimes in ways you didn't even think possible.
There are a lot of extensions specific to Google and its services, which isn't surprising considering Chrome is Google's browser. They work across operating systems. Best of all, every extension mentioned here is entirely free, so there's no harm in giving them a try. If you don't like one, just type chrome://extensions into the browser's address bar. From there, you can disable or remove any or all of them. You can also right-click an extension's icon in the toolbar to remove it.
Let us know if we included your favorite or if we missed the best in the comments section.

IN THIS STORY:
Blogging
Screen Capture
Google Services
Images
Interface Enhancement
Productivity
Security
Shopping
Social/Sharing
Tabs
Video

Ref:

Pcmag 

 

U.S. Bill Would Fight Chip Counterfeiting

Legislators in the United States took a small step toward combating the big problem of counterfeit electronics last week. As Celia Gorman detailed in our June issue, the counterfeiting problem is growing, and the U.S. government doesn't like it one bit. Three congressmen introduced a bill that streamlined the interaction between U.S. Customs and Border Protection and potential victims of counterfeiting.

According to a press release from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), until 2008, the CBP would snap pictures of the trademarks and other info on suspected counterfeit chips and send the images to semiconductor firms for verification. That stopped with when the Department of Homeland Security implemented a new security policy.

The bill would reverse that policy, freeing CBP to share its photos.

In applauding the measure SIA president Brian Toohey said:

The legislation introduced yesterday by Reps. McKeon, McCaul and Keating would reverse the CBP policy and allow semiconductor companies to receive photographs that show identifying information on suspected counterfeit chips to determine their authenticity. This legislation would allow CBP and industry to resume working together in order to halt and seize suspected counterfeit semiconductors before they enter the U.S. supply chains.

Of course, a picture might not be enough. As Tam Harbert reported in April, the U.S. Defense Department is testing the use of plant DNA as a marker, which would make it much harder for importers to fake a trademark.

Ref:

TechReview

Computer Issues Affecting Millions of NatWest Bank Customers in UK

I would assume that the computer rage meter pegged for a lot of people yesterday, and for some, it will likely remain so for the next few days if not longer.
According to news reports like this one at the London Telegraph, millions of customers of the UK bank NatWest and some 100 000 customers of Northern Ireland's Ulster Bank, both of which are owned by RBS Group (and in which the UK government owns an 84 percent stake), have not had their accounts updated since Wednesday evening due to "technical issues" with the banks computer systems. As a result, customers have been having trouble with their accounts, leaving many without any money or the ability to automatically pay their bills.

EBay Will Rely on Fuel Cells to Power Major Data Center

EBay announced this week that its expanded data center in Utah will rely on a 6 MW fuel cell array supplied by Bloom Energy, based in Sunnyvale, Cal., which makes an innovative solid oxide system. It will be the largest stationary fuel cell bank ever installed in a non-utility setting, and the first time a data center has been designed to rely on fuel cells as its primary energy source, with the grid serving as backup. The normal procedure is for data centers to get electricity from the grid, with some kind of backup system to kick in when the grid goes down—an expensive procedure.

Adobe Lightroom and Corel AfterShot Pro

Two programs can help you get your photo house in order

It used to be an effort to take pictures and get them developed and easy to keep and show them. Today, it’s the other way around—pictures are easy to take, and as a result, we’re swimming in them. Drowning, even. Every time we shoot another thousand or so at a simple birthday party, we’re left with a major task—sorting out the best ones, then editing and sharing them.

Big F..k you for NVIDIA by Linus Torvald

Big Fuck you for NVIDIA by Linus Torvald

P.S.

Quantum Dots Are Behind New Displays

They make LCDs brighter and could challenge OLEDs for future TV dominance

Bright Dots: Red, green, and blue pixels made from quantum dot LEDs developed by QD Vision.

13 June 2012—Liquid crystal displays dominate today’s big, bright world of color TVs. They are inefficient, though, and don’t produce the vibrant, richly hued images of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) screens, which are expensive to make in large sizes.
But a handful of start-up companies have been plugging away at another display technology that could enhance LCDs and unseat OLEDs: quantum dots. These light-emitting semiconductor nanocrystals shine pure colors when excited by electric current or light and promise rich, beautiful displays that would be inexpensive and easy to manufacture.

Reduce Audio Latency On Your Nexus S And GSM Galaxy Nexus With This Mod

Although Android is the most commonly used mobile ecosystem on the market, it’s not without its fair share of caveats. Aside from the scores of malware outbreaks plaguing Google’s mobile OS, there’s also the long-standing issue of audio latency.
"Big deal!" I hear you exclaim, and while audio latency may not be too much of an issue for the overwhelming majority, those using the likes of Skype, or the increasingly-popular mobile instrument and music production apps available, will notice just how significant it can turn out to be. Tapping the virtual drum, for example, and waiting for a split-second for the sound to be played from your device’s speaker, adversely affects the experience, and given said apps can often be priced into the tens of dollars, it’s simply not on.
The issue has snowballed, and since the problem has been prevalent through many versions of Android yet still not resolved, it’s now become the proverbial elephant in the room. It was discussed at last year’s I/O, and Google Android chiefs had hoped something could be done to amend the issue in Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0), but the complexity of the issue has meant it still remains unresolved.
Still, whenever there’s a problem, there are usually plenty of modders and devs on hand, attempting to fix the problem in an unofficial yet extremely convenient manner. Okay, so this isn’t exactly what we would regard as an outright fix, but for those rocking a Nexus S or a GSM Galaxy Nexus, it’s the next best thing.
One little mod, created by a couple of intuitive folk over at XDA Developers, improves the audio latency existent on aforementioned device. It’s a re-jig of each device’s respective audio libraries, although the Nexus S mod has had more hours put into it, thus performs much better, than that of the Galaxy Nexus. Still, it’s encouraging work, and if you own either device, then check out the thread links below and see if you can improve that annoying audio lag by modifying those files within your device’s audio libraries.
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Redmondpie

How To Get The Best iOS 6 Features On iOS 5 Right Now

After including major missing features in iOS 3, 4 and 5, iOS 6 has turned out to be more of an incremental update than anything else. Other than Maps, there are no downright mind-blowing features. Everything iOS 6-related announced by Forstall at WWDC 2012, we’ve seen in one form or another whether as a Cydia tweak or a minor feature on other platforms.
Yes, I am tad disappointed at how things turned out at the event. I went through the iOS 6 keynote, wrote down every new feature mentioned in it and found that most of these features are available in iOS 5. They are definitely more scattered and less polished, but the functionality is there and that’s what we will be discussing in this post: how to get iOS 6’s best features on iOS 5 right now.

There's a Map for That—Several, Actually

Map time: Hover, a 3-D-focused map company that’s still in stealth mode, can gather pictures from different sources and combine them to produce models of buildings that can be updated later on if more images are added.

Beyond Apple and Google, a number of companies are hoping to find success with new mapping technology.

Apple's announcement that its own mapping app will be added to the next version of its mobile software sounded like a punch in the gut for Google Maps, which has been a constant presence on the iPhone since the gadget first launched in 2007.
Apple's senior vice president of iOS software, Scott Forstall, gave a glimpse of the Maps app on Monday at the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Forstall showed off maps of countries around the globe, as well as Flyover, a feature that uses images captured by planes and helicopters to build crisp, 3-D views of buildings like the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco and the Sydney Opera House in Australia.

How to Stuff Five Universities Into One Computer Center

A multi-institutional Massachusetts computer center tests out terascale computing—and the social engineering needed to use it

24 May 2012—When the Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing Center launches at the end of this year, its energy efficiency and low carbon emissions (as IEEE Spectrum has detailed) may garner some headlines. But MGHPCC is a trailblazer in one other, perhaps more significant, way.
It puts to a high-stakes test what might be called the “Thanksgiving dinner” approach to academic computing: Put multiple outspoken and diversely opinionated entities under one roof, cross your fingers, and work to ensure that they all get along.
Each of MGHPCC’s five member institutions at the Thanksgiving table—Boston University, Harvard University, MIT, Northeastern University, and the University of Massachusetts system—will by year’s end begin transitioning research computing over to the center. MGHPCC, based in Holyoke, a once-thriving Massachusetts mill town two hours west of Boston, does not provide its own computers but rather the power, networking, and cooling infrastructure needed to remotely and inexpensively host members’ computers.

Few Privacy Regulations Inhibit Facebook

Laws haven't kept up with the company's ability to mine its users' data.
Now that it's a public company, Facebook needs to significantly boost its revenues to bring them in line with shareholders' expectations. That means finding new uses for the endless amounts of personal data the company collects from its users—but this prospect concerns privacy advocates, who say Facebook has outgrown existing privacy laws. Although regulators around the globe are increasing their scrutiny of Facebook, it might be years before they catch up.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, for example, will subject Facebook to 20 years of regular privacy audits after settling charges last year that the company engaged in "unfair and deceptive practices" such as misleading people about whether information they disclosed on the site would stay private. The FTC has a mandate to protect consumers from false advertising, but its ability to restrain Facebook is limited because current U.S. privacy laws are decades old. They're written to shield medical and financial information, even motor vehicle and movie rental records, but they don't address many practices common online today, such as compiling profiles of online behavior to target ads. 

LinkedIn and eHarmony Hacked: 8 Million Passwords Taken

After initially pleading ignorance, the professional social network LinkedIn confirmed yesterday that it had been hacked and that the encrypted passwords of at least 6.5 million of its 161 million users had been taken.
According to a story at Cnet, a list of 6.5 million passwords allegedly from LinkedIn was uploaded to a Russian hacker server, after which someone claimed on a Russian forum that he was the one who had hacked into LinkedIn and uploaded the information. LinkedIn was contacted about the claim, and soon said that it was unable to confirm that it had been hacked.
However, as word spread about the alleged hack, experts at the security firms Sophos and Rapid7 announced that that they had confirmed the uploaded list contained the LinkedIn passwords of some of their colleagues.
 User names are also suspected of being stolen along with the passwords.
Not long afterwards, LinkedIn confirmed that it had indeed been hacked.  According to the story at Cnet:

“LinkedIn encrypted the passwords using the SHA-1 algorithm, but did not use proper obscuring techniques that would have made the password cracking more difficult, said Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist of Cryptography Research. The passwords were obscured using a cryptographic hash function, but the hashes were not unique to each password, a procedure called ‘salting,’  he said. So if a hacker finds a match for a guessed password, the hash used there will be the same for other accounts that use that same password.”

Google Brings New Meaning to the Web

The search-engine giant now “understands” what you’re looking for

7 June 2012—Depending on where you are, you may have recently noticed a dramatic change in your Google search results. For example, if you type in the key words “Margaret Thatcher,” you’ll get the usual set of links to highly ranked sites about this former British prime minister. But to the right of that list, you’ll also see a new pane with information about Thatcher—her photograph, date of birth, children, education, books she’s written—along with links to similar sets of information about her husband, other British prime ministers, and even Meryl Streep, who played Thatcher in the movie Iron Lady.
This new feature is the first visible outgrowth of something Google calls the Knowledge Graph, a vast collection of information about a half-billion entities and the relationships between them. It represents Google’s new push to make sense of the Web in terms of “things, not strings,” to use the company’s catchphrase. Instead of just indexing Web documents by the words they contain, “we really need to understand about things in the real world,” says Shashi Thakur, technical lead on the Knowledge Graph project, which some see as a stepping stone to a long-sought system called the Semantic Web.
The Knowledge Graph is very different from the basic search strategy Google was founded on, which was to crawl the Web and build up a giant index of the words contained on each of the documents found. With such an index, Google could easily return links to pages that included your search terms. The company’s secret sauce was the algorithm it used to rank results. This approach, while somewhat daunting to carry out at the scale required, is fundamentally straightforward. The computers doing the crawling, indexing, and ranking don’t need to have any sort of understanding of what the strings of letters you are searching on signify.

Anonymous Message To Cyprus | By AvengersOn- #opCyprus

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Diamond Quantum Memory Beats Record

It holds a quantum bit long enough for real computation

7 June 2012—A new type of memory could give the emerging field of quantum computing a much-needed boost. Scientists at Harvard University say they’ve developed a solid-state, room-temperature quantum memory that can hold information longer than one second. The memory records a quantum property called spin on the nucleus of an atom inside a diamond. Earlier solid-state nuclear-spin-based memories would lose their data after only milliseconds unless cryogenically cooled. The research is being reported in this week’s issue of the journal Science.
For practical quantum computers—experimental machines that aim to solve problems beyond the reach of ordinary computers by exploiting some of the stranger rules of quantum mechanics—it is essential to have quantum memories that last long enough to process information and churn out answers. Physicists think that the needed time frame is about one second.
“Diamond turns out to be a particularly good material for [the] purpose,” says Peter Maurer, a graduate student in physics at Harvard who came up with the new memory along with his advisor, Mikhail Lukin, and other colleagues. “It is possible to fabricate diamond with very few impurities.”
The Harvard scientists exploited such an impurity, a defect in the diamond lattice known as a nitrogen vacancy, to create a quantum bit, or qubit. The qubit could interact with a nearby carbon-13 atom in the diamond lattice, which acted as the quantum memory.

5 Common Reasons Why Blogs Fail

Many people find blogging to be a difficult task. Whether your blog is part of your business website, a place to generate some extra income or a standalone blog for personal reasons you may have found that your audience is missing. Blogs may sound easy but you need a combination of skills and commitment if you wish yours to become a success. This is not an easy way of making money; however it can be highly enjoyable and worthwhile with commitment and dedication.

Learn from the Blogging Mistakes of Others

I have seen many blogs die a quick death and become fully abandoned, and to help you ensure that this doesn’t happen to yours it can help to be aware of the problems that lead to this path. Use these 5 reasons why blogs fail effectively to ensure it doesn’t happen to you and soon you could become the owner of a popular blog.

Trying too hard to make money

A Dollar For Your Data

Information about you is free for the taking on the Web. A new crop of entrepreneurs wants you to collect. 
Unless your name is Oprah Winfrey or Warren Buffett, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone to pay $1,000 to hear about your purchasing habits. Anyone who wants this information can glean much of it from your behavior on the Internet anyway. Companies tracking and aggregating our clicks, taps, and swipes are the ones making fortunes. Individuals are not.
But a startup called Personal thinks it can change this. Its starting point is an idea that may seem strange to the Facebook generation: an online network where users control what information advertisers can access.
Personal, based in Washington, D.C., is among a number of startups that want to help people "collect, curate, and derive value" from their own online data, according to the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, a group formed in 2010 to encourage such efforts; it lists 30 businesses as members.
Personal cofounder Shane Green believes that many Internet surfers are primed to share more detailed and revealing information than they commonly do today—so long as they stay in control, and possibly earn money from it.
sers of the network, launched last November, are encouraged to upload information of all sorts, trivial (pizza orders) or sensitive (student loan records, medical prescriptions). They place the data in a "vault" and can grant other people or Web programs access to relevant portions. You could enter your home alarm code and share it only with houseguests, or grant a financial advisor access to details about your retirement accounts.

What’s Apple Going to Announce Next Week?

Apple's World Wide Developers Conference kicks off on Monday, June 11. There will be lots of major announcements for sure, so get ready for an exciting summer. Here's what we know, what we think, and what we wish is coming...

iOS 6

Like last year, there is a very high probability that Apple will feature iOS prominently at WWDC. iOS 6 will be the cornerstone of the keynote and the follow-up sessions. Don't expect it to be available for users quite yet, though. Like iOS 5 last year—detailed at WWDC, released in October—iOS 6 will probably be available at a later date. Also like last year, it will have quite significant new features, perhaps new maps and Facebook integration.
This will be a technology preview or a beta aimed at 1) getting developers ready for its new features and changes, 2) getting consumers excited, and 3) putting the screws to Google.
Gut feeling: Definite

The Curious Case of Internet Privacy

Free services in exchange for personal information. That's the "privacy bargain" we all strike on the Web. It could be the worst deal ever.
Here's a story you've heard about the Internet: we trade our privacy for services. The idea is that your private information is less valuable to you than it is to the firms that siphon it out of your browser as you navigate the Web. They know what to do with it to turn it into value—for them and for you. This story has taken on mythic proportions, and no wonder, since it has billions of dollars riding on it.
But if it's a bargain, it's a curious, one-sided arrangement. To understand the kind of deal you make with your privacy a hundred times a day, please read and agree with the following:

By reading this agreement, you give Technology Review and its partners the unlimited right to intercept and examine your reading choices from this day forward, to sell the insights gleaned thereby, and to retain that information in perpetuity and supply it without limitation to any third party.

Can Your Facebook Profile Predict Job Performance?

In a recent study from Northern Illinois University, researchers found that Facebook profiles can help predict job performance and academic success. A small group of HR professionals and students were asked to review students’ Facebook profiles, grade them according to the Big Five personality traits (conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion, emotional stability and openness) and then rate their hirability. Six months later, researchers matched these ratings against employee evaluations from the students’ supervisors and found a strong correlation between the two.
“In five or 10 minutes, our raters could look at the tone of a subject’s wall post, note the number of friends they have, peruse their photos to see how social they were and assess their tastes in books and music. It’s a very rich source of information,” says Don Kluemper, lead researcher of the study.
Other major takeaways of the study include:

• Facebook scores were a better predictor of future academic success (based upon grade point averages) than personality and IQ scores combined.
• Facebook profiles are more authentic than personality profiles questionnaires.
• Emotional extremes displayed on Facebook can translate to “emotionally unstable.”

What can I do to make sure my profile is the best reflection of my personality?
Reppler helps you monitor your Facebook profile, and generates an “Image Score” to evaluate the tone of the language on your wall (positive, neutral or negative). Our “Common Word” widget keeps record of the words used most often by you and your connections. Like to “vent” on Facebook? Chances are your score will indicate a higher level of emotional instability (not exactly something a potential employer wants to see). When it doubt, choose something positive to post.
Interestingly enough, however, social pictures on your profile are not always a bad thing. They indicate extroversion and friendliness. Does this mean anything goes? Certainly not. Some pictures, and you know which ones, should remain for your eyes only.
Whether we like it or not, Facebook is being used as a reliable job-screening tool. It is important to ensure that your profile is consistent with how you would like to be perceived by others, personally and professionally.

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Repller

Facebook Pages 4 New Features.. Don't Miss!

Facebook is releasing new features and it is very clear that it wants to give more to Facebook Pages, mostly owned by Brands, Shops and Business. The 4 major features that we will mention below are ready to offer to Facebook page owners' better productivity on how they manage their Facebook page.

So let's check them out:

This is big since many of us rely on services like Hootsuite to do this. Now you can easily create a new post and instead of posting, you just schedule it to be automatically posted on a day and time you prefer. This is very helpful for page owners that do not have a flexible time to spend with their page and let you for example, write a post in the morning and have it schedule to be posted at night 20:00.

Be careful, wrong use of this feature might cause you to lose a lot of engagement with the fans, if you use it with the wrong way.

You will notice a tiny button on the right bottom side of your post. There you can spend a few cash in order to boost your post's virallity and get it promoted on the first page activity stream of your fans. I'm not a huge fan of this feature since it requires payment to be used but if you have something really important to share, Facebook just give you the opportunity to do it with some extra cash.

Doing some quick math. Let's say that your average selling product is 20 Euro and that your average conversion rate from Facebook is 0.1%. That means by spending 5 Euro promoting a post to reach 1000 fans, you will get a customer with 5 euro. If that is Ok with you in order to pay 5 euro and get a customer from Social Media then you should try out this feature.

Another good feature, which let you have a quick look of your Reach Metrics at the bottom of each post. I know a lot us don't have time or don't bother checking all the time the Insights page, so that's a good one for those who just want to have a fast look on how their post is doing.

Check the picture above. What you see is

1. Organic reach which is how many fans have seen your post

2. Viral reach which is how many friends of your fans seen your post. (Very useful)

3. Paid reach which is how many fans saw your posts from the promoted feature we mention above

Another final huge feature that at last let you create several roles for your Facebook page. This is very useful especially for big pages and brands, who have several staff to manage several tasks on each page. For example, if you are owner of a retail store page you might want to give access to a marketing analyst of your page and you don't want to bother him with many admin features that he will not need. In that case you can assign him with the role of Insights Analyst and that's it.

These are just few of the "more to come' from Facebook. It is clear that Facebook wants to invest on Brands and Business owners who aim to reach customers and create brand awareness from Facebook. That's not bad at all, but let's hope that Facebook do this slowly with caution because giving Page owners too much freedom and promotion features might break the relationship between fans and create "walls". We don't want this to happen and we all shall invest time on providing great content to our fans.

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Webarts