Syabas' Popbox: Get Ready for the New Media Streamer Champ [Hdmediaplayers]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/6CI-zd0pwLg/syabas-popbox-get-ready-for-the-new-media-streamer-champ

Take Syabas' Popcorn Hour C-200, the much-loved streamer of choice for AV nerds. Now make it smaller, add Netflix support and a far superior interface, and cut the price from $300 to $130. That's the Popbox.

The Popbox isn't a replacement of the Popcorn Hour, which remains on as a giant hackable tank of a machine, but it does look fully ready for mainstream adoption. Here's why: Syabas expects to slash the price down to a mere $130, yet it keeps the Popcorn's stellar codec support and a lot of the online channels the Popcorn was missing, like Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, MLB, and a whole bunch more. (It does lose some things, like the internal hard drive bay and Bittorrent support, but it's still all open-source so you can install games, apps, or whatever fun stuff the homebrew community can think up). Plus, Syabas's interface (which Wilson, in his streamer roundup, described as "lame") has been totally revamped, and actually looks, well, kind of awesome. It's got great little touches like animated weather and automatic IMDb and AllMusic lookup for movie, TV and music info.

The hardware's been significantly revamped, too—it's much smaller than the admitted beast that is the Popcorn Hour, and it's fanless (AKA silent), but it'll still pump out full 1080p video over HDMI. It's also got 2 USB ports and an SD slot for added storage, since you lose the hard drive bay the Popcorn Hour has. It remains to be seen whether Syabas has fixed the problems users found with the Popcorn Hour's remote control, but we'll find that out soon enough.

It's set to be unveiled on January 5th at CES, where we'll stop in and get some photos and impressions&mdas! h;but I' m really excited for it already. We'll find out release date there, but they seem locked in on the $130 price point, which is super reasonable—Roku, Asus and the rest should be very scared right now. [Syabas]

Update: Due to a typo in my notes, you may have seen an early version of this story as saying the projected price will be $100. Syabas actually expects the final price to be $130, and I need to practice my typing. Sorry for the confusion.

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How Non-Latin Domain Names Could Be Used to Steal Your Money [Crime]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/5lWG2rA50Wk/how-non+latin-domain-names-could-be-used-to-steal-your-money

Unicode is great because it supports multiple languages simultaneously, bringing international understanding, universal peace, and planetary love. And so is ICANN's decision to allow domain names that use non-Latin alphabets. Until both combine to steal your credit card numbers.

Or your login name, passwords, address, or whatever other data a phishing site can get from you.

Until now, there was an easy way to test if a site was legit or not: You just look at the browser URL. If it's not paypal.com or amazon.com or whatever.com, then it's not those companies' web sites, no matter how well they clone their layout and graphics.

The problem will come in 2010. That's when sites' URLs would start popping in non-Latin alphabets like Cyrillic. And that's when there will be cases of mistaken identity: Just check the image above, in which the russian word "raural" becomes "paypal." According to trademark expert Charlie Abrahams, of MarkMonitor:

The risk for general brand abuse is going to increase exponentially. It's difficult enough in English. At present, most e-mail phishing does not use anything that resembles the real site name. We could see the level of sophistication in phishing attacks increased by the use of foreign languages.

Can you see what this is going to be bring? Yes, unless someone comes up with rules soon, this will bring a big bag full of hurt. [The Times via Masable]

Note: To those readers who said there's no "l" in the Cyrillic alphabet, you are right, there's no "l" in traditional Cyrillic, but there is in the extended Cyrillic supported by Unicode.

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MSI Prepping Dual Screen, Nvidia-Powered eReader and a 3D Laptop [EReaders]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/A8ivBOdWRTQ/msi-prepping-dual-screen-nvidia+powered-ereader-and-a-3d-laptop

Rumor has it that the eReader MSI plans to unveil at this year's CES will not only have Nvidia Tegra graphics, but dual screens as well. A 3D laptop may also be in the works.

Of course, as you can see from the Asus dual screen eReader pictured here, the concept of a dual screen eReader is nothing new. But I have to wonder how devices like this will compete or blend with more functional tablet computers. As for the 3D laptop, there isn't any further detail. Hopefully we will learn more when CES kicks off. [Digitimes]

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Can Microwave Technology be Used to Make Food Cold? [Microwaves]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/oD-6ijhJoa8/can-microwave-technology-be-used-to-make-food-cold

Microwaves can transform a frozen pizza into hot, melted goodness in four minutes flat, but they can't rescue your melted ice-cream sundae. Or can they?

To cook food, a microwave oven converts voltage into high-frequency electromagnetic microwaves. The molecules in food-especially water and fat-absorb this energy and wiggle at high speeds, causing them to heat rapidly and warm the surrounding food. Although quickly turning leftovers cold would be handy, this is a one-way operation, explains David Pozar, a professor and microwave expert at the University of Massachusetts. Microwaves can only speed up atoms, not slow them down.

Scientists do have a high-tech method for slowing atoms, however: lasers. Shoot a moving atom with a laser, and it will absorb the laser's photons and re-emit them every which way, causing the atom to hold nearly still. Placing an atom at the junction of multiple beams can slow its momentum in all directions, decreasing its energy and cooling it.

This drops an atom's temperature a couple hundred degrees Fahrenheit-much colder than anything you'd want to put in your mouth-in less than a second. But because it works most efficiently on low-density gases of atoms of a single element, physicist Mark Raizen of the University of Texas doesn't think it will be useful for cooling food anytime soon: "Not unless you can subsist on a thousand sodium atoms."

Popular Science is your wormhole to the future. Reporting on what's new and what's next in science and technology, we deliver the future now.

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WebOS Getting Doom, Quake, OpenGL, and Native SDK [Palm]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/4AlTZVkvGuA/webos-getting-doom-quake-opengl-and-native-sdk

With some elbow grease, we've been able to play Doom on our WebOS devices for a while, but now we can do so without any messy terminal commands. Oh, and there's a playable version of Quake, too.

The folks of the webOS Internals global team have been throwing new things at us each day lately. At first Quake was only an unplayable demo, but now it plays just as well as the previously released version of Doom. These won't be the last games we'll see on the Pre though, because the same team has discovered demoed an OpenGL application and a "method for installing and running native Linux applications without the need for add-on services like webOSInternals' own Upstart Manager Service."

All of this is great news for homebrewers, Pre owners, and smartphone gamers, but tell me, what are you most eager to see next? [PreCentral]

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