Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/29/lookouts-app-genome-project-warns-about-sketchy-apps-you-may-ha/
Lookout's App Genome Project warns about sketchy apps you may have already downloaded originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Source: http://gizmodo.com/5597832/intels-optical-breakthrough-holds-promise-of-staggering-speeds
Intel detailed their breakthrough to the press at an event today, marking the milestone of impressive 50 gigabits per second transfer speeds using an underlying technology that could go much, much further. We've covered the promise of fiber optic speeds before, but nothing like this. Intel CTO Justin Rattner explained just what "silicon photonics" even means, why the world needs it, and what it promises in the near future.
Silicon photonics is, simply, the combination of optical technology with traditional silicon chip manufacturing techniques—the same processes used to make all of our CPUs and GPUs. By employing existing methods, turning data into light and back again will be affordable.
The fundamental process is that of transferring data by converting electrons—which are what make the device you're reading this on right now work—into photons. Intel's photonic technology uses a dazzling bit of engineering—and I do mean dazzling, as we're on the scale of your fingernail—to encode data into laser streams. These streams converge into one, and travel along a fiberoptic strand to their destination, where they are decoded from light back into electrons.
Why would we need anything as complicated and sophisticated as this? The fact of the matter is that we're nearing the limit of what we can do with electrons—and there's no arguing with physics. Once we get in the realm of 10 gigabit transfer speeds, we've pushed copper wiring about as far as it will go without degrading the signal beyond usefulness. And with the mind boggling volume of data swirling around—HD movies, lossless audio, high resolution photos—what might sound excessive today will be essential sooner than we think.
Intel's fiber connection, on the other hand, can take us farther and faster. Immensely so. At the speed Intel has announced today, you could download an HD film from iTunes or 100 hours of music in less than a second. And if they reach their theoretical potential of 1 terabit per second, you could slurp down three seasons of an HD show or backup your entire harddrive in the same amount of time.
Rattner said Intel hopes to have silicon photonics "widely deployed" by mid-decade, though holding one's breath in cases like this is usually a bad idea. We asked Intel, after hearing them tout the advantages silicon photonics offers for consumer devices, whether we could expect to see this technology replacing USB within this timeframe, prompting them to stress that the significance of the breakthrough is in its potential, not its concrete applications—commercial adoption will hinge on the market and manufacturing factors. Still, they have proven the technology works, and works well. For now, I can safely say that they have preemptively ruined USB 3.0 for me. [Intel Silicon Photonics Research]
Source: http://jezebel.com/5597934/when-foursquare-gets-creepy
Sylvia lives in Kansas City and works in online marketing. Her story, first chronicled on her personal blog and reprinted in The Guardian, is creepy on unending levels. There is the fact that he chose to call the restaurant and ask the manager to find her, based on a description culled from her profile photo. There is the threatening, teach-you-a-lesson tone, shortly after she declined to be overjoyed at his advances. And somehow, the simple act of jumping platforms — hasn't he ever heard of tweeting at someone? — into the physical space, at an unguarded moment, is creepiest of all.
In a piece published alongside Sylvia's, Leo Hickman writes about how he was on the other end of the equation: as an experiment, he picked a woman off Foursquare, culled Internet data on her, and then apprehended her at a work event in a London bar. When she showed up, "sensibly accompanied by a male colleague," she was understandably not that thrilled with the whole thing.
And yet services like Foursquare are supposed to do this, at least in part: Create a kinship between people who use the same services and share the same spaces but might never speak. That's why people opt in to it, though that sense of real-time lack of privacy is exactly why I've stayed away from it, however enthusiastically I've embraced other social media. Every Internet user negotiates how much personal information to share and how and when, but I would argue that for women, the situation is far more volatile, the vulnerability more terrifying. (Is it a coincidence that both targets, experimental and otherwise, in the Guardian stories are women?). And once you invite people into an aspect of your private life in any sort of public way, it's difficult to order them out.
Last year, before Twitter had geolocation and before Foursquare really took off, I was at a party, rummaging through a fridge for a beer, when someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked me if I was Irin. "I found your tweet!" he said triumphantly, waving an iPhone in my face. How, exactly? I had tweeted a mention of a "rooftop party," and the neighborhood where it was taking place; he had been demonstrating Twitter to someone at the party, typed in the neighborhood where we were. When he saw my tweet, he used the tiny thumbnail photo and asked around to find me.
Now, despite my initial alarm, it turns out this guy is not a total creep like the guy who called Sylvia, and we are still friendly — at my urging, he joined my salsa studio, and he in vain tried to teach me how to play squash. In fact, we have real-life mutual friends, including but not limited to the ones throwing the party. You could argue that Twitter had bridged the awkward gap of strangers talking to each other at a party, the broken social bonds of our fragmented society, and so on and so forth. And yet some of those social bonds are broken for a good reason: There are terrible people in the world, we shouldn't necessarily trust all of them implicitly, and drawing lines around what we share can be useful and necessary.
Sylvia wrote of her experience, "I'm angry. I feel like someone violated an understanding that all of us generally nice people online have -– you don't cross the line." Of course, even people you know well in your physical life can turn out to be not "generally nice people." But there, the possibilities are more controlled and limited, and you choose to share different levels of information with, say, your Mom as opposed to your co-worker as opposed to the guy who serves you coffee. When those lines are crossed, it's enough to make you want to stay at home.
How I Became A Foursquare Cyberstalker [Guardian]
The Night I Was Cyberstalked On Foursquare [Guardian]
Image Via Korn/Shutterstock
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5597914/how-to-make-a-diy-macro-iphone-lens
Instructable user RVogel decided to create his own macro lens for the iPhone and came up with a pretty nifty solution. Basically, he took the lens from a disposable camera and repurposed it on a mount to fit an iPhone (theoretically, you can create a mount to fit any cell phone camera).
It's a pretty tough job that involves some drilling, sanding, cutting, bending wires at 90 degree angles, and more, but after you're done, you can take pictures like this:
Which is to say, not bad! His full instructions on making your own iPhone macro lens can be found here. [Instructables via Unplggd]
Source: http://gizmodo.com/5597549/nokias-crowdsourced-design-competition-shows-fans-really-do-want-android
Ok, fair enough, Symbian is open-source and can do a small amount of multitasking. But say "an open source platform capable of multitasking" to anyone on this planet, and they'll think of Android. And rightly so—Nokia-adopting-Android rumors have circulated in the past, mostly due to an overwhelming desire from their users for a platform that's just a little bit more up-to-date than Symbian.
Nokia may've quashed those rumors just like they discarded Symbian for their high-end series of phones, but can MeeGo really save the day? I'd start looking at Android, if I were their new CEO. This crafty designer has the right idea.
But back to the design competition. There are three design sketches that you can vote for, with the winning design being turned into a 3D render by Nokia's team of artists. Whether or not it turns into an actual phone, that's for Nokia to decide. Somehow, I can't quite see it happening however. [Nokia Conversations via EuroDroid]
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