drag2share: Hackers Stealing $3 Million from Subway Means You Should Probably Pay with Cash [Security]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5870170/hackers-stealing-3-million-from-subway-means-you-should-probably-pay-with-cash

If you've eaten at a Subway recently, there's a slight chance that you might've got your credit card information stolen. Okay probably not! But a group of Romanian hackers have managed to hack into Subway cash registers and have been logging down all sorts of customer info since 2008.

According to the courts, the hackers have managed to tap into 150 different Subway locations and 50 other small retailers through each store's point-of-sale systems, gathered credit card information from 80,000 people and racked up THREE MILLION DOLLARS in fraudulent chargers. What's amazing is how terribly simple the hack was, they didn't even have to break a sweat.

The Subway owners weren't following Subway security standards and fell into the slippery slope of leaky software. According to Ars Technica:

The hackers then deployed a collection of hacking tools to the POS systems, including logging software that recorded all the input into the systems-including credit card scans. They also installed a trojan, xp.exe, onto the systems to provide a back door to reconnect to the systems to allow the installation of additional malware, and prevent any security software updates.

All the info was transferred to FTP dump sites registered to stolen credit cards and some even began printing their own credit cards (with other people's information). Next time I buy a $5 footlong, I'm paying cash. [Ars Technica]

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drag2share: AMD's Radeon 7970 Is Here: Your New Drool-Worthy Super GPU [Guts]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5870314/amds-radeon-7970-is-here-your-new-drool+worthy-super-gpu

The Radeon 7970 is packing some serious firsts: a brand new core design, and the world's first GPU using cool, efficient 28 nm transistors. But it's also designed, of course, to be fast as hell. Gamers, you're gonna want one.

The 7970's numbers are heavy as hell on paper: 3 GB of RAM, up to 32 internal computing units, the first use of PCI-E Gen 3, Direct X 11.1 support, and a fat, CPU-style L2 cache. That adds up to a potential six monitors gaming at once. And that's just with one—you can sling together up to four of these things at once. AMD is promising enormous gains over Nvidia's top cards—billing it as the world's fastest—but we'll hold off on judgment until we have something firmer than internal, synthetic benchmarks. Still, there's no reason to think this thing will be anything less than incredibly powerful, with both games (of course) and the bevy of desktop software it's capable of accelerating.

But it's not all about power! The 7970 is power with responsibility, or something. It's capable of ramping up its power consumption when needed—and scaling it down to practically zero when your desktop has been idling for a while. And it'll be quiet, unlike many GPU powerhouses—no leaf blower, if AMD is to be believed. They claim a new fan design and smarter ventilation angles will mean softer cooling. With all that horsepower, we hope so!

Again, we'll have to wait until the 7970 drops on January 9th (for $550) to see how the card stacks up IRL. If you want to punch Battlefield 3 down into submission, be excited. [AMD]

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drag2share: Stonehenge Experience: The School of Rock [App Of The Day]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/vip/~3/_Cd2XdnHgcs/stonehenge-experience-the-school-of-rock

Unravel the mysteries of Stonehenge. Did aliens build it? Was it built by Druids as a place to sacrifice virgins? Oh Stonehenge, how you taunt us with your gray boulders and alignment with the sun. Luckily I no longer have to fear what I don't understand. The new Stonehenge Experience app will answer all my questions about alien sacrifices and sun dials.

What's it do?

Like the name implies, Stonehenge Experience helps you explore the British remains in an interactive fashion. See how the stones lie in relation to the sun as it passes overhead during the summer solstice. Use your finger to excavate the remains from the surrounding landscape. If you want to feel like you're actually there, the app uses the iPhones accelerometer and gyroscope to let you walk amongst the stones.

Why do we like it?

These are the kind of apps that get me all giddy inside. Sure, fighting demons and building towers is fun. But when an app takes full advantage of the available technology to help you learn about a topic, I'm ecstatic. The app includes the making of Stonehenge which should put to bed my fears that aliens are using it to sacrifice druids.

Stonehenge Experience

Download this app for:

• iPhone, $3

The Best

Edutainment

The Worst

No Aliens

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drag2share: How to Create Synthetic Symphonies on Your Android [Video]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/vip/~3/nPuAY1rNRZI/how-to-create-synthetic-symphonies-on-an-android

The number of noteworthy music apps in Google's Android ecosystem is on the rise, but it's still weak in certain sub-categories – in particular, music-making apps. Until recently, Android showed a real dearth of high-powered music-making apps.

This was a real buzzkill for musicians (myself included) who wanted to make music on our Androids in mobile settings. Latency problems at the core of the Android OS (originally very real, and later exaggerated) and performance inconsistencies due to variation of Android devices from various manufacturers drove away the developers of serious music creation apps. Maybe they were just tired of all those comments saying "It doesn't work on my ___."

Thankfully, Android's latency problem was resolved, and the upshot is surprisingly-capable mobile apps including Audiotool Sketch.

Basically a pared-down version of the Audiotool web app, Audiotool Sketch for Android offers one melodic synth and two drum machines that clone popular analog sounds. It also makes quick, simple work of creating and editing beats, in stark contrast to apps like ReBirth for iOS, which have potential, features-wise, but look like the dashboard of a space shuttle.

Most importantly, for those that want to take this past the realm of "fun toy" and into the "useful tool" category, the output audio doesn't sound like you made it on a cellphone, as is apparent even in the following video demonstration. (The app looks like it really shines on an Android tablet, but unfortunately our Kindle Fire, which ranks among the most affordable models, is not supported.)

After setting the length of your melodic segment, you pick the notes in the melodic sequencer. Then, you can set accents and slides to each note and apply filters and waveform editors to home in on exactly the sound you want, while octave controls let you program bass and melody lines from the same interface.

And it scales, so to speak: Once you've programed a pattern, you can copy/paste it to one of the banks where you can edit and add variations, or randomize the sequence for automatic inspiration.

Two included drum machines work similarly to each other, but with slightly different sounds and ways to edit parameters. Working in concert, they provide a variety of rhythmic options. As with the melodic sequencer, you can also set the duration of drum sequences to be longer or shorter, to fit the groove.

An overview window handles the mixing of all of these elements. There, you can adjust volume and left/right panning for each virtual device and add delay (with adjustable mix and feedback). Also helpful: Pattern switching can be done from the mixing window, which means you could use this thing in a live composition/performance scenario. BPM is adjustable from this window with a simple slider, or by tapping - another essential feature in my book.

That about covers it, but this thorough video tutorial covers the features more in-depth - but really, for its current discounted rate of $1, which developer Audiotool says will be only through the end of the year, Audiotool Sketch is definitely worth seeing for yourself.

Evolver.fm observes, tracks and analyzes the music apps scene, with the belief that it's crucial to how humans experience music, and how that experience is evolving.

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drag2share: Intel's First Android Smartphone Plays Blu-ray Quality Video Without Breaking a Sweat [Intel]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5869995/this-is-the-first-intel+powered-smartphone

Intel is late to the smartphone game, sure, but its Medfield system-on-chip has been touted as the firm's make-or-break venture into the market. Now the first working Intel Android phone is in the wild—and it seems mighty promising.

The guys over at Technology Review were lucky enough to get a sneak-preview of Intel's reference designs—devices which have been sent out to inspire manufacturers interested in building products around Intel's latest technology. Intel hopes that its first all-in-one mobile processor design can strip away some of the luster from UK-based ARM, which currently dominates the Android market.

The Technology Review team actually got their hands on a pair of Medfield prototypes running Android: a phone similar in size to the iPhone, running Gingerbread, and a tablet close to the iPad 2 in thickness, running Ice Cream Sandwich. So, are they any good?

From what they say, the phone seems promising. They report that it could play Blu-Ray-quality video and stream it to TV, and that web browsing was smooth and fast. Apparently the Medfield chip is designed specifically to speed up Android apps and Web browsing, so that probably has something to do with it.

Elsewhere, the camera seems impressive. With a burst mode which captures 10 full-size, eight-megapixel images in 0.66 seconds — equivalent to a rate of 15 frames per second — it seems real effort has been put into the image-processing capabilities of the devices.

The Intel tablet, which uses the same Medfield chip as the phone, runs Ice Cream Sandwich. With a slightly larger screen than the iPad 2, it was about the same in thickness and weight, and their short trial suggests that it was much nicer to use than many current Android tablets. Which isn't that hard, but it sounds promising.

Of course, there's the ever-looming question of battery life that has dogged Intel's mobile efforts in the past. All that power could mean a whole lot of drain. Still, Intel's wanted a piece of this market so badly for so long, one hopes that they wouldn't be diving in unless they'd really cracked it.

Intel VP Stephen Smith told Technology Review that Intel "expect products based on these [chips] to be announced in the first half of 2012." But with these references designs already with the big manufacturers, might we see some early announcements at CES in January? Let's wait and see. [Technology Review via The Verge; Image: Intel]

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