Technology

Ed Hunsinger / Laughing Squid:

Chatroulette Map: Not So Anonymous Anymore  —  Whenever people mention the random webcam site, Chatroulette, it inevitably leads to talk of how there are certain less-than-desirable webcam chat partners on the service.  Some would wager that the guise of anonymity on Chatroulette helps these users feel a bit safer when baring it all.

Jason Chen / Gizmodo:

Sony Motion Controller is Called PlayStation Move, Launches Fall 2010  —  Sony's finally put a name to their motion controller, and it's called PlayStation Move.  Live Updating  —  Sony will have multiple packages.  A standalone Move controller, or a package with PlayStation Eye + Move + a game, or an entire console solution.

angry tapir writes "A Transportation Security Administration analyst has been indicted with tampering with databases used by the TSA to identify possible terrorists who may be trying to fly in the US. If convicted, he faces 10 years in prison."

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John Cook / TechFlash:

RealNetworks' Rob Glaser on why Apple's model must be stopped  —  RealNetworks Chairman Rob Glaser has battled Apple over the years.  And that antagonistic relationship was on display — albeit subtly — this morning as Glaser encouraged the mobile industry to work together in a more collaborative and open manner.

An anonymous reader writes "We all know about the Mythical Man-Month, the argument that adding more programmers to a software project just makes it later and later. A Linux startup out of MIT claims to have busted the myth, using an MIT holiday month to hire 20 college student interns to get all their work done and quadrupling its productivity."

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Bloomberg:

FTC Said to Ask Google Rivals for Statement on AdMob, May Signal Challenge  —  U.S. regulators are seeking sworn declarations from Google Inc. competitors and advertisers as part of their probe of the Internet company's bid to buy AdMob Inc., indicating the government may challenge the deal …

Marc Benioff / TechCrunch:

The Facebook Imperative Cannot Be Stopped  —  Editor's note: This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com.  In it, he responds to critics of his last guest post arguing that enterprise software should be more like Facebook.

itwbennett writes "Niney of the 249 Zeus command-and-control servers were knocked offline overnight when two ISPs, named Troyak and Group 3, were taken offline. Whoever was behind the takedown 'just decided to knock out a large area of cybercrime, and this was probably one of the easiest ways to do it,' said Kevin Stevens, a researcher with SecureWorks. As with the McColo takedown of just over a year ago, Troyak's upstream providers seem to have knocked it off the Internet, Cisco said in a statement. 'The ISP was "De-peered,"' Cisco said. 'Troyak's upstream network providers effectively pulled the plug on Troyak's router, refusing to transmit its traffic.'"

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adeelarshad82 writes "After eight years of development, remote gaming service OnLive is scheduled to roll out on June 17 for Windows and Mac. The company also announced its service pricing: users will need to pay $14.95 per month, which will allow them access to the service. However, the company did not disclose the price to rent or purchase games. 'It is partnering in this launch with publishers including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, 2K Games, THQ and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. The games will also include new releases like Mass Effect 2, Borderlands, Assassin’s Creed II, as well as a bunch of other titles. Perlman anticipates anywhere from a dozen to 25 titles to be available at launch time, and more after that, depending on how negotiations with other publishers proceed.'"

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snydeq writes "Google has launched the Google Apps Marketplace, providing a venue for third-party, cloud-based applications to supplement Google's own online applications. The program enables integrations with such applications as Google Gmail, Documents, Sites, and Calendar. All told, the effort begins with 50 vendors participating, including Atlassian, NetSuite, Skytap, and Zoho. Participation in Google Apps Marketplace is open to customers of the Premier, Standard, and Education editions of Google Apps. Applications are linked to the marketplace via REST Web services and APIs including OpenID and OAuth."

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Official Google Reader Blog:

And now for something completely different  —  Since I've been working on Google Reader, I've told a lot of my friends about how great it is.  And while some of them try Reader and find it really useful, many of them aren't interested in taking the time to get Reader set up.

Cleve Nettles / 9 to 5 Mac:

New Gestures coming to an iPhone/iPad near you: triple tap and long press  —  On the surface, the latest iPhone 3.2 Beta 4 SDK didn't have much new information.  Diving a little deeper however, we find some very exciting news.  —  In the gestures folder, you'll see two new types of commands …

alobar72 writes "I have quite a few old maps (several hundreds; 100+ years old, some are already damaged – so time is not on my side). What I want to do is to digitize them and to apply geo-coordinates to them so I can use them as overlays for openstreetmap data or such. Obviously I cannot put those maps onto my €80 scanner and go. Some of them are really large (1.5m x 1.5m roughly, I believe) and they need to be treated with great care because the paper is partly damaged. So firstly I need a method or service provider that can do the digitizing without damaging them. Secondly I need a hint what the best method is to apply geo coordinates to those maps then. The maps are old and landscape and places have changed, it maybe difficult to identify exact spots. So: are there any experiences or tips I could use?"

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Adam Pash / Lifehacker:

Google Reader Play: Fullscreen Playback of Popular/Recommended Reader Items  —  Google Reader Play is a new Reader feature that plays a slideshow of cool items from around the web based on the stories you star.  It's like a 10-foot viewing experience for your newsreader.

ral writes "The human tongue can taste more than sweet, sour, salty, bitter and protein. Researchers have added fat to that list. Dr. Russell Keast, an exercise and nutrition sciences professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, told Slashfood, 'This makes logical sense. We have sweet to identify carbohydrate/sugars, and umami to identify protein/amino acids, so we could expect a taste to identify the other macronutrient: fat.' In the Deakin study, which appears in the latest issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, Dr. Keast and his team gave a group of 33 people fatty acids found in common foods, mixed in with nonfat milk to disguise the telltale fat texture. All 33 could detect the fatty acids to at least a small degree."

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An anonymous reader writes "'Alien' and 'Star Wars' art director Roger Christian was given £25,000 by George Lucas in 1979 to make a 25-minute medieval B-feature called 'Black Angel.' This spiritual tale of a knight on a strange quest was inspired by Christian's near-fatal fever when he fell ill in Mexico making 'Lucky Lady.' 'Black Angel' made a huge impression, not least because it shared the dark tone of 'Empire Strikes Back.' John Boorman showed it to the crew of 'Excalibur' as a template for how he wanted his film to look, and 'Black Angel' went on to influence films such as 'Dragonslayer' and 'Legend' throughout the 1980s and beyond. But it has not been seen by anyone since 'Empire' finished its theatrical run. Two weeks ago Roger Christian unearthed a print of a film that was thought lost forever, and in this interview he talks about 'Black Angel,' and provides the only picture from the film that has ever hit the Internet."

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Neil Hughes / AppleInsider:

Apple iPhone targeted in patent lawsuit over sync, Bluetooth  —  Apple — along with AT&T, Research in Motion and a number of other mobile companies — is the defendant in a new patent suit that covers a broad range of smartphone related technologies, including e-mail syncing and Bluetooth connectivity.

HipToday writes "As posted on the OpenBSD Journal, OpenSSH 5.4 has been released: 'Some highlights of this release are the disabling of protocol 1 by default, certificate authentication, a new "netcat mode," many changes on the sftp front (both client and server) and a collection of assorted bugfixes. The new release can already be found on a large number of mirrors and of course on www.openssh.com.'"

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Aaron / YouTube Biz Blog:

YouTube calling: Now serving ads on the YouTube mobile site  —  Mobile phones are rapidly becoming essential tools for surfing the web, connecting with friends, and sharing and watching video online, and we're seeing these effects at YouTube.  The YouTube mobile site is more popular than ever …

comScore:

comScore Reports January 2010 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share  —  Use of Social Media via Mobile Sees Considerable Gains in Past Three Months  —  comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from the comScore MobiLens service …

Zordak writes "Amazon's infamous '1-click' patent has been in reexamination at the USPTO for almost four years. Patently-O now reports that 'the USPTO confirmed the patentability of original claims 6-10 and amended claims 1-5 and 11-26. The approved-of amendment adds the seeming trivial limitation that the one-click system operates as part of a 'shopping cart model.' Thus, to infringe the new version of the patent, an eCommerce retailer must use a shopping cart model (presumably non-1-click) alongside of the 1-click version. Because most retail eCommerce sites still use the shopping cart model, the added limitation appears to have no practical impact on the patent scope.'" Also covered at TechFlash.

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Barence writes "A debate that crops up time and again is whether it's better to have a dedicated keyboard on your smartphone or whether an on-screen keyboard with text correction is adequate. Some phones with screen-based keyboards have started to provide tactile feedback, either using an ultra-quick spin of their vibration alert or, like the BlackBerry Storm2, using clever piezo-electric technology to simulate the feel of a button press. But which system works best? PC Pro's Paul Ockendon gathered six of the most popular handsets around and put them through a timed typing test to see which proved quickest and most typo-free."

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52-year-old Anthony Digati was arrested for trying to extort $200,000 from an insurance firm by threatening to spam them with six million emails unless they paid up. Digati said he would use a spam service and his amazing talents as a "huge social networker" to drag the company "through the muddiest waters imaginable" and presumably unfriend everyone. He added that the price would increase to $3 million if they failed to pay up by Monday, according to federal authorities.

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Eric Engleman / TechFlash:

Amazon.com's 1-Click patent confirmed following re-exam  —  The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is confirming Amazon.com's controversial 1-Click patent following a re-examination that lasted more than four years.  —  Amazon's 1-Click has come under a lot of fire over the years from critics …

kang327 writes "As Java developers we are used to the familiar file-based user interface that is used by all of the major IDEs. A team at Brown University has developed an IDE for Java called Code Bubbles that makes a fairly radical departure from current IDEs — it is based on fragments instead of files. The idea is that you can see many different pieces of code at once. Fragments can form groups, have automatic layout assistance, wrap long lines based on syntax, and exist in a virtual workspace that you can pan. A video shows reading and editing code, opening different kinds of info such as Javadocs, bug reports and notes, annotating and sharing workspaces, and debugging with bubbles. They report on several user studies that show the system increases performance for the tasks studied, and also that professional developers were enthusiastic about using it. There is also a Beta that you can sign up for."

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SkinnyGuy writes "The only thing more remarkable than NewEgg shipping fake Core i7 CPUs to customers is getting your hands on one and checking it out. Apparently there are only a couple hundred of these things in existence and Gearlog somehow managed to get and unbox one. The images are fascinating."

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andylim writes "Separate teams at Oxford university and Zentium, a South Korean company, are working on next-gen augmented reality solutions, which make it possible to fuse real and 3D computer-generated visuals on the fly using mobile phones. The team at Oxford university has named its solution Parallel Tracking and Mapping (PTAM) and it has licensed its technology to QderoPateo LLC, which has ambitious plans to grow the mobile augmented reality market and create an augmented reality search and gaming engine running for its 'Ouidoo' smart phone. Zentium's solution is called D-Track and is being used to develop the first markerless mobile augmented reality pet, called iKat. D-Track's mapping technology is very similar to PTAM and allows your phone to recognise the space in front of the camera and create an appropriate space for an augmented reality object or pet."

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Leena Rao / TechCrunch:

Get Satisfaction Turns To Facebook To Socialize Customer Support  —  Two years ago customer support startup Get Satisfaction turned its ear to Twitter to help its clients monitor Twitter for mentions of brands.  Get Satisfaction makes a network of customer support forums where customers …

On last night's Colbert Report, Stephen covered the Pringles recall that's rocking the nation. Evidently, two flavors of Pringles are being pulled from the shelves, because they may be tainted with salmonella.

The best hybrid cars of today can only deliver about 48 miles per gallon. By using this newly developed fuel injection system a test vehicle was measured at achieving 64 miles per gallon in highway driving. This is approximately a 50% increase in fuel efficiency in a gasoline engine.