If money is no object, the Astro A50
is about the best pair you can get. For a $300 price tag, you'll get a
wireless headset with some of the best sound quality in gaming
headphones. The set usually rates high for comfort, despite being a
little heavier than most similarly sized models. It has great features
for volume control and a mixer on the right earplate.
This brand has been turning out quality headphones for years. One of its wireless sets, the Skullcandy PLYR 2
has three different audio profiles to match different types of games.
The lightweight model is especially good for comfort. It's also an
inexpensive choice, running about $130 for a pair.
If you're looking for your first pair of PC gaming headphones, or you just want to stay on a budget, then the Logitech G230
is a good entry point. It has fewer snazzy features than the more
expensive models, and the microphone setup may not be ideal for serious
voice chatters. But at $59, it's one of the best bargains in terms of
cost for sound quality and comfort.
Razer makes many accessories for gamers and has expanded into a few choices for headphones. The Razer Kraken Pro
is one of the strongest options available from the brand. It has
powerful sound quality and range for such an inexpensive set, as well as
a built-in microphone. A set costs $70 to $80.
This option from Razer has the distinct benefit of portability. Razer Hammerhead Pro
is a good choice if you might be gaming at a friend's house or if you
want a set to perform double-duty as transit headphones. The in-ear
headphones have great sound quality, with serious bass for such small
buds.
This is a headset for controlling your audio
experience. With options to create and save sound profiles for different
games, and a multiplayer-focused Scout Mode, the Sound Blaster Recon3D Omega Wireless
is a solid choice for people who want serious audio across multiple
gaming platforms. They're not a cheap investment considering the almost
$200 list price, but nevertheless, a solid all-around choice.
This model uses a USB wire, so it's a PC-only option. For that subset of gamers, the Corsair Vengeance 1500
is an excellent choice, using a built-in sound processor and large 50
mm drivers to deliver top audio quality. It's reasonably priced at about
$100.
Google can't say
"mission accomplished" just yet, but the search giant made it clear that
the Internet is winning its decade-old war against phishing and spam
emails.
In a blog post published Friday,
Google said the Internet-wide efforts against unauthenticated emails,
which can be used by spammers and phishers to fake email addresses and
deceive users, are working. In fact, the vast majority of non-spam email
that Gmail users receive is authenticated with standards designed to
fight phishing.
"91.4% of non-spam emails sent to Gmail users come from authenticated
senders, which helps Gmail filter billions of impersonating email
messages a year from entering our users’ inboxes," Google security
researchers Elie Bursztein and Vijay Eranti said in the post.
Since 2004, Internet industry groups and authorities have been
pushing for authentication standards, called DomainKey Identified Email
and Sender Policy Framework, to be widely enforced. Google said that as
much as 74.7% of incoming email on Gmail use both DKIM and SPF, while
14.4% use SPF only and 2.25% use DKIM only. That leaves just 8.6% of
emails as non-authenticated. But the war isn't over yet. As Google points out in the post,
phishers can still target unprotected domains, and even protected ones,
if they use weak encryption. That's why Bursztein and and Eranti
suggested using at least 1024 bit keys, as "the use of weak
cryptographic keys — ones that are 512 bits or less — is one of the
major sources of DKIM configuration errors (21%)."
If you often find yourself waiting with bated breath for a time
traveler to appear in your midst, and give you the secret to the
time-space continuum, we've got just the thing for you: a Craigslist ad.
Because all time travelers must be seeking out friends somewhere, right?
This Doghouse Diaries
comic describes the best way to address time travelers so you don't
spook them. And remember, you really have to emphasize your ability to
keep secrets.
The world's largest vessel just set sail off the coast of South Korea.
The Prelude is 1,601 feet long — that's 150 feet longer than the Empire State Building is tall. Owned by Shell, the vessel's massive size has earned it the title of largest object currently afloat.
The bright red vessel weighs 600,000 tons and is 243 feet wide, according to Wired.
Construction of the Prelude, which has three engines that pack 20,100 horsepower, took a full year to complete.
So how does Shell plan to use the mammoth vessel? It will be a
floating liquefied natural gas facility, where natural gas will be
harvested from the depths of the ocean, processed on board and
transferred to transport ships waiting in the sea. Wired reported that the Prelude will produce 3.9 million tons each year.
The floating facility will take some of the strain of gas production off the environment, Shell said in a release.
"It also avoids the potential environmental impact of constructing and
operating a plant on land, including laying pipelines to shore and
building other infrastructure."
Since the Prelude is so large, it will require a system of pulleys
and levers to haul it across the sea. So while it is entirely mobile,
the vessel will remain stationary for large blocks of time. Its first
destination, for example, is off the coast of Western Australia, where
it will anchor for 25 years.
Responsible for 175 Olympic-sized swimming pools' worth of natural
gas at any time, it isn't hard to understand why the vessel has put
safety systems in place to combat weather troubles. A turret the height of the Statue of Liberty
has been constructed to run through the Prelude, ensuring stability
even during a Category 5 hurricane, as the mooring system gently absorbs
the force of winds.
While the Prelude will begin its trek to Australia in 2017, Shell is already working on the designs of an even bigger vessel, according to Reuters.
What do you get the coffee drinker who has everything? Consider Starbucks‘ version of the “Black Card”—
a limited-edition, $450, fancy looking gift card, ideal for that
special someone who can’t bear paying with something as pedestrian as
cash, credit or even an app. For the second holiday season in a row, the
coffee chain is offering its over-the-top metal gift cards, which go on sale at Gilt.com starting Friday at noon.
Before you spit out your latte, consider that this may not be as
ridiculous as it sounds. Superfluous, yes, but the gift/reward cards
come with $400 in Starbucks credit (enough for 200 coffees!) and offer
the highest-level rewards membership.
The company claims that the $50 difference doesn’t even cover the cost
to produce each card, “so there really is a strong value to the
customer,” spokeswoman Linda Mills said in an email. She went on: “It’s
completely handmade and features an artisan rose metal base with
rose-colored coating. Starbucks lettering is laser-etched on the front,
and since it’s in such a small quantity, we do incur quite a bit of
expense to produce them.”
Recent history suggests the chain is on to something. Last year, Starbucks offered 5,000 cards in a stainless steel color, and USA Today
reports they sold out in about six minutes. Recap: That’s $2.25 million
worth of gift cards in 360 seconds. (Now you can spit out your latte.)
This year, only 1,000 of the cards will be sold — for a total of
$450,000 — because Starbucks wants it to be “a very premium, exclusive
offering.” Well, it sure beats a fruitcake.
Congratulations, libertarians, your clever little digital
currency based on nothing but arithmetic, arrogance and
faux-revolutionary Kool-Aid has been smeared in US Senate-love
and slid all the way up to the US$1200 mark. Bitcoin is being taken
seriously in serious quarters, it seems. Well done. So now it's time to
build some structure and regulation around it.
Cue the sound of a million crypto-currency fans screeching a thousand
well-parrotted slogans that "explain" why every other monetary system
will soon collapse and nations-states will crumble — and why anyone who
disagrees is just an ignorant slave to outmoded economic thinking.
Actually, the "why" is never explained, it's just asserted.
Back in April I discussed how Bitcoin is more ideology than trustworthy currency,
noting such fun facts as Bitcoin's value seeming to track the number of
people searching for it on Google, and that even boosters like Pirate
Party founder Rickard Falkvinge consider it "still far from ready for
prime time".
The comments in reply were a fascinating jumble of ideas, admittedly
not all of which were completely loopy. But you'll get a much better
idea of the effervescent assertions emanating from the Bitcoin
wonderland by following the Twitter account @bitcoin_txt, which picks out the highlights.
These recent examples illustrate the image problems Bitcoin needs to
overcome before ordinary non-geek folk can start taking it seriously.
Bitcoin as magic: "BitCoin will end ALL Hunger & Poverty (at
last) through humanities caring and sharing, by instantaneously
providing funds to those in need" and "BitCoin heralds the end of the
misuse of money and other ponzi schemes including, pensions, copyright,
patents, insurance, etc."
Bitcoin is for real men: "The Rise of Bitcoin: Why I for one welcome
our new Neckbeard Overlords and how it will lead to Game-Over for
Feminism" and "You cannot suppress the free currency. Go back to your
clan of ugly, hairy, women" and "Feminism will suffer if crypto
currencies take off simply because of reduced tax receipts; no more
feminist suckling at the State teat." and "Not only are men going their
own way, but they're starting their own currency and economy separate
from the feminist system."
Bitcoin as infinite money: "Sigh. Bitcoins are worth at least 126k
dollars each." and "a lot of assumptions are made, but i think
eventually the bit coin might be worth 1 million or even more."
Bitcoin as alternate history: "THIS IS HUGE! The stuff we are working with is what scared Bill Gates into retirement!"
OK, it's easy to ridicule an idea by focusing on its loopiest
supporters. But if Bitcoin wants to be a serious contender for an
everyday digital currency, it doesn't need any more of this over-the-top
rhetoric, it needs stability and trustworthiness — and while its
monetary value may have been soaring on the back of rampant speculation
these last few months, those two key attributes haven't exactly been
keeping pace.
Bitcoin's wild price swings represent a risk factor that should
prevent any sane business from entering into contracts based on the
currency. But even if that risk can be hedged against, there's the core
issue of trust — not trust in the integrity of Bitcoin's seemingly
robust cryptographic protocols, although researchers have warned of fundamental flaws, but trust in Bitcoin's financial community.
When young Australian TradeFortress had a million dollars worth of Bitcoin stolen
last month, he didn't report it to the police. "The police don't have
access to any more information than any user does when it comes to
Bitcoin," he told ABC Radio, seemingly oblivious to all the news stories
about law enforcement's access to network data and his own
responsibilities as a good-faith custodian of other people's money —
although perhaps he was also worried about what the police might think
of some of his other online activities.
When some $100 million worth of Bitcoin was stolen from the Sheep Marketplace
a few weeks later, we see a few lone hackers trying to track the
bandits, but once more no professional law enforcement activity — but
given that Sheep Marketplace was a successor to Silk Road, we can guess
why.
People accept the risks inherent in handling physical cash because
they can mitigate against them with appropriate security procedures.
There are specialists to help them, and when cash does get stolen the
police are generally brought in to help.
But with Bitcoin, at least so far, the balance seems all wrong. The
computing power devoted to transaction-verification and mining is now 256 times the power of the world's top 500 supercomputers combined — does that strike you as efficient? — but rather less effort seems to go into building a trustworthy community.
Meanwhile the speculative Bitcoin bubble continues to inflate.
Hard-core Bitcoiners are presumably getting sick of it being compared
with the tulip mania of 1637,
but the parallels are obvious, what with the constant hype about the
ever-soaring value of some random commodity — because Bitcoin is
generally being treated as a commodity rather than a currency.
China's government banned
financial institutions from trading in bitcoin on Thursday, in what
analysts said was a restrained first step towards regulating the digital
currency that has exploded in popularity in China and soared in value
in recent months.
A statement by the central bank and four other
agencies said that, while the computer-generated currency does not yet
pose a threat to China's financial system, it carries risks. It did not,
however, curtail the use of bitcoin by individuals.
"I think
it's measured and it's positive," said Zennon Kapron, of the financial
consultancy Kapronasia. "It does add legitimacy to the idea that it
could be a nationwide accepted currency."
The value of bitcoins
on Chinese exchanges fell after the announcement, however, with one
expert predicting the price could halve in the short-term. Digital
currencies are generally highly volatile.
Bitcoins have seen
their value relative to the dollar skyrocket some 800 percent in the
past two months as speculators have piled into the currency, according
to bitcoinity.org.
While there is no official data available,
bitcoin market operators say Chinese nationals are major participants in
the market and hold an outsized share of the total number of bitcoins
in circulation. Shanghai-based BTC China has recently become the world's
largest bitcoin exchange by volume.
A statement on the website
of the People's Bank of China (PBOC) said that the government would act
to prevent money laundering risks from bitcoin, which is not backed by a
government or central bank.
The PBOC may have cause to be concerned about bitcoins, which are
anonymous, untraceable, and can be carried on memory sticks or
transmitted electronically, because they represent a potential hole in
the country's capital controls.
However, analysts point out that,
given the tiny value of the total bitcoins in circulation relative to
other currencies, it is unlikely to have much impact on the wider
economy.
EYES ON BITCOIN
More cause for worry is the way
these digital currencies have engendered a new wave of creative
criminality focused on hacking online platforms and stealing bitcoins
stored there, and their potential for use in money laundering, bribery
and purchases of illicit products such as drugs and weapons.
The
government will require trading platforms that deal in virtual
currencies such as bitcoin to register with telecommunications
authorities, it said.
The notice was issued jointly by the PBOC,
the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the China Banking
Regulatory Commission and the China Securities Regulatory Commission and
China Insurance Regulatory Commission.
"This is an industry that
will need to be governed or regulated. The safety and the well-being of
the common user has to be taken into consideration. All this is
expected," said Ron Cao, Managine Director at Lightspeet
Venture
Partners, which recently invested $5 million in BTC China.
"'We've got a long way to go. This thing needs to be regulated at some
point. We're studying it. Don't jump into it.' My read is that's the
tone of the message."
Bitcoin traders sold on the Chinese government's announcement.
On the Chinese platform FXBTC.com, the yuan-bitcoin exchange rate
dropped as much as about 20 percent after the news before rebounding
slightly to around 5,800 yuan per bitcoin in heavy trading.
On BTC-e, the dollar-bitcoin rate had fallen about 11 percent to about $945 from $1,063 before the news.
Cao said he would not be surprised to see the value of bitcoins fall as much as 50 percent over the next week or two.
Many bitcoin proponents say the currency's volatility will have to
flatten out before it can be adopted more widely as a near-frictionless
means of payment and regulation may help.
More regulation was likely, although the initial ban on financial institutions may eventually be lifted, analysts said.
"I would be cautious about jumping the gun and taking today's
announcement as indicative as how the space will be regulated in the
future," said Mark Natkin, of Beijing-based Marbridge Consulting.
"Once they have a better idea of how the market works and which players
are likely to emerge as the leading players, then they'll come out with
firmer regulations, with more specific licensing requirements," and
possibly minimum capital requirements for firms entering the sector, he
said.
A scene in the 2004 film "I, Robot" involves an army of rogue NS-5
humanoids establishing a curfew and imprisoning the citizens of Chicago,
circa 2035, inside their homes. That's not how Knightscope envisions
the coming day of deputized bots.
In its far less frightful future, friendly R2-D2 lookalikes patrol
our streets, school hallways, and company campuses to keep us safe and
put real-time data to good use. Instead of the Asimov-inspired NS-5,
Knightscope, a Silicon Valley-based robotics company, is developing the
K5.
Officially dubbed the K5 Autonomous Data Machine, the 300-pound,
5-foot-tall mobile robot will be equipped with nighttime video cameras,
thermal imaging capabilities, and license plate recognition skills. It
will be able to function autonomously for select operations, but more
significantly, its software will provide crime prediction that's
reminiscent, the company claims, of the "precog" plot point of "Minority
Report."
"It can see, hear, feel, and smell and it will roam around autonomously
24/7," said CEO William Santana Li, a former Ford Motor executive, in an
interview with CNET.
At the moment, the K5 is only a prototype, and Knightscope next year
will launch a beta program with select partners. But the company is
shooting to have the K5 fully deployed by 2015 on a machine-as-a-service
business model, meaning clients would pay by the hour for a monthly
bill, based on 40-hour weeks, of $1,000. The hourly rate of $6.25 means
the cost of the K5 would be competitive with the wages of many a
low-wage human security guard.
Servicing and monitoring of the bots will depend on client
needs, Li said, with either Knightscope or the customer employing
someone to manage the bots full-time.
Crime prediction is one of the more eye-popping features of the K5, but
the bot is also packed to the gills with cutting-edge surveillance
technology. It has LIDAR mapping -- a technique using lasers to analyze
reflected light -- to aid its autonomous movement. "It takes in data
from a 3D real-time map that it creates and combines that with
differential GPS and some proximity sensors and does a probabilistic
analysis to figure out exactly where it should be going on its own," Li
explained.
It also has behavioral analysis capabilities and enough camera, audio,
and other sensor technology to pump out 90 terabytes of data a year per
unit. Down the line, the K5 will be equipped with facial recognition and
even the ability to sniff out emanations from chemical and biological
weapons, as well as airborne pathogens. It will be able to travel up to
18 mph, and later models will include the ability to maneuver curbs and
other terrain.
(Credit:
Knightscope)
The K5 will not be armed. Still, teens with late-night bot-tipping
ambitions had best beware, lest their hijinks be recorded for posterity,
and possible prosecution. Li said that messing with a Knightscope bot
-- which would be difficult given its weight -- will have serious
ramifications, as would tampering with any other form of security
equipment on private property.
Still, the most sci-fi of all its features, the crime prediction
algorithms, do sound too good to be true. And to be more precise, the K5
won't be so much predicting crime as much as it will be analyzing
multiple data points simultaneously and knowing when a situation may be
on the precipice of becoming dangerous.
"Predicting crime is being deployed today, but it's unfortunately using a
lot of historical data," Li explained. "What doesn't exist in that
algorithm is real-time on-site data. So if you actually had data that
was fresh, that was actually from the location you're trying to analyze,
it would make that algorithm much more robust." Li noted that the main
goal of the crime prediction algorithms and autonomous function is to be
able to push out an alert early with that kind of data, as well as aid
the K5 in knowing when to charge itself and what time of day or night is
optimal for uploading and downloading data in a specific environment.
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"That extra 30 seconds or that extra 17 minutes ... that time could
actually save someone's life," Li added. The K5 will require a human
being on the other end, both to manage it in the event it cannot rely on
autonomous movement and to be able to interpret the alert data and loop
in the necessary law enforcement agencies.
"What security 3.0 looks like: it's a human, it's robotics, and it's actual intelligence," Li said. A K5 in every school, eventually Security bots are one of the
healthier subsets of the robotics industry. iRobot, maker of the
popular Roomba vacuum bot, supplies both consumer and military-grade
bots that perform a multitude of functions from cleaning floors, pools,
and gutters to aiding bomb squads. And a number of smaller companies and
research university projects have cooked up everything from consumer
robots for personal property to helicopter drones for surveillance
purposes.
Where the robotics industry has been lacking is in providing public
spaces and large businesses with an all-purpose and highly capable bot
that anyone in need of security and surveillance can employ, with
military-grade guts that detect deviations from everyday activity.
"Our plan is to be able to cut crime by 50 percent in an area. When we
do that, every mayor across this planet is going to be giving us a
call," Li said confidently.
Knightscope derives some of its crime-fighting motivation from recent
school shootings. "Must a hero be human?" the company asked when it
announced in September that the K5 is being designed with the Sandy Hook
Promise in mind. It hopes to have its bot one day patrolling schools
because "you are never going to have an armed officer in every school,"
Li told The New York Times recently.
(Credit:
Knightscope)
Li cited other examples of situations where security professionals could
reasonably expect to need assistance, such as large-scale concert
venues and sporting events. The goal is twofold: to offer a security
robot that is vastly more capable than current options, but also to
reassure the public that the the presence of K5 units is no threat to
privacy.
"The likelihood a criminal is going to walk into an area with a few
hundred droids, and the community is engaged using this tool and that
transparency is there and there's no privacy concerns -- a criminal is
going to have second thoughts," Lee said.
While no schools have yet signed up to put K5 machines outside
classrooms, Knightscope has partnered with FIFA to bring its bot to the
World Cup next year summer in Brazil. It's also working, Li noted, with
"some of the largest malls," some private security companies, and a
well-known insurance firm.
As for whether Knightscope is working with any defense contractors or
the US military, Li was tight-lipped, adding that the company had been
approached but could not talk specifics. A better security guard -- at the expense of human jobs While
keeping schools safe is an undeniably noble pursuit, Knightscope, with
its competitive hourly pricing model, is also targeting the security
industry from the bottom up, taking aim at the particularly vulnerable
group of 1.3 million private security guards nationwide who are
typically non-unionized workers and who mostly earn a minimum wage that
amounts to around $23,000 annually.
Even then, that makes the K5 -- at $6.25 an hour and $36,000 a year,
with each unit capable of performing up to three eight-hour shifts a day
-- a job-killing prospect. "It is triple-shift-capable," Li said when
discussing the K5's endurance, noting that the machine can run up to 24
hours on a single charge.
Li and co-founder Stacey Stephens, a former Texas police officer, chose
Sunnyvale, Calif., for Knightscope's headquarters, as a way to appeal to
the needs of Apple, Facebook, and the many other Silicon Valley
institutions with sprawling campuses and elaborate security needs.
And Knightscope relies on the commonplace line of argument touting the
benefits of automation. "That gives a security company a tool that's
much more cost-effective and gives security guards and law enforcement a
much more meaningful job," Li said. "Those jobs are miserable for a lot
of folks."
Google, which maintains a sprawling facility in nearby Mountain View, is
currently tangled up in a long-running labor dispute between its
non-unionized security guards and the contractor it hires, Security
Industry Specialists. Whether the company would do away with security
workers aiming to unionize and replace them with robots like the K5 is a
debate that is now more timely than ever.
(Credit:
Knightscope)
Kevin O'Donnell, a spokesman for the Service Employees International
Union's Stand for Security campaign that handles disputes of this
nature, doesn't place any blame on Knightscope or the K5 for potential
displacement of security guard workers down the line due to automation.
Rather, he puts the responsibility on tech companies.
"I would say that companies like Apple and Google need to think about
the impact of these decisions on the community in Silicon Valley,"
O'Donnell said. "What is going to be the economic impact on the
community? Already, you see huge rates of homelessness in Silicon
Valley, huge rates of poverty, and huge rates of food stamp
participation."
Knightscope has not announced any official partnerships with Silicon
Valley tech companies for its 2014 beta, but did disclose that will be
setting up K5 units in a "particularly large Silicon Valley city."
"What security 3.0 looks like: it's a human, it's robotics, and it's actual intelligence." William Santana Li, CEO, Knightscope
Still, Li is adamant about Knightscope's vision of bringing to reality
what many feel to be the inevitability of automation closer, and sounds a
theme often heard from proponents of robots. "Let the human do the
strategic work, and the machines do the monotonous and sometimes
dangerous work," he said.
O'Donnell pointed out, meanwhile, that even if automation opens up new
opportunities, that doesn't automatically equate to better employment of
security guards. "If new employment is generated, what kinds of jobs
are these going to be? Are they going to be good jobs, and will they
sustain communities?" he asked.
"And of course," he added, "who will have access to those jobs?" Eyes and ears on every street corner Even if you buy into the
proposed benefits of automation and the need for more high-tech
security in schools and businesses, privacy issues boil to the surface
most notably when it comes to the K5's role in public spaces.
But Li likens the potential privacy infringements of the K5's video and
audio recording capabilities -- not to mention its facial and license
plate recognition -- to necessary evils that could become
inconsequential when weighed against the benefits of robotic security.
"If you're in the public, the assumption of your privacy is a little bit
different than in your home," Li said. When asked about the possibility
of making people uncomfortable with the 360-degree image-capturing
capabilities of the K5, Li defended the approach of pushing the
boundaries of privacy in the name of innovation. "Fear doesn't effect or
make a positive change. Technology can make a huge change in change in
saving people's lives. Our intentions are honorable here," he added.
The company is aiming to make the K5's crime data publicly available on a
Web-based platform. It hopes that that measure will reassure
communities that the K5 can be a positive force for public safety.
"There's been some concerns about facial recognition," Li acknowledged.
"But what if I told you that you could actually match the kid to the
right license plate to the right
car
so the right kid can be going into the right vehicle?" he posited. With
the K5's license plate and facial recognition technology -- alongside
its LIDAR 3D mapping and predictive software that keeps track of daily
patterns -- that may not be a fantasy.
"What puts people on edge is not necessarily privacy. What puts people
on edge is being shot at," Li said. "I think we have an opportunity to
have those instances stop, or at least significantly decline them by
having these types of machines in the community."
Bacteria can do a whole lot of things. Two London-based artists have
taken advantage of the fact that some types can be rotated in ways that
cause light to scatter, creating a visible shimmer inside liquid, to
bring a novel imaging technique to life.
Laura Cinti and Howard Boland combined magnetotactic bacteria,
which can orient itself along Earth's magnetic fields, with electronics
and photo manipulation to create real-time liquid images. They call
their interactive installation "Living Mirror," as the manipulated cells form a "living mirror" within liquid that essentially mimics images captured of people.
"Multiple pulsating waves of bacteria can be made to form a pixelated
but recognizable image using tiny electromagnetic coils that shift
magnetic fields across surface areas," explain Cinti and Boland of the
art-science collective C-Lab.
"By taking pixel values from darker and lighter areas in captured
images, 'Living Mirror' attempts to programmatically harmonize hundreds
of light pulses to re-represent the image inside a liquid culture."
The resulting image might not work for a passport photo, but it does represent a rather unusual blend of art and science.
Peter Clatworthy, a 19-year-old in the UK, has been saving his pounds to buy an Xbox One
console for his young son. In particular, he had his sights aimed at
the special and hard-to-find Day One edition. Day One editions on eBay
UK have been selling for upwards of $800, so Clatworthy thought he had
gotten a deal when he found one for $735.
There was one big red flag on the listing. The description noted the
item up for auction was a photo. However, since it was listed in the
consoles category and the seller had good feedback, Clatworthy went
ahead with the purchase. "It said 'photo' and I was in two minds, but I
looked at the description and the fact it was in the right category made
me think it was genuine," he explained to the Nottingham Post.
Clatworthy's package showed up looking a lot flatter and smaller than
he expected. It was, indeed, merely a photo of a Day One Xbox with the
words, "Thank you for your purchase" written on the back.
To add insult to injury, the photo wasn't even of a high quality. It
looks to have been printed off from an inkjet with failing cartridges.
Definitely not suitable for framing.
All is not lost. Clatworthy is working with eBay to get his money
back. He has been told he will get a full refund due to the misleading
nature of the listing.
A look at completed listings on eBay UK shows several listings with
450 pound ($735) buy-it-now prices with the title "Xbox One Fifa 14 Day
One Edition, Photo Brand New UK 2013." The links to the actual listings
and descriptions are no longer active.
Clatworthy's disappointing experience should stand as another eBay
cautionary tale about reading the fine print and being wary of deals
that seem too good to be true, but it's hard to blame him for trying to
make his Xbox dreams come true. A quick question asking for
clarification might have saved some grief, but the scummy seller is
really the heart of the problem.
The Bank of France
warned on Thursday about risks related to the digital currency bitcoin,
adding its voice to growing concerns about the unregulated, online
money.
Bitcoin is not backed by any central bank or government, or
by physical assets. Their value depends on people's confidence
in the currency.
It has been gaining acceptance by the general public and
investment community but have yet to become an accepted form of
payment on websites of major retailers such as Amazon.com
.
The Bank of France said the price of bitcoin in legal currencies was inherently volatile and users may find it difficult to convert to real money.
The anonymity that bitcoin offer users also raises the risk
that they could also be used for money-laundering and financing
of terrorism, the central bank said in a publication.
"Even if bitcoin is not currently a credible investment
vehicle and therefore do not pose a significant risk to
financial stability, they represent a financial risk for those
who hold them," the Bank of France said.
Though
the central bank saw no threat to its monopoly on the issuance of legal
tender, bitcoin's growing popularity has increasingly attracted the
attention of authorities in several countries, including China and the United States.
The Chinese central bank warned financial institutions on
Thursday against trading bitcoin, which has proven particularly
popular in China.
The price of the digital currency rose over $1,000 last
month for the first time, extending a 400 percent surge in less
than a month and fuelling concerns of a bubble in the making.
The Bank of France warned that speculating on the price of
bitcoin could become costly if other users became unwilling to
convert gains into legal tender, potentially putting the whole
system at risk of collapse if bitcoin demand evaporated.
Noting a growing number of retailers and service providers
who accept bitcoin for payment in France, the central bank
warned they benefited from no guarantee that the bitcoin could
be cashed for real money.
The NSA collects nearly 5 billion records a day on the locations of
cell phones overseas to create a huge database that stores information
from hundreds of millions of devices, including those belonging to some
Americans abroad, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.
Documents provided to the Post by NSA leaker Edward Snowden detail
how this database is able to track people worldwide and map out their
relationships with others.
The NSA inadvertently gathers U.S. location records, along with the
billions of other records it collects by tapping into worldwide mobile
network cables, the Post reported.
The database and projects designed to analyze it have created a mass
surveillance tool for the NSA, allowing it to monitor individuals in a
way never seen before.
NSA analysts can look at the data and track an individual’s movements
throughout the world. They can then map out the person's relationships
with others and expose previously unknown correspondence.
The agency collects the large amount of cell phone data in order to
find out who is interacting with targets the agency is already tracking,
even though most of the records collected are not relevant to national
security.
The number of Americans who are tracked as part of the data
collection overseas is unclear from the Snowden documents, and a senior
intelligence official told the Post it is “awkward for us to try to
provide any specific numbers.”
U.S. officials told the Post the programs that collect cell phone
data are strictly geared towards tracking foreign intelligence targets,
and are not against the law.
For almost a year, four journalists at Bloomberg News were investigating the political connections of China's richest man, Wang Jianlin. In October, according to The New York Times, Bloomberg editor-in-chief Matthew Winkler told them the story wouldn't run because if it did, Bloomberg News would lose reporting access in China.
A few days later, Winkler reportedly spiked a second story, on the
children of Chinese officials employed by foreign banks, presumably for
the same reasons. Winkler reportedly defended his decision by "comparing
it to the self-censorship by foreign news bureaus trying to preserve
their ability to report inside Nazi-era Germany." Chinese officials
responded last week by conduct unannounced investigations of Bloomberg's Chinese bureaus.
What's most surprising about these revelations is not that Winkler
allegedly spiked the stories to preserve access, but that he didn't opt
to publish the articles under what Bloomberg calls Code 204, which keeps stories from appearing on its financial data terminals in China. Since Code 204 was created in 2011, Bloomberg has used it to block access to its 2011 report on Chinese censorship of “Jasmine Revolution” protests and its 2012 article on Chinese millionaire Xi Jinping, the Times reports. Bloomberg
maintains that it is merely holding the Jianlin investigation because
it's not yet ready for publication. But its hasty call to withhold both
October stories suggests that Bloomberg, like many Chinese
media outlets and Internet companies, has but a tenuous grasp on how
Chinese censorship operates, and has resorted to self-censorship to stay
in business.
As Chinese social media analyst Jason Q. Ng pointed out in a talk at Google last month, China has come to depend upon the subtle “self-censorship by private companies” to maintain the Great Firewall,
the government's online censorship and surveillance shield that
prevents Chinese citizens from accessing sites like Twitter and the Times. Ng has argued
that part of the reason the Great Firewall is so effective is because
it encourages self-censorship of two varieties: “the self-censorship by
content providers, who must make judgment calls on what needs to be
censored in order to stay in the government’s good graces, and
self-censorship by users, who face the threat of being detained and punished for anti-government posts.” The Bloomberg
incident obviously falls into the former category, and it is not
dissimilar from the practices of the more than 1,400 Chinese social
media sites that are required to filter their own content to continue
doing business in the country.
These sites rely on human censors to manually process all of the content uploaded to the Chinese Internet.
The censors are responsible for manually ensuring that all content complies with Chinese Internet regulations and the Public Pledge of Self-Regulation and Professional Ethics,
but the exact methods they use are kept under wraps. Over the past few
months, however, two new academic studies have exposed the capricious
apparatus of Chinese censorship, whose many inconsistencies make
incidents like the Bloomberg debacle more likely to occur.
The first installment of an ongoing University of Toronto study
of Chinese Internet controls, published last month, exposed the
censorship of private communications on several instant messaging
services in the country. The report found that censorship of Chinese
instant messages varies from region to region, and that on at least one
service “millions of chat records were being collected and stored on a
publicly accessible, unsecured server based in China.” The researchers
(of which Ng is one) also compiled a list of known keywords
that, if used in an instant message or social media post, would
automatically cause the communication to be blocked. Writing in The Atlantic
last week, Ng claimed that what’s especially worrisome about the study
is that these companies “engaged in pre-emptive self-censorship” in
order to continue operating in China. Social media users internalize
this self-censorship, Ng writes, citing China scholar Perry Link’s
“metaphor of an ‘anaconda in the chandelier’
to describe how the Chinese state cajoles individuals to censor their
own thoughts and words, an example that applies neatly to companies like
LINE [an instant messaging service] and Bloomberg.”
But according to an October report from Harvard political scientist Gary King, the Chinese government is more concerned with censoring groups of people rather than individuals. In the first large-scale randomized study of Chinese censorship,
King and his team attempted to document China’s censorship system. They
authored 1,200 posts on 200 social networks throughout China to see
which ones would be blocked, and drew up the following map to explain
how it works:
Chinese companies have to employ their own censors to make sure they
stay in line with the Public Pledge of Self-Regulation. So after
analyzing all the posts, King and his team went one step further and
built their own social network to test how companies internally interact
with censors. “We’d call them up and we’d say, “Hey, how do we stay out
of trouble with the Chinese government?” And they’d say “Well, let me
tell you,” King explained.
King’s
research found that calls for collective action or any kind of large
gathering are far more likely to be blocked than political dissent
King’s
research found that calls for collective action or any kind of large
gathering are far more likely to be blocked than political dissent,
but also uncovered the “highly inexact” nature of the algorithms that
censors use to detect banned keywords. “Automated methods of text
analysis that work based upon keyword algorithms, they work really
badly,” King said. In practice, this means that a lot of the time even
pro-government posts are blocked and, more broadly, that the apparatus
of Chinese censorship is highly variable and subject to human error.
Based on their conversations with censors, King’s team concludes that
there is “a great deal of uncertainty over the exact censorship
requirements and the precise rules for which the government would
interfere with the operation of social media sites, especially for
smaller sites with limited government connections.”
If there is uncertainty about censorship requirements even among
China’s censors, then one might assume there is uncertainty in the
Chinese bureaus of traditional media outlets. "The complexity of the
censorship system makes 'censor' itself hard to define," says Isaac Mao,
a social media researcher who was one of China's first bloggers. After
years of perplexing censorship, media outlets operating in China have
learned “how to define the red lines spontaneously.” For Bloomberg News, that spontaneity has come at a cost to its reputation — both in the West and with the Chinese government.
When you need help with a difficult problem, it’s always wise to turn
to an expert. Maybe that’s why India’s home ministry is planning to ask
the United States for assistance in decrypting communications over
Skype, BlackBerry, WeChat and other services.
The request is on the agenda for the U.S.-Indo police chiefs conference, which starts Wednesday in Delhi, the Economic Timesreports, citing an “agenda note” from the ministry. It reads:
The communication over these services is encrypted and
the encryption-decryption technologies available with the service
providers will be required by security agencies even if the facility for
lawful interception of these communications is extended to security
agencies in India. The technology in use by US agencies may be an area
of co-operation.
While governments in many countries, including India, have reacted
with anger to this year’s revelations from former National Security
Agency contractor Edward Snowden that the United States spied on foreign
officials, several have also been increasing Internet surveillance at
home. India has started using a system that allows security agencies and
income tax officials to directly intercept phone calls and emails
without any court or legislative oversight, Reuters reported this summer.
Blackberry’s encrypted messages, though, have thwarted Indian
security officials for years. Authorities threatened to shut down
Research in Motion’s services in India, before announcing last year they
thought they may have found a way to read BlackBerry messages, a claim that many found hard to believe. The NSA and cracked BlackBerry’s encryption as early as 2009, documents leaked by Snowden show. As the “agenda note” indicates, Indian officials may still need a little help.
More than 2 million accounts have been compromised from popular sites such as Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn after malware captured login credentials from users worldwide, according to a new report.
According to web security firm Trustwave,
hackers have stolen login usernames and passwords across various sites
in the past month with the help of Pony malware, a bit different than a
typical breach.
"Although these are accounts for online services such as Facebook,
LinkedIn, Twitter and Google, this is not the result of any weakness in
those companies networks," said Abby Ross, a spokesperson for Trustwave.
"Individual users had the malware installed on their machines and had
their passwords stolen.
Pony steals passwords that are stored on the infected users' computers as well as by capturing them when they are used to log into web services."
Although the culprit behind the hack remains unknown, Trustwave wrote
on its blog that two targets were Russian-speaking social networking
sites (vk.com and odnoklassniki.ru), which could hint at the virus'
origin.
"The malware was configured so that the majority of the credential
information was sent to a server in the Netherlands," Ross said. "The
server does not show from which countries the information came from so
we cannot break down exactly how many users from each country were
affected. However, we can confirm the attackers targeted users worldwide
including in the U.S., Germany, Singapore, Thailand and others."
It's also important to note that the stolen credentials were never
publicly posted online. Trustwave researchers were able to access a
command and control server used by the Pony botnet and recovered the
passwords from there.
"We have reached out to the major service providers affected and they
are taking steps to inform their users or remediate the compromised
accounts," Ross told Mashable.
Facebook accounted for about 57% of the compromised accounts, followed by Yahoo (10%), Google (9%) and Twitter (3%).
A Facebook spokesperson told Mashable the company has already reached out to those with compromised accounts.
"While details of this case are not yet clear, it appears that
people’s computers may have been attacked by hackers using malware to
scrape information directly from their web browsers," a Facebook
spokesperson told Mashable.
"As a precaution, we've initiated a password reset for people whose passwords were exposed."
Facebook added that its users can protect themselves when using the
site by activating login approvals and login notifications in their
security settings.
"[These users] will be notified when anyone tries to access their
account from an unrecognized browser and new logins will require a
unique passcode generated on their mobile phone," the spokesperson said.
The company also discovered most of the compromised passwords were considered "weak."
"In our analysis, passwords that use all four character types and are
longer than 8 characters are considered 'excellent,' whereas passwords
with four or less characters of only one type are considered
'terrible,'"
Trustwave wrote on its blog. "Unfortunately, there were
more terrible passwords than excellent ones, more bad passwords than
good, and the majority, as usual, is somewhere in between in the medium
category."
Back in 2006, scientists developed the first invisibility cloak,
but it wasn't yet able to make an object appear invisible to human
vision. Now, a new type of invisibility cloak takes us one step closer
to that goal.
So far, scientists have developed more than 10 cloaking devices, and
the latest invisibility cloak is thinner model using "active" technology
or electric power. Invented by University of Texas at Austin
scientists, the new cloak enables more effective shielding of an object
at a wider variety of light frequencies.
For example, an object invisible in red light would also be invisible
in blue light; with previous cloaks, an object would disappear in red
light, but appear in blue light, as explained in the team's recent
research paper on The Physical Review X.
During experimentation, scientists made a cylindrical rod invisible,
and determined this with the aid of machines and systems tracking
microwave or radio frequencies, which are outside of what humans can see
in the visible light spectrum. Light frequencies are all in the
electromagnetic spectrum, where visible light wavelengths are a very
small part of the spectrum that is visible to the human eye.
Made from a thin layer of metamaterials or
synthetic textiles with properties not found in nature, the cloak bends
and scatters light around the rod. The cloak then makes the rod
disappear at the microwave or radio frequency level.
Led by University of Austin professor Andrea Alù, the research uses electronic amplifiers in the ultra-thin cloak
— known as "active" technology — which relies on electrical currents to
make an object disappear over a broader light-frequency range. Previous
invisibility cloaks were not as physically thin and failed to fully
shield an object since the "passive" technology required no power source and used limited bandwidths.
The passive cloaks "scattered more waves than the bare object they
were trying to hide - when tested over the whole range of the
electromagnetic spectrum," as reported by the BBC. Therefore, passive cloaks only made an object invisible in a specific light frequency range and not across different ranges.
Research team member Jason Soric says electronically powered cloaks
change the functionality of previous "passive" cloaking devices. "The
active cloaking works over a much larger bandwidth than any other
passive cloak, especially considering, that it cloaks at all angles, and
not just in one direction.
"Embedding electronics into passive cloaking covers has been shown to
allow great control over the surface current needed to cancel the
scattering of bare objects," Soric told Mashable in an email.
Currently, the University of Texas scientists are working on a cloak prototype that should be available in the next few years.
Platform: Xbox One
If your gamer waited in line to grab her Xbox One, you absolutely have to get Dead Rising 3, one of, if not the best game currently available for the system.
Platforms: 3DS, PS2, PS3, PS4, PS Vita, Wii, PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One
For the star athlete who occasionally likes to cuddle up with a
console (or, really, any gaming platform -- it's available for
everything) opt for FIFA 14.
Platforms: 3DS, PS3, Wii, Wii U, Xbox 360, PS4, Xbox One
Action figures aren't just for kids. The new Skylanders is available on all consoles and handhelds, and lets you mix and match figures to combine powers.
Platforms: PS3, Xbox 360
We think there are still a few people left who haven't played the latest installment in the GTA series. If your gamer is one of them, you better make sure to get her up to speed with the rest of the gaming world.
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360, PC, Wii U, PS4, Xbox One
If first-person shooters aren't really her thing, the newest Assassin's Creed is set in the pirate-infested Caribbean.
Platforms: PC, PS3, Wii U, Xbox 360
This is the origin story your gamer deserves. If she played Arkham Asylum or Arkham City, or if she just can't get enough of the Caped Crusader, Arkham Origins is sure to impress.
No console or gaming PC? You can get Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate for 3DS and Playstation Vita instead.
Platforms: PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3, PS4
Even if your gamer is a Call of Duty purist, Battlefield 4 is a fresher, more hardcore first-person shooter. It's perfect for the video game junkie who needs a challenge.
Platforms: PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U, Xbox One, PS4
The latest in the massive franchise, Call of Duty: Ghosts is
a safe bet if you have no idea what your gamer likes. The series is so
popular that at least you know she'll always have someone to play with.
Platforms: PC, 3DS, PS3, PS4, PS Vita, Wii U, Xbox 360, Xbox One
Especially great for little ones who want a cool game but shouldn't see all the blood and gore of some on this list, Lego Marvel Superheroes will appeal to young and old gamers alike.
Platforms: PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One
How do you know if your gamer will like the new Madden game? Look for any of the 13 previous versions of the game in her collection. See one? Ok, she's probably going to like it.
Platforms: PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One
If your game enthusiast is also a basketball fan, look no further.
2K's newest NBA game will make her feel like their part of the action.
Platforms: PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One
For the gamer who also has a lead foot, this pick will satisfy her Need for Speed without putting you and other passengers in harm's way.
Platform: PS Vita
If you want to give your video game nut something unique, Tearaway is a beautiful game that will make full use of the Playstation Vita hardware.
Platform: Wii U
If you actually want to hang out with your gamer this Christmas, pick up Wii Party U and play with her -- it's tons of fun, we promise.
MEXICO CITY — A missing shipment of radioactive cobalt-60 was found
Wednesday near where the stolen truck transporting the material was
abandoned in central Mexico state, the country's nuclear safety director
said.
The highly radioactive material was found in an empty lot
about a kilometer (a half a mile) from Hueypoxtla, an agricultural town
of about 4,000 people, but it poses no threat or a need for an
evacuation, said Juan Eibenschutz, director general of the National
Commission of Nuclear Safety and Safeguards.
"Fortunately there are no people where the source of radioactivity is," Eibenschutz said.
The
cargo truck hauling the extremely dangerous cobalt-60 that had been
used in medical equipment was stolen from a gas station early Tuesday,
and authorities had put out an alert in six central states and the
capital looking for it. Police and the military joined in the hunt.
The truck was taking the cobalt to a nuclear waste facility in the state of Mexico, which is adjacent to Mexico City.
Eibenschutz
said direct exposure to cobalt-60 could result in death within a few
minutes. He said hospitals near the area were asked to report if they
treat anyone exposed to radioactivity.
"This is a radioactive source that is very strong," Eibenschutz told The Associated Press.
But, he added, the material poses no threat to human life if kept at least 500 yards (500 meters) away.
Eibenschutz
didn't know the exact weight of cobalt, but said it was the largest
amount stolen in recent memory, and the intensity of the material caused
the alert.
The material was used in obsolete radiation therapy
equipment that is being replaced throughout Mexico's public health
system. It was coming from the general hospital in the northern border
city of Tijuana, Eibenshutz said.
Before the container was found,
he said the thieves most likely wanted the white 2007 Volkswagen cargo
vehicle with a moveable platform and crane.
Eibenschutz said there
was nothing to indicate the theft of the cobalt was intentional or in
any way intended for an act of terrorism.
The truck marked
"Transportes Ortiz" left Tijuana on Nov. 28 and was headed to the
storage facility when the driver stopped to rest at a gas station in
Tepojaco, in Hidalgo state north of Mexico City.
The driver,
Valentin Escamilla Ortiz, told authorities he was sleeping in the truck
when two men with a gun approached about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday. They made
him get out, tied his hands and feet and left him in a vacant lot
nearby.
When he was able to free himself, he ran back to the gas station to get help.
On
average, a half dozen thefts of radioactive materials are reported in
Mexico each year and none have proven to be aimed at the cargo,
Eibenschutz said. He said that in all the cases the thieves were after
shipping containers or the vehicles.
Unintentional thefts of
radioactive materials are not uncommon, said an official familiar with
cases reported by International Atomic Energy Agency member states, who
was not authorized to comment on the case. In some cases, radioactive
sources have ended up being sold as scrap, causing serious harm to
people who unknowingly come into contact with it.
In a Mexican
case in the 1970s, one thief died and the other was injured when they
opened a container holding radioactive material, he said.
The
container was junked and sold to a foundry, where it contaminated some
steel reinforcement bars made there. Eibenschutz said all foundries in
Mexico now have equipment to detect radioactive material.
A Hezbollah commander who fought in Syria's civil war was shot dead
outside his home in Lebanon in a killing which the militant Shi'ite
Muslim group blamed on Israel.
Hassan al-Laqqis was shot in the head from close range by a silenced
gun as he arrived home at around midnight in the Hadath district of
Beirut, a source close to Hezbollah said.
Israel, which fought a 34-day war with Hezbollah in 2006, denied any
role in the shooting and hinted that the motive may have been
Hezbollah's military support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his
war with Sunni Muslim rebels.
A previously unknown group, Ahrar al-Sunna Baalbek brigade, claimed
responsibility for the attack in a message on Twitter. The claim could
not be verified but the name of the purported group suggested Lebanese
Sunni Muslim connections.
Film from the scene shown on Hezbollah's Al Manar television showed
two bullet marks in a wall and muddy footprints it said had been left by
possibly more than one assailant.
"The Israeli enemy tried to get to our martyr brother several times,
in more than one location, but these attempts failed until this
repugnant assassination," the group said.
Israel would "bear full responsibility and all the consequences for this heinous crime", it said.
Hezbollah said Laqqis had been with the group since it was set up
with Iranian support in the 1980s to fight Israeli troops occupying
south Lebanon. His son was killed in the 2006 war with Israel. The
source close to Hezbollah said Laqqis had taken part recently in several
battles in Syria.
Hundreds of mourners attended Laqqis's funeral in Baalbek, following
his grey coffin draped in the yellow Hezbollah flag through the
rainswept streets of the Bekaa Valley town.
Some blamed Israel for his death. "We are all (heading) this way if
God wants it. We are defeating the Zionist plan. This is a Zionist
operation," said Ali Saleh.
But Israel denied involvement. "This has strictly nothing to do with Israel," foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said.
"Hezbollah has made a fool of itself in the past with these automatic
and groundless accusations against Israel ... If they are looking for
explanations as to what is happening to them, they should examine their
own actions." Professional hit
Hezbollah also blames Israel for a Damascus car bomb five years ago
which killed top commander Imad Moughniyah. It has vowed to avenge
Moughniyah's killing at a time of its choice.
The source close to Hezbollah said Wednesday's attack also bore the
hallmarks of an Israeli operation, and analyst Charles Lister of IHS
Jane's in London said it suggested an element of "professionalism and
prior intelligence".
"But what is very clear is that it comes under the context of
Hezbollah and its role in Syria," he said. "It was expected that
Hezbollah would blame Israel, but that is not necessarily the case."
The open role of Hezbollah fighters in the Syrian civil war and the
steady flow of Lebanese Sunnis joining the anti-Assad rebels have
fuelled sectarian strife in Lebanon.
Car bombs killed dozens of people in Beirut in August and a twin
suicide attack on the Iranian embassy in the Lebanese capital killed at
least 25 people last month.
An Iranian foreign ministry spokeswoman blamed Israel for that
attack, but responsibility was claimed by a Lebanon-based al
Qaeda-linked group, the Abdullah Azzam brigades.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said he believed the group
had support from Saudi Arabia, Iran's main regional rival whose backing
for Assad's foes has pushed it deeper into a proxy conflict in Syria
against Tehran.
Abdullah Azzam "is not a fictitious name," Nasrallah said in an
interview broadcast on Lebanese television on Tuesday night. "This group
exists ... It has its leadership ... and I am convinced it is linked to
Saudi intelligence," he said.
(Credit:
Knightscope)
(Credit:
Knightscope)
(Credit:
Knightscope)
