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Announcements

Submission + - Midway Only One Solid Franchise Away from Profitab (gamedaily.com)

Submitted by
njkid1
njkid1 writes: "Midway and profitable aren't words that are readily associated with each other. Year after year the struggling publisher reports losses — last year's was $77.8 million — but Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter thinks the publisher's fortunes could be on the rise."
Power

Submission + - Electrostatic Magnet Motor Made from Kitchen Stuff (peswiki.com)

Submitted by
Sterling Allan
Sterling Allan writes: "Scott F. Hall, an associate professor of art at the University of Central Florida, was tinkering around with stuff in his kitchen and came up with a continuously rotating mechanism that appears to harness electrostatic energy from the atmosphere — or something. The gizmo spins at around 80 revolutions per minute, and is constructed from a can of dog food, tooth picks, refrigerator magnets, a pencil, spring clips, and a small corner cut out of a box. Three toothpics are formed into an inverted tripod and spin atop the fourth toothpick held vertical by a spring clip that has magnets situated around the base. A graphite pencil is held over the the point of the inverted tripod via another spring clip sitting atop the can of dog food. Hall (suitable last name) posted a video at YouTube showing the gizmo running. The next day, he posted another video showing a round paperweight spinning (though not continuously) via magnets placed on its perimeter, with magnets on two adjoining dog food cans."
Sci-Fi

Submission + - Burj Dubai - The new world's tallest building (sizzledcore.com) 2

Submitted by
MoNSt3r
MoNSt3r writes: "Now coming back to the topic, Burj Dubai is being constructed in "New Downtown" of Dubai and on Saturday, 21 July 2007, the developers reported it's height as 512.1 metres with 141 completed floors surpassing the Taipei 101 (509.2 m) as the tallest high-rise building in the world. Amazing isn't it? :)"
Microsoft

Submission + - Mac users' Internet experience to remain seamless 2

Submitted by thefickler
thefickler writes: Mac users will continue to see the Internet as it was intended, thanks to the renewal of a font licensing agreement between Microsoft and Apple. At TypeCon2007 Microsoft and Apple announced they have renewed their font licensing agreement, giving Apple users ongoing use of the latest versions of Microsoft Windows core fonts.

Back in 1996 Microsoft started the "Core fonts for the Web" initiative. The idea of this initiative was to create a a standard pack of fonts that would be present on all or most computers, allowing web pages to be displayed consistently on different computers. While the project was terminated in 2002, some of the fonts defined as core fonts for the web have gone on to become known as "web safe fonts", and are therefore widely used by Internet developers.
Security

Submission + - Point and click Gmail hacking at Black Hat (tgdaily.com)

Submitted by
not5150
not5150 writes: "Using Gmail or most other webmail programs over an unsecured access points just got a bit more dangerous. At Black Hat, Robert Graham, CEO of errata security, showed how to capture and clone session cookies. He even hijacked a shocked attendee's Gmail account in the middle of his Black Hat speech."
United States

Submission + - Forensics Expert says Al-Qaeda Images Altered

Submitted by WerewolfOfVulcan
WerewolfOfVulcan writes: Wired reports that researcher Neal Krawetz revealed some veeeeeery interesting things about the Al-Qaeda images that our government loves to show off.

From the article: "Krawetz was also able to determine that the writing on the banner behind al-Zawahiri's head was added to the image afterward. In the second picture above showing the results of the error level analysis, the light clusters on the image indicate areas of the image that were added or changed. The subtitles and logos in the upper right and lower left corners (IntelCenter is an organization that monitors terrorist activity and As-Sahab is the video production branch of al Qaeda) were all added at the same time, while the banner writing was added at a different time, likely around the same time that al-Zawahiri was added, Krawetz says." Why would Al-Qaeda add an IntelCenter logo to their video? Why would IntelCenter add an Al-Qaeda logo? Methinks we have bigger fish to fry than Gonzo and his fired attorneys... }:-) The article contains links to Krawetz's presentation and the source code he used to analyze the photos.
Amiga

Submission + - Hacker does a DIY Amiga in FPGA (hetnet.nl)

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: Developer Dennis van Weeren recently announced completion of his from-scratch completely re-engineered Amiga chipset. His PCB design is fully operational and compatible and his verilog code has been released under GPL. Will this finally give the Amiga community a new breath of life?

Feed The 2006 Engadget Awards: Vote for Worst Gadget of the Year (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed

Filed under: Announcements, Misc. Gadgets

Ready to get your hater on? We're at the end of the line, and your chance to cast your ballot for the 2006 Worst Gadget of the Year! (Note: nominees were not necessarily selected for having outright bad or defective gadgets -- the disappointment / let-down factor also plays a big role.) Our Engadget Awards nominees are listed below, and you've got until 11.59PM EST on Wednesday, April 18th to file your vote. You can only vote once, so make it count, and may the best tech win! The nominees: Defective Apple MacBooks (see here, here, here, and here), Exploding Sony batteries (see here, here, here, here, here, and many more), Microsoft Zune, Motorola Q, Nintendo Wiimote straps (see here, here, here, and here), and Sony PlayStation 3.

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!
Media

Submission + - You're all obsolete: Machine-readable news

Submitted by guanxi
guanxi writes: One of the fastest growing markets for news has no interest in sex, celebrity gossip, or partisan hackery — it's computers. Financial traders looking for an edge no longer want to wait for people to read, analyze, and communicate the latest events; they want the news fed right into their computers so they can process trades immediately. The turnaround time from a "PS3 sales slow" story to dumping the stock is milliseconds. Reuters met this demand with NewsScope Real-Time, which outputs machine-readable news, and reportedly Thomson Financial (which already sells computer-generated news) and Bloomberg offer similar products. Would you trust your money to an unskeptical computer reading the news? Can bloggers compete? Will Jon Stewart have a feed?
Privacy

Submission + - ID theft: how likely?

Submitted by spge
spge writes: Everyone's going on about ID theft these days, but there's a lot of FUD being sprayed around. Apparently, in the UK there's much more chance that you'll get punched or just plain shouted at by a criminal, than to have him nick your identity. UK crime stats extrapolated here.
The Internet

Enforced Ads Coming to Flash Video Players 397

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the advertising-ploy-to-rule-the-world dept.
Dominare writes "The BBC is reporting that Adobe is releasing new player software which will allow websites that use their Flash video player (such as YouTube) to force viewers to watch ads before the video they selected will play. 'But the big seller for Adobe is the ability to include in Flash movies so-called digital rights management (DRM) — allowing copyright holders to require the viewing of adverts, or restrict copying. "Adobe has created the first way for media companies to release video content, secure in the knowledge that advertising goes with it," James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research said.' This seems to have been timed to coincide with Microsoft's release of their own competitor, Silverlight, to Adobe's dominance of online video."

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