pbahra writes "When you think of product placement on television you tend to think of cumbersome 1950s examples where the actor would cheesily turn to camera and hold up, say, a bar of soap—where do you think the sobriquet soap opera came from—to deliver his line. Perhaps to save all of us the artistic murder, the practice was prohibited in Europe, but recently the prohibition has been relaxed and a U.K. start up is offering digital producers the chance to inject products realistically in post production with full directorial control. The problem with existing physical product placement is that there are no clear business plans, and the process is incredibly slow. In Europe, legal constraints prohibit directors from re-writing scripts to include products, so any placement has to be done at the creative stage."

itwbennett writes "I bet you forgot all about the JooJoo, the tablet that started life as CrunchPad and sparked a bitter fight between Michael Arrington and Fusion Garage. Well, Fusion hasn't forgotten and 'they are back in the news with a new line of products,' writes blogger Peter Smith. 'The Grid4 is a smartphone and the Grid10 is a tablet, both of them running the new GridOS, a custom OS built on the Android [kernel],' says Smith. Fusion calls GridOS 'stunning, smart, social and transportable,' whatever that may mean."

An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo has partnered with Facebook to test the iconic social experiment known as 'six degrees of separation' (everyone is on average approximately six steps away from any other person on Earth). The goal of the Small World Experiment is to determine the social path length between two strangers by tapping into the world's largest social network and its 750 million users, each of whom have an average of 130 friends." Looks like a fun project, but not quite as useful as knowing how close you are to Kevin Bacon.

Some nameless reader noted a surprising twist in the tale of Cyanogen, an android modder once cease and desisted by Google. "Samsung Mobile has hired one of the homebrew market's most notorious and successful Android hackers, Steve 'Cyanogen' Kondik, best known as the creator of the CyanogenMod for Android."

Trailrunner7 writes "Finding Aaron Barr at this year's DEFCON hacker conference in Las Vegas was like a giant game of 'Where's Waldo.' Given the events of the past year, you can hardly blame him for keeping a low profile. First there was the attack on him and his then-employer, HBGary Federal, his decision to part ways with HBGary, his work to rehabilitate his image and turn his personal misfortunes into a 'teaching moment' for the industry, and then the legal wrangling in recent weeks that threw cold water on his plans to take part in a panel discussion about Anonymous at DEFCON. Barr was courted by numerous news outlets at the show, including the mainstream media. But he preferred, for the most part, to keep his own counsel. But he offered his thoughts to Threatpost on the experience of being at the conference, what the attack by Anonymous has done to him and whether it's possible for the group to turn its attentions to more constructive pursuits."

Slags writes "The idea behind Fluidinfo is that read-only information is just not as useful on the Web as openly writable information. Metadata is used routinely in the real world from name tags to post-it notes but it is much harder to apply metadata to information on the Internet. That is where Fluidinfo comes along. When information needs to be stored about an object the Fluidinfo database is queried. If the object exists in Fluidinfo, the information is appended to the object. If the object does not exist then it will be created and stored."

wintertargeter writes "Yeah, it's another article on security, but this time we finally get a complete picture. Tom's Hardware looks at WPA/WPA2 brute-force cracking with CPUs, GPUs, and Amazon's Nvidia Tesla-based EC2 cloud servers. Verdict? WPA/WPA2 is pretty damn secure. Now to wait for a side-channel attack. Sigh...."

I typically travel with a laptop and camera, but usually with a bag for each: a backpack for the laptop and a lowepro top loader for the camera. I'd really prefer a single backpack for both a 17" macbook and a DSLR with a larger 24-70mm or 70-200mm lens attached, as well as perhaps a few spare lenses and accessories. I've seen options from Case Logic (the SLRC-206), Kata (the DR-467), the Streetwalker Hard Drive, and LowePro (the CompuDay Photo 250, the CompuPrimus AW), but I'm not seeing a clear winner. I'm guessing a few of you have opinions on this subject, so share them so I don't buy a piece of garbage.

coondoggie writes "Denizens of the malware underworld who sell access to compromised computers do so at varying rates depending on where the machines are located, researchers told the Usenix Security Symposium this week. The researchers followed what they called the pay-per-install (PPI) industry, which obtains infected machines from which malware can be launched and sells access to these machines to parties looking for someplace to execute malicious code. Sometimes the PPI sellers hire middlemen to supply the compromised machines, and the PPI dealer retails them."

MojoKid writes "The Federal Communications Commission has released the results of a year-long scientific study it conducted with regard to the upload and download speeds of thirteen American Internet service providers. Most of the ISPs hit 90 percent of their advertised upload speeds. Of the 13 providers tested, only four (or less than a third) averaged at or even above their advertised download speeds (Charter, Comcast, Cox, and Verizon Fiber). The tests were performed by a private firm that has run similar tests in the U.K. It measured performance at 6,800 'representative homes' nationally in March."