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Android

Submission + - Google Boots Transdroid From Android Market (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by
fysdt
fysdt writes: "Google has pulled one of the most popular torrent download managers from the Android Market because of policy violations. Before Google booted the application, Transdroid had been available for two years and amassed 400,000 users during that time. Thus far Google hasn’t specified what the exact nature of Transdoid’s violations are, but it’s not unlikely that they relate to copyright infringement.

For many Android users Transdroid is the perfect remote access app for managing their BitTorrent clients on the go. The app allows users to start and stop torrents, search torrent files and even use the barcode scanner to find matching torrent files.

Transdroid offered both a free and a paid version of the app, and judging from the 400,000 downloads people seemed to appreciate it. However, as of this week, Google decided that Transdroid is no longer eligible to be placed in the Android Market."
Printer

Submission + - A Solar-Powered 3D Printer Prints Glass from Sand (thisiscolossal.com)

Submitted by Tx-0
Tx-0 writes: From the article:
Industrial designer and tinkerer Markus Kayser spent the better part of a year building and experimenting with two fantastic devices that harness the sun’s power in some of the world’s harshest climates. The first he calls a Sun Cutter, a low-tech light cutter that uses a large ball lens to focus the sun’s rays onto a surface that’s moved by a cam-guided system. As the surface moves under the magnified light it cuts 2D components like a laser. The project was tested for the first time in August 2010 in the Egyptian desert and Kayser used thin plywood to create the parts for a few pairs of pretty sweet shades. But he didn’t stop there. Next, Kayser began to examine the process of 3D printing. Merging two of the deserts most abundant resources, nearly unlimited quantities of sand and sun, he created the Solar Sinter, a device that melts sand to create 3D objects out of glass.
Power

Submission + - Top Home Energy Hogs Are DVRs and Cable Boxes 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Elisabeth Rosenthal writes that cable setup boxes and DVRs have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, causing an increase of over $10 for a home with many devices with some typical home entertainment configurations eating more power than a new refrigerator. The set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are running full tilt, 24 hours a day, even when not in active use consuming $3 billion in electricity in the US with 66 percent of that power wasted when no one is watching and shows are not being recorded. “People in the energy efficiency community worry a lot about these boxes, since they will make it more difficult to lower home energy use,” says John Wilson, a former member of the California Energy Commission. “Companies say it can’t be done or it’s too expensive. But in my experience, neither one is true. It can be done, and it often doesn’t cost much, if anything.” The perpetually “powered on” state is largely a function of design and programming choices made by electronics companies and cable and Internet providers, which are related to the way cable networks function in the United States. Similar devices in some European countries can automatically go into standby mode when not in use, cutting power drawn by half and go into an optional “deep sleep,” which can reduce energy consumption by about 95 percent (PDF) compared with when the machine is active but cable companies say US customers will not tolerate the time it takes to reboot the system once the system has been shut down or put to sleep. Although the EPA has established Energy Star standards for set-top boxes and has plans to tighten them significantly by 2013 cable providers and box manufacturers like Cisco Systems, Samsung and Motorola currently do not feel consumer pressure to improve box efficiency. When Wilson asked box makers why the hard drives were on all the time, using so much power. The answer was: “Nobody asked us to use less.”"
Cloud

Submission + - Should a web startup go straight to the cloud?

Submitted by Javaman59
Javaman59 writes: I am a one person company developing a web site from home. The site is hoped to attract millions of accounts and daily hits (just to give an idea of the scale of things, as its important to the question). My infrastructure is currently Visual Studio 2010 on a PC.To progress the site I need to set up version control, continuous integration, and staging. I have a Win2008 server VM, with all the Windows software (free and legal) to do this. However, I am only just competent as a Win admin, and I foresee each step of the way (setting up a domain; SQL-Server, etc) as a slow, risky process, and a big disruption to development. Should I forget my VM server (it will make a nice games machine!) and just go straight to the cloud for all my infrastructure?
Programming

Submission + - Author of Cash-Spitting ATM Malware Heads to Jail (securityweek.com) 1

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: A former Bank of America (BOA) computer programmer was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison this week, after he installed malware on Bank of America ATMs that allowed him to suck out large amounts of cash from the machines.

Hired to work on a project involving the bank’s ATM systems, he installed malware on certain ATMs that caused them to disburse cash without any transaction record of the disbursements. The code enabled him to suck approximately $285,000 from the machines.

Submission + - SCOTUS Adds Exception to 4th Amendment (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by T Murphy
T Murphy writes: The US supreme court has ruled 8-1 that police may enter a residence without a warrant if, upon knocking, they hear sounds suggesting evidence my be getting destroyed. The ruling was made over a case where police pursuing a drug suspect into an apartment building knocked on the wrong apartment when they smelled marijuana smoke. They heard people moving and assumed evidence was being destroyed, so they entered and arrested the defendant for drug trafficking upon finding cocaine. Justice Ginsburg, alone in dissent, raised a concerning question: “How ‘secure’ do our homes remain if police, armed with no warrant, can pound on doors at will and, on hearing sounds indicative of things moving, forcibly enter and search for evidence of unlawful activity?”.

Submission + - Air France Black Box Found Intact (yahoo.com)

Submitted by clm1970
clm1970 writes: Finding the proverbial needle in the haystack the Black Box from Air France Flight 447 has been recovered almost two years after the crash that killed all 228 passengers on board. Investigators have been able to download the data and can further sift for clues as to what caused the mysterious crash.
Games

Submission + - 10 Unreleased Video Game Consoles

Submitted by adeelarshad82
adeelarshad82 writes: It's been almost four decades now since the first video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, made waves in electronic entertainment. With such a long and varied history of video game systems behind us, it should be no surprise that more than a few consoles were planned but never made it to market. Even though concepts like Odyssey 3, Phantom and others were marketable, unfortunately they never made it into production.
Hardware

Submission + - Micro-SD Card Slot Abused as VGA-Port (qi-hardware.com)

Submitted by dvdkhlng
dvdkhlng writes: The guy who did this calls it an "unexpected capability". The Ben NanoNote open-source hand-held computer has often been criticized for not being very extensible hardware-wise. A community-effort now starts to challenge this by shipping the so-called UBB board, that plugs into the micro-SD port, making 6 I/O lines available to hardware hackers. The most impressive use so far is this VGA port implemented by just a few resistors, with signal-generation mostly controlled by software. Schematics and source code are available under the GPL.

Submission + - Last major US record label is sold (google.com) 1

Submitted by
jmanforever
jmanforever writes: "Several sites are reporting that Russian billionaire Len Blavatnik has agreed to buy Warner Music Group for $3.3 billion. The deal means that every one of the big four record label groups will be foreign owned.
Can the RIAA explain again why it is in the best interest of the United States to collect performance royalties from American radio stations and internet streaming sites, then send the money to Tokyo, Paris, London and now Moscow?"
Cloud

Submission + - Dropbox Can't See Your Dat– Er, Never Mind (bnet.com)

Submitted by bizwriter
bizwriter writes: Dropbox, the online backup and file sharing service claims to have hit 25 million users in a single year. But a change in terms, noting that Dropbox will give up data to law enforcement under a legal request, showed that the company's security claims couldn't be possible. It turns out that Dropbox claims in one place that encrypted data makes it impossible for employees to see into user files, but in another says that they're only "prohibited" from doing so.
Data Storage

Submission + - Ultra-Fast Magnetic Reversal To Speed Up ReadWrite

Submitted by intellitech
intellitech writes: A team from Stanford University recently discovered a magnetic phenomenon which could accelerate data storage by several orders of magnitude (pdf). With their observations, the researchers have not only shown that magnetic reversal can take place in femtosecond timeframes, they have also derived a concrete technical application for it. "Translated to magnetic data storage, this would signify a read/write rate in the terahertz range. That would be around 1000 times faster than present-day commercial computers," says Radu.
Republicans

Submission + - Republicans believe in climate change, not warming (mongabay.com)

Submitted by Damien1972
Damien1972 writes: A new study finds that self-described Republicans are less skeptical of "climate change" than "global warming". The research, conducted by psychologists at the University of Michigan, found that 44 percent of Republicans endorsed the idea that "global warming" is real, whereas 60 percent believed in "climate change." Among self-described Democrats the difference in wording was negligible: 86.9 percent vs. 86.4 percent.
Games

Submission + - How the PC is making consoles look out of date (pcauthority.com.au)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: What has been clear from this year’s Games Developer Conference is that consoles are beginning to show their age. With nothing beyond a possible Nintendo update on the horizon, developers at this year's GDC have turned their eyes to the PC. This article includes three videos that give a fantastic insight into where PC graphics are headed, including a version of Epic's Unreal engine, Crytek's Cryengine 3, and DICE's Frostbite 2 engine. Considering that these leaps in eye candy are only possible with the current state of PC graphics we wonder how long consoles will be the target platform for development of blockbuster games.
Wikipedia

Submission + - Wikipedians are More Liberal Than US Population (jonathanwstokes.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This blogger scraped 137,000 Wikipedia user pages to graph Wikipedians by political party. The results show 57% of Wikipedians identify as liberal, 10% identify as Libertarian, and 26% as Conservative.

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