Sony to inspect PlayStation hacker's hard drive
SAN FRANCISCO — PlayStation 3 jailbreaker George Hotz must allow console-maker Sony to comb through his computer’s hard drive and retrieve information “that relates to the hacking of the PlayStation,” a federal judge ruled Thursday.US District Judge Susan Illston’s ruled from the bench in Sony’s ongoing legal action against the New Jersey hacker, who goes by GeoHot. The lawsuit is in connection to the 21-year-old being the first to fully hack the 4-year-old console, a jailbreak allowing it to play pirated and homebrewed games.
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Meet the newest virus fighter: Salmonella
Gene therapy sounded so promising. The ability to cure illnesses at the genetic level—to prevent the proteins that cause problems from even being made in the first place—has wonderful potential. Yet the technology has faced many problems. One area of disappointment has been the use of interfering RNA-based therapies.These interfering RNAs (or close chemical relatives) are meant to match the sequence of the messenger RNAs made from genes, and then to block or inactivate the mRNA, keeping it from being translated into a harmful protein. One of the main hurdles has been delivering the agents specifically to the cells in which they are needed. An article in this Tuesday’s New York Times drew attention to this problem when reporting that many pharmaceutical companies have suspended their research into RNA interference.
But what if you could use a common bacteria to deliver the payload? In work reported in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, researchers led by Fenyong Liu at UC Berkeley made a modified strain of Salmonella to deliver interfering RNA exactly where it was needed. The result: they inhibited cytomegaloviral infection in mice.
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"Space is meaningless": Hazard is indie, non-Euclidean, brilliant
Alexander Bruce delights in watching people play Hazard. I asked him how to solve a puzzle, and he declined to comment, merely taking note of my failed attempts to pass a tricky section. When another writer played after me, I understood Bruce's reaction: watching how people interact with the game and how they learn to play it is part of the fun. This is a game that changes every mechanic you've become comfortable with during your time in gaming, and it forces you to learn a new way to think.Read the comments on this post
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World's total CPU power: one human brain
How much information can the world transmit, process, and store? Estimating this sort of thing can be a nightmare, but the task can provide valuable information on trends that are changing our computing and broadcast infrastructure. So a pair of researchers have taken the job upon themselves and tracked the changes in 60 different analog and digital technologies, from newsprint to cellular data, for a period of over 20 years.The trends they spot range from the expected—Internet access has pushed both analog and digital phones into a tiny niche—to the surprising, such as the fact that, in aggregate, gaming hardware has always had more computing power than the world's supercomputers.
The authors were remarkably thorough. For storage media, they considered things like paper, film, and vinyl records, and such modern innovations as Blu-ray discs and memory cards. To standardize their measurements across media, they used Shannon's information theory to consider data storage in terms of optimally compressed bits. They also tracked technology, noting that in the year 2000, bits of video were compressed using cinepak, which was far less efficient than the current MPEG-4 format; calculations were adjusted accordingly.
Even so, there are some significant estimations here. "For example," the authors note, "after normalization on optimally compressed bits we can say things like 'a 6 square-cm newspaper image is worth a 1,000 words.'"
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Capitulation: Nokia adopts Windows Phone 7
In a joint briefing made at Nokia's Capital Markets Day event, Microsoft and Nokia announced a partnership to collaborate on mobile technology. Nokia has adopted Windows Phone 7 as its primary mobile phone platform and it will also embrace Microsoft's Web services stack, including the Bing search engine.The partnership creates some uncertainty about Nokia's existing platform efforts, including the Linux-based MeeGo operating system that Nokia co-develops in collaboration with Intel and other vendors. Nokia has confirmed that it will continue selling its current lineup of Symbian devices and that it has at least one MeeGo device planned for launch this year.
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(Virtually) face to face: how Aaron Barr revealed himself to Anonymous
Aaron Barr, CEO of security company HBGary Federal, spent the month of January trying to uncover the real identities of the hacker collective Anonymous—only to end with his company website knocked offline, his e-mails stolen, 1TB of backups deleted, and his personal iPad wiped when Anonymous found out.Our lengthy investigation of that story generated such interest that we wanted to flesh out one compelling facet of the story in even more detail. In a sea of technical jargon, social media analysis, and digital detective work, it stands out as a truly human moment, when Barr revealed himself to Anonymous and dialogued directly with senior leaders and "members" of the group.
The encounter began on February 5. Barr had managed to get his work written up in a Financial Times story the day before, and now strange traffic was pouring in to HBGary Federal. With his research done and his story in print, Barr needed only to work up some conference slides and prepare for a meeting with the FBI, which had been tracking Anonymous for some time. So Barr ditched the covert identities he had been using to watch the group, and on February 5 he approached a person on Facebook whom he believed was the powerful CommanderX.
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"iPhone nano" rumor comes back to life, now with $200 unsubsidized price tag
Rumors about the "iPhone nano," a smaller version of Apple's iconic iPhone, go back to before the iPhone even existed. We haven't heard much about it in recent months, but that's about to change thanks to a new rumor out of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The publication claims that Apple is still working on a shrunken-down version of the iPhone that would retail for $200 without any kind of subsidy or contract.Bloomberg cited "people who have been briefed on the plans" as the source of the information, claiming that at least one person had seen a prototype. The phone is allegedly about one third smaller than the current iPhone 4, and it will use components that are contained within the current model, helping Apple cut costs while it puts the pricier parts into the as-yet-unannounced iPhone 5.
The miniature iPhone is supposedly slated for launch mid-year but, as always, the sources claim that Apple's plans could change at any time and it may even be scrapped.
Two other sources said that Apple is also working on offering iPhones that can be used on both CDMA and GSM networks. A recent teardown of the CDMA iPhone 4 meant for Verizon showed that it could have been dual-mode if Apple wanted it to be, but the lack of a SIM card slot meant that it was relegated to being CDMA only. Apple is expected to begin using dual-mode chips in the next-generation iPhone, though, which would allow the company to offer just one iPhone model that works on networks everywhere in the world. Whether the dual-mode tech would make its way into the rumored smaller iPhone wasn't specified.
The fact that this rumor and various "leaks" associated with it have existed for so long—since at least 2007—fuels the belief that Apple has at least been experimenting with such an idea for a while. Apple experiments with many products that don't ever see the light of day, though, so we'll stick with our usual mantra for now: we'll believe it when we see it.
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Sparrow 1.0 hands-on: smooth, highly usable e-mail for the Mac
Developers Dominique Leca and Dihn Viêt Hoà have reached a major milestone by releasing version 1.0 of their Mac OS X IMAP e-mail client, Sparrow. Now available on the Mac App Store, it has become the top paid and top grossing app in less than one day.We took the 1.0 version for a spin and wanted to give readers a run-down of some of the changes since the initial beta. We also have 10 free promo codes to give away, so read on to get the details.
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Obama pitches plan to free 500MHz, raise $28B, and bring 4G to everyone
President Obama announced a plan today to free up 500 MHz worth of spectrum for wireless Internet and mobile network use over the next 10 years. Alleged crowding of the spectrum has been a concern for some time, but Obama hopes to incentivize current users to give up the chunks of spectrum they occupy by giving them a cut of the spectrum's sale at auction, and then using some of that money to reimburse the rollout of wireless and 4G to 98 percent of the country. By letting the current owners (read: broadcast TV stations) of needed or unused spectrum volunteer their frequencies for auction, Obama hopes to raise funds in the neighborhood of $27.8 billion. He hopes this will offset some of the investments he wants to make in mobile and wireless: $5 billion would go to investment in building out 4G networks into rural areas, $3 billion would go to 4G-related research and development, $10.7 billion would go to building a wireless public safety network, and the balance would go toward paying down the deficit.
Of course, the desired frequencies may not draw that much at auction, and potential buyers like AT&T or Sprint are big enough in size and small enough in number that they could hold out against high prices. Selling frequencies will also be voluntary, at least at first, so it may be tough to get owners to give them up.
The government is doing its part to make sure the program is well on its way: Obama announced that the government will start by freeing up 115 MHz of federal spectrum by using frequencies more efficiently, and it plans to open another 95 MHz the same way.
But space and access to wireless or mobile connections may not be the problem; Free Press research director S. Derek Turner notes that "according to the FCC's own data, 98 percent of households in the United States already have access to wireless broadband service, while less than one-third subscribe to it." Nothing in the plan encourages them to adopt it, Turner said.
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Hands-on: Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate
After tens of millions of downloads of last year's beta, Microsoft has shipped the release candidate of Internet Explorer 9. The latest iteration of Microsoft's new browser boasts a few new features, a refined user interface, better performance, and improved standards compliance.Perhaps as a testament to the success of its platform preview program and beta release, the changes are, for the most part, quite subtle. The platform previews have allowed Web developers to track the progress of the browser's core rendering engine, and to submit bugs and feedback to the company; thus, when the beta was released, there were few surprises in the browser's treatment of webpages.
The new user interface was the big surprise of the beta: taking a leaf from Chrome's book, Internet Explorer 9's user interface is a pared down, minimal affair, designed to be much less intrusive and to put the focus squarely on websites rather than the browser itself.
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Hands-on with Twitterrific 4.0 for Mac: still a worthy competitor
Two long years have passed since Iconfactory's Twitterrific—one of the original Twitter clients on the Mac—got a major overhaul, but the day has finally arrived. Twitterrific 4.0 is now available via Iconfactory's website and also from the Mac App Store. Like its predecessor, it comes in either a free, ad-supported version or a more feature-rich (and ad-free) $9.99 version. Since this app is our old favorite (and remains a top choice among Mac users), we decided to give the new app a spin. So far, we like what we see.Twitterrific's interface has had a complete overhaul since its previous version, one that—like Twitter's official app—makes it more similar to the iOS version of Twitterrific. The sidebar on the left tastefully lists your tweets, mentions, messages, and favorites, and it includes a search box, a list of today's trends, and list support (helpful for when you only want to see certain tweets). This sidebar is mostly collapsible, if all you want to see are the icons representing those options.
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Feature: We know where you've been: privacy, congestion tracking, and the future
Highway congestion is a serious problem that will only get worse as the US population grows. And our traditional solution to congestion—building more lanes—seems to be running out of steam. With governments facing record deficits, elected officials are having enough trouble finding the money to maintain existing infrastructure, to say nothing of adding new capacity. And in many places, proposals to expand highways encounter fierce resistance from nearby residents.So public officials are searching for strategies to use existing highway capacity more efficiently. Recently they've begun experimenting with a new strategy for controlling congestion: demand-based pricing of scarce road capacity. Congestion pricing promises to kill two pigs with one bird, keeping traffic flowing smoothly while simultaneously generating new revenue that can be used for public investments. New technologies—notably RFID transponders and license-plate-reading cameras—are allowing the replacement of traditional tollbooths with cashless tolling at freeway speeds.
The congestion tolling projects that have been undertaken to date are relatively modest, but some transportation experts view them as a first step toward a future where tolls are collected on most major roads, and perhaps even the minor ones. Such schemes might abolish traffic jams once and for all, but they also have significant downsides. Ubiquitous tolling requires ubiquitous surveillance, which raises obvious civil liberties concerns. And more ambitious tolling schemes have proven broadly unpopular with voters, who believe they have already paid for the roads via other taxes.
In this article we'll consider whether congestion pricing can cure what ails the American transportation system. The economic arguments are compelling, and the current generation of tolled express lanes have produced real benefits. But we remain skeptical that the economic advantages of more ambitious tolling regimes are large enough to justify the potential costs in individual liberty. At a minimum, there needs to be much stronger legal and technological safeguards to ensure that infrastructure built to catch people evading tolls isn't used as a general-purpose system for governments to monitor and control motorists' every move.
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Science's burden: storing terabytes of research data for decades
Scientists in all fields collect large amounts of data, and it’s not always easy to organize, preserve, analyze, and use all of it in the best possible way. A recent issue of Science has a special section that highlights a few stories about how scientists deal with the data deluge.High-energy physicists tries to preserve and reuse data
It may seem odd that particle physicists would ever want to look back at decades-old experiments as they forge ahead with newer, bigger hardware. However, with updated theories and perspectives, physicists can extract new results from old data. Siegfried Bethke, the head of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany, managed to publish over a dozen papers when he reexamined data from his days as a young physicist at DESY, a high-energy physics lab in Germany.
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