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Sunday, August 1, 2010

Hubble Accuracy Surpassed By

randuev writes "A high-speed adaptive optics system helped the Large Binocular Telescope (on Earth) to beat the accuracy of the Hubble Space Telescope's observations. 'A special sensor detects atmospheric distortions in real time and controls the mirror to adjust its position to compensate, effectively canceling out the blurring. The mirror can make adjustments every one-thousandth of a second, with accuracy to better than ten nanometers.' Now, that's what I call real-time. This nifty trick multiplied the Strehl ratio (optical quality) of the LBT by about 80 times. The new system was tested in May and June, so hopefully we'll soon see more space around us in higher resolution on Google ...

App Review:

EveryGame offers up (potentially) every game

Filed under: iPhone, App Review, iPad

Ever wanted to open up an iPad app and have an entire game closet with just about every game ever tumble out? Well, given enough time, that's what could happen with an appropriately titled app called EveryGame [$3.99, universal]. ...

Browser-based Jailbreak Available for All iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches at

JailbreakMe.com

A hacker has created a website that will jailbreak iPods, iPads and iPhones running almost any version of iOS, freeing the devices from software restrictions placed on them by Apple. ...

Sarah Palin Uses Hand Notes To Defend Bush Tax Cuts

On 'Fox News Sunday' (VIDEO)

Back in February, Sarah Palin was widely mocked for writing crib notes on her hand for an appearance at a Tea Party convention. Now the former vice-presidential candidate has used the trick again. ...

Pocket Universe updated with iPhone 4 gyro support

Filed under: iPhone

Pocket Universe has always been one of the best of the astronomy apps, and I reviewed the earlier version positively. I like the use of augmented reality to overlay a star chart on the real sky, and there are lots of features like astronomy news, a planning module for any particular night, and quick and easy guides to finding visible comets and other nighttime events. With some nice clear summer nights there are plenty of things to see and ...

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Dropbox app for Blackberry goes beta

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, News, Productivity, web 2.0

Dropbox has quickly become a favorite tool for people on the go, but Blackberry users haven't been feeling much app-love. Yesterday, Dropbox announced on their forums that they had begun Dropbox for Blackberry Beta -- but only for the first 500 users to hit the site and request ...

Thank a

Ranger Day

Alison Brick pauses to thank the people behind our National Parks.

It's the heart of summer, and you can almost hear the pounding of tent stakes into the ground and the blowing of embers to start campfires as people make their way outdoors. National and state parks across the country are being appreciated this time of year for their natural beauty, but what about the people who run ...

Microsoft To Issue Emergency Fix For Windows -

Microsoft To Issue Emergency Fix For Windows

Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft will issue an out-of-band patch on Monday for a critical vulnerability in all of the current versions of Windows. The company didn't identify which flaw it will be patching, but the description of the vulnerability is a close match to the LNK flaw that attackers have been exploiting for several weeks now, most notably with the Stuxnet malware. The advance notification from Microsoft on Friday said that the company is patching a critical vulnerability that is being actively exploited in the wild and affects all supported Windows platforms. The LNK flaw in the Windows shell was first identified earlier this month when researchers discovered the Stuxnet worm spreading from infected USB drives to PCs. Stuxnet has turned out to be a rather interesting piece of malware as it not only uses the LNK zero day vulnerability to spread, but it had components that were signed using a legitimate digital certificate belonging to Realtek, a Taiwanese hardware ...

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iPad Development Paying Off for Friendly App Creator

On Saturday, I highlighted the recent release of Friendly, an iPad-optimized application for Facebook that enhances the world's most popular social network to take advantage of the iPad's screen and touch interface. One of the co-founders on Friendly and Twazzup, its sister product, Cyril Moutran (@mocy), met with me for lunch today and discussed how developing for the iPad presents new opportunities to make a splash in a less-crowded field, and gain real revenue. He also said he believes the launch of more touch-centric interfaces could be as revolutionary as the mouse and hyperlink did with the first generation of the Web. ...

A new approach to iPhone panoramas -

A new approach to iPhone panoramas

Filed under: iPhone

There are plenty of iPhone apps that shoot panorama photos. You take a picture. Move to the left or right, and after you have 3 or 4 images the panorama software stitches the images ...

OpenAppMkt:

The iPhone Gets a Web App Store

Plenty of websites and services use slick web apps in lieu of, or in addition to, native software for the iPhone App Store, but they had no storefront of their own until now.

OpenAppMkt is an HTML app store that launched today, with everything I'd expect to see in a mobile app market. It has a clean interface for searching or browsing by category, along with a website that's equally polished. iPhone users can "install" OpenAppMkt by adding the website to their home screen, and individual apps are installed in the same way, creating icons on the home page as if they were native ...

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The American Museum of Natural History's Explorer app

for the iPhone and iPod touch

Filed under: App Review

The American Museum of Natural History on New York City's Upper West Side has released AMNH Explorer (free) for the iPhone and iPod touch. This app, funded by Bloomberg, is a tour guide and personal navigation system that allows you to easily traverse the museum's huge collection. You can search for an exhibit by popularity, exhibit hall, or an alphabetical listing, and the app will use the museum's free Wi-Fi to give you step-by-step directions to your intended destination (using either the stairs or elevators). You can also get directions to the closest restroom or exit as well as information about restaurants and gift ...

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Thursday, July 29, 2010

FacePlant brings FaceTime chat status and visual voicemail to the iPhone 4

Filed under: Utilities, VoIP, iPhone

So, you've got a new iPhone 4, and you love FaceTime, but you're finding it's just not that useful. It's hard to know when friends are actually going to be on Wi-Fi and available to take a FaceTime call, so you've stopped using it after those first giddy test calls. It sounds like you need ...

ClearCam goes legit, will increase image resolution at a price

Filed under: iPhone

ClearCam has been around for a while, and I first took a look at it more than a year ago. It was a clever app that had two modes. One mode took a series of four pictures in rapid succession, and then it saved the best and sharpest one in your photo library; the other mode took six images together and stacked them in order to increase resolution and reduce noise. In practice, it meant that the old 3G 2MP camera became the rough equivalent of a 4MP ...

Prizmo provides optical character recognition on the iPhone

Filed under: iPhone

Prizmo is a popular OCR (optical character recognition) app for the Mac that allows you to scan documents and things like business cards easily and quickly, avoiding the step of typing them in by hand. Now, Creaceed has announced that it's bringing the app to the iPhone, so you'll be able to make use of the really powerful OCR software, all on the go using the iPhone's HD camera as a ...

Barracuda Labs analyzed more than 25 million Twitter accounts, both legitimate and malicious. The purpose of this part of the study was to measure and analyze account behavior on Twitter in order to model normal user behavior and identify features that are strong indicators of illegitimate account use. The study reviews several key areas including True Twitter Users, Twitter Crime Rate, and Tweet Number.

Key highlights from the Twitter research include:

In general, activity is increasing on Twitter: more users are coming online; True Twitter Users are tweeting more often, and even casual users are becoming more active. As users become more active, the malicious activity also increases.

Only 28.87 percent of Twitter users are actual True Twitter Users.

Half of Twitter users tweet less than once a day, yet one in 10 users tweet five or more times a day and 30 percent of Twitter accounts have never tweeted.

One in every eight Twitter users has at least 10 times more followers than they are following.

Only one in 10 users is following more than 100 users, and almost half are following less than five.

The Twitter Crime Rate for the first half of 2010 was 1.67 percent.

http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=9654

How 100 million Facebook users ended up in a list on BitTorrent

News that details of 100 million Facebook users was understandably met with some panic - particularly because the data was then dumped on file-sharing service BitTorrent alongside pirated music, bulk credit card details and the odd bit of legal content.

The real story was a little more curious. It was Canadian security researcher Ron Bowes who downloaded the data - 2.8Gb of it - by creating a crawler script to pluck information from Facebook's open access directory

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2010/jul/29/facebook-bittorrent-data

Dark Reading |

Internet Infrastructure Reaches Long-Awaited Security Milestone

Posted by Kelly Jackson Higgins on Wednesday Jul 28th at 9:44pm

BLACK HAT USA -- Las Vegas -- Two years after a major flaw was exposed in the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS), a major upgrade to the infrastructure protocol that fixes that weakness is now up and running in all of the Internet root servers.

DNSSEC, which has been in the works for nearly two decades, was fully deployed in the root this month, the final level of deployment needed to finally get the deployment of the security protocol officially off the ground. DNSSEC is considered the key to preventing attacks exploiting the now-infamous cache-poisoning vulnerability revealed at Black Hat USA in 2008.

http://mobile.darkreading.com/9287/show/03cfa23ac45fd9c72d5728ea12926347/

Just How (In)secure are Smartphones?

Last week a clever, duplicitous fifteen-year-old got Apple to approve an iPhone flashlight app which contained a secret tethering utility. A few days later, Citi told users of its iPhone mobile banking app that it was storing personal information in a manner which might have left it vulnerable to misuse by other apps or ...

33 Fresh and Cool Fonts for Designers

- The Qub font looks extremely cool. -

33 Fresh and Cool Fonts for Designers

Finding the appropriate font for your design purpose is important. Simple designs can become extraordinary with the correct font choice. Though a wide variety of fonts are available to download online, there is always a demand for fresh varieties to express text or copy in a brand new ...

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