Wired: Top Stories (23 unread)
-
Honda Sells Its 60 Millionth — Yes, Millionth — Cub
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Autopia
Tags: [edit]
The venerable Cub is the most successful vehicle in history, a tireless workhorse that gave rise to Japan's dominance in the motorcycle industry and brought affordable personal transportation to millions of people. Fifty years later, it still rolls on.
-
Google, Facebook in Stalemate Over Social Data
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 7:00pm EDT by Associated Press
Tags: [edit]
As Google continues to try to gain traction in the social networking world, it runs into fierce resistance from the innovators at Facebook, who has blocked the search engine leader's new Friend Connect system from its site.
-
Good News for a Change: Humpback Population Rising
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 5:50pm EDT by Associated Press
Tags: [edit]
Humpback whales, once hunted to the brink of extinction, are bouncing back in big numbers, a new study says.
-
Teen Science Whiz Isolates Plastic-Bag-Munching Bacteria
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 5:00pm EDT by Wired Science
Tags: [edit]
A 16-year-old in Ontario defies scientific odds and conventional wisdom by decomposing a plastic bag with dirt, yeast and tap water.
-
'Dollhouse' Fans Campaign to Save Show -- Before 2009 Airdate
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 4:30pm EDT by The Underwire
Tags: [edit]
Fearing Joss Whedon's latest show, Dollhouse, is destined to build a dedicated following only to be dropped, Whedon fans are organizing an online 'save this show' campaign eight months before it even airs.
-
Peer-to-Peer IT Admin Convicted in Federal Case
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 3:30pm EDT by Listening Post
Tags: [edit]
A 25-year-old Brooklyn man who managed servers for an underground file sharing service has been found guilty of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement in what the RIAA says is the first case of its kind to result in conviction at jury trial. Barry Gitarts faces up to five years in jail and a $250,000 fine.
-
Deadly Earthquake Doesn't Shake China's Internet Censors
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 3:10pm EDT by Threat Level
Tags: [edit]
The Chinese government's response to an earthquake that left 55,000 dead included deploying "Jing Jing" and "Cha Cha" -- cartoon characters that pop up on web forums to remind you not to criticize management of the disaster.
-
Put Steve McQueen's Porsche in Your Driveway
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Autopia
Tags: [edit]
Got $2 million burning a hole in your bank account? It might be enough to put you behind the wheel of the Porsche that Steve McQueen raced in one of the best endurance races ever. But you still won't be as cool as he was.
-
Hookers, Teens, & Halo: Story Was Too Good to Be True
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 3:00pm EDT by Epicenter
Tags: [edit]
The story had legs -- hooker's legs -- plus teens, stolen credit cards, and Halo. It got Dugg, play on Fox News and was widely blogged. It was also made up -- and the original "story" has a disclaimer to that effect (of course, you'd have to read it, and to the bottom). So internet marketer Lyndon Antcliff, who whipped this all up, is having the last laugh.
-
Linux Brings Open Source to the .car Era
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 2:00pm EDT by Autopia
Tags: [edit]
Wind River and Intel are working on an open source Linux platform for cars, a move that would spur development of infotainment appls while bringing cooperation to the emerging but fractured in-car multimedia market.
-
Does M. Night Shyamalan Have a Thing for the Pixies?
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 1:30pm EDT by Listening Post
Tags: [edit]
Hitchcock had Bernard Herrman to add depth and dimension to his films and M. Night Shyamalan has ... the Pixies? It might be a bit of a stretch, but there are some tantalizing clues that the alternative rock band which disbanded 15 years ago is a muse to the cultish filmmaker.
-
Weezer Taps Internet Stars for Its New YouTube Channel
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by Listening Post
Tags: [edit]
The video for "Pork and Beans" puts web celebs like Tay Zonday and Chris Crocker in the pop culture blender.
-
Robot Boats, Sonic Blasters Come Ashore for NY Fleet Week
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 1:00pm EDT by Danger Room
Tags: [edit]
It's Fleet Week in New York, which means Times Square is filled with sailors and leggy retro-pinup models. Oh, and there's a robotic boat (complete with gun detectors and sonic blaster).
-
Review: 'LostWinds' WiiWare Game Is Sweet, but Very Short
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 10:30am EDT by Game|Life
Tags: [edit]
Engrossing gameplay, novel use of the Wiimote, flute-filled soundtrack -- riding the wind was never so much fun. Too bad the ride ends so quickly.
-
To Have or Have Not: Fibre Creates a New Digital Divide
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 9:20am EDT by Associated Press
Tags: [edit]
The rollout of fiber connections to the internet is creating a new digital divide between "haves" and "have-nots." Fiber is something like 10 times faster -- and can easily be 100 times faster -- than plain vanilla broadband. But the only major carrier swapping out the copper is Verizon, whose FIOS service is or will be in only 17 states.
-
Iphone 2.0 To Incorporate Photo Geotagging
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 8:53am EDT by Gadget Lab
Tags: [edit]
Version 2.0 of the iPhone rumored to be due out in, oh, 17 days or so will include geotagging for photos. It isn't clear whether this will be done by GPS or by the iPhone's current triangulation methods.
-
Toyota building $192 Million Green Car Battery Plant
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 8:08am EDT by Associated Press
Tags: [edit]
Toyota says it is teaming up with Matsushita to build a $192 million plant in Japan that will build batteries for hybrid cars. The plant will produce nickel-metal hydride batteries, now in the Prius. Meanwhile, a press report in Japan reports that Toyota is building another plant to make lithium-ion batteries.
-
Yahoo, Icahn in Sights, Postpones Annual Meeting
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 7:39am EDT by Associated Press
Tags: [edit]
Yahoo postpones its annual meeting, an indication it wants its place in the world a bit more settled than would be likely by July 3. Carl Icahn, who blames Yahoo for the collapse of the Microsoft deal, is leading a shareholder mutiny and Microsoft is still trying to get into the act. No new date was set, but the meeting is now expected in late July.
-
Sex Drive: Social Media Eat Porn's Lunch (Again)
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Regina Lynn
Tags: [edit]
Newsweek sparked a conflagration among conservative Christians last week by pointing out that Christian dating site BigChurch.com is owned by Penthouse Media Group.
This wouldn't have been big news to BigChurch members who bothered to look under the site's hood. The Christian dating site has been operated by social networking giant Various, Inc. (which runs AdultFriendFinder.com, Bondage.com and Penthouse.com) for years. Penthouse Media Group acquired BigChurch, along with dozens of other niche social networking sites, when it purchased Various last December.
As a result of the purchase, Penthouse is now just one brand among many in a corporation that focuses on social networking, says Penthouse Media Group CEO Marc Bell.
Some people still think of Penthouse as Playboy's dirty cousin, even though Penthouse changed hands in 2004 and is now trying to be one step raunchier than Maxim rather than one step classier than Anal Sluts 13.
But when an old-guard porn kingpin like Penthouse becomes just another niche, you know that times have changed. This focus on social networking supports my ongoing argument that the fantasy of porn will continue to yield to the fantasy of sex, and that savvy adult companies will keep up with these changing consumer expectations.
I also think the fantasy of sex, served by both mainstream dating sites and adult social networks, will open our wallets in ways online porn hasn't for years.
Of course, social media does not guarantee sex any more than porn does. But it provides the anticipation of sex, the possibility of sex, the idea that you just might get lucky. It's the premise of porn, manifested in reality. Almost.
Social networking promises a new experience each time. And free porn can only be an advantage in an adults-only social networking context. Just ask YouPorn.
If customers find themselves flirting and even cybering on a regular basis, they return again and again, paying for premium memberships until disillusionment sets in (why am I not getting laid for real?). Those who hook up in person remain members as long as the nookie is more fun than the drama.
Old-style softcore simply can't compete with that. Not because we don't like to look at it, but because we don't like to pay for it -- especially when we can see the same thing on the social networking sites while chatting with the women in the pictures.
It's not like BigChurch isn't about sex. It's just more subtle than a site that's explicitly aimed at swingers. BigChurch's function is to connect people whose concepts of sex are tied so closely to faith and doctrine that it can be difficult to meet potential partners in more traditional settings.
Many people who identify as Christians have a fairly secular attitude toward premarital sex, while others believe in sexual pleasure within marriage. A handful still relegate sex to procreation, and God forbid that you (or at least, she) enjoy it.
With all this variation, it's possible that Christians benefit more from online dating than even kinky people do, in that they don't waste as much time chatting up people who don't share their particular beliefs. After all, with an online matchmaker, it's just a matter of checking the right boxes.
Whether BigChurch can survive the public link to Penthouse Media Group remains to be seen. I'm not sure Penthouse would miss BigChurch if a membership exodus killed the Christian dating site. BigChurch says it has a mere half-million members, while AdultFriendFinder alone claims about 24 million.
Even selling BigChurch might be a challenge now, as the URL will carry the taint of blatant sexuality, unless whoever buys it can pull off a "saving BigChurch from the devil" marketing campaign.
Given that Penthouse Media Group owns all of the FriendFinder and Spring Street Networks sites, as well as the legendary Danni.com and several webcam networks, it's hard to see how losing one small property would make much of a dent.
It's the corporate version of the Question of Our Age: "What if my day job learns about my sex blog?" Only this time, sex will win, either way.
See you in a fortnight,
Regina Lynn
- - -
Regina Lynn shows you how to have more fun with sex in her new book, Sexier Sex: Lessons From the Brave New Sexual Frontier, available now.
-
Murder, His Hard Drive Wrote
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Marty Graham
Tags: [edit]
SAN DIEGO -- Forget everything you've seen on CSI. In the information age, crime scene forensics are beginning to take a back seat to the science of recovering and sifting through evidence hidden on computers, cellphones and thumb drives.
Nowhere is that shift clearer than at the FBI's Regional Computer Forensics Lab here, which once lifted traces of incriminating Google searches from a suspect's hard drive to help convict him of murder. This week the lab became the sixth computer forensic lab in the nation to be accredited by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors, in another sign that computer forensics is no longer just about investigating hacker attacks.
"We've found video of gangsters rapping a song about a murder they committed," RCFL examiner John Leamons says.
The growth of law enforcement computer labs is an indication of how technology is increasingly involved in, or on the periphery of, criminal activity. San Diego-area law enforcement agencies founded the first regional forensic lab in 1998; there are now 14 such labs in the United States, with two more coming online this year. Last year the labs collectively performed more than 13,000 forensics examinations. The San Diego lab alone handled more than 1,000 requests from 40 law enforcement agencies in 2007, including 171 child pornography cases and 160 murder investigations.
In its early days, the RCFL examiners not only recovered the data, they analyzed it for evidentiary value based on the particulars of the case. But with exponentially growing data and caseloads, the 22 examiners here now focus on collecting and preserving data in a manner that will hold up in court, then hand that data back to the police agency for analysis.
Not surprisingly, the most valuable information comes from the files that suspects thought they had deleted, but which remained hidden in the nooks and crannies of their hard drives. "The key to computer forensics is unallocated space," says Leamons, who is on loan to the lab from the San Diego Police Department.
No one can remember a case being kicked because the lab made an error, but they can remember cases where they found evidence that exonerated people charged with crimes, Leamons says.
Cellphones pose a particular challenge, says Rebecca Adimari, one of the five examiners who work on them.
"Each has its own operating system and frequency -- there's probably over 500 makes and models and not many of them are the same," she explains. "There can be so much evidence on there."
From the unique ringtone caught on camera during a holdup -- to the accidentally recorded conversations on voice notes, to the Israeli thug keeping notes of extortion visits on his PDA -- the way people use their phones can be pretty incriminating.
"When they arrested the Arellano Felix people (a gang of Mexican drug lords later convicted of murder and drug crimes in 2007), they recovered 14 phones including one with a photo of a machine gun," Adimari says.
She has hundreds of power and data cables, since they're all peculiar to individual phones. And she has a special box that blocks signals on the phones in the lab, so no information is lost or compromised.
Examiner Patrick Lim, from the Naval Criminal Investigative Services, says he recently recovered data from a hard drive that had been burnt to a crisp. Asked if it was from an arson or a murder, Lim says he can't reveal the details.
"It was burned. That's all I can say."
-
May 23, 1962: Give That Kid a Hand!
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Randy Alfred
Tags: [edit]
1962: A team of 12 doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston reattaches the severed arm of an injured boy. It is the first successful reattachment of a human limb.
Freckle-faced Everett "Red" Knowles had been trying to hop a freight train in Somerville, Massachusetts. He was thrown against a stone wall that ripped his right arm off cleanly at the shoulder. Knowles walked away from the tracks, using his left hand to hold his right arm inside a bloody sleeve. A police ambulance rushed the 12-year-old across the Charles River to Boston, where emergency-room staff discovered the extent of his injury.
Surgeons had successfully attached partly severed limbs before, but never had the ideal candidate for a complete reimplantation, or replantation. Mass General's 30-year-old chief surgical resident, Dr. Ronald Malt, had Knowles' arm put on ice, and he assembled the team of experts he needed. All of the techniques they used that day had been used before, but never in the complete combination that saved an entire limb.
In hours of surgery, doctors reconnected the blood vessels, pinned the arm bone together, and grafted skin and muscle together, but they decided to wait to reattach the nerves. To their delight, Knowles' hand turned pink and a pulse returned to the wrist.
Malt became a celebrity. Knowles became a celebrity. The Little Leaguer got souvenirs and letters from Major Leaguers.
In September, doctors reattached four major nerve trunks. Within weeks, Knowles was complaining of severe pain in the arm, which in the unusual circumstances was a good sign.
A year after the surgery Knowles' arm and fingers were sensitive to heat, cold and touch, and he could move his fingers and bend his wrist. He could also play first base -- but only with his one good hand. The year after that, he was playing tennis and baseball. After four years of recovery, Knowles had the same use of his right arm and hand as a natural lefty. He eventually drove a six-wheel truck and lifted sides of beef at his job.
By 1966, surgeons had performed dozens of similar operations, failing at least half the time. That led to a editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting that limb replantation be performed only if the patient is under 30 with no other major injury, with the severed limb in good shape, and is in a hospital with top-flight medical facilities. For all other cases, JAMA wrote, an artificial limb might be the better solution.
Source: Various
-
Inside an FBI Computer Forensics Lab
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Kevin Poulsen
Tags: [edit]
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comThe experts at the FBI's newly accredited Regional Computer Forensics Lab in San Diego have already helped solve murders, child porn cases and robberies. They're among the best in the nation at pulling evidence from hard drives, cellphones and memory cards.
There are now 14 such labs in the United States, with two more coming online this year. Last year, the FBI labs collectively performed more than 13,000 forensics examinations. The San Diego lab alone handled more than 1,000 requests from 40 law enforcement agencies in 2007, including 171 child pornography cases and 160 murder investigations.
Wired.com got a rare look at the inner workings of the San Diego lab this week, and we snapped some photos of the toys inside.
Left: Darrell Foxworth greets members of the media in the entrance of the San Diego Regional Computer Forensic Laboratory.
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comJeff Cable, assistant director of RCFL, opens the door in to the lab to start the tour. Cable notes that it is very rare that they ever allow anyone but FBI agents through this door.
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comThis device copies the data off the hard drives and makes sure it can't be overwritten.
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comFBI agent Dan Dandridge plugs a hard drive into a "lunch box," which clones the data off the drive as the first step of a noninvasive examination.
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comCellphones can be a treasure-trove of forensic evidence. In one case, a man was robbing a store when his cellphone rang. Captured by a security camera, and studied by the lab, the robber's unique ringtone eventually led to his conviction.
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comThis set of equipment is the AVID video processing system at the San Diego Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory.
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comForensic examiner Tim Hamon shows off the inside of the RCFL mobile unit.
: Photo: Matt Mallams/Wired.comLacking in subtlety, the rolling lab is not used in covert surveillance missions.
-
FriendFeed Rooms Let Social Networkers Tune Out the Noise
Posted: May 23rd, 2008, 12:00am EDT by monkey_bites
Tags: [edit]
Social web users are constantly being bombarded with a dizzying amount of information -- such as trite updates about their friends' pets. A new feature from the social networking aggregation site FriendFeed gives its users the ability to interact with tight groups of their friends and discuss only topics they care about.