Wired: Top Stories (24 unread)
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Meet 'Takahashi-Meijin,' Japan's Blazing-Fast Videogame Hero
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 9:00pm EDT by Chris Kohler
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His ability to mash a game-controller button 16 times per second earned him a spot in classic 8-bit titles. Now the rise of casual gaming is giving Toshiyuki Takahashi a second shot of gaming fame.
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'Anonymous' Member Unmasked, Charged With Web Attack on Scientology
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 7:17pm EDT by Ryan Singel
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Federal agents charge an 18-year-old New Jersey man with computer hacking Friday for participating in an anonymous internet attack on the Church of Scientology in January. He faces up to 18 months in prison for an offense that thousands of bored online griefers joined in on.
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RIAA Decries Texas Woman as 'Vexatious' for Demanding File Sharing Trial
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 7:13pm EDT by David Kravets
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The Recording Industry Association of America is calling a Texas woman "vexatious" for wanting to defend herself at trial against a file sharing charge instead of settling for $7,400. The woman is now a 22-year-old university student, and the allegations concern her use of a file sharing program when she was allegedly between 14 and 16 years old.
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Add Drop-Down Menus Using CSS
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 5:30pm EDT by Scott Gilbertson
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When you've got too many links to list in one web page, you might want to consider drop-down menus in your site design. Good looking menus are deceptively simple. All you need are HTML list elements and some CSS styles and you can wow your visitors with interactive menus.
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Flash and the Pan: 4 Tapeless AVCHD Camcorders Tested
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 5:17pm EDT by Jackson Lynch
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The future is here and it sure doesn't include physical media. Tapeless camcorders using the AVCHD format provide the best solution for recording HD video. Here we take four of these shooters to task and find the best one.
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How to Photograph the Microscopic World With Your Digital Camera
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 4:45pm EDT by How-To Wiki
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There's an entire ecosystem living in that river down the street, or in the pond at your local park. You can easily photograph its many insects, microbes and other denizens with a student-model microscope and a cheap digital camera. In Wired.com's How-To Wiki.
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Alleged Hackers Charged With Highway Robbery, Literally
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 4:43pm EDT by Kevin Poulsen
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How do you run a successful trucking company without ever driving a truck? Step one: hack the Department of Transportation.
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WhereCamp Conference Zooms In on Portland
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 4:25pm EDT by Adam Duvander
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Point your GPS units to the geek hub of the Pacific Northwest this weekend and you'll arrive at WhereCamp, a free conference about all things geodata. Webmonkey reports live from Portland, Oregon.
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'Max Payne' Movie Tries to Beat Videogame Curse
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 3:56pm EDT by Hugh Hart
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Mark Wahlberg stars in the latest cinematic attempt to make the jump from third-person shooter to the silver screen. Will the successful game translate into a film that frags at the box office?
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Who Will Facebook Partner With for Its Music Service?
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 3:55pm EDT by Eliot Van Buskirk
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Music fans already share their tastes on Facebook using a variety of apps, but now that MySpace is launching its own music service, Facebook apparently has designs of its own with the help of an undisclosed partner. Here's our guess on which company that will be.
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Twitter to Get Down to Business in 2009, Investors Say
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 3:43pm EDT by Chris Snyder
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Major leadership changes Twitter renewed questions about its business prospects -- was the replacement of CEO Jack Dorsey by fellow co-founder Evan Williams a shuffling of deck chairs on the Titanic? But VC backers of the microblogging service interviewed by wired.com insisted they remain bullish, and Bijan Sabet, a general partner at Twitter backer Spark Capital, revealed that new revenue models will be unveiled in the first half of next year.
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Put Mozilla on Your Phone: Mobile Firefox Browser Hits Alpha 1
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 2:30pm EDT by Scott Gilbertson
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The first alpha version of Fennec, the mobile version of the Firefox web browser, has been released for testing. Along with a build for Nokia mobile, Mozilla is also offering a desktop version that anyone can download and try out.
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Telecom Spying Amnesty Unconstitutional, EFF Tells Court
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 2:19pm EDT by Ryan Singel
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A civil liberties group suing AT&T over its alleged complicity in illegal government wiretapping tells a federal court Thursday that Congress had no right to pass a law giving telecoms a free pass for helping out.
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Giant Homemade Chinese Transformers Kick Bot
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 1:57pm EDT by Keith Barry
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A fanboy known only as Mr. Zhu uses junked cars and scrap metal to gloriously celebrate the action figures that changed the world.
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Going Green and Burning Rubber in a CNG Mustang
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 1:52pm EDT by Chuck Squatriglia
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A 300-horsepower natural gas-burning Mustang shows "green" does not mean "boring."
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The Hypocrisy of the World Wildlife Fund's Eco-Tour
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 10:30am EDT by Dave Demerjian
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How, exactly, does spewing 1,200 tons of carbon dioxide flying wealthy donors around the world jibe with the WWF's climate-friendly agenda?
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Redesign of iGoogle Sparks User Outrage
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 9:58am EDT by Scott Gilbertson
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Google updated the user interface for its popular iGoogle Ajax start page Thursday. Almost immediately, angry users started lobbing complaints at the web titan, some even going as far as creating a web-based petition to switch the site back to the old layout.
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Does The Long Tail Apply to Mobile Music?
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 9:45am EDT by Eliot Van Buskirk
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Mobile music hasn't yet been able to tame the long tail, according to details unveiled at the Popkomm conference in Berlin -- but that could be due to cellphone providers' inability to embrace the openness and integration that have become second nature to web 2.0 developers.
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Real Ad Men Talk About Mad Men
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 8:32am EDT by Meghan Keane
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Every week on AMC TV's Mad Men, the men and women at Sterling Cooper create and design retro 1960s ad campaigns, all while obsessively chain-smoking, drinking and womanizing. Looking for a little fact in the fiction of Mad Men, Wired.com is asking some real-world ad men and women to talk about the show’s realism and relevance to the advertising industry today. This week, we spoke with Mike Doherty, president of Cole & Weber United.
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56 Arrested in DarkMarket Sting, Says FBI
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 12:20am EDT by Kevin Poulsen
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The FBI acknowledges what Wired.com readers learned Monday: The internet's top English-speaking cybercrime forum was secretly run by the bureau for the last two years. The FBI says 56 people have been arrested around the world.
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Oct. 17, 1973: Angry Arabs Turn Off the Oil Spigot
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Tony Long
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1973: The Arab oil-producing states impose an embargo against nations supporting Israel in the Fourth Arab-Israeli War, also known as the October War or Yom Kippur War.
The effect upon petroleum-consuming countries was immediate, profound and long-lasting. The oil embargo, and the cut in production that accompanied it, doubled the price of crude and reduced overall supply. That forced gas prices to skyrocket at the pump and led to rationing and the imposition of price controls in the United States and Western Europe. Long gas station lines and frustrated motorists became iconic images of the early 1970s.
It also awakened the West to just how dependent it was on Middle Eastern oil, and how fragile that lifeline really was.
The decision to use oil as a weapon was made prior to the opening of hostilities. Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Saudi Arabia's King Faisal met a month and a half before Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. They agreed to play their trump card — in many ways, their only card — when the expected support for Israel materialized, which it quickly did.
The Yom Kippur War, which began with a surprise attack Oct. 6 (timed to coincide with the Jewish Day of Atonement), went badly for the Arabs. After initial gains, the Syrians were driven from the Golan Heights, and an entire Egyptian army was cut off in the Sinai Peninsula. The offensive fell apart, the United Nations and United States brokered separate ceasefires, and it was all over by Oct. 26.
But the embargo continued. Because of the embargo, Arab oil producers were able to wrest control of their vital commodity from the Western oil companies that had been exploiting them for years. When some members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, notably the Saudis, followed up the embargo by nationalizing their oil companies, the westward flow of petrodollars reversed itself and the drunk-on-money Middle East cartel that we know today began to emerge.
In the West, and especially in the United States, the embargo and the "oil shock" that accompanied it brought about profound changes. In November, President Nixon signed the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act, which — among other things — instituted rationing and price controls. A few months later, the United States embarked on Project Independence, an early and failed attempt to make the country energy independent.
As a result, offshore oil drilling became a priority in a way it never had been before.
Later, when the embargo ended and the flow of oil resumed, these correctives were either cut back or abandoned. But the psychological damage was complete: Oil-gluttonous Americans have remained paranoid about their supply ever since.
Finally, on March 17, 1974, Arab oil ministers (with the exception of Libya) lifted their embargo against the United States. But the playing field was forever changed.
Source: Various
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Lawsuit Claims Mapmaking Firm Owns Your Neighborhood
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Marty Graham
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A mathematician who pioneered a fractal-based urban-mapping technique is embroiled in a copyright battle that raises legal questions about whether a company can claim ownership of the definition of neighborhoods: their specific locations and boundaries. The dispute highlights a growing movement to quantify the amorphous tendrils connecting communities.
Bernt Wahl had the idea in 2004 to use a blend of mathematical modeling and old-fashioned shoe leather to map out unofficial neighborhoods — areas like Bernal Heights in San Francisco, or New Orleans' French Quarter — whose borders are drawn mostly in the minds of the inhabitants.
Since then, he's produced maps defining more than 18,000 neighborhoods in 350 U.S. and international cities, which are used in everything from search localization to epidemiology. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is currently using Wahl's maps to better understand which neighborhoods are being slammed hardest by the mortgage crisis.
Vermont-based mapping company Maponics is now suing Wahl to keep him from creating any more neighborhood maps "derived from or containing parts of" the original maps he produced four years ago, which defined 7,000 neighborhoods in 100 cities. Wahl did that work as a contractor for a real estate web portal, which then sold the copyright to Maponics. Because American's biggest metropolitan areas were included in the original batch of maps, the lawsuit could effectively bar Wahl from the mapmaking business for good.
The lawsuit highlights the growing importance of neighborhood data in web applications and science. Since Wahl pioneered the industry four years ago, other companies have entered the neighborhood-mapping field, which has swollen into a big part of a $17 billion localized-mapping industry, says Ian White, CEO of San Francisco-based Urban Mapping.
Neighborhood mapping is being used for marketing, siting new retail outlets, social networking, and analyzing crime patterns and earthquake damage. Yahoo announced in June that it had licensed neighborhood-mapping data from Urban Mapping for 2,000 U.S. cities. Earlier this year, Zillow opened its database of 7,000 neighborhoods to the world under a Creative Commons license.
"Everyone made out like a bandit except me," Wahl says.
Wahl began his work when he was contracted by real estate portal HomeGain to optimize the firm's search engine. At that time, real estate site maps were organized either by ZIP code or by census tract, which are both fairly arbitrary shapes drawn with disregard for the differences in the neighborhoods within. The Thomas Guides have long noted neighborhoods, but did not attempt to define where they begin and end.
Wahl saw that as a fatal flaw. "Neighborhoods are really important," he says. "For example, there's a census tract that combines downtown Berkeley and North Berkeley. In Berkeley hills, the average age is 57, and downtown it's 24. The incomes and values are completely different. It made me start thinking that we needed a different way to let people look for homes."
Working with 15 student interns, Wahl began phoning local-government planning departments, chambers of commerce and other community sources in hundreds of cities. "There's usually a librarian in each place who remembers the neighborhoods — the trick is finding them," Wahl says. "And you have to be careful about what people tell you, because they can tend to bleed their home into a better neighborhood."
Using the anecdotal data, Wahl drew polygons that contain the neighborhoods, then tacked them to base maps created by the U.S. Census. The new maps hit big. HomeGain went from limping into its last few million dollars of startup capital to being one of the leading real estate search sites. The company was eventually sold to a consortium of five giant newspaper companies, including the Washington Post.
When HomeGain's management changed, the new bosses sold Wahl's first neighborhood map data to Maponics for $40,000. Wahl had permission to keep selling and using the data for six months, according to court documents.
"They gave me $5,000," Wahl says.
Wahl has continued to develop his data, refining the boundaries on his U.S. maps, and expanding internationally to Asian and European cities in 30 countries. His customers include Craigslist and Ask.com, and he gives away data at no charge to researchers, including those at the FDIC, and to epidemiologists working with the Centers for Disease Control to track the spread of disease.
"We aren't getting rich off this, though clients do pay for the data," Wahl says. "We try to get the data out everywhere we can, so we can see how people are using it — that's very interesting. It's about public service and the public good as much as making money."
But the low price tag for Wahl's maps is precisely what irks Maponics, which accuses Wahl, and his company, Factle, of offering the data at "fire-sale prices."
Last year, Maponics contacted one of Wahl's customers, Toursheet.com, and demanded the social place-marking site stop using Wahl's data. "It allows ... Toursheet to use a common map to show the attitude of the neighborhood, so people can have a real sense of community," says founder Kyle Else. "Well, it did before I heard from Maponics.... They threatened my future development. I missed my window because of their threats, and I'm stuck in limbo until this is sorted out."
Maponics filed suit in federal court in Los Angeles in November 2007 accusing Wahl of copyright infringement and unfair competition.
"We're not out to put Bernt out of business," says George Frost, Maponics' attorney. "If they've got another product that isn't related to our product, they're free to sell it. But the software and information that went into it belong to us."
Maponics CEO Darrin Clement has said in e-mails to Wahl's customers that Wahl "stole" Maponics data. That's prompted Wahl to countersue for defamation.
Wahl believes neighborhood boundaries are in the public domain. "I don't know how anyone can say they own it," Wahl muses. He argues there's more at stake than just profits.
"This data literally saves lives," says Wahl. "We could make more money at other jobs or selling the data for market value, but want we want to do is save lives and save the world. That starts at the neighborhood."
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Jargon Watch: Green Crude, Popcorning, Edupunk
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Jonathon Keats
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Green crude n. A new kind of crude oil harvested from genetically engineered algae. The dark-green syrup thrives on CO2, which could be funneled from coal-burning power plants, and can be made into gasoline or diesel in conventional refineries. The results burn cleaner than petroleum fuels.
Popcorning v. A chain reaction in which the accidental explosion of one nuclear warhead causes others in the vicinity to detonate, releasing lethal radiation for miles in every direction. Newly declassified documents reveal that dropping a Trident missile while loading it onto a submarine could ignite a Jiffy Pop Nagasaki.
Edupunk n. Avoiding mainstream teaching tools like Powerpoint and Blackboard, edupunks bring the rebellious attitude and DIY ethos of '70s bands like the Clash to the classroom.
Hairy blobs n. pl. Prickly prehistoric microorganisms that once lived in acidic, saline lakes chemically similar to ancient Martian waters. The recent discovery of fossilized hairy blobs in North Dakota lake beds could help in the search for microbial chia pets and other exotically hirsute life-forms on Mars and beyond.
— Jonathon Keats jargon@wired.com
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Gallery: NASA Spacecraft Will Explore Outer Solar System
Posted: October 17th, 2008, 12:00am EDT by Betsy Mason
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: Image: Walt Feimer/Goddard Space Flight CenterNASA will launch its Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) Oct. 19, on a mission to explore the interaction of our sun and solar system with the galaxy. IBEX will orbit 200,000 miles above the Earth and capture the first-ever images of our solar system's boundaries.
The mission will help us visualize our place in the galaxy and learn how the interaction between our sun and the galaxy beyond may have evolved. Scientists will get a better look at the solar wind — the outer layer of the sun's atmosphere that is expanding out into the galaxy as a plasma moving at a million miles an hour. The plasma creates a bubble, known as the heliosphere, that protects the solar system against radiation from galactic cosmic rays.
Left: Once the IBEX spacecraft is in low-Earth orbit, a solid rocket motor will burn for 75 seconds to give it a final boost into position, pointing at the sun and ready to deliver data.
: Photo: Southwest Research Institute Once the hardware and software was loaded aboard IBEX, technicians performed a series of stress tests. The spin test is shown here.
: Image: NASA GSFCThe primary mission of IBEX is to explore the edge of our solar system and how it interacts with the galaxy beyond.
: Image: NASA GSFCThe heliosphere, pictured here, separates our solar system from the interstellar medium and fends off galactic cosmic rays.
: Image: Walt Feimer/Goddard Space Flight CenterIBEX will study coronal mass ejections, depicted here, which are flows of plasma made up primarily of electrons and protons that propagate from the sun.
: Photo: Southwest Research InstituteOne of IBEX's two sensors. Each time an energetic neutral atom comes into one of the sensors, it is recorded.
: Photo: Southwest Research InstituteOne of two sensors aboard IBEX is shown here. As the spacecraft slowly rotates, its sensors will capture information from the entire 360 degrees in a process that takes six months.
: Photo: Southwest Research InstituteEngineers work in a clean room using jumper cables to test the connections between the side panels (shown at left and right) that hold the sensors and the rest of the spacecraft (center).
: Photo: Southwest Research InstituteThe complete IBEX payload with both sensors is inserted into the thermal vacuum chamber for testing in space-like conditions.
: Photo: NASA/VAFBThe IBEX spacecraft is mounted on the front of the Pegasus rocket prior to being enclosed in the protective outer fairing.
: Photo: Southwest Research InstituteTechnicians at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California help guide the Star-27 kick motor and nozzle that will propel IBEX during the final leg of its journey into orbit.
: Photo: Southwest Research InstituteInside a protected clean room tent at Vandenberg Air Force Base, both halves of the fairing are installed around the IBEX spacecraft. The fairing is a molded structure that fits flush with the outside surface of the rocket and forms an aerodynamically smooth nose cone, protecting the spacecraft during launch and ascent.