Facebook hired Sony PS3 hacker "Geohot"

The giant social networking website, Facebook have confirmed on Wednesday that they have hired George Hotz, a celebrated hacker known as "GeoHot" who was sued by Sony for hacking the Japanese company's PlayStation 3 gaming console.

According to the online rumors, Hotz is now working very hard at the Facebook application for Apple’s iPad application.

Sony had accused Hotz of violating federal law by posting online tutorials that could be used to modify the PS3 security system and allow players to play downloadable pirated video games on their consoles.

In April, Internet vigilante group Anonymous began staging cyber attacks on Sony's online services, including the PlayStation Network, in retaliation for the legal action against Hotz and another hacker, Alexander Egorenkov.

Anonymous argued the reason for their attack was that PS3 console owners have the right to do what they wish with their consoles, including modifying them however they like. Despite that, Hotz later reached a settlement with Sony in April involving the PS3 hacking case. Hotz also was the first person to go public after successfully hacking into an iPhone.

Sony's PlayStation Network, Qriocity music streaming service and Sony Online Entertainment were among the online services targeted during the attacks and data breaches which compromised more than 100 million user accounts and resulting a one month closure of PSN.

Team Fortress 2 is now Free 2 Play

“The most fun you can have online” - PC Gamer
Is now FREE!
There’s no catch! Play as much as you want, as long as you like!

The world’s #1 war-themed hat simulator!

One of the most popular online action games of all time, Team Fortress 2 delivers constant free updates—new game modes, maps, equipment and, most importantly, hats. Nine distinct classes provide a broad range of tactical abilities and personalities, and lend themselves to a variety of player skills.

New to TF? Don’t sweat it!

No matter what your style and experience, we’ve got a character for you. Detailed training and offline practice modes will help you hone your skills before jumping into one of TF2’s many game modes, including Capture the Flag, Control Point, Payload, Arena, King of the Hill and more.

Make a character your own!

There are hundreds of weapons, hats and more to collect, craft, buy and trade. Tweak your favorite class to suit your gameplay style and personal taste. You don’t need to pay to win—virtually all of the items in the Mann Co. Store can also be found in-game.

There's mixed feelings about this. Earlier Valve have released some F2P games but no one expected the formerly $19.99 game to be free of charge after the Uber Update. Free players can upgrade to premium with no restriction to trading by just purchasing anything of the Mann Co store with the cheapest item costing merely 50 cent.

Quickly after the news broke, The Team Fortress 2 forum was filled with topics of rage from players that are concerned at the amount of cheaters that will come as free account hackers/offenders can just evade the bans with a new account.

Others rejoice as they can now invite their cheap friends to join them to play online while experienced players are excited at the prospect of increasing their kill/death ratio with the plethora of newbies on the servers.

Lovers or haters share the same problems though, as almost all servers with 24 players are now full with free accounts players instead of premium account holders that actually paid $19.99 or $9.99 or $2.50 on the Steam Sales.

I paid $19.99 2 weeks ago for TF2 and all i got was this lousy hat

Team Fortress 2 is now first on the Steam Stats peaking with over 100 000 players online ahead of Counter Strike and Modern Warfare.

Sign up for a Steam account and download ~10 GB of the game at http://store.steampowered.com/app/440/

Monitor Parkinson's disease via iParkinson

Not really, it's called the iTrem. Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) have developed an iPhone application that may enable people with Parkinson's disease and certain other neurological conditions to use the ubiquitous devices to collect data from their hand and arm tremors and relay the results to medical personnel.

They believe the app could replace the subjective tests that is being used now to assess the level of tremors, while potentially allowing more frequent patient monitoring without having to fork out expensive medical bills.

iTrem will first undergo a clinical study at Emory University and must receive any required approvals from the Food and Drug Administration. They expect it will be on the Apple Apps store later this year.

Principal project investigator, Brian Parise said, "We expect iTrem to be a very useful tool for patients and their caregivers," and Robert Delano, another GTRI research scientist added, "And as a downloadable application, it also promises to be convenient and cost-effective."

iTrem utilizes the iPhone's built-in accelerometer to collect data on patients wherever they are. The application will then track tremor information currently, and in the future will use simple puzzle games to record tremor data, which will then be processed and transmitted.

The researchers expect the clinical trial to show that data gathered by the program would allow physicians to remotely monitor the degree of disability, progression and medication response among patients with tremor-related conditions. In addition, iTrem offers a social function that allows people to share stories, pictures and data.

Teen Builds Nuclear Detector Device

17 year old Taylor Wilson have built a functioning device that can detect nuclear weapons smuggled in cargo containers. It works via a nuclear fusion reactor that he also built 3 years earlier.


Taylor Wilson was recently honored at the Intel International Science Fair for his project, which he's dubbed "Countering Nuclear Terrorism."

It's a scanner that can automatically check to see if a cargo container may have a nuclear bomb hidden inside. Today that has to be done manually, and given the amount of containers that comes into the country, that essentially means most of them aren't being checked.

Taylor stated:

[B]asically how it works is it fuses together heavy hydrogen – deuterium. And when these deuterium atoms fuse together, they give off neutrons. It's that neutron radiation that goes into the cargo container, and depending on what the makeup of the cargo container is, it will react in such a way that it gives off radiation. I detect that radiation and it's specific to whatever that cargo container's contents are.

He then said:

Some people may not go into science because they think, just nerds go into science, or science isn't cool. But the thing is, science is cool, and me and my friends who do science are cooler than the people who don't. So, I really think that science is a cool thing and if you really want to change the world, go into science. Because that's the future and that's who will really change the world.

1/6 Time Spent Online Involves Social Networking

Since 2007, social networking use has doubled and it's all thanks to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and an array of other social companies reaching record traffic highs.

According to web analytics firm, comScore, the average online user in the U.S. now spends nearly 16% of their time on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr or Twitter. That’s an increment from just 8% in July 2007. In the last year alone, social networking use has increased by approximately 25% and a large part of that is contributed by Facebook's 700+ million users.

It wasn't until May 2009 until Facebook finally caught up with MySpace, and ever since then Facebook has stayed on top, while MySpace has experienced a dramatic fall. In May 2011, Facebook had 157.2 million visitors, more than four times the size of Myspace (34.9 million visitors).

Facebook now reaches 73% of the U.S. Internet population each month, while MySpace has lost nearly 50% of its audience in the last year alone. Now users can even sign into Myspace using Facebook.

LinkedIn, Tumblr and Twitter all hit record highs in May 2011. LinkedIn now gets 33.4 million U.S. visitors, more than Twitter’s 27 million and Tumblr’s 10.7 million. Tumblr is the fastest-growing of the three companies though, boasting 166% growth in the last year. LinkedIn’s U.S. audience increased by a strong 58% since last year.

Medieval Style Slingshot Crossbow

Forget Duke Nukem: Forever, this is much cooler. Joerg Sprave, a bald man from Europe that probably have too much free time that brought us the Sawblade Slingshot, is back and this time it's the Medieval-Style Slingshot Crossbow.



As Joerg explains, it's not the most powerful slingshot he's ever built, or the biggest. But the craftsmanship of the Medieval-Style Slingshot Crossbow sublime, the destructive force complete.

Learn how to make this for yourself at HERE

Apple sued for iCloud

Just a week after Steve Jobs announced Apple's new online storage service, iCloud; iCloud Communications, a Phoenix-based voice over IP provider have filed claims for damages and infringement since Apple copies its name and causes confusion over their competing products.

The suit was filed in a U.S District Court in Arizona, and claims that since Apple launched their iCloud offering, the public now looks at the iCloud name and sees it an an Apple product, rather than one of iCloud Communications.

iCloud Communications wants Apple to stop using the iCloud name, and requesting the Arizona district courts for profits made by Apple's iCloud so far. iCloud Communications have been in business since 2005 and despite that, not the first result you will find if you do a quick online search.

Apple did however applied for a trademark under the iCloud name in Europe on March 31. Apple also  forked out $4.5 million from Swedish company Xcerion for the iCloud.com domain who was using it for Linkoping, a cloud-based data storage service. 

Apple does have a history of launching products that already have established names, only to reach an agreement after the product launch. Apple was also hit with a lawsuit with Cisco over the iPhone name, but eventually settled it out of court; and the iPad name was owned by Fujitsu. Most famously, the name of the Beatles record label was Apple Corp, but the computer version of Apple and the Beatles version of Apple worked it out.

Three arrested for Sony attacks

Spanish police have arrested three men suspected to be members of the hacker group "Anonymous" on Friday, charging them with organizing cyber attacks against the websites of Sony Corp, banks and governments. Despite that, they weren't responsible for the recent massive 1 month downtime of Sony's PlayStation Network that compromised 100 million user's data.


The three alleged "hacktivists" helped organize an attack that temporarily disabled access to Sony's websites.
The men also were charged for launching attacks on Spanish banks BBVA and Bankia, and Italian energy group Enel SpA.

Spanish police said the accused, all in their 30's and Spanish, were arrested in Almeria, Barcelona and Alicante, and were guilty of coordinated computer hacking attacks from a server set up in a house in Gijon in the north of Spain.

The police did not rule out further arrests while  Sony PlayStation spokesman Dan Race declined to comment on the arrests on Friday.

Microsoft sued $290 million

A software and designing company based in Canada called i4i sued Microsoft back in 2007, alleging that the creator of various Windows operating system have without permission, used an editing tool patented by their company.

It is believed that i4i's program was used in Microsoft word processing application, Word 2003 and 2007 that infringes patent relating to i4i's text manipulation software.

Microsoft filed an appeal but on Thursday, lost in the Supreme Court by a conclusive 8-0 vote. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said federal law clearly states patents granted by the U.S. Patent Office are presumed valid and the court ordered Microsoft to pay $290 million to i4i which is still unpaid and with interest, are expected to rise above $300 million.

Google, Apple, Yahoo, Cisco and Intel backed up Microsoft's case by stating that is often impossible to determine whether a software program is patented, since programmers can and do quickly build new programs based on existing knowledge.

Microsoft's share price dipped when the decision was announced but quickly recovered and was little changed at $23.93 in afternoon business trade.

Microsoft have issued a statement, saying it "would continue to advocate for changes to the law."

Lefties are not more talented

The Simpsons

Scratch that myth about lefties superpower, Professor Mike Nicholls, from Flinders University Australia have concluded that lefties in fact aren't more special than right handed people. Interestingly enough, Professor Nicholls is also a lefty.

In his research of 5000 five-year-old Australian children whom 10 per cent were left-handed, their school performance and teachers evaluations was recorded.

"Left-handers tend to do worse as a group than right-handers," Prof Nicholls, a left-hander himself, said.


Backed up by additional research carried out in the US and the UK, Prof Nicholls also dismiss reports that being left-handed was a result of "something going awry at birth".

However, the reduced cognitive ability of lefties was similar to the "negative outcomes" of being born prematurely, he said.

E3 2011

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, commonly known as E3, is an annual trade show for the computer and video games industry presented by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA). It is used by video game developers to show off their upcoming games and game-related hardware at the Los Angeles Convention Center (LACC) in Los Angeles in June.

What to expect this year:

• Sony Next Generation Portable (NGP)

A 5-inch OLED touch screen, built-in 3G and looks like PSP 2.0

• Nintendo's New Console

No news about this but it would be huge alright.

• Sega

Sonic The Hedgehog

• Activision

Modern Warfare 3

• EA

Battlefield 3
Mass Effect 3
Madden 12

Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed: Revelations would likely be released next year while Kinect-enabled Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, are expected to be shown off, along with upcoming western crime game Call of Juarez: The Cartel.

Apart from Duke Nukem, what games are you looking forward most of all?

More buttons, less problems

Google Inc. have rolled out it's “+1” button for websites, allowing users to recommend things to their contacts and friends.

Sites that you've “+1” will appear more prominently in your friends’ search result (implying you have friends), provided that your pals have +1 enabled and are have login to their Google accounts.

The button already is available on sites like Mashable and the Huffington Post.

Google’s +1, however, is a little different. Instead of focusing on a separate social network like Facebook's "Like" button that is everywhere in the internet, it is geared toward search, which is the thing Google does best (and adSense). Because Page Rank is crucial to websites, webmasters might will have more of an incentive to include the +1 button.



The Twitter “follow” button, on the other hand, is a service to get more novice interweb users to be sucked into Twitter. If website readers see that they can use Twitter to get more information from their favorite actors, they might be more likely to get on board the Tw@ter.

Regular slingshots are for nubs

Joerg Sprave, a man that probably have too much free time has built the sawblade slingshot.



This might be the ultimate weapon choice for mankind during the zombie apocalypse 2012 soon. We need more people like him, bright ideas and well mannered.