Archive for 'Geek News'

Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s prostitute scandal is still big news in New York. In February earlier this year, the former Governor was caught in a federal wiretap arranging to meet with a high-priced prostitute at a Washington hotel.

The story quickly swept the tabloids, all of who soaked up Spitzer’s downfall with little mention of how and why his crimes actually came to light.

Spitzer was originally flagged when a series of Suspicious Activity Reports - reports that banks must to file with the Treasury to assist in investigating anything from money laundering to terrorist activity – were submitted.

The prostitution ring that counted Spitzer as a customer had been responsible for shady bank accounts, checks and wire transfers of up to $400,000, they soon became under-investigation.

According to the FBI’s complaint:

“In or about October 2007, the FBI and the United States Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigative Division (”IRS-CID”) began an investigation focusing on an organization suspected of conducting prostitution and money-laundering crimes in the United States and Europe.”

The investigation began with a suspicious activity report on Spitzer. According to the Wall Street Journal, Spitzer’s transactions were regular and always kept under $10,000. A pattern that the Feds class as suspicious.

“There has been a massive federal crackdown on money laundering in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and banks have been extremely diligent in filing such reports. Those reports often include details of transactions done by innocent people.”

According to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) there have been 4.7 million SARs filed as of June 30, 2007.

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For the last 18 months Google has been working to develop their personal health records solution. So far we haven’t been given much insight into what the product will be like, however there is promise that it will be comprehensive and user-friendly.

As of last month Google received a large endorsement from the Cleveland Clinic to help in the development of the technology.

The big medical center has now started a pilot project to begin linking the health information for some of its patients with Google’s personal health records.

Cleveland Clinic currently employs a sophisticated IT system to store their 100,000+ patient’s personal health records.

But a sizeable portion of those patients are retirees that may spend four or more months elsewhere, typically in Florida or Arizona. When these patients travel, their electronic health records don’t follow them explains Dr. C. Martin Harris, the clinic’s chief information officer.

“It forces the patient to become his or her own medical historian,

“Google personal health record is a solution to that problem”

Using Google’s technology, a person can approve the transfer of their medical records from the clinics computers to series of secure Web pages.

The pilot project is scheduled to last six to eight weeks, and will involve approx 10,000 patients.

Marissa Mayer, a vice president, who took over management of the health team six months ago said, “The project with Cleveland Clinic is “a milestone” for Google”.

Google’s personal health records is still in development, and it will be introduced publicly and made widely available, after the pilot project is concluded, Ms. Mayer said.

With Cleveland Clinic being at the forefront of health information technology, the recent endorsement is more promise that Google’s Personal Health Records will provide a one-stop solution for all health records.

Although we may not know much until the release of the product, what we do know is that Google will offer a fresh new user-interface as well as automated data links, so the patient does not have to type in personal data, as is required with some personal health records.

The recent endorsement from the Cleveland Clinic has also prompted other medical centers to sign up.

“This is truly a patient-controlled health record, and that’s a very significant step in the drive toward a more consumer-oriented system of health care,” said Dr. John D. Halamka, chief information officer of the Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Halamka is also chief information officer at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, which plans to link its electronic patient records with Google personal health pages.

9. Thermite vs. Liquid Nitrogen

One of the greatest scientific questions of all time: can liquid nitrogen freeze molten iron?

8. Gummy Bear Dies In Firework Display

Watch the helpless gummy bear explode when it is dropped into liquid potassium chlorate.

7. Scientist Spits Flaming Spores

A favorite circus trick. In this instance the scientist breaths fire by igniting a cloud of lycopodium spores.

6. Mysterious Reaction Creates an Undulating Brew

Here we see several clear liquids being poured into a beaker; the mixture then quickly changes colors, over and over again. This demonstration was perfected back in 1973 by two high school teachers Thomas Briggs and Warren Rauscher.

5. How to Make Stalagmites Instantly

Sodium acetate will suddenly crystallize if you prepare a saturated solution and pour it onto a seed crystal. This is same chemical reaction found in many hand warmers.

4. Elephant Toothpaste

If you mix concentrated hydrogen peroxide with dial soap and then add a pinch of sodium iodide, a fountain of oxygen-filled bubbles will erupt from the container.

3. How to Make Your Own Glow Sticks

Ever wondered how glow sticks generate light?

2. The Inner Life of A Cell

Animator John Liebler gave the world a look at the beautiful ballet of molecules which gives rise to life.

1. Magnesium Burning Between Bricks of Dry Ice

The pick of the bunch! Watch magnesium burn whilst sandwiched between two bricks of dry ice. This is possible because magnesium can combust in an atmosphere of pure carbon dioxide.

The forthcoming TeraDisk (developed by Mempile) promises to leave Blu-ray in its wake by offer a massive 1TB (1000GB) of space on a regular sized (CD/DVD) optical disk.

How it this possible? Existing optical media records and reads data on semi-transparent layers; a CD uses just one layer, whilst Blu-Ray uses up to eight. The layers are restricted to a certain depth because as the light passes through, it becomes distorted and unable to read/write.The TeraDisk uses 200 layers, each storing 5GB of data. The disks are made from the same Plexiglas material used in other disks so the support will stay the same; it is only the read and write technology which will be new.

“Teradisk uses traditional chemical synthesis along with advanced quantum mechanical calculations and cutting-edge photophysical laboratory experiments to design molecularly-engineered nonlinear optical chromophores”

In laymen’s terms, the chromophores which are injected into the layers change their chemical structure upon the two-photon interaction with red laser. This change causes the two-photon fluorescence signal to modulate without affecting the liner optical properties of the material. Thus allowing for massively multilayer data to be accessed on what appears to be a regular optical disk

The molecules have been optimized not only for their two-photon response, but also for other desired capabilities such as data lifetime, cost, chemical stability, and processability (for manufacturing).

Developers say the new technology will be cheap and should be available to the public in 2010.

With email providers giving away more and more online storage space, many people have taken to using their email account to store personal information.

While being able to access your details using an internet connection may seem like a good idea, an inbox/outbox or folder with passwords, bank account numbers, account usernames and other crucial information is a jackpot bonanza for identity thieves who manage to hack your email.

Even if you are careful not to store this type of information in your email account, you may still be inadvertently revealing personal information in emails conversations between family and friends.

The worst of it all is that you may never even know if your email is being hacked. A hacker can easily read an email then mark it as unread, if nothing appears to be different how are you going to know?

The easiest way to find out if your email is being hacked is by setting up an electronic tripwire which alerts you if an unwanted intruder breaks into your account.

1. For our example we will use OneStat. You must first sign up (you can leave a fake name and URL but must provide an email address).
2. You will receive a welcome email from OneStat, with a link to download an attachment. The attachment will contain your account number, write this number down and delete the attachment; you wouldn’t want a hacker to find this information!
3. Change the name of a text document to something that will attract an email hacker such as ‘password list’ or ‘account number and pin’. Also change the file format from a text to a website page, for example ‘account number and pin.htm’
4. Then attach this dummy file to an email and send it to the account you want to monitor. Make sure the email subject title also lures in the snooper (List of Passwords, Bank Details etc)
5. Now the trap is set, if someone opens the email and the attachment, OneStat will record a hit. If you log into your account everyday you will be quickly notified if anyone has been snooping around.

The OneStat account page then gives you details on each “visitor” including the date and time they accessed the web document and more importantly their location and IP address!

Although this may not stop your email being hacked, it’s a good way to monitor your account. If your email does get hacked then you should quickly change your password to something stronger.

Also if you see the hacker’s location and you only know one or two people in that area, then it can narrow down your list of possible suspects.

A legend in the ‘handheld gaming’ hall of fame, the Sega Game Gear is a classic example of a popular retro handheld gaming console.

For those who missed out, Sega’s 8 bit, full color Game Gear was the third ever handheld console and was release back 1991 in competition with perhaps the more popular, Nintendo Game Boy.

The Game Gear was basically a Sega Master System housed in a portable case, boasting a 3.2 inch wide color screen that had a slightly lower resolution than the Master System, but which allowed for a larger color palette.

Gameplay and graphics were certainly hi-tech for it’s time, so much so that the Game Gear is still extremely playable, especially for the those who enjoy classic arcade beat em’ ups, racing games and platform games like Sonic The Hedgehog, Streets Of Rage and Road Rash.

The slower refresh rate of the Game Gear could cause fast moving games to be slightly blurred and the contrast and brightness of the screen made it difficult to play in brightly lit areas. The battery life was also quite low; six AA batteries only provided enough power for 5 hours gameplay. Apart from these points the Game Gear was and still is a lot of fun.

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Touch Screen interfaces are paving way for the new generation of display units. Already featured in many devices such as ATMs, phones and PDAs, the simplicity of touch screen is user-friendly and extremely appealing to most.

A demo at the recent 2008 CeBIT Expo, shows what the future of multi-touch touch-screen displays will look like. The display closely resembles the touch screen display used by Tom Cruise in the popular film Minority Report.

Although it may not be the first attempt at this kind of multi-touch, the demo of a fully working unit on display to the public is certainly a first.CeBIT (Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik; German for “Centre of Office and Information technology”) was traditionally the computing part of the Hanover Fair, a big industry trade show held every year in Germany.

In the 1986s the IT and telecommunications section was straining the resources of the industry fair so much that it was given a separate trade show held four weeks earlier than the main Hanover Fair. CeBIT expo’s have since become world renowned and are also held in Shanghai, Sydney and Istanbul.

Another Multi-Touch Display causing a stir has been incorporated into the surface of bar. iBar as the display is know, gives your bar a crazy multi-touch effect which will either provide you with hours of visual entertainment, or make you dizzy after one too many….

Sun and the Texas Advanced Computing Center recently unveiled a new supercomputer dubbed ‘Ranger,’ that can process 500 teraflops or 500 trillion floating point instructions per second.

The 500 teraflops of power will enable Ranger to process simulations and computations beyond anything we have seen before. This ability will give way to scientific breakthroughs and economic growth in all areas of society from weather forecasting to astrophysics.

Sun Constellation Linux Cluster

System Name: Ranger
Host Name: ranger.tacc.utexas.edu
IP Address: 129.114.50.163
Operating System: Linux
Number of Nodes: 3,936
Number of Processing Cores: 62,976
Total Memory: 123TB
Peak Performance: 504TFlops
Total Disk: 1.73PB (shared); 31.4TB (local)

The Ranger is based on Sun’s Constellation System which ushers in the new era of “petascale” computing in which high performance supercomputers approach one petaflop (one quadrillion floating point instructions) per second.

Using petascale architecture reduces switching elements by a factor of 300, cabling by a factor of six, and system footprint by up to 20%.Director, Texas Advanced Computing Center, Jay Boisseau says,

“Without a doubt, Ranger is the most powerful general-purpose supercomputing system for research ever.”

At the heart of Ranger are 72 Sun Fire X4500 storage servers, each with 48 500GB drives, yielding 1.7 petabytes of raw storage capacity and125 terabytes (TB) of memory.

Ranger also links two Sun Datacenter Switch 3456s, the world’s fastest InfiniBand switch to achieve an aggregate bandwidth of up to 110 terabits.

The system’s ultra-dense unibody chassis saves about 500 lbs. per rack when compared with traditional chassis and rack combinations. It also gives you 50 percent more compute power than its nearest competitor from HP, and 71 percent more than an IBM rack.

The revolutionary F-117 Night Hawk, the worlds first attack aircraft to employ stealth technology, is scheduled to be retired at the end of this month.

‘The Black Jet’ with its futurist angular design has spent a wholesome 27 years serving as part of the airforce’s arsenal, secretly patrolling hostile skies from Serbia to Iraq. This will all come to an end on April 22nd when the last F-117’s are scheduled to arrive at their final destination, Tonopah Test Range Airfield in Nevada, the site where the jet made its first flight in 1981.

Last month the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, which previously managed the F-117 program, had an informal private retirement ceremony with military leaders, base employees and representatives from Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The last of the F-117’s will now fly to Palmdale, California, for one more retirement ceremony on April 21st, before making their final flight to Holloman.

Fifty-nine F-117s were made; 10 were retired in December 2006 and 27 since then, the Air Force said. Seven of the planes have crashed, one in Serbia in 1999.The technology which led to the development of the F-117 was designed back in the 1970’s and although it was not invisible to radar, the shape and coating of the F-117’s design greatly reduced its detection.

The single-seat aircraft was designed to fly into heavily defended areas undetected to drop its payloads with surgical precision.

Since the F-117 went operational a total of 558 pilots have flown the jet. Each pilot is then dubbed a ‘bandit’ each with their own bandit number. Feest, ‘Bandit 261’, was the first to lead the stealth fighter on missions into Iraq during Desert Storm in 1991.

He said the fire from surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft guns was so intense that he stopped looking at it to try to ease his fears,

“We knew stealth worked and it would take a lucky shot to hit us, but we knew a lucky shot could hit us at any time,”

Incredibly, not one stealth was hit during those missions,

The Air Force decided to accelerate the retirement of the F-117s to free up money to modernize the rest of the fleet. The F-117 is being replaced by the F-22 Raptor, which also has stealth technology.

With most of the population owning a cell phone, the numbers of text messages flying around the airwaves has drastically increased over the last 5 years. And with spammers try to expand their audience, text messages have become fertile territory for malicious spam adverts.

Estimates vary greatly regarding the exact percentage of spam text’s out there, however Clouldmark - a San Francisco company that makes anti-spam software for carriers – claim that the problem is on the increase with numbers expected to quadruple by the end of the year.

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The Optimus Maximus keyboard is one of its kind. At first glance it looks like a standard keyboard, nothing too flashy going on, just a nice simple design with pleasing lines. But upon closer inspection you will see that each and every button on the Optimus Maximus keyboard is actually a tiny display screen that uses OLED technology.

Each button consists of a moving cap, a microchip and a display which shows the current function assigned to the key.

To help extend the lifetime of the buttons and to cut down on vulnerable wires, the OLED display is fixed in the transparent cap, this means replacing a key is as easy as it would be on a standard keyboard, perhaps with one exception…the cost.

Optimus’s customizable layout enables the use of any language — Cyrillic, Ancient Greek, Georgian, Arabic, Quenya, hiragana, etc. — as well as any other characters: notes, numerals, special symbols, HTML codes, math functions etc.

The included configurator software enables the user to program each button and the image displayed and once everything is set up, you can switch between layouts with ease.

To run the Optimus Maximus you’ll need Windows XP, Vista or Mac OSX 10.4.8 or higher, at least 20 MB of hard disk space, at least 256MB of RAM and the $400+ it costs to buy one.

The OLED technology used in the keyboard is still an expensive alternative to a standard keyboard however; OLED screens are theoretically cheaper to produce in the long-run compared to regular LCD screens.

There are also other advantages over LCD. OLED screens can be as thin as a human hair, they can produce light without the need for a back-light, the can be bent and transferred to fabric, they have a greater range of color and the image quality is equally as good.

The main disadvantage is the lifetime of the OLED is very limited, almost 10 times shorter than LCD. But, according to experts it will only be a matter of time before the technology is improved and these types of displays will be found on many devices from laptops to revolutionary new ‘multi-use newspapers’ or video screens embedded in clothing.

Check out the video to see the OLED keys in action!!!

We just reviewed the latest installment in the Guitar Hero series – Guitar Hero 3, Legends Of Rock. Despite the realistic game play, even if you’re using the guitar-shaped controller gameplay is not quite the same as actually playing a guitar.

For those who don’t play the guitar, this is probably a good thing but for those who are seeking an even more realistic version of the game, you should check out fourth coming rival game, Guitar Rising.

Guitar Rising is basically the same as Guitar Hero with one major difference, you can use any electric guitar, yes a real electric guitar to control the player.

Check Out The Video Promo Of Guitar Rising.

Stumble Upon is a collaborative web search tool that utilizes a growing Stumble Upon community to help you cut down on Googling and get better directed to what you are looking for.

Developed by Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Justin LaFrance, and Eric Boyd,“StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences.”

This web search tool comes in the form of a browser add-on which can be found for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Opera.

Click Here To Download StumbleUpon

How StumbleUpon Works

StumbleUpon finds a new site every time you click the ‘stumble!’ button; once you find a page that you like, you can rate the page by giving it a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down.’

The pages which StumbleUpon send your way are based on your ratings of previous pages, as well as ratings from your friends and other users with similar interests. In this way, websites with great content get recommend for the next user by real people – not heartless machines.

The StumbleUpon community is extremely large and continuing to grow. In July 2006 StumbleUpon had around 1 million users and as of December 2007, the community had grown to over 4 million. The rising number of the stumble upon community was something that eBay noticed back in May 07 when they acquired StumbleUpon for a whopping $75,000,000 (75 million) USD.

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The highly anticipated MacBook Air hit finally stores earlier this year and for most Mac fans, it really does live up to expectations.

With all the press the MacBook Air is getting, it wasn’t going to be long before we at 800HighTech managed to make these available on finance for all Military Service Members and Civilian DoD’s regardless of past debt or bad credit history.

MacBook Air Now Available On Finance From 800HighTech

So why all the hype? For starters the MacBook Air has managed to cram a powerful 1.6GHz (or optional 1.8GHz) Intel Core 2 Duo processor, an 80GB hard disk (or optional 64GB solid-state drive) and Intel GMA X3100 graphics processor into an extremely slim line casing measuring just 0.16 to 0.76 inches, whilst at the same time, still offering the comfort of a full sized backlit keyboard as well as a large 13.3 inch screen.

A couple of things you will immediately notice about the slim design is the absence of an optical disk drive and the reduction of video and audio in’s and out’s. As standard the MacBook Air only comes with a DVI output (which can also support VGA by the use of an included adaptor), one USB port and an audio out. This may seem like a drastic measure to save space but Apple have done their best to compensate for this by incorporating remote disk technology (keep reading for more information about MacBook Air’s remote disk technology works).

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Asus are all set to release the ‘big brother’ of the popular 7 inch Eee PC. The new larger model referred to as the Eee PC 900 (not confirmed) will boast a slightly higher spec as well as some great new features.

The Eee PC was a big hit for Asus, being voted the “The Most Wanted Christmas Gift” by American Amazon.com and Cnet, as well as winning a prestigious award at the International CES Innovations Design and Engineering Awards for 2008, it was inevitable that Asus would develop a bigger more powerful machine.Recently unveiled at CeBIT 2008 the new Eee PC 900 seems to have kept the same basic concept as its smaller counterpart, adding a slight specification upgrade and just enough new features to keep you happy.

ASUS promises the screen will display a 1024 x 600 pixel resolution and specs will be upgraded to 1G of memory, a larger storage of up to 12GB and wider 8.9-inch screen. There is also the addition of a “multi-finger gesture input” trackpad, which will provide the ability to zoom in and out as well as allowing for two-finger scrolling similar to the pad found on Macs.

The Eee PC will be compatible with both Linux and Windows although the Windows version is set to retail at nearly twice the price. Here we really notice the cost benefits of open source software.The Eee Pc is set to release in the summer, will retail for around 399 (Linux OS), making it reasonably priced depending on the choice of hard drive space.