Human Washing Machine ready

This next machine is a real sign of the times. It is a washing machine that is designed to wash you instead of your laundry.
This human washing machine, known as the Avant Santelubain 999 allows the user to lie down and let the machine spray him or her with soap and water, along with infrared light for steam heat. It will even use aromatherapy and sound, then has an option of a seaweed wrap.
Say what? I’m not really certain how that seaweed wrap part works, but I have heard that the Human Washing Machine will sterilize itself after a wash is completed.
So what are we looking at here? A replacement for the shower and the bathtub? It looks like it takes up just as much space. It combines the spraying of the shower, and the relaxation of the tub. That might make a good slogan if anyone ever wants to market this thing.
I imagine that you could probably stick yourself in a washing machine and accomplish the same thing, but you don’t want be around for the spin cycle. Now, if only someone could invent a human washing machine that could also clean the clothes that you are wearing.

Source

Sony Dropping PS2 Price To $100

Sony (NYSE: SNE) on Tuesday cut the price of the PlayStation 2 to $100, offering a low-cost entry into video games.
The new price, which takes effect on Wednesday, represents a 23% drop and is likely to extend the life of Sony's previous-generation console. In addition, the cut makes it more likely Sony will drop the price of the PlayStation 3, Dow Jones Newswire reported. The PS3 sells for $399 and lags in sales to rivals the Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii.

Hands On With the New Nokia 5800

The touchscreen 3G Nokia 5800, set to launch in North America later this month, will give the mobile world a pleasant surprise. This iPhone rival brings plenty of hardware goodies, but can it compete with Apple's crown jewel?

The 5800 will launch on February 26th, and will be available in an unlocked version, which can be used on either AT&T's or T-Mobile's network, for $399. I've been using the Nokia 5800 as my primary phone for the past few days to see how well it performed--and how well it compares with my iPhone.



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Build a USB Digital Microscope in 60min and 15$

Build a USB Digital Microscope in 60min and 15$
How to turn a 10$ microscope and a 5$ USB camera into a cool digital microscope in 60 minuets.

http://www.instructables.com/id/Build-a-USB-Digital-Microscope-in-60min-and-15/

How much data does Skype on my mobile use?

The amount of data used will vary depending on the size of your Skype contact list and your Skype activity.

Let's look at an example user (approximate usage only):

Tom has 20 Skype contacts and signs in twice a day for a total of 90 minutes. He instant messages for about 25 minutes each day and makes 20 minutes of Skype calls. Tom would use just under 1 MB of data in one month.

If you have a large number of contacts, or you IM for long periods of time, your data usage will be higher. You should check with your operator to see how much you will pay per megabyte, and we strongly recommend you sign up for an unlimited data plan with your operator.

Download: http://www.skype.com/intl/en/download/skype/mobile/

Single drive wipe protects data, research finds

A single wipe will make drives impossible to read.

In research published on Thursday, auditor Craig Wright tested the ability of a special type of electron microscope, known as a magnetic force microscope, to read data that has been erased. While overwriting the data multiple times with a random series of 0s and 1s makes it harder to recover, Wright found that it is nearly impossible to recover any meaningful amount of data after a only single pass. Recovering a single byte of data, for example, on a used drive is successful less than one percent of the time, he found. Accurately recovering four bytes, or 32 bits, of data only works nine times out of each million tries.

(Editor's note: SecurityFocus is currently investigating the veracity of the research paper mentioned in this article. Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland, an expert on secure deletion, has criticized the work in the epilogue to his paper on secure deletion.)

"Although there is a good chance of recovery for any individual bit from a drive, the chances of recovery of any amount of data from a drive using an electron microscope are negligible," Wright stated. "The fallacy that data can be forensically recovered using an electron microscope or related means needs to be put to rest."

Many software products designed to wipe hard drive allow for multiple passes to erase the data. Common wisdom holds that the more sensitive the data, the more times you should overwrite the drive. However, Wright's research suggests that a single pass is all that's necessary to protect the data on a hard drive.

Wright did find that multiple passes do make it harder to recover data and that data written to a pristine drive is much easier to recover. Yet, in the most common case, where the drive has been used and written to multiple times, a user can be assured of their privacy by a single pass.

"In many instances, using a MFM (magnetic force microscope) to determine the prior value written to the hard drive was less successful than a simple coin toss."

USB 3.0 is ten times faster

USB 3.0 is being demonstrated at CES. It is ten times faster that USB 2.0 but will not be available on products until next year.
The annual Consumer Electronics Show is a showcase in one sense and an indicator of future trends in another. The show is held in Las Vegas and getting around all the stands puts a serious strain on the physical and nervous systems. This year you can do it quite a lot as press conferences on the Internet are streamed live.
There are still many improvements needed but there is little doubt that, say, five years from today few journalists will bother with all the hassle and expense of being at these shows. They will sit and watch the presentations at home.
Every year CES shows something which points the way to the future. This year one of the pointers is the new USB 3.0.
Seagate and Symwave are jointly demonstrating the first consumer applications of USB 3.0, showing a Seagate FreeAgent drive running through a Symwave USB 3.0-compatible storage controller device. According to a Symwave press release, this will result in ’speeds previously unattainable with legacy USB technology.’ Which means, if you understand PR-write, it will be much faster.
How much faster is that? A serious amount. Probably ten times faster.
This is a very quick move from specification to working model. The USB 2.0 Promoter Group only completed the USB 3.0 specification in November. Now it is being demonstrated. However, that speed will not mean the product will be on sale real soon now. In fact, although it works it will not become mainstream until 2010.
The new standard, also known as SuperSpeed USB 3.0, will manage transfer speeds of up to 5 Gbps — more than ten times the transfer speed of USB 2.0. Which was thought was very quick when it was first introduced, ten years ago.
But the public demand for quicker, better is ever with us and this new standard is a major step forward. Not just in terms of speed of data transfer but in it ability to send more electricity to devices, and control them intelligently. For instance, USB 3.0 will not poll devices, which will allow them to enter a sleep-like mode.
USB 3.0 will be backward-compatible with USB 2.0 and 1.1.
Not connected with CES but related is the fact the Chinese government has declared its intention to force all digital phone makers to use a standard USB connector from the charger. That would mean that a single charger would do for all of your devices and would save an immense amount of wastage and frustration.
The mobile phone companies are fighting it tooth and nail. They are saying if the Chinese government implements these changes then they will take their bat and ball and play elsewhere. ‘Twas ever thus.
Note carefully the illustration is USB 2.0. You will have to wait a year before you can see the new standard in real life. Worth the wait.

Download Windows 7 Public Beta

Microsoft's Windows 7 public beta is now available at

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/beta-download.aspx

Minimal System Requirements.

* 1 GHz processor (32- or 64-bit)
* 1 GB of main memory
* 16 GB available disk space
* Support DirectX 9 graphics with 128 MB memory
* DVD-RW drive

Brave techies can try Microsoft's new Windows 7

Microsoft is opening up its new Windows computer operating system to anyone brave enough to download it early.
On Friday the public will be able to fetch a pre-release, test version of Microsoft (MSFT) Windows 7, the successor to the oft-maligned Windows Vista. CEO Steve Ballmer made the announcement Wednesday night on the eve of the Consumer Electronics Show.

Trying out the software this soon is risky for all but the most tech-savvy. Beta software tends to be buggy. Moreover, the program will expire in about six months, while the for-sale versions of Windows 7 aren't expected until late this year or early next. So testers must revert to Windows Vista, XP or some other alternative.

Ballmer told USA TODAY that a range of people will want Windows 7 now (to be available at www.microsoft.com/windows7). "Certainly a lot of techies will, a lot of corporate IT people will, my 14-year-old son. … He'll go out and get one because he's a PC enthusiast."

Pundits have criticized Vista as bloated, overly intrusive and requiring powerful hardware to make it run properly. "Microsoft will do everything it can in 2009 to get the market away from focusing attention on Vista and really driving Windows 7 as the future," says analyst Michael Gartenberg of Jupitermedia.

Microsoft has sold 180 million copies of Vista. It's a "very successful product that's been perceived as a failure in the marketplace," Gartenberg says. Microsoft says nearly 90% of its Vista customers are satisfied.

The latest operating system promises the kind of multitouch capabilities Apple has in the iPhone. "Windows 7 is definitely a big step forward in user interface, simplicity, the integration of touch, better integration of handwriting …" Ballmer says. "We focused on the basics: performance, reliability, speed, power management."

Of course, Microsoft is spreading the Windows 7 gospel at a time when the economy is reeling. "Our job has got to be to continue to innovate," Ballmer says. "There will be some things that probably don't make as much economic sense because the market has contracted. But by and large none of the things that we're excited about change because the economy is down. We may sell less, but still enough in most cases to make very good money doing it."

The Universal Wireless Charger:

The latest concept in the world of technology is the introduction of witricity. This is a phenomenon invented by a team of researchers from the MIT where it is possible to transmit energy to from a power source to an electrical gadget without any physical connections like wires and cables, or having to recharge or replace batteries periodically.

In keeping this concept in mind, the universal wireless charging pads were created where you need not plug in your cell phone or ipod for charging. All you have to do is to toss the gadgets onto the universal wireless charger wherein it drinks up the electro-juice and get charged up.
All that has to be done is to fit these universal wireless chargers on all desks, hotel rooms, the rooms in your home and you can very well go anywhere without worrying about carrying your charger along with you. Moreover, there will be no need of fidgeting with fidgety connections anymore or to have to keep up with the clutter of wires. Site Courtesy Hotel Utrecht and western union jamaica.

These universal wireless chargers are available in different sizes; they may be large enough to accommodate numerous devices or they may also be small where there is sufficient space and power to empower a single device. For an electrical gadget to use these universal wireless chargers, it is necessary that the gadget have a receiver coil that is built in them or at least have an adaptor that is clicked on the back of the gadget These devices, when placed on the pads then start charging.

Lenovo announces dual-screen Thinkpad

Research Triangle Park (NC) – Lenovo today announced the world’s first dual-screen notebook, which may give the idea of a mobile workstation or business desktop replacement notebook new meaning. The Thinkpad W700ds adds a slide-out display to the system’s main 17” screen to duplicate a desktop dual-screen environment. The privilege of owning one of these notebooks comes at a price – in terms of weight, battery life and money.

The Thinkpad team has had fantastic ideas to enhance the usability of its mobile computers in the past – we especially remember the Thinkpad’s butterfly keyboard in the mid-90s. But few of these ideas actually survived and we are not sure whether the dual-screen notebook approach has the potential to last.

Lenovo’s new Thinkpad is designed as a 17” mobile workstation that is 0.5” thicker than its W700 predecessor and hides a 10.6” slide-out display in its lid. The main screen offers a resolution of 1920 x 1200, the smaller screen (which can be angled towards the user) 768 x 1280, which is about 40% of the screen real estate of the main display. Realistically, the 768 pixel width is not enough to comfortably browse web pages or to edit text documents, presentations or large spreadsheets. In everyday use, the display may be limited to secondary applications such as instant messaging, video calls or emails.

Compared to the W700, which is already a substantial notebook, the ds version packs an additional 2 lbs and weighs about 11 lbs. Add the power adapter and you are at 13 lbs and even that may not be the final word, especially if you are adding a second or third hard drive. The measurements are 16.1”x12.2”x2.1”.

The core hardware components of the W700ds include Intel Core 2 processors (quad-core available), Nvidia workstation graphics (Quadro FX 3760M), 4 – 8 GB memory and a hard drive capacity of 320, 640 or 960 GB. Prices for a W700ds base model start at just under $3700, while a quad-core model with Nvidia’s workstation graphics chip will break the $5000 barrier. Add more memory and max out the storage space and you will see a bottom line that exceeds $6000.

There are plenty of reviews of the W700ds already available on the web and it appears that this system is not exactly as mobile as your average notebook. Not only is it bulky and heavy, its battery time is also well below two hours - if both screens are used. The battery times published in the reviews we have seen range from about 95 to 110 minutes with a standard 9-cell battery.

If you are looking for a notebook with more battery time and do not need the second screen, Lenovo is now offering what the company describes as “one of the thinnest and lightest 16-inch laptops.” The Ideapad Y650 is just 1” thick (at its thinnest point) and weighs about 5.6 lbs. The Y-series, which is also available with a 15.6” or a 14” screen, can be configured with up to 4 GB of DDR3 memory and up to 500 GB of hard drive space.

14% of SSL certificates on the Internet potentially unsafe

Chicago (IL) – Netcraft provided more details on a critical digital certificate vulnerability revealed last week. Although Microsoft downplayed the problem by stating that the successful exploit was not published, Netcraft found that 14% of SSL certificates use the vulnerable MD5 hashing algorithm. That number may provide a large enough target for attackers to invest time into cracking MD5, while certificate authorities will have a choice of using MD5 and hope that it will not be cracked or transitioning to a stronger encryption technology such as SHA-1.

A digital certificate is what we typically rely on as evidence for a secure encryption to another website. Especially when we want connection to be protected, for example during money transactions and online banking, these certificates provide proof that we are in fact dealing with an intended website and not, for example, a phishing attack. However, that may no longer be the case as researchers demonstrated last week that it is possible to create to create a rogue certification authority (CA) that is “trusted by all major web browsers and a cluster of more than 200 commercially available game consoles” by using an advanced implementation of a strategy called collision attack.

Collision attacks aimed at MD5 were first demonstrated in 2004, which created two different messages with the same digital signature. In 2007, collision attacks were advanced and enabled researchers to create virtually any two messages they wanted. With a rogue CA in place, it is clear that any MD5-based certificate on the Internet is vulnerable. But how likely is such an attack and how many MD5 certificates are there on the Internet?

Internet analysis firm Netcraft did some research and discovered that there are currently 135,000 valid third party digital certificates using MD5, which translates into about 14% of all existing certificates on the Internet. The firm found that the “majority of certificates are from RapidSSL (shown as Equifax on the certificate).” All of the 128,000 RapidSSL certificates in use were signed with MD5, Netcraft said. The remaining 7000 vulnerable certificates from Thawte and Verisign, but the analysis firm noted that most of their certificates are signed with the SHA-1 algorithm, which is currently believed to be secure. All other certificates on the Internet use only SHA-1.

“Verisign (owners of RapidSSL since 2006) have stated that they have stopped using MD5-signing for RapidSSL certificates, and will have phased out MD5-signing across all their certificate products by the end of January 2009,” Netcraft wrote. “Other affected CAs are likely to follow suit, as SHA-1 is well established and is already in use for the majority of SSL certificate signing, so it should be simple to switch to using this more secure alternative. Once it is impossible to obtain new certificates signed with MD5, this attack will be neutralized.”

Microsoft recently told its customers that it “is aware that research was published at a security conference proving a successful attack against X.509 digital certificates signed using the MD5 hashing algorithm.” However, the company said that “this new disclosure does not increase risk to customers significantly, as the researchers have not published the cryptographic background to the attack, and the attack is not repeatable without this information.”

While Microsoft said that it is not aware of any active exploits of the vulnerability and stressed that it is not a Microsoft-specific vulnerability, it advised users to ask their certificate authority “for guidance” and to make sure that trusted connections to web sites use at least Extended Validation (EV) certificates, which “show a green address bar in most modern browsers. These certificates are always signed using SHA-1 and as such are not affected by this newly reported research.”

Netcraft agreed and added that “this shows that requiring minimum standards from the CAs can have positive effects.” However, it also noted that browser vendors will have to “take note” and need to require “similar minimum standards to other certificates.”

How to unlock your 3G iPhone

YellowSn0w is out and it’s ready to rock. Here’s how to become SIM-independent.

NB: Install the latest 2.2 firmware before beginning this process.

1. First, download quickpwn and jailbreak your phone.

Pick your device. We want the iP3G, obviously.

2. Use the latest firmware to pwn your phone (download it from Apple here). This will allow you to install Cydia or Installer. If you just updated your phone or updated your phone on the computer you are running quickpwn on, you probably won’t have to download the firmware.

Rebuilding the IPSW

Sending the firmware

2. Then, add the repositories (DO NOT ENTER THESE URLs INTO YOUR BROWSER per Dev Team’s instructions).
For Cydia enter: http://apt9.yellowsn0w.com/
For Installer enter: http://i.yellowsn0w.com/

3. Install yellowsn0w. Run it.

Yellowsn0w steps

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4. Turn off the iPhone and install your third party SIM.
NB: f you are in the U.S. and are trying this with T-Mobile, you must turn off the 3G switch in Settings.

5. Turn on the phone. Wait until your carrier pops up. If it doesn’t, take the SIM out and reinstall it.

Note: This is all in beta and there is no guarantee of success. You will have to jailbreak your phone for this to work, as well. All of the sources above are lagging like crazy right now so wait a few hours before you begin. I’m following these steps as we speak and will post screenshots shortly.

UPDATE - I haven’t been able to get it to work on two iPhone 3Gs, both with fresh 2.2 firmware and baseband. I’ve heard plenty of people HAVE had luck, however, so it seems to be an either/or thing. I suspect some cells aren’t accepting the iPhones as valid equipment.