larvae signpost

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

My whole life is a hack: how Geohot owned the iPhone, PS3 and inadvertently rallied hacktivists

George Hotz is no stranger 'round these parts. Better known as Geohot, he first achieved internet fame at the age of 17 with his announcement of a hardware unlock method for the original iPhone. From there, he moved on to even greater notoriety with a PlayStation 3 exploit that quickly attracted the ire -- and legal wrath -- of Sony. Now profiled in The New Yorker, we're given a candid and unique insight into the world of George Hotz, whereby his own admission, he wasn't motivated by an ideology so much as boredom and the desire to control a system. The freedom issues, it seems, were merely an afterthought.

George Hotz is unique. We're talking about someone who was programming by age five, building video game consoles by the 5th grade and making appearances on NBC's Today at age fourteen. Like many brilliant adolescents, he experimented with drugs and rebelled against authority. Eventually, the powers that be caught up with him, and George Hotz was sued by Sony on January 11th, 2011. The lawsuit drew the attention of malicious hacker groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec, which retaliated against the company in very public ways. However unintentional, Geohot became the poster child for hacktivists and inspired a movement that quickly grew out of control -- if only more of us could be so productive with our boredom. For an insightful read into one of the most influential hackers of our time, be sure to hit the source link below.

My whole life is a hack: how Geohot owned the iPhone, PS3 and inadvertently rallied hacktivists originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 May 2012 04:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | source

The New Yorker | Email this | Comments

nike nfl jerseys katie couric barista university of kentucky ncaa oakland news alec baldwin

BlackBerry 10 camera app gets 'timeline lens,' bad photographers get a do-over

Thorsten Heins is on stage at BlackBerry World 2012 and has just unveiled the new BB10 camera app. It is designed to capture those "magic moments" you miss by not hitting that shutter quick enough. If you miss it by a couple of seconds, you can cycle back through the camera's cache with a circular "timeline" lens and take your pick from the previous seconds worth of frames. It's eerily reminiscent of technology used in the Nikon 1 series, although the implication here is that as soon as the camera app is loaded, it'll start recording frames for your ease of use.

BlackBerry 10 camera app gets 'timeline lens,' bad photographers get a do-over originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 May 2012 09:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | | Email this | Comments

signing day 2012 football gasland college football recruiting bjork national signing day 2012 landon collins dorial green beckham

Monday, April 30, 2012

Backstreet Boys Welcome Back Kevin Richardson

'Kevin is coming back!' band announces at London concert over the weekend.
By Jocelyn Vena

Backstreet Boys
Photo: Larry Busacca/WireImage

Kevin Richardson is Backstreet's Back, all right. The fifth member of the Backstreet Boys has announced that he is formally rejoining the group after leaving in June 2006.

In footage posted on their website from their show with New Kids on the Block at London's O2 Arena, BSB member Nick Carter told the excited room, "I think we should let them in on the secret we have. Since we love you guys so much, especially in London, that we are going to come back, we are going to be back in July to record the next Backstreet Boys album this year."

While that bit of news had the crowd cheering, it was what Brian Littrell shared that really got the room screaming. "There's two parts to that secret," he said. "And Kevin is coming back!" They then added that they might play shows with all 10 members of NKOTBSB.

Though Richardson left the group six years ago, he has made sporadic concert appearances with the band, including one on the Backstreet Boys cruise back in December. Still, the remaining members of the band always were skeptical that a full-fledged reunion would ever take place.

On Twitter, they had this additional message for their fans. "Now everything is back to normal ... Welcome back @kevinrichardson." For his part, Kevin seemed pretty stoked about being reunited with his band of brothers, adding on his Twitter, "Hello beau-ti-ful people. Yes, the cat is OFFICIALLY out of the bag. It's on and crackin!"

Richardson's return wasn't the only big news the guys of BSB had for fans. A.J. McLean posted a video message revealing that he and his wife, Rochelle, are expecting their first child together. "Because we love you all so much, we wanted to share with you for the first time something very special: We're having a baby!" the couple said in the video message. "See you guys soon."

Voting in round two of MTV's Battle of the Boy Bands runs until noon ET on Monday, April 30. Winners are determined by fan votes, so if your favorite band made the cut, make sure you keep voting. Tune in to AMTV and MTV Hits for their boy-band video takeovers each day and make sure to spread the word on Twitter using the hashtag #BBB and like us on Facebook for updates!

Related Artists

Backstreet Boys

bohemian rhapsody spike lee carson daly heejun han donovan mcnabb donovan mcnabb lottery ticket

NVIDIA unleashes GeForce GTX 690 graphics card, loads it with dual Kepler GPUs, charges $1k

Would you look at that? NVIDIA hinted it would be coming today, and it looks like the tease is living up to the hype. The company stormed into the weekend at its Shanghai Game Festival by unleashing its latest offering, the GeForce GTX 690 -- and oh yeah, it's packing two 28nm Kepler GPUs! Trumping the recently released GTX 680 as the "worlds fastest graphics card," it's loaded with a whopping 3,072 Cuda cores. The outer frame is made from trivalent chromium-plated aluminum, while you'll find thixomolded magnesium alloy around the fan for vibration reduction and added cooling. Aiding in cooling even further, the unit also sports a dual vapor chamber and center-mounted fan. It'll cost you a spendy $1,000 to pick up one of these puppies come May 3rd, and you'll likely be tempted to double up -- two can run together in SLI as an effective quad-core card. With that said, NVIDIA claims that a single 690 runs 4dB quieter and handles about twice the framerate as a duo of GTX 680s in SLI -- impressive, but we'll reserve judgement until we see it for ourselves. Check out the press release after the break if you'd like more information in the meantime (...and yes, it runs Crysis -- 2 Ultra to be exact -- at 57.8fps, according to NVIDIA).

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]