Showing posts with label Tech. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tech. Show all posts
13 September 2012

Apple Launches iPhone 5; Makes it Taller, Faster, Stronger & Better

After months of speculation and numerous leaks, Apple today finally unveiled the iPhone 5. The phone looks similar to the leaks we have been seeing in the past couple of months and sports an all glass and aluminum design. Apple claims they have changed almost every part inside the iPhone 5. Read on to find out more.

Design: It is an all glass front and an aluminum back casing that comes in white and black. The iPhone 5 is just 7.6 mm thin and is lighter than the iPhone 4S. From photographs and early reactions, it looks stunning. Apple claims it is nothing like what they have ever designed before and it shows.

Display: It sports a bigger 4-inch display with a 1136×640 pixel resolution giving it a pixel density of 326 pixels per inch. It is now a 16:9 aspect ratio, which is the first time Apple has implemented on any iOS device. All of the core iOS apps have been modified to make use of the extra pixels and the home screen will have one extra row of icons. Apps that haven’t been updated will be letterboxed. And yeah, the display does use “in-cell” technology that is thinner and gives much better clarity.

Processor: The iPhone 5 has a new A6 chipset rather than the A5X it used in the new iPad. Apple claims its CPU and GPU are twice as fast as the iPhone 4S, which leads us to believe that either Apple is using a quad-core processor or something similar to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 stuff.

Connectivity: The iPhone 5 will indeed have LTE connectivity but won’t be compatible with 4G LTE networks that are coming up in India. It also does HSPA+ and dual carrier HSDPA. Apple has also added dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11n.

Battery: Apple claims the battery not only matches that of the iPhone 4S but exceeds it, which would be a great feat considering the bigger display, faster processor and LTE connectivity. However, getting more real estate would have helped with accommodating a bigger battery. Apple is claiming the iPhone 5 can do 8 hours of talking or web browsing over 3G, 10 hours of web browsing over Wi-Fi, 10 hours of videos, 40 hours of music or 225 hours of standby.

Camera: The camera remains at 8-megapixel but Apple has added some more bells and whistles. It has backside illumination, a f/2.4 aperture, sapphire crystal and a dynamic low light mode. Apple has also added a panorama mode, the ability to click photographs while recording video and some cool editing features. It remains to be seen how it compares to the Nokia Lumia 920, which we tend to believe has a better camera.

Connector: As expected Apple has introduced a new 8-pin connector it calls Lightning as leaked earlier in the day.

In a nutshell, Apple has taken the iPhone 4S and made it look prettier and at the same time faster, stronger and better. It will be available in the US and eight other countries on September 21, followed by a few more countries on September 28. Apple will be launching it in 100 countries by the end of this year. We are expecting an India launch close to Diwali.
06 September 2012

Everything You Want To Know About The Nokia Lumia 920

By Sahil 'Bones' Gupta




Nokia has officially unveiled the Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone 8 smartphones in New York. The Lumia 920 is Nokia’s latest flagship phone and Nokia is calling it the most innovative smartphone in the world.


The Lumia 920 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz and features 1GB of RAM and 32GB of onboard memory along with 7GB of free Microsoft SkyDrive storage. It sports a 4.5-inch HD display with a resolution of 1280×768 pixels with PureMotion HD and ClearBlack technologies that improve brightness levels, video clarity and enable blur free scrolling with refresh rates 2.5 times higher than any other product on the market. Nokia even touts a super sensitive touch technology that enables users to operate the device even using gloves.

Now one the biggest expectations with the Lumia 920 camera was that it will have a PureView camera like the PureView 808’s 41-megapixel camera. Unlike the PureView 808, the Lumia 920 features a 8.7-megapixel camera with the PureView branding, however this time around the camera is not using the pixel oversampling technique heralded in the PureView 808, but sports a floating lens technology. Nokia claims this technology improves low-light performance by ten times without flash and stabilizes motion blur while shooting videos.

With the Lumia 920, Nokia is using a 2,000 mAh battery that supports wireless charging using the Qi standard. Nokia has introduced the FatBoy Pillow wireless charger to facilitate this.

Nokia will ship the Lumia 920 with Nokia Maps, and other custom applications like the augmented reality app City Lens. The Lumia 920 will be available in five colors – Yellow, Red, Grey, White and Black. Nokia will release the device later this year and will announce the pricing at the same time.

Key Specifications:
  • 4.5-inch PureMotion HD+ IPS display with a resolution of 1280×768 pixels
  • 1.5GHz  dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU
  • 1GB of RAM
  • 8.7-megapixel PureView camera, 1080p video, 1.2-megapixel front facing camera
  • 2,000 mAh battery, Qi Wireless charging
  • 32GB of internal memory
  • NFC
24 August 2012

India’s SMS Hoax Panic: Could It Happen In The U.S.?

Photo by vagawiA TechCrunch analysis on whether the same sort of panic can happen in US.

By Klint Finley


Last week tens of thousands of migrants from India’s northeast region fled urban areas rumor ricocheted through text messages and social media that Muslims would attack them after Ramadan. Fake photos added to the rumors credibility.

The Indian government responded by imposing a five message limit on bulk text messaging, and now The Times of India reports that India may crack down on Twitter if the company doesn’t comply with requests to remove “objectionable content.”

Given how forward button happy we can be in the U.S., I can’t help but wonder if a similar panic could happen here. I spoke with Shlok Vaidya, a former Department of Defense consultant turned entrepreneur in residence at the Tech Ranch Austin incubator, about how this happened in India and what it would take for something like that to happen here.

How It Happened

SMS and social media were necessary but not sufficient conditions for the event. Vaidya says there were a few requirements that enabled this to happen.
First, the target of the hoax had to be a group people who are marginalized and/or distrustful of the establishment and have little institutional support. In this case, a minority group with a distinct appearance (north-easterners look more East Asian than other Indians) that hasn’t been well integrated into the mainstream of Indian society (
some in the northeast states have agitated for independence from India and integration with China). Update: Indian commenters on this post are claiming that that an integration with China is not at all a mainstream opinion in the north east states. I apologize for including the link, which is a translation of a discussion on a Chinese message board, without doing more research on the topic.
Second, the target group has to had to have access to the media that the hoax was spread through. In this case, mobile phones and social media were widely enough available to this group for the message to spread quickly. Vaidya describes the ubiquity of cell phones in India and other parts of the world as a unique moment in history, noting that we’ve typically seen the spread of mobile phones and the web in developing parts of the world as “empowering.” But Vaidya says empowerment is neutral — individuals can use that power for negative actions.
I would add that the hoax connected to fear that’s on fresh in people’s minds. In the northeast state of Assam over 400,000 Bengali Muslims, many of whom have been living in India for generations, are living in camps after having their homes burned down according to Reuters. Over 80 people have been killed. Muslims in Assam are being accused of being illegal immigrants, but according to the BBC many of these families have lived in India for generations. Given this ongoing conflict, retaliation wasn’t implausible and even north-easterners from states other than Assam fled the cities, preferring to be safe rather than sorry.
Vaidya says that the Indian government’s response was inadequate and too slow. Instead of responding immediately through the same media the hoax was spreading the government sent police door to door and tried to setup face to face meetings — but not until the rumors had already been spreading for a day. By the time the government started limiting bulk messaging and blocking websites, the damage had been done.
Censorship and regulation aren’t the answer, he says, but more people are needed to provide legitimate information through new media. But establishing credibility with marginalized groups is easier said than done. The real issue is that these groups need to be better integrated into society, and that’s been an ongoing problem for the region.
It’s still unclear who started the hoax in India, but according to the Times of India the messages have been traced back to Pakistan by Facebook and YouTube. If the hoax was propagated by Muslims, you might be tempted to think it backfired by creating more sympathy for north-easterners. On the other hand, I’d never read anything about the conflict in Assam until the SMS story hit the front page of the New York Times last weekend. And I doubt I’m the only one. The incident may end up doing more harm than good for everyone involved, but if nothing else it’s putting on the table issues that, according to The Economist, have largely been ignored in India outside the northwestern states.

Could It Happen Here?

The dynamics of the panic in India are specific to those circumstances. But something similar could happen here, given the right conditions. “I fully expect someone to target a company like this one day (to coerce a change in policy),” John Robb, author of Brave New War and a colleague of Vaidya, told me.
Vaidya mentions the activist group the Yes Men and how easily they’ve been able to hijack corporate identities in the past. For example, in 2004 Yes Men member Andy Bichlbaum was able to appear on the BBC World claiming to be a spokesperson for Dow Chemical. Bichlbaum told views that the company would dissolve Union Carbide, a company it owns, and use the proceeds to pay restitution for the Bhopal disaster, an industrial disaster caused by Union Carbide in 1984.
That shows how easily a corporate identity can be hijacked to spread a message, but it didn’t have, for lack of a better term, virality that the SMS panic in India had. The intention of this action wasn’t to create a panic, and there was a “canonical” source of information, the real Dow Chemical, to quickly dispel the hoax. But the group achieved their goal of raising awareness of the issue and bringing it back into public discourse, however briefly.
Trying to think of something that fit the mold of what happened in India, I asked Vaidya about the calls for Obama’s birth certificate in the U.S. Those rumors are more difficult to debunk because the target audience was already distrustful of the government and mainstream media, and right wing institutions were either slow to distance themselves from the demands and rumors or propagated them themselves. So even once the birth certificate and a Hawaiian newspaper birth announcement were made available, so-called “Birthers” weren’t convinced and claimed the birth certificate was fake and/or called to see a long form birth certificate.
Some Birthers will never be convinced, no matter what evidence is produced. This is similar to the problem in India: no one could prove conclusively that the northeasterners weren’t in danger. Any attempt to engage with Birthers and conspiracy theorists, such as such as Cass Sunstein’s “cognitive infiltration” proposal is likely to backfire and make them even more paranoid.
Vaidya says what the Birther movement and the India SMS hoax have in common is that both will have longer term effects than a Yes Men hoax. Tens of thousands of north-easterns are in the process of migrating. If nothing else it will have lasting economics effects. It’s not clear to me what effect the birth certificate controversy will have. I doubt many Birthers would have voted for Obama anyway. But the meme is certainly lodged in the minds of its target audience, and it certainly created a distraction during the health care debates.
Pulling something like this off isn’t easy — otherwise those quit Facebook day protests would have worked. The conditions have to be right. The outcomes for the perpetrator are uncertain. But the costs for trying are close to zero, so it’s inevitable that people will try to replicate this eventually, whether to try to cause a run on a bank, a race riot or some other purpose.
Photo by vagawi / CC

 Source: Techcrunch
13 August 2012

Indian Government Migrates To Cloud Computing

By Harsimran Julka

New Delhi, Aug 13 : At a time, when private enterprises are only testing the waters around cloud computing, India's central government has made a bold decision to migrate critical information infrastructure on the cloud.

Department of information technology is planning to set up a national cloud based network that connects all state data centers which would make that the backbone of national e-governance plan, which when completed would deliver many government to citizen and government business services via the internet.

In effect, each of the 28 states and 7 union territories will now have a private cloud of their own. The Department of IT has invited proposals from IT companies like HP, IBM, Cisco and Dell to set up and maintain private clouds in each state. The move may cost the Centre less than Rs 100 crore, and will help the exchequer prevent wastage of money on duplication of resources.

State Data Centres built at a cost of Rs 4-5 crore each, are operational in about 16 states, with the rest lagging behind. UP, Punjab, Assam, Mizoram, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh are laggards, even as all states in the South have fully functional data centres, provisioning many public services online.

The move will save taxpayer's money and time, as IT resources like servers and storage will be shared amongst departments, and also provide elasticity and on demand services.

"SDC will now be operated as a Private Cloud for each State and will be managed by a third party," the draft tender put out by the Department of IT, last month.

Though India has woken up only now, other government have taken a lead. US was one of the first government's in the world to come out with a federal cloud strategy, which was invoked by CIO of the US Vivek Kundra in 2010-11. The Obama government has allocated $20 billion of the Federal Government's IT budget to migrate existing infrastructure on the cloud.

UK government has also come up with a G-cloud strategy for reduction in costs, and achieve 'economies of scale'.

An India-based e-governance official at a US based IT firm told ET that the company had been making presentations to the government for last six months, on cloud adoption, as other governments are adopting across the world. The official expects the final RFP to be out in 2-3 months, as the new IT Secretary J Satynarayana has come on board.

The public cloud computing market in India is expected to grow at $685 million by 2014, according to an independent research firm Zinnov Management Consulting.

US IT companies HP and IBM are expected to benefit the most, if India goes the cloud way, as most operational data centres have been built and being operated by the two firms.

As per Zinnov Consulting, the overall Indian market for Cloud is about $860-$912 million. Of this Public Cloud market comprises of only 20% share, while the remaining 78-80% is accounted by Private Cloud. Zinnov estimates Public Cloud market to grow to $685 million by 2014 in India.

"The IT department at center has been talking about setting up cloud computing based services for a while now but what remains to be seen is how fast these services will be set up," said Prof Sadagopan - Director of IIIT - Bangalore and Chairman - Core Committee Meeting at the Center for e-governance, Karnataka. "Once established, it'll be big shift from our current PC culture but we also need greater understanding of the data security challenges that could arise out of this."
06 August 2012

UnoTelly Allows Streaming Of BBC Olympics Coverage Worldwide For Free

Unhappy TV-viewing Olympics fans can now instead watch the BBC iPlayer Olympic broadcast for free using UnoTelly‘s simple DNS-based service. UnoTelly have set up a decidated DNS, which anyone worldwide can use to gain high-speed access to the BBC iPlayer in order to watch the Olympics.

There are a great number of people worldwide who are unhappy with their local TV coverage of the London Olympics. We can blame this on exclusive TV rights deals and programming based on the supposed popularity of sports or personalities. What it means though, is that there are lots of people who would just like to see live coverage of as many sports as possible, such as what the BBC is offering via iPlayer.


People are keen to actually see the sports they are interested in, watch footage of all countries who compete and not just their own, and to see these competitions before breaking news spoils the surprise of who won. It sounds simple, but this just isn’t being served up by many of the TV networks with exclusive rights to the Olympics and that is ruining the Olympics for a lot of viewers.


To use the UnoTelly DNS, there’s no need to register. Simply visit their site to get the DNS settings, update your computer to use their DNS and you are ready to go. It’s pain-free and able to be used on any device you own.


Source: UnoTelly
01 August 2012

Goodbye Hotmail, Hello Outlook

The Best Reason Yet to Ditch Gmail.

Microsoft is renaming its vintage Hotmail email service as Outlook.com. Hotmail was still the world's largest email service with 324 million users (about 36 per cent of the market) but had been losing its market to Google's fast-growing Gmail. The name Outlook is familiar to most corporate workers who use the popular Microsoft Office email application.

Hotmail was launched in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith and acquired by Microsoft in 1997 for an estimated $400 million.

The rebranding and overhaul of Microsoft's email service is Microsoft's first major change in its email service in eight years. Here are 10 highlights of the new email service from the world's largest software company:

Goodbye Hotmail, hello Outlook: Top 10 features
1. Outlook.com has a new design that Microsoft says users 60 per cent fewer pixels but 30 per cent more messages visible in the inbox
2. Outlook.com connects to Facebook and Twitter to enrich conversations. Users can view recent status by friends and Tweets shared by friends.
3. Users can chat with Facebook users and other Outlook users from inside Outlook.com.
4. Users can open, edit and share Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in Outlook.com.
5. Outlook's address book integrates contacts from Facebook and LinkedIn.
6. With Outlook.com users can make Skype video calls even when both users don't have Skype installed. This feature will be rolled out soon.
7. Photographs attached with emails can be viewed as a slideshow.
8. Outlook.com comes integrated with with Microsoft's cloud storage service SkyDrive, this removes the restrictions of attachment size limits.
9. Outlook.com automatically detects mass messages such as newsletters, offers, daily deals and social updates and puts them in separate folders. Users can customize the process to sort mail any way they want to.
10. Existing Hotmail users can upgrade to the Outlook.com preview and their email address, password, contacts, old email, and rules will remain unchanged. They can continue to send and receive email from their @hotmail.com or @msn.com or @live.com address.

31 July 2012

The World’s First 3D-Printed Gun

Hobbyist builds working assault rifle using 3D printer

It hasn't blown to pieces yet

Hobbyists have used 3D printers to make guitars, copy house keys, and bring robot dinosaurs to life, but a firearms enthusiast who goes by the handle "Have Blue" has taken this emerging technology into a new realm by assembling a working rifle from 3D-printed parts.

Specifically, ExtremeTech reports, Have Blue used 3D CAD files to print the lower receiver part of an AR-15 class assault rifle – the style of gun the US military has called an M16. The lower receiver is sometimes referred to as the "body" of the weapon, which houses the trigger assembly, the magazine, and the safety selector.

The lower receiver of a factory-produced AR-15 is usually made of metal, typically stamped aluminum. Have Blue made his out of the standard ABS plastic used by low-end 3D printers. He then combined it with off-the-shelf, metal AR-15 parts to complete the weapon.

The next step was to actually fire it. Have Blue started by chambering the gun for .22 caliber pistol rounds, a relatively low-powered ammunition. After firing 200 rounds, he announced to an online AR-15 forum that it "runs great!"

He then re-assembled the weapon to use .223 caliber rifle ammunition and tried again. "No, it did not blow up into a bazillion tiny plastic shards and maim me for life," he said, but the combination of the homemade and off-the-shelf parts wasn't working all that well, causing the gun to jam. Try, try again.

Image of AR-15 rifle assembled from 3D-printed partsIt's 3D-printed plastic, but it works, and it has no license or serial number. (Source: Haveblue.org)

Where this all gets interesting is in the potential legal ramifications of what Have Blue has done. It is legal in most US states to purchase AR-15 style rifles, provided the purchaser is licensed, which involves a background check.

It is difficult to get around the license requirements by purchasing the gun in pieces and assembling it yourself, because at least one piece – the lower receiver – carries a serial number and must always be purchased from a federally licensed arms dealer.

Without the lower receiver, the gun can't fire, so under US law the lower receiver essentially is the gun. The other components are less closely regulated and can be purchased online or from unlicensed dealers.
But Have Blue didn't buy his lower receiver from anyone. He made it himself. Using his method, potentially anyone could assemble a completed rifle from mail-order parts without any government licensing or registration at all.

Image of AR-15 rifle lower receiver printed on a 3D printerIt may not look like much, but the gun won't fire without it. (Source: Thingiverse.com)

It's not entirely as simple as that, though. First, although Have Blue says he used between $30 and $50 worth of plastic to print the gun, 3D printers that can output items the size of the AR-15 lower receiver are still expensive. But their cost is declining.

Second, a 3D printer cannot print ammunition. But given that accused Aurora, Colorado shooter James Holmes was found to have stockpiled some 6,000 rounds of ammo that he purchased online, the prospect of individuals being able to assemble working, unlicensed weapons using 3D printing technology should give regulators in the US and abroad some pause.
30 July 2012

Google Nexus 7 Tablet on Sale for Rs 15,884

New Delhi: The recently launched Google Nexus 7 tablet is now available on HomeShop18.com for Rs 15,884. The company is selling imported units of the Nexus 7 tablet at an additional discount of Rs 2,000.

On visiting the website, you will find that the company is selling the tablet for Rs 17884, but consumers can avail a huge discount of Rs 2,000 and grab the much-awaited Nexus 7 tablet for Rs 15,884.

"Use GC No. 'GC39P4UA81PE' and get Rs 2000 off during check out when you pay online," as mentioned on the HomeShop18 website.
HomeShop18 selling the Google Nexus 7 tablet for Rs 15,884
It means that consumers can get this huge discount of Rs 2,000 during the check out process while paying online and can get the unit for Rs 15,884.

According to the company, the unit will be delivered in 17-18 working days.

The Nexus 7 tablet has an internal memory of 8GB and 1GB RAM. It features a 7-inch HD Back-lit IPS display with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. It comes engineered with a Quad-core Tegra 3 processor.
Weighing 340g, it is the first tablet to run the Google Android Jelly Bean operating system. The device has a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera.

The tablet is powered by a 4325 mAh battery that is touted to offer up to 9.5 hours of HD video playback and 300 hours of standby.

The Secret Online Arms Store That Will Sell Anyone, Anything

By Sam Biddle
The Bushmaster M4 is a 3-foot rifle capable of firing thirty 5.56×45mm NATO rounds, and used by spec ops forces throughout Afghanistan. It's a serious weapon. But in the Internet's darkest black market, it's all yours. Who needs a background check? Nobody.

The Armory began as an offshoot of The Silk Road, notable as the Internet's foremost open drug bazaar, where anything from heroin and meth to Vicodin and pot can be picked out and purchased like a criminal Amazon.com. It's virtually impossible to trace, and entirely anonymous. But apparently guns were a little too hot for The Silk Road's admins, who broke the site off from the main narcotics carnival. Now guns, ammo, explosives, and more have their own shadowy home online, far from the piles of Dutch coke and American meth. But the same rules apply: with nothing more than money and a little online savoir faire, you can buy extremely powerful, deadly weapons—Glocks, Berettas, PPKs, AK-47s, Bushmaster rifles, even a grenade—in secret, shipped anywhere in the world.
The Secret Online Weapons Store That'll Sell Anyone Anything
So I wondered, just how easy is it to get a gun? A semi-auto, 9mm Beretta 92FS with "No scratches or dents, very slight wear from extremely light usage" would hit me for 338.69 bitcoins. At the current Bitcoin/Dollar exchange of roughly 9-to-1, that's a little over $3,000. A stiff markup. But that got me thinking: what if you wanted to go beyond arming yourself? What if you wanted something more powerful, or more plentiful? What if you weren't just interested in self-defense or hunting? What if you wanted to, say, arm a 20-person paramilitary group to overthrow a West African government in a Internet-armed coup d'état? Could a band of anonymous weapon mongers prepare me and 19 imaginary compatriots for illegal warfare? If you've got a spare million or so, looks like the answer is yes.
——
The Secret Online Weapons Store That'll Sell Anyone Anything The Amazon comparison might not be fair—The Armory wants to make itself hard to access (for obvious reasons that have to do with not going to prison), so it's not as easy as just firing up any old website. In fact, it's not really on the web in any traditional sense. To get to The Armory, you need to deploy a free piece of software called TOR. Originally (and ironically) developed by the Navy, it's become the anonymizing software par excellence among criminals, hackers, schemers, and the otherwise paranoid. TOR routes and reroutes your connection to the Internet through a sprawling maze of encrypted nodes around the world, making it a herculean feat to find out who's who. The Armory's URL—ayjkg6ombrsahbx2.onion—reflects that, a garbled string of letters and numbers deliberately impossible to memorize. Once you're actually signed in, you then have to turn to Bitcoins as mandatory currency, a further exercise in computer secrecy and complexity in itself. This ain't exactly walking into a gun show and walking out with a pistol.
Still, the site prides itself on being about as easy to use as an illegal underground weapons dealership can be:
The Armory is an anonymous marketplace where you can buy and sell without revealing who you are. We protect your identity through every step of the process, from connecting to this site, to purchasing your items, to finally receiving them.
That receiving part is almost as tricky as the labyrinthine purchasing process. How exactly do you illegally ship illegal guns to potential criminals? In pieces. Small pieces. The crafty gun dealers of The Armory aren't going to just stick an assault rifle into a manilla envelope and drop it into a local mailbox. Rather, buyers get each gun component shipped in shielded packages—disguised to look like other products—that then require self-assembly. You get your gun, the dealer gets his money, The Armory retains its secrecy, and the mail carrier doesn't realize it's part of an international weapons smuggling operation.
The Secret Online Weapons Store That'll Sell Anyone Anything
But who are these anonymous online gunslingers? Nobody can know for sure. Nary a single one will mention where they source their wares, or provide even the slightest shred of locational information. You're lucky if you know what continent they're on. Some won't even talk to you unless you use an added layer of super-tough PGP encryption in all of your messages, gilding the lily with layer upon layer of software scrambling.
There's dave00, a European who'll ship you a bazooka:
Hello
I'm dave00 a new firearms and explosive supplier. I have plenty of contacts all over EU
that can provide me a large variety of weapons,ammunitions and explosives.
usually all orders have to be considered shipping included .
I can ship in various ways postal systems for small orders
and dead drops with gps location .
I can create custom listings on request
I can ship in all EU and also to the USA
I'm able to get handguns, full auto weapons, machineguns, grenade and rpg launcher and ammunitions
There's Steinberg, "Just a gun seller trying to expand his business."
And then there are the steely super-pros like "bohica," whose profile is written like it should be read in a thick, generically Soviet accent:
Greetings Armory Members,
We are Bohica and Associates and new to the Armory, but not new to the business. We are professionals that understand the needs of real shooters. We only locate and carry small arms, tactical equipment and munitions. If you need cheap shit guns, you can try IcePick and T-Dog on the corner, but you won't find any of that here. Our offerings initially will be a sample of our regular inventory. We will slowly release our inventory line as transactions progress. We want to be clear upfront we do not locate "exotic or collectible" small arms.
Luckily, as this is all online, you don't have to worry about bohica cutting your throat if your business goes awry. Which is good news, because I intended to do some serious fake business.
The Secret Online Weapons Store That'll Sell Anyone Anything
I started asking around for guns, contacting sellers directly. But what was the point? They list their stuff directly on the site. With pictures, specs, and price tags. There's no fun in window shopping—I wanted a special order. I wanted to equip a private army and overthrow a 3rd world government, combining faint fantasies of that time rich British guys conspired to take over Equatorial Guinea and various scenes from Clear and Present Danger. I'd need guns. Powerful guns. Lots of them. Could The Armory handle more than a pistol order—could it help me become a dictator?
I started asking around via private message—"Do you have what it would take to arm a small paramilitary group? Say, 20 people?" I made it clear that I needed something "more powerful" than what was displayed on the site.

The answers poured in:
I can provide: tec9, scorpion, ak47 and one single vietnam war "thumper", but its ammo costs.
Smgs are much less expensive, and satisfy your self protection or combat needs very well: the sound of a easy-to-conceal soviet scorpion can scary the most badass motherfucker will stand in front of you...
I'm telling this for you: one single grenade of a thumper costs 50 btcs to me: the GL itself will be around 100, to me. Take your time to choose, there's no rush: but be sure your purchase is worth :)
My sources aren't object of discussion, sorry.
The cost depends from what do you need, obviously.
I will provide good quality items:
what about something full auto easy to conceal?
-H&K MP5K-PDW, i will get 16 pieces in two weeks.
Something less "lady style"?
-H&K G3A3, 15 pieces in 2 week.
Something cheaper?
-AK47, 28 pieces in 10 days.
Something sharper?
-H&K PSG1 civilian model, 5 pieces in 2 weeks.
Something sharp but cheaper?
-Dragunov SVD, 12 pieces in 10 days
Take your time and make your choice Sir, we're here to serve you.
I can provide a Accuracy International AW50 included optics and accessories
But the power has always a big cost
For this weapon i can provide also API, AP , Incendiary , tracer and explosive rounds
I would recommend ak47 or m4 , for sidearm mp5 or handguns like glock or beretta 92
The body armor will be NIJ IV level, it can stop also an ak47 rounds
This kind of material is easily to obtain especially for body armor
But it was my supervillain friend bohica who seemed most willing to help me with my imaginary coup:
Absolutely, we can accommodate your request, but we need more parameters such as your exact arms needs and destination country. We only deal with small arms and equipment, but if you need artillery, MANPADS [Man-portable air-defense systems], ordinance, APCs, Helos we do have resources and can make certain introductions for a fee. Please send your next message through PGP encryption, our public key is on our profile page.
Regards,
Bohica
Bohica seemed ready to deliver me enough weapons to take on the US government, to say nothing of some West African backwater.
I told each seller I was ready to do ASAP, and they went off to get me pricing information and begin the long process of sourcing enough weaponry to arm twenty men through jungle and urban combat. Of course, I didn't buy anything—I don't have the tens of thousands of dollars to buy crates of rifles, or perhaps millions to buy helicopters and armored troop carriers. But there's every reason to believe that, with a little patience, a lot of money, and uneasy trust, these things could have been in my hands—or the hands of anyone else. Say, someone who wanted to go on a domestic shooting spree, assassinate a world leader, or any infinite number of other nefarious things you can do with guns and armored vests.
The Secret Online Weapons Store That'll Sell Anyone Anything
There's a mantle of skepticism here, of course: the huge and necessary question here is Are these people real? Is an entity like Bohica just an elaborate scam—an untraceable means of parting a fool (or warlord) with his money? I didn't find out, of course, as I don't have a giant cache of war money or the desire to topple Equatorial Guinea, but you're bound to wonder, are these "dealers" just putting together a federal sting operation? Sure, maybe—but there's plenty of reason to believe this is just as terrifyingly real as it looks. The sellers have feedback ratings, and reports in the Armory message boards of successful shipments. There's a whole thread dedicated to listing scammers, and none of my contacts were flagged.
And then there's the spooky case of "mrpman888," who instead of listing guns for sale, listed his seller's account. He'd had enough, he said, and wanted to offload the account to someone else—no questions asked. I asked a question, and he replied, curtly, "i just dont want it anymore. its never been used." Could he elaborate a little? "No."

Unless dozens of anonymous figures are all collaborating on one of the Internet's most bizarre forms of performance art meets con art, the whole thing is just too complicated to be wholly fraudulent. Some of these guys are selling guns. And if you're someone who doesn't want to be indiscriminately shot at, that's a problem.

Shouldn't the government be standing between us and a swarm of people who will send war weapons to anyone with the necessary cash? Say, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives? Surely, if the DEA is creeping up on The Silk Road's infinite drug stash, the feds must be up on The Armory? Right? Or have any idea of what it is? Not really. A call to the ATF didn't bring much reassurance: After trying to explain The Armory to a confused spokesperson, she replied only, after a long pause, her hair likely vibrating, tensely, from the dry air conditioning somewhere inside the federal sprawl, "It does seem like a problem." That was as much as she could give me. She put an ATF agent on speakerphone, who after another pause said only that he'd check into any ongoing investigation of The Armory, but that if there were such an investigation, he wouldn't be able to tell me. The ATF later called back to say they'd located The Armory in Virginia Beach, and that it was a fully licensed, legitimate operation. This, despite the fact that I'd explained again and again that it existed only within a marsh of online encryption, with the explicit mission of illegally selling illegal guns, illegally. I explained how a storefront in Virginia was sort of the opposite of The Armory, but it wasn't much good—the ATF said it'd have to dig around itself again and get back to me. It hasn't.
The Armory shouldn't scare you, really. There are plenty of ways for a crook to buy guns, and there have been since both crooks and guns existed. The site doesn't represent some new influx of bullets into murderous hands, so much as it's a harbinger of things to come—and a klaxon for what's already here. The Armory is a tiny community, but the network that hides it is immense and near impossible to dismantle. We should find solace knowing that there are tools like TOR to keep our emails away from, say, the prying eyes of an oppressive regime. But this tool is powerful far beyond privacy. If even a single gun is shipped to a single person, we're living in a society in which things that kill people can be moved around the world with zero accountability. And then there might be the guy whose dream of a heavily armed third world coup d'état is more than just an experiment.
31 May 2012

Samsung Galaxy S III To Hit Indian Stores

p1.jpg New Delhi, May 30 : Samsung launched its top-of-the-line smartphone Galaxy S III in Europe on Tuesday, hoping to do even better than its previous model and take the game further away from Apple.

Due to be launched in India on Wednesday, the Galaxy S III has garnered upwards of 9 million pre-orders worldwide (the iPhone 4S managed about 4 million), and this kind of pre-launch buzz was never seen from a non-Apple device.

What's even more interesting is that the Korean company is ready to take on Apple at its own game, including the hype that surrounds a launch.

Having become the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer (by unit sales) in April this year, Samsung is now ready to have another go at Apple, which is still by far the more profitable.

Samsung plans to use Galaxy S III to win over customers from the iPhone camp. The S III whips the iPhone 4S on specs and may even have a leg-up on the yet to be launched iPhone 5.

According to the Daily Mail, Trusted Reviews concluded "the S3 is light years ahead of Apple's profitable darling".

But Apple loyalists are quick to point out that it's never been about the hardware specifications, but more about the experience and intuitiveness of the platform. While that may be true, it seems that Samsung is sparing no effort to improve its overall user experience as well.

The Galaxy III provides a natural, ergonomic shape, a dazzling 4.8-inch super AMOLED screen and a great camera.

It also brings some firsts into the smartphone arena: a screen that stays on as long as you keep looking at it, wireless charging, HD video playback in a small screen while you do other tasks and automatic calling of a contact when you hold it to your ear.

The reviews and first impressions that are pouring in so far are quite ecstatic. CNET calls the Galaxy S III "the Ferrari of android phones", one that's "pretty much unrivalled in the speed and power stakes right now".

Matt Warman, The Telegraph's (UK) consumer technology editor, praised the S III by calling it the first phone where he almost forgot that he was actually using a phone and not a full-fledged computer.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/photo/13650382.cms

Prominent gadget blog Engadget says that "the power and storage-hungry Android user simply cannot go wrong with this purchase". Slashgear calls the S III "one of the best performing, most usable Android devices around, if not the best".

On Wednesday, we'll have more details on the device, including the final price (expected to be in the range of 36,000-38,000) and store availability.
11 May 2012

The Cost Of Smartphone Component

Inside a smartphone: The component story
Nomura Equity Research recently released its "2012 Smartphone Guide," which offers a look at the components that go into phones and their providers' market shares. More than 25 parts are needed to make a modern smartphone. Ever wondered which is the costliest part? And also which are the companies providing these components?

Here are the key components that go inside your smartphone and their bill of materials cost.

NAND flash

NAND flash

Component makers: Samsung (31% marketshare), Toshiba (31%), Micron (27%) and SanDisk (9%)
Cost: $20-22

Display


Display

Component makers: Samsung (25% marketshare), Japan Display (20%), LG Display (15%), Sharp (10%), Chimei (10%) and AUO (10%)

Cost: $18-20

Applications
processors








Component makers: Qualcomm (35% marketshare), Texas Instruments (20%), Samsung (12%) and Nvidia (5%)

Cost: $15-17

DRAM







DRAM
Component makers: Samsung (38% marketshare), Hynix (21%), Elpida (16%) and Micron (13%)

Cost: $8-10

BASEBAND

Baseband
Component makers: Qualcomm (45% marketshare), MediaTek (13%), Intel (10%), STEricsson (11%), Broadcom (5%) and Marvell (3%)

Cost: $10-13

CAMERA MODULE


Component makers: Sharp (10-15% marketshare), LG Innotek (10-15%), Foxconn (8-10%), SEMCO (5-10%) and STM (5-10%)

Cost: $9-10

Touch panel

Touch panel

Component makers: TPX (15-20% marketshare), Young Fast (15-20%), Wintek (10-15%) and Nissha Printing (10-15%)

Cost: $7-11

Battery

Battery
Component makers: Simplo (40-50% marketshare), Dynapack (35-40%)

Cost: $5-8
10 May 2012

App Self-Destructs Sexts After Ten Seconds

App Self-Destructs Sexts After Ten Seconds
By Yi Chen
Snapchat allows users to set a timer up to 10 seconds of when the message would self-destruct after being received. If the receiver tries to take a screenshot, then the sender will be instantly notified.

Snapchat

via PSFK
25 April 2012

The Ugly Side of Facebook Memes

Courtesy of BuzzFeed
By Jack Stuef

James Denham does not have a strong social media following. He’s basically anonymous; type his name into Google, and you’re not going to find anything about him. But in January, Denham ran across an image of what appeared to be two teenagers cruelly hanging a puppy by a string and posted it to his Facebook wall. Text on the image implores users to “share this picture” and contact authorities if they recognize the perpetrators.

The photo has since been shared over 70,000 times from this profile, making it among the most widely viewed content on the site. Yet what Denham didn’t realize at first is this image has been circulating on the Internet for years, and the culprits were identified long ago. The photo is completely useless at this point. It appears somebody eventually notified Denham of the image’s past, as he has left multiple comments on his post trying to alert other users to its history. But it’s been in vain. The photo continues to be spread around by oblivious people every day, despite the comments and despite being of absolutely no use to the world.
Facebook is great for sharing funny things, but the truly funny ones almost always come from somewhere else. These don't. These are Facebook’s memes.

The Facebook share button, in its current iteration, allows users to take content from another user’s profile and re-post it on their own profiles, along with a byline from the original poster. By design, it works like Tumblr’s reblog or Twitter’s retweet function. In practice, it can work more like a human centipede.
These shared items, which are usually an image that has text, or sometimes an image accompanied by an urban-legend type caption, carry on the legacy of chain emails that were a major part of Internet culture in the 90s. Such spam has since diminished  as Internet content has grown and, along with its users, become more sophisticated. That these dumb images, which regularly accumulate tens or hundreds of thousands of “shares,” now rival even the most “liked” articles and videos on Facebook, is an embarrassment for the social network.
Courtesy of BuzzFeed

Urban legendsSome of these shares,  like this one recounting a hoax story about a woman on an airplane complaining about sitting next to a black man, got their start as  chain emails. Snopes.com dates  this tale back to 1998. On Facebook, a photo of a white flight attendant is used to make the story shareable. At least one posting of this urban legend has more than 100,000 shares and likes combined. Note: That's just a single post on one profile – there are many, many more.
The NAACP’s Facebook page, by contrast, had less than 106,000 likes at the time of this post. Perhaps if that organization had spent more time spreading made-up stories about bigots in the sky and less time trying to get civil rights legislation passed, it would be more popular on Facebook today.
The users who post these things are often shameless and have no qualms about asking for shares in the caption or in the image itself.
Quotations of dubious origin are also a favorite Facebook meme. People elsewhere on the Internet have debunked the attributions on Betty White and John Wayne quotes, but that hasn't made a difference.
The debunkings of these memes are never going to be shared nearly as broadly as the memes themselves, which seem like they will become viral intermittently in perpetuity. John Wayne and Betty White will be “saying” these things on Facebook until its users forget who they are. At that point, the quotes will be attributed to elderly stars like Justin Bieber and that dog from "The Artist."
Courtesy of BuzzFeed

Of course, we can’t expect like-hungry trolls to stop at photos of abused puppies. Congratulations, babies with serious medical conditions — you’re all Facebook famous! Such memes use the same tactic: exploit a small dying child’s photographs; write a breathless, obviously fallacious caption about how this kid will only get the medical care he or she needs if the meme scores enough likes and shares; and watch the attention roll in. Meanwhile, the child either recovers without your help or dies. Or the child's been dead for years.
Political rhetoricDespite Facebook sponsoring presidential debates, interviewing newsmakers and commissioning opinion polls, keeping up appearances as an important American institution and serious media organization concerned with civic values, the prevailing political discourse is as rotten as any Facebook meme.
It’s telling that the only political item on Facebook’s top 40 “most shared” news article list of 2011 was a blurry, resized infographic of debatable accuracy: Occupy Party vs Tea Party Comparison. That’s exactly the sort of thing that becomes a Facebook political meme, albeit even more poorly made and less likely to be factual.
Courtesy of BuzzFeed

The image above, as BuzzFeed’s J.P. Moore reported in January, has been among the most widely shared by conservatives on Facebook. It’s brilliantly stupid the way only chain e-mail propaganda can be.
Courtesy of BuzzFeed

Courtesy of BuzzFeed

These two memes are among the most widely shared by liberals, and they’re both wildly inaccurate. The "Who Increased the Debt?" chart had already been discredited  by political fact-check blogs many months before it appeared on Facebook. The photo of Mitt Romney is a 2008 Getty image showing the presidential candidate going through airport security before boarding a plane. But somebody decided it looked like the official wanding him was actually shining his shoes, so another meme predicated on misinformation was born.
These political memes may be the most insidious of all, because they could – theoretically – have serious effects not only on the discourse, but on election outcomes as well. Political images spread quickly in part because Facebook users’ friends are by and large demographically similar to themselves. Most conservatives are mostly friends with conservatives; most liberals are mostly friends with other liberals. These politically insular memes confirm and strengthen users’ ideological beliefs, and truth is optional. One can’t just dismiss these memes because they’re dumb, poorly made and factually challenged. Facebook is huge, and this is its most popular content.
Facebook may now be America’s greatest entertainment, but the junk content that is increasingly working its way into our news feeds makes eHow articles look like the Great American Novel.
Facebook would be more enjoyable for some people if it went back to the basics and focused on its original role as a virtual hub for maintaining real-life friendships. As some have suggested, it could encourage users to take time to mass-unfriend people and prune their network into a group of true friends they actually care about. Instead of worrying about the threats posed by other kinds of social networks and jamming similar features into Facebook after they become popular elsewhere (Instagram, for instance), the company could focus on cautiously improving what it does best and learn to live among a community of social networks that offer different things to different people. But it seems there’s no turning back.
Still, if enough people complain about these memes littering the site, I’m sure Facebook will find a way to clean it up for the users who don’t want to see it. The company eventually managed to tuck "Mafia Wars" requests away into the profiles of people who actually want to play the game, to the relief of the majority of its users who just can’t seem to see the vital importance of helping a friend steal a virtual handgun in text-based Chicago. That’s no small feat.

A longer version of this story (with even more crazy images of Facebook memes) originally appeared on BuzzFeed.

Unique 10lb Nikon Fisheye Lens

So wide-angle it can 'see behind itself'

By Rob Waugh

A camera lens so wide-angle it can 'see behind you' - offering a 220-degreee field of view - has gone on sale in London, priced at £100,000 - minus the camera.

When it was introduced in 1970 at the Photokina exhibition, it was the most extreme fisheye lens of all time - a 10lb glass dome which dwarfs the camera attached.

An exceptionally rare Nikon wide-angle lens has gone on sale in London this week: The 6mm F2.8 ultra-wide lens is priced at £100,000 via Grays of Westminster An exceptionally rare Nikon wide-angle lens has gone on sale in London this week: The 6mm F2.8 ultra-wide lens is priced at £100,000 via Grays of Westminster

THE LENS THAT CAN 'SEE BEHIND ITSELF' - NIKON'S 6mm F/2.8

6mm f/2.8 Fisheye-Nikkor lens
Picture angle: 220º
Diaphragm: Automatic
Aperture scale: f/2.8-f/22
Weight: 5200g
Dimensions: 236mm dia. x 171mm long
160mm extension from lens flange
Front lens cap: Slip-on, delivered in a rugged metal case 'Our vintage camera buyer Toni Kowal spent six months tracking it down from overseas,' says Gray Levett, of Grays of Westminster, which is selling the lens.

'We were fortunate to be able to find this example in such pristine condition.'
Nikon stunned the photographic world at Photokina in 1970 by introducing a 220 º fisheye Nikkor with a speed of f/2.8.


The Nikon 6mm lens prototype was never put into full production, but was made to order for several specialist photographers.
Jeremy Gilbert, Group Marketing Manager at Nikon UK says: ‘The 6mm f2.8 lens is an incredibly rare lens that was initially designed for scientific and meteorological use. It represents the pinnacle in lens design, from a time when lenses had to be designed with a slide rule and individual ray diagrams.

He adds: ‘Having worked at Nikon for 25 years I have only had the pleasure of seeing two 6mm f2.8mm lenses. And yes, the lens does see slightly behind itself 220 degrees -  you see your feet in every picture!’
The 10lb fisheye lens was shown off at the Photokina exhibition in 1970, and was made to order from 1972

The 10lb fisheye lens was shown off at the Photokina exhibition in 1970, and was made to order from 1972 'The 6mm is for scientific and industrial applications and special effects when shooting portraits, architecture and interiors,' says Levett.

Lens production began in March 1972 and was only made available to special order.'