Author: Adam Frucci

The best part about dominoes? Watching them fall down. The worst part? Setting them back up again. The Ouroborus Domino sculpture turns the worst part into the best part and makes me dizzy in the process. [Doobybrain via SlipperyBrick]

App store analytics firm Distimo recently released a bunch of juicy info about the major mobile app stores, and the results are pretty interesting. For one, Android has a much higher proportion of free apps.

Apple and BlackBerry are pretty close with their app stores, offering free apps making up 25% and 24% of their respective stores. Android more than doubles that number with 57%. Of course, with the size discrepancy between the stores, Apple still offers up more free apps than Android’s entire store, but it’s still interesting to see the relative differences.

Surprisingly, the number of free apps doesn’t drop the average price paid for paid apps down in android. Apple’s average paid price is $3.62, while Android’s is $3.27. BlackBerry, on the other hand, shoots way up with an $8.26 average. This is due to price variations across the app stores for the same app. IM+, for example, is $4.99 in Apple’s store and a whopping $29.99 in BlackBerry’s.

There’s some other data about store sizes (spoiler alert: Apple’s is way bigger than anyone else’s), but this price and spending data was the new stuff to us. [Distimo via ReadWriteWeb]

This is the Kodak Bantam Special, a limited-edition camera designed by Teague and released in 1936. It’s totally art deco and totally beautiful. [Monoscope via Kottke]

Here’s something we can all get behind: levitating chairs for the elderly that scoot around like bumper cars. There is no way this can go badly.

Created by researchers at Japan’s Kobe Gakuin University, the chairs work like an air hockey table, with high-powered air jets at the bottom of the chair creating a pocket of air beneath the chair for it to float on. Of course, it only works on smooth, solid surfaces. No tatami mats! But come on, fill a room with old people on these, push one into the middle and you’ve got yourself a party. [Robot.M via Crave via Dvice]

If you love movies, you love The Criterion Collection. It’s as simple as that. So get excited, because the CC now has a channel on Hulu.

As of right now, it only has the first six features from the Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman series, but more should be coming in the near future. Of course, since it’s Hulu, it’s not available outside the US, which sucks. But come on, free streaming Criterion Collection films! It’s tough to complain about that. Your lunch breaks just got a whole lot more sophisticated. [Criterion via Good]

So the Nokia N97 was a bit of a disaster. Normally, companies pretend that all of their products are great, even when they aren’t. But one Nokia VP is willing to admit that the N97 was a steamer.

Nokia’s VP of Markets Anssi Vanjoki recently said in an interview that the N97 was a “tremendous disappointment in terms of the experience quality for the consumers and something [they] did not anticipate.” How refreshingly candid!

Of course, he’s using such candidness as an excuse to claim that they’ve learned their lesson and are working to make the N97 a real contender via firmware updates. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that it might be a little late for firmware to save the N97, but if Nokia really is learning from its mistakes, bring on the next gen devices. If Microsoft can retool its mobile division after the abortion that was WinMo 6.5, there’s no reason Nokia can’t do the same. [All About Symbian via Engadget]

ChatRoulette, for the unaware, is the insane new site that randomly connects two videochatters together. It’s mostly used by gross dudes masturbating and stoned college kids. But here are some examples of how it could be so much more.

First Place—Neal Rosenblat
Second Place—Thrillcox
Third Place—Balazs Denes Kovacs

Those “Windows 7 was my idea” ads only make sense if you assume the people with the ideas weren’t idiots. This take on the ads is more honest about what Microsoft would’ve gotten if they’d really crowdsourced their OS. [CollegeHumor]

I love weirdo concept designs as much as the next guy, but these “Curious Displays” seem a bit too far out of left field for me. Essentially, they’re hundreds of mini display blocks that can form wherever they want.

So if you needed a reminder of where the remote was, a bunch could go form an arrow pointing at it. A bunch more could make up a shopping list for you near the fridge. And so on and so forth.

My issue is that it just all seems so impractical. How often do you need a location-based display? How many problems that this system claims to solve couldn’t be solved more cheaply and easily on an already-existing device, like a phone or a tablet?

But who knows, I’m no futurist. Maybe Curious Displays are the wave of the future. Then again, maybe not. [Curious Displays via Boing Boing]

A 43-year-old mother of three is currently wanted by the police in Oklahoma City for seducing a 14-year-old kid on PlayStation Home. Her avatar must’ve been really something.

Apparently, Annamay Alexander of Deltona, FL met this kid via Home and started sending him messages and a picture of her in her underwear. She then traveled to Oklahoma to see him and met with his mom, claiming to be there to talk about the kid wanting to marry her daughter. OK then!

Even after being told off by the kids mom, she continued to send downright-unsettling texts like “My body is yours to do whatever you want with,” and “I love you and we are going to get married.”

So yeah, be careful out there in those virtual worlds, kids. It’s probably best to stick with Xbox Live, where the 14-year-old boys are so fucking obnoxious no one would ever in their right mind try to seduce them. [KOCO via Kotaku]

You’ve gotta love companies trying to figure out this whole “social networking” thing. Take Denny’s, for example. Their menus invite you to follow @dennys on Twitter. They do not run @dennys.

Instead, a dude from Taiwan named Dennys Hsieh owns it. And these menus have been this way for months.

A Denny’s rep says the menus are a result of a misprint, and that they run two Twitter accounts: @DennysAllNightr for late night customers and @DennysGrandSlam for morning people. Both of those are featured on the respective late night and breakfast menus. The normal menus, however, still point you to Mr. Hsieh.

It’s all pretty troubling, at least to me. I mean, if I can’t get Moon Over My Hammy updates via Twitter, what the hell is the point of Twitter? Come on, Denny’s! [CNET]

There is nothing about this old Dead Kennedys cassette single I don’t love. [SB1 via HypeMachine]

Back at E3 last summer, Hideo Kojima announced Metal Gear Arcade, an arcade version of his tactical shooter. And now we’re getting our first peek of its crazy head-tracking 3D glasses. This is gonna be some arcade game.

If you’re unfamiliar with head tracking, you’ll want to watch this video. Then get excited, because this is one of the first games to use the technology, and it should be amazing. And in 3D no less!

The game should hit Japanese arcades first, but god-willing it’ll make its way to the States soon enough. [Konami via Joystiq]

You can thank our friends over at Jalopnik for creating this masterpiece. It goes fast because it’s not being slowed down by the inefficiencies of Flash!

Somewhere on the web is the ultimate music site. It has virtually every album, EP and single ever released in a variety of high-quality formats with insanely fast download speeds. You’re probably not allowed in.

The Pirate Bay is dead. So is TorrentSpy, MiniNova, Suprnova and many other public BitTorrent trackers. But the most savvy and obsessive file hoarders don’t care about that stuff; they wouldn’t be caught dead using public trackers.

People serious about downloading pirated music, movies, TV shows, software and other media aren’t interested in getting a letter from their ISP or the RIAA/IFPI/MPAA/CRIA. They’re also not interested in getting viruses or fake files, often seeded on public trackers by copyright enforcers looking to make piracy annoying. So they’ve built up hundreds of private sites that only trusted users can access.

A private BitTorrent tracker is a site that you can only gain access to via an invite from a current user. Some of them are very basic, featuring merely a searchable list of torrents people have uploaded. Many feature forums with the trackers for people to announce and discuss files that are available. The most sophisticated feature gigantic databases that organize the files like the greatest online downloading store ever built, but with no checkout.

There are huge private trackers that, like The Pirate Bay, offer up everything and anything that you could want. But there are many more smaller, more specialized trackers. There are sites for music, for movies, for HD Blu-ray movie rips, for both Mac and PC software, for porn, for comic books, for console games, for anime, for TV shows, for E-books and for sporting events. If you know where to look, you can find a site that specializes in exactly what you care about downloading the most.

But downloading media isn’t the only thing going on at these sites. At some, they’re software development communities, with large numbers of developers donating time to building the site together into something more than just a place to grab files and leave. And it’s just this sort of development that gives these sites the ability to reappear in different forms if they get shut down. Because, when you’re in the illegal file-swapping business, getting busted is a fact of life.

The RIAA told me that while both public and private trackers are “enormously damaging,” they’ve handed the reins over to the IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) to go after these sites. This is probably because many of these sites are hosted overseas. The IFPI told me that “it focuses resources on the top of the illegal supply chain of music, regardless of whether that is a public tracker, private tracker or other source.”

OiNK was probably the biggest private music tracker on the web when it was shut down in 2007 by the IFPI. It was huge and well loved. Even Trent Reznor admitted he had an account:

I’ll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often. At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world’s greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If OiNK cost anything, I would certainly have paid, but there isn’t the equivalent of that in the retail space right now.

OiNK was so well loved because, as Reznor said, it was amazing. If there was an album you were searching for, it was a couple of clicks away. And thanks to infamously strict bitrate requirements, it was available in a number of formats, all higher-quality than what iTunes was offering at the time.

Furthermore, OiNK had very strict ratio requirements, meaning that if you didn’t upload as well as download, you’d be kicked off the site. This ensured that files were seeded for a long time and were continually available.

Last month, after a two-year legal ordeal, OiNK founder Allen Ellis was found not guilty and released in the UK. But immediately upon OiNK’s demise, multiple other trackers popped up to replace it, built by former members of the OiNK community and following the same ratio and quality guidelines that made OiNK so popular. And those replacements offer even more functionality than OiNK did, continuing to grow and improve in the years since it was shut down.

One of them, let’s call it Site X, has surpassed OiNK in terms of content and functionality. It’s run like a business, with multiple staffers putting in many hours a week to code it, manage it and work on new features. I talked to the founder and lead SysOp of Site X, who said when the site first started he put in a full-time job’s worth of hours. “Nowadays, a conservative estimate would be 15 hours,” which is still no small amount. And he is one of three SysOps. There are also two administrators, one developer and 17 moderators on the Site X staff. That’s a lot of manpower for something nobody is getting paid for.

And according to this head SysOp, all money made from user donations goes to maintaining the servers and not into any wallets. “I’d be too scared to touch it, even if I could dampen my sense of morality enough to reach my hand into the piggybank.” (One of the main charges levied against OiNK founder Alan Ellis was that he made “hundred of thousands of pounds” from user donations.)

Site X’s main feature is its huge database of torrents. All are organized by artist, so you can find everything someone has released in one place. Many releases are available in multiple file formats, ranging from lossless FLAC to various bitrates of MP3 to AAC to Ogg, for weirdos that really want their music to all be in Ogg. And for major releases with multiple versions available, you’ll find every version, from the original to the vinyl to rereleases, available separately.

Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, for example, has 20 different versions available on Site X spread across 60 different download options (click the image to the left to see the entire crazy list). Sure, most people will go for the basic V0 MP3 of the standard issue recording, but if you really want to find the 1981 Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab master digitized from vinyl as FLACs, or the 1983 Japanese Black Triangle Pressing in 320 AAC, they’re here. It’s a completists’ paradise.

But what about discovering new music? Site X has two features that help with that: collages and similar artist maps. Collages are basically user-made lists of albums. They can be something like Pitchfork’s 100 Best Albums of the 70’s or AllMusic 5 Star Albums or just one guy’s favorite 90’s ska records. At the bottom of every album page it lists what collages that album is a part of so you can explore other music that somehow relates to it.

Similar artist maps are visual guides that appear at the bottom of each artist page. Anyone can add an artist they feel is similar to an artist’s page, and as those suggestions get voted up and down, they appear in various sizes in the visual guide at the bottom. Like a band? Simply check out other bands in the map to try something similar.

All of this is built on a system that’s rooted in a community. There’s an extensive forum here, as well as a Wiki full of information on everything from site rules to how to digitize a vinyl perfectly. And the community helps build the site, coding features that are added to the system and creating hundreds of custom CSS skins to change the appearance.

But what if Site X gets shut down like OiNK was? It has over 116,000 users as of this writing, a number far too large for it to escape the notice of the same people that shut down OiNK. The head SysOp admits that they’ve already gained some unwanted attention: “We’ve gotten multiple letters from the CRIA, but none in the past year and a half. It’s been very quiet lately. They’ve either realized they can’t do anything, or are busy launching an amazing assault.” Won’t all the work put into this system be for nothing if the latter is true?

Nope. Because the entire site was built as an open-source piece of software called Gazelle, one that’s continually tweaked and updated. Gazelle runs the whole structure of the site, and they’re currently working on writing an entirely original tracker from scratch for it. And so far, there are over 50 other private trackers running Gazelle. If one dies, another will pop up to replace it.

So does the existence of such a large network of meticulously-built private BitTorrent sites mean the IFPI and other trade organizations are losing the piracy battle? No, actually. These sites are very difficult to get into and just as difficult to stay in once you’re there. They are most definitely not for laypeople, and they’re also not at “the top of the supply chain.” The days of Napster and Kazaa making piracy easy enough for your mom to do it are gone. It’s actually harder to pirate media now than it was a few years ago thanks to the efforts of copyright holders.

Yes, these sites exist that are far, far better than any option has ever been before. But even a site as large and sophisticated as Site X has only 116,000 members. That’s nothing compared to the millions of people who populated the large peer-to-peer file-sharing programs a few years ago.

So yes, piracy is indeed alive and well, more sophisticated than ever before. But it’s been pushed to places that most people can’t get to, and though that’s an unlikely victory for the recording industry, I doubt they’d ever claim it as theirs.

Investigators at the NSA have tracked the huge online attacks that Google used as their reason for leaving the Chinese market to two universities, one with ties to the Chinese military.

If supported by further investigation, the findings raise as many questions as they answer, including the possibility that some of the attacks came from China but not necessarily from the Chinese government, or even from Chinese sources.

Tracing the attacks further back, to an elite Chinese university and a vocational school, is a breakthrough in a difficult task. Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.

So this could mean a couple of things. The Chinese government could be using this school as a front for its attacks. Or it could be the work of “patriotic hackers” in the school, one of the best computer programs in the world. Or the schools could have been used as a proxy by another country looking to put the blame on China.

But one thing is sure: the attacks took place through a newly-discovered Internet Explorer vulnerability.

Executives at Google have said little about the intrusions and would not comment for this article. But the company has contacted computer security specialists to confirm what has been reported by other targeted companies: access to the companies’ servers was gained by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser.

Forensic analysis is yielding new details of how the intruders took advantage of the flaw to gain access to internal corporate servers. They did this by using a clever technique – called man-in-the-mailbox – to exploit the natural trust shared by people who work together in organizations.

After taking over one computer, intruders insert into an e-mail conversation a message containing a digital attachment carrying malware that is highly likely to be opened by the second victim. The attached malware makes it possible for the intruders to take over the target computer.

This is why you should not be running IE 6.0, you lazy companies. [NY Times]

GorillaPod, the bendy tripods you know and love, just announced its newest version: GorillaPod Magnetic. This guy has magnets on each of its feet, allowing you to stick it to pretty much any magnetic surface.

Of course, it’ll still work without sticking to a surface, as it’s still a normal GorillaPod above the feet. But if you feel the need to have your camera attached to the side of your car door, well, now you’ve got the ability to. It’ll be available in April.

Well, this doesn’t seem quite right. Apparently, retail copies of SOCOM US Navy SEALs: Fireteam Bravo 3 come with a code that’s needed to unlock online play. Bought it used? A new code will be $20, please.

It’s no secret that publishers absolutely loathe the used games market, as it takes money out of their pockets. The problem? It’s perfectly legal to buy and sell used games. So now we’re seeing more and more publishers do shady stuff like include one-time-use codes in retail packaging that leaves used game buyers without the full experience. This is the most extreme case of this practice yet.

It’s all perfectly legal, I’m sure, but it’s shady as hell and a pretty dick move. But hey, It’s OK! Sony has public good will to spare! [IGN via Consumerist]

The Four Works Workstation is a very fancy chair designed for working from home. It’s got everything you need to do so efficiently save a toilet under the seat so you never have to stand up.

The Four Works features a fold-out laptop stand, cabinet space for peripherals, a spot for the requisite mug of cofee and a nook for your keys and phone.

But really, it just looks classy, if a bit impractical. I mean, sure, it’s nice to have it all in one space, but I’m not sure it does anything a, you know, desk doesn’t do. But for those completely desk-averse, here you go. [Four Design via Materialicious via Unplggd]