Cleverly disguised under the phrase "to complete necessary non-production work," American manufacturer Chrysler announced the extension of the holiday break at several of its facilities, with plants beginning work only in the middle of January.
According to Chrysler, the shutdowns will be used to perform scheduled maintenance, install equipment and supplier re-sourcing related to the closure of the Twinsburg (Ohio) Stamping Plant as well as for the line of refreshed mod… (read more)
These days the world is looking at Copenhagen Summit, its agenda and how much carbon footprint it is generating. At the same time the most climate-friendly childcare center in Denmark is being established in Hørsholm. Hørsholm is situated in the north of Copenhagen. This childcare center will be opened in November 2010. The […]
Posted in: Economy, Environment, Industry
It may be an art installation, but this “digital” clock, operated for 24 hours straight by a group of staunch Dutchmen might fare better as a desktop widget. I suppose it’s meant to say something about the nature of time, and perhaps it does, but this is a gadget blog, not the MOMA coffee shop. Go, you. Talk about it there.
You can buy it in their shop, and the DVD includes a tool that synchronizes the movie with your computer’s clock. It’s like one of those little virtual dancing ladies, but slightly more practical.
[via Metafilter]
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Ford Racing unveiled today the next generation of racing Mustang in the form of the new BOSS 302R, a beast fitted with a new 5.0-liter V8 engine. Bud Moore Engineering prepared the race car in honor of the 40th anniversary of Parnelli Jones’ 1970 Trans-Am championship, with prices starting at MSRP $79,000 and with deliveries expected to begin in the third quarter of 2010.
Aside from the 5.0-liter four-valve engine mated to a six-speed manual transmission, each Mustang BOSS 302R … (read more)
By Steve Blank, Columnist, Entrepreneur Corner, Venturebeat
Last week, as a favor to a friend, I sat in on a board meeting of a fairly successful 3.5 year-old startup. Given all that could go wrong in this economy, they were doing well. Their business had just crossed cash flow breakeven, had grown past 50 employees, just raised a substantive follow-on round of financing and had recently hired a Chief Financial Officer.
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By Stan Schroeder, Features Editor, Mashable
It’s hard to argue that 2009 wasn’t the year of Twitter. Yes, the questions about monetization loomed over the young web company as soon as it started gaining popularity, and they’re still largely unanswered. But people loved this new way of communicating via 140 character messages that go out to everyone who wants to hear them.
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The Mercedes SLS AMG Desert Gold edition was presented at the Dubai motor show, and here is the video of the car, along with pics from the show. The SLS AMG gold tint version could possibly be included as a permanent colour for the Middle East market, with the option appearing as part of the AMG Performance Studio exclusive personalisation program.
The external Desert Gold look is contrasted with a black carbon fibre finish interior, while the engine remains unchanged. The Middle East is Mercedes’ fourth largest market, and so the Dubai motor show also featured a preview of the new Mercedes E-Class cabriolet. Check out the SLS AMG Desert Gold in the pics.
The fact that the automobile industry is seriously affected by the global recession is no secret to anybody, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that all car sales went down, as France is expected to announce its highest car sales since 2001.
According to French newspaper Les Echos, the increase is related to the fact that drivers took advantage of government scrapping and other incentive schemes before the end of 2009.
The newspaper also said it is expected that mor… (read more)
Although rumors were hinting that Saab might still live on – through an acquisition by Spyker – it seems the Swedish unit is getting close to the official closure, as the possibility to seal a deal is becoming a more unlikely scenario. A person close to the matter told Reuters that General Motors is keen on its plans to wind down Saab and the process will begin in early January as initially projected.
Still, the US-based manufacturer is negotiating with Spyker, who recently submit… (read more)
The 2010 season of Formula One could have brought us not one, but two Schumachers on the grid. Aside from the never-ending story of Michael Schumacher’s return, his brother now revealed that he could have came back in F1 if he really wanted. However, the offer that was made to him did not match his expectations.
Ralf had a concrete offer (to return to F1 in 2010) but it wasn’t the challenge he wanted, a friend of Ralf Schumacher was quoted as saying to the German newspaper Bild. <... (read more)
Article Tags: Alan Siddons, Leon Ashby
Food for thought about CO2 from Alan Siddons
Concentrated CO2 exposed to infrared will get somewhat warmer than everyday air. But this only proves that everyday air (99.96% of which is nitrogen, oxygen and argon) is more transparent to IR and less apt to be heated that way. Air molecules, CO2 included, initially acquire heat by contact with warmer surfaces. Via mutual collisions and convective transport, this heat gets spread around within an airmass.
To some slight degree, CO2 also has the option of acquiring heat by radiative transfer. But, rather ironically, it cannot radiatively transfer this heat to the nitrogen, oxygen and argon molecules which surround it because, as said, they are largely infrared-transparent. As a result, an excited CO2 molecule is obliged to share its heat just like the rest of them do, by bumping into other molecules. In short, there’s nothing special about CO2 in a real-world context. Outnumbered 2500 to 1, CO2’s energy is lost in a busy buzz of collisions, its radiative properties wasted.
Moreover, any heated gas radiates infrared — and in this case 99.96% of the gas consists of molecules other than CO2.
File attachment: Climate Sceptic News 27 th Dec.pdf
Indoor off-road driving test experience Camp Jeep will be offered to visitors attending the 2010 San Diego International Auto Show, scheduled to be held between December 30 – January 3, at the San Diego Convention Center. The 30,000-square foot exhibit will give auto show attendees a chance to experience the extreme on- and off-road capabilities of Jeep vehicles without leaving the show floor.
"We have created this unique auto show opportunity to provide our customers with a… (read more)
In the beginning of December, we brought you the news that pit crew member Donald "D.J." Richardson of the Richard Childress Racing organization came down with the H1N1 virus. While at the time Richardson was recovering from complications, he did not manage to survive the virus and passed away on Christmas Day, at 37 years of age.
All of us at RCR are saddened by D.J.’s passing, Richard Childress, president and CEO of Richard Childress Racing said according to Auto123. … (read more)
Article Tags: ClimateGate, Editorial
Associated Press coverage raises eyebrows
With trillions of dollars at stake in the battle over global warming, now would be the time for the press to closely scrutinize the claims of those who would reorganize the world’s economy from farm to factory and laboratory to living room. And the Climategate scandal – where leaked e-mails and dodgy computer programs from the University of East Anglia raise powerful new questions about the role of politics in climate science – would be the perfect opportunity to explore what is going on behind the scenes.
That’s not happening. To judge by recent coverage from Associated Press, the Fourth Estate watchdog has acted like a third-rate pocket pet. Case in point is an 1,800-word AP missive that appeared in hundreds of publications, many carrying it on the front page of their Sunday, Dec. 13 issue with the headline, “Science not faked, but not pretty.” AP gave three scientists copies of the controversial e-mails and then asked them about their conclusions. The wire service portrayed the trio of scientists as dismissing or minimizing allegations of scientific fraud when, in fact, the scientists believe no such thing.
The first scientist quoted in the article, Mark Frankel, is director of scientific freedom, responsibility and law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AP quotes him as concluding that there is, “no evidence of falsification or fabrication of data, although concerns could be raised about some instances of very ‘generous interpretations.’” While the article mentions that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and some Republican lawmakers are calling for independent investigations, AP doesn’t note the views of the scientists they interviewed.
Click source to read FULL Editorial from The Washington Post
Source: washingtontimes.com
Article Tags: Lord Monckton
In December 2009, Scientific American, once a respected popular-science journal and now a pulp science-fiction picture comic, viciously attacked US Senator James Inhofe because he had proclaimed 2009 to be the Year of the Skeptic. By skepticism, he meant “standing up and exposing the science, the costs and the hysteria behind global warming alarmism”.
Venomously, Science Fiction American’s editorial comment continued: “Within the community of scientists and others concerned about anthropogenic climate change, those whom Inhofe calls skeptics are more commonly termed contrarians, naysayers and denialists.” Yah-Boo! This name-calling marks the depth of unscientific desperation to which the proponents of the “global warming” nonsense have now sunk.
Unscientific American pompously continued: “Not everyone who questions climate change science fits that description, of course—some people are genuinely unaware of the facts or honestly disagree about their interpretation. What distinguishes the true naysayers is an unwavering dedication to denying the need for action on the problem, often with weak and long-disproved arguments about supposed weaknesses in the science behind global warming.”
Source: sppiblog.org
If you’re pregnant, drinking several sugary soft drinks each week can increase the chance you’ll develop gestational diabetes, a condition that occurs when women who’ve never had diabetes develop high blood sugar levels during pregnancy.
According to new research from Louisiana State University Health Science Center in New Orleans, women who consumed at least five servings of non-diet cola per week faced a 22% greater risk of gestational diabetes when compared to women who consumed less than one serving a month.
The risk was still present after accounting for other diabetes risk factors, including BMI and exercise habits. However, researchers still aren’t sure if cola consumption before pregnancy affects the risk for developing gestational diabetes.
Researchers also found that pregnant women who had five or more sugar-sweetened beverages of any type a week were 23% more likely to develop gestational diabetes compared to women who consumed less than one serving a month.
The good news: Consuming diet cola didn’t increase risk of gestational diabetes. The research is published in the journal Diabetes Care.
According to the American Diabetes Association, gestational diabetes is usually diagnosed around 28 weeks or later. Each year, about 4% of all pregnant women (135,000 cases) in the US will have gestational diabetes. The condition usually goes away after pregnancy, but there’s a higher chance of gestational diabetes in future pregnancies. Women who’ve had diabetes during pregnancy are also at increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes years later.
Treatment for diabetes during pregnancy includes special meal plans, scheduled physical activity and possibly daily blood glucose testing and insulin injections. Sticking with treatment helps the mother and baby’s health, and it also lowers the risk of a cesarean section birth.
(Image via stock.xchng)
Post from: Blisstree
Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Rohit Khare, the co-founder of Angstro. Building his latest project, social address book Knx.to, gives him a deep familiarity with the privacy policies of all the major social networks.
I’d be wishing everyone a happier New Year if it were easier to mail out greeting cards to friends on Facebook and colleagues on LinkedIn. I’d like to use knx.to, our free, real-time social address book, but their ‘privacy’ policies prevent us from downloading contact information, even for my own friends.
At least those Terms of Service (ToS) that force us to copy addresses and phone numbers one-by-one also prevent scoundrels from stealing our identity; reselling our friends to marketers; and linking our life online to the real world. Right?
Wrong. When RockYou can stash 32 million passwords in the clear; when RapLeaf can index 600 million email accounts; and when Intelius can go public by buying 100 million profile pages; then our social networks have traded away our privacy for mere “privacy theater.”
With apologies to Bruce Schneier’s brilliant coinage, “security theater” (e.g. the magical thinking behind forcing passengers to sit down and shut up for the last hour of international flights), social networks have been dogged by one disaster after another in 2009 because they pursue policies that provide the “feeling of improved privacy while doing little or nothing to actually improve privacy.”
As long as the same information that social networks piously prohibit their own customers from using is being bought and sold on the open market by giant marketing companies, social networks are only pretending protect your privacy.
Last week’s headlines brought news that RockYou had accumulated 32,603,388 identities over the past few years — and negligently stored them in plaintext in an incompetently protected database.
RockYou’s official bluster about “illegal intrusion” should fool no one: blaming Imperva, the firm who exposed the flaw, or accusing the hacker(s) of being the identity thieves is misdirection: it was actually RockYou who stole those credentials, and RockYou should be held to account.
I realize that I’m using the incendiary terms “identity theft” and “stole,” even though I would agree that users voluntarily consented to type their passwords into RockYou’s forms. I assume that both users and RockYou’s developers actually only intended to share some particular bits of information: a contact list, a user photo, a friend’s gender; but the bottom line is that instead of sharing that specific data, RockYou retained enough secrets to impersonate those users at will.
The fault, dear Reader, is not in our stars; it lies with sites that pretend to waive all care and duty by idly warning their users not to share their account passwords with anyone else.
In the absence of vigorous enforcement of those ToS agreements, any RockYou developer who passed up the opportunity to, say, phish MySpace passwords was putting their own employer at a disadvantage to any other startup that was willing to race them to the bottom.
RockYou minimized the scope of this breach by maintaining that it only affected their “legacy platform” for widgets rather than its larger “partner applications platforms” that use “industry standard security protocols.” After all, the advent of social networks’ partner APIs was supposed to make impersonation and scraping obsolete.
Those APIs came with their own new ToS agreements that added new, overlapping, and sometimes-contradictory restrictions as they worked through all of the implications of letting third parties in on the fun. The ACLU released a fun quiz that makes quite clear how much information is at stake, from your hometown to your friends’ sexual orientation.
For example, if you upload a photo of me that I find embarrassing, I could prevent you from tagging me in it, but I can’t forbid you from keeping your own photo online (or keeping it private, bugs aside). I can’t even forbid another friend of ours from caching a copy in his or her browser.
However, the Facebook API ToS can (and does) prevent a third-party application from caching a link to the photo for more than a day (a week on Orkut). Unfortunately, direct links to the photo server didn’t double-check the privacy policy, so a third-party app would be at risk of leaking images users thought were private, unless the developer remembered to make a separate API call every time to re-verify every photo on a page.
In an ideal world, a third party developer shouldn’t have to store any personally-identifiable information (PII). In many jurisdictions, PII is akin to toxic waste, because of the regulatory burdens and civil, even criminal, liability for acquiring and disposing of it.
Here again, Facebook is the pacesetter: it’s possible to display “She liked 7 photos uploaded by Mr. Smith two weeks ago” using little more than a numeric user id. The developer writes a sentence in Facebook Markup Language (FBML), and Facebook’s servers will dynamically substitute the name, gender, item count, and ensure grammatical agreement of pronouns, singular/plural choices, and time intervals.
OpenSocial gadgets have to copy PII into the browser to format a sentence like that. LinkedIn’s partners even have to copy PII to their own servers, since their Open API is currently incompatible with AJAX authentication.
Even though copying PII is the root of all privacy risks, there are three reasons it can be necessary: latency, history, and agility. Without caches, slow API calls can make an app’s performance suffer. Without archives, analyzing only the most recent events can mislead an app’s trend detection or recommendation services. Without “offline” access, waiting for a user to log in again delays an app’s reaction to events in real-time.
There aren’t many technical countermeasures once data has been copied. LinkedIn spent more than a year tinkering with their public API, but the only substantial difference is that it now encrypts every member id with the identity of the developer and application to trace the source of a breach. I applaud them as an industry pioneer — though they’re so dependent on search-engine optimization that they still include the public numeric ids in the profile page URLs anyway.
Exporting PII with legal strings attached is the best policy we can hope for. While Amazon’s ToS requires its associates to display accurate, up-to-date prices, Twitter has only recently realized the implications of searching deleted tweets and doesn’t yet oblige its API partners to update their copies when tweets are deleted or protected.
If PII is so hard to protect, then the only way for social networks to protect their users’ privacy must be to prohibit partners from accessing contact information in the first place. I might not be able to export my holiday card mailing list from my favorite social network— a roach motel for our data — but giant marketing corporations can buy and sell our private information with impunity.
I could go to Rapleaf right now to buy an analysis of any list of email addresses to learn its makeup by gender, income, residence, and all manner of other demographic data. Who’s to say how short that list could be—it’s a slippery slope from aggregate info to personal info. Or I could shop at one of Intelius’ many fronts and affiliates who are selling PII explicitly (TRUSTe-certified!). Or I could barter some of the stray business cards on my desk on Jigsaw to fill in the rest of the puzzle. All of these businesses depend on PII data harvested from social networks.
How is that possible? None of the social networks that we’ve integrated with has an API for reading email addresses — but all of them have no problem asking you to “Invite your friends!” After all, most social networks remain hypocritical enough to phish passwords to other social networks themselves as soon as they ask you to “Invite your friends” for their own viral growth!
Putting aside the hypocrisy of phishing passwords to scrape those friends’ email addresses in the first place, the subtler flaw is that social networks are more than happy to search their member database for those addresses to share a list of suggested friends. That’s how a Rapleaf could take a mailing list, pretend that those are all friends of theirs, and slowly accumulate a “reverse phonebook” that maps emails to social network profiles.
Or you could just crawl their websites. Social networks depend on search engines for traffic, so they almost universally have public pages for every member with well-known URLs and directory listings by name for crawlers to index. A mini-boomlet in funding “people search“ startups underwrote this massive exercise, but they sold their archives to less–than–savory marketers.
Now, merely indexing public web pages can’t be evil—but reconciling online identities and 3rd-party advertising cookies with real-world credit reports, government records, and other databases can be. Adding in all that information doesn’t increase Mr. Smith’s anonymity; Jeff Jonas has made a small fortune proving that semantic reconciliation dramatically collapses uncertainty. Just think about combining Spock’s 100M profiles with Intelius’ 20B other data points; or Wink’s 200M profiles with Reunion MyLife’s 34M members and 700M records…
The philosophical question at hand is what rights do I have in my friends’ information. When I accept a business card from someone I’ve just met, I don’t believe I have the right to re-sell it on Jigsaw in good conscience (they’d disagree 18M times). If it’s a colleague’s card, on the other hand, I might take the initiative to forward a new lead, or even buy a gift subscription to a magazine. Does that constitute a violation of their privacy, or spam?
Social networks haven’t let their users make their own decisions on this issue. Through selective enforcement of their policies, some startups get locked out while big partners get exemptions. Power.com ended up in (and out of) court. Plaxo found out the hard way that they couldn’t assist their paying customers to OCR Facebook email addresses; or to synchronize with LinkedIn. It says a lot about LinkedIn’s draconian ToS that even with paying customers demanding it, Comcast hasn’t signed up for their API. Even if users manually download their own LinkedIn address books, it won’t even include links back to folks’ public profile pages.
I also claim that social networks are engaging in Privacy Theater because there’s no shortage of examples of organizations on the Web that process vast quantities of PII while providing real privacy protection. Do you think that the “bad guys” haven’t gone after Webmail services to phish passwords and harvest contact information? Aren’t e-commerce sites sharing product information and reviews out to legions of affiliates without leaking your purchase history? How long do you think RockYou would have gotten away with it if they were asking for your online banking username instead of your email address?
Social network sites have not (yet) demonstrated the high degree of proactive surveillance and enforcement characteristic of other organizations that deal with PII on the Internet. Users see worms on MySpace and viruses on Facebook, but not on Hotmail — because they defend against cross-site-scripting attacks. Users find malware distributed on Slide, but not on Wikipedia — because they filter content aggressively. Users are blocked by DDoS attacks and DNS attacks on Twitter — but Amazon stays up because they can react in real-time (mostly). How much more quickly do Cease & Desist letters for putting up a fake PayPal logo go out than for impersonating a Facebook Page?
From personal conversations, I’m beginning to wonder if the recent rise of Hadoop is part of the problem, surprisingly. Trying to detect patterns of abusive crawling and suspicious bursts of activity from partner apps by analyzing yesterday’s log files alerts you too late to react. The culture of many social networking websites seems to emphasize page load times (especially after the great Friendster meltdown), which isn’t quite the same as the enterprise IT, networking, and transactional database backgrounds of other leading Web architects. And unlike the formal (and informal) networks of security officials at online financial institutions to track distributed threats, I fear we have little evidence of coordinated responses to privacy threats that correlate identities across social networks.
I have first-hand experience that it takes more time (and more money) to ship applications that comply with social networks’ privacy policies. If we weren’t living with Privacy Theater, that might not have been a wasted investment. Inevitably, Gresham’s Law kicked in, and the good guys are being driven out by the bad guys (spammy apps, scammy apps, sneaky apps, conniving apps).
Naturally, I prefer to think of myself as one of the ‘good guys.’ I prefer to believe that privacy protection is a competitive advantage that users (citizens!) really value. Until this outrageous RockYou breach, I didn’t fully realize how irrelevant that is.
I’d argue that the hapless state of ToS enforcement by the major social network platforms only provides the feeling of improved privacy while doing little or nothing to actually improve privacy: that’s privacy theater.
Unfortunately, that analogy is still unfair: TSA may screen children at the airport, but at least their security theater doesn’t obscure the fact we haven’t had a catastrophic security failure in the US air transportation system (yet). Our major social networks’ privacy theater is distracting us from ongoing, large-scale identity theft and misuse of private and personally-identifiable information.
If the industry expects self-regulation to forestall government regulation, well, here’s what I think it would take: An immediate ban on all of RockYou’s applications by all of their partners, pending a public audit of all of their apps. That’s taking a page from the audit provisions of LinkedIn’s ToS and adding sunlight by publishing the results.
Sounds harsh? I thought the market was supposed to provide swifter, surer justice than some pesky regulator with its clunky old notions of due process and presumptions of innocence. API agreements are a private matter between ruthless corporations. Heck, if they really wanted to put the rest of the ecosystem on notice, they ought to audit every application funded by Sequoia, Partech, DCM, and Softbank, all lead investors in RockYou.
It’s not like lawsuits are being filed, as Marissa Mayer announced by going after work-from-home scam artists in an interview with Mike Arrington at LeWeb. It’s not like this is Scamville 2.0, since this isn’t stealing users’ cash, only their dignity. It’s not like there’s a legal spotlight on the issue, since there’s only $9M set aside for a hazy new privacy foundation in the latest Facebook class-action settlement. It’s not like it’s a political issue in the headlines, since a Facebook Chief Privacy Officer is running for Attorney General, the top law-enforcement office in California. It’s not like it’s as complicated as “don’t be evil,” since I can give you one simple tip to eliminate privacy theater: enforce your ToS and obey others’ ToS — or else stop setting unrealistic expectations and just let users have their data back!
(Photo credit: Flickr/FaceMePLS).
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In an age of advertising hyperbole so gratuitous that every spec tweak or color change is accompanied by a press release, it’s honestly refreshing to watch Lenovo tip-toe interesting new products into retail with nary a peep. Like this palm-sized Multimedia Remote with Keyboard spotted by an Engadget reader inside a Singapore mobile phone shop. Seems this wireless pup (model 57Y6336) has been on sale for about a week across the globe with a $60 MSRP or about $30 after a quick Google for discount coupons. That meager tithe takes home a 2.4GHz keyboard with trackball and USB “nano dongle” for your Windows home theater PC good for about 10-meters of wireless sofa surfing. See it in the wild after the break.
[Thanks, Bryan C.]
Continue reading Lenovo’s wireless Multimedia Remote with Keyboard sneaks out for retail
Lenovo’s wireless Multimedia Remote with Keyboard sneaks out for retail originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 01:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Alex Albrecht is on Wikipedia. Therefore, he is important. Not only that, but he also made a cool iPhone app that hit the store for just $1. Cheap. Like all the other iPhone apps. Unlike most other $1 iPhone apps, this one is pretty fun.
The concept is simple: Duel enables you to host a duel on your iPhones. (Don’t fret, parental-types; though this iPhone duel will pay homage to the duels of the Wild Wild West, it will differ in one major way: nobody’s gonna get shot.) Instead, should you lose, you will simply find your fellow dueler’s ugly mug laughing hysterically in your face. Here’s how you duel: All you need is two people with two iPhones. Both need to have the app (so you could argue this app really costs $2, which is still cheap). You connect your iPhones via Bluetooth, and then you raise your phones vertically. The timer on the phones counts down from 3. Once it hits zero, you turn your phones horizontally to shoot. First one to shoot wins.
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