Category: News

Goodfellas actor Paul Sorvino is cooking up a treat for fans — he’s launching his own line of pasta sauces using an old family recipe.

The 70-year-old celeb came up with the idea after sampling some of the bland sauces available on supermarket shelves. He decided to launch his own product with the help of Paul Sorvino Foods and his mother Angelina’s Neopolitan cuisine secrets.

“I have had a life long passion for food and have enjoyed cooking since I was twelve years old. I am really excited about creating food that consumers will be able to enjoy and share with family and friends,” he tells The New York Daily News. “I have a box full of family recipes waiting to be developed. I want Paul Sorvino Foods to be a ground breaking company that produces great tasting food that will be affordable to consumers. Our company’s trademarked slogan is ‘Simply the finest.’”

Paul, who is the father of actress Mira Sorvino, says: “I get my tomatoes from Naples. I get the olive oil from Puglia. The spices I use are fresh, like the basil and in the marinara, a touch of oregano. No fillers, syrups or preservatives.”

Paul’s sauces are expected to go on sale later this month.

You may recall last year that prosecutors in Pennsylvania wanted to charge some girls who had taken either nude or partially unclothed photos of themselves, and then sent them via their mobile phones, with “child porn” charges. This seems pretty ridiculous no matter how you look at it, and it was good that a judge temporarily blocked the prosecutor from moving forward. You would hope that this would give the prosecutor a chance to rethink this idea, and perhaps realize that it’s beyond extreme.

Instead? The prosecutor is appealing the ruling and still wants to charge at least one girl with child porn charges. The ACLU is fighting back, not just for this particular girl, but apparently over the threats of felony charges on 16-girls, who were then forced to participate in a “re-education” class to avoid charges. I have no problem with children being educated about why such things are really bad ideas, but to threaten them with felony charges, especially when even the mothers of one of the girls says that photos were just some girls goofing around, and in most cases no worse than what you’d find it a typical Victoria’s Secret catalog? That seems like a prosecutor going too far.

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Intel’s effort to get computers in the hands of the world’s school kids is making good progress, based on the latest information from the chip maker.

In 2006, the world’s biggest chip maker started the program of creating low-cost laptops that could be used in classrooms, and Intel has outlasted some of its rivals in pushing the program forward. Now it has shipped more than 2 million units through local distributors in more than 30 countries, said Agnes Kwan, a spokeswoman at the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company.

By comparison, One Laptop Per Child says it has 1.5 million units shipped and another million on order. Kwan acknowledged it is hard work. The company has to work with governments, local industry providers, and software companies. But resistance to the idea of putting computers in the classroom has melted away and there are more countries participating now.

Three new ones include Argentina, which will provide 250,000 Intel-powered Classmate PCs starting this spring in secondary schools. It is targeting 16-year-old to 18-year-old students in 1,500 schools across 24 states in Argentina. The Argentine government is funding the program, which is being administered by the United Nations.

Brazil’s Ministry of Education is providoing 150,000 Classmate PCs in a pilot program in 300 primary schools in 27 states. The rollout begins in the next two months. And in Turkey, the local government of Kocaeli will distribute 26,000 Classmate PCs to all fifth graders by the end of the school year. Intel is providing teacher training in all of the city’s 369 public schools.

Intel has three models that are operating system agnostic, and they include Microsoft’s Windows 7 software. The competition still includes rivals such as NComputing, which makes thin clients that attach to a master PC. With NComputing’s solution, one computer can power the monitors and computing for 10 or so students.

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Someone finally said it.

A security consulting firm that Google brought in to investigate an attack last month — the one that compromised the Gmail accounts of two Chinese political activists — told Computerworld today that they “believe the attack code was designed and launched with support from Chinese authorities.”

This explains the involvement of the U.S. State Department, which met with Chinese diplomats this week. The department is drafting a formal denouncement which will put the heat directly on Premier Wen Jiabao.

Mandiant, a security incident response and forensics firm based in Washington, D.C., worked with Google to reverse-engineer the attack. Carlos Carrillo, a principal consultant with the firm, spoke to Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer on Friday:

Carrillo was the project manager for the Google investigation. During an interview Friday, he frequently chose his words carefully, saying that there was much he couldn’t discuss because the work was ongoing.

“The malware was unique,” Carrillo said. “It had unique characteristics … it was … let’s just say it was unique.”

When asked if the code quality pointed toward Chinese state support, Carrillo answered, “I would say so.”

It now appears that for some weeks, Google may have had ample evidence that the Chinese government was behind the break-ins, and that the State Department confronted Chinese authorities with that evidence.

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Looks like the movie studios are beginning to realize that Netflix is racing away with the streaming market, and things are starting to change fast: hot on the heels of Warner forcing Netflix to accept delayed DVD rentals in exchange for better streaming terms, Disney and Starz are reportedly renegotiating their deal, and blocking Netflix is one of the terms. Most new releases on Netflix right now are part of the StarzPlay package, and the studios don’t get a cut, since they’ve already sold those rights to Starz. As we all know, the studios aren’t big fans of not getting a cut, so what Disney is trying to do is block Netflix from dealing with Starz and force it to license streaming rights directly — not the end of the world and certainly not impossible, but a move that has the potential to disrupt service and raise prices. As of right now, things are status quo and no one’s talking on the record, but we’ve got the feeling there’s a shakeout coming — stay tuned.

Disney renegotiating Starz deal, might pull movies from Netflix streaming originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Technology Review has an article about a “copper-based catalyst helps turn the gas into antifreeze and household cleaners” – a useful form of carbon sequestration (on a micro-scale) – A New Way to Make Useful Chemicals from CO2.

When it’s exposed to the elements, the surface of copper turns green because it reacts with oxygen. But now scientists have discovered a copper-based material with a surprising property: it reacts with carbon dioxide in air rather than oxygen. Though the reaction is not a practical way to remove large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it does provide an alternative new route, using a cheap, nonpetroleum feedstock, to make useful chemicals.

Researchers have been looking for such a material for a long time, taking a cue from plants, which use atmospheric carbon dioxide to produce a wide range of useful materials. But previous approaches have fallen short in a variety of ways. For example, they’ve required large amounts of energy and concentrated streams of carbon dioxide rather than the trace amounts found in air. One of the big challenges is that materials tend to preferentially react with oxygen, which is much more reactive than carbon dioxide and far more abundant. Oxygen makes up over 20 percent of the atmosphere, whereas there are only a few hundred parts per million of carbon dioxide.

With the new material, “the energy you need to put in is very low,” says Daniel DuBois, a senior scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA, who was not involved with the research. “And the fact that it will bind and reduce CO2 directly from the atmosphere is pretty startling. I wouldn’t have thought that you could do that.”

Found under: T-Mobile, Haiti, Support,

The tragedy that has hit Haiti hasnt gone unnoticed. In fact people from all over the world are ready to help the small country recover from the disaster that hit it. One of them is T-Mobile USA which is ready to help if needed.The company is offering free international long distance calls to and from Haiti between January 12 and January 31. If you have friends or family there youll be able to call them for free which is not a bad idea. Given the fact that much of the island in

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Los Angeles: The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has arrested a pair of suspects in a string of business robberies.  

On
January 13, 2010, Angelo Wingo, 18, and Devon Glover, 21, were both
arrested after a patrol unit stopped a blue BMW for a traffic
investigation in the 3900 block of Coco Avenue in South Los Angeles.

They were both taken to LAPD’s Southwest Division Jail on suspicion of robbery and are being held in lieu of $200,000 bail.  

Since December 2009, the suspects have hit up to six stores throughout the Los Angeles
area.  According to detectives, the suspects would enter the store and
walk around posing as customers. A day later, the suspects would return
and commit a takeover robbery during which they ordered the employees
to a back room, tied them up and demanded access to the safe.  The
suspects then left with an undisclosed amount of money and drove off.  

During the investigation, Wilshire Division robbery detectives learned
the suspects’ vehicle description and shared the information with
neighboring police stations, which lead to the arrest of the robbers.

Detectives believe the suspects are part of a large robbery ring and
are asking for the public’s help in recognizing Wingo and Glover to
link them to additional reported robberies.

Anyone with information about this crime is urged to call Wilshire
robbery detectives at 213-473-0514 or 213-922-8205.  During
non-business hours or on weekends calls should be directed to
1-877-LAPD-24-7.  Anyone wishing to remain anonymous should call
Crimestoppers at 800-222-TIPS (800-222-8477).  Tipsters may also
contact Crimestoppers by texting to phone number 274637 (C-R-I-M-E-S on
most keypads) with a cell phone. All text messages should begin with
the letters “LAPD.” Tipsters may also go to LAPDOnline.org, click on
"webtips" and follow the prompts.

Rescuers from all around the world are converging on Haiti in the wake of this week’s earthquake – and not all of them are human. Finding survivors amid the rubble of Port-au-Prince is a job tailor-made for dogs and devices.

The search-and-rescue operation “appears to be unprecedented in scale,” Discovery.com reports.

Many of those teams, such as Virginia Task Force 1 and California Task Force 2, have been in this kind of situation before – for example, after the catastrophic Iranian earthquake of 2003 or the collapse of a Haitian school in 2008. But the magnitude of this week’s disaster is so great that rescue teams who have never before gone into an international operation are being pulled into action.

“This is an unusual situation,” said Debra Tosch, executive director of the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation.

…(read more)

We found an interesting little blub about a software program that converts images into music. Specifically, it “converts the RGB, Red, Green, and Blue, values of every pixel of an image and plays a 3 note harmony based on the RGB values. It reads the pixels from top left to bottom right playing a song a long the way.” According to señor willburns1 on his blog (link), “most of the time it seems like set a child loose on a piano but it is sometimes pretty cool.”

Intrigued, I thought I’d spice up this Friday afternoon with audio created from some of my favorite images, but alas! it was not to be. It seems there’s a patent on this technology, and Kenji Kojima, the creator of <a href="RGB MusicLab, was told to stop:

Dear people,
I was informed that I had to remove RGB MusicLab from the web site from a person who had a patent that enabling the interpretation of color as music. I have never heard it was a patent and believed it belonged to all humankind. However I have to obey the US law.

Kenji Kojima

Some samples are still online, if MIDI is your thing.

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Somewhere on the family tree of the Edifier M3-Plus you are going to find a tennis ball and a cardboard tube. Surprisingly, this design hodgepodge has yielded some interesting portable speakers.

Designed for travelers, the Edifier M3-Plus consists of two racquetball sized speakers and a 2-inch Neodymium-iron Boron Magnet assembly subwoofer housed inside an aluminum tube. Availability information has not been announced, but the 2.1 system should come in at around $100 when it’s released. [Edifer via Unplggd]

It will be a long time before we understand all the ramifications of Google’s decision to cease censoring their Chinese services — and the cyber-attack on their corporate and user data that prompted that change of heart. The story is still confusing in parts (Sky Canaves at the WSJ clarifies some of the more muddled reports). Nonetheless some intriguing new details have emerged since the initial announcement — but they raise as many questions as they answer.

Reporting by the New York Times has fleshed out the implication in Google’s announcement that the attacks were co-ordinated, or at least conducted with the approval of, Chinese government agencies. And in a detailed analysis, Computer World writes that the security breach included an attack on Google’s internal intercept systems, used to comply with requests from United States law enforcement.

Security experts have long warned that systems designed to make compliance with lawful interception more convenient can also create security vulnerabilities of their own. By providing an attractive one stop shop for outside attackers, surveillance compliance systems by their very nature often override the secure compartmentalization of data.

Security breaches that involve lawful interception systems are not new (see the Greek mobile eavesdropping scandal in 2005), and we’re sure it will happen again. When a security conscious company like Google can get hit, it is a wake up call to all corporations about the dangers of hosting systems designed to snoop of their customers. What would the agent of a foreign power do with full access to Sprint Nextel’s convenient live web interface for GPS location data on its fifty million subscribers?

We know that Google was not the only company targeted by this attack: other names mentioned have included Yahoo, Symantec, Juniper, Northrop Grumman and Dow Chemical. We don’t know whether those attacks obtained proprietary information or personal user data. But users of these companies’ products are rightfully concerned and we’d hope and expect more public statements that clarify this important difference.

The Obama Administration is also reacting to the Google China news. Secretary Clinton was already booked to make a detailed policy announcement on global Internet freedom next week; the White House has already said it supports Google. But what does government support for a censorship-free Internet look like? Advocacy groups and think-tanks have long suggested that blocking Internet traffic at the border of a country may be a violation of WTO free trade agreements. Foreign Policy runs with the idea, and looks in detail at the idea of “Firewall Protectionism”.

If China were attempting to block the import of American tires, instead of American Internet media, would Americans applaud Goodyear and Congress for not putting up a fight against blatant WTO violations?

Reuters also reports that lawmakers are using the Google announcement as impetus for a proposed US law that, among other measures, would require Internet companies to keep records of requests for information from violating countries, and report them to the State department.

Will more United States government involvement in online free speech issues lead to greater international pressure on censorious countries like China? Or will it serve to aggravate US allies who have their own less visible systems of censorship, which as Rebecca MacKinnon notes, now includes traditional allies like France and Italy?

The following is another dispatch from Bill Quigley, long-time advocate for human rights in Haiti, as well as a leading advocate in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Facing South published Quigley’s earlier piece yesterday, “10 Things the U.S. Can and Should do for Haiti.”

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE FOR HAITI?

By Bill Quigley

Point One: $100 Million – Are You Kidding Me?

President Obama promised $100 million in aid to Haiti on January 14, 2009. A Kentucky couple won $128 million in a Powerball lottery on December 24, 2009. The richest nation in the history of the world is giving powerball money to a neighbor with tens of thousands of deaths already?

Point Two: Have You Ever Been Without Water?

Hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti have had no access to clean water since the quake hit. Have you ever been in a place that has no water? Have you ever felt the raw fear in the gut when you are not sure where your next drink of water is going to come from?

People can live without food for a long time. Without water? A very short time. In hot conditions people can become dehydrated in an hour. Lack of water puts you into shock and starts breaking down the body right away. People can die within hours if they are exposed to heat without water.

Point Three: Half the People in Haiti are Kids and They Were Hungry Before the Quake.

Over half the
population of Haiti is 15 years old or younger. And they were hungry
before the quake. A great friend, Pere Jean-Juste, explained to me that most of the people of Haiti wake every day not knowing how they will eat dinner that day. So there are no reserves, no soup kitchens, no pantries, nothing for most. Hunger started immediately.

Point Four. A Toxic Stew of Death is Brewing.

Take hundreds of thousands of people. Shock them with a major earthquake and dozens of aftershocks. Take away their homes and put them out in the open. Take away all water and food and medical care. Sit them out in the open for
days with scorching temperatures. Surround them with tens of thousands
of decaying bodies.

People have to drink. So they are drinking bad
water. They are getting sick. There is no place to go. What happens
next?

Point Five. Aid is Sitting at the Airport.

While millions suffer, humanitarian aid is sitting at the Port au Prince airport. Why? People are afraid to give it out for fear of provoking riots. Which is worse?

Point Six. Haiti is Facing A Crisis Beyond Our Worst Nightmares.

“I think it is going to be worse than anyone still understands.” Richard Dubin, vice president of Haiti shipping lines told the New York Times.

He is so right. Unless there is a major urgent change in the global response, the world may look back and envy those tens of thousands who died in the quake.

Wake up, world!

Photo: A boy in Cite Soleil carries away a hard-won bucket of water from a broken water pipe where many Haitians struggled for their share. The shanty town of Cite Soleil has been left with severely diminished water resources after a powerful earthquake rocked the area on 12 January. UN Photo/Logan Abassi

Bill Quigley is legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. A longtime contributor to Facing South, Quigley is a Katrina survivor who has been active in human rights work for years with the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti.

To help step up relief efforts, donate to Haiti relief groups through the Institute’s NC Haiti Action campaign — the Institute will match all gifts up to $1,000 made through this campaign!

Found under: Windows Mobile 7, MWC, Microsoft, ,

We have talked earlier about Symbian4 and iPhone OS 4.0 so we cant ignore Windows Mobile 7. Rumored to be launched this year Microsofts OS was said not to arrive at MWC 2010. Now according to some inside information it would seem that MWC 2010 will feature Windows Mobile 7 after all. People say that the new OS is going to feature gesture control exactly like the Xbox 360 will later this year thanks to Project Natal technology. Unfortunately other OS particularities havent been m

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Found under: HTC, HD2, Capacitive, Stylus, ,

Do you happen to own a HTC HD2 Would you like a special stylus for it Well luckily for you it looks like HTC is thinking similar thoughts. Although most smartphones out there rely solely on fingers a stylus could be good addition to some phones. Sure we might lose them all the time and have to get replacements but they will always be more refined when it comes to pressing that touch-friendly screen than our bulky fingers. The HD2-dedicated stylus has started to appear in vario

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