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Year: 2008 (Page 2 of 52)

Accelerometer Headphones Control Music Via Headbanging

Gizmodo – One of the projects that caught our eye at NYU’s ITP winter show last night (the program that brought you Big Screens) were the Head(banger)phones, accelerometer-equipped to change the music as you bob your head.

Lee-Sean Huang attached the accelerometer to the top of the headband, and fed its data readings into the visual audio programming platform Max/MSP to control the sound output based on where your head is at, so to speak. But unlike the horribly bad mushroom trip that you could not escape from after listening to Massive Attack, all it takes to change things up—in this case, shifting in and out between various synth sample—is to bob your head.

Accelerometers are in everything, so adding them to consumer headphones would be the easy part. Coming up with a novel way to utilize the sensor readings to change the sound, now that’s the trick. I told Lee-Sean he should hook up the guy from the Boredoms with a pair—I think he’d love them.

To try to build one yourself, Lee-Sean’s Max/MSP source code is available on his site.

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Report: Hackers Will Be Bolder, Smarter, Craftier in 2009

TechNewsWorld – Malicious computer hackers will utilize better technological and psychological techniques in the year ahead, according to a security report from equipment vendor Cisco. Targeted attacks, cross-vector attacks and a rise in threats originating from legit domains are the report’s most concerning trends.

As malware writers and Internet attackers become more sophisticated, 2009 looks to be a year of more focused attacks by profit-driven criminals bent on stealing data from businesses, employees and consumers.

Networking firm Cisco released its annual Threat Report Monday, citing a nearly 12 percent increase in the number of disclosed vulnerabilities over 2007 and a tripling of vulnerabilities in virtualization Consolidate Mac Servers. Run Windows Server on your Mac. Watch a Demo or Download a Trial. technology since last year.

Targeted attacks and blended, cross-vector assaults, along with a 90 percent growth in threats originating from legitimate domains, top this year’s list of the most worrisome new trends plaguing computer users, according to the report.

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Wireless Technology: Worlds Apart

TechNewsWorld – The Asian cellular phone market is something of a paradox. Countries such as Japan and South Korea have invested the equivalent of billions of dollars to develop sophisticated, high-bandwidth wireless services, such as mobile video and mobile commerce technologies. One reason for doing this was so they could lead the world in deployment of such services; however, other countries have been slow to follow that lead.

In terms of sophisticated cellular data services, Japan and South Korea are well ahead of their European and North American counterparts. “When the Internet first evolved in the late 1990s, it was largely English-based,” noted Neil Strother, an analyst with Forrester Research. “In Japan and Korea, mobile alternatives emerged, and these countries have remained ahead of the pack since then.”

In those countries, consumers rely heavily on their handsets. “In Japan and Korea, the cell phone functions like a laptop,” Bill Hughes, principal analyst at In-Stat, told TechNewsWorld. Users surf the Internet, purchase goods and watch TV on their handsets.

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Remote PC Repair, Part 1: The Warranty Alternative

TechNewsWorld – Online support, or remote computer repair, offers consumers the ability to have a computer technician resolve their computer issues across the Internet. There are many companies that offer these services. The biggest differences tend to be in terms of support, hours of operation and price. A consumer with an ailing computer contacts the repair service either by phone or through the company’s Web site.

Consumers and small-office and home-office (SOHO) workers often buy their computers from online stores or discount warehouses. They often reject add-on support packages at checkout to keep the purchase price low. If the computer breaks within 60 or 90 days, the manufacturer will handle the repairs, they reason.

However, when the initial warranty period expires and the computer misbehaves or malfunctions, who to call for service often becomes a daunting — and costly — challenge. Big companies outsource maintenance and repairs or have an in-house tech staff. Consumers and SOHO/SMB entities are stranded when computer woes strike.

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Google Blasts WSJ, Still ‘Committed’ to Net Neutrality

Wired – Google is taking some heat this morning from a Wall Street Journal piece that argues the company is abandoning its support of network neutrality in an attempt to make sites like YouTube faster than the competition.

The WSJ claims Google has approached major internet service providers “with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content.”

That would seem to fly in the face of the company’s long-standing support for network neutrality, but Google has called the WSJ’s article “confused,” and says that it remains committed to network neutrality.

The contention comes from the varying definitions of network neutrality. The simplest version of network neutrality says all internet traffic should delivered at the same speed over the same network. Unfortunately for supporters of the everything-is-absolutely-equal version of network neutrality, the concept has always been an ideal, more of a myth than reality.

The problem lies with what are known as content delivery networks (CDNs) that use so-called edge servers, located physically closer to you, to cache and deliver content faster. When you request the content from, in this case YouTube, it can be transmitted from the proposed edge servers rather than from Google’s central servers.

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