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First Suite of Google Android Applications
USA Today is reporting that A La Mobile, a small software developer, plans to announce today a host of new applications designed to run on the Google-backed operating system, Android. For now the applications are installed in an HTC smartphone, and include a browser, camera, games, contacts manager, audio player and more. HTC is just one of 34 companies in Google's Open Handset Alliance, so this is really just the start. Google says to expect an Android-based phone later this year.
Netflix just announced plans to begin dispatching movies straight to televisions through an LG-Electronics-made, Internet-connected set-top box. Netflix distributes most of its content—movies, TV shows and more—the old-fashioned way: through the mail. More than 7 million subscribers take part in one of its many rental plans, sending and receiving DVDs in small square envelopes. Now, thanks to high-speed Internet connections, the company is hoping to quicken the process, and allow customers to rent movies via the Web.
Netflix has already dipped its toes into this arena, but its "Watch Instantly" program hasn't fully caught on, in part because most users had to watch the content on their computers. The LG box will change that, allowing users to watch up to 40 hours of movies and shows per month. The selection isn't as great, but it's still significant. The company's DVD library is 90,000 titles strong, and the online selection currently has more than 6,000 options.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a study this past weekend that details how we use the Internet. Apparently, 58 percent of Americans go online when looking for information about health, school, taxes, jobs, voting, legal issues, immigration and other key issues. That may seem low, but relative to other potential sources, it's surprisingly high. Only 36 percent, for example, looked to traditional media such as magazines and newspapers, and 45 percent turned to friends and family. Furthermore, only 13 percent went to the library. Surprisingly, though, 40 percent of respondents in the 18 to 30 age bracket known as Generation Y said they'd go to those book-filled buildings for information. Not necessarily for the stacks, though. 65 percent of them said they'd go to libraries because they have computers.—Gregory Mone
It's the time of year for parties, sitting around the fire, relaxing with the family and, for many people, opening strange email attachments and allowing their machines to become infected. Last year, security researchers identified an enormous botnet—a network of infected computers controlled by hackers - that built much of its illicit network through holiday-themed emails. An infected computer might then be used to spam other users, potentially implicating the innocent owner of the machine in cybercrime. We should all know better than to click on or open something suspicious, but, for this holiday season, the computer forensics research team at the university of Alabama Birmingham has put together a helpful list of suspect subject lines. Check it out here.—Gregory Mone
Google just released its annual summary of the hottest topics on the Web, the 2007 Year-End Zeitgeist. In the U.S., the fastest-rising search was—surprise, surprise—the iPhone. But besides that obvious winner, the other winners are certainly interesting. Kids clearly had some influence, as Webkinz grabbed the number two slot, and Club Penguin, a Disney-owned, child-safe online community, wasn't too far behind. The most popular lawsuit? That honor belongs to Borat. It's an interesting compilation to sort through, though not always reassuring for science-minded type. After spotting "Who is Keppler?" on the top ten list of "Who is" questions, I wondered if 2007 had brought a sudden surge of interest in the history of cosmology, even if the name wasn't spelled quite right. Alas, that's not the case. All those Internet sleuths were looking for the Keppler of CSI fame.—Gregory Mone
Merriam-Webster, the dictionary publisher, awarded "w00t" with the title of word of the year. The word, which is typically spelled with two zeros in the middle, is the equivalent of "yay." It's an expression of joy. The origin of the word is debated - some say it's derived from a sound made in the game Quake III. Others say it came from Dungeons and Dragons, and is shorthand for "Wow, loot!" Still others attribute it to hackers, calling it code for root access to a computer.
Regardless, it's one of a host of new alphanumeric words that have popped out of our text-messaging and game-loving culture.—Gregory Mone
YouTube, the online video giant, announced plans yesterday to expand its advertising program to a number of amateur movie-makers. Ads will be spliced into the videos, and the creators will get the chance to share the revenue with Google, YouTube's corporate parent.
The ad program itself isn't brand new. YouTube picked a small group of established content producers to test its pilot program. But now the site will let users apply to be part of the revenue-generating machine. The favorites will be those who post frequently, have a loyal following, and stick to YouTube's rules. Currently, it's available in the US and Canada, but will probably expand soon, if the community's demands have anything to do with it. The very first comment to YouTube's blog post on the subject: When are you going to expand this to Slovenia? It's the big question on all of our minds.—Gregory Mone
The social-networking site Facebook may have to find another way to cash in on its huge user base. The company's new "social ads" program, called Beacon, has been controversial, forcing company founder Mark Zuckerberg (pictured here) to apologize, and tell users that they can turn it off if they like.
With Beacon, if a user bought a ticket through the movie site Fandango.com, his or her entire network would be informed. This didn't go over well. Moveon.org put together a protest and overstock.com, one of Facebook's ad partners, backed out after getting too many complaints. So, it looks like the company will keep looking for less invasive or annoying ways to generate revenue, and justify its enormous valuation. This isn't necessarily a devastating blow to Facebook, though. Some experts say the company simply needs to learn how to mind its manners, and all will be well again in its corner of Web 2.0.—Gregory Mone
In September of last year, a 13-year-old girl was contacted through MySpace by someone claiming to be a teenage boy named Josh Evans. The two corresponded for a month, but then the tone of their exchanges switched, and "Evans" accused the girl of treating her friends poorly, and told her that he wanted to end their friendship. A day later, the girl hanged herself. Eventually it came out that an older neighbor was posing as Josh Evans to learn what she thought of another girl. Yesterday, the local police department announced that no charges will be filed, provoking outrage from the victim's family.—Gregory Mone
Could it be that instant-messaging is making those teen years a bit more bearable? A new poll shows that 43 percent of teens use instant-messaging to express something they wouldn't say face-to-face. Some use it to ask others on dates. Others use it to break-up.
While a bit frightening, this doesn't exactly mean that instant-messaging is creating a population of kids who use technology to avoid confrontation, discomfort and more of life's little unpleasantries. Plenty of people used parchment and quill for the same purposes years ago. They probably just took a little more time to pick their words.
Some other stats from the poll: Overall, nearly half of teens say they use the quick and easy form of communication. Ten percent use it for more than three hours a day. Which is so sad, since they could be using that time for more productive ends, like watching TV.—Gregory Mone
Would this be Web 3.0? Or 0.2? A Brooklyn Web designer locked eyes with the "girl of his dreams" on the subway Sunday night, but excessive crowds prevented him from introducing himself. Either that, or fear.
So he threw together a web page, complete with sketches of himself and the girl in question, noting her outfit, how she wore her hair, plus the fact that she was writing in a journal.
Hours later his Inbox was slammed with emails—he posted his address on the site—and by Tuesday night, he was in touch with a friend of the mystery girl.
Now he has pulled his contact details, and plans to keep whatever happens next between them. But here's a guess: Hollywood options the idea for a $1 million, and Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal star.—Gregory Mone
The British group Radiohead recently launched a somewhat daring Internet sales experiment, offering its fans the chance to download its latest album for whatever price they felt like. Including $0. And how did that work?
According to research firm ComScore, Inc., 62% of listeners who downloaded the album in the first four weeks paid nothing. The other 38% paid an average of $6. U.S. customers paid more, shelling out $8. Don't cry for the rockers, though. They still might have made up to 10 million dollars, and they'll be selling a higher-quality CD, for more money, before long.—Gregory Mone
Spam has gotten a voice. The AP is reporting that last week, an MP3 file touting a penny stock turned up in Inboxes around the world, encouraging people to invest in a company called Exit Only Inc.
This is a common spam scam. People bite on the sales pitch, buy the stock, and drive up the price. Then the scammers sell their shares, and bail out. In this case, though, it didn't work. The company says the stock price has remained flat. Maybe this had something to do with the fact that the voice of the person delivering the message reportedly sounded like a female version of Darth Vader. Who would trust stock advice from a Sith?—Gregory Mone
On the final day of the Web 2.0 Summit, game designer and researcher Jane McGonigal gave a fascinating presentation about how gaming life and real life are merging—and how that could possibly be a good thing.
McGonigal offered some research findings that suggest the average gamer spends 16 hours per week in videogames or virtual worlds, and up to an additional 10 hours per week thinking about about gaming. She explained that young people worldwide (and in Asia, especially) have revealed that they feel more comfortable and more successful in the structured environment of games—where rules, goals, and paths to success are clearly defined—than in the real world. Sounds like a depressing trend, but one that's perfectly reasonable from a psychological standpoint. So what's the best way to reach a generation of people who prefer the safety of gaming worlds to real-world interactions? As McGonigal pointed out, game designers can keep cashing in by designing more interesting and elaborate games that allow people to withdraw to their computers, or they can help schools, charities and workplaces to introduce some of the best parts of gaming into everyday life, to make the real world more fun and less confusing.
Two notable examples of the latter, positive trend are the alternate reality game Cruel 2 B Kind, from McGonigal's company, Avant Games, and Attent, a workplace productivity app created by Seriosity.
Cruel 2 B Kind requires players to "attack" strangers through random acts of kindness—a stray compliment or helpful deed can earn a player points and weaken opponents. Strangers don't know why you're being especially nice to them, but it doesn't really matter. Nice is nice, right?
Attent helps desk jockeys build an "attention economy" in the office by providing prioritizing emails both sent and received through a currency system. Users trade virtual cash for getting things done through collaboration. The app also includes a really cool mapping function that shows, through cumulative email data, which people on your team are active contributors, and which could use a little, well, encouragement. Translation: everyone is accountable, so no more ignoring emails or passing the buck. Plus, it's kind of fun, and the game doesn't require any more effort than that annoying "high-priority" exclamation point people already stick on emails.
McGonigal's suggestion that adapting real-world processes to the psychology of gamers could increase productivity (and maybe even kindness) certainly is compelling...as long as we can get everyone out of WoW and into the office in the first place. —Megan Miller
My favorite moment at the Web 2.0 Summit so far happened this afternoon, when Bill Tancer, the global research manager of online research firm Hitwise, described how five months ago, his company predicted the success of seemingly out-of-nowhere chart-topping rapper Soulja Boy.
In case you're not familiar, Soulja Boy is the auteur of the incomprehensible but highly dance-able song "Crank That," which has been number one in the Billboard 100 for the past six weeks.
Apparently, Hitwise charted the Soulja Boy boom by tracking the amount of traffic streaming from social networking sites to search engines to his official Web site, and predicted back in May that the rapper (who was virtually unknown at the time) would become a major mainstream success.
"If there’s buzz on the social networks, we track traffic going from those sites to a band's official web site. Buzz bleeds over to search and you can chart that and see the tipping point in advance," Tancer said.
Phillippe Dauman, the CEO of Viacom (You know, the little company currently embroiled in a lawsuit with YouTube?) was brave enough to get up on stage and field questions at the Web 2.0 Summit today. Gotta give him props for that. But surprise, surprise: he doesn't really get Web 2.0 at all. His idea of opening up Viacom content is to make it available on Viacom-branded show Web sites—with no embed codes for sharing, naturally.
At one point during the interview, he was asked to comment on the announcement today by a coalition of big media companies that industry standards for digital copyright use need to be enacted. Dauman responded:
"There's been a consensus among developers and content providers. Today's announcement is meant to benefit consumers, bringing them what they want and encouraging creators of great professional content to continue to produce great content. And there's been an acknowledgment by all parties that there needs to be rules of the road."
Now, as far as I can tell, that's whole point of the alternative copyrights offered by Creative Commons. And I was surprised that the interviewer didn't call Dauman out on that, so I went up to the mic and asked the question myself. Here's what I said:
"I noticed that you very carefully expressed the value of “professional creators of great content.” To me, the emphasis on the word "professional" seems to indicate some sort of implicit feeling about non-professional content creators. So my question for you is two-pronged: What’s your feeling about the value of user-generated content and remix culture, and what do you think of Creative Commons?
Dauman sat silent for a moment, looking—as an audience member later commented—"like a deer in the headlights." He finally responded, "I'm sorry, Creative...?" The interviewer on stage repeated the question to him and he said,
“I love all creators of content. I did not mean to make the distintion between professional and non-pro content creators. UGC is great. We’re 100% focused on content creation, that’s all we do.”
And then he rambled on for several minutes about the Laguna Beach virtual world, effectively avoiding the question. Sorry, CC, I tried. —Megan Miller
I'm in San Francisco for the next few days, bringing you regular reports from the Web 2.0 Summit on some of the most interesting ideas and innovations at the leading edge of the Internet.
One of this evening's most interesting presenters was Marissa Mayer from Google, who introduced a new application called Google Health, which will allow users to search for and create pages that aggregate all sorts of medical information, from symptoms and conditions to x-rays to personal medical records to Google Maps mashups that locate nearby doctors by specialty, and figure out whether they have appointments available and how other patients have rated them. The new app will also incorporate searches from Google Co-op, a feature that categorizes Web pages hand-selected by known experts in various health fields.
The idea of opening up your medical records and putting them online sounds scary, but Google plans to keep private information private with the same security that keeps snoopers out of your Gmail. Clearly there are advantages and disadvantages to online record archiving, but Ms. Mayer made a compelling argument by describing the loss, during Hurricane Katrina, of thousands of medical records in that could have been safeguarded if they were digitized and Web-accessible. She also mentioned the fact that x-ray data in North America, which is not centrally archived anywhere, currently numbers in the petabytes and could become a valuable research tool for physicians if properly tagged and organized. This, of course, is another part of the plan for Google Health.
The launch date for the beta site has not yet been made public, but as I'm one of those hypochondriacal people who constantly searches symptoms and treatments anyway, I'm particularly excited about the potential of this app. —Megan Miller
The House Foreign Affairs Committee is calling for two Yahoo executives to appear at a November 6th hearing that will address whether or not the company gave false testimony last year in the case of an imprisoned Chinese poet and journalist.
Previously, Yahoo's general counsel told Congress that the company was not aware of why the Chinese government asked for information regarding pro-Democracy advocate Shi Tao (left). In 2004, Yahoo turned over details that helped Beijing police find Shi, and he has since been sentenced to ten years in prison. Now the committee says that Yahoo couldn't have been so clueless with regards to the government's intentions, and wants to find out more about whether the company is truly protecting the privacy rights of its overseas customers.—Gregory Mone
Here's hoping that today will go down as a watershed date in the music industry—the day that a mass-market band finally got it right. I'm talking about the English rockers Radiohead and their innovative distribution model for their new album, In Rainbows, which was released for digital download today.
Rather than wait for it to be leaked online well before its physical release, the band decided to publish the recently completed album to the Web themselves, forgoing the many months of promotion and planning that usually come between an album's completion and its arrival in stores. Better yet, the band allowed each downloader to pay whatever they wanted for the DRM-free record—anything from two cents to, well, hundreds of dollars if you were so inclined.
The beauty of this is that nearly every music fan I know (most of whom haven’t paid for music in years) was excited to buy this album. Excited because they could pay a very small amount of money, sure, but also because they knew it was going straight to the band they admired and not to a record company. They were also excited to play it however they wanted, on an unlimited number of MP3-capable devices or CDs, without DRM restrictions.
Radiohead discovered something important today: Once customers are not theoretically required to put up money for an album that they were going to download for free anyway, they instantly become more excited about actually paying money for it. It certainly also helps if the album is fantastic, which In Rainbows is. Let's hope other major bands and labels follow suit. The future is now! —John Mahoney
Last night Google released Presentations, the latest in its suite of online applications, and a potential competitor to Microsoft's massively popular PowerPoint. All you need is a Google Docs account to access the free tool, an easy-to-use, scaled-down version of Microsoft's mainstay. Not all the reviews have been glowing. At this point there's really no competition. Powerpoint has far more features, and it's already more than a simple business presentation tool—it's a medium for artistic expression, and nearly a cultural force. But every champion needs a good challenger now and then.—Gregory Mone
Free music? As in, honestly, no record companies coming after you free? Yes, that's the story with the newly launched, ad-supported Web site, Spiralfrog.com.
The music service, which has had its share of business woes recently, cut a deal with Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group to build its catalog. Universal opened up its collection, which includes top artists like Gwen Stefani (left), in return for a cut of advertising and sponsorship revenue. Selling those little discs must not be working out so well anymore.
Users sign up for free, but must visit the site at least once a month to retain access to their tunes. You won't be able to burn discs, but you can transfer the music to portable players. Just not the iPod. And that's the catch.—Gregory Mone
Granted, it's not even in beta yet, so this isn't entirely fair, but if SciVee, a new website being billed as the YouTube of science, is really going to reach the people, the presentations will really need to evolve. Right now the site consists of a few video presentations from biologists. The material is interesting, and there's a cool feature that lets you follow along in the actual published paper as the speaker presents his or her work. But the overall effect is really no different than what you'd get if you trained cameras on presenters at a biology conference, then posted the clips on the Web. And that might be part of the point of this site—it gives scientists a new, slightly less formalized way to communicate the ideas in a new paper to their peers. But part of the stated mission is also to reach a wider audience, and to do that these scientists are going to need a different approach. Step One: Getting rid of the powerpoints. It's not too, too hard to get most scientists to sum up their research in layman's terms, but once they get a few of those slides in front of them, they revert to speaking the very technical language of their peers, not the masses. Again, though, it's only in the alpha phase, and it's a great idea. So let's hope it works.—Gregory Mone
At today’s USENIX Security Symposium in Boston, researchers from the University of California presented a new study of more than a million spam emails—and the findings were pretty amazing. Apparently, 94 percent of the study’s emails directed traffic to a single Web server, and 57 percent led to a single host in the U.S.
It’s still unclear whether that host could be my mom. This would explain the good-luck chain letters, insane urban myths and cute-kitten spam, but probably not the ViaG7A and Ci4Li$ ads flooding your inbox.
At any rate, the UCSD study provides new information that may help experts block the next wave of spam messages at their source, simply by disabling the server that delivers them. —Megan Miller
Morale could use a little boost here at PopSci HQ this evening—our long awaited first office softball game has been postponed due to the approach of inclement weather. Alas, our poor opponents will have to wait another week to face our softball wrath. One good thing has come out of Mother Nature's cruel trick, however: the discovery of the National Weather Service's free Doppler Radar service on Google Earth.
If you ask me, Doppler radar is one of the finer developments of our time. From switching over to the local cable channel that used to show all-radar-all-the-time as a kid to witnessing the news channels' eternal Doppler arms race (New! Doppler Super Hawk Vision 3000!), much ballyhoo has always surrounded our ability to visualize the approach of oncoming storm clouds and prepare ourselves accordingly.
I don't know if it will ever get better than this, though: simply head over to the NWS's special site, choose your region and the type of radar you want (Composite Reflectivity! Storm Relative Motion!) and open the resulting file in Google Earth. Awesome. —John Mahoney
Okay, so you've all heard about the spate of crack addicts, homeless people, freelancers and other layabouts advertising on Craigslist that they'll stand in the iPhone line at the Apple store for $200. But this post marks a new low: linesitters for the line. "Will let you pee for cash"? Somebody just bomb us—we're done for. —Megan Miller
The PopSci staff and our contributing troubadour, Jonathan Coulton, have spent today combing through the remarkable array of "I Feel Fantastic" videos sent in by loyal readers and podcast fans. After much deliberation and humming of that annoyingly catchy refrain that just won't get out of our heads, we arrived at a winner. This stick-figure animation, by YouTube member AnnieKate76 made us laugh our collective butts off. Says JoCo himself, "I like AnnieKate's video because it's got this very simple visual
look, but it's deep, man. I keep noticing new stuff every time I watch it, all these quick cuts to funny things. It's like an episode of Lost, but funny, and with stick figures." Right, what he said. So without further ado:
For her hard work and hilarity, AnnieKate76 will receive the grand prize of one 80 GB iPod, custom-engraved with Jonathan Coulton's autograph. Congrats!
But there were so many excellent entries that we decided to name five honorable mentions who put tons of work into creating really excellent animations, machinima and live-action music videos. Each of the five co-winners listed below will receive a free subscription to Popular Science. Great job, everyone!
First runner-up goes to YouTube member Demetrius3d, using Lightwave 3D animation:
Second runner-up goes to YouTube member ThrowingBricks, using The Sims 2 machinima:
Third runner-up goes to YouTube member theshirtevent, using Flash:
Fourth runner-up goes to YouTube member Zeedoos, using World of Warcraft machinima:
And fifth runner-up goes to YouTube member team blackcatbonafide, for their live-action music video:
Many thanks to everyone who submitted a video! If you're one of the winners mentioned here, please contact us again via YouTube with your name and address, so we can send you prizes. Look for more PopSci contests in coming months (hint: if you like making stuff, you'll want to check out our "green tech" challenge beginning July 10. —The PopSci Editors
How Many Licks Does it Take To Get to the Center of the Internet?
The Internet may be referred to as the "information superhighway," but a better analogy might be an enormous, hulking Tootsie Roll pop. Check out this colorful new Internet map (click the image to enlarge) from physicists at Tel-Aviv University in Israel and you’ll see what we mean. It’s a mathematical representation of the pipes, routers and other bits of hardware that ferry data across the Web. At the map’s red gooey center is a cluster of 100 networks operated by massive corporations like ATT Worldnet and Google. Its purple crunchy outer shell consists mostly of small ISPs. The trouble with being on the periphery is that your data must travel through the congested center, which is sort of like flying through O’Hare on your way from New York to Los Angeles. Basically, it’s really inefficient. The researchers don’t offer much in the way of solutions but say their model will help scientists better track the evolution of the Web, which in turn will help people innovate ways to make it less like a lollipop and more like, well, a superhighway.
If want to learn more about the map and you’re undaunted by math speak like “k-shell decomposition,” “percolation theory,” and “fractal geometry,” download the paper. —Nicole Dyer
The repetitive graphics of most iTunes visualizers are about as appealing as The Osmond Family doing an album of Public Enemy covers. But just in time for springtime party season, The Barbarian Group (usually a crackerjack Web design team; now, all of a sudden, software developers) has released Magnetosphere, a mesmerizing new open-source plugin you can customize to pulse and glimmer according to your own personal tripping-out style.
Compatible with Mac OSX and most versions of Windows (probably works with Linux, too, but we haven’t tried it yet), Magnetosphere takes about a minute to install and run. The graphics are superior to any of the myriad other visualizers available right now and you can even adjust the sensitivity of the on-screen splashes and sparks by hitting the + and – keys, or add and subtract the number of particles in each image with the A and S keys. Be careful, though: If you go crazy with the key punching, your computer will get a little angry and, Fred Sanford-style, call you a dummy by freezing the app. That’s why this is the beta version. While Barbarian works the kinks out, just restart iTunes and all is well.
Developer-types will appreciate that Magnetosphere was built in the open-source environment, Processing, and is licensed as freeware for non-commercial use (mushrooms not included). This is the first of five upcoming software releases from Barbarian, and I’m anxious to see what comes next. In the meantime, excuse me while I get back to staring at my computer screen. —Adam Dorn (Mocean Worker)
Things got crazy in Diggville last night. If you're unfamiliar, Digg.com is a pioneering social news site that gives full editorial control to its community of users. Until last night, that is.
Things started to go bonkers when some industrious hackers finished cracking the DRM cipher that protects new HD-DVDs from being illegally copied (and played on Linux computers) and immediately began spreading the critical 16-digit hexadecimal code around the Web. This should have been a surprise to no one, considering practically every copyright-protection scheme of recent times has eventually fallen.
Apparently, the only people who were surprised were the lobbyists supporting the HD-DVD DRM technology, a company called Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator. The AACS-LA began a blanket cease-and-desist campaign, sending out threatening notices to any site on which the cracked hex code could be found. Even Google received a cease-and-desist for the number simply appearing within search results. All this, even though the number being so frantically protected is akin to the blueprint for building a house—the code itself is useless to the common user, and only helps those with the expertise to write a software application that uses the code to play or rip copyrighted HD-DVDs.
Anyway, the folks at Digg were freaked out enough to start deleting any link submissions or comments regarding the whole affair. This in turn got their users whipped into quite a frenzy; the number started appearing in uncharacteristic places (such as in YouTube videos and fake Web site URLs), all of which received massive attention. Finally, late last night, Digg's founder, Kevin Rose, decided to damn the torpedoes and give the users what they wanted, lifting the ban on stories containing the code and seemingly risking the future of the site in the process.
Something tells me, though, that the interval between the initial ban and Rose's turnaround was just enough time for Digg's lawyers to realize that they were probably safe. Or that they were willing to fight the good fight and make an intellectual-property test case out of it. Nevertheless, pretty interesting stuff from Web 2.0-land. —John Mahoney
You know how much we here at PopSci HQ love animal-related live web cams— well, I spotted another one today that takes the herds of drinking wildebeests we couldn't stop watching last fall and raises them an adorable newborn symbol of our nation. That's right, a spiky-haired baby bald eagle recently hatched in California's Santa Cruz Island National Park, and the good folks at the Nature Conservancy have a 24-hour streaming nest cam to monitor the proceedings. Bets on how long it takes for Stephen Colbert to pick this up? —John Mahoney
In the space of a few minutes between 3:30 and 3:45 p.m. today, I trolled the usual news outlets to see what they were reporting about Anna Nicole Smith, who died today after collapsing in her hotel room in Hollywood, Florida. After reading an early report of the incident on TMZ.com, I cycled through CNN, MSNBC, the Miami Herald and TMZ again, all of which were reporting that she had been transported to a hospital and was unresponsive, but they had yet to announce her death. On a lark, I checked Wikipedia, to see if her entry was updated with this latest episode. To my shock, it not only had the story but had her birth and death dates modified (November 28, 1967—February 8, 2007) and all the tenses changed to past, along with the known details of her transport from the Hard Rock hotel to a hospital. I quickly scanned through the other sites again, and none of them were reporting yet that she was dead. So, as best as I can tell, Wikipedia was the first major site to break the story of her death, which occurred at 2:49 EST.
This should come as no surprise to anyone not living under a rock these days. As huge, traditional media companies struggle to adapt to the online world, the little guys—often with a widespread community of everyday users at their backs—are regularly beating the media companies at their own game. Even TMZ, technically a blog but still dependent on a limited staff of writers and reporters, was no match. They're busily making up for it as best they can, with a flurry of 17 posts as of this writing at 6:10 EST.
On the other side of the coin are the numerous and tasteless defacements of Smith's Wiki page that blipped to the surface as news continued to unfold (Gawker.com has a list). The fact that these were spotted and removed in such a timely fashion to only appear for the span of a few minutes—even seconds, in some cases—is an indication of just how tight a ship Wikipedia actually is. —John Mahoney
IT security expert Sebastian Wolfgarten wanted to find out if he could get
around the so-called Great Firewall of China, a vast Internet
censorship system that prevents Chinese citizens from accessing
information their government deems sensitive. Yesterday, he told Chaos Communication Congress attendees how he did it.
Researchers have known
for the past several years that when Chinese citizens type certain
phrases like “Falun Gong” and “Taiwan” into Google, they
receive very different results than people outside the region do. Wolfgarten
wanted to know why, and whether there might be a simple technical way
to dig a little escape route through the Great Firewall.
Getting into China's network turned out to be easier than you might imagine. Wolfgarten simply bought a server at a Chinese ISP by phone. Once the server was set up, he could log into it from Germany. And all the data that went through the server
would be subject to the same digital censorship that Chinese citizens
experience every day. He quickly discovered that when he requested
information on Taiwan through his Chinese server, he got
no data in return. Sometimes, he couldn't access his server for days
on end. When he phoned the ISP for information, workers there told
him the server was running. He was just blocked from reaching it.
Over the next year, he tried several
methods for getting uncensored data to his Chinese server through
the Great Firewall. He would log into the server, then make requests for information about Amnesty.org or
Falun Gong. What he discovered was that there are three fairly simple
ways to trick the automatic Chinese censorship system.
The first, and easiest, is to use the anonymous network Tor. Though there has been some debate as to whether Tor would work in China, it seems to be successful for now. Another method, which had been previously identified by researchers with the OpenNet Initiative a couple of years ago, involves essentially ignoring censorship commands sent by Chinese servers. Apparently the Great Firewall censors data by responding to forbidden key words with a network command called a "reset." The reset instructs the Chinese computer to drop its connection. The hitch is that the data is still coming in, but injected with the "reset" command. Program your own firewall to ignore "reset" commands and you've got uncensored data.
Crafty anti-censorship types in China can also get uncensored data by doing something called "tunnelling," which seems particularly appropros when dealing with a Great Firewall. Wolfgarten tested what happened when he hid requests for "Falun Gong" inside seemingly-innocuous requests for e-mail or basic network information. A computer outside the Wall unwraps the requests, gets the data, rewraps them and returns them to China uncensored.
Wolfgarten admitted that it's not clear that servers owned by foreigners are subject to the same treatment as Chinese-owned servers. He concluded by saying that a lot more research needs to be done, and invited others to help him.
You can read Wolfgarten's paper about his research here. --Annalee Newitz
It used to be that if you wanted something like Adobe Photoshop, the digital age's ne plus ultra of expensive pro-level software, you had two choices: Plunk down $650 (plus several hundreds more down the road for upgrades), or quickly and easily (and illegally) grab it via BitTorrent and have it up and running in an hour, for free. The sheer ubiquity of Photoshop in mainstream culture (“Photoshopped” isn't in Webster's yet, but it won't be long) seems to suggest that most people, unsurprisingly, tend to go with option B.
Thankfully, a much less insidious third option is gaining momentum: the world of free and open-source alternatives. Although the Internet might be the largest black-market trading post in the history of the world, it's also, lest we forget, a tool that facilitates other kinds of collaborations that no one before could have possibly imagined. So whereas it once took a team of well-paid and overworked engineers to develop complex professional software programs like Photoshop, the same high-quality work can be done with much greater efficiency and drastically less cost through open-source software projects that harness the talents of amateur and professional software engineers the world over. Better yet, the fruits of all this next-level labor are almost always made available free of charge.
OSalt.com is an incredibly handy guide to this constantly evolving world. It pairs open-source projects with their traditional expensive equivalents, making it easy to find what you need. All the heavy hitters are there: Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, the Adobe Premier video-editing suite, Microsoft Office (including the diagramming software Visio), Dreamweaver, Maya (for 3-D modeling) and many more—all told, thousands of dollars’ worth of pro software with surprisingly capable and, best of all, free alternatives. And since their source code is open to everyone, several open-source apps have interesting spin-offs, such as Gimpshop, the version of the GIMP image-processing application that mirrors Photoshop's menus and keyboard shortcuts exactly, making power users feel instantly closer to home.
There aren't too many things able to liberate your conscience and your wallet at the same time. And it's only going to get better from here. —John Mahoney
With the midterm elections over, you may find yourself missing the warm buzz of negative campaign ads in your home every night. No? Well, you should still check out the Museum of the Moving Image's excellent online exhibition “The Living Room Candidate,” which compiles TV commercials from every presidential campaign since 1952. It's truly fascinating to see how they've (d)evolved. May I suggest starting in the turbulence of 1968, where Richard Nixon's Vietnam-related ads are particularly trippy (“I pledge to you we will have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam”). Also cool are the downloadable election-focused lesson plans for teachers. Who's ready for '08? —John Mahoney
Productivity is at an all-time low around the office since we discovered wavelit.com’s watering-hole webcam. Set atop a termite mound and focused on a little pond on Sabi Sands Game Reserve, which abuts South Africa’s Kruger National Park, the 24-hour-a-day “Africam” pans and zooms to get the best, longest view of the creatures that visit. Right now it’s nighttime in the reserve, and nary a wildebeest is stirring, but earlier we saw a pack of impala, a herd of snorting buffalo, a critter that appeared to be a hyena and, best of all, a hulking rhino looking for a drink. OK, so a lot of the time, nothing happens, but it’s fun to keep a window open on your desktop anyway. The sound of chirping crickets calms this beleaguered cubicle dweller, and it’s a gas to yell “Warthog!” across the office and see your colleagues come running. —Martha Harbison
If you still haven't seen the Mentos-and-Diet-Coke-fountain video that came out earlier this year, congratulations. You are among the few, the proud—the ultimate YouTube luddites. Chances are, though, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Which makes what happened this week all the more interesting.
On Monday, Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz, the two backyard scientists behind the Diet Coke/Mentos experiment, released a sequel to their original phenomenon as the first Google “Sponsored Video”—a new program from our Internet overlords aimed at sharing ad revenue with marquee videographers. The new video (see below), in which the lab-coated duo initiate a domino-effect chain reaction with their famous two-liter Diet Coke fountains, features prominent linkage to coke.com and mentos.com, followed by a short message urging viewers to enter a coke.com-sponsored contest by submitting their own Mentos/Diet Coke–related footage.
The new Google program presents another potential solution to the challenge underlying the explosive popularity of online video: finding the best way to make money from the immense mishmash of user-generated clips. Grobe and Voltz made $35,000 on their first video’s massive viral success via Revver, a YouTube–like site that serves an ad at the end of each video and splits the revenue generated with you 50/50 based on how many times your clip is viewed. The financial details of their current deal with Google, Coke and Mentos are, so far, unavailable.
Unlike Google’s revolutionary AdSense service, which capitalizes on small amounts of targeted-ad revenue collected by millions of smaller sites across the Net, Google video sponsorship will be available only to large-scale content providers with more than 1,000 hours of content or broadcast exposure.
The question remains, though: Is this landmark arrangement a glimpse at the future of online video? Will the second video, with its unabashed commerciality, be as fun as the first one (which even without the obvious branding probably encouraged the sale of lots of Diet Coke and Mentos)? What do you think? Watch it below and let us know in the comments. —John Mahoney
If you're a regular listener to the PopSci Podcast, you already know how proud we are of the reporting being done by Jonathan Coulton, our far-flung correspondent dutifully manning PopSci's satellite office on the moon, Lunar Base One. We're so proud, in fact, that we recently sent up Jonathan's first-ever live visitor in the form of Mr. John Hodgman—author of the all-purpose reference work The Areas of My Expertise, the Daily Show's expert-of-all-trades or, of course, that totally square PC guy. Aside from delivering a fresh shipment of Yoo-hoo and Doritos, Mr. Hodgman let Jonathan in on the real story behind those fuzzy undersea lobsters.
YouTube Sells Self to Google, Parties Like It's 1997
Well, yesterday evening it was made official—Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion, outbidding Viacom, Yahoo and News Corp. to acquire the Internet's 10th-most-trafficked site.
Harking back to a time when massive Web buyouts happened every time some crusty old big-money executive called his accountant to find out what this whole "e-mail" thing was all about, the GooTube deal touched on some familiar territory: the arbitrary valuations of unprofitable startups, the venture-capital payoff (big-time Silicon Valley firm Sequoia Capital's initial investment of $11.5 million netted it almost half a billion dollars in Google stock), the final offer of $1.6B being passed between Moons-Over-My-Hammies at a South San Francisco Denny's, the delirious "Holy #%@$, we're rich" announcement the next day, and so forth.
Well, now I've found a new love. Last night, while enjoying a frothy stout at my most beloved local beerhouse, a visiting Chicagoan told me about beermapping.com—a site that has taken up the noble task of cataloging the finest breweries, brewpubs, beer stores and beer bars in US cities (23 and counting), and plotting them all on a Google Map for easy browsin'. And we're not talking any old bar with Tuesday night Bud Light specials—these are the places for serious devotees of the hops, places whose list of Dutch Weissebiers is longer than your arm (and most bars' full rosters). Not only is it an excellent source for travelers, it can help you rediscover your own neighborhood through the eyes of an enlightened beer drinker. And seriously, what's better than a little enlightened drinking? Cheers to you, beermapping.com—this next one's on me. —John Mahoney
Is there anything Web 2.0 can't do? Earlier this week, the photo-sharing site Flickr rolled out a new feature called geotagging, letting users tag their photos with the location of where they were taken. This is done via a gorgeous AJAX-type interface that lets you grab sets of your photos and drag them onto a zoomable Yahoo map of the world, which automatically tags them with the exact location you drop them on.
The applications of a huge community-based database of geotagged photos are virtually infinite. (Special emphasis on huge: Flickr has 228 million photos in its database with an additional million photos added daily, and 1.2 million photos were geotagged within the first 24 hours of the feature's launch—far exceeding Flickr's expectations.) Moving to a new neighborhood? Scout it out first on Flickr. Need a free illustrated travel guide to Romania? You got it. Plus, like, a million other uses that neither I nor anyone else has thought of...yet. Seriously, mind-boggling stuff. —John Mahoney
USA Today is reporting that A La Mobile, a small software developer, plans to announce today a host of new applications designed to run on the Google-backed operating system, Android. For now the applications are installed in an HTC smartphone, and include a browser, camera, games, contacts manager, audio player and more. HTC is just one of 34 companies in Google's Open Handset Alliance, so this is really just the start. Google says to expect an Android-based phone later this year.
If you still haven't seen 
Well, yesterday evening it was made official—Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion, outbidding Viacom, Yahoo and News Corp. to acquire the Internet's 10th-most-trafficked site. 
