China and US smash child porn sites

A police officer works on a computer to combat cyber crime. China and the United States have closed down a network of Chinese child pornography sites, in a rare instance of cooperation between the two nations on cyber crime, Beijing said.

China and the United States have closed down a network of Chinese child pornography sites, in a rare instance of cooperation between the two nations on cyber crime, Beijing said.

The network comprised at least 48 pornographic sites, 18 of which contained graphic images of children, China's public security ministry said in a statement released Thursday.
The ministry said the operation to close down the sites, which were aimed at a Chinese audience, was "the first successful joint law enforcement campaign by the two nations on online crimes".
"We will continue to strengthen joint judicial cooperation with other nations to tackle international cyber crimes such as online pornography, fraud, gambling and hacking," it added.
Chinese police arrested several people suspected of money-laundering and maintaining the sites in China, the ministry said.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said earlier this week that Chinese-born Wang Yong, a permanent US resident, had been charged over the sites and faced a minimum sentence of 15 years if found guilty.
"The charges against Mr. Wang stem from a nine-month undercover FBI operation dedicated to protecting the most innocent members of our society: children," FBI official Janice Fedarcky said in the statement.
China maintains strict censorship of the Internet to curb what the government deems to be unhealthy content, including pornography and violence -- an effort that has become known as the "Great Firewall of China."
China has the world's largest online population, at 485 million people.

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Behind Apple's products is longtime designer Ive

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In this file photo taken March 19, 1999, Jonathan Ive, left, Apple's vice president of design, and Jon Rubinstein, Apple's senior vice president of engineering, pose behind five iMac personal computers, at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. Apple CEO Steve Jobs may be the company's most recognizable personality, but much of its cachet comes from its clean, friendly-looking designs _ the product of its head designer, Jonathan Ive. (AP Photo/Susan Ragan, File)

 

Steve Jobs has been Apple's most recognizable personality, but much of its cachet comes from its clean, inviting designs. For that, Apple can credit its head designer, Jonathan Ive.

Ive, a self-effacing 44-year-old Brit, helped Jobs bring Apple back from the brink of financial ruin with the whimsical iMac computer, whose original models came in bright colors at a time when bland shades dominated the PC world. He later helped transform Apple into a consumer electronics powerhouse and the envy of Silicon Valley with the iPod, the iPhone and, most recently, the iPad.
In the wake of Jobs' resignation as CEO, Apple must show that it can keep churning out head-turning products even without its charismatic leader. Apple's chief operating officer, Tim Cook, is now CEO, taking on the role of Apple's public face.
But in many ways the real pressure will fall on Ive to make sure Apple continues its string of gadget successes.
Ive, known to his friends as "Jony," has led Apple's design team since the mid-'90s. Working closely with Jobs, Ive has built a strong legacy at Apple, ushering in products that are sleek and stylish, with rounded corners, few buttons, brushed aluminum surfaces and plenty of slick glass.
Apple's pride in this work is evident even in the packaging: Open up any iPhone box, for example, and see Apple proudly proclaim, "Designed by Apple in California." Six of Ive's works, including the original iPod, are even part of the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
People who have worked with Ive describe him as humble and sweet, quiet and shy, but also confident, hard-working and brilliant. Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design for MoMA, said she knows "hardly anybody that is so universally loved and admired" as Ive.
"Products have to be designed better now for people to buy them because of Jony Ive and Steve Jobs and Apple," Antonelli said. "All of a sudden people have gotten used to elegance and beauty, and there's no going back."

Design, as well as software that makes the gadgets easy to use, is a crucial part of setting Apple products apart from those of its rivals. Apple didn't make the first music player or smartphone, but it blew past rivals by making ones that looked cool and worked well.
Ive started out far from Apple Inc.'s Cupertino headquarters. He grew up outside London and studied design at Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University) in Newcastle, England. After finishing school, he co-founded a London-based design company called Tangerine. There, he designed a range of products including combs and power tools. It was through Tangerine that he first got to work with Apple.
In 1992, while Jobs was still in the midst of a 12-year exile from Apple, the company's design chief at the time, Robert Brunner, hired Ive as a senior designer. Thomas Meyerhoffer, who worked under Ive at Apple in the `90s, believes Ive came because he understood Apple was different from other computer companies.
"He came to Apple to take that even further," Meyerhoffer said.
And Ive did, but not right away. Ive quickly became a leader, working as the creative studio manager and helping to build Apple's design team during a period in which the company struggled to innovate.
Apple declined requests for an interview with Ive. But during a 1999 interview with The Associated Press, Ive said that for years, designers would produce foam models of computers only to be sent back to their drawing boards because of managers' fixations with focus groups and marketing figures.
"We lost our identity and looked to competition for leadership," Ive said at the time.
Brunner left in 1996 and suggested that Ive take over the post, even though Ive was only 29. When Jobs returned from his exile and became interim CEO in 1997, he named Ive as senior vice president of industrial design.
With Jobs again at the helm and Ive as his style guru, Apple refocused around design and produced a hit that got the company back on track. Apple shook up the personal computer industry in 1998 with the candy-colored all-in-one iMac desktop, the original models shaped like a futuristic TV.
Unlike previous product attempts, the iMac concept was immediately embraced by the top decision makers at Apple, and the design went through very few revisions.
"We knew we had it when we saw it, and with Jobs' support we were able to make it happen," Ive said in 1999.
At a time when most computers were boxy and largely black, beige or gray, the iMac was bulbous and flashy. People snapped up 150,000 of them in the first weekend following its release. Apple sold 800,000 iMacs by the end of the year.
The iMac changed the way consumers thought about personal computers and about Apple itself. It gave Apple a vital boost that helped it usher in a new era of consumer electronics that were quirky, fun and colorful. The marketing team even teased consumers by encouraging them at one point to collect all five - strawberry, blueberry, grape, tangerine and lime.
With Ive in charge of design, Apple then bought out the first iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007 and the iPad in 2010. In recent years, the company has largely dropped the bright color palette (though you can still find it on some iPods) in favor of black, white and silver hues. Yet they retained simplicity that made them approachable to everyone - from the tech geek to Grandma - as well as the curves, shiny surfaces and expensive appearance.
As a result, Apple's products are more popular than ever, allowing the company to surpass rival Microsoft Corp. last year as the most valuable technology company in the world.
"He wasn't responsible for them, but they definitely couldn't have done them without him," said Leander Kahney, who has written about Apple in several books and on his "Cult of Mac" blog.
Ive and Jobs have worked hand in hand and, in many respects, have contributed to each other's success. Ive has always been in contact with Jobs and speaks the same language as him, Antonelli said, and they clearly have chemistry.
Don Norman, who worked at Apple in the `90s as vice president of the company's advanced technology group, said that while Ive had good design ideas "sitting on the shelves," he needed Jobs to get those designs off the shelves.
"Jony has always been Jony - brilliant," Norman said. "What he needed was a Steve Jobs to say, `Make this happen.'"
Now, the test will be whether Cook can continue to keep that focus at Apple and encourage Ive to continue creating hits.
In a sense, the challenge won't be as difficult as it had been in the 1990s. Now that Apple has developed a style, it can build on it rather than try to reimagine it with each new product.
And that, Norman says, is now in Apple's DNA.

source : http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-apple-products-longtime-ive.html

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Audi A0 concept monocycle definitely does not have Quattro

Audi has lifted the wraps on its latest design innovation, the A0, a sort of sit-down half-Segway stroller for grown ups. It may only have one wheel, but the runabout was engineered with a single, hollow tire to self-stabilize.

Designed by a collaborative effort of Technische Universität München and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the self-propelled unicycle is good for an hour's cruise at up to nine miles per.

That's not as far or as fast as the Segway can travel, but we're not sure how long you'd want to go on one anyway. To make things even more enticing, it has handlebars and a seat, so you avoid all that unpleasant standing the Segway requires.

Click past the jump for a video of Audi's monocycle in action.

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Canadian lingerie model Maryeve Dufault jumps to NASCAR

There are rules in racing. Like not passing under the safety car. You can't intentionally hit another driver to take him out of the race. And if you're going to make it as a female driver, you'd better be hot. Smoking hot.

There aren't a lot of women in motorsports, typically male-dominated as it is, but the few we've seen have mostly been pretty, well... pretty. The first example to come to mind, of course, is Danica Patrick, who moonlights as a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. Jodie Kidd, meanwhile, is a model who moonlights as a racing driver. Natacha Gachnang and Susie Stoddart aren't hard on the eyes, either. Noticing a trend here? Now put it to rest, because the next up-and-coming talent in motor racing is a certified knock-out.

Her name is Maryeve Dufault, and she's making her NASCAR debut this weekend in Montreal in the Nationwide Series for the NAPA Auto Parts 200 on the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, not far from her hometown of Sorel, Quebec. Until now, she's been working her way up in the ARCA feeder series. But before that, she made it as a model, showing up on the New York Euphoria team in the Lingerie Bowl and on The Price is Right, and even did some stunt driving on a b-movie called Fast Girl that might as well have been about her.

We'll be watching to see how Maryeve does on her NASCAR debut this weekend, and maybe enjoying perusing the photos just a little bit more for it. But for now, you're invited to view some interview footage of her after the jump.

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IBM's New Chips Compute More Like We Do

A microchip with about as much brain power as a garden worm might not seem very impressive, compared with the blindingly fast chips in modern personal computers. But a new microchip made by researchers at IBM represents a landmark. Unlike an ordinary chip, it mimics the functioning of a biological brain—a feat that could open new possibilities in computation
.
Inside the brain, information is processed in parallel, and computation and memory are entwined. Each neuron is connected to many others, and the strength of these connections changes constantly as the brain learns. These dynamics are thought to be crucial to learning and memory, and they are what the researchers sought to mimic in silicon. Conventional chips, by contrast, process one bit after another and shunt information between a discrete processor and memory components. The bigger a problem is, the larger the number of bits that must be shuffled around.
The IBM researchers have built and tested two demonstration chips that store and process information in a way that mimics a natural nervous system. The company says these early chips could be the building blocks for something much more ambitious: a computer the size of a shoebox that has about half the complexity of a human brain and consumes just one kilowatt of power. This is being developed with $21 million in funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in collaboration with several universities.
The company's researchers and their academic collaborators will present two papers next month at the Custom Integrated Circuits conference in San Jose, California, showing that the chip designs have very low power requirements and work with neural-circuit-mimicking software. In one experiment, a "neural core," as the new chips are called, learns to play Pong; in another, it learns to navigate a car on a simple race track; and in another it learns to recognize images.

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The Evolution of Motorola’s Wireless Technology

1930 First Motorola brand car radio (reproduction), model 5T71
With this week's announcement of Google's plan to buy Motorola Mobility, we took a look at the significant technology milestones in the company’s history. Motorola, founded in 1928 as the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, was pivotal in advancing communications from business to space and government. Achievements included everything from releasing the world’s first commercial handheld cellular phone to introducing one of the first commercially successful car radios in 1930, reproduced above.
This radio was the first product to carry the Motorola brand. It was designed to be mass-produced, affordable, and easily installed. The components, as shown in this reproduction, included (left to right) radio receiver, tuning control, and speaker.

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High-speed camera slows Jaime Alguersuari's Toro Rosso way down

The word "slow" doesn't often factor into F1 racing, where everything moves fast. The cars move fast, the pit crews have to move fast, even the cameras have to move fast to keep up with the action. But lately things have been slowing down. Not because of restrictions on performance, which at best manage to hold back the tides temporarily as technology outpaces legislation, but with the use of new camera technology.

With high-speed, high-frame-rate video technology, cameras are able to slow the action way down to let us see all the details we'd normally miss because they're just happening too darn fast. One camera crew went down to the Misano World Circuit with such a setup to film Jaime Alguersuari doing his thing with a Scuderia Toro Rosso grand prix car. Follow the jump to watch the stunning frame-by-frame results at the very limit of traction.

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Personal Security

Many medical implants, such as insulin pumps and pacemakers, are equipped with wireless radios that let doctors download data about the patient's condition and adjust the behavior of the implant. But these devices are vulnerable to hackers who can eavesdrop on stored data or even reprogram the implant, causing, for example, a pacemaker to shock a heart unnecessarily. While it may be possible to engineer new, more secure implants, millions of people are walking around with vulnerable devices that can't be replaced without surgery. An anti-hacking device presented this week at the annual SIGCOMM communications conference in Toronto may offer them a solution.
Created by researchers from MIT and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the laptop-sized device, called "the shield," emits a jamming signal whenever it detects an unauthorized wireless link being established between an implant and a remote terminal (which can be out of sight and tens of meters away).  Although no attack of this kind is known to have occurred , "it's important to solve these kinds of problems before the risk becomes a tenable threat," says Kevin Fu, an associate professor of computer science at UMass and one of the developers of the shield. Fu was Technology Review's Young Innovator of the Year in 2009 for his work in uncovering the previously unsuspected danger that hackers pose to implant wearers.
The key innovation is the new radio design that the shield uses for jamming. "If you just do simple jamming [broadcasting radio noise on a given frequency], then the attacker doesn't get the information, but the doctor doesn't either," says Dina Katabi, another developer of the shield and an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Instead, the shield allows a jamming signal to be broadcast while it simultaneously receives data signals from the implant and relays them over a secure link. So doctors can still download data and confirm adjustments even while the shield is jamming an attacker.
Normally, trying to get a radio to detect data while it's broadcasting on the same frequency is like attaching a hearing aid to a megaphone on full blast and expecting the hearing aid to pick up a nearby conversation. Earlier attempts to make radios capable of simultaneously transmitting and receiving on the same frequency relied on a carefully spaced trio of antennas. But at the frequencies used in medical devices (about 400 megahertz), this spacing would result in a jamming device far too big for a person to carry. Instead, the researchers worked out how to use two closely spaced antennas: one for receiving and the other for broadcasting the jamming signal. The trick is to feed an "antidote" signal to the jamming signal into the receiving antenna, canceling out the jamming noise.

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Watching the Protein Tango

A new microscope has allowed researchers to watch molecules move within a cell on a millisecond-by-millisecond time scale for the first time. The novel method, which combines two preëxisting microscopic techniques, opens a window onto cellular processes that had previously been undetectable, unveiling molecular activity within a cell at a much finer level than ever before possible.
"This allows us to look at interactions of molecules, and their mobility," says Malte Wachsmuth, a cell biophysicist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, who helped develop the new microscope. Current microscopy techniques can home in on a single spot within a cell, but they can miss vital information when the focus moves from one spot to another. "A typical protein might spend one to two milliseconds in such a spot," Wachsmuth says. "Molecules are quite mobile, diffusing all around, and it's a very fast process. A lot can happen in a few tens of milliseconds."
The technique developed by Wachsmuth and his colleagues allows them to analyze proteins and other molecules inside an entire cell, all at once, as they move about. It combines light-sheet microscopy, which illuminates just a thin plane of an object, and single-molecule spectroscopy, which can track movements of individual molecules. The result offers both high sensitivity and fast processing time.
The researchers believe the technology could be very helpful for understanding how proteins drive processes like transcription (the method through which DNA is expressed). "Understanding how proteins interact with each other is what everybody's interested in, in terms of trying to decipher cell biochemistry," says Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz, a cell biologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved in the research. The scientists quickly put their tool to use. "We could watch a single molecule in the nucleus of a cell as it goes from one compartment to another," Wachsmuth says. He and his collaborators also examined how proteins bind to tightly wound DNA, called chromatin, during the process of transcription inside a cell's nucleus. Researchers still don't understand the intricacies of how transcription proceeds. Previous studies had suggested that when proteins are tagged with fluorescence, bright spots attached to the chromatin indicated longer binding times while dim spots indicated briefer visits. But when the researchers trained their new microscope on the process and analyzed protein movements within the nucleus, they found that the dynamics are far more complex, with binding times equal in dim areas and bright ones.

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A Chip to Encrypt the Web

A new computer chip will help tackle one of the Web's weak spots—the fact that most data is exchanged without any protection against hackers or eavesdroppers.

For some communications, such as credit card payments and online banking transactions, it is standard to encrypt the information that users and websites send each other. But most online activity is completely unprotected, largely because encrypting communications requires extra work from Web servers and software, which is costly to implement.

Search queries and social media updates, for example, are almost exclusively sent in forms easily read by a third party snooping on Web traffic. Listening in to Web traffic can be as simple as using the same Wi-Fi network as the target, as Ashton Kutcher found when his Twitter account was hijacked at the TED conference earlier this year, by means of a Firefox add-on called Firesheep.

A microchip developed by semiconductor design company Cavium could allow much more—perhaps even all—Web traffic to be encrypted, by reducing the cost of implementing encryption. Cavium's Nitrox III chip is designed to be installed in data centers that serve up Web pages and manage Web apps. It's specialized design is extremely fast and efficient at the mathematical calculations underpinning the encryption that secures Web sites that use the protocol SSL. Sites secured this way have Web addresses that start with HTTPS, instead of HTTP.

When a person accesses an HTTPS site, the computer and the Web server exchange and mathematically verify cryptographic keys to establish a secure link. Any data exchanged over that link is then encrypted and is practically impossible for an attacker to decrypt.

Cavium's new chip can perform the necessary mathematical calculations much more quickly and efficiently than a general-purpose processor inside a Web server, making it cheaper to secure Web traffic, says Jeff Pangborn, the company's principal engineer for networking hardware. "The people operating data centers are very concerned about efficiency and how much power they use," he says.

source :http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38336/?ref=rss

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Mobiado Grand Touch Ponsel Berlapis Emas 24 Karat

Mobiado perusahaan manufaktur dan designer bermarkas di Kanada ini baru saja meluncurkan ponsel ultra mewahnya. Mobiado ini memang mengkhususkan diri untuk menciptakan produk-produk mewahnya dengan desain modern minimalis. Produk terbarunya ini diberi nama Mobiado Grand Touch GCB. Ponsel ini menggunakan sistem operasi Android. Ponsel ini menggunakan 139 karat kristal safir, mesin CNC, bodinya berlapiskan emas 24 karat, Tombol perangkat juga terbuat dari kristal safir. Anda juga memiliki pilihan untuk memiliki kristal inlayed di salah satu sudut droid tersebut.

Ponsel ini berjalan di jaringan GSM 850/900/1800/1900 dan HSDPA 900/1700/2100, dengan layar 4 inci, resolusi 480 x 800 piksel, menggunakan layar sentuh S-LCD kapasitif dengan 16 juta warna, menggunakan Kamera 5 megapiksel dengan flash LED, sudah terintegrasi dengan A-GPS, jack audio 3.5mm, MP3/WAV/eAAC + player / AC3, MP4/H.264/H.263 player, konektivitas GPRS, EDGE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v2.1 dengan A2DP, EDR, akselerometer dan multi touch input. Ponsel ini tersedia dalam warna kuning dan emas. Masih belum ada informasi resmi mengenai harga Grand Touch ini yang pasti harganya mahal. Dikutip dari Mobiado dan gsmarena.

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