Product: 5 Internet Tablet (With Android) Manufacturer: ArchosWired Rating: 5Take one of the most-vaunted portable media players on the market, drop the Android OS on it, and what do you get? An odd little mashup of media player and tablet PC that does…
It’s been a great year in pictures—some more identifiable than others. Here is a retrospective of 2009’s best mystery shots. Care to take another guess?
Each image links back to the original post containing the answer.
Hint: Once you find out what it is everything makes sense. Don’t over think it. [Click to see the answer]
Doc Brown’s flux capacitor? A blinged-out religious relic from the future? A Tron 2.0 prop? [Click to see the answer]
Jellyfish attacking an undersea monster? That would be cool, but the reality is much simpler, and more beautiful. [Click to see the answer]
Ready for some mystery? The answer is… [Click to see the answer]
The engine room of the next Enterprise? A glimpse at the heart of some new particle accelerator? The lens of a new US military laser? [Click to see the answer]
While it may look a bit like Galactica’s CIC it’s probably older than you are. [Click to see the answer]
It looks like a gigantic bird hunting device but it will actually let you become one with nature rather than destroy it. [Click to see the answer]
Some kind of circuit board close up? No. A nuclear power plant’s control panel full of gauges and labels? No, that’s not it either. [Click to see the answer]
No, that’s not the moon… [Click to see the answer]
A shot from the Iron Man sequel? A costume from a 22nd-century staging of Swan Lake ? My new back tat? [Click to see the answer]
They aren’t shiny radio dishes or deadly antimatter arrays in Area 51. [Click to see the answer]
A huge version of Darth Vader’s light saber? Close, but not quite close enough. [Click to see the answer]
Is this a cosmic dover over the skies of California? Maybe the aliens are telling us to chill out. Or perhaps the Holy Ghost went to grab some In-n-Out. [Click to see the answer]
Is this the entrence to Jason Chen’s secret lair where the Gizmodo magic happens? Maybe a place to lock up anyone with the swine flu? What on Earth requires a HAL 9000 to keep guard? [Click to see the answer]
At first glance I thought this was a NASA image of some sort, maybe a solar flare. I even wondered if I could get a high-res version in turn into a poster. Then I found out what it actually is. [Click to see the answer]
Tattoo under a powerful microscope? One near some feminine naughty bits? No. [Click to see the answer]
This is a tricky one. What’s the QR Code on that flag our little Android friend is waving? [Click to see the answer]
I knew this was bound to happen sooner or later, but it’s wrong. From the iTunes description. “If you love pussy, this application is for you. Each and every pussy is more and more tight and super tempting.” Really?
Of course not. They are just two apps loaded with photos of the other kind of tits, boobies, and pussies:
Still, I find it ironic that Apple censored the app titles to “T**s and Boobies” and “P***y Lovers”, yet allowed the icons to say exactly that, and the descriptions to be like the one above or this one:
These tits and boobies are wide exposed and open to nature. You can see them as God intended to be viewed in their real forms.
I wonder how many people will fall into the trap and buy these apps. Oh, wait, you jumped to see the article, didn’t you? DIDN’T YOU? [Krapps]
If you owned a bike when you were a kid, you would have, at some point, turned it into a “motorbike”. You would have taken a clothespin and a playing card and attached the latter to the chain-stay with the former. The resulting flickety-flack sound was enough to turn your pushbike into a roaring speed [...]
digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/gadgets/iPhone_reception_issues_plague_O2_too’; It would appear that AT&T isn’t the only carrier in the world suffering from a horrible and nagging case of the iPhones. In an interview with the Financial Times, O2 head Ronan Dunne apologized to customers for the poor performance the network has been experiencing since the introduction of the iPhone 3GS to its airwaves this summer. Just as US customers (particularly those in dense, urban areas) have learned to struggle through dropped calls, the inability to make or receive calls, or weak data connections, our brethren on the other side of the pond have felt a similar sting. Says Dunne, “Where we haven’t met our own high standards then there’s no question, we apologise to customers for that fact,” adding that the carrier had fixes at the ready and that the issues would be “more than addressed” shortly. Unlike the widespread problems here, the O2 mess seems to be relegated largely to London, though it’s curious to know that AT&T isn’t alone in being hamstrung by a network clearly not prepared for the onslaught of data being pushed up and down its virtual pipes. Also unlike the AT&T situation is the fact that O2 has solutions in mind (including the installation of 200 additional mobile base stations in London), and they’re clearly taking ownership of the situation. Ahem, Ralph.
Update: AT&T responded and let us know they had fixes underway too. Here’s an outline of forthcoming changes the carrier says it’s making.
iPhone reception issues plague O2… too (updated with AT&T’s response) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 09:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Don’t worry, pushing the big red button on this chrome reading chair by Aleksej Iskos simply turns on the lights, though we insist that you try it first…err, because we’re so hospitable. [Aleksej Iskos via HomeQN via notcot]
If you’re envisioning lines of code flying across bays of screens, amphetamine-fueled digital manhunts and dramatic, albeit rendered, explosions, I’m sorry. When major botnets fall nowadays, it’s the product of hard work, patience, and some well-placed phone calls.
For the last couple years, security firm FireEye has been under contract to protect its clients’ computers from the Mega-D botnet, a 250,000-PC-strong army of drones that’s probably spammed you at one point or another, if not worse. After a while, they took the fight to the botnet’s home turf. It’s a tale of phone calls! Emails! Polite requests! Filling out forms! Etcetera!:
FireEye and the registrars worked to claim spare domain names that Mega-D’s controllers listed in the bots’ programming. The controllers intended to register and use one or more of the spare do mains if the existing domains went down—so FireEye picked them up and pointed them to “sinkholes” (servers it had set up to sit quietly and log efforts by Mega-D bots to check in for orders).
This is how you kill a botnet: by slowly, diligently severing all its ties to legitimate companies, which, whether knowingly or not, play a vital role in its survival. Anyway, BORING, why do we care?
MessageLabs, a Symantec e-mail security subsidiary, reports that Mega-D had “consistently been in the top 10 spam bots” for the previous year. The botnet’s output fluctuated from day to day, but on November 1 Mega-D accounted for 11.8 percent of all spam that MessageLabs saw. Three days later, FireEye’s action had reduced Mega-D’s market share of Internet spam to less than 0.1 percent, MessageLabs says.
Three dudes prevented billions of averted V1AGR4 messages, without ever leaving their office. They should make a Band of Brothers-style miniseries about this. It would be boring! But I would watch it. [PCWorld]
