http://www.thetechlounge.com Recent News en-us Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:11:34 -0600 Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:11:34 -0600 General general Copyright 2009, TheTechLounge, Inc. 60 http://www.thetechlounge.com/templates/thetechlounge/images/88x31_ttl.png http://www.thetechlounge.com 88 31 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13968/GPS-Apps-Get-Immigrants-Across-Borders/ "Over the past two decades, Ricardo Dominguez has been utilizing electronics and the internet to piss off just about every high-level administrative authority in the US. In the late 90s, his performance-art-cum-activist organization the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) set up a participatory website-jamming network called the FloodNet system, which allowed anyone with an internet connection to gum up the official sites of the US Border Patrol, White House, G8, Mexican embassy, and others, rendering them inaccessible. The Department of Justice retaliated with an electronic attack o...]]> Recent News: Electronics Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:17:07 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13968/GPS-Apps-Get-Immigrants-Across-Borders/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13967/The-Case-of-the-Fraudulent-Sushi/ "A biologist walks into a sushi bar and orders some tuna. What does he get? Escolar, a nasty fish with buttery flesh that can cause bizarre episodes of diarrhea, accompanied by a waxy intestinal discharge. It’s not a joke. It happened five times to the same scientists during a brief research project. The results of that study were published Wednesday in PLOS One. “A piece of tuna sushi has the potential to be an endangered species, a fraud or a health hazard,” wrote the authors. “All three of these cases were uncovered in this study.” The team of researchers from Columbia Uni...]]> Recent News: Science Fri, 20 Nov 2009 19:07:13 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13967/The-Case-of-the-Fraudulent-Sushi/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13966/Hotness-Google-Chrome-OS-Available/ "Seriously, how awesome have the past few hours been? Engadget turns the design stakes up to 11, Google finally dishes the dirt on Chrome OS, and now you can even download the forthcoming software to have a fiddle with yourself. It's completely free, though you'll need VMWare running atop a Windows, Linux or OS X installation to make the magic happen. Naturally, we've been considerate enough to provide download links for everything you'll require at the source below, so get those fingers clicking. ...We've had a chance to have a quick and dirty snoop aroun...]]> Recent News: Software Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:58:21 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13966/Hotness-Google-Chrome-OS-Available/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13965/Dont-Tase-Me-Mom/ "In a report on the incident the officer, Dustin Bradshaw, said the mother gave him permission to use the Taser. When he arrived, the girl was curled up on the floor, screaming, and resisting as her mother tried to get her in the shower before bed. "Her mother told me to take her if I needed to," the officer wrote. The child was "violently kicking and verbally combative" when he tried to take her into custody and she kicked him in the groin. He then delivered "a very brief drive stun to her back," the report said." OK, he didn't tase her, he used a stun gun on h...]]> Recent News: General Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:48:53 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13965/Dont-Tase-Me-Mom/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13964/Climate-Change-Hacked-Restored/ "The e-mail system of one of the world's leading climate research units has been breached by hackers. E-mails reportedly from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), including personal exchanges, appeared on the internet on Thursday. A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission. An investigation was underway and the police had been informed, he added. " But it gets funnier: "I’ve attached a cleaned-up and commented version of the matlab code that I w...]]> Recent News: Internet Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:38:45 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13964/Climate-Change-Hacked-Restored/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13963/Modern-Warfare-Hacked-Restored/ "Yup. You read that right. Modern Warfare 2 PC now has dedicated servers. Wait, PC gamers! Before you send Bobby Kotick a thank you letter, know that it wasn't they who did it, but rather the gamers who took Infinity Ward and Activition's attempts to lock down the game as a challenge. And bring it those gamers did, managing to hack in the developer console and enable the ability to set up dedicated servers. Keep in mind, the game hasn't even been out a week. Perhaps some of the boycotters caught playing the game were not being hypocrites, but rather hard at work t...]]> Recent News: Software Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:55:29 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13963/Modern-Warfare-Hacked-Restored/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13962/App-Records-Everything-Just-In-Case-Youre-Funny/ "Careful what you say — that iPhone over there could be a live microphone. Which is to say there’s a new, free iPhone app called Soundbiter designed to monitor the world’s audio and upload it to Twitter and Facebook with the push of a button. When running, the Soundbiter app is constantly recording, keeping an audio buffer of a minute or so. Then when you hear a good joke, a fine guitar riff or a politician’s slip-of-the-tongue, you hit the apps’s only button, which saves the last 60 seconds of sound. From there, it’s a cinch to edit, upload, title and publish the sonic snippet ...]]> Recent News: Electronics Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:56:36 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13962/App-Records-Everything-Just-In-Case-Youre-Funny/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13961/Boycott-Averted/ "Just as a FYI. (Click for the full thing)" @ Kotaku "According to "internal Activision estimates", Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 didn't just have a good launch, it had "the biggest launch in history across all forms of entertainment". This claim is based on sell-through sales, with Activision bean-counters reporting the game managed to pull in $310 million in its first 24 hours on sale. And that's not a worldwide number, that's just in North America and the UK. $310 million. In a single day. In three countries. Sure, games cost mor...]]> Recent News: Software Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:51:04 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13961/Boycott-Averted/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13960/In-A-World-Where-My-Mom-Kicks-Your-Ass/ " Think you can type? Now's your chance to jump in the ring — err, take a seat at your keyboard — and go head-to-head with the fastest typists around. Put your fierce typing skills to the test for a chance to win $2,000 and be crowned the first-ever Ultimate Typing Champion. " The current dude is leading at 171 WPM, which, actually probably beats her. But she can still blitz the rest of you. I mean, c'mon, she was a legal secretary, she doesn't break keyboards so much as punch them through desks. Still, 171... HAX]]> Recent News: General Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:42:51 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13960/In-A-World-Where-My-Mom-Kicks-Your-Ass/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13959/Chicken-Little-Chipmaker-Lawsuits-Dropped/ "Intel and AMD are fierce competitors in the world of chipmaking, but in recent years they've taken the fight to the courtroom. AMD has sued Intel for antitrust violations (allegations that have been picked up by a number of governments), while Intel fired back by claiming that AMD had violated a licensing agreement for x86 technology. This morning, however, the two companies made a surprise announcement: they've reached an agreement that settles all legal issues between them. " @ AnandTech "Out of this settlement come four major things for AMD: ...]]> Recent News: General Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:33:26 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13959/Chicken-Little-Chipmaker-Lawsuits-Dropped/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13958/Mouse-Testimony/ Recent News: Hardware Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:34:29 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13958/Mouse-Testimony/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13957/More-On-Modern-Multiplayer/ "In fact, many of you have commented that you have cancelled your preorders in response to the design decisions made by Infinity Ward. But Activision, publisher of what will be one of the largest titles of the year, doesn't seem all that worried about the backlash from PC gamers. "We're, of course, watching this very carefully and paying attention to it," Activision president Mike Griffith said in response to a financial analyst, as noted by Kotaku. "But we're not overly concerned about it." "One of the problems with our PC SKUs in the past is that it has not been...]]> Recent News: Internet Fri, 6 Nov 2009 16:45:21 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13957/More-On-Modern-Multiplayer/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13956/For-Every-Obama-theres-a-Biden/ "The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to "national security" concerns, has leaked. It's bad. It says: * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn't infringing will exceed any hope of profitability. * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet ...]]> Recent News: General Tue, 3 Nov 2009 20:22:06 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13956/For-Every-Obama-theres-a-Biden/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13955/The-Princes-Movie-Trailer/ " As a fan of the ridiculous acrobatics in the games, one of the aspects I was specifically watching for in the trailer was the stuntwork. As expected, the action is heavy on the CG, but as a result the free running in the trailer is as unbelievable as in the games, if not more so. Some specific moves shown off in the trailer will be familiar to fans of the games, while others are so fantastic that a game would be hard pressed to replicate them outside of a cut-scene or quick time event. Suffice it to say that I was pleased with the quality and density of acrobatic stunts in the trail...]]> Recent News: General Tue, 3 Nov 2009 19:14:10 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13955/The-Princes-Movie-Trailer/ http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13954/Dragon-Ages-PaytoKeep-Inventory-Scheme/ "The first step to solving this problem of limited inventory space is to use your characters as mules. In my game, every single character has a secondary weapon equipped. Every amulet and belt slot is used. Both ring slots are filled. Not necessarily because the character is going to use those items, but because it frees up slots in my backpack. The second step is to shell out for the backpack expansions. These are an ingame money sink. They partly encourage you to visit various merchants to see if they sell one of the precious backpack expansions. But they mostly force hard decisi...]]> Recent News: Hardware Tue, 3 Nov 2009 18:57:53 -0600 http://www.thetechlounge.com/news/13954/Dragon-Ages-PaytoKeep-Inventory-Scheme/