For everything from family to computers…
When Gizmodo alumnus and wonderful human Mat Honan got hacked, the point of entry for the hackers was through Amazon and Apple’s lax security policies. Amazon immediately admitted its fault in the situation and updated its security policy accordingly. Apple? Well, Apple still doesn’t know what do yet. More »
from Gizmodo
NFC is used primarily for enjoyable activities, like buying things, sharing content and making QR codes feel old. But Japanese company Elecom is looking to change all that with a compact keyboard that exploits NFC for productivity. The silicon menace requires a companion app and is compatible with Android phones running Gingerbread (2.3.4) and up. If the bundled case had you sold on the peripheral, you may want to reconsider. The retail price is a sizeable 18,690 yen (approximately $240), and what’s worse, the battery is neither rechargeable nor replaceable, so you’ll have to bin it after the stated six months to a year 18 months (eight hours a day) of life. Still interested? Then head over the break for a video demo from Norwegian co-development company one2TOUCH.
Gallery: Elecom NFC keyboard press shots
from Engadget
The little blue marble we call Earth is no stranger to HD Voice — it’s been around commercially since Orange debuted the service over its 3G network in Moldova nearly three years ago — but the technology still hasn’t been officially deployed over an LTE network. That is, until SK Telecom launches the service later today. Doing so will allow the South Korean carrier to snag the crown for world’s first before Sprint, which recently announced that its network won’t have it until later this year. It’s a win-win scenario for the company: HD Voice over LTE is meant to vastly improve call quality and reduce latency for the customers, while lessening network strain and offering new revenue-making opportunities for SK Telecom. What about devices? It hasn’t announced any brand new smartphones that can take advantage of the service, but the company’s ready to pre-load the Samsung Galaxy S III with software that enables HD Voice capability, and is planning to push an update to current owners of the flagship device. If you’re the type of person that still makes the occasional call, this kind of progress should come as pleasant news.
from Engadget
OUYA’s slew of collaborations isn’t letting up, even with less than two days to go before its fundraising round is over. The XBMC team has just pledged that its upcoming Android app will be tailored to work with the upcoming console. While the exact customizations aren’t part of the initial details, the media center app developers will have early access to prototypes of the OUYA hardware. There’s suggestions that there won’t be much of a wait for the Android port of XBMC, whether or not you’re buying the cuboid system — XBMC’s developers note that Android work should be merged into the master path once “final sign-offs” are underway. All told, though, the OUYA is quickly shaping up into as much of a go-to media hub as it is a game system.
Update: OUYA itself has also posted word that TuneIn’s radio streaming is also on its way. And just to top off its efforts, the company has posted rendered images that better show the scale of the console: our Joystiq compatriots note that it’s really a “baby GameCube” in size, and its gamepad looks gigantic by comparison.
Gallery: OUYA console size comparisons
from Engadget
Google announced that it is to bring live and typical traffic support to roughly 130 smaller cities across America through Google Maps. In addition, they are also including even further support for areas in China, Brazil, Canada, and many other countries. Google didn’t post a list of every supported area, but did give this chart that shows traffic lights at every area that allows for the coverage. Thanks, Google.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Via: Google Lat Long Blog
from Droid Life
Amazon is committing itself to gaming much more seriously than providing a storefront: it just launched its own game development house. The simply titled Amazon Game Studios is starting out gently by producing a Facebook hidden object game, Living Classics, that lets the socially inclined dig around through scenes from well-known literature — what else would you expect from the Kindle’s creator? While the free, me-too game isn’t going to give Microsoft or Sony any frights just yet, the company has the ambition of making “innovative, fun and well-crafted” titles. Amazon is actively recruiting more help for the studio as we write, so we’d expect more grandiose work before too long.
from Engadget
More than 15 percent of Mitt Romney’s Twitter followers may be generated by paid services that use fake accounts to artificially inflate the number of people subscribed to the presumptive Republican nominee for US president, according to a new report.
The report comes from researchers at security firm Barracuda Labs, and it cites the addition last month of 116,922 followers to @MittRomney in a span of just 24 hours. The infusion on July 21 represented a 17-percent spike in accounts following Romney. A quarter of those new accounts were less than four days old, and 23 percent of them had never issued a single tweet. Ten percent have since been suspended by Twitter for unspecified reasons.
“Based on the above distinguishable features, we believe most of these recent followers of Romney are not from a general Twitter population but most likely from a paid Twitter follower service,” Barracuda Labs Research Scientist Jason Ding wrote in the report. Such services allow customers to buy followers for any Twitter account, he stressed, so it’s not clear if the fakes were purchased by Romney, his supporters, or his political foes.
from Ars Technica
