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Are you finding it easier to get work done today? Are you plagued by fewer distractions? Perhaps you should thank Amazon. It turns out Amazon had a little hiccup this morning with its cloud services that some pretty big customers use. Those customers include Foursquare, Reddit and Quora, among others. I have to thank Chanel Lee of FanStuff for alerting me to the story. I read up on it over at The Next Web. I’m sure some users have felt a moment of panic — I’m one of them. How can I hope to maintain my status as Foursquare mayor of HowStuffWorks.com if I can’t check in?
The news broke earlier this week: Researchers Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden discovered that the iPhone 4 and iPad 3G devices — essentially cellular devices running iOS 4 — have a secret file hidden away that tracks the devices location regularly. It appears that these devices determine location through pinging cell phone towers and triangulating the resulting position. Then the device records the estimated latitude and longitude with a timestamp in a file called consolidated.db. Allan and Warden hasten to add that, as far as they can tell, this information remains stored locally on your phone (though it will transfer to any computer you synchronize your device to).
Physicist Postulates Dimensions Added as Universe Expands
by Josh Clark | April 21, 2011
I remember many years ago in the mid-90s — during the zenith of paranoia in the alien abduction phenomenon — the whole affair being offhandedly dismissed by Car Sagan, I believe it was. Sagan (I think) mentioned that every description of aliens who were visiting Earth and carting off country folk for probing and the like all shared a suspicious similarity to humans. Despite the differences — like communicating telepathically — the alien abductors bore a real resemblance to people in that they had a roundish head atop a neck, a face that featured a mouth and eyes, used, ostensibly, to engage in sensing the world. They walked on two legs and were capable of and driven by malicious intent or callous indifference to the suffering of their captives. They were pretty much a rough sketch of how humanity saw itself.
Dating Science: Who Pays on the First Date?
by Cristen Conger | April 21, 2011
Heterosexual dating customs say the guy should be ready to whip out the wallet on the first date, but isn’t that a little antiquated? Perhaps, but a 2007 Salon interview with famed anthropologist Helen Fisher indicates that heteros might be biologically “hard-wired” for this fiscal arrangement, rather than just tethered to outmoded courting rituals.
If there is one thing that Digg and Gawker have taught us with their redesigns, it’s this: If you run a major website, you should consider making changes to the design carefully, incrementally and with audience permission/buy-in. If you don’t do this, you risk losing your audience. This article tells the tale for Gawker, which [...]
The internet is alight with the news:Apple’s iPhone and 3G iPad track your location and store the data in a hidden file. Wired had one of the first reports: iPhone Tracks Your Every Move, and There’s a Map for That Your iPhone or 3G-equipped iPad has been secretly recording your location for the past 10 [...]
iPhone Tracks Your Every Move, and There’s a Map for That – “Your iPhone or 3G-equipped iPad has been secretly recording your location for the past 10 months. Wired.com can confirm that: The screengrab above shows a map containing drop pins of everywhere yours truly has been in the past year….” iPhone Tracker – “This [...]
You asked: How fast is the fastest microprocessor chip, now and in the future? Marshall Brain answers: Today, in 2011, the fastest microprocessor chips that are commercially available to “normal people” are the six-core hyperthreaded chips from Intel. These chips run at approximately 3.3 gigahertz and each core can execute two threads. If everything is [...]
This two-part video discusses the meat we eat. In this case, it shows how cows are slaughtered and butchered in a small slaughterhouse (2,000 cows per year, or roughly 10 cows per working day). Everyone who eats meat should be aware of the process, and this video is completely transparent in showing that process. But [...]
Oddly, the day after Robert and I recoded the podcast, “Is privacy an illusion*?” I saw this headline on NY Times, “How to Fix (or Kill) Web Data About You.” It’s not woo-woo odd, mind you, just timely odd since it discusses the various ways that you can follow your online data trail and scrub it free of past transgressions (or at least try).
In the podcast we discuss the fact that we’re all so eager to streamline our lives through the convenience of technology that most of us think nothing of sharing our most personal data. Think about all of the pieces of information you’ve floated into a data stream — from the crappy album review you left on Amazon and your Peru vacation pics on Flickr to online results of your IQ — and then think about stitching together every iota of information to form a composite of yourself. What sort of picture would it paint? What could go wrong with a seemingly endless stream of data about ourselves that we’ve given of our own volition?
Recent Postings by Category
BrainStuff
- Thank You and Best Wishes to Marshall Brain
- Contest – Design a $300 house and win $25,000
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Keep Asking
- Why can a 5 foot 8 inch man dunk a basketball on a 10 foot rim while some people of taller stature can’t?
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Stuff Mom Never Told You
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Stuff to Blow Your Mind
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Stuff You Should Know
- The Southern Death Cult, the Maya and Georgia
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The Stuff of Genius
CarStuff
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How-to Stuff
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PopStuff
- PopStuff Show Notes: Episode 36: Now Available in 3-D
- PopStuff Show Notes: Episode 35: Let’s do brunch!
- PopStuff Show Notes: Episode 34: Play it again, Sam
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know
Stuff to Change the World
- Who will own the Arctic?
- Obesity: The New Global Crisis
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Stuff You Missed in History Class
- Butch Cassidy: Should we read between the lines?
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- Party Time: A Look at Unconventional Politics
