Rambler Takes Home The Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon Grand Prize, Learn To Drive And Radical Are Runners Up

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Rambler, created by William Hockey, Zach Perret and Michael Kelly, is a web app that lets users view their credit and debit card transactions on a map. During the dev process, the team tapped the Foursquare API for locations and the Plaid API to access user spending data.

via Rambler Takes Home The Disrupt NY 2013 Hackathon Grand Prize, Learn To Drive And Radical Are Runners Up | TechCrunch.

This is an interesting science project.  The security implications however would cause me to steer clear of this app entirely.  I don’t understand what benefit anyone would gain from using this app and this is the grand prize winner.

Here’s another one…

After 24 hours of hard work at the Disrupt NY Hackathon, Michael Kolodny, Jingen Lin and Ricardo Falletti demoed us HangoutLater, a nifty hack built on top of the Foursquare API. When you check in and a friend is close to you, it will ask you if you want to hang out later. Then, it will automatically find you a central location to meet.

If they’re that close to you why not just talk to them the old fashioned way?  And my favorite:

A project at our Disrupt Hackathon called “Bar Power” is an app that will remind you to “not be a douchebag.” It’s somewhat of a game, walking you through nice things to do when you enter a bar. For example, the app will suggest that you say “hi” to the bartender and introduce yourself. If you do it and mark it down in the app, you get some karma points.

Perhaps they should consider a little less coding/hacking and a little more focus on requirements.  My favorite comment about the above app:

BREAKING: Yahoo just acquired it for $300 million.

EVE Online | Stories From The First Decade

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The decade of history of EVE Online is unique. It has its heroes, scoundrels, heists and intrigue. Unlike other games, those are not stories written by developers and acted out by NPCs. They are true stories about the actions of the players that inhabit this world.

via EVE Online | Stories From The First Decade.

Go to this site and read some stories.  This game has always amazed me with the news it generates through the stories it has produced throughout the years.   I find games like this very complicated.  The stories do read like a novel or possible screenplay.

Wolfram Alpha Drills Deep into Facebook Data

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At this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas, Wolfram Alpha creator Stephen Wolfram offered up some interesting details about his computational engine. Wolfram Alpha contains more than 10 trillion pieces of data cultivated from primary sources, along with tens of thousands of algorithms and equations. Solving complex math problems is one of the system’s key abilities.

via Wolfram Alpha Drills Deep into Facebook Data.

More information from Data Science of the Facebook World

Some of this is rather depressingly stereotypical. And most of it isn’t terribly surprising to anyone who’s known a reasonable diversity of people of different ages. But what to me is remarkable is how we can see everything laid out in such quantitative detail in the pictures above—kind of a signature of people’s thinking as they go through life.

LivingSocial Hacked — More Than 50 Million Customers Impacted

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The hack includes customer names, emails, birthdates and encrypted passwords.

via LivingSocial Hacked — More Than 50 Million Customers Impacted – Kara Swisher – Commerce – AllThingsD.

I’d like to read a post mortum on this.  Knowing names and emails will allow for more precise phishing attacks against those 50 million customers.  Hopefully people know to lie about their birthday and if this attack was caught fast enough the bad guys might not have had time to decrypt the encrypted passwords to exploit the accounts.

One positive note in a not-so-positive situation: The email sent to employees and customers noted that neither customer credit card nor merchant financial information was accessed in the cyber attack.

Pinging the Whole Internet Reveals Unsecured Backdoors That Could Tempt Hackers and Cyber Criminals

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Moore’s census involved regularly sending simple, automated messages to each one of the 3.7 billion IP addresses assigned to devices connected to the Internet around the world (Google, in contrast, collects information offered publicly by websites). Many of the two terabytes (2,000 gigabytes) worth of replies Moore received from 310 million IPs indicated that they came from devices vulnerable to well-known flaws, or configured in a way that could to let anyone take control of them.

via Pinging the Whole Internet Reveals Unsecured Backdoors That Could Tempt Hackers and Cyber Criminals | MIT Technology Review.

Help Stop 1-800-CONTACTS from Abusing Patents to Squelch Competition

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1-800-CONTACTS also protests that there is nothing “scandalous” about its CEO visiting Ditto’s site to check out its product. We agree. There is certainly nothing wrong with keeping tabs on the competition. What we do think is scandalous, however, is what the company did next. After checking out Ditto’s product, 1-800-CONTACTS apparently went out and purchased a patent in order to sue its competitor.

via UPDATED: Help Stop 1-800-CONTACTS from Abusing Patents to Squelch Competition | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Deutsche Telekom to curb ADSL volumes

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Germany’s national telco Deutsche Telekom is fighting back against OTT players using its broadband network for data-intense services like video-on-demand (VOD) portals without sharing their revenues by throttling the data rate to 384Kbit/s for ADSL and VDSL customers if they exceed the volume included in their tariff.

via Setback for OTT: Deutsche Telekom to curb ADSL volumes | Rapid TV News.

And so it begins….

Turning a standard LCD monitor into touchscreen with a $5 wall-mounted sensor

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Now, by plugging an EMI sensor into any wall socket, you can read your house’s EM signature — and if you continue to listen, you can detect changes in the signature. Obvious changes occur when a device is switched on or off, but it also turns out that simply moving your hand close to an LCD monitor also alters your house’s EM signature. It might sound a bit unbelievable, that a single finger moving towards an LCD monitor can be detected by a sensor at the other end of the house, but that’s exactly what the University of Washington researchers have accomplished.

via Turning a standard LCD monitor into touchscreen with a $5 wall-mounted sensor | ExtremeTech.

T-Mobile No-contract Advertising: WA Court Orders Retraction

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Under T-Mobile’s new setup, subscribers can purchase handsets by making a relatively small up-front payment and then paying the remaining cost of the phone over the following 24 months. For example, Apple’s iPhone 5 costs $99 down followed by 24 monthly payments of $20. While customers do not need to sign a standard contract committing them to T-Mobile’s wireless service for two years, they do have to sign an agreement taking responsibility for full equipment costs.

via T-Mobile No-contract Advertising: WA Court Orders Retraction | BGR.

Charging $(24×20) + $99 = $579 for an IPhone when you can get a decent tablet with a bigger screen and similar features for under $200 is ridiculous.  It amazes me how people will complain when gas goes up a nickel a gallon but don’t think twice about over paying for cell phones by hundreds of dollars.

Does ‘Sarah Hanson’ exist? The story of this 19-year-old entrepreneur may be a hoax

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The story, which was first-reported by VentureBeat and then by sites including Huffington Post, Yahoo! and AOL, was unique. Here was Hanson, a 19-year-old college student from Seattle, ditching the traditional college route and utilizing a silent auction site to help achieve her entrepreneurial dreams.

Now it looks like the story may have been too good to be true.

via Does ‘Sarah Hanson’ exist? The story of this 19-year-old entrepreneur may be a hoax – GeekWire.