$130 Zunes -- $10 Woot credit mocks Apple
from Engadget by Thomas Ricker
Friday, September 21, 2007
BenQ launches uber-quiet MP622 / MP622c projectors
Clever USB: 19-inch Monitor from Samsung Connects to your PC via USB
WASH CYCLE ATMs Become Handy Tool For Laundering Dirty Cash
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119033266947734601.html?mod=hps_us_pageone
With Small Deposits,
Couriers Outwit Banks;
Bag of Money in Queens
With Small Deposits,
Couriers Outwit Banks;
Bag of Money in Queens
By MARK SCHOOFS
September 21, 2007
September 21, 2007
At 8:50 a.m. on March 15, 2006, Luis Saavedra and Carlos Roca began going from bank to bank in Queens, New York, depositing cash into accounts held by a network of other people, according to law-enforcement officials. Their deposits never exceeded $2,000. Most ranged from $500 to $1,500.
![[Luis Saavedra]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_s7AjAp6fpui4mHLvKyxJ1SUDZCu3e9BKe5ONfj8Axi04698xdyG_nWFVMCRSlpAhLouZru9ix8M2eufKKXS3rCsAhm4ki-Fg7SzBgE5pm-R7PhMZLAQ0R9O-nQ3wz3unH5bltu_GhaZUoKKqupJBeXYf_1=s0-d)
Around lunchtime, they crossed into Manhattan and worked their way up Third Avenue, then visited two banks on Madison Avenue. By 2:52 p.m., they had placed more than $111,000 into 112 accounts, say the officials, who reconstructed their movements from seized deposit slips.
Confederates in Colombia used ATM cards to withdraw the money in pesos, moving quickly from machine to machine in a withdrawal whirlwind, the officials say. "The organization at its height was moving about $2 million a month," estimates Bridget Brennan, Special Narcotics Prosecutor for New York City.
Messrs. Saavedra and Roca were arrested in June and charged under state money-laundering laws. Officials say they were moving money for a Colombian drug-trafficking organization that sells cocaine and the club-drug Ecstasy. Prosecutors say the two men engaged in a laundering practice called "microstructuring," a scheme notable for its simplicity. To evade suspicion by banks, they always made small deposits. In Colombia, getting at that money was as easy as pushing buttons on an ATM.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
New Induction Cooktops from GE Are the Highest Wattage Ever
Solar Power: Floating Solar Island Will Produce Energy While Annoying Plankton and Fish
Brilliant: FIQL Avoids Copyright Trap Through Music Videos
from TechCrunch by Michael Arrington
FIQL is a nice niche social network focused on music playlists. Users upload, categorize and share their playlists with others. People who view the playlists can buy songs through links to iTunes and other music services. But for the most part they can't simply listen to the songs online, other than through somewhat cumbersome links to Napster and Rhapsody, which allow people to listen to songs for free with certain restrictions.
Since listening to music on playlists has so many restrictions, the service hasn't grown much - it has just 15,000 playlists from 50,000 registered users since launching in 2005.
But at 9 AM PST I have a feeling they will be getting a whole bunch of new users and a lot more playlists when they launch a new product called FIQL TV. That's because they figured out a brilliant, if somewhat obvious, end-around to copyright laws that restrict them from playing music outright: music videos hosted on third party video sites like YouTube.
It's widely known that music videos are available on video sharing sites (some of them are even distributed legally). In fact, sites like Middio have sprung up that do nothing more than provide music video search for YouTube and other sites. There are a number of services that also allow people to download these videos to their hard drives (see our own YouTube download tool) - and converting them to iPod format is only a small additional step.
Videos are regularly pulled down as copyright holders complain, but they are quickly re-added by other users. That means bookmarks of videos often go stale, but using a search engine will always help you find what you're looking for in no time.
FIQL Leverages Music Videos To Avoid Copyright Trap
FIQL has also created an embeddable player for those videos that can be dropped in to MySpace and other social networks and websites, or add it to their Facebook application. So now, if you have a favorite playlist in iTunes, you can simply export it to FIQL and get an embeddable player back that plays the music videos of all your songs. An screencast overview of the new service is here.
Problem solved.
Or, mostly. Technically FIQL is still subject to copyright claims. But they've pulled themselves one step away from direct contact with the content owners, who are mainly focused on the sites that actually host the infringing content. Case law is still developing in this area, but they are under little real threat of litigation.
Is Your Computer Connecting To Websites Without Your Knowledge
If you are worried that some programs on your PC are secretly making connections to websites in the background, here's a quick tip that uses a simple DOS command to detect and prevent such suspicious activity:
1. Type cmd in your Windows Run box.
2. Type "netstat -b 5 > activity.txt" and press enter. After say 2 minutes, press Ctrl+C.
3. Type "activity.txt" on the command line to open the log file in notepad (or your default text editor)
The file activity.txt will have a log of all process that made a connection to the Internet in the last two minutes. It will also show which process connected to which website in this time. And not just the web browsers (like iexplore.exe or opera.exe), the log will also show your IM clients, download managers, email programs or any software that requires a net connection.
Scroll though the activity.txt file and look for any process names or website addresses that you are not aware of. If you track one , go to the task manager (or Process Explorer) to find the location of the executable on your computer and eliminate it.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Cellphones: Digitimes Reconfirms gPhone
Apple: iPhone GPS Hack Works and is Awesome
Kind of. It's off by a few hundred yards, but this is a lot better than the total lack of location awareness that the iPhone officially enjoys. And its FREE. It also claims Wi-Fi positioning, which I don't completely understand. A caveat: It crashed Chen's phone, but it worked great for me. And this is only version 1.0, but maybe the real question is why wasn't this functionality built into the iPhone to begin with? Go Navizon!
Who Owns Your Financial Data?
That's the question we should all be asking. Now that Mint has finally launched and joined Wesabe, Geezeo, Buxfer and a few others in the personal financial web service space, it's time to discuss what it means to take your personal financial data out of the hands of your bank and credit card company (who thinks they own it but do not), and put it on the web.
Wesabe, a Union Square Ventures portfolio company, has a Data Bill Of Rights.
It says:
- You can export and/or delete your data from Wesabe whenever you want.
- Your data is your data, not ours. Our job is to help you understand and act on your data.
- We’ll keep all of your data online and accessible for as long as you have an account. No “archive access” charges.
- Any data you want us to keep private, we will.
- If a question comes up not covered by these rights, we will answer it remembering that your data belongs to you.
That's a good start. But I think its time to discuss this at length. And there's no better place to do that than in the blogs. Here's some questions to ponder.
- who owns the metadata you and others create about the transactions that come into the system? - is it better to let the service do the tagging or is it better to let the community to do the tagging of the transactions? - should the tags be shared and if so, when and with whom? - where should your login and passwords be stored? - can these services be hacked? - is personal identifiable information (PII) being stored with the data?
I am sure there are more questions. So now that we have a full fledged category here with at least four high quality companies in it, let's figure out the rules of the road.
Mint Wins TechCrunch40 Top Company Award; Takes $50,000 Prize
Jason Calacanis just announced that Mint was chosen as the best presenting company at TechCrunch40. The provider of an impressive personal finance application will receive $50,000 as part of the award.
Mint presented its application this morning during Session 5, which was entitled "Productivity and Web Applications". See our coverage of that session here.
Mint is a personal finance application that lets users track and monitor their financials in one place without the need of routine maintenance or accounting knowledge. Their application tracks bank, credit union and credit card transactions and alerts users to upcoming bills, low balances or unusual spending. Mint's patent-pending technology automatically categorizes transactions, so users know with precision where they are spending money, what their bank and credit balances are, and how much interest they have earned.
Their application also helps people find ways to save money by constantly searching for deals on credit cards, bank accounts, etc. Mint's technology also analyzes your finances and makes suggestions all while using the same security systems as top banks.
Metaplace: open DIY virtual worlds for everyone
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow on 9/19/07
Metaplace -- a virtual world creation system that lets anyone make their own multiplayer games, link them and share them -- has just launched, at the Techcrunch 40 event. Metaplace was created by Raph Koster, the architect of Star Wars Galaxies and Ultima Online -- and the author of the incredible Theory of Fun. Metaplace is a world-creator that runs right in your browser, and that makes it incredibly simple to share objects, characters and entire worlds. I joined the advisory board as soon as Raph told me what he was working on and why -- this is one of the coolest ideas for gamespace that I've ever heard of.
LinkOur goals are sort of idealistic. We think there are all kinds of things on the Internet that would be improved if anyone could have a virtual place of their own. Right now, there aren't enough good games, for example, and they all seem to be about elves in tights or soldiers in battle armor. Metaplace allows more diversity. Right now, there are lots of people who want to use virtual worlds for research, or education, or business, but it's just too darn hard to get one going. Now you can create a world in just a few minutes and start tailoring it to your needs. Basically, we wanted to democratize the process of making online spaces of all sorts...
We speak Web fluently. Every world is a web server, and every object has a URL. You can script an object so that it feeds RSS, XML, or HTML to a browser. This lets you do things like high score tables, objects that email you, player profile pages right on the player -- whatever you want. Every object can also browse the Web: a chat bot can chatter headlines from an RSS feed, a newspaper with real headlines can sit on your virtual desk, game data could come from real world data... you get the idea. No more walled garden.
DigiTimes: Google will definitely launch its own branded handset
Citing sources at "Taiwan handset makers," DigiTimes is reporting that "Google will definitely launch its own branded handset." However, the Googlephone's OS, hardware specs, production contractor and operating partners have still not been finalized. Given that we're already pretty sure that Google has developed their own mobile OS based on Linux, we'll assume that their use of "finalized" refers to the final feature set and UI polishing -- not the possibility of the gPhone running Symbian or WinMo, for example. DigiTimes' sources also note that Google is contemplating going with a 3G handset instead of EDGE for its initial foray into the cellphone market. However, the choice for Qualcomm's 3G versus TI's EDGE could push the introduction of the HTC manufactured handset into the first half of 2008. Come on Google, it's post-Labor Day now so just go ahead and announce your plans already. We're big boys, we can take it.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Imogen Heap - Just For Now
Popout
Imogen Heap singing acapella "Just For Now" (from her album "Speak For Yourself") at the Studio 11 for Indie 103.1FM on september 2006. Amazing performance. Thanks to Derek and Daniele for the video.
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