As reported on Wired. BY DAMON LAVRINC View as gallery The seventh generation of the Corvette has arrived, and Chevrolet is so damned proud of it they’ve brought an iconic name back from the past: Stingray. The Corvette has never been a refined machine. But that’s part of its blue-collar charm. It’s the working man’s supercar. A big, brutish middle finger to the Italians and Germans. This latest version doesn’t stray too far from that…
As reported on Wired. BY ANNALIZA SAVAGE Best known for his work on horror films like Evil Dead and action blockbusters like the Spider-Man films, Sam Raimi may not be the first director who comes to mind for Disney’s new Wizard of Oz film. But Raimi says Oz: The Great and Powerful is like nothing he’s done before. Raimi calls the original Wizard of Oz ”one of my favorite movies of all time,” but instead of following Dorothy down the Yellow Brick Road, Oz: The Great…
As reported on Wired. BY CADE METZ Image: Flickr/HarshWCAM3. One early morning in 2011, somewhere behind the curtain at the world’s most popular social network, a Facebook engineer pressed a single button and brought down the entire operation. This unnamed engineer didn’t necessarily make a mistake. He just decided to run the kind of software task the social networking giant runs all the time. He ran a “Hadoop job,” a way of analyzing data. The…
As reported on The Verge. By Adi Robertson Defense Distributed, a group dedicated to making viable 3D printed firearms, has enjoyed increasing publicity during the recent debates over gun control. Now, it’s directly addressing efforts to ban one of the most frequently criticized components: rifle magazines holding over ten rounds, often referred to as “high-capacity” magazines, like those used at the attack in Newtown, CT. In a video posted yesterday, the groupdemonstrated shooting from a 30-round AR-15 magazine…
As reported on The Verge. By Bryan Bishop The family of Aaron Swartz pulled no punches in their comments after the 26-year-old’s suicide, blaming a “criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.” Assistant United States Attorney Stephen Heymann is one of the individuals that’s been named in particular — and it turns out Swartz isn’t the first subject of a Heymann investigation that’s taken his own life. Buzzfeed reports that in 2008 Jonathan James also committed suicide two weeks…
As reported on The Verge. By Jeff Blagdon Kaspersky Labs reports that over the past five years, a co-ordinated malware campaign called “Rocra” (short for “Red October”) has been funneling classified information and geopolitical intelligence from diplomatic, governmental, and scientific research systems all over the world. It uses known exploits in Microsoft Word and Excel documents to gain access to users’ systems, relying on a targeted social engineering or “spear phishing” element in order to trick users…
As reported on The Verge. By Ben Kersey An international team of astronomers led by the University of Central Lancashire in the UK has discovered “the largest known structure in the universe.” The team says that the recently observed large quasar group — comprised of dozens of highly energetic star-like objects — has a typical size of 500 Megaparsecs, but the size of the cluster is closer to 1200 Mpc at its widest point. To put…
As reported on The Verge. By Ellis Hamburger It’s time for Mark Zuckerberg to turn his focus back on users, not just investors We’ll be live blogging Facebook’s event tomorrow starting at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. Check it out here! There’s no numerical evidence that Facebook has “lost its cool,” but you can feel it. You hear people talking about it. Instead of seeing Facebook blue illuminating the phones of fellow subway and bus riders, you…
As reported on TechCrunch. by FREDERIC LARDINOIS You know a mobile app store is still young and needs more content when the company behind it still writes its own blog posts when interesting new apps appear in it. With 150,000 apps, the Windows Phone store isn’t actually quite as empty as the Windows 8 store, but Microsoft could sure use some marquee apps for its mobile platform. To get developers and consumers a bit more excited about it, the company…
As reported on TechCrunch. by JAMES ALTUCHER Editor’s note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and several-times entrepreneur. His latest books are I Was Blind But Now I See and 40 Alternatives to College. Please follow him on Twitter @jaltucher. People read TechCrunch because they want to create something, they don’t want to follow orders all of their lives, and they want financial freedom. I’m being blunt. The above three items feel good. God bless you. Hopefully once you get the three things above,…