Technology

You lost your wallet in Jakarta. You got hit by a car in Paris. You need to get online in a sketchy internet cafe in Reno. Getting stuck in a strange city with no ID, no money, no credit cards, and no medical or insurance documents can be inconvenient. In a medical emergency, it can be life-threatening. So have a backup plan: a secure flash drive loaded with your most vital documents and details. Here’s how to build your own — via Gizmodo Australia

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a great way to browse the web securely, and OS X has a VPN option built right into it. The problem is that it doesn’t always automatically connect when you boot up your computer, or after it disconnects for some reason. A simple Applescript over on Stack Exchange solves this problem — via Lifehacker

EVE helps you to learn shortcuts, in order to increase your productivity with MAC OS X. Every time you execute an action using the mouse, EVE will show you the matching shortcut

With Mountain Lion, you can now use the OS to encrypt disks other than the startup volume, assuming they are in GUID format. This includes USB flash drives and external Firewire/USB/ThunderBolt drives.

In the Finder, open a new window. Find your mounted (GUID) drive in the sidebar.

Control-click on the drive in the sidebar, then choose Encrypt. You are now prompted for your password and a hint (which is required). You will get no feedback, so wait for a few minutes; the time depends on the size of the drive.

The drive should unmount and mount again. Once this happens, your drive is encrypted — via Mac OSX Hints

OSX Mountain Lion changes a lot of small things with the way the operating system works. It also locks down a lot of default behaviours that many people were used to in OSX Lion. Thankfully, a group over at Github has compiled a huge list of the command line tricks that still work in Mountain Lion — via github

Ever feel tricked by your phone’s signal bars into thinking you have a better reception that you actually do? This simple hack will transform those bars to show the actual signal in decibels (dBm). No jailbreaking is required and it’s reversible — via Lifehacker

These estimates have been cited on many occasions by government officials, who portray them as evidence of the threat against America. They are hardly the only cyberstatistics used by officials, but they are recurring ones that get a lot of attention. In his first major cybersecurity speech in 2009, President Obama prominently referred to McAfee’s $1 trillion estimate. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the main sponsors of the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 that is expected to be voted on this week, have also mentioned $1 trillion in cybercrime costs. Last week, arguing on the Senate floor in favor of putting their bill up for a vote, they both referenced the $250 billion estimate and repeated Alexander’s warning about the greatest transfer of wealth in history.

A handful of media stories, blog posts and academic studies have previously expressed skepticism about these attention-getting estimates, but this has not stopped an array of government officials and politicians from continuing to publicly cite them as authoritative. Now, an examination of their origins by ProPublica has found new grounds to question the data and methods used to generate these numbers, which McAfee and Symantec say they stand behind.

One of the figures Alexander attributed to Symantec — the $250 billion in annual losses from intellectual property theft — was indeed mentioned in a Symantec report, but it is not a Symantec number and its source remains a mystery.

McAfee’s trillion-dollar estimate is questioned even by the three independent researchers from Purdue University whom McAfee credits with analysing the raw data from which the estimate was derived. I was really kind of appalled when the number came out in news reports, the trillion dollars, because that was just way, way large, said Eugene Spafford, a computer science professor at Purdue — via redwolf.newsvine.com

NBC has absolutely botched the coverage of the Olympics. As much as it’s possible to achieve universal agreement on anything, it seems that tape-delayed coverage and the inclusion of Ryan Seacrest have combined to accomplish the impossible. Unfortunately, for law abiding Americans who choose not to or are not aware of how to view illegal online streaming coverage, there would seem to be few other options for enjoying the once-every-four-years spectacle.

Fortunately, AnchorFree, maker of the popular traveller’s VPN (Virtual Private Network) HotSpot Shield offers another solution. The company’s little discussed niche VPN product Expat Shield gives users a UK-based IP address: BOOM, live streaming BBC coverage of the Olympics in all its suspense-filled, NBC-free glory — via redwolf.newsvine.com

New research being released this week at the Black Hat security conference by academics in Spain and the US may make that possible.

The academics have found a way to recreate iris images that match digital iris codes that are stored in databases and used by iris-recognition systems to identify people. The replica images, they say, can trick commercial iris-recognition systems into believing they’re real images and could help someone thwart identification at border crossings or gain entry to secure facilities protected by biometric systems.

The work goes a step beyond previous work on iris-recognition systems. Previously, researchers have been able to create wholly synthetic iris images that had all of the characteristics of real iris images — but weren’t connected to real people. The images were able to trick iris-recognition systems into thinking they were real irises, though they couldn’t be used to impersonate a real person. But this is the first time anyone has essentially reverse-engineered iris codes to create iris images that closely match the eye images of real subjects, creating the possibility of stealing someone’s identity through their iris.

The idea is to generate the iris image, and once you have the image you can actually print it and show it to the recognition system, and it will say ‘okay, this is the [right] guy’, says Javier Galbally, who conducted the research with colleagues at the Biometric Recognition Group-ATVS, at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, and researchers at West Virginia University — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Wikipedia is written and maintained by tens of thousands of volunteers across the world. Those, in turn, are assisted by hundreds of bots — autonomous computer programmes that keep the encyclopaedia running.

Penis is the male sex organ, the Wikipedia page in question read.

While that statement is undeniably true and thus may merit inclusion in Wikipedia, it belongs nowhere in the site’s article on national supreme courts and their legal roles.

When an anonymous Wikipedia reader in South Carolina offered that contribution to the globally popular online encyclopaedia last week, it took just seconds for the blemish to be discovered and deleted.

The vandalism was caught not by a reader, but by a simple artificial intelligence programme called a bot — short for robot — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Twitter is working on a tool that would let users export every tweet they’ve ever made on the site, the company’s chief executive, Dick Costolo, told The New York Times.

But why would someone want all their tweets — possibly going all the way back to 2006, when Twitter was first launched?

Facebook already lets you download a personal archive that includes a list of every message you’ve ever sent to someone, a list of every friend you have on the network, copies of any photos or videos you have ever uploaded to the site, and much more. I recently fetched mine and was surprised at the amount of data I’ve shared — packaged up by Facebook into 46MB worth of files and folders — and I consider myself a light user.

Now imagine data from Twitter’s 140 million users who are firing off 140-character tweets throughout the day, every day, whether about their own personal trivia, or their thoughts on current news as it unfolds — via redwolf.newsvine.com

About a year ago, two design students named Alex Cabunoc and Ji A You travelled from their homes in Los Angeles to Cerro Verde, a 30,000 person slum outside of Lima. As students in the celebrated Design Matters program at Art Centre College of Design, which focuses on social innovation, they had come to Cerro Verde as part of a special studio called Safe Agua Peru. Their goal? Develop a commercial product that alleviates issues related to water poverty, targeted at people who earn between $4 and $10 a day.

The students spent two weeks in Cerro Verde, working closely with inhabitants to prototype co-created products at a break-neck speed. Since returning, nearly half of the students have won International Design Excellence Awards, and a student-made documentary about the trip called Hands in the Mist has been shortlisted for a Young Directors Award at Cannes. Cabunoc and You’s design–a manually powered washer and dryer that costs less than $40 called GiraDora–has drawn special attention — via redwolf.newsvine.com