We've also got games 5 and 6 of the Battle Of Vancouver...hopefully the loser moniker rests with the Canucks, and what could be the final game of the series rests here Sunday (and let's hope it's their last, not ours). I'm slightly a loser too this weekend as a last minute project has forced some weekend overtime at the office.
Best of the week: Gizmodo has the tech scoop of the year, all because one idiot tester got too tipsy on a night out.
Grey Powell was out on March 18, enjoying the booze at Gourmet Haus Staudt, a German beer garden, for his 27th birthday. "I underestimated how good German beer is," he typed into the next-generation iPhone he was testing on the field, cleverly disguised as an iPhone 3GS. It was his last Facebook update from the secret iPhone, and the last time he'd ever see the device before abandoning it on a bar stool on his way home.Apple's legendary security has always worked well, and the company has reacted swiftly when dealing with product leaks. Aside from a blurry factory photo here or information strategically whispered to friendly media there, when it comes to the big stuff, everything is airtight. Really. At their Cupertino campus, any gadget or computer that is worth protecting is behind armored doors, with security locks with codes that change every few minutes, and prototypes are bolted to desks. The leak of a strategic product could cost them millions of dollars in free marketing promotion and make them lose control of the product news cycle. But that doesn't protect against simple human error.
The person who eventually ended up with the lost iPhone was sitting next to Powell. He asked around the beer hall, but nobody claimed it. While waiting around to see if the stranger would return for the phone, he played with it. "I thought it was just an iPhone 3GS...it just looked like one. I tried the camera, but it crashed three times." The iPhone didn't seem to have any special features, just two bar codes stuck on its back: 8800601pex1 and N90_DVT_GE4X_0493. Next to the volume keys there was another sticker: iPhone SWE-L200221. Apart from that, just six pages of applications. One of them was Facebook. And there, on the Facebook screen, was the Apple engineer, Gray Powell.
Thinking about returning the phone the next day, he left, but upon waking in the morning, the phone was dead. He turned to MobileMe, the service Apple provides to track and wipe out lost iPhones, and then realized that there was something strange that iPhone. The exterior didn't feel right and there was a camera on the front. After tinkering with it, he managed to open the fake 3GS and found a shiny thing completely different from everything that came before. He called a lot of Apple numbers and tried to find someone who was at least willing to transfer his call to the right person, but no luck. No one took him seriously and all he got for his troubles was a ticket number. Shortly thereafter, he sold the device to Gizmodo for $5000, who tested the product, cracked it open to check the guts, and spread a whole tin of embarrassment pie on Apple's face.
You can follow the whole saga in detail below...
• How Apple lost the next iPhone
• Why Apple couldn't get the lost iPhone back
• All the details about the device
• The next iPhone, dissected
• Apple didn't leak the iPhone, and why that matters
• And finally, how Apple asked for their phone back
Plus: A new autism disease identified in a flawed paper linking a common children's vaccine to autism, may not exist, according to new, unfabricated research.
A dozen years ago, Andrew Wakefield and colleagues published a study on a new bowel disease and proposed a connection between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella. The research set off a health scare, and vaccination rates in Britain dropped so low measles outbreaks returned. Eventually the study was widely discredited, 10 of Wakefield's co-authors renounced its conclusions, leading to the journal to retract the paper in February.
This week a paper examined if the illness described by Wakefield and colleagues — autistic enterocolitis, a bowel disease found in autistic people — actually exists. You see, back in 1996, Wakefield was hired by a lawyer to find a new syndrome of bowel and brain disease to help launch a lawsuit against drug companies that made the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.
Eight of the 11 children included in Wakefield's original study had normal bowels. But in the published study, 11 of the 12 were said to have a swollen bowel, which was said to be proof of a new gastrointestinal disease affecting autistic children. In 2005, Wakefield started a clinic in Texas to research and treat the syndrome, but with the original biopsy slides from the children in the primary study no longer available, it started to add up to, well, a load of shit. Independent experts we called to examine hospital reports on the biopsies, and failed to find any distinctive inflammation that would qualify as a new disease. Several studies have shown a link between inflamed bowels and autism, but too little evidence exists to prove there is a new illness.
Britain's General Medical Council ruled Wakefield had acted unethically. He and the two colleagues who have not renounced the study face being stripped of their right to practice medicine in Britain.
And: The Donner Party, the 19th century pioneers who became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada and supposedly resorted to cannibalism, may not have eaten each other after all, suggests a new study on bones found at the Donner's Alder Creek campsite hearth. Sorry for the decades of scorn and slander!Detailed analysis of the bones instead found that the 84 Donner Party members consumed a family dog, along with cattle, deer and horses. Cattle, likely eaten after the animals themselves died of starvation, appear to have been their mainstay. The study is the first to show that the Donner members successfully hunted deer, despite the approximately 30 feet of snow on the ground during the winter of 1846-1847. The horses are thought to have come from relief parties that arrived in February and could have left a few of their animals behind.
Newspapers were primarily responsible for promoting the allegations of cannibalism, which were fiercely denied by the Donner Party survivors. And with the new evidence, there are still naysayers. "They're not saying cannibalism didn't happen there, they're saying they haven't found any PHYSICAL evidence of cannibalism, they haven't found evidence so far that confirms cannibalism," said Gabrielle Burton. Sure, you can't prove something because you haven't yet found the thing you need as proof - that's a reasonable argument.
At the end of February, 1847, trapped nearly four months, Patrick Breen wrote in his diary: Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday that thought she would commence on Milt & eat him. I don't think she has done so yet, it is distressing. The Donnos {Donners} told the California folks (the 1st rescue, a group too small to take everyone out) that they commence to eat the dead people 4 days ago, if they did not succeed that day or next in finding their cattle then under ten or twelve feet of snow & did not know spot or near it, I suppose they have done so ere this time.
Best picture of the week:
golden wiener Best bonus links:
• New Implants Mold To Brain Like Shrink-Wrap - They need to get this for breasts, and then we're talking!
• 15 Movie Posters Re-Imagined With The Stars Originally Cast - A little twist on some more well known flicks you may have seen.
• Cocaine Smuggler's Bestiality Farm - This week's automatic link.
• Christina Aguilera: I'm 'More Sexual' After Motherhood - Says the gal who wore red panties and chaps in her videos. And that was before her gigantic implants. Wow, twice with implants.
• VH1 Ousts Trashy Reality Shows - They're serious about it too. The truth will eventually come out as to their methods.
• ‘Curb’ Renewed For 8th Season - I don't watch it, but this will make some people happy.
• Boxer Edwin Valero Found Dead In Jail - First round TKO after allegedly killing his wife.
• Salt & Fat - An amateur cooking site that strips away the elitist aura from the kitchen and makes it accessible.
• These People Really Need To Get Stoned - It's 4/20, and it's okay to loosen up.
• Firefly Fan Webcomic Takes Serenity Carnage To New Levels - You need to be familiar with the movie, but if you are, this is funny.
• Washington Woman Drops Rape Lawsuit Against Copperfield - He made those charges...disappear. (you knew that was coming)
• Alan Cumming Drops Out Of Spider-Man Musical - Smartest career move he made relating to that whole mess.
• 'Bachelor' Bob Guiney's Wife Files For Divorce - Wonderful news for a guy who's only claim to minor fame was being single.
• Everest Death Zone Set For A Spring Clean Up - Spring cleaning isn't just for closets and garages. And who doesn't want to have a cleaner mountain death zone?
• The Poor Man's... - Pajiba out the stars head to head and shows you the best. And second best.
• The Trustworthiness Of Beards - You can't trust a Fu-Manchu. Not ever.
• Toy Tests Your Ability To Endure Electrical Shock - Christmas time is going to be exciting around the emergency room.
Worst of the week: Computers in companies, hospitals and schools around the world got stuck repeatedly rebooting themselves after an antivirus program identified a normal Windows file as a virus. See, computer troubles are not just for Apple.
McAfee Inc. confirmed that a software update it posted caused its antivirus program for corporate customers to misidentify a harmless file. It has posted a replacement update for download. They could not say how many computers were affected, but judging by online postings, the number was at least in the thousands and possibly in the hundreds of thousands. It did not appear that consumer versions of its software caused similar problems. It is investigating how the error happened "and will take measures" to prevent it from recurring.
The computer problem forced about a third of the hospitals in Rhode Island to postpone elective surgeries and stop treating patients without traumas in emergency rooms. In Kentucky, state police were told to shut down the computers in their patrol cars as technicians tried to fix the problem. The National Science Foundation headquarters in Virginia also lost computer access. Intel Corp. also appeared to be among the victims.
In many locations, personal attention to each PC from a technician appeared to be the only way to fix the problem because the computers weren't receptive to remote software updates when stuck in the reboot cycle. It's not uncommon for antivirus programs to misidentify legitimate files as viruses - last month, antivirus software from Bitdefender locked up PCs running several different versions of Windows. However, the scale of this outage was abnormal.
Plus: A third of U.S. teenagers with cell phones send more than 100 texts a day. Go outside or read a book, whydoncha!
The study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, offered an obvious glimpse into teen culture and communication. Their ability to notice the obvious showed that texting has risen dramatically even since 2008, eclipsing cell phone calls, instant messaging, social networks, and talking face-to-face. Three-fourths of young people between 12 and 17 own cell phones and of those that do, girls typically send or receive 80 text messages per day and boys, 30 per day.
"Texting is now the central hub of communication in the lives of teens today, and it has really skyrocketed in the last 18 months," said a Pew researcher, recognizing the rise in payment plans that allow unlimited texting. The study's authors also point out for people that have never texted that, unlike phone calls, text messaging can be quietly carried out under the noses of parents, teachers or other authority figures and, unlike computers, it can be done almost anywhere. No shit?
Text messaging has become so much a part of teenagers' lives that 87% of those who text said that they sleep with, or next to, their phone. What are the obvious chances of that? The percentage of teens with cell phones who sent at least one text message a day increased from 38% in 2008 to 54% in September 2009, according to the study. Meanwhile 38% of teens said they daily make at least one cell phone call, 30% said they talk on a landline phone and 24% said they used instant messaging.
And: Republicans are stepping up their criticism of the Securities and Exchange Commission following reports that senior agency staffers spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were supposed to be policing the nation's financial system.
Top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Darrell Issa said it was "disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink of collapse," when they should have been overseeing the growing problems in the financial system.
The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years. According to them 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed. So basically, SEC personel looked at more porn after the crisis occured than during it - though you can expect that to be an indictment of the Democrats by the GOP.
The memo summarizes past inspector general probes and reports some shocking findings:
• A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.
• An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as "Sex" or "Pornography." Yet he still managed to amass a collection of "very graphic" material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC's internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense, and received a 14-day suspension.
• Seventeen of the employees were "at a senior level," earning salaries of up to $222,418.
The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. The cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008. Oops, Republicans - that was under your watch. About 16% of men with Internet access at work admit to looking at online porn while at the office, according to a 2006 survey. Also, 84% of men surveyed lied.
Worst picture of the week:
you're serious about working out because you have a professional exercise outfitWorst bonus links:
• Eliminated Idol Andrew Garcia: I Was Just Confused By the Judges - You didn't understand when they meant when they said you sucked and wanted you off the program? Well, at least you'll have time to think about it.
• Divorce Dilemma: Texas Says Gays Can't Get Divorce - They can't get married there, so you won't let them get a divorce? Way to get involved.
• Crazy Tits Is Not A Stupid Whore; She Is THE Stupid Whore - Maybe Tila did bring lesbianism into the mainstream...oh, wait, that was Ellen she was mixing herself with.
• Would You Wear Fergie's Snakeskin Suit? - No. Especially after her ballsweat stains set in. Though only a snakeskin suit could distract from her tranny face.
• Biggest Loser's Jillian Michaels Can't Handle Getting Fat While Pregnant - Weight issues for the obsessive compulsive trainer? What a (not) shock.
• Jay Leno On Conan O'Brien's TBS Show: 'I Knew He'd Land On His Feet' - No thanks to you, dickbag. Way to join the cheering section.
• Church Pedophilia Scandal Grows In Latin America - The Catholics have made an art of ruining children's innocence throught the western hemisphere.
• Heidi Montag Compares Post-Surgery Body To Barbie - Horribly out of proportion, made of plastic, and not a good role model for little girls.
• Courtney Love Changes Her Name - Though I think I liked her better before she went with Skankbones Whoredrug.
• Robot Mouth Simulates The Human Voice - Which human's voice. It sounds like a deaf person having a seizure at the bottom of a well.
• Mariah Carey, Nick Cannon To Wed A Third Time - That's three gifts I haven't sent, and a third time I don't care at all.
• Sharon Osbourne To Give Breast Implants To Ozzy - Guys want fake boobs in your chest, not taken out and then given to them. What's he going to do with them now anyway?
• WellPoint Routinely Targets Breast Cancer Patients - Fucking scumbag company.
• Nicole Scherzinger Opens Up About Aunt With Down Syndrome - We're only pretending to care because you're hot. You've seen one aunt with down syndrome, you've seen them all.
• Want Porn? Buy An Android Phone, Steve Jobs Says - Thanks for helping me make my new phone purchase decision.
• Scott Baio Defends Wife's Lesbian Shitass Rant - It's the most work that he's done in years. And the material is edgy!
• Video: Pennsylvania Woman Gets House Arrest For Piercing Kittens - The tattoos were okay, but you have to draw a line somewhere.
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