IBLOG SPACE

You read that right, folks, the representatives speaking for the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation said this week that their Beidou satellite navigation system is currently operational and will have free, global coverage in place by the year 2020. This system Beidou, otherwise known as Big Dipper, will be providing both location data and SMS messaging to any device that can utilize it for free. Beidu is working right this minute mainly in China and the group says that global coverage is in the works for full working operation inside 8 years. Ran Cheng of CASTC made a formal commitment this week that Beidou service would be free and remain free to all through the future. Chinese workers are currently seeing to the fact that this system must be operable with the US GPS system in the future as well as the forthcoming EU Galileo network and Russia’s already in-place GLONASS. This first service is currently working for the area inside 84 degrees to 160 degrees east longit

This week the customers of global intelligence firm Stratfor fell victim to the hacker amalgamation known as Anonymous, and starting today the folks at Dazzlepod have made a webpage available where you, the user, can check your email to make sure you weren’t amongst those hit. The Dazzlepod collective has a searchable database which includes all of the information stolen and dumped by Anonymous over the past few attacks, this able to be searched by you to see if your email is amongst those compromised. A lovely service for those wishing to stay clean! The folks at Dazzlepod are located in Malaysia and have over 750,000 accounts on file for your searching pleasure, this nothing more than a collection of what’s already been made available to the public by Anonymous. Where what Anonymous has done is to make secrets available to the public, Dazzlepod aims to help those who wish to remain anonymous. Sound like a bit of a paradox to you? Stratfor’s computers were compromised over this holi

Handheld gaming devices aren’t dead yet, not by a long shot if Sony and the FIFA family has anything to say about it, what with their brand new ad spot showing off not just the game FIFA 12, but the system it relies on as well: PS Vita. This device is the ultimate next generation sports experience you can place in the palm of your hands, says the group, and nothing will beat it down for in your face soccer action right out of the box. Call it futball if you really love the sport, and check out how fabulous it’s going to be for you when you’ve got the hardware to match. If this next generation handheld console by the name of PS Vita has one thing going for it, it’s support by the developers unwilling to let go of the many different ways people want to play games in their home and aboard airplanes. Because where else could you better take the time to play a full sports session than flying 50,000 feet above the ground? In this video FIFA 12 is shown to work with dual analog sticks, touc

It’s just been confirmed in the official Meizu forums by Meizu CEO J. Wong that they’d be producing their second big release with the Meizu MX name in 2012: a quad-core version of the handset! This is more than exciting for those of us who’ve yet to even get our hands on the first version released in Hong Kong late this year, this device running the greatest version of Android out there: Meizu’s custom! This user interface, for those of you unfamiliar, is a very popular ROM made by developers essentially for the fun of it until late this year when this team of industrious manufacturers picked it up and made it the real deal with this, the Meizu MX version one. The first version of the device, just called the Meizu MX, totes the fantastic Exynos 4210 dual-core processor from Samsung that you’ll also remember from the original Galaxy S II. This processor portends the next generation Meizu which may well be running with the Samsung Exynos 4412 quad-core chip. You can bet your biffy this

I’ve been messing around with a Kindle Fire for the past week or so as my good pal Marty picked one up pre-Christmas for the holiday stay up here in Northern Minnesota – it’s been great but for the lack of Ice Cream Sandwich. That is to say, it’s OK, but it’s not the perfect masterpiece that Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich would make it. Hackers have taken the reigns this past week and have made a port of the newest Android mobile operating system a relative reality here on this PlayBook form clone, making us once again wonder if it’s worth the cheap, cheap price it costs. You’ll be treated here to a vision of Ice Cream Sandwich working on the Fire, complete with some lovely widgets and the cyan coloring. Not one whole heck of a lot of the primary functions are working in full force as of yet, but it’s encouraging to see. This especially since this device was not approved by Google and therefor did not have the Android Market nor a suite of Google-made apps, not to mention a custom us

The rumors have been flying for a long time now that Apple was looking to make an actual TV. The company has had the Apple TV in the past that was a set-top box. The new TVs would presumably have similar functions built into the set. According to DigiTimes sources, the supply chain is getting the components needed to build the new iTVs ready to go. The sources claim that the materials will be readied in Q1 2012 to meet the Apple schedule for launching the sets in Q2 or Q3. In previous rumors about these TVs we had heard the screens would be three different sizes including 24-inch, 32-inch, and 55-inch versions. DigiTimes sources are claiming that the initial sizes will be 32-inch and 37-inch. Other sources are also cited that are saying the traditional next-gen Apple TV set-top box will debut in 2012 as well. It would make sense for Apple to target the new buyers with a TV that has the tech integrated and a set-top box for those that don’t want to buy a new TV.

The GSM standard is widely used on mobile phones of all kinds depending on the carrier you are on. A security researcher is claiming that a flaw in the GSM standard has been discovered that could be exploited by criminals and hackers to give them control of the device. Once that control was going that hacker could force the phone to make calls or send text messages. Reuters reports that GSM standards are used on 80% of the mobile phones on the market today meaning billions of mobile phone users could be open to the attack. This sort of attack has been carried out before and was targeted to specific devices. The difference here is the number of devices open to the attack. Karsten Nohl, the head of Germany’s Security Research labs said that the new flaw would allow a nefarious sort to attack hundreds of thousands of phones in a short time frame. The attack would allow hoards of calls to be placed to premium numbers racking up potentially huge money for the hacker. Thankfully, Nohl wo

The EV and hybrid industry runs on batteries and those batteries have the potential to cause a fire hazard if the right set of circumstances occurs. GM found this out the hard way with the recent battery woes that led to some Volt test vehicles catching fire after an impact that affected the coolant system for the battery. Fisker is the latest EV firm to have battery issues. The good news for Fisker is that the issue with battery pack supplied to it by A123 Systems Inc was discovered when only 50 vehicles had been produced with the flaw. A123 also supplied batteries to GM and Daimler AG, there is no word on if the same flaw might have something to do with the battery issues on the Volt. According to A123, the issue is with a misaligned hose clamp that is part of the battery pack internal cooling system. The misaligned clamp has the potential to cause a leak, and the leak could cause a short leading to a fire. The fires in the Volt test vehicles have been potentially linked to leaki

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has discovered two Earth-sized planets orbiting a very distant star. The two planets are 0.76 and 0.87 times the Earth’s radius. The planets are thought to have once been much larger. The smaller rocky planets discovered are believed to be all that’s left of once larger gas giant planets. The two planets are the smallest ever discovered orbiting around an active star. Astronomers studying the newly discovered planets think that they were once gas giants along the lines of Saturn or Jupiter. They became the small rocky planets that were discovered after the parent star became a red giant and burned off the outer gas layers. Any planets that orbited closer to the parent star would have been vaporized when the star expanded. The two planets are orbiting a subdwarf parent star called KIC 02697388. The star is about 4,000 light-years away in the direction of the Cygnus constellation. A Subdwarf B star is a very hot blue star that is between a red giant and

Google’s Eric Schmidt gave an interview to an Italian newspaper last week that talked about all sorts of things. The most titillating part for gadget hounds is the little blurb offered that Google would be making a tablet directly in the next six months. This would be a move similar to what Google has done with Nexus smartphones in the past. The Google Nexus devices were designed by Google and tossed onto the market to show the ultimate blend of hardware and Google software in action. With the slower adoption of most Android tablets compared to the iPad, this move is no surprise. Google could do well with a tablet that has high-end hardware and is tightly and perfectly designed to use Android 4.0. Schmidt offered up no detail on the tablet plans for Google. All he said was Google was working on the tablet and gave it a six month window. That six-month window lines up with the launch rumors for the next iPad pretty well. It would be interesting to see the new iPad go head to head wi

Life starts in diapers for us all and for those that live to an advanced age life often takes you back to diapers. Once people lose the ability to control urine or get up and go to the bathroom themselves, an adult diaper is the only thing standing between the wearer and a big mess. The catch is that if no one is around to help change the diaper things can be nearly as messy as having no diaper at all. Leave it to the industrious Japanese to come up with an automatic diaper called the Humany pad. This thing has a pouch for the penis that helps funnel the urine and a sensor that recognizes the urine and kicks off a suction pump. That pump takes the urine for the diaper into a tank. That allows the wearer to avoid sitting in urine inside the diaper until someone can change it out. The suction machine apparently removes all the urine in the diaper except for about 0.5 cc of liquid. This sounds like a medical gadget that would save effort on the caregiver’s part and keep the wearer muc

Last week GoDaddy reportedly saw 70,000 domain names moved away from its services as a registrar. The mass exodus was the internet response to GoDaddy throwing its support behind the SOPA act that is seeking to become law right now. The swift removal of tens of thousands of domains names registered at GoDaddy was a good thing for competitors like Namecheap and others. Many of those domain registrations that GoDaddy lost went to competitors like Namecheap. The transfer didn’t go smoothly, and Namecheap has accused GoDaddy of withholding some of the needed details to make a smooth transfer to the new registrar. Namecheap said that GoDaddy was returning incomplete Whois information thereby delaying the transfer process. GoDaddy claims that the limiting of Whois information is a standard practice to prevent Whois abuse. GoDaddy also says that had Namecheap contacted it the limit on the Whois data would have been lifted. Since the mass exodus of domains kicked off, GoDaddy has retracted

Since Apple unveiled Siri on the new iPhone 4S there have been users of older iPhone devices that are frothing at the mouth to get their hands on Siri code and bring the virtual assistant to other devices. That had been illegal since the files needed for the port were encrypted by Apple and using them was a copyright violation. With a recent iOS update; those files were left unencrypted. That raised the possibility of a legal port without hacking encryption. A new installer has now surfaced that will install Siri on any jailbroken iOS device that you may be using. The installer is called the Spire installer. Spire goes around any copyright infringement and downloads about 100MB of files to get Siri working on your device. It uses a proxy server with information that comes from an iPhone 4S to act as a go between to get Siri to work since it needs access to Apple servers. The Spire installer is on the Cydia store right now for you to try out. If you download Spire and install it on

Hacker group anonymous has hit a security firm based in Austin, Texas called Stratfor. The hackers are alleging that they were able to gain access to the security firm’s servers and steal detailed information on customers, including credit card details. Anonymous claims that they could steal the detailed information because Stratfor didn’t encrypt the data. For now, Stratfor has suspended operations on its servers and via email while it investigates the attack. A person posted online claiming to be a member of Anonymous and claims that the hacker group had used the credit card details that were stolen in the attack to donate more than a million dollars to various charities. That claim is unconfirmed for now. As of now, the Stratfor site and servers will remain closed for an unknown period until the hack is investigated, and the security issue that allowed access is found. Stratfor says that the stolen details were a list of some members who had purchased their publications Stratfor

Supercomputers have been getting ranked on their performance for a long time now. The list of the fastest surfaces each year and often it changes from printing to printing as new supercomputers are deployed around the world for scientific and educational purposes. Generally, the machines are in place at government labs and universities and are only for use by the staff at those locations. Amazon has a virtual supercomputer that is on the list of the world’s fastest machines. The big difference between the Amazon cloud supercomputer and the other machines on the list is that Amazon’s machine doesn’t actually exist. The cloud supercomputer runs on the Elastic Compute Cloud that Amazon deployed, and the company provides access to the virtual supercomputer when it is needed. The big difference between the Amazon virtual supercomputer, that at its core still uses real clusters like the other machines on the list, and the traditional machines on the list is that the Amazon offering runs

Boxee’s newest 1.5 update today essentially marks the company’s transition from focusing their media-streaming service on the desktop, to that of devices. With that said, the app comes with a newly revamped interface, that provides faster access to the browser and the menu appearing as an overlay, along with an easier to access search function. The movie and TV sections have also both been updated, given more effortless navigation by genres and sources, and making it easier to check for previously unwatched video episodes. The app is available for download on Macs running Snow Leopard or newer OSes, Windows XP or later, and Linux boxes running 32-bit Ubuntu 11.10 or later. The 1.5 release marks the final desktop version of Boxee, and will be pulled after late January rolls around, when the interface arrives on Boxee’s own hardware with the Live TV Tuner add-on. Boxee explained that the decision to put the desktop app to rest was an expectation that TV was increasingly more likely t

It’s the time of the year when Apple fires up its 12 Days of Christmas app once again, to mark the start of its annual holiday promotion that gives away free songs, music videos, apps, and books to Canadian and most European residents all around the world. Although the promotion does not run to Apple customers based in the US, the app is available for download from the iTunes stores in Canada, the United Kingdom, and several other European countries. In its fourth year running, the 12 day promotion extends from the day after Christmas, December 26th, to January 6th and gifts its app users with a free digital download from iTunes each and every day. This year’s giveaway starts with a free digital copy of Coldplay’s live EP from the not so long ago Apple-sponsored iTunes Festival in London. Apple says that each day’s free daily “gift” will only be available to download from iTunes for up to 24 hours. Moreover, iTunes users who don’t own an iOS device themselves can sign up for email

It’s the day after Christmas eve, and we’ve just found out that Intel has reportedly told company partners that a full release of their Thunderbolt I/O technology is slated in April 2012. Intel is prepping to go beyond just Macs (Apple’s the only company w/Thunderbolt support on its MacBook Air, iMac, and MacBook Pro lineups), and will allegedly launch Thunderbolt on motherboards, notebooks and desktop PCs, springtime of next year. A report from Digitimes stated that the cost of the Thunderbolt technology is expected to experience a decrease in the second half of 2012, allowing for more widespread adoption in the consumer market. Though, at the moment, Apple does offer Thunderbolt across most of the Mac line, the very first Thunderbolt products have been primarily limited to relatively high end electronics. More widespread adoption should facilitate the drive in adoption by accessory makers that will be advantageous to both Mac and PC users that utilize Thunderbolt as a future medium

When the going gets tough, and you first-world gift receivers are crying because ALL YOU GOT was an Android tablet that wasn’t quite the iPad 2 or the Transformer Prime you were hoping for, listen to this: I’m not going to punch you in the face for being ungrateful more than one time, and here’s a list of things you can do with this non-returnable hunk of technology trash. You’ve got a tablet running some form of Android and a processor that’s not the worst in the world, but certainly isn’t as nice as even the most basic high-end smartphone out there: what do you do? You fill it up to the brim with music, news, and simple games with low requirements for high amounts of fun.

It’s time to get serious about blowing up everything from your car to your pet dog to your swingset and back down to your salt and pepper shakers – with Action Mobile FX for iPhone, you can do such a thing with the greatest of ease. This application was released on the 22nd of December, right before the holiday rush, and is set to set the virtual world on fire directly through your device’s camera. You select your effect (the missile is best), hit GO for your camera, film a short scene, and the effect is added automatically: fire, fire for everyone! This isn’t the first time someone has created an instant-effects app for the iPhone, but it’s certainly the best effort to date. Have a peek as a coffee table is blown up right before your eyes with the greatest of ease! This one’s filmed with the iPad 2, by the way, so marvel at how good it is even with that less than perfect camera: Now tap fast and tap instantly on down to your local iTunes store here: [Action Movie FX app on iTune

Holidays are generally a time for high blood-pressure, so it’s always nice when technology steps in to smooth frustrations and make things easier. Unfortunately, time with family – or indeed away from them – can also introduce its own electronic headaches. Many of us make the annual pilgrimage to the family home with a bag full of cables, gadgets and thumb-drives loaded with anti-malware software, along with the apprehension that we’ll be the unpaid Geek Squad while we’re there. Some things, though, should be simple: talking to distant family via Skype, for instance. Unfortunately, as I discovered myself this Christmas, that wasn’t to be the case.

There are two main hero features on the camera you’re about to witness: the first being that it’s essentially got a drawstring that’ll blast the lens around in a 360 degree circle so you can capture the area you’re in in a full panorama scene. The second bit is that this camera is clad in Italian Toledo leather, complete with a lovely thatched pattern so you’re in style in the field. Take it out to a field full of cows for ultimate odd artistic appeal. What more could you want than a camera that spins its head around in a circle so you can grab the whole scene? This obsession with capturing really, really long photos is not new, nor is it an abnormality here in this current mobile landscape we’re in. It’s become such an interest that the newest version of Google’s mobile OS Android has a built-in function to essentially do the same thing you can do with this camera. This camera though, is a fabulous piece of hardware in and of itself. Hold the pole and pull the string! This camera

The folks at LG have let known today what and when they plan on doing with their active line of smart devices in regards to the newest Google-made mobile operating system Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. What they’ve got on the books as of today is a “global upgrade schedule” beginning in the second and third quarters of 2012, followed then by a “global roll out.” There is a list, of course, which we’re hoping LG will follow implicitly, as they promise that they’re “taking all possible measure to offer a smooth OS upgrade in a timely manner.” On the other hand, they do not that exact start dates very well could vary by market as each country, carrier, and smartphone model have different requirements. What LG is announcing today is a start of 2012 upgrades to Ice Cream Sandwich with the LG Optimus LTE, Prada phone by LG 3.0, the LG Optimus 2X, the LG Optimus Sol, the LG my Touch Q and the LG Eclipse, each of these starting in the second quarter of the year. After these are updated, or

Get your salt out, ladies and gentlemen, because although this device may well be a real-deal object set for the 2012 event already set in place by Nokia for CES, it’s also only appearing in a single photo which very well could have been doctored to look like an attempt by Mr Blurrycam at capturing a unique glace for himself. The story that goes along with the image you’re about to see is that someone at Boored@Work got Nokia’s Chris Weber to show off a piece of the “Amazing Everyday” event early: this piece being a business card sized device made by Nokia and set to bust apart the idea that your smartphone is the only device you need. Not that we needed more incentive to check out new devices, of course, we’re always up for a few more digital bits, but what use would this tiny monster be? Perhaps it is a digital business card made to only display a few screens and therefor having near-infinite battery life? Maybe we’ve got a new iPod contender on our hands here? Or maybe it’s just a