Thousands Of Hotmail Passwords Leaked Online

Confirmed report!

Geeeez...right now, I'm really wondering if my e-mail account is among those that were hacked.

Read the full story here. Hotmail/MSN users, beware.

Touchable Holography

I must admit--the Japanese seem to always think two steps ahead of everyone else. While most people are still innovating on current hologram technology, the Japs are putting it to the next level--by letting users feel the 3D images! And they're using Wii sensors and air to help them achieve it.

Don't believe me? Watch the video below:





Now I'm really wondering what's next from here...

Hidden Song

Are you a struggling musician waiting for a big break? Waiting for that once-in-a-lifetime shot at stardom may cause excessive career trauma, so while you're waiting, I suggest you share your brand of music over at Hiddensong!


Hiddensong is a social networking site that (tries to) connect you with the people of the entertainment industry (I don't want to get hopes up too high, that's why I enclosed the phrase "tries to"). Who knows--your lucky break may just be waiting for you on this site!

Click here to visit Hiddensong. And while you're at it, you may also want to visit featured artist Alex Dutton's page--he's got some impressive tunes for everyone to hear.

Lessons From The Top 10 Brands Explained In A Sentence

I know, the title was a mouthful. But how else am I going to explain, in a nutshell, the Good Brands Report made by PSFK and The Purple List? Haha :D The sentences are quite amusing, really.

Here are three of the brands (my personal picks, actually) that made the list:

Google

Experiment rapidly, embrace failure.

Facebook

Create the playground and let your customers define your offering.

Skype
Reach scale with free product, make money from premium services.

To read the rest of the list, click here.

Parts of the top ten list aggregated from PFSK.

The Art Of Making Friendship, Version 2.0

I've been using "2.0" a lot lately. Hahaha! But isn't it so true?

Image aggregated from Hubspot.

DOS attacks on Facebook and Twitter

Why anyone would want to hack on Twitter and Facebook (other than cripple its capabilites to generate huge revenues from its services) is really beyond my understanding. Unless of course these hackers really want to get close with Britney Spears or aplusk Ashton Kutcher.

BBC News reports that:

The strike was aimed at a pro-Georgian blogger known as Cyxymu. The attack caused a blackout of Twitter for around two hours, while Facebook said its service had been "degraded".
Google said it had defended its sites and was now working with the other companies to investigate the attack.

[The] attack appears to be directed at an individual who has a presence on a number of sites, rather than the sites themselves," a Facebook spokesman told BBC News.

(Click here to read the rest of the article)

It has been reported earlier that a Hacker has been able to break through Twitter's security without even really hacking the site--just guessing a random Twitter employee's password.

Now you know why it's important to have a strong password.

Stunning Silhouette Photography

Why are silhouette photos so irresistably charming? Personally, I think it's because there's a lot of stories to share behind the black-and-white splashes or the black-and-yellow combinations. I am undeniably drawn closer to silhouette photos whenever I look at them, and there's this feeling of wanting to know more about how the image was taken, just like in the photo below:

Don't you just want to know why the man is holding balloons in the dark?

That's just one sample of stunning silhouette photography; there's actually more where that came from, and Digital Picture Zone has 30 of that to share. Click here to see the other photos.

Image aggregated from Flickr user Thomas Hawk, via DigitalPictureZone. Please contact Thomas Hawk for permission to use the photo for personal or commercial purposes.

Finally!

After all the hacking drama yesterday and today, Blogger is up and running once again!

I missed it. I know a lot of you did, too.

Mickey Mouse Version 2.0

Mickey Mouse has gone so tech-y, the steampunk feel is really way behind the popular rodent's history.

Here are just some of the electronic items designed after Mickey that I have scoured on teh interweb (if only I can get my hands on these items...):

Mickey Mouse flash drive

Mickey Mouse and Minnie computer mouse

Mickey Mouse MP3 player

Mickey Mouse USB port

I'm sure there are loads more Mickey Mouse themed gadgets...

Images courtesy of Geekalerts, Uberreview and Sinewelectronics.

Smile Though Your Day Is Crumbling...

Admittedly, it's not really easy to flash a smile when you're in the middle of a chaos, like working inside a train station. But for people in Japan, not smiling is almost a crime! And because of that (coupled with classic Japanese ingenuity), they created the Smile Scanner. I am betting it has the same principle/technology behind the Smile Shutter function of the newer Sony Ericsson mobile phones and Sony Cyber-shot digital cameras, wherein it actually looks for your smile. Only then will you be able to click.

So why is smiling a prerequisite in the Japanese train system?

The Freakonomics section of New York Times Online tells readers:

Japan’s Keihin Express Railway Co. has set up “smile scanners” at 15 of its stations, where railway employees have their smiles assessed by software in the hopes of perfecting a customer-friendly look.

However, BBC reports that it's not really a compulsory thing:

Some of the busiest train stations in the world have installed computerised 'smile scanners' to help employees deliver a better service.'

Well, forcing people to smile is really something. But if it's for the sake of achieving satisfactory customer feedback, then let's all hold a peace sign, smile, and say "kawaii!!!"

*Image aggregated from Destination360.

**Parts of news article courtesy of BBC and NYTimes.

Webcams for Music Video

Here's a very interesting music video from Sour. Sour is a Japanese post-rock band formed in spring 2002 by hoshijima (gut guitar/voice), Sohey (eub/bass), KENNNNN (drums/toys). The video for their single 'Hibi no Neiro' (Tone of everyday) from their first mini album 'Water Flavor EP' was made with the help of their own fans. The cast were selected from the actual Sour fan base, of which many are from outside of Japan. Dig this: each person and scene was filmed purely via webcam.

So how did low-res webcam videos made this particular music video very interesting? Well, watch and see:




If you can't view it here, try clicking on this link.

Video source from Youtube. Video copyright by Sour's music label. Please contact them for commercial use of the material.

Found at Adverblog.

The WayBack Machine

That may have sounded like news about the recent development on time travel technology, but really, The WayBack Machine is simply an archive of web pages, images, and even music! I personally find it very interesting because it has kept record of the changes of (most) major

websites on the internet from 1996 to present date. So if you want to remember how your favourite websites looked like in, say, 1997, just type in the url and hit "Take Me Back"!

To try it yourself, click here.

Here are some of the indexed web pages I have uncovered. Hahaha do you guys still even remember the old Lycos? ;-)

Upside Down Celebrities

Best viewed when drunk! :-P

The images here are from FreakingNews, a website that promotes Photoshop contests...I am not so sure of the prizes, though. Probably just bragging rights to Photoshop Wizardry level. But hey, the stuff there are really good so you may want to check the site out.

I must admit--I'm pretty impressed with the senders' photo editing skills!

So now you know where the images from most funny forwarded emails are taken from! :-)

View the rest of the Celebrities Upside Down gallery by clicking here :-)

Image aggregated from FreakingNews.

Wiierd Stuff

No, I didn't misspell that :)

Yahoo Games featured an article about what could probably be the most dangerous Wii accessory to date: CTA Digital's Bowling Ball Controller. CTA Digital claims that this is the first ever Wii accessory to be "fashioned" after a real bowling ball (weight and all). That should sound scary, if in case of a freak accident, this Bowling Ball Controller suddenly slips out of a player's hand and flies right into somebody's precious Ming vase. Or worse, somebody's head.

But that's just looking at the worst case scenario. CTA Digital has fitted the thing with a wrist strap to secure it in the player's hand, even though their disclaimer is all but encouraging.

And you think this Bowling Ball Controller is weird? Wait till you see the list of other weird Wii stuff from Yahoo Games, like this Riiflex that's supposed to be a dumbell replica. Why not just hit the gym? Read the rest of the article by clicking here.

Images courtesy of Yahoo.com and CTA Digital.

Digital Footprints Turned Snail Mail For Grannies

Here's a bright idea: converting your emails/updates/what-have-yous into hard copies so that your octogenarian relatives may fully understand all those LOLs and ROFLs in a way that's comfortable and "closer to home".

It may be a bright idea alright, except that if we have to think "environmentally" along these lines, it would seem like the idea would generate a higher rate of carbon emission--getting electricity to power your laptops/desktop units to printing the emails on fresh paper, the paper having gone through a process that required machineries to run on electricity, gas, mailing the letters requiring fuel-powered vehicles...the list would probably go on and on. I think that's the major downside to this otherwise nice idea. Then again, Grandpa and Grandma may not be that internet savvy, which means getting to log on to Gmail to check their emails would be a big hassle for them. Therefore, receiving the printed emails may actually be beneficial for them.

Oh well. I guess it's gonna take some time to fully bridge the technological gap between the generation abc and the generation xyz. Until that happens, Sunnygram will continue to offer their services to help the elderly people get in touch with the younger ones:

"The company is called Sunnygram, a play on telegram or maybe gramma — though grandpas like Murray might appreciate the correspondence as, say, a Father's Day gift. Sunnygram is the newest entrant in a field of products trying to bridge the technical divide between those who e-mail and their loved ones who don't. Early efforts, like the Mail Station and Mail Bug, tried to create computer products simple enough for the elderly to learn to use. The next generation of services has scrapped that paradigm entirely. Instead, companies like Sunnygram, Presto and Celery are turning e-mails into faxs, phone messages or stamped letters — media senior citizens already understand — so that users can keep in touch on their own terms."

To read more about Sunnygram, click here.

Italicized text aggregated from an article in Time.com and is copyright by its author, Jeninne Lee St.John. Please contact her for permission to commercially reproduce the article.

Image aggregated from Lilla Roger's portfolio. To see the rest of her gallery, click here.

The Real Sixth Sense

Wow. First it was the holographic interview at CNN. Then comes this ultimate "virtual hub" to juggle all of a person's gadgets and data.

It's amazing what technology can offer to us now. I just came across this article about an MIT graduate student who gets known the world over because of this revolutionary ‘Sixth Sense’ device he created. As the article goes:

"Dr. Pattie Maes, Director of the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab and Pranav Mistry, a graduate student within the same group, have developed 'Sixth Sense', a wearable device that presents the user with a revolutionary way to interact with the world. Sixth Sense enables the wearer to summon data or virtual gadgets, such as a watch or mobile phone, interact with these virtual objects and dispose of them at will. The device, which premiered at the TED conference last month (to a standing ovation), will be demonstrated at ACM's Computer-Human Interaction (CHI) conference on Tuesday, April 7th at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston, Massachusetts, USA."

To read the rest of the article, click here.

Image copyright by Chi2009.org and its respective contributor(s). Please contact them for use of the photo.

Text and image aggregated from Chi2009.org.

First Camera Phone Photograph

This is the first image taken and transmitted with a camera phone and was done by Philippe Kahn, inventor of the first camera phone solution.

To read his full interview and his description of how photography linked to wireless technology changes the way we share images and ideas, click here.

Image copyright by Philippe Kahn

Aggregated from Click.si.edu