JERUSALEM — A concerted effort of millions of attempts to cripple Israeli websites during the Gaza conflict has failed, Israel’s finance minister said Monday, claiming that the only site that was successfully hacked was back up within minutes.
Cyber security experts said that such hacking attempts have become a new aspect of modern-day warfare and states have to invest in fortifying their virtual defenses on a battleground with vague terrain.
Amira Young’s friend gave her some controversial advice right before her marriage ended in divorce. In a blog post, Young revealed that her friend “said that if I wanted to stay married, I needed to hang around the right people, namely, “married and coupled people.” She elaborated: “If you want to be single, keep hanging out with your single friends and you will be.”
On a segment for HuffPost Live, Young further explored how friendships with singles may affect marriage, and if they were at the root of her own divorce.
“I examined quite a few of my friendships, particularly with two of my male friends who are described in the piece,” she said. “In truth, it was not the friendships themselves, even though there have been claims of emotional affairs, which was not the case. I realized that it’s because I had good friends, but I put those friends first, beyond my marriage. Which is not something you should do. Your marriage should come first.”
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Controversial conservative Christian and evangelist Rev. Franklin Graham gave a typically outspoken interview last week, telling David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network that Obama’s second term will “usher in the largest changes in our society since the Civil War.” He also maintained that President Barack Obama’s reelection is proof that America has “turned our back on God.”
As Right Wing Watch points out, the noted religious right leader told Brody that both parties have lost sight of moral values.
“We need someone like a Jerry Falwell to come back and resurrect the Moral Majority movement where you get people that have a moral background who are willing to come together and vote for moral issues that are important to this nation,” Brody said during the interview.
Jackson Rathbone, who plays “Jasper” in the hit movie franchise “Twilight,” came by the HuffPost Live studio Monday to talk “Twilight” and chat with fans about the series. He thanked fans for being part of the phenomenon and even brought one “Twilight” fan, Emma Clark, to tears.
“It’s been the most amazing five, six years,” she told Rathbone. “I don’t have words for how much it means to me. To get to be a part of it is so huge.”
Rathbone and HuffPost Live host Abby Huntsman discussed the existence of vampires — and while the actor doesn’t believe in vampires, he does believe in “emotional vampires.”
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What if you could give Christmas gifts to yourself but actually be surprised when you open them up? That’s exactly what Darius Kazemi did when he wrote a bot that buys him random crap off of Amazon. And he never has any idea what he’s going to get. More »
ESPN on the Xbox just got a helluva lot better. Instead of being an awkward, half-featured sports channel, Xbox Live is now getting the real deal: a WatchESPN app. That means you can watch ALL of ESPN’s channels: ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3, ESPNU and more. More »
The Wii U had its big moment yesterday, launching to long lines and excited customers. As a game console, the Wii U brings a lot of exciting possibilities with it, especially with Nintendo‘s tablet-style gamepad. We’re looking forward to seeing what happens with the Wii U in the future, but first things first: how are the launch games holding up with the critics?
It turns out some of them are faring better than others. Currently, Metacritic gives the crown of highest-rated Wii U game to Batman: Arkham City Armored Edition, with a score of 84. It’s worth pointing out that Metacritic is only showing five reviews for the game though, so that score could go up or down as more reviews influence the aggregate rating. New Super Mario Bros. U comes in just behind Arkham City with a score of 82, this one based on reviews from 17 critics. Super Scribblenauts rounds out the top three Wii U games on Metacritic, though again, the site’s score of 78 is only based on five reviews.
Nintendo Land is doing pretty well, netting an aggregate score of 76 from 20 different reviews, while Ubisoft’s ZombiU is at the bottom of the pack. The game, which was the subject of a lot of attention in the lead up to the Wii U’s release, is showing a score of 72 based on 14 different reviews. While 72 out 100 isn’t a bad score by any means, it’s enough to bump it into Metacritic’s “mixed or average reviews” category.
When we look at user ratings, it’s a bit of a different story. Scribblenauts Unlimited steals the top spot away from Arkham City with a user score of 8.2 based on 6 ratings, while New Super Mario Bros. U‘s 45 user ratings put it at 7.9. Assassin’s Creed III actually comes in third behind those two, with a score of 7.3 based on 9 ratings.
Of course, these scores will fluctuate and more games will be given ratings as new reviews come in, but at this early hour, it looks like New Super Mario Bros. U, Scribblenauts Unlimited, and Nintendo Land might all be good picks (though if you’re buying a Deluxe bundle, you don’t have much of a choice when it comes to Nintendo Land). Which Wii U games have you been enjoying? Do you agree with the Metacritic scores for these titles?
Wii U launch titles hit Metacritic with varying scores is written by Eric Abent & originally posted on SlashGear.
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The downfall of Microsoft’s Kin smartphones is a fairly well-known story at this point, and something that Microsoft would no doubt prefer to forget, but details have a tendency to keep trickling out. The latest comes courtesy of Wired’s Gadget Lab, which has obtained some previously unseen internal testing videos that paint a bleak picture of the problems Microsoft was facing. While the devices in question are pre-production models, they’re said to be “changed very little from the shipping product” and, as you can see in the videos, they didn’t exactly make a good impression on the product testers. Words like “lag” and “frustrating” are the common theme, with one tester adding: “I can imagine my daughter would give this back very quickly.” Of course, these are just a small sample of what were undoubtedly many testing sessions, but the complaints are remarkably similar to those we’d see when the phones were ultimately released. You can find one video after the break and the rest at the link below.
Continue reading Internal Microsoft Kin testing videos offer a new look at what went wrong
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Microsoft
Source: Wired Gadget Lab
While more and more devices are beginning to be able to understand what we’re saying, one problem that we face is that not everything that we communicate is in the form of a verbal cue. With that in mind, the roboticists at the Honda Research Institute have been working on a robot that can not only understand words, but other sounds.
HEARBO (the HEAR-ing roBOt) uses a technology called Computational Auditory Scene Analysis to distinguish various sounds from its environment. This allows it to not just pick out verbal communication, but everything from the beep of an alarm clock to the mailman knocking on your front door. It can then use this information to make decisions about what to do.
The specific version of the technology being used for HEARBO is called HARK, an open source library that breaks down the understanding of sounds into three steps: localization, separation and recognition. This allows it to not only distinguish sounds in a noisy location, but exactly where they are coming from. In fact, the technology can nail down the direction that sound is coming from down to 1 degree of accuracy. Currently, the system can distinguish up to four different sounds going on at once, but in theory more microphones could allow it to handle even more sources.
Here’s a short demonstration video showing how the robot can understand what’s going on despite the world’s most annoying alarm clock going off the whole time:
And here’s an example of HEARBO easily distinguishing music from human commands, identifying song attributes, and even dancing a little bit:
So why develop such a robot? The technology could be used for things like robot butlers that could automatically answer the doorbell, or do things like turn off the TV if the kids have been using it for too long.
[via iEEE Spectrum]
Sometimes carting around expensive electronics in your bag can be worrisome. Bad weather is always a threat since no one wants their laptop to get wet. If you’re paranoid, then the Watershed Big Creek Backpack might ease some of your anxiety. More »
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