HTC phones preloaded with malware
Now this is quite scary:
Security researchers have found that Vodafone, one of the world’s larger wireless providers, is distributing some HTC phones with malware pre-installed on them.The phone, the HTC Magic, runs the Google Android mobile operating system, and is one of the more popular handsets right now. A researcher at Panda Security received one of the handsets recently, and upon attaching it to her PC, found that the phone was pre-loaded with the Mariposa bot client. Mariposa has been in the news of late thanks to some arrests connected to the operation of the botnet.
HTC Phones Pre-installed With Mariposa Bot Client | threatpost
4 Pixels or Less: A range of movies represented in four pixels (or less).
Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface
Skinput turns your body into a touchscreen:
More info here, until their paper will be released at CHI 2010.
Books in the Age of the iPad
Books in the Age of the iPad is an amazing article exploring the implications the iPad (and other eReading devices) will have on books and their design. It beautifully illustrates the important distinction between formless and definite content:
Formless Content can be reflowed into different formats and not lose any intrinsic meaning. It’s content divorced from layout. Most novels and works of non-fiction are Formless.
[...]
Content with form — Definite Content — is almost totally the opposite of Formless Content. Most texts composed with images, charts, graphs or poetry fall under this umbrella. It may be reflowable, but depending on how it’s reflowed, inherentmeaning and quality of the text may shift.
Highly recommended, a great read.
“This Too Shall Pass” Rube Goldberg machine
OK Go’s video for their song “This Too Shall Pass” features an amazing Rube Goldberg contraption:
Wired has a making-of article.
Jesse Schell at DICE 2010: Design Outside the Box
Everyone on the intertubes has been linking and embedding Jesse Schell’s presentation at DICE 2010 so you’ve probably seen this already, but now that i’ve finally found the time to watch it i would feel remiss not to point to it myself. See how game mechanics are creeping into more and more aspects of everyday life:
Gamasutra has a brief write up.
Motion Control in Gaming: Rationalizing a New Dissonance
But something happened the first time I tried out Microsoft’s high definition motion control system, Project Natal. Instead of waving a remote around wildly to smack a tennis ball or knock an in-game foe down with a digital sword, I found myself feeling disconnected from Microsoft’s controller-free experience. I realized, as I played around with the Project Natal prototype, due to hit stores this year, that I was spending more time examining the game’s reaction to my motions than I was having fun.
Motion Control in Gaming: Rationalizing a New Dissonance – Kotaku
Flyfire
In its first implementation, the Flyfire project sets out to explore the capabilities of this display system by using a large number of self-organizing micro helicopters. Each helicopter contains small LEDs and acts as a smart pixel. Through precisely controlled movements, the helicopters perform elaborate and synchronized motions and form an elastic display surface for any desired scenario.
Stamen Designs Live Twitter Visualizations of the Vancouver Olympics. Nicely done, you can find the live version here.
Steven Johnson on the iPad
If you time-traveled back to 1995 and asked the leading futurists of that time where our machines were soon to take us, you might well have heard just as much rhapsodizing about document-centric interfaces as that about hypertext and the World Wide Web. [...]
The weird thing about the iPad is that it has landed us 180 degrees from where we thought we were heading. The iPad interface — like the iPhone's — tries to do everything in its power to do away with documents and files.