T.I. Becomes a Hero After Helping Car Crash Victim

While T.I. was getting some grub, he became an unlikely hero for the day. The Atlanta rapper was headed to Popeye’s restaurant when he came upon a serious car accident and sprung into action.
The ‘Blurred Lines’ rhymer told TMZ that he saw the accident while driving up to Popeye’s in Inglewood, Calif. Apparently, a taxi cab slammed into a woman’s SUV causing it to flip over on its side.
Tip said he ran over to help the female driver who was still in the vehicle when she looked up at him and said, “Is that T.I.?”
T.I. stayed with the woman until medical help arrived. Oddly enough, the crash victim wasn’t wearing any underwear and was worried, according to TMZ. But Tip rest assured her that no one would look.
Afterward, T.I. decided to hit up a different Popeye’s restaurant because “that one had too much going on.”
Props to T.I. for his help in a serious car accident. His act of heroism was far less intense than his standoff with police at a club last week.
At least, T.I. is not afraid to put himself in harm’s way for his fellow citizens.
Rick Diamond, Getty Images While T.I. was getting some grub, he became an unlikely hero for the day. The Atlanta rapper was headed to Popeye’s restaurant when he came upon a serious car accident and sprung into action.
The ‘Blurred Lines’ rhymer told TMZ that he saw the accident while driving up to Popeye’s in Inglewood, Calif. Apparently, a taxi cab slammed into a woman’s SUV causing it to flip over on its side.
Tip said he ran over to help the female driver who was still in the vehicle when she looked up at him and said, “Is that T.I.?”
T.I. stayed with the woman until medical help arrived. Oddly enough, the crash victim wasn’t wearing any underwear and was worried, according to TMZ. But Tip rest assured her that no one would look.
Afterward, T.I. decided to hit up a different Popeye’s restaurant because “that one had too much going on.”
Props to T.I. for his help in a serious car accident. His act of heroism was far less intense than his standoff with police at a club last week.
At least, T.I. is not afraid to put himself in harm’s way for his fellow citizens.

View the original article here

Bits Blog: Tech Moves to the Background as Design Becomes Foremost

Stephen Lam/Reuters Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president for software engineering, discussing the redesign of its mobile software system.

In the last few decades, the computing industry has passed through several different eras. In the ’90s, the big tech companies were in a race for faster and more powerful computers. Then in the 2000s, the industry moved to mobile in a quest for slimmer phones with brighter screens.

Now, the industry is entering the era of design.

As I noted in my column this week, Disruptions: Mobile Competition Shifts to Software Design, tech companies are looking for ways to make sure the user interfaces of their products are unique.

Design experts I spoke with noted that many of the devices we use today look almost exactly the same, which explains the emphasis on the software that goes into that interface. Battery life and processing speed are only marginally different within product categories such as smartphones. But the look and feel of the software is what allows a competitor to leap ahead of the competition.

Cesar Torres, a former Apple designer who now works for Sidecar, a ride-sharing start-up, said on Twitter: “While I don’t agree with the stylistic choices in iOS 7, it excites me that ‘design’ is a term that shows up in major news site headlines.”

Design, it seems, is becoming a mainstream topic. And for those who have lived and breathed design for decades, it’s a refreshing change.

“In the ’90s when I would meet with investors, there was no return on investment for design. Yet today, 20 years later, every project I do is because design is seen as absolutely central,” said Yves Béhar, the founder of Fuseproject, a San Francisco design agency.

Mr. Béhar said that, now, directors, chief executives and investors often sit in meetings and ask about user interface, overall experience, and the look and feel of a product. Twenty years ago, most investors wouldn’t even know what those terms meant.

What the mainstream and the financiers are now starting to realize is that design is a doorway to something much more important.

“Design, even if you’re talking about Apple and their sexy devices, is a promise of quality,” explained James Victore, an award-winning art director, designer, and author. “It’s a promise that the public is not going to be let down.”

Bits Blog: Ellen DeGeneres’ iPhone Game Quickly Becomes a Sensation

On her talk show, Ellen DeGeneres plays a game with celebrity guests where she holds a card up to her forehead showing a word or name, like “Justin Bieber.” The guest then gives clues to Ms. DeGeneres to help her guess the word.

It’s a game that many have played in college dorms or bars. Some call it Celebrity; others might call it Charades. Why not turn this into an iPhone game?

That’s the idea the producers of the Ellen show came up with in October. They hired an iPhone app development studio, Impending, to design and code the game, and released it Thursday in Apple’s App Store.

“Big news!” Ms. DeGeneres said on her Twitter account. “I’ve got a brand new game! Its called ‘Heads Up!’ and you’re appsolutely gonna love it.” Within several hours, Heads Up! had soared to the No. 1 spot on Apple’s list of best-selling apps.

In Heads Up!, you can pick a category like blockbuster movies, animals or music. Then you hold the iPhone up to your forehead with the screen showing the word, and your friends shout clues at you. After you guess it correctly, you put the phone face down and hand it to the next player, who gets a new word. The players pass the phone around, guessing as many words as they can until time runs out.

Unknown to most new players, the front-facing camera on the iPhone is recording a video of the whole game session. The players can save the video, share it on Facebook or even “Send to Ellen.” Sending the video to Ellen posts the video on the Ellen show’s Facebook page, and producers will pick out their favorite videos to play on the television show.

“We have 700 videos uploaded already,” said Daniel Leary, digital producer of “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and a creator of the app. “We’re getting a video a minute, it’s pretty crazy.”

The game costs $1 in the App Store. Mr. Leary declined to comment on how the revenue would be divided between Warner Brothers, the Ellen show and the app developers. But Bob Mohler, a senior vice president of Telepictures Productions, which produced the game, said its purpose was to expand Ms. DeGeneres’ brand in digital media. The show already has accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, he said.

“We expand Ellen’s digital footprint pretty broadly,” Mr. Mohler said. “We’re just constantly trying to find the next idea to continue to grow.”

Online Dispute Becomes Internet-Snarling Attack

Millions of ordinary Internet users have experienced delays in services or could not reach a particular Web site for a short time.

However, for the Internet engineers who run the global network the problem is more worrisome. The attacks are becoming increasingly powerful, and computer security experts worry that if they continue to escalate people may not be able to reach basic Internet services, like e-mail and online banking.

The dispute started when the spam-fighting group, called Spamhaus, added the Dutch company Cyberbunker to its blacklist, which is used by e-mail providers to weed out spam. Cyberbunker, named for its headquarters, a five-story former NATO bunker, offers hosting services to any Web site “except child porn and anything related to terrorism,” according to its Web site.

A spokesman for Spamhaus, which is based in Europe, said the attacks began on March 19, but had not stopped the group from distributing its blacklist.

Patrick Gilmore, chief architect at Akamai Technologies, a digital content provider, said Spamhaus’s role was to generate a list of Internet spammers.

Of Cyberbunker, he added: “These guys are just mad. To be frank, they got caught. They think they should be allowed to spam.”

Mr. Gilmore said that the attacks, which are generated by swarms of computers called botnets, concentrate data streams that are larger than the Internet connections of entire countries. He likened the technique, which uses a long-known flaw in the Internet’s basic plumbing, to using a machine gun to spray an entire crowd when the intent is to kill one person.

The attacks were first mentioned publicly last week by CloudFlare, an Internet security firm in Silicon Valley that was trying to defend against the attacks and as a result became a target.

“These things are essentially like nuclear bombs,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare. “It’s so easy to cause so much damage.”

The so-called distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks have reached previously unknown magnitudes, growing to a data stream of 300 billion bits per second.

“It is a real number,” Mr. Gilmore said. “It is the largest publicly announced DDoS attack in the history of the Internet.”

Spamhaus, one of the most prominent groups tracking spammers on the Internet, uses volunteers to identify spammers and has been described as an online vigilante group.

In the past, blacklisted sites have retaliated against Spamhaus with denial-of-service attacks, in which they flood Spamhaus with traffic requests from personal computers until its servers become unreachable. But in recent weeks, the attackers hit back with a far more powerful strike that exploited the Internet’s core infrastructure, called the Domain Name System, or DNS.

That system functions like a telephone switchboard for the Internet. It translates the names of Web sites like Facebook.com or Google.com into a string of numbers that the Internet’s underlying technology can understand. Millions of computer servers around the world perform the actual translation.

In the latest incident, attackers sent messages, masquerading as ones coming from Spamhaus, to those machines, which were then amplified drastically by the servers, causing torrents of data to be aimed back at the Spamhaus computers.

When Spamhaus requested aid from CloudFlare, the attackers began to focus their digital ire on the companies that provide data connections for both Spamhaus and CloudFlare.

Questioned about the attacks, Sven Olaf Kamphuis, an Internet activist who said he was a spokesman for the attackers, said in an online message that, “We are aware that this is one of the largest DDoS attacks the world had publicly seen.” Mr. Kamphuis said Cyberbunker was retaliating against Spamhaus for “abusing their influence.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 29, 2013

An article on Wednesday about an Internet snarl caused by a dispute between a spam-fighting organization and a company that hosts Web sites misstated part of the name of the employer of Patrick Gilmore, who commented on the parties involved in the squabble. He is chief architect for Akamai Technologies, not Akamai Networks.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 29, 2013

An earlier version of this article erroneously identified the streaming service Netflix as an example of an Internet service affected by the spam dispute. Netflix is not available to customers in Germany and Asia, where the attack had its greatest impact. While millions of European Internet users were affected, it is not the case that Netflix users were among them.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 29, 2013

An earlier version of a correction to this article erroneously included London among areas that are not served by Netflix. The service is not available in Germany and Asia, but it is available in London.