Weekend Open Forum: Your biggest tech failures

We've all been there: you're kicking ass and taking names when all of a sudden you're staring at a memory error, blue screen of death or, in the case of one TechSpot moderator, a plume of smoke. During a recent round of Team Fortress 2, Leeky's four-month-old Corsair HX750 exploded, taking practically his entire system down in a blaze of glory.

Flames charred his chassis while the electrical surge fried his Asus ROG motherboard, Core 2 Quad Q8300, GeForce GTX 280, 8GB of RAM, 256GB RealSSD C300, and even his aftermarket CPU fan. Only his hard drive and Blu-ray player survived to tell the tale. It's unclear what caused the issue, but the PSU is on its way to Corsair for inspection.


Although tech catastrophes of that magnitude are uncommon, we imagine most of you have witnessed the partial or complete destruction of some electronic device. Have you lost data during an HDD failure? Fried a processor by forgetting to apply thermal paste? Dropped your smartphone in a pool? Share your greatest tech snafus after the jump.

*Image via Flickriver

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Blog - Spins 'n' Turns

Blog - Spins 'n' Turns

How People Broadcast Their Locations Without Meaning To

People were up in arms this week about the privacy implications of news that the iPhone gathers location information and stores it in a file on the user's computer. But experts say that smart-phone owners are unknowingly taking a much bigger risk with information about where they go all day. During a presentation at the computer security conference Source Boston, Ben Jackson of Mayhemic Labs and Larry Pesce, a senior security consultant with NWN, described the way photos taken by many phones are routinely encoded with latitude and longitude tags. When users post those photos online through services such as TwitPic, they often expose much more personal data than they realize.

"It is definitely true that folks don't [understand] the risk," says Jackson.

For example, by looking at the location metadata stored with pictures posted through one man's anonymous Twitter account, the researchers were able to pinpoint his likely home address. From there, by cross-referencing this location with city records, they found his name. Using that information, the researchers went on to find his place of work, his wife's name, and information about his children.

A few smart phones, such as the BlackBerry, leave the geotagging feature turned off by default. In many devices, however, photos are tagged with this information unless users to go in and disable the feature themselves.

To make people aware of the dangers of this data, Jackson and Pesce launched a site called I Can Stalk U, which searches Twitter for posts that reveal location information and creates a map pinpointing the places where pictures were taken. "We wanted to inform people of what they're really posting," Jackson says.

The researchers have struggled to find an effective way to spread this message. Twitter has twice shut them down (though they were able to get themselves reinstated), and many users react with alarm when they see what I Can Stalk U is doing. Jackson and Pesce say they hope they're educating people, and the site includes information about turning off location features, as well as links to organizations that work to protect user privacy, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

So many pictures with location data get posted every day that when the researchers tried to analyze every picture posted to TwitPic, they couldn't keep up. Now their site downloads an average of 15 gigabytes of photos per day, scans more than 35,000 tweets, and analyzes more than 20,000 pictures.

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Meet Heather Poe


This is Heather Poe. She?s a young woman, living in Los Angeles and attending college there, though it isn?t her hometown. She?s kind, happy, eager to please and a little bit geeky. She?s also one of the best features of one of my favourite games, Troika?s Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines.

You find Heather in the hospital, where she?s been rushed into the emergency room for some strange neck wound. As a newly turned vampire yourself, you know that there?s more to this story than meets the eye, but your heightened senses also tell you that she?ll survive her undead encounter if she just gets some fresh haemoglobin. Unfortunately, there isn?t a doctor to hand and the hospital is criminally understaffed.

Earlier, a friend of yours told you that vampire blood has certain special characteristics when drunk by humans ? mainly as a healing elixir. You pause, then slit your wrist to save her young life before disappearing back into the night. You have errands to run, after all. Little do you know that this isn?t the last time you?ll be seeing Heather.

She shows up a few nights later, grabbing you on the street and desperate to thank you. She?s babbling and doe-eyed and she knows far too much about you and your kind ? you?ll suffer reprisals if you don?t take this matter in hand, but now is not the time. You send her back to your haven ? that grotty motel in Santa Monica ? and tell her to wait for you.

You have a choice now. Your blood is mixing with Heather?s and creating a potent, mind-altering brew. The more time she spends with you, the more she falls under your thrall, whether you want her to or not. You know you should send her away, break the bond and tell her to forget all this silliness about vampires. You know you should, but a lot of reasons run through you mind for why you shouldn?t ? a lot of excuses.

You?re little more than a servant for others at the moment, so the idea of cultivating your own slave does have a certain appeal. Letting her go may bring the wrath of your superiors if she exposes you. You wonder about the direction you could steer Heather, making her serve you in a way that seems repugnant in the daylight hours.

That?s what's great about being a vampire; not casting a reflection. You can avoid a lot of guilt and shame when you don?t have to meet your own gaze.


Over the next few days or weeks, Heather changes. Sometimes you're the one pushing, telling her how to dress or to surrender her life savings. At other times, it?s the blood that changes her. She was eager to please at the beginning, but now her devotion is fanatical. One day you find she?s bought you home some food - still alive and locked in the bathroom. The longer the ?relationship? lasts, the more you get the idea that it isn?t going to end well, but the harder it becomes to end it.

Heather?s fate ultimately lies in your hands. She?s a nice, likeable person and you want to do well by her. At the same time, though, the rest of LA is working to reshape you. You may have been just an average guy a few weeks ago, but now you?re a vampire; suffering and cruelty is your stock and trade.

As you acclimatise to this new existence, you start to adapt. You already don?t have to look at yourself in the mirror, but now you?re learning to hide the rest of yourself behind your new definition of what you are. You are a demon. Once you accept that, it becomes very easy to do very nasty things to a very nice person.

Then, when the game ends, you realise what?s happened and you learn something about yourself. That?s why Vampire: Bloodlines is one of my favourite games.

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Google backpedals: offers Google Videos to YouTube transfer option

After hearing from users that the migration off of Google Videos was unnecessarily difficult, Google has decided to eliminate the April 29, 2011 deadline. Google Videos users can rest assured that they won't be losing any of their content as the company begins to shut down the service.

Last week, Google sent an email to those who had uploaded content to Google Videos, telling them of two new deadlines. After April 29, 2011 they would no longer be able to watch any more videos. They had until May 13, 2011 to download their videos. Google encouraged them to re-upload their videos to YouTube but didn't offer users an option to transfer their videos to a YouTube account.

That changed this week when Google realized users were not happy with this decision. The company has decided to automatically migrate content from Google Videos to YouTube. For those who want to do so themselves, Google is now offering an Upload Videos to YouTube option on the Google Videos status page. To use this function, you'll need to have a YouTube account associated with your Google Videos account.

Google Videos was launched on January 25, 2005, but Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in October 2006. Google announced on June 13, 2007 that Google Videos search results would begin to include videos discovered by their search crawlers on other hosting services, including YouTube. In May 2009, Google Videos stopped accepting uploads. Although previously uploaded videos were still available, the service remained as a video search function, and now the search giant wants to finish the transformation by (eventually) deleting all remaining videos.

"Last week we sent an email to Google Video users letting them know we would be ending playbacks of Google Videos on April 29 and providing instructions on how to download videos currently hosted on the platform," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. "Since then weve received feedback from you about making the migration off of Google Video easier. We work every day to make sure you have a great user experience and should have done better. Based on your feedback, heres what were doing to fix things."

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Blog - Spins 'n' Turns

Chicago News Cooperative: In Emanuel?s Team, a Mirror of the Man

How People Broadcast Their Locations Without Meaning To

People were up in arms this week about the privacy implications of news that the iPhone gathers location information and stores it in a file on the user's computer. But experts say that smart-phone owners are unknowingly taking a much bigger risk with information about where they go all day. During a presentation at the computer security conference Source Boston, Ben Jackson of Mayhemic Labs and Larry Pesce, a senior security consultant with NWN, described the way photos taken by many phones are routinely encoded with latitude and longitude tags. When users post those photos online through services such as TwitPic, they often expose much more personal data than they realize.

"It is definitely true that folks don't [understand] the risk," says Jackson.

For example, by looking at the location metadata stored with pictures posted through one man's anonymous Twitter account, the researchers were able to pinpoint his likely home address. From there, by cross-referencing this location with city records, they found his name. Using that information, the researchers went on to find his place of work, his wife's name, and information about his children.

A few smart phones, such as the BlackBerry, leave the geotagging feature turned off by default. In many devices, however, photos are tagged with this information unless users to go in and disable the feature themselves.

To make people aware of the dangers of this data, Jackson and Pesce launched a site called I Can Stalk U, which searches Twitter for posts that reveal location information and creates a map pinpointing the places where pictures were taken. "We wanted to inform people of what they're really posting," Jackson says.

The researchers have struggled to find an effective way to spread this message. Twitter has twice shut them down (though they were able to get themselves reinstated), and many users react with alarm when they see what I Can Stalk U is doing. Jackson and Pesce say they hope they're educating people, and the site includes information about turning off location features, as well as links to organizations that work to protect user privacy, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

So many pictures with location data get posted every day that when the researchers tried to analyze every picture posted to TwitPic, they couldn't keep up. Now their site downloads an average of 15 gigabytes of photos per day, scans more than 35,000 tweets, and analyzes more than 20,000 pictures.

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Hardware 22 - The Second Day Magazine

Hardware 22 - The Second Day Magazine

Posted on 23rd Apr 2011 at 09:52 by Podcast with 1 comments

It?s podcast time again, and this time we?re talking about all the lovely hardware we?ve seen in our labs over the last few weeks. Clive starts off by telling us all about the AMD Radeon HD 6790, and why it?s only likely to be around for a relatively short period of time.

We also get chance to quiz Antony on the Silverstone TJ11, which it was his pleasure to review. The case is humungous, but isn?t quite the water-cooling behemoth we expected. Paul then gives us an account of his recent trip to Istanbul to cover the MSI Master Overclocking Arena European finals. Extreme overclocking and benchmarking is a funny old world, and it?s always interesting to get to see the action first hand.

Finally, we find time to discuss some of the larger tech news stories such as Seagate swallowing up Samsung?s hard disk production division, and the rumour that AMD is planning to mass produce its Radeon HD 7000-series GPUs in May.

Hardware 22 - The Second Day Magazine

As always, we've also set up our weekly competition too, the lucky winner of which will walk away with a Speedlink Strike FX wireless gamepad. This game pad is compatible with both the PC and PlayStation 3, and functions at distances of up to 10m.

As ever, the bit-tech hardware podcast features music by Brad Sucks, and was recorded on Shure microphones. You can download the podcast direct, listen in-browser or subscribe through iTunes using the links below. Also, be sure to let us know your thoughts about the discussion in the forums.

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