Researchers Use Webcams To Rub Poor Posture In Slouching Office Workers’ Faces

Whether you’re chatting it up with a far-away friend or, um, hanging out in a Google+ Hangout, we all know that webcams can supply tons of digital video fun. But did you know webcams can improve your health, too? Neither did we, at least not until we heard of a nifty project involving webcams, 60 office workers, and a research team from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Sit up and pay attention!

The researchers first showed those 60 office workers an image of proper sitting posture, PC World reports. Some custom software used the webcam to snap periodic pictures of those workers in their chairs, then displayed the picture on screen side-by-side with the reference picture – you know, so the workers could see how they should be sitting. The researchers reported sustained posture improvement throughout the study, as opposed to the measured, yet brief improvement that occurs after a typical in-office posture training session.

Guys are the most hard-headed (or dedicated) slouchers; women and old folks proved most responsive to the project. The team hopes that offices can use webcam posture programs to help reduce the rate of musculoskeletal disorders over the long term – which should help lower insurance rates. Win-win!

Image credit: thebackuniversity.com

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Steam: Savior or Slayer of PC Gaming?


Is Valve’s dominant digital platform the future? Or does it herald the end of PC gaming as we know it?

Steam. Publishers and rival digital distributors want to be it. Gamers and developers want to be with it. And animals lacking opposable thumbs want to learn how to use computers just to use it… or so Valve would have you believe. But all isn’t as rosy in the land of PC gaming as all that, and as Valve’s digital gaming platform has picked up more and more, well, steam, it’s garnered its fair share of backlash as well. With Valve’s recent tiffs with EA over their upstart Origin distribution platform, never before has the community been so polarized by Steam. Will Steam continue to dominate the PC gaming landscape? And if so, what does this mean for gamers?

First off, let’s dispel the myth that Origin is a rival to Steam. Perhaps it will be in time, but as it stands now, EA’s digital marketplace is just that – a digital store front for EA published titles. For the moment EA is content in simply bypassing Steam, in order to sell their products directly without losing revenue to a rival distributor.

So, no, Origin is NOT in direct competition with Steam, but neither are any of the other PC digital distributors. And I don’t mean ‘no competition’ in the ‘we’re kicking your ass in marketshare’ kind of way. No, I mean they’re literally not selling competing products—they simply lack the depth and breadth of what Steam has to offer. Whereas Origin, Impulse, Direct2Drive, GoG, GamersGate and others are all perfectly valid online stores and distributors, they aren’t what Steam is: a unified, managed gaming platform for the PC.

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Researchers Find Chrome OS Vulnerability

chromeWith the Black Hat security conference going on right now, it’s the season for new hacks. Although, we didn’t really expect Google’s cloud-based Chrome OS to be a star this year. Google highlighted the increased security of Chrome OS when it was announced, but a team of security researchers has managed to use web tools to gain access to user data.

Matt Johanson and Kyle Osborn spent a few months looking at Chrome OS, eventually finding a flaw in the ScratchPad extension included on ever ChromeBook. ScratchPad is used to take notes and save them to the cloud. The exploit allows the hacker to access a user’s cloud data like Gmail, contacts, Docs, and Google Voice messages. Google has been working on improving security in Chrome extensions, so hopefully this type of attack won’t be repeated.

Johanson and Osborn demoed the hack live on stage. Despite the gasps of the assembled crowd, many researchers are not surprised. They worry that the use of techniques like XSS and clickjacking will result in more exploits in Chrome OS. Do you think the lack of a real on-disc operating system will make Chrome users more secure, or is this just the beginning?

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Intel integrated graphics: finally good enough for the MacBook Air?

At long last, Apple released Intel’s highly anticipated

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Latest MacBook Air features "half-sized" SFF Thunderbolt controller

Apple’s newest MacBook Air models are using a newer, small-form factor Thunderbolt controller to power its single Thunderbolt port, as revealed by AnandTech. Dubbed Eagle Ridge, the lower-cost controller could increase the chances of Thunderbolt adoption by OEMs other than Apple.

When iFixit disassembled the new MacBook Air last week, it didn’t find the same Thunderbolt controller chip used in Apple’s MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac mini. Because the MacBook Air’s logic board has so little room, CEO Kyle Wiens speculated that the Intel controller paired with the ULV Sandy Bridge processor contained an integrated Thunderbolt controller. But as it turns out, there’s an unnamed chip on the MacBook Air’s logic board that is the SFF version of Eagle Ridge.

According to AnandTech, Intel’s first Thunderbolt controller chip is codenamed Light Ridge. This part is what you will find in most other Thunderbolt-equipped Macs. It can support up to four bi-directional 10Gbps channels (or 80Gbps total) and up to two DisplayPort output channels.

However, Intel has a second Thunderbolt controller code named Eagle Ridge. This part comes in two packages—one is like the standard packaging used for Light Ridge, and the other is a slim, SFF package. It can support two bi-directional 10Gbps channels and just one DisplayPort channel. It is essentially, as AnandTech describes it, “half of a Light Ridge chip.”

Eagle Ridge’s single DisplayPort channel is part of the reason the new MacBook Airs can only support one external display. Since the 13″ MacBook Pro also only supports one external display, despite the higher-end Thunderbolt controller, the Intel HD 3000 also appears to be a limitation as well.

It’s worth noting that a single Thunderbolt port only uses two bi-directional channels, so machines that don’t need to support more than one external display and only have one Thunderbolt port could use easily use either version of Eagle Ridge.

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Hands on: new Android Market app sells books and movie rentals



Google has started rolling out a major update of the Android Market application for smartphones. It offers a more sophisticated layout, an improved visual style, and some significant new features—including support for renting movies and buying books.

Virtually all of these features are already present in the Honeycomb version of the Android Market, but were not previously available in the smartphone version. The update brings feature parity and a unified look and feel between the phone and tablet variants of the market.

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AT&T to begin throttling heaviest data users on October 1 (Updated)

Move over, Verizon: AT&T may begin throttling the data speeds of its heaviest wireless users as soon as October of this year. The move remains unconfirmed as of yet, but sources speaking to 9to5Mac claim that AT&T will begin implementing a network congestion plan similar to other carriers in order to battle the 80x increase in data traffic it has seen since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007.

According to the site’s sources, AT&T’s throttling plan will mirror that of Verizon’s, which was implemented in February just before the introduction of the Verizon iPhone. Under that system, Verizon reduces the data throughput speeds for the five percent of customers who “use an extraordinary amount of data.” The throttling typically lasts through the remainder of the current billing cycle and returns to normal at the beginning of the next one, though under some circumstances, it’s possible for the reduced speeds to spill over into the next billing cycle as well.

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