trends

Streaming video is Netflix's future--it's no secret, not to their customers, not to the press, and not to their peers. But the company's difficulties in securing top-quality movies and TV shows from the studios to stream is well-documented. How is Netflix dealing with this problem?Smartly, it turns out. CNET explains some of the ways Netflix is working to make sure their streaming video service moves as fast as their customers. First, it's a cyclical process. Mailing DVDs and Blu-ray discs out is far more expensive than streaming video, and it's also less convenient for the consumer. The better Netflix's streaming catalog is, the more people will use it, and consequently use their physical disc mailing service less. I can vouch for that--I use Netflix Instant Watch streaming nearly every day (I've given up cable) but have had the same three DVDs for months.When people use the mailing service less, Netflix can cut costs from that part of the business--which is exactly what happened. In the most recent financial quarter, Netflix spent $24 million on the physical disc part of their business, almost half of the $43 million the company spent in the year-ago quarter. And while Netflix's monthly fee hasn't changed, they've exploded in subscriber base size: In the last year, the company added 5 million new members, and predicts a possible 18.5 million subscribers by the year's end. For comparison, Comcast, the country's largest cable provider, has 24.6 million subscribers. Netflix will probably top 20 million sometime next year, putting them right in the same category as Comcast. That's a powerful position to be in.Netflix is also making deals advantageous to the studios. In agreeing to not rent any Warner Bros. movies for 28 days after their DVD release, Netflix got into that studio's good graces. And now, with all the new revenue flowing in, Netflix is making friends the old-fashioned way: by buying them. In the most recent quarter, Netflix spent $66 million on streaming video acquisitions, more than seven times as much as it spent in the year-ago quarter. Netflix's star is going to keep rising. They're very simply the best movie distribution service we've ever seen, and these kinds of shrewd moves are going to keep them there.Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, corresponded with via email, and stalked in San Francisco (no link for that one--you'll have to do the legwork yourself).

Google Earth is one of the great "wow" applications in Google's stable, especially on touch devices like Android smartphones or the iPad, whether it's showing undersea formations or cities in 3D. It's also surprisingly useful, and Google's always adding elements to it to give it more utility and/or fun.The newest is the clouds layer, which now shows rain and snow in real-time weather patterns, across the globe. After enabling the clouds layer, you can just zoom in to any location you want, provided Google has supplied the layer for the part you want to see. So far, that's limited to just parts of North America and Western Europe, but that includes some of the rainiest places I can think of, including the Pacific Northwest and the UK. By enabling the radar layer, you can see where the precipitation data is available.Maybe the coolest thing about the new feature is that it's in real time, updated as it actually happens. That means you can track weather patterns, storms (including scary ones like hurricanes), and watch them as they move across the map. It's potentially pretty useful, as the image above shows--that's Hurricane Alex, passing into Texas. Steer clear of there!You can find the latest version of Google Earth here.Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, corresponded with via email, and stalked in San Francisco (no link for that one--you'll have to do the legwork yourself).

Remember yesterday, when I said that you can all stop freaking out about those 100 million "hacked" Facebook profiles? Well, I wasn't wrong, but the number of major corporations who have been shown to have downloaded that data is big and scary enough to be slightly worrisome.The data collected was public, of course--all of these corporations could have just found this data on Google. But after white hat hacker (the good kind, if your definition of "good" is malleable) Ron Bowles collected all of this public data and smushed it into one massive file, it may have sparked an interest that wouldn't have existed otherwise. Sure, these companies could have found this data elsewhere, at any time--but they likely didn't. Public information on a Facebook page is still public, and public means your friends as well as sort of scary corporations like Halliburton, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin have access to it. A Gizmodo reader found that software called Peer Block (as well as others, but that's the one he used) can find the IP of any other user downloading that file. It also identifies the source of that IP, often an entity like a company, college, or other organization. So he looked through the list and picked out some of the ones that popped out at him. Of course, we should note that just because an IP address associated with a company downloaded this file, it doesn't mean that that company requested the file be downloaded, or is even aware that it was. A single Halliburton employee might've read Fast Company and downloaded the torrent file at work to see what the hubbub is about, and bam, now Halliburton's on the list. Also, some of these organizations, like the BBC, Viacom, Time Warner, and Turner, have news branches, which would be a logical and forgiveable reason to download the file.Without further ado, the list. The linked names are companies on our Most Innovative Companies list.A.C. Nielsen;
Agilent Technologies;
Apple;
AT&T, possibly Macrovision;
Baker & McKenzie;
BBC;
Bertelsmann Media;
Boeing;
Church of Scientology;
Cisco Systems;
Cox Enterprises;
Davis Polk & Wardwell; Deutsche Telekom;
Disney;
Duracell;
Ernst & Young;
Fujitsu;
Goldman Sachs;
Halliburton;
HBO & Company;
Hilton Hospitality;
Hitachi;
HP; IBM;
Intel;
Intuit;
Levi Strauss & Co.;
Lockheed-Martin Corp;
Lucasfilm;
Lucent Technologies;
Matsushita Electric Industrial Co;
Mcafee;
MetLife;
Mitsubishi;
Motorola;
Northrop Grumman;
Novell;
Nvidia;
O'Melveny & Myers;
Oracle Corp;
Pepsi Cola;
Procter and Gamble;
Random House;
Raytheon;
Road Runner RRWE;
Seagate;
Sega;
Siemens AG;
Sony Corporation;
Sprint;
Sun Microsystems;
Symantec;
The Hague;
Time Warner Telecom;
Turner Broadcasting System;
Ubisoft Entertainment;
Unisys;
United Nations;
Univision;
USPS;
Viacom;
Vodafone;
Wells Fargo;
Xerox PARC[Image credit: Gizmodo]Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, corresponded with via email, and stalked in San Francisco (no link for that one--you'll have to do the legwork yourself).

After the long, storied mess that is Google vs. China, with its accusations of government-sponsored hacking, flimsy workarounds, and censorship debates, Google's legal status and availability in China ended up varying day to day. So the company set up a site that monitors the availability of lots of Google's services, like Search, Images, YouTube, News, Gmail, Blogger, and Picasa, updated daily.That site is reporting today that several Google services that had previously been available no longer are, including important ones like Search, News, and Images. That's a major change, especially Search--that Google's bread and butter would be shut down in China is major news, and was reported by, among others, Reuters, AP, and the New York Times. Google's shares fell 1.72% at the day's end of trading, in large part due to the news.But reports on Twitter and elsewhere suggest it's all some sort of misunderstanding. Check the #googlecn hashtag on Twitter for evidence: Users are all saying that it's a false alarm, and that Google is working just fine for them in mainland China. Users in Hunan and Beijing, among other places, confirm that Google is not down at all. Google finally responded, saying that a "small blockage" caused a misrepresentation of the total block in China. The site set up to monitor the availability of Google services does not do so in real time, so it remained incorrect all day. That statement:Because of the way we measure accessibility in China, it's possible that our machines could overestimate the level of blockage. That seems to be what happened last night when there was a relatively small blockage. It appears now that users in China are accessing our properties normally.Please also note that the dashboard is not a real time tool.Dan Nosowitz, the author of this post, can be followed on Twitter, corresponded with via email, and stalked in San Francisco (no link for that one--you'll have to do the legwork yourself).

Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos is many things: Successful, certainly, and enigmatic for sure. He's also responsible for some fabulous sound-bite-like quotes. (And he's not the only one on Amazon's executive team who can be a little over-enthusiastic: Amazon's Steve Kassel
has been telling the media that by next year, "we will sell more Kindle books than paperback books.")Do you know Bezos well enough to work out which of these quotes are his and which are from another CEO?On e-reader technology:"Rapid screen updates required for animation create eyestrain.""E-readers will outsell iPads. It’s got a backlit screen, and it’s too expensive to give one to everyone in your house."Amusingly, Jeff's quote is the first one--and it reveals he's not looked into the science of the matter much. Quote two is by E-ink's CEO, Russ Wilcox. His business may be bound to Amazon's success, but maybe he should read the iPad sales figures?On advertising:"The next big wave in advertising is the mobile internet.""We don’t make money when we sell things; we make money when we help people make purchase decisions."No prizes here: Bezos' is behind the second quote, made when defending the unusual choice to let negative reviews stay on Amazon.com. Google's Eric Schmidt is responsible for the first one, and it highlights how differently both companies treat (and exploit) advertising.On the future of publishing:"There's a dispute in the [news] industry about subscriptions versus advertising. We want to enable both, and let users choose.""Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service."The first quote is Google's Eric Schmidt again, talking about how publishing's earning mechanisms may change in the digital future. The odd attitude to promotion in quote two is Bezos himself, who evidently intends to let the Kindle promote itself.On the future of interactive books:"You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets.""It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.""Print is dead."Quote one is Bezos--speaking to the Wall Street Journal about the future of interactive books, and presumably as a slight against the kind of amazing interactive books and magazines that are slowly turning up on the iPad. To say nothing of the bright future of interactive infographics in newspapers. Quote two is Steve Jobs himself, on the future of books of all sorts, before Apple launched iBooks. Quote three? Egon from Ghostbusters. We couldn't resist.On tablet PCs:"The question has arisen lately, is there room for a third category of device, something between a laptop and a phone?""There are going to be 100 companies making LCD [screen] tablets, why would we want to be 101?"Quote one is Steve Jobs again, banging on about his fabulous new category product. The second quote is Bezos, banging on about the army of tablet clones that'll chase down the iPad, and calmly ignoring the army of e-reader clones that're chasing down the Kindle.How did you do? Bezos is surprisingly hard to pick out sometimes, even when he does spout phrases that seem a little tangential to real life. Perhaps he needs to borrow some of Steve Jobs' "Reality Distortion Field." To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

The idea of former Reuters Innovation boss Azeem Azhar, PeerIndex is a Twitter-centric tool that measures your social network standing and influence on the Web. It launched in beta yesterday, and is the kind of thing that will, first of all, redirect 20 minutes of your time as you go through all the names of your colleagues and friends. This, friends, is the 140-character version of the Google vanity search.It works by identifying "from millions of users the opinion leaders from the merely opinionated," according to Azhar, and can separate a person's different spheres of excellence--for example, Fast Company's very own Kit Eaton is in the top 1% of authorities on Apple Inc. PeerIndex has a bunch of backers that include former Economist editor Bill Emmott (both of the above, surely).At the moment it seems weighted toward business and tech topics. For example, while tweeter extraordinaire Stephen Fry is featured, he's not ranked so far. And they haven't even heard of Lady Gaga yet, merely her imitators, but there's probably still tweakage of the algorithm going on. For the moment PeerIndex seems to be after commentators and writers, using their social profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn, but it relies heaviest on the word of the bird.In an interview with PaidContent:UK yesterday, Azhar also called the site a "speakers bureau" with one of its aims being to hook up influencers with the brands they're hot on. The vanity side to PeerIndex will ensure that people come flocking; money will be made, however, from a premium service which offers brand marketeers and bigwigs in the communications industry custom categories.Once fully tweaked and glitches ironed out, you can see this becoming an obsession for the mouthy brigade of the online community, probably forcing them to up their game--and their tweet rate. One thing that's worth predicting if PeerIndex takes off: Twitter's outgoings will increase as they are forced to buy more servers.

Despite research showing location based services are little-used and largely unknown, Foursquare's head of development sees big growth and innovation on the horizon.
"We could imagine something akin to a Google AdWords-like model, where
merchants can have featured placement based on latitude and longitude,
time of the day, or day of the week," says Tristan Walker, head of
business development for Foursquare. "We're still exploring, and
encouraging all retailers to get on our platform and help us find the
product that we could actually charge for."

I spoke with Walker yesterday following the release of a report on location-based apps by Forrester Research.
The study found that just 4% of online adults in the U.S. have ever
used services like Foursquare and Gowalla, and that 84% of respondents
were not even familiar with geo-location apps. Forrester recommends that
major marketers should hold off on "check-in" services until they
become more popular.

Walker disagrees. "It may be a fair comment on how there needs to be
more education around what geo-location can mean in general," he says.
"But here's an opportunity for marketers to lead--to take a burgeoning
space and do some really exciting things with it." And Walker points out
that Foursquare is growing, too. More than 2.3 million users now
check-in roughly 1 million times per day, and a "pretty high percentage"
of users check-in more than once per week, despite Forrester's
conclusion that only 1% update that often. Moreover, while the report
claimed 80% of location-based service users were male, Walker said
Foursquare's male-female ratio was approaching 60-40, and moving
"closer and closer toward parity."

But numbers aren't the only thing that should appeal to marketers. "I
don't think we need huge scale to be successful. It's not only about
reach, it's about engagement. Foursquare allows consumers to build an
even deeper affinity for brands," says Walker, citing successful
Foursquare partnerships with Bravo and Starbucks. "Services like Twitter
and Facebook have shown that brands can engage with consumers in really
interesting ways online, and Foursquare is well poised to take all that
engagement offline, providing brands with tools to lead their consumers to do things, as opposed to just suggest."

Walker isn't shy about Foursquare's lack of a comprehensive plan for
revenue, and he shouldn't be. Most  start-ups out there are trying to
figure out how to make money in social media, even as the market's
popularity soars (see: Twitter). "We're focused right now on making the
experience better," he says. "How can we charge for that? We don't
know."

Ideas for revenue streams are so far "pie-in-the-sky," according to
Walker, but that doesn't mean Foursquare isn't working toward a
financially-viable future. The service already charges for
sponsored-badge integrations, and in addition to a potential Google
AdWords-like service, Walker foresees a time when the New York-based
start-up might "charge for really robust analytics that haven't been
served before." "We're hoping to offer retailers tools to aid consumer
retention and acquisition," he explains. "So, telling them a little more
about their loyal customers--that is, who checks in, when, where, how
soon, how often, where they go before, where they go after. And on the
acquisition side, geo-tag specials that can entice new consumers."

So is geo-location the future of social media? Walker thinks so. And it
that's true, don't expect Foursquare to be the only player on the field.
Look for competitors such as Google, Twitter and Facebook in the
market, too.

Solar power took a big step toward becoming the alternative energy of choice with this week's news that energy from sunlight might be cheaper than nuclear power. The analysis, which comes from a Duke University report entitled Solar and Nuclear Costs: The Historic Crossover, claims that, "Electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants" in North Carolina.The reason, according to the study, is a dramatic drop of the price of solar in recent years combined with an increase in the price of nuclear. In 2002, construction cost estimates for new nuclear power plants were in the $3 billion per reactor range. As new design and engineering problems emerge, construction costs continue to rise--now nuclear plants are estimated to cost $10 billion per reactor. And price isn't even the half of it. The study (PDF) reasons:Solar electricity has numerous advantages other than cost. Rooftop solar can be installed in a few days. Small incremental gains in total generating capacity start producing electricity immediately. One does not have to wait ten years for huge blocks of new capacity to come online. Solar panels leave no radioactive wastes. They do not consume billions of gallons of cooling water each year. There are no national security issues with solar installations. An accident would be a small local affair, not a catastrophe.This doesn't mean that we should completely ditch nuclear power. The Duke analysis argues that solar's status as an intermittent power source (it only works when the sun shines) is irrelevant because of smart grid technologies that optimize the energy mix. And the upfront costs for nuclear are astronomical compared to the cost of implementing, say, a rooftop solar system, but the fact remains that nuclear plants can pump out energy 24 hours a day. Solar plants can't. A long-lasting nuclear plant will most likely generate more energy per dollar invested than a solar plant ever could.Solar should always be considered first, to be sure--one report estimates that construction of 100 new nuclear reactors would cost taxpayers an extra $1.9 trillion to $4.4
trillion over the 40-year life of the devices. But writing off any reliable, clean energy source would be a mistake.
Ariel Schwartz can be reached on Twitter or by email.

We've called out the e-reader "race to the bottom" in terms of pricing before, noting that it may be a feature of the short lifespan these single-purpose gadgets may have on the average electric store's shelves. Now Amazon's dropping the Kindle price even more.The new Wi-fi-only Kindle costs a mere $140, $40 less than the Kindle 2's most recent price, and it's definitely a "breakthrough" price for the world's most famous e-reader, which puts it right at the top end of many folks impulse-buy bracket, particularly if you're talking about gifts, or the back-to-school purchasing period.But it's not alone, and many budget e-readers, lacking Amazon's huge Kindle e-publishing ecosystem, are pushing toward similar prices. Amazon's big competition in the market, Barnes and Noble, are doing so too. And now there's news that a company called Copia, a DMC Worldwide subsidiary, will be offering a 5-inch screen color e-reader at a mere $99 when its products hit the market later in 2010. That's going to smart, since the Kindle is resolutely grayscale, and $99 is below that fictional $100 mental price barrier between something that seems expensive, and something that really doesn't.The Wall Street Journal notes that it's Apple's aggressive pricing on the iPad that's behind some of this. Before the device launched, skeptics argued it would cost close to $1,000, citing manufacturing costs and the famous, if misleading, "Apple Tax." When the iPad's entry price of just $500 was announced, it shook the mobile device world--and Amazon especially, since the figure wasn't so very far from the then price of its big Kindle DX e-reader, which can do so much less than Apple's gadget. The newspaper even cites a report by researcher company Forrester, which suggests that the price war between e-readers (our famous race to the bottom) will continue to be influenced by evolutions in the tablet market.So, just as we suspected, the race to the bottom is on, and Amazon's along for the ride. Will it doom the e-reader totally, so much that in a couple of years they'll be extinct? No. It may doom them to being a solely niche-device though, bringing their e-ink displays to situations that most benefit from them, while the tablet PCs mop up the rest of the slate-format e-reader market.To keep up with this news, follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.

"Consumers have a lot of curiosity about our products," says Cathy Dial, head of consumer affairs at Frito-Lay. "They want to know where we get the ideas for our flavors."  With flavors that range from zesty taco and fiery habanero, to sizzlin' picante and cheeseburger (seriously), who hasn't pondered what culinary mastermind is behind Frito-lay's wild-tasting chips and snacks.

Meet Stephen Kalil, executive research chef at the Frito-Lay Culinary Innovation Center. Kalil has been in the business over 20 years, and is now "tasked with bringing culinary excellence and integrating that with the excellence in food science" to the snack factory. "We're leveraging a discipline that we call culinology," he told Lay's lovers in a recently released video.

According to the experienced corporate chef, Culinology is a blending of the culinary arts and food technology that enables Frito-Lay to bake the best damn flavors out there. Kalil focuses in on Lay's new Tangy Carolina BBQ potato chips, which he says was a product of serious research into regional cuisine. "That flavor was inspired by a traditional Carolina BBQ pulled-pork sandwich," he says. "[We] held that up as a culinary gold standard." What's more, food science enabled a lower sodium count, so chip-lovers can munch more and more on their "flavor adventures"

Check out the video below to see more of Frito-Lay's Innovation Center and to hear Dial and Kalil chat more about "culinology." Easily the best part is the 50 angles of Dial experiencing the Carolina BBQ chip like it's some Michelin-starred gastronomical wonder. I guess that's what you get for investing in "culinology." Nom, nom.[youtube UhXgtXSTKtE]

After he graduated, development major Mark Rembert applied
for the Peace Corps, thinking he could help developing countries
strengthen their communities. But when his hometown's largest
employer shut its doors, Rembert found that rural Ohio needed him
most.DoSomething, headed by Fast Company columnist Nancy Lublin, has recognized five young social entrepreneurs with $10,000 grants--and one with a prize of $100,000. Fast Company will profile one of these enterprising youth each day this week. Click here to read the other winners' stories.Getting into the Peace Corps is no small matter. The application
process is arduous, and has become more competitive. In the fall of
2008, the Peace Corps said yes to Ohio native and recent Haverford
College graduate Mark Rembert. Then 23, the activist and
economic-development major was looking forward to traveling to
Ecuador, where he would pursue field work helping rural villages with
asset-development. But news from his native Ohio sent him in a totally
different direction. That November, Rembert read that DHL, the largest
employer in his hometown of Wilmington, in rural Clinton County, was
shutting down. An estimated 8,200 residents in Clinton County would
soon lose their jobs.

Instead of flying to Ecuador, Rembert went home. "When your community
has 18% unemployment, its hard to justify going to [Latin America] to
help out," Rembert says. In Wilmington, he found Taylor Stuckert,
another would-be Peace Corps recruit, and together, they started
Energize Clinton County (ECC), a not-for-profit devoted to creating
green jobs, investing in sustainable energy, and marketing local
industries and businesses. His initiative earned him a $10,000 Do
Something award, money that he says will be plowed back into the
community.

With ECC, Rembert and Stuckert are doing the same thing they would
have in the Peace Corps: They have helped a rural community take
advantage of resources it already had. Though Clinton County had been
buoyed for years by the massive DHL facility, Rembert saw that his
region had many other strengths it had previously ignored, including a
charming downtown, an abundance of farmland, and the benefit of Ohio's
tax incentives for green businesses.

Forming a group of town leaders charged with understanding the red
tape for green industries, ECC designated Wilmington a Green
Enterprise Zone, the first of its kind in the nation. The move -part
marketing strategy and part zoning ordinance-has helped Wilmington
secure Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants from the
federal government's Recovery and Reinvestment Act. These in turn have
served to attract private capital from solar energy companies in his
small town. Part of Rembert's job is simply to understand how
Wilmington's utilities work, to make the job easier for investors, he
says: "We spend a lot of time working with utilities, so that when
[solar] companies come to town we can tell them where to go."

Recently, ECC's efforts landed Clinton County a Purchase Power
Agreement with Gaia Energy USA to install solar panels on the county
jail. Gaia will provide more than $300,000 in capital investment to
install 65 kilowatts of panels. Once installed, the panels could help
the county save more than $25,000 a year on energy costs.
Meanwhile a project is being seriously explored to make poetic use of the abandoned DHL
facility by installing solar farms on its roofs, while another will use
farmland in the county for utility scale solar fields. If successful, the
later would count as one of the largest solar power sources east of the
Mississippi.

To spur green-job creation through construction, ECC has also focused
on retrofitting buildings. The organization solicited help from a
professor at nearby Dayton University to supply line-by-line energy
audits on town buildings. The service is key to helping businesses and
public works invest in retrofitting, which saves money and creates
construction jobs. "Since you can't see energy and you can't see the
money leaving your building, it's really difficult to convince people
to invest [in retrofitting]," Rembert says. "When we're armed with
data, it has a huge impact."

ECC has also designed an easy-to use and professional-looking online
portal that promotes 170 locally owned businesses and sends out a
weekly e-mail newsletter read by 1,000 people every week. Thanks to a
renewed involvement, the downtown commerce area has been completely
tranformed. "When we were growing up, downtown was dead. We went to
the strip, to Walmart-that's where everyone was. Now everyone wants to
be downtown," says Rembert.

He senses that young American designers, economists, and urban
planners have shown a renewed interest in rural areas, where projects
are easier to initiate and have a much larger impact than in dense and
highly regulated city centers. His own ECC is a remarkable case study
of development and planning skills, which he intended for use in third
world countries, at work domestically. "We ended up realizing that a
lot of the principles used in the Peace Corps-community asset
based-development-were what was need in Wilmington."

His epiphany and his subsequent follow-through earned him not just the
$10,000 prize but also a trophy given to him live on VH1 by none other
than Megan Fox, who grew up in eastern Tennessee. "I think she's
really passionate about rural America," Rembert says. Always
on-message, he believes he was especially lucky to have been paired
with the actress-for exposure's sake: "We have no doubt," he says, "that our video has been viewed many, many times."

More winners' stories:
Micaela Connery: Knocking Down Barriers With the Power of Performance
Jacqueline Murekatete: Genocide Survivor Embraces Her Ordeal to Educate Others

Will Perez: Med Student Pioneers “Political Medicine” in Rural Haiti

News from this year's Black Hat conference is already hitting the wires, but here are a few extra gems for you, all about hacking ATMs and how Apple's closed-door App Store now seems a really neat idea after a malicious Android app has struck.Cash WaterfallThe efforts of a researcher dubbed Barnaby Jack to demonstrate an ATM hack deserves particular attention, since Jack actually "performed" the hack live on stage at Black Hat, on two different ATM types, no-less. It was actually due to be performed last year, but it's such a contentious issue that an ATM manufacturer objected enough to raise the matter with Jack's then-employer. This year, working for a different firm, he was free to show exactly how easy the hack was.And it's shockingly easy, it would seem: No theatrics with stolen fork-lift trucks or backhoes to snatch ATMs out of glass store frontages are needed. All you do is bust into the ATM's chassis with a low-security universal key, locate the USB port that's typically used to service the machine, and shove in a USB data key loaded with the rootkit hacking code on it, and watch the money spew forth. Obviously the magical hacking trickery is in the details of this code, but the hack works on Windows CE-based hardware, so there must be millions of snippets of sample code strewn around the darker corners of the Internet, thanks to Window's long history of use. Apparently Windows CE machines on ARM or XScale chipsets are vulnerable, and once in the hacker can do pretty much anything (the ATM's core is just a PC after all) like showing movies or, in Jack's case, scrolling the word "Jackpot!" as the device throws money out.How can ATM makers react? By slapping damn big locks on the metal chassis for a start. The particular makers affected by Jack's hack are probably already secure, since in the best habits of a community-minded hacker he alerted them to the details before demonstrating how.Android AttackMobile security firm Lookout also has bad hacking news, but this time it's too late to take protective action: A malicious Android app, that was supposedly an innocuous screen wallpaper app giving users cutesy photos, was actually a sophisticated cover. The real purpose of the app from Jackeey Wallpaper wasn't to plaster your Android phone with Star Wars backdrops, but to sniff out your private data. This is stuff like your browsing history, SMSs and even really personal stuff like your voicemail password. All the data was then surreptitiously fired off to a site in China to be used for who-knows-what nefarious purposes.Advice for anyone who thinks they may be affected is probably to keep an eye on your phone bills, change all your passwords, and keep your Android version fresh. But this advice needs to be broadcast pretty widely: Lookout thinks that the app was downloaded anywhere between 1.1 million and 4.6 million times (the figure is rough as Android doesn't report exact data like this.)Malicious apps like this are actually fairly easy to get onto the Android platform, due to its open submissions policy, and though Google can do a good job of policing them after they've hit, it's obvious from this example that millions of people can be affected in the interim. Such sneakery is also possible on the Apple iPhone, but due to Apple's strict app approval policy, and the overall closed-door format of the iPhone in terms of code, it's much less likely to occur. Score one for Apple against the Android army!Battling BadgesApart from these serious bits of news, there's other, more positive stuff coming out of the hacker world, like the sneak peak of the DefCon 18 Ninja Party Badge. If its title befuddles you, then don't worry--it's a beffuddling notion right from the get-go. The idea is that attendees of the Ninja Networks parties would get given a free lapel badge that's actually a sophisticated little mini-sized Android-powered computer, complete with LCD display. The circuitry carried a game that lets players wirelessly "fight" with other badge-holders, earning experience points as they do. The gizmos also interact with other pre-installed devices at the venue, giving the game a location-based angle, and there are reward lights that mimic the colors used for items in the online multiplayer-game World of Warcraft.Why's this curio exciting, apart from for the people attending the event though? Because it's actually very sophisticated, was cooked up pretty quickly, and it gives a good indication of one direction for the future of computer gaming: As a hardware/software mashup that combines multiple play elements, including clever location-based stuff. The devices you use will probably be your smartphones, rather than dedicated hardware, but the overall gaming experience will be the same. It sounds like geeky fun.To keep up with this news follow me, Kit Eaton, on Twitter.