Hack a Can of Compressed Air So It’s Refillable

It’s useful for blasting dust, crumbs, and other crap off your keyboard and electronics, but those overpriced compressed air cans are almost as big a rip-off as printer ink . So here’s a brilliant and relatively simple hack that makes a compressed air can refillable with a standard tire pump. And just to highlight what’s probably the most crucial step in this project: you’ll want to make sure the can you’re using is completely and thoroughly empty before going at it with a drill. [ YouTube via Dooby Brain ] More »

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Hack a Can of Compressed Air So It’s Refillable

Researchers show method for de-anonymizing 95% of “anonymous” cellular location data

Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility , a Nature Scientific Reports paper by MIT researchers and colleagues at Belgium’s Universite Catholique de Louvain, documents that 95% of “anonymous” location data from cellphone towers can be de-anonymized to the individual level. That is, given data from a region’s cellular towers, the researchers can ascribe individuals to 95% of the data-points. “We show that the uniqueness of human mobility traces is high, thereby emphasizing the importance of the idiosyncrasy of human movements for individual privacy,” they explain. “Indeed, this uniqueness means that little outside information is needed to re-identify the trace of a targeted individual even in a sparse, large-scale, and coarse mobility dataset. Given the amount of information that can be inferred from mobility data, as well as the potentially large number of simply anonymized mobility datasets available, this is a growing concern.” The data they studied involved users in an unidentified European country, possibly Belgium, and involved anonymized data collected by their carriers between 2006 and 2007. Anonymized Phone Location Data Not So Anonymous, Researchers Find [Wired/Kim Zetter]

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Researchers show method for de-anonymizing 95% of “anonymous” cellular location data

TapTapPass Quickly Enables Your iPhone’s Passcode from Anywhere

iOS ( Jailbroken ): If you want to enable the passcode on your iPhone you usually need to jump into the settings, hit the toggle, and enter your passcode. It’s a bit tedious, but if you want to speed up the process TapTapPass makes it possible to enable your passcode from pretty much anywhere. More »

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TapTapPass Quickly Enables Your iPhone’s Passcode from Anywhere

Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up en masse

Aurich Lawson Apple’s iCloud is marketed to us end users as a convenient and centralized way to manage data on all of our Macs and iOS devices: sync contacts and bookmarks, re-download music and apps, back up iOS devices, and sync documents and data for third-party apps as MobileMe did. The last item, syncing of documents and data, is one of the least glossy features of iCloud, but it is one of the most important, and it should be among the most straightforward. Right? Perhaps not. Almost a year after Apple shut down MobileMe for good in favor of iCloud , third-party developers have begun to speak out about the difficulty involved in working with Apple’s cloud service. A piece published at The Verge this week highlights many of those complaints, with quotes coming from well-known developers and anonymous sources alike about the challenges faced by the developer community. From data loss and corruption to unexpected Apple ID use cases, developers have seen it all—but are stymied by the persistence of problems that prevent them from shipping products with working iCloud support. What’s the big problem, exactly? According to Bare Bones Software’s Rich Siegel, there are a number of moving parts to iCloud that all affect how things come out on the other end. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Frustrated with iCloud, Apple’s developer community speaks up en masse

Egyptian Forces Capture 3 Divers Trying To Cut Undersea Internet Cable

Egypt’s Naval forces claim they have captured three scuba divers who were trying to cut an undersea Internet cable in the Mediterranean. Col. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said in a statement that the divers were caught while “cutting the undersea cable” of Telecom Egypt. Internet services have been disrupted since March 22 in Egypt. From the article: “The statement was accompanied by a photo showing three young men, apparently Egyptian, staring up at the camera in what looks like an inflatable launch. It did not have further details on who they were or why they would have wanted to cut a cable.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Egyptian Forces Capture 3 Divers Trying To Cut Undersea Internet Cable