The resurgence of diplomacy in the Iranian nuclear standoff has generated hope in the West for a peaceful solution to the long-running crisis, and hope in Iran for the lifting of painful economic sanctions. But the new opening has also invigorated hard-line opponents in Israel, Washington and Tehran. Analysts say pressure from these conservative critics could derail the talks as they enter a particularly difficult phase.
She's one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, so it's no surprise that L'Oreal Paris would declare Blake Lively the new face of their brand.
On Tuesday (October 29), the cosmetic/beauty company took to its Instagram account and revealed Blake's first campaign images.
Brand global president of L'Oreal Paris Cyril Chapuy said in a statement, "[Blake] has become a beauty icon for a whole generation with her gorgeous gold-dipped hair, luminous gaze and drop dread smile.This strong, charismatic and definitely glowing actress is joining the L'Oreal Paris family. And we're so proud of welcome her."
Miss Lively also commented, "I am thrilled and honored to join the incredible women who represent L'Oreal Paris. I grew up with the inspiration of their message, 'We're worth it.' What an important value to instill in women. That beauty is rooted in confidence. That is key. That is why I'm so proud to be a L'Oreal Paris woman."
The former "Gossip Girl" star will be joining the line with fellow brand ambassadors including Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce, Eva Longoria, and Freida Pinto.
A quick heads-up for anyone in the UK thinking of signing up with EE — the carrier's wide range of new contract and Pay As You Go plans are now live. Announced a couple of weeks back, EE's new range of services lets customers get hold of 4G LTE data without signing a monthly contract, while also giving mobile broadband subscribers the option of higher data allowances. EE's new tiered approach to data speeds means there are also cheaper contract deals available for those who don't need more than 30Mbps.
EE's new PAYG and contract plans are fairly complex, so check out our original report, linked below, for a full rundown of what's new.
NEW YORK (AP) — Smokers younger than 21 in the nation's biggest city will soon be barred from buying cigarettes after the New York City Council voted overwhelming Wednesday to raise the tobacco-purchasing age to higher than all but a few other places in the United States.
City lawmakers approved the bill — which raises from 18 to 21 the purchasing age for cigarettes, certain tobacco products and even electronic-vapor smokes — and another that sets minimum prices for tobacco cigarettes and steps up law enforcement on illegal tobacco sales.
"This will literally save many, many lives," said an emotional City Councilman James Gennaro, the bill's sponsor, whose mother and father died from tobacco-related illnesses. "I've lived with it, I've seen it...but I feel good today."
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is a strong supporter of the tough smoking restrictions, has 30 days to sign the bills into law. The minimum age bill will take effect 180 days after enactment.
"We know that tobacco dependence can begin very soon after a young person first tries smoking so it's critical that we stop young people from smoking before they ever start," Bloomberg said in a statement.
With Wednesday's vote, New York is by far the biggest city to bar cigarette sales to 19- and 20-year-olds. Similar legislation is expected to come to a vote in Hawaii this December.
Officials previously shelved a plan Bloomberg unveiled with fanfare earlier this year: forcing stores to keep cigarettes out of public view until a customer asks for them.
The city's current age limit is 18, a federal minimum that's standard in many places. Some states and communities have raised the age to 19. At least two towns, both in Massachusetts, have agreed to raise it to 21.
Advocates say higher age limits help prevent, or at least delay, young people from taking up a habit that remains the leading cause of preventable deaths nationwide. And supporters point to drinking-age laws as a precedent for setting the bar at 21.
Cigarette manufacturers have suggested young adult smokers may just turn to black-market merchants. And some smokers say it's unfair and patronizing to tell people considered mature enough to vote and serve in the military that they're not old enough to decide whether to smoke.
The tobacco-buying age is 21 in Needham, Mass., and is poised to rise to 21 in January in nearby Canton, Mass. The state of New Jersey is considering a similar proposal, and the idea has been floated in other places, including the Texas Legislature.
E-cigarette makers say their products are healthier than tobacco, and a trade association leader bristled at the city's proposal to prevent people under 21 from buying them.
"Is 21 the right number? People can join the Army at 18," said Ray Story, founder of the Atlanta-based Tobacco Vapor Electronic Cigarette Association.
There is little to enjoy about plane travel in America anymore, but if you have flown Delta Airlines anytime in the last year, you've probably already encountered its delightfully subversive airline safety video. It's your standard "seat-doubles-as-a-flotation-device" information, but with all sorts of fun visual gags mixed in. When I first saw it, it not only put a grin on my face, but it also kept my attention all the way through, as I waited for the next cheeky joke. Check it out.
Now, Virgin America is taking the safety video challenge. "We thought, what better way to shake things up than to re-imagine the safety video through the language of music and dance?" Virgin America writes on its site. Here it is:
YouTube
Virgin America's safety video is directed by the Step Up 2 film director.
"There's a 'robot rap,' a gyrating nun and countless back-breaking dance moves, all filmed by Step Up 2: The Streets director Jon M. Chu (who also did this recent Microsoft Surface ad) and choreographed by frequent Chu collaborators Jamal Sims and Christopher Scott."
For its part, Delta has updated its in-flight safety message for the holidays. Enjoy.
YouTube
A brief holiday-themed safety presentation from Delta.
Locking lips for a special scene in LA today (October 30), the lovely Jessica Alba and suave and sophisticated Pierce Brosnan continued filming "How to Make Love Like an Englishman."
Each of them looked fantastic during their passionate kiss scene, the "James Bond" stud in jeans and an overcoat, and the "Killer Inside Me" sweetheart dressed in a tan sweater and jeans, her lovely flowing hair down about her shoulders. Both exchanged smiles as they finished off the scene.
"How to Make Love to Make Love Like an Englishman" comes at us from "Extraordinary Measures" director, Tom Vaughan, the movie also stars the multi-talented Salma Hayek.
According to the romantic flick's synopsis, "A drama about a Cambridge poetry professor who begins to re-evaluate his life of Byronic excess."
Sprint is flexing its network muscle with technologies to combine frequencies for gigabit-speed performance and to let subscribers maintain data sessions while moving from one band of the network to another.
On Wednesday, the fourth-largest U.S. carrier bragged about its new capabilities and demonstrated a high-speed service it calls Sprint Spark, with current peak speeds of 50-60Mbps (bits per second) and the potential to exceed 1Gbps. It also promoted three upcoming handsets that will be able to take advantage of all three of its spectrum bands.
Sprint is in catch-up mode against its bigger rivals, Verizon Wireless and AT&T, and is looking to use its huge spectrum holdings as an advantage. The company is deploying LTE in its 800MHz and 1.9GHz bands as well as the 2.5GHz spectrum it acquired with Clearwire, on which the Sprint Spark service runs. Sprint prides itself on its Network Vision project, which has built a network that's flexible enough to support multiple technologies.
In the 2.5GHz band, Sprint plans to combine different sets of frequencies and make them act like one block of spectrum. The company used this technique in a demonstration at its Silicon Valley lab on Wednesday, showing peak throughput of 1.3Gbps (bits per second). More aggregation could offer as much as 2Gbps, Sprint said.
Other contributors to Spark performance include multiple antennas, transmitters and receivers. Sprint also plans to deploy small cells for coverage, capacity and speed starting next year, while keeping the number of full-size "macro" cells on its network steady at about 55,000 for the next few years.
The Sprint Spark service is available now in five markets: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami and Tampa, Florida. It will reach 100 million U.S residents by the end of next year, Sprint estimated.
Now the only missing piece is the hardware to enjoy Spark. The first devices that will be able to use all three of Sprint's bands will go on sale Nov. 8, the carrier said. They are the LG G2, Samsung Galaxy Mega and Samsung Galaxy S4 mini. The Samsung devices will get a software upgrade for tri-band capability shortly after launch, and the LG will get its upgrade early next year.
Sprint's tri-band devices will be able to move from one band without interrupting a subscriber's data session, the carrier said. However, speeds will vary: Using LTE on its 1.9GHz spectrum, Sprint estimates peak speeds of 30Mbps and average speeds of 6Mbps to 8Mbps.
The overall reach of Sprint's LTE will hit about 200 million by the end of this year and rise to 250 million by the middle of next year, the company said. Also on Wednesday, Sprint reported financial results for the third quarter, including a total subscriber count of 54.9 million and a net loss of 313,000 subscribers.
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen's e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com
Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service , IDG News Service
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for the IDG News Service. More by Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service
Sorry, National Institutes of Health: 2001 isn't 2003.
Photo & photo illustration by Slate
One of the juiciest, most heated, and ultimately most productive rivalries in the recent history of science was the race to sequence the human genome. On one side was a methodical, massive, publicly funded international project managed by the National Institutes of Health. On the other side was a lean, speedy, profit-driven company run by a brash scientist who came up with a method for sequencing DNA that ran circles around the NIH technique. The public consortium, led by Francis Collins, now head of the National Institutes of Health, criticized the company, Celera, for trying to turn a profit off the genome. J. Craig Venter, who ran Celera, had quit the public effort in frustration at its slow pace. His company’s slogan was “Speed Matters.” Members of the two teams despised one another. It was delicious.
Self-interest trumped rivalry for a brief time in June 2000, when the two teams called a truce and shook hands at a White House ceremony. They announced that they each had a working draft of the human genome and would soon publish their independent sequence maps jointly and reveal what they had discovered about life’s code.
The peace ended a few weeks later as they raced to piece together their sequences. The public consortium tried to prevent Science from publishing Celera’s genome over questions of how the data would be made available. (Disclosure: I worked for Science’s news department at the time.) And its scientists spent the days leading up to publication telling science reporters that Celera’s method had failed. (It hadn’t.)
Why in the world are the National Institutes of Health and the Smithsonian Institution celebrating the 10th anniversary of the sequencing of the human genome this year?
After an exhausting final sprint by thousands of scientists, the two sequences of the human genome were revealed to the world on Feb. 12, 2001, to great acclaim, in Science and Nature (themselves archrivals). There were press conferences and celebrations and headlines around the world. The New York Times said the publications opened “a new era in human biology and medicine.” Eric Lander, one of the leaders of the public consortium, said, “We are standing at an extraordinary moment in scientific history. It's as though we have climbed to the top of the Himalayas. We can for the first time see the breathtaking vista of the human genome.” Collins wrote that “the publications in February 2001 carried with them the kind of satisfying scientific significance that laborers in the genome fields had longed for.” He told Science, “There’s a long list of things that blew my socks off,” such as the unexpectedly low number of genes. Venter, still reeling over the concerted effort to discredit his genome, told the New York Times, “If we weren't resistant and somewhat defiant this never would have gotten done,” and Don Kennedy, editor of Science, told the paper, “There is no doubt the world is getting [the human genome sequence] well before it otherwise would have if Venter had not entered the race.”
The genome sequences were accompanied in Science and Nature by dozens of analysis papers each from the two teams, wall-size posters of human chromosomes with their genetic sequences spelled out, timelines, and CD-ROMs. Scientists celebrated with Champagne, teary speeches, and blowout parties, including one at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. Francis Collins was there: He performed onstage with his band. (They were called the Directors because the band members all directed NIH divisions, and everybody played lead guitar.) That date, again, was February 2001.
So why in the world are the National Institutes of Health and the Smithsonian Institution celebrating the 10th anniversary of the sequencing of the human genome this year?
They didn’t miss a deadline or mess up the math. By designating 2003 as the year the genome was sequenced, the NIH is still fighting against Celera. It’s laying exclusive claim for credit and trying to push its rival out of the history books. It’s trying to give the leaders of the public consortium an edge in the battle for the inevitable Nobel Prize.The Celera genome paper had more than 200 authors, and the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium’s paper listed more than 300, from 25 institutions. The Nobel Prize can be split only three ways.
In 2001 both teams clearly acknowledged that their sequences were first drafts. The maps had some gaps and fuzzy bits, but the main structure was known. Scientists could tally genes and place them in the correct positions on chromosomes. The two teams proved that their techniques for assembling 3 billion base pairs could work. They compared the human genomes with the genomes of other species. (We’re much more mouselike than anyone anticipated.)
After the dueling sequences were published, Celera shifted its focus from genome sequencing to drug development. The public consortium spiffed up its sequence and published the “complete” human genome in Nature in April 2003. This publication didn’t get a lot of attention, and it didn’t make major changes to the analyses from 2001.
I asked the National Human Genome Research Institute why it celebrated 2003 rather than 2001, and a spokesman replied (emphasis mine): “This is because 2003 marked the final release of the genome sequence, and the research the institute does now is widely based off of it. You’re right by saying that the 2001 papers were extremely important and groundbreaking, but 2003 marks the year that the Human Genome Project was completed and the completed genome sequence was released. There was still a little more research to be done to complete the sequence after the 2001 sequence was released.”
The NIH has been hosting anniversary events all year, but the most galling anniversary claim is made in an exhibit that opened this year at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the second-most-visited museum in the world. (Dang that Louvre.) It’s called “Genome: Unlocking Life’s Code,” and the promotional materials claim, “It took nearly a decade, three billion dollars, and thousands of scientists to sequence the human genome in 2003.” (Disclosure: I worked for Smithsonian magazine while the exhibition, produced in partnership with the NIH, was being planned, and I consulted very informally with the curators. That is, we had lunch and I warned them they were being played.) To be clear, I’m delighted that the Smithsonian has an exhibit on the human genome. And I’m a huge fan of the NIH. (To its credit, the NIH did host an anniversary symposium in 2011.) But the Smithsonian exhibit enshrines the 2003 date in the country’s museum of record and minimizes the great drama and triumph of 2001.
Celebrating 2003 rather than 2001 as the most important date in the sequencing of the human genome is like celebrating the anniversary of the final Apollo mission rather than the first one to land on the moon. Just this once, don’t listen to the NIH. Remember the thrills and rivalries and breathtaking accomplishments of 2001. And happy 12th anniversary of the sequencing of the human genome.
Researchers from device security firm Skycure have unearthed an unnerving vulnerability in iOS that can be used to hijack a number of apps when used on an insecure Wi-Fi network. And it might not just be an iOS issue, either.
Skycure calls the problem "HTTP Request Hijacking," or HRH for short, and it exploits the way many iOS applications deal with receiving an HTTP 301 status code ("Moved Permanently") from a server.
"Most mobile apps do not visually indicate the server they connect to," says Skycure, "making HRH attacks seamless, with very low probability of being identified by the victims."
At its core, the attack is essentially a variant on a standard man-in-the-middle attack. If an app is used on an insecure Wi-Fi network, an attacker can intercept requests sent by the app, reply to the requests with a 301, and trick the app into being redirected to a hostile server.
This is bad enough, but iOS apps have a behavior quirk that makes them particularly vulnerable to the attack: Whenever they receive a 301 redirection request, that request is cached indefinitely. In other words, once an attacker uses a request hijack on an iOS app, its requests are redirected continuously to the hostile server until the cache is cleared ... and the user may never know about it.
HRH attacks do require a few conditions to be met before they can be pulled off successfully. Most crucially, they need to be "physically near the victim for the initial poisoning," meaning that the attacker has to know where the user is connecting via Wi-Fi and hijack that specific connection.
Skycure has declined to name specific apps that are affected by this bug, as part of its responsible disclosure policy. Instead, the company has created a sample application that demonstrates the problem in action, along with a short video demonstrating the hijack. Most importantly, Skycure has published code in its article that allows concerned iOS developers to fix the problem quickly.
The New York Times Bits Blog was one of the first third-party sources to spread the word, noting that the same researchers also found another iOS-related security issue, back in 2012, in which LinkedIn's iOS app turned out to be leaking sensitive information when it collected meeting details from users' iOS calendars. LinkedIn has long since fixed that problem, but more recently it's come under fire yet again for another iOS app, LinkedIn Intro.
In a final note to its post, Skycure adds that "HRH isn’t necessarily a problem of iOS applications alone; it may apply to mobile applications of other operating systems too." In the abstract, the mechanism of an HRH attack isn't specific to iOS. If another platform -- Android, for instance -- behaves the same way in caching 301 requests, the same attack could conceivably be performed there as well.
Let's hope that's not the case -- but better yet, let's find out if it is true and do something about it.
Paramount Insurge, Paramount's label responsible for low-budget movies such as the Paranormal Activity franchise, has picked up a comedy spec script titled Fetch from first-time writers Kristen Vincent and Tim Moran.
Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec, who wrote Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol for Paramount, are producing with their Space Floor partners Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinkner.
Logline details are being kept in the doghouse but it is described as an offbeat buddy comedy involving a uniquely talented dog and his owner.
Insurge vp of production Alison Small, who was responsible for pinpointing the spec and spearheading its acquisition, will now oversee the project.
Insurge, which focuses on low- and microbudgeted movies, seems to be in an active phase, with Fetch being the second buy in under a week. Last Friday, the label picked up the sci-fi project Prism.
Appelbaum and Nemec cut their teeth writing and producing for shows such as Alias and Life on Mars before going on to make their feature debut with Ghost Protocol. They also worked on the script for Paramount’s upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.
After being sidelined for more than two years because of knee injuries, bantamweight champion Dominick Cruz will finally fight again at UFC 169 Feb. 1 against interim belt-holder Renan Barao. Cruz last fought and won with a unanimous decision over now flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson in October of 2011.
After that, Cruz was selected as a coach of The Ultimate Fighter, opposite his rival Urijah Faber. The two had fought twice before and were set to have a rubber match after coaching TUF.
Cruz tore his ACL in a knee and was forced out of the fight. Barao stepped in to fight Faber in an interim title bout, which he won.
Cruz' recovery was delayed by a second ACL tear and surgery. Barao has defended his interim title twice in the meantime.
The main event of UFC 169 will include another title bout as featherweight champ Jose Aldo defends against Ricardo Lamas. Lamas has won four straight bouts heading into his long-awaited title shot.
Pandora today updated its Android application to finally bring about a proper design for tablets.
The revamp smartly covers both portrait and landscape orientations, though the latter looks a little weird until you get two or three album covers onto the screen. No matter, though, it's absolutely an update you'll want to snag.
With the redesign you get easier access to your playlists, song lyrics and other sharing and purchasing options. Pretty self-explanatory, actually.
Sprint Spark network is a go, phones coming November 8
Sprint has sent out a note to the press, chock full of news plenty of folks are going to love. They are about to officially kick out Sprint Spark — what they've named their tri-band LTE technology — and have three phones in the works to use it.
Spark is Sprint's attempt to get some serious LTE speeds for their customers by utilizing the three different wireless spectrums they use and hold licenses for. The network and devices capable will use active hand off between 800MHz, 1,9Ghz and 2.5GHz frequencies to cover three needs. The 800MHz bands will offer great building penetration, the 1.9GHz bands are good for general purpose LTE connections in more populated (and slightly congested) areas, while the 2.4GHz frequency allows Sprint to cover long distances with maximum capacity. There are five markets officially live today — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Tampa and Miami — and 100 of America's largest cities will be covered during the next three years.
You're going to need phones that support this, and Sprint has three new ones coming.
Like every other major metropolis, New York City has tunnels for people, tunnels for cars, and lots of tunnels for trains. But it also has something rather more unique: tunnels for cows. Or does it? This is the story of New York’s lost, forgotten, or perhaps just mythical subterranean meat infrastructure.
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