iPhone 5 Event To Be Held On Apple Campus In Cupertino - By Aby Benedict

According to a report published today, Apple will holding their next media event on campus in Cupertino instead of San Francisco.

The report comes from All Things D  – a technology-related blog part of Wall Street Journal’s Digital Network.
In the report, John Paczkowski cites sources “close to the company” which claim that, for the first time in many years, Apple will be holding their next media event on-campus at Infinite Loop, Cupertino, California.

From All Things D:

Historically, Apple has held its big product demonstrations in San Francisco. The iPad and iPad 2 where unveiled there, as were all iterations of the iPhone to date.
This year things are going to be different.  This year, Apple’s holding its big iPhone media event closer to home.
Sources close to the company say the demonstration — currently scheduled for Tuesday October 4, a date first reported by AllThingsD — will be held at Apple’s campus in Cupertino, California.

Although we won’t know for sure where the event will take place, who will present the keynote and which products will be announced until things are official, following recent reports does give a rough idea of what to expect.
Several reports, including one from All Things D itself, suggest that the upcoming event is where the next iPhone (or iPhones) will be announced: a low-end iPhone 4 look-alike or a dual-core A5-toting iPhone 4 and a high-end next generation iPhone (which referred to as the iPhone 5).
Paczkowski has also has previously claimed that the keynote will be given by new CEO Tim Cook.Cook’s keynote will have other important Apple executives like Scott Forstall (Senior VP, iOSSoftware) and Philip Schiller (Senior VP, Product Marketing).
The reason behind this apparent change of venue isn’t very clear at the moment. Apple traditionally hosts their events in large spaces like Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) but the company has, for one reason or another, decided to hold the next event on-campus.
The rumored October 4th release date is just 8 days away, so if Paczkowski’s previous report has any truth in it, we should see Apple sending invites to the media any day now!

Here's digital video of what we see inside our brains - By Aby Benedict

I don't know what kinds of things you see inside your head, but I do worry about it.

As for the things I see inside my head, well, if only I could show you. Actually, there are scientists at UC Berkeley who believe that they can show you.

I haven't let them into the house yet. But I can show you video of their work. I am grateful to the inner brains at Gizmodo, who first revealed this footage to me.

You will, naturally, be wondering whether the scientists created this footage, well, naturally.

In a way. They put their human guinea pigs (themselves) into a functional MRI machine for several hours. Which sounds uncomfortable.

They then showed themselves two different Hollywood movie trailers. As they watched these trailers, the blood-flow through their visual cortex was being recorded.

Then it was down to a computer program that divided into voxels-- three-dimensional cubes otherwise known as volumetric pixels.

"We built a model for each voxel that describes how shape and motion information in the movie is mapped into brain activity," Shinji Nishimoto, lead author of the study, explained on the UC Berkeley site.

The computer program, on a second-by-second basis, began to learn what sort of visual patterns appeared in the brain as subjects saw particular types of visual stimulus in the first set of trailers.

Then a second set of trailer information was used for the computer--which had been fed 18 million seconds of random YouTube footage--to correlate.

In the end, what you see is a merger of the 100 clips most similar to the first clip the subject saw, but blurred together to form an entity.

Clearly, this is both complicated and imperfect. However, wouldn't you ultimately like to know what your Congress sees inside its collective head when it confronts, say, the economic crisis?

Wouldn't you want to see what your lover sees when he or she suddenly sees, well, red?

Surely, one day, these images might help us understand each other. At least a little.

NASA's falling satellite caught on video?

We're generally skeptical of any video of strange lights in the sky, but this one is worth a gander. A family in Okotoks, Alberta--a suburb of Calgary--believes they caught footage of the fiery death spasms of NASA's UARS satellite, parts of which returned to earth early Saturday morning after two decades in orbit.

We can't confirm this video actually shows UARS' final descent. It's certainly out of the ordinary, but it's also not consistent with reports that the satellite likely fell in the Pacific Ocean before reaching Canada. NASA says that other amateur satellite watchers in Canada and the Pacific Northwest of the United States were keeping an eye out for UARS, but none actually spotted it--suggesting it did in fact fall in the ocean. Or maybe it was just saving the show for Okotoks...

Watch for yourself --does this look like speeding space junk on fire? Or just some distant street lamps and jittery camerawork?

Mac OS X vulnerable to new PDF trojan malware - By Aby Benedict

Although Macs have the squeaky clean image of being malware-free, things may start to change as the platform gets increasingly more popular. Researchers at F-Secure and Sophos have discovered a new trojan horse malware that targets Mac OS X and is disguised as a PDF file. The malware was first seen in July but has now been identified as two utilities that work together to install a backdoor.

The first is the trojan dropper that installs a downloader component while disguising the action by opening up a PDF file. The PDF file contains Chinese characters and is mainly to distract the user as a backdoor program is downloaded and installed on the system. When this happens, it will create a launch agent that keeps the malware active to send the system’s current username and MAC address to a remote server. The server will then instruct it to archive files for upload or to upload screenshots.

At the moment, F-Secure says that the malware doesn’t work very well and appears quite crude. It’s possibly still in the testing phase and could become more advanced. It’s not known yet how the malware is being distributed, but it’s likely through e-mails and underground web sites. Therefore, it’s best to avoid downloading any PDF files from unknown sources.

If you suspect that your Mac may be infected and you do not have a malware scanner, then you should check your Activity Monitor for any processes called “checkvir.” If so, click the red button to stop the activity, quit your Activity Monitor, and proceed to remove the files “checkvir” and “checkflr.plist” from this directory: /username/Library/LaunchAgents/

iPhone loyalty at 89%, dwarfs other phone makers

According to a recent survey by UBS Investment Research, the number of iPhone owners who indicated that they would stick with Apple for their next handset is overwhelming compared to rival phone makers. The retention rate for Apple is 89 percent, while the second closest competitor, HTC, has a retention rate of 39 percent.

In third place is RIM, which slipped dramatically from a 62 percent retention rate to 33 percent, followed by Samsung with 28 percent, Motorola with 25 percent, and Nokia with 24 percent.

When looking at the software platforms rather than the hardware, Android fared better with a 55 percent retention rate. However, 31 percent of Android users have expressed that they are considering switching to the iPhone for their next handset.

Overall, UBS finds Apple’s retention rates to have held up “incredible well.” Of all the current handset owners looking to switch for their next handset, more than 50 percent say that they plan to pick up an iPhone. Only about 10 percent plan to switch away from the iPhone.

Apple seeds new Mac OS X 10.7.2 beta to developers

Apple has just seeded a new beta build of Mac OS X 10.7.2 to developers ahead of the much anticipated iCloud launch. This new beta comes less than a week after the last beta was issued for testing and, interestingly, on the same day that Apple warned developers that it would be resetting all iCloud data.

It’s not clear what problems, if any, this new version addresses but it’s known as 11C52 and is about 740.2MB in its delta form. The focus areas remain the same as the previous beta version and includes the AddressBook, GraphicsDrivers, iCal, iChat, iCloud, Mail, MobileMe, the Mac App Store, Safari, Spotlight, and Time Machine.

The recent betas seeded to developers have all included iCloud integration whereas previous versions had required developers to download a separate installer. It’s believed that Mac OS X 10.7.2 will be released alongside the iCloud and iOS 5, which are both expected to launch with the next-gen iPhone (be it the iPhone 5 or the iPhone 4S) on October 4.

Where do I sign up for Facebook Timeline beta?

It’s the question that just about everyone in the Facebook world is asking this week after we saw a massive amount of excitement following the big keynote speech at the f8 2011 developers conference covered here: Zuckerberg reveals Timeline, a whole new Facebook at f8 2011. Now we know Timeline is the way of the future, might as well bring it on right away! Facebook is the sort of platform where to upgrade your environment, you’ve only to tap a button and make it happen. That’s what’s going on here, and though it’s still in beta form, you can go jump in the pool right this second – sign up for Timeline!

While most people won’t hear from Facebook for at least a few days, we’ve got word that there are a select few out there that have already converted. All you’ve got to do is head on over to the webpage Introducing Timeline here: http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline and hit the Sign Me Up button in the lower right-hand side. Once you’ve hit this button, if you were signed in to your Facebook account that is, that’s an important bit of this equation, you’ll get a note popping up that says:

Timeline is coming soon.

We’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready.

So fear not, your Facebook will be changing again soon! Meanwhile just keep plugging away at sharing and clicking and liking and everything like that because just like every other Facebook update, all of your content travels on safely and soundly to the next version, and if this intro video and the explanation of what we’re seeing holds up, it’ll be the most aesthetically pleasing version of Facebook yet, not to mention the most interactive and – oh my goodness – user friendly as well.

Also feel free to follow along with us all day for all the rest of the Facebook news from f8 2011!