Kim Dotcom Is Creating a 'Cutting Edge' Encrypted Email Service

According to RT, the man behind Mega plans to start running a "highly-secure email service to run on a non-US-based server." In a blog post, Mega’s Chief Executive Vikram Kumar explained the thinking behind the new initiative:

“These [recent closures] are acts of ‘Privacy Seppuku’ – honorably and publicly shutting down (“suicide”) rather than being forced to comply with laws and courts intent on violating people’s privacy.”

So, apparently Mega is working on an email system with an "exceptional level of encryption," a project which is “exciting” but “very hard.” He explains:

“The biggest tech hurdle is providing email functionality that people expect, such as searching emails, that are trivial to provide if emails are stored in plain text (or available in plain text) on the server side. If all the server can see is encrypted text, as is the case with true end-to-end encryption, then all the functionality has to be built client side... On this and other fronts, Mega is doing some hugely cutting-edge stuff. There is probably no one in the world who takes the Mega approach of making true crypto work for the masses, our core proposition."

For his part, Dotcom insists that Mega never holds any decryption keys so customer email can never be read, even if someone wants it to be. Looks like secure email might not be dead just yet. More here.

45 Seconds Is All This Kettle Needs To Boil Water

When the craving for Ramen noodles hits, no one wants to have to wait for minutes on end before they can enjoy a bowl of salty goodness. So Tiger, maker of some of the most advanced rice cookers on the planet, has used its expertise in heating things up to create a steam-free kettle that can boil a cup of water in just 45 seconds. That's even faster than a microwave.

The secret to the kettle's high-speed boiling capabilities is a re-designed heating element inside, as well as a steamless design that traps water vapor before it can escape, condensing it back into droplets of hot water to further the heating process. And since the kettle produces piping hot water in less than a minute, it also means it's more energy efficient than other models using about 22 percent less power to boil a cup of water.

The only downside? A $130 price tag when the kettle's available starting in December. Like with most things in life, if you want it fast you'll have to pay a premium, but in this instance it may be worth it for a pot that actually does boil when you watch it. More here.

Brain Teaser Table Is More Complicated Than Ikea, But Also More Fun

Do you like a challenge when it comes to assembling flat-pack furniture? And we're not talking about deciphering the illustrations and hieroglyphs in an Ikea manual. We mean real Mensa-level stuff. If blank crossword puzzles and unsolved Sudoku grids get you really excited, you'll love the incredibly complicated furniture from Bulgaria's Praktrik.

One of its most challenging pieces is this coffee table/stool simply called the 4x6. Inspired by what's known as a Burr Puzzle, it comes as a collection of 24 pieces that requires a very specific methodology to assemble. Do it wrong, and you'll be spending hours on end trying to figure it out. But that's all part of the fun, right? More here.

This Stunning Spiral Galaxy Is Out There Right Now

M74 is an Sc galaxy, meaning that it has "loosely wound spiral arms, clearly resolved into individual stellar clusters and nebulae." This image was created with data recorded in 2003 and 2005 by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, and depicts the galaxy in all its 30,000 light-years-across glory. A major component of the data is hydrogen emissions, which create the patches of red glow. It's kind of hard to contextualize or grasp, but M74 is really out in the universe right now, just chillin'. More here.

The Pirate Bay Celebrates 10 Years With a New Blockade-Busting Browser

File sharing site The Pirate Bay set sail ten years ago. While the site and its founders have had plenty of legal trouble along the way, like Keith Richards, they refuse to abandon ship. They're marking a decade of file plundering with a typically typo-laden decree and a new way to circumnavigate torrent blockades.

On their blog, TPB marked the occasion by reassuring fans that they aren't going anywhere:

Oh look, we made it.

A decade of agression, repression and lulz.

We really didn't think we'd make it this far. Not because of cops, mafiaa or corrupt politicians. But because we thought that we'd eventually be to old for this shit. But hey, running this ship makes us feel young.

And we're gonna stay young til we die.

They also unveiled a new browser (well, a souped-up version of Firefox for Windows) that promises to bust any torrent-blocking shenanigans your ISP might attempt. While PirateBrowser utilizes some Tor functions, it doesn't make browsing anonymous the way Tor does. Still, if you were looking for a fitting way to celebrate ten years of information freedom, opening up PirateBrowser and torrenting a few files would seem appropriate. More here.

This Is What an Undersea Data Cable Actually Looks Like

When they're not being tapped by the NSA or severed by criminals, undersea cables have to cope with some pretty traumatic conditions. High pressure salt water isn't the friend of any communication link, and that's before you even think about geological shifts and other undersea activity.

So the deep-sea lines that let you watch cat videos from the other side of the world are heavily reinforced to ensure that internet outages are the exception rather than the rule. Essentially that means a lot of steel reinforcing, a whole heap of polymer shrouding, and a dash of copper shielding. Get through all of that and lurking there, just in the middle, are a few precious glass fibers that carry your data.

It might seem like overkill, but it really is worth it: When one was damaged in Myanmar earlier this year, the country's bandwidth instantly plummeted. More here.

Scientists Have Created a Malaria Vaccine That's 100% Effective

For the first time in history, scientists have completed successful human trials of a malaria vaccine that provides 100% protection against the often fatal disease.

Currently, we have no truly effective method of protecting against malaria. Even the World Health Organization had only set their sights on a vaccine with an 80% efficacy rate—and they weren't planning to have that until 2025. Because before today, according to Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland, "we have not even gotten anywhere near that level of efficacy." But this newest incarnation has surpassed everything we thought possible.

Called PfSPZ, the vaccine is made from weakened sporozoites (SPZ), the form of the malarial parasitePlasmodium falciparum (Pf) when it's in its initial infectious state. Even though the parasite is weakened, it's in its whole form, thus invoking an immune response. The six human subjects that were given five intravenous doses of PfSPZ were 100% protected when they were later bitten by infectious mosquitoes—five of the six unvaccinated control participants and three of the nine people only given four doses went on to develop malaria.

Previously, most of the malaria vaccines being experimented with only used a few of the parasite's proteins. Stephen Hoffman, head of the Maryland developing firm Sanaria, decided to test a vaccine using the whole sporozoite after researching past experiments going back to the 1970s in which strong, long-lived protection from malaria resulted from volunteers being exposed to thousands of bites from irradiated infected mosquitoes. Stefan Kappe, a malaria researcher at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute in Washington, tells Nature:

The trial results constitute the most important advance in malaria vaccine development since the first demonstration of protection with radiation attenuated sporozoite immunization by mosquito bite in the 70s. This is a pivotal success.

But part of the reason it's taken so long to get to this point is that the process of actually making the vaccine is incredibly difficult and complex. First Sanaria had to raise mosquitoes in sterile conditions "on an industrial scale." He would feed them blood that had been infected with the malaria parasite and then exposed to radiation to so that the parasite would weaken. That way, the body would recognize its presence without being infected with the actual disease.

Next, billions of these parasites were harvested from the mosquitoes' salivary glands, purified, and cryopreserved. And while all this was happening, most researchers in the field were expecting him to fail. They didn't think it would be possible to mass-produce this parasite in a way that passed the highly strict quality and safety standards that human medicine must undergo. And now, as Fauci mentioned to Nature,"To my amazement, Hoffman did it."

Now, the trial is going to need to be repeated and over a much wider range of participants in the regions where malaria is most rampant. This way, scientists will be able to determine if it's actually effective against strains different from that used in the vaccine, as well as how its effects might vary according to age, gender, etc. From what we've seen so far, though, we have every reason to hope that we may be on our way to making malaria a thing of the past. More here.

The Kindle Fire HD Is Cheaper Than It's Ever Been

In case you haven't noticed yet, Amazon's been hitting its Kindle Fire HD 7-inch with sale after sale, and right now, you can pick one up for the lowest price ever in its relatively short history—a cool $160 compared to the usual $200.

The sale's being offered for a limited time only, so if you've been making plans to get one for yourself, now's the time. Especially since all these sales would seem to hint at a good ol' fashioned inventory exodus. Amazon's inevitably going to unveil a new line of Kindles in a few months, so it's going to need to clear out the last of the Kindle Fire HDs one way or another.

Of course, you could always wait and hope that they're going to go even lower, but with how cheap these things are now, if you're serious, might not want to risk it. More here.

Groundbreaking New Particle Could Make Hard Drives 20 Times Smaller

There are many reasons why we still have size limitations on technology, but when it comes to data storage, one thing really stands out. You can only squeeze particles so close together before they start bumping into each other and screwing up the data. That's all about to change.

Scientists have finally created a long-theorized particle called the skyrmion. The best way to imagine a skyrmion is to think of a magnetic field that resembles a twisted vortex of atoms. In a normal particle, the charges of the atoms all line up in the same direction, but in a skyrmion, they're arranged in these little twister shapes that also happen to be quite stable. You can move them around and shake them up, but they won't come untwisted.

This is where they come in handy for data storage. Information is burned onto a hard disk by turning the magnetic north poles of normal clusters of atoms up or down to denote a "one" or a "zero," a digital bit. But if you push these particles too closely together, the magnetic fields begin to interfere with each other and scramble the data. This doesn't happen with skyrmions. Because of that unique vortex shape, you can squeeze the particles super close together, and the magnetic state of each bit will remain stable.

The really exciting news is that scientists think that they can make devices like optical hard drives up to 20 percent smaller using this technique. The bad news is that we're a ways away from making such devices. The idea of skyrmions has been around since the 1960s, but only in this latest study have scientists proven that they were able to actually use them to write data. Even then, they were only able to do it about 60 percent of the time.

But you know what? We used to burn data onto CDs that used to skip, like, 80 percent of the time, and look at us now. You probably can't even remember the last time you heard something skip. More here.

Facebook Is Getting Trending Topics

Want some Twitter in your Facebook? No? Too bad. According to a report by All Things D, Facebook is getting trending topics and they're rolling out today. Oh, and yes, they are literally going to be called "Trending Topics."

The new feature will take the form of a banner on the mobile site that displays across the top of a user's newsfeed, displaying information that the unwashed Facebook-masses are keen to chat about, whether or not they are friends of the user. If they click it, they'll see how their own personal friends are reacting to the trend, but they'll see content from a bunch of total strangers too.  More here.

Latest Trailer for Jobs Is Eminently Watchable

Why read the Steve Jobs biography when you can just watch Ashton Kutcher play the part in the new trailer for Jobs?

From that memorable moment when the founder himself switches on the very first Apple I to that sort of creepy bit towards the end when he's bearded and grey, you pretty much get the man's whole life story in 90 seconds. And 90 completely captivating seconds, they are.

The First 3D Printed Rifle Now Fires Multiple Rounds Without Breaking

The Canadian sucessor to the Liberator's attempt at bringing plastic firearms to the masses has apparently just gotten one step closer to his goal. After firing one semi-successful, barrel-cracking shot from his newly designed 3D-printed rifle, the Grizzly, a YouTube user going only by "Matthew" was able to fire a full 14 shots before the gun gave way. More here.

Refoldable Cardboard Furniture Makes It Cheap And Easy To Mosey On

When you're moving and you have a lot of IKEA furniture, you know what you should do. You should take it apart, transport it and then put it back together on the other end. You know this. You consider this. And then you create a last minute flash sale on Craig's List, get whatever money you can from all that MALM, and re-buy down the line. Chairigami is trying to end this cycle.

Founded by Zach Rotholz, Chairigami produces furniture made entirely out of triple-wall cardboard that is easy to unpack and repack. Flat. The company grew out of Rotholz's senior project at Yale, and started on $5,000 he had saved from his bar mitzvah. After all, seed funding is the whole reason to come of age.RELATED

Currently Chairigami is working on large orders, including one for 2,000 stools for summer camps. And Chairigami isn't the only company that makes cardboard furniture, but it's one of the first in the U.S.. Shelving starts at $65 and the couch is $100. More here.

Disposable Spy Computers Are Disturbingly Easy and Cheap to Make

Be honest, how often do you use unsecured Wi-Fi for something you shouldn't? You know, just a quick Facebook login at Starbucks. If you've done it even once, that's too much, because making a secret spy computer that can steal all that data is dumb easy. And cheap to boot.RELATED

Brendan O’Connor, security researcher, founder of the consulting firm Malice Afterthought, and mind behind the F-BOMB, has been showing off his newest toy at DEF CON. It's called creepyDOL, and it's like a budget PRISM-box for DIY hackers.

With a $25 Raspberry Pi and a handful of adapters—including Wi-Fi—each creepyDOL box costs a mere $57 in parts, and is worth its weight in stolen data. But the really scary stuff is what O'Connor can rig up the units to do as a network once they've got enough data to identify your specific gadgets.

The New York Times explains some of the creepy possibilities:

You could spy on your ex-lover, by placing the sensor boxes near the places the person frequents, or your teenage child, or the residents of a particular neighborhood. You could keep tabs on people who gather at a certain house of worship or take part in a protest demonstration in a town square. Their phones and tablets, Mr. O’Connor argued, would surely leak some information about them – and certainly if they then connected to an unsecured Wi-Fi. The boxes are small enough to be tucked under a cafe table or dropped from a hobby drone. They can be scattered around a city and go unnoticed.

Granted, O'Connor isn't doing any of this stuff, but if he could, so could just about anyone else. This kind of surveillance preys on insecurity that's pretty inherent to digital world as it is today, so it's hard to hide from. You can read more about O'Connors little toy over at The Times. And you thought it was enough to just worry about the NSA. More here.

Earth Is Just a Pale Blue Dot From Saturn

The image above is what Earth looks like from Saturn, a stunning reminder from NASA's Cassini spacecraft that we're nothing but a small speck of dust. All respect to Carl Sagan, but it's definitely hard sometimes to tell a dot from a pixel. And maybe that's even more to the point. More here.

People Are Literally Getting Palm Line Surgery for Better Fortunes

There's fate, and then there's science. But sometimes—just sometimes—the two will join in an unholy union, spawning a monster bearing the worst qualities of both. And that is where cosmetic, surgical palm line adjustment comes in. Because occasionally destiny needs a little shove in the right direction. With a scalpel.

In Japan, palm reading is still one of the most prominent methods of predicting the future. But this isn't the dark ages any more, and what with the iPhones and the virtual reality and the immediate access to hot singles in your area, we have the technology now to do practically anything. So naturally, one woman figured if you want to change your future (and your palm lines determine that future) might as well take it straight to the source.

She went to plastic surgeon Takaaki Matsuoka, who after reading about a similar surgery being done in Korea, decided to go with an electric scalpel. And as Matsuoka told the Daily Beast, this is far from hocus pocus kind of stuff:

If you try to create a palm line with a laser, it heals, and it won’t leave a clear mark. You have to use the electric scalpel and make a shaky incision on purpose, because palm lines are never completely straight. If you don’t burn the skin and just use a plain scalpel, the lines don’t form. It’s not a difficult surgery, but it has to be done right.

As for whether or not it works, Matsuoka is a bit less certain, noting that "it's not like the palm lines are really written in stone... They do change with time." Yeah, especially when you take a searing hot knife to your hand.

So far no analysis has been done on its effectiveness, but Matsuoka believes any success can probably be chalked up to the placebo effect. You'll never really know unless you find out for yourself, though, and a brand new future can be yours for the low, one-time payment of $1,000. More here.

Apple's Shiny New Chipmaker Could Give It a Major Battery Boost

Apple's just acquired Passif, a wireless chipmaker that specializes in making tiny chips that require very low amounts of energy. The deal, it seems, happened sometime in the last few months, reports Jessica Lessin.

What's that mean for Apple? Well, it could indicate that Apple is, in fact, making some type of wearable device. Or, it just means that future versions of its own Ax chips will be even more energy efficient. Battery technology clearly stinks these days and mobile devices are only going to require even more battery power. If the rumors of a wearable from Apple are true, then this shows just how serious the company is about entering the wearables market.

This marks the fourth acquisition for Apple in recent weeks. Last month it was announced that Apple had acquired both HopStop and Locationary to boost its mapping efforts. And in March Apple acquired WifiSLAM, a company that specializes in indoor location mapping via Wi-Fi signals. More here.

Apple Has Fixed the Number 1 in iOS 7's Calendar

Rejoice, humans of the Earth, for the ugly off-center 1 in Apple iOS 7's Calendar app icon has been at last, FIXED! It took almost two entire years of design rants after every update, but someone in Cupertino has at last listened and corrected what was a horrible design decision made by someone else who is no longer in Cupertino. iOS 7 beta 4 has a perfectly centered 1.

The Insides of Meteorites Are Nature's Stained Glass

On the outside meteorites look like volcanic rocks. But astronomy photographer Jeff Bartoncracks them open to reveal the glittering geodes inside.

Barton—who is the director of Sciences at Cowell, Texas's Three Rivers Foundation—calls the innards of space debris "natural stained glass." He's been collecting these gems since 2004. The photos from this set are from the Allende Meteorites, which rained on the Mexican state of Chihuahua in 1969.

To capture the stunning shots of meteorite guts, Barton cuts the rocks open with a rock saw with a diamond-coated blade. He'll then grind down a stamp-sized piece so thin light can pass through it, like sun through the windows of a cathedral. Photos are subsequently taken with polarizing filters and a DSLR attached to a petrographic microscope. Aren't they just beautiful? I wish I could wear one on a necklace. More here.

Commercial Drones Are Now Approved for Aerial Surveillance

Creepy drone spying is no longer just the purview of the military in the United States. The Federal Aviation Administration recently cleared two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for commercial use surveilling the Alaskan coast, marking a sharp turn for the future of domestic drone use.

One of the drones, an Insitu Scan Eagle 200, will be used by a "major energy company" for monitoring migrating whales and icebergs off the Alaskan coast, while the other one, an AeroVironment PUMA, will monitor oil spills up in the Beaufort Sea. These are the first of what will surely be a significant number of commercial drones use for aerial surveillance around the country.

The arrival of certified commercial surveillance drones comes as a first step to measures in the FAA Reauthorization Act that President Obama renewed last year calling for new regulations to govern the use of commercial drones by 2015. Until now, drones could only fly with an experimental airworthiness and not for commercial purposes. Although that didn't stop photographers or journalists from using the machines for specialized purposes. Itdid kickstart an entire industry of commercial drone manufacturing to make sure there are UAVs ready for purchase when the FAA gives the go ahead. More here.