LunaTik lets you wear your iPod Nano on your wrist

If you are the owner of the stylish Apple iPod Nano, you would probablywant this cool watch kit to make theportable media player into a watch.Launched at the recent COMEX Show in Singapore, and carried by Tat Chuan Acoustic Pte Ltd in Singapore, the LunaTik isa premiumconversion kit designed for those want toconvert their iPod Nanoas a wristwatch. The product comes with a tool kit that lets you screw in the nano into the wristband.The LunaTik case is forged from aircraft-grade aluminium with great durability and the straps are made from compression moulded high-grade silicone rubber with anti-dust coating while the hardware is made from stainless steel. Available in silver, black andred, the LunaTik is retailing at S$129 (with GST).

The other model, which is called TikTok,has asimple snap-in design that allows the user to quickly and securely snap the iPod Nano in and out of the wrist dock. It integrates the media playerand transforms it into a modern multi-function timepiece. TikTok is designed for those who want to easily transition from clip mode to watch mode. Moulded from reinforced PC/ABS, the straps are made from compression moulded high-grade silicone rubber withanti-dust coatingand the hardware is stainless steel. The TikTok isavailable in black or white at S$69 (with GST).

Lunar water likely comes from solar wind

For many years, it was believed that the moon was about as dry as things get, but over the past five years, that notion has come to change. New research has been done on the soil samples brought back from the Apollo missions in the 60s and 70s, as well as on the moon itself via spacecraft observations; as it turns out, the moon is quite wet.

The moon hardly needs a caption, but it gets one anyway

There is a surprisingly large concentration of ice crystals in the moon, as well as in the dust- and rock-layer called regolith, which coats the moons surface. One standing theory is that all of this water is a result of impacts with comets and other rocks rich in water. Another theory, first thought of in the late 1970s states that the Sun may be responsible, and a recent paper published in Nature Geoscience supports this theory.

University of Michigans Youxue Zhang and colleagues at the University of Tennessee, and California Institute of Technology, believe that the solar winds which are emitted by the Sun have been creating the water through chemical reactions. The solar wind, which hammers the solar system endlessly and is responsible for the auroras seen on planetary poles, is rich in hydrogen ions. These ions could be combining with oxygen molecules on the moons surface, and thus create H2O, water.

The researchers have been using infrared and mass spectrometry top analyze lunar samples from Apollo, and have found hydroxyl inside aglutinate glass (aglutinate is common and makes up 50% of the lunar regolith). The hydroxyl, essentially a bonded hydrogen and oxygen atom, would need another hydrogen atom to become water, but it is a first step in the process. The research shows that the creation of hydroxyl likely comes from interaction between the moon and solar wind.

Grain of the glass which hold hydroxyl groups on the moon

This in turn makes it likely that the water ice found in the north and south poles of the moon also exist as a result of the solar wind. That would make it likely that other inhospitable places in the solar system, such as the planet Mercury or asteroid Eros, may hold water as well; a very important finding if our species ever plans on establishing permanent colonies off-world.

LulzSec’s Ryan Cleary indicted in U.S. court

Ryan Cleary, a 20-year-old British citizen, was indicted by a jury in Los Angles on Tuesday on charges of hacking into websites of Sony, Fox, and PBS.

Cleary’s group, LulzSec, is accused of obtaining confidential information, defacing websites, and server attacks using compromised computers—or, “botnet.” The FBI says that Cleary’s actions have negatively impacted a large number of businesses.

An FBI spokeswoman states that: "Cleary is a skilled hacker. He controlled his own botnet, employed sophisticated methods and his broad geographic scope affected a large number of businesses and individuals."

LulzSec is an affiliate and/or have some connections to the hacktivist group “Anonymous”—which has been active in India in recent news. According to the Chicago Tribune, LulzSec initially targeted organizations that supports internet censorship, but later expanded their reach to Scientology and global banking system.

The FBI states that they would let overseas authorities’ prosecution against Cleary “take its course” before they seek to extradite Cleary in the U.S. A U.K.’s court date for Cleary is set for the 25th of June.

Luxa2 announces its iPhone 5 cases ahead of Apple’s launch

Were not sure this was the smartest move in history, but Luxa2, a division of Thermaltake has sent out its press release about its new iPhone 5 cases showing off a total of 13 different designs. Although the images doesnt give away too much in terms of details, theres one front shot of a dummy unit which suggests that Apple decided to keep the round button for at least one of its rumoured two new models that are expected to launch later today US time.

If nothing else its a great way of getting some free publicity, as iPhones cases are a dime a dozen these days and although Luxa2 has come up with a couple of slightly unusual looking cases such as a wooden one and a braided one, the other are fairly generic in terms of look, although six models appear to the made of clear plastic with various patterns.

If the dummy fitted to the cases turns out to be anything like the real deal, which wed expect it to be this close to launch, then were back to a metal back with a plastic Apple logo. The logo is used to improve the antenna signals which would be blocked by the metal back otherwise. The camera doesnt appear to have changed in any significant way as far as the design is concerned, but thats about as much as we can tell from the pictures.

The volume buttons have changed into a slim line rocker design and it appears as if the lock switch has been moved right next to the camera on the opposite side of the volume rocker. As far as the front of the phone is concerned, well, it doesnt look that different, but its possible that Apple has supplied the case manufacturers with dummy units that dont give away the rumoured front re-design. Make what you want of this, but the wait is almost over.

LuvBook TW600X with Blu-ray

(Mouse Japan) Mouse Computer Japan announced a new LuvBook, theTW600X that will retail at just 99,750 yen(~S$1590) and comes with aBlu-ray drive.

The specifications are not too shabby, it comes with a 15.4” WXGA screen. The laptop is powered by a Core 2 Duo P8700, 4GB of DDR2 (PC2-5300) RAM, 320GB of HDD, Blu-ray reader with DVD Super Multi and a an average Mobile Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD. The OS that comes with it is a Vista Home Premium SP1. Some of the outputs are USB2.0 × 3, HDMI output port × 1 and a Express card slot.

LulzSec promises quot;retribution quot; against hackers responsible for attacking SEGA

So you have read the news about SEGA being the latest victim in a string of cyber attacks that have seen many huge corporations being forced to take their servers offline in a bid to perform damage control and prevent hackers from further compromising any more personal information. However, in this case, SEGA can probably thank its lucky stars that it did not suffer the same kind of damage and data loss that some of its fellow victims have faced; while the company did not deny that it did lose a huge chunk of personal information as a result of a successful attack on one of its databases, it has also assured users that the most important piece of information, which is the credit card details of its subscriber base, was still safely secure in its servers.

According to a report posted by ZDnet, SEGA has confirmed that the attack has resulted in its SEGA Pass service being forced offline, and that the information that had been stolen as a result of the attack consists of personal information such as names, dates of birth, email addresses and passwords that that subscribers typically use to access the service, although it was quick to point out that the damage is not as severe as most people may have imagined it to be. For example, the company has revealed that the stolen passwords stored in its database were encrypted and not stored in plain text; as such, hackers or individuals in possession of those passwords will have their work cut out of them in the form of decrypting the information in order to obtain a subscribers original passphrase. And even then, SEGA is clearly taking no chances, having taken additional measures to prevent unauthorised access by resetting the passwords for all its subscribers, so the possibility of having someone successfully gaining access to SEGA Pass with a stolen password is decidedly slim. More importantly, SEGA also revealed that the server used to store its subscribers credit card information is in the custody of an external service provider, and was therefore safe from the attack.

However, it would seem at least one prominent hacker group does not condone such actions, and has gone out of its way to offer SEGA its assistance in finding and exacting vengeance on those hackers who perpetuated the attack. Indeed, a quick look at LulzSecs twitter page reveals that the hacker group does mean business this time round:

By the way, just for the record, a total of 1.3 million accounts were compromised in the recent attack against SEGAs database. Now that is definitely food for thought.

Source: ZDnet, Twitter

LulzSec leaks porn sites, mil, gov passwords; threatens to hack Brink servers

Hacker group LulzSec has recently revealeda large number of usernames and passwords (including admins and webmasters) from porn sites, approximately 26,000 of them. On top of that, usernames and passwords from government and military email accounts have also been leaked. The information is listed on their website. If your email is in that list, we advise you to change your password to avoid unauthorized personnel access.

LulzSec has hacked Sony Pictures and Sony BMG and even Nintendo web servers, and on Twitter, the group has recently tweeted about Brink and Bethesda, which could mean that they are targeting the Brink servers next. Brink is a first-person shooter developed by Splash Damage (and published by Bethesda)which have the combination ofsingle-player game with multiplayer elements. If LulzSec is successful in the servers hack, we would soon see the information posted on their website – http://lulzsecurity.com/releases/.

LukeXE’s Dual Stage Single Compressor CPU Cooler

LukeXE from our forums has done up a really sweet looking singlecompressor – dual stage Cascade cooler for his CPU.

Running Carbon Dioxide on the second stage, he pulls temperaturesof around -85 degrees celcius! Remarkable feat for a home-brewed project thiscompact and tidy! Check out more details and pictures he postedhere.

LucidLogix wants to play in the cloud, games that is

In addition to its XLR8 software, LucidLogix also announced VGWare or Virtual Graphics Ware which is a cloud graphics software according to the company that will allow for cloud gaming and remote graphics rendering. Beyond enabling remote gaming on just about any device away from your desktop PC its also targeting any other application that would need high-end graphics performance on a platform that lacks it.

Lucids usage scenario seems to be based around a "server" which in reality could be a high-end PC with a graphics card in it. VGWare supports AMD and Nvidia GPUs, multiple ones at that, as well as CUDA, OpenGL and OpenCL. In other words its possible to use it for a lot more than gaming, especially as GPU computing starts to really take off. Lucid claims low latency for fetching and transmitting frame buggers and even suggests that its possible to run multiple, concurrent games on a single GPU, although were not quite sure how that would work.

That said, Lucid doesnt tend to use a GPU as intended with its software and we have a feeling this has something to do with it. On the client side Lucid claims less than to frames lag over Wi-Fi, something that sounds quite impressive. Apparently any DirectX or OpenGL program should work, be it a game or a professional 3D application and it should be possible to run them on another desktop, a laptop, a tablet, a smartphone or even an internet TV. We would expect that Lucid would have to provide some kind of client software on this end, unless its relying on a web browser based solution.

Interesting stuff, although in some parts not entire revolutionary as OnLive is offering a remote gaming service in the US that does the same, just over much greater distances. That said, Lucids press release seems to suggest that VGWare is capable of doing something similar as it talks about running remote servers in the cloud or data center (arent they the same?). This is another tricky one, but something that doesnt seem quite as farfetched as Lucids XLR8 claims. The question is how much of a demand there will be for VGWare, as in as much as it sounds like a useful solution in some cases such as shuffling your PC games onto your TV, wed rather not play them on a smartphone or tablet.

Source: LucidLogix

LucidLogix Hydra destined to go the way of its ancient ancestor

LucidLogix made a technological breakthrough when introducing its first generation multi-GPU accomodating Hydra Engine to the world around 2 years ago now, which at the time by concept alone had people shouting out "Bravo!" thanks to the ability to mix up brands and models of graphics cards between the two major players, AMD and NVIDIA.

The issue is, Hydras performance with a mixed config has never been astonishing in line of what can be harnessedwhen using a pair of duplicate cards in CrossFire or SLI. It is for this reason that most avid gamers and enthusiasts dont go down this road.

In turn, it is becoming clear to motherboard manufacturers that the cost in adding Hydra to select motherboards isnt as appealing as it once was when the idea had everying sharing wow and cool comments together after its inception in the enthusiast motherboard segment. The folks over at Overclockers Ukraine have indicated that Hydra could well be on its way to nothing more than ancient history, not unlike its its greek mythological multi-headed ancestor.

While Lucid as a company are well and truly thriving thanks to their well evolved technologies including Lucid Virtu and XLR8, apparently as far as their hardware-based Hydra Engine technologies go, theyre looking square on at stamping them with a big "Obsolete" sign, especially since several motherboard manufacturers are providing both AMD and Intel chipset boards these days that give support for both SLI and Crossfire.

The signs of Hydras demise are particularly intensified after an MSI rep recently told OCUA that the company (who tended to always be the first and most likely partner to opt for Hydra SoCs on select boards in the past) no longer has any products on the horizon, nor planned in the future that will use Hydra.

Source: http://www.overclockers.ua/news/hardware/2012-01-21/108678/