ghost

Roughly a week ago, the 2009 Frankfurt Auto Show wrapped up an exciting ten or so days of new cars being paraded around for industry insiders. A few days ago I presented a video clip in this blog documenting what Edmunds.com believed to be highlights of the Frankfurt festivities. One of the new cars coming out that caught my attention was the 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost. So I spent this evening doing some digging around on what this latest Rolls-Royce production model was all about, and this video is the best synopsis of this classy ride.

This video produced by … Read more

Like most social-networking sites, Twitter isn't immune to lurkers, fakes, and creeps. The 404 Twitter account received over 600 followers in the last 24 hours, which leads us to believe that we're either becoming wildly popular or more likely, the new adds are demonized accounts; in other words, people that had their accounts taken over by a spam bot. This has to stop, Biz--stop teasing our egos!

In other ridiculous news, the CBS video print ad we picked apart in Episode 411 is fetching up to $400 on eBay--what the what? If we'd known that prices would skyrocket on the black market, we would have ganked a few more copies from our parent company, CBS! This is a great example of how you can buy practically anything online, including an 800 thread count Egyptian Cotton duvet cover or a set of custom-made Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle drapes from your humble host's childhood...don't ask, just watch the show.

After the break, we get to a few Calls From the Public, including one from a caller all the way in the Caribbean! We also run down the 20 best cartoons from the 1990s, but they forgot about the X-Men cartoon! And where is "Teenage Mutant Ninja Frickin Turtles?!" Take a look at the list and let us know your favorites!

Wanting to build excitement leading up to the 2009 Frankfurt auto show, Rolls-Royce has released a slew of details and photos of its upcoming Ghost (formerly known as the 200EX Concept). As expected, the Ghost features umbrellas hidden in the door jambs, self-righting "RR" wheel caps, and a motorized Spirit of Ecstacy hood ornament, but we're most interested in what's happening under the hood and in the cabin.

Under the brushed metal hood is a new direct-injected 6.6 liter twin-turbo V12 engine, sending 563 horsepower and 575 pound-feet of torque through an eight-speed, shift-by-wire, automatic … Read more

Mood-based music playlists have been a holy grail for audio entrepreneurs since the dawn of the MP3. There's just something unshakable about the idea that your iPod might sense your mood and play music to fit your precoffee grogginess or sun-filled Saturday frolic. Unfortunately, everyone from MIT to Memorex has experienced mixed success trying to crack the music mood algorithm.

The problem with automatic playlists based on mood is that the scope of music can often be overwhelming (what's more energetic, Techno or Oompah Polka?) and the technology used to analyze and assign mood attributes to music files … Read more

In the middle of the desert between Israel and Palestine, Ghost's high-tech Virtual Computer is set to launch Tuesday. After three years of work, Ghost finished the development of its Web-based operating system that uses "cloud computing" to let users access their desktop and data from any computer worldwide.

Ghost, short for Global Hosted Operating System, was founded in 2006 by Zvi Schreiber, whose goal was to create the Virtual Computer that works with third-party Web applications like Google Docs, Zoho, and Flickr and joins them together into one online service and can be accessed from any … Read more

During the day, we're mild-mannered tech bloggers, wearing glasses and looking moody in our vast, yet innocuous, Crave penthouse. But at night, we fight crime. We take on the persona of a creature of the night--black, terrible, shadowy. We become the Ghost Pigeon.

To protect our loved ones, we have to keep our secret identity super-duper seekrit. That means hiding our calls and texts to the police commissioner, especially when we send him MMS messages with videos of us collaring a miscreant.

Luckily, just for people like us there's Sonaworks' Ghost Pigeon software, a secret-phone-within-a-phone that will hide your texts, MMS messages, and calls. It's available now in the U.K. and a bunch of other countries, including Estonia, Bulgaria, Norway, Nigeria, and Cyprus, but apparently it hasn't made its way to the U.S. yet.

Ghost Pigeon is invisible on the phone--there's no icon in the menu. Instead, you launch the application by typing in a password. Here at Crave UK, we installed Ghost Pigeon on our 8GB Nokia N95, and although it's visible in the list of installed apps, its name is well disguised.

We could hide contacts, so that we only saw them from within Ghost Pigeon, not in our normal list of contacts. The phone rang normally for incoming calls from hidden --or "pigeonated"--contacts, but they were only stored in Ghost Pigeon's call logs and weren't visible in the normal call log.

Similarly, our phone alerted us to incoming texts from a hidden contact, but the texts didn't show up in our normal in-box, only in the Ghost Pigeon in-box. … Read more

Man, we're never going to have a complete show again. With Wilson in Boston visiting his newborn son, we invite Natali Del Conte back on the show, where we disgust and delight her with stories about gravity-defying bras, sleeping with rodents, and a $4k pair of Xbox/Nike sneakers.

After begging Natali to take me back, we move onto a story about a pair of Nike sneakers that fetched $4k on eBay this weekend. They're custom made and feature fiber optic wiring that makes the shoes light up and glow on the wearer. You can guess how wide Jeff opened up the hating floodgates on these guys.

We've also got a really disgusting story about a new strain of SUPER RAT found in Europe that's resistant to pesticides and modern poison. I've got my own story to tell about my ongoing battle with mice in my home, and I won't give away any secrets, but be sure to listen to the last 15 minutes of the show to hear the rest...R.O.U.S. is a staggering understatement. Enjoy your lunch everyone!

China is coming under scrutiny as the possible source of malicious software and Internet attacks directed at foreign governments and other institutions.

A pair of recent research reports have cast some light on shadowy online initiatives with roots in China. Completed separately, both reports--"Tracking GhostNet," from the Munk Centre for International Studies in Toronto, and "The snooping dragon," from the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory--address the Chinese government's efforts to monitor the activities of the Dalai Lama and the governing of Tibet.

Asked about the reports, analysts in China say that such claims are … Read more