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If you're looking for a way to share Internet connectivity from one of your Android devices to another tablet or laptop, this guide can help you. Open Garden is an app that will broadcast your Internet signal to devices around you via Bluetooth, in hopes of creating a seamless mesh network. The idea behind the app is to make the connection process easier so you can spend more time being productive or surfing the Web. Here's how to get connected:

Install Open Garden on your mobile device that has a connection to the Internet. This would … Read more

The mysterious Flame malware used domain names registered with fake names to communicate with infected computers in the Middle East for at least four years, researchers said today.

Someone began creating the 86 domains and more than 24 IP addresses that host the command-and-control (C&C) servers as early as 2008, using fake identities and addresses in Austria and Germany to register them with GoDaddy and others, Roel Schouwenberg, senior researcher at Kaspersky Lab, said in a Web conference with reporters this morning. He speculated that stolen credit cards were used for the transactions.

The IP addresses point to … Read more

If America's Wi-Fi routers could vote, they'd likely reelect President Obama by about 6 percentage points.

That's just one of the unprovable conclusions I reached after looking at some clever new research by OpenSignalMaps, an Android app that relies on its crowd of users to keep track of all kinds of wireless data signals around the world. The app has gathered a database of almost 75 million geolocated routers worldwide and OpenSignalMaps co-founder James Robinson decided to parse some of that data for sentiments toward the president after noticing how many nearby routers were expressing themselves politically. … Read more

The bottom line: If at first you don't succeed, update and update again. Regular Chrome OS updates over the past year have made it faster, with better offline support and more compatibility with traditional file formats. But it's still only for die-hard Googlers.

Review: Welcome to the Chrome channel. Google's operating system started off last year as being little more than all Chrome, all the time. Updates made over the past year have given Chrome OS users better file format support, faster navigation, revised menus, dramatically improved offline abilities, and a new, traditional-looking desktop.

But if you … Read more

This year at the San Francisco Bay Area Maker Faire, trying to juggle my own interests (talk to cool people) and my 5-year-old son's (build or break stuff), we both hit paydirt at the same time when we stumbled across the Grid Beam exhibit.

My kid spent 45 minutes in the hot sun inventing and screwing together a life-size car-like contraption, and I got to dive into the minutiae of the product with its creators, Phil and Richard Jergenson.

Grid Beam is Erector Set meets IKEA. The hardware is standard 2x2 wood beams with holes drilled through every 1 1/2 inches (which is the actual width of a 2x2 beam), and standard furniture bolts that will be familiar to anyone who's ever assembled a futon frame.… Read more

Open Garden wants to help you share your Internet connection with every Wi-Fi-enabled device within 20 meters.

The San Francisco-based mobile startup, which launched today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, lets users create a large mesh network that allows all the Open Garden-enabled devices to automatically share Internet access and bandwidth, according to a TechCrunch report. Essentially, what Open Garden wants to do is create a crowdsourcing platform for mobile connectivity.

The mesh network currently only uses one Internet connection, but it will break down larger networks into smaller ones with about 10 nodes, TC reports. If the network detects … Read more

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson recently made some public statements about Google that the Web giant says don't really pan out, according to 9to5Google.

During a panel discussion put on by the Milken Institute last week, an audience member asked Stephenson why there's such a delay in updating Google's operating system on devices carried by AT&T. Basically Stephenson blamed Google for delayed updates.

"Google determines what platform gets the newest releases and when," Stephenson replied. "Oftentimes, that's a negotiated arrangement and that's something we work at hard. We know … Read more

When it comes to the grill, procedure and setup are important aspects to consider. Aside from obvious safety concerns when dealing with hotter-than-hot objects, everything from grill placement to grill accessories need to be determined. And of course, when dealing with charcoal or natural wood, a means to light the fire would be necessary. All the better if that can be accomplished with no accelerant.

The Looftlighter Electric Firestarter requires no lighter fluid to get the fire going. Constructed with a 10-foot power cord, the grill gadget plugs into a standard outlet and supplies focused heat at a high temperature. … Read more

Apple has finally acknowledged the use of OpenStreetMap data in its iOS iPhoto app, the open-source mapping project said yesterday.

The iPhoto app, a photo-sorting tool for the iPad and iPhone, switched from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap (OSM) data back in March. The app uses mapping data so it can display the shoot location of geotagged photos.

However, the app did not credit the use of OSM data, leaving it up to the mapping project's team to point out the development in a blog post. That post was updated on Thursday with a screenshot of the credits in the … Read more