In recent news a software developer has been discovered outsourcing his job to China. The company identified the crafty programmers scam when it allowed Verizon to start monitoring its VPN connections and identified an open and active VPN connection from Shenyang, China.

How did he spend his days? His internet history shows a penchant for cat videos and Reddit (one and the same really). Evidence has shown that he may have been using the same scam with other companies in the area.

To top it off his performance reviews cited well-written code. A job well done I say. This guy should get a promotion.

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Booking a flight can be a stressful experience. Ticket prices can fluctuate dramatically and you never know what time is the best time to buy. To help alleviate ticket-buying stress KAYAK has a launched a new price forecasting tool that will predict whether the prices in your search are likely rise or fall over the next week.

In addition to the fare history chart we’ve provided for some time, KAYAK flight search results now include a forecast of whether the prices in your search are likely to rise or fall within the next 7 days. The feature also provides the statistical confidence level behind the forecast.

Giorgos Zacharia, KAYAK’s Chief Scientist, led development of KAYAK’s price forecasts and comments, “our algorithm incorporates data from multiple faring and availability providers across the over one billion annual queries performed

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Digital activist and cofounder of Reddit, Aaron Swartz died on Friday after committing suicide according to a relative of Swartz. Along with co-founding Reddit, Swartz was the founder of DemandProgress.org, co-creator of the RSS 1.0 standard at the young age of 14 and was a strong proponent of Internet freedom.

Swartz was arrested in 2011 for accusations of stealing more than 4 million documents from MIT and JSTOR consisting of articles, book reviews and academic partner journals. He would have faced as much as $2 million in fines and as much as 50 years in prison if convicted. Swartz pled not guilty in September of 2012.

The news of Swartz death comes only two days after JSTOR announced that it will be releasing more than 4.5 million articles to the public.

This is the first post in a while. We’re just trying to fire this up again….

If you are a fan of Time Inc’s publications, you’ll be happy to know that it will be bringing all its 21 publications out as tablet editions before the end of the year. Time Inc. is the first major U.S. magazine publisher to make all of its titles available specifically for tablet devices.

Time Inc. has also announced a new agreement with Barnes & Noble to sell digital subscriptions of its publications on the NOOK Color e-reader. No surprise there. The new e-reader editions will be available toward the end of August.

Gaming and driving? At the same time? Awesome. Garnet Hertz’s augmented reality-based OutRun project marries a concept car to Sega’s classic driving game with an electric golf cart, allowing players to navigate their way around real-life courses. It’s like driving an arcade cabinet.

Hertz outfitted the system with cameras and customized software that can see in front of the car to automatically reproduce the route on the screen. The map is displayed in the same 8-bit rendering as the original OutRun, with perspectives changing with the steering. It only hits 13 mph, but it’s awesome even at that speed.

Have you been on the fence about getting a Nexus S? Well, Best Buy has announced that starting last night (August 2nd) at midnight it will begin offering the Google Nexus S for free. You’ll still have to have a two-year agreement with AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile, but it beats full price.

Better hurry because if you wait a day later the price will jump back up. We imagine Best Buy will be very busy today with this news.

Today students have many more tools at their disposal for research and studying. For example Samsung will be offering 1,000 Galaxy Tab 10.1 units to 1,000 students at the University of South Mississippi. The tablets will be given to selected Honors College, McNair Scholars, Southern Style and Gulf Coast students, and the goal is to give students and educators mobile access to their courses, textbooks, grades and schedules.

It will be interesting to see if grades improve after they receive the tablets or if it just means more playing of Angry Birds.

Fans of the Diablo franchise from Blizzard have been waiting for Diablo III. Now some details on the game surfaced and gamers are not happy about them. For one thing the game will require a constant internet connection and there is no offline mode.

Yep, you can only play online. But it gets worse. Blizzard has specifically disallowed game mods and bots. This is one of the main reasons people play the game. The final nail in the coffin is that all of the items in the online auction houses will be sold for real world money. No farming for gold and making loot by killing enemies. It’s like this title has just committed suicide. Anyone

Redbox has announced that it will add video game rentals to an additional 5,000 kiosks starting August 1st. The company announced last month that game titles for the Xbox 360, Sony PlayStation and Nintendo Wii would be added to 16,000 more redbox kiosks by the end of June, and the total after this next round of additions will approach 27,000.

Redbox owns and operates about 33,000 rental kiosks around the country, and the company did not indicate if or when video games might be added to the remaining 6,000 kiosks that will not have them. All games carried in redbox kiosks are $2 per night.

News Junkies will love this news. CNN is finally returning to streaming and is offering live feeds of CNN and HLN, online and through iOS apps. Sounds great right?

It does, but you’ll need to have a pay TV subscription through AT&T, Comcast, Cox, DISH Network, Suddenlink or Verizon to access those streams. Nothing for Android users right now however, but we imagine they will take care of that soon.

The Ideum MT-55 Platform is a 55-inch LED LCD multitouch table that comes with an integrated solid-state computer built in. The 55-inch (1920×1080) HD display delivers a 5,000,000:1 contrast ratio and a wide 178-degree viewing angle, while the optical multitouch system supports 32 simultaneous touch points so that two people can operate it.

The computer inside is powered by a 2.66GHz Intel Hyper-Threaded Dual Core i5 processor with 8GB of RAM, and a 128GB solid-state drive. Other specs include WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet connectivity and multiple HDMI outputs. The Ideum MT-55 Platform Multitouch Table is just $17,950 with two-year warranty. Assuming you have it.

Pandora has announced that it now has over 100 million users, and that soon the site will begin rolling out a new design. It will look nicer and also work better. Pandora will begin to use HTML5 on the front-end, which they say should create “a much faster experience.”

The site’s UI will look like a combination of iTunes and Facebook and the controls will appear centered in a top control bar.

Looks like anonymous is not finished with its hacking just yet. They are claiming responsibility for an attack that targeted US military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. The group reportedly posted e-mail accounts from 90,000 military personnel who were associated with the consulting company.

Along with the email accounts, the hackers allegedly posted 4GB of source code from the company’s servers, along with “some related data on different servers we got access to,”. The company was said to have been targeted due to their alleged role in the SWIFT surveillance program.

As far as I’m concerned the only person who needs a razor made of meteorites that costs $100K is Superman and then only if the meteorites are not from Krypton. Well, they’ve made one anyway. The Zafirro razor is an Iridium Razor available in a limited edition.

99 pieces in all. They cost a hundred thousand Dollars apiece. Why? Because Iridium is extremely rare and expensive. The metal is so dense that they say it can survive a drop into molten lava. I’ll stick with something cheaper.