By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I am sure when the founders of HotPads came up with their website business, the idea was to tap into the red-hot housing market. Sadly, things have changed and now the word “hot” has a whole new meaning.

Hotpads is a free service that lets you compare rentals and homes for sale in many top US cities. Even more interesting is the site’s heatmap feature. As shown here, foreclosures in the San Francisco Bay Area are indeed heating up.

We Say: Why not throw in a gasoline price tracker heat map and we an all just drown ourselves right now.

Alice Adds: If you truly want to depress yourself, check out Gas Buddy. San Francisco has hit $4.11 a gallon. sigh…

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Anyone who travels a lot will simply look at this device and sigh with relief. Why? Hotels are awful about providing enough power outlets near the desk - and with more and more gadgets hitting the road, it means a room strewn with charging cell phones and laptops and headsets, etc. One room I had not long ago sported a whole free outlet behind the bed - picture groping around behind that disgusting headboard.

Spec-wise, not much to say that you can’t see here. It boasts three surge protected AC outlet plugs, and will also charge two USB devices. Price: $24.99.

Product Page
Source: Belkin

Our Take: True, it means hauling along one more device and it isn’t exactly cheap, but if you really, really travel, this one is no-brainer, especially if you can expense it.

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

Google has begun offering secondary search boxes within their search results (above). Typical of Google offerings, not everyone is seeing the “feature” yet, as it rolls out to different data centers.

The secondary box restricts the search to the site in question. It seems like the searches that are most likely to bring up the secondary box involves retailers (as above), although The New York Times brings up a secondary box and some say YouTube and Wikipedia do also (though I did not see that result).

How are these sites are chosen? Do they have to pay for this extra search box, or is some algorithm at work?

Since it’s not available in all data centers yet, if you really want to see it now, you can try this data center where the new feature is working.

What do you readers think of this new feature? Try it out and let me know.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

It certainly sounds like magic to me. When my small Sony notebook started over-heating I bought a pad-shaped cooling device that I placed under the unit - not only was pad bigger than my small notebook, it was noisy and certainly killed the point of having a 3.5lb computer. The Magic Idea Laptop USB Cooling Fan does something a little more magical - instead of blowing cool air in, it extracts the hot air and blows it out - claiming to be more more efficient as well as far smaller than current cooling solutions. Best of all, the fan runs at two speed and you can rotate the unit 180 degrees to shoot warm air in multiple directions.

1. World’s first Patened NB Air Extracting Fan. It allows faster extraction of the hot air out of a running system, which stabilizes the operation of the NB and prolongs its lifetime. 2. Universal Clip for fastening USB power interfaces, Compatible for all major NB brands 3. Weighs only 60g. Compared with other bulky NB cooling pads, it is very suitable for storage, and carry.

Product Page
Winwinindustry.com via Red Ferret

We Say: My office is freezing cold year-round. This could be a great way to heat up a cold space and keep your laptop cool. Strange-looking device, but I’m up for anything that frees me from the monstrous cooling solution I have now.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I would file this under nice to know vs. insanely useful. But… if you happen to own an iPhone and want to IM or call using Skype here is a service called IM + Skype (in beta) that let’s you do just that.

“IM+ for Skype is a web service that enables voice and text communication with other Skype users and provides cost-effective calling to landlines and mobiles. The application is designed especially for iPhone’s touch screen and complements the design and interface of iPhone.” Source: Shapeservices.com via fosfor

Alice Adds: For even more fun, browse this great website, iPhonehacks.com. Love it!

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

January 1, 2007 marked the start of RFID-embedded US passports. You can tell you have a new one if the logo on the front is different and there is a little bulge in the back cover. Depending on where you fall on the security issue - some say broadcasting your whereabouts from the passport in your pocket will signal terrorists that an American is nearby, others say wearing loud white tennis shoes in Paris will do exactly the same thing - one things is clear, it is easy to disable the chip.

Short of building your own RFID-blocking wallet, the gang at Wired discovered that simply hitting the chip with a hammer (located inside the back cover) will render it useless. So much for high tech. And to be clear, a disabled chip does not invalidate the passport. Just don’t brag about the hammer in the customs line or you’re looking at 25 years of hard time.

We Say: What else? Looks like it’s hammer time!

By David Johnston
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

At this year’s DefCon, a disturbing hack was shown off which involved breaking into a victim’s Gmail account over wifi. Robert Graham, who demonstrated this vulnerability, showed how simple the hack was by breaking into an account during a presentation. All he had to do was select an IP address of any computer he was able to see on any wifi network, and watch any cookies traveling between it and the wireless access point. Because Google only uses SSL by default on the login page, cookies sent to Gmail after the login process is completed are vulnerable to interception. What’s worse is that this hack will actually work for any website that uses cookies to track login information–that’s a lot of websites. Graham claimed to have successfully tested his hack on Yahoo Mail as well, for example.

Luckily, all hope is not lost. There is a simple way to guard yourself against this hack even if you are forced to use an unencrypted wifi hotspot or one encrypted using the ineffective WEP. All you have to do is remember to manually tell Gmail to use SSL for the entire session by using the address: https://gmail.com. If you use Firefox like I do, you can also use an extension called CustomizeGoogle to automatically do this for you–just make sure that you enable the “Secure” option for Gmail after installing it. Unfortunately, there are probably a lot of other websites which don’t offer you the option of using SSL to encrypt your entire session. In these cases, my best advice would be to either avoid using these websites on weakly-protected networks or at least use different passwords so that if, for example, a hacker steals your randomwebsite.com login information he or she can’t use it to log into your bank website

Source: TG Daily

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I’ve always aspired to have a video wall, until the thought of all those talking heads and ceaselessly moving images remind me to steer clear of the TV aisle for now. But thanks to video search engine Blinx, I can now have one virtually. You can customize your own video wall (6 screen or 16, you decide), or search the Blinx library. It’s not YouTube, but the video viewer is interesting. And the price is right.

Hint: Mouse over the screens for more info.