emergency

A few months ago, Tessa Hulls ventured on a cross-country bike trip from San Diego to the East Coast after breaking up with her boyfriend. Hulls is still peddling away on her solo ride, but her family has, in a sense, joined her. She's attached a GPS locator to her pink and white bike and downloaded an iPhone app called Life360 so her family can see her location in real time, whenever they want to.

A couple of days ago, her brother Chris Hulls was curious about his sister's whereabouts, so he clicked on the Life360 app on his iPhone. She was in Connecticut.

Until now, subscribers needed an Android device or iPhone to use the mobile security service. Last week, however, Life360 opened up its service to non-smartphone users and customers subscribing to all carriers except MetroPCS, as a way to tap into a bigger market of consumers.

"For smartphones, we get your location through a mix of GPS, cell triangulation, and Wi-Fi data. We save that on our server and share it with your family members," said Chris Hulls, who also happens to be Life360's co-founder. "For non-smartphones, we do the same thing, but instead of getting the location from our app, we get it from the carriers directly." … Read more

Software made by a Chinese company and used around the world by chemical, defense, and energy companies contains security holes that attackers could exploit to hack into critical systems.

In an advisory issued yesterday (PDF), the Department of Homeland Defense warned of two vulnerabilities in software made by Beijing-based Sunway ForceControl (Google Translate English version). The Chinese company makes SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) software, which is used in computer systems that control and monitor manufacturing plants and equipment used by different industries.

Discovered by security researcher Dillon Beresford of NSS Labs, the security holes could allow cybercriminals to … Read more

Lenovo's fourth quarter was a mixed bag relative to expectations, but its strategy to protect its home turf--China--and mature markets such as the U.S. while attacking emerging markets appears to be working well.

The PC maker reported fourth-quarter earnings of $42 million on sales of $4.88 billion. Wall Street was expecting revenue of $5.08 billion, according to Thomson Reuters. Barclays Capital was looking for $5 billion. Earnings appear to be better than expectations, but the estimates are all over the place.

For fiscal 2011, Lenovo doubled its profit to $273 million on revenue of $21.6 … Read more

Oh, that sinking feeling as you watch your cell phone take a plunge into a pool, puddle, toilet bowl, or ocean. Don't panic. All is not lost. We've already shared a how-to on drying out your soaked phone with methods ranging from rice to silica packets.

Phone dunking is a common enough problem that Dry-All has now released kits for removing the liquid from your precious communications companion.

Most drying methods can take between 24 and 72 hours. Dry-All shortens that up a bit with a 6-hour dry time for the Wet Smartphone Emergency Kit. That will get you back to your important LOL text messages and zombie-killing apps much faster than usual.

The kit uses Dry-All's proprietary Blue Bead Technology, a dehumidifier originally developed way back in 1964 for keeping safes and military equipment dry. Little did it know that its future destiny would be to save us from our gadget clumsiness.… Read more

There is no plane I feel safer in than a Boeing 747. Its sheer size and its apparent effortlessness offer something no other plane seems to manage: the ability for passengers to relax.

And they don't seem to drop out of the sky all that often either.

However, Boeing is introducing a new and more economical version of the jumbo jet, the 747-8. So, in order to test its capabilities and secure safety certification, Boeing conducted an experiment to see just how well the new plane could abort takeoff.

They loaded it with almost 1 million pounds of weight … Read more

An app developed by the UK Resuscitation Council may help doctors in emergency cardiac arrest situations, according to a study in the April issue of the journal Anaesthesia.

Researchers recruited 31 doctors (average age 27.5 years) who had taken advanced life-support training in the past four years to investigate whether the free app, called iResus, can improve test scores in simulated cardiac emergencies.

The doctors were divided into two groups--those who used iResus during the simulation and those who did not. Their knowledge and skills were evaluated using the CASTest scoring system during the simulated cardiac arrest emergency.

Those … Read more

Nobody likes a conversation interrupted by the mobile-device grab, that increasingly familiar maneuver by which someone betrays a total lack of interest in said conversation and searches for whatever else might be going on in the world instead.

But when your physician gets device-happy in the middle of your next doctor's visit, even in the ER, chances are it's for a good cause, such as looking up the latest on your condition in a reference guide.

Rosen and Barkin's best-selling 5-Minute Emergency Medicine Consult has, for years, been a six-pound, 1,300-page clinical reference tome designed to support urgent care providers. Now, Unbound Medicine is releasing the new-and-improved fourth edition for mobile devices (including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, etc.) in a "proven, rapid-access format."

At $99.95, the price tag is heftier than it is for the paper product (at the time of this posting the hardcover is $81.64 on Amazon), but it features not only the guide's 600-plus urgent care topics and updated protocols and treatment guideline, but also personalized "favorites" (perhaps not the best word) for symptoms and conditions a user might encounter more frequently.… Read more

A Senate proposal that has become known as the Internet "kill switch" bill was reintroduced this week, with a tweak its backers say eliminates the possibility of an Egypt-style disconnection happening in the United States.

As CNET reported last month, the 221-page bill hands Homeland Security the power to issue decrees to certain privately owned computer systems after the president declares a "national cyberemergency." A section in the new bill notes that does not include "the authority to shut down the Internet," and the name of the bill has been changed to include the … Read more

The Windows Explorer shell is responsible for some of the most basic aspects of the way Windows looks. The Start menu, system tray, and other aspects of the taskbar are all part of the shell. Emerge Desktop replaces the Windows Explorer with a different, more customizable shell. On the whole we didn't find it to be a huge improvement over the Windows default, but if you like to tweak your desktop's appearance, it might be worth checking out.

The program's interface isn't the most intuitive thing we've ever seen, and we had to consult the … Read more