tilting

The founder of an Internet poker company has been arrested and charged with operating a Ponzi scheme that allegedly bilked poker players out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Raymond Bitar, founder and CEO of Full Tilt Poker, was arrested today as he arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Bitar, 40, said in a statement issued through his lawyers that he voluntarily returned from Ireland to face charges.

"I know that a lot of people are very angry at me," Bitar said in the statement. "I understand why. Full Tilt should never have … Read more

Instagram is a free and fairly simple photo enhancement app that requires only a couple of touches to produce great-looking images. But what's really special about Instagram are the sharing capabilities that let you tell the story of your life through photos.

Start by signing up with Instagram with an e-mail address, username, and password. From there you can configure Instagram to autopost to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare, and Posterous, or just choose to share images from within the app or via e-mail. You can also turn any of these options on or off if you don't … Read more

When Instagram finally arrived on Android, it was missing a major photo effect that iOS users had been enjoying for some time: tilt shift. Just over a month after its release, Instagram for Android has been updated to finally include tilt shift. It's a fun little effects tool that can make subjects in your photos appear miniature or to create a shallow depth of field.

Here's how to use tilt shift:

1. After choosing a photo, tap the new teardrop icon in the effects toolbar and choose whether you want a radial or linear tilt shift.

2. By … Read more

Add-on sync and two new developer tools are the hallmarks of today's update to Firefox.

The stable version of the browser that you can download now, Firefox 11 (download for Windows | Mac | Linux) allows you to mirror the same add-ons across multiple desktops. While it's true that Google Chrome has been able to sync add-ons since late 2010, its implementation has been notably uneven. It'll be interesting to see how well Firefox handles it. You can toggle add-on synchronization from the Sync tab in the Options window.

A Mozilla representative told CNET that there would be no … Read more

There are tons of photo-editing apps in the iTunes App Store, but a recent update to an old favorite might be one of the best yet. It's called Photogene 2 and it offers so many tools that it's almost like it does the job of multiple apps.

Photogene 2 (99 cents until November 17) is the successor of a favorite photo-editing app of ours on iOS, and this completely rebuilt version is definitely worth checking out. To start off, a redesigned interface offers intuitive controls for exploring Photogene2's many editing options.… Read more

Full Tilt Poker has lashed out at the U.S. Justice Department for calling it a Ponzi scheme.

"While the government has obviously taken issue with the underlying activities of FTP, under any reasonable interpretation, the world-wide operations of the online cardroom are not a so-called Ponzi scheme," Full Tilt Poker attorney Ian Imrich told The Wall Street Journal in an interview published today.

Earlier this week, the Justice Department amended an earlier civil complaint against the site's executives, including celebrity poker players Howard Lederer and Christopher Ferguson, charging them siphoning off hundreds of millions of dollars … Read more

I've been living in slight confusion lately, which has made it very hard to keep up with the hurtling sands of time.

So when I read moments ago that the U.S. Department of Justice had impounded the Full Tilt Poker Web site and accused the organization of being a "global Ponzi scheme," I thought that my mind had perhaps missed a day--or even a month.

I was sure that I'd been told very recently that it was social security that was a Ponzi scheme. How could social security have anything in common with poker played … Read more

The U.S. Department of Justice accused celebrity poker players Howard Lederer and Christopher Ferguson and other executives who ran the Web site Full Tilt Poker of defrauding players of more than $300 million, The Wall Street Journal reported today.

The U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York amended an earlier civil complaint to allege that the players and two other directors of Full Tilt Poker ran a Ponzi scheme, in which the individuals illegally paid themselves with funds that were deposited by players supposedly for safe keeping.

The Web site's domain has been seized by … Read more

To achieve a miniature, tilt-shift effect on subjects, one can typically rely on specialized lenses or miniature-styled programmed modes found in today's cameras. A Norwegian design studio called Skrekkogle has done the opposite with its Big Money Project.

Instead of "shrinking" a subject with special effects, they have created a massive 20:1 euro cent coin to make a subject appear small, like a miniature scale model, in comparison.

Skrekkogle's giant coin was available for sale at its Web site, but is, alas, currently out of stock. More pics below. … Read more