• New Autobot ‘Sentinel Prime’ & More Spoilers of Transformers: Dark Of The Moon

    // Gradly // blog, Movies, News, Rants & Raves, Superheroes No Responses

    We still haven’t seen an actual trailer for Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon yet, just some awesome Super Bowl spot & TV spot.

    In the meantime, Empire debuted a new cover featuring an Autobot called Sentinel Prime, who’s a “big brother and mentor to Optimus Prime.” Obviously he’s going to have to come in and help out. Other news from the mag is that TF3 won’t have “dorky humor” or “sand“, but they will give “weight” to the bots again: “when robots die, they’re really going to die and we’re gonna show that.” Damn.

    Bay describes this third installment as “kind of like a spy movie.” Bay also reveals the Ferrari is a Decepticon named Dreadbox, and there’s a bot that “the scale on one of them is jawdropping.” Can’t wait for more!

    Sentinel Prime – An Autobot who will debut as a red/black Rosenbauer Panther fire truck. Optimus Prime’s brother & Mentor.

    Transformers: Dark of the Moon is again directed by everyone’s favorite explosive director, Michael Bay, of the previous two Transformers movies as well as Bad Boys I and II, The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor and The Island. The screenplay was written by Ehren Kruger, who co-wrote the Revenge of the Fallen script but went solo this time, and also worked on The Ring, The Skeleton Key and Brothers Grimm screenplays. Paramount is bringing Transformers 3 to theaters everywhere in 3D starting July 1st, 2011 this summer!

    Michael Bay shared some plot details for Transformers: Dark of the Moon and they contain some pretty big spoilers.

    Spoilers

    • There will be no sand.
    • There will be no dorky humor (“We wanted to make the movie much more serious, more adult.”)
    • When a robot dies, it will actually die. And that death will be shown onscreen.
    • The robots will be given more ‘weight’ in the story (“They were missed in movie two. We’ve given them a strong back-story and pathos.”)
    • Sentinel Prime is “A big brother and mentor to Optimus Prime”.
    • The Ferrari is a Decepticon nicknamed ‘Dreadbox’.
    • Starscream and Shockwave will have new companions. “The scale on one of them is jaw dropping” – “It will be ‘what the Hell was that thing?”
    • The Apollo 11 ‘incident’ show in the teaser is a big government secret.
    • There will be no army. Chicago is left in the hands of the Autobots (but some heroes sneak in through the back-door so to speak).
    • The human gliders are used because they slip under the Decepticons’ radar – as do humans – so they’ll be the people who can hammer it to the ‘Cons and create an opening for the Autobots.

  • What Do We Expect in iPad 2?

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, iPad, News, Rants & Raves, Tech. No Responses

    There are a lot of expectations for iPad 2 hardware out there but ours largely falls in line with AllThingsD:

    Aesthetically, the iPad 2 is expected to be slimmer and lighter than its predecessor, with a larger speaker and an improved display designed to deliver a better experience in bright sunlight. It will likely run on a 1.2GHz, dual-core, ARM Cortex-A9 chip and Imagination’s SGX543 GPU architecture–a big improvement over the SGX535 Apple uses today. A Qualcomm multimode chip will allow it to run on both GSM- and CDMA-based networks around the world. And it will have double the RAM–512MB, same as the iPhone 4. Finally, it will feature those front- and back-facing cameras we’ve been hearing about for some time now–one for FaceTime and Photo Booth, the other for POV FaceTime and shooting photos and video.

    The star of the show might be iOS 5 preview which will likely showcase new voice navigation features with Siri’s AI, perhaps a new maps application and certainly Cloud/MobileMe/iWork/iLife integration.  And notifications have to be getting updated.

    We’re getting pumped.  12 hours to go.

  • Rio New International Poster

    // Gradly // blog, Movies, News No Responses

    RIO. was directed by Carlos Saldanha (Ice Age, Robots, Ice Age: Meltdown, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs), and stars Jesse Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, Neil Patrick Harris, Rodrigo Santoro, George Lopez and Jake T. Austin.

    Synopsis:

    ‘Rio’ is a 3-D animation feature from the makers of the ‘Ice Age’ films. Set in the magnificent city of Rio de Janeiro and the lush rainforest of Brazil, the comedy-adventure centers on Blu, a rare macaw who thinks he is the last of his kind. When Blu discovers there’s another — and that she’s a she — he leaves the comforts of his cage in small town Minnesota and heads to Rio. But it’s far from love at first sight between the domesticated and flight-challenged Blu and the fiercely independent, high-flying female, Jewel. Unexpectedly thrown together, they embark on an adventure of a lifetime, where they learn about friendship, love, courage, and being open to life’s many wonders. ‘Rio’ brings together a menagerie of vivid characters, a heart-warming story, colorful backdrops, energizing Latin and contemporary music, and family-friendly song and dance.

  • New Trojan Targets the Mac

    // Gradly // Apple, blog, News, Rants & Raves No Responses

    Some security researchers have long complained that Apple won’t take security seriously because doing so conflict with the company’s marketing message that Mac buyers need not worry about being attacked. The discovery of a beta of a Mac-attacking Trojan once again shows Mac invulnerability to be a myth. And in an unrelated move, Apple has reached out to security researchers, showing that it may finally take security seriously.

    The security company Sophos says that it’s found the beta of a backdoor Trojan targeting the Mac that’s “a variant of “a well-known Remote Access Trojan (RAT) for Windows known as darkComet.”

    The author calls it the ‘BlackHole RAT,’ strongly implying that plans are to have it masquerade as the legitimate Black Hole security application designed to keep a Mac safe by purging private information such as clipboard data and recent file lists.

    Sophos is quick to point out that the Trojan is not yet finished. But the company clearly believes that attacks on the Mac are in the offing. It notes on its blog:

    It appears there is a new backdoor Trojan in town and it targets users of Mac OS X. As even the malware itself admits, it is not yet finished, but it could be indicative of more underground programmers taking note of Apple’s increasing market share.

    That Sophos researcher Chet Wisniewski has seen another Trojan called HellRTS already in circulation on file-sharing sites used to pirate Mac software.

    Apple hasn’t responded specifically to these new threats, but there’s a major, encouraging sign that it is taking Mac security very seriously, possibly because it now has a big enough market share that malware writers see it as a financially viable target.

    The Edible Apple blog reports that Apple is offering security experts free preview versions of OS X 10.7, called Lion, “so that they can take a look at Apple’s new security measures and presumably reach back to Apple with any thoughts, observations, and concerns they might have.”

    The site reports that Apple sent out the following note to security experts:

    “I wanted to let you know that I’ve requested that you be invited to the prerelease seed of Mac OS X Lion, and you should receive an invitation soon. As you have reported Mac OS X security issues in the past, I thought that you might be interested in taking a look at this. It contains several improvements in the area of security countermeasures.”

    Security researchers so far are pleased that Apple seems to be taking security more seriously than they have in the past. Edible Apple reports that MacBook hacker and security consultant Dino Dai Zov tweeted “This looks to be a step in the direction of opening up a bit and inviting more dialogue with external researchers.”

    And CNet quotes OS X hacker Charlie Miller saying in an email:

    “As far as I know they have never reached out to security researchers in this way. Also, we won’t have to pay for it like everybody else. It’s not hiring us to do pen-tests of it, but at least it’s not total isolation anymore, and at least security crosses their mind now.”

    That’s more than just faint praise, it appears that Apple may finally accept that security needs to trump marketing.

    [via: computerworld]