Head-Direct HiFiMan HM-801 Audio Player

Suck It, iPod: Meet the King of Geeky Portable Audio Devices

 Reviewed by Eliot Van Buskirk  • May 06, 2010

It used to be there were only two ways to improve the sound quality on your portable music player: Ditch the shoddy included earbuds for real headphones, or hook in a headphone amplifier.

Now there's a third option, in the form of the HiFiMan HM-801 Audio Player.

This is, without a doubt, the first audiophile-worthy portable digital audio player I've encountered in the past 13 years of covering portable audio technology. Sure, some players have had slightly better sound than the iPod, but none could really deliver sound the way sharp-eared audio purists desire. (We're talking about people who own gold-tipped connection cables and headphones that cost more than your laptop.)

But the HiFiMan delivers audio that even the snootiest sound snob will find little to gripe with. It does this with a first-of-its-kind preamp (swappable if there's another preamp your ears desire) and the support of not only standard formats (MP3, AAC, WMA, OGG), but multiple lossless formats (APE, WMA, FLAC). There's even 24-bit resolution and a 96-kHz sampling rate for FLAC files.

That means HiFiMan not only plays lossless files that sound as good as CDs but also 24-bit files that sound better than CDs, with much wider frequency and dynamic ranges. That equates to reproducing very high pitches (even ones outside the human hearing range, which some say colors the sound we can hear), and music with more gradations in volume that allow dynamic nuances to shine through.

HiFiMan connects to your computer via USB (16-bit 48 kHz) or home stereo system with its digital coaxial input (16-bit 44.1 kHz or 24-bit 96 kHz). Bonus: It can double as an excellent home headphone amplifier through its Burr-Brown PCM1704U digital-to-analog converter.

Paired with high-quality headphones, the HiFiMan sounds better than an iPod Classic, reputedly the best-sounding model Apple makes, even when playing the same files. We perceived no hiss or distortion, backing up the strong audio specs (102-dB signal-to-noise ratio) and everything from deep bass frequencies to ultrahigh cymbals sounded clearer, punchier. Sonically, it's drastically better than the iPod in every conceivable way.

We squeezed just over seven hours out of the HiFiMan playing a combination MP3s, lossless files and 24-bit FLAC files. If that's not enough juice, you can pick up a spare battery for another $80. Also worth mentioning is the clean analog volume attenuator that allows smooth, precise control of sound.

Now the bad news: This thing costs $790. By audiophile standards that's a pittance but for the uninitiated that's plain crazy, especially for a rather homely device with a button-driven interface. Oh yeah, the device has no on-board memory — hard drives cause too much audio interference — so you'll have to supply your own SD cards to store your tunes. Forget about popping this monster in your pants either; at 4.4 x 3.1 x 1 inches, it's a bit too big for pockets. A velvet bag and a mini-briefcase come with it for transportation, but who wants to tote something around that qualifies as carry-on luggage?

But the most significant reason you might not want to drop nearly 800 bones on the HiFiMan is that your ears simply might not care enough. Sound quality is a game of decreasing returns, and some people don't get the same charge out of ultraclean, expansive, dynamic, crisp, properly imaged sound that audiophiles do.
But if you're willing to put up the cash and endure its design shortcomings, the HiFiMan's rich quality of sound will enrich the quality of your life.

WIRED Audiophile-pleasing deep, rich, clean sound. Pulls double duty as portable and home-stereo headphone solution. Walkman looks shout "don't steal me." Modular components (amplifier, battery). Comes with screwdriver and schematics for alternate amp designs.

TIRED Barely portable — large awkward chassis hard to carry. Menu and button configuration clearly traveled via flux capacitor from 2001. Only a small selection of 24-bit music is available for sale online. No docking station. You'll need high-quality headphones to enjoy the player's sounds.

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ECB May Kiss Credibility Goodbye: Daniel Gros and Thomas Mayer

Commentary by Daniel Gros and Thomas Mayer

May 11 (Bloomberg) -- There is an old saying among central bankers that credibility is earned in years of hard work, but can be lost overnight. On Sunday night, the European Central Bank may have said goodbye to its credibility when it agreed to buy the government bonds of euro nations in trouble.

This casts a dark shadow over the euro area’s 750 billion- euro ($980 billion) stability package, which was dressed to impress, and seems to have worked so far. Markets will probably advance in the near term as short positions need to be covered.

A major casualty of the emergency decisions was the ECB. With its move to prop up the failing bonds of governments in financial distress, it has allowed itself to be transformed into an agent of fiscal policy. The intention to sterilize bond purchases means, in effect, that it taxes euro-area private borrowers to support governments in difficulty. In the long run, this is likely to undermine confidence in the ECB and the euro.

Markets last week gave their thumbs down to the Greek rescue program led by the euro area and the International Monetary Fund, probably for two reasons: fears that Greece can’t implement the program, and that Greece wouldn’t return to solvency even if it did.

Here is what has scared investors (apart from the riots in Athens): Even if the IMF program were fully implemented, the Greek debt ratio is projected to rise to 150 percent of gross domestic product by 2013. Assuming an interest rate of 5 percent, Greece would pay 7.5 percent of its GDP to bondholders. With more than 80 percent of creditors being foreign by then, the country would transfer at least 6 percent of its GDP abroad.

No Trust

How likely would it be that Greece can generate a structural current account surplus before having to make interest payments of this magnitude? Traders saw little likelihood of this and expected an eventual debt restructuring. And because they didn’t trust the package that the IMF and euro- area governments have offered Greece, they didn’t trust other euro-member countries in fiscal distress to find a viable solution. This, and not a conspiracy of speculators, was the brew that generated contagion.

The huge stability package has stopped that contagion for the time being, but to ensure lasting success of the coordinated effort, the European Stability Mechanism and the loan guarantee scheme have to be developed into a European Monetary Fund, capable of running adjustment programs and of managing orderly defaults of insolvent countries in the region.

Managing Debt Burdens

Earlier this year, we proposed the creation of such a fund designed to manage fiscal crises in the euro area, including a possible bond restructuring of a member country unable to cope with its debt burden. The fund could issue its own debt and create the nucleus of a common euro-bond market. The European stabilization mechanism agreed by the Council of Finance Ministers opens the door to such an instrument.

Whether the measures announced on the weekend will prove successful depends on whether governments follow up and construct this framework. Without it, the management of public finances will remain ad hoc and crisis-prone. Monetary union may degenerate into the feared “transfer union,” as discretionary bailouts would fuel moral hazard of weak governments.

The ECB has now joined the list of major central banks that have lost their innocence during this financial crisis by moving closer to fiscal policy than seemed possible not long ago. However, the descent of the ECB from the path of virtue has been the most dramatic. The Maastricht Treaty, on which monetary union was based, states that every country is responsible for its own finances and that the central bank is independent from governments. With its decision to buy failing sovereign debt, the ECB has undermined both principles.

Fiscal Agent

To the extent that it does not sterilize the effects of its intervention, it monetizes government debt. To the extent that it does sterilize the purchases, it acts as a fiscal agent, taxing other euro-area borrowers to support a government in fiscal distress. The claim that intervention serves the purpose of creating orderly market conditions seems unconvincing when governments or the ECB decide which market movements are justified and which aren’t.

The ECB may now have years of hard work to restore the credibility that it put on the line on Sunday night.

(Daniel Gros is the director of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. Thomas Mayer is the chief economist of Deutsche Bank AG in Frankfurt. The opinions expressed are their own.)

--Editors: David Henry, James Greiff.,
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Twitter hit by major disruption

 

The fllaw could have been exploited by spammers 

 

Twitter has fixed a major bug that saw many users of the service appear to lose all of their followers and friends. 

The problem began when a flaw was uncovered that allowed people to force others to "follow" them on the site.

People who typed "accept" followed by a person's Twitter name forced the user to be added to their list of followers.

The hack was quickly passed around the social network with many people using it to force celebrities to follow them.

It could have easily allowed spammers to insert messages into thousands of accounts.

Web flaw

  Twitter quickly closed the loophole but was forced to temporarily reset many accounts as it cleaned up the damage. The reset made it look like many users had no followers and were also following no one.


"We identified and resolved a bug that permitted a user to 'force"' other users to follow them," the site said in a blog post.

People were still able to use the service during the disruption.

Twitter allows users to post messages - known as tweets - up to 140 characters long.

People can see what others are writing by choosing to "follow" them. However, unlike many social networks, both parties do not have to reciprocate the friendship.

The new bug allowed many people to force celebrities, such as Lady Gaga, to follow them by simply typing "accept @ladygaga".

This would make it appear that Lady Gaga had chosen to follow them and would also inject a user's tweets into the singer's feeds.

The flaw only worked on the website and not through third-party software used to access the service, such as Tweetdeck.

Twitter has exploded in popularity since 2007, when it was launched, and now has more than 100 million users.
News of the flaw follows the discovery of a recent high-profile security bug at Facebook, another poster child of the social web.

The exploit - now fixed - exploited the site's privacy settings and allowed users to eavesdrop on their friends' live chats and see their pending friend requests.

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Five hidden dangers of Facebook

Facebook claims that it has 400 million users. But are they well-protected from prying eyes, scammers, and unwanted marketers? 

Not according to Joan Goodchild, senior editor of CSO (Chief Security Officer) Online.

She says your privacy may be at far greater risk of being violated than you know, when you log onto the social-networking site, due to security gaffes or marketing efforts by the company.

Facebook came under fire this past week, when 15 privacy and consumer protection organizations filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, charging that the site, among other things, manipulates privacy settings to make users' personal information available for commercial use. Also, some Facebook users found their private chats accessible to everyone on their contact list--a major security breach that's left a lot of people wondering just how secure the site is.

In two words, asserts Goodchild: not very.

On "The Early Show on Saturday Morning," Goodchild spotlighted five dangers she says Facebook users expose themselves to, probably without being aware of them:

1. Your information is being shared with third parties
2. Privacy settings revert to a less safe default mode after each redesign
3. Facebook ads may contain malware
4. Your real friends unknowingly make you vulnerable
5. Scammers are creating fake profiles

Below is an edited transcript of the interview.

Is Facebook a secure platform to communicate with your friends?

Here's the thing: Facebook is one of the most popular sites in the world. Security holes are being found on a regular basis. It is not as inherently secure as people think it is, when they log on every day.

Certainly, there are growing pains. Facebook is considered a young company, and it has been around a few years now. It is continuing to figure this out. They are so young, they are still trying to figure out how they are going to make money. It is hard to compare this to others; we have never had this phenomenon before in the way [so many] people are communicating with each other--only e-mail comes close.

The potential for crime is real. According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, victims of Internet-related crimes lost $559 million in 2009. That was up 110 percent from the previous year. If you're not careful using Facebook, you are looking at the potential for identity theft, or possibly even something like assault, if you share information with a dangerous person you think is actually a "friend." One British police agency recently reported that the number of crimes it has responded to in the last year involving Facebook climbed 346 percent. These are real threats.

Lately, it seems a week doesn't go by without some news about a Facebook-related security problem. Earlier this week, TechCrunch discovered a security hole that made it possible for users to read their friends' private chats. Facebook has since patched it, but who knows how long that flaw existed? Some speculate it may have been that way for years.

Last month, researchers at VeriSign's iDefense group discovered that a hacker was selling Facebook usernames and passwords in an underground hacker forum. It was estimated that he had about 1.5 million accounts--and was selling them for between $25 and $45.

And the site is constantly under attack from hackers trying to spam these 400 million users, or harvest their data, or run other scams. Certainly, there is a lot of criticism in the security community of Facebook's handling of security. Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that the company rarely responds to inquiries.

Do people really have privacy on Facebook?

No. There are all kinds of ways third parties can access information about you. For instance, you may not realize that, when you are playing the popular games on Facebook, such as FarmVille, or take those popular quizzes--every time you do that, you authorize an application to be downloaded to your profile that gives information to third parties about you that you have never signed off on.

Does Facebook share info about users with third parties through things such as Open Graph?
Open Graph is a new concept for Facebook, which unveiled it last month at its F8 conference. It actually is basically a way to share the information in your profile with all kinds of third parties, such as advertisers, so they can have a better idea of your interests and what you are discussing, so Facebook can--as portrayed--"make it a more personal experience."

The theory behind Open Graph--even if it has not implemented it--is its whole business model, isn't it?

That is the business model--Facebook is trying to get you to share as much information as possible so it can monetize it by sharing it with advertisers.

Isn't it in Facebook's best interest to get you to share as much info as possible?

It absolutely is. Facebook's mission is to get you to share as much information as it can so it can share it with advertisers. As it looks now, the more info you share, the more money it is going to make with advertisers.

Isn't there also a security problem every time it redesigns the site?

Every time Facebook redesigns the site, which [usually] happens a few times a year, it puts your privacy settings back to a default in which, essentially, all of your information is made public. It is up to you, the user, to check the privacy settings and decide what you want to share and what you don't want to share.

Facebook does not [necessarily] notify you of the changes, and your privacy settings are set back to a public default. Many times, you may find out through friends. Facebook is not alerting you to these changes; it is just letting you know the site has been redesigned.

Can your real friends on Facebook also can make you vulnerable?

Absolutely. Your security is only as good as your friend's security. If someone in your network of friends has a weak password, and his or her profile is hacked, he or she can now send you malware, for example.
There is a common scam called a 419 scam, in which someone hacks your profile and sends messages to your friends asking for money - claiming to be you--saying, "Hey, I was in London, I was mugged, please wire me money." People fall for it. People think their good friend needs help--and end up wiring money to Nigeria.

A lot of Web sites we use display banner ads, but do we have to be wary of them on Facebook?
Absolutely: Facebook has not been able to screen all of its ads. It hasn't done a great job of vetting which ads are safe and which are not. As a result, you may get an ad in your profile when you are browsing around one day that has malicious code in it. In fact, last month, there was an ad with malware that asked people to download antivirus software that was actually a virus.

Is too big a network of friends dangerous?

You know people with a lot of friends--500, 1,000 friends on Facebook? What is the likelihood they are all real? There was a study in 2008 that concluded that 40 percent of all Facebook profiles are fake. They have been set up by bots or impostors.

If you have 500 friends, it is likely there is a percentage of people you don't really know, and you are sharing a lot of information with them, such as when you are on vacation, your children's pictures, their names. Is this information you really want to put out there to people you don't even know?
This interview, "Five Hidden Dangers of Facebook," was originally published on CBSNews.com.
 
Facebook flooded with fake profiles

Spammers and malware writers exploiting site to infect users

Up to 40 per cent of new Facebook profiles could be fictitious registrations created by spammers and malware writers to infect end users, security firm Cloudmark has warned.

Neil Cook, European head of technology services at Cloudmark, told vnunet.com that research carried out by the firm revealed that between 20 and 40 per cent of new profiles on the popular social networking site could be bogus.

Cook explained that, once set up with a portfolio of fake profiles, virus writers encourage users to click on links to malicious sites by including them on postings on other users' walls or blogs.

Another tactic is to try and get users to visit their profile pages through friend requests or personal messages. The profile page then redirects visitors to a malware site.

"Social networks are very collaborative so it's great for spammers and virus writers to attack," said Cook. "As soon as social networking took off, so did the attacks."
Cook also predicted that SMS spam would eventually seep into the UK market, spreading from China and other Asian countries.
 

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Topics:

Privacy and data protection

Mother day Special: Made out to be a tyrant

AM 60 and still working so as not to be a burden to my three children, who give me some pocket money. I was the breadwinner/home-maker of the family when they were very young.


I’m conservative and I love my family. I love to see everyone sitting down for dinner at least once weekly, to enhance the family bond.

My younger son, who lives with me, is married to an Indonesian woman who would only come downstairs at about 1pm, when he wakes up for work. She will not acknowledge the presence of others in the house if they do not speak to her first. At times, she just walks past me as if I were a piece of glass.

She had been staying with us well before she married my son. I was not in favour of their marriage but gave in when my son insisted. I even signed as a witness for their registration.

Apart from sweeping the floor which I have swept and mopped before leaving for work, she hardly does any housework. She only cooks dinner when she feels like doing so. I do my husband’s and my own laundry, while my daughter does hers and helps with the housework when asked.

I speak and joke with my daughter-in-law when she wants to communicate, even though I do not like her, for which I cannot give any reason. I have never scolded her or shouted at her for not helping with the housework. Most of the time she stays in her room when I am in the house.

Once when I commented to my son that his wife was not helping with the housework, he retorted that since my daughter did not help, why should his wife do. He has been staying in the house for years but has never helped with the financial upkeep, or to clean it.

The first time we had a spat, my daughter-in-law left the house and only returned after three months. One morning, she kept quiet when I asked why she looked as if everybody had offended her. When asked further, she exploded, saying that I did not like her and so forth. I countered that I had never scolded or asked her to do anything and I had to accept the fact she was married to my son.

She is behaving as if I am the cause of her problems. My son condones his wife’s behavior. He has not advised her to respect her elders, or told her her duty and responsibilities in the house. I feel she is trying to tell me that she is the one in control.

My son seldom speaks to me now, and they’re planning to move out. It’s not that I cannot live without them; what really hurts is that despite trying to build a happy family I am being labelled a tyrant.

Tyrant

IT would be best for all when your son moves out. Having them in the house is creating too much tension and unhappiness.

Do not blame yourself or worry that you are deemed a tyrant. You are a great mother who has sacrificed much for your family. But perhaps your son and his wife feel that your earlier objection to their marriage marks your disapproval and dislike. This would have made them more sensitive to what you say and do. 

Your son must love his wife very much and has been trying very hard to protect her. However, he seems to lack maturity and understanding of the situation.

While you have been trying your best to accept your daughter-in-law, they prefer to stay at arm’s length and keep from being too close and warm. From the bad start, she might have felt unwanted and unwelcome in your home. She probably had been badly advised to stay aloof to avoid quarrels and altercations. And being so insecure about her position, she wouldn’t want to start her married life being treated like the housemaid in her husband’s house.

Your son and his wife should appreciate your trying so hard to hold the family together. They should also understand that you are only human and there would have been moments when you could not hold back your disappointment or disgruntlement. They could also have tried harder to fit in instead of acting like strangers in your house. 

You face a very common problem of trying to live with the daughter-in-law. Each of you has a story to tell as both sides try to justify words and actions. The best way is to simply accept your son’s decision to move out and wish them well.

If they have bought a house, be happy for them. Invite them back for the weekly family dinner, and be warm and gracious to your daughter-in-law. Treat her like family, and do not be overly polite. Hopefully, time will heal the rift. 

Thelma StarMag, Sunday May 9, 2010