Are you wondering how much your old smart phone or iPod is worth? Lots of us have aging technology lying around in the draw that we've been meaning to get rid of, but haven't got around to. EBay has just launched a new service designed to get you a fair price. It's called eBay My Gadgets, and it's available here.

The service looks at all the gadgets you already bought on eBay, and adds them to the list, before inviting you to enter your other electronic devices. Then, it checks to see how much they're selling for on eBay, and even lets you track trends over time. Finally, you can sell them, to get back some of that money that you unwisely spent on a Wii U earlier this year.

There are tens of different categories for networking equipment. All the obvious ones are there, such as cell phones, PDAs, and tablets. But you can also use this to get rid of your old WebCam, router, internal hard drives (for pity's sake people, make sure you do a low-level format first), and even your old VHS tapes.
You could manually do this before, searching on your particular item and seeing what people were listing for, but this is far more elegant, basing the price on a rolling 14-day average, and the pretty graphs are also new.
The first thing I'm going to get rid of is the Jawbone Bluetooth earpiece that doesn't work properly, but makes me look like a complete tool whenever I'm using it. Sadly, however, there doesn't seem to be an entry for "Samsung S3 with cracked screen", which is a shame because I managed to drop it just a month after buying it.
What old technology is lying around in your bottom drawer?
Danny Bradbury, MSN Tech & Gadgets

New carnivore discovered, rare with teddy bear looks

Photograph by Mark Gurney, Smithsonian Institution

A fuzzy fog-dweller with a face like a teddy bear is the first carnivore found in the Western Hemisphere in more than three decades, a new study says.

The 2-pound (0.9-kilogram) creature, called an olinguito, didn't make itself easy to find. The orange-brown mammal lives out a solitary existence in the dense, hard-to-study cloud forests of Colombia and Ecuador, which inspired part of its Latin name Bassaricyon neblina: Neblina is Spanish for "fog."

Source: National Geographic

What's more, the large-eyed critter—now the smallest known member of the raccoon family—is active only at night, when it hunts for fruit in its Andean habitat. Like other carnivores such as the giant panda, olinguitos seem to eat mostly plants, but are nevertheless part of the taxonomic order Carnivora. (Also see "Pictures: 14 Rarest and Weirdest Mammal Species Named.")

This meant there was an unidentified species out there-and sparked a ten-year search for a new species. In 2006, Helgen and Roland Kays, director of the Biodiversity and Earth Observation Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, set out to find the critter in the wild. (Also see "Pictures: 'Scruffy' New Carnivorous Mammal Found.")

"The age of discovery is not over," Helgen said. "In 2013 we have found this spectacular, beautiful animal, and there's a lot more to come."

Because Carnivora is the most well-studied order in the animal kingdom, it's "the last place you'd expect the olinguito to be hiding," said study leader Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Finding a mammal is relatively rare, and finding a carnivore—which are less plentiful than herbivores—is "incredibly rare," according to the study.

That's why the "spectacular" new species is "my most exciting discovery yet," Helgen said at a press conference Thursday in Washington, D.C., where a projected picture of the olinguito's cartoonish face elicited a chorus of awws from the audience.

"It's our pleasure to bring the olinguito out of the fog."

In Search of the Olinguito

Helgen's first hint of a new species emerged in 2003, when he was studying museum specimens of olingos, a related group of tree-living, South American carnivores whose family tree is still unknown. He noticed that some of the museum specimens looked different from the others—ie. these strange individuals were smaller overall, with tinier teeth and longer, denser coats.

While at Chicago's Field Museum, "I pulled out this drawer and there were these skins of carnivores like I'd never seen before. They were these rich, red skins with flowing fur," recalled Helgen, also a National Geographic Emerging Explorer.

Notes that accompanied the odd specimens showed that they'd been collected decades ago in the northern Andes, at elevations between 5,000 to 9,000 feet (about 1,500 to 2,700 meters)—much higher than olingos are known to live, according to the study, published August 15 in the journal ZooKeys.

This meant there was an unidentified species out there—and sparked a ten-year search for a new species. In 2006, Helgen and Roland Kays, director of the Biodiversity and Earth Observation Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, set out to find the critter in the wild. (Also see "Pictures: 'Scruffy' New Carnivorous Mammal Found.")

With the help of Ecuadorian zoologist Miguel Pinto, the team pinpointed their search in western Ecuador's Otanga Cloud Forest Preserve.

On their first night, while traipsing through wet, thick vegetation, the frogs and crickets singing, the team heard the stirrings of animals up in trees. Staring back at them was a kinkajou, a porcupine, and then, "the animal in the headlight was an olinguito," Helgen said.

They found several olinguitos on that trip, and even more on subsequent journeys in other parts of the Andes. Later genetic analysis revealed not only are olinguitos very different from olingos, but there are four subspecies of the olinguito throughout its range.

Foggy Future?

Even though the olinguito has a fancy new name, it's been among us for a while—people have been living near olinguitos for centuries, and specimens of the animal, though misidentified, have been in museums for more than a hundred years, Helgen noted.

An olinguito misidentified as an olingo even lived in U.S. zoos in the 1960s and 1970s, moving frequently because—not surprisingly—the animal wouldn't breed with olingos, Helgen said.

And it looks like the olinguito will live on in the foreseeable future: "Hearteningly, it's not an extremely endangered species," Helgen said.

There are probably thousands widespread in protected mountain habitats of Colombia and Ecuador.

But that doesn't mean there aren't any threats: An estimated 42 percent of the olinguito's habitat has already been converted to agriculture or human settlements, according to the team, and deforestation is always a problem.

— Christine Dell'Amore, National Geographic

Follow Christine Dell'Amore on Twitter and Google+.

Toronto man fired after Twitter pot request

An online search for marijuana has turned into a job hunt for one Canadian Twitter user.

Sunith Baheerathan caused an online stir when he issued a tweet requesting prospective pot sellers to bring some of their wares to a Mr. Lube location in a Toronto suburb.
That location was Baheerathan's place of employment until Tuesday, according to both the company and Baheerathan's own tweets.

Baheerathan first raised eyebrows when he expressed his workplace craving in a public tweet and appealed directly to those who may be able to satisfy it. "Any dealers in Vaughan wanna make a 20sac chop? Come to Keele/Langstaff Mr. Lube, need a spliff," he wrote.
But the tweet soon turned into a viral sensation when it caught the attention of local police, who lost no time in contributing to the online chatter.
"Awesome! Can we come too?" read the retort from the York Regional Police's official twitter feed.
Moments later the twitter exchange was a trending topic in Toronto. Shortly after that, Baheerathan found himself looking for work.
"Just got the call of termination," he tweeted to a friend.
An employer at the Mr. Lube location mentioned in Baheerathan's controversial tweet, who would not share his name, confirmed that Baheerathan had been fired yesterday but would not say whether his dismissal was related to his online activities.
Phone calls to the head office of Mr. Lube in British Columbia were not immediately returned.
Baheerathan responded to an interview request by retweeting it to his followers alongside several messages expressing consternation at his firing.
"I've lost complete hope in society man. There's killers/rapists/people missing and all they care about is a dude asking for weed," he wrote in one tweet.
"Gotta watch what you tweet nowadays, even the freedom of speech & the right to an entitled opinion isn't safe," read another.
Social media consultant Amber MacArthur doesn't believe freedom of speech has much to do with the issue.
Companies are unlikely to look kindly on any employee that brings them unwanted attention, she said, adding canvassing illegal activity on Twitter is one of the most basic breaches of corporate online etiquette.
"There is that perception that employees can be free to say whatever they want, but the reality is an employer does have the right to dismiss an employee if the employee has connected their name with some kind of activity . . . that doesn't reflect well on them, and this is a perfect example of that," she said.

How will we solve Canada's First Nations connectivity problem?

Down in New Mexico, the Navajo Nation has just opened a data center on its reservation. So why are so few First Nations communities in Canada able to access adequate broadband Internet?

The datacentre, which opened this week at the Navajo reservation in Farmington, New Mexico, cost $8 million. When it opened, tribal officials recalled how a teenaged girl who won a laptop computer in a school contest couldn't connect to the Internet because she had no phone line at home. Then, they opened a laptop, connected to the Internet, and played a YouTube video. By the time they're done, the data center will give high-speed wireless access to 70% of the people on the reservation. So in at least in one US First Nations community, connectivity options are getting better.

Sadly, things are little different north of the border. Figures from 2007 showed that only 4.7% of First Nations communities had broadband access, with another 17% planning it.

Things have improved since then, but not by enough. Check out the government's own map of connected First Nations communities.

The map shows how well-connected to the Internet reservations are across Canada. It differentiates between different connectivity speeds, using the Industry Canada standard of a 1.5 Mb/sec download speed as a threshold. Put simply, communities listed in red have slow or no connectivity, while those in green are adequate or better.
Some provinces fare better than others. BC, For example, is a sea of green, indicating that speeds are high, even in communities far north. Alberta and Saskatchewan, too, are leafy forests of well-connected aboriginal communities. Nunavut’s far-flung First Nations communities are healthily connected via satellite at more than 1.5Mbit/sec.
The maritimes have mostly nailed it, too. In New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and PEI, every community is solidly connected. Newfoundland and Labrador could try harder: one third of the communities listed there have low speed connections.
Quebec was so-so, and Manitoba has a worrying preponderance of red. Some of these are consumer broadband connections offering less than the 1.5Mb/sec Industry Canada threshold. And a large number are on dial-up.
Large numbers of communities in Ontario – our most populous province, and the home of our capital - are also very poorly connected to the Internet. Manitoba and Ontario aren’t that far ahead of the NWT and the Yukon, where connections are abysmal.
It's also worth pointing out that 1.5Mbit/sec is far from stellar. You may not even get away with basic videoconferencing at that speed, because uplink speeds are far lower than downlink speeds. Communities listed on the map with 1.5Mbit/sec downlinks often struggle along with 256Kb/sec uplinks, which can be woefully inadequate for videoconferencing.

And yet in remote, poorer communities, broadband connections are particularly important. The Canadian Council on Learning sums it up best: " In order to effectively use distance education one requires reliable access to broadband internet services such as cable, digital subscriber lines (DSL) or fixed wireless. As a result such courses are simply not viable in regions where only slower, dial-up connections are available.”

Getting robust digital infrastructure into these communities creates access to opportunities for remote learning and remote medicine, not to mention commercial opportunities such as starting online businesses.
Canada is supposed to be on top of this. Over two years ago, Industry Canada published a consultation on creating a digital economy for Canada. In June last year, then-Industry minister Christian Paridis said "Together we can capture the potential of the global digital economy. We can create its technology, make the best possible use of its potential and reap its benefits.”

Unfortunately, Paradis never did release that Digital Economy Action plan. Perhaps the Canadian government was too busy closing down the Aboriginal Canada Portal, which was a central government resource hub for First Nations communities. For First Nations communities eager to take advantage of the digital economy, the government has made no steps forward, and two steps back.

Canada's First Nations communities desperately need better conductivity of all the opportunities that the Internet has to offer. But there are more pressing problems, aren't there? Before many residents can think about connectivity, they are in dire need of basic water and housing. The problems are mounting up. And while we wait for politicians to solve them, a young person on a Canadian reserve is 6-11 times more likely to commit suicide than elsewhere, due to plethora of factors, including a lack of opportunity.

Canada needs to get its act together, and quickly – or the digital divide will continue to be just one more example of a far broader economic rift.
Danny Bradbury, MSN Tech & Gadgets

Which cloud-storage service is right for you?