Ken Block’s Wildly Modded ’65 Mustang Puts Out a Nonsensical 845 HP

Ken Block's next Gymkhana video will star a wonderfully modified '65 Mustang. Hoonigan Racing Division

Ken Block's next Gymkhana video will star a wonderfully modified '65 Mustang.

Hoonigan Racing Division

Ken Block and his team found the 1965 Mustang on eBay. Hoonigan Racing Division

Ken Block and his team found the 1965 Mustang on eBay.

Hoonigan Racing Division

The car had to be outfitted with a custom all-wheel-drive system to accommodate Block's rally driving style.

The car had to be outfitted with a custom all-wheel-drive system to accommodate Block's rally driving style.

The side fender flares give the car a wider stance, which translates to better handling at speed. Hoonigan Racing Division

The side fender flares give the car a wider stance, which translates to better handling at speed.

Hoonigan Racing Division

The 6.7-liter Ford V-8 poking out produces 845 horsepower. Hoonigan Racing Division

The 6.7-liter Ford V-8 poking out produces 845 horsepower.

Hoonigan Racing Division

The car has been outfitted with a race-ready rollcage and carbon fiber body panels. Hoonigan Racing Division

The car has been outfitted with a race-ready rollcage and carbon fiber body panels.

Hoonigan Racing Division

The huge engine is set far back in the hood to accommodate the drivetrain.

The huge engine is set far back in the hood to accommodate the drivetrain.

If you haven’t lost a few hours to watching Ken Block’s gymkhana video series, you probably should start now. Without spoiling the spectacle, the episodes follow Block as he uses overpowered cars to terrorize racetracks and public roads by drifting within inches of barriers and occasionally humans.

The star of Block’s next video, “Gymkhana 7,” is a heavily modified 1965 notchback Mustang with 6.7-liter Ford V8 overflowing from the hood. Also known as the Hoonicorn, it produces a nonsensical 845 horsepower. That’s like tying 845 adult horses to a car, and have them all start running at the same time. The best part is, it’s in the hands of a guy who can handle all that power.

“I’ve always been a Mustang fan,” says Block, “but especially the old Mustangs. It’s the original muscle car.” He wanted to find a car that would even appeal to kids, like a big Hot Wheels car. Out of respect for the vehicle, Block turned to eBay for a banged up model to work with. “I didn’t want to take a nice restored one,” he says, “so we worked had to find one that was beat up.”

The huge engine is set far back in the hood to accommodate the drivetrain. HOONIGAN RACING DIVISION

That was the start of two years of work by Block’s team Hoonigan, ASD Motorsports in Charlotte, North Carolina, and with RTR, a Michigan-based company that specializes in tuning Mustangs. Underneath the classic body, the tubular chassis, roll cage, and three-piece wheels are all custom. The tires are specially-made Pirelli Trofeo Rs. The body panels are carbon fiber. The side fender flares give the car a wider stance, which translates to better handling at speed. A six-speed transmission sends the motor’s 845 horsepower to an all-wheel-drive system.

One of the biggest challenges was adding the all-wheel-drive system to a car with such a big engine. “No one’s really put an AWD system in this sort of car,” Block says. The huge engine is set far back in the hood to accommodate the drivetrain. The team also made sure to make the suspension is nice and soft. By being able to compress the shocks and send all the weight to the front of the car, Block can easily get the rear wheels loose and drift as needed (which is a lot).

The video series in which the Mustang will make its debut started in 2008. Block, a pro rally driver and co-founder of DC Shoes (which sponsored the videos) went viral, driving around industrial sites with trains and cranes for obstacles to dodge, making the tires scream through turns. Our personal favorite is “Gymkhana 6,” in which Block takes a blown-out Ford Fiesta through a desolate San Francisco, laying rubber around streetcars and catching air over intersections.

But given the glory of this Mustang, we’re thinking Gymkhana 7, whenever it comes out, could top even that.

Gadget Lab Podcast: The Echo Is Amazon’s Latest WTF-Worthy Gadget

Amazon’s Echo voice-powered personal assistant. Amazon

Have you seen Echo, Amazon’s always-listening, occasionally snarky, voice-powered purchasing, media playback, and informational assistance device for the home and office? It’s amazing. Mat and Mike talk about this new thing from the company, which joins a long list of left-field WTF-worthy hardware releases from the retailing giant. Also, the hosts discuss the latest Nexus devices, for which the reviews have started to roll in. Mat thinks Android Lollipop is the best mobile OS we’ve got out there. And Mike thinks you’d be crazy to buy a tablet with anything more than the minimum storage. Listen to both of them and get angry. The show ends, as always, with some cultural criticism.

Listen to this week’s episode or subscribe in iTunes.

Send the hosts feedback on their personal Twitter feeds (Mat Honan is @mat and Michael Calore is @snackfight) or to the main hotline at @GadgetLab.

Optical Networking: The Key to Enabling Mass 4K Ultra HD Adoption — and Beyond

Capt Kodak/Flickr

Film and television have come a long way from the old black-and-white, standard-definition (SD), analog broadcasts to the superior high-definition (HD), digital color broadcasts we almost take for granted today.

What once were manual processes are now automated, with many in the industry adopting content distribution networks to send gigabytes of files digitally instead of full reels via courier. This enables production efficiencies and collaboration, workflow acceleration, cost reductions, multi-platform distribution and – most important to the bottom line – a quicker time-to-market for content.

However, yesterday’s legacy networks weren’t built for this type of bandwidth-heavy data transfer. And today’s HD and high-resolution video is putting even more strain on available network capacity.

With files only bound to get bigger as we head into the 4K era and with 3D almost a prerequisite now for any blockbuster film, it’s clear these legacy networks built to support limited SD video will not be able to cope with the increased demand. So, network architectures must evolve to efficiently and effectively support the transfer of next generation video formats. Specifically, the network must be both scalable to meet the significant bandwidth demands as well as programmable to deliver the exact service performance required. This transformation will involve the consolidation of multiple, discreet and single-use legacy networks into high-capacity, secure and low-latency packet-optical infrastructures.

Here are a few reasons why the network is moving in this direction.

Future-Proofing to Meet New Standards

Both HD and 4K Ultra HD are now industry standards. In large part, networking technology has enabled us to get to this point, even facilitating live demonstrations of the seamless transport of 4K imagery across the Pacific Ocean. But don’t confuse “industry standards” with the idea of mass adoption, as legacy SD networks are still the norm rather than the exception.

Yet the industry is already preparing to move a step further, with HD-3G and 8K gaining traction among producers. So, if we think legacy networks have been slow now before 4K has really taken hold, just wait. The next bout of bandwidth-hungry formats will devour even more capacity and demand even greater flexibility to support higher pixel density, color depth and frames-per-second.

Catering to this expected demand, and the next generation after that, networks must be tremendously scalable, support multiple formats and deliver an on-demand experience. A packet-optical network can provide for these attributes in a future-proof, format-agnostic and scalable platform, with the added bonus of software-defined networking (SDN) technologies to turn capacity into capability for the performance- and bandwidth-on-demand required to make it all work.

Transporting Uncompressed, High-Definition Video

It’s easier to maintain picture quality when you can keep it in its raw form, whether that’s high-or-standard definition, and keeping it that way for as long as possible. Packet-optical networks have the capacity to transport HD and other high-end video and film in its native form, and can do so far quicker than a legacy network. With coherent optical transmission, distance is not an issue as, so data transfers from an external venue (sports ground, for instance) to the studio are quick and relatively painless.

Supporting Today’s Storage and Archive Methods

The old days of the physical film library are long gone since automated content archiving replication technologies came along. Still, legacy networks make retrieving those old pieces of footage a chore, especially when multiple files are sourced. A packet-optical network enables the swift transfer of images and video to a library off site and allows them to be retrieved easily as required.

Preparing for the Unexpected Outage

Disaster recovery is becoming more important, and having a plan for media and entertainment companies invariably requires the need to maintain constant access to in-production and archived content. A packet-optical network opens up greater options and resolutions when faced with a disaster like an unexpected network interruption or power outage as meshed optical connections can readily include a connection between a mirrored broadcast site.

The network needs to keep up with the radical changes in digital formats and standards across the media and entertainment industry. The evolution is occurring at an alarming rate, particularly when compared to how long it took us to move from black-and-white to color, from analog to digital, and from SD to HD. While we once enjoyed a sense of predictability in film and television production – we had analog signals from the dawn of TV up until just a few years ago when the NTSC systems were abandoned – we no longer have that luxury.

We need to jump ahead of the curve and future-proof our networks to continue making film innovations a reality for the mass market.

Steve Alexander is Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Ciena.

The Arab Spring of Privacy Is Upon Us

CNN’s headline from February 2011, following an uprising in Egypt that was part of the Arab Spring. mrbeck/Flickr (Courtesy CNN)

Lately it seems not even a week goes by without news of a major data breach at one of our favorite retailers, banks or web sites. It’s become so common that each incident now follows a similar script: Company announces that tens of millions of their customers may have had their personal information stolen by hackers who gained access through flaws in their IT systems. The company apologizes and offers to pay for a year of credit monitoring services for impacted customers who, in turn, have new credit or debit cards issued to replace the accounts that may have been compromised. After the news fades, the company is left to figure out how to better protect their data while consumers just shrug their shoulders, seemingly resigned to the fact that such incidents are simply part of living in a digitized and connected society.

Should we be so accepting? Or should we demand that those companies entrusted with our personal information do a much better job of protecting it? It’s one thing to have your credit card data stolen but a completely different matter when someone gains access to intimate details about your family, your retirement savings accounts, or your genetic test results. We, as individuals and as a society, need to decide whether to live with the status quo or demand a new era of data security. Is the Arab Spring of privacy upon us?

After living for generations under repressive regimes, many citizens in the Arab world began taking to the streets in 2010 to demand that government be more responsive to their needs. After decades of believing they had no power, these people decided that they should get to choose who their leaders are and how they should serve their citizens. Many regimes are able to stay in power through brute force, but several leaders are overthrown and still others institute reforms to address concerns raised by the protesters.

When it comes to data security and privacy, consumers feel powerless. They cannot force the companies they do business with to better protect their information. And the stronghold many companies have over our personal data is not unlike the control some of the Arab dictators have over their citizens’ lives.

Up until now, most data security efforts have been focused on making it harder for unauthorized users to gain access to customers’ data. Companies build stronger and stronger fortresses around their data in a constant effort to stay ahead of the increasingly effective weapons hackers use to break through. Once inside the walls, however, unauthorized users have full access to highly sensitive data and personal identifying information, often available in plain text and able to be sold to the highest bidder.

But there’s a better way to protect the data that your customers hold dear. In a zero knowledge environment, sensitive data is transformed into random numbers, letters or other characters in such a way that still allows the data to flow through required processes but is unable to be understood by anyone who doesn’t have permission to access it. In other words, even if hackers were to get around the firewalls and other defenses put in place around the data, all they would see is meaningless gobbledygook.

This level of data security is now commonplace in the payments industry. However, data security is increasingly moving beyond payments data to data privacy – protecting the ever-growing amount of information that is being generated and collected. The exponential growth of data generation and need for elastic, highly scalable infrastructure, is leading to a more central role for cloud services and Big Data platforms, such as Hadoop. These platforms are designed to analyze massive data sets for transformative insights, and are uniquely capable of consuming data very rapidly.

As much of this data is or will soon be considered sensitive according to internal or external regulations, modern businesses will increasingly require a highly transparent data security solution that can protect the data without obstructing business operations or analysis. If companies protect the data itself in a zero knowledge environment, it is free to be used by authorized users and useless to non-authorized users.

Once consumers awaken to these issues, businesses that understand and act on establishing a zero knowledge environment will be able to acquire and keep customers based on their reputation for safely protecting their customers’ data. Centralized, data-centric security will be a competitive advantage. Privacy will be another trait or brand attribute customers use to determine whether they will do business with your company. Organizations that are not at the cutting edge of their industries when it comes to data protection should be fearful about losing market share to companies who do a better job at privacy.

We could very well be witnessing the beginnings of a revolutionary wave of users demanding vendors protect the data itself instead of simply building walls around it. The revolt is coming. But instead of protests and armed conflict, customers looking to gain back control of their sensitive information will have one of the greatest weapons at their disposal: a choice with whom they do business.

The Arab Spring of privacy is upon us.

Suni Munshani is CEO of Protegrity.