Jailbreaking or rooting your phone is pretty much a nerd birthright at this point. But soon it could once again be deemed illegal, if the acts’ exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act runs out. That’s where you come in. More »
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Jailbreaking (or Rooting) Your Phone Could Become Illegal Again. Fight It. [Jailbreak]
When Mac OS X 10.7 Lion introduced full disk encryption, called FileVault 2, it was a huge improvement over the original FileVault, which only encrypts a user’s home folder. And because of the “creative” way FileVault was implemented, there were numerous incompatibilities, gotchas, and caveats to its use. FileVault 2 on the other hand, encrypts individual disk blocks so the encryption is invisible to the file system and really doesn’t get in the way of normal use. Adding to this is another new feature in Lion: the recovery partition and the network recovery system introduced in last year’s hardware.
In almost all cases, these new features will work together without trouble. Still, there are a few things you should know, especially if you use encrypted Time Machine backups and if you can’t depend on fast Internet connectivity to be available should your boot drive fail.
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Lion’s FileVault 2 and disk restore: caveat encryptor
Microsoft will upgrade its disc technology for its next Xbox from DVDs to Blu-Ray discs, catching up to rival Sony, games industry sources tell Kotaku. More »
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Sources: The Next Xbox Will Play Blu-Ray, May Not Play Used Games (And Will Introduce Kinect 2) [Xbox 720]
IFPI, the international trade group for the record industry, has trumpeted a study that allegedly shows that France saw a surge in iTunes sales following the institution of a mass-scale regime of “disconnection warnings” — threats to remove you and your family from the Internet if you don’t stop downloading. These warnings are the first step of the controversial HADOPI system, which is the first of a series of global “three strikes” laws pushed for by IFPI.
TorrentFreak had a look at the study, which was written by researches at Wellesley College and Carnegie Mellon, and they found that none of the benefits claimed by the record industry were in its conclusions: “What the researchers found is that in France, compared to five other European countries, more music was sold through iTunes. Looking at the graph below (from the report), it’s clear that the “uplift” in France before Hadopi was introduced (March 2009) is actually much sharper than the two years after.”
“We also estimated the model for the 6 months before and after September 2010, as this was the first month that HADOPI began sending out first notices. In this case, the resulting coefficient was close to zero and statistically insignificant.”
Indeed, when the three-strikes warnings were actually sent out, there was no effect on iTunes sales compared to the control countries. This is unusual, because you would expect that the hundreds of thousands of warnings that went out would have had more of an impact than the ‘news’ that this could happen in the future.
In addition, if we look at the search trends for Hadopi and The Pirate Bay we don’t see a drop in interest for the latter, suggesting that the interest for pirated goods remained stable.
Anti-Piracy Warnings Have No Effect on iTunes Sales
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Study does not show that disconnection threats terrorized France into using iTunes
In the days before Intel, Apple and Google, computing was a much more traditional affair. We’re talking levers, gears, and other mechanisms that could all automate counting in some way or other. Russian scientist Vladimir Lukyanov, however, built one that ran on water. More »
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The Russian Computer That Ran On Water [Past Perfect]
zacharye writes with an except from an article over at BGR about Apple’s quarterly results: ” Disappointing’ though it may have been to some, the iPhone 4S propelled what is now confirmed to have been the most profitable quarter any technology company has ever recorded. Apple on Wednesday reported record earnings for the December quarter, revealing a profit of $13.06 billion on revenue that surpassed $46 billion. Among technology companies, Apple’s fiscal first quarter represents the most profitable quarter ever recorded. Only one U.S. company has ever posted a more profitable quarter — Exxon managed a profit of $14.8 billion in the third quarter of 2008 — and the driving force behind Apple’s record-setting performance was quite clearly the iPhone.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apple Announces Most Profitable Quarter in History
Time for the latest instalment of “shit people are saying/guessing about the next Xbox console”! This week we have two reports, one from IGN and the other from Fudzilla. More »
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Next Xbox Out In Oct/Nov 2013, Chips Already Being Made [Rumor]
This is not a metaphorical view inside a nuclear reactor. This is for real-real.
This month, the good folks at TEPCO sent a remote-controlled endoscope and thermometer into the containment vessel of Fukishima’s crippled reactor #2, hoping to learn something about the level of cooling water, the state of the fuel rods, and the temperature in the reactor. The view is obscured by steam, the effects of radiation, and (are you sitting down) actual goddam gamma rays just whizzing by. According to the PBS Frontline blog, those are the little streaks and flashes that you see in this video.
The probe revealed corroded piping and dripping humidity, but did not reveal the water’s surface level, which TEPCO had expected to be as high as four meters. The containment vessel was flooded with seawater during the reactor meltdown when other attempts to cool it failed. Current water levels inside the reactor remain unknown.
The probe’s thermometer function proved more revealing; it recorded the interior temperature at 44.7 degrees centigrade (112 degrees Farenheit), demonstrating that the unit’s own thermometer, thought to be off by as many as 20 degrees, is still functioning accurately.
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A view inside a nuclear reactor