Tech Today w/ Ken May

While there’s still little known about Sony’s efforts to pioneer the first 4K movie download service , one thing we can say almost definitely now is that the service will in fact be compatible with its ( supposedly ) upcoming PS4. In an interview with The Verge , Sony President and COO Phil Molyneux almost sort of definitely confirmed that the service would be compatible with the ethereal console by promising that we “will not be disappointed.” Oh, and by the way, a typical 4K movie download will chew up more than 100 GB of bandwidth. More »

” deux-al pianos .” The amazing and gifted musician Evan Shinners demonstrates how to play Bach’s double manual keyboard music. Evan’s new album of Bach compositions is available as an MP3 download at Amazon: ” Evan Plays Seven .” (thanks, Joe Sabia !)

How does he do it? How does cerkahegyzo manage to shape the lead so precisely without shattering it? I want to see a video of him at work. Gallery -via Twisted Sifter

The bad news: just as much of the world is starting to get excited about the prospects of 3D printing , science is moving on to the world of 4D. The good news: in the future, you might not have to assemble that Ikea chair yourself. “4D printing” is the term cientists are using to refer to a technology that MIT’s Skylar Tibbits talked up during a recent TED appearance. The fourth “d” here is time, referring to an object that, once printed, is capable of changing shape (over time, naturally). “Essentially the printing is nothing new,” Tibbits told the BBC. “It is about what happens after.” So far the concept has been demonstrated with thin strands of plastic, which, once added to water, form into a predetermined shape, using energy from the absorption. Suggested future applications involve furniture, pipes, bikes and buildings. First, however, scientists will have to demonstrate the technology on a larger structure, of course, and they’ll explore the possibility of other energy sources, like heat, sound and vibration. Filed under: Science , Alt Comments Source: BBC

In a stunning first for neuroscience, researchers have created an electronic link between the brains of two rats, and demonstrated that signals from the mind of one can help the second solve basic puzzles in real time — even when those animals are separated by thousands of miles. More »

The Atlantic has a fascinating photo gallery about the DIY Weapons of the Syrian Rebels . Homebrew explosives are the norm, as are catapults (Reuters photo above) and tele-operated machine guns controlled with scavenged video game controllers.

Apple’s System Status page offers some info, but no expectation of when the services will be back up. If you’re a regular Photo Stream or Documents in the Cloud user, this morning’s iCloud outage is probably already giving you hives. The entire service isn’t down, but key parts of it are. Users can still make use of Find My Friends, iTunes Match, and Contact, Calendar, Reminders, and Notes syncing, but iOS device backups, document syncing, and Photo Stream have been down for (as of this writing) almost seven hours and counting. Apple’s System Status page , which was revamped last December to offer more information to users, shows that the three iCloud services have been down since just after 3am CST. Apple claims “less than 3%” of users are affected by this outage, though such a claim seems disingenuous—at the very least, there’s a hefty portion of iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad users who back up their devices to the cloud, and tons of others sync documents over iCloud through various apps. (And, as noted by 9to5Mac earlier, some users on Twitter are reporting other iCloud services being down that Apple has not indicated on the status page.) iCloud outages are, unfortunately, nothing new. Still, they rarely last this long. There’s no indication when these services will be back up; we’ve reached out for comment, but Apple has yet to respond. We’ll update this article if we hear anything back. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

China is routinely accused of launching concerted hacking campaigns against the US, many of them reportedly tied directly to the army’s Unit 61398 in Shanghai. If you believe the Ministry of Defense’s spokesman Geng Yansheng, however, just the opposite is true. Along with claiming that China would never hurt (or rather, hack) a fly, he asserts that the Ministry and China Military Online sites faced an average of 144,000 hacking attempts per month from foreign sources in 2012, 62.9 percent of which allegedly came from the US. The Ministry’s man stops short of leveling cyberwarfare charges, although he notes the US’ recent plans to expand and formally define its cyberwar strategy. There’s some ‘splainin to do, he argues. While there isn’t a formal US response, we suspect that neither side is an innocent dove here — China is just the most recent to cry foul. Filed under: Internet Comments Via: Reuters Source: Ministry of National Defense (translated)

mask.of.sanity writes “The passwords of thousands of Australian businesses are being stored in clear readable text by the country’s tax office. Storing passwords in readable text is a bad idea for a lot of reasons: they could be read by staff with ill intent, or, in the event of a data breach, could be tested against other web service accounts to further compromise users. In the case of the tax office, the clear text passwords accessed a subsection of the site. But many users would have reused them to access the main tax submission services. If attackers gained access to those areas, they would have access to the personal, financial and taxpayer information of almost every working Australian. Admins should use a strong hash like bcrypt to minimize or prevent password exposure. Users should never reuse passwords for important accounts.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.