Reddit Users Lose Real Money After Meme Currency Bot Dies

Another day, another cryptocurrency clusterfuck. This week, the creator of the tipping bot “dogetipbot”—a service that let Reddit users “tip” each other in Dogecoin— announced that his company is broke, he’s broke, and the bot is broke because he spent all the coins, after he himself ran out of money. Read more...

Watching two waves of hot lava in the Solar System’s largest volcano

Enlarge / Loki Patera, in the lower-center, has a central island that divides two waves of molten material. (credit: NASA/JPL/USGS ) Volcanic activity appears to be a common feature in our Solar System; we have evidence of it on three planets and two moons and hints of it elsewhere. But that doesn't mean all volcanic activity is the same. Venus' activity is driven by a simple version of plate tectonics. On the Moon, massive lava flows were released by large impacts, and Mars just seems to have vented heat left over from its formation. There are also hints of cryovolcanoes, which belch up ice rather than lava, on some of the bodies of the outer Solar System. But when it comes to sheer volume of activity, all of this takes a back seat to Jupiter's moon Io. Io is partially molten due to gravitational stress from its proximity to three large moons and a massive planet. The results are active volcanoes and vast pools of molten material on the Moon's surface. And we just got a good look inside the biggest of them. Slicing up Loki Loki Patera is the most powerful active volcano in the Solar System. It's an enormous crater with a central island; around that island is a sea of hot material that covers more than 20,000 square kilometers. By all appearances, that hot material isn't stable, since the entire surface seems to be reworked every few years, temporarily replaced by new hot material. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Just Look at How Insane Your Phone’s Graphics Will Be Next Year

Project Logan is NVIDIA's next-gen mobile processor. Inside of it is the Kepler GPU, which NVIDIA claims the fastest, most advanced scalable GPU in the world. Last year, Kepler hit desktops and laptops, and next year your phone and tablet are about to get supercharged . Read more...        

Barnes & Noble adds Google Play store to its tablets

The Nook HD and HD+ may not be fully 'open' Android tablets, but they're now much more open [Read more]        

Scientists Finally Know What Makes These Weird Glass Droplets So Incredibly Strong

Something unusual happens when a drop of molten glass falls into water. As it cools, it creates a crystal clear tadpole-like droplet that’s bulletproof on one end, but impossibly fragile on the other. We’ve known about these droplets for 400 years, but scientists have only recently figured out what makes them almost… Read more...

Indian IT firm accused of discrimination against “stupid Americans”

Sean MacEntee Infosys, an Indian IT software and services company with offices throughout the world, has been accused of discriminating against American job applicants. One Infosys employee who raised concerns about the company's hiring practices was repeatedly called a "stupid American, " the lawsuit states. Infosys has about 15, 000 employees in the US "and approximately 90 percent of these employees are of South Asian descent (including individuals of Indian, Nepalese, and Bangladeshi descent), " the lawsuit states . Infosys allegedly achieved this ratio "by directly discriminating against individuals who are not of South Asian decent in hiring, by abusing the H-1B visa process to bring workers of South Asian descent into the country rather than hiring qualified individuals already in the United States, and by abusing the B-1 visa system to bring workers of South Asian descent into the United States to perform work not allowed by their visa status rather than hiring individuals already in the United States to perform the work." Infosys "used B-1 visa holders because they could be paid considerably lower wages than other workers including American-born workers, " the lawsuit states. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

Mac users installing popular DVD ripper get nasty backdoor instead

(credit: Patrick Wardle ) Hackers compromised a download server for a popular DVD-ripping software named HandBrake and used it to push stealthy malware that stole victims' password keychains, password vaults, and possibly the master credentials that decrypted them, security researchers said Monday. Over a four-day period ending Saturday, a download mirror located at download.handbrake.fr delivered a version of the video conversion software that contained a backdoor known as Proton, HandBrake developers warned over the weekend . At the time that the malware was being distributed to unsuspecting Mac users, none of the 55 most widely used antivirus services detected it. That's according to researcher Patrick Wardle , who reported results here and here from the VirusTotal file-scanning service. When the malicious download was opened, it directed users to enter their Mac administer password, which was then uploaded in plain text to a server controlled by the attackers. Once installed, the malware sent a variety of sensitive user files to the same server. In a blog post published Monday morning , Thomas Reed, director of Mac offerings at antivirus provider Malwarebytes, wrote: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Apple now lets Windows users sync iCloud bookmarks with Chrome and Firefox

While the release of iOS 7 was yesterday's big news, Apple also dropped a number of other smaller, but no less important , software updates. Not content with allowing only Internet Explorer users import their iCloud bookmarks to Windows PCs, the company is now letting Chrome and Firefox join the party. The additional functionality comes by way of an update to Apple's iCloud Control Panel for Windows, a small app designed to keep contacts, calendars and bookmarks up-to-date between iOS devices, Mac and PC. To make it possible, Apple -- which isn't known for dedicating resources to rival platforms -- submitted two browser extensions to do the heavy lifting. Ironically, Mac users are excluded from the fun, putting Windows users in the enviable position of receiving a feature before anyone else. Filed under: Software , Apple , Microsoft , Google Comments Via: Apple Insider , The Verge Source: iCloud Control Panel , iCloud Bookmarks (Chrome Web Store) , iCloud Bookmarks (Firefox Add-ons)

Android 5.0 Lollipop, thoroughly reviewed

Android updates don't matter anymore—or at least that's what many people think. Back-to-back-to-back Jelly Bean releases and a KitKat release  seemed to only polish what already existed. When Google took the wraps off of "Android L" at Google I/O, though, it was clear that this release was different. Android 5.0, Lollipop is at least the biggest update since Android 4.0, and it's probably the biggest Android release ever. The update brings a complete visual overhaul of every app, with a beautiful new design language called "Material Design." Animations are everywhere, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a single pixel from 4.4 that was carried over into 5.0—Google even revamped the fonts. 5.0 also brings a ton of new features. Notifications are finally on the lockscreen, the functionality of Recent Apps has been revamped to make multitasking a lot easier, and the voice recognition works everywhere—even when the screen is off. The under-the-hood renovations are just as extensive, including a completely new camera API with support for RAW images, a system-wide focus on battery life, and a new runtime—ART—that replaces the aging Dalvik virtual machine. Read 171 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Solar power’s epic price drop, visualized

As in, holy crap, we knew solar was getting cheap, but wow . Among energy afficionados, the precipitous decline in the price of solar cells is called "The Swanson Effect." And no – not after that Swanson . Read more...