Under the Fourth Amendment, Americans are protected from unreasonable searches and seizures, but according to one group of federal prosecutors, just being in the wrong house at the wrong time is cause enough to make every single person inside provide their fingerprints and unlock their phones . Read more…
View article:
Feds Claim They Can Enter a House and Demand Fingerprints to Unlock Everyone’s Phones
Apple will make all iPhone 4 models, the late 2010 13-inch MacBook Air, third-generation AirPort Extreme, and mid-2009 AirPort Time Capsule obsolete come October 31, MacRumor claims, citing a different report. From the report: Apple products on the vintage and obsolete list are no longer eligible for hardware service, beyond a few exceptions. Apple defines vintage products as those that have not been manufactured for more than five years but less than seven years ago, while obsolete products are those that were discontinued more than seven years ago. Each of the products added were released between 2009 and 2010. The report specifically pertains to Apple’s vintage and obsolete products list in Japan, but the new additions will more than likely extend to the United States, Australia, Canada, and the rest of the Asia-Pacific and Europe regions. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Original post:
Apple To Obsolete iPhone 4 and Late 2010 MacBook Air On October 31
The iPhone 7’s non-moving home button may feel odd at first, but it has its perks… especially if it ever stops working. MacRumors forum goer iwayne has shown that the new iPhone will give you an on-screen home button (along with a warning that you may need repairs) if it thinks the physical key is broken. While that’s not much consolation if your phone needs to be fixed, it does mean that you can keep using your device in a relatively normal way while you’re waiting for your Genius Bar appointment. The technology may be short-lived when there are reports of Apple possibly ditching physical home buttons entirely with the next iPhone . However, it’s not hard to see why Apple would push for a motionless button in the short term. It’s not just the customizable haptic feedback — the new design is theoretically less likely to break (since it doesn’t click down) and reduces the pressure to get an immediate fix. That helps Apple’s bottom line, of course, but it may also make you a happier owner in the long term. Image credit: iwayne, MacRumors Forums Via: MacRumors Source: MacRumors Forums
Read this article:
Here’s Apple’s workaround when your iPhone 7 home button fails
Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford describes how the city of Santa Monica installed its own high-speed IoT backbone on its street lights and traffic signals — and why it’s important. Neutral “micro” cell sites can make very high-capacity wireless transmissions available, competitively, to everyone (and every sensor) nearby. This can and should cause an explosion of options and new opportunities for economic growth, innovation, and human flourishing in general… Very few American cities have carried out this transmogrification, but every single one will need to. Santa Monica…is a city that will be able to control its future digital destiny, because it is taking a comprehensive, competition-forcing approach to the transmission of data… Cities that get control of their streetlights and connect them to municipally overseen, reasonably priced dark fiber can chart their own Internet of Things futures, rather than leave their destinies in the hands of vendors whose priorities are driven (rationally) by the desire to control whole markets and keep share prices and dividends high rather than provide public benefits. Santa Monica’s CIO warns that now telecoms “are looking for exclusive rights to poles and saying they can’t co-locate [with their competitors]. They’re all hiring firms to lock up their permits and rights to as many poles as possible, as quickly as possible, before governments can organize.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See the original post:
California City Converts Its Street Lights Into A High-Speed IoT Backbone
Verizon has unveiled a new pay-as-you-go unlimited mobile data offering yesterday called PopData that has some significant strings attached. The option charges you $2 for 30 minutes or $3 for 60 minutes of unlimited internet data. The Verge reports: Think of it like a microtransaction or in-app purchase in a mobile game, where you can’t enjoy the full benefits of a product you ostensibly already own or pay for without ponying up a few extra bucks. There does appear to be some legitimate reasons to want unfettered data access for a short amount of time. For instance, perhaps you know youâ(TM)ll be downloading large files to your phone like numerous Spotify playlists, or maybe you want to enjoy an uninterrupted stream of a sports game or Netflix movie without having to worry about your data cap. But thereâ(TM)s no telling really whether this is a good or bad deal, as it complicates how we think of the value of data by blending a monthly bucket metaphor with that of a time-based subscription system. This wouldnâ(TM)t be such a big deal if customers could simply pay for unlimited data every month. Yet Verizon — unlike ATT, T-Mobile, and Sprint — does not offer customers a standard unlimited plan, and the company has made an effort to kick users off their grandfathered plans in the past. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Follow this link:
Verizon Is Now Selling Unlimited Data In 30-Minute Increments
Beam is a lightbulb replacement that screws into any light-socket and turns it into a remote-controlled LCD projector. (more…)
Read the original:
Turning light-sockets into LCD projectors
Obama ends restrictions on Cuban cigars, rum: It’s about time!
Nice place! Via PBS : The discovery occurred earlier this month in the Florida Keys, where the U.S. Department of Agriculture detected the New World screwworm, a parasite that lives inside open wounds, in a deer. About 30 deer have been found dead or been euthanized in the last two weeks due to screwworm infections. As a result, the county declared an agricultural state of emergency. “The screwworm is a potentially devastating animal disease that sends shivers down every ranchers spine,” Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Adam Putnam said. “It’s been more than five decades since the screwworm infested Florida, and I’ve grown up hearing the horror stories from the last occurrence.”
Read the original:
State of emergency declared as Florida struck by flesh-eating screwworms
Amazon’s children’s video offerings are expanding once again. This time it’s with an animated version of Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter . That name might sound familiar if you were assigned a book report in 5th grade for Astrid Lindgren month but didn’t want to read Pippi Longstocking . The details of the show’s production are a little convoluted, so bear with me. It’s directed by Goro Miyazaki and hasn’t made it outside of Japan and the Scandanavian region. Goro is the son of famed Studio Ghibli mastermind Hayao Miyazaki ( Ponyo , Howl’s Moving Castle ), and Studio Ghibli co-produced this project . That version came out back in 2014 . What Amazon will stream is an English dub spanning 26 episodes, narrated by everyone’s favorite FBI agent , Gillian Anderson. She has a bit of history with Ghibli as she did the voice for Moro in the Princess Mononoke dub, which was handled by Disney. So, the chances of this being a solid version with western voice-overs are probably pretty high. But, again, it’s important to note that this isn’t a full-on Amazon Original. With Studio Ghibli on hiatus, this might be the last bit of the team’s work, so make the most of it. For those with little kids (and who aren’t just young at heart themselves), Amazon has also ordered Little Big Awesome which features flying sea turtles and “a jelly giant.” That hails from Ben Gruber of Spongebob Squarepants and Super Jail fame, and is being animated by the house of Metalocalypse , Titmouse Inc. It probably won’t be brutal, but we can always hope for a William Murderface Easter egg, can’t we? Source: Amazon
Read more here:
Amazon to stream Ghibli-produced ‘Ronja, the Robber’s Daughter’
The amount of pixels in a display has been the source of forum flamewars since the advent of HDTV, which makes an experimental display technology from the University of Sussex so interesting. It’s called JOLED and it measures a whopping 7 x 6 voxels high and wide, respectively. Hold on, it gets more interesting. Each voxel is a diminutive multi-colored sphere, and they’re suspended in mid-air by an array of ultrasound speakers that “create high-pitched and high-intensity soundwaves that are inaudible but forceful enough to hold the spheres in place, ” according to the school . That holds the JANUS objects in place, but to make them spin and show different colors at different times is something else entirely. What seems to be the key to the rotation is that the spheres are coated with titanium dioxide — also used to purify air when mixed with concrete — which, when a exposed to an electrical field causes them to rotate. “JOLED could be like having a floating e-ink display that can also change its shape, ” researcher Deepak Sahoo said in a canned press release quote. Maybe don’t expect to have these sitting on your desk, though. The school suggest that it could wind up like many of Disney Research’s projects and be used in commercial or tourism settings. Some examples? Showing the changing patterns of carbon footprints or changes in currency conversion rates. So, don’t expect to watch Luke Cage on one of these in HDR anytime soon is what I’m saying. “We also want to examine ways in which such a display could be used to deliver media on-demand, ” University of Sussex’s Sriram Subramanian said. “A screen appears in front of the user to show the media and then the objects forming the display fall to the ground when the video finishes playing.” The scientists hope to increase the pixel density as well as the amount of colors displayed (sound familiar?), and will be presenting their research next week at Japan’s ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium. Via: TechCrunch Source: University of Sussex
Read the article:
Forget holograms, here’s a ‘floating e-ink’ display