HP is recalling batteries used in a variety of the company’s laptops because of fire concerns. The affected models include the HP ProBook, HP ENVY, Compaq Presario, and HP Pavillion laptops sold between March 2013 and October 2016. Read more…
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HP Recalls Over 100,000 Laptop Batteries, Here’s How to Check Yours
If you want to email a .js file to somebody for any reason, you only have a few more days to do so through Gmail . The service will start blocking JavaScript file attachments starting on February 13th, adding it to its list of restricted file types, which includes .exe, .msc and .bat. If you try to attach a .js file on or after the 13th, you’ll get a notification that says it’s blocked “because its content presents a potential security issue.” JavaScript files aren’t inherently bad, but people could attach them to emails so that when you click on one, it acts as a downloader for a ransomware or other types of malware. Gmail can detect .js files even if they’re sent as a .zip, a .tgz, a .gz or a .bz2. In case you really have to send one to a friend or a co-worker, the big G recommends uploading it to Google Drive instead. Source: G Suite updates
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Gmail will start blocking JavaScript attachments in February
The Long Island coastline. (credit: Stanley Zimney ) On Wednesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the state had approved a 90 MW offshore wind farm to be installed off the coast of Long Island. That would make what will be called the South Fork Wind Farm the biggest offshore wind farm in the US. The announcement comes just a month after Block Island, a facility off the coast of Rhode Island , became the first ever commercial offshore wind farm in the US to transmit electricity in late 2016. Deepwater Wind, the company that installed the turbines off Block Island, will also be supplying the turbines for South Fork. In a press release, the New York governor’s office wrote that the turbines will be placed 30 miles southeast of Montauk and “out of sight from Long Island’s beaches.” The press release added that South Fork will provide electricity for 50,000 Long Island homes. Two weeks ago, Governor Cuomo announced that New York would commit to installing 2.4 GW of offshore wind by 2030. That comes just as the state announced that Indian Point, a 2 GW nuclear energy facility just north of New York City, would close by 2021 . The state of New York celebrated the closure of Indian Point, claiming that the plant was unsafe and too close to a major metropolitan area. But critics of the move said it would be difficult for New York to replace all of that greenhouse-gas-free energy with renewable energy. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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New York approves a 90 MW wind farm off the coast of Long Island
It appears Apple is filtering and censoring bad reviews of the LG’s UltraFine 5K display. From a report on The Next Web: The deletion was first spotted by a Reddit user four days ago. Though it’s possible the reviews were removed for some other reason, at first glance, it looks like censorship. It’s not a good look for the company. Apple said it was getting out of the monitor business, and instead chose to work more closely with third-party partners, heavily featuring LG’s 5K and 4K UltraFine displays at its recent MacBook Pro unveiling. But then the monitor received multiple negative reviews from users who were experiencing issues such as the screen failing to wake up from sleep. The Reddit post also points out that: “In many cases, attempts to fix the problem through physical reconnection[sic] of the monitor, or manual restarts, have caused the attached Mac to crash, become otherwise unresponsive, or develop problems with the touch bar (where equipped).” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Apple Seemingly Censors UltraFine 5K Monitor Reviews After Poor Feedback
Enlarge / “Domain: space. Subject: female energy clouds.” (credit: Paramount) The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA), the US Intelligence Community’s own science and technology research arm, has announced it is seeking contenders for a program to develop what amounts to the ultimate Google Translator. IARPA’s Machine Translation for English Retrieval of Information in Any Language (MATERIAL) program intends to provide researchers and analysts with a tool to search for documents in their field of concern in any of the more than 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. The specific goal, according to IARPA’s announcement, is an “‘English-in, English-out’ information retrieval system that, given a domain-sensitive English query, will retrieve relevant data from a large multilingual repository and display the retrieved information in English as query-biased summaries.” Users would be able to search vast numbers of documents with a two-part query: the first giving the “domain” of the search in terms of what sort of information they are seeking (for example, “Government,” “Science,” or “Health”) and the second an English word or phrase describing the information sought (the examples given in the announcement were “zika virus” and “Asperger’s syndrome”). So-called “low resource” languages have been an area of concern for the intelligence and defense communities for years. In 2014, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) launched its Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI) project , an attempt to build a system that lets the military quickly collect critical data—such as “topics, names, events, sentiment, and relationships”—from sources in any language on short notice. The system would be used in situations like natural disasters or military interventions in remote locations where the military has little or no local language expertise. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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US Intelligence seeks a universal translator for text search in any language
More and more, we’re getting our movies and TV via streaming services instead of on disc . But a certain DIY crowd still appreciates support for physical media piped through a home theater PC, and that’s the group the first Ultra HD Blu-ray drive is made for. Pioneer Japan announced two disc drives, the BDR-S11J-BK and the BDR-S11J-X that it will release in late February, ready to read the triple-layer 4K-ready discs. Both drives come bundled with a copy of Cyberlink’s PowerDVD software that is ready to play back 4K movies from disc. However, you’ll also need a PC running Windows 10 as well as a 7th-generation Core i7 or i5 Intel processor (Kaby Lake) and an HDMI 2.0a connection that’s HDCP 2.2 capable (just like 4K Netflix on the PC) . Once you get past the demands of HEVC compression and the DRM wrapping, it should be all set. Still, we have seen some growing pains with the first Ultra HD Blu-ray players and it’s possible a software update or two will be needed for every movie to work just right. Both drives are capable of reading and writing (read-only for Ultra HD Blu-ray), and are basically identical although the J-X has some extra tweaks for CDs, whether you’re listening or just ripping. There’s no word yet on price or exact release date, but we’ll probably see drives in the US soon. As Myce (f.k.a CDFreaks) notes, both Pioneer and Hitachi-LG are licensed to make the drives, so whatever arrives will probably come from one of those two. Via: AV Watch Source: Myce , Cyberlink , Pioneer Japan
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The first Ultra HD Blu-ray PC drive ships next month
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Softpedia: It’s finally here! After so many months of development and hard work, during which over 6, 600 bugs have been patched, the Wine project is happy to announce today, January 24, 2017, the general availability of Wine 2.0. Wine 2.0 is the biggest and most complete version of the open-source software project that allows Linux and macOS users to run applications and games designed only for Microsoft Windows operating systems. As expected, it’s a massive release that includes dozens of improvements and new features, starting with support for Microsoft Office 2013 and 64-bit application support on macOS. Highlights of Wine 2.0 include the implementation of more DirectWrite features, such as drawing of underlines, font fallback support, and improvements to font metrics resolution, font embedding in PDF files, Unicode 9.0.0 support, Retina rendering mode for the macOS graphics driver, and support for gradients in GDI enhanced metafiles. Additional Shader Model 4 and 5 shader instructions have been added to Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 11 implementation, along with support for more graphics cards, support for Direct3D 11 feature levels, full support for the D3DX (Direct3D Extension) 9 effect framework, as well as support for the GStreamer 1.0 multimedia framework. The Gecko engine was updated to Firefox 47, IDN name resolutions are now supported out-of-the-box, and Wine can correctly handle long URLs. The included Mono engine now offers 64-bit support, as well as the debug registers. Other than that, the winebrowser, winhlp32, wineconsole, and reg components received improvements. You can read the full list of features and download Wine 2.0 from WineHQ’s websiteS. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Wine 2.0 Released
On Tuesday, an international team of scientists announced they successfully tested “Bivoj, ” a high peak power laser named after a legendary Czech strongman—and boy, they really want you to know it’s really, really strong. Read more…
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Insecure Scientists Build 1000-Watt ‘Super Laser’ 10 Times Stronger Than Stupid Regular Lasers
Under mysterious circumstances, Russia has arrested Ruslan Stoyanov, head of computer incidents investigations unit at the huge cybersecurity firm at Kaspersky. He’s been charged with treason. Read more…
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Russia Arrests Top Kaspersky Hacking Investigator for Treason
Reader Krystalo writes: Mozilla today launched Firefox 51 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The new version includes a new warning for websites which collect passwords but don’t use HTTPS, WebGL 2 support for better 3D graphics, and FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) playback. Mozilla doesn’t break out the exact numbers for Firefox, though the company does say “half a billion people around the world” use the browser. In other words, it’s a major platform that web developers target — even in a world increasingly dominated by mobile apps. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Firefox 51 Arrives With HTTP Warning, WebGL 2 and FLAC Support