May 11, 2017 – Page 30 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

New Windows look and feel, Neon, is officially the “Microsoft Fluent Design System”

Enlarge / Project Neon in the Groove Music app. (credit: Tom Hounsell ) SEATTLE—Earlier this year, pictures of a new Windows look and feel leaked . Codenamed Project Neon , the new look builds on Microsoft Design Language 2 (MDL2), the styling currently used in Windows 10, to add elements of translucency and animation. Neon has now been officially announced, and it has an official new name: the Microsoft Fluent Design System. The awkward MDL2 name exists because the original codename for the geometric, text-centric style introduced with Windows Phone 7 and incrementally iterated ever since was subject of a trademark dispute. That look and feel was internally named Metro, but Microsoft had to stop using the Metro name after pushback from a German supermarket chain . The company didn’t initially have any particularly good name to refer to the styling formerly known as Metro, so many people continued to use that term for lack of anything better. It wasn’t until a couple of months after dropping “Metro” that a new name, “Microsoft Design Language,” was settled on. Our understanding is that Neon befell a similar fate; someone out there is using the Neon name, forcing Microsoft to pick a different appellation. This time around, however, the company has recognized that it’s important to have an official name for the style that it can talk about and describe, giving us “Microsoft Fluent Design System.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Windows look and feel, Neon, is officially the “Microsoft Fluent Design System”

Windows 10 fall update will restore (and improve) OneDrive’s best feature

Microsoft Windows 10 was a big improvement over Windows 8.1 in most important ways, but it made a big change to the way OneDrive syncing worked. In Windows 8.1, you could see all the files you had stored in OneDrive, but the operating system would only actually download and open the file when you needed to open it. At least for PCs that usually have Internet connections, this was a neat way to offer cloud file syncing without consuming gigabytes of space for infrequently used files on every computer you were signed into. But the behavior could be error-prone—apps could attempt to open the placeholder files created by OneDrive rather than the files themselves—and it could create confusion about which files were actually available offline. So in the initial releases of Windows 10, Microsoft changed the behavior to be more Dropbox-esque . All OneDrive files are now downloaded to your PC when you sign in, though as with Dropbox you can choose to only sync selected folders based on what you need to have available at all times. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 10 fall update will restore (and improve) OneDrive’s best feature

Windows 10 Timeline remembers everything you did on your PC

One of the more intriguing features Microsoft will include in this fall’s Windows 10 Creators Update is Timeline. As the name suggests, it’s a way for you to move backwards in time and see things you were working on in the past and resume what you were doing. Microsoft described it as a visual timeline of everything you were doing on your computer, and you can jump back into files, applications and websites where you left off. Introducing Timeline. Easily jump back in time to continue where you left off. #Windows10 #MSBuild pic.twitter.com/e3gxhXnp6W — Windows (@Windows) May 11, 2017 Timeline lives in the Windows app switcher. When you click it, you’ll see your active apps, but below that you’ll see what you were running earlier in the day. Clicking down on one of those things that you were using earlier will pop it open just as you were using it before. This works across multiple devices, as well — when you open up another Windows device where you’re signed in, you can resume the tasks you were using before. This will even work across other devices like an iPhone using the Cortana app. If you’re somewhere where you have Cortana, it’ll prompt you to continue working on whatever you were doing before. If you don’t have the specific app installed on your phone, it’ll help point you to the right app as well. At first glance, it sounds a little bit like the Time Machine backup feature that Apple has included in macOS for years now. But Time Machine is more of a file backup system that lets you go back and see earlier versions of files that you might want to restore. Microsoft’s Timeline covers applications and websites as well as just files, and it doesn’t require an external hard drive, as it’s not really a true backup system in the way Time Machine is. Indeed, Timeline appears more like Microsoft’s answer to Continuity, a feature Apple build into macOS and iOS that lets you pick up and resume work across whatever Apple device you’re using. Timeline is just one feature in the forthcoming Creators Update, which features a host of tools for using Microsoft’s software and services across devices. The “Microsoft Graph” set of APIs will let you pick up and continue work across multiple devices and will iOS and Android as well as Windows. It’ll also let you have a “universal clipboard” across your devices. Click here to catch up on the latest news from Microsoft Build 2017.

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Windows 10 Timeline remembers everything you did on your PC

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…

Harley-Davidson embraces the potential of electric motorcycles

Bikers interested in going green have reason to rejoice today. Harley-Davidson has already shown off its prototype Livewire electric bike, and it’s promised to offer you a real one in the next five years . Today, the motorcycle manufacturer said it has plans to make 100 new motorcycles over the next 10 years, including an entire range of electric vehicles. Vice president Bill Davidson confirmed that electric bikes are Harley-Davidson’s future to Drive magazine while in Sydney to celebrate the brand’s 100th anniversary in Australia. While an electric Harley won’t have the signature engine boom that its combustion-powered bikes have, Davidson said that the company is working on a sound that he likens to a jet engine. “It is an amazing motorcycle, ” he told Drive . “While it doesn’t have a 45-degree, pushrod twin-cylinder engine it has the performance expected from a Harley Davidson even if it won’t sound the same, ” he said. So far, we’ve only seen the one Livewire concept model with a limited top speed and range, it’s likely thHarleyely-Davidson will create both sport and cruiser-style bikes to appeal to both the speed freaks and the touring bikers. Davidson noted that as automated cars become more ubiquitous, driving enthusiasts may turn to motorcycles to get their manual fix, telling Drive , “I think the more automatic cars [happen], motorcycling will become more appealing. I see it as a huge opportunity.” Via: Autoblog Source: Drive

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Harley-Davidson embraces the potential of electric motorcycles

Google’s mysterious Fuchsia OS looks like an Android re-do

When we last looked at Google’s Fuchsia operating system , it was very modest. While it was designed for everything from Internet of Things devices to PCs, there wasn’t even a graphical interface to show. Well, things have… evolved. Ars Technica has revisited Fuchsia several months later, and it now touts an interface (nicknamed Armadillo) that makes it clear this isn’t just some after-hours experiment. It’s only a set of placeholders at the moment, but it gives you a good idea as to what to expect. The home screen is a large, vertically scrolling list of cards for “stories, ” or collections of apps and OS components that work together to complete a given task. There’s also a Google Now -style section that has “suggestion” cards for tasks — use them and you’ll either add to an existing story or create a new one. The prototype UI also includes a simple split-screen interface, and scales up to tablet size. Fuchsia isn’t based on Linux, like Android or Chrome OS, but it still uses open source code that would let anyone tinker with the inner workings. Apps, meanwhile, are built using Google’s Flutter kit, which lets developers write both Android and iOS apps. Things are clearly coming along. But there’s one overriding question: just what role will Fuchsia have? Google’s Travis Geiselbrecht stresses that this “isn’t a toy thing, ” but there’s no public strategy. Ars speculates that Google is treating this as a sort of Android re-do: what if the company could design a platform while dumping all the technology it no longer needs or wants, such as Linux or any traces of Java ? The use of Flutter would let you run Android apps until there’s broader software support. It might take years before Fuchsia is ready for public use, assuming that’s the ultimate plan, but there could be a day where Android is no longer the center of Google’s computing universe. Source: Ars Technica

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Google’s mysterious Fuchsia OS looks like an Android re-do

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

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Mac users installing popular DVD ripper get nasty backdoor instead

The Blackbelt lets you 3D print really long items

The conveyor belt has long been the center of wacky adventures. From Charlie Chaplin to Lucy, things whizzing by on a flat belt has made for comedy gold. Now you can watch your 3D printed objects whiz past on the Blackbelt, a conveyor system for FDM printing that lets you build huge objects. The Blackbelt Kickstarter will launch in 3 days and you can expect the system to cost about 9, 500 for… Read More

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The Blackbelt lets you 3D print really long items

New ultra-high resolution printer makes colors from nanostructures

Researchers from the Technical University of Denmark demonstrated a new nanotechnology-based printing technique that produces long-lasting color images on plastic at resolutions up to 127,000 dots per inch, many times more detailed than traditional laser printers. The system uses a laser to alter the structure of nanoscale structures on the plastic material. (A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter; a human hair is around 60,000 nanometers in diameter.) The nanoprinting technique could also lead to new kinds of 3D displays or invisible watermarks. From New Scientist : The surface of the plastic is shaped so that it has lots of tiny pillars, one roughly every 200 nanometers. A thin film of the element germanium is then spread over the plastic. Heat from a laser melts the germanium on each pillar, morphing its shape and thickness. As a result, it reflects a specific color. The coating protects the shapes of the newly carved nanostructures. Resonant laser printing of structural colors on high-index dielectric metasurfaces (ScienceAdvances)

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New ultra-high resolution printer makes colors from nanostructures

NIST’s Draft To Remove Periodic Password Change Requirements Gets Vendors’ Approval

An anonymous reader writes: A recently released draft of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s digital identity guidelines has met with approval by vendors. The draft guidelines revise password security recommendations and altering many of the standards and best practices security professionals use when forming policies for their companies. The new framework recommends, among other things: “Remove periodic password change requirements.” There have been multiple studies that have shown requiring frequent password changes to actually be counterproductive to good password security, said Mike Wilson, founder of PasswordPing. NIST said this guideline was suggested because passwords should be changed when a user wants to change it or if there is indication of breach. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NIST’s Draft To Remove Periodic Password Change Requirements Gets Vendors’ Approval