December 2017 – Page 11 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

An electric cargo ship is delivering coal in China

An all-electric cargo ship is now in use in China and it boasts an impressive 2.4 MWh energy storage capacity, Electrek reports. The ship is over 230 feet long, 45 feet wide and 14 feet deep and can carry a maximum of 2, 000 tons. Supercapacitors and lithium batteries make up the energy storage system and the ship can go about 50 miles on one charge. It will run between two shipyards, each of which has a charging station that can recharge the ship in around two hours. Moving towards electric power will be important for the shipping industry and this vessel is a step in that direction. Its payload however, is, wait for it, coal. And that may seem like an odd pairing but at least the ship isn’t burning fossil fuels while it’s carrying them. Tesla , Daimler , Cummins and Toyota are all working on shipping trucks that use alternative fuels and pushing our cargo ships in that direction will do a lot for the environment. The ship, which took its maiden voyage last month, will transport coal along the Pearl River in China’s Guangdong Province. Via: Electrek

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An electric cargo ship is delivering coal in China

Starbucks offers AR tours of its lavish Shanghai coffee shop

Starbucks has a long, long tradition of using tech to bring you into its coffee shops , and that will be truer than ever with the latest supersized Reserve Roastery location in Shanghai. The beverage behemoth will use a mobile app to offer guided augmented reality tours of the coffee-making process when the restaurant opens on December 6th. Point your phone at equipment like the roaster or cask and you’ll get an explanation of what happens as beans eventually turn into your venti latte. The chain is offering virtual badges for participating in the tour, and you’ll get a “unique Roastery filter” to mark your trip. We’re not sure who’s excited to show that they’ve visited a Starbucks (even if it’s a very elaborate one), but it at least means you’ll have a virtual record of your trip. There’s no mention of whether or not you’ll see this AR experience in other Reserve Roasteries (we’ve asked about future plans), but it’s reasonable to expect that this won’t be available at your corner Starbucks any time soon. This is more about turning your visit into a mini event and encouraging you to linger a while longer. As it is, we could see other restaurants following suit if this catches on. Source: Starbucks

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Starbucks offers AR tours of its lavish Shanghai coffee shop

Quentin Tarantino said he preferred Trek over Star Wars, now he has a film idea

Enlarge / “Spock, the funny thing about the Beta Quadrant is the little differences . They’ve got the same shit over there they got here, but it’s just a little different.” (credit: CBS via Getty Images) This evening, both Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter dropped reports that would cut through any diehard sports- or politics fan’s timeline. High aesthetic, foul-mouth dialogue auteur Quentin Tarantino reportedly has an idea for a new Star Trek movie, and he’s already approached Trek cinema careholder JJ Abrams. Both entertainment outlets confirm the two now plan on bringing a writers room together for Paramount to flush things out. Tarantino’s resume speaks for itself, from Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction through Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight. He’s one of the most distinct modern filmmakers with an easy to recognize (and parody ) style. The director has worked with other creators’ IPs before ( Jackie Brown comes from the great Elmore Leonard, for instance), but a Trek film would represent the first time he dabbled in an established major movie franchise. (Deadline notes he has dabbled in TV franchises like CSI and ER. ) Of course, an idea and a writers room promise does not guarantee a movie. Tarantino already has a Charles Manson-ish movie in progress for 2019, while Abrams recently agreed to come back to the Star Wars franchise with Episode IX. And Paramount already expressed a desire for a fourth Chris Pine-led Trek installment to follow up the ehhh that was last year’s Star Trek Beyond. The studio did not respond to requests for comment from either Hollywood publication, so there’s no clarity on whether Tarantino’s interest would impact those plans. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Quentin Tarantino said he preferred Trek over Star Wars, now he has a film idea

Infiniti debuts breakthrough engine technology in new QX50

Jonathan Gitlin The new Infiniti QX50 might not seem the most natural fodder for these pages, but its engine surely is. Just introduced to the world at the Los Angeles Auto Show, the crossover is powered by the world’s first production variable-compression ratio engine. It’s a 2.0L turbocharged four-cylinder called the VC-Turbo, and it represents a huge leap forward for internal combustion engine technology. By altering the distance that the piston head travels within its cylinder, the VC-Turbo can operate with a compression ratio as low as 8:1 (for maximum performance) or as high as 14:1 (for maximum efficiency). The engine is as powerful as the older naturally aspirated 3.5L VQ V6 in the previous QX50 and makes more torque, but it’s also smaller, lighter, and a lot more fuel-efficient. It can even switch between the Atkinson and regular combustion cycles. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Infiniti debuts breakthrough engine technology in new QX50

Man Hacks Jail Computer Network To Get Inmate Released Early

An anonymous reader writes: A Michigan man pleaded guilty last week to hacking the computer network of the Washtenaw County Jail, where he modified inmate records in an attempt to have an inmate released early. To breach the jail’s network, the attacker used only spear-phishing emails and telephone social engineering. The man called jail employees and posed as local IT staffers, tricking some into accessing a website, and downloading and installing malware under the guise of a jail system upgrade. Once the man (Konrads Voits) had access to this data, investigators said he accessed the XJail system, searched and accessed the records of several inmates, and modified at least one entry “in an effort to get that inmate released early.” Jail employees noticed the modification right away and alerted the FBI. The man as arrested a month later and is now awaiting sentencing (maximum 10 years and a fine of up to $250, 000). Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Man Hacks Jail Computer Network To Get Inmate Released Early

Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years

If you tried to start a car that’s been sitting in a garage for decades, you might not expect the engine to respond. But a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up Wednesday after 37 years without use. NASA announces: Voyager 1, NASA’s farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or “puffs, ” lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980. “With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years, ” said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years

Two Technologists Create Black Metal Album Using An AI

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Outline: Coditany of Timeness” is a convincing lo-fi black metal album, complete with atmospheric interludes, tremolo guitar, frantic blast beats and screeching vocals. But the record, which you can listen to on Bandcamp, wasn’t created by musicians. Instead, it was generated by two musical technologists using a deep learning software that ingests a musical album, processes it, and spits out an imitation of its style. To create Coditany, the software broke “Diotima, ” a 2011 album by a New York black metal band called Krallice, into small segments of audio. Then they fed each segment through a neural network — a type of artificial intelligence modeled loosely on a biological brain — and asked it to guess what the waveform of the next individual sample of audio would be. If the guess was right, the network would strengthen the paths of the neural network that led to the correct answer, similar to the way electrical connections between neurons in our brain strengthen as we learn new skills. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Two Technologists Create Black Metal Album Using An AI

Every iPhone X Is Not Created Equal

According to a PC Magazine report that uses data from Cellular Insights, the Qualcomm-powered iPhone X has better LTE performance than the Intel-powered model. From the report: There are three iPhone X models sold globally. Using lab equipment, Cellular Insights tested two of them: the Qualcomm-powered A1865, sold by Sprint, Verizon, and U.S. Cellular and in Australia, China, and India; and the Intel-powered A1901, sold by most other global carriers including AT&T and T-Mobile. (The third model, A1902, is only sold in Japan.) Here in the U.S., we anticipate that the SIM-free model sold directly by Apple will be the A1865, as that’s the model that supports all four U.S. carriers. For this test, Cellular Insights looked at performance on LTE Band 4, which is used by every major U.S. carrier except Sprint, as well as in Canada and parts of Latin America. Cellular Insights attenuated an LTE signal from a strong -85dBm until the modems showed no performance. While both modems started out with 195Mbps of download throughput on a 20MHz carrier, the Qualcomm difference appeared quickly, as the Intel modem dropped to 169Mbps at -87dBm. The Qualcomm modem took an additional -6dBm of attenuation to get to that speed. Most consumers will feel the difference in very weak signal conditions, where every dBm of signal matters, so we zoomed in on that in the chart below. At very weak signal strength, below -120dBm, the Qualcomm modem got speeds on average 67 percent faster than the Intel modem. The Intel modem finally died at -129dBm and the Qualcomm modem died at -130dBm, so we didn’t find a lot of difference in when the modems finally gave out. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Every iPhone X Is Not Created Equal

Updating macOS can bring back the nasty “root” security bug

Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cunningham ) The serious and surprising root security bug in macOS High Sierra is back for some users, shortly after Apple declared it fixed. Users who had not installed macOS 10.13.1 and thus were running a prior version of the OS when they received the security update, found that installing 10.13.1 resurfaced the bug, according to a report from Wired . For these users, the security update can be installed again (in fact, it would be automatically installed at some point) after updating to the new version of the operating system. However, the bug is not fixed in that case until the user reboots the computer. Many users do not reboot their computers for days or even weeks at a time, and Apple’s support documentation did not at first inform users that they needed to reboot, so some people may have been left vulnerable without realizing it. The documentation been updated with the reboot step now. The root bug allows anyone to log in or authenticate as a system administrator on systems running macOS High Sierra by simply typing in the username “root” and leaving the password field blank, in many circumstances. It was a serious bug that drew an uncharacteristically strong apology from Apple, which said its “customers deserve better.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The Underground Uber Networks Driven by Russian Hackers

Joseph Cox, reporting for DailyBeat: Uber’s ride-sharing service has given birth to some of the most creative criminal scams to date, including using a GPS-spoofing app to rip off riders in Nigeria, and even ginning up fake drivers by using stolen identities. Add to those this nefariously genius operation: Cybercriminals, many working in Russia, have created their own illegitimate taxi services for other crooks by piggybacking off Uber’s ride-sharing platform, sometimes working in collaboration with corrupt drivers. Based on several Russian-language posts across a number of criminal-world sites, this is how the scam works: The scammer needs an emulator, a piece of software which allows them to run a virtual Android phone on their laptop with the Uber app, as well as a virtual private network (VPN), which routes their computer’s traffic through a server in the same city as the rider. The scammer acts, in essence, as a middleman between an Uber driver and the passenger — ordering trips through the Uber app, but relaying messages outside of it. Typically, this fraudulent dispatcher uses the messaging app Telegram to chat with the passenger, who provides pickup and destination addresses. The scammer orders the trip, and then provides the car brand, driver name, and license plate details back to the passenger through Telegram. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Underground Uber Networks Driven by Russian Hackers