Author: kenmay

Las Vegas gets “kinetic tiles” that power lights with foot traffic

Enlarge (credit: EnGoPlanet) A New York-based startup called EnGoPlanet has installed four streetlights in a plaza off the Las Vegas Strip that are powered exclusively by solar and kinetic energy. The installations aren’t mere streetlights though—they also power a variety of environmental monitors, support video surveillance, and, for the masses, offer USB ports for device charging. The streetlights are topped by a solar panel crest, and have “kinetic tiles” on the ground below them. These panels reportedly can generate 4 to 8 watts from people walking on them , depending on the pressure of the step. The renewable energy is then collected by a battery for use at night. The solar-plus-kinetic energy design is useful on those rare Vegas days without too much sun—as long as there is still plenty of foot traffic. The four streetlights have a host of sensors that collect information, and details on what kind of information is collected are sparse. In EnGoPlanet’s promotional video , a quick slide lists the streetlights’ additional capabilities: environmental monitoring, air quality monitoring, video surveillance, and the ever-vague “smart analytics.” If the bright side of progress is more environmentally-friendly streetlights, the dark side is that as you replace those old analog streetlights you get the addition of video surveillance from a private company. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Las Vegas gets “kinetic tiles” that power lights with foot traffic

Hayao Miyazaki is Stepping Out of Retirement for One Final Film

You can’t keep Hayao Miyazaki away from what he loves. The celebrated anime director announced during a television special that he wants to come out of retirement to turn his 20-year pet project into a full-length animated feature. Read more…

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Hayao Miyazaki is Stepping Out of Retirement for One Final Film

Hack Exposes 412 Million Accounts on AdultFriendFinder Sites

“Almost every account password was cracked, thanks to the company’s poor security practices, ” reports ZDNet — even for “deleted” accounts. An anonymous reader quotes their article: The hack includes 339 million accounts from AdultFriendFinder.com, which the company describes as the “world’s largest sex and swinger community [and] also includes over 15 million “deleted” accounts that weren’t purged from the databases. On top of that, 62 million accounts from Cams.com, and 7 million from Penthouse.com were stolen, as well as a few million from other smaller properties owned by the company. The data accounts for two decades’ worth of data from the company’s largest sites, according to breach notification LeakedSource, which obtained the data… The three largest site’s SQL databases included usernames, email addresses, and the date of the last visit, and passwords, which were either stored in plaintext or scrambled with the SHA-1 hash function, which by modern standards isn’t cryptographically as secure as newer algorithms. The attack apparently coincides with the discovery of “a local file inclusion flaw on the AdultFriendFinder site, which if successfully exploited could allow an attacker to remotely run malicious code on the web server. ” Ironically, Friend Finder Networks doesn’t even own Penthouse.com anymore. They sold the site to a new owner last February. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hack Exposes 412 Million Accounts on AdultFriendFinder Sites

New attack reportedly lets 1 modest laptop knock big servers offline

(credit: Bonnie Natko ) Researchers said they have discovered a simple way lone attackers with limited resources can knock large servers offline when they’re protected by certain firewalls made by Cisco Systems and other manufacturers. The denial-of-service technique requires volumes of as little as 15 megabits, or about 40,000 packets per second, to sever the Internet connection of vulnerable servers. The requirements are in stark contrast to recent attacks targeting domain name service provider Dyn and earlier security site KrebsOnSecurity and French Web host OVH . Those assaults bombarded sites with volumes approaching or exceeding 1 terabit per second. Researchers from Denmark-based TDC Security Operations Center have dubbed the new attack technique BlackNurse. In a blog post published Wednesday , the researchers wrote: Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New attack reportedly lets 1 modest laptop knock big servers offline

Earth’s Plants Are Countering Some of the Effects of Climate Change

A new study published in Nature Communications has found that Earth’s plant life between 2002 and 2014 has absorbed so much carbon dioxide that the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere has slowed down, despite humans pumping out more CO2 than ever before. The study also found that between 1982 and 2009, “about 18m square kilometers of new vegetation had sprouted on Earth’s surface, an area roughly twice the size of the United States.” The Economist reports: In 2014 humans pumped about 35.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air. That figure has been climbing sharply since the middle of the 20th century, when only about 6 billion tons a year were emitted. As a consequence, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has been rising too, from about 311 parts per million (ppm) in 1950 to just over 400 in 2015. Yet the rate at which it is rising seems to have slowed since the turn of the century. According to Dr Keenan, between 1959 and 1989 the rate at which CO2 levels were growing rose from 0.75ppm per year to 1.86. Since 2002, though, it has barely budged. In other words, although humans are pumping out more CO2 than ever, less of it than you might expect is lingering in the air. Filling the atmosphere with CO2 is a bit like filling a bath without a plug: the level will rise only if more water is coming out of the taps than is escaping down the drain. Climate scientists call the processes which remove CO2 from the air “sinks.” The oceans are one such sink. Photosynthesis by plants is another: carbon dioxide is converted, with the help of water and light energy from the sun, into sugars, which are used to make more plant matter, locking the carbon away in wood and leaves. Towards the end of the 20th century around 50% of the CO2 emitted by humans each year was removed from the atmosphere this way. Now that number seems closer to 60%. Earth’s carbon sinks seem to have become more effective, but the precise details are still unclear. Using a mix of ground and atmospheric observations, satellite measurements and computer modeling, Dr Keenan and his colleagues have concluded that faster-growing land plants are the chief reason. That makes sense: as CO2 concentrations rise, photosynthesis speeds up. Studies conducted in greenhouses have found that plants can photosynthesis up to 40% faster when concentrations of CO2 are between 475 and 600ppm. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Earth’s Plants Are Countering Some of the Effects of Climate Change

Alibaba Posts $1 Billion in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

Alibaba Group posted $1 billion (6.81 billion yuan) of sales within the first five minutes of its Singles’ Day sales, a 24-hour event that may offer clues on the health of the Chinese economy and its largest online retailer. From a report on Bloomberg:Investors are keeping a close eye on the annual Nov. 11 spending blitz that dwarfs Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the U.S., to see if Alibaba can reprise the 60 percent leap in transactions to 91.2 billion yuan it managed last year. The e-commerce giant again turned up the star-wattage for 2016, enlisting Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson, sports celebrity David Beckham, basketball legend Kobe Bryant and pop-rock band One Republic to headline a pre-sale gala and drum up international attention. Pioneered by Alibaba in 2009 and since replicated by rivals including JD.com Inc., Singles’ Day has become somewhat of a barometer of Chinese consumer sentiment. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Alibaba Posts $1 Billion in Sales in 5 Minutes on Singles’ Day

Surface Book with Performance Base: A lot more graphics in a little more weight

Enlarge (credit: Peter Bright) Most of the PC OEMs have refreshed their Skylake systems to include Intel’s new Kaby Lake chips. Kaby Lake parts are for the most part drop-in replacements for Skylake parts—same chipsets, same power envelopes and cooling requirements—and some manufacturers have taken advantage of this fact. Dell’s new XPS 13 is in most regards identical to the old XPS 13, for example, except for the processor swap. Some manufacturers have been a little more ambitious; HP’s updated Spectre x360  adds Thunderbolt 3 and Windows Hello support as well as slashing the size and weight. Microsoft, however, has gone for none of these routes. The Surface Pro 4 with its Skylake processor remains the current iteration of the company’s productivity-oriented tablet and hasn’t changed since its introduction. The Surface Book, the laptop that can do double duty as a tablet, also remains a Skylake system. But Microsoft has made an upgrade of sorts to the Surface Book range in the form of an even more expensive version that sits at the very top of the range: the Surface Book with Performance Base. Specs at a glance: Microsoft Surface Book with Performance Base Base Best As reviewed Screen 3000×2000 13.5″ (267 PPI), 10-point capacitive PixelSense touchscreen OS Windows 10 Pro CPU Intel 6th generation Core i7 RAM 8GB 16GB 16GB GPU Intel HD Graphics 520 + Nvidia GeForce GTX 965M 2GB SSD 256GB 1TB 1TB Networking 802.11ac/a/b/g/n with 2×2 MIMO antennas, Bluetooth 4.0 Ports Mini-DisplayPort, headphones, SD, 2 USB 3.0 Cameras Rear: 8MP autofocus, 1080p video Front: 5MP, 1080p video, infrared facial recognition Size 12.30×9.14×0.59-0.90″ (312×232×14.9-23 mm) Weight 3.68 lb (1.647 kg) Battery 18 Wh (tablet) + 62 Wh (base) Warranty 1 year Price $2,399 $3,299 $3,299 Sensors Ambient light sensor, accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer Charger 65W Other features Surface Pen, TPM 2.0 The Surface Book’s big party trick is that the screen portion is the part that contains the computer; it has batteries, a processor, RAM, storage, and everything else. The keyboard base, the part that in a regular laptop houses the computer parts, contains only the keyboard, touchpad, and battery. On higher-end models the keyboard base also contains a discrete Nvidia GPU. This GPU is non-standard; it doesn’t neatly line up with any of Nvidia’s usual mobile parts, and while it’s faster than the Intel integrated graphics, it’s not as quick as the more mainstream numbered parts. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Surface Book with Performance Base: A lot more graphics in a little more weight

These SNES-era Kirby games were considered lost until this week

These four early Kirby games will now have their ROMs preserved, thanks to the efforts of a group of preservationists. (credit: Frank Cifaldi / Twitter ) A group of dedicated game preservationists has obtained a set of obscure Japanese Kirby games from the Super Famicom era in order to archive them for future generations. But the uncertain fate of such early games presages a much bigger problem facing digital game preservation going forward. Even die-hard Kirby fans would be forgiven for not knowing much about Kirby’s Toy Box , a collection of six mini games that was only available through Japan’s Satellaview , an early satellite-based distribution service for the Super Famicom (the Super NES in the West). That system only let you download one game at a time to a special 8-megabit cartridge, though, and you could only download when that specific game was being broadcast across the narrow satellite feed. Thus, existing copies of most Satellaview games are available only if they happen to be the last game downloaded to individual cartridges (Satellaview broadcasts ended in the late ’90s). While some of these games have been publicly dumped and preserved as ROM files, many exist only in the hands of Japanese collectors. Sometimes, those individuals are reluctant to release the digital code widely. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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These SNES-era Kirby games were considered lost until this week

New neural interface restores severed spinal connections without wires

People suffering from spinal cord injuries could soon have another treatment option at their disposal — one that doesn’t involve strapping themselves into a mechanical exosuit . Rather than hardwiring an electronic bridge into a patient’s back, a new neural interface bypasses the damaged spine’s air gap and transmits motor signals from the brain to the legs wirelessly. Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne (EPFL) collaborated with others from Brown University, Medtronic and Fraunhofer ICT-IMM to develop the system. “The system we have developed uses signals recorded from the motor cortex of the brain to trigger coordinated electrical stimulation of nerves in the spine that are responsible for locomotion, ” David Borton, assistant professor of engineering at Brown, said in a press statement. “With the system turned on, the animals in our study had nearly normal locomotion.” The research teams managed this by first implanting a pill-sized electrode array in the monkeys’ brains which recorded the signals generated by the motor cortex. These signals are then bounced by a wireless neurotransmitter to an external computer which translates the electrical impulses to mechanical commands. The computer then retransmits these commands to an electrical spinal stimulator implanted in the lower back, below the injury. While the damage inflicted on the two test monkeys wasn’t permanent, it would have taken the primates over a month to recover full use of their legs. But with the neural interface active, they regained control nearly instantly. This is heartening news to spinal injury sufferers but the research is still quite a ways away from human trials. The researchers must first determine how well test animals can use their restored appendages — in terms of balance and how much weight can be borne — before moving on to larger primates and, eventually, humans.

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New neural interface restores severed spinal connections without wires