Time Machine is a great service for backing up your computer, and by default it doesn’t use much CPU power to do it. That’s great most of the time, but sometimes you need to get stuff backed up as soon as possible. Defaults-Write points out the Terminal command for doing so. Read more…
Read More:
Temporarily Speed Up a Time Machine Backup With a Terminal Command
EzInKy writes: Science Daily has an article speculating that Venus may have been habitable which is suggested by NASA climate modeling, which proposes that Venus may have had a shallow liquid-water ocean and habitable surface temperatures for up to two billion years of its early history. Talk about global climate change run amok. Venus may represent a near Earth example of what is in store for the future of our world if we don’t make it a number one priority to address. Science Daily reports: “Venus today is a hellish world. It has a crushing carbon dioxide atmosphere 90 times as thick as Earth’s. There is almost no water vapor. Temperatures reach 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius) at its surface. Scientists have long theorized that Venus formed out of ingredients similar to Earth’s, but followed a different evolutionary path. Measurements by NASA’s Pioneer mission to Venus in the 1980s first suggested Venus originally may have had an ocean. However, Venus is closer to the sun than Earth and receives far more sunlight. As a result, the planet’s early ocean evaporated, water-vapor molecules were broken apart by ultraviolet radiation, and hydrogen escaped to space. With no water left on the surface, carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere, leading to a so-called runaway greenhouse effect that created present conditions.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read the article:
Venus May Have Been Habitable, Says NASA
File this under a totally bizarre and improbable way to hack someone . Security researchers have recently demonstrated a way to use the sounds of your computer’s hard drive to possibly transmit information. In short, they can use it to gather your data without you knowing. Weirdly enough, the DiskFiltration hack, as it’s called, works by taking control of a hard drive’s actuator. Much like the arm of a record player it moves back and forth across a hard drive’s platters to read and write data, and while it moves it makes a series of various sounds. Using the right type of malware, hackers can use those very sounds for some extremely shady machinations. If the right person is listening for the right thing, those noises can let go of a lot of information like an encryption key. The DiskFiltration method only works up to about six feet and it’s limited to a data rate of about 180 bits per minute. That’s obviously not very fast at all, but it’s quick enough to capture an encryption key in about a half hour. The entire idea and method of execution is massively impractical but it does work, except with solid-state drives. Still, it’s a very weird and very real way of intercepting data. As if people needed another way to do so. Via: Gizmodo Source: Cornell University Library
Read the original:
Your hard drive’s sounds could help hackers crack your system
We finally got another trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story last night, and it was packed full of new stuff—including, of course, Darth Vader. We’ve gone through it with a magnifying glass and all of our nerdery to see what secrets and details are hiding inside it. Read more…
In 2012 the Macbook Pro Retina wasn’t so much the next stage of laptops as it was a fun oddity by Apple. It was a workstation, designed to handle grueling video and photo editing tasks with aplomb, but it was missing some workstation musts, like a DVD drive or Ethernet port. Instead it was thinner and lighter than a traditional Macbook Pro, had a gorgeous 1800p display, and was outfitted with a solid state drive. Read more…
View article:
Apple’s Best Laptop Is Four Years Old
You might be able to repair your ripped jeans one day just be adding water, thanks to a breakthrough from Penn State researchers. Based on its earlier research on self-healing plastics , the team turned squid teeth proteins (yep) into a liquid form using yeast and bacteria, then used it to coat cotton, wool and other fabrics. If the material is torn, you just need to put the edges together, apply warm water and it magically “heals, ” as flexible and strong as before — even after being laundered. “Fashion designers use natural fibers made of proteins like wool or silk that are expensive and they are not self-healing, ” said Penn State Professor Melik C. Demirel. “We were looking for a way to make fabrics self-healing using conventional textiles. So we came up with this coating technology.” The proteins can be used to fix regular, non-coated fabrics by adding water, or applied to threads before the material is even made. The technique isn’t perfect — there are visible seams — but it’s still better, stronger and easier than any sew job I’d attempt. As the garments can be self-healed by water, throwing them in the wash would also fix small tears or other defects. It sounds great for klutzy clothes owners, but the research, supported by the US Army and Navy research arms, isn’t just aimed at consumers. Dermirel thinks the substance could be adapted to create clothing that protects soldiers, farmers or industrial workers by neutralizing toxic chemicals. “If you need to use enzymes for biological or chemical effects, you can have an encapsulated enzyme with self-healing properties degrade the toxin before it reaches the skin, ” he said. By adding anti-bacterial properties, it could also be used in medical dressings or mesh clothing to reduce infection risks. The team now needs to figure out how to create the proteins without using actual squid or their teeth, and plans to further torture-test the repaired materials. “The next step would be to see if clothes can self-repair when we pour the liquid into a washing machine, like you would a detergent, and apply water and heat, ” Demirel tells CNN . Via: Gizmodo Source: Penn State
Read More:
Squid protein makes textiles self-healing
Even more bad news for Volkswagen: security researchers have discovered a huge security hole that affects potentially up to 100 million cars. It’s possible, using hardware as cheap as a $40 setup with an Arduino and an add-on radio transceiver board, to intercept signals from a Volkswagen Group key fob, and then by combining it with a small number of cryptographic keys shared by every VW car, one could essentially clone the car’s key fob. Read more…
Read More:
Almost Every Volkswagen Built Since 1995 Is Vulnerable To Wireless Unlocking Hacks
If you’re counting on technology to radically extend your lifespan , you’ll want to pay close attention to what’s happening with the Greenland shark. According to a new scientific paper , this mysterious deep-sea dweller can live up to 400 years, making it the longest-lived vertebrate on Earth. Read more…
Read more here:
A 400-Year Old Shark May Hold the Cure to Aging
On August 9, Facebook announced that it had defeated adblockers ; on August 11, Adblock Plus announced that it had defeated Facebook. (more…)
Taken from:
48 hours later, Adblock Plus beats Facebook’s adblocker-blocker
Many people have promised us that 5G will be here very soon. And it will be the best thing ever. To quote Lowell McAdam, the CEO of Verizon, 5G is “wireless fiber, ” and to quote SK Telecom, thanks to 5G we will soon be able to “transfer holograms” because the upcoming standard is “100 times faster” than our current communications system 4G LTE. But if we were to quote Science, the distant future isn’t nearly as lofty as the one promised by executives. Backchannel explains: “5G” is a marketing term. There is no 5G standard — yet. The International Telecommunications Union plans to have standards ready by 2020. So for the moment “5G” refers to a handful of different kinds of technologies that are predicted, but not guaranteed, to emerge at some point in the next 3 to 7 years. (3GPP, a carrier consortium that will be contributing to the ITU process, said last year that until an actual standard exists, ‘”5G’ will remain a marketing & industry term that companies will use as they see fit.” At least they’re candid.) At the moment, advertising something as “5G” carries no greater significance than saying it’s “blazing fast” or “next generation” — nut because “5G” sounds technical, it’s good for sales. We are a long way away from actual deployment. Second, this “wireless fiber” will never happen unless we have… more fiber. Real fiber, in the form of fiber optic cables reaching businesses and homes. (This is the “last mile” problem; fiber already runs between cities.) It’s just plain physics. In order to work, 99% of any “5G” wireless deployment will have to be fiber running very close to every home and business. The high-frequency spectrum the carriers are planning to use wobbles billions of times a second but travels incredibly short distances and gets interfered with easily. So it’s great at carrying loads of information — every wobble can be imprinted with data — but can’t go very far at all. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Follow this link:
Next Generation of Wireless — 5G — Is All Hype