E-readers get a bad rap—probably because there are a lot of illiterate assholes out there who hate reading. For the rest of us totally wicked people e-readers are amazing and Amazon’s rumored announcement of a new e-reader is a cause to celebrate. Read more…
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Leak of New Amazon E-Reader Suggests It’s Flipping Cool
After an inexplicable shift into Emergency Mode, NASA managed to partially recover its planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft. But we still don’t know what caused it to freak out in the first place. Read more…
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NASA Just Recovered Its Drifting Kepler Spacecraft
Reader wiredmikey writes: Swedish military computers were hacked and used in an attack targeting major U.S. banks in 2013, the armed forces said on Monday. The attack knocked out the web sites of as many as 20 major U.S. banks and financial institutions, sometimes for several days. According to Swedish military spokesman Mikael Abramsson, a server in the Swedish defense system had a vulnerability which was exploited by hackers to carry out the attacks. At the time, the attack, which began in 2012 and continued for months, was one of the biggest ever reported. U.S. officials blamed Iran, suggesting it was in retaliation for political sanctions and several earlier cyberattacks on its own systems. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Hacked Swedish Military Servers Used In Attacks On US Banks
Like many other corporations, Airbnb and Uber use offshore shell companies to avoid taxes. The companies aren’t profitable yet, but they have set themselves up to avoid taxes once they become profitable. For years, pharmaceutical and tech companies including Pfizer, Merck, Google, and Apple have slashed their U.S. federal tax bills by using offshore tax havens and shifting profits abroad. Airbnb and Uber are starting to extend this strategy across vast new fields: PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that sharing-economy businesses generated $15 billion in revenue in 2014 and will take in $335 billion in 2025, growing largely at the expense of companies that pay billions in U.S. taxes. Bloomberg: The Sharing Economy Doesn’t Share the Wealth [ via ]
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Uber assigns "its IP to Bermuda, leaving less than 2% of its revenue taxable by the US"
An anonymous reader writes: On April 6, a hacking outfit going by the name of Cyber Justice Team leaked data from multiple Syrian government and private websites. The leak includes the password file from the breached server, along with MySQL host permissions, admin passwords, and a link to the 10GB compressed file, uploaded to the file sharing site MEGA. While some of the data seems to be from older data breaches, some of it is also new. This is one of the biggest leaks of Syrian government data, a regime that has remained protected against such threats due to an aggressive cyber-policy. The government has been known to secretly back the Syrian Electronic Army hacker group, who the US government recently indicted (3 members at least). Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Syrian Government Hacked, 43GB of Data Spilled Online By Hacktivists
Late last week, an absolutely ginormous python was found caught under a tree that had fallen near a Malaysian construction site. Its length has been pegged at 26 feet (8 meters), which, if verified, would make it the longest snake ever captured. Read more…
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World’s Longest Snake Captured, Promptly Dies
A smart thermostat manages your home’s temperature automatically , but there’s another interesting way to use it: as a motion detector. You just need a little help from IFTTT . Read more…
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Turn Your Nest Thermostat Into a Motion Detector With IFTTT
Rain is normally a solar energy cell’s worst nightmare, but a team of Chinese scientists could make it a tremendous ally. They’ve developed a solar cell with an atom-thick graphene layer that harvests energy from raindrops, making it useful even on the gloomiest days. Water actually sticks to the graphene, creating a sort of natural capacitor — the sharp difference in energy between the graphene’s electrons and the water’s ions produces electricity. The catch is that the current technology isn’t all that efficient. It only converts about 6.5 percent of the energy it gets, which pales in comparison to the 22 percent you see among the world’s better solar panels . If the creators can improve the performance of this graphene-coated cell, though, they could have a dream solution on their hands — you wouldn’t have to live in a consistently sunny part of the world to reduce your dependency on conventional power. Via: Science News Journal Source: Wiley Online Library
Google is famous for integrating tiny, handy features directly into its search results. With a new in-line live code editor that pops up when you search for programming questions, Bing may just have beaten Google at its own game. Read more…
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Bing’s New Live Code Editor Is Surprisingly Useful
Look out, Pepper : you have some fresh competition. Hitachi has unveiled EMIEW3, its first humanoid assistant robot built for full-fledged commercial service. Like its SoftBank-made counterpart, it’s designed to help you find your way around stores and public facilities. It’s particularly focused on tourists, as it can switch languages on the fly. However, its edge may simply be its ability to cope with real-world situations. It’s much faster than Pepper (3.7MPH versus 1.2MPH), so it’s more likely to keep up with humans; it can also get back up if it falls down, and listen to you in noisy street environments. The machine also reflects a lot of lessons learned from its predecessor and beyond. For instance, it knows to slow down near corners so that it won’t smack into someone. It identifies people asking for help, too, and will approach on its own. Its biggest drawback is simply that it’s not as personable as Pepper (you’re just looking at a pair of expressionless eyes), and doesn’t have a built-in display to show information. It’s going to be a while before you see EMIEW3 in service, as Hitachi doesn’t expect it to be ready until 2018. However, Hitachi has grand ambitions for its third-generation hardware. It’s hoping to offer the new robot beyond Japan, so you might just witness this little helper guiding you through offices and stores in your corner of the world. Via: Nikkei , I4U Source: Hitachi
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Hitachi’s answer to Pepper the robot is swifter and sturdier