Author: kenmay

FBI Director Says Unlocking Method Won’t Work On Newer iPhones

Even though the FBI was able to gain access to the San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone without Apple’s help, the Apple-FBI saga continues. It was reported yesterday the FBI is telling members of Congress of the methods used to break into the iPhone 5c. The most recent tidbit comes from FBI Director James Comey in regard to how many iPhones are at risk from the unlock tool. An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: FBI Director James Comey said Wednesday that the government had purchased “a tool” from a private party in order to unlock the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. “Litigation between the government and Apple over the San Bernardino phone has ended, because the government has purchased, from a private party, a way to get into that phone, 5c, running iOS 9, ” Comey said. The FBI director also said the purchased tool worked only on a “narrow slice of phones” that does not include the newest Apple models, or the 5s. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FBI Director Says Unlocking Method Won’t Work On Newer iPhones

You Can Now Deposit Cash Into PayPal At Your Nearest CVS or Rite-Aid

Android/iOS: PayPal may be a decent way to transfer money online, but if you use cash, PayPal doesn’t exactly have a local branch you can deposit money at. Until now. The latest app update now lets you deposit money at CVS and Rite-Aid. Read more…

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You Can Now Deposit Cash Into PayPal At Your Nearest CVS or Rite-Aid

Amazon cloud has 1 million users and is near $10 billion in annual sales

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. (credit: Dan Farber ) Amazon Web Services (AWS) will become a $10 billion business this year, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a letter to shareholders this week. While Amazon as a whole “became the fastest company ever to reach $100 billion in annual sales” in 2015, Amazon Web Services will hit the $10 billion mark “at a pace even faster than Amazon achieved that milestone,” Bezos wrote. AWS is used by more than 1 million people from “organizations of every size across nearly every industry,” he wrote. AWS launched in March 2006 with the Simple Storage Service (S3). It expanded with the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) a few months later, letting customers rent virtual machines over the Internet. The service allowed developers to obtain computing capacity on demand without having to operate their own servers, and over the years, many startups have built online businesses with Amazon’s data centers and services providing the back-end infrastructure. It’s not just small companies relying on Amazon, though, as big names like Adobe, Capital One, GE, MLB Advanced Media,  Netflix , and Pinterest use the online platform. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Amazon cloud has 1 million users and is near $10 billion in annual sales

Nation-wide radio station hack airs hours of vulgar “furry sex” ramblings

(credit: TJJSvdM ) Some Tuesday morning listeners of KIFT, a Top 40 radio station located in Breckenridge, Colorado, were treated to a radically different programming menu. Instead of the normal fare from Taylor Swift, The Chainsmokers, or other pop stars, a hack by an unknown party caused one of the station’s signals to broadcast a sexually explicit podcast related to the erotic attraction to furry characters . The unauthorized broadcast lasted for about 90 minutes . KIFT wasn’t the only station to be hit by the hack. On the same day, Livingston, Texas-based country music station KXAX also broadcast raunchy furry-themed audio . And according to an article posted Wednesday by radio industry news site RadioInsight.com, the unauthorized broadcasts from a hobbyist group called FurCast were also forced on an unnamed station in Denver and an unidentified national syndicator. “All in all the FurCast aired for an hour, possibly two,” Jason Mclelland, owner and general manager of the KXAX Radio Group, wrote in an e-mail. “During that time they talked about sex with two guys and a girl in explicit details and rambled on with vulgar language not really having much of a point to the podcast. I’m assuming there was no real reason for this hack.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Nation-wide radio station hack airs hours of vulgar “furry sex” ramblings

Rare Shakespeare’s First Folio found in Scottish isle

A rare copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio turned up on a Scottish island, reports the BBC . Only 230 copies are known to exist, or thereabouts, and the last to be sold fetched £3.5m (about $5m) in 2003 and £2.8m in 2006. Countless fakes are knocking around, too. This copy of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623, was found at Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute. Academics who authenticated the book called it a rare and significant find. … Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare studies at Oxford University, said her first reaction on being told the stately home was claiming to have an original First Folio was: “Like hell they have.” But when she inspected the three-volume book she found it was authentic. The folio represents the first legitimate compendium of Shakespeare’s work; we wouldn’t have much of Macbeth were it not for its publication, among many other works preserved in it.

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Rare Shakespeare’s First Folio found in Scottish isle

Hipster White Noise Generator Simulates Working in a Crowded Coffee Shop

Do you find it easier to work with the din of a bustling coffee shop all around you, but would rather not deal with the guilt of not actually buying coffee for hours on end? A new website called Hipster Noise can simulate the sounds of a busy Starbucks, but from the lazy comfort of your home office. Read more…

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Hipster White Noise Generator Simulates Working in a Crowded Coffee Shop

A Convoy of Autonomous Trucks Just Drove Across Europe

As much as everyone is getting excited about Google’s cute little autonomous cars, self-driving trucks are the most obvious—and probably easiest—beneficiaries of autonomous tech. To prove this, a “platoon” of connected trucks from six brands completed a 1, 300 mile trip across Europe. Read more…

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A Convoy of Autonomous Trucks Just Drove Across Europe

All-bacterial battery makes a nutrient when charged, eats it to discharge

Diagram of a microbial fuel cell that runs on acetate, one half of the bacterial battery described here. (credit: Oak Ridge National Lab ) The chemical that powers most of our cellular processes is produced through something called the electron transport chain. As its name suggests, this system shuffles electrons through a series of chemicals that leaves them at a lower energy, all while harvesting some of the energy difference to produce ATP. But the ultimate destination of this electron transport chain doesn’t have to be a chemical. There are a variety of bacteria that ultimately send the electrons off into the environment instead. And researchers have figured out how to turn these into a fuel cell, harvesting the electrons to do something useful. While some of these designs were closer to a battery than others, all of them consumed some sort of material in harvesting the electrons. A team of researchers in the Netherlands figured out how to close the loop and create an actual bacterial battery. One half of the battery behaves like a bacterial fuel cell. But the second half takes the electrons and uses them to synthesize a small organic molecule that the first can eat. Its charging cycle is painfully slow and its energy density is atrocious, but the fact that it works at all seems rather noteworthy. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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All-bacterial battery makes a nutrient when charged, eats it to discharge