Author: kenmay

Shazam’s song recognition just got a lot faster

Shazam is doubling down on what it does best with its latest update: Recognizing songs when your memory (or pop cultural knowhow) fails you. And, for the first time, the app now highlights a search feature on its main page, which lets you dig for more information about songs and artists. The goal, naturally, is to convince you to stay within Shazam rather than hopping over to the web for music research. In my brief testing, the new Shazam app recognized songs from television and radio in a few seconds — at times it even found a result in under a second. It feels significantly faster than previous versions of the app, which sometimes took over five seconds to lock onto a song. That’s not a huge difference, but given that Shazam has been around for years (it was one of the first killer apps back when the iPhone’s App Store launched in 2008), it needs to keep improving to keep up with competitors like Soundhound. Via: TechCrunch Source: Shazam

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Shazam’s song recognition just got a lot faster

Intel Broadwell-E, Apollo Lake, and Kaby Lake Details Emerge In Leaked Roadmap

bigwophh writes: In Q4 2016, Intel will release a follow up to its Skylake processors named Kaby Lake, which will mark yet another 14nm release that’s a bit odd, for a couple of reasons. The big one is the fact that this chip mayn not have appeared had Intel’s schedule kept on track. Originally, Cannonlake was set to succeed Skylake, but Cannonlake will instead launch in 2017. That makes Kaby Lake neither a tick nor tock in Intel’s release cadence. When released, Kaby Lake will add native USB 3.1 and HDCP 2.2 support. It’s uncertain whether these chips will fit into current Z170-based motherboards, but considering the fact that there’s also a brand-new chipset on the way, we’re not too confident of it. However, the so-called Intel 200 series chipsets will be backwards-compatible with Skylake. It also appears that Intel will be releasing Apollo Lake as early as the late spring, which will replace Braswell, the lowest-powered chips Intel’s lineup destined for smartphones. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Broadwell-E, Apollo Lake, and Kaby Lake Details Emerge In Leaked Roadmap

This High-Def Footage Of Colored Water On The ISS Is Mesmerizing 

This is really cool: astronauts onboard the International Space Station have long shown off what it’s like to play with water in microgravity. Now, they’ve taken some ultra high-def footage with color and effervescent tablets. Read more…

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This High-Def Footage Of Colored Water On The ISS Is Mesmerizing 

Oddball machine makes ‘analog’ techno music with vinyl records

Many techno DJs are used to playing music on vinyl , but creating it? That’s another matter. However, Graham Dunning has found a wonderfully strange way to make that idea work. His Mechanical Techno device produces full-on dance tracks by driving several heavily modified records at once with a turntable, with each record relying on unique triggers to produce a sound. Electrical contacts will produce a synth sound as one record spins around, while piezoelectric triggers create that all-important beat on another disc. The result is techno that’s at once analog and not. It sounds digital, but it has the imprecision and unpredictability that you’d never get from software. Via: Boing Boing , Nerdcore Source: Graham Dunning

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Oddball machine makes ‘analog’ techno music with vinyl records

Sued Freelancer Allegedly Turns Over Contractee Source Code In Settlement

FriendlySolipsist writes: Blizzard Entertainment has been fighting World of Warcraft bots for years. TorrentFreak reports that Bossland, a German company that operates “buddy” bots, alleges Blizzard sued one of its freelancers and forced a settlement. As part of that settlement, the freelancer allegedly turned over Bossland’s source code to Blizzard. In Bossland’s view, their code was “stolen” by Blizzard because it was not the freelancer’s to disclose. This is a dangerous precedent for freelance developers in the face of legal threats: damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Sued Freelancer Allegedly Turns Over Contractee Source Code In Settlement

600,000 Arris Cable Modems Have ‘Backdoors In Backdoors,’ Researcher Claims

An anonymous reader writes: A security researcher using Shodan to probe Arris cable modems for vulnerabilities has found that 600, 000 of the company’s modems not only have a backdoor, but that the backdoor itself has an extra backdoor. Brazilian vulnerability tester Bernardo Rodrigues posted that he found undocumented libraries in three models, initially leading to a backdoor that uses an admin password disclosed back in 2009. Brazilian researcher Bernardo Rodrigues notes that the secondary backdoor has a password derived in part from the final five digits from the modem’s serial number. However, the default ‘root’ password for the affected models remains ‘arris.’ Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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600,000 Arris Cable Modems Have ‘Backdoors In Backdoors,’ Researcher Claims

TrueCrypt Safer Than Previously Thought

An anonymous reader writes: Back in September, members of Google’s Project Zero team found a pair of flaws in the TrueCrypt disk encryption software that could lead to a system compromise. Their discovery raised concerns that TrueCrypt was unsuitable for use in securing sensitive data. However, the Fraunhofer Institute went ahead with a full audit of TrueCrypt’s code, and they found it to be more secure than most people think. They correctly point out that for an attacker to exploit the earlier vulnerabilities (and a couple more vulnerabilities they found themselves), the attacker would already need to have “far-reaching access to the system, ” with which they could do far worse things than exploit an obscure vulnerability. The auditors say, “It does not seem apparent to many people that TrueCrypt is inherently not suitable to protect encrypted data against attackers who can repeatedly access the running system. This is because when a TrueCrypt volume is mounted its data is generally accessible through the file system, and with repeated access one can install key loggers etc. to get hold of the key material in many situations. Only when unmounted, and no key is kept in memory, can a TrueCrypt volume really be secure.” For other uses, the software “does what it’s designed for, ” despite its code flaws. Their detailed, 77-page report (PDF) goes into further detail. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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TrueCrypt Safer Than Previously Thought

Researchers Create Plant-Circuit Hybrid

sciencehabit writes: Researchers have crafted flexible electronic circuits inside a rose. Eventually such circuitry may help farmers eavesdrop on their crops and even control when they ripen. The advance may even allow people to harness energy from trees and shrubs not by cutting them down and using them for fuel, but by plugging directly into their photosynthesis machinery. The researchers used “an organic electronic building block called PEDOT-S:H. Each of these building blocks consists of a short, repeating chain of a conductive organic molecule with short arms coming off each link of the chain. Each of the arms sports a sulfur-containing group linked to a hydrogen atom. Berggren’s group found that when they placed them in the water, the rose stems readily pulled the short polymer chains up the xylem channels (abstract). … The upshot was that the myriad short polymer chains quickly linked themselves together into continuous strings as long as 10 centimeters. The researchers then added electronic probes to opposite ends of these strings, and found that they were, in fact, wires, conducting electricity all down the line.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researchers Create Plant-Circuit Hybrid