Author: kenmay

Amazon’s grocery service now requires a $299 yearly membership

Amazon warned late last year that it would eventually require a $299 yearly membership just to use its AmazonFresh grocery delivery service. And like or not, the internet giant is making good on its word: shoppers in New York City, Philadelphia and Seattle (and possibly other cities) are finding out that they need that pricey Prime Fresh subscription before they can go food shopping. The outlay gives you free delivery on all orders over $50, on top of the benefits of a regular Amazon Prime membership, but it’s now considerably more expensive if you only occasionally want groceries shipped to your door. So far, tests that would open the door to standard Prime members (who’d always pay delivery fees) haven’t led to anything concrete. The pricing doesn’t stack up well next to rivals like Instacart, which both costs less up front ($99 per year) and waives the delivery fees at a lower threshold ($35). However, it’s doubtful that Amazon will have a change of heart in the near future. The company is one of the old hands in the online grocery delivery business, and it had a long time to do the math — it’s likely convinced that an all-encompassing $299 plan is more sustainable than a groceries-only option. [Image credit: Andrew Hitchcock, Flickr ] Via: GeekWire Source: AmazonFresh

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Amazon’s grocery service now requires a $299 yearly membership

Maybe You Don’t Need 8 Hours of Sleep After All

schwit1 writes: You’ve heard of the Paleo diet, but the next big thing in health may well be the Paleo sleep schedule. A UCLA researcher studied three hunter-gatherer and hunter-farmer groups — the Hadza in Tanzania, San in Namibia, and Tsimane in Bolivia, “who live roughly the same lifestyle humans did in the Paleolithic, ” as NPR reports — and determined our ancient ancestors may not have slept nearly as much we thought, and may have actually slept less than modern Westerners. “People like to complain that modern life is ruining sleep, but they’re just saying: Kids today!” Jerome Siegel tells the Atlantic . “It’s a perennial complaint but you need data to know if it’s true.” Siegel found that members of the three aforementioned groups sleep between 5.7 hours and 7.1 hours per night. That’s less than is recommended for our health, yet the groups seemed very healthy indeed. (And if you’re feeling insomniac, some earlier Slashdot stories about sleep are also pretty thought-provoking.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Maybe You Don’t Need 8 Hours of Sleep After All

Moscow State University Releases 10th HEVC Video Codec Comparison

An anonymous reader writes: The Graphics and Media Lab Video Group of Moscow State University has released its tenth video codecs comparison. This latest comparison focuses on HEVC codecs and includes some non-HEVC codecs such as x264 and VP9. The report concludes that Intel’s MSS HEVC Software codec leads the pack in the “fast transcoding” use case whereas x265 takes the lead in the “ripping” use case. VP9 compares favorably to the HEVC codecs in the fixed quality and the speed versus quality test cases. See the PDF version of the report for more details. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Moscow State University Releases 10th HEVC Video Codec Comparison

Dragonlock Lets You Print Your Own RPG Dungeons

 Your party enters a darkened room. Candles flicker in the gloom and something is glinting along the far wall. Your thief enters first. Her dwarvish blade begins to glow. Danger is nearby! What will you do? Will you 3D print a wall section and snap it to a floor section? Or will your move a 3D-printed Beholder into the room? What about a pillar or stairs? What about a little wooden door?… Read More

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Dragonlock Lets You Print Your Own RPG Dungeons

Russian hackers reportedly stole stock trading info from Dow Jones

Last week, Dow Jones (owner of The Wall Street Journal among other things) said that its customer database was hacked — but it’s possible the company has been contending with a much bigger data breach for a long time now. According to Bloomberg , the FBI, Secret Service, and SEC have all been investigating a theft of data from Dow Jones by Russian hackers who wanted to access insider trading information. There’s a bit of a twist to the story, however: Dow Jones is strongly denying the Bloomberg report. In a statement, Dow Jones says: “to the best of our knowledge, we have received no information from the authorities about any such alleged matter, and we are looking into whether there is any truth whatsoever to this report by a competitor news organization.” Despite that strong denial (and shade thrown at Bloomberg’s reporting), CNBC received confirmation from the FBI’s New York office that it was indeed aware of the hack and investigating it. For months, the FBI and SEC have been trying to determine exactly what sort of data was accessed and how the hackers could have profited from the breach. Some of Bloomberg’s sources claimed that the hackers were able to view news stories not yet released for publication, some of which could have provided information and news about companies that hadn’t been released to the public. And this isn’t the first hack centered around finding insider info: earlier this year, Ukrainian hackers infiltrated servers from PR companies like PR Newswire and Businesswire for five years to access unreleased press releases from major corporations. [Image credit: AP/Mary Altaffer] Source: Bloomberg , CNBC

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Russian hackers reportedly stole stock trading info from Dow Jones

Fires in Indonesia are Emitting More Carbon Than All Americans Combined

The United States may be the second largest carbon emitter on the planet, but it’s got a new rival: Forest fires. Indonesia is in the midst of a devastating fire season, one that’s kicking up more greenhouse gases than the entire US economy. Read more…

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Fires in Indonesia are Emitting More Carbon Than All Americans Combined

Tennessee’s 10Gbps broadband is $299 a month

Remember back when Chattanooga, Tennessee fought the FCC and Comcast earlier this year over broadband regulations ? Of course you do. Now the city’s back in the news because it’s offering 10Gbps internet service that spreads across some 600 square miles and is accessible by “every” home and business. It’ll cost those 170, 000 homes and businesses, though. According to a release from local utility company EPB, that blazing fast speed will run $299 a month (pretty similar to Comcast ) with gratis installation and without a contract. There’ll apparently be 5Gbps and 10Gbps options for small businesses and 3Gbps, 5Gbps and 10Gbps pro-level packages for enterprise. Those prices will vary, but almost positively won’t be “cheap” for folks like you and me by any stretch of the imagination. [Image credit: Associated Press]

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Tennessee’s 10Gbps broadband is $299 a month

How to Protect Yourself from the NSA If You Use 1024-bit DH Encryption

In a post on Wednesday, researchers Alex Halderman and Nadia Heninger presented compelling research suggesting that the NSA has developed the capability to decrypt a large number of HTTPS, SSH, and VPN connections using an attack on common implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm with 1024-bit primes. Earlier in the year, they were part of a research group that published a study of the Logjam attack, which leveraged overlooked and outdated code to enforce “export-grade” (downgraded, 512-bit) parameters for Diffie-Hellman. By performing a cost analysis of the algorithm with stronger 1024-bit parameters and comparing that with what we know of the NSA “ black budget ” (and reading between the lines of several leaked documents about NSA interception capabilities) they concluded that it’s likely NSA has been breaking 1024-bit Diffie-Hellman for some time now. Read more…

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How to Protect Yourself from the NSA If You Use 1024-bit DH Encryption