Author: kenmay

Nissan has a glow-in-the-dark Leaf EV, but you can’t buy one

Oh, Nissan, you tease. The company has just coated a Leaf EV with some custom-made glow-in-dark paint , which can apparently last for up to 25 years — but it has no plans (not yet, anyway) to make it available for purchase. Nissan partnered with glow-in-dark pavement creator Hamish Scott to concoct a special paint as a symbolic representation of how Leaf inspires its owners to convert to solar energy. It’s easy to find glow-in-the-dark paints these days, of course, and you can even do Tron-like designs on your car if you want, but the company claims the one it mixed up isn’t like any other. The secret formula apparently uses organic materials, including an ingredient called Strontium Aluminate . This concoction absorbs energy from the sun during the day, which gives it power to glow at night for up to 10 hours. A glowy Leaf certainly sounds like it’ll go well with glow-in-the-dark roads ; not to mention, it looks a lot tougher to steal. As we’ve mentioned, though, you can’t waltz into a dealership and demand one ASAP, so you’ll just have to make do with watching it on video for now. Filed under: Transportation Comments Source: Nissan

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Nissan has a glow-in-the-dark Leaf EV, but you can’t buy one

That "Holy Grail" Les Paul is "just a broken-down guitar," says Paul’s son

Geoff Edger’s Washington Post article about the controversy surrounding the upcoming auction of a Les Paul guitar, advertised as “the most important Les Paul guitar of all time, ” is a fun read. Read the rest

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That "Holy Grail" Les Paul is "just a broken-down guitar," says Paul’s son

Apple made it harder for hackers to breach FaceTime and iMessage

As a means to further secure your digital life, Apple said today that it’s adding two-step verification to FaceTime and iMessage. That still leaves the likes of iTunes and the Apple website vulnerable to ne’er-do-wells who want to remotely access your sensitive info (and have your password), of course, but now Cupertino’s universal messaging and video chat programs are locked down a bit further. Given the progress that’s been made toward adding the second authorization step to the rest of its ecosystem in recent months , it likely won’t be too long before those spots are buttoned up too. Any questions? The Apple two-step verification FAQ is only a click away. Filed under: Cellphones , Mobile , Apple Comments

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Apple made it harder for hackers to breach FaceTime and iMessage

US Gas Pump Hacked With ‘Anonymous’ Tagline

An anonymous reader writes Researchers at Trend Micro have uncovered a gas pump in the United States whose ID has been changed from ‘DIESEL’ to ‘WE_ARE_LEGION’ — the call-sign of the Anonymous hacking group. Following up recent revelations regarding the vulnerability of gas pump systems to online attackers, the researchers found 1, 515 completely unprotected gas pump monitoring devices via the Shodan device-based search engine. The report notes that the exposed devices are capable of being protected via six-digit pins, but this security measure is not being used. The report concludes: “Our investigation shows that the tampering of an Internet-facing device resulted in a name change. But sooner or later, real world implications will occur, causing possible outages or even worse.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Gas Pump Hacked With ‘Anonymous’ Tagline

WA Pushes Back On Microsoft and Code.org’s Call For Girls-First CS Education

theodp writes On Tuesday, the State of Washington heard public testimony on House Bill 1813 (video), which takes aim at boy’s historical over-representation in K-12 computer classes. To allow them to catch flights, representatives of Microsoft and Microsoft-bankrolled Code.org were permitted to give their testimony before anyone else (“way too many young people, particularly our girls…simply don’t have access to the courses at all, ” lamented Jane Broom, who manages Microsoft’s philanthropic portfolio), so it’s unclear whether they were headed to the airport when a representative of the WA State Superintendent of Public Instruction voiced the sole dissent against the Bill. “The Superintendent strongly believes in the need to improve our ability to teach STEM, to advance computer science, to make technology more available to all students, ” explained Chris Vance. “Our problem, and our concern, is with the use of the competitive grant program…just providing these opportunities to a small number of students…that’s the whole basic problem…disparity of opportunity…if this is a real priority…fund it fully” (HB 1813, like the White House K-12 CS plan, counts on philanthropy to make up for tax shortfalls). Hey, parents of boys are likely to be happy to see another instance of educators striving to be more inclusive than tech when it comes to encouraging CS participation! Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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WA Pushes Back On Microsoft and Code.org’s Call For Girls-First CS Education

Voltera, The Electronics Printer, Launches To Much Fanfare

 One of our absolute favorites from the Hardware Battlefield just launched on Kickstarter and they are, if you’ll excuse the cliché, crushing it. The company appeared on our stage at CES 2015 and showed of an early working prototype. Now, however, they’re ready to take orders and start shipping. The printer is essentially a PCB maker. You put in a board, upload a circuit diagram, … Read More

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Voltera, The Electronics Printer, Launches To Much Fanfare

Apple’s Activation Lock Leads To Big Drops In Smartphone Theft Worldwide

 The temptation of a smartphone for a thief is dropping, thanks to Apple’s decision to implement a remote kill switch via Find My Phone that can erase and disable a phone once it’s been stolen or gone missing. A new report from Reuters found that iPhone theft dropped by 50 percent in London, 40 percent in San Francisco and 25 percent in New York. The drops represent theft activity… Read More

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Apple’s Activation Lock Leads To Big Drops In Smartphone Theft Worldwide

VESA publishes Embedded DisplayPort 1.4a standard that supports 8K displays

VESA, the standards body responsible for such luminary technologies as DisplayPort and the omnipresent VESA monitor mount, has published the specification for version 1.4a of Embedded DisplayPort (eDP). The new standard builds upon DisplayPort 1.3, which was published at the end of 2014. In short, eDP 1.4a allows for laptops, smartphones, tablets, and all-in-ones with 8K displays (7680×4320) or high-frequency (120Hz) 4K displays—but it includes a few other neat features, too. eDP 1.4a appears to be almost entirely based on DisplayPort 1.3—which was published in September 2014—with a couple of new features thrown in for good measure. eDP 1.4a specifies four high-speed (HBR3) lanes between the graphics adapter and display, with each lane capable of 8.1Gbps; the lanes can either be used individually, in pairs (more on that later), or all together for a total theoretical bandwidth of 32.4Gbps. That’s enough bandwidth to drive a 4K display (3840×2160) at 120Hz with 10-bit color or an 8K display at 60Hz. Beyond higher bandwidth, one of the more interesting features of eDP 1.4a is Direct Stream Compression (DSC), a standard developed by VESA and MIPI that—as the name implies—compresses the output video signal. According to VESA, the compression is “visually lossless” (i.e., it is lossy, but your games won’t suddenly look like a hand-me-down JPEG). VESA and MIPI say that DSC can reduce the component cost and power consumption of high-resolution displays—a claim that obviously needs to be confirmed once eDP 1.4a devices start shipping. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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VESA publishes Embedded DisplayPort 1.4a standard that supports 8K displays

Palm-sized pwnage: Ars tests the Pwn Plug R3

Imagine for a moment the following scenario: you’re the manager for a busy bank branch in a major city. You come back from lunch and are told by one of your employees that someone from corporate IT dropped by to check on a reported problem with a branch PC. You don’t remember putting in a trouble ticket with IT, but apparently the guy left after looking under a desk and re-plugging a network cable or something. It took less than five minutes. You think nothing of it and go back to approving loans. Three days later, you get a call from the head of corporate security, wanting to know why someone at your branch has been performing wire transfers from the accounts of customers who’ve never used your branch to accounts at offshore banks. A few hours later, you’re unplugging the bank’s network equipment while he’s shouting at you over the phone about gigabytes of corporate data being pulled down from something in your bank. And when the security team and police arrive to investigate, they find a little nondescript box plugged into a network port, connected to a broadband cellular modem. Something like this happened to banks in London last year . A man posing as an IT contractor wired networked keyboard-video-monitor (KVM) switches connected to cellular routers into PCs at two bank branches. The ring involved with the thefts was only caught because they decided to go for a third score, and their “technician” was caught in the act. The digital heists were a variation on the hacker “drop box” strategy: boldly walking into a place of business and planting a device, often hidden in plain sight, to use as a Trojan horse to gain remote access to the business’ network. Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Palm-sized pwnage: Ars tests the Pwn Plug R3