Losing your hearing can be a frighteningly isolating experience. But instead of trying to replace the audible landscape he began losing at age 20, science writer Frank Swain decided to find a way to listen in on something humans can’t hear: the hum of Wi-Fi all around us. Read more…
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A Man Going Deaf Can Hear Wi-Fi Signals, and Here’s How They Sound
Thanks to Ms. Swift’s recent actions , artist compensation from music streaming is quite the hot topic, and one company has a new option to lend a hand. Bandcamp has been a choice for musicians to sell their music and merchandise for years, and now it’s looking to help sort streaming subscriptions as well. Each artist will be able to create a subscription-based plan for their music, allowing fans to access new tunes as they become available through the Bandcamp app. Listeners can download the tracks too, and acts can decide to offer parts of their existing catalog as a perk for opting in. New albums or songs can be released to subscribers only for a certain amount of time or remain exclusive, and the musicians themselves can set the cost of the plan. For its efforts, Bandcamp takes the same 15 percent cut that it does for regular sales — a fee that drops to 10 percent once the $5, 000 sales mark is reached. “The whole motivation here is that when you get to a point that you love an artist — when you go from liking them to being a real true fan of theirs — at some point you just want everything they make, ” the company’s chief executive Ethan Diamond told The Guardian . [Photo credit: Shutterstock] Filed under: Internet , Software Comments Via: Fact Mag Source: The Guardian
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Bandcamp lets artists create their own music subscriptions
Christopher Becke, a high school physics teacher, made this outstanding size comparison showing what the Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko would look like next to famous spacecrafts from science fiction. His images show the comet next to ships from Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica. Read more…
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A size comparison of the comet 67P with popular sci-fi spaceships
If you thought cramming a PlayStation into your TV with the cloud-based PS Now was crazy, Sony’s now trying to do, well, the exact opposite, bringing broadcast TV (and a bigger dose of on-demand content) to the PS4, PS3 and, at a later date, even the iPad. Another subscription service, you might think. However, Sony has already signed up some major networks and players (Fox, CBS, Viacom and ABC, for starters) and a no-contract setup: you’ll pay month by month — like how you pay for Netflix. More device support from both Sony and non-Sony hardware is set to roll out to the service in the future, although there’s no specifics just yet. Beta testers will see around 75 channels of content, including local networks, when tests start later this month, although there’s one proviso: they have to live in Chicago, Philadelphia or LA. For the rest of us, the entire service is set to go live in early 2015. While the service was originally teased back at CES 2014 in January, this is the first time it’s been given a name — and well, some tangible details. According to SCE, anyone that pays up will be able to save their favorite shows within their account without storage restrictions or scheduling conflicts: it sounds like you won’t be using any offline storage, although we imagine there would be an offline viewer of sorts. Once a show is tagged, you’ll be able to watch it for up to 28 days after. Filed under: Displays , Gaming , Internet , Sony Comments Source: PlayStation
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PlayStation Vue, Sony’s new on-demand and broadcast TV service, launches in 2015
Investigators are still trying to figure out exactly what went wrong in with the tragic crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo . While the National Transportation Safety Board has been looking into an issue with the braking system , the agency has released details from surviving pilot Peter Siebold about how he managed to escape the exploding spacecraft. Read more…
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SpaceShipTwo’s Surviving Pilot Ejected Into -70 Degree Air at 50,000 Feet
Recently, Verizon was caught tampering with its customer’s web requests to inject a tracking super-cookie . Another network-tampering threat to user safety has come to light from other providers: email encryption downgrade attacks. Read more…
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Why Are ISPs Removing Their Customers’ Email Encryption?
That shampoo you’re lathering into your hair may claim that it’s packed with “all-natural ingredients, ” but the label tells a different story. DMDM hydantoin? Ammonium lauryl sulphate? What is this stuff anyhow? Read more…
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What the Ingredients On Your Shampoo Bottle Actually Mean
Microsoft’s Lync communications server is to be rebranded. The next version, due to be released next year, will be named instead Skype for Business . It will retain Lync’s infrastructure—the ability to use on-premises servers, optional federation with external communications networks, and so on and so forth—but the branding and client design will closely match those of Microsoft’s consumer communication platform. The Skype and Lync development teams have been working together since shortly after Microsoft bought the popular Skype platform for $8.5 billion in 2011. Skype for Business will further improve interoperability with regular Skype. While voice and instant messaging are already interoperable between Lync and Skype, the next version will add video messaging and access to the Skype user directory. This will mean that, should administrators choose to enable it, the Skype for Business client software will serve as a fairly fully featured Skype client, too. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Lync rebranded as “Skype for Business” in 2015 release
As scary as Heartbleed was this past Spring, it looks like virtually every Microsoft Windows user is in for a little deja vu. Microsoft just released a critical patch for a huge server vulnerability —one that affects every current version of Windows out there. Read more…
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All Current Versions of Windows Have a Huge Vulnerabilty, Get the Patch Now
Samsung definitely isn’t taking NVIDIA’s first patent lawsuit lying down. The Korean tech firm has countersued NVIDIA not just for allegedly infringing on six patents, but for leading buyers astray with benchmarks for the Shield Tablet . NVIDIA is supposedly trying to “confuse customers” by claiming that the slate’s Tegra K1 processor outpaces the Exynos 5433 chip in the Galaxy Note 4 ; regular benchmarks show that’s not true, Samsung claims. The suit also accuses PC vendor Velocity Micro of violating two additional patents (for a total of eight), since NVIDIA’s graphics cards play a heavy role in its lineup. NVIDIA tells Engadget that it’s still examining the complaint, but it’s already rejecting allegations that it misled gamers with its Shield tests. Both devices were using their stock, fresh-from-the-box software loadouts, the company insists. Whether or not that’s true, the lawsuit comes across as the pot calling the kettle black. After all, it was the revelation that Samsung inflated benchmark scores which led many to question the honesty of mobile device makers. Really, the assertion of dodgy benchmarking is as much about corporate pride as anything else — if successful, it would force NVIDIA to eat humble pie. Filed under: Gaming , Tablets , Mobile , Samsung , NVIDIA Comments Source: Law360 (registration required)
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Samsung lawsuit claims that NVIDIA’s benchmarks are misleading