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New Particle Collider Is One Foot Long

Jason Koebler writes The CERN particle collider is 17 miles long. China just announced a supercollider that is supposed to be roughly 49 miles long. The United States’ new particle collider is just under 12 inches long. What the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s new collider lacks in size, it makes up for by using plasma to accelerate particles more than 500 times faster than traditional methods. In a recent test published in Nature, Michael Litos and his team were able to accelerate bunches of electrons to near the speed of light within the tiny chamber.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Android 5.0 Makes SD Cards Great Again

An anonymous reader writes: Over the past couple of years, Google has implemented some changes to how Android handles SD cards that aren’t very beneficial to users or developers. After listening to many rounds of complaints, this seems to have changed in Android 5.0 Lollipop. Google’s Jeff Sharkey wrote, “[I]n Lollipop we added the new ACTION_OPEN_DOCUMENT_TREE intent. Apps can launch this intent to pick and return a directory from any supported DocumentProvider, including any of the shared storage supported by the device. Apps can then create, update, and delete files and directories anywhere under the picked tree without any additional user interaction. Just like the other document intents, apps can persist this access across reboots.” Android Police adds, “All put together, this should be enough to alleviate most of the stress related to SD cards after the release of KitKat. Power users will no longer have to deal with crippled file managers, media apps will have convenient access to everything they should regardless of storage location, and developers won’t have to rely on messy hacks to work around the restrictions.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For its next stab at original programming, Netflix is venturing into kid-land with a series based on

For its next stab at original programming, Netflix is venturing into kid-land with a series based on Daniel Handler’s Lemony Snicket books . The series is a partnership with Paramount, which produced the 2004 Jim Carrey film. How great would it be if Carrey starred in the series, too? [ Variety ] Read more…

GM’s next-gen infotainment system to run Android—not Android Auto—in 2016

The 2015 Cadillac ATS coupe with integrated LTE. It’s basically a big red smartphone. Ron Amadeo Harman International, the car infotainment manufacturer, recently spilled the beans on a “next-gen” infotainment system it is building for General Motors. Automotive News has quotes from the company’s CEO, Dinesh Paliwal, who describes an Android-based system with an app store and “instant” boot up. The report says that Harman is “working closely” with Google to make the system a reality. This system isn’t Android Auto. Unlike regular Android, Android Wear, and Android TV, Android Auto isn’t an operating system. It doesn’t live on the car’s computer, it doesn’t control peripherals, and it doesn’t have an app store. Like Apple’s CarPlay, Android Auto is just a “casted” interface. Your plugged-in smartphone sends a custom interface to the car’s screen and receives touch events, but the car still has to run some other operating system. Harman won a $900 million contract from GM to build the system, and judging by the Harman CEO’s description, this is an actual embedded Android system that will power the entire infotainment setup. That typically includes the audio system, air conditioning, navigation, voice recognition, phone calls, reverse cameras, and Internet access. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GM’s next-gen infotainment system to run Android—not Android Auto—in 2016

Crypto attack that hijacked Windows Update goes mainstream in Amazon Cloud

Underscoring just how broken the widely used MD5 hashing algorithm is, a software engineer racked up just 65 cents in computing fees to replicate the type of attack a powerful nation-state used in 2012 to hijack Microsoft’s Windows Update mechanism. Nathaniel McHugh ran open source software known as HashClash to modify two separate images—one of them depicting funk legend James Brown and the other R&B singer/songwriter Barry White—that generate precisely the same MD5 hash, e06723d4961a0a3f950e7786f3766338. The exercise—known in cryptographic circles as a hash collision—took just 10 hours and cost only 65 cents plus tax to complete using a GPU instance on Amazon Web Service. In 2007, cryptography expert and HashClash creator Marc Stevens estimated it would require about one day to complete an MD5 collision using a cluster of PlayStation 3 consoles . The MD5 hash for this picture—e06723d4961a0a3f950e7786f3766338—is precisely the same for the one below. Such “collisions” are a fatal flaw for hashing algorithms and can lead to disastrous attacks. The practical ability to create two separate inputs that generate the same hash is a fundamental flaw that makes MD5 unsuitable for most purposes. (The exception is password hashing. Single iteration MD5 hashing is horrible for passwords but for an entirely different reason that is outside the scope of this post.) The susceptibility to collisions can have disastrous consequences, potentially for huge swaths of the Internet. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Crypto attack that hijacked Windows Update goes mainstream in Amazon Cloud

Jawbone UP3: A Fitness Tracker With Some Fashion Sense

Everybody’s vying for fitness tracker dominance. Microsoft released its Band last week , and new models of the Fitbit and Basis smartwatches are on the way. Now, Jawbone wants create a fashionable fitness tracker that you wouldn’t mind wearing all day. Read more…

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Jawbone UP3: A Fitness Tracker With Some Fashion Sense

You Can Increase Your 401(k) Contribution by $500 Next Year

The IRS doesn’t often raise the amount that you can contribute to your 401(k), so when they do, we tend to take notice. As of 2015, you’ll be able to contribute an additional $500 to both your regular 401(k) as well as another $500 to catch-up contributions if you’re over 50. Read more…

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You Can Increase Your 401(k) Contribution by $500 Next Year

Chip-and-PIN cards let nearby fraudsters steal $1M at a time

Visa’s new Paywave chip-and-PIN credit-cards have a $1M limit on foreign-currency transactions that can be verified “in-card, ” meaning that someone who gets close enough to your UK wallet can simply wave a phone at it and charge a megabuck to it without raising any realtime security alerts. Read the rest

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Chip-and-PIN cards let nearby fraudsters steal $1M at a time

ShitExpress will send poop in a box anywhere in exchange for Bitcoins

You can find absolutely anything on the internet, and services that send poop on your behalf to people who’ve incurred your hatred are old news . This new startup called ShitExpress, however, offers something its older rivals can’t: the ability to accept Bitcoins for total anonymity. No credit card means no paper trail. And, if you take great care to make sure you browse the internet anonymously, nobody will find out it’s your doing. For the Bitcoin equivalent of $17, the company will send horse manure (more types will be added in the future, as should be expected from a respected poop delivery service) anywhere in the world for you. That price includes packaging (you can choose to send it in a plain box or disguised as a fancy, expensive gift), shipping, a personalized letter and a message telling the recipient to be a better human being. When Motherboard’s Jason Koebler sent an order to himself, he said the package was marked as a Halloween gag gift to pass customs. But, we’ll bet an official from one of the stricter countries will open one to check it, only to come across a nasty surprise. [Image credit: Kristian Bjornard/Flickr ] Comments Via: Motherboard Source: Shit Express

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ShitExpress will send poop in a box anywhere in exchange for Bitcoins

Nest Just Made Your Thermostat Smarter With a New Algorithm

It’s been a while since we heard anything new about Nest’s flagship product, the quiet elder brother to the attention-hogging Protect . But today the company is pushing a new software update to all existing devices this week, and it’s using a clever new bit of software to make them far more efficient. Read more…

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Nest Just Made Your Thermostat Smarter With a New Algorithm

Ken May

Author: kenmay