Author: kenmay

‘Game of Thrones’ Season 4 hits Google Play and Amazon just days after the TV finale

The fourth series of Game of Thrones came to its conclusion just a few days ago, but HBO isn’t leaving anything to chance. Knowing that single episodes are smashing piracy records on Bittorrent, the company has quickly made the whole season available to download on both Google Play and Amazon. As it stands, Amazon is the best place to get your Lannister fix, pricing the full season at £16.99 for a standard definition copy and £23.99 for an HD download. Google, on the other hand, has it up for £18.49 and £24.49 respectively. If you’re after individual episodes, prices start at £1.89 on both services, letting you witness some of the biggest battles (like the one pictured above) the seven kingdoms have ever seen. Update : Tesco is hitting the launch hard too , offering Game of Thrones Season 4 for £17.99 in SD and £23.99 in HD. However, it’s also throwing in 1, 000 Tesco Clubcard points and a free 10″ Finest pizza with every purchase. Filed under: Home Entertainment , Internet , Google , Amazon Comments Via: Pocket-lint Source: Game of Thrones Season 4 (Google Play) , (Amazon) , (Blinkbox)

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‘Game of Thrones’ Season 4 hits Google Play and Amazon just days after the TV finale

Confiscated data must be returned or deleted if it’s not covered by a warrant

Picture a scenario where the government’s accused you of a crime. During its investigation, law enforcement copies your computer’s hard drive to look for evidence of your misdeeds (pursuant to a warrant, of course). Until today, it was unclear if law enforcement could hold onto copies of your data forever. A new Federal Court decision, however, has crystallized things for us all: the government can no longer keep that data indefinitely. United States v. Ganias is the name of the case in question, and the court held that indefinite retention of our digital files is an illegal seizure under the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. So now, when law enforcement obtains, searches, and finds the data it’s looking for pursuant to a warrant, it’s got to either return the other files it copied or delete them. Unfortunately, the Appeals court didn’t say just how long the government can keep that other data before disposing of it — meaning someone else gets to figure that little detail out. Gotta keep those lower courts busy, right? Filed under: Misc Comments Via: Washington Post Source: 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals (PDF)

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Confiscated data must be returned or deleted if it’s not covered by a warrant

Elon Musk vows for 2026 manned Mars mission—wants self-sustaining city

Elon Musk just said that his SpaceX spaceships will get humans to Mars by 2026, with or without NASA. It may seem cocky, but coming from a man who has built this entire company so he can die on Mars —and to “help ensure the survival of humanity”—those words are not to be taken lightly. Read more…

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Elon Musk vows for 2026 manned Mars mission—wants self-sustaining city

Sharp flaunts Free-Form displays for funky-shaped devices

When Motorola unveiled its snappy Moto 360 smartwatch, the first thing we thought was “how do you make a round display?” Sharp has one answer with its new IGZO-based “Free-Form” LCD prototype that can be sculpted into any shape. The company’s current IGZO tech only works with rectangular displays, where the circuits that drive the LCD live on the perimeter of the screen. Sharp managed to bake those chips into the display itself, allowing for not only a shrunken bezel but nearly any display format you might want. That’ll let designers create much more compact car dashboards, new digital signage, unusually shaped monitors and yes, wearables like smartwatches. That likely won’t include the Moto 360, though, since it’s rumored to have an OLED display. Also, Sharp says that the Free-Form display is nearly ready for mass production, but isn’t quite there yet. Filed under: Displays Comments Via: TNW Source: Sharp

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Sharp flaunts Free-Form displays for funky-shaped devices

China is Building Fake Islands to Bolster Its Claim to Disputed Waters

Pity the poor mapmaker assigned to the South China Sea. The hotly disputed waters in the Pacific are torn between competing claims from all the countries that surround it. China, especially, has been aggressive and sly. It’s now dumping sand onto small reefs and shoals, building whole new islands to bolster its territorial claims . Read more…

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China is Building Fake Islands to Bolster Its Claim to Disputed Waters

Code Spaces Hosting Shutting Down After Attacker Deletes All Data

An anonymous reader writes Code Spaces [a code hosting service] has been under DDOS attacks since the beginning of the week, but a few hours ago, the attacker managed to delete all their hosted customer data and most of the backups. They have announced that they are shutting down business. From the announcement: An unauthorized person who at this point who is still unknown (All we can say is that we have no reason to think its anyone who is or was employed with Code Spaces) had gained access to our Amazon EC2 control panel and had left a number of messages for us to contact them using a Hotmail address. Reaching out to the address started a chain of events that revolved around the person trying to extort a large fee in order to resolve the DDOS. At this point we took action to take control back of our panel by changing passwords, however the intruder had prepared for this and had already created a number of backup logins to the panel and upon seeing us make the attempted recovery of the account he proceeded to randomly delete artifacts from the panel. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Code Spaces Hosting Shutting Down After Attacker Deletes All Data

Harley-Davidson Is Making An Electric Motorcycle

Harley fanatics are about to lose their collective shit. The crew from Milwaukee is going to show off its first electric motorcycle tomorrow, causing scads of chap-wearing dentists to revaluate their alternative weekend lifestyles. Read more…

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Harley-Davidson Is Making An Electric Motorcycle

LG’s Glueless Packaging Is Almost as Impressive as the OLED TV Inside

A product’s packaging is usually nothing but the last obstacle between you and a shiny new gadget, but often there’s as much thought that goes into the design of a cardboard box as the device inside. For instance, LG put a remarkable amount of design effort into the box its OLED TVs ship in, and most consumers will never even notice. Read more…

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LG’s Glueless Packaging Is Almost as Impressive as the OLED TV Inside

Amazon Announces ‘Fire Phone’

Amazon has unveiled the Fire Phone. It runs a modified version of Android, and it will launch exclusively for AT&T’s network. The screen is a 4.7″ IPS LCD (they tested from 4.3″ to 5.5″, and decided 4.7″ worked best for single-hand use), with an emphasis on brightness. It runs on a quad-core 2.2GHz processor with 2GB of RAM, and an Adreno 330 GPU. It has a rear-facing, 13-megapixel camera using an f/2.0 five-element lens with image stabilization. There’s a dedicated physical button on the side of the phone that will turn it on and put it into camera mode when pressed. The phone comes with dual stereo speakers that produce virtual surround sound. Amazon wants the phone to be distinctive for its ability to provide video content, both from a hardware and software perspective. The Fire Phone runs Mayday, Amazon’s live tech support service for devices. They also demonstrated Firefly, software that recognizes physical objects using the phone’s camera, as well as TV shows and songs it hears. It runs quickly, often identifying things in less than a second (and it pulls up an Amazon product listing, of course). It can even recognize art. Firefly has its own dedicated physical button on the phone, and Amazon is providing a Firefly SDK to third parties who want to develop with it. Another major feature of the Fire Phone is what Amazon calls “dynamic perspective.” Using multiple front-facing cameras, the phone tracks the position of a user’s head, and uses that to slightly adjust what’s displayed on the screen so content is easier to see from the new angle. It allows for gesture control of the phone — for example, you can tilt the phone to scroll a web page or move your head slightly look around a 2-D stadium image when browsing for available seats. Putting your thumb on the screen acts like a mute button for the head tracking, so it isn’t confused when you look up from the screen or turn your head to talk to somebody. It’s an impressive piece of software, and they’ve made an SDK available for it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Amazon Announces ‘Fire Phone’

Hacker infects Synology storage devices, makes off with $620,000 in Dogecoin

One of the affected Synology devices. Synology A hacker generated digital coins worth more than $620,000 by hijacking a popular type of Internet-connected storage device from Synology, security researchers said. The incident, which was documented in a research report published Tuesday by Dell SecureWorks, is only the latest hack to steal other people’s computing resources to perform the computationally intense process of digital currency mining. The cryptographic operations behind the process often draw large amounts of power and produce lots of heat. People looking to acquire a large war chest of digital coins typically must pour large amounts of money and effort into the endeavor. One way malicious actors get by this requirement is by compromising large numbers of devices operated by other people. The devices then perform the work at the expense of the unsuspecting end users and pass on the proceeds to the attacker. According to researchers from SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit, the attackers exploited four separate vulnerabilities contained in the software of Synology network-attached storage boxes. The vulnerabilities were documented in September and fixed in February by Synology . By then, large numbers of people began complaining their Synology devices were running sluggishly and extremely hot . It turns out that at least some of them were running software that mined large sums of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hacker infects Synology storage devices, makes off with $620,000 in Dogecoin