kenmay

4K Monitors: Not Now, But Soon

An anonymous reader writes 4K monitor prices have fallen into the range where mainstream consumers are starting to consider them for work and for play. There are enough models that we can compare and contrast, and figure out which are the best of the ones available. But this report at The Wirecutter makes the case that absent a pressing need for 8.29 million pixels, you should just wait before buying one. They say, “The current version of the HDMI specification (1.4a) can only output a 4096×2160 resolution at a refresh rate of 24 Hz or 3840×2160 at 30 Hz—the latter, half that of what we’re used to on TVs and monitors. Connect up a 4K monitor at 30 Hz via HDMI and you’ll see choppier animations and transitions in your OS. You might also encounter some visible motion stuttering during normal use, and you’ll be locked to a maximum of 30 frames per second for your games—it’s playable, but not that smooth. … Most people don’t own a system that’s good enough for gaming on a 4K display—at least, not at highest-quality settings. You’ll be better off if you just plan to surf the Web in 4K: Nvidia cards starting in the 600 series and AMD Radeon HD 6000 and 7000-series GPUs can handle 4K, as can systems built with integrated Intel HD 4000 graphics or AMD Trinity APUs. … There’s a light on the horizon. OS support will strengthen, connection types will be able to handle 4K displays sans digital tricks, and prices will drop as more 4K displays hit the market. By then, there will even be more digital content to play on a 4K display (if gaming or multitasking isn’t your thing), and 4K monitors will even start to pull in fancier display technology like Nvidia’s G-Sync for even smoother digital shootouts.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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4K Monitors: Not Now, But Soon

Symbian was once held ransom for several million euros, and Nokia paid it

Long before Nokia took up residence at Microsoft and became enamored with Windows Phone, the company had another Mobile OS to care for: Symbian . For awhile, it was the most widely used smartphone OS in the world, and according to a Finnish TV station, being its custodian was no easy task: in 2007 Nokia apparently paid several million euros to keep its encryption key private. MTV News (no, not that MTV ) reports that criminals threatened to release the encryption key into the wild, potentially opening the OS to attacks and malware by unsavory programmers. Naturally, Nokia contacted the police, hoping to catch the crooks when they attempted to collect their ransom in a Tampere parking lot. Sadly, something went wrong: after the criminals collected the untold millions, Police somehow lost track of them. The suspects, their encryption code and Nokia’s bag of money were gone. MTV News and Reuters both indecently verified the blackmail with Finnish police, which is still considered an open case. These days, Symbian is a bit more open source — but remember: once it was a big enough driving force in the mobile market to be held for ransom. Filed under: Cellphones , Mobile , Nokia Comments Source: MTV News , Reuters

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Symbian was once held ransom for several million euros, and Nokia paid it

These Inductive Batteries Keep Your Power Tools Perpetually Charged

It’s almost impossible to think of a time when you had to wrangle a long cord while working with power tools. But as convenient as cordless tools are, they’re useless if their batteries are dead. So this fall, Bosch will be introducing batteries with inductive charging that simply need to be placed on a base station for the power to flow. Read more…

Ikea’s New Glowing Stool Lights a Safe LED Fire Under Your Butt

The summer isn’t even here yet, but if you’re leaving home and heading off to college in September, it’s never too early to start planning and stockpiling what you’ll need. And since you’ll probably be crammed into a tiny dorm room, Ikea’s new glowing LED stool does double duty as a lamp and place to sit/pile dirty laundry. Read more…

iOS 8 Will Make Drawing on Your Devices Way More Intuitive

Perfecting your artistic technique using a stylus is about to get a whole lot more refined. With the introduction of iOS 8 , your screen will be sensitive to the relative width of whatever’s running across its surface. That’s great news for folks who prefer Paper and other drawing apps to, well, paper. Read more…

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Undergrad breaks Android crypto ransomware

Early in June, Ars reported the discovery of Android/Simplocker , which appeared to be the first cryptographic ransomware Trojan targeted at Android devices. Simplocker encrypts photos, documents, and videos in devices’ local storage and then instructs the device owner to send money if they ever want to see that content again. One researcher—Simon Bell, an undergraduate student at the University of Sussex—managed to dissect the code for Simplocker. He found that while the code actually called back to a command and control server over the Tor anonymizing network to pass information about the infected device, all of the encryption work was done by the malware itself. Today, Bell released an antidote to Simplocker —a Java program that can decrypt the files attacked by the malware. “The antidote was incredibly easy to create because the ransomware came with both the decryption method and the decryption password,” Bell wrote. “Therefore producing an antidote was more of a copy-and-paste job than anything.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Undergrad breaks Android crypto ransomware

Report: Seattle paid $17,500 to boost online reputation of city official

tdlucas5000 A newly-published document shows that Seattle’s publicly-owned electrical utility paid thousands of dollars to Brand.com to manage the online reputation of CEO Jorge Carrasco. The document , which was received and published Saturday by the Seattle Times after a public records request, shows that Brand.com charged City Light $5,000 in December 2013. As the contract states: Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: Seattle paid $17,500 to boost online reputation of city official

Unicode 7.0 introduces 2,834 new characters, including 250 emoji

We can leave dumb old “words” behind as soon as emoji evolve to express all forms of human feeling and emotion. Andrew Cunningham The Unicode Consortium has just announced the release of version 7.0 of the Unicode Standard , the list of characters ” which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards .” Unicode 7.0 adds 2,834 new characters to the existing list of 110,187 characters defined by Unicode 6.3, including new symbols for currency, new “lesser-used and historic scripts,” and extended support “for written languages of North America, China, India, other Asian countries, and Africa.” Of course, the Internet being what it is, what people seem the most excited about are the 250 new emoji characters, listed here by Emojipedia . Notable additions include “hot pepper,” “sleuth or spy,” “man in business suit levitating,” “reversed hand with middle finger extended,” and “raised hand with part between middle and ring fingers” (aka the ” live long and prosper ” thing). The list of emoji also extends the character set’s adorable fascination with outmoded technology thanks to icons like “soft shell floppy disk,” “fax icon,” and “old personal computer.” Mostly absent from that list of new emoji are the more racially diverse characters Apple said it was trying to introduce back in March . There are a few characters that suggest progress on that front (“sideways black left pointing index,” “black up pointing backhand index,” and so on, assuming that “index” is a reference to index fingers), but those additions don’t introduce parity between black- and white-skinned icons, nor do they account for other skin tones. That’s not necessarily surprising, since these standards take a long time to change—hopefully more characters are introduced in a future Unicode release. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Unicode 7.0 introduces 2,834 new characters, including 250 emoji

US government lifts restrictions on high-detail satellite imaging

The US government will now allow the likes of Google and Microsoft’s Bing to use satellite images containing far more detail. Previous restrictions stopped anything smaller than 50 cm (1.64 feet) being shown on satellite photos. Imaging company Digital Globe was behind the request, and reckons it could well take shots from space that capture things as small as 31 cm. Lawyer Marc Daultich told the BBC that this could raise security concerns, although this restriction didn’t really encompass the blurring or otherwise obscuring of sensitive locations. Digital Globe plans to launch new satellites following the decision and says it’ll be able to take thrilling photos of ” key features such as manholes and mailboxes”. And hopefully something a little more interesting, too. Filed under: GPS Comments Source: BBC

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US government lifts restrictions on high-detail satellite imaging

Time Warner Sells Telecom Business to Level 3

gavron (1300111) writes “We all know about TW Cable being acquired by Comcast (subject to regulatory approval) but news from today is that their non-cable business is being purchased by Level3 for almost 6 billion dollars. What used to be the ‘largest media and distribution company ever’ (AOL Time Warner) is now nothing more than a garage of pieces being parceled off to the first available bidder. This might be good for consumers, but recently Time Warner (and Comcast) won awards for consumer hatred.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Time Warner Sells Telecom Business to Level 3

Ken May

Author: kenmay