Those living in apartments or homes without central air have to come to terms with ugly, boxy air conditioners hanging out their windows. It’s either that, or be roasted alive in the summer. But it doesn’t have to be that way, not when LG is somehow packing air conditioners into these ultra-slim housings that hang on your wall like artwork. Read more…
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An Ultra-Flat Air Conditioner That Could Be Mistaken For Artwork
Since 2010, the National Security Agency has kept a push-button hacking system called Turbine that allows the agency to scale up the number of networks it has access to from hundreds to potentially millions. The news comes from new Edward Snowden documents published by Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept today. The leaked information details how the NSA has used Turbine to ramp up its hacking capacity to “industrial scale,” plant malware that breaks the security on virtual private networks (VPNs) and digital voice communications, and collect data and subvert targeted networks on a once-unimaginable scale. Turbine is part of Turbulence, the collection of systems that also includes the Turmoil network surveillance system that feeds the NSA’s XKeyscore surveillance database. While it is controlled from NSA and GCHQ headquarters, it is a distributed set of attack systems equipped with packaged “exploits” that take advantage of the ability the NSA and GCHQ have to insert themselves as a “man in the middle” at Internet chokepoints. Using that position of power, Turbine can automate functions of Turbulence systems to corrupt data in transit between two Internet addresses, adding malware to webpages being viewed or otherwise attacking the communications stream. Since Turbine went online in 2010, it has allowed the NSA to scale up from managing hundreds of hacking operations each day to handling millions of them. It does so by taking people out of the loop of managing attacks, instead using software to identify, target, and attack Internet-connected devices by installing malware referred to as “implants.” According to the documents, NSA analysts can simply specify the type of information required and let the system figure out how to get to it without having to know the details of the application being attacked. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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NSA’s automated hacking engine offers hands-free pwning of the world
cartechboy writes “What’s $50 billion among friends, right? At least Felix Kramer and Gil Friend are thinking big, so there is that. The pair have published an somewhat audacious proposal to spend $50 billion dollars to buy up and then shut down every single private and public coal company operating in the United States. The scientific benefits: eliminating acid rain, airborne emissions, etc). The shutdown proposal includes the costs of retraining for the approximately 87, 000 coal-industry workers who would lose their jobs over the proposed 10-year phaseout of coal. Since Kramer and Friend don’t have $50 billion, they suggest the concept could be funded as a public service and if governments can’t do it maybe some rich guys can — and the names Gates, Buffett and Bloomberg come up. Any takers?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Environmentalists Propose $50 Billion Buyout of Coal Industry – To Shut It Down
Built for over a million people, the city of Ordos was designed to be the crowning glory of Inner Mongolia. Doomed to incompletion however, this futuristic metropolis now rises empty out of the deserts of northern China. Only 2% of its buildings were ever filled; the rest has largely been left to decay, abandoned mid-construction, earning Ordos the title of China’s Ghost City . Read more…
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Welcome to The World’s Largest Ghost City: Ordos, China
We know that the NSA has been ramping up its efforts to collect data from computers , but it’s now clear that the intelligence agency has the tools to compromise those computers on a grand scale. Information leaked by Edward Snowden to The Intercept has revealed that the NSA has spent recent years automating the way it plants surveillance software. The key is Turbine, a system launched in 2010 that automatically sets up implants and simplifies fetching data; agents only have to know what information they want, rather than file locations or other app-specific details. A grid of sensors, nicknamed Turmoil, automatically spots extracted info and relays it to NSA staff. The combined platform lets the organization scrape content from “potentially millions” of PCs, instead of focusing only on the highest-priority targets. The spies also have a wide range of weapons at their disposal. They can grab data from flash drives and webcams, remote control PCs and intercept the content from both internet calls as well as virtual private networks. The NSA doesn’t always go directly after a target, either. It frequently compromises IT administrators to reach people on the networks they run, and it will both spoof websites and alter traffic to trick targets into installing code. Snowden’s latest leak isn’t all that surprising given that we’ve seen governments use similar espionage methods in the past, but it suggests that the NSA can easily watch a large number of computer users without sweating the exact techniques that it uses. Filed under: Networking , Internet Comments Via: CNET Source: The Intercept
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Here’s how the NSA can collect data from millions of PCs
With about 6.3 million Twitter followers, UberFacts reaches millions of people with little nuggets of trivia every day. Unfortunately, many of those “fun facts” are completely wrong or misleading. Read more…
If you ever want to change the style of all the headings or captions in a document, bold all the italicized text, or otherwise fine-tune the formatting of your document in one swoop, Microsoft Word has a setting for that. Read more…
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Select All Text with the Same Formatting in Word (and Other Word Tips)
Integrated graphics are getting better and better , but if you really want to game on your laptop, ain’t nothing gonna beat discrete. Nvidia’s new line of GTX mobile cards are about as good as it gets, and they’re not just bringing performance upgrades, but better battery life as well. Read more…
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Nvidia’s New Laptop Cards Are Battery-Saving Scorchers
“Thin and powerful” aren’t words we tend to associate with gaming laptops, Razer has always been an exception. The company’s Blade and Blade Pro laptops have been challenging our preconceptions for almost three years now, but the shadow of compromise has hung over each iteration of the product in some form or another. Last year, it was the 14-inch model’s low resolution display — a thinly veiled bottleneck that kept gamers from over-taxing the machine’s GPU. That won’t be an issue for the laptop’s 2014 refresh: Razer announced today that it’s outfitting the Razer Blade with a 3200 x 1800 IPS panel with multitouch support, a Intel Core i7-4702HQ processor and NVIDIA’s new GeForce GTX 870M (3GB GDDR5) GPU. It’s a loud answer to the issues we had with the last generation. It also takes it one step further from the new 17-inch Razer Blade Pro. Like the standard Blade, the 17-inch model has been outfitted one of NVIDIA’s new Maxwell GPUs, specifically the GTX 860M (2GB GDDR5). It’s also kitted out with twice as much RAM (16GB DDR3L), an Intel Core i7-4700HQ processor and Razer’s Switchblade User Interface — a miniature keyboard with 10 keys (each with their own LED display), an LCD driven trackpad / touchscreen and a small suite of apps. Here’s where things get interesting: buyers after Razer’s Switchblade interface will wind up with a lower resolution screen without support for multitouch. Razer told us the Pro’s matte display was a better choice for productivity, and pointed out that 17.3-inches was a bit large for touchscreen gestures. Instead, the Razer Blade Pro will come with a Switchblade “Charms” app for Windows 8, as well as new applications for productivity suites like Maya, GIMP, Adobe Photoshop and Premiere. Razer’s Pro and Standard Blade laptops were always separated by size, processor configuration and the Switchblade interface, it somehow seems different this time around. With more video RAM, a touchscreen and a higher resolution display, the 14-inch Blade seems to be built with entertainment in mind, while the Razer Blade Pro leans more towards productivity with a larger (but lower resolution) screen, more RAM and apps tailored to the needs of multimedia professionals. While both promise to be capable gaming rigs, they aren’t quite targeting the same buyers. Figure out what side you belong to? Start saving: the Razer Blade Pro ships at the end of the month, starting at $2, 299, with the 14-inch Blade following soon afterwards for $2, 199. Check out Razer’s product page for pre-orders, configuration options and eye-candy. Filed under: Gaming , Laptops Comments Source: Razer (1) , (2)
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Razer refreshes its Blade gaming laptops with NVIDIA Maxwell GPUs, multitouch support
Thanks to the appearance of a curiously thin MSI gaming laptop at CeBIT a few days ago, we had an inkling that NVIDIA’s new batch of laptop GPUs were inbound. Indeed, the 800M series has just become official, with a number of features geared toward portability and battery life. For a start, the lower half of the stack — the 830M, 840M, 850M and 860M — has been endowed with the company’s latest Maxwell architecture , which allows gaming credentials to be claimed by thinner and lighter machines. The new Gigabyte P74 is a decent example: It contains an 860M inside a 21mm-thick chassis and we managed to play BioShock Infinite on it, running at 1080p and max settings with a frame rate above 40 fps — that’s a level of performance that NVIDIA says would have required a 55mm-thick laptop three years ago. The other big promise with this generation concerns battery life, and it comes courtesy of a setting called “Battery Boost.” The Battery Boost setting won’t affect general-purpose stamina, but instead only springs into action when you load up a game. It lets you set a target frame rate, such as 30fps, and then it dials down the performance of the system whenever possible in order to meet that target, so you don’t waste power on frames that you can live without (at least while you’re traveling away from a mains socket). Based on some testing by Tom’s Hardware , NVIDIA says the average duration of battery-powered gaming on a current GeForce laptop is less than 50 minutes, but Battery Boost should be able to increase that by 50-100 percent in a relatively easy-to-run game like Borderlands 2 . Finally, NVIDIA is also bringing some desktop features across to its laptop range of GPUs for the first time. These include Shadowplay, which lets you record 1080p footage (as h.264 video) of your gaming exploits for broadcast on sites like Twitch and UPlay. Then there’s Gamestream, which lets you play games on your laptop remotely using an NVIDIA Shield handheld. Filed under: Gaming , Laptops , NVIDIA Comments
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NVIDIA says most laptops die after 50 minutes of gaming, claims new GPUs will double that