Author: kenmay

NanoLeaf Bulbs Provide Unusually Bright, Energy-Efficient LED Lighting

We’re all for energy-efficiency, and NanoLeaf managed to pack quite a bit of it into one of the weirdest looking lightbulbs we’ve ever seen. With their LED bulb you get 30, 000 hours of brightness equivalent to a standard 100W unit. Read more…        

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NanoLeaf Bulbs Provide Unusually Bright, Energy-Efficient LED Lighting

How Apple’s Address Book app could allow the NSA to harvest your contacts

Ashkan Soltani Overlooked in last week’s revelation that the National Security Agency is harvesting hundreds of millions of e-mail address books around the world was this surprising factoid: Apple makes this mass collection easier because the Address Book app that by default manages Mac contacts doesn’t use HTTPS encryption when syncing with Gmail accounts. As a result, addresses that automatically travel between Macs and Google servers are sent as plain text , independent privacy researcher Ashkan Soltani wrote in The Washington Post last Monday. He provided the above screenshot demonstrating that Address Book contents appear in the clear to anyone who has the ability to monitor traffic over a Wi-Fi network or other connection. His observation came 15 months after another Mac user also warned that the Mac app offered no way to enable HTTPS when syncing e-mail address lists with Gmail . “It appears that it’s an Apple issue,” Soltani told Ars, referring to the inability to enable HTTPS when Apple’s Address Book is updated to a user’s Gmail account. “Their other products support Gmail over via HTTPS, so I suspect it would be a three-line fix in the contacts to alleviate this problem.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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How Apple’s Address Book app could allow the NSA to harvest your contacts

Biological Clock Discovered That Measures Ages of Most Human Tissues

starr802 writes “A biological clock capable of determining how old different human tissues and cells are has been discovered by a team of researchers from the University of California Los Angeles (abstract). ‘To fight aging, we first need an objective way of measuring it. Pinpointing a set of biomarkers that keeps time throughout the body has been a four-year challenge, ‘ Steve Horvath, a professor of human genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and of biostatistics at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health said in a statement. ‘My goal in inventing this clock is to help scientists improve their understanding of what speeds up and slows down the human aging process.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Biological Clock Discovered That Measures Ages of Most Human Tissues

Soylent gets a $1.5 million infusion of venture capital

EVERYBODY SOYLENT. Lee Hutchinson TechCrunch is reporting that Rob Rhinehart’s Soylent, the nutritionally complete meal replacement shake/drink mix, has just closed out a $1.5 million seed funding round from a wide mix of investors led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lerer Ventures. This is on top of the $1.5 million in pre-orders the company already amassed as part of its crazy-successful crowdfunding run earlier this year. The project has been a poster child for crowdfunding success—in fact, the sheer volume of orders has caused its own set of delays in scaling Soylent from a hand-mixed product for a few dozen testers to a mass-produced meal replacement for hundreds of thousands of customers. Rhinehart and company have discussed the ongoing growing pains on the official Soylent blog . The round of funding should give the Soylent crew some breathing room. TechCrunch reports that the company has finalized the 1.0 formulation of the product and will be moving some amount of manufacturing in-house. The company is also moving offices from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and Soylent will bring in a “culinary director” to help evolve the product’s flavor and (currently extremely chalky) mouthfeel. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Soylent gets a $1.5 million infusion of venture capital

Netflix tops 40 million customers total, more paid US subscribers than HBO

Netflix’s results for the third quarter have arrived and one of its most important numbers, the total amount of US subscribers (not including trial accounts), has reached 29.93 million, more than HBO’s last count of 28.7 million. Last year at this time it had notched 25.1 million US customers, and including trial subscribers it passed HBO’s customer base back in April . Internationally it’s up to 9.19 million subscribers and is anticipating that it will add more than three million customers total in the next quarter. New original series Orange is the New Black has been a hit and while Netflix still isn’t releasing viewing numbers, it says the show will end the year “as our most watched original series ever.” Regarding its original content push, Netflix has already rolled out some of the stand-up comedy specials it promised (Aziz Ansari’s is next up on November 1st) and says it will expand soon into original documentaries, largely based on the popularity of that kind of content among its customers. Developing… Filed under: Home Entertainment , HD Comments Source: Netflix (PDF)

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Netflix tops 40 million customers total, more paid US subscribers than HBO

Laser-Scanning Hundreds of Artificial Caves Beneath Nottingham

There are more than 450 artificial caves excavated from sandstone beneath the streets and buildings of Nottingham, England—including, legendarily, the old dungeon that once held Robin Hood. Not all of these caves are known even today, let alone mapped or studied. Read more…        

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Laser-Scanning Hundreds of Artificial Caves Beneath Nottingham

Wikipedia editors, locked in battle with PR firm, delete 250 accounts

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Flickr user: Niccolò Caranti Wikipedia editors have disabled hundreds of paid Wikipedia editing accounts in recent weeks as part of a campaign against so-called “sockpuppetry.” The efforts were described in a statement published this morning by the Wikimedia Foundation, in which director Sue Gardner acknowledged that “as many as several hundred” accounts belong to editors who are being paid to promote products or services on the site. That’s a violation of Wikipedia policies and terms of use, Gardner noted. “As a result, Wikipedians aiming to protect the projects against non-neutral editing have blocked or banned more than 250 user accounts,” continued Gardner. “The Wikimedia Foundation takes this issue seriously and has been following it closely.” The statement follows reports earlier this month in the The Daily Dot and last week in Vice .  The stories describe the increasing amounts of money flowing toward paid editing of English-language Wikipedia pages. According to both articles, Wikipedia editors attribute the growth in paid edits to a company called Wiki-PR . Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Wikipedia editors, locked in battle with PR firm, delete 250 accounts

Watch This Madman Recreate the iOS 7 Homescreen in Microsoft Word

Observe, citizens, as this delightfully talented and probably unhinged gentleman recreates the iOS 7 from scratch using only the tools in Microsoft Word. There is no good explanation for this, but I still can’t tear my eyes away from it. Read more…        

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Watch This Madman Recreate the iOS 7 Homescreen in Microsoft Word