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‘Breakthrough’ LI-RAM Material Can Store Data With Light

A Vancouver researcher has patented a new material that uses light instead of electricity to store data. An anonymous reader writes: LI-RAM — that’s light induced magnetoresistive random-access memory — promises supercomputer speeds for your cellphones and laptops, according to Natia Frank, the materials scientist at the University of Victoria who developed the new material as part of an international effort to reduce the heat and power consumption of modern processors. She envisions a world of LI-RAM mobile devices which are faster, thinner, and able to hold much more data — all while consuming less power and producing less heat. And best of all, they’d last twice as long on a single charge (while producing almost no heat), according to a report on CTV News, which describes this as “a breakthrough material” that will not only make smartphones faster and more durable, but also more energy-efficient. The University of Victoria calculates that’s 10% of the world’s electricity is consumed by “information communications technology, ” so LI-RAM phones could conceivably cut that figure in half. They also report that the researcher is “working with international electronics manufacturers to optimize and commercialize the technology, and says it could be available on the market in the next 10 years.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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‘Breakthrough’ LI-RAM Material Can Store Data With Light

Final Stage: incredible graphical demo shows what you can do with 4 kilobytes of source code

Graphical demos created with severe code-length limitations sometimes betray the techniques used to fit a world into a few kilobytes: tessellating textures, featureless fractals, repetitive sequences, and so on. Final Stage , by 0x4015 , is not one of those demos. [ via ] Here it is rendered on a XEON x560 with a GTX 1070 video card and 24GB of RAM. Check out all the other uploads from the Revision 2017 demoparty. Eidolon , by Poo-brain, won in the 64k category: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bwLkEwLIgQ

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Final Stage: incredible graphical demo shows what you can do with 4 kilobytes of source code

Microsoft’s Rumored CloudBook Could Be Your Next Cheap Computer

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a few weeks, at its education-oriented software and hardware event in New York, Microsoft could unveil a sub-premium laptop — something more robust than a Surface but not as fancy as a Surface Book. And rather than run good old Windows 10, the new product could run something called Windows 10 Cloud, which reportedly will only be able to run apps that you can find in the Windows Store, unless you change a certain preference in Settings. The idea is that this will keep your device more secure. However, that does mean you won’t be able to use certain apps that aren’t in the Store — like Steam — on a Windows 10 Cloud device, such as the rumored CloudBook. Microsoft is going after Google’s Chromebooks that are very popular in the education space — so much so that they are playing an instrumental role in keeping the entire PC shipments up. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft’s Rumored CloudBook Could Be Your Next Cheap Computer

Police Searching for This Man Who Allegedly Posted a Murder Live on Facebook

The Cleveland Police Department is searching for a man named Steve “Stevie Steve” Stephens in connection with the murder of an elderly man that was broadcast live on Stephens’ Facebook page. In earlier posts, he claimed to be perpetrating an “Easter day slaughter.” Read more…

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Police Searching for This Man Who Allegedly Posted a Murder Live on Facebook

That MOAB Bomb Dropped On Afghanistan Actually Cost $170,000

The United States Air Force dropped a 21, 600-pound Massive Ordnance Air Blast, or MOAB, bomb on what it said were ISIS militants in Afghanistan on Thursday. At least 36 people were killed in the explosion from the largest American non-nuclear bomb. Read more…

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That MOAB Bomb Dropped On Afghanistan Actually Cost $170,000

G.SKILL Hits 4500MHz With All-New Trident Z DDR4-4333MHz 16GB Memory Kit

BrianFagioli quotes a report from BetaNews: G.SKILL is a respected RAM maker, and the company is constantly pushing the envelope. Today, it announced a new DDR4-4333MHz 16GB Memory Kit (2x8GB) — the first ever. While that alone is very cool, the company is bragging about what it accomplished with it — an overclock that hit 4500MHz using an Intel Core i5-7600K processor paired with an ASUS ROG Maximus IX Apex motherboard. Pricing and availability for this kit is unknown at this time. With that said, it will probably be quite expensive. What we do know, however, its that the insane overclock to 4500MHz is for real. This was achieved using timings of CL19-19-19-39 in dual channel, which resulted in read/write of 55/65GB/s and copy speed of 52GB/s. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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G.SKILL Hits 4500MHz With All-New Trident Z DDR4-4333MHz 16GB Memory Kit

The Great Japan Potato-Chip Crisis: Panic Buying, $12 Bags

Demand for potato chips has surged in Japan this week, with products on offer for 6 times their retail price online after Japanese snack company Calbee halted the sale of some of its most popular chip brands. From a report: Calbee’s pizza-flavored chips were going for about 1, 250 yen ($12) on Yahoo Japan Corp.’s auction website Friday. One bag usually sells for less than 200 yen. Photos of near-empty shelves at their local supermarkets were trending on Twitter. The crunch came after Calbee warned on Monday that it will temporarily halt the sale of 15 types of potato chips due to a bad crop in Hokkaido, a key potato-producing region. The northern island was hit by a record number of typhoons last year. Calbee, which has a market value of 507.9 billion yen and is 20 percent-owned by PepsiCo Inc., has a 73 percent market share of potato chips. Potato chips are a big deal in Japan, a country also known for its senbei rice crackers and Pocky sticks. Calbee’s potato-snack products were the most and second-most popular snacks in a TV Asahi poll of 10, 000 people and 13 confectionery makers last year, and the subject of a primetime show that lasted more than two hours. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Great Japan Potato-Chip Crisis: Panic Buying, $12 Bags

NSA-Leaking Shadow Brokers Just Dumped Its Most Damaging Release Yet

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Shadow Brokers — the mysterious person or group that over the past eight months has leaked a gigabyte worth of the National Security Agency’s weaponized software exploits — just published its most significant release yet. Friday’s dump contains potent exploits and hacking tools that target most versions of Microsoft Windows and evidence of sophisticated hacks on the SWIFT banking system of several banks across the world. Friday’s release — which came as much of the computing world was planning a long weekend to observe the Easter holiday — contains close to 300 megabytes of materials the leakers said were stolen from the NSA. The contents (a convenient overview is here) included compiled binaries for exploits that targeted vulnerabilities in a long line of Windows operating systems, including Windows 8 and Windows 2012. It also included a framework dubbed Fuzzbunch, a tool that resembles the Metasploit hacking framework that loads the binaries into targeted networks. Independent security experts who reviewed the contents said it was without question the most damaging Shadow Brokers release to date. One of the Windows zero-days flagged by Hickey is dubbed Eternalblue. It exploits a remote code-execution bug in the latest version of Windows 2008 R2 using the server message block and NetBT protocols. Another hacking tool known as Eternalromance contains an easy-to-use interface and “slick” code. Hickey said it exploits Windows systems over TCP ports 445 and 139. The exact cause of the bug is still being identified. Friday’s release contains several tools with the word “eternal” in their name that exploit previously unknown flaws in Windows desktops and servers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NSA-Leaking Shadow Brokers Just Dumped Its Most Damaging Release Yet

Blue horseshoe crab blood sells for up to $14,000 per quart

Unfortunately for horseshoe crabs, their blue blood is so good at detecting harmful bacteria that the hapless critters are being scooped up by the hundreds to be attached to industrial horseshoe crab blood milking stations. Now the International Union for Conservation of Nature has categorized the American horseshoe crab is “vulnerable” to extinction. From Popular Mechanics : Their distinctive blue blood is used to detect dangerous Gram-negative bacteria such as E. coli in injectable drugs such as insulin, implantable medical devices such as knee replacements, and hospital instruments such as scalpels and IVs. Components of this crab blood have a unique and invaluable talent for finding infection, and that has driven up an insatiable demand. Every year the medical testing industry catches a half-million horseshoe crabs to sample their blood. But that demand cannot climb forever. There’s a growing concern among scientists that the biomedical industry’s bleeding of these crabs may be endangering a creature that’s been around since dinosaur days. There are currently no quotas on how many crabs one can bleed because biomedical laboratories drain only a third of the crab’s blood, then put them back into the water, alive. But no one really knows what happens to the crabs once they’re slipped back into the sea. Do they survive? Are they ever the same?

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Blue horseshoe crab blood sells for up to $14,000 per quart

Latest version of Denuvo’s DRM cracked yet again

Enlarge / This art for 2Dark also serves as a handy artist’s conception of Denuvo trying to hold off crackers. In the endless back-and-forth war between DRM makers and crackers, it looked like Denuvo had established a temporary beachhead recently. A revamped version of the piracy protection (which the community is referring to as “v4”) had started appearing in a handful of games in recent months, and v4 seemed more resistant to the kind of quick cracks that had plagued titles like Resident Evil 7 and Mass Effect Andromeda , which each ran older Denuvo versions. But the Denuvo beachhead has now been breached, as cracking collective CPY has released a DRM-free version of 2Dark , an Alone in the Dark spiritual successor that launched with v4 Denuvo protection about a month ago. The vagaries of Denuvo mean other games with similar protection (including Dead Rising 4 , Nier: Automata ,   and the recently released Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition ) will still need to be cracked individually. Still, the 2Dark crack proves that the newly revamped version of the DRM is just as breakable as the old version (which was itself considered unbreakable for quite a while). That also means Mass Effect: Andromeda , which had Denuvo v4 patched in alongside other improvements after launch, may soon see a cracked version that includes the game’s post-launch updates. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Latest version of Denuvo’s DRM cracked yet again