In 2012 the Macbook Pro Retina wasn’t so much the next stage of laptops as it was a fun oddity by Apple. It was a workstation, designed to handle grueling video and photo editing tasks with aplomb, but it was missing some workstation musts, like a DVD drive or Ethernet port. Instead it was thinner and lighter than a traditional Macbook Pro, had a gorgeous 1800p display, and was outfitted with a solid state drive. Read more…
View article:
Apple’s Best Laptop Is Four Years Old
You might be able to repair your ripped jeans one day just be adding water, thanks to a breakthrough from Penn State researchers. Based on its earlier research on self-healing plastics , the team turned squid teeth proteins (yep) into a liquid form using yeast and bacteria, then used it to coat cotton, wool and other fabrics. If the material is torn, you just need to put the edges together, apply warm water and it magically “heals, ” as flexible and strong as before — even after being laundered. “Fashion designers use natural fibers made of proteins like wool or silk that are expensive and they are not self-healing, ” said Penn State Professor Melik C. Demirel. “We were looking for a way to make fabrics self-healing using conventional textiles. So we came up with this coating technology.” The proteins can be used to fix regular, non-coated fabrics by adding water, or applied to threads before the material is even made. The technique isn’t perfect — there are visible seams — but it’s still better, stronger and easier than any sew job I’d attempt. As the garments can be self-healed by water, throwing them in the wash would also fix small tears or other defects. It sounds great for klutzy clothes owners, but the research, supported by the US Army and Navy research arms, isn’t just aimed at consumers. Dermirel thinks the substance could be adapted to create clothing that protects soldiers, farmers or industrial workers by neutralizing toxic chemicals. “If you need to use enzymes for biological or chemical effects, you can have an encapsulated enzyme with self-healing properties degrade the toxin before it reaches the skin, ” he said. By adding anti-bacterial properties, it could also be used in medical dressings or mesh clothing to reduce infection risks. The team now needs to figure out how to create the proteins without using actual squid or their teeth, and plans to further torture-test the repaired materials. “The next step would be to see if clothes can self-repair when we pour the liquid into a washing machine, like you would a detergent, and apply water and heat, ” Demirel tells CNN . Via: Gizmodo Source: Penn State
Read More:
Squid protein makes textiles self-healing
Even more bad news for Volkswagen: security researchers have discovered a huge security hole that affects potentially up to 100 million cars. It’s possible, using hardware as cheap as a $40 setup with an Arduino and an add-on radio transceiver board, to intercept signals from a Volkswagen Group key fob, and then by combining it with a small number of cryptographic keys shared by every VW car, one could essentially clone the car’s key fob. Read more…
Read More:
Almost Every Volkswagen Built Since 1995 Is Vulnerable To Wireless Unlocking Hacks
If you’re counting on technology to radically extend your lifespan , you’ll want to pay close attention to what’s happening with the Greenland shark. According to a new scientific paper , this mysterious deep-sea dweller can live up to 400 years, making it the longest-lived vertebrate on Earth. Read more…
Read more here:
A 400-Year Old Shark May Hold the Cure to Aging
On August 9, Facebook announced that it had defeated adblockers ; on August 11, Adblock Plus announced that it had defeated Facebook. (more…)
Taken from:
48 hours later, Adblock Plus beats Facebook’s adblocker-blocker
Many people have promised us that 5G will be here very soon. And it will be the best thing ever. To quote Lowell McAdam, the CEO of Verizon, 5G is “wireless fiber, ” and to quote SK Telecom, thanks to 5G we will soon be able to “transfer holograms” because the upcoming standard is “100 times faster” than our current communications system 4G LTE. But if we were to quote Science, the distant future isn’t nearly as lofty as the one promised by executives. Backchannel explains: “5G” is a marketing term. There is no 5G standard — yet. The International Telecommunications Union plans to have standards ready by 2020. So for the moment “5G” refers to a handful of different kinds of technologies that are predicted, but not guaranteed, to emerge at some point in the next 3 to 7 years. (3GPP, a carrier consortium that will be contributing to the ITU process, said last year that until an actual standard exists, ‘”5G’ will remain a marketing & industry term that companies will use as they see fit.” At least they’re candid.) At the moment, advertising something as “5G” carries no greater significance than saying it’s “blazing fast” or “next generation” — nut because “5G” sounds technical, it’s good for sales. We are a long way away from actual deployment. Second, this “wireless fiber” will never happen unless we have… more fiber. Real fiber, in the form of fiber optic cables reaching businesses and homes. (This is the “last mile” problem; fiber already runs between cities.) It’s just plain physics. In order to work, 99% of any “5G” wireless deployment will have to be fiber running very close to every home and business. The high-frequency spectrum the carriers are planning to use wobbles billions of times a second but travels incredibly short distances and gets interfered with easily. So it’s great at carrying loads of information — every wobble can be imprinted with data — but can’t go very far at all. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Follow this link:
Next Generation of Wireless — 5G — Is All Hype
Martin O’Leary not only made a cool fantasy map generator , he’s giving away the source code and has described the process at a high enough level for an idiot like me to partly understand how it works. I wanted to make maps that look like something you’d find at the back of one of the cheap paperback fantasy novels of my youth. I always had a fascination with these imagined worlds, which were often much more interesting than whatever luke-warm sub-Tolkien tale they were attached to. At the same time, I wanted to play with terrain generation with a physical basis. There are loads of articles on the internet which describe terrain generation, and they almost all use some variation on a fractal noise approach, either directly (by adding layers of noise functions), or indirectly (e.g. through midpoint displacement). These methods produce lots of fine detail, but the large-scale structure always looks a bit off. Features are attached in random ways, with no thought to the processes which form landscapes. I wanted to try something a little bit different. It’s an odd feeling to look at these instantly-generated, detailed maps and realize that they represent nothing. I feel like I’m being wasteful pressing the “Generate high resolution map.” The Uncharted Atlas is a twitterbot that posts a new map every hour.
Read more here:
Generate your own random fantasy maps
An anonymous reader writes: In another installment of “Linux has malware too, ” security researchers have discovered a new trojan that targets Linux servers running Redis, where the trojan installs a cryptocurrency miner. The odd fact about this trojan is that it includes a wormable feature that allows it to spread on its own. The trojan, named Linux.Lady, will look for Redis servers that don’t have an admin account password, access the database, and then download itself on the new target. The trojan mines for the Monero crypto-currency, the same one used by another worm called PhotoMiner, which targets vulnerable FTP servers. According to a recent Risk Based Security report from last month, there are over 30, 000 Redis servers available online without a password, of which 6, 000 have already been compromised by various threat actors. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Visit link:
Linux Trojan Mines For Cryptocurrency Using Misconfigured Redis Servers
In a world where thermostats, and smart locks can be hacked, and companies covertly record information, why should sex toys remain unaffected. Fusion is reporting that the We-Vibe 4 Plus, a popular vibrator sends a range of intimate data to its manufacturer. The sex toy uses a smartphone app, which lets a use control the vibration among other things. From the report: When the device is in use, the We-Vibe 4 Plus uses its internet connectivity to regularly send information back to its manufacturer, Standard Innovations Corporation. It sends the device’s temperature every minute, and lets the manufacturer know each time a user changes the device’s vibration level. The company could easily figure out some seriously intimate personal information like when you get off, how long it takes, and with what combinations of vibes. This was revealed on Friday at hacker conference Defcon in Las Vegas by two security researchers, who wish to be called only by their handles @gOldfisk and @rancidbacon. The two examined the app’s code and the information being sent by the device over Bluetooth. In a statement sent by email, Standard Innovation Corporation’s president Frank Ferrari confirmed that the company collects this information. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View the original here:
Popular Sex Toy Caught Sending Intimate Data To Manufacturer
An anonymous reader writes: While Samsung has the world’s largest commercially available SSD coming in at 15.36TB, Seagate officially has the world’s largest SSD for the enterprise. ZDNet reports: “[While Samsung’s PM1633a has a 2.5-inch form factor, ] Seagate’s 60TB Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) SSD on the other hand opts for the familiar HDD 3.5-inch form factor. The company says that its drive has “twice the density and four times the capacity” of Samsung’s PM1633a, and is capable of holding up to 400 million photos or 12, 000 movies. Seagate thinks the 3.5-inch form factor will be useful for managing changing storage requirements in data centers since it removes the need to support separate form factors for hot and cold data. The company says it could also scale up capacity to 100TB in the same form factor. Seagate says the 60TB SSD is currently only a ‘demonstration technology’ though it could release the product commercially as early as next year. It hasn’t revealed the price of the unit but says it will offer ‘the lowest cost per gigabyte for flash available today.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.