Last month, it was alleged that the Internal Revenue Service had been using Stingray devices to track people by scraping their phone metadata. Now, it’s admitted as much—and gone so far as to say that it wants another of the units, too. Read more…
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IRS Admits to Using the Same Spy Tech as the FBI to Track 37 Phones
If you’re looking for a free iOS game, an interesting new option has just opened up. Puzzle-adventure game Monument Valley managed to pull off the hat trick of being fun, zen and beautiful all at the same time — which helped garner it Apple’s Game of the Year and Design awards for 2014. The title, normally $4, is now showing as “free, ” though there’s no word on how long that offer will last. After launching in May last year, it had earned $5.8 million by January 2015, mostly from sales to iOS gamers (creator Ustwo said that only 5 percent of Android sales were paid). Via: @Wario64 (Twitter) Source: iTunes
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Apple game of the year ‘Monument Valley’ is now free on iOS
A telephone regulator has warned that festive decorations can spoil your festive internet fun. Here’s the science. Read more…
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Can Christmas Lights Really Play Havoc With Your Wi-Fi?
Uber is partnering with Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and—as the slogan goes—they’ll pick you up! By “they” I mean the poor schmucks who sign up to pay around $1000 a month to work for Uber. Read more…
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Uber Launches Insane "Pay-to-Work" Car Rental Program
Augmented reality (AR) isn’t all headsets and funny glasses . Amazon wants to turn it into something that you can interact with in your living room, judging by a couple of the company’s recently approved patents. The ” object tracking ” patent shows how a system of projectors and cameras could beam virtual images onto real objects, and track your hand while you interact with them. The other, called ” reflector-based depth mapping , ” would use a projector to transform your room into a kind of holodeck, mapping the depth of objects and bodies in a room. Via: Bloomberg Source: USPTO (1) , (2)
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Amazon wants augmented reality to be headset-free
(credit: Steven Depolo/Flickr ) After more than a quarter of a century of rising diabetes rates, the number of new cases seems to be on a downward trend. From 1980 to 2009, the annual number of new diabetes cases more than tripled in the US, going from 493,000 to 1.7 million diagnoses a year in people aged 18 to 79. But since 2009, case numbers appear to have slumped, though the decline had not registered as statistically significant. Now, using newly released data from 2014 , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that case numbers are definitely on their first sustained decline. In 2014, the number of diagnosed cases was down to 1.4 million. “It seems pretty clear that incidence rates have now actually started to drop,” said Edward Gregg, one of the CDC’s top diabetes researchers told the New York Times . “Initially it was a little surprising because I had become so used to seeing increases everywhere we looked.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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New diabetes cases finally on the decline
Western Digital’s HGST division has released the world’s first helium-filled 10TB hard drive for everyday use—assuming you have about £600 burning a hole in your pocket, anyway. Meanwhile, despite reiterating that it would have a 10TB drive on the market this year, Seagate hasn’t yet moved past the 8TB mark. The Ultrastar He10 is notable for two reasons: it’s hermetically sealed and filled with helium, which is still a rather novel idea; and it has seven platters crammed into a standard-height 25.4mm (1-inch) hard drive. PMR vs. SMR. With SMR, there’s almost no guard space between tracks, which increases density but can reduce write speed (if you want to rewrite a track in the middle, you may also have to rewrite the adjacent tracks as well). (credit: Seagate) The platters themselves are impressive, too: instead of using shingled magnetic recording (SMR) to boost areal density, these platters use conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). PMR has been the standard hard drive recording tech since 2005, when it replaced longitudinal recording. The move to PMR has increased the maximum platter density by an order of magnitude—from about 100Gb per square inch to 1000Gb—but now, alas, we’re beginning to hit the limits of PMR. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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HGST beats Seagate to market with helium-filled 10TB hard drive
The crowning glory of Amazon’s just dropped post-Thanksgiving press missive — trumpeting apparently accelerating holiday sales — is the lack of any actual metrics… Read More
An anonymous reader writes: The city of Los Angeles is considering a new plan to fight prostitution: sending letters to men who solicit prostitutes in the hopes that the letters are seen by family members. Why not just arrest them while they’re doing it? Because these letters aren’t being sent to the houses of men who were convicted, or even arrested. Instead, automated license plate readers would scan the cars driving down streets known to have a prostitution problem, and the letters would be sent to the address associated with those vehicles. An article about the plan says, “There isn’t ‘potential’ for abuse here, this is a legislated abuse of technology that is already controversial when it’s used by police for the purpose of seeking stolen vehicles, tracking down fugitives and solving specific crimes.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Los Angeles Flirts With Pre-Crime
T-Mobile’s Music Freedom , a program that allows you to stream music from select services without it counting against your data cap, has been around since June last year. As of today, there’s 11 more services you can use without worrying. Read more…
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T-Mobile Is Adding 11 More Services to Its Unmetered Music Freedom