Sit in the orchestra pit with Google’s 360-degree video

To get a good view of a world-class orchestra in New York’s Carnegie Hall, you normally have to buy an expensive front row seat. With a little help from Google, however, you can now sit on stage for free. The company is launching a “virtual exhibition” today called Performing Arts which includes four performances recorded with multiple 360-degree camera rigs. Alongside Carnegie Hall , you can experience the Berliner Philharmoniker , London’s Royal Shakespeare Company and the Theatro Municipal in São Paulo. Via: Google (Blog Post) Source: Performing Arts

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Sit in the orchestra pit with Google’s 360-degree video

Meet the only micro HD-camera drone in the world that can fly upside down

The Micro Drone 2.0+ is truly in a league of its own, offering a new perspective on aerial photography, and a world of technological capabilities that make flying ridiculously fun. Simply throw it in the air at any angle and its self-correcting algorithm will stabilize for smooth sailing in no time. You’ll stay entertained with flips, rolls, 720p HD videography, and much more. Performs 360-degree flips w/ the pre-programmed algorithm Captures HD video from upside down w/ a flick of a switch Stabilizes to its horizontal flying position w/ self-righting algorithm & sensors Designed to be durable & extremely fun to fly Perfect for flying indoors & outside (doesn’t suffer stability issues in wind) Easily recharges via USB Includes a range up to 400 ft & an 8 minute flight time per charge Get the Extreme Micro Drone 2.0+ for 42% off ($99.99) in the Boing Boing Store today.   

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Meet the only micro HD-camera drone in the world that can fly upside down

Why wouldn’t Reader’s Digest remove malware from its website?

For nigh on a week, the internet hollered at Reader’s Digest to remove malware from its website, to no apparent response . The attack consists of a malicious script injected within compromised WordPress sites that launches another URL whose final purpose is to load the Angler exploit kit. Site owners that have been affected should keep in mind that those injected scripts/URLs will vary over time, although they are all using the same pattern (see IOCs below for some examples). The website of popular magazine Reader’s Digest is one of the victims of this campaign and people who have visited the portal recently should make sure they have not been infected. The payload we observed at the time of capture was Bedep which loaded Necurs a backdoor Trojan, but that of course can change from day to day. Dan Goodin got exasperated: Hey Reader’s Digest: Your site has been attacking visitors for days . Reader’s Digest has been infected since last week with code originating with Angler, an off-the-shelf hack-by-numbers exploit kit that saves professional criminals the hassle of developing their own attack scripts, researchers from antivirus provider Malwarebytes told Ars. People who visit the site with outdated versions of Adobe Flash, Internet Explorer, and other browsing software are silently infected with malware that gains control over their computers. Malwarebytes researchers said they sent Reader’s Digest operators e-mails and social media alerts last week warning the site was infected but never got a response. The researchers estimate that thousands of other sites have been similarly attacked in recent weeks and that the number continues to grow. 1. If you would like an ill-informed passive-aggressive quip, go to 2 . If you would like earnest outrage, go to 3 . If you would like to hear the voice of reason that really isn’t, go to 4 . 2. What give$, Readers Digest? 3. They’re probably being paid to do it, isn’t that disgusting? 4. Guys, it’s Readers’ Digest. They’re all 120 years old and have no idea what a website is or why they have one.

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Why wouldn’t Reader’s Digest remove malware from its website?

MST3K Kickstarter Poised To Break Kickstarter Record

New submitter the_Bionic_lemming writes: Recently Joel Hodgson, the creator of Mystery Science 3000 — which had a successful run of over 197 shows — has after 15 years launched a kickstarter to relaunch the series. In just over two weeks Joel has been wildly successful in not only having over 25000 fans contribute, but actually scoring the second-highest show kickstarter on record — he has just under two weeks to shoot past the Number 1 kickstarter, Veronica Mars. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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MST3K Kickstarter Poised To Break Kickstarter Record

Google hires the lead for Tesla’s semi-autonomous driving tech

Apple and Tesla aren’t the only two tech companies grabbing each other’s staff to fulfill their automotive dreams — Google has quietly hired Robert Rose, the lead for Tesla’s semi-autonomous Autopilot program. It’s not clear what he’s working on besides software at Google Robotics, but it won’t be surprising if he’s working on self-driving cars . He’s unlikely to be working for Boston Dynamics , whose staff are relatively independent from the Google mothership. One thing’s for sure: Tesla will notice his absence. Rose was the lead engineer for some of SpaceX’s earlier rocketry and reported directly to Elon Musk while at Tesla, so this clearly wasn’t a trivial move. [Image credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images] Via: 9to5Google Source: LinkedIn

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Google hires the lead for Tesla’s semi-autonomous driving tech

How to Quickly Flush the RAM on Your iPhone

Apps misbehaving? Phone acting sluggish? If you’re experiencing any kind of problem with your iPhone, then emptying out the device’s RAM can often do wonders. It effectively ditches everything the phone was trying to juggle in its memory at once. Restarting your iPhone is one way of doing this, but there is a quicker option. Read more…

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How to Quickly Flush the RAM on Your iPhone

The Horrifying Vtech Hack Let Someone Download Thousands of Photos of Children

The latest details about a recent security breach at a kids’ toy company are in, and they are disturbing. A couple weeks ago, hackers successfully broke into the servers of connected toy maker Vtech and stole the personal information of nearly 5 million parents and over 200, 000 kids. What we didn’t know until now: The hackers stole pictures of kids, too. Read more…

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The Horrifying Vtech Hack Let Someone Download Thousands of Photos of Children

Apple’s A9X has a 12-core GPU and is made by TSMC

Enlarge / A die shot of the A9X. The ratio of GPU to CPU is becoming pretty insane. (credit: Chipworks via AnandTech ) Apple makes interesting chips for its mobile devices, but it doesn’t talk about them much aside from extremely high-level relative performance comparisons. That means it’s up to experts like the ones at Chipworks to open them up and figure it out, and they’ve partnered up with AnandTech to dig into the A9X in the iPad Pro. The most significant news is about the GPU, which is a 12-core Imagination Technologies PowerVR Series 7XT design. The company doesn’t generally offer a 12-core design, as shown in the chart below, but the architecture is designed to be easily scalable and it wouldn’t be the first time Apple had gotten something from a supplier that other companies couldn’t get. The standard A9 in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus uses a 6-core version of the same GPU. Apple feeds that GPU with a 128-bit memory bus, something that it’s also included in other iPads to boost memory bandwidth and GPU performance. The Series 7XT lineup. The iPad Pro’s GPU falls somewhere in between the stock 8-cluster and 16-cluster designs. (credit: Imagination Technologies) Imagination’s chart for the Series 7XT GPU puts a hypothetical 12-core design in the same general performance neighborhood as an Nvidia GeForce GT 730M, a low-end discrete GPU that’s a bit slower than the stuff Apple is shipping in its high-end MacBook Pros. Our own graphics benchmarks place it a bit higher than that, but as some of you have pointed out , iOS may have a small advantage in some of these tests because of differences between the mobile OpenGL ES API in iOS and the standard OpenGL API used in OS X. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple’s A9X has a 12-core GPU and is made by TSMC

The National Security Letter spy tool has been uncloaked, and it’s bad

It took 11 years to finally unveil what the FBI demands in a National Security Letter. How it evolved over the years is shown above. (credit: ACLU ) The National Security Letter (NSL) is a potent surveillance tool that allows the government to acquire a wide swath of private information—all without a warrant. Federal investigators issue tens of thousands of them each year to banks, ISPs, car dealers, insurance companies, doctors, and you name it. The letters don’t need a judge’s signature and come with a gag to the recipient, forbidding the disclosure of the NSL to the public or the target. Nicholas Merrill (credit: Wikipedia ) For the first time, as part of a First Amendment lawsuit, a federal judge ordered the release of what the FBI was seeking from a small ISP as part of an NSL. Among other things, the FBI was demanding a target’s complete Web browsing history, IP addresses of everyone a person has corresponded with, and records of all online purchases, according to a court document unveiled Monday. All that’s required is an agent’s signature denoting that the information is relevant to an investigation. “The FBI has interpreted its NSL authority to encompass the websites we read, the Web searches we conduct, the people we contact, and the places we go. This kind of data reveals the most intimate details of our lives, including our political activities, religious affiliations, private relationships, and even our private thoughts and beliefs,” said Nicholas Merrill, who was president of Calyx Internet Access in New York when he received the NSL targeting one of his customers in 2004. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The National Security Letter spy tool has been uncloaked, and it’s bad

Hey Reader’s Digest: Your site has been attacking visitors for days

Enlarge (credit: Malwarebytes ) An active hacking campaign is forcing Reader’s Digest and many other websites to host malicious code that can surreptitiously infect visitors with malware and linger for days or weeks before being cleaned up. Reader’s Digest has been infected since last week with code originating with Angler, an off-the-shelf hack-by-numbers exploit kit that saves professional criminals the hassle of developing their own attack scripts, researchers from antivirus provider Malwarebytes told Ars. People who visit the site with outdated versions of Adobe Flash, Internet Explorer, and other browsing software are silently infected with malware that gains control over their computers. Malwarebytes researchers said they sent Reader’s Digest operators e-mails and social media alerts last week warning the site was infected but never got a response. The researchers estimate that thousands of other sites have been similarly attacked in recent weeks and that the number continues to grow. “This campaign is still ongoing and we see dozens of new websites every day being leveraged to distribute malware via the Angler exploit kit,” Malwarebytes Senior Security Researcher Jérôme Segura wrote in an e-mail. “This attack may have been going on for some time but we noticed a dramatic increase in infections via WordPress sites in the past couple of weeks.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Hey Reader’s Digest: Your site has been attacking visitors for days