Category: reader

Electric-Car Startup Faraday Future Building a $1 Billion Factory In California

An anonymous reader writes: Faraday Future, an electric car startup based in California, wants to take on Tesla and is building a $1 billion factory in the California. Business Insider reports: “The startup of about 400 employees has poached executive talent from Tesla and also draws its name from a luminary scientist — Michael Faraday — who helped harness for humanity the forces of nature. Even Faraday’s public announcement that California, Georgia, Louisiana and Nevada are finalists for the factory mirrors the approach Tesla took to build a massive battery factory. Nevada won that bidding war among several states last year by offering up to $1.3 billion in tax breaks and other incentives. Faraday hopes to distinguish itself by branding the car less as transportation than a tool for the connected class.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Electric-Car Startup Faraday Future Building a $1 Billion Factory In California

Badly-Coded Ransomware Locks User Files and Throws Away Encryption Key

An anonymous reader writes: A new ransomware family was not tested by its developer and is encrypting user files and then throwing away the encryption key because of an error in its programming. The ransomware author wanted to cut down costs by using a static encryption key for all users, but the ransomware kept generating random keys which it did not store anywhere. The only way to recover files is if users had a previous backup. You can detect it by the ransom message which has the same ID:qDgx5Bs8H Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Badly-Coded Ransomware Locks User Files and Throws Away Encryption Key

10,000 wax cylinders digititzed and free to download

The University of California at Santa Barbara library has undertaken an heroic digitization effort for its world-class archive of 19th and early 20th century wax cylinder recordings, and has placed over 10,000 songs online for anyone to download, stream and re-use. (more…)

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10,000 wax cylinders digititzed and free to download

Sorry, No Aliens! The Navy Test Fires Trident Missile Off The Coast Of California

Reports flooded in today stating that the warning areas off the coast of Southern California—around the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range —would be activated, causing noise issues associated with re-routed LAX operations. Theories flew, some being totally absurd. In the end, it was exactly what it should have been—a Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile test. Read more…

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Sorry, No Aliens! The Navy Test Fires Trident Missile Off The Coast Of California

The Keurig Kold: You could just buy a mini-fridge instead

As I took Keurig’s Kold machine out of its box, the first thought that ran through my head was, “Man, Alton Brown would hate this.” You see, the Good Eats and Cutthroat Kitchen host has a vendetta against single-use kitchen gadgets: that is, products designed to do one thing and one thing alone. And it’s usually a purpose that could easily be replicated by another doodad already living in your kitchen. In the case of the Kold, a device that dispenses single servings of cold drinks at the touch of a button, that doodad would be your fridge.Slideshow-339263

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The Keurig Kold: You could just buy a mini-fridge instead

Microsoft considers blocking SHA-1 certificates after cost of collisions slashed

Microsoft may phase out support for TLS certificates that use the SHA-1 hashing algorithm as early as June 2016 . The decision comes in the wake of recent calculations that suggest generating collisions is quicker and cheaper than previously anticipated. SHA-1 is a hash algorithm, used to derive a 128-bit value from an arbitrary input. Its intent is for collisions—different inputs that hash to the same 128-bit value—to be hard to generate. As compute power has steadily grown over the years, it becomes quicker and cheaper to generate collisions. It was previously projected by Bruce Schneier , based on the observed growth of compute power, that creating SHA-1 collisions would be within reach of criminals by 2018 at a cost of about $173,000. On this basis, Microsoft intended to cease supporting the use of new SSL/TLS certificates using SHA-1 on January 1, 2016 and all SHA-1 SSL/TLS certificates on January 1, 2017. The new cost and performance estimates, however, suggest that the cost is both drastically lower—$75,000 to $120,000—and that the compute resources are immediately available through cloud services such as Amazon EC2. This has given browser vendors little option but to reconsider the previous 2017 timetable for retiring support of SHA-1. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Microsoft considers blocking SHA-1 certificates after cost of collisions slashed

LA’s New Streetlamps Will Keep Cell Service Running After an Earthquake

Cities beefing up their smart infrastructure have tapped the ubiquitous streetlamp to track traffic data and measure pollution . Now, in Los Angeles, some streetlights will help keep the communications network intact after an emergency. Read more…

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LA’s New Streetlamps Will Keep Cell Service Running After an Earthquake

An unmanned restaurant where guests cook for themselves

Add / Remove Pushing the idea of the ‘restaurant’ to its absolute limit, Foodsy is a new DIY Amsterdam eatery that does away with staff altogether. Instead, patrons cook, serve and even pay themselves using the food, equipment and instructions provided. Foodsy was created by chef Edwin Sander, and will open in a temporary location this week. Guests will be provided with a menu of recipe cards that they can use to cook for themselves easily in under 20 minutes — diners simply use the raw ingredients, or in some cases pre-prepared soups or stews. There are also instructions for how to tap a beer and the best setting to make their own coffee. Once they have eaten, guests simply pay for their meal using an iPad app. Because there is no staff, most of the meals are significantly cheaper than they would be elsewhere. Of course the unmanned restaurant experience is very unlikely to replace the pleasure of being waited on, but the concept could definitely thrive in busy areas where the trade of casual lunches are prevalent. We have already seen a pop-up restaurant that serves only food cooked by individuals in their homes. How else could eating out be adapted to suit different locations? Website: www.foodsy.amsterdam Contact: info@foodsy.amsterdam The post An unmanned restaurant where guests cook for themselves appeared first on Springwise .

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An unmanned restaurant where guests cook for themselves

First-of-its-kind gene-edited cells treat baby’s leukemia

(credit: Sharon Lees/Great Ormond Street Hospital ) With genetic tweaks and snips, researchers created cancer-busting immune cells that, so far, seem to have wiped out a life-threatening form of leukemia in a one-year-old girl. The new cells are one-size-fits-all, beating out earlier cell-based cancer therapies that required custom engineering of each patient’s own immune cells. If proven effective in more trials, the new, generic cells could offer an easy, off-the-shelf treatment for life-threatening forms of leukemia. “It is something we’ve been waiting for,”  said Stephan Grupp, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved with the research. Previous methods requiring engineering cells, specifically T cells, from every single patient could be slow, costly, and impossible in some patients with low T cell counts. “The innovation here is gene-editing T cells so that one person’s T cells could be given to another even if they are not a donor match,” he said in a statement. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First-of-its-kind gene-edited cells treat baby’s leukemia