Category: reader

First ever online-only NFL game draws over 15 million viewers

(credit: Jaguars.com ) Over the weekend, the NFL and Yahoo streamed the first ever online-only NFL game , a Bills/Jaguars matchup in London. The game was mostly seen as an experiment for the NFL to test the viability of online distribution for a football game. Yahoo seems happy with the turnout, trumpeting 15.2 million unique viewers and 33.6 million total views for the game. The site also claims 33 percent of the streams came from international users. As Deadspin notes, the numbers were seriously pumped up by Yahoo thanks to auto-playing streams on the Yahoo and Tumblr homepages. Anyone who visited either high-traffic homepage counted as a viewer for the game. Still, Yahoo notes that “460 million total minutes” of the game were streamed, which means that each of the 15.2 million viewers hung around for an average of 30 minutes. When the Yahoo/NFL deal was announced, a CNN Money report said that Yahoo paid “at least $10 million” for the rights to the game. The game was available for free online, supported only by advertising. Yahoo promised advertisers 3.5 million viewers in the United States, so things seem to have gone better than expected. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the original article here:
First ever online-only NFL game draws over 15 million viewers

How Microsoft Kept the Surface Book’s Coolest Feature a Secret

The jaw-dropping new Surface Book arrived with a splash of glitter and surprise . It’s so beautiful, so powerful, so— Oh wait holy shit the screen comes off?! Nobody expected this, and that’s exactly how Microsoft wanted it. Read more…

Continue Reading:
How Microsoft Kept the Surface Book’s Coolest Feature a Secret

A Map Of Middle Earth Annotated By J.R.R. Tolkien Has Been Discovered

This is a pretty incredible find: a map of Middle Earth featuring annotations from its creator, J.R.R. Tolkien was recently discovered in a copy of a book owned by illustrator Pauline Baynes, which sheds some light on some of the inspiration behind it. Read more…

Read More:
A Map Of Middle Earth Annotated By J.R.R. Tolkien Has Been Discovered

Functioning Hoverboard Unveiled

An anonymous reader writes: Last year, a company called Arx Pax set up a Kickstarter campaign to develop a functioning hoverboard. Now, the company has demonstrated an updated version of the device, which is fully capable of hovering over a surface made out of conductive metal (video on YouTube). CEO Greg Henderson said, “The hover engine creates a primary magnetic field which is then put over a candidate surface like aluminum or copper. The hover engine then creates swirls of electricity and those create a secondary magnetic field, which propels the firsts.” The device is expensive; Arx Pax is delivering a handful of units to Kickstarter backers who contributed $10, 000. It’s out of the reach of typical consumers, but it does seem to work. Plus, the company is sharing their magnetic field technology with teams taking part in the competition to build pods for a prototype of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop vacuum tube transportation system. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View the original here:
Functioning Hoverboard Unveiled

Engineers Create the Blackest Material Yet

schwit1 writes: Researchers have created the least reflective material ever made, using as inspiration the scales on the all-white cyphochilus beetle. The result was an extremely tiny nanoparticle rod resting on an equally tiny nanoparticle sphere (30 nm diameter) which was able to absorb approximately 98 to 99 percent of the light in the spectrum between 400 and 1, 400nm, which meant it was able to absorb approximately 26 percent more light than any other known material — and it does so from all angles and polarizations. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

View post:
Engineers Create the Blackest Material Yet

Apple Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over iOS Wi-Fi Assist

An anonymous reader writes: A class-action suit has been filed against Apple in U.S. District Court over Wi-Fi Assist being turned on by default in iOS 9. Wi-Fi Assist is designed to switch to cellular data when a user is trying to perform an action over the internet on a poor Wi-Fi signal. This has the natural side effect of using cellular data. Since iOS 9 turned it on for many users, they weren’t necessarily expecting that extra use, causing some of them to exceed their data caps. A former Apple employee who was in a leadership position for Mac OS X Wi-Fi software has commented on the issue, saying that the Wi-Fi Assist mess was unavoidable given how Apple’s management treats that part of the business. Quoting :”[O]ne particular directorial edict which I pushed back against at the end of my tenure sticks out as not just particularly telling, but deeply misguided: ‘Make it self-healing.’ Self healing in this context meaning that the networking system, Wi-Fi in particular, should try to correct problems that caused the network to fail, which, if you have spent any time trying to diagnose networking issues is a clear misunderstanding of the issues involved. … Asking the devices which connect to this vast complex network of networks to detect, and then transparently fix problems in the infrastructure without the permission of the administrators is, well, it’s absolutely the pinnacle of buzzword driven product management. Real pointy-haired boss territory.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See the article here:
Apple Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over iOS Wi-Fi Assist

Patricia, Strongest Hurricane Ever Seen In Eastern Pacific, Strikes In Mexico

CNN reports that Hurricane Patricia has made landfall in Mexico; Patricia is notable for having the third-lowest barometer reading ever recorded, and as “the strongest hurricane ever observed in the eastern Pacific or Atlantic oceans.” Slate points out that at one point, “satellite estimates of Patricia’s intensity broke the Dvorak scale, peaking at 8.3 on the 8.0 scale. … In fact, Patricia is now very close to the theoretical maximum strength for a tropical cyclone on planet Earth.” The Weather Channel is tracking the storm’s path, and predicts “catastrophic damage … along a narrow path as the eye slices into the interior of southwest Mexico Friday night.” Here’s a map from the National Weather Service showing Patricia’s track as well as projected path. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See the article here:
Patricia, Strongest Hurricane Ever Seen In Eastern Pacific, Strikes In Mexico

DoJ to Apple: your software is licensed, not sold, so we can force you to decrypt

The DoJ is currently trying to force Apple to decrypt data stored on a defendant’s Iphone, and Apple, to its great credit, is fighting back, arguing that on the one hand, it doesn’t have the technical capability to do so; and on the other, should not be required to do so. (more…)

Originally posted here:
DoJ to Apple: your software is licensed, not sold, so we can force you to decrypt

Joomla bug puts millions of websites at risk of remote takeover hacks

Enlarge / Here’s the control panel hackers can access by exploiting a just-patched Joomla vulnerability. (credit: Spiderlabs) Millions of websites used in e-commerce and other sensitive industries are vulnerable to remote take-over hacks made possible by a critical vulnerability that has affected the Joomla content management system for almost two years. The SQL-injection vulnerability was patched by Joomla on Thursday with the release of version 3.4.5 . The vulnerability, which allows attackers to execute malicious code on servers running Joomla, was first introduced in version 3.2 released in early November 2013. Joomla is used by an estimated 2.8 million websites. “Because the vulnerability is found in a core module that doesn’t require any extensions, all websites that use Joomla versions 3.2 and above are vulnerable,” Asaf Orpani, a researcher inside Trustwave’s Spiderlabs, wrote in a blog post  (the post appears to be offline at the moment, but it was working through most of Friday morning). The vulnerability, and two closely related security flaws, have been cataloged as CVE-2015-7297, CVE-2015-7857, and CVE-2015-7858. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Original post:
Joomla bug puts millions of websites at risk of remote takeover hacks