The latest version of the iOS 9 beta has brought some goodies, among them the new Wi-Fi Assist feature, which will recognize bad Wi-Fi connections, and use cellular data instead. http://gizmodo.com/ios-9-preview-… Read more…
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iOS 9 Will Use Cell Data When Your Wi-Fi Sucks
astroengine writes: As a suitably impressive follow-up to the new “blue marble” image of our world released in July, NASA shared a gorgeous animation created from pictures captured by NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft positioned nearly a million miles (1.5 million km) away — over four times farther than the moon. In a series of images acquired between 3:50 and 8:45 p.m. EDT on July 16, 2015, the moon can be seen passing in front of a rotating Earth, the warm gray face of its far side framed by the swirling-cloud-covered blue water of the eastern Pacific Ocean. The north pole is at the 11 o’clock position, illustrating our planet’s 23.5-degree axial tilt. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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An Epic View of the Moon In Earth’s Orbital Embrace
Android: Last month, we got news of a particularly nasty Android vulnerability called Stagefright that affects nearly every Android device. If you want to find out if you’re vulnerable, Stagefright Detector can let you know. Read more…
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Stagefright Detector Detects if Your Phone Is Vulnerable to Stagefright
There’s no shortage of smart water bottles on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. But when a brand like Thermos enters the game with a new smart lid for its bottles that tracks hydration and even monitors the temperature of your water, you better pay attention. Read more…
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Thermos’ New Smart Bottle Tells You When Your Water’s Warm and Gross
Last month, science fiction fans gave a collective thumbs-up when Team Angry Filmworks announced that it was planning to produce a new Buck Rogers flick— Armageddon 2419 A.D. The Rogers character, originally known as “Anthony Rogers,” first appeared in the 1928 novella by the same name, Armageddon 2419 A.D . It was penned by science fiction author Philip Francis Nowlan and appeared in the magazine Amazing Stories . And producer Don Murphy, who was behind Natural Born Killers , The Transformers , and other films, seemed dead set on recreating the science fiction spaceman. But Nowlan’s heirs say the potential blockbuster needs a license from the Dille Family Trust, which owns the rights to the Buck Rogers namesake and the original Armageddon 2419 A.D, according to a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles. Team Angry Filmworks, on the other hand, contends that the character has fallen out of copyright and is in the public domain, free for anybody to exploit. The Hollywood studio wants a federal judge to declare that the character is in the public domain. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Is Buck Rogers in the public domain? New movie hangs in the balance
The age of the copper land-line is nearing its end, but traditional phone lines aren’t going quietly: new rules from the FCC now require service providers notify customers of the impending removal and drawbacks of switching to a VOIP line three months before killing a copper network. It sounds like a reasonable move — customers need to know that the technology replacing their traditional land-line won’t work during a power-outage without an external power source — but not everybody at the FCC is happy with the new rules. “It appears that Chicken Little rules the roost, ” writes Commissioner Ajit Pai in a dissent to the updated transition rules. “By dragging out the copper retirement process , the FCC is adopting ‘regulations that deter rather than promote fiber deployment.'” Pai argues that the FCC is making it more difficult for companies to modernize their networks because lobbyists are claiming that retiring copper will cause the “sky to fall, ” disrupting services and hurting their business model. He has a point — but wouldn’t you want to be notified if the phone company was changing out your voice service worked? Check out the FCC’s official announcement at the source link below. [Image Credit: Raymond Kleboe via Getty Images] Filed under: Misc Comments Source: Verge , FCC Tags: copper, copperlandline, fcc, landline, phones, telco, telephone
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Phone companies ditching copper wires will have to follow the rules
All electronic devices emit radio waves when they’re powered on , even if they don’t connect to the internet or Bluetooth. Governments have been using these accidental waves to spy on each other since the 1960s—but this week, a computer scientist at the Black Hat hacker conference took the idea way further than we’d thought possible. Read more…
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This Zombie Printer Was Hacked To Broadcast Radio Waves
If you look at the picture above, you probably think of the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, costumed heroes who have been kicking their way across TV in different incarnations for nearly 20 years—but you’d be wrong. These are actually the Zyurangers, the stars of a Japanese TV series that inadvertently spawned a global sensation. Read more…
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Secret Origins Of The Japanese Superhero Show That Became Power Rangers
The Matchstick , a Firefox-OS-based Chromecast-style device, kickstarted on the promise of bringing open, user-rights-respecting video to our homes — then they decided to add DRM. Read the rest
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Open "Chromecast killer" committed suicide-by-DRM
Judging by recent announcements, we’re about to enter a golden age of fast, nearly unlimited storage for all the high-res selfies you can shoot. Following an announcement by Intel and Micron last week , Toshiba and partner SanDisk revealed their own 256Gb flash chips. Toshiba already has the smallest flash cells in the world at 15 nanometers, which it stacks in 48 layers to maximize density. The new chips add in 3-bit tech (first used by Samsung ) to squeeze even more bytes in, helping it double the storage of chips it announced just a few months ago. The result will be faster and more reliable memory for smartphones, SSDs and other devices. Intel and Micron announced 256Gb chips using different, 32-layer tech earlier this year , so they may beat Toshiba/SanDisk to the manufacturing punch. Consumers will be the main beneficiaries of the rivalry, in any case. Micron said the tech will eventually yield up to 10TB laptop drives at much lower prices per gigabyte than current models. It’ll also result in cheaper and faster memory chips for smartphones and other mobile devices. Toshiba’s in the process of building its new fab plant in Japan, and said the 256Gb chips will be available sometime in 2016. Filed under: Storage Comments Source: Toshiba
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Toshiba’s new flash chips hold twice the data