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Intel Launches SSD 750 Series Consumer NVMe PCI Express SSD At Under $1 Per GiB

MojoKid writes Today, Intel took the wraps off new NVMe PCI Express Solid State Drives, which are the first products with these high speed interfaces, that the company has launched specifically for the enthusiast computing and workstation market. Historically, Intel’s PCI Express-based offerings, like the SSD DC P3700 Series, have been targeted for datacenter or enterprise applications, with price tags to match. However, the Intel SSD 750 Series PCI Express SSD, though based on the same custom NVMe controller technology as the company’s expensive P3700 drive, will drop in at less than a dollar per GiB, while offering performance almost on par with its enterprise-class sibling. Available in 400GB and 1.2TB capacities, the Intel SSD 750 is able to hit peak read and write bandwidth numbers of 2.4GB/sec and 1.2GB/sec, respectively. In the benchmarks, it takes many of the top PCIe SSD cards to task easily and at $389 for a 400GB model, you won’t have to sell an organ to afford one. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Launches SSD 750 Series Consumer NVMe PCI Express SSD At Under $1 Per GiB

After 150,000 Years in a Cave, a Neanderthal Skull Looks Like This

This is the Altamura Man. He’s old . In 1993, cave researchers stumbled across an odd formation in Italy: a skull that had essentially grown over time to become part of the cave, calcite budding from its features. Now, scientists have discovered that it could easily be 150, 000 years old. Read more…

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After 150,000 Years in a Cave, a Neanderthal Skull Looks Like This

TrueCrypt security audit is good news, so why all the glum faces?

The ongoing audit of the TrueCrypt whole-disk encryption tool used by millions of privacy and security enthusiasts has reached an important milestone—a detailed review of its cryptographic underpinnings that found no backdoors or fatal flaws. The 21-page Open Cryptographic review published Thursday uncovered four vulnerabilities, the most serious of which involved the use of a Windows programming interface to generate random numbers used by cryptographic keys. While that’s a flaw that cryptographers say should be fixed, there’s no immediate indication that the bug undermines the core security promise of TrueCrypt. To exploit it and the other bugs, attackers would most likely have to compromise the computer running the crypto program. None of the vulnerabilities appear to allow the leaking of plaintext or secret key material or allow attackers to use malformed inputs to subvert TrueCrypt. The report was produced by researchers from information security consultancy NCC Group . “The TL;DR is that based on this audit, TrueCrypt appears to be a relatively well-designed piece of crypto software,” Matt Green, a Johns Hopkins University professor specializing in cryptography and an audit organizer, wrote in a blog post accompanying Thursday’s report . “The NCC audit found no evidence of deliberate backdoors, or any severe design flaws that will make the software insecure in most instances.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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TrueCrypt security audit is good news, so why all the glum faces?

OnLive shuts down streaming games service, sells patents to Sony

The first company to try to make a business out of streaming gameplay over the Internet will soon be shutting down its service. OnLive announced today that its servers will go offline on April 30, and that the company is selling its portfolio of patents to Sony Computer Entertainment America. The announcement comes almost exactly six years after OnLive first announced its plans in the nascent streaming gaming space. The idea was to take in user input over the Internet, put it through a game running on high-end hardware at a centralized server location, then send back video and audio to end user hardware that could be significantly cheaper and less powerful. The service and a $100 microconsole launched in late 2010 , but suffered from noticeable latency and image quality issues in our initial tests. With its pay-per-game service and a limited subscription-based streaming model failing to connect with many consumers, OnLive faced massive layoffs and a drastic business restructuring in 2012. The company soldiered on to launch a new hybrid streaming/downloadable game plan last year, though. Players who took part in that hybrid plan will still be able to play their purchased games through Steam, but streaming games purchased through Cloudlift or the older Playpass subscriptions will no longer be usable after the end of the month. OnLive will continue to exist as a corporate entity to manage remaining unsold assets such as trademarks, copyrights, and product designs. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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OnLive shuts down streaming games service, sells patents to Sony

A Fire Has Raged Beneath London For 24 Hours Straight

The most complex and important parts of our city are below our feet. If things go right, we never even notice the thick layer cake of cables, pipes, insulation, and refuse that are packed right under the pavement. But in London yesterday and today, the city got a smokey reminder . Read more…

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A Fire Has Raged Beneath London For 24 Hours Straight

Google intros a way to run Android apps on desktop platforms

A handful of Android apps made their way to Chrome OS last year, thanks to Google’s native client called App Runtime for Chrome (ARC). Now, Google is giving all Android developers access to ARC and not just well-known ones like the creators of Evernote and Vine (two of the apps ported in 2014). To be exact, Mountain View has released an app/browser extension called ARC Welder that packages Android APKs into applications for Chrome OS and other desktop platforms. Yes, these converted apps could work even on Mac, Windows and Linux computers loaded with the Chrome browser. We say “could, ” because the final products don’t always work. Ars Technica put a few applications to the test and found that a lot of them don’t run on computers, because, well, they were designed for smartphones and tablets. Developers can tweak their creations if they stop running after going through ARC Welder, though. Once they’re done, they can upload the files directly to the Chrome Web Store. Even if you’re not a developer, you can still use ARC Welder to convert APKs on your own, but as we said, don’t be surprised if some of them don’t work. Filed under: Laptops , Google Comments Via: OMG! Chrome! Source: Chrome Developers , ARC Welder

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Google intros a way to run Android apps on desktop platforms

BMW can’t build its $135,000 plug-in hybrid fast enough

Gas may be cheap right now, but even the well-to-do prefer not to burn it. BMW is doubling the production pace of its 357 horsepower i8 plug-in hybrid car — which runs 23 miles or so on electricity alone — to around 20 vehicles per day. The automaker is bumping the numbers to meet demand and cut the four-month waiting list in half. As our sister site Autoblog pointed out, that’s a mere .04 percent of an F-150’s production, but then again the i8 costs around four times as much. A more apt comparison might be against the Tesla Model S , with sales of 35, 000 units last year, compared to 18, 000 BMW i3 EVs and i8 plug-in hybrids, combined. At the same time, Chevy sold nearly 19, 000 copies of its plug-in hybrid Volt in 2014, while Nissan sold 30, 000 Leaf EVs for a combined 7 percent bump over 2013. That shows not only that BMW is holding its own in the clean vehicle market, sales-wise, but that the overall market is growing — even in a time of $2 per gallon gas. [Image credit: Autoblog] Filed under: Transportation Comments Via: Autoblog Source: Automotive News Europe

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BMW can’t build its $135,000 plug-in hybrid fast enough

Comcast’s new broadband service is twice as fast as Google Fiber

Comcast has drawn a new battle line against Google Fiber by launching a 2Gbps fiber broadband service called Gigabit Pro . It arrives next month in Atlanta and will be available in 18 million homes across the US by the end of the year. The package will deliver symmetric uploads and downloads like Fiber does, but at twice its 1Gbps speed. Mountain View had already announced that it would bring Fiber to Atlanta, but Comcast will now beat it to the punch both in timing and data rates. Comcast also tweaked Google’s nose by saying “our approach is to offer the most comprehensive rollout of multi-gigabit service to the most homes as quickly as possible, not just to certain neighborhoods.” That’s a reference to the search giant’s glacially slow rollout of its highly-sought service. However, most consumers don’t mind dealing with Google, something Comcast certainly can’t say. It’s been mired in bad press over customer service issues , and has adamantly opposed new net neutrality rules that are favored by consumers. That said, the sheer speed of the service is impressive. Comcast emphasized that you’ll need to be in an urban center near its fiber network and will require a “professional-grade” installation. It hasn’t revealed pricing yet, but given similarities to its business-grade service, we’d expect it to be costly. However, you might get a break if you’re in a city that also has Google Fiber. Filed under: Internet Comments Via: The Verge Source: Comcast

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Comcast’s new broadband service is twice as fast as Google Fiber

Google Chrome will banish Chinese certificate authority for breach of trust

Google’s Chrome browser will stop trusting all digital certificates issued by the China Internet Network Information Center following a major trust breach last week that led to the issuance of unauthorized credentials for Gmail and several other Google domains . The move could have major consequences for huge numbers of Internet users as Chrome, the world’s most widely used browser, stops recognizing all website certificates issued by CNNIC. To give affected website operators time to obtain new credentials from a different certificate authority, Google will wait an unspecified period of time before implementing the change. Once that grace period ends, Google engineers will blacklist both CNNIC’s root and extended-validation certificates in Chrome and all other Google software. The unauthorized certificates were issued by Egypt-based MCS Holdings , an intermediate certificate authority that operated under the authority of CNNIC. MCS used the certificates in a man-in-the-middle proxy, a device that intercepts secure connections by masquerading as the intended destination. Such devices are sometimes used by companies to monitor employees’ encrypted traffic for legal or human resources reasons. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google Chrome will banish Chinese certificate authority for breach of trust