How Sound Engineers Made the Millennium Falcon’s Most Iconic Noise

The Millennium Falcon is the king of cool when it comes to classic sci-fi spaceships. The vessel is a kitbashed masterpiece and bold image that screams Star Wars. It’s also a “piece of junk, ” a “bucket of bolts, ” and constant headache for Han Solo and company, but hey, she’s got it where it counts. Read more…

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How Sound Engineers Made the Millennium Falcon’s Most Iconic Noise

Facebook Is Ditching Bing’s Search Results

Facebook and Microsoft have had a relatively long-standing partnership when it comes to search: for years, Facebook searches would also show Bing results, and Bing queries have thrown up results from your friends. But history seems to mean very little to Facebook, which appears to have quietly killed Bing results. Read more…

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Facebook Is Ditching Bing’s Search Results

Peru Indignant After Greenpeace Damages Ancient Nazca Site

HughPickens.com writes The NYT reports that Peruvian authorities say Greenpeace activists have damaged the fragile, and restricted, landscape near the Nazca lines, ancient man-made designs etched in the Peruvian desert when they placed a large sign that promoted renewable energy near a set of lines that form the shape of a giant hummingbird. The sign was meant to draw the attention of world leaders, reporters and others who were in Lima, the Peruvian capital, for a United Nations summit meeting aimed at reaching an agreement to address climate change. Greenpeace issued a statement apologizing for the stunt at the archaeological site and its international executive director, Kumi Naidoo, flew to Lima to apologize for scarring one of Peru’s most treasured national symbols. “We are not ready to accept apologies from anybody, ” says Luis Jaime Castillo, the vice minister for cultural heritage. “Let them apologize after they repair the damage.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Peru Indignant After Greenpeace Damages Ancient Nazca Site

Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte ‘Archive’ Hard Drive

MojoKid writes Seagate’s just-announced a new ‘Archive’ HDD series, one that offers densities of 5TB, 6TB, and 8TB. That’s right, 8 Terabytes of storage on a single drive and for only $260 at that. Back in 2007, Seagate was one of the first to release a hard drive based on perpendicular magnetic recording, a technology that was required to help us break past the roadblock of achieving more than 250GB per platter. Since then, PMR has evolved to allow the release of drives as large as 10TB, but to go beyond that, something new was needed. That “something new” is shingled magnetic recording. As its name suggests, SMR aligns drive tracks in a singled pattern, much like shingles on a roof. With this design, Seagate is able to cram much more storage into the same physical area. It should be noted that Seagate isn’t the first out the door with an 8TB model, however, as HGST released one earlier this year. In lieu of a design like SMR, HGST decided to go the helium route, allowing it to pack more platters into a drive. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Seagate Bulks Up With New 8 Terabyte ‘Archive’ Hard Drive

Report: The FBI Is Warning US Businesses About Iranian Hackers

On the heels of a research paper published about a global Iranian hacking operation , Operation Cleaver, the FBI is now warning critical US businesses that they might be targets of Iran’s team of hackers. Read more…

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Report: The FBI Is Warning US Businesses About Iranian Hackers

Dropbox makes it easy for workmates to edit Office files

In November, Dropbox users gained the ability to edit Office files from within the app, thanks to its partnership with Microsoft. Now, the company has launched its first set of Project Harmony tools so groups of workmates can take advantage of that feature — but only if they’re Business users part of Dropbox’s early access program. These features, which were first previewed when the company started letting users link their business and personal accounts, can make team projects, well, more bearable than usual. Each Word, Excel or Powerpoint file now comes with a Dropbox “badge” on the margin, and clicking it reveals options that shows each user who else is editing. It also shows if the other person has saved a newer version and includes an option to generate a link without having to leave the document, spreadsheet or presentation. Dropbox didn’t mention anything about a wider release, but seeing as the company calls these tools the “first phase” of Project Harmony, it probably has more in store to help prevent workplace tiffs. Filed under: Misc , Mobile , Microsoft Comments Via: Venturebeat , GigaOm Source: Dropbox for Business

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Dropbox makes it easy for workmates to edit Office files

Steam’s first “Holiday Auction” halted after dupe bug ruins market [Updated]

Update:  Valve has updated its auction site to note that the Gem auctions will return “shortly” and that “an issue with Gems… means we need to reset and start again.” Specifically: All gems created by you will be returned to your Inventory. All Gem purchases from the Community Market will be reimbursed. All Auction bids have been canceled and the Auction will be reset. Trades involving Gems are being investigated on a case-by-case basis. Original Story The virtual “Holiday Auction” Steam first announced yesterday evening seemed like a cute idea at the time. For a limited time, users would be able to trade in unused or unwanted Steam Inventory items for “gems,” which could in turn, starting Monday, be used to bid against others on codes for 2,000 Steam games, 200,000 copies in all. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Steam’s first “Holiday Auction” halted after dupe bug ruins market [Updated]

Possible Dark Matter Signal Spotted

TaleSlinger sends this news from Space.com: Astronomers may finally have detected a signal of dark matter, the mysterious and elusive stuff thought to make up most of the material universe. While poring over data collected by the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton spacecraft, a team of researchers spotted an odd spike in X-ray emissions coming from two different celestial objects — the Andromeda galaxy and the Perseus galaxy cluster. “The signal’s distribution within the galaxy corresponds exactly to what we were expecting with dark matter — that is, concentrated and intense in the center of objects and weaker and diffuse on the edges, ” [assuming that dark matter consists of sterile neutrinos] study co-author Oleg Ruchayskiy, of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, said in a statement. “With the goal of verifying our findings, we then looked at data from our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and made the same observations, ” added lead author Alexey Boyarsky, of EPFL and Leiden University in the Netherlands. The decay of sterile neutrinos is thought to produce X-rays, so the research team suspects these may be the dark matter particles responsible for the mysterious signal coming from Andromeda and the Perseus cluster.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Possible Dark Matter Signal Spotted

IsoHunt Unofficially Resurrects the Pirate Bay

An anonymous reader writes: Torrent site isoHunt appears to have unofficially resurrected The Pirate Bay at oldpiratebay.org. At first glance, The Old Pirate Bay seems to be just a commemorative site for The Pirate Bay, which went down this week after police raided its data center in Sweden. Upon further inspection, however, it turns out the site is serving new content. This is much more than just a working archive of The Pirate Bay; it has a functioning search engine, all the old listings, and working magnet links. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IsoHunt Unofficially Resurrects the Pirate Bay