According to an article in World News Daily Report , loggers in the Amazon have accidentally cut down a 5, 800-year-old Samauma tree, the oldest in the world. Except there is no such tree. This “news” article with 143, 000 Facebook shares is a wholesale fabrication. Read more…
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Loggers didn’t cut down world’s oldest tree—but the real story is better
Distraction-free writing software is one of those things that seems unlikely to ever go away, despite the fact that I’m willing to bet 90 percent of users who buy it use it once and never again. A new hardware startup out of Detroit is hoping that a physical solution might help users focus on the writing, in much the same way e-readers allow people to focus on books without getting… Read More
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Hemingwrite Modernizes The Typewriter With An E-Ink Screen And Cloud Storage
Reminder: Computers are dangerous. Lenovo issued a recall this week for over 500, 000 possibly defective power cords that could overheat, spark, burn, or melt. Yeesh. Read more…
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Lenovo Is Recalling 500,000 Power Cords for Being a Fire Menace
CoolChip Technologies is a startup working to redesign fans to be less of a nuisance. While there are alternatives (like liquid cooling) for those who simply cannot stand the presence of fans, CoolChip’s work doesn’t require significantly changing a machine’s internal layout. Read More
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CoolChip Technologies Is Redesigning The Humble Computer Fan
The US may never have used its microwave pain gun in combat, but that isn’t stopping China from exploring the concept of non-lethal force. Local manufacturer Poly has unveiled the WB-1 , a millimeter-wave weapon that heats the water under your skin (much like the US’ Active Denial System) to deliver intense agony without injury. It currently works at a relatively short range of about 262 feet, but extra power can bump that up to 0.6 miles — if you know where to shoot, you could cause misery from afar. It’s reportedly meant to be used on the high seas, where it could enforce China’s territorial claims without the need to capture or destroy wayward vessels. There are some unanswered questions. Besides the uncertainty of when (and if) WB-1 might enter service, there’s also the matter of its technical feasibility. The Active Denial System took 16 hours to start, and it didn’t work reliably in dust or rain. Unless Poly has licked those problems, its gun won’t do much when there’s a surprise encounter or stormy weather. With that said, you might want to be careful if you go boating around Chinese waters… you may get a lot more than a stern talking-to if you venture into disputed areas. [Image credit: Top81 ] Filed under: Science Comments Via: Popular Science Source: IHS Jane’s 360
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China has a microwave pain weapon of its own
HughPickens.com writes: Benny Evangelista reports at the San Francisco Chronicle that a class-action suit has been filed in District Court in San Francisco on behalf of Toyer Grear and daughter Joycelyn Harris, claiming that Comcast is “exploiting them for profit” by using their home router as part of a nationwide network of public hotspots. Comcast is trying to compete with major cell phone carriers by creating a public Xfinity WiFi Hotspot network in 19 of the country’s largest cities by activating a second high-speed Internet channel broadcast from newer-model wireless gateway modems that residential customers lease from the company. Although Comcast has said its subscribers have the right to disable the secondary signal, the suit claims the company turns the service on without permission. It also places “the costs of its national Wi-Fi network onto its customers” and quotes a test conducted by Philadelphia networking technology company Speedify that concluded the secondary Internet channel will eventually push “tens of millions of dollars per month of the electricity bills needed to run their nationwide public Wi-Fi network onto consumers.” The suit also says “the data and information on a Comcast customer’s network is at greater risk” because the hotspot network “allows strangers to connect to the Internet through the same wireless router used by Comcast customers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Comcast Sued For Turning Home Wi-Fi Routers Into Public Hotspots
MojoKid writes: AMD just dropped its new Catalyst Omega driver package that is the culmination of six months of development work. AMD Catalyst Omega reportedly brings over 20 new features and a wealth of bug fixes to the table, along with performance increases both on AMD Radeon GPUs and integrated AMD APUs. Some of the new functionality includes Virtual Super Resolution, or VSR. VSR is “game- and engine-agnostic” and renders content at up to 4K resolution, then displays it at a resolution that your monitor actually supports. AMD says VSR allows for increased image quality, similar in concept to Super Sampling Anti-Aliasing (SSAA). Another added perk of VSR is the ability to see more content on the screen at once. To take advantage of VSR, you’ll need a Radeon R9 295X2, R9 290X, R9 290, or R9 285 discrete graphics card. Both single- and multi-GPU configurations are currently supported. VSR is essentially AMD’s answer to NVIDIA’s DSR, or Dynamic Super Resolution. In addition, AMD is claiming performance enhancements in a number of top titles with these these new drivers. Reportedly, as little as 6 percent improvement in performance in FIFA Online to as much as a 29 percent increase in Batman: Arkham Origins can be gained when using an AMD 7000-Series APU, for example. On discrete GPUs, an AMD Radeon R9 290X’s performance increases ranged from 8 percent in Grid 2 to roughly 16 percent in Bioshock Infinity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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AMD Offers a Performance Boost, Over 20 New Features With Catalyst Omega Drivers
How thin is too thin? Well, the Chinese smartphone makers are always pushing their limits on this end. Following Gionee’s 5.1mm Elife S5.1 and Oppo’s 4.85mm R5 , today Vivo has set a new record with its X5Max, a 4.75mm-thick Android phone that still manages to pack a number of notable features. The slim aluminum mid-frame houses a vibrant 5.5-inch 1080p Super AMOLED screen, a 1.7mm-thick logic board and a 5-megapixel f/2.4 front camera. Flip to the back and you’ll find a 13-megapixel f/2.0 main camera — the inevitable bulge that goes beyond the phone’s official thickness by almost 2mm — and a loudspeaker towards the bottom. On the whole, the phone feels surprisingly light (Vivo has yet to list the official weight) but also solid and well-made. It’s worth pointing out that unlike the Oppo R5, the X5Max has managed to keep its 3.5mm headphone jack instead of forcing a micro-USB adapter upon us. Another equally impressive feature is the dual-SIM tray (fits one Micro SIM and one Nano SIM) that also lets you use a microSD card (up to 128GB) in place of Nano SIM, but you might have already seen this on the likes of the Lenovo Vibe Z2 Pro or the Huawei Ascend Mate 7 . The X5Max is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 chip that’s both octa-core (quad 1.7GHz Cortex-A53 and quad 1GHz Cortex-A53) and 64-bit ready, though the latter part won’t be usable until the phone is updated from Android 4.4.4 to Lollipop. You also get 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage to boot, while the fixed 2, 000mAh battery should be sufficient for a full-day usage; though you’ll miss out on the Oppo R5’s awesome rapid charging technology. Like its sibling devices, the X5Max places heavy emphasis on its audio performance, which is why it packs some dedicated audio chips — Yamaha YSS-205X signal processor, Sabre ES9018K2M DAC, exclusive Sabre ES9601 headphone amplifier and OPA1612 amplifier — as part of its “Hi-Fi 2.0” package. Together, these apparently outperform the Xplay3S’ offering in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, dynamic range and restoration. More importantly (for this author, at least), the Yamaha chip is actually for implementing a karaoke mode, in which you can sing along with songs and music videos while also hearing yourself — with added echo or reverb if desired — through headphones. It may be gimmicky for some, but apparently it’s also what the cool kids like to use these days. Alas, the X5Max is only launching in China to begin with: The China Mobile version will be available for CN¥2, 998 or about US$490 as of December 12th. As for those outside China who need a phone to quench their karaoke thirst, stay tuned for an FDD-LTE version later. Filed under: Cellphones , Mobile Comments Source: Vivo
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The world’s slimmest smartphone is now 4.75mm thick
Trailrunner7 writes: Researchers have discovered a new version of the Destover malware that was used in the recent Sony Pictures Entertainment breaches, and in an ironic twist, the sample is signed by a legitimate certificate stolen from Sony. The new sample is essentially identical to an earlier version of Destover that was not signed. Destover has been used in a variety of attacks in recent years and it’s representative of the genre of malware that doesn’t just compromise machines and steal data, but can destroy information as well. The attackers who have claimed credit for the attack on Sony have spent the last couple of weeks gradually releasing large amounts of information stolen in the breach, including unreleased movies, personal data of Sony employees and sensitive security information such as digital certificates and passwords. The new, signed version of Destover appears to have been compiled in July and was signed on Dec. 5, the day after Kaspersky Lab published an analysis of the known samples of the malware. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New Destover Malware Signed By Stolen Sony Certificate
cold fjord writes: The Weekly Standard reports, “This week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced the release of the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan 2015-2020, which details the efforts of some 35 departments and agencies of the federal government and their roles in the plan to ‘advance the collection, sharing, and use of electronic health information to improve health care, individual and community health, and research.’ … Now that HHS has publicly released the Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, the agency is seeking the input from the public before implementation. The plan is subject to two-month period of public comment before finalization. The comment period runs through February 6, 2015.” Among the many agencies that will be sharing records besides Health and Human Services are: Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Justice and Bureau of Prison, Department of Labor, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of Personnel Management, National Institute of Standards and Technology. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Feds Plan For 35 Agencies To Collect, Share, Use Health Records of Americans