Replace a Lost Apple ID Recovery Key Before You’re Locked Out

Apple’s two-factor authentication is great , but like other services, it relies on a Recovery Key when you get locked out. Without that key, you can’t access your account if it’s hacked. The Next Web learned this the hard way. Read more…

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Replace a Lost Apple ID Recovery Key Before You’re Locked Out

High Temperature Superconductivity Record Smashed By Sulfur Hydride

KentuckyFC writes Physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany have measured sulfur hydride superconducting at 190 Kelvin or -83 degrees Centigrade, albeit at a pressure of 150 gigapascals, about the half that at the Earth’s core. If confirmed, that’s a significant improvement over the existing high pressure record of 164 kelvin. But that’s not why this breakthrough is so important. Until now, all known high temperature superconductors have been ceramic mixes of materials such as copper, oxygen lithium, and so on, in which physicists do not yet understand how superconductivity works. By contrast, sulfur hydride is a conventional superconductor that is described by the BCS theory of superconductivity first proposed in 1957 and now well understood. Most physicists had thought that BCS theory somehow forbids high temperature superconductivity–the current BCS record-holder is magnesium diboride, which superconducts at just 39 Kelvin. Sulfur hydride smashes this record and will focus attention on other hydrogen-bearing materials that might superconduct at even higher temperatures. The team behind this work point to fullerenes, aromatic hydrocarbons and graphane as potential targets. And they suggest that instead of using high pressures to initiate superconductivity, other techniques such as doping, might work instead. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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High Temperature Superconductivity Record Smashed By Sulfur Hydride

This Giant Vacuum Sucks Prairie Dogs Right Out of Their Holes 

For years, prairie dogs have been the bane of cattle ranchers, whose livestock are routinely injured when stepping in prairie dog holes. In response, ranchers have gassed, poisoned, drowned, or buried entire colonies alive. But one enterprising pest control company has devised a more humane method of removing the rodents—with a modified sewer cleaning truck. Read more…

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This Giant Vacuum Sucks Prairie Dogs Right Out of Their Holes 

San Francisco’s Monkeybrains ISP offering gigabit home wireless connections

It’s $35/month for the service, from San Francisco’s coolest indie ISP (founded by Rudy Rucker’s son, Rudy Jr, it was the inspiration for Pigspleen, the fictional ISP in my novel Little Brother ) and if you opt to pay a little extra, they’ll install a free link in a low/medium income neighborhood, too. Read the rest

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San Francisco’s Monkeybrains ISP offering gigabit home wireless connections

Your old laptop’s battery will light homes in developing countries

Don’t be too quick to toss out the battery from that ancient laptop — it might just be the key to powering homes in developing countries, and helping the environment in the process. IBM researchers have revealed UrJar , a device that turns old lithium-ion battery packs into rechargeable energy sources for low-power devices like LED light bulbs, fans and cellphones. To create the gadget, the team extracts functioning lithium-ion cells from a trashed battery and combines them with both charging dongles and safety circuitry. It sounds simple, but it’s potentially very effective. According to IBM, roughly 70 percent of all discarded batteries can provide at least four hours of LED lighting every day for a year. That’s enough to offer extra safety to homes in areas with little to no reliable electricity, or to keep a street vendor in business after sunset. There’s still some necessary refinement left before UrJar is ready, but IBM is quick to stress that this isn’t a commercial product. Instead, it hopes to give devices away for free in countries whose “energy poverty” hurts the quality of life (and chances of a better future) for poorer residents. UrJar should also kill two birds with one stone by making good use of the ever-growing mountain of e-waste . Rather than send your old batteries directly to landfills, you could give them a second life that helps the less fortunate. That’s not as eco-friendly as truly clean power , but it might prevent technological garbage from getting out of control. [Image credit: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images] Filed under: Household , Peripherals Comments Via: MIT Technology Review , Popular Science Source: University of Toronto (PDF)

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Your old laptop’s battery will light homes in developing countries

POODLE Flaw Returns, This Time Hitting TLS Protocol

angry tapir writes: If you patched your sites against a serious SSL flaw discovered in October you will have to check them again. Researchers have discovered that the POODLE vulnerability also affects implementations of the newer TLS protocol. The POODLE (Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption) vulnerability allows attackers who manage to intercept traffic between a user’s browser and an HTTPS website to decrypt sensitive information, like the user’s authentication cookies. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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POODLE Flaw Returns, This Time Hitting TLS Protocol

Sony hack snowballs as movie scripts, celebrity phone numbers leaked

Sony Pictures is in full-blown damage-control mode and has called an all-hands meeting following another huge leak of sensitive, confidential info. The new trove of data released by the so-called GOP (Guardians of Peace) includes more private employee info, actor phone numbers and traveling aliases , legal claims against Sony Pictures, film budgets, scripts and more. As pointed out by the WSJ , it also includes private info of some 40, 000 Sony Pictures ex-employees like home addresses, previous salaries and social security numbers. Many of those folks are incensed with the Culver City-based company, which gave them no guidance on how to protect their identities or sign up for credit monitoring. Suffice to say, much of the information could be highly damaging to Sony’s reputation and bottom line. As pointed out by Fusion , the hackers have thrown many of its business practices into the open, which may make future negotiations with high profile actors, technicians and vendors difficult. Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton sent a memo to all employees saying that it had “recognized experts working on this matter” and that the FBI had taken control of the investigation. He also said that employees could meet one-on-one with their managers and called an all-hands meeting for this Friday. Much of the information could be highly damaging to Sony’s reputation and bottom line. Yesterday, Sony released info from the security firm Mandiant, which said the “unprecedented” attack would’ve been difficult to prevent. But many employees expressed disbelief that sensitive info like social securities numbers and salaries would be kept in unprotected folders by a security-conscious company. Some experts also doubt Sony’s claims that the attack was that sophisticated, saying that it should’ve noticed suspicious activity, even if the virus was “undetectable.” One researcher told Mashable that “to protect their image, they need this to be an unpreventable, incredibly sophisticated attack.” Meanwhile, the group allegedly responsible for the hack released another statement along with the leak. The GOP demanded that Sony “stop immediately showing the movie of terrorism” in reference to “The Interview, ” the upcoming Sony Pictures flick that mocks the North Korean government. That marks the first time the hackers have directly referenced the film, which was denounced by the rogue nation. However, another recently discovered email, sent several days ago, demanded monetary compensation instead. All that, along with another email that contained Korean grammatical errors, means investigators still have no idea if the attack came from North Korea or not. Filed under: Home Entertainment , HD Comments Via: Fusion Source: Gist (Github)

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Sony hack snowballs as movie scripts, celebrity phone numbers leaked

A silk casing enables long-lasting, implantable Wi-Fi medical devices

Not the silk casing discussed. Flickr user: CameliaTWU For a variety of medical reasons, it’s useful to implant devices inside the body. These devices may be needed to help regulate the cardiovascular system, or they can release drugs inside the body. Unfortunately, they’re also problematic. Once such a device has served its function, it must be removed, which necessitates another surgery. Plus, the presence can lead to complications such as infection, inflammation, and pain. To address some of these problems, scientists have developed new kinds of circuitry that can safely dissolve in the body. While these water-soluble devices don’t need to be removed, they come with a new problem—they dissolve too quickly for many purposes. So a group of researchers have now reported that they’ve developed a new way to control how long the devices last. The researchers propose that dissolving devices could be encased in a material made from silk protein and magnesium. The advantage of this approach comes from a property of the silk: its crystallinity. Different preparations of silk dissolve in water at different rates depending on their crystallinities. Altering this property allows researchers to choose among a range of dissolution times from only a few minutes up to a few weeks. This gives more control over the duration of the device, which is important, since different medical situations require devices that can last vastly different times. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A silk casing enables long-lasting, implantable Wi-Fi medical devices

Amazon Instant Just Got 4K Streaming

Amazon’s streaming video service just got an upgrade . Starting today, Prime Instant Video offers 4K Ultra High Definition streaming at no extra charge, so people with compatible TVs will have the option to watch Transparent and a limited selection of movies and television in 4K HD. Read more…

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Amazon Instant Just Got 4K Streaming

Windows 8.1 now natively supports the MKV video format, which has been supported by the Xbox One for

Windows 8.1 now natively supports the MKV video format , which has been supported by the Xbox One for a little while now. Read more…

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Windows 8.1 now natively supports the MKV video format, which has been supported by the Xbox One for