AT&T has phased out a controversial tracking program it used that inserted identification tags without an opt-out into users’ internet traffic. Read more…
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Oh Good: AT&T Will Stop Putting Undeletable Tracking IDs on Your Phone
We’ve all received that email at least once before. A kind prince/princess/spambot in Nigeria has millions of dollars, and better yet, they want to split it with you . Just hand over your social security code and wait for them to arrive on American soil. As the above newspaper clipping shows, these types of scams were going on even before email came around—in this case, as early as 1876. Read more…
Against all odds, Philae has confirmed that the first ever drilling of a comet has happened! ESA has received telemetry data indicating that the drill went down and up. The probe will now analyze whatever material the drill has managed to grab. What is Philae going to find? Perhaps the buildi ng blocks of life? UPDATED 2. Read more…
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First comet drilling ever confirmed: 100% successful mission, says ESA
San Francisco photographer Kevin Twomey shot an amazing gallery of images of the inner workings of a large collection of mechanical calculating machines from the collection of Mark Glusker , stitching together multiple images to ensure that every rod, gear and linkage was vividly rendered. Read the rest
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Beautiful, detailed photos of mechanical calculators’ guts
Add / Remove For a reason unknown to parents, kids are constantly doing their best to get lost or wander off into some sort of danger. In the past we’ve seen the Sync Smartband send alerts to parents if their child moves out of their sight. Created in China, Budiu are a pair of kids’ sneakers that feature embedded GPS locators so parents know where they are. Developed by Angela & Lucas , each pair features a GPS chip integrated into the tongue of the shoe, able to pinpoint their location to within 3 meters if the child is outdoors and 50 meters if they’re indoors. Within the companion app, parents or guardians can check the whereabouts of their kids on a map. They can even check the location through street view mode or quickly message them without leaving the app. Budiu also gives parents the option to set up a safe zone that alerts them if their child strays outside of it. If the child loses the sneakers or they get stolen, the app can also help locate them. Interestingly, the company is looking to offer a service as much as it is a product. The shoes can be personalized through the online store so kids can pick their own designs. For parents, the app doubles as a social network where they can communicate with other parents and share tips on how to keep kids safe. The shoes also aren’t available to buy outright. Instead, parents pay for the GPS usage at a cost of RMB 730 over 2 years. As part of this package, they get 4 free pair of shoes and 1 free chip. Considering how often active kids arrive home with a ruined pair of shoes, this could prove economical for parents. Watch the video below to see the Budiu kit in action: Cleverly marketed to appeal to today’s kids, the sneakers offer technology to provide parents with peach of mind without having to add a new item to their wardrobe. How else can wearable technology be integrated into the clothes we already wear? Website: www.ebudiu.cn Contact: www.andl.com/article.php
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Trendy shoes use GPS so parents can keep track of their kids
Aleksander Markin On Thursday afternoon, the Wall Street Journal published a report saying that the US Marshals Service (USMS) was using small, fixed-wing Cessnas equipped with so-called “dirtboxes”—receivers that act like cellphone towers—to gather data from citizens’ phones below. The purpose of such collection is to target and spy on criminal suspects, but the data from any citizen’s phone is collected by such devices. Sources told the WSJ that USMS operated these planes from five major airports in the US and that the program had a flying range “covering most of the US population.” The devices on the planes can capture unique identifying information from “tens of thousands” of cellphones on the ground. Using that information, federal authorities can pinpoint a cellphone user’s location from “within three meters or within a specific room in a building,” the WSJ said. Individuals with knowledge of the matter told the news outlet that the plane flyovers were targeted at “fugitives and criminals” and that non-target phone data is “let go” as it is gathered. The dirtboxes are described as higher-grade Stingrays, which police use on the ground to collect International Mobile Subscriber Numbers (IMSI). Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Feds gather phone data from the sky with aircraft-mimicking cell towers
MojoKid (1002251) writes “Life is hard when you’re a AAA publisher. Last month, Ubisoft blamed weak console hardware for the troubles it had bringing Assassin’s Creed Unity up to speed, claiming that it could’ve hit 100 FPS but for weak console CPUs. Now, in the wake of the game’s disastrous launch, the company has changed tactics — suddenly, all of this is AMD’s fault. An official company forum post currently reads: “We are aware that the graphics performance of Assassin’s Creed Unity on PC may be adversely affected by certain AMD CPU and GPU configurations. This should not affect the vast majority of PC players, but rest assured that AMD and Ubisoft are continuing to work together closely to resolve the issue, and will provide more information as soon as it is available.” There are multiple problems with this assessment. First, there’s no equivalent Nvidia-centric post on the main forum, and no mention of the fact that if you own an Nvidia card of any vintage but a GTX 970 or 980, you’re going to see less-than ideal performance. According to sources, the problem with Assassin’s Creed Unity is that the game is issuing tens of thousands of draw calls — up to 50, 000 and beyond, in some cases. This is precisely the kind of operation that Mantle and DirectX 12 are designed to handle, but DirectX 11, even 11.2, isn’t capable of efficiently processing that many calls at once. It’s a fundamental limit of the API and it kicks in harshly in ways that adding more CPU cores simply can’t help with. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Ubisoft Points Finger At AMD For Assassin’s Creed Unity Poor Performance
An anonymous reader writes Scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory have used Wikipedia logs as a data source for forecasting disease spread. The team was able to successfully monitor influenza in the United States, Poland, Japan, and Thailand, dengue fever in Brazil and Thailand, and tuberculosis in China and Thailand. The team was also able to forecast all but one of these, tuberculosis in China, at least 28 days in advance. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Researchers Forecast the Spread of Diseases Using Wikipedia
Nerval’s Lobster writes With the debut of Android 5.0 (also known as Lollipop, in keeping with Google’s habit of naming each major OS upgrade after a dessert), it’s worth taking a moment to break down how the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system matches up against Apple’s iOS 8. After years of battle, the two are remarkably similar. So while nobody would ever confuse Android and iOS, both Google and Apple seem determined to go “flatter” (and more brightly colored) than ever. Whether or not you agree with their choices, they’re the cutting edge of mobile UX design. The perpetual tit-for-tat over features has reached a climax of sorts with Lollipop and iOS 8: both offer their own version of an NFC-powered e-wallet (Apple Pay vs. Google Wallet), a health app (Apple’s Health app vs. Google Fit), car-dashboard control (Android Auto vs. CarPlay), and home automation. That’s not to say that the operating systems are mirror images of one another, but in terms of aesthetics and functionality, they’ll be at near-parity for most users, albeit not for those users who enjoy customizing Android and hate Apple’s “walled garden.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Android 5.0 ‘Lollipop’ vs. iOS 8: More Similar Than Ever
If you ever wondered what the characters of South Park looked like in real life in the minds of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, wonder no more. Last night’s crazy episode revealed what Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny would look like if they weren’t just cartoons made of shapes and circles but actual humans instead. Read more…
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What the characters from South Park look like in real life