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FTDI Reportedly Bricking Devices Using Competitors’ Chips.

janoc writes It seems that chipmaker FTDI has started an outright war on cloners of their popular USB bridge chips. At first the clones stopped working with the official drivers, and now they are being intentionally bricked, rendering the device useless. The problem? These chips are incredibly popular and used in many consumer products. Are you sure yours doesn’t contain a counterfeit one before you plug it in? Hackaday says, “It’s very hard to tell the difference between the real and fake versions by looking at the package, but a look at the silicon reveals vast differences. The new driver for the FT232 exploits these differences, reprogramming it so it won’t work with existing drivers. It’s a bold strategy to cut down on silicon counterfeiters on the part of FTDI. A reasonable company would go after the manufacturers of fake chips, not the consumers who are most likely unaware they have a fake chip.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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FTDI Reportedly Bricking Devices Using Competitors’ Chips.

Google’s Inbox App Wants To Read Your Email So You Don’t Have To

Today, Google revealed a project two years in the making. At first glance it looks just like a redesign of Gmail, and that’s sort of half true. It’s actually a completely new system called “Inbox” and it wants to reimagine your email. Read more…

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Google’s Inbox App Wants To Read Your Email So You Don’t Have To

The NSA can now use Samsung’s Galaxy phones for classified work

Samsung Galaxy phones and tablets have just become the first consumer mobile devices approved by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to carry classified documents. The edict covers most of its newer Galaxy devices, including the Galaxy S5 , Galaxy Note 4 , and the Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet (2014 edition) — as long as they’re equipped with Knox , Samsung’s mobile security app. Knox-enabled devices have already been approved by the US Department of Defense, but only for general, not classified, use. That’s a shot of good news for Samsung in the face of recent dismal earnings , and it no doubt wants to translate the NSA’s golden nod into consumer and corporate sales. Ironically, many of those potential customers may be paranoid… of the NSA. Filed under: Cellphones , Samsung Comments Via: PC World Source: Samsung

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The NSA can now use Samsung’s Galaxy phones for classified work

How to Tap Your Network and See Everything That Happens On It

Your home network is your fortress. Inside it lies tons of valuable information—unencrypted files, personal, private data, and perhaps most importantly, computers that can be hijacked and used for any purpose. Let’s talk about how you can, with the power of evil, sniff around your home network to make sure you don’t have any uninvited guests. Read more…

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How to Tap Your Network and See Everything That Happens On It

What It Took For SpaceX To Become a Serious Space Company

An anonymous reader writes: The Atlantic has a nice profile of SpaceX’s rise to prominence — how a private startup managed to successfully compete with industry giants like Boeing in just a decade of existence. “Regardless of its inspirations, the company was forced to adopt a prosaic initial goal: Make a rocket at least 10 times cheaper than is possible today. Until it can do that, neither flowers nor people can go to Mars with any economy. With rocket technology, Musk has said, “you’re really left with one key parameter against which technology improvements must be judged, and that’s cost.” SpaceX currently charges $61.2 million per launch. Its cost-per-kilogram of cargo to low-earth orbit, $4, 653, is far less than the $14, 000 to $39, 000 offered by its chief American competitor, the United Launch Alliance. Other providers often charge $250 to $400 million per launch; NASA pays Russia $70 million per astronaut to hitch a ride on its three-person Soyuz spacecraft. SpaceX’s costs are still nowhere near low enough to change the economics of space as Musk and his investors envision, but they have a plan to do so (of which more later).” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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What It Took For SpaceX To Become a Serious Space Company

A huge Halo: Master Chief Collection clocks in at 65GB

Microsoft reportedly scrapped its original plans to ship Master Chief Collection in a “car full of 5.25″ disks” format. Lenore Edman About a year ago, we had to quickly get used to 50 GB download sizes for console games like PS4 launch title Killzone: Shadow Fall . Game size inflation hasn’t exactly stopped since then, as evidenced by word that the upcoming Halo: Master Chief Collection will take up a whopping 65 GB on Xbox One hard drives next month. Buried in Friday’s official “gone gold” announcement was word that the Xbox One’s remastered edition of the first four Halo games, which is currently available for pre-loading, would actually be bigger than a standard 50GB Blu-ray disc. Rather than splitting the 65GB across two discs for the retail edition, Microsoft has decided to include 45GB of data in the box and require players to download a 20GB day one “content update” to access “some features and multiplayer content.” Players will be able to play the bulk of the single-player content while the 20GB content pack is downloading and installing, Microsoft says. Why make even retail buyers download so much data? “The game is designed to run as a single, unified product,” 343 Industries Franchise Development Director Frank O’Connor explained on gaming forum NeoGAF over the weekend . “Digital is seamless obviously, but we also wanted disc users to have the same experience, without swapping discs. Since the bulk of [the download] is [multiplayer] or MP related, the logic is sound.” While it may have been feasible to simply install a single, unified game to the Xbox One hard drive from two discs, O’Connor elaborated that such a solution “simply wasn’t practical for this product, this year in this timeline.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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A huge Halo: Master Chief Collection clocks in at 65GB

A German U-Boat From WWII Has Been Found Off The Coast of North Carolina

On July 15th, 1942—in the midst of World War II’s long-running Battle of the Atlantic—a German U-boat and a Nicaraguan freighter were wrecked a mere 30 miles off the coast of North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras. Now, over seven decades later, their watery resting places have been (re)discovered . Read more…

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A German U-Boat From WWII Has Been Found Off The Coast of North Carolina

Software Glitch Caused 911 Outage For 11 Million People

HughPickens.com writes: Brian Fung reports at the Washington Post that earlier this year emergency services went dark for over six hours for more than 11 million people across seven states. “The outage may have gone unnoticed by some, but for the more than 6, 000 people trying to reach help, April 9 may well have been the scariest time of their lives.” In a 40-page report (PDF), the FCC found that an entirely preventable software error was responsible for causing 911 service to drop. “It could have been prevented. But it was not, ” the FCC’s report reads. “The causes of this outage highlight vulnerabilities of networks as they transition from the long-familiar methods of reaching 911 to [Internet Protocol]-supported technologies.” On April 9, the software responsible for assigning the identifying code to each incoming 911 call maxed out at a pre-set limit; the counter literally stopped counting at 40 million calls. As a result, the routing system stopped accepting new calls, leading to a bottleneck and a series of cascading failures elsewhere in the 911 infrastructure. Adm. David Simpson, the FCC’s chief of public safety and homeland security, says having a single backup does not provide the kind of reliability that is ideal for 911. “Miami is kind of prone to hurricanes. Had a hurricane come at the same time [as the multi-state outage], we would not have had that failover, perhaps. So I think there needs to be more [distribution of 911 capabilities].” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Software Glitch Caused 911 Outage For 11 Million People

Borderless Gaming Fixes Alt+Tab Issues in Full Screen Games

Windows only: Games are best when played full screen, but many won’t play nice with Alt+Tab in full screen mode—which means you can’t look at your browser for a guide or change the music playing in the background. Borderless Gaming fixes that problem. Read more…

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Borderless Gaming Fixes Alt+Tab Issues in Full Screen Games

Fake LED Flames Indicate How Hot Samsung’s New Induction Stove Gets

Induction stove tops might be more energy-efficient than electric or gas burners, but many chefs miss the obvious visual cues about what temperature they’re cooking at—a red-hot burner is hard to misinterpret. So for its new Chef Collection Induction Slide-in Range, Samsung is introducing a clever new feature that uses LEDs to project fake flickering flames onto the side of a pot. Read more…

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Fake LED Flames Indicate How Hot Samsung’s New Induction Stove Gets