Pity the poor mapmaker assigned to the South China Sea. The hotly disputed waters in the Pacific are torn between competing claims from all the countries that surround it. China, especially, has been aggressive and sly. It’s now dumping sand onto small reefs and shoals, building whole new islands to bolster its territorial claims . Read more…
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China is Building Fake Islands to Bolster Its Claim to Disputed Waters
An anonymous reader writes Code Spaces [a code hosting service] has been under DDOS attacks since the beginning of the week, but a few hours ago, the attacker managed to delete all their hosted customer data and most of the backups. They have announced that they are shutting down business. From the announcement: An unauthorized person who at this point who is still unknown (All we can say is that we have no reason to think its anyone who is or was employed with Code Spaces) had gained access to our Amazon EC2 control panel and had left a number of messages for us to contact them using a Hotmail address. Reaching out to the address started a chain of events that revolved around the person trying to extort a large fee in order to resolve the DDOS. At this point we took action to take control back of our panel by changing passwords, however the intruder had prepared for this and had already created a number of backup logins to the panel and upon seeing us make the attempted recovery of the account he proceeded to randomly delete artifacts from the panel. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Code Spaces Hosting Shutting Down After Attacker Deletes All Data
Harley fanatics are about to lose their collective shit. The crew from Milwaukee is going to show off its first electric motorcycle tomorrow, causing scads of chap-wearing dentists to revaluate their alternative weekend lifestyles. Read more…
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Harley-Davidson Is Making An Electric Motorcycle
A product’s packaging is usually nothing but the last obstacle between you and a shiny new gadget, but often there’s as much thought that goes into the design of a cardboard box as the device inside. For instance, LG put a remarkable amount of design effort into the box its OLED TVs ship in, and most consumers will never even notice. Read more…
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LG’s Glueless Packaging Is Almost as Impressive as the OLED TV Inside
Amazon has unveiled the Fire Phone. It runs a modified version of Android, and it will launch exclusively for AT&T’s network. The screen is a 4.7″ IPS LCD (they tested from 4.3″ to 5.5″, and decided 4.7″ worked best for single-hand use), with an emphasis on brightness. It runs on a quad-core 2.2GHz processor with 2GB of RAM, and an Adreno 330 GPU. It has a rear-facing, 13-megapixel camera using an f/2.0 five-element lens with image stabilization. There’s a dedicated physical button on the side of the phone that will turn it on and put it into camera mode when pressed. The phone comes with dual stereo speakers that produce virtual surround sound. Amazon wants the phone to be distinctive for its ability to provide video content, both from a hardware and software perspective. The Fire Phone runs Mayday, Amazon’s live tech support service for devices. They also demonstrated Firefly, software that recognizes physical objects using the phone’s camera, as well as TV shows and songs it hears. It runs quickly, often identifying things in less than a second (and it pulls up an Amazon product listing, of course). It can even recognize art. Firefly has its own dedicated physical button on the phone, and Amazon is providing a Firefly SDK to third parties who want to develop with it. Another major feature of the Fire Phone is what Amazon calls “dynamic perspective.” Using multiple front-facing cameras, the phone tracks the position of a user’s head, and uses that to slightly adjust what’s displayed on the screen so content is easier to see from the new angle. It allows for gesture control of the phone — for example, you can tilt the phone to scroll a web page or move your head slightly look around a 2-D stadium image when browsing for available seats. Putting your thumb on the screen acts like a mute button for the head tracking, so it isn’t confused when you look up from the screen or turn your head to talk to somebody. It’s an impressive piece of software, and they’ve made an SDK available for it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Amazon Announces ‘Fire Phone’
One of the affected Synology devices. Synology A hacker generated digital coins worth more than $620,000 by hijacking a popular type of Internet-connected storage device from Synology, security researchers said. The incident, which was documented in a research report published Tuesday by Dell SecureWorks, is only the latest hack to steal other people’s computing resources to perform the computationally intense process of digital currency mining. The cryptographic operations behind the process often draw large amounts of power and produce lots of heat. People looking to acquire a large war chest of digital coins typically must pour large amounts of money and effort into the endeavor. One way malicious actors get by this requirement is by compromising large numbers of devices operated by other people. The devices then perform the work at the expense of the unsuspecting end users and pass on the proceeds to the attacker. According to researchers from SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit, the attackers exploited four separate vulnerabilities contained in the software of Synology network-attached storage boxes. The vulnerabilities were documented in September and fixed in February by Synology . By then, large numbers of people began complaining their Synology devices were running sluggishly and extremely hot . It turns out that at least some of them were running software that mined large sums of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Hacker infects Synology storage devices, makes off with $620,000 in Dogecoin
Like Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets, the new Fire Phone will get Amazon’s 24-7 video tech support, Mayday . The service works over Wi-Fi and 3G/4G, and connects you with a representative in under 15 seconds, according to CEO Jeff Bezos. Read more…
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Fire Phone Is Getting Amazon’s Awesome 24-7 Video Tech Support
Adobe is announcing new release of Photoshop CC today, and with it comes one particularly cool feature: the ability to automatically select the out-of-focus areas of an image. Read more…
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The Best New Feature in Photoshop CC
angry tapir writes: Unisys is phasing out its decades-old mainframe processor. The chip is used in some of Unisys’ ClearPath flagship mainframes, but the company is moving to Intel’s x86 chips in Libra and Dorado servers in the ClearPath line. The aging CMOS chip will be “sunsetted” in Libra servers by the end of August and in the Dorado line by the end of 2015. Dorado 880E and 890E mainframes will use the CMOS chip until the servers are phased out, which is set to happen by the end of 2015. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Unisys Phasing Out Decades-Old Mainframe Processor For x86
On Monday, the internet was all kinds of excited over the fact that hundreds of new emoji were soon to arrive . Now, the Unicode Consortium has published a chart which shows us what they’ll actually look like. Read more…
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Here’s What All Those New Emoji Actually Look Like