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Now all Last.fm tracks are playable through Spotify

Spotify may not have the massive marketing muscle behind it like that of new entrant Beats Music , but the small streaming service is looking to expand its reach in other ways. Today, the company announced a partnership that’ll see the entirety of its music catalog made available for playback on Last.fm . Now, when Last.fm users click play on a track, Spotify will be launched in the background, with a convenient bar for playback controls appearing at the bottom of the screen. Additionally, any grouping of tracks on a particular Last.fm page will appear as a playlist within Spotify. The integration is pretty straightforward to get set up, as all you’ll need to connect your Last.fm and Spotify accounts, whether free or premium, is to click on a track and initiate playback. There’s not much else to it beyond that. Just don’t expect this Spotify and Last.fm integration to work on your smartphone or tablet, as it’s not currently supported on mobile browsers. There are also a few known bugs for the service to work out, like unavailable tracks showing play buttons and only the first 70 displayed tracks on page being made available for playback. Oh, and it should go without saying that if you’re in a territory where Spotify’s not yet available, well, you’ll have to sit this one out. Filed under: Internet Comments Source: Spotify , Last.fm

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Now all Last.fm tracks are playable through Spotify

Drilling surprise opens door to magma-powered electricity

Gretar Ívarsson Can enormous heat deep in the Earth be harnessed to provide energy for us on the surface? A promising report from a geothermal borehole project that accidentally struck magma—the same fiery, molten rock that spews from volcanoes—suggests it could. The Icelandic Deep Drilling Project, IDDP , has been drilling shafts up to 5km deep in an attempt to harness the heat in the volcanic bedrock far below the surface of Iceland. But in 2009 a borehole at Krafla, Northeast Iceland, reached only 2,100m deep before unexpectedly striking a pocket of magma. The molten rock was intruding into the Earth’s upper crust from below at searing temperatures of 900 to 1000 degrees Celsius. This borehole, IDDP-1, was the first in a series of wells drilled by the IDDP in Iceland looking for usable geothermal resources. A special report in this month’s Geothermics journal details the engineering feats and scientific results that came from the attempt to harness the incredible geothermal heat. (The only previous case like this was in Hawaii in 2007, but that well was sealed in concrete.) Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Drilling surprise opens door to magma-powered electricity

Man loses rare Twitter handle after PayPal and GoDaddy inadvertently help scammer

Naoki Hiroshima had a rare and valuable Twitter handle, @N . It was extorted from him , he claims, by a scammer who figured out that PayPal reveals part of one’s credit card number during security verification—and that GoDaddy accepts the same part of the number during security verification. I asked the attacker how my GoDaddy account was compromised and received this response: From: SOCIAL MEDIA KING To: Naoki Hiroshima Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 19:53:52 -0800 Subject: RE: …hello – I called paypal and used some very simple engineering tactics to obtain the last four of your card (avoid this by calling paypal and asking the agent to add a note to your account to not release any details via phone) – I called godaddy and told them I had lost the card but I remembered the last four, the agent then allowed me to try a range of numbers (00-09 in your case) I have not found a way to heighten godaddy account security, however if you’d like me to recommend a more secure registrar i recommend: NameCheap or eNom (not network solutions but enom.com) GoDaddy outright refused to help him at first, too. It’s shocking how weak account security is there, and at PayPal: “Don’t let companies such as PayPal and GoDaddy store your credit card information,” Hiroshima writes.        

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Man loses rare Twitter handle after PayPal and GoDaddy inadvertently help scammer

This Leech Can Survive For 24 Hours in Liquid Nitrogen

You’re looking at Ozobranchus jantseanus , a little leech found in East Asia. It doesn’t look much, but it has a very special skill indeed: it can survive for up to 24 hours immersed in liquid nitrogen . Read more…        

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This Leech Can Survive For 24 Hours in Liquid Nitrogen

Lavabit goes head to head with feds in contempt-of-court case

In oral arguments heard on Tuesday, Lavabit and federal prosecutors each presented their cases in front of three judges from the 4 th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia. This particular case is an appeal of contempt-of-court charges against Lavabit, a now-defunct e-mail hosting service that once offered secure communication. In the summer of 2013, Lavabit was ordered to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one of its users, widely believed to be Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor-turned-leaker. When Lavabit told the feds that the only way it could hand over communications was through an internal process that would deliver results 60 days after anycommunication was sent, the authorities returned with a search warrant for Lavabit’s SSL keys , which could decrypt the traffic of all  of Lavabit’s users. Ladar Levinson, the CEO of Lavabit, handed over the SSL keys but then shut down his 10-year-old business rather than expose all of Lavabit’s users. Levinson now faces charges of contempt-of-court. The case is proving to be difficult for both parties, as well as presiding judges Roger Gregory, Paul Niemeyer, and Steven Agee, to parse. As PC World reports : “Attorneys from both Lavabit and the US government agreed that the legal issues between them could have been resolved before heading to court, though neither party seemed to have an adequate technical answer of how Lavabit could have successfully passed unencrypted data to a law enforcement agency in order to meet the government’s demands.” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Lavabit goes head to head with feds in contempt-of-court case

Old-school Wi-Fi Is Slowing Down Networks, Cisco Says

alphadogg writes “The early Wi-Fi standards that opened the world’s eyes to wire-free networking are now holding back the newer, faster protocols that followed in their wake, Cisco Systems said. The IEEE 802.11 standard, now available in numerous versions with speeds up to 6.9Gbps and growing, still requires devices and access points to be compatible with technologies that date to the late 1990s. But those older standards — the once-popular 802.11b and an even slower spec from 1997 — aren’t nearly as efficient as most Wi-Fi being sold today. As a result, Cisco thinks the 802.11 Working Group and the Wi-Fi Alliance should find a way to let some wireless gear leave those versions behind. Two Cisco engineers proposed that idea last week in a presentation at the working group’s meeting in Los Angeles. The plan is aimed at making the best use of the 2.4GHz band, the smaller of two unlicensed frequency blocks where Wi-Fi operates.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Old-school Wi-Fi Is Slowing Down Networks, Cisco Says

Largest-Yet EVE Online Battle Destroys $200,000 Worth of Starships

Space MMO EVE Online has been providing stories of corporate espionage and massive space battles for years. A battle began yesterday that’s the biggest one in the game’s 10-year history. The main battle itself involved over 2, 200 players in a single star system (screenshot, animated picture). The groups on each side of the fight tried to restrict the numbers somewhat in order to maintain server stability, so the battle ended up sprawling across multiple other systems as well. Now, EVE allows players to buy a month of subscription time as an in-game item, which players can then use or trade. This allows a direct conversion from in-game currency to real money, and provides a benchmark for estimating the real-world value of in-game losses. Over 70 of the game’s biggest and most expensive ships, the Titans, were destroyed. Individual Titans can be worth upwards of 200 billion ISK, which is worth around $5, 000. Losses for the Titans alone for this massive battle are estimated at $200, 000 – $300, 000. Hundreds upon hundreds of other ships were destroyed as well. How did the battle start? Somebody didn’t pay rent and lost control of their system. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Largest-Yet EVE Online Battle Destroys $200,000 Worth of Starships

Cheap Laser-Sintering Printers Are Coming Thanks To The Expiration Of A Key Patent

Today is a big day for 3D printing: Patent #US5597589 is set to expire and will open up the possibility for makers to use laser sintering — shooting a laser at a layer of nylon powder — in cheaper devices, essentially opening the technology to the small maker. The patent is fairly clear on what sintering is. It describes an “apparatus for selectively sintering a layer of powder to produce a part made from a plurality of sintered layers and the apparatus includes a computer controlling a laser to direct the laser energy onto the powder to produce a sintered mass.” This means anything that shoots a laser at powder could run afoul of this patent much as Form Labs bumped up against 3D Systems’ stereolithography patent. Most larger “professional-quality” printers use laser sintering and you can create homogenous, solid-looking objects with stable structures using the technique. Does this mean we’ll have sintering printers in our homes next year? Possibly, but given the materials needed and the components involved I could see prices going down but not dropping until there is mass acceptance of 3D printing. FDM printers that deposit layers of plastic is still the cheapest method, but sintered parts are almost seamless, creating a cohesive whole that is very useful in prototyping and engineering. In short, however, it’s a great day for makers. via 3Dprint

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Cheap Laser-Sintering Printers Are Coming Thanks To The Expiration Of A Key Patent

​World of Warcraft’s Impressive First Decade, By the Numbers

The numbers may be shrinking a bit in recent years but, when you look at it, the sheer aggregate of people who’ve made a toon, joined a raid or bought a pet in World of Warcraft is still mind-boggling. Read more…        

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​World of Warcraft’s Impressive First Decade, By the Numbers

The rumors are true: Google’s bringing Chrome apps to iOS and Android.

The rumors are true: Google’s bringing Chrome apps to iOS and Android. Well, it’s providing the tools developers need in order to do so . The toolkit is only in a beta form at the moment, but it holds the promise turning Chrome apps into cross-platform suckers for your phone. If it turns out to be as easy at it sounds, Chrome apps just got a lot more interesting. [ Chomium Blog ] Read more…        

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The rumors are true: Google’s bringing Chrome apps to iOS and Android.