Sony Touts 25 Hour Battery Life For Haswell-Equipped Vaio Pro

An anonymous reader writes “Sony claims that both the new 11.6-inch and 13.3-inch models of its Haswell-equipped Vaio Pro ultrabooks are the world’s lightest. The 11.6-inch model weighs in at 1.9lb (0.87k , where as the 13.3-incher is a little heavier at just 2.33lb (1.06kg). But it’s the battery life on offer here that really makes the new Pros stand out. The 11.6-inch Vaio Pro offers 11 hours of battery life as standard, while the 13.3-inch achieves 8 hours. However, Sony is also offering a sheet battery you can connect to the base of the ultrabooks. On the 13.3-inch Pro that increases battery life to 18 hours, but on the 11.6-inch you get a true day-long amount of juice with 25 hours of battery life claimed.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Excerpt from:
Sony Touts 25 Hour Battery Life For Haswell-Equipped Vaio Pro

The NSA Is Actively Spying on Every Single US Verizon Customer

We’re being watched. Or listened to. Or recorded. Probably all three. The National Security Agency is collecting the phone records of millions of US citizens on Verizon right now. It’s ongoing. It’s daily. It’s happening right now. How is that possible? A top secret court order forced Verizon to give up the call data. Read more…        

View the original here:
The NSA Is Actively Spying on Every Single US Verizon Customer

More than 360,000 Apache websites imperiled by critical Plesk vulnerability

Wikimedia Hundreds of thousands of websites could be endangered by publicly available attack code exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Plesk control panel . This particular vulnerability gives hackers control of the server it runs on according to security researchers. The code-execution vulnerability affects default versions 8.6, 9.0, 9.2, 9.3, and 9.5.4 of Plesk running on the Linux and FreeBSD operating systems, a configuration used by more than 360,000 websites . Plesk running on Windows and other types of Unix haven’t been tested to see if those configurations are vulnerable as well. The exploit code was released Wednesday on the Full-Disclosure mailing list by “kingcope,” a pseudonymous security researcher who has frequented the forum for years. He has a proven track record for developing reliable exploits. “This vulnerability has a high severity rating,” kingcope wrote in an e-mail to Ars. “An attacker can use this exploit to get a command line shell remotely with the privileges of the configured Apache user.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
More than 360,000 Apache websites imperiled by critical Plesk vulnerability

Uh, This Dude Re-Invented the Wheel. And It’s Kind of Square.

David M. Patrick has accidentally re-invented the wheel. The California-based inventor was toying around with six short, curved lengths of cable that he had connected into a sort of helical loop–and then he accidentally dropped it. What he observed next was surprising: The loop began to roll… and roll… and roll. It was a self-balancing wheel. Even stranger was that no one expected it to roll; Patrick’s loop actually looks square when it is rolling. A lifelong skater, Patrick then prototyped a skateboard wheel based on his design, this one comprised of side-by-side helical coils. He call it the Shark Wheel : (more…)        

View original post here:
Uh, This Dude Re-Invented the Wheel. And It’s Kind of Square.

How Americans Speak Differently in Various Regions, Visualized

Depending on where you’re from and where you’ve lived in the United States, you probably say things a little differently than people from other parts of the country. You’ve experienced this, but you’ve never seen how the regional dialects of the United States break down quite so cleanly. Read more…        

More here:
How Americans Speak Differently in Various Regions, Visualized

China Criticizes US For Making Weapon Plans Steal-able, Alleges Attacks From US

Etherwalk writes “Huang Chengqing, China’s top internet security official, alleged that cyberattacks on China from people in the U.S. are as serious as those from China on the U.S. ‘We have mountains of data, if we wanted to accuse the U.S., but it’s not helpful in solving the problem.’ Huang, however, does not necessarily attribute them to the U.S. government just because they came from U.S. soil, and he thinks Washington should extend the same courtesy. ‘They advocated cases that they never let us know about. Some cases can be addressed if they had talked to us, why not let us know? It is not a constructive train of thought to solve problems.’ In response to the recent theft of U.S. military designs, he replied with an observation whose obviousness is worthy of Captain Hammer: ‘Even following the general principle of secret-keeping, it should not have been linked to the Internet.'” A few experts think China’s more cooperative attitude has come about precisely because the U.S. government has gone public with hacking allegations. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See the article here:
China Criticizes US For Making Weapon Plans Steal-able, Alleges Attacks From US

European HbbTV Smart TV Holes Make Sets Hackable

mask.of.sanity writes “Vulnerabilities in Hybrid Broadcast Broadband TV television sets have been found that allow viewers’ home networks to be hacked, the programs they watched spied on, and even for TV sets to be turned into Bitcoin miners. The laboratory attacks took take advantage of the rich web features enabled in smart TVs running on the HbbTV network, a system loaded with online streaming content and apps which is used by more than 20 million viewers in Europe.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Link:
European HbbTV Smart TV Holes Make Sets Hackable

Pandora, one of our favorite streaming music services, unveiled a new browser-based interface for TV

Pandora, one of our favorite streaming music services , unveiled a new browser-based interface for TVs , starting with the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. Both consoles will get semi-native apps with streaming, rating, and station search. You can get it for your console here . [via TechCrunch ] Read more…        

View the original here:
Pandora, one of our favorite streaming music services, unveiled a new browser-based interface for TV