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Ableton Live will remember your riffs if you forget to press record

Ableton Live is popular with computer musicians thanks to its flexibility. As the name suggests, it enables live performance of electronic music, but it’s also a robust music making tool in its own right. Fans of Live are long overdue an update, as the last full release (Live 9) was four years ago. Today Ableton revealed Live 10, which promises to make it even easier to translate ideas into anthems. Aside from Live’s double duty as performance and creation software, one of the biggest lures for budding producers is its workflow. Ableton designed Live to work on one screen, with clever shortcuts to jump between common tasks. Live 10 builds on that with new tools to do more with less. For starters, you can now edit multiple MIDI clips side by side, and zoom in for precision work with one key. Most musicians have struggled with getting a part of their track just right. Currently, if you start playing a project back, you won’t hear MIDI instruments until the next note in the clip. This means if you start playback mid-note, you won’t hear it — annoying for long strings sounds, for example. A new “Note chasing” feature solves that, meaning all notes will play even if halfway through. It’s a low key change, but one that will please anyone who’s heard the same part over and over again just to get to where you want to edit. For those (like me) who seem to give their best performance while not recording, there’s “Capture.” It sounds similar to a feature in Apple’s Logic Pro that remembers all MIDI input in the background, even if you’re not recording. So, if you happen to play a killer riff along to a beat, but weren’t recording, Live will have snagged it anyway so you can retrieve it. For advanced users, Ableton’s “Max for Live” kit has long allowed you to create tools like Capture , or software instruments from scratch. Max is now built right in to Live 10 (previously it was a $200 add-on), but it’s good to see some of the more popular ideas made in Max find their way into the standard version of the software. Other updates include a new built-in synthesizer call “Wavetable” for squelchy sounds a-la Stranger Things and three new audio effects (Pedal, Drum Buss and Echo). Owners of Push — Ableton’s companion hardware controller — can look forward to improved graphics and visualizations so you can keep your eyes away from the computer (and look less like you’re checking your email on stage). Despite the announcement today, eager users will still need to wait a little longer. Ableton Live 10 won’t be available until early 2018. The good news is, that you can snag a copy of Live 9 right now if you don’t already have it at 20 percent discount, which will automatically be upgraded to the new version once it lands. Once released, Live 10 will cost $449 for the standard version and $499 for the suite with all the software instruments (this is the one you probably want). Source: Ableton

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Ableton Live will remember your riffs if you forget to press record

Android Oreo Bug Sends Thousands of Phones Into Infinite Boot Loops

An anonymous reader writes: A bug in the new “Adaptive Icons” feature introduced in Android Oreo has sent thousands of phones into infinite boot loops, forcing some users to reset their devices to factory settings, causing users to lose data along the way. The bug was discovered by Jcbsera, the developer of the Swipe for Facebook Android app (energy-efficient Facebook wrapper app), and does not affect Android Oreo (8.0) in its default state. The bug occurs only with apps that use adaptive icons — a new feature introduced in Android Oreo that allows icons to change shape and size based on the device they’re viewed on, or the type of launcher the user is using on his Android device. For example, adaptive icons will appear in square, rounded, or circle containers depending on the theme or launcher the user is using. The style of adaptive icons is defined a local XML file. The bug first manifested itself when the developer of the Swipe for Facebook Android app accidentally renamed the foreground image of his adaptive icon with the same name as this XML file (ic_launcher_main.png and ic_launcher_main.xml). This naming scheme sends Android Oreo in an infinite loop that regularly crashes the device. At one point, Android detects something is wrong and prompts the user to reset the device to factory settings. Users don’t have to open an app, and the crashes still happen just by having an app with malformed adaptive icons artifacts on your phone. Google said it will fix the issue in Android Oreo 8.1. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Android Oreo Bug Sends Thousands of Phones Into Infinite Boot Loops

Newly discovered planet is nearly 25 percent the size of its star

Enlarge (credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick ) What does it take to build a gas giant? Building models of planet formation and studying exosolar systems have both provided us with some hints. But there’s a small but growing list of cases where the two of these approaches disagree about what’s possible. A new paper adds to that list by describing a gas giant planet that orbits a dwarf star, creating a situation where the planet is 25 percent the size of its host—the smallest difference between planet and star yet observed. Gas giants, as their name implies, are mostly hydrogen and helium. But models of planet formation have suggested that they can only form in systems with a lot of heavier elements around. The idea is that a large core of rocky material has to form quickly, before the star fully ignites and drives off any nearby gas. If the rocky body gets big enough early enough, it can grab enough gas to start a runaway atmospheric accumulation, turning itself into a gas giant. Studying exosolar systems provides some support for this idea. We can get a sense of how many heavier elements—generically termed metals—were around during planet formation by looking at their presence in the host star. If the star has a high metal content, then the planets probably had access to lots of heavier elements, too. For small, rocky planets, it doesn’t seem to matter how many heavier elements were around, as they’re found at stars with various degrees of metal content. The same is true for super-Earths and Neptune-sized planets. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Newly discovered planet is nearly 25 percent the size of its star

Today’s art thieves rob via email

London galleries — and some US dealers — have been hit by a rash of electronic thefts by crooks who take over the gallery’s email accounts and interrupt the transmission of invoices at the close of high-ticket sales, substituting fake invoices with throwaway bank accounts that close up and disappear after the money lands — then the crooks stay in the email, interrupting “where’s my money” emails and sending back fake replies assuring the galleries that the “buyer” is doing all they can to locate the rogue payment. (more…)

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Today’s art thieves rob via email

Student Charged By FBI For Hacking His Grades More Than 90 times

An anonymous reader shares a report: In college, you can use your time to study. Or then again, you could perhaps rely on the Hand of God. And when I say “Hand of God, ” what I really mean is “keylogger.” Think of it like the “Nimble Fingers of God.” “Hand of God” (that makes sense) and “pineapple” (???) are two of the nicknames allegedly used to refer to keyloggers used by a former University of Iowa wrestler and student who was arrested last week on federal computer-hacking charges in a high-tech cheating scheme. According to the New York Times, Trevor Graves, 22, is accused in an FBI affidavit of working with an unnamed accomplice to secretly plug keyloggers into university computers in classrooms and in labs. The FBI says keyloggers allowed Graves to record whatever his professors typed, including credentials to log into university grading and email systems. Court documents allege that Graves intercepted exams and test questions in advance and repeatedly changed grades on tests, quizzes and homework assignments. This went on for 21 months — between March 2015 and December 2016. The scheme was discovered when a professor noticed that a number of Graves’ grades had been changed without her authorization. She reported it to campus IT security officials. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Student Charged By FBI For Hacking His Grades More Than 90 times

New VibWrite System Uses Finger Vibrations To Authenticate Users

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bleeping Computer: Rutgers engineers have created a new authentication system called VibWrite. The system relies on placing an inexpensive vibration motor and receiver on a solid surface, such as wood, metal, plastic, glass, etc.. The motor sends vibrations to the receiver. When the user touches the surface with one of his fingers, the vibration waves are modified to create a unique signature per user and per finger. Rutgers researchers say that VibWrite is more secure when users are asked to draw a pattern or enter a code on a PIN pad drawn on the solid surface. This also generates a unique fingerprint, but far more complex than just touching the surface with one finger. During two tests, VibWrite verified users with a 95% accuracy and a 3% false positive rate. The only problem researchers encountered in the live trials was that some users had to draw the pattern or enter the PIN number several times before they passed the VibWrite authentication test. Besides improvements to the accuracy with which VibWrite can detect finger vibrations, researchers also plan to look into how VibWrite will behave in outdoor environments to account for varying temperatures, humidity, winds, wetness, dust, dirt, and other conditions. This new novel user authentication system is described in full in a research paper entitled “VibWrite: Towards Finger-input Authentication on Ubiquitous Surfaces via Physical Vibration.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New VibWrite System Uses Finger Vibrations To Authenticate Users

Some Google Docs users are being locked out of their files (updated)

A number of Google Docs users have reported being locked out of their documents today for, according to the message that pops up when they try to access the affected document, violating Google’s terms of service . Users that have tweeted about the issue have said their locked-out pieces were about a range of topics including wildfire crimes, post-socialist eastern Europe and a response to reviewers of an academic journal submission. FYI according to this thread some Google spam system has gone rogue and is randomly blocking some Google Docs https://t.co/A83vuPOapo — SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) October 31, 2017 Tfw your finalizing a piece on E. Europe post-socialist parties in Google Drive and Google removes it because it’s in violation of its ToS?? — Bhaskar Sunkara (@sunraysunray) October 31, 2017 Working away happily on @googledocs with a response to reviewers. Suddenly: “This document is in violation of Terms of Service”. #WTF pic.twitter.com/o2pjoTTTWo — Leighton Pumpkin

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Some Google Docs users are being locked out of their files (updated)

iOS 11.1 brings new emojis and important security updates

Apple has released iOS 11.1 and it comes with over 70 new emojis, the return of 3D Touch multitasking and a handful of bug fixes. Some of the new emojis include a cursing smiley face, a vampire, a hedgehog, Chinese takeout, a sandwich and a mermaid. Some existing emojis have been tweaked to improve their design as well. Once you update your OS, the new selections will appear in your keyboard, and if someone sends you one of the new emojis, they won’t show up properly on your phone until you’ve updated. As for 3D Touch multitasking, Apple had included it in earlier operating systems, but removed it. However, now you’ll again be able to touch the left side of the display with a little pressure in order to get back to your app carousel. Along with these improvements and additions, iOS 11.1 also comes with a handful of security updates, most notably a fix for a major WPA2 WiFi vulnerability. Prior to this update, attackers could use a key reinstallation attack , aka Krack, to pull out sensitive data and personal information by decrypting network traffic. That vulnerability has been patched for Apple mobile devices with iOS 11.1 and you can check out the full list of included security updates here . The update is available now for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch and it’s just in time for the launch of iPhone X . Via: 9to5Mac Source: Apple

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iOS 11.1 brings new emojis and important security updates