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Roku’s new ad-supported channel lets you watch a bunch of movies for free

The Roku 4 and its remote. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Movie buffs looking for titles to watch now have a new option on Roku devices. Roku announced  that its new channel (aptly dubbed The Roku Channel) is now available for all US users that have a Roku device made after June 2011. This channel has a bunch of movies from studios including Lionsgate, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Warner Brothers that are available to watch for free with advertisements. Roku revealed plans for this channel about a month ago, but now it has rolled out to all customers with compatible devices. Roku has curated content collections in the past, like its Roku Recommends and 4K Spotlight sections. But now the company is actively seeking licensing agreements with studios to offer movies and TV shows on The Roku Channel. In addition to big studios, the channel also has content from smaller companies including Popcornflix and American Classics. After adding the channel to your Roku homepage (it’s under the “Featured,” “New and Notable,” and “Movies and TV” sections in the Streaming Channels setting), you can watch any of the available titles for free. There will be ads throughout the movie, so it’ll be more similar to watching a movie on a broadcast network than streaming one on Netflix. And don’t expect to see the newest movies or the latest seasons of your favorite TV shows on The Roku Channel: since viewing is free, most of the content available is older. Roku cites  Mission: Impossible 3, Beauty Shop, Philadelphia, and Zookeeper as just a few of the options available. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Roku’s new ad-supported channel lets you watch a bunch of movies for free

Quickly add the Google Play store to your new Amazon Fire 10HD

Last time I bought an Amazon tablet adding the Google store was a real pain! It takes about 3 minutes and one reboot on the new Amazon Fire HD 10 . In order to get the most out of my new 7th generation Amazon Tablet, I needed the Google Play store. GMail, Chrome and a few other apps were not available via Amazon’s walled garden. Used to be Amazon made this hard. Now it is very easy! To add the Google Play store follow these steps: STEP THE FIRST Enable apps from UNKNOWN SOURCES! Settings > Security > Enable Apps from Unknown Sources This will trigger a warning. Read it, then ignore it. THE SECOND STEP Download and install four Google apps in this specific order: Google Account Manager Google Services Framework Google Play Services Google Play Store STEP THREE Reboot the device. FOURTH Open the Google Play app. Login and start installing apps. It was that easy. I’m just getting into playing with the new tablet, but thus far it is great. I’m pretty sure this’ll work for all 7th generation tablets regardless of screen size. All-New Fire HD 10 Tablet with Alexa Hands-Free, 10.1″ 1080p Full HD Display, 32 GB via Amazon

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Quickly add the Google Play store to your new Amazon Fire 10HD

Supreme Court: Hacking conviction stands for man who didn’t hack computer

Enlarge / Front row from left, U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, and Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, back row from left, Associate Justice Elena Kagan, Associate Justice Samuel Alito Jr., Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch. (credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images ) On Tuesday, the Supreme Court let stand the novel hacking conviction of a man who did not hack a computer to gain unauthorized access. The justices, without comment, turned away the the appeal of David Nosal, who was convicted of three counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) hacking statute. Nosal’s conviction was based on a hacking conspiracy of sorts. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Supreme Court: Hacking conviction stands for man who didn’t hack computer

Equifax: we doxed 400k Britons, erm, make that 700k, erm, we mean 15.2 million

Oh, Equifax : “Equifax says that for approximately 14.5 million of the 15.2 million affected, the stolen records contained only a small amount of information, limited to name and dates of birth.”

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Equifax: we doxed 400k Britons, erm, make that 700k, erm, we mean 15.2 million

Accenture left four servers of sensitive data completely unprotected

UpGuard has yet again uncovered a trove of corporate data left unprotected, this time from major consulting and management firm Accenture . The data — contained on four cloud-based storage servers — were discovered by UpGuard Director of Cyber Risk Research Chris Vickery in mid-September and weren’t protected by a password. Anyone with the servers’ web addresses could download the stored information, which included decryption keys, passwords and customer info. And Accenture’s client list includes a number of large companies. On its website , Accenture says its clients “span the full range of industries around the world and include 94 of the Fortune Global 100 and more than three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500.” UpGuard says that the information stored on the unprotected servers could have been used to attack Accenture itself as well as a number of its clients and Vickery told ZDNet that the data amounted to the “keys to the kingdom.” In a blog post about the exposure, UpGuard said, “Taken together, the significance of these exposed buckets is hard to overstate. In the hands of competent threat actors, these cloud servers, accessible to anyone stumbling across their URLs, could have exposed both Accenture and its thousands of top-flight corporate customers to malicious attacks that could have done an untold amount of financial damage.” This data exposure is just the latest to be sniffed out by cybersecurity firm UpGuard. Other recent discoveries by the company include Election Systems & Software’s exposure of 1.8 million Chicago residents’ personal information, Deep Root Analytics’ leak of nearly 200 million US citizens’ data, the release of 14 million Verizon customers’ info by Nice Systems and exposure of classified intelligence data by a US defense contractor. In light of these repeated mishandlings of sensitive data, it’s becoming increasing clear that major companies need to take a serious look at their cybersecurity practices. UpGuard quickly notified Accenture after discovering the exposed data and the company secured the servers soon thereafter. Accenture also said that UpGuard was the only non-authorized visitor to access the servers. Accenture told ZDNet , “We closed the exposure when the Amazon Web Services S3 issue was first reported. As we continue our forensic review we may learn more but, the email and password information in the database is more than two and a half years old and for Accenture users of a decommissioned system.” Source: UpGuard

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Accenture left four servers of sensitive data completely unprotected

Super NES Classic hacks are now oh, so easy to pull off—you can even add features

Enlarge / The clean look of the SNES Classic gets ruined a bit the second you plug stuff in. (credit: Kyle Orland) After guesses, estimations, and positive early tests, the Super NES Classic has emerged as a hackable little piece of gaming nostalgia—and quite an easy one to hack, at that. This weekend saw the September device receive a simple exploit in the form of hakchi2 , a Windows program designed by a Russian hacker who calls himself “ClusterM,” and, among other things, it allows fans to add far more games to the system than its default set of 21. If any of that sounds familiar, as opposed to gibberish, it’s because the same program and hacker emerged shortly after the launch of 2016’s Linux-powered NES Classic. ClusterM found a way to wrap that system’s FEL-mode exploit (read lots more about that here ) in a tidy Windows GUI, which allowed fans to use Windows Explorer menus to dump game ROMs, emulator cores, and even new art into their boxy ode to ’80s Nintendo bliss. ClusterM announced plans to repeat his trick well before the SNES Classic landed in stores, and his hacking hopes looked promising with the reveal, courtesy of Eurogamer , that the SNES Classic has a near-identical chipset and board compared to the NES Classic. Initial tests of the FEL-mode exploit, which requires booting into a telnet interface to talk to Nintendo’s Linux box, proved promising, and ClusterM returned eight days after the system’s launch with a new hakchi2 version—which now works with either “Nintendo classic” system. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Super NES Classic hacks are now oh, so easy to pull off—you can even add features

This is how good PS3 games were meant to look

Be sure to view full-screen and at full resolution on a high-res monitor to really see the difference. Fans of classic gaming emulation know that modern emulators can do a lot to sharpen up the standard-definition sprites and polygons made for consoles designed to be played on low-resolution tube TVs. This weekend, though, an update to the RPCS3 emulator showed how much resolution scaling can improve the look of even early HD games. While the new update technically supports rendering at up to 10K resolutions, the video above shows that upscaling to 4K resolution and adding 16x anisotropic filtering can lead to a huge improvement for games originally made to run at 720p. Upscaling the 11-year-old hardware with three times the resolution doesn’t even put too much strain on modern GPUs—the creators say in an explanatory blog post that “anyone with a dedicated graphics card that has Vulkan support can expect identical performance at 4K.” Unlike N64 emulators, which often require handmade high-resolution texture packs to make upscaled games look decent, RPCS3 can often get amazing improvements in sharpness and clarity just by using content that’s already in the PS3 software. That’s because many PS3 titles stored extremely high-resolution assets on the PS3’s Blu-Ray discs, then crushed those textures down for faster processing by the console. The result is that surfaces that looked muddy and jagged on the original hardware can take full advantage of the art as it was originally conceived when upscaled for the emulator. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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This is how good PS3 games were meant to look

Red’s new flagship camera is the $80,000 Monstro 8K VV

RED’s cinema cameras are too expensive for most of us , but they do push the state-of-the-art, making future camera’s you can afford better. A case in point is RED’s latest sensor called the Monstro 8K VV (Vista Vision). The bombastic name aside, it packs impressive specs. The sensor is 40.96 x 21.6 mm, which is slightly wider and slightly shorter than 35mm full-frame, handles 35.4-megapixel stills and 8K, 60 fps video, features 17+ claimed stops of dynamic range, and shoots at higher ISOs with lower noise than the last model. You can take RED’s dynamic range (DR) claims with a pinch of salt, but even if it’s plus or minus a stop, that would make it one of the best, if not the best, sensors on the market. RED’s current Helium 8K S35 sensor is the current DXOMark champ with a score of 108 (Nikon’s D850 is the best DSLR with a 100 score). DXO measured a dynamic range of 15.2 for the Helium, below RED’s claimed 16.5+ stops, but the Monstro 8K VV should easily best the 108 score. The sensor launch is good news for RED, but things didn’t exactly go as planned with its large-format 8K sensor. It originally launched the full-frame Dragon VV sensor back in April 2015, but was unable to make very many due to manufacturing yield problems. As a result, many folks that ordered one never received it. The good news is that RED will now offer those folks the 8K Monstro VV instead, giving them a better sensor for the same money. New orders, meanwhile, will be fulfilled in early 2018, the company says. “Thanks for waiting, and sorry again that it took so long to tame the VV process, ” said RED CEO Jarred Land. The new sensor is the big news, but RED also made a smaller announcement that might be more beneficial for users. It released a “completely overhauled, ” less complex image-processing pipeline (IPP2), with improved color management. Despite the company’s technical prowess, it has struggled to draw many filmmakers who prefer the look and handling of ARRI’s cameras, which dominate film and TV production credits. It no doubt hopes the simpler IPP2 process will sway those folks to its system which is, on paper, technically superior to ARRI’s system, and cheaper to boot. Via: Red Shark News Source: RED

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Red’s new flagship camera is the $80,000 Monstro 8K VV

‘Batman: The Animated Series’ is coming to Blu-ray in 2018

Batman: The Animated Series is finally getting the remaster treatment it deserves. From this weekend’s New York Comic Con Warner Bros. announced that “later in the year” in 2018 it will release the influential animated show to high-def formats. As Polygon notes , the specifics are a bit fuzzy at this point. Will the 85-episode show come out all in one boxed set, or in volumes like the DVDs before? At this point that’s up in the air. However, any package will likely look and sound better than streaming the show on Amazon Prime . Plus, every episode will almost assuredly have the iconic opening credits sequence attached. This summer Warner released Batman: Mask of the Phantasm on Blu-ray, the PG-rated feature-length movie that takes place in the Animated Series universe. If you want a peek at how gussied up episodes of the old series might look on Blu-ray, that’s probably your best bet.

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‘Batman: The Animated Series’ is coming to Blu-ray in 2018

GM’s Cruise buys LIDAR company to drastically cut self-driving costs

GM has already said it has what it takes to get a fleet of autonomous vehicles on the road before anyone else, and that timeline might’ve sped up further. Cruise Automation , the company GM acquired a little over a year ago, has announced it’s made a purchase of its own: Strobe, which specializes in shrinking LIDAR arrays down to a single chip. The most immediate benefit here is cost. In a post on Medium , Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt writes that LIDAR-on-a-chip will drop the price “by 99 percent” versus other LIDAR systems. “Strobe, Cruise and GM engineers will work side by side along with our optics and fabrication experts at HRL (formerly Hughes Research Labs), the GM skunkworks-like division that invented the world’s first laser, ” Vogt wrote. The new LIDAR system can apparently deal with sun reflecting off rainy streets and help differentiate between someone clad in black jaywalking at night. Vogt wrote that when combined with RADAR and cameras, the LIDAR can handle pretty much every type of sensing needed for self-driving applications. If you were looking for proof that GM might beat the competition to market, well, this could be part of it. Via: TechCrunch Source: Medium

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GM’s Cruise buys LIDAR company to drastically cut self-driving costs