Spider silk is one of the world’s strongest natural materials . Graphene is a super material with many amazing uses . So, oddly, scientists decided to combine the two by spraying spiders with the carbon-based wonder material—and the results were surprisingly impressive. Read more…
An anonymous reader writes: Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is considering making a bid for CRM and cloud software company Salesforce, after hearing that Salesforce was entertaining an offer from another company. No talks are underway, but Salesforce has started working with investment banks to figure out how it wants to respond to such offers. Salesforce has a market value of about $50 billion, so any sort of acquisition would be a huge business deal. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
View original post here:
Report: Microsoft Considering Salesforce Acquisition
citpyrc writes: According to the Register, Microsoft is making some changes to how it rolls out updates in Windows 10. Home users will receive updates as they come out, rather than queueing them all up on “patch Tuesday.” Business users will have the option to set their own update cycle, so they can see if any of the patches accidentally break anything for home users before trying them out. There will also be an optional peer-to-peer updating mechanism for Windows 10. Microsoft announced a service called Advanced Threat Analytics, which employs various machine learning techniques to identify malware on a network. As a premium service, top-dollar customers can pay for Microsoft to monitor black-hat forums and alert the company if any of its employees’ identities are stolen. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See the article here:
Microsoft: No More ‘Patch Tuesday’ For Windows 10 Home Users
We asked for your worst stories of working IT phone support — and boy, did you ever answer our call. You have the patience of saints and the fortitude of soldiers. We’ll never look at a phone the same way again. Read more…
More here:
"In The Shower Eating Cherries" and More Tales of Nightmare IT Calls
ememisya writes: I wonder if I posted, “There will be another 12/7 tomorrow, just a warning.” around December, would people associate it with Pearl Harbor and I would find myself arrested, or has enough time passed for people to not look at the numbers 12 and 7 and take a knee jerk reaction? A student was arrested for “Harassment by Computer” (a class 1 misdemeanor in the state of Virginia) due to his post on an “anonymous” website [Yik Yak]. Although the post in and of itself doesn’t mean anything to most people in the nation, it managed to scare enough people locally for law enforcement agencies to issue a warrant for his arrest. “Moon, a 21-year-old senior majoring in business information technology, is being charged with Harassment by Computer, which is a class one misdemeanor. Tuesday night, April 28, a threat to the Virginia Tech community was posted on the anonymous social media app Yik Yak. Around 11:15 p.m., an unknown user posted ‘Another 4.16 moment is going to happen tomorrow. Just a warning (sic).’ The Virginia Tech Police Department released a crime alert statement Wednesday morning via email informing students that VTPD was conducting an investigation throughout the night in conjunction with the Blacksburg Police Department.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
More here:
VA Tech Student Arrested For Posting Perceived Threat Via Yik Yak
Ubiquitous in many classrooms since the 19th century, chalk and chalkboards are familiar to most of us. White, powdery and prone to sticking to those surfaces where it is put (and just as easy to wipe away), chalk and its accompanying board are excellent instructional aids. Notably, however, most chalk today isn’t technically chalk at all, but gypsum. Read more…
More here:
Blackboard Chalk Isn’t Really Chalk at All
TheRealHocusLocus writes: HR 2039: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act for 2016 and 2017 (press release, full text, and as a pretty RGB bitmap) is in the House. In $18B of goodies we see things that actually resemble a space program. The ~20, 000 word document is even a good read, especially the parts about decadal cadence. There is more focus on launch systems and manned exploration, also to “expand the Administration’s Near-Earth Object Program to include the detection, tracking, cataloguing, and characterization of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects less than 140 meters in diameter.” I find it awesome that the fate of the dinosaurs is explicitly mentioned in this bill. If it passes we will have a law with dinosaurs in it. Someone read the T-shirt. There is also a very specific six month review of NASA’s “Earth science global datasets for the purpose of identifying those datasets that are useful for understanding regional changes and variability, and for informing applied science research.” Could this be an emerging Earth Sciences turf war between NOAA and NASA? Lately it seems more of a National Atmospheric Space Administration. Mission creep, much? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more here:
NASA Gets Its Marching Orders: Look Up! Look Out!
An anonymous reader writes: For over 5 years, and perhaps even longer, servers around the world running Linux and FreeBSD operating systems have been targeted by an individual or group that compromised them via a backdoor Trojan, then made them send out spam, ESET researchers have found. What’s more, it seems that the spammers are connected with a software company called Yellsoft, which sells DirectMailer, a “system for automated e-mail distribution” that allows users to send out anonymous email in bulk. Here’s the white paper in which the researchers explain the exploit. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See original article:
Unnoticed For Years, Malware Turned Linux Servers Into Spamming Machines
An eReader lets travelers bring thousands of books with them on their journeys, but what if each of those stories was customized to wherever they happened to be at the moment? Read more…
Taken from:
GPS eReader Lets the Book Take Place Wherever the Reader Is Located
If you ever thought Hulu was only half-heartedly committed to winning the streaming TV wars, think again: the online service just slapped down “just under $1 million per episode”, securing the rights to every minute of Seinfeld ever aired. Read more…
Read More:
Hulu Just Paid Nearly $180 Million For Every Episode Of Seinfeld