A new research paper just published in the scientific journal Plos One brings us new fuel for nightmares: Spiders not only eat other insects but also kill and eat fish often much larger than them. And it’s not only one or two species, but many species at a global scale. Read more…
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Scientists discover that spiders kill and eat fish too
Facebook appears to be offline, internationally. The social network isn’t working on web or mobile, and even its developer platform is down. Facebook is yet to offer an explanation on its own site or via Twitter. Read more…
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Facebook Is Down (Updated: It’s Fixed!)
An anonymous reader writes Code Spaces [a code hosting service] has been under DDOS attacks since the beginning of the week, but a few hours ago, the attacker managed to delete all their hosted customer data and most of the backups. They have announced that they are shutting down business. From the announcement: An unauthorized person who at this point who is still unknown (All we can say is that we have no reason to think its anyone who is or was employed with Code Spaces) had gained access to our Amazon EC2 control panel and had left a number of messages for us to contact them using a Hotmail address. Reaching out to the address started a chain of events that revolved around the person trying to extort a large fee in order to resolve the DDOS. At this point we took action to take control back of our panel by changing passwords, however the intruder had prepared for this and had already created a number of backup logins to the panel and upon seeing us make the attempted recovery of the account he proceeded to randomly delete artifacts from the panel. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Code Spaces Hosting Shutting Down After Attacker Deletes All Data
Harley fanatics are about to lose their collective shit. The crew from Milwaukee is going to show off its first electric motorcycle tomorrow, causing scads of chap-wearing dentists to revaluate their alternative weekend lifestyles. Read more…
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Harley-Davidson Is Making An Electric Motorcycle
A product’s packaging is usually nothing but the last obstacle between you and a shiny new gadget, but often there’s as much thought that goes into the design of a cardboard box as the device inside. For instance, LG put a remarkable amount of design effort into the box its OLED TVs ship in, and most consumers will never even notice. Read more…
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LG’s Glueless Packaging Is Almost as Impressive as the OLED TV Inside
Amazon has unveiled the Fire Phone. It runs a modified version of Android, and it will launch exclusively for AT&T’s network. The screen is a 4.7″ IPS LCD (they tested from 4.3″ to 5.5″, and decided 4.7″ worked best for single-hand use), with an emphasis on brightness. It runs on a quad-core 2.2GHz processor with 2GB of RAM, and an Adreno 330 GPU. It has a rear-facing, 13-megapixel camera using an f/2.0 five-element lens with image stabilization. There’s a dedicated physical button on the side of the phone that will turn it on and put it into camera mode when pressed. The phone comes with dual stereo speakers that produce virtual surround sound. Amazon wants the phone to be distinctive for its ability to provide video content, both from a hardware and software perspective. The Fire Phone runs Mayday, Amazon’s live tech support service for devices. They also demonstrated Firefly, software that recognizes physical objects using the phone’s camera, as well as TV shows and songs it hears. It runs quickly, often identifying things in less than a second (and it pulls up an Amazon product listing, of course). It can even recognize art. Firefly has its own dedicated physical button on the phone, and Amazon is providing a Firefly SDK to third parties who want to develop with it. Another major feature of the Fire Phone is what Amazon calls “dynamic perspective.” Using multiple front-facing cameras, the phone tracks the position of a user’s head, and uses that to slightly adjust what’s displayed on the screen so content is easier to see from the new angle. It allows for gesture control of the phone — for example, you can tilt the phone to scroll a web page or move your head slightly look around a 2-D stadium image when browsing for available seats. Putting your thumb on the screen acts like a mute button for the head tracking, so it isn’t confused when you look up from the screen or turn your head to talk to somebody. It’s an impressive piece of software, and they’ve made an SDK available for it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Amazon Announces ‘Fire Phone’
Like Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets, the new Fire Phone will get Amazon’s 24-7 video tech support, Mayday . The service works over Wi-Fi and 3G/4G, and connects you with a representative in under 15 seconds, according to CEO Jeff Bezos. Read more…
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Fire Phone Is Getting Amazon’s Awesome 24-7 Video Tech Support
Adobe is announcing new release of Photoshop CC today, and with it comes one particularly cool feature: the ability to automatically select the out-of-focus areas of an image. Read more…
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The Best New Feature in Photoshop CC
Rectangular screens are so square. Which is presumably why Sharp has announced a new technology called Free-Form Display—that could allow screens to come in any space, and reduce bezel size to almost zero. Read more…
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Sharp’s Free-Form Display Make Bezels Super-Thin, Screens Any Shape
phrackthat writes with an update to Friday’s news that the IRS cannot locate two years worth of email from Lois Lerner, a central figure in the controversy surrounding the IRS’s apparent targeting of Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny. Now, the IRS says there are another six workers for whom the agency cannot locate emails. As with Lerner, they attribute the unrecoverable emails to computer crashes. Among them was Nikole Flax, who was chief of staff to Lerner’s boss, then-deputy commissioner Steven Miller. Miller later became acting IRS commissioner, but was forced to resign last year after the agency acknowledged that agents had improperly scrutinized tea party and other conservative groups when they applied for tax-exempt status. Documents have shown some liberal groups were also flagged. … Lerner’s computer crashed in the summer of 2011, depriving investigators of many of her prior emails. Flax’s computer crashed in December 2011, Camp and Boustany said. The IRS said Friday that technicians went to great lengths trying to recover data from Lerner’s computer in 2011. In emails provided by the IRS, technicians said they sent the computer to a forensic lab run by the agency’s criminal investigations unit. But to no avail. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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IRS Lost Emails of 6 More Employees Under Investigation