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Android On Intel x86 Tablet Performance Explored: Things Are Improving

MojoKid writes: For the past few years, Intel has promised that its various low-power Atom-based processors would usher in a wave of low-cost Android and Windows mobile products that could compete with ARM-based solutions. And for years, we’ve seen no more than a trickle of hardware, often with limited availability. Now, that’s finally beginning to change. Intel’s Bay Trail and Merrifield SoCs are starting to show up more in full-featured, sub-$200 devices from major brands. One of the most interesting questions for would-be x86 buyers in the Android tablet space is whether to go with a Merrifield or Bay Trail Atom-based device. Merrifield is a dual-core chip without Hyper-Threading. Bay Trail is a quad-core variant and a graphics engine derived from Intel’s Ivy Bridge Core series CPUs. That GPU is the other significant difference between the two SoCs. With Bay Trail, Intel is still employing their own graphics solution, while Merrifield pairs a dual-core CPU with a PowerVR G6400 graphics core. So, what’s the experience of using a tablet running Android on x86 like these days? Pretty much like using an ARM-based Android tablet currently, and surprisingly good for any tablet in the $199 or less bracket. In fact, some of the low cost Intel/Android solutions out there currently from the likes of Acer, Dell, Asus, and Lenovo, all compete performance-wise pretty well versus the current generation of mainstream ARM-based Android tablets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Android On Intel x86 Tablet Performance Explored: Things Are Improving

How to make your own bootable OS X 10.10 Yosemite USB install drive

Even in the download-only era, it’s easy to make yourself offline OS X install media. Andrew Cunningham It was 2009 when Apple last released a new operating system on physical media . Things have proceeded remarkably smoothly since version 10.7 switched to download-only installers, but there are still good reasons to want an old, reliable USB stick. For instance, if you find yourself doing multiple installs, a USB drive may be faster than multiple downloads (especially if you use a USB 3.0 drive). Or maybe you need a recovery disk for older Macs that don’t support the Internet Recovery feature. Whatever the reason, you’re in luck, because it’s not hard to make one. As with last year , there are two ways to get it done. There’s the super easy way with the graphical user interface and the only slightly less easy way that requires some light Terminal use. Here’s what you need to get started. A Mac, duh. We’ve created Yosemite USB from both Mavericks and Yosemite, but your experience with other versions may vary. An 8GB or larger USB flash drive or an 8GB or larger partition on some other kind of external drive. For newer Macs, use a USB 3.0 drive—it makes things significantly faster. The OS X 10.10 Yosemite installer from the Mac App Store in your Applications folder. The installer will delete itself when you install the operating system, but it can be re-downloaded if necessary. If you want a GUI, you need the latest version of  Diskmaker X  app—we wrote this article based on version 4 beta 2, but if a “final” version is released alongside Yosemite we’ll update the article. This app is free to download, but  the creator accepts donations  if you want to support his efforts. An administrator account on the Mac you’re using to create the disk. The easy way Diskmaker X remains the easiest, most user-friendly way to get this done. Andrew Cunningham Once you’ve obtained all of the necessary materials, connect the USB drive to your Mac and run the Diskmaker X app. The app will offer to make installers for OS X 10.8, 10.9, and 10.10, but we’re only interested in Yosemite today. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How to make your own bootable OS X 10.10 Yosemite USB install drive

Millions of Voiceprints Quietly Being Harvested

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from The Guardian: Businesses and governments around the world increasingly are turning to voice biometrics, or voiceprints, to pay pensions, collect taxes, track criminals and replace passwords. “We sometimes call it the invisible biometric, ” said Mike Goldgof, an executive at Madrid-based AGNITiO, one of about 10 leading companies in the field. Those companies have helped enter more than 65M voiceprints into corporate and government databases, according to Associated Press interviews with dozens of industry representatives and records requests in the United States, Europe and elsewhere. … The single largest implementation identified by the AP is in Turkey, where the mobile phone company Turkcell has taken the voice biometric data of some 10 million customers using technology provided by market leader Nuance Communications Inc. But government agencies are catching up. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Millions of Voiceprints Quietly Being Harvested

VeraCrypt Is the New TrueCrypt — and It’s Better

New submitter poseur writes: If you’re looking for an alternative to TrueCrypt, you could do worse than VeraCrypt, which adds iterations and corrects weaknesses in TrueCrypt’s API, drivers and parameter checking. According to the article, “In technical terms, when a system partition is encrypted, TrueCrypt uses PBKDF2-RIPEMD160 with 1, 000 iterations. For standard containers and other (i.e. non system) partitions, TrueCrypt uses at most 2, 000 iterations. What Idrassi did was beef up the transformation process. VeraCrypt uses 327, 661 iterations of the PBKDF2-RIPEMD160 algorithm for system partitions, and for standard containers and other partitions it uses 655, 331 iterations of RIPEMD160 and 500, 000 iterations of SHA-2 and Whirlpool, he said. While this makes VeraCrypt slightly slower at opening encrypted partitions, it makes the software a minimum of 10 and a maximum of about 300 times harder to brute force.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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VeraCrypt Is the New TrueCrypt — and It’s Better

Outsourced Tech Jobs Are Increasingly Being Automated

Jason Koebler writes Yahoo announced [Tuesday] it would be laying off at least 400 workers in its Indian office, and back in February, IBM cut roughly 2, 000 jobs there. Meanwhile, tech companies are beginning to see that many of the jobs it has outsourced can be automated, instead. Labor in India and China is still cheaper than it is in the United States, but it’s not the obvious economic move that it was just a few years ago: “The labor costs are becoming significant enough in China and India that there are very real discussions about automating jobs there now, ” Mark Muro, an economist at Brookings, said. “Companies are seeing that automated replacements are getting to be ‘good enough.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Outsourced Tech Jobs Are Increasingly Being Automated

Man Walks Past Security Screening Staring At iPad Causing Airport Evacuation

First time accepted submitter chentiangemalc writes While Australia is on “high alert” for terror threats a man walked past a Sydney Airport security screening while engrossed in his iPad and delayed flights for an hour. From the article: “This event was captured on CCTV and unnerved officials so much that they evacuated passengers. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported, the man found himself (or, perhaps, didn’t) going into the terminal through an exit passage that clearly was convenient for him, but less convenient for the hordes of passengers who not only had to be removed from Terminal 3, but also re-screened. A spokeswoman for Qantas told the Morning Herald: ‘The man disembarked a flight and left. It appears he wasn’t paying attention, was looking at his iPad, forgot something and walked back past (the security area).'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Man Walks Past Security Screening Staring At iPad Causing Airport Evacuation

Marines Put Microsoft Kinect To Work For 3D Mapping

colinneagle points out this article about how the Marines are using a Microsoft Kinect to build maps. A military contractor has come up with something that has the U.S. Marine Corps interested. The Augmented Reality Sand Table is currently being developed by the Army Research Laboratory and was on display at the Modern Day Marine Expo that recently took place on Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. The set-up is simple: a table-sized sandbox is rigged with a Microsoft Kinect video game motion sensor and an off-the-shelf projector. Using existing software, the sensor detects features in the sand and projects a realistic topographical map that corresponds to the layout, which can change in real time as observers move the sand around in the box. The setup can also project maps from Google Earth or other mapping and GPS systems, enabling units to visualize the exact terrain they’ll be covering for exercises or operations. Eventually, they hope to add visual cues to help troops shape the sandbox to match the topography of a specified map. Eventually, the designers of the sandbox hope to involve remote bases or even international partners in conducting joint training and operations exercises. Future possibilities include large-scale models that could project over a gymnasium floor for a battalion briefing, and a smartphone version that could use a pocket-sized projector to turn any patch of dirt into an operational 3-D map. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Marines Put Microsoft Kinect To Work For 3D Mapping

Nearly 2,000 Chicago Flights Canceled After Worker Sets Fire At Radar Center

SpzToid sends this news out of Illinois: Nearly 2, 000 flights in Chicago have been canceled so far today as federal aviation officials slowly resume operations at O’Hare and Midway airports following a fire that was deliberately set at an FAA radar center, apparently by a disgruntled worker. The center handles high-altitude traffic across parts of the Midwest. Controllers there direct planes through the airspace and either hand off the air traffic to other facilities handling high-altitude traffic or direct the planes to terminal radar facilities, including one in Elgin, which in turn direct planes to and from airport towers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Nearly 2,000 Chicago Flights Canceled After Worker Sets Fire At Radar Center

TrueCrypt Gets a New Life, New Name

storagedude writes: Amid ongoing security concerns, the popular open source encryption program TrueCrypt may have found new life under a new name. Under the terms of the TrueCrypt license — which was a homemade open source license written by the authors themselves rather than a standard one — a forking of the code is allowed if references to TrueCrypt are removed from the code and the resulting application is not called TrueCrypt. Thus, CipherShed will be released under a standard open source license, with long-term ambitions to become a completely new product. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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TrueCrypt Gets a New Life, New Name

Home Depot Says Breach Affected 56 Million Cards

wiredmikey writes: Home Depot said on Thursday that a data breach affecting its stores across the United States and Canada is estimated to have exposed 56 million customer payment cards between April and September 2014. While previous reports speculated that Home Depot had been hit by a variant of the BlackPOS malware that was used against Target Corp., the malware used in the attack against Home Depot had not been seen previously in other attacks. “Criminals used unique, custom-built malware to evade detection, ” the company said in a statement. The home improvement retail giant also that it has completed a “major payment security project” that provides enhanced encryption of payment card data at point of sale in its U.S. stores. According to a recent report from Trend Micro (PDF), six new pieces of point-of-sale malware have been identified so far in 2014. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Home Depot Says Breach Affected 56 Million Cards