article – Page 223 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Synchronized Virtual Reality Heartbeat Triggers Out-of-Body Experiences

Zothecula writes “New research demonstrates that triggering an out-of-body experience (OBE) could be as simple as getting a person to watch a video of themselves with their heartbeat projected onto it. According to the study, it’s easy to trick the mind into thinking it belongs to an external body and manipulate a person’s self-consciousness by externalizing the body’s internal rhythms. The findings could lead to new treatments for people with perceptual disorders such as anorexia and could also help dieters too.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Synchronized Virtual Reality Heartbeat Triggers Out-of-Body Experiences

Dark Day In the AWS Cloud: Big Name Sites Go Down

An outage of one company’s servers might only affect that company’s customers — but when a major data center for Amazon hits kinks, sites that rely on the AWS cloud services all suffer from the downtime. That’s what happened today, when several major sites or online services (like Instagram and AirBnB) were knocked temporarily offline, evidently because of problems at an Amazon data center in Northern Virginia. From TechCrunch’s coverage of the outage: “The deluge of tweets that accompanied the services’ initial hiccups first started at around 4 p.m. Eastern time, and only increased in intensity as users found they couldn’t share pictures of their food or their meticulously crafted video snippets. Some further poking around on Twitter and beyond revealed that some other services known to rely on AWS — Netflix, IFTTT, Heroku and Airbnb to name a few — have been experiencing similar issues today.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three Banks Lose Millions After Wire Transfer Switches Hacked

mask.of.sanity writes “Criminals have stolen millions from three unnamed U.S. banks by launching slow and stealthy denial of service attacks as a distraction before attacking wire payment switches. The switches manage and execute wire transfers and could have coughed up much more cash should the attackers have pressed on. RSA researcher Limor Kessem said, ‘The service portal is down, the bank is losing money and reliability, and the security team is juggling the priorities of what to fix first. That’s when the switch attack – which is very rare because those systems are not easily compromised [and require] high-privilege level in a more advanced persistent threat style case – takes place.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Studying the Slow Decay of a Laptop Battery For an Entire Year

First time accepted submitter jradavenport writes “I’ve been keeping a log of the health of my MacBook Air battery for the past year, taking samples every minute I use the computer (152, 411 readings so far!). This has allowed me to study both my own computing/work habits, but also the fascinating rapid decay of battery capacity. Comparing it to my previous 2009 MacBook Pro, the battery in this 2012 Air is degrading much faster.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Studying the Slow Decay of a Laptop Battery For an Entire Year

4-Billion-Year-Old Fossil Protein Resurrected

First time accepted submitter Zoë Mintz writes “Researchers have ‘resurrected’ a 4-billion-year-old Precambrian protein and found they resembled those that existed when life began, proving that protein structures have the ability to remain constant over extended periods of time.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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4-Billion-Year-Old Fossil Protein Resurrected

China Has a Massive Windows XP Problem

An anonymous reader writes “The Chinese are going to have a very, very hard time kicking the Windows XP habit. The deadline for the retirement of Microsoft’s most successful operating system ever is eight months from tomorrow: April 8, 2014. That’s the day when the Redmond, Wash. company is to deliver the last XP security update. According to analytics company Net Applications, 37.2% of the globe’s personal computers ran Windows XP last month. If Microsoft’s estimate of 1.4 billion Windows PCs worldwide is accurate, XP’s share translates into nearly 570 million machines. In the U.S., 16.4% of all personal computers ran Windows XP in July, or about one in six, Net Applications’ data showed. But in China, 72.1% of the country’s computers relied on the soon-to-retire operating system last month, or nearly three out of every four systems.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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China Has a Massive Windows XP Problem

First Ever Public Tasting of Lab-Grown Cultured Beef Burger

vikingpower writes “Today, at 14:00 Western European Time (9:00 am Eastern), Professor Mark Post of Maastricht University ( the Netherlands ) will present a world first: he will cook and serve a burger made from Cultured Beef in front of an invited audience in London. The event will include a brief explanation of the science behind the burger. You can witch the event live, online. The project’s fact sheet is to be found here (pdf).”e Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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First Ever Public Tasting of Lab-Grown Cultured Beef Burger

Placebo buttons do absolutely nothing, and they are everywhere

Ever stood at an intersection and prodded at, leaned on, elbowed and otherwise palm-slapped the ever-living hell out of a crosswalk button and wondered to yourself if the thing actually does anything at all, really? Well – chances are, it doesn’t. Read more…

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Placebo buttons do absolutely nothing, and they are everywhere

New Alternatives To Silicon May Increase Chip Speeds By Orders of Magnitude.

First time accepted submitter Consistent1 writes “A paywalled article in the “Nature Materials” journal describes the use of Magnetite to achieve ultra fast electronic switching, albeit, at the moment, only at extremely low temperatures. According to a story on Quartz, the team, led by Dr. Hermann Dürr from the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences hopes ‘to continue the experiment with materials that can operate at room temperature. One possibility is vanadium dioxide.’ Chips utilizing this technology may operate at clock cycles thousands of times faster than the silicon-based chips used today.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Alternatives To Silicon May Increase Chip Speeds By Orders of Magnitude.

Hackers Reveal Nasty New Car Attacks

schwit1 writes “Stomping on the brakes of a 3, 500-pound Ford Escape that refuses to stop–or even slow down–produces a unique feeling of anxiety. In this case it also produces a deep groaning sound, like an angry water buffalo bellowing somewhere under the SUV’s chassis. The more I pound the pedal, the louder the groan gets–along with the delighted cackling of the two hackers sitting behind me in the backseat. Luckily, all of this is happening at less than 5mph. So the Escape merely plows into a stand of 6-foot-high weeds growing in the abandoned parking lot of a South Bend, Ind. strip mall that Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have chosen as the testing grounds for the day’s experiments, a few of which are shown in the video below. (When Miller discovered the brake-disabling trick, he wasn’t so lucky: The soccer-mom mobile barreled through his garage, crushing his lawn mower and inflicting $150 worth of damage to the rear wall.) The duo plans to release their findings and the attack software they developed at the hacker conference Defcon in Las Vegas next month–the better, they say, to help other researchers find and fix the auto industry’s security problems before malicious hackers get under the hoods of unsuspecting drivers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hackers Reveal Nasty New Car Attacks